Stranger Will (23 page)

“No,” William says. “It isn’t.”

“Sure it is. You know that kid won’t go anywhere.” “He could.”

“Says you.” She reaches for the radio, fuzz cracking the speakers. Everything is static and rain. Lyrics fall through the air, fading in, fading out, momentarily permanent. William watches telephone poles come, go, predictable because one needs two others needs two others needs two others until A and B are connected. The commentator on the radio speaks of the rising price of soybeans and the current land stress for corn-based bio fuels driving it. The voice fades in, fades out. William counts the poles, thirty-three, thirty-four, each falling into context, a part only of what surrounds it. He acknowledges their passing while dreaming of a safe Eugene.

Scenario number one: Eugene is waiting at the bench.

As common as this situation has become William anticipates a smooth grab. What has become a morning ritual for both of them will continue for another day, and as it does their harmo- nious exit will provoke no confrontation, no opposition, no reaction at all. Because a reaction is not an option for balance, and what, if not balance, have those children been taught to fight for.

Shelia breaks his smile. She lowers the volume of the static and shakes her head like she knows. “Mrs. Rose figures you’ll try something,” she says. “She isn’t allowing Eugene to talk to you anymore.”

“Why would Eugene even want to talk to me? If Mrs. Rose is doing anything right he shouldn’t want anything to do with a stranger.”

“And that,” a thread of hair caught in the crack of the window, bouncing as the wind attacks, “is just the type of behavior that holds him back.”

Scenario number two: Eugene is protected.

Eugene being protected means that Eugene has been accepted. He has been found strong enough to continue with Mrs. Rose’s training, which would mean that his attempts to save the boy would be unnecessary. Eugene: a member of the continuum. William reaches for the radio knob.

Shelia smacks his hand away. She lowers the volume again and pulls her caught hair from the window. “The thing is,” she says, “Eugene isn’t your call. Everything had been decided since before you two threw bloody raccoons to each other, since before you met Mrs. Rose, since before even I met Mrs. Rose. This is a lifelong project. She’s had failures. She’s learned from them. We all have. Eugene is just one of them.”

“Why does Mrs. Rose get to decide?”

“She doesn’t. The context around her does.”

And to that William cannot say a thing. He lights a cigarette, feels it flow through his skin and hates the way it makes him so docile. He hates that Mrs. Rose orbits the impossible. He hates that she has so many with her to guide evolution toward an intangible. He hates—sucking back smoke into his lungs to his muscles through his pores—that Mrs. Rose has led everyone to believe that direction is motivated by context. He hates most that he still believes this to be true. He could save Eugene—save his life—but safety is contextual. Who has he saved? From what? If there is danger, there is perfection and one thing William will never agree with is perfection. Mrs. Rose is his teacher and his opponent. His rival, his mentor.

But he can pull Eugene away. Let him live to come to these conclusions himself. “It may not be a chemical-coated tree,” he says, “but one day he will realize he is alive.”

“But he isn’t,” Shelia says as soft static still pours into the car. “He loves Mrs. Rose. He respects her. If she tells him to fear you, he will.”

Scenario number three: Eugene will never listen to William again.

Loose dirt and gravel fades into pavement fades into a world filled with the chatter of children. William steps from the car and counts every child but Eugene. He walks toward the bench, his bandaged hand against his chest and throbbing as his pulse conquers the sedation of smoke.

“How’s the hand?” Shelia says. William continues searching.

“With the cayenne pepper packed in there it shouldn’t get too infected. Unless, it already was. I’m no doctor.”

He approaches the fence, its diamond links molding the fabric and skin of his body. He pushes further in, feeling his legs separate into shapes. “Eugene,” he yells and not a single head turns. Not a single curiosity among the crowd, wondering what that strange voice is unlike all the others. “Eugene,” he yells again, but the children keep him outside their world.

He forces a toe into a link, his shoelaces dripping with mud. “Don’t,” Shelia says from the car. “One foot inside and she
has
to call the police.”

“She owns the police.” Two toes in and he lifts his body over the top. Scanning from the higher perch, he spots Eugene drawing in sand underneath a silver slide. “Eugene,” he yells again and throws his feet to the other side. Every child remains occupied.

