The Bird Eater Read online

It was way too early to call water and power to request the house’s utilities be reinstated—they wouldn’t be open for another few hours, right along with the hardware store and the supermarket, so Aaron decided to take the opportunity to explore his old hometown. Maybe it was the fond memories of being a kid without any worries, but he was drawn to his old elementary school first.

  Ironwood Elementary looked just the way he remembered it, save for one glaring detail: The windowless single-story redbrick building—rumored to have been designed by a prison architect—had the elementary part of its signage removed, left to simply read IRONWOOD SCHOOL with a disquieting gap between the words. The parking lot was abandoned, but that was to be expected; it was the dead of summer. Classes wouldn’t resume for at least another month. But there were fliers taped to the inside windows of the doors, and the sign out front read S_AY _AFE THIS SU_MER! spelled out in skewed marquee lettering. When Aaron pulled around the back to get a look at the playground, he spotted a football field where there had been nothing but soybeans, two yellow-painted field goals jutting up into the sky. The side of the building was painted in red and white—twelve-foot script reading IRONWOOD WARRIORS blazing bright against the bricks. The monkey bars Aaron remembered had been replaced. Where there had once been a triad of simple raw metal bars of varying heights, there was now a glossy red-and-white swing set attached to a covered spiral slide—the kind that heated up like an oven in the summer, so hot it could flay the skin right off your back. A couple of tetherball poles lined the far end of the playground, the balls removed to prevent theft, dingy white ropes swaying in the breeze. But it didn’t make sense that Ironwood would choose to send high school students to the elementary school rather than the other way around. Aaron’s curiosity getting the best of him, he doubled back to Ironwood High—a school he’d only attended for a few months before everything had changed.

  What he found was a relic of a building so utterly covered in graffiti it easily rivaled the ruins of a dilapidated Detroit. Aaron turned the camera onto the high school’s façade, slowly panning across desecration that radiated animosity toward its middle-of-nowhere locale. Beneath what was left of the school’s signage, someone had spray painted the word SUCKS! with a giant exclamation point hammering the sentiment home. Another tag read BURN ARKANSAS and a third more eloquently declared: THIS TOWN IS A GHOST.

  Aaron swallowed at that assertion, something about it making his stomach go sour. Those scrawled, paint-runny words felt heavier than they should have, as though they were speaking directly to him, translating to: get out, go home, save yourself, run. He took the advice and pulled away from the skeleton of a building that had, at one point in his life, been his school. He had only spent a couple of months in those halls when Ironwood became little more than a distant memory, a phantom of what it had once been, a ghost, just like the graffiti said.

  The burger joint directly across the street from the defunct Ironwood High was still there, but the place he and the Holbrooks had frequented on Friday nights was now called Bennie’s Burgers rather than Fred’s. The joint radiated a sad sort of charm, holding out hope for a future that Ironwood couldn’t offer, let alone guarantee.

  The Superette, which had been one of two grocery stores that served the community, had been converted into some sort of nameless club, its windows blacked out, oddly reminiscent of home. Back in Portland, he had started frequenting strip clubs to dull the pain, convincing himself that there was no better place to buy himself a dose of disease. He was lonely. He hated his life. And yet he still craved human contact. He blamed the Beatles. “All you need is love,” and if you couldn’t find love, a stripper in need of some extra cash would do in a pinch. Then again, the Beatles also claimed that “happiness is a warm gun.” He had taken that advice to heart as well, a never-been-used .45 caliber pistol lying in wait in one of a dozen moving boxes, safely tucked among his things.

  The Dairy Queen where Fletcher took Aaron for ice cream was no longer a DQ, but some cheap knockoff. Whoever had bought the place had gutted the sign that had once shone proudly above the walk-up portico, leaving nothing but the iconic soft-serve cone. Dairy Queen’s white capital letters had been replaced by a close match to the original. Its new name—Mr. Ice Cream—blazed in the early morning sun.

