“You mean in there?” he asked.
“Or right here on the floor if you’d like.” She laughed and something rattled in her chest.
Wendell’s back was now pressed up against his door, but his face was now calm, curious.
“I don’t blame you for being a little cautious,” she continued, “especially with some old lady you just met, and especially after last night’s festivities.”
“Yeah, that.”
Her face darkened. “That Drake. A little friendly advice: don’t let him back in. He was in your place earlier. I saw him through my peep hole. It’s not wise.”
“Yeah, he’s—”
“More than you think, Wendell. Trust me. He used to have his own goon squad, and he was their Pied Piper. They’d lace up those Doc Martens boots of theirs and stomp over anything that got in their way. Most of them are in prison for one thing or another. Drake, no stranger to prison cells in the past, has stayed out recently. Don’t know how he’s managed that. Now he’s—”
“Crazy.”
“He’s a true believer. His religion is dark.”
“You said I shouldn’t let him keep me up at night.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t dangerous.”
“How dangerous?”
“Just avoid him. He hurts people. He’ll hurt you. Some people, like Drake, are just born enjoying pain.”
But I stopped him, Wendell thought.
“You just showed up here Wendell,” Agatha said. “You probably missed the commotion outside.”
“Yeah, I heard. Somebody got killed.”
“Now I’m not the police, and I’m no lawyer. And God help me if I’m a gossip, but with what happened down there and what I know lives in this building, well…”
“You think he did it?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“So he’s crazy,” Wendell said.
“Beneath that skull of his is more than just a hamster on a wheel. There’s something truly—” And she stopped herself, putting her hands up in front of her. “Well now, I’m going on and on.”
“I know,” Wendell said, “I’ll steer clear.”
She nodded, seeing Wendell’s anxiety return. “And if the landlord pokes around, I’ll tell him Diane gave me a spare key, and all’s well in there.”
“Thanks.”
“She seemed like a hard woman, your mom. Quiet, small, but tense. Hard. Is that right?”
“Yeah, hard.”
“When life gives us lemons,” Agatha said, “some of us just let the lemons rot.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Well, I don’t want to take any more of your time.” They both stood in the hall and stared at each other.
“So, nobody else?” Wendell asked.
“What?”
“Nobody else at my door. Just that landlord?”
“You expecting someone?”
“No, I just— But you haven’t seen anyone else?”
“Nope.” She saw his shoulders relax, and then added, “You’re not here just to put her things in order, are you?”
“What?”
“You’re not here just for that, for her estate or something like that.”
“No, I’m just—”
“I’ve dealt with runaways for years, Wendell. You’re a runner. What you’re running from, I haven’t the foggiest. But the truth is, no one can keep on running forever. At some point you have to stop.”
Or they catch you.
“Then what about you?” he asked.
“No, I can just spot them.”
“I’ll be okay.” He brought his gloved hands together in front of him, tapping the fingertips together.
“So then, now you know that a quick knock will get you through the door and sitting at my dinner table,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” She smiled one last time, and entered her apartment and closed the door.
And with her went the aroma of bread. Wendell turned and opened his door.
DAY FIVE
PLEASE DON’T SEE ME.
The bright sunshine indicated another day. A hammer and a few remaining nails sat in the middle of the floor. She had finished nailing the windows shut late the previous night, but the drapes weren’t yet sewn together. And over it all was a sense of anticipation, of anxiety.
No, dread.
Wendell the child stood at the center of the kitchen. The wooden table…she had left the box there for weeks, the box that once held the birthday cake. An aunt he had never seen before eventually tossed it, after the ants tried claiming it as their own. Weeks ago, months.
A year? Could it have been a year? It all felt so fresh.
He looked around. No one there. He was alone.
With her.
Turned around, away from him. Sitting in the rocking chair in her black dress and faux pearl necklace, the one his father had given her. She was facing the corner next to the bathroom door, motionless.
No, he wouldn’t approach her. He would just make his way towards the apartment door and leave without attracting her attention.
Please don’t see me, he thought.
But she did. She saw him, or could feel him move, like she was reading his thoughts.
“Wendell…” Deep, rusty sounding, like a car exhaust pipe.
Keep quiet, he told himself, walking on his toes towards the door.
“So you’re leaving too,” she said.
“No, I’m just—”
“You’re leaving too.”
She stood up, and Wendell froze. Still, she kept staring into the corner.
“It’s all labor, Wendell. Always has been.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Told your daddy it would happen. Eventually, it would happen. Again and again I said it, but my word’s nothing. Never was to him.” She turned towards him, robotically. The lace edges of her dress barely moved.
No, not dread. Worse.
Her face was smooth, like egg shell, wiped of all the premature aging lines that had dug themselves in over the years. And there was neither sneer nor smile, but a jagged tear of a mouth on a papier-mâché face. It was blank, empty, a moving mask.
“There are spirits about, Wendell. I can feel them. Demons.” She looked around. “Are you with them?” She looked at him. “My own baby, my own little boy, you’re with them. Just another one of them.”
“Please, Mom, just don’t...” Her stare hurt like frost. There was something in her hand, but he couldn’t make it out.
