Devil and the Bluebird

by Jennifer Mason-Black

  “He said he’d pay for everything. He said he’d take her on the road with Device.” Fury had made Cass red, her makeup obvious on the scarlet sea. “But she talked it over with Tish and they’d decided together. Fucking Tish. We could have had anything we wanted if Mama hadn’t been selfish and stupid in every way, if she hadn’t picked Tish over my father . . .”

  Father. That was the word that had broken Cass’s voice, the one that had made her lock Blue out of the bedroom for the rest of the day. If Blue hadn’t opened the sealed envelope, if she hadn’t wanted to show off, hadn’t wanted to make a crack in the glossy surface of her sister—if she hadn’t done it, Cass would never have left.

  An oil slick of disaster trailed behind her. It had to stop. She had to stop. Inside her was a road map: every wrong turn she’d made in life highlighted in red; every person she’d hurt, or who had left her, lit like stoplights she’d ignored. She wanted to peel her skin away, open herself up to the elements until she was nothing more than bones by the side of the road. Bones couldn’t hurt, could they?

  She didn’t hold a thumb out to the first two cars that passed. She didn’t need to. Her ride was coming. She could feel it.

  The third car drove slowly. The silver sedan was piloted by an older man with a graying crew cut who looked her over as he pulled to a stop.

  “Where you headed?”

  Above her, a wall of clouds was spreading across the blue. More snow coming. She balanced the notebook on her knee, wrote quickly, the only possible answer.

  Wyoming.

  He said nothing when she showed him the note explaining that she couldn’t talk. He just kept the radio on, tuned to Christian music. Not pop, like what Cynthia had listened to on the drive to Chicago. No, this was hard-core, hymns sung by choirs, sometimes by soloists, often sounding as though they’d been recorded with a tape recorder set up in a basement. He shook his head when the DJs broke in, though they were less like announcers and more like preachers, talking about God and hell and the wages of sin.

  The wages of sin fit perfectly with her mind-set. She kept hearing Andrea’s scream, thinking about Lacey in her mother’s arms, the scars on Andrea’s face. She could write sorry endlessly, in blood, and never even come close to what she was feeling.

  The man stopped for gas in the afternoon. She left the guitar in his car while she went into the rest-stop bathroom, ignored her hunger as she passed the racks of candy and chips in the store. Hunger had become part of her penance. If she shed everything, every little piece of herself, maybe the woman in the red dress would show Andrea mercy.

  On the way out, she took her license out of her pocket and dropped it in the trash. No one would learn her name again, not without her giving it.

  Somewhere in South Dakota it started to snow. Not hard, just steady, white flakes flying against the window. They stopped again, another gas station, and she watched the man eat a hamburger from a paper bag.

  “Guess you don’t need anything,” he said after his first bite. “What I’ve seen is that the Lord provides for those who need it. If you don’t have anything, that generally means you don’t need it, or you don’t deserve it. You understand that fact?”

  She nodded. It made perfect sense. She didn’t have anything because she didn’t deserve it.

  By that logic, Steve didn’t deserve a home, and Andrea didn’t deserve to love her daughter and be safe. Mama didn’t deserve her life.

  Blue shook her head. No thinking. Thinking meant asking him where they were going, piecing things together, getting out of the car with her guitar and figuring out what to do. She didn’t want to.

  She fell asleep with her cheek pressed against the window. By the time she woke, it was dark. The snow was coming much thicker, a solid sheet rather than individual stars. The headlights didn’t illuminate much ahead of them, and the car shimmied as it went.

  “It’s not the way people think,” the man said abruptly.

  She rubbed her eyes and looked into the night, at the clock on the dashboard. They’d been traveling nearly twelve hours. A highway sign, barely visible through the blur, alerted her that they’d left South Dakota behind and were now in Wyoming.

  “People always get things wrong. They think they know, and they never do. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Usually Blue woke slowly, her head fogged in until she’d been up for a bit. Not now. The world seemed much clearer, more focused, than it had been earlier. Her feet throbbed in her boots, and her stomach growled, and the blanket of self-pity she’d settled under had shrunk to the size of a place mat.

