The Hiring of May Witherspoon

May liked to set out bits of meat for the big birds. It was one of her few pleasures. She would dice up some cheap round steak and set it out in cubes along the porch rail. The part she loved, the thing about the ravens she adored was, they left her presents. She left them food, and they left her a fake pearl, a thimble, little shiny things.

She watched out her window as the big black birds landed and took pieces of meat. A raven landed and dropped a rock-like object, and they all flew away. Some had bits of steak in their beaks. She donned her housecoat and stepped out on the porch, curious about the rock.

It was an uncut diamond the size of a cashew. Her gaze snapped up to the wire where they perched.

“Where the fuck did you get this?” she asked the raven she knew as the alpha. Over time, they built a relationship, communicating with sign language. For instance, when he sat near the steak pieces, he would nod thanks, and she would return his nod.

As the big black bird gripped the wire, he turned his head and stared straight at her, as his eye was more to the side of his head. Behind his black silhouette on the wire, the gray sky made a solid backdrop and enhanced his face and eyes. The alpha wrinkled his brow and dipped his head – a heartfelt human gesture of thanks for the food.

That same day she caught the bus. May wasted no time cashing out her diamond in downtown Seattle. The broker asked where she got it. “Ta fuck difference does that make?” she had asked, shouting at the broker. Next, they did a background check on the stone, per their policy, he explained, and he hurried back and offered her a truckload of cash.

Now, May no longer depended on disability checks, and she opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands. May rode the bus home with a genuine, breathless smile, the first time she’d been this excited in years.

The next day, May watched her neighbor, Ken Stritter, standing in his nasty dogshit strewn and mud-packed fenced-in back yard. He wore blue, print boxer shorts, a t-shirt, and a pair of sandals with his beer belly hanging out. Stritter aimed his Crossman 1077, CO2 Air Rifle toward the power and cable lines which ran along the single light rail tracks they installed last year. May peered at the disgusting man through her kitchen window.

Bap! The CO2 rifle smacked feathers off one of the two big ravens on the power cable.

The gunshot caused the ravens to flutter and take flight, raising their gurgling croak to a shrill alarm, “Aaarrng!” and blood dripped from the wing of the targeted raven as it flew. And other ravens joined them – four ravens total now – May’s four ravens.

She wrapped her housecoat good and opened her kitchen door. She was going to put an end to this. She clutched her housecoat at her bosom with one hand and held to her railing with her left. She negotiated the steps sideways down from her porch. Her black curly hair mixed with gray bounced in front of her eyes as she stepped down.

The rain left her wooden steps slick, as usual. She meant to repaint them last summer. The white paint had peeled off the ten steps down to the yard. Her house was set high off the slope atop her walk-in basement. The front of the house set at ground-level.

This neighborhood in Seattle was old, rotting from the outside-in. Like everything in this wet, like me. She stepped sideways down the steps.

May counted three dead ravens in his backyard.

“Don’t you come down here, bitching at me, May!” Stritter said as he aimed at the big black birds circling. “If you didn’t feed these damned things, they wouldn’t come around.”

May paused and glared, her large dark eyes narrowed. “You need to go put some fucking pants on!”

Stritter snatched down his gun and faced her. He jerked down the front of his boxers and showed his junk to May and grinned. His rotted front teeth were nasty.

She snorted. “Seen longer cocks on the rats in my basement!” Nasty man! She took a couple more steps down. “You need to stop shooting my ravens! In my yard, I’ll feed whatever the fuck I want to feed, nasty man!”

“And in my yard, I’ll shoot whatever the fuck I want to shoot, dirty lezzie!”

Stritter turned, shouldered his pellet rifle, and searched the sky for ravens.

“Like fuck, you will,” May said as she reached the bottom step.

The ravens lit on the roof of the house on the other side of the tracks. Stritter smiled as he aimed.

May picked up a stone the size of her fist. She backed up two steps where she could clear the chainlink fence separating the back yards. May was a high school softball pitcher. She pushed the rock out and went into her wind-up, wheeling her arm around and releasing the stone at her knee. It flew like an arrow and popped Stritter upside his head. He wheeled his arms and peddled his feet in the slick mud and landed on his back. May laughed.

