Mockingbird Read Free Page B

conversations.
      The wheels turn with a flywing hum.
      Her head-wound stings in the salt air.
      She smokes as she rides, the cancer plume lost behind her.
      It was a year ago that she first came over this causeway, heading to the island to save Louis from a fate she'd inadvertently assigned him. He was tied to a chair at the top of a lighthouse. Tortured by a monster. She saved him before he lost his second eye – and, subsequently, all brain function – and in turn learned that one special exception to her abilities.
      The only way to divert death is to give it a life.
      Like she did today, with the gunman. Fork him, that motherforker , she thinks, the joke pinballing around the inside of her skull. But it doesn't get funnier with each echo. Instead, it makes her feel sicker, stranger, more unstable.
       You have work to do.
      She shudders even in the heat.
      Finally, the end of the causeway. Bay Ave gives way to Barnegat Road. Pine trees thrust up out of sandy mounds. She never thought pine trees belonged at the beach but here they are. Of course, she never thought medical waste belonged at the beach either, but that's New Jersey for you.
      She ducks down Green Street, past the little surf shop, then past the dinky bait shop, all to avoid the traffic circle. That's another New Jersey thing: the traffic circles. Can't just be a regular intersection. Oh, no. Around and around. A hellish carousel of traffic that would make Dante fall down in a pile of his own sick.
      You could just ride one of those circles forever, she thinks.
      Swirling the drain.
      That's how she feels as she heads home. Like that's all she's doing. Treading water, doggy-paddling, waiting for sharks to come or for her arms to give out or for a boat to come along and suck her into the propeller.
      Home. Home . Ugh.
      Home now is a 1967 Airstream Trade Wind trailer parked at the Bayview Trailer Park just outside Tuckerton. The name of the park is a bit of a misnomer, though she eventually discovered it's not a total lie – if you climb on top of one of the trailers and then scamper up the nearby telephone pole, sure as shit you can see the murky gonorrhea tides of the bay.
      The trailer park is the standard assortment of miscreants and deviants. Over there, a nice older couple with a fetish for vintage Hawaiian shirts and a pair of the Chattiest Cathies she's ever had the displeasure of meeting. Next to them, a duo of college drop-outs who sell ditch-weed to other college drop-outs. At the other end of the park is a seedier contingent: a guy who makes either meth or bombs (or maybe both), a hoarder who hoards not stuff but Jack Russell terriers (the barking, the barking ), and a middle-aged divorced guy who always wears flannel shirts even in the heat and who Miriam is pretty sure is a big ole kid-toucher.
      A real friendly crowd.
      A crowd to which she belongs. She knows this. She doesn't like it, but there it is.
      Miriam waves at the nice older couple – the Moons – but is sure not to stop, lest she find herself trapped in a conversational gravity well from which there is no escape but to hack off an arm with a nearby garden trowel.
      She grabs her crotch at the two pot dealers – Scudder and Nils, the former a gangly surf-bum version of Ichabod Crane, the latter a pot-bellied man-boy with a hipster beard and black-rim eyeglasses. They wave back with big dumb smiles. As is the tradition.
      Then: home.
      "Home."
      Whatever.
      Dead marigolds sit out front in a planter made of crooked bricks. Next to them stands a ceramic lawn gnome with a cracked hole in his forehead, a hole she put there with a rusty mini-golf putter she found behind the Airstream. A putter she uses for a variety of purposes: to whack pebbles off the Airstream roof, to scratch her back, to threaten both meth-heads and cockroaches alike.
      The putter lays nearby, in high weeds and grass.
      Crossing the