Billy found a black wooden scabbard that held no sword. Although not a sword aficionado by any stretch of the imagination, Billy had grown up around weapons and been in the army himself, so he was at least familiar. He had never known Pop to have anything more exotic than an oversized hunting knife and nothing this old and intricate.
This was something of museum quality and finely crafted. It was an old school job, not something a samurai or ninja would carry. It was more of a throwback to the Romans or the Greeks.
A ceremonial weapon a king would carry into battle. The flash-light picked up the gold inflections worked into the joints and the seams of the wood.
The five emblems near the open end below where the hilt would rest were engraved circles of gold. Like coins attached to the wood.
Each bore a unique symbol. Billy had no sense of what they could mean.
The symbols were in this order:
A flower, the moon, an owl, and a broom.
The last coin was a skeleton key with a cog toothed head.
Billy held it and wouldn't let it go or stop staring at it for a long time. His mother had been in this room long ago and if these were her things, then this was a thing that meant something to her. That made it one of the most important treasures of the world to Billy Purgatory.
When Billy finally did wrap it back into the jacket for safekeeping, he went about removing the odd metal puzzle box from the locker.
It struck him that it was an 8mm movie projector, and as Billy tore into the drug store bag beside it, he found a tiny reel of film.
Billy took both of these things then and went in search of a wall outlet that still held a spark.
III
Billy had assembled the projector, carefully un-boxing and unhinging it. Tons of brainpower weren't required to discern how it worked and which reel went where - that is after he realized he had mistakenly put the spool onto the take-up reel. When he cast the contraption into motion, all he accomplished was making a slapping noise as the leader banged again and again into the lens.
The main issue seemed to be a short somewhere along the way to the wiring that connected to the lamp. Billy knew it wasn't dead, but it struggled to cast light, and Billy burned his fingers more than once pushing it in just such a way that it made connection and sent finally a true frame of warm light against an empty living room wall.
Billy focused the square and started the reels turning while he took a seat on the couch.
An image faded in. Color and motion assaulted. Billy hadn't considered there wouldn't be sound, but there was none beyond the clatter of the projector's motor.
There was a man in army green with a bushy 1970's moustache. The identification above his breast pocket read:
CARLTON
The hands of two others reached out for him, coming into the sides of the frame, and the man, this Carlton, laughed. The backgrounds were that of a marketplace, one in an Asian locale, probably Vietnam. People selling what they had to offer glancing at the Americans with odd expressions wondering why anyone would ever want to record what was going on there.
To Billy Purgatory, it was the best movie he'd ever seen.
Billy knew that one of the invading hands going for Carlton belonged to his father. Billy just knew it was Pop's hand.
Billy leaned forward when he saw the other hand belonged to a woman. It was delicate, but strong, with slightly long nails that shined in the South Asian sunlight. That hand mixed in with the bright parasols, fans and flowers of the background was a most beautiful sight.
“Show her.”
The image went blurred and black.
“No.”
Carlton's face appeared again wearing a goofy close-up smile and the man stuck out his tongue and blinked his eyes, laughing.
Then everything became a blur again as the camera spun, and Billy saw his father standing before him. It was completely weird to see this younger version of Pop move and talk (albeit silently).
Pop wasn't a clown like Carlton, who must now have been holding the camera. Pop was serious as all get out. There were brief breaks in this, though, where Billy could see Pop threatening to smile.
Pop had both of his legs - you could tell by how he walked. He was steady and strong in a way that Billy had never witnessed before.
Billy didn't have much time to process it, though, because the frame enlarged without warning and there she was.
Billy Purgatory's mother was taller than he had always imagined her to be. Her body was mostly lean, and she had the well-defined muscle tone of an athletic and vibrant woman. Her facial features were just sharp enough and reminded Billy of an Iris flower framed in very long, very blonde hair, not Marilyn blonde, but bleached by the sun blonde. Beyond that, she seemed completely unaffected by the sunlight, even though her skin was like a doll's. There were no lines of worry in her face, no make-up, nothing fancy or altered. She simply was.
A force of nature, and Billy couldn't tell at times where the beauty of all God's creation ended and his mother began. She was a goddess from an old book and could have easily worn a helmet with Viking horns and been screaming out an opera from her lips to make the world weep.
The dress she wore was white and simple. The only adornment attached to her was the gold-flecked eyes that looked across time and space to her son sitting on the couch.
She smiled and laughed, and Billy did too. Billy laughed for the first time in a long time. Billy found himself letting a few tears fall. Emelia of the silver screen held out her arms, and then she laughed again. She moved like she was within a constant dance and her hands went down and pulled her dress firmly to her mid-section and revealed for all to see the bump of her belly.
Billy saw his own hand reaching out for the screen, and as he did, his father's hand mirrored this motion and pressed against Emelia's pregnant stomach.
Pop smiled with her then.
The happy little drama in the marketplace didn't last.
The images changed scenes many times as the end of the Vietnam conflict played out. Billy could see his mother's hands adjusting the lens of the old camera refocusing the optics. Her left hand wore a band of woven dried vine where an engagement ring would be, an old religion throwback worthy of a child of the forest who was in love.