  There were a few buildings he didn’t recognize—a wonder that anyone would have the audacity to build in Ironwood at all: a coffee shop that boasted free Wi-Fi, a questionable-looking Chinese buffet, a mechanic’s shop that rotated tires for free with every oil change. Despite the businesses that had changed hands and changed names, the center of Ironwood looked just as it had in the early nineties.

  The roundabout that caused more than its fair share of accidents was still there, a fifteen-foot-tall lumberjack carved out of pine posing for everyone and no one all at once. The giant held an ax over one shoulder, one boot propped up on a wood-carved steel beam that rested under his enormous boot. That lumberjack was the symbol of what Ironwood had once been—steel and lumber, both industries having left the area decades before. But the lumberjack kept smiling. Even when the local kids doused him in gasoline and set him on fire during Aaron’s fifth-grade year, the lumberjack continued to grin as flames licked up his sides. He was still tarnished and soot-black from feet to chest, and the platform he stood on continued to be surrounded by flowers. Edie had volunteered as the roundabout caretaker for a couple of springs, planting daisies and petunias along the lumberjack’s base. Whether people still volunteered for such a thing was a mystery, but someone had taken the time to plant pansies in Ironwood Warrior red and white around the giant’s blackened feet, as though doing so would invite good luck into a town that desperately needed it.

  Aaron looped around until he reached the hardware store, called water and power to get the house back on the grid while he waited for the store to open, then weaved through the lanes in search of cleaning supplies that could put some sort of dent in the ruin that awaited him back home. He asked the cashier for the number of a local window replacement place, and then ventured to Banner Goods for provisions.

  Along with the Blue Ox, Banner’s seemed to be the only place in town that was reminiscent of what it had been twenty years before. Bright sales signs for fresh fruit and bread decorated the windows, while a selection of potted plants and flowers flanked the sliding front doors. Eric’s grandpa had opened the place back in the fifties or sixties during Ironwood’s heyday, and after Grandpa Banner had had his run, Eric’s dad took over the store. Eric and Aaron had spent countless summer afternoons sitting up in Eric’s dad’s office, the title of “Store Manager” stamped on the door. They’d play Operation and Connect Four while Mr. Banner placed phone orders for produce and paper products. Eric had been proud of his dad owning Ironwood’s most successful business, gloating about how he’d run the place all on his own one day.

  Aaron squinted at the store’s bright white façade as he crossed the parking lot on foot, wondering if Eric had changed his tune as he grew older, wondering whether it was possible for anyone in their right mind to want to stay in a place like this. Aaron hadn’t had the choice of whether to stay or go, but seeing Ironwood for what it was now, he couldn’t help but feel that his sudden departure had been a blessing in disguise.

  He pushed his cart up and down the aisles, settling on a loaf of white bread, a jar of chunky peanut butter, and some grape jelly. Until water and power allowed him to survive off of frozen pizza and TV dinners, PB&J would suit him just fine. He and Ryder would have marathons where they’d eat endless crustless sandwiches while watching old Transformers episodes.

  The girl ringing Aaron up snapped her gum and eyed his tattoos as she ran his purchase over the scanner, her gaze slithering over his arms and neck.

  “You a big fan of PB&J?” she asked, dropping the loaf of bread into a paper bag.

  Aaron gave her a faint smile as he fumbled with his wallet, struggling to get his credit card fr
ee of the plastic holder. Eventually sliding his card through the reader, he waited for his purchase to be approved, unable to help glancing around the place while waiting for his receipt.

  “Did you find everything okay?” she asked, flipping her hair over her shoulder. She was wearing an Ironwood Warriors T-shirt beneath her work apron, bright red with a fading screen print of a Greek warrior helmet half-concealed by her bib. “You look like you’re forgetting something.”

  Aaron shook his head, nudging his credit card back into his wallet. “Just looking for someone.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Eric Banner.” There was no way Eric had stuck around Ironwood, not with the amount of decline that surrounded the place. Eric’s father would have never allowed it.

