Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird

by Jesse James Freeman

  “I see that he is, Momma.”

  Billy turned to her. “Who did that to you?”

  Chimera turned from him. “I gotta go.”

  “Please…” Billy thought he might beg if she wouldn't say.

  “They got us all.” Chimera's words were quiet, maybe so her mother couldn't hear. “The Five. Looks like they tried to get you too.”

  Lee Anna screamed for the girl one last time, and Chimera left Billy and started running towards her. Lee Anna took the girl by the hand and turned back to Billy before she would pull the girl away from him. “You better stay out of that bog, Billy Purgatory. Alligators'll finish the job on you quick.”

  Billy rubbed his neck as the woman and her daughter moved away. “I've already been bit, lady!” There was no further screaming from Lee Anna in her green dress. Billy ran a fingertip across his face tracing where his imaginary second scar would run. “Looks like I was way too fast for whoever they were.”

  II

  Billy Purgatory slept the rest of the night on the porch swing covered in that quilt. He wouldn't see Chimera Lee again for many years.

  Billy never made it down to see what was going on at the water. It would also be many years before he learned any of that - how to make soap.

  The next morning, Mudder Kelroy was back and loaded Billy onto his motorcycle. Pop had never taken him for a ride on his own Harley. Pop had told Billy that they were dangerous.

  Billy didn't find a motorcycle particularly dangerous and figured that Pop just didn't like riding them anymore. Billy thought, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, that Mom probably used to ride with Pop. Billy figured that made Pop sad, that she wasn't around to go riding anymore.

  Plus, it had to be a bitch to drive one of those things with a wooden leg.

  Billy watched the landscape fly by over his own right shoulder. He had to take the side view because there was no seeing over Mudder Kelroy. Trees began turning into hills and then into mountains. The high cliffs were impressive and intimidating to the boy. He'd never seen anything like them, even in books. Billy had never been this far up the coast before.

  The line of bikes pulled off the road and into the woods until finally Mudder parked and everyone got off. He said he had to ‘kick a tire’ and Billy found out that meant that everyone was going to find a tree and pee on it. The day was turning awesome finally.

  Mudder told the gang that he and Billy would go in the rest of the way on their own. Once again, Billy was walking in the woods.

  “How do you know my Pop, anyhow?”

  “We were in the war together.”

  “So you guys were friends?”

  “Of a sort, yeah.”

  “How come I've never seen you before?”

  “Your Pop likes being alone.”

  There was a long silence, the occasional bird or snapping twig underfoot.

  Billy always broke silences. “Did you know her?”

  “Know who?”

  “My mom.” Billy said this with an implied “duh”. Mudder gave the kid a look, like he was unsure how to answer that question.

  Then, Mudder Kelroy turned sharp. Billy watched, and it all began to go by faster than the boy could keep up with. Mudder had pulled a knife and now had it to Pop's throat. Pop had a pistol, and it was pressed to Mudder's forehead. Pop was camouflaged so well he had blended right in with the forest, and they'd almost walked right by him and would have never known he was there if he hadn't sprung.

  Neither Mudder nor Pop moved now. Billy was scared to move, too.

  Finally both men retracted weapons with little more than a look. Billy had his arms wrapped around his skateboard and had it pressed into his gut.

  Mudder turned and walked past Billy, mussing up his hair with his dirty bear claw hand. “Here's your boy back, Ulysses.” Mudder headed back down the mountain, not uttering another word.

  Pop gave Billy, and his skateboard, a hug. Said nothing, other than, “Come on Billy-boy.” They walked quietly off the mountain together and found the highway. Mrs. Scopas' Cadillac sat silently by the side of the road waiting on them.

  Chapter 9

  Lissandra

  I never had playmates when I was young.

  What I did have were plenty of little old ladies who trusted in the power of my grandmother's scrying over bones or crystal sphere, laying out the cards or reading the withered lines in their hands to them.

