The Death of Wendell Mackey

by C. T. Westing

  “Home,” his father had said, smiling.

  Wendell turned to his mother.

  “Home,” said his mother. Her neck was rigid.

  Wendell’s bed was placed beneath a brown water stain in the ceiling. Even after being fixed by the landlord, it eventually returned. But as long as his father was there, there was a sense of warmth, even though his mother never once smiled in the apartment. At least his father had tried. But it wasn’t enough. Almost immediately, Wendell’s mother insisted that Wendell wasn’t coping.

  “If you can’t see it, then you’re not looking,” she had said.

  “He’s fine,” said his father. “We’re all coping. Nothing wrong with him.”

  But she had worn him down, and within a week Wendell was in therapy. Dr. Harbison, a kind, grandfatherly man, had an office on the edge of the city.

  “You’ve got yourself a creative little boy,” Harbison said to his mother and father, after the third or fourth visit, when they came in for an update from the doctor.

  Wendell had been sitting outside of the doctor’s office, a teddy bear and blue toy truck with a gimpy wheel unceremoniously dropped in his lap by the secretary to keep him occupied. The door had been left open a few inches, and Doctor Harbison’s voice, a thick baritone emanating from his barrel chest, easily flowed out. When the secretary had escorted Wendell out, Harbison was behind his desk, leaning back in his leather chair with his hands resting on his girth, while Wendell’s parents sat in chairs across from him.

  “Imaginative,” Harbison continued. “He tests well. And there’s nothing at all wrong with a child his age being a little reserved.”

  “Reserved?” said Diane. “That’s what you call it?”

  “Diane…”

  “No, don’t do that,” she said. “The boy’s off. Ever since the move.”

  Wendell ran the toy truck with the awkward wheel back and forth over his palm and up his forearm. He was only six, but still perceptive enough to see the obvious: due to what he had done, or hadn’t done, or what was assumed he should have been doing by his parents, this parent/doctor meeting was convened. “It’s about your feelings,” Dr. Harbison had said after their initial meeting, weeks earlier, in his office, “about what’s inside of you.” No sneezing, or stomach aches, or fever, but still something was evidently wrong with him, deep within and imperceptible to all but his parents—or his mother—and the good doctor. Even with his warm smile, and the feeble but honest attempts to relate to his young patient—with the awkward “Do you enjoy the video games?” and “Which one’s tougher, Spiderman or Batman?” take-the-edge-off questions—Wendell felt himself sitting but wanting to stand, uncomfortable at any angle. The office felt both too large and too old, with Wendell’s own presence anachronistic among the antique end tables, vintage maps and Rembrandt prints. Doctor Harbison would ask questions, and Wendell would hem and haw before answering and then would offer up more questions of his own, to which Harbison would lean back, stare at the ceiling and speak in his slow baritone syllables. After a few meetings, Dr. Harbison told him that he wanted to meet with his parents after their next session. Still unsure of all the reasons why he was there, Wendell assented, and the meeting was called.

  “Your boy is not off,” responded Harbison, “just a little different, perhaps.”

  “He’s always in his head,” said Diane, “always…quiet, thinking to himself.”

  “Like that’s a problem,” Wendell heard his father say.

  “But it’s not normal.”

  “It’s not bad,” said Harbison.

  “But not normal.”

  “He’s special,” said his father.

  “You mean retarded special?”

  “Come on, Diane. Special. To me. He’s my boy. So I don’t care—”

  “You’re making me the bad guy here. I’m not the bad guy. I’m not—”

  “But all of this was your idea. This whole therapy thing.”

  “—just wanting our son, just wanting us, to adapt,” she said, sounding like she had been carrying on a conversation with someone other than her husband or the doctor, “to take our situation, this ruinous fortune of ours—”

  “Now I’m the bad guy, right Diane?”

  “—and actually do more than just survive. That’s not asking too much, is it Doctor?”

