Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  “Pop, what's with the chicken? Why do we have it?”

  Pop blew smoke in reply.

  III

  Billy was ten again as he left his memories of the day he met the Devil Bird and stood at the pen, considering whether or not to toss in more feed. The Devil Bird stared at him from the corner of the pen. Billy could just make out the eyes, and the talons of its feet. The Devil Bird never ate while Billy stood there watching. Billy figured that it didn't like people eyeballing it when it was trying to grub. That in some way it made him think you were looking down on him if someone did. Billy didn't feel like he was any better than the Devil Bird just because he stood on the other side of the chicken wire.

  “People are the dumb ones. You've got it all figured out, chicken.” The giant rooster eyed Billy back, seemed to nod.

  That night, Billy realized he was having that dream again – the one where the air smelled funny. For the longest time, Billy had no idea what sort of alien tang was creeping up his nose. Until one night he realized it was something he'd never smelled in his town.

  Fresh air.

  In the dream, Billy stood atop a rise and looked down towards a natural ramp that sloped down the top of the mountain peak. There weren't buildings or a town anywhere to be seen, and Billy could see for miles and miles in every direction. The ground started rocky up in this high spot, but there was a long downhill that became surprisingly smooth. Like many had come before him and worn it down. All Billy wanted to do when he was up here was to skate that ramp and go flying. Billy never had his board in this dream though. Right when he would start looking for it was when he always woke up.

  Tonight, Billy looked over and the wind blew at the stately white feathers of the Devil Bird. “How'd you get out of your cage, chicken?” Billy had to ask because he asked it every time.

  “I'm not a chicken, you idiot.” The Devil Bird had a big voice and he shook his head at Billy just like the school janitor did, “I'm an oracle.”

  Billy just nodded. Then they stared at one another, and Billy realized he was supposed to say, “What's an oracle?” Billy didn't give a big top rip what the answer was going to be. It was just something to keep the conversation going and keep the dumb dream moving along until his skateboard showed up.

  “I was sent by a goddess to look after you.”

  “What's a goddess?” Billy didn't really care about that part either and kept staring down the mountain ramp.

  “A dying breed, kid.”

  The Devil Bird was engaged in the chit-chat, because he wouldn't shut up after that. “Beware of Helkross, the unholy paladin spawned of the doom breath menagerie of the Order of the Inverted. His name is the curse on the lips of the fallen blood-dried damned in the field of the dragon-goat.”

  Billy made a circle in the wind with his finger, the universal sign for ‘Hurry up your shuttin' up.’

  “It will come for you too, and it will snap at you,” the Devil Bird kept going. “If it gets you, you're worse than dead. Remember the dials must be set properly. It's not just time, it's time and space. Everyone always gets that part wrong.”

  “Where's my board?” asked Billy. He knew he'd wake up soon now that he was really looking for it.

  “It's important, Billy. It has to do with your mother.”

  Billy looked at the Devil Bird then, suddenly on task. “My mother is on the other side of the wall.”

  The Devil Bird gave a concerned smirk, the kind that can only be given by something with a beak. “Do you even know what's on the other side of that wall?”

  Billy could feel that fire welling up in his belly and making his innards twist, and he was about to smack the big chicken right in the face.

  “Don't you talk about her! She's on the other side of the wall and that's good enough for me. Pop said so.”

  “Nothing is ever really dead you know. Not if you set the dials just right.” The Devil Bird pointed to his own chest.

  “She's not dead.” Billy whispered this, but the wind carried the sound with it down across the plains below.

  “You'll know when it's close. It comes in a flash. No way to predict its passing to and going yonder. But you'll smell it first. You'll smell death.” The Devil Bird pointed to its nose now. “When that smell comes, move first and fast or by the time it passes off your nose it will have already taken her.”

  Billy looked down the ramp of stone. He was going to skate down this thing this time. “Screw you, Devil Bird.”

