Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  She wished she could be like other people, like those who went out on a Friday night and did exciting things. There was a Fredericksburg County Fair going on over in Fredericksburg, only a few miles south on the I-95 from the junction with 132, but she could never go to things like that - just the idea of getting out and doing that kind of thing set her stomach on edge. The doctors said the ulcers were getting worse, and even with all of their medicines and operations, the ulcers continued to get worse. When she asked what they could do next, the doctors had recently grown quiet, shaking their heads and repeating their endless admonitions about ‘taking it easy’ and ‘avoiding stress and excitement’. Just the very fact that they had no new ideas scared her, and only a couple of days ago one of her doctors said there was nothing else they could do for her. The ulcers were some of the worst on record, resisting all attempts at treatment or surgical removal, and now the doctors had no idea what to do next, if anything. They had collectively given up on the idea of ever curing Norma of her ‘demons’, as she called them, and now the doctors only seemed to think that, at best, the ulcers could be contained and, hopefully, prevented from getting any worse.

  This episode of the X-Files was a repeat, and one of her favorites. It was about the FlukeMan, a crazy looking fish guy that lived in the swamps and sewers under New York City. The fish guy was actually a sailor from a Russian fishing trawler who had accidentally fallen into a septic tank, and it had turned him into something else, something not human. During the commercial interruptions, the Fox News people kept coming on with video of the Hurricane damage down in Florida and updates on the latest location of the storm, but Norma didn’t care - she just wanted them to get back to Scully and that hunk Mulder as they chased the FlukeMan.

  Norma sat on the couch in her small house, one arm curled around a tub of low fat popcorn. This show was a really good one, and the FlukeMan was a creepy monster, but the rumbling in her stomach reminded her that she couldn’t get too excited about it.

  But God, how exciting it would be to be like Scully and Mulder! Traveling all over the country, investigating strange cases and discovering spooky things that couldn’t be explained by rational science. Norma still longed for the life of a policeman - actually, she had joined the force originally because she was more interested in investigating crimes and tracking down criminals. She still loved to read mystery and detective novels, and movies about courtrooms and juries and trials and long-lost evidence always thrilled her.

  And sometimes she wondered what her life would have been like if she had stayed a cop. It was impossible after everything that had happened, but what would it have been like? She had been pretty good at it, she thought, and every once in a while someone on the current police force would contact her and get her opinion on a case or a piece of evidence. It wasn’t like they called her in to consult on a case or anything like that - she didn’t wander around the crime scenes like Mulder and Scully with their impossibly-bright flashlights - but she sometimes gave her opinion on things, if people called. She had one friend on the force in particular who called every few weeks for Norma’s opinion on something, and Norma liked that. It made her feel as if her life still meant something to someone.

  X-Files went to commercial, and Norma got up and padded into the kitchen to grab another Pepsi. She usually didn’t drink carbonated beverage (another vice sacrificed at the ‘demons’ alter) but tonight she was making an exception. The Pepsi went well with the popcorn, and she would be going to bed soon. She had just gotten the new John Grisham novel, and she was planning on reading a good portion of it tonight before she fell asleep. She had loved A Time to Kill and The Firm, but she’d thought his last few books had been disappointing, and she hoped this new one would be better.

  She sat back down as the show came back on, and resigned herself to the fact that if anything exciting was ever going to happen in her life, she would either have to watch it on the ‘magic box’ or read about it in some novel. Exciting things didn’t happen in Liberty - it had been a long time since something exciting had happened, and Norma didn’t want to think about that night. And even if something exciting did happen in this dinky little town, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway, except maybe read about it the next day in the paper.

  Chapter 8 - Saturday,

  September 17

  As the sun began to peak over the horizon, a new day dawned and the body drifted quietly, occasionally snagging on underwater growth that here grew so close to the surface. Near the banks the river was less than ten feet deep, and the plants and tendrils that reached towards the sun nearly reached the surface. The plants grasped at the body as it moved, grabbing at the leg or the hands or the buckles that trailed from the gaping hole where a leg should have been. The plants would tug and pull and sometimes even catch and hold the body for a long, timeless moment, and then the current of the water would win and the body would move on, drifting again.

  In the blackness of the night the body had drifted unmolested, troubled only occasionally by the plants that grew near the middle of the river. As it slowly approached the Charleston Municipal Bridge, the river widened a little and the body began to drift off to one side, the northern bank of the river. Here the plants and bushes and trees that grew along the banks held a thousand obstructions, a thousand resting places, a multitude of grasping, scrabbling fingers that tugged and pulled at the body and it’s covering of clothing and at the buckles and straps that trailed behind the missing leg.

  Not too many miles away, a man’s alarm clock sounded noisily in the slowly growing light of dawn. The man’s hand drifted mindlessly from his sleeping wife’s waist and flopped down on the alarm, silencing its call.

  The man rolled over and sat up, holding his face in his hands. A glance at the alarm clock told him that it was indeed 3:50 in the morning, and there were only two possible reasons for someone to be up that early: either someone had died, or someone was going fishing.

