The Death of Wendell Mackey

by C. T. Westing

  “Come on…”

  “You know how things end, don’t you?” Drake said.

  Wendell stood silent.

  “How you see things,” Drake continued, “right before you die. They say your life flashes before your eyes. But we believe that at that moment, everything flashes before your eyes, your past and any future you were meant to have, all right before you. Where you were supposed to go, who you were supposed to be. Like your brain’s wishing for what it can’t have.”

  “What do you want?”

  “That’s what we think,” Drake said. “So I’m wondering what you’re seeing right now: little Wendell walking to school, or playing with his toys; and you, walking out of this city thinking you got away from me.”

  “Just take it easy man.” Wendell looked down one end of the alley, then the other. No one else was there.

  Another chuckle, almost a gurgle. “You’re not gonna leave.”

  “I just wanna get outta here.” Wendell bit his lip. “It doesn’t have to go this way—”

  “Yeah it does. And if not by me, then by one of those guys following you.”

  They’re close. I knew it.

  “What are you talking about?” Wendell’s throat tightened, and like a slate wiped clean, his headache disappeared.

  “Yeah, I saw them. Watching you. Which means they were watching me too, and I can’t have that.”

  Wendell’s hands twitched. “You saw them?”

  “They’d get you soon enough. Too bad for them.”

  “Look, you don’t want this.”

  “It’s how the world wants it,” Drake said, stepping forward again. “And it won’t hurt much.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “If only.”

  “Please…”

  “You’re not gonna leave.” And for a moment, Drake almost sounded nervous.

  “…don’t do this…”

  “It’s all good. I’ll be quick.” Drake’s features seemed to tilt to one side as his mouth grew into a sneer like cracked glass.

  You can’t stop it, Wendell thought, no matter what, you can’t stop it.

  The switch was being thrown again, that primal urge, lustful and hungry. There was tunnel vision, with Drake swelling at the center as everything around him receded; with cat’s eye clarity Wendell even saw the individual pores in the man’s bent nose. Wendell felt his arms and legs tense. The heat increased. His ears began to ring.

  “Wonder what you’re seeing right now Wendell.” Drake’s smile grew. He stepped forward.

  Wendell lunged.

  Drake’s mouth froze open.

  Black.

  Feeling wet and cool brought him back. Wendell opened his eyes, and found himself standing in the rain on the roof of an unfamiliar building. At the edge of the roof, past the three-foot brick parapet lining it, the toes of his sneakers hanging out into the air. He gasped, recoiled, and fell backwards, feeling the parapet on the backs of his knees. He sat down on it.

  Just do it.

  He leaned forward from his seat on the wall, trying to see the street below him, six stories down.

  Two steps forward, and…

  “No,” Wendell whispered.

  He leaned back again, trying to remember what had happened. It was foolish, he thought, both because he knew he couldn’t remember, and didn’t want to even if he could. He was better off that way. Still, his mind wanted to paint a picture of the corpse he was convinced he had left in the rain. Off in some dark alley, Wendell knew, there were the remains of an evil man: a pair of hands without a body; or a skull picked clean, with only two forlorn eyes poking out, something horrifying. Deserved or not, it must have been horrifying.

  Those red stains they were washing away, Wendell thought. Deep down you knew it was you, just like now, with Drake.

  The clouds had descended on the city like a shroud, fogging the tops of skyscrapers as their rain drowned the streets. From his perch, in the blue-gray light, Wendell saw people on the street two blocks away, running into doorways and huddled under umbrellas. The heat was gone, as was his headache.

  His gloves were in his pocket, wadded up around the pistol. A corner of the letter from Agatha was stuck to the sole of his sneaker, the ink now running and illegible. He pulled the pistol out from the tangle of the gloves, flipped open the cylinder and saw the butts of the six bullets, none of which had dimples on their primers, which meant none had been fired. He closed the cylinder and dropped the pistol back into his pocket. The rain ran down his hands and—

  Blood.

  He brought a hand up. “It’s nothing, it’s just…”

  Of course it’s blood.

  But was it? Something darker than the rain was dripping off his hands, but in the low light he couldn’t be sure. He put a finger in his mouth. Salt from sweat, salt from blood, he didn’t know. The rain had washed most of it away.

