Black Bird

Nettles frothed in boiling water. Somewhere the mechanic drank until his migraines stopped. The thermometer he checked twice- still over 90 degrees. He look out the road and tall weeds. Black birds compressed the power line. The oil in his love lines reeked. He finished work, scrubbed his palms clean, and drove home. The migraines blinded him but he stayed on the road. Once home he took pills and swallowed hard cups of water. Then he came to his machine. It waited under a cover in the garage. The exhaust fan he screwed in reached further than the grill. Ridges on his tools impressed his palms as he fixed his mistake, he worked slow, and tossed the fan to the corner. He stared into the hood like a puzzle with missing pieces. He needed new hub caps. The upholstery needed staples. He spilled his bottle of steering wheel fluid down the hood, and it leaked in fingers to the unstained cement. He dabbed it up with towels, then dropped them into the bucket with other biological contaminants. The sign he wrote on it read “Smart birds don’t shit the nest.” From there he examined his awards on the wall. Best of show: 2010,2011,2013. Runner up 2014, and 2016.

The car he took up ran on a soup can. A bar bridged the wheel wheel wells and obstructed view of the deeper workings. He sat his tools aside, painted over the rust and soldered borders. He used a amber brass color that devolved into shades of bruised squash. He ran his fingers through his hair, greasing his locks with lubricant. He looked through his car schedule- he didn’t miss a single day, but missed his six month mark. He worked on the car for over a year. Already changed the wheels the seating, the steering wheel, even the fuel gauge needles needed replaced. He dove into dark wells of auto mechanic libraries to for a manual on historical cars. The car rolled onto the floor in 1924. He’d been using parts from the 30s. He just wanted to get the car  running- and he knew the judges. Small towners who like their world local- they wouldn’t notice nor interfere with his infractions- but then he found the bulletin that his year, the Historical Car Society judged the show. He came to his computer. He invented five hundred words telling how he purchased the car for nephew Agette, who planned to fix it when he returned from Iraq, but came back in a box instead.

He found clip art of a young man’s farmstead homecoming, and and applied it all together to be printed onto a sheet of cardboard. It took some pretending. The mechanic never took step on stage, but he told enough lies to convey the story with pauses, and sniifs since he couldn’t force tears. The judges needed to see the tears. He tried thinking of losing his pets, his family, his old house, and old cars-  but only one thing tickled his sadness.

He took home another trophy- “semi runner up” it read. He kept in his closet. “Thanks, Agette.” He tossed in the poster with it. Of all the cars he worked on, and of all the cars he dreamed of- nothing compared to the car that ran him over as a boy.

He remembered, but it happened long ago. The hot rubber left tread over his stomach. His forehead seared to the grill, and the doctors told him when he awoke that they prepared to bury him.

Ever since, he dreamed of seeing the barron’s car roll into his garage. Ever since seeing the black bird dig its beak into his flesh, since seeing his blood drip down its iron feathers,  he decided he’d work on cars.

The land barron owned many cars, but as he aged into his hundreds, he only drove one. A classic from the 20s, with a black bird adorning the hood-its wings bore forward like horns. Each wing the length of a hatchet. It’s beak stabbed like a javelin.

He caught a glimpse of its engine one day- and salivated as he watched it spin. Helmet, gauntlets, lance, shield- a complete machine. Even when the engine sputtered it cried like a war horse. The smoke smelled sweet, the burning oil and incense.

One day the owner drove it into the pond. A banker came to collect from him, but found his home empty. The police searched for a missing person for twelve years, until the Mechanic as a small boy went fishing in the pond. He spun the reel, smelled catfish frying in butter, but he pulled out a slimy tuft of human hair. He kept it secret, but every year the summers got longer and the pond dried more and more. He kept the hair, and watched the leather holding it together crinkle to dust in a jar next to his piggy bank. The summers lengthened  and winters shortened. The city announced plans to drain the pond for dumping.

The mechanic watched them tow it out. He almost tore ins own heart in half when he saw his idol disfigured.  The ropes tightened, and the car struggled to break from the murky bottom. Fish scales and festering mud filled the air. The car rose to its nose, grime dripped clean from the black bird. The rope reeled,  and the car scrapped the bed surface, tilled the earth up the slope. Mud sloped from pockets and rust cavities. Fish bones and black water spilled out the windows. Inside they found the leather bound bones of the barron. Forty rubber belts strapped him to the seat and the steering wheel. His wife died fifty years prior and he never remarried, not conceived children.

Weeds conquered his property and the prairie absorbed it into the sea of tall grass. Except for the driveway and the gas pump he kept in the center of his yard. All the furniture stayed in the house as it rotted away to a square of bordered by sunken blocks. Nothing grew inside.

The mechanic stood after winning his trophy and inspected the grounds. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and morning chill soaked his socks and frosted the hairs on his knuckles. “But by noon the sun will bake the earth- and the humidity will be thick as gum.”