  A long pause. This usually indicated a triumph for his mother, whose notion of argumentative victory was a rhetorical snipe that left his father holding the noose that would hang his family. Victimhood suited her, however false it was, with her autobiography being one long funeral dirge, and every word her epitaph. But covering it all was a mantle of superiority, impossible to hide as she foisted all responsibility for their situation onto her husband with ridiculous enthusiasm. So she grabbed for her ashes and sackcloth, lustfully, and prepared to devour any critics—be they familial or not—as a lioness would her prey.

  “Do you think your boy is disturbed?” Harbison asked her.

  “Well, no. Or… I mean, I think that he isn’t acting in the way—”

  “Imaginative, quiet, keeping to himself, these aren’t signs of a sick boy, but one who—”

  “An hour a week, Doctor, and not a cheap one at that, but an hour a week. And you think you know him? Better than me?”

  “Diane, take it easy.”

  “And what about you?” Another pause. Wendell knew she was staring holes into his father. “I see. It’s me, isn’t it? You’re both looking at me like it’s me. You want to know what I think the problem is? You want to know why I brought Wendell here?” She cleared her throat, and in his mind Wendell saw her straightening her jacket, flattening out wrinkles that weren’t there, whetting her lips and folding her hands into one large angry fist. And then—

  The door closed. Wendell looked up to see the secretary above him, her hand on the door.

  “I wasn’t listening.”

  “We both were,” she said. “Couldn’t help it.” She attempted an air of compassion, softening her face. “Sometimes adults say things that…don’t come out right.”

  Wendell stared at her.

  She leaned down, bringing her face closer to Wendell’s. “You seem like a normal little boy to me.” Her lips stretched up at the corners, a smile on a face not used to revealing one.

  “Thanks for the truck,” Wendell whispered. The secretary moved towards her desk, and Wendell squeezed the teddy bear in the crook of his arm.

  The therapy had continued—at times off and on when paying for the sessions became difficult—for almost eighteen months. Finally, it ended when it had all ended, when things came crashing down. The last session was on Wendell’s eighth birthday.His father was dead four hours after Wendell’s birthday cake was served. When the city had fallen asleep, and the street lights cast the shadows that hid the skulking street life, three men entered their apartment through a window and beat his father to death with a metal pipe. A struggle, a shriek, and a series of muffled thumps. Then Wendell heard only traffic. His mother had been in her bedroom, cowering with him, and he remembered her narrow fingers wrapped around the bed post, white like her bloodless face. The blinds had been open, and the moonlight streamed in, a bone white light, making her face a kabuki mask, expressionless and rigid. She should have been crying, or biting her hand to stifle a cry, or whispering to the cops on the phone, but there was nothing. She was bathed in moonlight, her face oddly smooth. And for a moment, Wendell remembered wondering if it was his mother, or someone else entirely, crouching next to him. He heard the men walking around outside of the bedroom, and then exit through the window.

  Nothing was touched. Nothing was out of place. There was no motive, and no real leads for the police to follow. Three men, in and out like mist. Wendell liked to think that they were there to steal something. Anything. Life couldn’t be that senseless.

  Every night after that was cold. Days became weeks, and months strung into years.

  “And that’s how I left it,” h
e said. Next thing I remember, he thought, I was paying rent and looking for work.

  He had to turn from the photograph. If he continued to stare, too much would flood back. He would step into the frame, and back into childhood. It would consume him. He was having enough trouble enduring the present. But memories were aphids, ready to reproduce and suck him dry of energy, spreading the damage of the past. His eyes focused on the picture of the little boy, then went fuzzy, as the boy floated in his vision, and the memories scrambled to make connections in his mind.

  The blare of a car horn brought him back.

  Food.

  The photograph was still there, hanging low on the wall. Wendell stood up straight, feeling his back crack.

  I gotta eat…

  Immediately after the murder, Wendell’s mother had made the apartment her cell, nailing windows closed and refusing trips to the laundromat. Squalor soon followed. Family members would come by from time to time to clean and help out, but it never lasted. Wendell could still see his mother’s dirty hair hanging limp and dead like the peeling wallpaper in her bedroom. The boy grew into a man, yet somehow Wendell held on to that child.

