"Let's go, roomie. I get the top bunk."
TWENTY-FOUR
Louis Returns
Katey's got a townhouse a half-hour from the school in Sunbury. Still not far from the river – look out the bathroom window upstairs, you can see moonlight pooling on the distant water. Glittering like broken glass.
The décor makes Miriam want to dry heave – it's all down-home country fun with a curious fixation on roosters. Katey hangs her keys on a wooden rooster whose feet are little hooks. She takes a cookie out of a ceramic jar shaped like a rooster. Embroidered rooster pillows. A rooster rug by the door.
Miriam tries to bite back the words but they're like butterflies that duck the swooping net. "You sure do love cock," she says.
Katey blanches, shocked. Blood draining from her face.
"Sorry," Miriam says. "Couldn't help myself. It's like a sickness."
But then the teacher quivers and shakes and erupts like Vesuvius, her sudden and uncontrolled laughter swiftly drowning out worry.
"I guess I do love…" she says, tears streaming from her eyes. "Cock!"
The way she squawks that word makes Miriam laugh, too, and for a good half-a-minute the two of them are caught in the throes of a cackling jag. Eventually it fades, and Katey says, "Oh, that felt suprisingly cathartic." She rubs her eyes. "I think that means it's time for this old lady to get to bed."
The teacher sets up Miriam on the couch with a fuzzy brown blanket heavy and soft.
But Miriam's not tired.
The vodka should be dousing her torch by now. But it isn't.
Her head keeps spinning. A carousel of awful images.
Two girls. Not one, but two. Wren and another girl. Only connection she has so far is the school. Do the girls know each other? Are they friends?
Philomela and Procne.
Silence the swallow. Cut out the tongue. Take the head of the children.
London Bridge is falling down…
No. No, no, no. Not now. Nothing to be done tonight. Put it away. Shove it in a desk drawer. Lock it. Burn it. Walk away from the fire.
Miriam gets up. Roots around the kitchen. (Rooster fridge magnets). Opens the freezer. Finds a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. Plops on the couch, screws the pint between her thighs, digs in. Turns on the television.
Cooking show.
Flip.
Something about volcanoes in Hawaii.
Flip.
Infomercial. Blah blah blah, Super-Mop.
Flip.
American Werewolf in London
. The climax. The titular wolf rampages through London's Piccadilly Circus. Mayhem. Foolishness. Cars honking. Screaming. The beast rips off a bystander's head, flings it into traffic.
Click.
TV, off.
Miriam feels dizzy. Overwhelmed by the task at hand. Sitting here, nursing a pint of fudgy ice cream, thinking what a shitty savior she makes.
Well, girls, I'm the only savior you got right now. You get what you paid for.
Of course, the thing she tries not to think about but thinks about anyway:
Solving their murder isn't all you have to do.
You gotta kill the killer.
It's then she hears something.
A footfall. Outside Katey's door.
Through the window next to the front door, Miriam can see a shadow stirring beyond the curtains. Out there in the dark.
The doorknob rattles.
She reaches in her bag, finds a cheap Chinese-made spring-loaded knife she bought at a Jersey flea market about eight months back.
She wishes suddenly that Katey had one of those little peepholes.
Miriam hits the button, pops the knife-blade, and then throws the door open.
And almost stabs Louis, his big meaty hamhock fist poised to knock.
"Miriam," he says. The look on his face is raw, pained, desperate. A look like that stokes her engines. Water on hot coals. Steam.
"One-eyed Frankenstein," she says back. Smiling. Beaming. Electric.
She flings the knife backward over her shoulder, doesn't care where it lands. The way she leaps on him is like two magnets snapping together. A perfect and irresistible fit.
Strong hands lift her high.
Her legs wrap around him. His cock is hard like rebar.
Mouths are open. They smash together sans grace, driven by hunger.
"I missed you," she hisses in his ear. Bites it.
He drops her ass on the coffee table. Palms the space between her legs like it's a basketball. A thermal lance of heat drives straight from her crotch to her brain and she wants him inside her, all the way to the hilt, to the heart, to the brain.
"Take off my shirt," he says, his voice dry, croaking, hungry. "Hurry."
Her fingers, usually nimble, fumble with the buttons on his corduroy L.L. Beam special. Hell with it. She grabs the first button with her teeth. Bites it off, spits it against the wall. It clatters onto and into a heating vent.
Her fingers search out the spaces between buttons. Like a rib spreader ripping open a chest to get at the viscera, she tears the shirt open. A rain of buttons like bullet casings fling to the four corners of the room.
And everything stops.
His chest, his bare chest, lays exposed.
His chest hair is gone. Shorn from the flesh.
A swallow tattoo – red and puffy, as though freshly drilled – rises from the skin.
She looks up in Louis's face.
"No," she says, her voice a whimper. "Not you."
He brings back his fist and hammers her hard in the nose. She feels it burst, break, a blood squib that pops and squirts two jets of red down to her chin.
Miriam tumbles back onto the table as Louis sheds his shirt.
"You like the ink?" he says.
"Fuck you," is her answer.
He piston-punches her in the gut. She doubles up and rolls off the table into the space between it and the television. Blood wets the carpet. Inside her it feels like something is collapsing in on itself.
A tiny crying baby.
Louis grabs both ankles, drags her out. The carpet burns her back as her shirt pulls up behind her.
He's got the knife,
her
knife, in his hand. It almost looks like a toy, it's so small in his cement-block grip. Louis smiles but it's not his smile. It's Not-Louis. Ghost-Louis. The Other.
"You," she hisses and spits.
"Give me your hand," Louis says.
"Trespasser.
Trespasser
."
Not-Louis just laughs.