She stepped towards him. “I was right Wendell.” Three steps towards him. “You and your daddy both, with them. So you go, you just go tell that lazy waste of a man that I was right.”
Tell him? He’s gone.
Wendell stepped back, but she was quick, and in four more steps she had him up against the wall.
“Just go after him Wendell, and you tell him I was right.”
She paused. Then she began to raise her arm. Wendell gasped and closed his eyes.
His eyes opened and he was alone. He was crouching with his hands holding his feet, his whole frame balanced on the edge of the tub, like some sorry gargoyle. Wendell didn’t remember entering the bathroom. He didn’t even remember waking up and getting out of the bed. He sat on the tub’s edge and stretched his legs, both sore and stiff. He could have been crouched there for hours. He stood up, unsure of his balance, and left the bathroom. Outside, his bedroom door was open, but he didn’t remember entering it either. He stuck his head in, seeing the piles of boxes, papers, and assorted medicines and esoterica. A few steps in from the door a box containing manila folders and papers had been overturned, the papers fanned out over the floor like a magician’s card trick. He turned and went into the kitchen, feeling on the top of the refrigerator for the apartment key and the gun, both still sitting where he had left them the day before.
She doesn’t feel dead.
In the corner the rocking chair sat empty, which brought an odd sense of relief.<
br />
“She’s dead,” he said. Thankfully, he thought.
The previous day had ended quickly, with Wendell still restless from hunger. But night had brought no relief. For hours, before finally falling asleep, Wendell paced the apartment, wondering if his hunger even felt human anymore. He slept, and dreamt of furry bodies and flying things. He awoke in a sweat, expecting someone to be standing over him. But the bedroom was empty. He soon fell asleep again and dreamt of meat, raw, slabs from the flanks of some unknown animal. He had been chasing it through a forest in the dream, finally catching up to it, hearing only his footfalls on the leaves, then feeling the animal’s fur in his hands, and his lips pulling back. An airplane passing low over the apartment building woke him abruptly, his mouth full of saliva. He leaned over the bed and spat onto the floor, turning to notice more hair on his pillow. Finally sleep came again, deep and thick, but soon penetrated by his mother, and that dream, that waking vision, whatever it was.
“Just a dream,” Wendell said, “nothing but a dream.”
Your head’s going, he thought, your mind’s just melting away in that skull of yours.
“Just gotta get out of here.”
Wendell stopped, looked over at the rocking chair, half expecting to see it move on its own.
“Probably don’t have much time.”
Stay, and he would give them time to find him. Stay, and soon he might be physically incapable of leaving. Stay, and he would stay for good.
He walked around the kitchen, kicking his feet out in front of him to wake them up. He arched his back, heard it crack, then reached for his sneakers on the floor next to the kitchen table. He sat down, pulled them on, and reached for the gloves and coat in a pile on the table. Wendell slipped them on and slipped himself into the coat, stepped to the refrigerator to grab the key and the pistol—dropping one in each coat pocket—and walked to the front door.
Just tear that rocking chair up first, he thought, just in case. Break it into kindling and pile it up on her bed and set it all on fire.
It was tempting, but time was short. Wendell turned back to the door.
Opening it, he almost tripped over the package in the hallway in front of his door. It was wrapped in a brown grocery bag, held closed with a line of twine. On top was a piece of stationery folded in half. Wendell stuck his head out into the hallway, looked both ways, and reached down for the note. Unfolding it, he saw words written in a script measured and small:
Trust old ladies, Wendell. We bake well. —Agatha.
He looked up at her closed door, wondering if she was watching, then back down at the note. He folded it again and put it in his pocket next to the gun and reached down for the package, which he brought back into the apartment and set on the kitchen table. He knew it from its smell.
“Bread.”
He had smelled it the day before, in the hallway. He pulled at the twine, which slipped out of its knot, and unfolded the paper. The inside of the paper was already moist, with little flecks of the still warm bread pulling off and sticking to it. Before he could register what kind it was and before his mind could assent to eating, his hands were in it and chunks were in his mouth. Apple bread. At least half was gone before Wendell realized that he hadn’t yet chewed, but had only swallowed the chunks. He tried to slow his pace, attempting to savor it, knowing that this subtle and human glimpse into heaven would quickly pass. In only minutes it was gone, and Wendell was licking the remnants off of his wool gloves. But for the moment, his inhuman hunger subsided.
“Trust old ladies,” he said, licking his lips and smiling. She’s safe, he thought. As far as anyone can be safe. He turned and looked out his front door—which he had foolishly left open in his haste—to her door across the hall. Good to know, he thought. But now it’s time. There was quite the walk ahead of him. With a little luck, some agreeable weather, and now with something in his stomach, he could leave the city. His trail would grow cold. And any memory of his mother would die as the city skyline faded behind him.
Still, he couldn’t help but look back to the closed door across the hall. Was she watching? Was this kind of thing just common neighborliness? Perhaps she was sitting on her couch, hands folded patiently, waiting for him to knock. But the speculation ended as his headache returned, and in earnest, so Wendell left the apartment, closed and locked the door, and hoped he would never see it again.
