Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  Annalee kept studying the girl, tried to judge her age. She looked young as yolk, fifteen or sixteen, but had a patch of grey hair growing from the crown of her head. And there was something else delightfully strange about the girl. She appeared as if she wasn’t from this age, as if she had been thrown back in time. She wore a ponytail with thick raven bangs chopped crooked and too short, a green vintage chiffon tank dress, and a pair of cat-eye glasses that gave her a dated, cockamamie look. She had no shoes to speak of, and she was missing an earring but wore the one she had as if wearing only one was by her design.

  The girl slammed the car door and banged on the driver’s side window, but the old man didn’t move; he didn’t turn to look the girl’s way. Perhaps he was deaf. Perhaps blind. But Annalee never knew any blind man to drive.

  Thunder rumbled and rattled the attic window, sifting flakes of paint to the heart-pine floor. Annalee, too intrigued with the girl, didn’t mind getting wet from one of the ceiling’s many leaks. The girl pounded on his window again. She placed both palms on the glass, tilted her head to the side, and drew her eyes on him as if he was the only thing in her world.

  “Look at me!” she yelled.

  The girl banged on the window again but stopped when a pack of shirtless little boys ran past. One of them tripped and fell face-first. The others kept running until they reached a safe distance. They turned around and hollered through the rain at the boy glued to the ground.

  “Wallace! Get up! Get up! Ms. Spivey’s gonna scratch your back!”

  Annalee had heard the old proverbs a hundred times before. Ms. Spivey’s gonna scratch your back! Ms. Spivey’s gonna snip your hair! Ms. Spivey’s gonna snatch your tongue! And a hundred times before she had witnessed panic in the child’s eyes, the one wiggling on the cement, trying to get away from the fingernails that had long ago yellowed, turned hard, and curled off. Annalee usually left the window at this point. She didn’t enjoy scared little boys and their fairytales. But the girl kept her there.

  Little Wallace struggled until he finally got up. Head slung back and elbows jackhammering the air, he sprinted past where the other children stood and didn’t stop to tell them goodbye and that he would meet them at the same time, same place tomorrow.

  The other children stared in silence at the strange girl standing in the drive of the old Spivey house. The girl waved and spooked the children away.

  She turned her attention back to the old man. “Grandpa!” she yelled, banging on his window.

  The old man didn’t budge. He sat still, faced forward, frozen. Annalee found it odd anyone could ignore a creature like that girl.

  The girl swiped her forearm across the windshield. Raindrops scattered through the air like rounds of crystal shrapnel. She kicked the door, and as she drew back to kick the door again, it swung open and the old man got out. He stood tall as a tree. His hair grew to his shoulders and had the color and sheen of garlic skin. She squinted to get a closer look at the man, and when she did, he looked up at the attic window where she stood. Her bones rattled, and she could have sworn a beat pulsed through her shriveled up heart.

  She backed away from the window, and for a long while all she heard was the sound of rain, but then came footsteps and the creak of porch boards, the turn of the doorknob, and the break of spiderwebs. When the front door opened, the hinges whined, and Annalee felt the stale breath of her tomb release with a force so strong it tugged her toward the attic flap.

  The door swung open, moaned until it hit the stop, and moaned again as it stuttered back their way. Grandpa clutched his .22 as he stepped over a mountain of brittle newspapers and yellowed mail that had collected by the door.

  Gradle followed close behind him and entered the stale, creepy house. It smelled sweet on the inside, like flowers, and a bit like death, the kind of death that had left skeletons of rats and snake spines in open graves along the floors. Vines ran across the ceiling like veins and rain trailed down the peeling plaster walls, making the house seem as if it was weeping.

  Grandpa went down the hallway and stood under the attic flap. He tapped it with the barrel of his gun like he was trying to scare something off. Dust fell from the ceiling and collected in the black wires of his brows.

  “Did you use to live here?” Gradle asked, knowing she wouldn’t get much of an answer. He didn’t say a word about where they were going the entire ride over, hadn’t told her anything about it, and probably never would. As with most things, it’d be up to her to figure out.