Gears shift into drive and Shelia is down the road, gone with the radio static.

He dodges the children, slides past their hopscotch and jump ropes, their bleeding knees and basketball, until he is standing in Eugene’s sun.

“Hey,” he says, knees cracking as he squats. “I missed you over there.”

The boy builds a castle with dry sand. Every tower crumbles to a pile as he removes his hands.

“What have you learned today?”

The child turns his back and starts a second pile of sand. “You’ve got to listen to me, Eugene. I need you to do something.”

“Mrs. Rose says I can’t talk to you. She says I can’t let you take me.”

“She says a lot of things,” and as William sits the boy stands. “Stay here.”

“I’m not supposed to. I can’t talk to strangers anymore. I’m supposed to tell Mrs. Rose.” Stepping away, he crushes the collapsed towers deeper into the earth.

“You can’t.” He grabs the boy with his bandaged hand. The grip numbs his arm.

“Let go.” The entire playground heeds the plea and stops for a silence broken only by Eugene’s shirt as it stretches to his elbow, to his wrist, to his hand. It rips until left hanging like the worn gauze.

William demands he stop. He takes off after the boy, chasing him through children frozen by this resistance. They watch as spectators privy to a movement, to a new mode of thinking, and William would use the opportunity to plant a seed but Eugene runs faster than a boy his age might let on. “She’s going to hurt you,” he yells, but the boy only runs faster.

The children toss words like “evil” and “kidnapper,” verbatim from television news programs and lesson plans, the impact of their meaning lost without the independent mind to place it. The claims grow through the crowd to chants and calls. Eugene darts behind Mike the Story Man’s tree, follows the fence, and passes the bench, each landmark’s history hollowed by the chase. He wants to save this child, give him a life outside the playground, but the boy keeps running.

“If you don’t let me help you…”
“Kid-nap-per. Kid-nap-per.”
“…Mrs. Rose is going to…”
“Stran-ger. Stran-ger.”

“…kill you, Eugene. She doesn’t love you…”

“E-vil. E-vil.”

“…She hates you. She—” but he stops. Eugene cowers in a corner, curled as deep as he can shrink. William wheezes and lights a cigarette with his hand, so damaged each subtle move cracks the skin. “I know she has told you not to listen to me. I know she says I am a bad man, but you’ve got to come with me. You have to leave this place,” and before he can say more, Mrs. Rose stands over the boy, opening for a hug.

“Thank you,” the boy says.

“It’s okay, dear.” She kisses his cheeks and wipes her lips on her sleeve. “I’ll take you away from him.” Eugene digs himself into her shoulder. The children have calmed their chants, a few still spread words throughout, but mostly they watch. “Now run inside,” she says squeezing him tight before releasing. He trips over untied shoelaces, never turning back. She turns to the children as the recess bell rings. “All of you.”

When all that is left of the playground is William, Mrs. Rose, and the stale air, she grabs him by the bandaged hand and admits that she should have noticed the bond earlier. “It is a school after all,” she says. “We are all learning. I met you with a dead bird in your hand, a gun in the other, and a child on the way about whom you spoke with convincing animosity. I’ve made the mistake before. I shouldn’t have made it again.”

“What is a mistake?” William says ripping his hand from hers. “Without finality there is no right and wrong.” He holds back a tensed bicep and a flexed fist.

“A failure
would
change a simple method into gospel.” She waves to children who then compete with each other for the rights of its reception. “I should have let you go after the wreck. I should have given you a pigeon, kept you at a distance, but you seemed to want it. You took the wreck pretty well.”

William rubs his dying muscle. “Frank is right.”

“Frank,” she says savoring the name on her tongue, “is an infection. But he will be cured.”

“I’m not a stranger anymore,” he says, the afternoon air turning sticky.

“You never were.” She dabs sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. “You are a bum. Probably always were. At least a child will fear a stranger. A bum, they are taught only to pity.”

“I’ll take pity,” William says. “Pity enlightens a person. Fear controls them.”

“We are all controlled, William.”

