Deathbird Stories

the slaughter and worship of Kali, and rejected her tenets, turning to the wisdom of the Gautama Buddha, drawing unto himself the powers of peace. Christ was able to heal the lepers, to walk on water. Samson brought down the temple, and David slew Goliath, and Jonah lived in the belly of the whale. And for the Machine God, the beloved child was…

Loping down the street, the gum-chewing fool leaped high in the air, like a lovesick schoolboy who has grabbed his first thigh in the schoolyard at recess. He came tumbling, gibbering, capering, laughing up to the station, and pointed back in the direction he had come. He broke up completely, slumping down against the porch-post. The other two men laughed with him. Selena looked in the direction their laughter was fleeing.

He was perhaps six feet tall, incredibly thin, with arms that might have been figs. 87 & 88 in a medical text on rickets. He was the compleat Ichabod Crane. His hands hung six inches below the cuffs of his no-color jacket, his knobbed ankles were exposed between the tattered legs of his pants and his highly-polished cordovan shoes. He moved in a long, disjointed manner, more like some whisper-articulated insect, a mantis or a spider, than a man. His hair was lank and as colorless as his clothing: the color of sand, the color of bricks, the color of rain, the color of teak, but none of these: all of them, with the highlights leached out. Mudpie hair. His face was all angles and planes, eyes big and a little vacant. Mouth as wide as a dog’s. He stumbled and stepped, a coordinated spastic, a colt learning its legs.

Selena stared at the apparition, and realized what the joke was. Ernest was the joke. His totality…his look, his manner, his walk, his presence…was a joke. The three men on the porch had extended the scope of their sport. They had brought her a halfwit to repair the car. The viciousness of it did not escape her.

Ernest came to her, and stopped.

She looked up into his eyes.

He was by no means a halfwit.

There was something living behind those eyes, and from silt-deep in her memory came a quote from Gerald Kersh that fit precisely:…there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

He stared at her, and she was beautiful. More beautiful than she had ever been before. For the first time in her life, Selena was uncomplicated. Light bathed her. She felt her flow and her pulse. The boy stared at her. He was no more than sixteen years old, possibly seventeen, but he saw her as she was, reduced to her essentials.

“Can you fix my car?”

He did not reply.

“There’s something wrong with it. Can you repair it?”

Shyly, he nodded yes. And the three fools fell down laughing at him.

Then, oh so strange….

Ernest started at the rear of the Packard. His long, delicate, pale fingers barely touched the metal. They grazed the green rusted hide of the ailing creature, and traced four thin lines from the rear fender forward, as he walked to the front of the machine. The light touch of someone getting to know someone. He stood in front of the car for a minute {while the fools roared and beat each other on the back), head cocked to one side, the hair hanging down over his right eye; listening. Then he touched the grille.

When Selena had angrily opened the hood for the gum-chewer, it had sprung up just as angrily on its counterbalanced springs, clanging fully open and quivering.

The grille opened smoothly now. Smoothly, slowly, as though exposing its interior to the gentle ministrations of a physician with the power of mist and cool.

Then Ernest laid his hands on the engine.

He touched it.

He touched it all over.

He pressed it. Sensuously. Charmingly.

As they watched, his hands caressed the engine.

Lightly.

He leaned in, and listened to the machine silently.

He talked to the machine. Silently.

Then he reached far up under the engine, where there was only darkness, and he moved his fingers delicately.

Selena watched, amazed. It was lunacy, of course, but the way he moved, the sureness and coordination in his hands. It was the joy of watching a good shoemaker at his last, the pleasure of watching a skilled cabinetmaker rabbet-joining two perfectly planed surfaces, the exquisite wonder of a sculptor forming grandeur from base rock; he talked to the machine.

After a while, he brought his hands back up into sight, and they held a twisted twig of metal, brightly- smeared down one side where its surface had been scored and abraded.

“Fell down into the engine,” he said.

His voice was a small child’s voice; the voice of a boy not yet a man, who seldom spoke.

“Can you repair it?” Selena demanded…gently.

He nodded.

The three fools were giggling now, holding their sides from the pain. Ernest went past them into the gas station. In a moment he came out with a plain black wire coat hanger. He took a pair of wire snips from a heavily laden workbench just inside the door of the garage and snipped off a straight piece nine inches long. He laid the wire snips where he had found them, returned the useless coat hanger to the station, and came back to the car.

He took the nine-inch piece of coat hanger in his left hand, and with his right he began to bend it.

He should not have been able to bend it so intricately, over such a short span, but Selena watched with growing wonder as he did precisely that. The final shape was something unlike a helix, and something unlike a moebius, and something unlike a buttonhook. It was something else.

Then he reached down, back into nowhere, where he had been, and he did things inside the engine. When his hands emerged, the metal had been left inside. There was no grease on his hands, and none on his jacket.

“Well?” Selena demanded. Gently.

Ernest nodded toward the car, and she knew he wanted her to start it up. She got in, turned the key, and listened to the instant surge of thrumming power that coursed through the Packard. It sounded strong, potent, impressive. The sound not even a new car makes.

She turned it off, and got out. She had two dollars in change in her purse. She offered it to him, but he shyly smiled, a childlike grin of embarrassment, and thanked her no ma’am thank you very much.

Then he bobbled back down the street, and was gone.

Selena stood there with the silver in her hand; she wore an empty, startled expression of what happened.

The three fools were now prostrate, clutching one another for support even on the ground.

“All right, you three incompetents!” she snapped.

They stopped laughing instantly.

“Ernest fix y’up real good, ma’am?” the youngest asked, snickering.

“He did a hell of a lot more than any of you idiots!”

The old one stared at her smoothly. He wasn’t laughing now. “Guess you’ll be movin’ on now, that right?”

Selena was not moving on.

“Where can I stay overnight in this cemetery? There’s a storm brewing and I’m not going on till I find someone in this idiot town who can give me a straight answer how to get back on the main road. If I take directions from anyone of you, I’m liable to wind up in Nome, Alaska. “

The old one looked at her.