Stranger Will (19 page)

William’s house is ash now because of a belief in priority. Everything he owned sits now as a soft puddle because Mrs. Rose had doubts that he was ever meant to survive the effects of his life prior. His home is just another layer of earth because an elementary school principal who believes in perfection thought his existence expendable. William considers taking his continued life as a sign, but he won’t. He thinks of the bird’s beating heart as testament to it having a reason to be alive, but lets the thought drift quickly away.

The bird jumps around on the floor in short hops, moving its head in relentless search. William blows smoke into its face and wonders if a destination is its sole motivation. Is point B the only goal or does it take time for the points in between? Is Philip’s house point A or is it just one of the many dots along the way?

Pulling slowly on his cigarette William watches the bird as it pecks at the floor. He feels so much greater than the bird, so much bigger, so much more. Eventually the animal finds a small bit of food tucked into the loops of the carpet. It stabs at the area for a few moments then pulls back its head before swallowing. What it ate William will never know, but he is intrigued by the fact that it did so without knowing anything of the food’s origin. It could have been a bread crumb fallen months ago or a recently dropped grain of rice. It could have been sprinkled with cinnamon or made of glass. The bird didn’t care. And not because, William believes, that it was too hungry to care, but because it hadn’t the capacity to care. It eats because it eats. That’s what it does. That’s what it has always done. Its ancestors. Its decedents.

With the ash growing limp, William can’t help but entertain deviance. He watches the bird bounce for more food, pecking at shadows. When the bird looms close and the cigarette hangs over its head, William taps. The ash explodes over the bird’s head, causing only a small jump. No screaming. Not even a slight chirp.

For a full minute, the bird pecks at the ashes. It rolls through them, bathing in the heat. William taps another flurry a few feet away. The bird catches only a glimpse before hopping over to inspect the fresh heat.

He taps again. The bird follows.

Soon the animal is following his every move. He leans to the left; the bird hops with him. He stands; the bird positions itself low, ready for any sudden movement.

He continues, swinging his hand and flaunting the heat above, running the bird to near exhaustion, until the cigarette falls stale. It’s been a long time since William has let a cigarette extinguish itself, and longer since he’s had no remorse about it.

He puts the cigarette to his mouth and pulls out a lighter. Two attempts, and a tall orange flame lifts the pigeon to its feet. He kills the heat and watches the bird fall. He brings it back and immediately the bird regains its enchantment. To its young mind, confusion might be a life or death dichotomy.
Choice—a pressurized hell. To die or to find heat, and only one way is truly right. Instinctual.

William takes the TR-32 in one hand and flicks the lighter with the other. He combines the two, coating the bird. The smell hits William first. He watches the flame grow from a single wing to full suit. He watches the mobile ball of heat panic the only way a young mind knows how to panic. It runs. It dodges table legs and lamps with surprising dexterity, hitting a wall only once before it finally falls. The flame drags and pushes along the floor, making little noise outside the cracking polyester in the carpet. When the bird falls, William stomps out the flame with his shoe and steps back, taking in the final result of its panic.

William’s shoe stinks already, but he masks the offense with more air freshener. The real goal for today is not cleaning cooked bird from his feet but convincing himself that all of this is truly as good as it makes him feel. For the rest of the day he will float. He breathes pure confidence in what he has done and for a single instant believes that when Shelia comes home to find her bird puzzled into the grooves of his shoe she might understand the intent behind it and sympathize.

But the logistics of covering up everything hit hard and quick. First, he scrapes the carpet and his shoes, scorching the underside of his fingernails. Then, he takes the mess out the back door and throws it as far as he can. Darkness obscures a landing, and the rain hits too hard to hear the body touch ground.

He leaves the stain. It kills him at first to ignore the mess, but the further he steps away the easier it becomes.

Chapter Twenty

At the playground the next morning, everything swells and drips. The sun breaks through with a mild heat, and the night’s slimy damp slickens every surface. The swing set obeys a soft breeze. The slides are all just fixtures lacking immediate reason.