  And the season was almost over.

  The man stood and tottered once back towards the bed, threatening to topple back into bed like a tree, but he caught himself and moved off towards the linoleum and tile of a bathroom, trying to not make much noise or wake his wife.

  When the water came on a few moments later she heard it, but she rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The kid’s body finally came to rest in the shallow waters about five miles upstream from Charleston, South Carolina. The large bridge spanned the wide river here, and the body got caught up in some of the underwater growth around the base of one of the bridge’s massive supports. Fish and plants populated the area around the support and the other materials that had been dumped here after the bridge was completed, forming an underwater obstruction that had sunk a few smaller boats that were brave enough to approach it. At one point a long metal spar stuck up from the water, black and rusty, a metal support beam from the bridge’s construction phase. Now it only pointed at the sky.

  One of the buckles became wedged in between two rusty pieces of metal about three feet under the water, and the body came to a halt, floating on the surface but dipping under it every once in a while. It was starting to become waterlogged, and would soon sink to the bottom.

  The fisherman yawned as he climbed down from his red Dodge truck and grabbed his gear out of the back, starting down the dusty hill towards the wide river and the base of the Charleston Municipal Bridge that stretched across the Columbia River, its hazy shadow darkening a wide stripe of the water. He liked to fish the areas around the northern support of the bridge, where lots of low-hanging branches and trees formed a perfect screen for fish to hide in. He knew that fish tended to congregate around areas with underwater obstructions, and all of the waste products from the construction of the bridge that had been thrown into the water around the support formed the perfect spawning ground - bad for boats, but great for catching fish.

  After a few minutes, he finally managed to make his way down to the bank of the r
iver and the first thing he noticed was how incredibly peaceful it was - tranquil to the point that it made him smile and thank God that he was alive, cheesy as it was.

  The sun was barely all of the way above the horizon, and thin, slanting light threw hazy shadows that looked mystical, almost dreamlike in the growing light.

  And then he stopped for a second and looked around, curiously sniffing at the air. Usually the new morning was reflected in the heady, pleasant scents of the river, but this morning he also caught the distinct odor of dead fish. Probably one had washed up onto the shore and died.

  He shook it off and reached for his equipment. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like that bother him. It was far too beautiful of a morning to worry about something as stupid as a dead fish.

  The fisherman took his time laying out all of the equipment he had collected over his ten years of fishing. Most of his best lures, the most important part of any fisherman’s tackle box, had been lost to a zillion branches or underwater weeds or broken lines, but some had managed to stick around and survive his years of torture and abuse. Those colorful lures now rested in the top tray of his tackle box, surrounded by several shiny, pointed hooks, some different colored sinkers and floaters, and a pair of pliers.

  After he laid out everything he was going to use, he set about threading his pole, hooking on a red-and-white sinker and a hook, and then topped it all off with a lure, one of his favorites. This one was called the King Zinger and had been with him for years.

  He stepped over to the muddy riverbank and tossed the lure out into the water with practiced ease, using a quick sidearm motion that expertly flung the lure and hook out over the water. It plopped down into the water, making only the slightest splash on the slow-moving surface. He allowed it to drift for a few long moments and then tipped the wooden pole up towards him and began slowly reeling the line back in to him, already comfortably relaxed by the reassuring motion. Occasionally, from upstream, he’d hear the sounds of birds, screeching near the shore.

  After a while, the fisherman settled down into his rhythm: cast out into the water, let it float for a couple of minutes, then reel it in. Cast, float, reel. It was relaxing and monotonous and somehow lovely, a feeling that his wife never seemed to understand or even cared to try to understand. Maybe it was something akin to the hunter instinct in males, being out in the wilderness and catching his own food. Maybe he was crazy, but it always felt like he had tapped into some primal instinct in himself whenever he fished.

  Or maybe it was just the mindless, pressure-free time, when the mind could wander off and ponder on things that it rarely considered during other times: life, death, religion, wherever the mind went.

  The fisherman reeled in his lure again, probably for the fiftieth time already this morning, but this time the lure was about ten feet out when it hitched and caught on something in the water.

  At first, he thought it was a fish or something like that, but as he tugged a little harder, he realized that the lure seemed to be caught on something much heavier, much bigger. The thin silver line bobbed and weaved as he tugged on the pole, but it still drew a line as straight as a laser into the water. Whatever it was caught on, the line wasn’t coming free. He released some of the tension, letting the line slacken, before trying to reel it in again.

  Probably caught on rocks or a branch on the bottom.

  The fisherman snuggled his pole into a crevice between two rocks and turned to grab his waders and pull them on, suddenly glad that he had gone to the extra and somewhat considerable trouble of bringing them down from the truck. Usually he didn’t. From the tackle box he grabbed the wire-cutters and slipped them into one of the breast pockets of his shirt.

