Stranger Will (2 page)

“Paul was a tapeworm,” she says.

“And ugly. But you can’t say I’m not better off without him.” “The comparison makes no sense,” she says.

“We needed each other, Julie.” William pulls on clean pants. “You didn’t need that thing. It was a parasite.”

“It used me and I couldn’t have imagined life without it.” “Parasite,” she reiterates starting the second stroke of an ‘E’.

“Your need was a mental thing.” “And the child?” he says. “What about the child?”

“Just a parasite, Julie,” he takes a sip of coffee, cold but he keeps his face straight. “Tapeworms, children, we could all use fewer of them.”

“Ungrateful shitheads, too” she adds.

When Julie first moved in, William’s house shifted from
his
heaven to
their
starting off point. Julie would talk about his home as though it existed only as temporary, that them living there was a way to save for something bigger. “A home we could grow into,” she had said. Now in Brackenwood they live in their second home, one Julie still refers to as a starter.

It was William who cared enough to fake optimism. It was William who pretended to care about the color of the nursery, who smiled when Julie smiled as her stomach stretched t-shirts and waistbands. And it was William who cared enough to reveal his cynicism, to admit that a child doesn’t deserve what little they can give it. Julie didn’t care.

Seven years and coffee still drips cold because a new coffee pot is not in their budget.

Julie finishes the ‘E’, snips the string and ties it with a knot nurtured by these months of dedication. She turns her work out and smiles.
Bless This Home
it says bordered with a floral pattern and what William thinks might be bunnies playing leapfrog, but he isn’t sure enough to comment.

“It’s time we call this place a home,” she says and already William conceives of places to hide the piece once he rips it from the wall. The sentiment, however, he agrees with.

He agrees that a blessing is a fair request considering the hostile nature of a life—where birth and death are the only guarantees. Faith embodies a certain level of helplessness and what if not helpless is he? He accepts that a blessing might be appropriate—he’s extinguished every other possibility for Julie’s conversion. She is a mother already, happily stitching plans into white fabric so that they can be hung, adored, and regarded as the end result of love.

Though William acknowledges the desire for a blessing, he knows the impossibility of one. He sees it every day, working the attempts free from the streets with scrub brushes and exhausted muscles. He cleans the dead from the world and what’s one more child? Just another body that someone will one day have to clean from the road.

William lights a cigarette in the living room. “It’s not going on the wall,” he says and leaves before yelling starts, slamming the door behind him. Engine heat still cracks and wheezes from his van. He climbs in and tries to clean his mind of the child.

Brackenwood is a town mortared by distance. Citizens use the word
neighbor
over
friend
. Whispers carry gossip and spilled secrets, but these neighbors rarely gather to celebrate openly. Parades and sporting events exist, but not as hyped events, instead as fodder for neglected community boards and discarded flyers. Conscious separation permeates every rigid nod, every quiet hello, like some historical founder dictated this world, and the scheme has sustained, passed from generation to generation.

The citizens embrace this seclusion, contentedly existing as dots gapped by miles of barren roads and dust and would remain isolated if not for the messenger pigeon hobbyist rings peppered throughout the county. Feathers blanket the sky during peak hours, settling to a sporadic streak mornings and nights. When William first arrived in Brackenwood, he took the birds as a sign of his potential morbid prosperity: vultures circling carrion. Soon, they became a sport for William, circling their own dead bodies.

The predictability of their flight patterns makes messenger pigeons an easy target. Not that William consciously seeks easy targets, but when something flies through an empty scope, ego steps in to pull the trigger. He studies a bird’s arc, its determined flight pattern. He squeezes enough time to set up a shot, take a few breaths. For a single moment the world moves around William and the bird. His is separate, pulled far from monetary engagements and doubt, fatigue and household concerns. All that matters is the pigeon and William and the inevitable.

William fought a childhood lisp. The terminology of speech therapists stays with him. They would call his shots
noise
—the interference along a communication channel interrupting an otherwise clear and articulated message. When parents scream at their children it creates a form of noise, the message grows bigger than the child’s willing comprehension. Beatings start. Bruises swell. Lives crumble.

