“Sparrow! What are you doing?” I stand and reach for his arm, but he opens his palm and sets the bird back in the rafters before I get to him.
“You’ll kill it, stop!”
He turns and blinks at me. “It’s just a few flight feathers. They’ll grow back.” He holds up two blue-hued feathers.
“What?”
“I only pulled out two flight feathers. They can still fly. The feathers will grow back.”
“But… I thought… I thought you were going to kill it.”
Sparrow blinks rapidly at me. “What kind of a man do you think I am, Meg?”
“I… I don’t know. I don’t know you.” And I don’t. I know nothing of this man oddly named Sparrow. The few men that I have had in my life have gotten me nothing but trouble and pain, except for Jim. Jim was good. Jim took care of me. Jim loved me like none of the others ever did.
Sparrow presses his lips together and turns away from me, moving to check on each of the windows. I return to my bag on the floor, sitting and unzipping the backpack.
“How long are we going to be here?” I ask.
“At least for the day, until you’re rested and ready to walk.”
I feel my shoulders drop. Getting to Kingston is going to take forever.
“You should eat and sleep,” Sparrow suggests. “And your bag is too heavy.”
I don’t want to admit it, but Sparrow is right; the bag is too heavy. I pull out the jars I took from Noah’s house. It looks like corn and tomatoes packed in them. Since I never knew Noah to be a canner, I can only assume he learned or got this from someone else. I twist the jars open and search my bag for the dining kit that I know is there.
“You want some?” I ask Sparrow, holding out my extra fork for him.
He looks at the fork as though it’s some strange object. “No thanks,” he tells me glancing towards the jars.
“Don’t you eat?”
“No.”
“That’s not possible,” I tell him. “You have to eat something.”
“I don’t need to eat. I get my energy from the sunlight.”
I stare at him, holding in what I really want to say. He is crazy.
“What were you in jail for?” he asks, watching me eat.
“Didn’t Noah tell you?”
“Nope, didn’t speak much to those guys.” Sparrow sits not far from me.
“Something happened,” I tell him, chewing on a forkful of the corn.
“Did you do something bad?” he crosses his legs and leans back on his hands.
“Are you worried I’m going to wake up like them,” I motion out the window towards the Halstead house, “because of my terrible sins?”
“Nope,” he tells me.
I set the jar and fork down and run my hand over my hair, remembering dead-Noah’s hand gripped there. My neck tingles; it’s that tingle you get when you think about bugs crawling on you. It doesn’t stop. I pull my hair out of the ponytail holder and search the backpack for the Swiss Army knife.
“What are you doing?” Sparrow asks.
“Something,” I reply as I open the knife, searching for the scissor attachment. This hair has gotten me into trouble before. Men like to pull on hair, and earlier it was nothing but a tether to control where I was going. It has got to go. I pull a handful of hair in front of my face and start cutting.
Sparrow frowns. “Why are you doing that?” he asks.
“Because,” I sigh, “it causes too much trouble.”
“I like your hair.” Sparrow sits up, coming out of his relaxed position.
“That’s exactly why I’m cutting it.”
He watches, his gaze a strange, sort of entertained look.
“What?” I finally ask.
“Would you like some help?”
“Are you a hairdresser?”
“Nope.” He reaches behind his back. “But I have a really sharp knife.” The machete I saw him with earlier must be strapped to his back.
I stop cutting and look at him through the hair in front of my face. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” He moves to stand. “How short do you want it?”
I pull my hair pack, holding it between my fingers just above the nape of my neck. “Like this.”
I feel his hand wrap around my hair. “Let go,” he tells me.
I release my hand, pressing it to my neck as though it might protect me if he changes his mind about killing me. I feel a slight pull and hear a strange sound, like a slice from a paper cutter.
“Done.”
I turn around to see Sparrow holding the long length of my dark hair. He starts walking towards one of the loft windows.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He pushes the window open and I notice there’s a pine tree outside this particular window. He flicks his arm and throws the hair up into the tree branches.
“What are you doing?” I repeat.
“Nesting material for the birds. They like hair too.”
I run my hand across my now bare neck. “Oh.”
I think of Jim, of seeing him again. Of him seeing me like this. He doesn’t like me with short hair. I always kept it long for him. Now I wonder what he’ll say when he sees me.
“You should get some sleep,” Sparrow suggests, wiping his hands on his coat.
“I have to eat this first.” I shovel the corn mix into my mouth. The kernels burst like overripe grapes as I bite down on them.
When I’m done, I dig through my backpack until I find the reflective blankets. “I have an extra blanket,” I offer Sparrow.
He waves it away. “I don’t sleep.”
“So you don’t eat and you don’t sleep.”
“That’s right.”
Sparrow walks towards the front of the barn and sits down near the window. From where I’m sitting, I can see the roof of the main house. He’s chosen a good lookout point.
“That doesn’t really make you human then,” I tell him, spreading the blanket on the floor and wrapping it around myself.
“I’m just as human as I need to be.”
“Sparrow Man?”
“What?” his voice sounds amused.
“If I close my eyes and fall asleep,” I ask him. “Can I trust that I won’t wake up with you holding a knife to my throat like Noah did?”