  The Devil Bird's words were getting farther and farther away as Billy looked to the sky - “It's the only way you can find her, Billy. The only way you can get to her.”

  Billy almost felt like a sissy who might start to cry and he just kept on staring away from The Devil Bird. He watched the sun rise and set all at once and he felt himself abandoned now as the world was rotting slowly away in his waking life.

  “They will try to stop you, just as they stopped me.”

  “Chicken--” - Billy paused – and he wasn't at all good at pauses - “How can anyone get to Mom if she's where you say she is? If she's in Heaven…”

  Even though Billy wasn't looking towards the ever-retreating voice of the big rooster, he could feel it shake its head again and make a sad face. “She's not in Heaven, boy.”

  Billy woke up fighting the covers and banging his fist into the hardwood floors of his room. That's what he did for a long time. He just kept slamming his fist into the floor. He cried some, but that still didn't make him a sissy.

  That was the night that Billy walked out into the backyard with a big kitchen knife. The Devil Bird was snoring in his pen.

  Billy smelled barbecue.

  Billy's Pop was sitting under the night sky on the wet grass, wooden leg jutted out into the yard. The barbecue had the lid on it. Smoke eked out the vent on the top and rose up over the roofs of the houses in the neighborhood. Pop had his M-16 propped up against a fencepost. “What-cha doing with that knife, son?”

  Uly's son looked down at his own hand, followed the trail of his flesh down the arm that ended in a blade. Billy looked up. “Thought you might need it, Pop.”

  Pop waved Billy over. “For barbecue?” Billy nodded and started walking. “Why you cooking, Pop? It's so late.”

  “Mood struck me. It's good to see you walking around with a weapon, boy. Shows forward thinking. You never know what the night is gonna barrel toss at ya.”

  Billy handed his Pop the knife. “What're you barbecuing, Pop?”

  “Chicken,” Pop answered. “I stuck beer cans up their butts. Feel like chicken?”

  Billy looked back at the pen of the Devil Bird near the tree line. “That might hit the spot, Pop.”

  “Good. You look like you could use a beer, boy.”

  “Pop, I'm ten.”

  Billy's Pop reached into a tub of ice, pulled out a root beer in a glass bottle. He snapped off the bottle cap by shoving it in the joint of his fake leg then handed it freshly opened to his son. Billy heard Pop crack the pull on a cold one of his own. The world smelled bad like the city always did, but the scent of barbecue made Billy's nose forget about that quick enough. Billy chugged back his root beer. He smiled and the moon smiled back.

  The boy didn't think about the dream. He just focused on the smoke lifting into the sky and up to the moon. He wondered if Jimmy Hoffa could smell it up there. Billy bet he could and that he was jealous.

  The only sound was the snoring rattle of the Devil Bird.

  Chapter 3

  Fortune Tellers

  Billy woke from a bad dream that he couldn't remember anything about except that there had been a mountain and a big skateboard ramp and he had talked to the Devil Bird.

  He remembered he and Pop had made barbecue chicken.

  His reflection in the mirror moved the internal curiosities along and he rubbed his face. The scar across his face had always been there and he couldn't forget about it because all of the girls at school delighted in telling him how ugly it made him. B
illy was forced to disagree with them, he thought he was a pretty handsome fellow for a fifth grader.

  Then Billy remembered the fight and the vampires and how he had rescued that girl they were trying to snack on.

  Mostly, he remembered the girl and the long black hair and the green of her eyes. No girl had ever held onto him that way before. He felt all weird about the gesture and it made him almost lightheaded. That was probably the last he'd ever see of her though. He'd already rescued her and now she acted like she didn't need him anymore. Billy didn't know who she was, what she'd been doing out there to get captured, or where she lived. He'd never seen her in school before. He wouldn't have forgotten her.

  He felt wrong about the situation and the world in general. He hoped that she was okay all alone, if in fact she was as alone as she acted. Being on the run from real vampires was way cool - but had to be scary too.

