Stranger Will (10 page)

Quiet
, the figure says
. Every move moves forever
.

William stops. He hears the sounds of other screams, other voices, come to his ears. He knows their histories, their lives, their origins and knows that he will not be the end of them.

Forever?
William says.
Every move moves
…

“…forever,” the figure says. “I know, I taught you that. Now get up,” and William does because he finally recognizes this heavy thunder of Mrs. Rose’s voice. He falls into the rhythm of shoveled dirt as the blood painted on his arms and his face tightens under the open air.

He wakes to the world passing outside a car window. “You dead?” Mrs. Rose says.

“Maybe,” William says. He places this car by the familiar smell of strained fan-belt rubber. Mrs. Rose’s car.

“Car wreck,” she says. “Pretty bad one, too,” then points to a shovel in the back seat. “Relatively speaking.”

His sits up as best his weak bones will let him. His arm, his legs, his clothes, all browned by dirt and blood. It’s on his face, in his mouth. He can taste it on his tongue. But all of him works. “Julie,” he says. “Where’s Julie?”

Mrs. Rose ignores the question. “You’ll have a hard time walking. Sorry about your side. I had to drag you. You’re heavier than you look.”

William looks down, feels the slick meat under shorn skin, rubbed raw and scored by tiny cuts.

“I didn’t want you walking,” Mrs. Rose says. “But I didn’t want you exposed either. The weather ’s been terrible today.”

“Where’s Julie?” William repeats. He attempts to rise from the seat to take in more of the outside surroundings, but a seatbelt holds him back.

“We’re almost there,” Mrs. Rose says.

They ride the remainder in silence, neither of the two expressing or striving for comfort. Rain drips through cracks in the roof, splashing to a puddle at William’s feet. His body throbs. Mrs. Rose drums the steering wheel. The beat builds as the car slows. When stopped, William looks up to see his van driven into a ditch.

“We’ve got to be quick,” Mrs. Rose says. “This road gets busy soon.”

William limps from the car to the twisted metal wad, still clinking and wheezing as hot fittings shrink under the cool rain. He turns back to Mrs. Rose, hoping that she can offer something in the form of motivation. William isn’t sure what to expect. He wants encouragement but knows by her still-twitching thumbs and anxious eyes darting everywhere around them that given Julie’s condition, encouragement in his interest is not something she is willing to offer. “Hurry,” she says.

The driver door hangs open, a wing, like a bird struggling for flight. The passenger door remains closed, dented, but William notices Julie’s soft brown hair through its cracked glass.

Mrs. Rose stops him from reaching for the door. “Don’t change anything,” she says. “This is going to be hard enough to explain.”

William steps around to the front windshield and presses his face against the glass, fogged breath disturbing his view. Julie appears asleep and calm despite broken arms and swollen joints. The chemical stink overpowers, but William leans closer. He walks to the driver ’s door and crawls under the steering wheel to reach her.

Mrs. Rose stabs William in the leg with a stick. “Just let her be.”

William wants to feel for a pulse, to grab his cold fiancée and shake her by the shoulders until she wakes. He wants to find words to justify her life. He wants to cry and embrace a mutual friend with intentions to rise above these unfortunate events and move on but always remember the way Julie made him whole. But he can’t. He’s never touched the limp body of someone so close.

This doesn’t feel the way he thinks it should. When he slides out from the van he turns to Mrs. Rose and asks, his voice cracking, “Is she dead?”

“Oh, no.” She coughs. “She’s still alive, just barely. She is breathing, but I can’t get her awake. Someone will call an ambulance.” She shoves the stick through the cracked passenger window and pokes at Julie’s stomach. “Congratulations, by the way.”

Following the stick down to where it touches his unconscious fiancée William notices for the first time her deflated gut. It looks nothing like he had imagined it would. He believed in a pelvis returned to normal, an exact replica of a shape before the baby. But the reality is a balloon robbed of its air.

The child is gone
, he tells himself reaching deep to find that feeling he thought would accompany the situation. He digs for peace, but all he can find is a version of indifference. He’s forced himself for so long to see the world without his child that when it actually happens he has only two things left to wonder about: one, its current location…

He asks Mrs. Rose like he would the time from a stranger. “So where’s the baby?”

