As Promised...

What follows is a new story I wrote last fall, The Bird.

My suggestion would be to copy and paste it into Word and print it out. If you double-space it, the story is nineteen pages, a good and fine length. I don't suggest trying to read it on the computer. Cozy yourself up in a chair, relax, turn down the lights.

We're going for a journey, friend. And where we're going, there's apt to be strange noises, bizarre sights, but don't worry. I've been here before. I know the way, and I can tell you that what you see out here in the dark isn't real.

At least, not all of it.

But to be safe, take hold of my hand. Hold tight.

Let's go.

The Bird
By Tyler Miller

For Lena
Who asked for a story
May this one keep her up late into the night

Ever since he’d seen the bird, nobody took Miguel seriously anymore. Before, people joked and laughed, patting Miguel good-naturedly on the back, old Miguel, ya bastard, you’re one of the good ones, amigo. Now, they only laughed with their eyes, their lips tightly holding together the absurd grins and cackles of laughter Miguel was sure erupted the instant he was gone. After seeing the bird, people in town crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him. Conversations wound down when he entered a room, the way a radio signal quickly fades when the cord is yanked from the wall. Children ran toward him in supermarkets, flapping their arms outrageously and cawing in high-pitched voices before their mothers could corral them once more, always muttering hurried apologies and never looking Miguel in the eyes. After the bird, they never looked him in the eyes.


Miguel ran a shop out of his garage at the east end of No See Um Road. His wife, Tatia, served chicken tamales and iced horchata in the shade of the pear trees while customers waited for their cars and trucks to be fixed. They chatted pleasantly with Tatia and listened to the clanging of wrenches and Miguel’s sporadic Spanish curses floating through the garage windows. He smiled at the women and told dirty jokes to the men, and rarely a day went by that there were not half a dozen cars to fix.


After Miguel saw the bird, the cars stopped coming. The tamales were wrapped in plastic and put in the fridge, and Tatia sipped horchata in the shade alone. For weeks no one came, until finally one bright Tuesday afternoon a small cloud of dust could be seen kicking up along the row of pear trees that lined No See Um Road.


Miguel came out of the house in a half sprint. He crossed himself three times for good measure, thanking the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mother, the Blessed Saints, and all the assorted angels of Heaven. It was, he figured, about damn time, too, thinking how the cupboards were growing bare and his wallet was feeling mighty thin.


He waved at the hulking boat-on-wheels, a Chevrolet Biscayne, 1959 if his eyes weren’t fooling him. It was once a delicate shade of blue but had degenerated into an off-color lavender. It was the kind of car people usually wanted returned to its original color, as if by reversing the effects of all those miles with a new coat of paint they might step back into their cars and become once again the people they had been when they bought it. As if they might drive away once more twenty-years-old, all their faith and illusions restored.


Miguel smiled and waved. “Over here, my friend. Bring the car over here!”


The car halted at the end of the driveway and came no further. Miguel waved again.


“Bring to the garage, my friend. I help fix you.”


He took a step toward the Biscayne, the smile still broad on his face. The Biscayne, however, rolled back, its reverse lights blinking on. When Miguel stopped, the car paused, the deep chug of the exhaust rumbling through the Tuesday afternoon and spoiling Miguel’s certainty that the tide had finally turned.


Inside the Chevy he made out the couple talking back and forth between themselves and pointing emphatically at Miguel, at the garage, at the house, at the sky. Miguel could not see their faces, but he didn’t need to. He’d seen such faces before. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and turned away. Eventually, the car left.


Miguel went back inside and told Tatia he would fix no more cars. She stood at the sink washing dishes. She had watched everything from the window, all the while feeling distinctly unclean in spite of the soap dripping off her hands. She remained silent. Miguel went to the living room, lay on the couch, and fell into a sleep from which he did not wish to wake.


* * *


When she heard the tapping at the screen door, Tatia thought, for the briefest instant, Raphael had come for breakfast. The midmorning sun cast deep shadows in the quiet kitchen, the time of day Raphael had most liked to arrive unannounced. Then it was gone as she scolded herself for such ridiculous thoughts.