Aiming at birds from a billboard fifty feet high along an unpopular highway leaving town from a desolate east side settles William the way eternal arguments with Julie can’t; those disagreements end always in a grey stalemate. From this high up the world takes on just two shades: trees and sky. The decisions are two: shoot, hesitate. The results are two: hit, miss. And the billboard, like all others, has two sides: eastbound, westbound.

The east side advertises a hand painted pro-life statement reading “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” but the “Heart” is a faded drawing. From a distance it only reads “Abortion Stops a Beating,” and the sentiment is oddly reassuring considering the life span of a bird and the length William allows it to live. The other side, pro-military, a soldier standing at attention, proud and confident. No words.

The subtle afternoon simmers to its pinnacle. He pans the treetops, pulling to sudden movements. Dust maybe. Maybe a glare caught in the chipped paint at the tip of the gun’s barrel. Maybe a bird. He pulls out a cigarette and calms. He breathes slow enough to notice a westbound pigeon. The air warms, and a breeze tempts William’s nerves as he views the world through his shotgun. Though he wouldn’t shoot without confidence, the shots do stray. He takes a chance.

Misses. The pellets die thousands of feet away, and the bird continues, unaware.

A second bird rises above the trees. It darts full seconds ahead of William’s aim but he shoots anyway; loose birdshot has no toll on his conscious. Thousands of feet away a kitchen window might break, a family pet may collapse, but this is thousands of feet away. William pulls a thick breath from his cigarette and falls for a moment into the philosophy of his shells, their origins, their ends, and the penetrated air between. But another bird crosses the first, eastbound, and William fires before thoughts get too deep. The bird drops into the clearing. He steps down the peg ladder, his shotgun strapped to his back, and he smiles, heading into the loose grip of overgrown grass and thorny weeds.

At first, he didn’t care about finding the bodies. Wild bird populations were never something William concerned himself with; assuming numbers were plentiful for an animal whose daily objectives filled a very short list: eat, fly, breed. But when William, on a whim, first found the bodies, and the messages they would never deliver—realizing they weren’t a wild breed as he had thought—it birthed an obsession: to collect and build relationships of these information snippets. Undelivered, these private little details lack consequence; they are forgotten transmissions. People aren’t dying, here. People are going on with their lives, assuming a thunderstorm trapped their bird. Assuming, at worst, a lost friend. These messages are trophies more than they are necessities.

Most of them are simple, harmless messages, brief confusions a phone call or letter via the post could clear up. Chess games are popular, bishop F2 to D5 and the like with a small postscript attached noting sports scores or questions about the health of a family member. Invitations are common around the holidays, recipes and phone numbers.

But collected among these small-talk letters there are those with more private intentions. William has found
bring three, four might not be enough
, and
alright, I suppose Jim doesn’t need to know,
and
I worry Donald may find out
, and larger the pile grows after each hunting trip. William reserves a special section for these “inside jokes” within the threads of his collection.

“It’s just a hobby,” he insists each time Julie brings the wall into one of their arguments. “Everybody’s got them.” A man named Buzz sends messages regarding the possible trade of toy trains. The details numb—serial numbers, model years, and the exact shade of crimson he needs—but the example stands. A woman named Carla Baucus speaks of her stance with God. She preaches damnation and hellfire one week, forgiveness and compassion the next. A seemingly infinite flock of pigeons dies for this cause. William’s pleading accomplishes little. Julie has her mind set about things, and helping her to see any other way is difficult.

Often the birds peak for only moments above the trees, dropping just as quickly. William assumes for food, or maybe a mate, but how much really do homing pigeons know? He wonders if future pigeon generations will learn to avoid the space for no other reason than instinct. “The Karma Debates,” an ongoing discussion William has interrupted on a few occasions, isn’t a very lively thread—two, maybe three, hobbyists send messages back and forth, arguing over the influence of one life on another on another on another and so on. Two, maybe three, hobbyists aren’t enough to warrant a definitive, “yes.”
Maybe pigeons will learn to avoid this space one day
, he thinks.
Maybe not
.

