The Bird Eater Read online

  “I didn’t have any way to reach out,” Aaron said. “No phone numbers, nothing like that. These days it would have been easy, but back then…” Back then, despite pining for his friends in Ironwood, he decided to let them go, convinced that it was better that way, that Arkansas held nothing but pain.

  “Yeah,” Eric said, looking a little distant. “You always were shit when it came to memorizing numbers.”

  They both went silent for a moment, the soft drone of Talk Talk and the blip of cash registers filling the quiet between them. Finally, Eric took a breath and raised both eyebrows in inquiry.

  “So, what now?”

  “I’m fixing up the house,” Aaron said. “I need to sell it. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Seriously?” A shadow of surprise flitted across Eric’s face. “Huh. Well, that’ll be new.” Aaron shook his head, not following. “That house,” Eric said. “It’s a bit of a legend. But that’s a conversation for another time.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I have to get back.”

  “Sure.” Aaron nodded.

  “You got a phone?” Eric pulled out his cell and the two exchanged numbers. “I’ll call you,” he said. “Man, the guys are going to shit when I tell them you’re back.”

  “The guys? People still live here?”

  “Hell, Craig never left, but like that’s a surprise. He grew up to be a real winner. Mike got out for a while but ended up coming back a few years later. Family stuff. Cheri’s still here.”

  “Seriously?” Aaron’s heart flipped. Something about the idea of seeing Cheri Miller again gave him butterflies, the same ones that had brushed their wings along the inside of his stomach when she had pressed her lips against his in the trees behind his house.

  “Yep. She got married last year; shacked up with the guy who owns that new mechanic’s shop just down the street, Vaughn Mechanical.”

  “Free tire rotation,” Aaron recalled.

  “The guy is a meathead, but he works his ass off. He’s still in business, anyway. Everyone else goes under within six months to a year.” Eric lifted his shoulders up to his ears, backing away. “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.” Aaron raised a hand in goodbye.

  “Go to Bennie’s,” Eric told him. “Used to be Fred’s out by the old high school. Get the bacon cheeseburger. It’s incredible.”

  Aaron gave Eric a parting smile and turned away, Banner’s automatic doors yawning open. It was impressive the way Eric had played his hand, casually suggesting Aaron eat something. Wandering across the parking lot in the warmth of what promised to be a stifling summer day, Aaron paused beside his Tercel, glanced back at Banner Goods, and gave the place a crooked half smile.

  Eric Banner. He could hardly believe it.

  Eric Banner, and Cheri Miller was still in town.

  Four

  Aaron sat at a tiny table outside of Bennie’s Burgers, shielded from the sun by a metal umbrella cemented into the ground. He idly chewed on his bacon cheeseburger, washing it down with sugary soda after every other bite, marveling at the quiet even though Ironwood’s main road was only a dozen yards away. The cicadas buzzed in the summer heat, the pulsating rhythm of their song relaxing him, uncoiling every nerve that had ever been wound tight. With the camcorder in the center of the small table, he pointed it toward a thicket of trees and pressed RECORD, documenting nothing beyond the calm he felt. It was exactly what his therapist would have suggested; if he got anxious later, he could relive the ease of that moment with the push of a button. He set the remainder of his burger onto a square of wax paper, sucked down another gulp of cola, and stared at the abandoned high school across the street.

  The house at the end of Old Mill Road would be a lot of work, but the more he thought about it, the more he relished that fact. He had spent nearly a year of his life doing nothing beyond feeling sorry for himself; he’d spent eleven months crying about things that could never be fixed, too afraid to accept reality to live any semblance of a normal life. It was one of the things that had pushed Evangeline away—his inability to look past what happened, to forgive himself and try to live. But forgiveness had been rendered nearly impossible when he had seen the mangled wreck that had once been the family car.

