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It was Benny who started it. We know that now. It was Mom really, but if you start saying it was Mom then you have to go back farther and say that, technically, it was Dad who started it, and then you re pushing over a line of dominoes that goes back forever, because if Dad was the one who started it, then he started it just by taking Exit 307 instead of 308.
They would both spit you out at our house was the thing. Our house was midway between the two—Evergreen Place runs parallel and right in the precise middle of the streets 307 and 308 exit onto. Precise as in we’d measured it with the odometer. It was an ongoing argument in the family which exit was faster, and at what time of day which was faster, and were you coming from the east or the west? Because then you d have to factor in that forever light under the bridge. Settling the argument once and for all, Dad took Exit 307 at nearly five-thirty one Tuesday afternoon after the office—he hated that light—and he didn’t make it home. The fault, according to the accident report, wasn’t his, but he was the one who paid for it. It wasn’t his fault, no. Him dying didn’t start it all.
And Mom didn’t start it either.
Here’s how she didn’t start it: four months after the Crash—we all capitalized it in our mouths like that—she caught that light under the bridge for pretty much the first time in the history of ever, and was ducking into those three or four seconds of grainy shadow when she cued into this big black carrion bird pulling something red and stringy up from the blacktop.
The reason it was still red, we assumed at this part in her story, it was either that the bird had been digging deep, for the hidden meat, the meat that still had some shine to it, or it was that the bridge had been shading the roadkill from the sun, keeping it from scabbing over cracky black, where the red bulges up from the slightest pressure.
Had it been a cat, a dog? A possum? A raccoon, Mom kind of thought. Because she had the distinct sense of . . . hands? Hands, yes. On roadkill.
Which was maybe the first time in four months we’d said that word, “roadkill.”
It didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel right. It was too personal. It was too soon.
The reason Mom flinched and veered and stopped traffic for the rest of the light’s cycle, it’s that where the bird was rising from so she wouldn’t hit it—where it was cupping the air with its oily wings that weren’t as wide and all-encompassing as she’d initially thought—that was exactly where Dad had been hit.
Did she, for an unguarded moment, and taking into account her sense of these “hands,” did she think the paramedics and city police hadn’t cleaned Dad up from the road? Did she stumble for an instant into a world where a man can lie in an intersection for sixteen weeks, his face turned sideways, mouth open and hollow, eyes caved in?
In her head, was that how he was, so that when she thought of him, which was probably every time she ducked under the bridge, she thought of him dead right there?
If so, then hell yes, that bird would have freaked her out.
She didn’t wreck that Thursday afternoon at two-thirty, though, like would probably happen in a story.
She just started her shaking, shallow-breathed, I’m-not-crying thing.
She was still doing it when she pulled into the driveway. We had to come out front, lead her in to the couch.
• • •
Benny.
How can we explain Benny, even to ourselves?
The way you would say it nicely is with a word along the lines of “irreverent.” Like, after church, if Benny’d drifted another snot airplane down from the balcony—he’d named them airplanes, and, really, it was the only term that fit—or if he’d “accidentally” spilled the offering plate again, after he’d done all that and everybody’s just making their way to lunch, you might pinch somebody’s sleeve, pull their ear back to your mouth, and whisper that that Miller boy, he’s so irreverent.
It’s not exactly the word you mean, but, with your tone and your eyebrows, you turn it into the word you mean.
The youngest of three brothers, though? How else could he have been?
He had our pranks and exaggerated misdeeds to live up to. Little brothers, they always have to go one step further, one step more. They don’t understand that the tall tales they hear around the family table at eleven at night, they’re part of an understood game of one-upmanship. Instead, they hear them as gospel. They take them as a model.
One story we’d all heard growing up—family legend—was how our grandma, after she’d been snakebit one summer, our two uncles had started hiding dead snakes around the house. Just to freak her out. Just to be cruel. Grandma hated the stories, but she’d smile, too, hearing them. The time she left her slippers in the middle of the living room, because she’d jumped right out of them. How she had to rewash a whole load of laundry, that one time she’d had the basket on her hip, when she was on the way to the clothesline and saw a scaly tail edged out from under the shovel blade.
Benny took that, and he raised them one.
We helped him catch the bird, though.
The trap was just the usual upside-down cardboard box propped on a stick, the stick tied to a string, the string leading right to us on the porch. Like a fuse, yeah.
When it lit, there was an explosion of black feathers.
We didn’t know for sure it was the big black carrion bird like Mom had told us about, but we knew it didn’t smell good anyway. And it was black and greasy. A crow, a raven? Is there such a bird as just a “blackbird”?
Does it matter, now?
Once our cardboard box fell over the blackbird, and there was that initial flutter of surprise at what was happening to the sky, there was an instant calm. Was it a moment we were supposed to reconsider our action in, or is that just how it feels, looking back? Was this our chance to not start what would turn us into what we are now?
Probably.
But you never know. Not at the time.
The bird wasn’t a big one, but it was meaty. If it had wanted to, it could have dislodged our flimsy cardboard box. It could have tumped it over, flapped itself back up into the wide-open sky.
Instead, it hunkered down in that blackness. It hunkered down in the privacy of that box and it ate the bread we’d baited it in with, its beak stabbing and tearing at the stale crust.
It knew this was just the beginning.
• • •
The way the bird died that night—we should have guessed it would try to make an escape, shouldn’t we have? It was a wild animal in a closed space. Never mind all Benny’s promises and insistences that he’d shut his door and locked it.
Evidently not.
When the bird climbed from its box in his closet, which he also hadn’t completely shut, it went seeking its sky down the hall. In the living room.
And, did it just walk down the hall, its marble eyes watching everything at once, its head ratcheting around to redirect those eyes, the way birds do?
We don’t think it flew, anyway. A flying bird dives at mirrors, and there’s a big one in the living room, over the fireplace. No, it must have walked, perhaps testing each next step delicately before giving its weight to the carpet.
It was hungry, see.