He takes her hand. Slams it palm-down on the carpet.
Then he gets to carving.
She can't see what he's doing, but she can feel it. The bite of the knife tip as it parts the skin. The pain draws a line. The misery makes a shape.
Two-pronged tail, swoop-back wings, head and beak thrust upward.
The swallow.
Like the tattoo on his chest.
"You're the Swallow," Not-Louis says. "I'm the Mockingbird."
"I don't know what that means."
"You will find out. I will
make
you find out. Think you can just walk away from this? Let this serve as a reminder, Miriam Black, Fate's Foe. Let this remind you that–"
He pulls the knife away, his fingers greasy with red.
"–you have a job to do and we won't let you walk away until it's done."
Miriam screams. But it isn't her voice coming out of her mouth.
It's the scream of Lauren Martin as she is beheaded.
PART THREE
A Trail of Ink and Blood
Philomela:
"Now that I have no shame, I will proclaim it.
Given the chance, I will go where the people are,
Tell everybody; if you shut me here,
I will move the very woods and rocks to pity.
The air of Heaven will hear, and any god,
If there is any god in Heaven, will hear me."
Metamorphoses,
Ovid
TWENTY-FIVE
Broken Crayon
Drive too long and too late and the road starts to run like paint, like something out of a Salvador Dali picture. Louis uncaps another mini-bottle of 5-Hour-Energy and slams it back. It tastes like someone strained cough syrup and vinegar through a gym sock.
Tonight, a haul of cable spools on a flat bed. From New York state to Charlotte, NC.
He's taken the scenic route. It's slower, adds time to the trip – which is a mistake – but Louis doesn't care. I-77's a nicer drive. Longer, leaner, fewer cars.
Right now, it's just him and the road. The occasional pair of headlights coming and going. Strobe. White flash. Gone again.
The clock on the dash – LCD blue – silently flicks over to 12:00AM.
He's been pushing it of late. Pushing it in a way he hasn't done in years. Long hauls. Late nights. More hours, more money.
But that's not what this is about. Louis doesn't need the money. He's not rich, not exactly, but he's a man with few bills, save the loan payments on a trailer just outside Long Beach Island in Jersey. Most Americans rack up debt. Louis is the opposite: He collects money the way other folks gather dust bunnies under the bed.
His father used to do that, too. Always saving for retirement. Always
talking
about retirement. How glorious it would be. Shangri-La. The Seventh Heaven. The day they open the cage door, let the animal run free.
The man died a year before retirement. Forklift accident.
Louis ended up with the old man's savings, what with his mother having died from emphysema only a few years before that.
With that money Louis paid for CDL class. Bought his first truck.
And now here he is, doing the same thing. Saving, saving. Waiting for something.
Or maybe, just maybe, running away from something.
Miriam.
Even now he's running from her but he can't avoid her. She's like a ghost that haunts the person, not the house. No matter how far you run, there she is.
He's not sure that he loves her. Not sure you can love a person like that. But he knows he cares about her. Deeply. Completely. Whether he likes it or not (and right now, he most certainly does not).
The itch. He lifts the eyepatch, scratches at the margins of an eye he no longer has. Whenever he thinks about Miriam, the ruined socket itches.
It's her fault that he lost his eye, and it's also because of her that he's not dead.
That's the
real
twist of the knife, right there.
He doesn't blame her. At least, that's what he tells himself. Some nights like tonight, when it's just him and the white reflective margins of the big slab of highway and the dotted yellow line that looks like the stitching of an autopsy incision, he's not so sure.
Still. He can't stop thinking about her.
It makes him feel like an addict. This trip was to help him get clean.
It's not working.
He turns on the radio. Sets it to scan for something, anything. The stations warble between static and country music and religious broadcasts until he finally settles on a night flight of Art Bell and his Coast-to-Coast AM, on which the commentator talks about conspiracies and UFOs and all manner of American weirdness. Art Bell: a trucker's best friend.
Driving like this feels like being on a boat in the fog. Drifting aimless.
It's then that his high beams catch something. A shape.
A shape that slowly resolves into a car. A wreck. In trucker lingo, a "broken crayon."
The cars sits in the middle of the lane.
He has time enough to react, apply brakes, slow the Mack. He could probably drive around it – the car is turned perpendicular to the highway's edge, but there might be enough room on the other side. But he should call this in. It's dangerous. And somebody might need his help.
The lights are on inside the car.
Steam or smoke rises in coils from under the hood.
He stops the truck. Leaves the lights on. Peers out the windshield.
Honda Accord. Five, six years old. Maybe it's not a wreck. He can't see any structural damage. Both tires on this side are flat.
He leaves the truck idling. Beams on bright.
Louis gets out of the cab.
The smell hits him: that acrid tang of anti-freeze, like bitter green blood running on the asphalt, pooling around the front flat.
Louis orbits the car. The tires on the other side are flat, too.
Nobody's inside the car. But the interior lights remain on.
Louis hears something behind him.
A shuffle. A scritch, a scratch.
He wheels on it–
And his breath catches in his chest.
It's like something out of that Hitchcock movie. The whole road, blanketed with birds. Blackbirds. Starlings. Grackles. Crows. Shifting uneasily. Claws clicking on asphalt.
Click click. Click click.
Beaks pointed away from him.
Eyes pointed
toward
him.
Some of them murmur. Or caw. Or make a low chirrup in the backs of their throats. He thinks, any minute, any one of these birds could come at him. Or hell, all of them at once – wings and beaks and talons. A fear runs through him, a fear in which the birds swarm and come for his face and he loses his last remaining eye, leaving him blind and in the dark forever.
Get away from them. Get away from them now.