It was Jimmy’s Dad who was trying to cook steaks out in the backyard with an umbrella over his head when the birds swooped down to poke at his meat. Maybe he didn’t realize they were in there when he slammed the lid shut, or maybe he just didn’t give a shit. There was a scream at first, apparently. The sky went dark for a second. Jimmy described a cloud of wings and bright eyes descending from the roof to swallow up his father’s body in some feathered suit, their tiny beaks piercing his skin. Their shrill squawks drowned out his voice and the air smelled like burning hair, but it was all those feathers in the barbecue. Jimmy’s Mom pulled him away from the window. It lasted maybe fifteen minutes until his Dad stopped moving. His Mom was the one who remained composed when the cops arrived to take a statement. She was the one who led them to the corpse. The birds left most of the body behind, but the eyes were gone. The medics carted the body away under a blue tarp, but Jimmy said it still left a wet trail behind. The birds still don’t go near the barbecue and Jimmy says all they fear is fire.
I push my way into the garage and look for a longer piece of hose. I don’t really think this plan is going to work. If anything, one of us is just going to end up on fire. There really isn’t anyone else to hang out with though. Jimmy and I are the only ones who will go outside. Most of the girls stay indoors and phone each other. Sometimes they just sleep or write messages in soap on their windows until the bird shit covers them again. We used to leave all the girls letters about our plan to burn out the sky, but they didn’t write back. No one really thinks we can pull it off. I don’t really blame them, but Jimmy seems to think girls aren’t worth our time anyway.
The garage is full of all his Dad’s stuff. Clothes and diplomas and fishing equipment are stacked up against the walls. Jimmy’s Mom dumped it all out here after they buried his father just outside town. She lets me stay over most nights when I get tired of listening to my parents strangling as many birds as they can for the government. My little brother says it’s like listening to someone treading water forever, but he’s a big fan of understatements. He uses headphones to block out the sound, but I swear all the chirping cuts right through the foam. It sounds like popped balloons or piñatas imploding inside the walls around me. It never seems to stop.
I step into the house still searching for the hose. Jimmy’s Mom keeps everything clean. There are no dishes in the sink. I sleep on a fold out couch that is tucked away every morning. Everything is in its right place. I move through the house looking for something to help us spew burning gas into the air. A funnel or a piece of pipe—there really isn’t much to find. Voices clatter down the stairs and I try to ignore them. With all the birds outside, most of us have to use the phone to reach each other. Some of the older houses out here still use a party line. Jimmy’s Mom is always on the phone with someone. I can hear her laughing up there. Then somebody who sounds like Orlando starts talking about moving and I stop at the bottom of the stairs.
“Look, I don’t need to stay here. I’ve got money from when my old man keeled over. He has an old house down in North Carolina or something. We can move down there, take the kid. I don’t really care what happens. I just can’t stay here any longer, Kelly.”
“Jimmy won’t want to go. He still wants to…”
“What, finish off the birds? No, Kelly, this is a fucking ghost town. No one is coming back here. Oh, they might come for the bird anniversary or to take pictures of all the dead shit out here, but no one is moving into Hudson. We’re slowly draining out all the people until it’s just old timers and the poor fuckers who think they can win against these goddamn starlings. The things reproduce faster than you can blink. It’s a lost cause.”
“I know, I know, alright Orlando? I hear you. You wanna be the one who tells Jimmy? His Dad’s still buried here. All his friends are here. His school is here. He is still trying to be a kid. He doesn’t even know about you yet and now you wanna move him a thousand miles away?”
I try to sneak out the back door. Their voices are rising, but I know Orlando’s right.
“If it means getting away from this endless rain of shit? Hell yeah, Kelly.”
There is no way we can win. We can only try and run.
* * *
“What is it?” Jimmy says. He’s got the mower stuck in the mud again. He’s pushing it out of a hole and back up into the clearing. I try not to say anything, but he grabs me by the shoulder.