He woke at five am every morning. Exorcised, listened for the woodpecker, ate eggs, and drove down country lanes until his shift started. Across the road just as the sun stabbed over the horizon, he saw an opal flash in his mirror blinded him. “Another migraine,” he bemoaned, reaching into his pockets for medicine. The flash dimmed to speeding wave hurling over clouds of dust, it bowled towards him. He pulled his machine from the road, and he saw no mistake- the paint job might have  looked newer, the tires might have looked chromed, but he made no mistake when he saw the black bird.

The mechanic went to work without thoughts about it and went to bed that night concerned with what to do for his next project. Before he fell asleep, the black bird cawed. His heart chilled. He jumped out of bed and starting working in his garage. He tightened his vice, and bent pieces of metal into likeness birds. None of them matched, few even looked fowlsome.

The next morning he got up before the sun, and drove to the same road. He watched as the sky darkened with rain clouds. The sun did not appear. Low thunder crushed in the distance. The wind smelled like turpentine. He waited until thunder fell overhead. The car shook, and ringlets of rain rattled the windshield. He put the car into first gear and went down the lane. Slow with the cold air blowing against the windshield, then he saw it. The barron’s car hurled up the road, up alongside him. The mechanic tried to keep up with it. His needle climbed to 90 miles an hour, still the barron’s car slipped ahead and became a gnat bouncing on his windshield.

The machine stopped taking his medication, and let the migraines split his brain in half. The drills and spark showers hammered bolts into crown and down his spine. The pails of wasted oil churned his stomach. His boss asked him if he wanted to go home. “No. Just stopped taking my meds.”

“I can’t afford another accident from you. Take them or go home.”

The mechanic wore the same uniform for five years. He left it folded in the sink, with the pills dissolving on top.

He stayed home, looked for other jobs, but mostly looked for psychologists. He read about the phenomenon of people seeing aspirations, figments of imagination, and the manifestation of repressed sexual desires or reactions to trauma.

As he left that morning for his car the weight of such a discovery settled on his shoulders, and pooled his soul until he felt nothing but the ocean of foreordination pulling him deeper with cold tides. He drove to a diner with warm lights glowing.

Only one person worked this early. The kitchen man grumbled about the waitress always being late. The retired farmers congressed with their coffee. The mechanic asked for a cup, and the kitchenman poured it for him. He asked for food too but the kitchman told him at the grill needed to heat up first.

The mechanic sat and listened to the fan spin. The farmers gave him odds looks. The kitchen man thought it strange that anyone came in before the sun rose, let alone the mechanic because he seemed too comfortable to be up at at the break of dawn. Once held his coffee stopped caring about them. He’d drink it and leave.

The old farmers conversed. “See it every morning. Down by highway 2.” The mechanic overhead and stared at the steam but all his attention vacuumed onto the old people. “Its a model T or something. Got a big chicken riding on the hood.” The mechanized chugged the steaming cup, stood at the table, his throat burning and tongue whipping, “It’s a  Studebaker Special 1924.”

He took his coat and walked out. The kitchenman called on him to close the door, but the Mechanic already vanished in the herbicide mists stirring between bean fields.

That night a storm struck. Lightning whipped across the plains and heavy pendants or rain dropped. By five am, the rain stopped but the creeks flooded. The roads shined by sun up with a gleaming film, but once out of the light the water flowed transparent and clear. He waited by the highway. The clock hit the same time as usual, and the blue flash appeared. The mechanic watched it sped down the road and turn to the highway. This time  he only followed its ripples.

The floodwater rose above the highway pavement by a razor width. His tires gushed forward, tearing through slime film, his own ripples stirred muddy fog under his carriage that rolled into the marble still pools, breaking covers of floating leaves, and obscuring the road before him. He slowed more and more. The barron’s car curved off the road and into the pink flood plains. The sun dropped under binds of harsh clouds, and a red ring burned underneath them, but they broke apart into dark chains. Splashes from the barron’s car foamed like pink mist, and its wrinkles carried the debris choked from its tail pipe layers. Collided into the mechanic tires.

The Mechanic pulled the car into the gravel of a country lane, and the mud sucked the up the front tires. The wheels hurled mud. The car moved forward, and the mud slushed beneath the car and devoured the back tires. The car bulldozed, wine colored water spilled from the hood rifts. He let his feet relax off the pedals. The engine lights glowed like the horizon. The engine rupturing stopped. He thought about the silence of cold mornings spent hunting for mountain lions in the west. Instead he looked over the archaic trees bordering the road and heard soft choirs rising from the collapsed husks of tree.

Pagan Pioneers claimed this land and when they settled here, they planted this breed of tree exclusive to Saxony. They called this rare strain “Irminsul” trees, and they planted them along every farm and country lane in their dominion.