  “You mean the manager?” He watched her expression falter, unnerved but trying to keep her cool—as though she was about to get canned for something she didn’t even know she had done—her high ponytail bobbing every time she moved her head. Aaron imagined he looked just as surprised, every nerve buzzing with a fretted sort of fascination.

  “He’s here?”

  “Want me to go get him? Was there, like, a problem or anything?”

  “No, no problem.” He gathered his paper bag up in his arms. “We went to school together. It was a long time ago. He probably wouldn’t even remember me.”

  “Manager to register two.” The cashier’s voice boomed through the PA system, crackling as it cut off a muffled eighties tune. Aaron’s skin bristled with self-consciousness. He looked like hell, hollow-cheeked and long-limbed. Eric would take one look at him and assume he was some wasted meth head who was giving his employee trouble. It was embarrassing to know that Eric wouldn’t have a point of reference to compare him to, that he’d assume Aaron had looked this way his entire life.

  As Aaron stood there, watching the girl ring up another order, he wondered if mentioning Eric had been a mistake, wondered if reconnecting with the ghosts of his past was really what he needed. Doc Jandreau would have said yes, but every muscle in Aaron’s body tensed, wound up tight as if ready to spring for the door. He turned away from the bank of registers, deciding it a better idea to simply slink out of the store and into the parking lot, when a question stopped him short.

  “What’s up?”

  Aaron glanced up from the waxed linoleum beneath his feet, the paper bag flush against his chest, his anxiety increasing two-fold when he recognized Eric’s face—older yet somehow exactly the same.

  “There’s a guy here to see you,” he heard the cashier say.

  His heart thudded in his ears. Over two decades gone and all that had changed with Eric Banner was that his mom had finally forced him to get a haircut. The unruly mop he’d once worn like a hat was now cropped and well-groomed, making his face look out of place.

  “Can I help you?” Eric asked.

  Aaron watched the forced, managerial smile quirk the corners of Eric’s mouth upward. It was a guarded smile, the kind a sales associate gives an edgy customer, fingers crossed behind their back that there wouldn’t be a scene.

  “Huh.” The girl behind the register cocked her hip and crossed her arms over her chest, as if fascinated by the exchange. “You were right,” she told Aaron. He adjusted the paper bag against his chest, willing her to stop right there, to not say another word—just let me leave quietly, forget I was ever here. “I guess he doesn’t recognize you after all.”

  Eric blinked, then squinted at the man before him, as though peering through slitted eyes would somehow jar his memory. His gaze scrutinized every inch of exposed ink, every flaw, like the dark hollows beneath Aaron’s eyes, the shiny scar that ran fat and jagged along the inside of his left arm. Aaron dug up the courage to open his mouth, ready to make up an excuse: I thought you were someone else, another Eric Banner. Wrong person. Wrong town. Wrong life. But Eric made a move, stepping around the register bay. His hand fell on Aaron’s shoulder while a baffled expression eclipsed his features.

  “No way,” Eric said quietly, his confusion shifting to a look of disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Aaron couldn’t help but give his old friend a hint of a smile, his initial anxiety melting into a helpless sort of amusement. Eric was wearing the same stupid expression he used to wear when they were kids, a look that had always cracked Aaron up because it was so full of wonder. But before he could say anything about it, Eric pulled him into an abrupt embrace, Aaron’s bag of groceries crushed between them.

  “Jesus Christ, what…?” Eric shook his head, struggling for words. “I thought…but you…”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  Aaron offered up a rueful shrug.

  The cashier was staring at them, perplexed by their spastic conversation. “Hey, Eric?” She shifted her weight from one white Ked to another, still snapping her gum. “I’m going on break, okay?”

  Eric didn’t bother glancing her way; his attention was glued to Aaron’s face. He idly lifted his right hand in a motion that assured her he didn’t care, just go. She slipped by them, smelling of sugar, her ponytail bobbing with each step.

  “When did you get back?” It was the first coherent question Eric was able to stitch together.

  “Yesterday.”

  Aaron watched as Eric struggled for words, his smile slowly growing wider as the store manager squared off against his own inability to speak.