The bodies often endure weeks of ripening before William finds them. Six states of decay: intestinal bacteria to the smell of putrescine to a slippery mound of feathers and still scavengers claim sustenance. What’s left of the bird might be shredded or spread to a puddle. No wings. No head. At best, the bird is still recognizable. But the message keeps, even if feet away, consumed by mud.

He parts the overgrown grass under the billboard, hand at his gun’s breech to keep it stable. To exploit the broken safety switch now—a caught grass stem or tree branch—would mean a hard crawl home. It’s not a trek to the clearing, just a short step across the highway, but it is difficult. The brush is thick and only densens as the open clearing gets closer.

He is deep when twigs ahead of him snap. Branches sway. His gun slips under a sweaty grip.

William has met people out here: legal hunters, hikers, outdoor adventurers. They stop for a breath or a handful of bellflower blossoms or for a scent their dog is begging to find and fill the time with obligated conversation. When two strangers meet in the woods, they don’t pass by with a nod. They don’t pretend something greater lies just ahead. They smile at company and make room for a few words.

Nice gun
, they say, or scoff, and comment on the beautiful day. Either way William has to do what he can to cover a nearby pigeon—to both lovers of nature and lovers of sport a dead pigeon is a waste.

It is
, he can say safely.

Leaves rustle. A deep rumble resonates. The branches have calmed but the grass still moves—a reaction he credits to a dead wind fallen into the clearing.

“I’ve got a gun,” he yells toward the sound as he tightens his grip.

The noise continues despite his threat. William proceeds, parting branches and peering over bushes. The noise grows to growling becomes snorting, and dirt erupts from behind the front row of foliage.

A dog, buried shoulder deep in a hole, throws dirt and grass through its legs. William brings his gun to his face and considers for a moment ending the dog. He contrives excuses, claiming his fear is reason enough, or maybe the dog attacked him. If asked he’d guess a territorial thing and the dog simply exploded, teeth lashing and spit—the whole deal. He would have to cut himself, maybe clamp the dead dog’s mouth around his forearm and press, to fully convince anyone with questions. Or he could just shoot and leave. Let someone else find the body.

He steps forward, the gun still at his back, and parts a bush to get closer. A fallen branch snaps under his foot. The animal pulls from the hole. Something swings from its mouth—a hidden bird maybe—as the dog searches for William’s scent.

“Hey boy.” William whistles.

The dog bounces his nose through the air, frozen otherwise, so William creeps closer.

“It’s okay.” He thrusts out a fist, shakes it, snaps his fingers, enticing the dog to limp forward. “I’ve got something for you.”

Bald spots materialize—large patches of fur, shorn likely by the dog’s own aged teeth, as they pick and dig for ticks. The animal hobbles close, sniffing William’s hand and the ground around his feet. It never locks sight because, as William discovers, the dog’s blind eyes—opaque and blue as concord grapes—haven’t the power. William pulls his hand from his gun and reaches to pet the animal’s trembling head.

The blind dog snaps, twice before latching on. William pulls, bringing the frail mutt with him. He fumbles with his free hand, swings a few times to its skull, to its ribs, kicking at its legs and throat. He reaches for his gun but can’t situate it until he pulls hard enough from the dog’s mouth to break weak teeth free. The broken canines burrow into William’s skin leaving the roots exposed as an extension of his own bone and blood. He pulls the gun’s comb to his cheek and steadies his aim, but the dog is already gone, dying somewhere within the woods. William fires anyway, twice into the trees.

“Fucking dog.” William removes his shoe for the sock underneath. He wraps his wrist, leaving the dog’s teeth in for fear that the blood won’t stop.

The sun sinks to the horizon. William replaces his shoe and stands tall to the pink sky.
It’s been a day
, he tells himself. The sun was high when he first arrived, heavy on his shoulders. Now he watches glow disappear and wonders for a moment how time works when he visits the billboard.

He continues into the clearing, his hand swinging at his side and throbbing enough for pain but not enough for retreat. The setting sun stretches shadows along the grass. William steps over some stones, trips on others, focused not on the impediments but on what might lie just ahead of them.