  “They think it’s about punishment. That’s just plain wrong. It’s about freedom from punishment.”

  It sounded as though he’d been talking for a while. The fear she should have felt back when he stopped for her, the fear Lou the truck driver had told her about, that she had felt at Barn Magic when she heard about the Traveler—now she could feel it. Loud and clear.

  “That’s the thing. When I first heard the call, I said it was too much. It wasn’t right to ask me to do it. Then I realized it wasn’t my right to choose or not choose. He’d tapped my shoulder and asked me to help, and I had to do his bidding.”

  Blue scrawled a note out, held it up. He paid her no mind. “It’s the children, you see. Children like you. They want to find their way to Him, only they can’t. The world’s so full of the devil that it blinds them, makes it so they can’t see the road signs. That’s what I can do. I can open the way for them. It’s like the light comes all the way down, deep inside me, and I show them. I free them.”

  The wind spun the snow around them, drove it against the windows, horizontally over the road. She didn’t even know for sure they were on a road anymore. Snow in the headlights, snow stretching flat before them.

  As if he were listening to her thoughts, he nodded. “Hard to tell where we’re going. I can make the path clear for you, though. I’m here to help you find your way home.”

  The blinker ticked. Turning where, into what? The snow swirled, pulling back long enough to expose a sign, but not long enough to let her read it. The car bumped along for another ten minutes or so. The man continued to talk, rambling around and around the same points while her skin crawled with the sensation of a thousand millipedes.

  Finally, the car came to a stop. She could see nothing but snow from the windows, the dark close around them, the headlights showing only white.

  “I can see you understand. Maybe not totally, but enough that I can help you. I felt the light inside of me as soon as I saw you. Can you feel it, too? Can you?”

  He leaned toward her. She recoiled, a thud as her head hit the window behind her. He didn’t touch her. Instead, he opened the glove compartment and took a cloth bundle out.

  “You’re a lamb in a den of wolves,” he said. His eyes were wide open, not cold, not cruel, not really even there. “Years ago, God asked that I find the lambs and free them from the evil of this world. God’s work. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to keep doing it, would I?”

  She shook her head. He seemed so calm. That was good, it had to be. Calm people didn’t do terrible things. Her gut was quick to call that a lie. Creepy overrode calm every time.

  He reached one hand out and touched her cheek gently, as though afraid of leaving a stain. She felt as though she were watching the two of them from some other place—above, outside the car.

  “Lamb, I can help you. I can make the suffering go.” As he spoke, he began to unravel the cloth from the object he held. She couldn’t look away. The wind howled outside the car, shaking it.

  “You’ve been born into a world of sin and you don’t deserve it. I can lift you right out. I’ve got the light. Can you see it?” He opened his eyes a little wider, leaned forward. The odor of hamburger and ketchup drifted by, but no light shone from him.

  He sat back up. The cloth fell away. She almost didn’t recognize what she saw. A hunting knife, clean, the handle worn.

&nbs
p; “We can pray together.”

  She heard a click, like two ends of a wire meeting. She leaned back, kicked out with one booted foot. His head thudded back against the glass, the knife blade catching the fabric of her pants. He moved slowly, free hand reaching toward the back of his head, as she threw open her door. She grabbed the guitar, the case catching on the seat until she yanked it free.

  The snow reached above her knees. She ran as well as she could; it was like sprinting through ocean waves, only the wind screamed over this ocean and there was no way to swim.

  “Come back!” he screamed into the wind. “Let me free you.”

  She believed she could hear him behind her, his breath as loud as the wind. She kept going, hoping that he was far away from her, that it was her own breath sounding in her ears.

  She stumbled and fell twice. Each time she jumped up again, kept moving. Run, just keep running. Now and then she thought she saw a light. She would have run toward it, but she thought about how he said a light shone through him, and she kept moving, away.

  She fell again, flat out. Pain flared in her ankle. She opened her mouth to cry out and instead inhaled a mouthful of snow.