  Cooper had retrieved Aaron’s things only days after the accident, but Aaron insisted that his friend had missed something on the first pass, and the guy working in the little trailer in front of the junkyard had waved him through, pointing him in the general direction he needed to go. After half an hour of searching in the drizzling rain, Aaron’s breath escaped him in a puff of vapor and failed to return. There, in the steely gray of an autumn morning, was the vehicle that had taken both his and his son’s lives. By some strange twist of fate, Cooper had been the closest unit to the accident that night; Aaron’s life had been restored by his best friend’s refusal to give up hope and let Aaron go. It was ironic that, after being given a second chance, Aaron was the one who gave up. He quit his job as an EMT, claimed disability, and disappeared down a rabbit hole of antianxiety meds and alcohol.

  Perhaps it would have been different had Aaron not visited the junkyard that morning; perhaps he would have found the strength to let the screaming fade to a dull roar inside his head. Maybe he would have finally understood that he and Ryder hadn’t stood a chance—the guy who ran the red had been going over sixty miles per hour in a massive pickup truck. When the grille hit the side of Aaron’s Honda Fit, it had all but pulverized the sedan. But the fact that the driver of the pickup was stumbling drunk didn’t tell the entire story. Ducking his head into the wrecked Fit, Aaron stared at Ryder’s car seat toppled over in the back. The seat belt was unlatched, the buckle snagged in the plastic base. Ryder’s head had hit against the back passenger window. Seeing the point of impact—the thing that had stolen his son away from him forever—doubled Aaron over in a wave of grief. The guy running the wrecking yard found him kneeling in the mud, soaked to the skin, weeping with his face pressed to the fabric of the backseat. If Aaron had only double-checked to make sure the fucking thing was secure; if he had only taken the time, Ryder wouldn’t have missed his eighth birthday.

  His parents wouldn’t have been on the verge of divorce.

  His father wouldn’t have been escorted out of a junkyard by Portland PD.

  Aaron was still convinced that the only reason he hadn’t been placed on involuntary psychiatric hold was because Cooper was an EMT, because the doctors and nurses in the ER knew Aaron, because they would have felt guilty sticking a former coworker in a rubber room.

  Taking the last few bites of his burger, he shook the ice in his empty cup and jabbed the straw into the corner, trying to suck up the dregs. If he could fix up the house at the end of Old Mill, he’d at least prove to Evangeline that he hadn’t completely folded beneath the grief. It was what she was waiting for, some sign that Aaron was still the man she’d fallen in love with nine years before. For a good six months after Ryder’s funeral, he secretly hated her for asking him to stop blaming himself, but Doc Jandreau helped him come to the understanding that Evangeline was blinded by Aaron’s all-consuming sorrow.

  You have to let her see that you’re still in there. You have to dig yourself out from under this mountain of mourning.

  If he could fix up the house, it would prove that he was still capable of doing something, anything. Aaron had to believe that was all Evangeline wanted—to know that some intrinsic part of him hadn’t died out there on the wet pavement, that when Cooper had saved him, he had saved all of him, not just some hollow shell of a man.

  His attention wavered when he caught movement from the corner of his eye. There was someone inside the old high school, their shadow cutting across a wall from beyond a shattered window. A ghost of a smile drifted across his lips. Aaron and Cooper had spent many a night pushing their way through ancient houses and old refineries just shy of the northern Pacific Ocean. Bored te
ens breaking into abandoned buildings was as banal as lonely old ladies surrounding themselves with cats. But just as Aaron was about to pack up and head home, ready to put a dent in the dust and debris that tainted his childhood home, he got an eyeful of the trespasser.

  It was the same kid he’d seen at the Blue Ox earlier that morning. The boy stopped inside the building, his ratty hair twisted up into unwashed peaks. Half in and out of shadow and framed by broken glass, his mussed hair nearly looked like a pair of horns. The boy peered at Aaron with a weird sort of scowl, his mouth curling up into a bizarre smile. He slowly raised his hands, linked them together at the thumbs, and with a twist of the lips, flapped them like a pair of bird wings before disappearing into the shadows of the interior.

  “What the hell?” Aaron murmured, crumpling his burger wrapper and shoving it into his empty cup. He remembered kids like that from when he still lived here, kids his aunt warned him about, weirdos who could turn a good kid into a miscreant by their presence alone.