  Grandpa kept his eyes triggered on the attic flap, and when his fingers coiled around the frayed string hanging down from it, something from above tapped back.

  “What was that?” Gradle asked.

  He cocked his gun, and pointed it at the flap. “Rats.”

  “Since when are you afraid of rats?”

  Gradle left a trail of wet footprints as she crept down the hall and went in and out of the neglected rooms, searching through the abandoned beauty for some clue as to why they had come here. There were no photographs or portraits hanging on the walls, no fingerprints to start a story. The only sign of the life that once lived here was in the mail that had collected at the front door. She went back there, sifted through the mound, and opened some of the envelopes. There were no invitations. No letters. Only unpaid balances for bills addressed to a Ms. Annalee Spivey, postmarked decades ago.

  “Who’s Annalee Spivey?” Gradle asked, as Grandpa’s footsteps came near.

  “It’s a felony to open other people’s mail,” he said, and went down the porch steps to the car, opened the trunk, and unloaded two boxes and his work tools. On his way back to the porch, he kept his stare on top of the house. His eyes were hooded and suspicious, as if he was being watched by something from above.

  “Pick out your room,” he said, stepping over her and the mound of mail.

  “We’re staying here?” she asked.

  She followed him down the hall to the room that had the most light and the most dead flowers on the floor, the one with the jewelry box and a vanity made for a girl. He put a box on the bed and left her alone in the room.

  “I guess this is it,” she whispered to herself and fell back onto the brass bed littered with dead flowers. She stared up at the vine-covered ceiling and imagined the possibilities of her very own room. This place was different. There wasn’t a sign advertising rates. You didn’t pay by the day. There was no front desk, no scent of smoke and diesel fuel. People didn’t come and go. This place was a home, and as ruined and creepy as it was, it had a beauty, a permanence, and a hope the Fireside Motel could never possess.

  Here, she could be a girl, or at least what she imagined a girl to be. She could play dress-up in front of a mirror. Keep her jewelry in a jewelry box. Reinvent herself. Maybe here she could make some real friends, have a sleepover, do what friends do. Maybe here she could meet a boy. Maybe here she’d have her first kiss.

  She rose from the bed, opened the box, and began to unpack her things. She hung her bird mobile on the glass doorknob and put her sock of lost-and-found jewelry, checkerboard, ink pens, and pencils in the nook of the bedside table that kept an old hairbrush and a lamp with a torn taffeta shade tilted to one side. She righted the shade, sat at the vanity, and arranged her fingernail polish and eye shadow beside a perfume bottle on a moldy mirrored tray. She brought the bottle to her neck, squeezed its lavender bulb, and out came a dribble of concentrated stink.

  Thunder boomed, shook the entire house, and made the chandelier in her room swing. She listened out for Grandpa and heard him stomping the floors as he unloaded the rest of his machinery and tools. She carried the box of leftover food and books into the kitchen, closed the stove’s mouth that was parched and hanging ajar, and turned on one of its eyes. A flame lit, and before it sputtered to its death, it singed the silk of a spiderweb and sent its tiny sparks dazzling off into the air. Maybe here she could learn how to really cook, taste some variety for a change. And maybe over there, at the kitc
hen table, she and Grandpa could sit and converse and consume something warm for a change. She opened the pantry door and placed the Wonder Bread, grape jelly, and SpaghettiOs next to a sack of grits that worms had nibbled to dust.

  With her books, the only thing left to unpack, she walked down the hallway toward the study. On her way, she passed Grandpa who stood under the attic flap, staring up at it, with his tool belt wrapped around his waist and his .22 shaking in his hand.

  “Heard any more rats?” she asked.

  He tapped the barrel on the flap again and flinched at the sound of skittering feet.

  She stared at him and tried to get a read. “You spooked or something?”

  He tapped the flap again, and his eyes roamed all over the ceiling, listening out for a sound that never came.