The bread, it hadn’t been enough.
And, we’d never thought of it that way, but there was stuff to eat in the living room. Not Mom’s potpourri bowl, like we thought would have made sense—do birds even have a sense of smell?—but the little beads of halogen-white fertilizer in the loamy dirt of our potted plants.
Before Dad’s funeral, we’d never been a live-plant kind of family. Instead of wreaths or arrangements, though, a lot of friends and family, they’d had actual living plants delivered. Plants that, if they weren’t from Dad’s funeral, we’d have let die, of course.
Now, though, now we were keeping them alive from a sort of guilt. Like, it was our duty to keep them going. If we didn’t, we’d be letting Dad go that much more.
So we watered them, we cycled them onto the back porch for sun, and we sprinkled foamy white fertilizer into their soil, just like the guy at the hardware store said.
After the bird had its night in the living room—after it used the living room as a buffet—all that soil, it was black again. Not a flash of white in there at all.
“Did it think they were stars?” Benny asked, standing over the stiff bird half-under the coffee table.
Birds don’t eat stars, we told him.
It led to a push, which turned into an elbow, which turned into a harder elbow, which turned into a shoulder tackle, which ended with Mom storming in, to break this scene up once again.
Since the Crash, we’d been more prone to this kind of behavior. Mom had explained to us that it was normal, that of course we were lashing out at whoever happened to be within arm’s reach.
That didn’t mean she had to tolerate it, though.
She waded in like always, like you do when you’re the single mom of three boys, two of whom are taller than you, but then she was falling back, her hand to her chest, no air in her lungs anymore, her eyes wide and terrified and, it seemed, suddenly certain of something.
She’d seen the bird, stiff on the floor.
Just as those dead snakes had got to Grandma a generation ago, her daughter, she was spooked by this dead bird.
Did a light go on in Benny’s little head at that moment? That’s not even a question.
• • •
Because one of us had a split lip after the living room fight, and because we were all marching straight to our rooms, we didn’t see Mom throw the bird away. Not in the rolling trash can in the garage, but walked down to the empty lot four houses down, what we’d always called the Dead Lot.
It was just because the homeowners who’d lived there—and died there, in the fire—they’d been into water conservation, so had xeriscaped with gravel and rocks. What was left of that xeriscaping, it looked dead in comparison to the green oases aproned out in front of all the rest of the houses on the block.
The Dead Lot had never been a good place to play, though. Unless you were starting fires like some of the kids on the block, in which case it was perfectly safe: there was nothing left to burn. All that had lived through the first was the cactus, and it had come through hungrier than ever, having to shoulder against each other for purchase in the thin soil now.
Mom lobbing the dead blackbird out into that spiny dryness, it should have been the end of it. We thought it was, anyway. Or—we weren’t even thinking in terms of “endings” then, because we hadn’t clocked any kind of “beginning.”
If we were thinking anything along those lines, then we’d have thought we were still in the middle, probably. Of getting over Dad. Early on, Benny had asked if we were half-orphans now. It was a stupid question, but it kind of wasn’t that stupid, really. When you’ve had a dad your whole life, and then you suddenly don’t, you have to rearrange yourself inside. It’s not a short process.
For Mom either. At night, we could still hear her in her room, crying.
And, she wasn’t wrong about us: we were fighting harder, since the funeral. Not just with each other, either. And we weren’t fighting to somehow keep Dad alive. It was more like, now that he was gone, it felt like he was watching. The fights we were getting into at school and down at the gas station and wherever, then, they were more like we were proving ourselves to him. We wanted him to see us, and for him to kind of nod from his new place, take ownership.
Nobody in Benny’s fifth grade would fight him anymore, though. It was because he never knew when to stop.
So he had to prove himself to Dad in other ways.
That night at dinner, Mom asked what had he done to his arm.
He looked at his forearm as if just seeing the cluster of fresh scabs.
“Snake bite?” he said, and we laughed because of how he made it a question, and how that snake would have had to have had a machine-gun strike, like a paddleball.
The scabs were from cactus spines. He’d been playing down there alone like usual, probably—he had a collection of lighters the other kids in the neighborhood dropped when their fires started—and had noticed some black feathers back in the sharpness.
“Hunh,” he probably said, looking around to see who might be watching. Mom had thrown his bird away down there. He’d just gotten it back.
Two weeks later, it showed up again. By Benny’s hand, of course.
He’s used toothpicks to prop the blackbird up by the entertainment center, in the corner under one of the plants. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was decoration, that it was intentional.
When Mom wouldn’t settle down enough after dinner to see it, he dragged her in to wait for a commercial he told her she had to see, because the used car salesman looked like a guy Dad used to know.
It was a flimsy excuse, but because it had “Dad” in it, she had to wait for that commercial.
Inside a minute, she registered the bird watching her.
Her spine straightened, her nostrils flared—we knew to watch, had seen Benny setting the bird up, had had to tell him where the toothpick shaker was—and then she looked back to us.
We had other places to be. Other places to look.
“I’m not disappointed in him,” she said, standing from where Benny had perched her, on the front edge of the coffee table.
She was supposed to have jumped out of her house shoes. She was supposed to have run screaming down the hall.
Instead, we were all grounded.
In addition, the cost of a new set of tongs, it was coming out of our allowance. This because she couldn’t touch the bird with her bare fingers, so needed metal ones. Ones she was now going to have to throw away, with the bird.
“It probably smells,” she said, holding the back of her hand to the underside of her nose.
It didn’t, though. That was the thing.
Its eyes had caved in like you’d expect, and it looked somehow shriveled, but . . . had Benny hollowed it out, packed it with sawdust? Had he been sealing it in more and more coats of hair spray or Scotch Guard every day after school?
What had he been doing with the bird, these last two weeks?
Little kid things, we presumed. If we presumed anything.
And now we were all grounded from it.
