Stranger Will (13 page)

Games they play seem modified to hide survival strategy. Hopscotch plays like an apocalyptic scenario, jumping from safe zone to safe zone. Jump rope sets numerical goals equivalent to the ounces of water a body needs each day to stay alive. “I can live for six days,” yells a small girl, sweating and gasping for oxygen, stepping out of a tangle of rope, “You can’t do better.” Childhood games, to them, don’t mean play. They mean everything.

William can tell the burden of Mrs. Rose’s curriculum on their minds by the way they play tag with more finely tuned sense of strategy, by the increased accuracy during long games of bombardment. These children dominate monkey bars like a training course. A girl, “Maggie” the children shout, races another child and the determination in her face lacks all the gapped-toothed smiles associated with play. Life is a mission to this child. These games are the same games William played as a kid, only focused. They are streamlined for an idealized effect.

When the bell rings again, the children herd back into the building. The tight screams and pounding feet disappear quickly and without ceremony. William doesn’t know what comes next, so he waits. He falls into shallow naps, waking as a breeze stiffens, or a bird caws. Amid the naps, he sees Julie’s face pressed against the destroyed van’s window, the school bell’s resilient echo morphing into the van’s incessant horn.

A change in the wind fully awakens William, bringing the familiar smell of a ripened maggot and fly death. It’s a death to be acknowledged with a pinched nose and a weary eye, nothing more. At first, he assumes dog; strong meat decays with a sweeter attar. But once close enough to see the tiny head and stiff ears of a cat, hairless after weeks of weathering, weeks of mites and tineid moths, he silently reprimands himself for the incorrect assumption. When William gets to within reaching distance he grabs a stick and pokes. The sun has baked the carcass to leather. He takes a foot and carries the body back to the bench with him for a more thorough examination.

With his head down to the animal, William almost collides with a man sitting at his bench. The man offers and outstretched hand and a blindingly white smile buried somewhere behind a grey beard, gnarled like the man himself appears to be.

“Frank,” he says then takes a long look at William’s fake beard, so white it glows. “You’re definitely the new guy.”

William accepts the handshake. Frank nods to William’s wrapped hand. “I like the towel. Makes you look a little deranged. That will work just fine around here,” he says. “Nice cat, too. That your thing?”

William looks to the stiff animal and starts to explain, but Frank interrupts. “Clever. Couldn’t stand the smell, myself,” he pulls a blue bag from under the bench and opens it wide for William to see. The man has filled his bag with Frisbees, deflated soccer balls, and a few mismatched tennis shoes. “I go for all the stuff those kids leave lying around. It’s not as creepy as what you got, but it gets the job done.”

William introduces himself. “You know Mrs. Rose?” “Of course. I’m not a pervert. Just another stranger.”

It sounds like a title the way he says it:
Stranger
—with a veiled mysticism. It comes out as a tactile breath, heavy, built with smoke.

“I didn’t see you earlier,” William says.

“Just got here. It’s a little early, but necessarily so. With afternoon recess the kids are at their brightest. They can tell if you try to fake something like permanence. I have to be a staple here, you know. I have to make it seem like we don’t come in shifts.”

William drops the cat into his bag. “Shifts?” he struggles with a caught zipper.

“You’ll get morning recess. Veterans like me get afternoons, and in a few months, you’ll get late recess. That’s the transition time. You’ve got to be good for afternoons. No offense, but you’re not good yet.”

From around the wall the herd starts again. In a blink, Frank fakes disorientation. His eyes glaze over and his hands begin to tremble. He leans to William, says he’d better get going, but first invites him to poker night. “Wednesday nights the strangers get together,” he says. “Play some cards. You in?”

“No, but thank you. I have to visit someone in the hospital.” “Oh yeah,” Frank says with an added slur to his speech, forcing a tiny stream of drool over his bottom lip. “I heard about that whole thing. Sorry.”

“No. It’s fine. She should be okay.”

“I hope,” he says and greases his hair with the falling spit. “Congratulations, by the way. You’ve made a wise choice. You have heart.”