  She went into the study, stepped over a couple of rat-shredded books, and on a shelf parted a row of rain-swollen books to make room for her own collection’s spines: Thumbelina, Strange Stories and Amazing Facts, The Big Book of Tell Me Why, A Guide to the National Parks, The Holy Bible, Webster’s Dictionary, and the bodice rippers left behind by the woman who drank Shasta Grape and smoked Misty Menthol Lights. She dusted off her hands. She was done, her life unpacked from a single cardboard box.

  She followed the sound of Grandpa’s drill back down the hall and into her new room. On top of her bed, bent-kneed and focused, he gripped her bird mobile between his teeth and balanced himself on the armrests of a tattered wingback chair. He wore his black-rimmed glasses he used for detailed work. She loved those glasses. They made him look softer, more approachable, and he talked more with them on, as if their glass shields made life easier to look at. She paused in the doorway, rested her cheek against the frame and watched him defy his age. She didn’t know how old he was, just that he was old, but there were times like these that made her wonder if he had any age at all.

  “What kind of flowers are these?” she asked, picking a dead flower from its vine.

  He grabbed an eyehook from his tool belt. “Moonflower,” he mumbled.

  “Why are they all dead?”

  He screwed the eyehook in the hole he’d started in the ceiling. “Sun kills ‘em. They only bloom at night.”

  “Why do they only bloom at night?” she asked, picking some flaking paint from the doorjamb.

  Grandpa took the mobile from his teeth and hung it on the hook. He blew hard and made it spin, lowered himself down, and put the chair back in its place.

  “Look it up in your Big Book of Tell Me Why,” he said, leaving the room.

  “It’s not in there,” she said at his back. Most everything she wanted to know wasn’t in that book. Like why wouldn’t he tell her why? Like why wouldn’t he tell her anything?

  She plopped down on the bed and stared up at the mobile, as the rain came down steady outside. Her stomach growled, but she was too tired to pry open a can of SpaghettiOs. She pulled the photograph from her bra and stared at her Grandpa’s half-dimpled smile until the rain lulled her to sleep.

  Midnight, she woke to a powerful sweet smell and a dark figure moving across her room. She jerked up and watched it move toward the window, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see Grandpa’s white hair glowing.

  He opened the window as high as it would go, sat down on the edge of her bed, and lit a candle. In the warm amber light hundreds of flowers shown down like little moons from above.

  “Watch,” he whispered. He pointed at something that had flown in through the window. It fluttered past her ear, hovered above a flower, and tongued its long white throat.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “A hawk moth.”

  After the moth drew in what it needed, it flew to another flower, while others came in through the window to feed. She lay back against the pillow and stared up at the ceiling at all the flowers above and their lovers, an entire hatch of them, fluttering at their mouths. There was magic all around. This place was different. She had to believe it was.

  SONNY JOE STITCH rolled to a stop and idled low in the alley behind the old Spivey house in his souped-up Chevy. The truck was a ‘73 C-20 he’d bought off a yard, painted with two coats of silver spray paint, and tailed with a straight-piped muffler. He turned the volume down on the Panasonic jam box he kept in the rear window to compensate for the gutted-out radio.

  “There she is man,” he said, backslapping Ceif in the ribs. He leaned over Ceif who looked up from the joint he was rolling on the back of his threadbare Bible with a 70-millimeter Zig-Zag and some dirt-weed shake.

  They stretched their necks and found an opening in the stand of camellias planted along the slanting iron fence. The girl sat on the back porch steps barefooted, with her knees catching the rain. She was staring at what looked to be a small square of paper and kept smiling at it, repeatedly, as if it was some form of exercise. They had been cruising by the old house off and on since they had spotted her yesterday standing in the front yard in the rain, staring into the passenger’s window of a black vintage Chrysler. Sonny Joe regretted not stopping then, but he was late for a fish-fight, and used it as a good excuse to cover up his genuine apprehension.

  “She’s gotta be fucking crazy,” he said. He took a slug from the half-pint of Southern Comfort he nested between his legs and chased it down with Mello Yello.

  “She’s beautiful,” Ceif said.

  “What the fuck is she doing at the old Spivey house?”

  Keeping his eyes fastened on the girl, Ceif pulled a drag from the joint and passed it to Sonny Joe. “You say fuck a lot.”