Explosions and jets - soldiers running between mortar fire spectacle in the streets - helicopters. Americans abandoning what they had found to be something they no longer believed in. Perhaps never had.
Emelia and Pop were among those ferried off the tops of the roofs that would soon gain new landlords all named Charlie.
The sea was a beautiful cut away from it all. She shot from high above. The blue waters and many ships awaited.
Women sat atop their footlockers clutching their belongings on the deck of the ships. The shoreline of Vietnam at their backs. Emelia was more pregnant now, and her lips smiled below tired eyes straining at the sun.
The next shots were in America. Billy knew this without question. It was an image of the house he sat in now. Billy's Pop pulled the For Sale sign from the yard with his own hand.
Pop had grown a moustache and wore jeans and biker boots. His green army jacket had been replaced with a leather one.
Pop made a devil-rock sign with the fingers of his right hand and smiled, looking completely badass. Happy to be home and feeling more at ease with the world and playing it up for the camera. Emelia turned the camera left and stepped back. Pop's bike was beside him now, brand spanking new.
Pop climbed on the hog with their new house in the waning dusk light. Lucifer's Circus jacket patch glaring at the camera lens.
Ulysses Purgatory put fingers to the handlebars and kicked the engine to a start. Billy could feel the roar of it awakening deep inside his heart even though these pictures had no accompanying soundtrack.
Billy wondered what his mother's voice sounded like.
Where was his mother? Did she still live? Seeing her moving now on the old film, it was harder and hard
er for him to believe that she was no longer in this world, somewhere.
Back in frame, she moved closer to her husband, and Pop's big arm wrapped around her waist from his seated position on the bike.
The camera refocused its eye up the street, and then the line of motorcycle outlaws thundered towards Billy's mother and father.
The club; Mudder Kelroy was at the lead.
Parking their bikes at the Purgatory residence front sidewalk. Mudder filled the frame.
“We're gonna get that boy a bike.” Billy could read the lips perfectly. He was fascinated watching the scar across Mudder's face move. “I know it's gonna be a boy.”
The movement began and Billy followed it. Mudder's big gloved hand touched Emelia's belly.
“…never too early to be a bad son'a bitch,” as the frame filled with Mudder's face again. “We're gonna start him right out the cradle.”
The biker king had a very familiar plank of wood under his arm. Billy thought about it waiting for him in the closet by the old dishwasher.
Everything went white then black.
When colors faded in once more, Mom's hands were sharpening a sword with a wet rock. It rested in her lap and shined under the garage lights. Pop had the camera now.
Emelia's pregnant bundle strained against her dress and rested above the sworded lap. The motions were quick, but Billy got a glimpse of the sword: it was straight out of Greek legend.
Mudder Kelroy was across the room, a murder of motorcycle devils between Billy's parents and he.
Lots of cigarettes and washtubs of ice and beer. Billy tried to imagine the music that had to be playing. Bikers toiled at torn down engines. Sparks and lit wielding torches threatened to constantly blow out the frames Billy pulled into his brain.
One was getting his sleeve tattooed by a biker girl and laughing at the pain. Those guys were living the dream. Dangerous men and their dangerous ‘old ladies’.
Mudder used a drill press, sinking the bit into the cut and shaped board, which in that time and place would soon be turned.
It would soon be it. “Mudder made it for me,” Billy said quietly in the dark room as the movie played.
The camera drew closer as Pop crossed to Mudder, and Billy could see the orange skateboard wheels on the workbench at Mudder's side. Mudder Kelroy, the strangest Santa Claus.
The big man turned to the camera and spoke to Pop, pausing his work. “Billy bad-ass,” came from his mouth. “Hell on wheels.”
Fade to black again.
Emelia Purgatory recaptured the light, standing in what must have been early morning. Her dress was long and always white. She was literally barefoot and (extremely) pregnant. She walked in the cool grass, dew clinging to her feet.
Her movements had purpose. She held aloft her sharpened sword, the one missing from the scabbard Billy had found in the footlocker. Emelia's body was a graceful engine. There was never a missed step or motion that fell to waste.
She allowed herself to fall seamlessly into the eastern sword forms and ritual so as to become the mother predator. A force to be avoided as one would avoid a tsunami wrapped in plague. Billy was cradled inside this body still, and none of it seemed to slow her actions. If anything, they added righteous intention to them.
Billy's mother knew how to use a sword, and she knew how to move. She was the most dangerous mother protector warrior who ever lived.
The sword swiped into the cold morning air as if Hell's hordes had just stolen into her nursery. Billy knew that Pop had been tough, but Emelia was now presenting herself on the projector wall gleam as the more accomplished of the two.
She had taught her son his moves before he had ever been born. Billy knew then that every trick, every dodge, every strike he had ever dealt had a part of his mother living in it.
Billy nodded to the image as if in thanks.
Then it all went wrong.
The film began to bubble and burn as it locked onto her face and refused to give motion any longer. Emelia Purgatory began to melt before Billy's eyes. The clacking of the projector ground to a halt and the wall went white as the lamp blew and then the room went black.
