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Chapter 36
  Marty’s Reckoning

Marty clapped his wings together and rose from the ground. It was both odd and easy to fly. He was surprised how natural it came to him, as if he had been flying for all eternity, and he wondered if maybe he had. Maybe he had been the owl since the beginning, wedged recently into a fleshy body. Maybe he was as old as the farthest star. Maybe he had been one of the first creations to meet God’s hammer and anvil, forged by fire and anointed with oil, sent forth into the universe to dispatch those who had betrayed the Almighty.

As he circled his yard, Marty shucked away those thoughts and decided the past could stay where it was, immovable, and he would plunge headfirst into the fluidity of the future. He was reborn. If he had not been the owl before, he was now, and owls had no use for their yesterdays.

The DPS officer patted Sadie on the head and stood. He went to the hurricane fence, put a hand and a foot on it, and loped awkwardly into Marty’s yard. He landed in the high grass, adjusted his belt and checked his gun, and then leaned into the walkie-talkie on his shoulder and said, “Richardson, bro, what’s your twenty?”

The radio answered back. “Where the hell you think I am? I’m working traffic. Where’d you go?”

“I’m at the house fire. You remember that place with the snakes and all? I’m checking the property.”

“Let county do that.”

Marty glided down, landed in the grass at the officer’s feet, and looked up at him. He was a tall man, lean and athletic, with the broad and well-protected chest of a lawman. Officer Lancome spit and stood still and must have been waiting for something to sink into Richardson’s head.

The radio was silent a few seconds and then Richardson crackled back on. “Wait. County’s got a couple of unaccounted-for officers, and we saw two county cars on the feeder. You think them’s the missing boys we got?”

“Copy that,” Lancome said. “You a genius. Now let one of them fire folks work traffic. I need you to come in the front way. We don’t got a warrant but we can check the property, knock the doors and windows and all. Be alert though. Remember, they was shots fired last time we was out. We know they armed.”

“Copy that,” Richardson said. “On my way.”

Officer Lancome walked by Marty, high-stepping in the overgrown grass. He went first to the house and looked inside the kitchen window. He removed a small flashlight from his belt, shined it through the window, sniffed, and spat. “They a bunch of pigs,” he said. “Ain’t nobody should live that away.”

Marty took flight, glided over Lancome’s head, circled the carport, and rose over the house. He flew through the smoke pouring out of Sadie’s house until he reached a clear patch in the sky where he could see his house, front and back. The other officer, Richardson, walked down the driveway from the front, scanning the house and yard with his flashlight.

As Lancome rounded the side of the carport, his flashlight stopped on the body of Officer Hernandez lying with his missing face in front of Uncle Cooper’s broken-down Ford pickup truck. Lancome leaned into the radio and said, “Richardson, we got a man down. Go live.”

Lancome slid his pistol out of the holster and shined it with his flashlight. He checked the bed of the Ford truck and the cab, panned across the tool shed and the pasture, and shined it on the house. He waved to Officer Richardson who approached from the driveway with his pistol in one hand, a large flashlight in the other.

“This one of our missing boys,” Lancome said. He lowered his voice and waved the flashlight over the body. “That’s Johnny Hernandez right there. Got him right in the face, big caliber .45, I bet. He’s fresh, too. See, the blood’s still slick. You call it in. I’m gonna check that shed, make sure ain’t nobody hiding out, and when we get a couple more cars out, we gonna bust in that back door and haul them white trash out by they heels. You copy?”

“Copy, boss,” Richardson said. He looked around with eyes that were suddenly sharper and more intense.

From his vantage point in the sky, Marty could see the clear outline of his mother’s body in the high grass, but to the officers on the ground, she was still hidden within the back yard darkness. Her body kinked sideways and her fingers thrust into the hole in her chest. Her head was thrown back in that agonizing death throe of any animal who died in pain.

While the flesh was dead, what had been inside that flesh crouched next to the broken body. The black form of a slack-bodied, skeletal Boogerbear stared up at Marty, marking his flight pattern as he weaved a slow figure-eight above the back yard. Her black head swiveled as she watched him and her eyes locked on his, making sure he saw her. After a few seconds, she emitted a piercing shriek, spread a pair of black wings and grasped the air with her ape-hands.

The grass around her came alive, and with his night-predator eyes, Marty saw the roping bodies of a hundred rat snakes radiate from his mother’s feet. They wound their way toward the two police officers in a solid, unified wave.