“Until we realize it,” and he turns in the slow heat, his foot spinning dust into the thick air behind him. “Your words.”

“I’m not sure Shelia’s fire was a suitable test,” Mrs. Rose says, just loud enough to cross the short distance between them. “You know, there are some people in this town, wayward types, who don’t like the idea of adults sitting around watching kids all day. They would have fun with a guy like you.”

“About that.”

“Brackenwood isn’t a place people move to. Brackenwood is a place that people like us end up.”

William parts the heat for the fence. Children press against windows, watching Mrs. Rose allow her defunct pupil to escape into a world of his own, born as a child without the heavy skin of his parents. He will come back for Eugene. He will warn Frank. He will continue this ripple with another. But tonight the hospital beckons.

Chapter Twenty-Six

William wakes to a fist digging deep enough into his skull that he can smell the lustrium of its wedding band. The hardest part, he discovers, about a punch to the face is accepting the inevitability of pain.

Physically, he can manage the pain. The fists and the boots and even the ground weren’t enough to make him scream. Lying there, face up on the cold concrete, waiting for someone to notice hurts the most.

“The world has enough people like you,” one guy shouted just before cracking William’s nose with his elbow.

“Won’t be staring at kids now, will you?” another said, raking William’s eyes with yellowed fingernails.

“Sicko,” the fattest one repeated like a mantra. He shook his head before each punch. “Sicko.”

These men he didn’t know, these men who didn’t know him, they came to him angry at his violation of a world they love. And they acted. They stopped him on this innocent street, on this innocent night and contaminated both with his blood.

William massaged two loose teeth and tongued the stretched spaces in his gums. His body fell numb, the fists and feet only massaged exhausted muscle.

These men, they beat him down to soup and their only concern was whether or not the world had enough “homeless dirtbags.” They “work hard to keep people like you out of this town,” they said and fell into the redundancy of their struggle with emptied lungs, tired, punches motivated only by gravity as the men pant and wipe sweat from their foreheads.

“Predator.” “Garbage.”

And as they walk away, he swears the name Mrs. Rose floats from their escaping silhouettes.

William hears an ambulance nearby, its sound pitched high, waving loud then soft. But he soon accepts that the siren might just be his dying ears.

He has fought for the community family, knowing today as he received fists and feet into soft muscle, that fighting means conquering and nothing is worth conquering.
Extinction is a privilege
.

The siren fades away until only the drone of car tires and stressed engines occupy the space around him. He settles into the hum, watching mist perforate golden streetlamp light.

Then steam rises from a hood, a car idling. He pulls tight what muscles still work and primes himself for the impact of business left unfinished.

“You dead?” a voice asks. It comes out hollow and distant but near enough to rouse hope.

“Maybe.” The syllables fall over his swollen tongue.

“I’ll get you to a hospital,” and arms woven with hair like yarn take William by the waist and heft him over a giant shoulder.

Before the dome light fades away, and the engine roars, William takes in the shape of the man, his hands like paws, his thighs like tree trunks. William can tell the car moves only because his forehead throbs against inertia. He’d ask questions if his voice didn’t encourage the pain.

“Got you just in time,” the animal says, his voice sounding filtered through gravel, and offers a wink. “Didn’t think I’d find you.”

William tries to return the gesture, but the car warmth has swollen his eyes shut. “William,” he says, but his lips can’t touch at the “M”.

“Good to meet you,” the man says. “Now, what do I look like?” He displays a profile and flexes his cheeks, flashing as streetlamps pass behind him.

“Maybe a Sam,” blood or drool streams from William’s mouth, “or a Gregory.”

“Neither,” he says returning to the road.

Streetlamps pass outside the window. Each one William takes as beautiful. He takes in all he can—benches, trashcans, sleeping animals. Then everything is gone. He sits back and rests until the first hint of another at the furthest point of the horizon lifts him again. Each moment of light, he sneaks a glance to the driver and blames the man’s circus attire on his own swollen face, distrusting what his injuries let him see.

“Vince,” the animal says finally. “I perform under Hippo, though.”

The warmth relaxes his jaw. “That was my next guess,” William smiles until it hurts.