The day before the storm  each one looked healthy and green, but the Mechanic noticed them now like never before. The leaves drooped, dripping with water, pink and yellow. The mechanic reached out to pluck one, but once he held one and felt itt squirm in his palm, he heard the leaf crunch... looked closer to see hives of pink and yellow needle points- each one a mites chewing on the leaf. Crunch…. crunch….

The branches stripped of leaves snagged out like infected blood vessels over the sky. Black birds perched on them. He listened to the birds, but they made no sound. But more and more flew in from the remaining clouds to mount the bare limbs. They pecked the leaves off the tree, and out of the water to eat the leaves.

The Mechanic knew how to find the car.

Once the sun came back the roads dried up again. He returned only one time to the road of tainted arbor to confirm a suspicion, and when he found the car he trapped there he almost missed it, because the roots of the trees wound through the door windows and out wheel wells. Bird tracks dashed the hood and roof. Fuzz and slime sealed farm debris to every inch. The fallen trees remained planted over the gravel. Mounds and bushes spilled into the road. Yet beneath the broken lumber and tangles of undergrowth he found the same impressions drawn down the road. Rubber scars still remained.

He went back to the car to take his toolcase with him, then he chased after the tracks. The deeper he went, more ribbons of smoke spiraled into the sky to dissolve in the sunrays. Yet no shacks nor trailers appeared down the road. He skipped further down, stepping over the obstructions left behind by the storm, frost crested on top of the fence posts. He shivered and huddled her arms to his chest. Cream overcasts gathered and sank over the land. The black birds huddled together on top of the Irminsul trees. Snow gathered in the ditches. Pink moss covered the lower trunks. The ground still felt wet.  

The Mechanic spent his whole life living in this county.  He heard all the lore from oxidizing farmers still wearing their Veteran hall hats, rambling about the 1919 burnings, how most don't remember Dennison anymore, “but only we know about what happened here… and the only reason we know is because we are still afraid to trespass down their roads.”

When the last of that generation settled into Lutheran Cemetery, no one lived to tell about what happened to the intruders that cut their trees down. But as the mechanic hopped over one, her pressed his hand onto its trunk, and as he lifted himself over the tree, he felt the raptures of a beating heart. When he looked into the gasping hollow, he saw large boens concealed within. He reach in and tugged one loose. It felt heavy, but flat. Rough, sandy curfacee clung to his clothing. Pieces of tree broke from the tree with the bone. The rings went on for only one hundred years, but it didn’t peel away. He hurled it at the flock of blackbirds watching him. The bone went over their heads, and they sat and stared at him.

Weeds grew over his head. Power cords fell into the dirt and never rose again. A gas pump stood on a cement pedestal. Further into the weeds, along where old crops once vibrantly flourished, old relics formed of corn husks and wheat stalk clutching long lost rag dolls. The mechanic thought about the crosses on the highway that always distracted him.

Sweat dripped down the weed blades. Despite the cold caving in on top of them, the ground still radiated warmth. Slabs of haze obscured the fields beyond the trees.  He saw only waving shadows. The mechanic ignored the whispers and chants calling from the fog in foreign verses never heard by him before- nothing Latin, something far more ancient.

The haze strengthened to walls of fog rolling against each other.  The rope of a well wound, whined, and twisted. Something on the other end scraped against the walls. He heard it so clear, but saw nothing, but then he smelled the fumes of hot grease boiling out over a steaming engine. A tail of gas rose from an isle of darkness. It hurt his nostrils. Red dust coated the snow banks as the smoke settled back down. The cinders of burning steel. The mechanic pulled nearer. A small row of building rose from the fog.

The ground hardened and clacked under the soles of his shoes. Frost crystals fell from his hair. He saw five sunken buildings. The walls of the theatre hummed. Pale faces beckoned him inside but hid in the dark when he looked towards them. Across the fissure in the road, he walked under the torn awning of a candy store. Dry postcards sat bleached in the rack and open wrappers littered floor revealed by the window. He squinted to see through the film of sediment over the glass. In the reflection he saw the row of dark, silent buildings. The sun slipped under the Irminsul branches. But one building teamed and glowed in the glass. The mechanic turned around to see  a sliver of light under a garage door. The chimney plumed from its roof. Red dust covered the pavement and building rusty calcium over the windows.

The tracks ended at the garage door. The wood panels broke and bent inwards. Black paint smudge the damage. The mechanic took the handle at the bottom and forced the door to lift but chain links snapped, and he stopped with the door to his knees. The odor of bubbling motor oil made his mouth water, and tears spill from one tingling eye. The smoke stopped flowing from the chimney. The last tail floated into the air for the moonlight to consume.

