Stranger Will (11 page)

The rain slows to rinse; Mrs. Rose stops her windshield wipers. William watches the drops stretch up the glass and disappear above his head.

He opens his mouth to disagree. He takes in a lung full of air and molds it to mean something angry, something Mrs. Rose will hear and understand as a truth deeper than her own, but as he opens, Mrs. Rose interrupts and tells him to remember his own father. “You were born because your parents believed in something that doesn’t exist. They believed in the end,” she says. “Perfection.”

F. Lowson was a small man, much smaller than would be necessary to detain an escaping convict, much less control a group of them, but he speaks of his position as a prison security guard with great conviction. Though he’d come home each night, tired and weary, his right eye dried to dusty rubber, he managed nightly lessons for his boy.

“Hell, boy,” rubbing at his naked eye, filling the socket with drops of liquid from a tiny bottle. “Saw a guy stabbed with his own toothbrush today. Right through his throat,” and Tiny William would listen, taking it all in. “Fine by me. That fucker was nothing, anyway.”

William swallowed his father ’s stories. The eyelid, his father says, was punishment, ripped from his face when he was young, “about your age,” he’d say year after year after year. But he was born with the defect. “If anything,” William’s mother told him, “it was pre-punishment, just a sort of an inborn charge against him because God knew he’d be bad.”

“The problem with perfection,” Mrs. Rose says, and William is back in the car, the rain still falling up, “is that it must be based on a single model. Who has the right to decide what the end is?

Why not accept that there is no end and exist accordingly?” She is driving with only glances to the road between sentences. Cars honk. “People change and grow but not toward something. We influence people, William, but only to show that we can really do nothing. How else would they know if we didn’t show them?”

Prison paid for their house. If it weren’t for criminals, the Lowsons would brush their teeth with rigor mortis squirrel legs and gargle in soup kitchen bathrooms. Tiny William understood the nobility of his father ’s occupation, which is why he wanted so badly to mimic it. After the call from his teacher, Tiny William falls to his bed, pulls a hidden roll of tape from under his pillow, and presses fresh strips to his face. His right eye stretched open like his dad. “Shut the fuck up, worthless childfucker,” he says to himself, his bedroom window posed as steel bars securing an outdoor prison cell.

With the tape off, he’s one of those childfuckers, those murderers, those thieves. “I’ll shut the fuck up when I want to shut the fuck up,” he tells his reflection in the glass.

These arguments end always in Tiny William adopting the criminal persona with intentions of crafting viscous shanks from aborted accumulatea. He filled the crevasses of his room with these items, pinning them under dirty clothes and blankets.

When his father gave haircuts, Tiny William would rescue each cluster from the trash. He kept all of his hair in the corner nearest his bed.

William would cut his toenails and fingernails every other day just to have them. William lived with the consistent sting of a shorn nail sliced too close to the skin. The moment the pain stopped, he’d cut again. These trimmings he kept at the furthest corner of his room, placing them low on the hierarchy because of their being easily attainable.

Under his pillow he kept outside collections, stuff unavailable from his father ’s house. Tea bags, miniature shampoo and lotion bottles, sample bars of soap, single serving condiments, all the building blocks of improvised prison weapons. Toys, really. Just a boy’s imagination left to worship his father.

Tiny William would spend hours counting, organizing, displaying, melding, tying, knotting, balling, taping, cutting. His mind followed a strict pattern: listen for Dad, make a weapon, listen for Dad, hide a weapon, listen for Dad…

When it ended, Tiny William left his searched room with a bruise and open cuts he had been talked into believing he deserved.

Tiny William stopped asking for Christmas gifts. He just waited and accepted anything as the way it was supposed to be.

Mrs. Rose hits the dashboard again. The static drops for a moment but returns even harder. “Damn,” she says. “You ever been taught something? Been told lies?”

William mumbles a word like ‘yes’ but it comes out as only breath.

“Every day, I’m sure,” she says.