William turns without responding, leaving Frank to his fake hand tremors and his forced drool. The dead cat stinks though the broken zipper. The stench, not blocked by a respirator or masked by chemicals, hovers and only thickens as he breathes deep in search of comfort.

Chapter Fourteen

The neutral hospital air incites envy. With a job like his, William fights for air this clean, but even a natural breeze, free of rotten flesh, feels contaminated when compared to air this sterile. Sitting down in the waiting room, William drags his nose through the open space and whispers, “amazing,” conscious of his display.

The waiting room television cuts news coverage between clips of emergency vehicles huddled in the center of the screen. An attractive anchor with lipstick strengthened by a primer coat, shined by a gloss coat, stares into the camera.

Philip claims a stiff chair in a corner of the waiting room and focuses on a word search he lifts from an overflowing table. William drifts close and watches Philip finish a word—
environment
—half-circled by what William says was a “grieving mother.” He points to the ink saying, “This half-circle marks the end of a happy woman.”

This is after a car ride filled with Philip’s apologies, his insistence on being rude with yesterday’s phone call—“she’s not that big,” he keeps saying. This is after Philip pulls to the side of the road upon William’s insistence, and leans close into the man’s face, teeth bathed in spit, and tells him “one more ‘sorry’ will mean your face through the windshield.” William apologized for the outburst, as sincere as he has ever been with Philip.

“And that mother,” William says still staring over Philip’s shoulder in the waiting room, “will affect both of us in ways we will never understand.”

“You don’t know that,” Philip says. The circle is split between the supposed-mother ’s blue ink and his own red. He makes laps until left with a muddy loop.

“She was just filling time,” William continues. “Searching for words, capturing them, and then a doctor comes, a doctor with a clipboard and a stethoscope and he looks deep into the mother ’s eyes—the eyes already dipped in glass—and delivers the news of her son’s death. Who would finish circling a word after that?”

“No. How will she affect us?”

“We’re talking right now aren’t we?”

The newscast anchor tosses to the ambulance behind her. The top of the screen reads “Earlier Broadcast”.

Philip drops his pen into the book’s crease before tossing it to the ground. He then turns away to thumb through a stack of magazines, wafting the scent of slick paper; celebrity gossipzines to medical journals; movie stars to lupus victims; famous singers to children with fibromyalgia.
All of them equally unimportant to a mother with a lost son.

“And things will keep moving,” William says pulling away from the TV screen. He sinks back into the waiting room chair, breathes slow, breathes loud enough to pull stares from passing nurses. “Who would finish circling a word after that,” he repeats, but Philip is already ignoring him in favor of an article about the rising trend of celebrities naming their children after fruit. William waits for more, waits for confirmation that he just might be on to something.

“Apple,” Philip says under his breath.

William often says of Philip that he cares enough to keep a person interested but too much to keep them distant. He lives in the context of other lives, never really staking one of his own. It is this mentality, and the knowledge that it will never go away without direct confrontation, that brings William back to his fiancée. “You didn’t know it was Julie,” William says. “It’s what we’ve always thought of the dead. Nobody likes to clean. Spaghetti or fat, left outside it all smells.”

Philip says to himself, “Peare,” commenting quietly on the superfluous ‘e’.

“I wasn’t really going to hit you,” William says. “A lot is happening right now, you know.” He grabs the magazine in Philip’s hand.

“You shouldn’t have said it then.” Philip reaches again to the magazine pile.

William thumbs through the stolen pages, stopping on a full- page print of a woman, her face painted with makeup. He pulls a pen from his pocket. “I wouldn’t have,” he repeats again filling the woman’s forehead with thick black eyebrows. He lowers the pen to her gut, begins to draw tiny eyes, tiny nose…

“I know,” Philip says. “I’ve just never seen you that way. I understand that everything involving Julie and the baby is tough. Just don’t let it kill you.”

William apologizes.

“Alright,” Philip submits, then looks down to William’s markings on the magazine model. “You’re ruining her.”

He’s back to the woman’s face, filling her chin with short strokes of hair. William says “impossible,” popping at the ‘o’ loud above all other sounds. “Nothing can be ruined,” and before he can finish a full set of two horns the news anchor tells the world. “Authorities are still looking for the owner of the van.” William leaves Philip to his magazine in favor of the suddenly compelling newscast.

