A Short Story

The widow swan had followed him.

Tinker was sure of it. Forget the fact that birds didn’t do that. Stalk people. Hold grudges. Seek vengeance. They couldn’t do that. Birds had little gumball brains. It was an absurd idea to even consider, and yet, there it was. Waiting for him at the end of the little dock that swayed in the chop of the lake like a huge loose tooth. Three hundred miles from where he’d left it, honking and flapping around the lifeless pile of its partner.

Tink had been a hero once. He hit four homeruns and plowed straight through the right field wall to clinch a state championship when he was seventeen. He’d been dining out on that catch for a decade. He loved the attention, always had. On her deathbed, his mother had said to him, “Tink, baby, I love you, but if you woke up alone in the desert tomorrow, you’d die from lack of attention before you died of thirst.”

“Yeah, well, if you woke up in the desert tomorrow, you’d die of bone cancer before you died of thirst.” He wished he could take it back. Three days later she did just that.

After his playing career stalled out in single-A ball, he crawled back home and took a job at his family’s sprawling auto mart. He made commercials where he smashed high prices with his baseball bat. He knocked hidden fees “out of the park.” His nose still looked like a garlic bulb. His blood-stained jersey still hung in a big shadowbox in the halls of Barlow High. At least it did before the thing with the swan.

It all happened so fast. The way most things did when he was shitfaced. He had sniffed out a party and crashed it. High school kids. There were keg stands and whisky shots and bong rips and at some point, someone handed him a baseball bat. It felt good in his hands. A security blanket. In the backyard, on the edge of a pond, there was a swan. He crept down to the shoreline, giggling. No one thought he would actually do it.

When he swung, it sounded like a rock hitting a windshield. Stupid bird never even moved. Its little round head just sat there on its long white neck in the moonlight like a brand new ball on a tee. He hadn’t seen the second swan, sleeping in the reeds, until it started shrieking.

Everyone gasped and screamed and some hotshot varsity football asshole hauled off and socked him in the face.

Broke his nose like a fortune cookie.

At the Car Farm the next day someone had written in blood across the windshields of four showcase cars on the edge of the lot, SWANS. MATE. FOR. LIFE. The letters were all stuck through with feathers.

There was a video from the party. It was getting around. When his brother told him he couldn’t be associated with the business anymore, at least not for a while, Tinker grabbed a set of the showcase keys and tore out of the lot in the MATE car. Everybody knew where he was going. Nobody stopped him.

Years earlier, Tinker’s father went missing during a weekend fishing trip to his little cabin on Lake Misty. The night of his disappearance he made three phone calls, starting at one in the morning, one after the other, to each of his kids. All three went unanswered.

Shortly thereafter, depending on who you asked, Big Zud had either made his way to the Hotdish Diner and run off with the waitress or caught a ride out of town with a long haul trucker like some goddamned hippy drifter, or; he got drunk, pulled a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and went fishin’ in the dark and drowned.

There was, of course, a third theory:

That the things that had always haunted the lake, that chirped and chittered in the woods at night and flooded the windows of the cabin with strange pulsing lights suggesting a code he couldn’t crack; and that compelled the disconnected phone and the unplugged stereo and TV to ring and whine and buzz with static, had actually, finally, taken him.

This was, predictably, a scenario to which no one afforded any real weight or consideration. The squat, stupid local cops laughed at the suggestion. Their ruddy cheeks flapping like fat, slapped asses. The yokels whispered and rolled their eyes and shook their heads.

Tinker, however, knew it to be true to the marrow in his bones. His father would never just disappear. He wasn’t stupid enough to fall off his boat, nor had he ever been too drunk to kick his feet if he did.

Zud wasn’t in the lake.

And until he fished his skeleton up off the bottom or out of the cattails with his own two hands, or cut him out of the guts of a gator with his own damned knife, Tinker would swear to it, on his dead dad’s grave, that his dad wasn’t actually dead.

It was the reason he had come to the cabin in the first place. To find proof.

Certainly not because he’d been run out of Barlow for killing some stupid bird.

For three days at the cabin the swan tormented him. It followed him around the property, close enough to pester him, but a safe enough distance away to alight any time Tinker charged after it. It honked incessantly, day and night. It roosted on the eaves of the cabin and shit on his head when he stepped outside in the morning.

It seemed to be getting bigger, too. On the fourth day, he was sure of it. He awoke to a cannonade on the aluminum jetty. The swan was stomping up and down the length of it. The size of a mastiff. Tinker screamed at it. Bluff-charged it with his baseball bat. It stormed up the hill toward him and he ducked inside.

At night, he rifled through his father’s things, looking for clues. Big Zud had more stuffed fish on the walls than pictures of his kids. Tinker drank his dad’s whisky, finished the chess game he’d abandoned halfway. Somehow, he lost. Outside, the bird sounded like a storm siren.

By day five the swan was the size of a horse. The dock was sunk. There were feathers everywhere as big as Chinese hand fans. Tinker threw rocks at it from the porch. He still had a hell of an arm.

Just after midnight he’d had to barricade the front door with a chest of drawers and the living room couch. The swan seemed to be outside every window at once, sounding its trumpet like Gabriel. Windows shattered, hinges creaked.

Then the phone rang. The old one on the wall with curly cord. It wasn’t plugged in. It rang again. Tinker answered. He listened as his father told him he never should have come here. That there was a reason he always called it Lake Mistake. They followed you up here, and they got bigger and bigger, until they were big enough to eat you alive.

Just then, an orange beak the size of a car hood peeled the roof off the cabin and plucked him up like a worm from the wet earth.