KILLDEER

KILLDEER
by Ted Ludzik

The tires on the rental car crackled over the shoulder’s gravel. Ellen killed the engine. The silence laid as wide as the surrounding Saskatchewan plains. The skyline was a blazing blue, broken by long bone-white clouds.

The house lay at the end of the long driveway. The way’s gate — old, scant, corroded – was an instrument of the wind, underscoring the ticking of her car’s cooling motor.

The roads of the three-plus hour drive from Saskatoon were the most barren, traffic-free she had seen in her life. All the drivers of the six pick-up trucks that had passed her on the other side of the road – and they were all pick-ups – had known her for a foreigner, a tourist, an interloper, and yet had to a one, smiled and waved. Her job kept her in cities and suburbs where strange hands were never raised in greeting.

She opened the mailbox that leaned beside the gate. Even the spiderwebs inside were abandoned.

After checking the road – no cars in either direction – and the windows of the house – all curtained or dark – Ellen placed her hands on the top of the gate and popped herself up and over it.

She saw the bird as soon as she turned from the gate to the house. It had appeared magically, perhaps from the long, yellowed grass that paralleled the driveway all the way to the house.

She didn’t know the species – despite the distinctive black lines that circled its white neck and head, making it look like a target – but Ellen knew it was injured. One of its wings was unfurled, jutted out at an odd angle, dragging in the dust of the drive. The bird watched the intruder over what was probably a broken or dislocated limb.

Ellen took a step. The bird moved immediately, unbalanced by its uncooperative wing.

Ellen took another two steps. The bird staggered, heading away from Ellen, but also to the opposite side of the driveway from which it had presumedly emerged.

“It’s a killdeer.”

The arrival of her father’s voice struck through the prairie silence and the twenty years since she had last heard it. Recognition was instantaneous, even with the husky rust and phlegmy crackle that coated and infused his words.

The bird forgotten, Ellen saw that the front door was open. Empty, but open. It framed a darkness and her father’s diminutive form.

“Don’t worry, the bird’s fine. I think its nest is somewhere there in the grass. It thinks you’re a predator and it’s playing hurt to get you to chase it and leave the mom and the eggs.

“It’s what they do. They can’t help it.” The voice receded as it said, “Close the door behind you.”

His words had walked her to the house. Close up, it wasn’t as dark inside. Once in and past the 2-wheel walker guarding it, she saw a kitchen to the right with its polyglot of furniture and fittings from 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Beyond, a short hall with a door that probably led to the bedroom.

To the left, the living area contained a worn IKEA couch and coffee table. The carpeting’s crosshatched baldness mapped a path to the couch.

Her father, decades older than the last time she had seen him in life, was in the kitchen. He put a steaming mug on the table backed away, leaving it closer to her.

“The water’s bad to drink. I live too close to the reservation, I guess, but I filter it and boil it with chicory from out back. It’s kind of like coffee.”

When she didn’t take it, or thank him, or sit, he leaned his tailbone against the counter and put his palms casually on its edge.

She said to him, “You’re looking more mobile.”

He glanced at the walker. “Today’s a better day than others.”

At his lies, hot mud bubbled in the cellar of Ellen’s gut. She settled it by looking away from him, casing the kitchen: tidy, not from cleanliness, but emptiness. Behind him a toaster so old, the shine had run from its chrome. Dirty dishes, or rather a dirty dish replete with crests of dried ketchup, and a fork lying across it. No knife. A tumbler with cola tar dried to the bottom. Drawers and cupboards, all closed, would take a second or so to open. But he had seen her coming down the drive, so he could have placed himself where it was most advantageous to him.

She asked, trying to match his casualness, “Can we sit and talk? In the living room?” The awkward phrasing made the angry mud glurk once in her belly.

“Sure.” He pushed off from the counter and extended an “after you” hand. While he was out of sight behind her, she didn’t hear him do anything other than follow.

For sitting, there was only the couch. She left it for him.

Uncurtained, the back window looked out onto endless yellowed grassland, peppered by awkward green plants, frowsy with pale mauve flowers.

“That’s chicory?”, she asked, not wanting to know, not wanting to admit that she just wanted to hear his voice. She didn’t know who to hate more for that, him then or herself now.

He sat, more in than on the defeated couch. Swallowing him, it made him look even tinier. “Yeah. It’s pretty friendly stuff. Find yourself talking to it when it isn’t too hot or cold to sit outside, which is about 3 days a year.”

Those eyes, she thought, were the most tired she had ever seen or imagined them. This version of him had less flesh on its skull.

“If I remember the little girl you used to be – the one who didn’t care how long it would take to fix her skateboard but why it broke in the first place – you want a reason for my leaving. For never coming back. For the radio silence since…”

“No. I don’t.” As a child, you can’t stop an adult from talking to distract, to delay, to wear down. She could now. Like a final axe stroke that feels the tree, it was very satisfying.

A dram of his casualness evaporated. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands steepled. He couldn’t look straight ahead at a little girl’s eyes. He had to look up to her.

“But I think you need to hear why. You couldn’t have understood then. If I had remained with you and your mother…”

She cut him off again. “It’s not important.” It had been on his mind. He had a prepared speech. Explanations hewn from a mine of guilt, polished and set in a ring which she now refused to let him give her.

“Of course it’s important.” His jaw set. He replaced the elbows on his knees with his hands, preparing to stand.

He barely had his ass out of the couch when her revolver sat him right back down.