  Billy knew he should go looking for her, even though she acted like she wasn't into getting his help. The feeling creeping in on him now about the situation was infinitely more frightening to him than what her future opinions of him would be.

  “She probably didn't notice the scar.” Billy traced his finger over it. If he could go back in time he'd have not played it so cool and at least asked her what her name was.

  II.

  Billy spent the better part of the morning tracking the girl through the broken places, the abandoned ones, along the edge of the woods and across the ruins of what had once been called a park and was now little more than statue tarnished patriot rot and overgrown field. She didn't leave a trail, of any kind, and if she had it could've been a trick. That's what he had figured out about her by now - she had to be crafty.

  He kept a low profile and avoided cops, who sometimes picked Billy up and dragged him back to school if he wasn't careful. He was probably still suspended from school anyhow and they wouldn't want him back today.

  Adventures were far more interesting than fifth grade.

  Billy wasn't sure if she was anywhere around. Sometimes he thought he saw something, but then nothing would be there and it could have been a shadow or something out of the corner of his eye.

  Just before dark, the murk above became true storm cloud. Billy stared into the open door of the house at the end of Smearman Street. It was tall with rounded cone roof spires and looked to be made of broken gingerbread painted with pollen, dust, and ash. No matter how hard the rain was about to fall, the house could never be washed clean for the stain wasn't some type of decoration of neglect - it was more like a glue that held the place together.

  In the front window of the home neon burned a message into the covering dark:

  KNOW YOUR FORTUNE

  Billy took the five steps up the porch in two strides and moved past the dangling seashells that cried with the wind. Their music cared little of his arrival: it was the deluge and the black they announced for anyone who cared to listen. Anyone and no one it seemed.

  Even less light was found within than the outside world. The smell of burning wax came with the candles that lit Billy's path.

  The Old Lady sat on the other side of a wooden card table covered in a cloth with stars and moons cheaply stamped onto it. Billy could see the lines where the machine had missed and the azure streaks of patterns fought one another for esoteric relevance. A large shelf behind her held books and jars and a crystal ball. The books spilled from the shelf and the stacks continued in antiquated sprawl upon the floor and became yellowed paper towers running halfway up the wall.

  There was a stuffed owl in flight, wings spread. Below it was an equally kept bunny. The hare stood oblivious to the owl about to swoop in for the feasting kill.

  “Which are you, owl or rabbit?” The voice of the Old Lady brought Billy's eyes back to her.

  Billy looked himself over and then back to the Old Lady. This broad was ancient and had a coldness about her like an aged movie star who cursed the draining of youth's lost glow. She seemed to be propped up as much by the chair she sat within as the surrounding stacks of tomes and magic tricks all about her withered form. She wasn't even pretending to project the nurturing spirit of grand-mothered bliss normally such a point of pride in a woman of her age.

  Billy thought about the owl and the bunny rabbit. To him he resembled neither.

  “Are you here to know finally of Romania?” She asked him this in a curt tone.

  “Who's that?” Billy had no clue.

  “Sit quickly,” came her words. “Once I am done with you I can go.”

  Billy sat on a wooden short stool, spray-painted green and decorated in hand-drawn frogs. “I've never had my fortune read before.”

  He would have rather looked around at all the magic trick junk, but his gaze always found her lonely eyes again.

  “Of course you have - you have the mark,” she said firmly.

  “Mark?”

  The Old Lady motioned with her fingertip a line across the diagonal of her own face. She meant his scar. Billy couldn't help but touch it - but only for an instant, and then he tried to put it out of his mind. He hated it because everyone else hated it and that to him was reason enough.

  Billy put his arm to moon-and-starred table, palm up.

  The Old Lady's ice fingers pushed Billy's palm away in hasty disgust.

  “You've no fortune in those hands.” She pointed stiffly with new resolve. “Give me that.”

  She motioned to Billy's skateboard. “I won't hurt it,” she promised, finally giving enough kindness to assure. “Come now.”