This time we heard Mom in the kitchen, disposing of the bird. Not in the disposal, because how do you replace a whole garbage disposal when there’s not a dad anymore, but with trash bags. She had dropped it into that great whiteness all by itself, then spun the body, letting the top twist enough where she could knot it.
And then came the tape.
From the tearing and wrapping we heard, the bird must have looked like a mummy by the time Mom was done with it. Did she carry it by the head when she deposited it in the garage trash can, or did she cup it under the breast, as if it were a living thing?
This is something we only considered later.
• • •
When the two officers—a man, a woman, the woman’s hat in her hands like a shield over her crotch, the man bald and hatless—when they’d come to the front door three months ago with their terrible news, Mom’s screaming had been what drew us up the hall from our bedrooms, where we’d been plugged into our various devices.
Mom was lying sideways on the slick tile of the entryway, where, if you track mud in, it’s supposed to be easier to clean up.
It gave her hip a pivot.
She was screaming and pedaling her feet. Or, her feet, they were trying to run her away from this news, from these officers. Except she couldn’t stand up anymore either, so she was just going around and around.
The way she screamed the night after she threw the bird away, it was the exact same.
Again, conditioned just by one instance of it to expect more bad news—your dad only has to die once for you to know the pattern of it—we edged up the hall, our eyes wide and hesitant.
Mom was balled up in the corner by the refrigerator. Which is to say, she’d fallen away from the foggy window on the door to the garage.
When she couldn’t speak, could only shake her head no, we finally offered her the phone.
Her first call was to the police. Her second was to Aunt Zoe.
The police were there in ten minutes, had cleared the garage of any intruder inside of two, with apologies.
The male officer . . . was he the same one who’d stood there over our mom, when she was trying to run away from the news about Dad?
The officer had a hat on now. We couldn’t tell.
Once Mom’s sister showed up, he excused himself, and he even tipped his hat to us in farewell, like daring us to recognize him.
After confirming that Zoe would stay as long as needed—when your Mom’s collapsed, you grow up for a few minutes—we retreated down the hall, for the sleep we were supposed to need for school the next day.
As far as Mom and Zoe knew, anyway.
Dad, he would have busted us. Not because he heard better, but because we were him, thirty years ago. He’d been us, once upon a time. And, with him not there, we felt we had to protect Mom like he would have. If that meant disobeying her orders in order to recon, in order to gather intel—we’d liked military movies, once upon a time—then so be it, right? She’d thank us later or she’d thank us never, but the right thing to do, it’s the right thing to do regardless of thanks.
This was something Dad had taught us.
He wasn’t a knight or a saint or some model of fatherhood, don’t worry. And we knew better than to lug him up onto some stupid pedestal just because he was dead. When he’d told us that bit about doing right things, it had been during a commercial for a cowboy movie we’d been watching in the middle of the day; he’d pretty much just been repeating what the movie had just said.
Still—that he’d been the one to say it, and that it was one of the few things like that we still had from him, it lent it some weight.
So we crept down the hall, as close to the dining room table as we dared. It was the formal dining room. Mom and Zoe had probably chosen it because the table and chairs there were extra sturdy, and you need sturdy things to set your coffee on when you feel like the ground’s crumbling away beneath you.
The broken story Mom whispered to her sister—Zoe who had always been the crazy one, the one who maybe saw a UFO, the one who didn’t not believe in Bigfoot—it came down to a glance, to peripheral vision.
Mom had gotten up from bed because she “still wasn’t sleeping right,” and had been reaching into the top shelf for Dad’s secret bourbon when an almost “wet” motion stopped her, up on one foot.
What it was was a shiny bowling ball twitching in a great socket. Watching her.
An eye.
Which is when the scream welled up from her throat.
The garage, as the officers had proved with their two flashlights, it was empty. Just Dad’s half-done, mostly abandoned projects.
We eased back down to Benny’s room. All three of us.
There was an interrogation that needed to take place. A prank was a prank, but this wasn’t funny anymore.
We squeezed Benny’s arms high up on the inside, where it hurt, where there’s no muscle, just little-kid bone, and we threatened the blanket he pretended not to be attached to, but he held fast to his innocence. No, he hadn’t been sneaking around in the garage trash can. It wasn’t him Mom had seen.
That he didn’t call out for her to save him from us, though, that was the real test. It meant he wasn’t pulling the eject lever. More and more this past year, he’d been not telling on us. It was him asking for permission to be one of us, we knew. It was him telling us that he could keep secrets.
It was working, too.
We apologized to him for the bruises, for the new and dangerous tear in his blanket, but we didn’t mean it.
We had to know, didn’t we?
It was for Mom.
And . . . the other possibility.
What Zoe hadn’t asked Mom, it was beneath asking, really.
If the eye was that big, and if it wasn’t just a new widow letting the night get the better of her, then there had to be a face around it of proportionate size, didn’t there?
And—and if Mom didn’t see it in the darkness of the garage, didn’t say anything about it, either to Zoe or to the police, then that could only mean that she didn’t see it.
Because it was deep black, we assumed.
Oily black.
Those kind of feathers that soak up the light.
• • •
The next afternoon, burning up his off hours, using up his night, the bald police officer stopped by, knocked on our door, his hat in his hand this time.
He was checking on Mom.
We stared at him with our six eyes, lied that she was sleeping. And then she stepped in behind us, guided us away by the shoulders, and stepped out onto the porch.
That night after lights out, we knew what we were hearing, but we let it happen: Benny, padding down the hall. Benny, creaking the garage door open. Benny, smuggling a bird-mummy back into his bedroom.
We never considered if maybe he was sleepwalking.
• • •
What Mom explained to us that weekend was that Officer Grant was just going to be “Mr. Grant” to us, if he wasn’t in uniform.
It hadn’t even been five months. It hadn’t even been half a year yet.
None of us said that. Before we could, Mom assured us that he was only a friend, that he was seeing her through a hard time, that she needed that, did we understand?
Yes. No.
Dutifully, in rebellion, we fertilized Dad’s funeral plants while she was explaining this new situation to us. There were enough white beads to see the plants through the next two months.