It was aimed down at the top of his head, where a babe’s fontanelle would harden and close. Where his never did. Beneath, his brain connected some puzzle pieces.

His voice sagged with the realization that a lifetime’s effort was in vain. “They found you anyways. And getting you to do it. Wow, that’s… that’s poetic.”

She ordered him: “Give me your belt.”

He stared out the rear window. She could see the man who talked to the chicory. She didn’t like how it was making her feel. That it was making her feel.

“Belt. Now.” She cocked the gun.

Eyes still on the window, he absently undid the leather belt from around his waist. She pointed where he was to throw it on the carpeting. He did so. She sidled over and felt for it, her eyes remaining on him.

“Stand.”

He rose. A muffled crack broke through the meat of his thigh. It bent where there was no joint. He collapsed back onto the couch, gasping, trying not to whimper.

Other dads pretended they had your nose or, if they were extra talented, tricked you into believing they had taken their thumb off at the knuckle. Her father’s stunt was no deception.

Acid mud boiled in the well of her throat.

“Oh stop it,” she said in the tone exhausted parents used with a child who thought real pain was leaving the toy store without a present.

Looking down at him, she said, “Early onset osteoporosis? Osteogenesis imperfecta? Paget’s disease? C’mon, give me something this time. Even a lie is better than nothing.”

She reached and grabbed the collar of his shirt, started hauling him off the couch.

He held onto the arm of the couch. His sternum folded out with a cartilaginous pop. His chest blew out like a pufferfish.

Startled, she released his collar and forced her finger to relax off the trigger. A fishbone’s width more and her father’s head would have caved to a bullet.

He looked from the gun to the belt. She could almost make out the litter of thoughts that were spawned by his confusion. “I knew they were cowards but brainwashing the child to hunt the parent.”

They warned her he’d try and work his fingers under the shell they had given her. Before she could twist off the spigot of anger, she said, “Parenting is brainwashing. You’d know that if you’d hung around.”

“Parenting is doing what’s best for the child.” His tone went from snapping to husky. “I’m sorry that it hurt you. I’m sorry they found you anyways.”

Whether it was the emotion in his voice or his unwillingness to abandon his lies, she broke. She flipped the revolver in her hand and bashed its grip into the side of his chin, causing the magical chain reaction that twisted the head on its stalk, overwhelming the brain and shutting it down.

He came to after all the hard work was complete. Just as well, she wasn’t sure he would have complied with her needs, especially after the belt had been looped around his neck.

Granted, she could have used help standing him up on the overturned trashcan, bracing his weight against the door jamb, and closing the bedroom door on the final few inches of the belt.

Her preference would have been for him to never again become conscious. Ironically, it might have been his own gagging and choking that woke him.

She backed off and he teetered and balanced on the wastebasket. His thigh bone was no longer bent and bore his weight just fine, thank you very much.

He coughed once more and winced. Or smiled. “This is where they told you to offer me my life in exchange for everything I know.”

“I already know everything. You’re a douchebag coward too petrified to raise the results of his dick-sticking…”

“No…”

She cut him off savagely. “… and you’re some endangered freak sub-species that can snap its own bones wherever it wants. Skulking and feeding off the empathy of people like my mother!”

“Hey, I’m dead.” He tapped the leather strap biting into his neck. “This is about you now. About what my daughter is. Or will be, once she fully matures.”

His eyes narrowed when he saw hers widen.

“It’s already happening? Just a little? Your knees and elbows feeling a little loose. Somewhere beyond double-jointedness. Some initial wobble in even the thickest of your bones. Yeah, it alternates genders. If you have any sons, they’ll get it too. One hundred percent.

“Wonder what they’ll want to do with you once they learn that.”

With a shriek, she kicked the trashcan out from under his feet.

His form jerked down. She saw him lengthen the bones in his neck, his toes trying for the shorn carpet. Another inch and he might gain a breath.

She leapt. She encircled her arms around his waist and hauled viciously down.

She heard the creak and pop from above. She released him and stepped back. His neck was a full foot in length. Eyes stuck open, head cocked at an absurd angle, making him look like he was curious about the coming afterlife.

Several days later, in a city of another country, she read about the fire that had levelled her father’s house and tried to recall if he had turned off the stove after making the chicory coffee.

She logged into the Society’s files on her father and his kind. Their abilities were strictly limited to the musculoskeletal system. The spine in the neck could not withstand the stress she had witnessed.

She would ask them if the unusually breakable bones might be more flammable than normal. The article about the fire was very short and made no mention of a body.

Questions might bring more attention. Attention that would lead to them asking why she had left the knob on the door from which her father had hung. Alive, he could have reached for and twisted it, releasing the belt. Allowing him to again run out of her life.

Two more weeks passed. After the debrief, the Society had asked no more questions. She was safe. From them. But his face, his final words, wouldn’t leave her be.

A huge moon sat low over the unwavering trunks of the city’s buildings. She stared at it through her rear window. Long enough that it and its light moved across the floor, creeping over her where she sat on the edge of her unused bed.

She imagined the blue light as x-rays that could illuminate the two bones of her forearm.

She lifted her knee and put it against those bones. She grasped the wrist. She estimated how much effort she’d need to snap them. Like branches being shortened to fit in a campfire.

If they broke easily and painlessly, she estimated the Society’s gratitude for handing herself over as a specimen available for study. Whether it would be enough that they would keep her alive. How much, if any, freedom they might allow her.

She reset her grip and inhaled sharply.

Fiction © Copyright Ted Ludzik
Image by Dr. Manuel González Reyes from Pixabay