Birdy got back behind the wheel. I climbed in the passenger side. Frank sat between us. Birdy drove back out onto the road, and we headed away from town, out into the hill country.
We didn’t talk about Cristina.
“What’s the something important you wanted to tell me?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Birdy said.
There was a knowing glance from Frank. His dark eyes held me. There was a conspiracy in the air.
Frank had beautiful eyes, dark eyes. Birdy and I were the same height. Frank was an inch shorter, and slimmer. His features were softer, and his dark hair shinier. He was the best-looking of the three of us; girls always fell for him. They fell into his eyes. We all did.
Frank reached for his pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. He had a fresh row of cuts down his left arm; maybe fifteen slices. There were things in our lives we didn’t talk about.
Frank smoked in our silence.
We drove for some time through the hill country, with its farms and farmhouses, and few people, and no cars on the road, and then Birdy turned off. The Volkswagen’s headlamps lit up a dark dirt trail into woodlands, and we drove along it. I didn’t know where we were going; there were a million of these turnoffs.
After a minute, we drove into a small clearing in the trees, and Birdy parked the minivan.
We climbed out.
In the moonlight, I realized we had parked next to a lake, a small lake you could skim a stone across. Lake Trentini, I figured.
Hidden in the back of the van under a blanket were two ancient television sets: boxy wooden cabinets on wooden legs, with big control knobs, and square-shaped screens, with speakers behind cloth. They were more furniture than appliance.
“They belonged to my grandmother,” Birdy explained. “One in the living room, one in the bedroom. She never turned them off.” Frank and I hauled them out.
In the light of the headlamps, we stood them side by side on the ground at the edge of the lake. One of the TVs was broken; there was a hole in it, its glass screen had been shattered, and inside you could see the broken rear shell of the cathode ray tube and shards of glass. The look of it burned into my brain. I would remember it later and think I had been looking inside my head.
Birdy was holding a beer bottle. Before we could take cover, he hurled the thing into the unbroken TV set. Its screen shattered on impact and the vacuum tube exploded. There was a bang like a gunshot. Glass sprayed out onto the ground, and a metallic cloud of smoke ascended into the night air.
Birdy asked me again, “Do you trust me?”
“You know I do.”
He had an odd look on his face. Nervousness. Excitement. It was as though he was about to tell me the biggest secret in the world.
But he never said a word.
He took a gun out of his jacket pocket.
He shot Frank in the head.
* * *
My mouth was full of dirt and I was going to die. I tried to scream and choked on the earth. I had been buried alive. I was going to die.
I woke up.
But I didn’t wake up.
Sleep paralysis.
The alarm clock on my phone went off and I immediately opened my eyes.
Six. Daybreak.
I sat up.
I was hyperventilating.
I took the bus.
I stared out the window.
I tried not to think about the lake.
Denial had always been my default.
I clocked in at the Cooper Fulfillment Center five minutes before my shift. I changed into running pants and a Foo Fighters T-shirt. I pulled on a fresh pair of low-cut socks and got into my red racing flats. Last on was an orange safety vest; we wore these so the guys riding the forklifts could see us as they thundered down the aisles. They rode those things like they were chariots.
Boxes.
My job was to collect an assignment sheet from the order desk; it listed a box size and one or more serial numbers. I’d get the box from a pile and fold the flat into the right dimensions. I’d then hunt down the serial numbers in the warehouse; they were for the objects that needed to go into the box: books, movies, food, clothes, toys, kitchen spatulas, garden gnomes, anything at all. I’d then take the box and its contents to the dispatch desk.
Everything I did was done on foot and fast. The fulfillment center was two million square feet of shelving and aisles. In my ten-hour shift, I probably walked and ran around forty kilometers—a kilometer is about one-sixth of a mile. When you’re a runner, you get used to metrics.
Birdy, Frank, and me were middle-distance runners; that’s how we met. After school, while everyone else hit their computer games or hung out at the mall, we would be out on the track: 800 meters, 1,500 meters, 3,000 meters.
On my first break, I sat outside the fulfillment center and waited for Frank; we had always timed our breaks to coincide.
Frank didn’t show up.
I ate a banana.
Of course he didn’t show up, and he wouldn’t. Ever.
The only word that had come out of my mouth since his last breath had been: “Why?” It had come out as barely a whisper.
Birdy had answered with: “It had to be done. There was no other way.” He could barely speak, either. He was trembling.
We said nothing else.
Birdy and I had carried Frank’s body around the lake and deep into the woods, with Birdy wearing a bicycle helmet with a lamp. A hole had already been dug; there was a shovel. I helped Birdy get Frank into the hole, and then watched as Birdy shoveled the dirt back into it.
There had been preparation.
I had none.
I hadn’t really been there at all.
I still wasn’t anywhere now.
I had no frame of reference for this shit.
I clocked out for the day and left the fulfillment center. I took the bus. It rained for the first time in three weeks.
The bus drove through town. It stopped and waited for a set of lights, and I saw Cristina on the sidewalk. She stood thirty feet away under an umbrella with her friend Sally. They didn’t see me.