On the porch, Luis wrung his hands, one into the other, the lines on his strong, handsome face drawn. When he saw Tatia on the other side of the screen, his eyes brightened. Tatia smiled. Then he knew it was okay, and he had not made a mistake in coming.


“Hello, Tatia.”


“Come inside. I am making coffee. You will have some and tell me what wonderful coffee I make.”


In the kitchen, Tatia ushered him toward a chair and took two cups from the cupboard.


“He is asleep,” she said.


At this, Luis grew calmer. “How is he?” he asked, taking a full cup from Tatia.


Tatia’s eyes drifted around the kitchen as if she might find an answer waiting upon the table, pasted upon a cupboard door, poking from the top of a cookie jar. Whatever she expected, she found nothing to remove the sad and angry quivering of her smooth brown lips.


“I am his friend, Tatia. His best friend. Maybe his only friend, yes? Yes, now, these days his only friend. I call, Miguel, how are you, my friend, how is life? Is well, amigo, life is not ever better. How is the work? Is well, amigo, a day and dollar, but there is mucho work to be cleaning the garage. Yes, mucho cleaning.”


Tatia nodded, staring into her untouched coffee cup. “Yes, he says to me the same.”


“That garage is not clean in ten years, I think. It not being clean has not stoped business before.”


Luis waited, knowing Tatia was weighing out her fear and her dread against her loyalty to her husband. To speak of what Miguel refused to speak of himself would be, in some small way, a form of betrayal. Tatia, though, was tired of fighting this battle all alone.


She told Luis everything. The swift accumulation of empty Cuervo bottles beneath the kitchen sink. The midmorning naps and afternoon naps and evening naps, all of them overlapping at the ends and becoming one long hibernation, interrupted only by the search for more tequila. And, what worried her most, the dark look in Miguel’s eyes which she had never seen before. It was not drunkenness, which Tatia could understand. Nor was it depression, which she did not understand but at least could forgive. This was something else. It was like Miguel had drawn a heavy curtain between them, and whether it was to shut her out or shut himself in she did not know.


“None of it is fair,” Luis said, pushing away his coffee. “It is not fair the way they treat him. Nor you, I think. You don’t be needing to suffer.”


“No one believes. No one believes in his stupid bird. In town they call him liar, and worse. And me, I am wife of Miguel, wife of the liar who believes in giant birds, Loch Ness dragons and leprechauns under the rainbows. They are laughing when I walk by and thinking I do not know what they are saying. Wife of Miguel. Wife of the liar.”


“No one knows what to think.”


“So he is telling the story about the giant bird, this bird that he is seeing in the woods, and for this they treat him like the man with the disease? Like the leper?”


“Not just the bird, Tatia.”


No, not just the bird, and she knew it. For a while, it was silent, both of them trying not to stare at the empty chair where Raphael used to sit. Where he had not sat since the day Miguel came out of the woods, and for the first time Tatia realized how much she missed her brother-in-law.


“If Miguel says there is this bird,” Tatia said, “I believe him. He is my husband.”


“I believe him too, I think,” Luis said.


Luis stood and poured his remaining coffee into the sink. He went to the door and watched the pigeons pecking along the ground outside.


“I will go to the store,” he said.


“We will have no charity,” Tatia said.


“I bring it back and you no want it, give it to the birds.”


* * *


For three months, Miguel rarely left the house. He barely left the couch. Tatia took a job at the middle school, translating for students who did not speak English. She worked mornings and made enough to buy food, but the bills did not stop coming. They came day by day, week by week, forming a pile upon the table that grew into a mound and kept right on expanding, its goal to become a mountain that would bury them both. One day, knowing they didn’t have the money to pay them, Tatia shoveled the bills into the trash. Soon, however, they were piling up again, like a cancer returned after a hasty surgery.


Eventually, the phone company shut off the phone.