  It’s what monsters do, he thought, wiggling his fingers and watching the rain collect in little ponds on his palms, then drip away and fall. You can’t help what they did to you. You know you can’t stop it either. And you know it’ll happen again too.

  But next time, Wendell feared, he might not black out. He might see it all, scarring images into his brain. Worse still, he might see it all and enjoy it, and seek out more. It’s what monsters do.

  And you’ll devour any good memories too, he thought. You’ll have to. You and Dad under the beech tree, eating sandwiches, chasing each other on the lawn, all gone. It’s the shape of things to come.

  Wendell looked around, trying to recognize any of the buildings near him. An abandoned warehouse sat to his left, a parking garage with its serpentine ramp to his right. In front of him stood a nondescript hotel that had seen better days, as its top floors looked to have been rented out as office space. Wendell looked into the top floors’ windows and saw people moving to and fro among stacks of boxes and papers. It all could have been the other side of the city, or another city altogether.

  Then he saw it, no more than half a mile away: the apartment building.

  “Just turn,” he told himself, “and keep walking.” In the other direction. Leaving that sad bulk alone to rot. Melt. Back into the sidewalk, as if it had never existed. Life would pass along, and dandelions would grow where those fat men once sat. The world would forget. Wendell would forget. If he only turned and walked away.

  But she’s there. Maybe I can…

  Lightning scratched across the gray above, splitting the sky in two. The rain persisted, grew thicker.

  And below, on the street, a car stopped, its lights off. Two men exited. They wore suits, and didn’t seem to care about getting wet.

  Wendell leaned forward.

  The men turned their heads towards the roof.

  And Wendell was gone. Seeing those heads turn made him jump the parapet and run to the doorway leading down from the building’s roof. He scrambled through it out of the rain and raced down the first flight of stairs, seeing nothing but rust and rats. Each floor had a doorway—each with the door propped open, or rusted open, or simply missing a door entirely—leading into a cavernous, hollowed out space with cement columns evenly spaced like stone trees, with the tiles and electrical wires hanging from the ceiling like their dead branches. One floor down, then two, each time stopping to glance through the doorway, just in case. But there was nothing but the repetitive cold space. Wendell hit the second floor, turned to look, then turned and continued—

  —and in the double take he saw—

  No it can’t be—

  That was no column. Too short. Too thin.

  Faster. Don’t think.

  But for a split second he had to stop, digest it all, test his eyes to see if it was real. It could all be—

  No column. It moved, slightly.

  Wendell swung himself around the hand rail and shot down the stairs, holding his breath. With every floor the same, every small detail stood out. Like that man. And it was a man, standing rigid and expect
ant. With the car out front and the two men exiting it, it had to be a man, one of them. Wendell made the first floor, took a breath, and ran down a short hallway to a set of double doors, the glass in them broken and covered in ply wood. Pushing through the doors, he found himself on the other side of the building. If the men from the car were pursuing, they would be on the opposite side, slowly making their way in, which gave him enough time to dash across the empty street and put a few blocks of space between himself and the building.

  An abandoned deli passed by, then a laundromat with its skeletal denizens, and an empty lot with a sagging chain link fence. Children were laughing in the rain, throwing empty bottles into a basement window. Wendell ran, turning his head to see nothing behind him. He veered right, crossing the street again, still turning and still seeing nothing. A young boy pedaling his bike in flip flops rode past, staring dumbly at Wendell as his bike fanned puddle water up from its tires. On Wendell’s right was a ramshackle building with stacked pallets for stairs and no door; from within came screams and laughs and a stereo’s thick and abrasive music.

  After ten minutes of running, his lungs’ protest forced him to stop. Wendell had tried to travel in a wide arc, which brought him back towards the abandoned building where he began. As he approached an intersection he saw the building to his right and down only two blocks. The rain was letting up. Wendell looked right, saw the building, saw the hotel across the street, but saw no car. No men. But it couldn’t be that easy. They must have seen him, so if they had gone in pursuit, they weren’t far. Cautiously, Wendell made his way across the street, keeping his eyes trained on the building’s entrance. No one exited. He reached the other side of the street and a line of empty storefronts with windows covered in graffitied cardboard.