“Whoa, there,” Lancome said. He jumped back and shined the flashlight at his feet. A rat snake wrapped around his calf. It squeezed and struck with its fangless mouth. Lacking poison, it could not be effective alone, but another snake wrapped around the officer’s other leg. Another ducked beneath the cuff of his slacks and wiggled into his pants.

He stumbled back and slapped at his legs, trying to shake off the snakes.

Marty’s mother rose into the air on a pair of jagged, well-worn wings and took aim at Officer Lancome’s chest. She thrust herself forward in a slow glide and dove through the man. Lancome slumped as if the wind had been knocked from him.

Richardson stood in disbelief, unsure how to manage this sudden attack, until the rat snakes swarmed from the grass over the dead Hernandez. They moved fast, a growing black tide of writhing, scaled flesh, until they carpeted the ground around the officers.

Marty’s mother made a huge, looping turn and glided through Richardson’s backside. She pierced his spine and wrenched her head as she passed. Richardson winced, and the snakes on the ground flowed up his legs and over his chest in a living black tide.

Both officers threw their weapons and flashlights to the ground and turned circles like men on fire, slapping their arms and thighs as they were consumed by the rat snakes. For every snake they tore free, two took its place. Soon the snakes covered their chest and neck, and both men fell to their knees as the air was choked from their throat.

A pair of Boogerbears, attracted to the chaos, glided beneath Marty. Marty flapped a few yards higher and then turned, dove, and with a darting attack, tore the head off one. The other squawked and made its retreat into the pasture, above where Marty had buried Sheriff Dansley.

As he was about to attack the second Boogerbear, something slammed into Marty. The world spun in wrecked flight circles, and there was no up or down until he hammered into the ground.

He tried to gain his feet but a pair of black arms clutched him from behind. They pinned his wings to his sides, and the beak of his mother tore into his neck. His knees buckled as she pushed him to the ground. She squeezed with her arms and wrapped her wings around him in a blanket of darkness as if he were being consumed by an enormous black mouth.

Even though she tore into him with beak and fist, Marty felt no pain. Instead, a dull longing formed within his chest. It was a seed, a tiny doubt, that with each rake of her claw grew in intensity. A darkness spread over him, and his mind turned to that moment with Gerald and the crack of a pistol.

His brother’s body crumpled and Gerald’s head thumped the floorboards. Marty smelled the lingering gun smoke. He dropped the gun and ran from his mother behind him, shrieking with the knife in her hand. He found himself in the woods alone, waiting in the darkness while the ambulance came, hiding from his mother, terrified to return home.

Uncle Cooper appeared in the driveway, looked right at him, and walked to him as he had done that night and reached down to pick him up from where he had been curled like a scared puppy in the weeds, whimpering. Only this time it was not Uncle Cooper. This time it only looked like him until the skin bled off from its face, leaving a wretched, bloody skull. A pair of black wings spread out from its shoulder blades, and a beak appeared where the nose should be. In place of the Dead-Eye was the knife from Gerald’s tattoo, the one jutting out of the skull’s eye socket, and the thing’s mouth opened and said the words, “Unmerciful. Unforgiving.” It plunged the knife into Marty’s chest, wrenched it free, and brought it down on him again and again.

The world around him faded and was about to plunge him into absolute darkness, when his eyes fell on Sadie at the fence. She lay with the oxygen mask held to her face. The raging inferno of her house lit her fiercely from behind, and she suddenly looked older and more mature. She looked kind. She looked gentle, and she stared back at Marty with a pair of golden-green eyes, wider than they had been before, and wiser.

With a hoot and a surge of strength, Marty managed to tear his wings free. He felt damaged as he scooted from beneath his mother and took flight, but he was still faster and more agile than the cumbersome form his mother had taken. She fell away beneath him as he climbed into the sky, hooting, until he was far above his house and the wreckage on the freeway.

Looking back, he saw his mother dive into the yard where the officers were fighting the snakes. She shrieked as she passed through the men, and they fell to the ground where the snakes blanketed them beneath their writhing mass. One of them rose and shucked off the snakes, leaned and helped the other and dragged him down the driveway, and then both of them stumbled to their feet and ran toward the freeway.

Marty turned Earthward and shot toward his mother. She glided upward, meeting him as she reached with her black arms. Her eyes swam with the emptiness of a soulless scavenger, and then Marty’s claws dug into her wings and wrenched them free from her shoulders. He threw her upward, caught her in a pin-wheeling free-fall and launched both of them high above the house.