Did the suddenness of Officer Grant make us forget the bird?
Hardly. It made us more aware of the bird. Had both not come into our lives at the same time? One night when Mom was out to dinner—no details, just promises to return, and pecks on the cheek—we confronted Benny in his room, and he finally had to show us the low shelf on his closet where he’d stashed the bird, behind his third-grade toys, where Mom would never look.
Our idea was that, if we did everything perfect, if we kept ourselves in perfect check, then the world would repay us by treating us properly as well—and it owed us one anyway, for Dad.
Instead of digging through the third-grade toys himself, Benny just pointed to them. Because he knew we would accuse him of tampering with the evidence.
It had already been tampered with, was the thing.
We extracted each toy carefully, laying it precisely in a fan behind us, and, instead of the decaying bird there at the lightless back of the shelf, we found its wrappings.
Behind it, there was a fist-sized hole in the drywall.
Where something had chewed through for this tasty treat, we had to presume.
Because we weren’t ready for the other explanation.
• • •
That night, all that night—was it our dreams? Our imaginations? Our fears?
We could hear a crawling in the walls. A feathery slithering. One that made us sure that, if we lowered ourselves to the electrical outlets, we would see an oily blackness through those two uprights slits, and in the throat of that always open (sad) mouth that Dad had told us was the ground.
If we slept, we didn’t remember it, and if we woke, it was just to the same thing we were already seeing: our bedroom walls. Now occupied.
We didn’t even hear Mom coming home at whatever hour she came home.
It was just supposed to have been lasagna two blocks over. A meal, then she would be here to tuck us in.
It wasn’t our first night alone; she’d been out for drinks with Zoe twice since the Crash.
And we weren’t entirely convinced we were alone, either.
Not that we’d have admitted that.
At daybreak, it was Benny’s thrashing and grunting that woke us.
The whole family collapsed onto his closet.
He had finally reached into the hole in the wall, like we should have expected. He had reached in for his contraband. His stolen, dead bird.
Our first thought wasn’t that a rat had him by the meaty part of the hand, right under the thumb, and it wasn’t that he’d snagged on a nail.
It was that a hand had him by the wrist, was trying to pull him through, to live on that side of the wall, where living wasn’t living.
Dad?
No, never. He wouldn’t want that for us. He wasn’t that selfish. He wanted the best for us. If he were on the other side of some wall, he would just stand there quietly forever, instead of scaring us.
We don’t know what Mom thought, if she was thinking at all.
She shrieked and dived ahead, her knees falling onto Benny’s blocky third-grade toys, and she hugged him away.
Which was when we looked around: there was one more of us. Because it was still so early, the kind of early where you’re not really thinking yet, it had seemed natural that our family’s headcount would be five. We didn’t have to look or register. It just felt right.
But it wasn’t.
Officer Grant was standing there in a pair of unbuttoned slacks. No shoes. His hair would have been mussed, if he’d had enough.
Mister Grant, we corrected in our heads.
“Boys,” he said to us, reaching forward to toe over one of the toys that had gouged into Mom’s knees.
We nodded that that was right, this was us. We didn’t add a “sir” to it.
Really, if we added anything—and we did, with the set of our lips—it was whatever’s the opposite of “sir.” Whatever’s the opposite of “Dad.”
Anything different, and we’d have been traitors.
• • •
Over a breakfast Mom made, Officer Grant—dressed now, in clothes he must have eaten lasagna in—explained to us his neck injury. Not because we asked, but because it must have been apparent we’d noticed.
Whenever he would turn to the stove to ask Mom a question, instead of just craning his head around, he’d turn with his whole upper body, shoulders and all. At first we suspected he had a bad eye, but his eyes were fine, he told us, blinking them to show. Like that somehow proved they could see.
The problem, as he explained it, was his neck. An old snowmobile injury, of all things. He’d done a jump, caught maybe fifteen, twenty feet of air (him acting it out over the breakfast table, holding hard to the grips), then come down hard enough on the runners to slam his face into the handlebar. It cost him three teeth—he showed us the dental bridge—and it had done something to his neck that was just now starting to give him trouble, ten years later.
He hadn’t told his CO yet, because he didn’t know if it was going to strand him at a desk or not. You need peripheral vision where bad guys are concerned.
And—this for Mom, though he didn’t turn around to her this time—he was glad he hadn’t filled out that paperwork, or else he might not have come on this call, met this pretty lady.
We didn’t say anything to this. About this. What would even have been approaching proper? A smile of agreement? A chuckle of appreciation?
The way he’d said it, though, the way he’d delivered it.
This was his line.
He’d done this before.
Maybe this was his MO, even. Women he responded to at three in the morning, they were perfectly positioned to see him in the best possible light, weren’t they?
And, because he’d been the one to deliver the news about Dad that day, he knew ahead of time that she was alone.
He had been right about one thing, though.
When there’s bad guys around, you need to dial up your peripheral vision.
• • •
Dad had taught us that steel wool is the trick for plugging holes you don’t want mice and rats crawling through.
In the light of day, we figured it had to have been a mouse or rat that had stolen Benny’s bird. Why it had stripped the dead bird’s wrappings off before dragging it into the hole—that was the part that gave us pause. But we weren’t rodentologists, we decided. It wasn’t our job to solve the crime, just to stop it from happening again.
After packing the bird-hole with steel wool, we got to talking. This was in Benny’s bedroom. It wasn’t so much neutral territory as it was that his room was all the way down the hall from Mom’s room. And if she came in from the kitchen, we’d hear her crossing the entryway tile.
We considered whether, every time her new cop boyfriend came around, what if we called 911? But from some far off part of town?
Except he wouldn’t be on duty if he was coming over. And how would we get across town the moment we heard the door knock? And where would we get the cash for a dummy phone, and how could we know where every ATM and traffic camera was and wasn’t? We used to like cop movies too, with Dad.