“Now the bastards they will stop calling, no?” Miguel said from the couch, grinning wickedly, drunkenly. He took a swig of tequila and laughed. “They not be calling Miguel no longer.”


Tatia shook her head. “All this for your stupid bird.”


Miguel’s eyes narrowed, his face turning dark and sour. “You say like it is my fault. You say like I choose to see the bird, like maybe I want to see it?”


Tatia, who’d been holding it in for over three months, could hold it no longer. She broke, the tears rushing to her eyes, her cheeks flushing a deep scarlet, her hands balling into tiny fists along her thighs.


“You did not have to tell them, Miguel. You did not have to say about this stupid bird that no one believes.”


Miguel hung his head. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “You are right, Chiquita. I did not have to be speaking about this bird. I did not have to be telling about what happened to Raphael in those woods, why he is not here to play with his children, why he is not here to work at his job, why he is not here to touch his wife. It is right, yes, that I did not have to say about anything? That what you think, Chiquita? That no one will be asking?”


“You could say something else.”


“Like what?”


“Something true.”


“I tell the truth!” Miguel screamed. He flew off the couch, the Cuervo bottle rising as he did, and he flung the bottle across the room. It shattered along the far wall. “I tell all the truth. Always the truth!”


Tatia felt her fingernails digging into her palms, and she tried to focus on the pain and stop the tears in her eyes.


“Then you could have say something people believe.”


Miguel’s rising anger suddenly, quickly deflated. His shoulders sunk. His sneer softened. His hips shifted unsteadily. He lowered himself to the couch.


“You no believe me?” he said.


Tatia said nothing.


Miguel looked away from her, unable to match her gaze. She left the room, and Miguel heard the slam of the bedroom door. Slowly, he settled into the couch, sprawling upon it with the apathetic resignation of a man who has just slit his own wrists and is waiting impatiently to die.


* * *


When he tried later to recall why he had called the school that particular morning, he could not remember. Most likely it was to tell Tatia to buy another bottle of tequila on her way home. Still, all of it remained hazy, and he could not be sure. About that morning, there was very little of which he could be sure.


“Your wife is not here, Mr. Hernandez.”


“Excuse?”


“Tatia is not here. For that matter, she hasn’t been here all week. We all just figured she was feeling under the weather. It’s been going round. Is she okay?”


Miguel hung up without answering. His head hurt, a throbbing spike in his skull as if someone were standing behind him and rhythmically hitting his head with a hammer. He rubbed at his eyes which were hot and red, and he tried to figure out why the bitch secretary would lie to him. Some fun she was having. He watched Tatia leave this morning, had almost told her how sexy she looked in that blouse, the way it drew in around her breasts and defined her figure, but when he saw her face he said nothing. She looked at him the way a man looks at a dog that has grown too mangy to be useful. She had said herself where she was going, I am to work, Miguel, there is lunch in the fridge, I see you later. Now this bitch at the middle school wanted him to believe Tatia was not at work, had not been at work all week. He could see her in that office, hanging up the phone and laughing, turning to all the other fat old cunts sitting in their plush cushioned chairs and telling them how she had just put one over on Miguel, yes, that Miguel, the one who saw the giant bird, can you believe it, the fucking loony, way I hear it he killed his brother himself and buried the body in the woods, Sheriff Conner’s just waiting to find the body, and when he does their gonna strap that little spic to a chair and give him a good taste of the juice, fry his skinny Mexican ass, he calls back you just see how I handle him, pull the wool over his eyes again, just you wait and see.


“Puta,” Miguel spat.


Unless…


A new thought formed in Miguel’s mind, a thought which only increased the throbbing in his head. Now it felt like someone had exchanged a hammer for a sledge, taking long, slow, thudding whacks that shot down to his toes.


Miguel got off the couch and searched for his boots.


Fewer than 900 souls went about their lives in the little town of Wapato on the north shore of Deep Water Lake. You could walk the entire town in under two hours, including over the north hill and down into the Wapato Valley. Careening along the streets and swerving down the alleys, Miguel’s Toyota pickup made the trip in under half an hour.