“Aaarrng! Aaarrng! Aaarrng! Aaarrng!” The ravens cheered and flapped their wings. Stritter scrambled, getting up, and holding his bleeding temple and went inside.

Before sunset, she put small pieces of round steak out on the rail of her back porch. She sat at her kitchen table until the black shadows passed by her backdoor and window. Something was different this time. Two birds flew together in a tight ball – a frantic flapping of black feathers.

She jumped up and went to the kitchen window and peered sideways across the porch. They brought her something big, and May waited for them to eat their food and return to their wire before she went to see. Easing the door open, she looked up to the powerline, and the four ravens sat watching her. The alpha bent forward, anxious to see her reaction. She eased the door open and stepped out.

It was a pistol.

High on the electricity line, the alpha nodded toward his mate on his left. The raven held out her wounded wing. The alpha raven growled to get May’s attention. He looked at the gun and pointed his head next door to Stritter’s place with a lift of his beak.

“You want me to wing him,” she said. “An eye for an eye.”

The alpha leaned forward and nodded toward the dead ravens and looked back at her. The alpha frowned and trilled a low growl, “Arrrr.” She studied the look in his eyes, the furrowing of his brow.

May gripped the rail and leaned. “You want me to kill that fucker, Stritter!”

They all stood tall, flapping and yelling, “Aaarrng! Aaarrng! Aaarrng!”

The alpha raven flew to the roof of the house across the tracks. He took a few steps down the far slope and flew back to the wire with an object in his beak. It was another uncut diamond, but this one was huge. He leaned forward on the power line, turning his head right and left, making sure she got a good look at it. He nodded his head toward Stritter’s house. His message was clear.

If you do him, then you get this.

The alpha’s crew all stared at him, and he nodded. They raised their wings and flew.

May craned her neck, watching them disappear – with her diamond.

“That’s a shitload of fucking money,” she whispered to herself.

She looked down at the pistol at her feet. “Let me get a close look at what you brought.” She picked it up and ducked inside her kitchen and shut the door behind her. She knew what killing Stritter meant. Life would be running and hiding, looking over her shoulder. May scoffed.

“What have I got going on in this house?” Loneliness, bad memories. A shitload of fucking money will buy a new life. She could live well for a while. May looked around and stopped at an old framed portrait of herself and her former love, Patsy, now long gone. Fuck it. I hear Vanuatu is nice. Hotels and bungalows by the beach. Swarms of pussy in bikinis. No extradition.

She got on the phone and made reservations.

She bought a wig and some new clothes and packed up what little she would take. She busied herself, tying off loose ends while she watched Stritter for a couple of days. He lived alone after his wife came to her senses and left him. She took off years back and got away to who the fuck cares. Good for her.

May watched out her living room window on her knees on her sofa with a small pair of binos. She wanted to catch him in the basement by the washer and dryer, where most of the noise was. But the nasty fuck didn’t do laundry much. Then a thought hit her, and she crawled off the sofa.

Early that evening, she went through the gate in his chainlink fence at the side of his house near his front porch. She trotted to the shadows and stopped. May set the paper bag on the ground and pulled out the contents. It was a disposable yellow gown worn in the hospital emergency departments, plus disposable booties, plus hair covering, which she set on the ground by the bag. She finished dressing and put on nitrile hospital gloves. The final piece was the surgical mask over her nose and mouth. Squatting, she took a rock from her sack and broke out all the glass on his basement window.

Bap!

“Ahhh!” She let out a muffled yell, grabbed her shoulder, and spun.

Stritter shot her with his air rifle, and it stung! She looked at her hand, and there was blood. She planned to surprise him, but there he stood at the corner of the house in his boxers, aiming the little rifle.

“What the fuck you doing breaking in here!” Stritter said.

She reached to the back of her blue jeans, and quick as a cat, brought around the .45 AutoMag. She gripped the big automatic handgun with both hands.