“You couldn’t find the hose or what? Come on, Tony. Do I have to do everything? Jesus.”
Jimmy starts stomping off towards the house, but I call after him. “You don’t wanna go back there, man. Let’s just finish up here and then…”
“What’s your problem, man?” Jimmy turns back towards me. He’s covered in sweat.
I say nothing and climb onto the mower. I try to back it up into the clearing, but Jimmy grabs the steering wheel. He tries to turn it off, but can’t get a handle on the key.
“Look, if you don’t wanna do this, that’s fine, alright? Just stop making excuses, Tony.”
I stop the mower. Jimmy won’t stop staring at me. His hands still clench the wheel.
“What is your problem, huh?”
I swallow and try to stare up into the trees.
“Orlando and your Mom—they were talking. They wanna go…”
“Go out, go what? Whatever he wants to do… Look, what is your problem?”
“They wanna move you down to Carolina or something. They wanna get out of town before everyone else leaves and Hudson just dies. And he’s right, man. I mean, he has a point.”
Jimmy lets go of the wheel and sits down on the ground. I don’t move from my seat.
“He thinks he’s my Dad? Is that it? I knew he was like, friends with my Mom, or whatever, but… he thinks he can take me down there? When we are doing all this shit here? Did they say anything about my Dad? What did my Mom say? Did she say it was a good idea? She knows that we own this house right? And that you and I are trying to get rid of all these things?”
I don’t want to say anything. I try to make eye contact with the birds around us. They are gathered on the branches, but they aren’t saying much. I want to crush them in my hands.
“He said he has a house… and I mean, well your Mom wasn’t happy, but Orlando kind of had a point. Like, who else goes outside besides us? No one is out there on the street at all.”
“That stupid pale fucker,” Jimmy says. His face goes red and I can see foam rising in his mouth. He spits onto the ground and I remember when Rachel Henderson shot him down in the fourth grade. He took all her pencil crayons and ran each one through the sharpener at recess until only shavings remained. Jimmy pulls his Dad’s motorcycle helmet and slams the visor shut.
“Nobody wants to fucking help. They’re all too busy planning with each other.”
Jimmy takes off into the woods and I’m left sitting on the lawn mower. The birds begin to cackle around me. I fire up the mower and try to ride it out of the woods. I want to follow him and explain this was all a mistake. We can still finish this project. We can still burn out the sky.
The mower gets stuck in the mud again and I am forced to walk.
* * *
Eventually, I catch up to Jimmy at Orlando’s gas station. He has smashed all the glass and is tearing down the pictures when I arrive. White sand beaches and Jimmy Buffett’s moustache flutter away into the wind past my face. The birds circle above the destruction, but refuse to swoop down for a closer look. Jimmy tears apart every image as I approach. He is still wearing his helmet and it is splotched with white arcs of shit. He turns and spots me riding toward him with the gas can dangling from my handlebars. He raises two middle fingers in my direction and runs toward his bike. I drop the gas can and keep pedalling. My lungs are filled with phlegm.
“We aren’t finished yet!” I scream through my bandanna. “We aren’t done! Come back! You can stay with me, man! You can stay, alright?”
Jimmy keeps pedalling away from me. His legs
have always been stronger than mine. He thinks he can outrun this cloud. I scream after him as my muscles begin to surrender. They burn and burn and eventually I have to stop before I throw up or pass out into a ditch. Jimmy tosses up a tail of dust behind him as he hits the road out of town. He passes the sign welcoming everyone to Hudson. He passes the graveyard where they put his father and all our grandparents. He thinks he can beat them, that he can escape the cloud lingering above us all. Jimmy passes the final corner toward the highway. I can only see the glint of his black helmet now. He thinks he’s gone.
I look up into the sky above me. Everything is black and the wings go on forever.