The night of the bedroom search F. Lowson calls Tiny William out into the backyard. He tells him to bring a lighter from the dining room table. Tiny William brings cigarettes too, hoping the gesture might count for something. From the porch, his father is only a silhouette pressed against a falling sun, setting but blazing still, struggling to make itself known for those final moments. When Tiny William gets close enough to his father to touch his hand, he notices the pile, a small mound, meaning nothing until stepping close enough to see blue and white mayonnaise wrappers. He sees hair, plastic bottles, paper wrappers, everything that was him.

“You couldn’t trust your father,” F. Lowson says, grabbing the lighter from Tiny William’s hand. He offers the cigarettes, but this father denies them. “Might want to back up a little.”

He gives the lighter its small flame and within two blinks the entire pile glows.

“Tomorrow,” he says, his face flashing to the sharp flames peaking in front of him, “tomorrow I’ll show you where all of this,” he points to the melting pile, “will take you.”

“Teaching,” Mrs. Rose says. “Lies. These are just forms of control. What we do—you, I, the other was-parents—we guide. We show people exactly what you now know…” and a long honk from a large van curtained behind the rain cuts her speech and pushes her back into her lane. She seems to forget her thought.

The next morning Tiny William wakes up with handcuffs dangling against his neck and a gun trigger dusting his left eyelash. The rest of F. Lowson’s uniform wraps his angry body tight, the whole package being darker than Tiny William remembers it ever being before, all the way to a scuffed and dulled name badge.

“Get in the car,” he says. They ride to the prison in silence. No radio. No talking. Only the steady whistle of his father ’s breath filling the space between them. They arrive. “Get out,” he says and steps down himself, dripping saline into his naked eye as he leads Tiny William to a set of enormous metal doors.

Everything smells like salt and metal inside the prison. They sink deep, past the free-roaming personnel, past guards with guns and uniforms, through to the men trapped inside cells. These men are still. They move only their eyes, matching the sway of F. Lowson’s keys dangling from his belt alongside the gun and handcuffs. Time kept by ticking eyes.

They sink deeper, past the airborne voices of dying inmates; unfamiliar words against which F. Lowson guards his son’s ears. The prisoners thin in size and number as they descend deeper. They pass rooms fronted by steel doors instead of bars. His father pushes on until even the echoes succumb to silence. They are as alone as F. Lowson wants them to be.

The father stops at the end of a long hallway. He points to the last of the steel doors. “Behind that door is the first man to keep things from his father.”

Tiny William sinks.

“Do you want to see him?”

Without allowing a response, F. Lowson lifts his son and pushes his eyes to the small sliding window at the top of the door.

The man lays dead. He lies curled as tight as a human skeleton would allow, pressed to the back wall. Tiny. Non- intrusive. He is a spider, dead with the reflex to reduce itself to as little a burden as possible.

Then, F. Lowson takes his gun from its holster. He slams the butt hard against the door. The sound brings the man inside alive. Tiny William always knew his father to have a magic trigger.

“He doesn’t move much anymore,” the father says. “Probably close to dead, this guy. The last thing he’ll see is one of those walls.”

The prison is a home of blind reality. And this truth only gains strength as they drip further down the hallway. F. Lowson pours into his son a little more fear with every doorway.

“Behind that door is the guy who invented lotion.” They descend further. “The man in there, they call him Shampoo.”

Item by item F. Lowson disposes of what Tiny William had for so long cherished as a tribute to his father.

“That guy in there doesn’t like toothpicks. Says they get dirty and starting wrapping them up like you like,” he says. “Bad idea. Made the germs grow faster, actually. Like a greenhouse.”

“Sorry,” Mrs. Rose says. “Fucking drivers out here. They don’t know how it’s done,” and she sits a moment, appearing to regain the lost thought. “What does every parent want, William?”

He shrugs.

“A better life for its offspring. And what does that take?” He shrugs.

“Control. Maybe a bit of luck, but mostly control. We show people what you now know, that control is an ineffective concept, because there is no pinnacle. But,” she says and William looks up. “Everyone needs a point of reference. Would you have believed any of this with a child? Would you even be listening if that
second chance
was still alive?”