  “Fuck you.” Sonny Joe pulled on the joint. He dabbed his finger with a little bit of spit to stop the run.

  “You gonna smoke the whole joint?” Ceif asked.

  “You gonna stop staring?” He slapped Ceif on the back of the head and handed him a few puffs short of a roach.

  “Don’t you think she’s pretty?” Ceif smoked the joint until it toasted the tips of his burnt-yellow fingernails. He flicked it in Sonny Joe’s lap and laughed while Sonny Joe squirmed in his seat.

  “Faggot,” Sonny Joe said.

  “Leprechaun.”

  “It’s burning my pecker, man!” Sonny Joe fished the roach from between his legs and threw it out the window. He took another swig of hooch. “Let’s go shoot the shit.”

  “I thought we’re gonna go see Delvis,” Ceif said.

  “Let’s invite her. She looks like she could use a couple of friends.”

  Ceif retrieved a pack of Midnight Specials he kept stocked in his left sock and started to roll a cigarette. “Don’t mess with her, man.”

  “Why you gotta be a poof all the time, preacher boy?” he asked. He leaned out of the window and whistled wild and loud at the girl.

  Her head jerked up, and her eyes found him in an instant. She put whatever she was staring at in her bra, walked down the porch steps, and glared at him through the rain.

  He got out of the truck and hopped the fence while Ceif limped after him with the help of his whittled pinewood cane. The clouds parted as Sonny Joe approached the girl, and the momentary sunlight made it rain down gold. Steam rose from the colorful tattoo of a Siamese fighting fish that covered the right half of his back and bled from the frays of the T-shirt he’d cut into a tank top. He looked back to check on Ceif, who was still struggling to get over the fence.

  “You lose your dog or something?” she asked.

  Her words stopped his advance. His palms started to sweat, and his head grew dizzy. He swayed a bit, had to hold out his arms to keep from falling over, and couldn’t tell if it was the weed kicking in or if it was the girl’s aggression, her fearlessness and beauty that made him stagger. He took a swig of liquor and looked up into the raining, sunlit sky, wishing he had a cigarette.

  “The devil’s beating his wife,” he said.

  The girl cocked her head, confused.

  “That’s what it means when the sun shines while it’s raining,” he said.

  “Yo
u learn that in church?” she asked.

  “Church ain’t my thing,” Sonny Joe said. “People around here believe in shit like that.”

  “Shit like what?”

  “Shit like the devil’s got a wife.”

  “You from around here?” she asked, smoothing out her dated yet vibrant green dress.

  “Yeah, I’m from here,” he said. “But I ain’t a believer like everybody else.” He turned up the half-pint of Southern Comfort and winced after he was done. “You know this place is haunted.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in shit like that,” she said.

  He smiled and took another drink, unable to find a comeback line. “Me and my buddy back there are gonna go mess with this crazy man if you wanna come with us,” he said, securing the bottle in the waist of his jeans.

  She looked over Sonny Joe’s shoulder at Ceif, who was making his way through the vine-tangled yard with one hand clutching his Bible and the other clutching his cane. She looked at him like most females did, first with shock, then pity, then with whatever it was that made women want to hold and cradle things in their arms. Whether Ceif knew it or not, his looks and his limp were to his advantage, and the kind of attention they demanded was always something with which Sonny Joe struggled to compete.

  “Don’t let his looks fool you,” he said. He yelled back at Ceif, “Ain’t that right, Tadpole?”

  Sonny Joe called Ceif “Tadpole” for one good reason. He looked like one. He had a big head, not much neck, and everything below his runty shoulders tapered off to a point as if he was stuck in the middle of metamorphosis. His mouth was small, so small it seemed capable of only producing words like “shoo” or “sit” but nothing as big and round as “hello.” He had sooty hair and a pair of shadowy eyes that made him appear severely malnourished and sleep deprived. He was both. He slept every night on an abandoned church pew and ate whatever Sonny Joe gave him or whatever he could steal. Ceif the preacher. Ceif the thief.