  More than once I had heard a scared prim gasp of terror as Grandmother uttered the phrase, “According to this, you're already dead.”

  Scream! Loss of all primness!

  “Wait, stop. Quiet now… Wrong line.”

  Grandmother would always tell me later, “Lissandra, mind your hands even more than your face.” She had beautiful hands and strong lines, but she would never hint as to what any of it meant for her, or for me.

  Obviously, one of Grandmother's important lines had succumbed to time because she didn't last forever - although she seemed to me as if she would, even though I was still very young when she passed. She was all I knew, or had ever known, and I had never known her young as I was then. To me she had been born very, very old.

  The boy with the skateboard was the first person my age I ever dealt with. It took a long time before we were on civilized terms. I saw him for the first time a week after Grandmother had passed. I had lied to the authorities who buzzed about the night she died, telling them that I was going to stay with my aunt. I even had them drop me off at the gates of that palace. I didn't walk up the hill though, and made my way alone back to the house where Grandmother had raised me - the place at the end of the only street I'd ever lived on, with the flashing FORTUNE TELLER's neon in the front window.

  I stayed there alone for a week, until the rain came one night and I found the boy wandering in the front room amongst Grandmother's things as if she was about to read him his cards. He was a distrustful sort, and I didn't like him at all and didn't like the violation of my departed guardian's home, and I ran him back out into the rain. “Impossible, inappropriate and near cruel” - those were my first impressions.

  The police and the social workers caught up with me after the storm and much debate ensued as to what my fate would be. My aunt did take me in, and I never heard the end of it from her. Grandmother had always despised her and wouldn't allow her to come visit so I saw her rarely when I was a girl. Aunt had a job working for the Brickstaff family, who were the wealthiest to-dos in all of the town. My aunt was the maid, but to hear her talk she was an integral part of the upper social crust of all of civilization.

  “Don't expect anything from them. You don't go up to the main house. Stay out of the pool and off the tennis courts, and don't think of bothering anyone at the stables. Unless you're helping me in the kitchen, then you're a ghost. Walk down the hill and ride the bus to school. Never ask for a ride. You owe everything to them. You'd be some immigrant orphan if it wasn't for their generosity and grace.”

  I had never stepped inside of a school in my life. Grandmother taught me to read and write and gave me books and pointed out everything worth knowing to me back then. Yet after the summer ended, I was to start the sixth grade and intermingle with all the girls and boys my age. With the kid on the skateboard being my only frame of reference, it was true that I wasn't looking forward to that at all.

  The Brickstaffs had a daughter, a little princess named Mandy, who happened to be my age as well. I saw her only from afar as she rode her horse about. She and her girlfriend's noses stuck so high in the air they brushed the feet of angels. Or so they thought.

  “You are a ghost, Lissandra.”

  I spent most of my time that way, with the shadow of the main estate and its hillside to my back and out of my head. It reminded me of an ancient temple sitting perched atop that crest. A temple to nothing filled with gold and jeweled encrusted less than nothings.

  The woods went on for miles, separating the places where the well-off and the middle class lived from one an
other. Below this mortgaged Olympus was the town proper, which my bleach bottle-dyed blonde Aunt referenced as “the ass-end of society.”

  The wrong side of the tracks where Grandmother and I had come from, and Aunty had as well. She would never admit to such though; she lied to everyone, saying she had come from Cape Marie and had been raised by wine growers.

  Gypsy was more precise.

  Aunty was completely obsessed with that estate. She hated to step foot off it and rarely did, while I simply hated the place and was more than content to never see the mansion itself. I was happy to live in our little cottage at the edge of the woods.

  She loathed it there and would have slept curled up beside the kitchen table in the big house like a dog if they'd have let her.

  All of this thankfully meant that she was never in our servant house save when it was time for her to sleep. This is the only time I ever came home either, to her snoring with dreams of sugar-lump dandies dancing in her head.