Marty rose higher on his sharp wings and higher still until his house was a pinprick point beneath him, engulfed by the column of smoke from Sadie’s house fire. He felt he might be able to fly off the Earth, out into space and beyond the moon. He was so near the stars that they no longer winked at him, but stared defiant and brilliant. He glided through the stratosphere where the air thinned to nothing. He clutched his mother’s damaged form and thought of Sadie’s broken legs. He thought of the legs he had carved for her, and the knife he had carved with the owl and lizard in the handle. He thought of hooting, and how he found the strength to dig up Uncle Cooper and scoop out his own eye.

His mother screamed and raked at his legs with her hands. With no more thought, he clapped his wings together and tossed her moonward. He was not sure if she would die, or live, but without wings she would never fly, and she would never again be able to catch him.

Chapter 37
  Sadie’s Legs

The firefighters punished Sadie’s house with water until the fire relented into a black mass of steaming charcoal. The front wall of the house stood but the rest had caved in as if some giant foot had stomped it into the ground. Two fire trucks continued dumping water on the remains, and half a dozen firefighters sifted through the debris with axes and shovels. They lifted pieces of wood, stabbed the wreckage with their tools, and then tossed it aside in their search for Sadie’s mother.

One of the firefighters, a young man with the word
Wormy
stenciled on his hat, knelt next to Sadie and said, “I got water in the truck. Are you thirsty? It’s Sadie, right?”

“Yes,” Sadie said.

He wore a thin goatee that parted when he smiled. “I’m Steven. They call me Wormy, though. My last name’s Wormwood, see.”

He was about to stand when he noticed Sadie’s misshapen legs. He looked at them for a long second, and then said, “You, um, you can’t walk, can you? You mind?”

When he motioned he was about to put his arms around Sadie, she said, “No, I don’t mind. Can you lift me?”

She asked because her mother would not have the
strength. Her mother could move her from bed to chair, and she could help her in and out of the shower and restroom, but she would not have been able to lean over and scoop Sadie off the ground as if she were no heavier than a feathered pillow. That had been before tonight though, when her mother had summoned a strength so absolute that it consumed her with an overpowering passion of motherhood.

She thought of being light, of flying, of running through the house with her mother tonight. She thought of all the hours spent watching Marty and hoping he would somehow come to her. She thought of her mother’s discourse over her obsession with the boy, both of them now ranked with her father, ranked as
dead.

The word
dead
made her eyes swell and she coughed, and something rose up her throat and stuck in the back of her mouth. For a moment she choked. Wormy’s hand on her back moved in a slow circle as she pushed through it. She choke-sobbed and sucked long breaths between the bursts rising up from her chest. She cried with her head pressed between her knees, until her head felt light and a long line of cry-snot and bile streamed out of her nose and the corners of her mouth.

A hand reached around and wiped her face, and then Wormy’s voice said, “You hang in there, okay, girl? Hang in there. That’s all you can do.”

He was plenty strong, and he lifted and hauled her across the yard to the idling fire truck. He put one foot on the side step of the truck, and balancing with Sadie he stepped into the back and lay her on the seat. He helped her arrange herself and handed her a sports water bottle.

“We ain’t got no cooties,” he said, motioning for her to go ahead and drink from the communal cup.

She drank and realized how thirsty she had been. Everything but the water smelled and tasted like smoke.

“Hup! Hup!” The words came from Sadie’s house and were yelled over the thrum of the idling fire truck. More cries erupted, and two firefighters who had been standing in front of the fire truck jogged toward the calls.

When Wormy’s eyes didn’t move from Sadie’s but stared at her as if waiting, she said, “Did they find my momma?”

“I don’t know. They found someone. Sometimes we don’t know for a while, have to, you know. We can’t tell who it is.”

“You mean like dental records?”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean. We use bone records and jewelry and, well. You okay?”

“No,” Sadie said. She closed her eyes and cried. She felt his hand on her shoulder, unmoving, resting there in warm human-to-human contact, as the wracking sobs coursed through her. She thought she might pass out from lack of air. She thought she might vomit. She did neither, but doubled over and put her head against her useless flesh-bags and let the agony of loss take full hold of her.

She must have cried for some time, because when she finally opened her eyes, a crowd of firefighters had gathered behind Wormy. They leaned on their shovels and axes, and on their dirty faces were the somber expressions of empathy.

Among them was the police officer, Lancome, who had sat with her earlier. The man looked as worn-out as the crowd he kept. His uniform had been relatively clean earlier, but now it appeared that he had rolled in the dirt and soot of the burnt-out house. Scratches streaked along his forearms and cheeks. His neck looked red as if from a rope-burn, and his once-crisp uniform was wrinkled and in some places ripped. In one hand he held a wedding ring and in the other, a shotgun whose stock had been damaged by the fire.

