The Bird Eater Read Online Free PDF Page B

stair, pushed his fingers through his hair, and breathed a sigh into the cicada hum that surrounded him. There was a lot of work that needed to be done. The dust needed to be cleared, the windows repaired and washed. The ghosts of his past extricated. He could only hope that once he started clearing the cobwebs here, his soul would be unshackled in kind. At least, that’s what Doc Jandreau had led him to believe, and Aaron had to believe. It was the only thing he had left.

Three
    It was dark when Aaron jerked awake—so incredibly dark that he hardly knew where he was. The house shone in the moonlight like a silver ghost, its windows somehow darker than the rest of the night. Aaron pushed himself up to sit in the reclined driver’s seat, winced against the crick in his neck, and grimaced at the way that house seemed to glare at him from behind those three large oaks. He fished his phone out of the cup holder and checked the time: 5:25 a.m. He’d slept through the entire night. The Ativan he usually took for his anxiety had been forgotten in a bag still in the trunk, and the alcohol he drank to soothe his nerves was still packed away in the U-Haul hitched to the back of the car. Drawing his hand down his face, he gave a quiet laugh. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour, but he still considered it his first success.
    Plucking the camcorder from the passenger seat, he balanced it on the dashboard, grimaced at the awkwardness of the whole thing despite being alone, and pressed RECORD .
    “Day one, Doc,” he told the blinking red light. “Still not sure about this whole thing; this place is a tomb.” He paused, shot a look through the windshield at the house he grew up in. “I don’t like the idea of sleeping in there. Just walking around inside feels, I don’t know…” He shook his head, frowning as he searched for the right word. “Inappropriate, I guess, like walking on someone’s grave. I doubt I’ll be able to handle it—I mean, maybe for the time being, but not to move in like I was considering. That whole idea was probably crazy, like you said. Except you didn’t call it crazy—you said it was ‘perfunctory’ or ‘impetuous’ or something really highbrow like that.” Aaron cracked a grin, but his smile faded as quickly as it came. “Evan might like it out here,” he continued, “but living here would be weird, at least without gutting the entire place, and t hat would cost a fortune. I don’t know…” He glan ced down to his hands, considering his words. “But at least I didn’t need any meds to sleep, and I haven’t touched the bottle. A step in the right direction. ‘Progress,’ as you’d say. And I think my appetite may be coming back, because I’m starving.” He leaned into the recorder and gave it a harried look—a look he was sure Doc Jandreau would question despite Aaron’s haggard expression being a joke. “Doc…” He breathed into the lens. “I need pancakes. My mental health hangs in the balance. ”
    After unhitching the rented cargo trailer from the back of his sedan, Aaron followed the intricate coils of streets into town, and ducked into the Blue Ox, a local diner that looked just as it had when he was a kid. The waitress that served him a steaming mug of bitter coffee smiled at first, but her cheerful demeanor quickly shifted to what Aaron could only assume was distrust. For a moment she looked as though she recognized him—impossible—or wanted to give him the small-town we don’t take kindly to strangers speech, but evidently she thought better of it and took his order instead.
    A stack of chocolate chip pancakes later, Aaron tinkered with the camcorder, recording Ironwood’s backwoods Americana in quick, jarring snippets: the middle-aged waitress with her graying hair and her outdated Mayberry uniform, a couple of truckers sitting at the lunch counter guzzling black coffee and inhaling rubbery scrambled eggs. Had anyone asked him, Aaron would have sworn he was