Then the testimonials start. The citizens are “angry,” they are “dumbfounded.” One man with hair bleached so white the camera translates only a flare for his head is, “flabbergasted,” he says, wiping sweat from his chin.

They ask the same questions: “how could anybody do this? How could somebody just leave a woman here?” They shake their heads and frown. They point, cry, shield children’s eyes.
To outcast, to protest, to furrow your brow on local TV and be appalled by something you haven’t given the chance to understand doesn’t make you innocent
, William thinks.
It makes you ignorant. Blind. Content with what you have been given, not with what you have searched for
.

One woman shows compassion for the pain Julie—“the woman,” she says—must be feeling. Behind her, a blanket of pigeons rises above a horizon full of trees. She pleads for a vigil, “or something to keep her in our thoughts,” repeating the word “pain” until it loses meaning. William thinks of his wall, of a note asking about abnormal bleeding, the word “pain” repeats throughout. William has always respected the passion of this note.

The woman on screen has flaming red hair and glasses. From this moment on William will think of the Vigil Woman when he reads this note about pain. A neighbor for his neighborhood.

William peeks over to Phillip who remains enthralled by his magazine.

The next to condemn is a man with a shallow beard thicker than the hair on his head. He demands that William’s life be spent forever in jail. He spits for the camera, owing words like “murderer ” and “evil.” William remembers a small cluster of notes regarding jail time and the semantics of the word “murder.” “It isn’t killing,” one note reads. Another one mentions “the animal kingdom does the same thing with weak young.” This mustachioed man, this angry man who only wants to tell the world of an evil-not-him will forever be the face of these notes about jail time. Another neighbor. Another neighborhood.

Whether or not these connections are accurate does not concern William. Accuracy is a flimsy goal when assigning roles. Mrs. Rose once told him, as she cursed her pigeons to silence during an especially busy morning over coffee, that people use the pigeon ring to share ideas; “to grow and change and ultimately become something self-contained. When they stop sending messages, they have truly grown.” More birds fill the onscreen sky.

A woman with visible nostril hair says how sick “this horrible person’s” actions make her. A note on the wall connected to the “pain” neighborhood, talks about sickness. Sickness has nostril hair now.

A short man with earlobes like tiny fingers claims that he would kill William if given the chance. A message about a possible chance of death, hangs from the “miscellaneous” neighborhood. Death has sagging earlobes now.

The receptionist calls from behind a large desk at the end of the room. William stands and turns to see a doctor waiting for him. Before leaving, he reaches up to the TV and changes the channel.

“You want me to come?” Philip offers.

William shakes his head and walks to the doctor, his hand already outstretched, his nose again embracing the sterile air.

“I’m the brother,” William says before the doctor can ask. He smiles, thinking
calm
in large billowy letters, repeating on and on and on…

The doctor accepts William’s hand and introduces himself. Doctor…something. William has already forgotten.

“I can’t smell anything,” William offers without provocation, stealing a lungful of air. “Amazing.” He searches for a reaction, a small grin telling of the accepted confidence, a bridge to convenient, temporary friendship. “A couple years ago I found a cow in the middle of the road,” he begins. “I had my van and thought why waste the gas to get back out there, so I set up a few warning signs to avert traffic and started scrubbing. This was when I first started out. I knew a little, knew what the training taught me, but I hadn’t yet tested out real world stuff. I was scrubbing like mad. I put everything into getting that road black again. I tried gasoline. I tried just soaping it up and hoping for a rain, but nothing. I couldn’t get the shine off. Finally, I just gave up. Just threw my shit into my van and took off.”

The doctor tries to speak.

“That fucking smell. Still in my van probably. I don’t know but you’ve probably heard what it looks like now. Julie, my sister, was borrowing it at the time. I just bring it up because with all the death you probably see here it’s amazing that I can’t smell a thing. Like a blind guy who claims to see nothing—not blackness, not darkness, just
nothing
. But you and I, having been able to see all our lives, just can’t comprehend it. I’ve just never smelled
nothing
before.”