Tatia’s Accord sat like a festering blister, an ugly sore on an otherwise beautiful day. Miguel drove down the block and parked. He stumbled back down the street quietly, crossing the lawn past the drawn curtains of the front window and easing his way silently along the side of the house.


Luis’s bedroom window was partially open. Miguel listened to his best friend’s labored breathing, to his wife’s soft, insistent moaning. He was unable to listen for long.


Miguel went back to his truck.


He drove straight home.


At home, he went to the bedroom and to the closet. From the top shelf, way at the back, he took down his rifle.


* * *


When Tatia stepped into the living room and saw the empty couch, she knew. She knew without having to throw open all the doors and find all the rooms vacant. Miguel’s presence, which had always somehow filled the house, the way water fills up a jar, was suddenly missing. It was only she, the betrayer, who was left to hold the empty container that had been their marriage.


Tatia collapsed to the floor and wept.


She did not see Miguel again for two months.


* * *


The way it happened she came out of the school just before lunch and there was Miguel, sitting on the hood of her Accord with his feet propped above the license plate and a wide, goofy grin that made him appear so much like a teenage boy again, as if he were waiting for his sweetheart to slip from class so they could run away from the dusty boredom of high school and study hall. Caught off guard, Tatia dropped her purse in surprise. She opened her mouth to speak and the air caught in her throat.


“You let in the flies, Chiquita.”


Miguel slid off the hood, approached her coolly, nonchalantly, as if he’d never been away at all. He bent down and picked up her purse, but instead of rising he only tilted up his head.


“I think you be dropping this, miss.” His eyes lowered. “I like this view from down here. Such pretty legs.”


“Miguel, I’m so sorry.”


“Yes, the prettiest legs I ever see.”


“I never meant to…I wasn’t at all thinking…”


Miguel reached forward as if to finger the hem of her clean, white sundress, but then stopped. He rubbed his fingers together, still inches from her dress. He rose up and held out the purse.


“Enough, Chiquita.”


It broke her. Not the words, but the way he said them, the way he looked at her when he spoke. For two months she’d gone to bed cold, frigid from the chill of her betrayal, and cold with the certainty that she would see Miguel again. Her days filled up with long imaginings of how the reunion would unfold. She rehearsed the scenes relentlessly, the bitter accusations, the weak but impassioned rebuttals, the inevitable shouting and the disarray of domestic disaster, abruptly caput by slamming doors that left nothing solved, and all of this reeled jerkily through her mind like a bad home movie stuck endlessly on replay. Yet, reality was turning out to be something quite different, and all of her well-scripted lines blew away from her. She had nothing at all to say to the Miguel before her, the Miguel who was not shouting, the Miguel who was not angry, the Miguel who still loved her. She closed her mouth and fell against him, into his arms as he caught her, and she cried.


She felt very much like a fool, knowing the bell would ring soon and her students would pour out into the parking lot. They would see her blubbering and wiping at tears and her makeup streaking across her face. They would pass by her with their eyes turned conveniently away, whispering to one another.


Isn’t that Miguel? Yes. The one who—yes. The one.


Tatia stepped back and found Miguel still smiling, as if this were really some great joke and if only she knew the punch line she’d be smiling too.


“Where have you been?” she said at last.


“I have been hunting.”


“Hunting?”


“Yes.”


“For two months?” Absurd, she thought. This is not happening, these tears on my face and Miguel with his grin and this hunting.


“Yes.”


“For what?” she stammered.


“For your faith in me, my love.”


And she nearly laughed, had to choke on the rising cackle, had to strangle it midway with a sharp hack into her hand. I am dreaming, Tatia thought. Only in dreams is everything so crazy.


“When I found you with Luis,” Miguel started, then sighed. “When I knew, I know what it is that is wrong. All at once it come to me, what it is that is wrong with me and you and with our life.”