Cristina was on her phone. She wasn’t talking; she was waiting for an answer. She was concerned. I guessed she had been leaving messages. Birdy had probably gotten one: Had he seen Frank? I wondered how he had replied, if at all.
“It had to be done. There was no other way.”
Frank had always come third, Birdy always first, me second; no matter how hard Frank and I had run, we couldn’t ever change that. And there we were last night: the first and the second carrying the third into the dark of the woods.
The bus dropped me a quarter mile from my house.
When I came in, my mom asked: “Have you seen Frank? His mother called. He never came home last night.”
I said I hadn’t seen him that day.
I didn’t lie.
It was Friday night, and we ate pasta for dinner; I had always gone to track meets on Saturdays, and the habit had stuck.
I ate hardly any of it.
After dinner, I put on a T-shirt and running pants. I laced up my blue runners, and I went out.
I ran on the road. There was no sidewalk at my end of town, just loose gravel. There was a full moon and no cars.
Running takes you to another place. I don’t mean so much that you physically go somewhere; I mean that it takes your thinking to another place. Call it what you want: calm, the zone, high, nirvana, or the I-simply-don’t-care.
I thought of heading into the woods and going to the Jellybean (an old cabin that Birdy, Frank, and I had made our own), but I had to pass by Frank’s house on the way, and I stopped there.
There was a police car parked in the driveway. A police officer was standing on the porch by the front door talking to Frank’s mom and dad. Frank’s dad owned an appliance store and had something to do with the church; everyone in town went. His mom looked worried. Frank hadn’t been at home for nearly twenty-four hours.
I woke up.
But I didn’t wake up.
Sleep paralysis; I fought against it.
In my dream, I had a mouth full of dirt, and I had been choking on it, swallowing, suffocating. And I had dreamed of the man with no face; it had been pecked to death, pecked away to bare wood.
I woke up proper.
I opened my eyes.
Daybreak. Ten minutes before six.
I remembered the rumor.
I took the bus.
I clocked in at the fulfillment center.
I collected an assignment sheet and an empty box. My brain was a box, too, and a lot of things had been put into it, but it wasn’t processing the information; the order was not being fulfilled.
My supervisor was talking to the police. I could see her through the glass window of her office. There were two policemen, guns at their belts. My supervisor was a nice woman. Divorced. Childless. She was telling the two officers that she hadn’t seen Frank; the box in my head could work that much out without hearing the words.
I ran.
The first item on my assignment sheet was forty-four aisles away; I ran toward it.
The man with no face was a picture pinned to the wall at the Jellybean. A picture of a man ripped out of a running magazine. Frank had used it as a dartboard. He’d thrown darts at it so often, the face had gone and all that was left was a circle of the bare wooden wall of the cabin behind it. I had been there when the first dart had gone in. The man in the picture had been Mr. Murray.
The rumor had been about Mr. Murray and Frank.
Shit.
I got hit by a chariot.
I spun in the air like a ten-year-old girl on the uneven bars. I landed on the concrete floor with a thud, and I stared up at the ceiling—it seemed so far away. There were skylights up there. There was daylight.
Mr. Murray had been our coach on the high school track team. He had been an Olympic champion. He taught us that movement is the body’s music; that when you run, it’s like a symphony of muscle, flesh, and bone.
Mr. Murray liked to touch you.
People made a fuss. They lifted me onto an empty pallet, and I was transported by forklift to the sick bay. My supervisor instructed me that the company doctor was ill. I would have to go and visit my family doctor. The company would pay.
I said I was fine.
She insisted. “You can’t tell just by looking at the surface of the skin what’s going on underneath.”
I took the bus into town.
I didn’t have a family doctor. I went instead to the town’s central civic building, the mayor’s office, where Birdy was interning. An election was coming up in a week, and Mayor Fulton’s picture was all over town; he was seeking a fifth term.
I stared at a poster of the man as I walked up: fat face, red cheeks. Underneath a photoshopped set of impossible teeth ran his campaign slogan:
A MAN IS A MAN, AND A WOMAN IS A WOMAN
Birdy was wearing a dark suit and tangerine tie, and he had his hair combed. He wasn’t happy to see me. He was pale and drawn. He took me outside, away from any ears.
Birdy was being groomed by the mayor for a career in state politics. There were great expectations. And why not? Birdy was smart and he could speak well. He had the blue eyes and the fair complexion. He was the most likely to succeed, the most likely to get out of town.
“Have you stopped eating, again?”
He looked at me and said nothing. The answer was in his eyes. They were dead.
We stood by a tree at the side of the building. Tree and concrete. There was no one around. There were cigarette butts everywhere.
“It had something to do with Mr. Murray, didn’t it?”
Birdy looked away. He didn’t want to say anything and maybe wouldn’t know how, even if he did, I suppose. How could we talk about the things we never talked about?
I knew I was right. My instincts were yelling inside my head.
“I trust you, and you have to trust me. You have to tell me why you did it.”