The Mechanic slid the tool case under first, then crawled in after it. Snow and frigid air blew under the door. His  palm cut against forgotten screws. The cold of the ground numbed the tiny lacerations, and since the chimney stopped burning, the platinum furnace cooled down, and the place sank into darkness, but he heard the flocking of feathers, the beating of wings, and the howl of a predatory bird that rings out over doomed rodents. As he stood his boots slid on sawdust over the floor. He took his case and shield the way ahead. Sharp tools and tetanus barbs leered around each stack of chopped combine parts. The wings beat like an falcon fighting to escape a poachers trap. Claws scraped against steel. Something brushes against a heavy cage hard enough force squares of air out. Papers littered the floor of a small office on the other side.

Around a desk he found a box with four buttons on them. He pressed one, and id did nothing. He checked the wire and found found it unstripped and in tact. He pressed the next button, and the third when he pressed the four a swinging fluorescent popped on. He saw the soft glow against the cage walls.

At  the rear, under a hanging light bulb,  a car cover collected dust. The bird cried beneath it. Blood dripped down his nose. The reek of tarnished effluvium possessed his senses. He grabbed the canvas. Dust poured between his fingers. It crunched as the fibers shifted. The crying ceased. He flung the cover to the floor and coughed into his sleeve. The cloud of dust dimmed the light, but the mechanic still saw the black bird ornament mounted on the hood.

The dust cleared but a gale still hung above the light. The mechanic kept coughing until knots broke loose in his throat and lungs. He hacked until a pin drove into his temple. The pin if pain magnified, and he lost vision in his left eye.

The car revved up. The migraine drove bolts into his spine. He set down his tool case and took out what he needed. Before he began,

He looked over the notes he kept in the case. The crank hung beneath the grill. The hood opened from the side port, and only one cylinder spun inside. Two six in tires on the front heavy suspension bars scraped the ground, footlong tires on the back. A wood wagon seat sat instead of a trunk.

He  closed the toolcase. The mechanic never saw an exterior and undercraft so pristine in his life. Even the engine turned like a snake shedding it skin. He wiped the blood from his lip.

The potential to win first place awards in car shows around the country provoked him to re examine the machine. White scars mained the glass, but he stored spare frames at home. He knew of the interior. He looked closer, when he heard scraping nails against the glass. Within, cheekless smiles greeted the Mechanic. mud gobs from from under the jaw bone.  The swollen remains of the Barron sat bound with forty rubber belts. His fingertips scraped at the windshield.

The mechanic opened the case, and worked through each item in the box to remove the black bird. His screwdrivers bent, his chisels split, hammerheads shattered, hacksaws dulled, his channel locks broke in half, and his vice grips fell apart in his hand.

He scoured the garage and came back with cobweb jammed tools. He started by taking the hood off, then working his way around until the engine ran exposed. He slid blocks underneath, and took the front wheels off. Then he worked his way to the back and worked off the rear wheels. He took apart the rear seating plank by plan. He removed the grill and the filter. The fan nearly cut his fingers off. Then he looted the frames and dragged the outside for him to claim later. The Black Bird still stood on its perch on the suspension, but he had everything else he needed. The barron still smiled at him, worms swelling from his eye socket, and the engine still spat exhaust. He reached inside, and twisted the knob. The engine stopped, and the barron turned to dust. Once the belts fell loose and the dust poured over the leather upholstery to the cracks in the cement beneath, the garage chilled enough to frost the engine parts. The black bird fell down crashed into the floor. His migraine went away.

He picked up the ornament and hauled it across the garage floor before stopping to relax his shoulders. Night fell since he first came. More snow fell, and shoe prints dashed the streets and sidewalks. He saw no one, and heard only the snowflakes melting under his boots.

At home, he collapsed , peeled his boots and socks off, and slept on the front porch and awoke when the sun rose. He went straight to bathroom to treat the bleeding from the boot cutting into his ankles, and washed everything from his hands. He made coffee, and drank three cups. Then he took the black bird and welded it his entry project. He went right to his network and entered the next show.

He spent every day until the show sitting the the car watching the ornament. When the day came, he just sat still and let the car start itself. The engine worked just fine now. The tires too. The black bird knew where to go, and it drove him sixty miles to city for the show.

The black bird stopped for nothing along its way. Fall branches became paper under the possessed vehicle. Deer bounced off, but pieces of fur stuck to the iron beak. Halfway to the city, the mechanic saw the blackbird drive on towards a semi turned over on the road. He grabbed the door and prepared to hurl himself out, but all the cuts on his hands hurt too much and instead braced for he car to ram the trailer. Instead the black bird drive them up and over the trailer, then hovered a bit before setting back over the road.

Over five hundred entered the car show. The black bird parked in an obscure arm of the showcases. That year four car bombings and one hundred car fires chased the judges from the competition. Hundreds went to the hospital. Only the Mechanic's car went unscathed. There, he planted Irminsul seeds, and carried enough to plant them wherever the black bird drove him. He entered more shows.