The rain gave up early that morning, with the sun burning a hole through the storm clouds. Before long, the whole city shimmered in thick and sickly heat waves. The sun gleamed on windows and car chrome and brought with it the kind of heat that weighted pedestrians down to the sidewalks. Cars and trucks swam through the humidity. Wendell walked out the apartment’s front doors and felt the fever of a new day, giving the street a pulse, making it throb like a headache. Like his headache, his forehead now a slowly drummed timpani. He had hoped—silly, he knew—that it would all look different with a new day, with the rain washing the streets clean. But it was all the same, the same garbage in the storm drains, the same cracked sidewalk slabs, the same craterous potholes. All of it furthered his resolve to look on that street for the last time, and to think only of the outside: hills, farmhouses, and hole-in-the-wall diners with sassy waitresses like in the movies. There would be empty spaces, Wendell thought, and trees, where I can disappear. He reached the sidewalk and turned left, not wanting to see again the alley and whatever was left of the red stains.
Steam rushed out of a sidewalk vent as if some beast below had just exhaled. Wendell’s headache grew, and he began to sweat. He glanced around, catching some curious eyes, but nothing seeming too threatening.
“Just another homeless guy,” he muttered, quickening his pace, “nothing to see here.”
From what he had seen, a trench coat and wool gloves on a hot day didn’t register as too bizarre for most people. As a child he remembered the White Woman of Towson Street, one street north. She would wear a white mask, cover her head in a shower cap and a hooded white sweatshirt, and wrap her arms and legs in toilet paper, with thick white mittens and moon boots, all to protect against radiation from Chernobyl. And there was old Mr. Pickett, who would line his clothes with tin foil and attach antennae to his shopping cart, which he dutifully pushed to the local grocer every morning, railing against any clerk who dared pass his milk over the barcode scanner. With types like them preceding, and with the assortment of oddities presently walking the streets, Wendell thought he could avoid focus and fade to the background. People would see him, and then see past him, which was all that he wanted. That, and rain. The heat promised to melt him into the sidewalk.
Two blocks up, he turned left, wondering where exactly to go, but sure that any direction that put distance between him and the apartment building would work. He passed a bus station, crowded with a line of city buses like mechanical dinosaurs, growling and steaming. Each had a different location written out on digital signs over their giant windshields, all locations outside of the city. People ran up the stairs to each bus, and one by one, the dinosaurs groaned and spat and lurched forward, slowly rolling away. Wendell watched them all leave, then continued on to the end of the block. Traffic grew, and clouds began to roll in.
His hands went to his forehead, cradling it as he clenched his teeth. He must have been running a fever, which was causing the headache. He stopped at the corner, feeling a touch of vertigo as the road and buildings seemed to tilt and move while he stood still. He shook his head, clearing the vertigo but exacerbating the headache.
Clench any tighter and I’ll crack my teeth, Wendell thought. The pain above his eyes was now unrelenting. Before he passed out on the sidewalk he knew he had to stop, so he hopped across the street when the traffic broke, ducked into an alley, and walked into the shadows. Panting, he leaned against a dumpster. No relief.
And no privacy. Someone else was there.
Wendell’s hands were slick with sweat, so he pulled the wool gloves off and stuffed them into his coa
t pockets. He squinted, looking into the darkness. Then he felt the eyes staring back at him. He heard a shuffle, then a grunt, or a growl, something both human and canine. Wendell moved his eyes without moving his head, catching motion in his periphery. It was a black shape in a blue shadow. He turned his head, and lost the sound of the street when he saw the man.
“Ain’t this nice,” the black shape said.
Wendell didn’t think he had been followed, but this couldn’t have been coincidence.
“Ain’t this just like Christmas,” said the voice, now familiar. It chuckled.
Wendell stepped down the alley, and saw him, again, or at least, saw his shape, which was unmistakable. Drake sat against the opposite wall a few paces from Wendell. In his hands were fistfuls of his flyers. The shadows hid his features but Wendell could still feel his face.
“Told ya,” Drake said.
Wendell stared at him. “Told me what?”
“That we’d be seeing each other again.” The shadow stood up.
“You following me?”
“Nope. Just one of life’s surprises.”
“You followed me.”
“We were meant to meet. It’s how the world wants it.” Drake pushed off from the wall and came to full height, and in the shadow he looked much bigger than before. “It’s beautiful, ain’t it?”
“Look man, I’m just trying to get out of here.”
“Nah, you’ll be staying.”
“What?”
“This is where things get a little awkward.”
“You came at me. I just defended myself. I never wanted trouble.” Wendell’s head pounded. He reached out for the wall to fight off more vertigo.
“Awkward, you know?” Drake stepped forward out of the shadow. “Like, who moves first, you or me? So I’ll just give it to you. Your move Mr. Wendell.” He opened his hands and the flyers fell to the ground. Above, clouds quickly rolled in.
“Look, Drake, just let me walk out and—”
“Just walk away. It’s that easy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“After what you did to me yesterday.”
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 10