Wormy stepped down and Lancome took his place next to Sadie. Lancome first held the ring to Sadie and he said, “Is this your momma’s ring, Sadie?”

It was, and Sadie said so. “She’s with my daddy now.”

“Yeah,” Lancome said. “I’m real sorry about that, baby. We got a hold of your Aunt Laura. She’s heading out this way to pick you up. I have to keep this ring for a little while. I’ll give it back though, soon as we’re done with the investigation.”

He motioned with the damaged shotgun toward Marty’s house. Sadie followed his eyes when he nodded for her to look that way. “You know them folks next door,” he said and it wasn’t a question. He already knew Sadie was aware of her neighbors. “This feller, Isaac Jameson, I believe they called him Ike Jameson, you think this could be his shotgun?”

Sadie looked back at the shotgun and said, “Where did you find it? In my house?”

“Yep. Right near where we found your momma, toward the back door. Was he in your house?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Thought so. He start the fire?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“How about that. Your momma, she looks like she been shot. He shoot her, too?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Hmm. Sadie, baby, I wish you’d told me all that earlier.”

His reprimand made her want to cry again, but he clipped the chide by hugging her. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I know. It’s been a long night for everybody. Look, I know this is bad right now and I know you’re a lost puppy, but let me tell you something. This gonna be the worst night of your life. You wake up tomorrow, there will never, never be anything worse than this night. You make it through this, you can make it through everything God throws at you. You get me? This is the worst it will ever be.”

Sadie laughed then and there was no humor in it. “I thought that once before.” She patted her legs for emphasis.

Aunt Laura came, and they made the drive into Houston in silence so deep it seemed like they were locked inside a pressurized cabin. She looked like Sadie’s mother from the side, but a few years younger, and thinner. That was the same nose and chin, and she wore her hair the same as her mother, in a loose ponytail without bangs, and her cheeks were red and slick where she had been crying. Even her young cousin in the back seat lay quiet, sensing how heavy this moment was, and how sacred the silence had to be.

Sadie didn’t sleep that night nor the one after. She lay in her cousin’s bed staring at the pink ceiling. Her cousin lay on the floor in a blue sleeping bag decorated with cartoon mermaids.

The nightlight kept it from being dark, but even so, the silence in the room made it feel darker than it would have otherwise. Out of the silence, Sadie heard a low hooting sound. She didn’t move, wondering if it had been from an almost-dream. She glimpsed a pair of blue wings, a pair of deep-blue eyes, heard a flutter, and then it was gone.

The next morning they drove to Children’s Hospital. A nurse met the car and helped Aunt Laura load Sadie into a wheelchair. Aunt Laura’s small car, a Camry, was not well-suited for a wheelchair. She had already discussed trading it in for a minivan.

Aunt Laura parked and walked with Sadie’s cousin, Christine, into the front lobby of the hospital.

“Can I ride on the back?” Christine asked, pointing at Sadie’s wheelchair. Sadie had the impression the little girl sort of envied her for having such a large, comfortable-looking chair. Maybe her envy brewed because Christine was so soon out of the stroller.

Sadie answered before her aunt could respond. “It’s okay. Hop on back, and Aunt Laura can push us.”

Christine grabbed the back of the wheelchair, and with Aunt Laura pushing, they made their way up to the pediatric intensive care unit on the third floor of the hospital.

The charge nurse buzzed the locked doors to the unit, and the smell hit Sadie in a cool wave. She rubbed her nose and tucked her knees beneath her chin. It was the sterile, impersonal smell that lingers with anyone who has ever been inside the ICU, and along with the smell were the familiar sounds of chirping and chuffing machines, and the familiar expressions on the doctors and nurses. The faces were different, but the eyes were the same as when Sadie had watched her father pass, sort of empty, having long ago given up on miracles.

Aunt Laura introduced herself at the charge station, and the nurse said, “He’s in room 6.” She pointed with a blue pen behind her, and smiled at Sadie and Christine.

Christine clung to the back of Sadie’s chair as they entered Marty’s room. Sadie had been expecting what she saw, but the seeing of it tugged at something deep within her. Tubes ran out of Marty’s mouth and nose. More tubes jutted out of each arm. The covers were thrown off him, and Sadie could see he wore a diaper, along with what looked like balloons puffed all around him. He looked like her father had looked, just before they harvested his organs, and they stopped in the doorway when Sadie began to cry.

Marty’s nurse sat at the computer against the far wall, and she rose with a box of tissues and handed them to Sadie. She held her hand out to Aunt Laura, who had a shocked look on her face. Sadie guessed she had not been expecting to see such a young person in such a critical state.