God Is a Place
Caleb takes the baby while Twink is at work. He bundles it up in sweaters and wraps it in a bath towel. He doesn’t trust the baby, and he doesn’t believe it’s his child. It burps and squeals while he tries to sleep in the other room. It drains the life out of Twink from her tits, sapping all that warm rich life away into piss and shit and other fluids. Twink’s night shifts stretch out into the early hours before dawn, where the old men ask her if she’s queer and ponder aloud why she was named after a pastry in the first place. Twink is nowhere to be found in those early hours and so Caleb is the one sitting at home, listening to the squealing mass, the baby she says is his, but it does not have his eyes, it does not have his long, bony hands and it never shuts up. It squeals for milk that is too warm, too cold, too much. There is always too much.
Caleb can’t get the prescription he needs and his left knee is still broken somewhere deep inside, somewhere deep and unknowable, according to the doctors who hold out soft, soft hands for their coins and cheques and endless pounds of flesh. The darkness is the same way and so Caleb continues down his path with the baby clutched in his arms, dodging streetlights and the occasional cab that slows to pass him on the shoulder. Everyone will have their piece eventually. Everyone will take a piece of the whole, punishing the body for the sins of the hand.
Caleb’s hands are red in the cold and he worries they will draw out wandering eyes. They are glowing and he can barely feel them. The baby is quiet; maybe it is freezing too. The cold is not an enemy. It is a warm embrace that articulates each breath you take. Caleb stops to lean against a tree to whisper something about St. Peter choking on a stone. All your idols are crumbling, he warns the baby and the baby cries because it knows Caleb is right and so Caleb says, you weren’t born from me. And the baby cries again.
Caleb fell off the top shelf of the pasta aisle at the grocery store a year ago. Twink was working the cash and she took him to the hospital and filed the workman’s comp and got them both kicked out of her Mom’s place once the baby bump could not be hidden anymore. She said it was Caleb’s, but Caleb can’t remember getting hard, not after his knee blew out and so he says okay, but it really isn’t okay. He remembers another boy and another bottle and not drinking. He doesn’t want the new apartment with the ducts and pipes filtering fluids and air through their bedroom, the stove rattling every time the bus stops in front of the house. He doesn’t want the feet shuffling above him or the loud screams of raccoons mating in the attic. Fighting, mating, all the same things; all flesh on flesh and the baby is just flesh, that’s it.
Caleb remembers a church group and being able to walk without a limp and his older brother telling them about Jesus carrying you when you were suffering, when life was hard and filled with stones that cut the bottoms of your feet. Caleb has forgotten to wear his shoes and his socks are soaked and growing stiff around his toes. His brother was a youth pastor and a saviour and always right until the police took everyone away because of the incident, and so Caleb focuses on the baby instead, the one in his arms, the one that isn’t his and he tells the baby it will be okay even though he’s in the park now and the snow is deeper than he thought. He tells the baby to breathe with him and that Twink will be better after this, she will be less sad, she will be so much better. She will find them locked in time, locked in place, held together by moisture in the air because that’s where God is. God is a place. God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.
Two joggers will find them in the morning cold and the baby still won’t have a name.
Self-cleaning Oven
After the third attempt, Harriet’s sisters started to call her the self-cleaning oven. Henry already had one kid with Doris, the bitch who kept calling them in the middle of the night to complain about the water temperature in Henry’s old house. She still expected him to maintain the property even after receiving full custody of their mewling little Jamie. Henry began sleeping through the phone calls and so it was Harriet who had to answer the phone.
“Stop. Just stop, Doris. Call a plumber. Just look it up online.”
Three years with Henry and the calls still continued. Three years and three miscarriages.
Harriet’s sisters asked her if she had read the books they gave her. The one’s about sleeping on your back for all nine months and eating only cucumbers or avocados. They asked if she was smoking cigarettes when no one else was looking. They checked her cabinets for secret stashes of whiskey and questioned Henry. Was he beating her? Did he have a history of malformed sperm? Harriet just wanted them to go away, but they had nothing else to distract them.