William takes a seat at the bench and sets his bag of animal bodies on the ground. The dried fur saturates with water from a puddle he didn’t care to spot. The mannerisms he’s been taught over the past few days mean nothing. He comes here now for Eugene. It has nothing to do with Mrs. Rose.

William imagines the boy now wondering about the bandaged children from the tree. He imagines Shelia leading Eugene around the school, filling his mind with misinformation and sermons praising Mrs. Rose as the only god worth worshiping. She tells him that those wounded children are good children and that he, for refusing to embrace the tree, is not.

She might be pulling him out of class by the arm, as is the daily routine, for his special education classes he takes in some broom closet down the hall. She might be wiping his face for him with his own shirt, reprimanding for a small dab of spaghetti sauce on his cheek. “The other children know how to eat,” she would say.

And William waits outside in the still damp drizzle because outside his home William is all Eugene might have.

His knee bounces. His breath heaves. He bites his lower lip. What bothers him is not that Eugene might be burning himself on a tree one day or that he might carve into his skin with a knife to show his devotion. What bothers him is that Shelia and Mrs. Rose have collective control leaving William to wait until everything is firmly in place before he can sneak in to break it all down.

Eugene might trip, he might fall and Shelia would tell him that only failures fall. She would pull him close to her heated nostrils and force through tight teeth that “children who don’t watch where they are going—”

She might say, “Won’t make it far.”

She might fill in this blank with “won’t last long.”

Or she might just stop; her attention pulled by a more promising student and forget whatever lesson she was about to teach.

Or “you won’t make it,” she would say and William wants to be right there to pull him away, possibly crying, possibly no feeling at all and say, “good.”

The bell rings and the children infiltrate the playground like maximum coverage is an inborn reaction. They cover sand pits and the soccer field, swings and the concrete basketball court in three frames of an instructional slideshow:

Empty. Full. Organized.

Since Mike the Story Man’s success it was no longer possible for William to stay oblivious. He sees the parts now. Though he’s known for days that these games teach survival, he sees now that these skills are not the school’s primary motive. Where once he saw a small tiff, children being as children will be, he sees now a gang initiation or extermination of the weak, not for survival but to prove dedication. Where once a group of children might play rhyming games, clapping hands, smiles and chants, they now share blood via severed fingers and cut palms.

A game of basketball drew no attention until William noticed targets and that these targets refuse to move. From three feet away a ball backed with the desire to impress slams a stoic-still head audibly hard into its shoulder. What William hears most is not a cracking or a thumping. He hears most the guttural wince from the beaten target and sees clearly the pride of endured pain.

William imagines any one of the strangers proposing a toast to this success. Getting drunk and laughing because Timmy or Maggie or Jill finally ran headfirst into a wall or went an entire day without eating.

The punishment for talking to a stranger is a second chance and noticeable scarring. The rewards are as warped as the ideologies encouraging their attainment.

Then Eugene comes running, a smile on his face, wide and eager. He yells, “William, William,” tripping over untied shoelaces, but the smile never breaks. When he finally reaches the bench, sweat dots his forehead.

“Look, William. Look,” he says and unfolds a balled piece of paper from his fist. “I wrote it.”

William takes the paper and attempts to decipher the boy’s burgeoning script. Eugene smiles wide; William encourages the feeling and admits pride. “Read it to me,” William says and returns the paper.

Eugene pulls the paper close to his face, bad eyes, and William hopes no other stranger sees the imperfection. Eugene starts, “why I love Miss Shelia,” and William’s lungs, full of proud air, collapse.

“She is nice and she is beautiful. She lets me draw pictures and color the duck.”

Stop
.

“She helps me with my work. She lets me go to the bathroom.”

Stop now
.

“She tells me when I am wrong.”

Enough
.

“She helps me.”

William snatches the paper, anger guiding the reaction. “Sorry,” he says after enduring Eugene’s fallen smile. He returns the paper, and with it, he forfeits a chance to steer the boy away from his teacher.