“You can trust me.” He nods and runs his fingers over the feather in his hand.
And for some reason, I do trust him.
…
I wake up to the worst alarm clock ever: the sound of moaning and shuffling feet. And for a moment I panic, thinking I’m back inside my cell with all the dead reaching through the bars at me.
A dark figure drops by my side and I scream.
“Shh!” A hand claps over my mouth. I try to pry it off, screaming and kicking my feet. “Meg!” the voice is a harsh whisper. “It’s me, Sparrow.”
Holy shit. I stop freaking out and he takes his hand off of my mouth.
“Oh my God, you scared the shit out of me!” I tell him, trying to catch my breath.
“You need to wake up,” he tells me.
I sit up and look around, noticing that it’s night again.
“I slept the whole day?” I ask, running my hand through my hair, it feels strange when I reach the back of my bare neck.
“You must’ve been tired.” Sparrow stands. “Sorry I touched you.”
“What?”
“I touched your face.” He turns towards me. “You told me not to touch you before.”
“Oh, um, thanks.” I stand, feeling the tight muscles in my legs stretch from our earlier walk. “Are the dead down there?” I ask hearing soft thuds and moans below us.
“Yeah.” He walks over to the opening cut in the floor that we climbed through, and looks down. “They’ll be asleep soon. In a big heap of rot on the floor. Then we’ll get out of here.”
“Okay,” I reply as I fold the blanket and tuck it into my backpack.
“Did you want to eat
again?” Sparrow asks me as he bends down to get a good look at what’s below us.
I open my backpack and find the sleeve of crackers and old soda. My stomach growls. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fill the hungry void. Not out in the boondocks like this. I need a Wal-Mart or an IGA or a gas station convenience store. I need to load up on snack cakes and soda and candy bars, all the things you can’t buy with food stamps. All the things you can’t find within the walls of the county jail. My stomach growls again.
“No,” I tell Sparrow. “I’ll eat at our next stop.”
I decide to distract myself and, reaching into my bag, I pull out the two handguns and boxes of bullets. I load them. The sound of the smooth metal of the bullets sliding against the metal of the magazine is strangely soothing to me, like sharpening a knife on a stone. When I open the last box, four fully loaded magazines instead of rows of bullets rest inside.
Thanks Noah, even though you tried to eat my face.
Sparrow spins on his heels, in his crouched position, viewing the commotion below us. “What’s with you and guns?” he asks.
“Protection,” I tell him as I check the safety on each gun and wrap them in my spare T-shirt.
“Guns can’t help us now, Meg.”
“I don’t care,” I tell him. “I’ll never live another moment of my life unable to protect myself.”
“You think you’ll do that with guns?” he asks, blinking at me.
“You bet your ass, Sparrow Man.”
Sparrow makes a noise as he slides against the wall, sitting next to the hole we climbed into the loft through. Every few moments he leans over and looks below us.
“How long until they’re sleeping?” I ask him.
His hand moves in his pocket, and although I can’t see it, I know he’s running his fingers along the smooth feathers in there. “When the moon rises above the trees, the dead sleep.”
Remembering that Noah seemed to turn in the middle of the night and wake up causes me to ask, “Why didn’t Noah wake up as a corpse? It was the middle of the night when he turned and attacked me.”
“What time of the day do you think it was when you arrived at Noah’s house?” Sparrow asks. He removes his hands from his pockets and taps his fingers on one knee.
I try to think back. I finished breaking the hole in my cell wall not long after I woke up. And those meat sacks in the jail were moaning and reaching through the bars as soon as the sun lit the sky. It couldn’t have taken me more than a few hours to make it to the sewer cap and to the front of my house. Then less than an hour to change and get the bag. Nothing more than a few minutes to run to Noah’s house.
“I think, maybe early afternoon,” I tell Sparrow.
He nods. “Noah and them slept during the day, Meg. They knew the same thing I know; the dead wander in the daylight, they sleep when the moon rises over the treetops. You ate and you slept. It was dark in that windowless basement, but it wasn’t dark outside. Noah and the others changed at the end of the day, when they woke up. It was almost perfect timing too because if it were any earlier, we would have had a hard time getting out of town with a trail of the dead following behind us.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mumble to myself, staring at the backpack in my hands.
“You have quite the mouth on you,” Sparrow quips as he leans to the side again.
“I like beer and cigarettes too,” I tell him. “I’m sure Noah and his pals told you that as soon as I stepped foot on his porch.” I don’t want Sparrow to be disillusioned, thinking I’m some prissy working-class princess. Not even close. The working class don’t grow up in a busted down trailer with a kerosene heater in the living room for the cold northern nights.
“You’re weird,” Sparrow tells me after a long pause.
“I’m not weird.” I find it odd that a crazy man who collects feathers and sings Bon Jovi each night thinks I’m weird. “I’ve just come to terms with what I am.”
“What are you, Meg?”
“Trash, through and through-”
There is a sound below us, like someone dropped a huge sack of laundry on the floor. Sparrow’s lip tips up. “They’re out,” he says, leaning to the side and looking below us.