  I spent my time very alone in the woods or lying in the grass at night under the stars. The forests were much more interesting to me than any borderland connected to them. This deep, and to me, magical realm was largely ignored by the populace of the town. The big trees ringed the outer edge of the neighborhoods and above the shipyards all the way to the coast and its rock shoreline. An impenetrable wall unto itself from the once industrial docks and the sheer stone cliff to the calm beachfront that was privately held by the yacht club set and ocean side escape homes.

  Only the wealthy got the good sand castles.

  Only the wealthy were allowed to swim.

  When I eventually found myself at their school, no one ever talked of the wood. The city park at its edge was largely abandoned and decaying. On windy days, there were no kite string struggles or picnic blankets.

  The woods weren't something I ever brought up to anyone either. If no one wanted to venture into them to explore, then I wasn't going to invite my world to anyone's attention.

  I did eventually see the boy with the skateboard in those woods. I knew that he made trips into them. This irked me fully. His paths and patterns were obvious and obscene. He created his own broken trails and made loud noises in the quiet. He was at his core, a defiler. A heathen miscreant.

  From the woods, I had seen him skateboarding over what was left of the roof of Grandmother's house. All of Grandmother's things had been taken away in trucks the week before. My Aunt had said that it was good riddance to rubbish and that it all went to be sold to pay back taxes. I hadn't been allowed to retain anything. None of Grandmother's books or jeweled charms had been left for me - a woman's entire life boxed up and stolen away.

  This was the point where I went from disliking my Aunt to hating her.

  Grandmother's house had been dismantled, but a large section of the roof remained and there he was, using it as a ramp for his ignorant games. I watched for a long time, and it wasn't until much later that I cried about it. I couldn't believe that my imperfect but very safe world had so quickly been pulled apart board and nail and that all that was left to legacy was the noise that kid's skateboard wheels made skidding off her remaining shingles.

  I went back into my trees and my solitude, but he didn't go away even then. He was the one person, aside from my Aunt, who I never wanted colliding with my world again - and I couldn't shake him off me. He was a cancerous tick that clung to me and sucked the life out of me with all his noise and dirty countenance.

  The day I found the old stone bridge over the creek drain, I knew he had been there first and already marked it with no more class than a dog hiking his leg and spraying a fireplug. The grate beneath the bridge had long since rotted in two, and the run-off from the frequent rain had forced its own dam of logs and brush at the entrance. Delicately laid stones that formed the bridge arch over the ancient waterway would have been a beautiful and stoic sentry to man's artistry and the conquering of a tiny corner of savage forest – or were before he found it.

  Flowing seamlessly with the stone that naturally lived at the creek side, the structure itself had been crafted to flow with the nature surrounding it. Had he not used black and white spray-paint and graffitied a letter into each of the stones so that the mouth above the pitch entryway spelled out his own namesake and call sign:

  PURGATORY

  Yes, he had claimed a bridge over a sewer tunnel. Had it not been so ironically appropriate to his character, it would have made me even more angry.

  And although I never saw him in the woods during that summer, I saw the traces of his presence. Even heard him at times.

  I found the fort that had been abandoned most likely for the tree house that he had also never completed. I found the skateboard ramps over the creek – each one bigger and more grandiose than the last.

  I kept to myself in the outside world after that summer - the schoolyard and the town and the shadow of the mansion I felt parasite to. He was rarely in school and when he was he kept to himself or was in detention.

  Like a ghost.

  The woods were my place to claim, though, and I would protect them from him. When I did find him out there I would let him know just how displeased the trees were with him and how unwelcome he truly was.

  It wasn't until winter came that I found him falling before me into the snow, shivering in deepest night. He looked up to me with genuine fear in his eyes as a helpless thing who had suddenly come to the conclusion that he is not the hunter, but the prey.

  The first real sentence he ever uttered to me I will never forget: “Do you know, gypsy girl, why I'm cursed?”