“Miguel, I am so sorry,” she said again. “I never should have—“


“Hush. No more. I no hear it. I be telling you what is wrong with us, Chiquita. It is faith, yes. Our faith, and your faith in me, your husband. Your faith it go away in me, and when it go no woman will stay with a man. She will find another, no? Find someone who she can believe in.”


“I always believed you.”


“You no believe in me, and that is why you go. It is not your fault, Chiquita. I lose your faith. I lose it when I come back out of those woods. I lose my brother, and that I know, but I also lose your faith, and that I not be knowing until you and Luis. Then I realize. I know.”


The bell rang. Within seconds the building doors launched open and students flowed into the parking lot. They drifted past Tatia and Miguel. Perhaps some saw Tatia’s tear-stained face or Miguel’s cocky, boyish grin, but if they did Tatia didn’t notice.


“I had to go, yes. To find it. And I did. I did find it.”


“Find what?”


“The bird. I find it in the woods. I find it to show you.”


“That is where you been for two months? Hunting for the bird?”


“For you, Chiquita. For your faith in me. So you know to believe again.”


For a long while Tatia couldn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say. She stared at Miguel and listened to the cars clamoring out of the parking lot, to the last fading shouts of the students, to the bell ringing again.


“It is real,” she whispered.


“Yes,” Miguel said.


She saw the truth etched in his eyes and realized it was the same truth that had stumbled out of the woods with him all those months ago.


“Show me.”


* * *


The path led deep into the woods along a straight stretch before bending into the thickly bunched trees and heavy undergrowth. At times the foliage broke away, alleviating the feeling of claustrophobia that tightened like a knot in Tatia’s stomach. The breaks never lasted long. Soon the forest closed in again, the tops of the trees masking the sunlight and leaving them trudging in a grey, gloomy light. Eventually, Tatia looked down and saw the path was gone altogether, and she wondered how far back it had disappeared.


When Miguel was a boy he had hunted with his father. He knew the forests well, knew how to move through them and , most important of all, how to find his way back. Tatia hated the woods, didn’t understand hunting, and never once felt comfortable leaving civilization behind her. These feeling stewed inside her, threatening to boil over, but she held them down. I need to see, Tatia told herself. And just why is that? Because seeing is believing, and I need to be believing.


Miguel pushed giddily ahead of her, like an errant schoolboy who’d made a successful escape. Tatia often lost sight of him. She called out to him to slow down, to wait for her to catch up. Miguel called back, and the delight in his voice was evident.


“It not be far now. Only up here a little more, and then you see it and you believe again, Chiquita. You believe in me again.”


They crossed a small stream, Miguel taking her hand and helping her jump the rocks. When they entered a new section of forest, Miguel seemed as if he could hardly contain himself. He jostled back and forth, spinning around.


“Come. Come! It is not far.”


The trees here were different. They were thin, leafless, narrow around and covered in white bark. They were tall, stretching so high Tatia lost sight of where they ended. A wind blew up there far above them, and the tall, slender trees swayed unnaturally side to side, back and forth. They made Tatia think of finger bones reaching from beneath the ground, the long phalanges of some restless giant unhappily interred.


Then the forest opened and they stood in a large clearing. The trees shrank back and in the middle of the clearing were three giant boulders. Two of the rocks were a dull grey, and the third, largest of the three, was a dusky black.


“Where…” Tatia began.


She realized what was before her.


“Look,” Miguel said.


The third boulder was no rock at all.


“My God,” Tatia whispered.


He had been telling the truth.


The bird was enormous, so large Tatia at first could not conceive of what she saw. It was as wide as two automobiles, maybe three. Its feathers were dirty black, an ominous, disheveled plumage. She realized she could smell it, the dusty feathers, the cold rank of high wind, the sweet stench of rotten meat.


“It is real,” she said.


The bird saw them, or smelled them, and suddenly it rose onto its feet. Its head stretched out of its feathers, a pale, naked pink orb with two brilliant black eyes bigger than bowling balls. It kept rising and rising, and Tatia imagined it might not stop until it blotted out the sky. The bird’s wings rustled, the sound scratchy and heavy, and then they expanded in a flurry, snapping outward so quickly Tatia started. The bird bounced and let out a screech so loud and shrill it made Tatia’s ears ache.


