Blackbirds Read Free Page B

like you said."
      Miriam isn't surprised.
      "I haven't been wrong yet. For the record, I liked Joe. I met him in a bar. I was drunk. He bumped me. I saw the stroke that'd kill him. Fuck it, I thought, and I told him. Every detail – that's where the devil lives, you know, right there in the goddamn details. I said, Joe, you're going to be out fishing. It's going to be a year from now – well, technically, 377 days, and it took me some noodling around on a napkin to get the number and the date. I said, you'll be out there in your hip-waders. You're gonna catch a big one. Not the biggest, not the best, but a big one. I didn't know what kind of fish, because, fuck, I'm not a fishologist–"
      "I think it's an ichthyologist."
      "I'm also not an English major, nor do I care to become one. He said it would probably be a trout. A rainbow. Or a largemouth bass. He asked me what kind of bait he had on the line, and I said it looked like a shiny penny, one flatted by a train so it makes a smooshed oval. He called it a spinner, said that's what he used to catch trout. Again, I'm not an ick, uhhh, ithky, a fish ologist."
      She taps the cigarette into the ashtray, crushing it.
      "I said, Joe, you'll be standing there with this fish in your hand, and you'll be smiling and whistling even though nobody's around, holding it up for God and all the other fish to see, and that's when it'll hit you. A blood clot will loosen and fire through your arteries like a bullet down a rifled barrel. Boom! Right into the brain. You'll lose cognitive function, I said. You'll drop into the water. Nobody'll be there for you. You'll die, and the fish swims on."
      Paul is quiet. He worries at his lip with the too-white teeth of a teenager.
      "That's how they found him," Paul says. "Pole in hand."
      Miriam chuckles. "Pole in hand."
      Paul blinks.
      "Get it? Pole? In hand? You know, like, his dick?" She waves him off, and pulls out another Marlboro. "Well, screw you, then. Joe would've liked it. Joe appreciated the finer points of a double entendre."
      "Did you sleep with him?" Paul asks.
      Miriam feigns shock. She fans herself like a wounded Southern debutante.
      "Why, Paul, what do you think of me? I am the very model of chastity." He isn't buying it. She lights the cigarette and waves him off. "Dude, I discarded the key to my virginity belt long ago – just up and tossed it into a river, I did. That being said – no, Paul, I did not bang your uncle. We just drank together. Closed out the bar. And then he went on his way and I went mine. I wasn't sure he really believed me until you found me."
      "He told me about it a month or so before he died," Paul says, running his fingers through his unkempt hair. Paul stares off at a distant point, remembering. "He totally believed it. I said, just don't go fishing that day. And he shrugged and just said, but he really wanted to go fishing, and if that's how he was going to die, then so be it. He got a thrill out of it, I think."
      Paul reaches over and turns on the digital recorder. He watches her carefully. Is he looking for her approval? Does he think she'll reach over and bite him?
      "So," he asks. "How does it work?"
      Miriam takes a deep breath. "This thing that I have?"
      "Yes. Yeah. That."
      "Well, Paul, this thing? It's got rules."

 
     
THREE
    Louis
     
    Long highway. Everything else is black, pulled away into shadow. All that exists is what the headlights reveal – the glowing middle line, the center divider, a pine tree or exit sign as it emerges from darkness and passes back to darkness.
      The big trucker is as his shadow suggested: canned-ham hands, shoulders like hunks of granite, a chest like a bunch of barrels strung up together. But he's clean-shaven, with a soft face and kind eyes, hair the color of beach sand.
      Probably a rapist, Miriam thinks.
      The cab of the truck is clean, too. Almost too clean, not a speck of dust or road