  “It’s all labor Wendell,” she once told him. “Been in labor with you for years. Since those late night cramps, when Daddy brought me to the hospital. It’s just that they never went away. I birthed something that keeps hanging on to me.”

  Mother loved her boy, with a pythonic fervor.

  “Glad she’s dead,” Wendell muttered. He closed his eyes and saw her behind his eyelids, her back to him as she rocked slowly in the rocking chair, facing the wall next to the bathroom door. He opened his eyes and she was gone. He turned back to the photograph.

  That’s strange, he thought. He thought the baseball bat had been over the other shoulder in the picture. I’m losing it. He turned and walked to the windows.

  They were still nailed shut, had stayed that way for years, but one of the faded plaid drapes had caught on a loose nail, revealing part of a yellowed window. The sun, occluded by years of grime, winked through a corner of the glass. Wendell drew closer, spat on it and rubbed with the side of his fist. Better. The sun now claimed its own dinner plate of white space on the floor. Wendell moved his hand through the beam of light, feeling its warmth and watching a mist of dust dance in it. He leaned down to look out. Outside his cocoon was a dark city on a sunny day. The afternoon was escaping towards the horizon, and a long stretch of low hills where the sun would soon bury itself rested miles beyond the city limits. Miles beyond brown and black, where things grew in unchoked air. It was far enough away to still live in fantasy, and Wendell imagined the farms and trees and neighborhoods. Out there was something beautiful. Wherever it was, he needed it. And for a moment, serenity found a place.

  A noise. The hallway. Footsteps.

  Wendell snapped his neck towards the front door.

  It was him again. The drunk. Had to be.

  “I need that gun.”

  There was a knock on a door down the hall, some muffled conversation through the door, then silence. The footsteps stopped at another door. A few knocks followed by silence. It repeated. A pause, footsteps, and again the knocks and no response. But it was getting closer. Something was said at the next door about food, or a delivery, and a door opened, followed by a curt response to the person knocking. The door slammed shut.

  The mere mention of food moved Wendell towards his door. Apprehensive, he rubbed his jaw, stopped to weigh his options, but realized that with a stomach throwing its acidic tantrums, he had no real options.

  The footsteps stopped. Wendell leaned towards the peep hole. The man outside was immense, wearing a white t-shirt too small for his frame, and with tufts of black hair—absent from his shaved head—sprouting from the neck line. His back was turned to Wendell’s apartment as he began knocking on Sister Agatha’s door across the hall. In his left hand was a stack of flyers. Next to him on the floor was a brown paper bag with the top rolled shut, a growing grease stain on its side. The door opened a crack and Wendell saw Agatha’s diminutive shape in the shadow.

  “Chinese food,” said the man. “Here’s your menu.” He handed her one of his flyers. “Read it and get a complementary egg roll.”

  Agatha took the paper, brought it close to her face—a face still hidden from the abrasive hall lights—and returned it to the man. “No thank you,” she said, with a voice neither angry nor welcoming. Tired perhaps, a bit irritated. The door closed.

  “See you next week,” said the man. He turned, and in the peep hole, Wendell saw the man’s eyes swell like lava lamp wax as he leaned towards the peep hole from the other side. Before knocking, he turned to grab the greased bag, dropping it to his side yet again.

  Egg rolls will do, Wendell thought. He would lick the bag clean, given the chance.

  The man knocked. “Chinese food. Check out the menu, get a free egg roll.” It was said with the rhythm of a cold call salesman whose opening line had been whittled down after countless rejections.

  Just think for a minute, Wendell told himself.

  And then: Nothing to think about. Just do it.

  Wendell was desperate, for both food and security, but lacking the former would eventually force him to take too many liberties with the latter. He needed to eat, and so the door needed to open.