  From somewhere to her left she heard him call: “Come, lamb, come to me. Let me end your suffering.”

  She sank into the snow. It melted around her, cool and then cold, her heat dissipating in it. Waiting, waiting, the wind, the snow, the silence, somewhere his footsteps coming toward her? Away? At one point she heard his voice again, muffled this time, as if spoken through a scarf wound several layers thick. She couldn’t understand the words, couldn’t even tell whether they were words or merely sounds spewed out into the dark. Perhaps what she heard was not even a voice; perhaps it was the sound of the wind playing a human body like a harp.

  Eventually there was no sound at all beyond the rise and fall of the wind. She’d been cold, but the heat started returning to her. She felt cozy, even, as though this were a place she could curl up in and rest.

  Lying still was good. Lying still kept her out of the wind.

  But lying still also meant letting the snow steal all her warmth. She had to move.

  Blue stood, with effort. The wind bit into her instantly, hungry, relentless. It hurt to be upright.

  But it didn’t matter that the woman in the red dress was out there, or that the man in the blue shirt was. It didn’t matter if all she had left of life was months. She wanted it.

  Move. Her brain was thick as her fingers. She had to move, but where? Snow surrounded her, and somewhere out there was a man with a knife. She held the guitar case against her body, where it blocked the wind. Somewhere ahead was light. It flickered in the storm. At first, she thought it was the crew-cut man’s headlights, but it was too high.

  She shook her head. Think clearly. Walk toward the light.

  Move. She forced one leg after the other toward the light. Once she reached it, she could sleep.

  She managed to continue until she hit something that didn’t move. Not a wall. More like seaweed. Its tendrils wrapping around her, pulling her down. She fell forward, one hand out, felt something tear at her palm.

  Up. Relax her hand, hold it to her face. She could taste blood on her lips. She reached out gingerly and touched barbed wire. A fence, a light—she had to be headed toward a house. To reach it she had to get by the fence, though. Over or around—which would it be?

  Around it was. One hand out, she began to walk along the fence. She’d made it only four steps when something grabbed her ankle.

  She swung her leg. “Lamb,” came the voice from below her. “Come, lamb, do not fight. Do you see the light, see it inside me? It’s not too late, not yet.” She could hear struggle in the words, as if he were drowning in the snow.

  She saw nothing. She gave another swift kick, then raised her other leg and pushed down on the hand.

  “Lamb,” he said again, gurgling as if waves filled his mouth.

  She could feel his fingers peeling away beneath her foot. She swung the other leg again, and it came free. She ran: stumbling, wading, listening. Again: “Lamb.” This time it was faint, barely audible above the wind.

  She had to keep moving. She pressed along the fence, to where the top strand dipped a little. Climbing over felt impossible, but she pressed on, dragging one foot and then the other over the top. From there, all that was left was to find the source of the light.

  She knew after a while that she wouldn’t make it. It was too far, too cold, she was too weak. Better to lie down at last and relax in the drifts. She came to believe there were others in the snow with her. Girls she didn’t know, and boys, wearing ragged clothes; in their eyes, she could see light. She knew they wanted her to find her way.

  Eventually even they faded from view. The world became a tunnel with salvation at one end and her at the other. It never came any closer, no matter how she tried. She sang, or it seemed she sang, “Bluebird” tumbling from her lips like water. The snow bounced off her eyes, fell into her mouth, consumed her with unabated glee.

  She shattered when she hit the wall. She’d watched Beck clean fish before, the knife separating the meat from the bones, leaving only raggedness behind. That was how it felt—as though her flesh were coming away, with only torn pieces remaining.

  A wall meant the possibility of a door, of heat and light and safety. She punched the wood, only capable of a dull thud. I give up. There was nothing to be done. It was too much, had been all along. The woman in the red dress had known that when she sent Blue out.

  One thought bubbled up from the wasteland within: Fuck the woman in the red dress. She wanted her life, all of it. She wanted her voice, to use however she chose. She wanted to see Steve again, and Cass, and Dill. She wanted to ride trains across country the way Dill had. She wanted to see everything turn from snow to sun.