The boy regains his pride, but William’s attention strays. Kids gather and yell at the opposite end of the playground. Eugene begins to turn, but William pulls him back. “Tell me more of what you wrote.”

“But it’s Mrs. Rose,” he says pointing toward the swelling crowd. He rips the paper from William’s hand.

The children embrace the woman. She walks wrapped in bodies and arms, surrounded like an idol both protected and worshipped. The children compete for her ear, shouting stories to impress, to prove lessons learned by reciting state capitals and spelling words, the names of knots for field dressing wounds and every prime number through one-hundred. A few fall under the militant stomp of feet driven to keep up with her march.

The praise could be surprise, the type of shock any child might feel when a teacher is brought down from her pedestal, and made human by human rituals. Caught at the grocery store. Caught in the bathroom. Caught being anything but a deity. It could be this shock or it could be genuine love.

Oh, God. Please let it be shock,
William says to himself.

Eugene stands three long breaths away now, smothered somewhere deep inside Mrs. Rose’s congregation. William might hear bones crack and ribs snap and lungs whimper if he’d listen, but he doesn’t because behind all that pain is an engrained satisfaction, a release that comes with another ’s approval and the internal bleeding to prove it. He wills himself deaf.

William doesn’t want to fear anything, but watching this devout following, seven radial feet of concentrated praise, he can’t help but entertain a slight urge to gain higher ground. He holds his bag of animals close.

At ten feet away, Mrs. Rose turns stern and tells the children to dissipate. They do without a movement otherwise.

“Shelia tells me you killed her bird,” she says smiling—a few children still investigating the situation from nearby slides and swings.

William drops the bag to his waist. “She’s precious.”

“The bird or Shelia?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’d be lying either way.”

She leans into the fence, pushes hard against it until her stomach and legs bulb through the diamond-shaped links. Her hair stands tightly curled, forced to defy the humidity of the world, and William almost feels sorry for it the way he feels sorry for an entire world according to Mrs. Rose.

“She loved that bird.”

“Past. A fitting tense,” he says.

“That’s two you’ve taken from her,” she says. “Twice just for fun.”

“I suppose they weren’t meant to live,” and he sets his bag on the bench.

Mrs. Rose pauses for a moment, her eyes pinched. “You’re right,” she says simply and turns toward the gate at the far end of the fence. “But what I do is not fun. What I do is necessary, and nothing necessary is ever fun.”

“
Nothing
is quite the qualifier,” he says.

Mrs. Rose unlatches the gate, biting her lip through its rusty squeal. “Necessity breeds spite, William. I understand your hesitation. But eventually necessity stops needing control and everything once pushed along will flow on its own. Then we finally get to pleasure. Pleasure is what happens when things are moving smoothly. Moving in accordance to the way they need to go.”

“So you like the crowds,” William says. “The attention, the devotion.”

“It’s a valid cause,” she says skirting the accusation, standing now at his side, surveying the schoolyard with William. “They do it because if they don’t the collective mind will never mature;
our
collective mind. We will exist in a constant state of permanence.” She sits. “What, I ask you, is less pleasurable to endure than permanence?”

“Step back far enough and everything is permanent,” William says. “I’ll leave this bench, but I’ll still exist. I might lose some weight or grow a real beard but above it all I’m still just a piece of something greater. You taught me that.”

She leans over William’s lap. He can feel the architecture of her hair and smell its aerosol mortar. She pulls back with the duffle bag in her hand, leaving a muddy trail along William’s lap. He can feel the wet already pasting his pants to his thighs.

Mrs. Rose works the caught zipper free and opens the bag. “You’re the one who told me there is no such thing as finality,”

William says. “You told me that there is no such thing as point B. After losing my baby I’ve really got nothing else to believe. I’m pretty comfortable with permanence, actually. And there is no possibility of permanent perfection. As long as contexts are changing so is the perfect result.”