  Leaving the pole on the bank, pointing straight up into the air, he stepped carefully out into the water, gauging the depth and the speed of the current. The bottom was silty and fairly clear of rocks, and he stepped slowly out towards the point where the line went into the water, determined to not lose one of his favorite lures. The bottom felt a little slippery under his feet, and he took it nice and slow.

  He followed the line and saw that it appeared to be caught on something on the bottom, something large and dark and greenish like a submerged rock. He bent over the mysterious object, spread his legs wide to get better traction on the muddy bottom, and bent over, exploring the greenish object with his probing, curious hands. His shirt front was instantly soaked as he strained to feel around the object that he could now identify as a moss-covered bottom rock, and the lure was there too, caught on the rock just deep enough to make this difficult. His face was only a few scant inches above the water’s surface as he peered down into it, trying to see the lure as well as he could feel it, and even with the surface clouded by the muck and dirt his feet had stirred up, he could see the rock, three feet below the surface, mottled and green, and he saw that the lure and his line were both wrapped around one end of the rock. The small waves on the surface threatened to wet his face and nose, and he turned his face to one side to get closer to the surface without getting his face wet.

  How could something like that happen? He didn’t know, but he did know that strange things could happen underwater. Strange currents could move things in ways that they should not be able to move. Wrapping some thin fishing line around a big rock didn’t sound like that big of a chore for a river.

  The fisherman struggled with straining fingers, but the lure would not come up. He wanted to just grab the damned thing and give it a good hard tug, but the chances were pretty good that he would poke the sharp barbs of the hook, which stuck up through the lure’s soft plastic body to catch the fish, into his hand, aggravating the problem. If that happened, how would he get his hand AND the lure loose? He’d probably just end up ripping it out, and that was not something he wanted to do. He’d ripped his skin a few times with other hooks, and it wasn’t fun.

  The lure and line wiggled a little bit under his probing fingers, and he almost had it free from where it was caught in the rock when one of his feet slipped and he lost his footing and fell forwards into the water. He popped up instantly like a whale breaching, cursing loudly. He’d managed to grab the lure and the line and pull them free as he fell, but now he was completely soaked. He pulled the line up and looked at the lure hanging there with the hook poking out from it, shaking his head and smiling despite his anger. The hook held a small bit of green underwater plant, and he pulled it free and flipped it into the water. He didn’t have a dry change of clothes down here or up in the truck (he’d never needed one before) and now it looked like his relaxing day of fishing was over.

  He was shaking his head and wading back towards the beach and he was about eight feet from shore when he heard birds screeching, loudly, like a predator was after them.

  He glanced upstream, past where he could see before, and saw several birds out of the corner of his eye. They flapped and dipped from the sky, screeching and circling something in the water, a small log floating upriver from him. Turning, he saw that something was caught among the tall weeds that grew along the river back just upriver from his favorite fishing spot.

  The thing had gotten caught up in the group of weeds and rusty metal pieces left over from the bridge’s construction. A bird had landed on the log. It squawked loudly at the fisherman and flapped away as he moved closer.

  And then he saw the hand.

  It was floating, palm up, fingers curled up slightly, and to his mind it looked like a dark, alien flower, floating easily on the surface of the brackish water.

  LAST DAY OF WORK, he thought nervously. It was weird, going in to work for the last time, and knowing that it was for the last time. There had been other jobs that he had quit or been fired from, but he had never had a job where he knew days ahead of time that he would be leaving. He only had one more 10 to 6 shift and then he was done. He was planning on leaving Liberty first thing in the morning.

  He parked right up front, up where the customers parked. Mel had always tol
d them to park away from the doors, allowing the close spots for the customers, but David didn’t think that Mel would mind this one time. And David had always bitched and moaned about having to park so far away, so it felt good to park so close. Good, but weird.

  David’s car was packed, filled with clothes and music and movies and a lot of the other things that a guy has a tendency to collect and not be able to live without. He figured that he would be in California for at least a year, even if Brian and his fiancée, that blabbermouth Crystal, didn’t want to put him up for that long. He could float for a long time on the money from his first check, and by this time next year the second check would have been deposited in his account here in Liberty. That would be his only connection to the town, and he’d been thinking about fixing that one, too - maybe after he got out there and got settled, he could set up a new account for Abe to deposit the money in out there. And then he wouldn’t even have to think about this crazy little town.

  The money he had now was in cash and travelers’ checks and inside a cigar box under his driver’s seat, so David actually had a good reason to park up front - almost everything of value he owned was in that car.

  His shift started at 10 but the store didn’t open until 11, so he had an hour to kill and decided to spend it shopping. This was, obviously, the last day he could get his employee discount, so he went on a mini-shopping spree, buying a lot of the things in the store that he had always wanted or dreamed about owning but had never had the money before.

  Another employee had been waiting at the front door when he had gotten there at 10:05, and after he had let them in and punched in the right security code, David had sent the new kid to straighten the comedy and drama sections of empty movie boxes, always notoriously messy on Saturdays after the busy Friday night rush.