  She inched along the wall. Something rattled by her shoulder, wood bumping against wood as the wind howled. She rubbed her numb hands across it, found a handle, and pulled. It opened, and she toppled inside.

  It was dark but dry, and it smelled of hay. As she leaned back against another wall, she felt the tickle of whiskers on the back of her neck. She couldn’t jump—couldn’t really move at all—just reached with one hand to touch the soft muzzle.

  Please, she thought, and sank to the floor.

  Blue awoke to sunlight, a door swinging open, and the wet press of a dog’s nose against her face. She raised an arm to protect herself, then let it fall from fatigue.

  A body crouched beside hers. She smelled something familiar.

  “Who the hell are you?” She’d know that voice anywhere—the rasp that followed her from turntable to YouTube to here, wherever here was.

  She lifted her hand again, trying to reach for the face she couldn’t open her eyes to see. It was captured by gloved hands—then, gloves gone, by warm skin. The fingers probed carefully, examining the ring on her finger.

  “Jesus Christ,” the voice said. “Blue?”

  For a moment, as she woke, she believed it had all been a dream. It had to have been, for she lay in a warm bed, not out in the snow.

  Then she saw the woman in the rocking chair beside the bed.

  Tish’s short hair was shot through with gray, and she seemed smaller than Blue remembered, but there was no doubt. Especially once she spoke.

  “I think you’ve thawed out enough to survive. That’s a hell of an entrance.”

  She stood, leaned over Blue. There were fine lines in the creases around her eyes, in the skin on her neck. “I’ll bring you some tea in a bit. Go back to sleep if you can.”

  The next time she woke, Tish was reading in the chair. When Blue moved, she looked up. “You ready to tell me how you turned up in my barn in the middle of a blizzard?”

  How had she? The snow had been a monster, holding her in its palm, trying to crush her. Only, no, it hadn’t been the snow. It had been . . . Blue touched her throat with one hand, mimed writing.

  “Since when c
an’t you talk?”

  There wasn’t time for questions. The man was still out there somewhere. Blue clasped her hands together, then pretended to write again. Tish shrugged.

  “You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Lynne know where you are?” Tish took a pen and paper from a desk at the far end of the room. She handed them to Blue.

  Where to start? With the most urgent, she supposed. She scribbled out a few lines about hitching a ride with a man who’d tried to kill her.

  Tish read it and raised an eyebrow. Blue waited for the words to sink in.

  Apparently there was nowhere for them to sink. Tish shook her head. “Kid, take a look out there.” She rose, pulled the curtains back on the window. It was hard to make anything out at first. The light seared her eyes, fell from the sky and rose from the snow in equal measure. When she was able to see clearly, all there was was snow: drifted, unbroken white for as far as she could see.

  “A storm like that is rare around here. It’s hard to survive it. Not sure how you did.”

  Blue gripped her pen more tightly.

  Has she been here?

  Tish tilted her head. “Her? Who?”

  She hadn’t. There wouldn’t be a question if she had. The Gully ended here, where Tish had started. Blue had traveled all the space between Mama and Tish and hadn’t found Cass anywhere.

  “Who, Blue?” A little more force now.

  Cass.

  It wasn’t easy to explain Cass, or to summarize nine years of life. Especially with a mind too tired to spell, let alone arrange words in recognizable patterns. Blue left out almost everything, except that she was looking for Cass, that she’d run away from an old man into the snow and found her way to the barn.

  By the end, she was falling asleep. Tish pulled the blankets up higher, paused, patted them. “Sleep, kid. There’ll be plenty of time to talk.”

  By the time she had the energy to move around the house, four days had passed. She celebrated by showering. It felt like washing off more than just dirt. The peace she’d found in Tish’s bed, the dreams she’d had—they swirled down the drain with the water. By the time she exited the bathroom, dressed in Tish’s sweats, and joined her in the sunlit kitchen, she knew she had to start dealing with things.