Part One of Two | For Clo's Contest
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Buddy wakes up slowly.
There is a musty taste in his mouth, and his jaw cracks open like the spine of a new book. The room he is in is dark, except for an arrangement of tired candles set up on the window sill. His bones feel stiff and brittle and there is a strange smell in the air. It perfumes the room, some kind of incense. He tries to move, but his limbs are strapped down. He struggles. The iron bedframe he is tied down to squawks and murmurs, like disturbed birds.
There is a rust in the darkness.
A bleeding-tooth ditch decay with wormwood fingers.
It creeps for him.
It swirls, stewed like laundry.
He can hear humming. Humming behind his head. He struggles a little more and calls for help.
For help.
“Hush, little baby, don't say a word.”
The voice is soft and deep. It comes through the darkness disembodied and spectral, kissing Buddy's ears like a whispered secret. The voice holds the last note of the song, reedy and wavering. He calls for help again. The voice just laughs softly and sings,
“Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird.”
He can practically feel the darkness, wooly as the heads of little black boys. His breath stays in his chest and refuses to move. He struggles. He gasps and struggles and worms around. Where is he? Where are his parents?
A hand strokes his forehead.
The fingers are rough and calloused and they make his spine prickle. They belong to a big man. But gentle, gentle. With the softness of the touch of a mother or a lover.
“And if that mockingbird don't sing, daddy's gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
A match is struck by his ear and a candle is lit and he can smell smoke. The feeble light casts forward weak, webby-eyed and drab. A chair is dragged over to the bed and the man sits down. He can see the man's face now. He has crinkly eyes and a mouth the disappears into a tangly beard and he smells of peppermint and pipesmoke. His skin is like newspaper clippings, yellowed.
“How do you feel?” the man asks. He has an accent.
It is hard to get any words out. All he manages is a squeak.
The man laughs. “You can call me Alfred.” He pauses and sits back. The chair sighs under him. “It is strange to wake up in a place you are not familiar with, no? It makes your head all cloudy and your heart all scared. Can't think straight, can't think at all. In the dark. In the light. Around and around and then you stop and look up. And there's the sun. And there's the god. Funny as hell, but nobody is laughing. We all wake up in a strange place. Every day. It makes us angry. It makes us want the old back, you know? You wouldn't know. You're only a child.”
His eyes glow pale cupped by his cheeks. Buddy still can't think straight. He can't focus on one thought, let alone this man's face. He opens mouth.
“Help.”
Alfred continues to smile, and touches his forehead.
“Help, you say. I can't give you help. I'm sorry, my little pale one. I can give you the chance of a lifetime, though. I can give you a chance to fix your parent's wrongdoing. I can give you a chance to make things right.”
Alfred stands up.
The man reaches into his pocket and produces a switchblade, which he flips open, gleaming red in the halflight, like a smear of blood. Strapped down to the bed, it takes a while for Buddy to think anything of this man with thimble-fingers who smells of peppermint. And then his eyes get all big. And he screams and pulls against the thick rope binding him to the bed. A sucking feeling of fear – it must be fear – creeps up his body like beanvines, roping around his chest and restricting his heart, keeping in there in his chest, in its place.
Alfred is praying.
The man's head is lifted and his hands are big and open-palmed. The darkness squeezes in to watch with a slinky smile and inky fingertips and steals all of his screams and cries and prayers and puts them into jar. He can hear them taptaptapping against the glass of the jar, flies at the window, beggars at the door.
Alfred looks down.
There is a godliness about his expression.
There is a peace and a security.
“Arbeit Macht Frei,” the man says, reaches down, presses his hand against Buddy's forehead, and slits the boy's throat.
**
The waves chase me. They come gobbling up the beach, frothing spit and amoeba-bodied and it tries to catch my toes, but I'm too quick for it and I'm always one step ahead. I can't help but laugh as I recede and retreat with the tide. I have my pantlegs rolled up to my knees, but they've still gotten wet somehow and when I bite down, there is sand in between my teeth that grits and grinds together. Seagulls. They wheel above me, black crescents against the sky which gray and somber as an orphan. They call. Tremulous, piercing shrieks. Lonely. It's as if they're looking for someone.
Papa stands a little ways a way, just smiling at me. He keeps his old, yellow, roostertalon hands in his pockets and watches me. He is tired, I know. When I walk with him, I can actually hear him creaking. Old kindling bone man. I tease him about it sometimes. And he laughs with me, but I know that deep down, he misses the fine-tuned lubrication of youngness. I can see it in his eyes.
He's just a pair of worn-out boots, with crumbly leather and broken laces.
The water is so cold.
After a while, I run back to him and I hold his hand and we go down to the tide-pools. Dimpled in the black, slimy rocks like dead eyesockets. We have to be very careful as we step from rock to rock, because of the slipperiness of the seaweed and the seaspray. The wind licks at us regularly with chancred cat-tongues, grooming and preening our faces until they drip. In the tide-pools, there are starfish, hard and spiny, and pucker-lipped anemones, and fragile little hermit crabs that suck themselves up into their shells and don't come out again no matter what you say to them.
Some rocks are covered with muscles, close-mouthed and black as crow-beaks. Papa tells me not to break them off. He tells me that they're just minding their own business. He tells me that it's not nice to chisel them away and pry them open and see their mushy, rotten banana tongues.
Everpresent, the ocean is steel and turbulent. It pines against the shore and the rockfaces, throwing temper-tantrums, cultivating the smells of dying things in the air, the reek of washed up things on the beach.
I breathe the rotten smell in real deep and I smile and hold Papa's hand a little tighter.
**
Papa tucks me into bed with sandpaper hands and gives me another kiss on the forehead. His beard tickles against my skin and my nose and I sneeze. He sits on my bed – the springs moaning like ghosts – and he puts his hands on his knees, looking out the window. I look out the window, too. The trees in the front yard stand there solemn and cheerless, like people in old-fashioned photographs, and the moon paints them with silver dresses. It is cold out there. I shiver and sink deeper into the nest of quilts and comforters around me, heavy-eyed.
“Will you sing me a song, Papa?”
“A song.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You've heard all of my songs, child.”
“Well, then sing me one I haven't heard for a while.”
His eyes are tired, too, I can tell. They sag like bluebells. He opens his mouth and then stops, thinking hard. Age has got ahold of him. It erodes him, smooths the edges of his bones down until he breathes out sawdust. It crawls throughout his body, testing and inspecting his thin, gossamer veins, and plucking them like harpstrings until Papa has to sit down and mop his brow and smile tightly at me and tell me to go along and play, he'll catch up. For such a big man, sometimes he can be very small. It all depends on the light he is in, I guess. Here in the dark, he is fragile and small and glass, like something dusty and intricate on the shelf of an antique store.
He coughs dustily and leans back.
“Alright, I've got one.”
He clears his throat.
He begins to sing.
Papa's voice is deep and huge, but he sings to me softly and I close my eyes.
“Hush little child, don't say a word, daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don't sing, daddy's gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
At the sound of his voice, I drop into sleep real quick and Papa's foghorn music bends away until its nothing more than a deep-seated thrum that I can feel shivering through my skin.
And if that ring turns to brass,
daddy's gonna buy you a looking glass.
a looking glass.
a looking glass.