“Hush, Chiquita. Hush.” Miguel held her, and she buried her head against his shoulder. “Be still. It is okay.”


Finally, she looked back. The bird stood over thirty feet tall, and its wings stretched nearly the whole span of the clearing. Every time it moved its feathers scraped together with a wispy scratching like nails drug across glass. When the bird opened its mouth, a putrid wave of air breathed down upon them.


“It will hurt us,” she said.


“No. Look.”


Miguel pointed, and now Tatia saw the bird’s leg and the chain around it. A heavy chain of large links that trailed back to a massive oak on the other side of the clearing.


“You caught it,” Tatia said. “Why didn’t you kill it?”


“I thought to be doing just that. I bring my rifle and say, Miguel, you are going to kill this damned bird, you will shoot it between the eye what killed your brother and ruined your life. But the bird is too great. A rifle is nothing with this bird.”


“How did you catch it?”


“Very careful. Very, very careful.”


“It is a monster.”


“Yes. A flying monster.”


The bird screamed and beat its wings. The rushing air nearly knocked Tatia off her feet.


“I want to go.”


“Do you believe? Do you believe now?”


“Yes. Now I see it and I believe.”


“You believe in your husband?”


She put her arms tightly around him. “Always and forever.”


She never saw the knife. Indeed, the blade moved so quickly and was so sharp she hardly felt the slice at all, only a single, sharp sting and then the warmth of blood running down her leg. She twisted her neck around, wondering what forest insect had bitten her, and felt shock at seeing the back of her pant leg turning deep crimson and the blood leaking over her shoe and into the dirt.


“Miguel, something has…”


She stepped back, and the first wave of pain swept over her. It exploded in two directions at once, sweeping up her thigh and down her leg. The edges of her vision swam dark and hazy. Her leg wobbled, buckled and she collapsed into a spreading pool of blood.


“Miguel, something bit…”


She still did not understand. She thought somehow the bird had broken its chain, but she saw clearly the bird still standing far from her, its fleshy head tilted curiously, its black eyes unblinking.


“Miguel, help me.”


Then she saw the knife in Miguel’s hand, and in the same moment her fingers slipped through the gap in her jeans and found the spurt of blood and the cleanly sawed ends of the tendons behind her knee.


“What is this? What have you done?”


“Now you believe, Chiquita.”


She screamed at him. The pain slammed her once, twice, pounding rhythmically now as her nerves set aflame. The darkness spread in her vision, threatening to close off her view entirely. Then Miguel bent down and slapped her across the face, and her head cleared.


“Stay a little longer.”


She almost screamed again, but knew immediately it would be useless. They were the only ones here. Her, Miguel and the bird.


Miguel wiped the blade along his pants, a dark crimson smear on the blue denim. His boyish grin had fermented into a sickish half-smile. He watched as she grasped her leg and tried to staunch the flow of blood.


When he went to the tree, Tatia began screaming again. Not for help, but at Miguel. She screamed for mercy, for forgiveness, for anything at all but what he had on his mind.


Her screams excited the great bird, but what excited it most was the smell of fresh blood. The bird cawed again, a mighty roar that shook the bony trees.


“It has not eaten in some time, Chiquita.”


Slowly, Miguel undid the chains.


The great bird flapped its winds.


From the edge of the clearing, Miguel watched how Tatia tried to stand, how she fell under her useless leg, how eventually she simply crawled, dragging her leg behind her. He watched the bird follow the trail of blood.


“Now you believe.”


* * *


When Luis opened the door, he was shocked to find Miguel on his porch. He was more shocked by the grin on Miguel’s face.


“My oldest amigo, hush now. Don’t say it. There is no need to be apologizing. Just wait until you see. You will see it and when you see you will believe in your amigo once more, no? Yes, I think when you see you will believe.”

THE END