  Billy set his board on the table, wheels up, and the Old Lady didn't hesitate as she began to run leathery fingertips over the lines in the wood.

  “Why are you here?”

  Billy watched her jagged movements. He'd never paid any attention to just how many lines and old knots there were in the wood. He couldn't help but consider how old it too must be, just like this crazy Old Lady. Both weren't much more than twisting pattern and broken ruts.

  The boy wondered what he was doing in this lady's house and why he thought she might know anything, but he played along.

  “I'm on an adventure.”

  The Old Lady shushed him even though she had just asked the question he answered. “No, why today? Why tonight?”

  “I was following a girl.”

  The Old Lady betrayed a smile. “Anastasia.”

  Billy didn't know if she was talking about places or people and was still caught up on who Romania was but then it fell into place. “Is that her name?”

  “Yes, Billy Purgatory. That is her name.”

  “Hey, how..?” He crooked his brow at her, he hadn't told Grammy his name. Then it hit him. “Oh, yeah, magic. Cool, nevermind.”

  Bony divination of splinters continued.

  “Who is she?” Billy was hung up on the girl again.

  “She is the pretty one. What more could you want to know?”

  “Lots of stuff. Where is she? How come vampires wanna kill her?”

  “She will be revealed to you.” The Old Lady looked into his eyes grinning. “Many times.”

  “Are vampires real? Am I gonna have to kick some ass?”

  “Everything is trapped in a spiral, Billy Purgatory.”

  “Talk American!”

  The Old Lady was staring into his board again. “You have many more lines and lives than are good for you.”

  “Someone want me dead, Mee Maw?”

  Then one of her chipped fingernails hit a new crook in the wood and she looked up with soulless, frightened eyes.

  The Old Lady hacked as violently as her bellows would press and straightened as she quickly pushed away from the wood. She spit, not onto the board but at her fingertips which without warning lit on fire, making them resemble striking matchsticks.

  “They won't let me see!” She continued to spit at her fingertips which burned hot with blue flames.

  “Lady, you're on fire!” Billy didn't know if he should grab her and pull her out into the storm
or if this was all part of the show. If it was a trick it was a convincing one, but the Old Lady seemed to be going somewhere with it all so he gave questions one last shot. “What can't you see, Lady?”

  “Mother!” She screamed with deadly serious emotion at the word while the fire spread up her arms.

  Billy grabbed the skateboard truck closest to him and pulled the board from the table and into his chest. He tumbled back from her and rolled across the floor and the legs of the stool wobbled. The stool hit the hardwood with a bang and thud and the Old Lady and the fire vanished. Billy's elbow bled from where he'd slid against the floor and the wind snaked from the open portal of the door and stung every candle dead.

  Billy stared at where she had been, looked under the card table for slippered feet. She was gone.

  “Lady?”

  Then the sound of the pouring rain was all he had left to answer his wonders. Billy stood and faced the storm outside.

  A girl stood in the doorway, and she was very pretty but she was not that girl, this Anastasia, the search for which had led him here. This girl had curly hair, and even in the darkness he knew there was red mixed with the brown. Those twists dripped of the arrived rain and she stood in what would soon be a puddle of the storm falling off her onto the wood at her feet. Her eyes were dark, but they weren't black, and Billy was intent on learning what color they were in sunlight. She was the same age as he, yet he knew, like Anastasia, he had never seen her before.

  She held her umbrella as a weapon. “What are you doing in my house?”

  Billy knew that she was going to hit him, and he honestly had no idea how he felt about that. He needed to know who she was, and it might prove a painful journey.

  “I was…” He looked back at the empty card table and the streaks of stars and moons, “The old lady was reading my fortune?”

  The girl looked like she might cry. Maybe it was the rain, but Billy thought he sensed tears. Nevertheless had she started crying, it wouldn't have made her any less strong or any less fierce. Her pain would only be another link of her armor.