“Just like that?” I ask. “They all drop like a sack of shit at the same time?”
“Yup.”
Sparrow stands and adjusts his coat. I watch as he bends, grasps the side of the cut out in the floor, and swings himself down.
I stand, taking my bag with me and run over to where he just was. Peering through the hole, I see Sparrow’s face as he looks up at me.
“You coming?” he asks. “These things reek.”
I toss him my bag down, and trying the same technique as him, I grasp the hole in the floor across from me and jump, swinging myself down. But I never let go. I’m not exactly short and not exactly tall, but I can tell the drop is too far and I’ll injure myself. So I hang there, swinging like deer bait.
“Uh, Sparrow?” I ask, digging my fingers into the wood floor of the loft.
“Yeah?”
“Can you help me?”
“To help you, I’d have to touch you…” he starts.
I catch a whiff of the mound of flesh bags piled on the floor near us. It’s worse than rotting garbage. My stomach churns at a rate I’ve never experienced before. It’s either from the smell or the canned food I ate earlier. I panic.
“Just grab my goddamned legs, Sparrow!” I shout.
I feel his arms wrap around my knees. “Jeez,” he says as I let go and he bends to set my feet on the floor. I grab my bag off of the floor and run out of the barn as fast as I can. Standing in the moonlight, taking deep breaths of the crisp northern air, I wait for Sparrow to waltz out of the barn.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him as he gets closer. “It’s just… I spent months in county with those fuckers clawing at me and the smell of them…” I shiver.
Sparrow just nods at me and starts walking down the driveway towards the barely lit road.
…
Walking in the pitch black of night, in the boonies, with a crazy man by my side, is an odd feeling. It’s better than spending a few months locked in a jail cell with the dead grabbing at me through the bars, but it’s still… odd. Every so often as we’re walking, the clouds cover the moon and I can’t see a thing, I can only judge where I am based on the sound of Sparrow’s footsteps next to me. For a moment I wonder if we’ll trip over any of the sleeping dead.
Since there’s not much space in a jail cell when there’s three foot of rotting arms stretching towards you, this is the most physical exertion I’ve seen in a while. It’s not long before my thighs burn from the walking and it doesn’t take long for exhaustion to set in.
“Can’t we get a car?” I ask Sparrow, interrupting the night calm.
“I told you, cars make noise, noise brings meat sacks.”
“You also told me that they sleep at night. So what does it matter?”
“…I guess you’re right.”
“If we had a car we could be to the border in a few hours.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t drive and I don’t have a car.”
“We could steal one,” I offer. “It’s pretty easy. Noah taught me how to hotwire one when we were sixteen. We snuck off to Six Flags down in Rochester for the day. Didn’t have much money, just enough for gas and admission. Sheriff picked us up just as we pulled onto route eleven near Antwerp later that night… I’m not sure why I just told you all that.” My admission doesn’t seem to faze him; he doesn’t even bother to look back at me.
“Sounds like cars get you in trouble. Walking is good for us.”
“But I’m tired as shit already.” I adjust the backpack across my shoulder and bend to rub my thighs.
“Garbage burns for a long time, you’ll be fine.”
I jerk upright and scowl. “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”
&nbs
p; “It means we walk.” He hooks his thumbs on the pockets of his jacket and continues on into the night.
Sure, I’ll walk for now, but the first car I come across I’m going to wire that sucker up and drive off into the sunset headed for the Canadian border, whether Sparrow likes it or not.
…
After a few hours I recognize the area we’ve made it to; soon this road we’re on will loop around just south of Yellow Lake State Forest, then we’ll be in Oxbow-a tiny little hamlet which is really nothing but a blink on the highway-before it loops north.
“Who’s Jim?” Sparrow asks as we walk down the dark country road.
“Jim is my fiancé.”
“Why is he not with you then?”
“Because I was in county lockup,” I reply.
“And he went to Kingston?”
“Yeah, he went to Kingston.”
“That’s not very nice,” Sparrow points out. “Leaving you behind like that.”
Suddenly I am filled with a strong need to defend Jim. “I told him to go,” I inform Sparrow. “I told him to go to Kingston and I would meet him there.”
“Did he visit you in jail?”
“No.” I grip the strap of my backpack, annoyed.
“Then how did you tell him this?”
“I told him before I went to jail.”
“Did you tell him that when you were bleeding on the floor and half-dead?”
I stop and turn to Sparrow. “What the hell did you just say?” I ask.
“I asked, when did you tell him?” Sparrow blinks at me. “Are you okay?”
“I could have sworn you asked me something else.”
“Nope,” he answers so innocently, his green eyes glistening in the moonlight.
We start walking again. What the hell? I decide to tell Sparrow a little bit of the truth. “I told Jim to meet me in Kingston after I was attacked in our home.”
“Who attacked you?”
“The men that the Governor sent around town during the gun raids.”
“Noah had guns,” Sparrow seems to drift off topic. “No one took his.”
“Noah also never registered his guns,” I point out.
“But…” Sparrow tips his head to the side. “That doesn’t make much sense.”
Sparrow Man Page 4