  Chapter 10

  The Lucky Cat

  Billy Purgatory was eleven years old as he walked through the snow. He wore a Soviet-issued and Cold War-approved officer's coat that was two sizes too big for him, but was warm at least. There was a collection of hand-me-down jackets and gear in the closet at the top of the stairs. Billy never asked Pop where any of it came from, and Pop never offered any explanation. Whenever young Purgatory needed clothes, he raided that closet. It was understood that aside from the package of new underwear and socks Billy would find in a stocking around Christmas time that all of his clothing had already been gathered and stored away.

  The coat Billy wore had a red star on each lapel and smelled like mothballs and vodka. It had belonged to a comrade named Dravich, who had taken good care of it. The fact that there were no bullet holes in this one was a plus.

  Snow had come early, and there was no good reason why he was out in the aftermath of a pre-Halloween blizzard. That there was no good reason wasn't a good enough reason for him not to be out. There was never a good reason why Billy did anything.

  Billy hadn't been sleeping since his birthday, staring at the ceiling all night listening to the wind blow. He had become convinced that he could hear his mother's voice mixed with this wind as it shook the rafters and rattled the vents.

  Billy had swiped one of Pop's Zippos and the only thing in the house that he was sure had belonged to his mother. Billy had found this thing of his mother's by accident. He was looking through the kitchen cabinets, and there it was stuffed in a little box wrapped in newspaper.

  A little porcelain hand-painted Lucky Cat.

  Billy's house was in no way decorated with knick-knacks or anything remotely feminine. The little cat figurine had definitely been hers. There was no way it had been Pop's. Billy had forgotten whatever it was he had been doing and had carried the box out to the trees at the border of the backyard.

  Billy held it to his chest, his board under his arm. Billy didn't look over at the Devil Bird's dirty pen; he didn't want anyone to see what he had found. He wasn't even going to show Pop, who would have just gotten moody and not come out of his room for days. Billy liked Pop at least where he could see him and knew he was safe. Pop talked less and less since summer had ended.

  Pop had ignored Billy's birthday, always had. If Billy's kindergarten teacher hadn't told him about his birthday, he might not even know w
hen it was to this day. Pop always got sad on Billy's birthday.

  Billy was as secretive as he'd ever been on his way through dead grass and cold wind to sit among the trees and unwrap the Lucky Cat and set it atop his skateboard in the dirt pit Billy used to build castles for green plastic army men.

  He heard the voice of the Devil Bird over his shoulder. “You know what you gotta do, kid. Take it out into woods, light a dead leaf fire and get the Witch to tell you what your mommy keeps whispering and wanting.”

  The words of the Devil Bird ended, and Billy put them out of his mind. He wouldn't have it that way. He wanted to keep the Lucky Cat and wasn't offering it for sacrifice to anyone's gods, especially those of a drunk rooster. He wrapped the Cat back up into the copy of Stars and Stripes and buried the box in the dirt at the trees where he kneeled.

  The dirt held onto the treasure on through his birthday and then the snow came and helped him to keep the only piece of his lost mother hidden.

  Lost, but a noisy woman, that mother of his. As quiet as Pop could be around this time of year, Mother became louder and louder and would not stay still with her windstorm songs.

  Billy pressed his ear to the walls and then to the ceiling, but he just couldn't hear what she was trying to say to him.

  So that night, Billy hadn't been able to stand it anymore, and he dug up the Lucky Cat, put the wrapped porcelain thing into Dravich's jacket pocket, and dragged himself and his very useless skateboard into the woods to find the Witch House.

  Billy wasn't meant to find the home of the Witch that night because try as he might he didn't. He did finally come into the Cypress Grove, and the trudging in the cold and the tired ache of his muscles told him that it was time to stop, and his head told him that this place in the tree-circle might be just magical enough to work. He used a broken tree branch as a rake and under the light snowfall, guarded by the ancient limbs far above his head, he found the leaves to be mostly dry and brittle as he swept them into a pile.