We considered breaking bottles by the curb for Officer Grant to flat his cop tires on, but that seemed what he would expect us to do, and the city would pay for repairs, not him. He might even get a better patrol car from it, so it’d be like we were giving him a gift.
Benny wanted to put a dead bird in his jacket pocket when he left it on the coat rack, but we didn’t really consider that one. Dead birds, they really aren’t the best solution to very many problems.
Still, the hour after our talk, there was Benny again, with the stick and the cardboard box, the string laid in a line from it to him across the backyard grass.
Because he was crying while holding the string, we didn’t hassle him, just laid down on our stomachs to either side of him.
“White or wheat?” we asked about the bread he’d left as bait.
“White,” he said, obviously.
Our idea last time had been that a bird could see white from the sky better than it could see wheat. We’d smelled both kinds of bread too, in case birds find what they find that way, but if there was a difference, it was beyond our human noses to make it out.
“Good,” we told him.
What we considered then was that Benny, he hadn’t just lost his dad recently. He’d also lost his first pet.
So now he just wanted another.
It made pretty good fifth-grade sense, really.
And, watching the first bird zig and zag through the grass, like feeling each blade of grass out with its dinosaur feet, we caught each other’s eyes over Benny’s back, to be sure we were seeing what we were seeing.
It made our skin cold. It drained the blood from our lips.
We shook our heads no, but then had to accept it, a few bird-steps later.
The way that bluebird—all birds were their color plus “bird” for the experts we weren’t—kept twitching its head around, that was a twitch we knew. We’d just seen it at breakfast.
Could it be, though?
Later we would talk it through in whispers, our hands shaking from the truth of it all, but even just lying there on the back lawn with Benny, we already knew exactly what had happened.
It went like this.
That bird buried in Benny’s closet, its rotting smell hadn’t attract mice or rats. What happened, what had to have happened, it’s that it shivered free from its wrapping all on its own. The wall, it was chewed through from Benny’s side of the room, not from the dark, unlit spaces on the other side.
And what happened next—this gave us that dry-heave, gorge-rising feel in our throat—what that bird had to have done then, it was walk the labyrinth of hallways between the walls of our house.
It didn’t need a light. It knew where it was going.
It had been going there ever since Mom had lost her breath over the steering wheel at a certain intersection.
It was going to her bedroom.
Working steadily, ripping at the back side of the sheetrock with its black beak, the bird opened a hole in the far corner of her room, and then turned its head sideways, to look out with one eye.
What it saw—what it saw, it was something we can’t allow ourselves to see.
A woman, grieving. A woman, trying to hold on. A woman, scared.
And the man she’s holding onto.
After he’s asleep, now. After he’s asleep there’s the naked back of his calf extended out from the tangled, humid sheets.
He sleeps on his stomach, we figured. For this to work, he had to.
The bird plops out of the hole in the wall it’s chewed and torn. It lands on a shoulder on the carpet, makes no sound.
It rights itself, takes another bearing.
Nothing. Just steady breathing.
Moving in bursts, like stabbing itself into proximity, it makes its way across the expanse of the master bedroom, going over the discarded clothes instead of around them, stopping every few steps to crank its head around, draw a new bead on the dark corners.
Is it afraid of cats? Is it afraid of us? Does this not work if it wakes the sleepers?
Even were they to stir, though, surely they would shake this off as a dream. Especially if the bird just stood there, on the corner of the bed now. If it just stood there, watching with its marble-black eyes.
The sleepers don’t wake, though.
We don’t have to guess about this part.
If they’d woke, then we wouldn’t have seen Officer Grant’s head moving like a bird at breakfast. If they’d woke, we wouldn’t have had to listen to his glued- and taped-together snowmobile story explaining what we already knew we were seeing.
Evidence. Of his true nature.
What had happened the night before, after Mom had let a man not our dad into her bedroom—after she took that first step—a certain darkness, it pulled her in deeper.
The bird, perched on the corner of her bed, it jerks forward step by step, and, its beak designed just for this kind of operation, it lightly slits the back of Officer Grant’s calf open. Then it waits for the response.
None. He’s sated. His lower leg is the last part of his body he’s paying attention to in his sleep.
And then the bird, it forces its beak into that slit, nosing for space between the striated musculature—was he once a basketball player?—and, when it finds the right entrance point, the one that keeps going, it pushes its head in, a clawed foot coming forward to grip the edge of the slit, force the rest of the black body in.
For a moment, it’s an unnatural lump in the calf, behind the knee, but then the leg accounts for its new mass, swallows it up to the thigh, and higher, the bird spreading its wings in its new home.
By morning, the opening on the back of Officer Grant’s calf, it’s just an itch.
But his twitch, his neck—that’s proof. It’s something we’d never seen before, from him.
This explained it perfectly.
By the time the bluebird dodged up into the sky, out of the grasp of Benny’s prayers, we already knew it to be true: Officer Grant wasn’t just an interloper. He wasn’t even human.
Dad had let us watch horror with him some nights as well, if Mom was already asleep.
Breathing deep but evenly—you can’t tell this kind of stuff to a kid, even one who knows how to keep a secret—we laid there with Benny almost until dinner, but not only did no more birds of any color or stripe swoop down for the tempting-tempting bread, but there seemed to be no birds in the sky at all. And usually it’s a chirp-apocalypse.
“Hunh,” we said, standing, stretching, not catching each other’s eyes because we knew our faces were telling stories.
When Benny stood, the string around his finger tightened, pulling the stick out from under the box.
“That’s why,” we said, before we even saw it.
The falling box had startled a big yellow cat from the bushes. It scrambled under a different bush.
Dad had hated cats being around. Because the enemy of our dad had to be our enemy too, we hated cats as well.
This one was too fast to chase over the fence, though, and too nock-eared to corner, and Mom was slapping her palms to the inside of the sliding glass door anyway, to come eat.
Over rotisserie chicken from the store and rolls warmed golden-brown in the toaster, she asked us where the steel wool had got off to.
