Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Some claimed they had poison beaks and could imitate human speech and do even more arcane imitations. A librarian sent a letter to the paper citing an eighteenth-century account that spoke of a traveler who had come upon an ancient mill where none had stood before and watched it erode and disappear, dissolving into a flock of grackles that somehow “had contrived its likeness from the resource of their myriad bodies, as though shaped and given the hue of weathered wood by a Great Sculptor.” Her account was debunked by a college professor who presented evidence that the author of the piece had been a notorious opium addict.

Jason Coombs’s daddy — Jason was our strong-side tackle, a huge African-American kid almost as imposing as the Taunton linemen — preached at the stomp-and-shout church over near Nellie’s West Side Café, and each year he delivered a sermon using the Devil’s Bird as a metaphor, punctuating it with whoops and grunts, saying that evil was always lurking, waiting for its opportunity to strike, to swoop down like an avenging host and punish the innocent for the failures of the weak, suggesting that evil was a by-product of society’s moral laxity, a stratagem frequently employed by evangelists but given an inadvertent Marxist spin by the Reverend Coombs, who halfway through the sermon took to substituting the word “comrade” for “brother” and “sister.” He had a field day with the Carlysle murder. Jason broke us up after practice one afternoon with an imitation of his old man (“Satan’s got his flock, huh, and Jesus got his angels! Praise Jesus!”), an entertainment that caused Coach Tuttle, a gung-ho Christian fitness freak in his thirties, to rebuke us sharply for making fun of a God-fearing man such as the Reverend. He ordered us to run extra laps and generally worked us like mules thereafter.

“You boys better flush everything out of your heads but football,” he told us. “This team has a chance to achieve great things and I’m prepared to kick your tails six ways from Sunday to see that you get the job done.”

I wasn’t fool enough to believe that we could achieve great things, but it was a heady time for Pirate football. We were assured of having our first winning season in four years. Our record was 6–2 going into the Crescent Creek game, and if we won that, our game with Taunton would actually mean something: win that one and we’d play in the regionals up in Charleston.

I did my best to focus on football, but I was experiencing my first real dose of woman trouble. My girlfriend, Carol Ann Bechtol, was making me crazy, saying that she didn’t know anymore if we had a future and, to put it delicately, was withholding her affections. She wanted more of a commitment from me. I envied those city kids who had friends with benefits, who could hang out and have sex and stay commitment free, because in Edenburg we still did things the old-fashioned way — we dated, we went steady, we got all messed up over one girl or one boy. Mama warned me not to let myself get trapped.

“You know that’s what Carol Ann’s doing,” she said. “She knows you’ll be off to college next year, and she wants to catch onto your coattails and go with you.”

“That’s not such a bad thing,” I said.

“No, not if you love her. Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

She sighed. “You can’t tell anybody what to do, and I’m not going to try and tell you. You have to work it out on your own. But you should ask yourself how Carol Ann is going to fare away from Edenburg, and whether she’s going to be a burden or a partner. Will she try and pull you back home or will she be glad to put this sorry place behind her?”

I knew the answers to her questions but kept silent, not wanting to hear myself speak them. We were sitting at the kitchen table. A steady rain fell and the lights were on and the radio played quietly and I felt distant from the gray light and the barren town outside.

“She’s a sweet girl,” Mama said. “She loves you, and that’s why she’s manipulating you. It’s not just a matter of desperation. She’s convinced you’ll be better off here in the long run. Maybe she’s right. But you’re bound to try your wings and you have to decide if you can get off the ground with Carol Ann along.”

“Is that what happened to you?” I asked. “With Daddy, I mean.”

“It’s some of it. I’ve had regrets, but I’ve lived past them and learned to make do.”

She flattened her long-fingered hands on the table and stared down at them as if they were evidence of regret and love and something less definable, and I saw for an instant what a wild and lovely creature it was that my daddy had gentled. Then the radio crackled and she was just my mama once again.

“What I wonder, Andy,” she said, “is if making do’s a lesson you need to learn this early on.”

I broke up with Carol Ann the Wednesday before the Crescent Creek game, at lunchtime in a corner of the practice field. She accused me of using her for sex, of ruining her life. I didn’t trust myself to speak and stood with my head down, my face hot, taking her abuse, wanting to say something that would make her stop and throw her arms around me and draw me into a kiss that would set a seal on our lives; but I couldn’t pull the trigger. She ran off crying, looking for her friends, and I went off to American history, where I listened to Mrs. Kemp tell lies about South Carolina’s glorious past and doodled pictures of explosions in my notebook.

Friday night, I played the best game of my career. I played with hate and self-loathing in my heart, throwing my body around, slamming into the Crescent City corners with vicious abandon, screaming at them while they lay on the ground — I scored three times, twice on short passes and once on a fumbled kickoff, threading my way through tacklers and plowing under the last man between me and the goal with a lowered shoulder. In the locker room afterward, Coach Tuttle was inspired to curse, something he rarely did.

“Did you see Andy out there tonight?” he asked the gathered team. “That boy played some damn football! He wanted to win and he did something about it!”

The team roared their approval, sounding like dogs with their mouths full of meat, and pounded me on my pads, doing no good to my bruised and aching shoulder.

“You know what next week is?” he asked, and the team responded on cue, “Taunton Week!”

“If y’all play like Andy did tonight, and I know you can”—he paused for effect—“their mamas are gonna be wiping those Taunton boys’ asses for a month!”

Doyle and the others wanted me to party with them, but I begged off, saying I needed to ice my shoulder. At home, I told my parents that we’d won and I’d done all right.

Daddy gave me a funny look. “We listened to the game, son.”

“Okay,” I said angrily. “So I was the goddamn hero. So what?”

His face clouded, but Mama laid a hand on his arm and said I seemed tired and suggested I get some rest.

I burrowed into my room, clamped on the headphones, and listened to some of the new Green Day album, but it wasn’t mean enough to suit my mood, so I got on my computer, intending to check my e-mail — all I did was sit and stare at the blank screen. I understood that I hadn’t truly broken up with Carol Ann until that night, and the game, my show of ultra-violence, had been a severing act, a repudiation of sorts. If my shoulder hadn’t been sore, I might have hit something. I finally turned on the computer and played video games until the dregs of my anger were exhausted from splattering the blood of giant bugs across the walls of a ruined city.