The Mockingbird Legends

A Postmodern Gothic Tale. Coming of Age Rural in a Dissolute Time.

Forty-four

The rented silver BMW made graceful work of the curves and hollows of the road west from the hospital in the city. The young men rode in silence for some distance and there was an awkwardness as well as a weariness emanating like a portent from the one driver’s seat. The one in the passenger seat sat slumped and somewhat emaciated with his right arm in a muslin hammock, seeming aged a decade in a matter of weeks. The driver spoke. So how are you feeling, anyways. Jones didn’t answer. Richard realized it was a stupid question but didn’t much care. He had been asked to pick up a friend and found himself with a stranger. I appreciate you coming to get me, Jones said finally, panning the undulant land of vineyard and woodlot, scrub and ravine pass by through the passenger window, punctuated by 18^th and 19^th Century houses of brick and houses of stone, great antique barns that housed myriad stock in the bygone days of the region’s mixed farming. I was expecting The Mayor, Jones said.

-The Mayor was at a meeting. Widening of the Queen’s Line.

-Of course he was. Silence. Then, I’m sorry about your mother going missing. And Lili, that you’re not with Lili now.

-Til now I was always confused what people meant when they said ‘they lost a family member.’

-Great.

-That was meant to be a joke.

-Good one.

-So they filled you in on what’s gone on?

-I guess.

-You got amnesia?

-My memory’s better’n ever. I just can’t remember what someone told me compared to what I saw in my head. Which is which.

-You bin seeing things in your head.

-I bin seein’ things in my head.

-The concussion likely. Richard glanced at his friend but his friend was looking out the passenger window. They went on in silence again awhile and then swept a final bend, passing through the south sliver of East Langdon before slewing down and scribing around in an arc descending the netherworld of Hogg’s Hollow.

-Do you know what happened to you Randy?

-Got my ass whupped.

-You remember the details?

-Not this again.

-Yeah, right. Sorry.

-I was crapulent, recall. Recall I went to take a piss and Lorna Foat stopped me, she was pretty lit and rammed her tongue down my throat, maybe you missed that part. I kept going and when I saw the lineup as usual I got real impatient, like always. So I went out back. Like always. Right? So I was just reaching for my fly when I heard my name, not loud. I looked and it was this dickweed coming out of the grass. He was all in black, could barely see him. About my height, balaclava even, something in his hand. I knew it was no good so I called him for a dickweed and threw my best right hook like always.

-And?

-And he caught my fist with no more effort’n you’d catch a slowball warmin’-up and I knew right there I was in big shit. I felt his hand contracting on my fist and I really knew I was in shit and next thing I knew I was going down and being dragged by the hair. Before I even hit the ground they had me by the hair and were dragging. There was someone else back there too. I think there was someone else. And that was it.

-What hand did he carry whatever it was he was carrying in it?

-I dunno. Right hand. It was a club of some kind. I threw my right and I recall his left coming up. So the club was in the right. I guess.

-Right-handed then.

-Like everyone.

-Maybe ambidextrous, to catch your hook in his left assuming he was carrying the baton in his main hand. Jones didn’t respond to this, turning back to the window. They bottomed out and crossed the bridge over the boulder-strewn creek south of the watersnake dens and continued on past the cryptic entrance to Caleb’s laneway. Richard opened his mouth to say something but did not and continued instead to drive on in silence and when they passed the almost invisible upward trace to the old homestead on the driver’s side Jones gestured at it come jarringly upright. Thrusting back rigidly then in his seat with his eyes rolled back and throatchords like pianostrings. Barking at volume, fuck a duck, fuck a duck, fuck a duck, before slumping back down in his seat and continuing to look north again out the passenger side. His friend glanced at him with a look of awe and then his face began to twitch and he was now weeping and laughing both, looking out his own side window trying to conceal the fact. They were rising from the hollow floor now, scribing a smooth series of broad sweeping curves through the dappled twilight under the overarching canopy of ancient hardwoods that looked much the same as they ever did but harboring only a fraction of the life they had harbored even two generations before. What was left coming back, drawn from the county surrounds and from more distant lands. They topped out and passed the white edifice of Philbert’s home on the south and Richard collected himself abruptly and studied only the road ahead and Jones looked out the passenger window to the north. They passed down now through a lesser clough and topped out again in a stretch of level woods, beyond which they entered the east end of Langdon town proper on the road now called Main Street. They passed the funeral home of Turpel and the Frisbee’s variety and Richard’s own hardware store and the feedmill with its elevator and slowed coming to the corner stoplights in front of the Bank of Commerce with the No Right Turn on Red sign. The young men sat in the morbid silence and then the one in the passenger seat said, when the light turns green don’t drive right away.

-Huh?

-When the light turns don’t drive - just sit here… there it goes, don’t go! Richard followed the instructions looking with scepticism at his cratered companion. Looking absently now the other way at the same moment as a tractor-trailer came barreling down off the ridge from the south and ran the red light, eliciting a squeal of rubber from the eastbound side of the intersection. The rig receding with improbable alacrity to the north. Holy fuck, Richard exclaimed.

-You can turn now, Jones told him blandly.

Ambrose looked carefully left and right before doing so and proceeded north on the Queen’s Line.

-How the hell did you know that?

-Saw it.

Richard looked at him shaking his head. How did this world suddenly get so goddamn dangerous, he said.

-It never stopped being. It’s just a big ol’ jar o’ splo with the lid half screwed at best. You just led a sheltered life until now. And so did I it seems.

They drove north under the boughs of the five-mile arbor through the old residential strip with its Georgian and Victorian homes and then still under the arbor into a belt of orchardlands with roadside fruitstands. Their graveled aprons. They passed Lachlan Creel’s on the right and Richard looked straight ahead and presently they came abreast on their left of the long lane to the Jones stables with its antique stone pillars on either side of the entrance. The Mayor’s gonna have to choose between his road and those pillars, Randy said.

-You can make more pillars. Plant more trees.

-Not with the hands that made and planted those, you can’t.

They passed horses at turnout behind white rail fencing and the stable and Richard arced the car halfway around the turnaround and stopped in front of the big one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house. The Mayor came out and stood there like a general or a mob-boss and waved without enthusiasm. Stood waiting. I’m sorry I wasn’t much for company on the drive, Richard said.

-You look like shit, the ruined Jones replied, attempting a wink. His friend smiled wearily.

-I have so much to tell you, to talk with you about.

-Oh god. Spare me.

-Cummon. I missed you.

-There’s time, Randy said staring straight ahead. The Mayor standing there.

-Is there though?

-So we’re told.

-What are you going to do now?

-I dunno. Same as always I guess. I know what I ain’t gonna be doing anymore.

-Going to Bushwacker’s?

-Playin’ ball.