We chewed slower, longer.
“Why?” we asked.
“You’re the men of the house now,” she said. “If there’s a mouse, then it’s your duty. And show Benny how.”
“Where?” we asked.
After dinner she showed us.
It was in her bedroom, where we were trying not to breathe too deep now, because it might smell musty blue like cop. Just a fist-sized hole in the dark corner between her closet and bathroom, which is when that part of the story started to take shape in our heads.
Benny made a noise but we shushed him with an elbow.
Dragging our eyes across her bed for the inevitable inspection, the mental photographs we wouldn’t be able to undevelop later, there was the last thing we wanted to see: an oily black feather on the rumpled white sheets.
At which point Officer Grant burbled his siren at the curb.
It was how he rang the doorbell.
“Boys,” Mom said to us—an admonition and a plea both—and then she was scurrying back down the hall to the entryway, her hands balled up close to her hips.
We’d used all the steel wool on Benny’s closet.
It didn’t matter anymore, though.
It was already too late.
How we know for sure, it’s that, when we come home from school the next day, when we come home and retreat to the backyard because Officer Grant and Mom are at the kitchen table drinking coffee on what he calls lunch when he’s working this shift, we find the big yellow cat just around the corner.
It’s been opened from neck to tail.
Ants are crawling over the dry, craggy surface of its mouth, and its eyes, they’ve been scooped out.
Because of what it saw through the sliding glass door, we know.
Because of what it knew.
It makes us cup our eyes in our face in a different way.
It makes us start to wonder where this all started. And how to stop it.
“What?” Benny says.
He’s picked a white flower from a weed, is studying it.
We shake our heads no, nothing.
• • •
The test we devise to try to remove Officer Grant from suspicion—the benefit of the doubt we’re giving him, for Mom’s sake—he doesn’t know about it, of course.
If Officer Grant is indeed what we know him to be, though, then surely certain observances have to be made. Certain obeisances.
You thank the one who invited you in, don’t you?
So we watch. At the dinners Officer Grant is there for, who does he favor first with the mashed potatoes? When he’s unloaded his service revolver, is passing it around the living room because “boys should know firearms”—the corollary is that we need a dad—who does he lower himself to a knee for, to guide into proper stance? Mom gasping the whole time, of course, because there’s a gun in the house.
Used to, it was a line she said she’d never cross.
There would be no negotiation.
There are promises and assurances in place, though. There have been lectures. This is the tail-end of one, the idea being to make the heavy pistol less exotic, less something curious boys might want to sneak around, play with in secret.
Like we ever would.
Except for in movies, Dad hated guns.
Still, because we’re watching, we play along, our hands limp on the grip, our eyes always sure to be looking out the sliding glass door, or into the kitchen.
Benny gets all the attention.
He’s also the one who laughs the hardest at Officer Grant’s stories about the stupidity of lawbreakers.
We grin too, of course. But not inside.
The back of our faces are grim, and, if we would admit it, reluctant.
We’re giving Officer Grant every chance, here, aren’t we? Is there no subterfuge at all to his approach, his—we don’t like the word—his insertion?
And does this implicate Benny?
We can’t deny that he was the one who wanted the bird. He was the one who felt an absence in his life that he thought bird-shaped.
And now that bird, it’s come home to roost, as it were.
Because of what we would have to admit is lack of nerve, a trepidation about crossing uncrossable lines, we go to Mom with this first.
Benny’s in the backyard, digging a hole we asked him to dig, for worms. Officer Grant—we’ll never call him “Mister”, because that’s a familiarity that might lead to “Dad”—is on-shift, covering for a buddy who got slapped (his word) by a front bumper while making a traffic stop.
Mom is sitting on the edge of Benny’s bed.
We’re standing, not sure how to say what we need to say.
Finally we just tell her, starting from the beginning: that bird she saw lifting from the intersection that day? Benny caught it in the backyard, see? And then, its death, that was hardly accidental. Not even a little. It had to die in these walls. That was its anchor. But it wasn’t set deep enough, yet. It wasn’t set until Benny set it himself, by smuggling the bird back from the Dead Lot.
“The what?” Mom said.
“With the cactus,” we told her.
“And it wasn’t dead, then?” she said, not ready to believe this, since she’d held the thing in her hands.
“It was dead,” we told her. “Just, that didn’t stop it.”
All it needed was for a family member, an unwitting traitor, to carry it inside. To hide it in the dark. To give it a place to incubate.
It didn’t matter that it was the closet-wall it had chewed through. Had Mom forced it headfirst into the disposal like she’d probably considered, then it would have come out in a glass of water Officer Grant drank at three in the morning. If she’d thrown it up into the rain gutter for a sky burial, then it would have sifted down through the heater vents.
“Jim would have drank it?” Mom said.
“He’s not what you think, Mom,” we told her. “Officer Grant.”
“Mr. Grant.”
We refused to ratify that familiarity.
“Just because he’s not your dad . . . ” Mom started, but couldn’t hold onto the thread, or get it phrased it like she wanted. “I miss him too, guys.”
Our gazes were steely.
“But we have to keep living,” Mom said, and we winced to hear the defensiveness in her tone. How she was possibly having to convince herself, as well. “And Jim, he’s . . . it’s hard to explain. Someday you’ll understand.”
She stood, pulled us into her embrace.
“Thank you,” she whispered into our necks. “Thank you for trying to defend me. For trying to defend us. You are the men of the house now. But—but this is all right, okay? This isn’t something you need to . . . to help with. You want me to be happy, don’t you?”
“We’ve seen the way he favors Benny,” we said.
It was the last thing we had. The one thing she couldn’t deny.
“He’s ten,” Mom whispered, as if that were an explanation. “Jim, he’s . . . he’s giving y’all your room. He knows he could never replace—”
“Dad,” we said, before she could.
Because, we could tell, he was only ours now, Dad. We were his last and only conservators.
