The Night Birds

“I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts.” Evers laughs at himself. In part because of how absurd it is to say that out loud. To feel compelled to remind himself he’s a rational person. Mostly though, he laughs because it calls to mind the Cowardly Lion’s timorous refrain: I do believe in spooks.

I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks.

“I don’t believe in spooks,” he says, trying on the impression. Then—as if to convince himself—he screams it, from the bottom of the staircase, up into the darkness. “I don’t believe in spooks!”

His voice caroms off the walls of the old cracker house. A bleat of defiance that fills him with a confidence as durable and enduring as a chewing gum bubble. Because if he truly does believe that he doesn’t believe in spooks, why is he so convinced his dead girlfriend from thirty years ago is in his bedroom upstairs?

Probably because of the dream he had last night.

His first night back home in years. In his old bedroom, in his old bed. Of course he dreamed of her.

She was covered in black plumage and perched on the hood of his truck. A line of dried clay split her face like a horizon, across the bridge of her nose. Above that line, she was as she was. The way he tried to remember her. Milk-white skin with just a touch of freckles. Those huge, wet, green eyes. Below that line, everything was caked and cracked and gray. Like sunbaked mud. Like a molting statue. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead she let loose a string of low, chittering hisses and croaks. A staccato of chirps and squawks.

The sounds of carrion birds fighting over scraps.

Then he woke up, impossibly, to the overwhelming scent of her. A cheap, department store body spray called Meadow Rain that she used to mask the musty smell of her dad’s old Army jacket. The same jacket she wore every day, over everything she wore, regardless of whether it clashed. For a moment, he was convinced the fragrance was simply a sliver of the nightmare that he had yet to fully slay; but it only seemed to deepen the longer he laid there.

Laura had been the new girl in school. In town. In the country, really. She was an Army brat. A title she wore with pride. Like a gaudy epaulet on the shoulder of that damned giant jacket. She had stick straight, straw-blonde hair that swished around her shoulders and she cursed like a Wild West madam. Her eyes—if you could catch them before they rolled at nearly anything anyone said—were a paralyzing grass-green; and when she smiled, it looked like she had too many teeth. But in a good way.

She had seen him play Bo, the lovesick rodeo cowboy in the school production of Bus Stop. It was a caricature of a performance. Shit-kickers and a secondhand Stetson, a big belt buckle and an over-the-top southern drawl. After the show, she elbowed past all the gushing moms and aunts and grandmas to tell him how great she thought he was. She’d seen him around and never would have guessed he had it in him.

“You were really, really, funny. Honestly. And so sweet.”

“Wow, thank you. So much, I—”

“Wait, what happened to your accent?”

“What accent?”

“From the stage. Before. The Oklahoma thing you were doing.”

“Well, that’s just… That’s the character. I don’t really talk like that.”

“Oh really?” She frowned. “Damn. Oh well, never mind.”

And then she turned and walked away. Left him standing there stammering, bewildered and bewitched, until finally she spun around and stuck her tongue out and laughed.

“I’m kidding!”

“Oh, okay, that’s good. That’s funny.”

“My name’s Laura by the way.”

“I’m Evers.”

“Nice to meet you, Evers."

“Likewise.”

“Likewise? What are you, forty?”

“People say likewise. It’s a real word.”

“Okay. Well, the next time you see me you should ask me out.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Well maybe I’ll say yes.”

“If I do, should I use the accent?”

“It can’t hurt.”

By the start of that summer, he was as big a fool in love as ever there was. A full foot taller from floating. They were seventeen. He spent every last nickel he made at the car lot on presents and flowers and burgers and fries, movie tickets and Twizzlers. They held hands and made up silly songs and she painted his fingernails. He met her parents. Had dinner with her family. Afterward, her father insisted on showing him all of his guns.

For his birthday, Evers’s dad gave him a stubby little Japanese pickup with a quarter-million miles on the odometer. He and Laura would watch the Tuesday night softball games and afterward sit there in the truck and make out. She kissed him a different way every time. Like she was practicing for some future, worthier boy. Like she was trying out all the styles she’d seen in movies to find the one that worked best with her mouth. When the timer finally turned off the big outfield lights they would fumble through their own awkward baseball game, right there in the cramped cab of his Toyota. Usually, they pulled up at second base. A few times, they managed to leg out a triple.

Most nights, before he dropped her off at curfew, they would stop at the video store and rent two copies of the same movie. One for each of them. When he got home, he would plug the extra-long cord he kept in his sock drawer into the telephone at the end of the hall and quietly drag it all the way to his room and wait for her to call. They tried as best they could to sync the two videos over the phone. Play, then pause, then play, then pause, until the sound mostly matched up. Then they would talk over the movies the whole time anyway, only occasionally referencing what was happening on screen. The big hair, or the big boobs, or some gratuitous axe murder. There were a few mornings he only realized he’d fallen asleep talking to her when his mother yanked the wire outside his door and tore the phone out from under his cheek. “Sorry,” he’d say, “sorry, sorry,” and scramble to collect the cradle and receiver. The first time it happened, she just shook her head and said, “Honey, I want you to remember something, for later on, when it feels like you’re gonna die: If it was supposed to last forever, they wouldn’t call it First Love.” Then she unclipped his not-sosecret extra-long cord and handed it back to him.