Sadie knew what the doctors and nurses called these patients. They called them beating heart corpses. That’s what they had called her father, when they hauled him downstairs to the operating room and took his beating heart and left him with nothing but the corpse. Marty was one of those now. His chest rose, fell, rose, and his heart beat, rested, beat. His skin was white, naked but for the diaper and tubes and tape. His eyes were closed, and they didn’t look the same as when a person sleeps. When a person sleeps, sometimes the eyes move. In a beating heart corpse, they don’t move at all.

Sadie cried as she watched Marty, and hated a thought that crossed her mind. At least they had a body to bury for Marty. Her mother had been found in pieces, shot and burned, and her father’s skull had been crushed. Marty, in contrast, looked perfectly healthy, no scrapes, no bruises that she could see. He was a little too thin, skinny, but his lean muscles had a living tone to them. He looked like a normal boy, or a young man, depending on your angle, and the nurse had even combed his hair.

“I’m Jennifer,” the nurse said. She spoke quietly, like they spoke at the funeral homes. “Are you friends or relatives?”

“Friends,” Sadie answered. She blew her nose, and Jennifer took the tissue from her. “He is my neighbor. He was.”

Jennifer said to Sadie, “Well, it’s good to have some visitors for Mr. Marty. He’s been pretty lonely up here by himself.”

Sadie wondered how much the nurse had heard about Marty, because she looked like she was about to ask a question, but then decided against it.

“What are those?” Sadie said. She pointed to the balloons wrapped around Marty.

“That’s for temperature regulation. They blow hot air. You know we pronounced him brain dead?”

Sadie nodded at the blunt question. She remembered how matter-of-fact the nurses had been with her father. She had forgotten that those who are battle-worn speak a different language.

“Well,” the nurse went on, “he can’t regulate his temperature anymore. So we keep a blanket of warm air on him so he can stay warm.”

“It smells gross in here,” Christine said.

Jennifer said to Aunt Laura, “You know we’re taking him down in about an hour?”

Aunt Laura said, “Yes. That’s why we’re here. Sadie wanted to pay her respects to him.”

“Then I’ll give you some privacy,” Jennifer said. “Do you need water or anything, maybe a blanket?”

“No.”

“I’ll be right outside. Mr. Marty here is my only patient.” She spun away from them and pulled the privacy curtain closed in a smooth, practiced twirl that almost looked like dancing.

Sadie looked at Marty for a while. She said nothing, and after a few minutes, Christine said, “Mommy, I have to go real bad.”

Aunt Laura asked if she would be okay by herself, and Sadie nodded. In the quiet, Sadie listened to the hypnotic rhythm of the breathing machine and the heart monitor. Every once in a while, one of the IVs squirted something into Marty’s body. Amid the noise, Sadie heard the same hooting noise from the night before. She heard the flutter of wings and caught a fleeting glimpse of a pair of blue eyes hovering over Marty’s chest, fading as if they were the afterglow of a camera flash. Sadie’s legs suddenly tingled as the nerve endings responded to something.

After her aunt returned, they all waited in silence until Jennifer stuck her head through the curtain and said, “The heart recipient is in preparation and the doctors are here to fetch Marty. Do you want to walk him down?”

Aunt Laura looked at Sadie and then nodded to the nurse that it was okay.

A team of blue-smocked surgeons appeared behind Jennifer—two women and a man. They flanked Marty and unlocked the bed’s wheels. One of the female doctors stepped to the head of the bed, leaned over Marty, looked up at the other doctors, and said. “We just had a reaction. His left eye opened.”

“I thought they pronounced him last night,” the other female doctor said, and she leaned down and looked at Marty’s eye. “He had no reactions. Must, must have been something else.”

“Is that a glass eye?” the male doctor asked. He leaned down and tapped it with his finger. “Sure is. That’s it. What about the other one?”

He tugged a penlight from his shirt pocket and pried open Marty’s right eye. He shined the light into Marty’s eye, out of it, back in, and then looked at the other two doctors. “What the hell? Who made the call?”

“His brain scan was black,” the female doctor said. “I saw it myself. Gupta and Iverson ran the tests yesterday and made the call. Let me see.”

She leaned over Marty and using her own pen light, verified what the other doctor had already seen. “He’s dilating. That’s not possible.”

The male doctor took a few paces back, put one hand under his chin and closed his eyes. He took a few deep breaths. Then he said, “Jennifer, can you please get Gupta and Iverson in here.”