Mom’s eyes were brimming with tears. With pride, at our defensive efforts? With fear, because some part of her knew we were right?
That night—the final, spur-of-the-moment test—the casserole Mom prepared for us, for the once-a-week sit-down meal she insisted upon, including Officer Grant, it had worms under the cheese crust.
They’d been baked in.
We’d told Benny not to recognize them from the hole he’d dug. He didn’t. That he played along so willingly, so innocently, his face a complete fifth-grade blank, it didn’t help his case.
Mom shrieked back from the table, and Officer Grant, his eyes, they changed. We were watching.
He’d been a suitor, a candidate, one over for a polite dinner.
Now, though, with dead, sour-cream coated worms trailing off his plate—a joke he had to get since he was what he was—his eyes rolled over to a more serious mode.
Had we not known him for what he was, we would have said it was his cop-face. An instinctual response. We might have even said he was protecting his date in a complicated situation, a situation in which she would be the first to defend her attackers.
What we actually saw, though, what the worms sang up inside him, it was the bird.
His eyes were cold, dead, calculating.
That night, when we crept from our rooms to scheme in the living room, he was standing there already, facing the sliding glass door. He was in shadow, was a silhouette, but he seemed to be either naked or just in his underwear.
What was he looking at? What was he watching?
When he didn’t look around to us, we looked around ourselves. Around the living room.
All the fertilizer in the dark soil, instead of being sprinkled randomly like stars that had fallen, it was now piled in careful pyramids in each pot.
Had Officer Grant caught our shapes in the reflection of the sliding glass door and nodded once, said Gentlemen to us, there’s a chance we would have still provisionally accepted him as human. His head, though, the dark silhouette of his unnatural head, it just jerked over, his shoulders coming with it, so as to fix the gaze of his right eye on some portion of the lawn past where we could see.
We melted back down to our bedrooms as best we could, as soundlessly as we could, sure that if we looked back, he would now be a shape at the front part of the hall, and an instant after that, he would be upon us.
The time for scheming was past.
• • •
Because of Benny’s nature, the next step was probably going to have happened anyway. That’s what we tell ourselves.
Officer Grant’s shift had gone double, and we’d made sure he ate more than his fill of Mom’s pot roast—Dad’s favorite—and then we’d gone to bed early ourselves, giving them their privacy.
We rose just after midnight, and, could we have, we would have traveled the thin space between the walls, unfolded ourselves from the chewed-through hole in Mom’s bedroom.
As it was, we had to creep down the hall on fingertips and toes, our grown-wild bangs dragging the carpet before our faces.
Earlier in the day we’d cracked into Dad’s tools, lubricated the hinges on the master bedroom door. After pushing it open, we just stayed there, listening to the steady breathing from the king bed until we could separate his and hers.
It took forty-five careful minutes to extract our enemy’s service revolver from its creaky holster.
When we stood again in the hall, our lungs full for the first time in an hour, Benny was watching us from his doorway.
He knew to whisper: “Where are you going?”
“You’re too young,” we told him.
It was the surest way to guarantee his participation.
He stood in defiance, to prove he wasn’t a little kid, and when we asked where his school backpack was, he guided it up from under his desk. We emptied it out, filled it with the third-grade toys from the closet, that Mom had gouged her knees with.
Instead of chancing the front door, we eased the un-oiled door to the garage open, then crawled one by one out the old dog door cut into the side of the garage an occupant or two ago. We handed the revolver ahead, careful of it.
The only place to go was the Dead Lot.
Because we were barefoot, we had to pick our way across the lawns. Three boys in their bright underwear, a shiny revolver held up at head level between them.
What we told Benny was . . . did he remember that movie we’d watched with Dad? Where the cowboy, alone in the desert, prepping for his big fight, where he flashed his pistol up from his thigh and shot all the spines off a cactus that was so far away the camera could hardly even see it?
Benny smiled with his whole face.
Once to the Dead Lot, we dug out Benny’s third-grade toys—the ones we thought Mom wanted gone, since they’d hurt her knees—and we walked out to a far, high cactus, and stuck the toys on the spines, for bigger targets. Because we knew we weren’t shootists, not really.
This wasn’t about that, though.
We fake-argued about who should go first—all scripted—and finally decided that, of the two of us, the younger should have the first shot. Things settled, then, we loud-whispered the proper firing checklist, everything you had to do in order to hit those toys all the way out there. Everything you had to do to be a real cowboy.
Benny soaked up every word, every gesture.
He was out here with the big boys. At night. With a gun. He couldn’t stand on both feet at once, kept having to trade back and forth, his eyes shiny with laughter he couldn’t let out.
We were just about to pop off the first round when we lowered the revolver, a realization forming on our faces: if the youngest shot first, then the youngest should shoot first, right?
Benny was getting in on a technicality.
Sad to be doing it, we passed the revolver down to him. It was heavy in his hands. When he started to look down the barrel, we grabbed his hand, pointed the revolver out into the dark.
“You forgot the silencer,” one of us said. It was another line.
We grubbed a foggy plastic green bottle sloshing with warm whatever up from the trash in the Dead Lot, twisted the cap off without smelling the yuck, pushed the barrel down into it.
“There’s not going to be enough shots,” we said then, suddenly sad about how soon this was going to be over.
We did the math out loud: two each. And there were nine toys speared on the cactus.
Our solution, it was so obvious we didn’t even have to argue to figure it out. We would sneak back to the cartridge belt for more. The cartridge belt in Mom’s bedroom. And, while we were gone, and because we were coming back with Officer Grant’s whole cartridge belt, Benny could shoot up all six of his shots. But he should wait, right? In case the silencer came off. He should count to sixty, slow.
That would give us time to get home. That would give us time to be innocent.
Benny nodded without smiling. Like a cowboy. One that could be trusted.
“And we were never here,” we said, crossing our lips with our fingers.
