have wished.
In addition to these things, the man in black found a towel used by both parents. The towel was the color of skin, and it bore telltale smudges of Mrs. Peterson’s foundation cream, and from it Mr. Peterson’s hair seemed to sprout, for just this morning he had trimmed his moustache before departing for the base, and the bristling hairs had adhered to the towel.
The man in black bunched the towel between his large palms. Then he twisted it, as if wringing it out.
Bunched again. Twisted again.
He worked faster and faster. Strange shapes appeared in the material. Shapes vaguely recognizable, but only for a moment, and then they were gone.
A nose. An eyebrow.
A woman’s cheek daubed with foundation cream.
A man’s graying moustache.
The man in black smiled as he wrapped the baseball in the towel and snared it with the jump rope.
Then he wrung the towel again, quite viciously this time.
Almost sadistically.
Soon the towel began to bleed.
Blood spattered the carpet as the man in black crossed Mr. and Mrs. Peterson’s bedroom.
Soon each and every drop had been wrung from the towel.
The man in black shattered the bedroom window.
No one noticed.
No one was home.
And the neighbors, the man thought with a wry smile, had flown.
Billy was about to unzip his U. S. Army surplus backpack when something moved within.
Billy gasped. The canvas material seemed to pulse before his eyes. He watched it, but he couldn’t move.
Until he heard the sound.
A faint cracking. The same sound Billy heard every morning when his father tapped a spoon against his soft- boiled egg.
Billy knew he had to move quickly. He unzipped the backpack. He snatched at the nest made from Gordon Rogers’ Slinky and Mrs. Rogers’ measuring tape and Mr. Rogers’ toupee.
He spilled three eggs from the nest.
Immediately, he spotted the crack in the biggest egg.
Another peck and it widened. Yet another peck and the crack was a hole.
One more peck and something pink showed through.
Something pink inside a blackbird’s egg.
Something as pink as Mr. Rogers’ bald head.
The hole in the egg was very tiny. Not nearly as large as the mouth of the cave. But the mouth of the cave was silent, and the hole in the egg was not.
“Billy,” a voice whispered from within. “Don’t… please, Billy. For God’s sake don’t…”
It was a tiny voice. Not like Mr. Rogers’ voice at all.
Not really.
Another tiny tap, like father’s spoon at the breakfast table.
A crack rippled across the surface of the second egg.
The smallest egg.
Gordon’s egg.
“Billy…”
Billy jerked the canteen out of the backpack and doused the nest and all three eggs with gasoline.
The box of safety matches was in his pocket.
Soon they were in his hand.
Soon the nest was a funeral pyre.
It crackled and crackled. Blood boiled in the eggshells and sizzled away to nothing. Mrs. Rogers’ measuring tape and Mr. Rogers’ toupee were crisped to fine ash, and soon all that remained of the nest was Gordon’s charred and blackened Slinky, which didn’t move at all.
Everything was quiet again.
The man in black screamed.
Sparks erupted from his shoulders and ignited the blackbird’s feathers and the bird screeched and took wing and crashed to the ground in a flaming, twisted heap while the man watched in agony.
But he did not watch for long. Fiery tongues leapt from his trouser cuffs and licked at his ankles. He ripped off his burning coat and tossed it in the corner. Hurriedly, he worked at the metal buckle of his flaming belt, his fingers blistering at the touch of hot metal.
And then just that quickly the fire was gone, and he scooped his winged companion from the floor and smoothed its black feathers, and he knew that there had been no fire at all.
No. That wasn’t quite accurate. There had been a fire. It had not been here, however. The fire had occurred elsewhere. The man in black and his winged companion were only being informed of it.
Reconnaissance. Sometimes it was unreliable, and sometimes it struck a little close to home.
The man in black picked up his coat, absently plucked lint from the sleeve, and slipped it on. The blackbird regained its perch on his shoulder.
The man sighed. The boy was not stupid. That much was certain.
In point of fact, the boy was very smart. But Billy Peterson was not nearly smart enough to tangle with an army of one.
The simple truth of it was that Billy had appeared at the Rodgers’ household at a most inauspicious moment. He had seen the blackbird lay three eggs in a nest made from a Slinky, a measuring tape, and a man’s toupee.
And he had heard the man in black utter words over that nest.
The same words the man now uttered over a nest made from a bath towel, and a baseball, and a length of jump rope.
A nest like a hundred others, all across town.
Billy stared at the blackened remains of the Rogers’ nest. The eggs were cracked and open, like broken black cups. The things that had grown inside were dead. That was very good.
Billy loaded his BB gun. He did not feel like a murderer. Still, he felt he should take the scorched nest to the cemetery and bury it.
Maybe he should do that with the pink bird, too.
Billy had noticed the bird just this morning. He had watched it take flight from a nest on the Jefferson’s roof, tiny veined wings fluttering.
The pink bird was hard to miss.
And the sounds it made. A series of shrill skreeghs.
Well, Billy had never seen a pink bird. Never heard one, either. Maybe it was a pet. Mr. Jefferson had a daughter who went to school with Billy. A sharp-tongued girl named Joleen who hated Billy. Maybe the bird belonged to her.
The pink bird came straight at Billy. It dive-bombed him, circled high and came at him again.
Usually Billy did not shoot at birds. Old bottles and cans were his favorite targets, maybe a discarded