“We’ll visit her next,” she says.

…and two, its sex: “her?” He lets the sound of it fall from his mouth. She has a pronoun, a title that means more than ‘baby’.

“I’m so proud, William.”

“What did you do with her?”

“I buried her.” She returns to prodding Julie’s gut with the stick. Stirring her flesh has the same thick gurgle as mud. “I honestly didn’t think you’d follow through.” She looks up to William, points down with her stick, “God, this is nasty.”

“Follow through?”

“All I can talk most people into is adoption.” She stirs to the body again, “
Listen
to this.”

“I didn’t want to kill the baby.”

“But you did. There is no such thing as finality. There is no such thing as a pinnacle and you’ve made the ultimate acknowledgement of this.” She drops the stick. It remains imbedded in Julie’s gut, toggling with the wind.

Finality
, William thinks and the blurry figure comes to mind, unable, though, to decide whether he is remembering or conceiving. “I feel different,” he says.

She steps back, pulls the stick from Julie’s gut. “You are.” She walks back to her hidden car, swinging her stick through the air. Raindrops explode against the wood, never to touch the earth whole.

“I don’t want to move,” he yells across the wet grass.

“Don’t start this. One car drives by and all of this is for nothing.” She slams the door and turns the key in a single seamless move. The car grunts but fails to start. “Get up,” she yells as she lowers a window. “We need to go,” and she turns the key again.

William looks back to the misshapen face of his fiancée pressed against the glass. “Shouldn’t we bring Julie?”

“It’s a goddamn ambulance, William. She will be fine.”

He stands from within the wreckage. Pieces of his van cover the road and in his mind, they stretch for miles, beyond even the horizon.

“We’ve got to go now,” she says, this time as close to yelling as he has ever heard. “You don’t want to be here when the ambulance comes.”

“Why?” William says. “We could claim hit and run.”

“Questions. Questions you can’t answer yet because I haven’t told you what to say.” She commands the engine alive, and it brings her to William, stopping inches from his knees. “I’m serious.” She tells him to get in, so he does.

They ride in silence. No radio. No talking. She drives back to where William woke up, and as she turns into the clearing, she leans over to William. “You’ve made some leaps,” she says.

She pulls onto a path, beaten down to tire tracks, navigating the dense woods with a concerning precision. When branches smack against the glass William expects shattering. But never. The windshield moves the branches, and William watches, through the rearview mirror, leaves vibrate until still.

She stops the car and directs William’s gaze along with hers to the single tree in the middle of the clearing.

“So you asked,” she says stepping out of the car. William follows.

Like a flooded graveyard the bodies of birds float from everywhere along stiff currents. A few carcasses bob and twist, obeying rocks and sticks along the makeshift streams. This was a paradise to him once, a place he came to hunt for messages, the birthplace of understanding. So many times he’s belonged to this clearing, taking from it what it let him take, and now he steps from a leaking car and watches so many birds float through his legs.

The bones of forgotten birds dance along the waterway, and he wonders if they believe in their single path, if they believe that the world was built only to carry them away. William empties his pockets and kneels to rip every message from every bird that he can. So many they almost mean nothing.

“Just step over them.” Mrs. Rose’s voice bellows in the open. “They’ll be there tomorrow. They’re not going anywhere.” She stands at the tree and waves William over. “Here,” she says.

He limps toward her. Mrs. Rose looks down to a fresh soup of mud.

“…well, most of her,” she says.

He slides a single foot to the muddy patch and shifts his weight. The pull starts slow but quickens as William panics. He is knee-deep into the earth before finally reaching out to Mrs. Rose for help. She grabs him and pulls.

“You did some work with the back of that gun,” she says sliding mud and a nearby pile of saturated grass onto the disturbed grave. She packs it with her foot like it was once something perfect.

“It was the van,” William says.

“Oh come now. Humility is a desperate killer.”

William leans against the tree, lifts his muddy leg. He grabs his shin and slides the mud from his pants, palming the results. When he throws the mess, it slaps hard against the bark of the tree.