  As a boy, Aaron was afraid of turning wicked. He subdued his own urges to rip off the wings of butterflies by focusing on music, movies, anything to keep himself occupied. After Edie died, those urges became stronger; he fought against them by smoking stolen cigarettes and drawing razors across his skin where no one would see. Adulthood was easier with tattoos and his job working alongside Cooper as an EMT. Aaron would never admit it, but he got into the profession not because he wanted to help people, but because of a secret love affair with blood, guts, tragedy, and trauma. Arriving at the scene of a suicide or domestic dispute made him feel a little less alien, as though seeing others in the throes of suffering dissipated his own distress.

  After Ryder’s sneaker had connected with the ribs of a wandering neighborhood terrier, he taught his own son that channeling aggression was a necessity that couldn’t be avoided. He and a then five-year-old Ryder struck a deal to keep Ryder’s explosion a secret. As long as Ryder promised to never hurt an animal again, Dad wouldn’t tell Mom.

  Swinging a leg out from the table’s bench seat, he nearly yelped as a crow swept in for a landing on Bennie’s open patio. The bird landed with the clack of talons against concrete, dangerously close to Aaron’s sneakered feet, and released an aggravated-sounding squawk before hopping across the slab of smooth pavement to an abandoned french fry beneath an adjacent table. Aaron stared at the bird for a moment, surprised by its size, then shot another glance toward Ironwood High. He wasn’t surprised the kid was gone. That was the way those types of kids existed, the way he had existed after he’d been torn from this place—here one second, gone the next. Had Ryder been granted a longer life, Aaron had no doubt in his mind that he, too, would be crawling through dilapidated buildings and haunting cemeteries. The apple never did fall far from the tree.

  Returning to the house at the end of the dead-end street with a belly full of burger and a head full of memories, Aaron waited for water and power to show up. He grabbed the freshly purchased mop, broom, and small artillery of cleaning supplies out of the back of his Tercel and got to work, focusing on his old bedroom and upstairs bathroom first. He didn’t have the heart to pull down the leaf-brittle posters from his walls. They were comforting in their own way, just like the old CDs that he played one after the other on the small stereo that was caked in spiderwebs but—with a fresh set of batteries—still worked like a champ. Mouthing the lyrics to the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Faith No More, he excavated items that had remained in the same place for over two decades from under a blanket of grime, placing the things he wanted to keep in empty cardboard boxes he had pulled from the U-Haul, dumping the stuff not worth keeping into a pair of garbage bags—one marked DONATE, the other labeled TRASH.

  He dusted off the old baseball bat that had been left standing in the corner of the room—the same one in the photograph downstairs—and pulled out his desk drawer, cracking a smile at a pile of Tootsie Pop wrappers, nearly all of them bright red. He remembered how he and Cheri Miller used to squirrel them away, always searching for the little Indian among the gang of printed characters like a poor-kid’s version of Where’s Waldo.

  He lifted a bag of marbles from its resting place inside the drawer, spotted a few crumpled dollar bills inside the bright yellow bag—the hiding spot for his life savings—and shoved them into his pocket for safekeeping, refusing to bend beneath the weight of sentimentality that accompanied the constant barrage of memory. He pushed aside a sandwich bag full of Kellogg’s box tops and wrapped his fingers around a toy shoved toward the back of the drawer. It was a small stuffed owl, strikingly similar to the one he’d fished out of the backseat of the Honda Fit before Portland PD escorted him out of the junkyard, eerily reminiscent of the one that was now permanently etched into his skin. That dusty little owl had been one of Aaron’s prized possessions. He didn’t remember where it had come from, just that he had always had it. Perhaps it had been a memento from his mother before she had dumped him on Edie’s doorstep and run off to get rich and famous—if that was actually why she had abandoned him in the first place. Regardless of where it had come from, Aaron had always cherished it; so much so that, when he had spotted a similar owl in a toy shop, he ducked inside the store and bought it six months before Ryder had been born.