  “Well,” Aaron said after a moment, finding his bearings, “you certainly haven’t gotten any better at holding a conversation.”

  Eric exhaled a flabbergasted laugh and hugged Aaron for a second time. “Christ, that’s some ink. I would have never thought.” There was a beat of hesitation. Eric shook his head again, still recovering from the shock. “Uh, how are you? I mean, how’ve you been? Like…”

  “Like in the past twenty years?” Aaron asked. “Can’t complain.” A lie if there ever was one, but with so much time spent apart, it was impossible to answer honestly. “You finally got your dream job, huh? Living it up in your dad’s shiny office?”

  Eric rolled his eyes. “With the faux wood paneled walls and everything. It’s heaven.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was out until a few years back. Left right out of high school…” So Aaron had been right; Eric had bailed. “I was taking business courses out in Little Rock, had an apartment out there. Full scholarship. And then my dad decided to wax the floor and break a hip. He wrecked himself in the bread aisle, couldn’t run this place anymore.” Eric looked around as if seeing the store for the first time. “My legacy, right? It was supposed to be temporary, just until he got back on his feet, but that was almost five years ago.”

  Aaron frowned. “He’s still not well enough to come back?”

  Eric snorted. “Sure he is, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to. As soon as you get used to someone else doing your work for you, it’s over. There’s no turning back. Anyway…” He waved a hand, dismissing the matter. “What the hell happened to you? One day you were here, the next day, just like that…”

  “I know,” Aaron murmured. “I found her on a Friday, spent the weekend at the sheriff’s office while they tried to locate next of kin, ended up getting driven out to Saint Louis, and I was on a plane a few days later. They didn’t let me go back to the house.”

  “They,” Eric repeated. “They who?”

  “The cops, then the state. Some lady from CPS asked me to make a list of things I wanted to take with me, but I could hardly think straight. The only thing I wrote down was for her to bring me my goddamn Game Boy.”

  “God.” Eric looked dismayed by the memory. “We didn’t know what to think. All I knew after a while was that I’d never see you again. We thought you’d at least be at the funeral. When rumor spread of her possibly being buried on the government dime without any fanfare, people chipped in. The
church sent the offertory basket around that Sunday and it came back full.”

  Bile rose in Aaron’s throat. They had told him there wasn’t going to be a funeral. He had said his final goodbyes to Edie in the cold fluorescent glow of the coroner’s office. Her lips had turned blue, and her skin had taken on a waxy alien-gray hue; he remembered staring at her hair because of how dry and brittle it looked, it too having lost its color. When Aaron insisted he saw Edie breathing, that there was a mistake, that she was still alive, a man in scrubs gently led him out of the steel room by his shoulder, explaining that the illusion of the chest rising and falling was normal, a reflex of the living. A day later Aaron found himself on an airplane for the first time in his life, but rather than being fascinated by flight, he only stared out the small oval window and thought about how he should have touched her, how he hated himself for having been afraid to reach out and put his hand into hers.

  His whole world had been torn out from under him; his house, his teachers, his friends—everything simply vanished and was replaced by something new. The Ozarks gave way to the enormous pines of the Pacific Northwest, and the rain…the rain felt like it lasted for years. The world wept for her, just as it wept for him. Sorrow came easy beneath the shadow of clouds.

  Edie was replaced by Claire and Joseph Tanner—Fletcher’s childless, distant West Coast cousins whom Aaron had never heard of, let alone met. For a while he hoped his mother would finally surface, that CPS would manage to find her and she’d whisk him away to California or New York or wherever it was struggling actresses lived. That, however, didn’t happen, and on his eighteenth birthday Aaron thanked the Tanners for their hospitality and left their home for a shitty studio apartment. He’d spent most of his time at Cooper’s place anyway. Cooper’s folks felt more like parents than the Tanners had. It wasn’t that the Tanners were bad people, just that the three of them had been strangers. Even after nearly five years together, they had little to talk about. Aaron didn’t hold it against them; he was sure they had been relieved when they spotted their emotionally stilted foster kid packing up his things.