He looked at me again with those blue, blue eyes; they held sadness.
“I loved Frank,” he said.
That hurt. And I knew it was true; my instincts had been yelling it for a while.
He then walked away, back to his aspirations.
* * *
I skipped dinner.
I went on a night run.
I ran past Frank’s house and kept going.
About a mile farther along the road lay the Wilson Woods, a large, wide swath of trees and undergrowth at the back end of the Wilson farm. When I got to them, I climbed over the fence. The Jellybean was a five-minute walk through the trees in the moonlight.
The Jellybean was an abandoned old cabin about the size of my bedroom. Frank had discovered it years ago; the word “Jellybean” had been spray-painted in red across the front of it. It had a door, a window, and a table and two chairs inside. Frank had made the little wooden building into his little house; he’d fixed the holes in the roof, and he and Birdy had carried an old sofa out to it. It had become Frank’s adopted home. The place he’d said he’d felt the safest.
There was a light on.
Birdy was inside and lit by a candle. I stepped in and sat next to him at the table. He wasn’t surprised I had come; I wasn’t surprised to find him there. The Jellybean had meant a lot to all three of us. I lost my virginity there. Frank and Birdy, too. We were odd friends. Frank the hurricane heterosexual, and his two odd friends who weren’t.
We sat for some time in silence, our quiet memorial. I could smell gasoline.
Birdy finally spoke: “Frank was going to kill Murray.”
There was an unfamiliar sound in the woods, in the distance.
“Murray did things to us, right from ninth grade. You know that.”
I wasn’t likely to ever forget it.
“He did things to Frank, too.” That had been the rumor.
“Frank told me about two months ago.”
The sounds in the woods were those of people, a group of them. They were heading in our direction. Someone called out, “Frank?”
The police were searching.
Birdy picked up the candle.
“Run.”
He threw the candle onto the sofa. The flame immediately ignited the gasoline he had soaked the thing in.
The cabin became engulfed in fire.
We ran.
When I arrived back at home and came in, my mom had the TV on in the living room. There was a report on the local news: Residents out near Lake Trentini had reported hearing what had sounded like two gunshots on Thursday night. The police had investigated and had found two old busted television sets.
Kids.
* * *
I screamed, but nothing came out of my mouth.
The sound of Birdy’s gun firing was a loud, piercing jolt of noise. A spray of blood shot out of Frank’s head and his body slumped lifeless to the ground. Birds shrieked in the trees around the lake.
I woke up.
But I didn’t wake up.
Sleep paralysis is a bitch. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Frank had seen the gun come out of Birdy’s pocket. The look on Frank’s face was three hundred different things.
I woke up proper.
I was damp with sweat. I rolled to the side of my bed and vomited.
It was Sunday, my day off.
At midday, I stood outside the mayor’s office. I was like one of those lone protesters, but nobody knew what I was protesting about. I guess I was protesting Birdy.
He finally came outside. People had been staring at me through the windows.
He wasn’t happy to see me.
I wasn’t happy to see him, either.
“Would Frank killing Murray have been so damn bad?” I asked.
He wasn’t happy I’d asked him that; he looked around to see if anyone had heard it. No one had.
I grabbed him by his suit sleeve. I pulled hi
m to me. I whispered, “Tell me why you did it. Give me one good reason, or maybe I go and tell someone where Frank’s body is buried.”
Birdy looked at me. He could say nothing. He was afraid. I had never seen that before. He asked me to meet him at the rear of the bus depot after five that afternoon.
Okay.
The rest of the day was a daze.
I spent it walking.
Cristina worked in a café in the center of town. I stood outside and didn’t go in. I liked Cristina, and she had been the perfect cover girlfriend. I had liked her to the point where I had started to hate the lying. How do you tell someone about the things you don’t talk about?
Maybe my life would have been different if I had grown up in a big city, or out on the coast (any damn coast), and I could have just been me. But, hell, this was Divine, Alabama; there were requirements and obligations …
A man is a man, and a woman is a woman.
* * *
At five, I stood at the rear of the bus depot, and I waited for Birdy. At the rear there lay a small park: a lawn, a fountain, and an intersection of cycle pathways. I could look across at my old high school over on the other side.
I hated school.
One day, between classes, a kid I barely knew called me a name; not Dean, or Dee, but one of those names kids like to punch you with. I crossed a boundary. I hit him. The kid called me another name. Frank was with me. He broke the kid’s nose. The principal asked him to explain. He chose not to. Expulsion. Both of us. The fact that the kid who’d started it didn’t want to press charges was the only reason Frank and me didn’t get into trouble with the police.
At fifteen after five, Birdy walked up. His movements were weak. We sat on a bench. There were few people about.
“You need to eat something.”
He shook his head.
He spoke wearily. “Frank and I had become close. You knew that.”
I suspected. I suspected Birdy had fallen away from me and was falling for Frank.
“An impossible relationship,” Birdy said. “A moth to his indifferent flame … We had a pact.”
“What kind of pact?”
Life Is Short and Then You Die Page 27