It was sometime in late July, during one of their witchinghour phone calls, that Laura first mentioned the Night Birds. It would be easy, in retrospect, to call it a portent. They were the reason, she said, that she’d been so tired all the time lately.

“The night birds?”

“Yes.”

“What night birds?”

“I don’t know. They’re in the trees outside my window or on the roof maybe, but they wake me up, over and over, all night. They never stop.”

“It’s probably just a mockingbird. They’re night singers.”

“No, it isn’t a song. It’s not birdsong, it’s like… a screeching.”

“A screeching—?”

“THERE! THERE IT IS! Right there, do you hear that?”

“No, I don’t—”

“Here listen…” He heard the bed springs groan and the snap of a latch. He heard the window being wrenched open. But he didn’t hear any birds. “You hear that?”

“I’m sorry I—”

“SHUT UPPPP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”

The window slammed and the bed squealed again and there was silence for a long time. Then, softly, she said, “I wasn’t telling you to shut up.”

“Oh I know. I know, it’s okay.”

“I think I’m just homesick.”

“But you always say you aren’t from anywhere.”

“I know!” She laughed a little. “That’s why I feel so crazy.”

“You’re not crazy.”

“I miss the mountains.”

The next night he packed a cooler with snacks and contraband beers and drove her out to the Wekseth phosphate mine on Barlow’s southernmost frontier. The truck wound its way along a service road flanked by massive settling ponds filled with a milky, blue-grey, slurry of water and clay. The entire place looked like an abandoned moon colony. Monotone and pocked with craters. On a ridge in the distance, a dragline crane the size of a gymnasium sat like the carapace of some enormous, ancient spider being uncovered in the sand. And then there it was, towering ahead of them, so tall she had to stick her head out the window to see the whole of it: Barlow Gypstack 3. A colossal, four-hundred-foot-tall pyramid of slightly radioactive phosphogypsum waste.

The tallest mountain in Florida.

“That’s not a mountain.”

“I know. But it’s the thought that counts, right?”

She smiled and kissed him. He spread a blanket out in the bed of his truck and they lay there for a while. He stared at her. She stared at the stars. There were three words in his mouth and he was working up the nerve to finally spit them out when she said, “Ev, we need to talk.”

It had been one of the best summers of her life, she said. But she didn’t want to get too attached. It was always too hard when she had to leave. She thought it would be best, for both of them, if they went into senior year without any obligations to anyone else. No hurt feelings, no titles or commitments. It was their last chance to be reckless and free and have fun and she didn’t want to resent him. She hoped they could still be friends.

He said it anyway, “I love you.”

“Likewise,” she said. Then she asked if she could stay the night, one last time, so she didn’t have to hear the birds.

Three months later, a worker at the Wekseth mine found her body in one of the giant clay settling ponds. At first, he thought an osprey or a buzzard had fallen in and drowned. Until he saw her bright green eyes. Open. Peeking out, just above the still, murky surface of the water. Her hair had been meticulously threaded through with vulture feathers. Dozens of them, all knitted into a strange, black headdress.

Her new boyfriend confessed a few weeks later. Some soccer player with a ponytail. He said she insisted they drive out there because she wanted to see the mountain. They had an argument. He pushed her, she hit her head. He panicked and dumped her in the slurry pond. He thought the sludge might keep her under.

He was insistent and emphatic, that he had nothing to do with the feathers.

“Did you hear me?!” Evers takes two quiet steps up the stairs and says it one more time, louder, “I said I don’t believe in spooks!”

Somewhere on the second floor, a phone rings. He yelps and retreats to the relative safety of the dogtrot. An exit at either end. He has half a mind to take one, right then, hit the turnpike and be back in Mobile by breakfast. Call his brother on the way out of town and tell him whatever is left he can keep it, or junk it, or sell it, or let it rot. Hell, he can burn it for all he cares. The house along with it. He swore when he left the last time, that it would be the last time. That he was never coming back. And yet here he is. Barlow sets its hooks in people. It might let you run for a while, but it always reels you back in. Hauls you up by your lip and has a good long look at you. Sometimes it throws you back. Sometimes it eats you up.

The phone rings again. An analog, metallic trill that somehow proves nearly as transportive as the smell of Meadow Rain. The sound triggers a long-dormant Pavlovian response in him. He has to answer it.

On the second floor landing he sees that the wall phone is missing. In its place, his super-secret, extra-long, sock drawer cord snakes around the corner and down the long hallway. He follows it, and the shrill, relentless ringing, to his bedroom, where he finds the old phone on his bedside table. He closes the door and sits and stares at it.

He picks it up. A muffled hum of white noise crackles on the other end.

“Hello?” he asks. And then, somehow, from somewhere, her voice:

“Evers?”

“Laura?... Is that really you?

“Evers…”

“How is this possible?”

Then, she asks him, one last time:

“Do you hear the night birds?”

The cord snaking into his room suddenly pulls taut. The phone is torn from his hand. It clatters and smashes in a heap at the base of the door. And then, from the hallway, and the rooftop, and the trees outside his window, he finally hears them.