  He tossed the owl into the TO KEEP box, gathered up the dusty sheets and blanket from the bed, and carried them down to the washer and dryer in the basement, only to stop short in front of the two appliances. They were so rusty, so utterly timeworn that he had to laugh. He dropped the sheets at the foot of the two machines and stalked back up the stairs while Axl Rose wailed and Slash killed it on electric guitar.

  Stopping in the kitchen to take a swig of lukewarm soda, he stared at the plastic-sheeted window that would be replaced the next day, officially sealing out whoever and whatever had made a habit of wandering through the house. But that small detail still nagged at him; people had broken in—he had seen their footprints in the dust, the wide arcs of sweeping hands along the walls—but they certainly hadn’t come to loot the place. Aaron kept searching for signs of obvious thievery, but everything looked in order. His aunt’s delicate cups and saucers were still tucked away behind kitchen cabinets. Her once-polished silver still rested spoon-in-spoon in the drawer beside the sink. Fletcher’s collection of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers tapes were still perfectly stacked next to a now irreparable stereo. Aaron hadn’t bothered to check Edie’s dresser drawers, but was sure that when he got around to it, he’d find jewelry and family heirlooms.

  It would have been less disturbing if the place had been ransacked. At least that would have made sense. But as it stood, it almost seemed as though something had been protecting the contents of the house. The idea of it made his skin prickle up in gooseflesh. He shook off the notion and continued to work despite the steadily rising temperature inside.

  By the time water and power arrived, Aaron had finished off two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and mopped his bedroom floor. But rather than celebrating when the lights came on, he groaned instead—dozens of dead moth carcasses were silhouetted against the glow of the few lightbulbs that still worked; yet another couple of tasks to tack on to an already endless list.

  He ended up sprawled across his old bed, the floor glinting in the lamplight, the walls clear of spiderwebs and the window so clean that, had there not been a reflection, it would have been invisible to the naked eye. The bathroom down the hall was just as spotless, and as he lay there with his hands folded over his chest, listening to the music of his youth, he couldn’t help but be hopeful that the house served as a metaphor for his own life—it was broken now, but one room at a time, it would be resurrected into something livable, bearable. It would never be as it had once been, but maybe, despite it all, it could be patched together again.

  Though, if it couldn’t, that revolver was still safely tucked away in the trailer outside.

  Evangeline stood at the top of the stairs,
looking toward Aaron’s old room with a thoughtful smile. The sunshine that filtered through the upstairs windows cast a fiery halo around her face, her red hair glinting in the sun. She pivoted on the bare soles of her feet, her wedding dress brushing across the tops of her toes as she twisted in place. Her smile brightened when a boy appeared in the doorway of Aaron’s childhood room—a child that was cast in silhouette. The boy stepped forward as if to meet her, but rather than moving through the upper breezeway, he jutted both arms outward, as if throwing an invisible net toward the bride. Evangeline’s smile wavered, confusion darkening her expression as a cyclone of shadow spun behind the boy, spilling out around him in a flurry of feathered wings.

  She exhaled a gasp, lifting her arms to shield herself from the onslaught of birds, screaming out as they pecked at her flesh, tarnishing the flawless tapestry of her dress with dashes of red. She swatted her arms around her face in a frantic attempt to scare them away, only to lose her footing and fall back into empty space.

  She drifted backward in slow motion, her eyes wide, her mouth an O of startled surprise, her red hair fluttering about her face like water, folding in on herself bit by bit, each crash against the stairs setting her limbs akimbo. Coming to an abrupt stop at the foot of the stairwell, she released a strangled cry of pain; but despite her collapse, she began to crawl, stretching her arms toward her only source of hope—the front door, so close yet so far away.

  The boy leapt down the stairs with a laugh, whooping as he danced around the weeping bride like a savage, stomping on her hands, mashing her fingers against the hardwood floor. When the woman rolled onto her back—her hands held out in defense—Evangeline’s face was replaced by Edie’s pleading gaze, but the boy paid no mind. He drew a kitchen knife from the back pocket of his pants, straddled his victim with a dangerous smile, and brought the blade down swift and unswerving, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing until her screams dwindled down to nothing and her blood ran free.