“Talk,” Mrs. Rose says. “About?”

“You’ve got to be feeling something.”

He is, but he dodges remorse for fear of what verbalizing it might do. All of it seems just a logical truth, anyway. He settles and dives deep for something else.

“The law, I suppose.”

“Good. That’s a rational fear.”

And one that never occurred to him until letting it out. He thinks of police, prisons, pointing fingers, no audience for his explanations, no one who will listen. He breathes heavy. Air isn’t abundant enough to keep his lungs satisfied. His throat collapses.

“Calm down,” Mrs. Rose says. “We’ll be fine.”

She walks away, her feet driving through the mud. Each step echoes with penetration and suction. The sound loses momentum as the distance grows. It isn’t until this moment, when William is able to look freely over the clearing as it soaks up rain and mixes mud, that he notices an unusual absence of

grass. Hardly a single blade.

“You know, people like the two of us…” Mrs. Rose says from long steps away, her face dark and her clothes hanging dead over sharp joints. She looks taped together, random pieces fitted without concern to the way the world might react, confident only in that it would. “…they aren’t as uncommon as you might think.”

Chapter Eleven

William leans against the passenger glass. He steals moments of rest between potholes and divots.

“You were a father,” Mrs. Rose says.

The tires, pulling moisture from the road, hum like his father would when trying to calm Tiny William, who might have hurt his toe, who might have lost a fight, who might have disobeyed his father ’s strict instruction. Metal snaps and spits under the hood the way his father ’s lumbering Ford Courier did, a sound- track to William’s youth. Mrs. Rose drums against the steering wheel like F. Lowson would against his own dashboard during the drives they often took to destinations William remembers now only by smell. Mildewed pond water. Blackened wood bonfires in flowered pastures. Salt and copper prison cells.

Everything William had forgotten about his own father comes back.

Tiny William Lowson stretched his right eye open with masking tape. The strips frame his eyeball. He wants to see the world how his father sees it.

A teacher expresses concern to his father over the phone, but his father insists in her overreaction.

“Won’t you talk with me about it?” the teacher says. “We are talking,” F. Lowson says.

“I mean in person.” “No.”

F. Lowson lays the phone on the counter and turns to Tiny William, his own gaze limping in a gesture of unwanted confrontation. “That was Mrs. Blank,” he exhales. “Empty your pockets.”

Tiny William guts his jeans, skins them down to the lint. His father surveys the emptied contents, warns the boy of lying, and demands that he empty his mouth as well. Tiny William opens and offers a tiny ball of salivated beige tape upon his tongue.

“You know not to keep things from me. I was punished for hiding things, once,” he points to his own right eye, shorn of its eyelid.

“I know a lot of fathers without kids, they will be so happy to know you,” Mrs. Rose says and turns her attention to the consol buttons. She is busy with knobs near the radio dial when red and blue lights suddenly appear and approach from behind. William peeks over his shoulder and sinks into his seat. “Relax,” Mrs. Rose says.

William sits straight. He rips a thick nail from his thumb and considers it with his tongue before spitting it to the floor.

The police car swerves around them and continues beyond the horizon.

“So many ways exist…” Mrs. Rose clears her throat, beings again. “So many ways exist to feel about any given situation. To dwindle down the options, to force a structure on emotional reaction is to believe in a single end. So many worlds exist. So many minds are at work this very moment making difficult decisions, enduring the pain, and living the results. About this situation, about your daughter under mud, you will choose to recognize the enduring good. You will choose to build your world in accordance only to that which we both know is truth: we drift, but not toward anything.”

William shakes his head. Slowly, contemplating, until finally he manages words. “I didn’t want to kill her.”

“But you did.” Mrs. Rose hits the dashboard three times before the radio fades in. The speakers emit more static than music. More noise than message.

“I didn’t have to kill my child,” William says. “And Julie.” “True. But you are still moving, and how else could you truly realize the possibility of moving beyond? A new life is just a new

death, William. You of all people should know this. You make a living by cleaning up exactly what I am talking about.”