  He opened it a crack, and the bag’s smell struck him. Chicken. No, shrimp. Desperation must have honed the senses, he thought. He remembered being allergic to shellfish, but at this point, Wendell would have shoveled live crabs into his mouth.

  The man towered above him, back lit by screaming white bulbs. He had a broad face with its features small and oddly set close together at the center, making the rest of his face a range of fleshy cheeks and chin.

  “Good for you man,” the man said. “Chinese food if—”

  “How many?”

  “What?”

  “How many can I have?”

  The man paused. “Give me ten minutes. It’ll change your life. And I’ll give you…three.”

  “How many’re in there?”

  “Okay, five. But no more. What matters is what I’ve got to say. It’s gonna change how you see things. What I’ve got here,” he said, as he waved the flyers, “this stuff’ll blow your mind, and—”

  “Fine. Just come in, quickly.” Wendell opened the door wider to let the man pass, popped his head out into the hallway to check for curious neighbors, and then shut it behind him.

  The man walked over to the wooden table and dropped the bag in the center. He peeled off one of the flyers from the stack, planted it down into the table with his thumb, and turned to Wendell.

  “So, they say I’m crazy,” the man said. “Do I look crazy?”

  Wendell kept close to the door, staring at the bag.

  “They say,” he said again. “They. You ever met the ‘they’ in they? They say all sorts of things. But it’s just another trick. Just another way for them to get you to drop your guard.” He smiled, revealing uneven yellowed teeth. He extended a hand and stepped towards Wendell. “Name’s Andy. You?”

  “It’s Wendell.” Wendell stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I’ve got the flu, so…”

  Andy’s hand dropped, but the smile stayed. “No worries,” he said.

  Both stood silently, and Wendell studied Andy’s face, his closely set eyes under the shelf of his forehead, which was smooth like a river stone. On his left forearm was a tattoo of a man, arms and legs tied to what looked to be a giant arrow, but with one of the man’s arms pulling free from its restraint. On his right forearm was tattooed the number 88 surrounded in barbed wire.

  “So what do you want?” Wendell asked.

  “You don’t waste time, do you Wendell?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well then,” Andy said, tapping at the flyer on the table. “I look crazy to you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “No matter what they say, right?” His eyes stayed on Wendell and hi
s mouth hung open slightly, like a loose hinge, like he was trying to coax a response out of Wendell, like he knew something that Wendell should have known. But seeing that Wendell wasn’t getting it, he closed his mouth and smiled between tight lips. “You know,” he continued, “they’re watching us. Right now.”

  Wendell’s throat tightened.

  No smell from the bag. No sound. No feel of the door behind him. Only those closely set eyes, ink stain eyes.

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me,” Andy said.

  How can he know? Wendell clasped both hands together in front of him, unsure of where to move next.

  “Or, I should say, they can watch us,” Andy continued. “They got unmarked cars, roaming in every city in America. Guys with ear pieces around each corner. Helicopters without insignias or tail numbers. Spy satellites miles above the earth,” and he pointed his finger up towards the ceiling, “able to read our magazines over our shoulders. Maybe able to read much more than that, if you catch my drift.” His finger turned and pointed towards his head, which he tapped lightly. “So…” He looked down at the table, fingering the words drawn into its surface by Wendell. He mouthed the words that he read, disinterested in what they could have meant. He turned back to Wendell. “So, you understand that what I’ve got to say is important. Vital even.”

  “The food, please.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He unrolled the top of the bag and stuffed his meaty paw in. He pulled out five egg rolls at once and dropped them into a pile on the table.

  Wendell took large steps from the door to the table, snatched the pile up and, oblivious to any decorum that might exist, even in their own grimy corner of civil society, began stuffing chunks of fried dough and cabbage into his mouth. The grease was heaven sent and coated his lips and chin. He sucked each finger clean, keeping the last bit of food in his mouth, savoring for as long as possible what he might never taste again.

  “It’s just that I’ve gone a while without dinner,” Wendell said, “and this is all—”