William breathes. He thinks of what he would have taught his child should she still be breathing. What would he have said when she came home from school with failing grades? What would he have suggested she do when, with tears in her eyes, she complained that a friend at school was mean to her and how would he define ‘mean’? When his daughter came home with an empty purse, face full of blood, and a claim of rape would he blame someone or would he use the event as a way to show that the world keeps going.

William remembers words from Mrs. Rose, spoken months ago when they first met at the clearing:
Fatherhood means believing in a world greater than possibility
. At the time, he only wanted to escape the legal repercussions of shooting her birds. Now the words mean everything. “No,” he says to Mrs. Rose. “No because if she were alive right now I would only be worrying about what I should do next.”

“
Should
,” Mrs. Rose says. “Good word.”

The rain slows.

“You are going to make a great addition,” she says to William. “You are going to give a lot of children their reference points.”

William nods.

“All those feelings right now, the twisting and churning— that’s just simple remorse,” Mrs. Rose says. “You’ll get over that, I promise.”

She hits the dashboard a final time, cracking it, ending the static and the music both. She yells out and brings her hand close to her face. When she turns it out William sees a small cut and blood dripping down her palm. She glances down to William’s bandaged hand, a wound he had nearly forgotten himself, smiles and says, “Twins.”

William offers a smile in return.

Chapter Twelve

A man stands facing William’s front door, swatting mud from a gray suit, the fabric as dismal and wet as the unfolding sky. His badge glints in the stillborn sun as he turns to Mrs. Rose’s car, the lumbering auto cracking gravel beneath balding tires.

The man’s cheeks drape around a forfeited smile. William freezes, a reaction Mrs. Rose dismisses with a confident grin. “These guys will hang around for a while,” she says. “As long as you don’t say something stupid, he has nothing on you.”

She says that all he needs to know is that he never had a child. The man keeps a stern face and waves his arm in a giant arch over his head. He says something inaudible. When Mrs. Rose steps from the car William follows, obedient and cautious.

The man gives his name and nods toward his badge. “I’ve got some questions.”

William sweats, hard breaths and acid rising in his throat. He brings his chewed hangnail to his mouth and says, “Come in,” as best he can with his tongue wrapped about the muddy finger.

The cold house swells to the group’s sudden heat. They sit across from each other, William in a small chair and the officer on the couch. Mrs. Rose busies herself around the house, pacing open doorways in the hall, turning a casual eye to the two men for the few feet she has between rooms. She walks each distance with various simulated burdens: a stack of bath towels, an armload of blankets, the same towels, three, four times, and peeking over each pile she studies the living room conversation. “You didn’t ask,” the officer says, “but it might calm your anxiety to know that your wife isn’t dead. Close, but not yet.” Mrs. Rose cuts through the hallway with her fists balled under her eyes and her faced stretched to sad. “Cry,” she mouths silently from behind the officer.

William tries. He thinks of Julie, disfigured and filled with tubes. He tries to imagine a life without her, or at best, a life with her rearranged form. He thinks of her reduced to routine maintenance—sponge baths, pills every two hours after a refilled feeding tube, hourly rotations to ward off bed sores, whatever will force tears, but all he can do is bite the inside of his cheek until his eyes water and say, “fiancée, actually.”

The officer nods and scribbles into a yellow-papered notepad. “I’ll bet the last few months have been exciting for you,” he says. “What do you mean?” William looks past the officer ’s shoulder for guidance. “Your baby.”

Mrs. Rose mimes pregnancy. She makes Xs with her fingers and shakes her head.

William stands. “You want something to drink? I need a drink.”

“No. I’m good. About your child—”

“I could use something. I’m going to get something,” and he leaves the room, rubbing his neck, still grinding his cheek between his teeth. When he gets to the kitchen Mrs. Rose pulls him to her mouth and whispers dissatisfaction. She pushes him back into the living room.

“Your drink?” the officer says.

William tongues the cut in his cheek. “Faucet’s broken.”

The officer surveys the living room. William watches him pause at framed cross-stitchings, the needles stabbed into the recliner arm laced still with thread, and photos of Julie and him smiling the way he suddenly realizes they never do without the motivation of a camera. Finally, the officer comes back to William. “The child.” No subtlety.