BOOM! The recoil brought the pistol up above her face. The power and recoil surprised her, and she almost dropped it, and she missed.

Stritter, dumbfounded, fell on his ass. He started crab-walking backward, as fast as he could go, around the corner and toward the back porch. She marched toward him, pointing the gun. He scrambled, pivoted, and got to his feet, picking up the Crossman 1077 rifle. As he reached the back porch, he fired it with one-handed over his back, and the pellet smacked May in the chest.

“Fuck!” She staggered back a step.

Stritter stumbled into his backdoor with May right behind him, and he got to his feet as he crossed his kitchen. She stopped and leveled the .45. May snarled, curling her lip.

BOOM!

Her ears rang, as the big gun resounded impossibly loud in the small kitchen. Stritter slammed against the refrigerator, and blood splattered across the fridge and all over the wall. Stritter grimaced with his left arm across his chest, still holding the Crossman in his right, then slid around and ran down the hall. She followed him, and he turned and aimed.

Bap!

The pellet knocked her out briefly, and when she came to on the floor, Stritter stood against the wall. He held his chest with his left hand leaning against the wall, the rifle in his right. He labored to breathe, and blood trickled out the corner of his mouth.

Blood ran down May’s face into her eyes, and she huffed for breath inside the surgical mask. He had shot her in the forehead. Damn! He was an excellent fucking shot with that thing! She moved and fell over onto something hard, striking her cheek. It was her gun. She felt around until her left hand found it.

Stritter, using the wall to hold him up, and leaving a long smear of blood, raised his foot and stomped her hand on the gun.

“AAAH!”

She looked up at his wide-open boxer shorts above her, and his rotten teeth. He grinned. The hallway tilted. Her head wobbled. She grinned back.

She shot her free right hand up the leg of his boxer shorts, grabbed his nut sack, and yanked hard.

The look of alarm on his face was priceless. The pain registered, and his knee came up. His foot lifted off her hand, and she got her gun. May rolled over on her back and aimed at his face.

BOOM!

Stritter’s head jerked, and his brains sprayed over the wall and ceiling.

Later, at her back-porch steps, May carried the sack full of bloody hospital surgical protective gear in one hand and the gun in the other. May struggled to pull herself up the steps holding onto the rails to her porch.

The front of her t-shirt had her blood mixed with Stritter’s spray, and the light shirt she had worn, she put in the sack too bloody to wear. May bled from her shoulder, chest, and forehead from that damned pellet gun.

Luckily, the small caliber pellet didn’t penetrate her skull, but she figured she had a concussion.

Once at the porch, she knelt and set the gun down on the landing and turned to the power lines running along the track. The setting sun behind the ravens on the wire streaked with hues of orange and blue. She nodded at the alpha raven. I killed him.

The alpha nodded back, eyeing her wounds.

She opened the door to her kitchen and sighed. May didn’t care about diamonds right now; she needed a stiff drink, a hot bath, and the first aid kit.

The next morning they took the gun was gone away the same way they brought it. In its place, the ravens left an uncut diamond, the huge one the alpha raven showed her yesterday. And beside it, they left an uncut ruby. She gathered the jewels and turned the ruby in her hand. “From her, his wounded mate,” May said.

She got busy. “Shouldn’t cash any more jewels local.” As she checked the flight itinerary, she daydreamed – Vanuatu, palm trees, beach blankets, and sand up the ass. She smiled at the thought.

She would sell the jewels in San Francisco and wire the money to the Caymans. Can’t land in Fiji or Vanuatu with too much cash. She made a checklist of shit to do. Passport, check. She updated it to cross the border to Vancouver. No time for a phony one, yet. I need an international burner phone.

She knew they would catch up to her at some point. The cops were like hound dogs. But she could live well for a long time, in the meantime. Movement out her window told her ravens had landed on the wire.

May stepped out onto the porch and locked eyes with the alpha. She saluted him. The alpha bird raised his beak, stopped, and raised his wing in a proud salute. He dropped it, signaled to his comrades, and they all flew away. Somehow, they knew this was goodbye.