All except the fire of the burning movie projector at Billy's back.
Billy's eyes locked on the fire and he sprang over the couch towards the card table he had set it up on. The old movie reel was on fire and it burned hot and fast. Fire began to run up the wall behind the table.
Billy pushed it all to the floor and beat out the fire on the wall with his shirt.
He stomped the burning projector and flaming film with his boots. Frantic and sobbing, the only connection ever discovered to his past was now a melted pile of sludge. All those images of his mom and pop were lost to him by suicide fire. The images seeped into the floorboards as they melted away.
Billy pulled the only piece of film left unscathed from the chemical fire mess he had helped jack-boot into oblivion.
He ran with the film to the kitchen window. Staring into the yard she had long ago swung her sword in. Billy pressed the film to the window glass. Three frames of her face were all that remained.
Billy cried for her, cried for him. He sank down and tried to work himself into the floorboards with all that was lost to him. Pain had taken over everything in his twisted life. He was completely alone and realized that he wanted to die just as the movie died and the life he never got died, and how Pop waited to die. How his mother…
Billy thought for only a moment that maybe he shouldn't have put out the fire. He didn't want to go on any longer alone. He had nothing and no one any longer.
Why had she left him? Why did they always have to die?
Billy had found a tiny bit of her trapped forever in those unburned film squares. Billy had seen her move. He knew her now, and Billy had always been a survivor.
He knew better than anyone that he should have died years ago. Death had spread her legs for him more than once. More than even he could remember. Dysfunctional as his family was, Billy and Pop had endured.
It was then when he became completely possessed with the notion that if he still lived after so many missed opportunities at a final visit to the morgue then his mother must live as well. More sure of it than he had been of anything else in his horrible life. “She's alive.”
Billy pulled himself from the floor, “My mother lives. Somewhere.”
Billy pushed the old dishwasher and the stacks of newspapers from the door of the hall closet. He remembered locking it away in there that night before he went off to see the world. He had decided to give up childish things that night.
The realization as he stood in front of that door was pure in his mind now. He had been running from his childhood. He had been running from her.
Billy forced open the door and creaking hinges were the first sound he had heard in hours.
It was lying atop Pop's bowling bag. Billy knelt down before it like some insane monk at an altar. He reached for it, and that's when he saw the folded sheet of paper sitting atop it.
Billy took his wooden skateboard made for him by motorcycle outlaws and placed it under his arm. He was bigger now, and he felt the tiniest twinge of glee remembering how big the deck had seemed to him when he was a boy.
The wood had always been sound. There were nicks and scrapes, and it had been center-wrapped like a mummy with rows of tarnished tape from the front truck to the rear.
“You're coming with me.” A long lost friend regained, his only lonely amigo. Billy and his skateboard reunited then.
Billy unfolded the note that could be intended for no other. It was short and simple. Pop's handwriting:
“Don't try to find her. Leave her be.”
Billy let the closet door close with a tap of his foot and retrieved Pop's army jacket with his mother's sword scabbard re-wrapped inside it.
He let the note from his father fall towards the floor and settle atop the melting pile of projector death.
Billy Purgatory had no use for notes written by
his father's ghost, but he did take the picture of Pop and LBJ.
Chapter 21
A Ghost Lit Every Candle.
Billy Purgatory sat alone in the Witch House on his birthday. As many times as he had explored the woods those long ago summers, chasing Lissandra and not really admitting to himself that he was chasing her, he had never found this place. It was a local legend: people said if you ever found her home the Witch would grant you a wish and a curse - both unavoidable.
The house itself had at one time been grand, but years of disrepair and loneliness had caused it to sink and shrink as the woods about it grew closer and the second floor collapsed into the first. Only the roofless parlor was still able to be explored – and that is where Billy had entered.
Billy leaned against the fireplace and watched the sky. Tonight he had only a harvest moon and the meteor shower casting lazy rotation down on him, his feet propped up on his skateboard.
Normally Billy retreated from the darkness when his birthday came. October - soon to be All Hallows Eve and then the Day of the Dead. Billy didn't feel real in such seasons.
That night William Purgatory was just another spirit wandering through the shafts of neon light the stars left in their wake before exploding high above his head.
Billy had never been one for birthdays. Pop had told Billy he received his skateboard the day he was born. This was the best thing he'd ever gotten, so what present was there to look forward to? Pop gave him lots of gifts growing up, knives and firecrackers and air rifles, but he never gave Billy any of these presents anywhere near his birthday. No matter the present, nothing ever de-kinged the skateboard. Pop had admitted that Santa Claus hadn't been responsible for dropping it into his hands, but would say nothing else regarding the matter. Billy knew the truth anyway: Mudder Kelroy had made it for him.
The only reason Billy had returned to the woods at all was to find Lissandra, who claimed she was not a gypsy, but an Indian maiden. Billy knew a gypsy when he saw one. Lissandra's grandmother had been the card-shuffling fortuneteller kind with the fancy neon sign in the window who had told him things from beyond her grave. The old lady had been right, and she'd looked just like a gypsy, so Lissandra's crystal ball Indian stories didn't hold water.
Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird Page 18