Theresa had her tubes tied after the third kid came out in one swift motion in a bus station bathroom and Deidra already had two kids in college. She never bothered finding another man after Bob was hit with two heart attacks in a row while cutting the lawn. It was Harriet, the youngest, who was lagging behind. Their mother would not have been impressed. Harriet’s sisters visited the graveyard once a week to talk to their mother’s marble gravestone and Harriet was pretty sure all they did was discuss how the youngest Donoghue had failed the family. They even brought letters about her to read. Harriet discovered them when she showed up with flowers on her mother’s birthday. Pieces of paper fluttering around the cemetery, listing all her faults and failures chronologically with footnotes and everything. It was a long list.
The phone rings again and Harriet picks it up. Doris is on the other end again.
“Do you think I have the money for a plumber? Do you realize how expensive this dump is to heat once October hits? It ain’t cheap, I can tell you that much. And if you hang up on me again, I swear to God—”
Harriet leaves the phone off the hook and rolls over to go back to sleep. Henry does not move. He has become impervious to noise. Harriet closes her eyes and tries to dream of a plant that will never die. All she can find are cactuses that stretch up into the clouds.
* * *
In the morning, she drives by the old house Henry surrendered to Doris during the divorce. The windows are covered in dust and half the trim has begun to rot away. Henry is still only allowed to see the boy on weekend visits with a social worker present. A minor sex offender conviction when he was in high school has become a ghost, a fifteen-year-old girl floating over every conversation; her parents demanded an officer press the charges.
This ghost appears at random, unravelling the many lives Henry’s tried to build since they were caught in her basement without pants or excuses. It pokes holes in resumes and drives away investors from his growing hot tub empire. It sulks in corners and lashes out in courtrooms and custody battles. Henry tells Harriet she would like his son, but he’s not allowed to bring anyone to the visits. Doris has filed a petition about corrupting influences. She isn’t wrong exactly. Harriet is the one who broke up their marriage, the one who slowly pulled Henry away from a life of baseball games and barbecues and cold bed sheets. Harriet is the one who diagnosed their marriage, the one who reached inside and pulled out a heart crusted in bile. She does not regret any of it, but sometimes she does regret there was a child. Doris holds him up like a trophy and the doctor says Henry’s sperm are still energetic, still thriving. Harriet wants to blame it all on the hot tubs, but the doctor says that isn’t the case. She tries to avoid thinking about other options. She foc
uses on Doris and what she would look like floating face down in a hot tub.
The boy is sitting on the porch with a deflated basketball. He tries to bounce it off the concrete steps, but it barely reacts. Harriet pulls over and watches him try to blow air into the tiny hole. The kid’s face turns red and then purple before he surrenders and tosses the ball away into the overgrown grass. Harriet rolls down the window and yells out into the street.
“You’re Henry’s kid, right?”
The boy is only six. He doesn’t say anything at first. He stands on the steps and looks toward the front door, but doesn’t move. Harriet climbs out of the car. She remembers all those public service announcements about strangers in cars. No matter what her sisters say, Harriet knows she is not a monster. She just doesn’t always think things through. Henry says it wasn’t her fault that they fired her from the cereal factory, but he doesn’t know about the lift she dropped on Debbie Anderson or the medical bills her family has to pay. Harriet doesn’t think he’d want to know. She bought a hot tub from him with some of the severance money. After all, nobody could prove Harriet was definitely the one who dropped that lift on Debbie. Debbie didn’t have a lot of friends on the inside of that place. She liked to take naps in the bathroom and smoke in the loading bay, leaving her butts behind for security to find on the midnight shift. She had it coming, Harriet told her sisters. They asked if it was an accident. Of course it was, Harriet said.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m just your Dad’s friend,” Harriet says. The kid looks for his basketball in the grass. He won’t look her in the eye as she steps toward him.
All We Want Is Everything Page 5