Just like Officer Grant had taught, Benny widened his stance, looked down his extended arm, and held his lips like to make the sound of the gun, the syrupy grossness in the bottle slipping down the front of the revolver, dripping from his elbow. But then we saw: he was already counting, his serious eyes on.
We ran, laughing, our tears streaming back down the sides of our faces, to tickle our ears.
We were two houses shy of the dog door when the explosions started happening, down at the Dead Lot, more distant than we’d hoped, but probably close enough.
A tight, guilty cluster of six shots.
We laughed harder, dove into the garage, sure that when we stood, a hand waiting at the light switch was going to blind us, indict us, convict us.
The garage was blissfully empty, exactly as we’d been praying.
However.
The kitchen light . . . it wasn’t on, but—there was a shadow?
It was her. Mom. She was reaching above the stove again, for Dad’s secret bourbon. The shadow bleeding into the garage, it was the little fifteen-watt range hood light she always left on.
We watched, not breathing, the two of us caught there in that foggy window, and for a moment, her arm extended up into the top shelf, Mom stopped, registering our languid rustling teenage motion in her peripheral vision, and for years, well into our own marriages and our own families, that’s the image of her we kept sacrosanct: the way she saw us but then re-saw us, convinced herself there wasn’t a monstrous bird leaned up to the glass, watching her.
Even though there was. At least the monstrous part.
We’re sorry, Mom.
But we had to, too.
We miss how Benny was in fifth grade as well. The way he was always up for whatever. The way he would jump first, figure out how he was supposed to land later.
He was the best of us, we know.
And, if the stories Dad told us about his own childhood were true, then of the three of us, it was Benny who most took after him.
It worked, though, our plan. In spite of everything that went wrong, what we meant to do, we did: that was the last night Officer Grant ever spent the night.
What happened, apparently, was Benny, curious as ever and never one to heed rules, had stolen Officer Grant’s service revolver, and then crept down the street to shoot it, perfectly fulfilling Mom’s greatest certainty about guns in the house. Proving false, once and for all, Officer Grant’s promises and assurances.
Only, for reasons Benny never told anybody, he’d screwed an old plastic bottle over the end of the revolver. Probably because he didn’t want to get caught? However, that there’d been a cap on that bottle, it should have told him to smell of that bottle.
The syrupy liquid dripping down the front of the revolver, coating his elbow, it was lamp fluid, smuggled down to the Dead Lot by one of the firebugs on the block.
The first shot lit, and, trying to shake the flames from his hand, Benny jerked on the trigger, emptying the cylinder as fast as his finger could spasm.
Which isn’t where it stopped.
Three of his shots, they went through the window of the house right by the Dead Lot. One of them went into the throat of a girl from Benny’s grade. Her name was Stephanie. She was sleeping. Just like Dad, it wasn’t her fault. Just like Dad, it didn’t matter.
That didn’t just kill her, though. Benny was never Benny, after having done that to a girl he’d once drawn a valentine for.
But he never told on us, either.
That’s how grown-up he was. That’s how much he grew up, that night.
It lasted until he was sixteen, just like we were that year.
With his melted hands, he—It doesn’t matter how he did it, does it? He did it. And he did it deep enough that he couldn’t come back.
When the cop—not Officer Grant—found Benny, just Ben by then, under the water tower, when that officer showed up at the door, his hat in his hand, Mom pushed him hard enough away that he fell onto the lawn.
She was screaming again. She was running away in her head.
She never stopped.
But, that night, before we knew all this, just the two of us standing there in the cold of the garage.
Finally Mom let her hand find that bourbon bottle up in its high cabinet, and we saw now that it wasn’t to drink. She was just touching the glass. Like a kiss, just, with the pads of her fingers.
Our hearts swelled.
She still loved him, didn’t she? There was still that left in her.
She closed the cabinet door gently, patted it once, then retreated, giving us room and time to sneak back in, which is just what we were doing, our hand to the twisted knob, when another form padded into the kitchen.
Officer Grant. Shirtless, his blue-black pants unbuttoned. No shoes.
He was asleep, still. It was obvious. This was the same self that had delivered him to the living room three nights ago, to stand watch at the sliding glass door.
This was the bird in his chest. In his blood. This was the bird perched on his mind.
We weren’t holding our breaths now. Our breath, it had been taken from us. Worse, we couldn’t let the doorknob twist back, because it would give us away. We had to stand there by the window. We had to see.
Without looking our way, he turned to the sink and turned on the tap as if to drink from it, but he didn’t. That was just cover-sound. White noise.
What he was doing was reaching up into the top shelf Mom had just been into. He uncapped our dad’s secret bourbon, turned the bottle up for a burbling swig, exactly as our dad really used to do when he thought no one was watching.
Mom wouldn’t have told him about this bottle she cherished, though, would she have?
No. Never.
And—and he wouldn’t have found it. Not yet. Not this soon. Not already.
Our chins were trembling now.
We each jerked in unison when his upper body twitched in that bird way one last time, and though he seemed to be looking into the garage, though he seemed to be looking directly into our rotten souls, he was what he was: fascinated with his reflection. His true self caught there in the wavering glass for a moment.
We couldn’t see what he was seeing, but we knew.
The only way he could have known where that bottle was, it was that he had risen as a bird from that very same intersection he’d died, and then Benny had smuggled him into the house. And he had forced his way into this Officer Grant.
Our dad, he loved us. He was fighting his way back to us the only way he could.
It made us cold and it warmed us at the same time.
It’s a feeling we live with, now.
When he put the bottle back, it was backlit for an instant by the range light. It was backlit long enough for us to see the lone black feather floating in there, now.
He turned the tap off, nodded once, probably satisfied just to be home again, with his family, and then he padded back to our mom, leaving us where we’d always been, where we’ve never really left: standing in the cold and the dark, halfway between exits 307 and 308, a scream welling in our throats, our transformation complete.
We’d been sons, and the kind of big brothers he’d always told us to be.
But, now—now someone was pinching our sleeve, now someone was pulling us back to their mouth, to their beak, to whisper our true name to us.