  “Just turn and walk away,” Wendell said. Where those geese went. That stretch of low rolling hills. Just move your damn legs, he thought, just make them move and go.

  And he almost did. Almost.

  But nothing happened. Even without seeing the apartment building, he knew it was there, waiting for him, and it was only a few minutes’ walk away. Fighting the familiar was painful, and it drew Wendell towards itself. He started walking in its direction, justifying it all as he went: he would return merely for an opportunity to dry out and then try for another escape, and for the chance at more food, or even for an opportunity to talk to her.

  Her, he thought. She’d want you to come back, wouldn’t she?

  More justification. He wasn’t sure if she would. Not if she knew the whole story. But it wasn’t like he was going to tell her the whole story.

  Wendell’s mind turned to Agatha, and he saw her sitting on her couch, hands folded, humming and smiling and waiting for him, an entirely ridiculous scenario, he knew. Still, it held something for him. Possibility, he thought. Maybe I can tell her, maybe she’ll want to hear it all…

  “Doubtful,” he said. Still, he walked.

  Wendell continued heading in the direction that he knew the apartment building to be, thinking of her couch, her kitchen, what he could only assume were warmly painted walls and tableclothed end tables. At the next street corner was a wooden door with a chipped white and black sign above, with the title The Corner Pocket Lounge painted on it, and a picture of a woman leaning on a pool cue, her hip pushed out suggestively. A man stumbled out the door into the rain, looked at Wendell quickly, pulled the gray knit cap down farther on his head, and walked across the street. He kept his eyes on the man, watching him shuffle down the sidewalk.

  Fishing into his pocket for his gloves, Wendell gingerly pulled them out while still keeping the pistol in, and put them back on. He quickened his step down the sidewalk; things began to look familiar. There was the gray brick building that was a neighborhood bank in his childhood; now it was a halal meat market. Men avoided the rain by huddling under its red awning, whose stenciled chickens and sheep were bookended by Arabic script. A block down was a pawn shop, its iron gate closed, with bars on the windows and paintings of giant diamond rings on its front face. It had once been a pizza parlor, with checkerboard napkins and an old man who used to flip the dough through the air and catch it on his fingers, the sole attraction in a ratty pizza joint for a boy like Wendell. But different neighbors couldn’t end the inexorable slouch of the neighborhood, even the city, like some stroke victim who each day was slower, weaker, closer to the ground, to the end.

  At the end of the next block he saw it, his building, as if it had grown since he left that morning. Wendell jogged across the street, headed through an alley covered in an inch of standing water, and emerged behind the apartment building. Old women like hermit crabs on the beach scuttled to and fro, picking up a scattering of empty soda cans that had blown off the back of a truck, dropping them into a grocery cart. They were too busy to bother with Wendell, now sopping wet and cold. He crossed the street to the back of the apartment building, looking up to the fire escapes, the open windows, seeing no one.

  The women cursed and shuffled about.

  Wendell hugged the brick wall and followed it to the end of the block. He didn’t see the man emerge from the same alley that Wendell had just left. The man no longer moved with a drunkard’s shuffle, and he kept his gray knit cap low on his head and his eyes on Wendell. He brought a fist up to his mouth and coughed, or spoke. His eyes didn’t move, until he shrank back into the alley.

  By then Wendell had made his way to the front of the building, jamming his fists into his coat pockets. His tongue was poking a tooth, looser than it had been the day before, as was the one next to it, and two others across from those. He winced, took one last look at the street, and entered the building.

  “Just knock,” Wendell said.

  Don’t.

  His fist came up, and then dropped back down. Then up again. He exhaled. The three knocks echoed down the hall. Wendell stood in front of her door, not sure if he wanted her to be home or not.

  Footsteps behind the door.

  Turn around, he thought. Just leave her alone.

  “Be right there Wendell,” came Agatha’s voice. More footsteps.

  Wendell stepped back, and the door opened. She leaned into the light of the hallway, smiling.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Who else would it be?” Agatha responded. “I don’t get visitors.”

  “I’m not bothering or anything, am I?”

  “No. Just everyday nun stuff. Polishing my yardstick, watching The Sound of Music, you know.” She read his confusion, and added, “It’s a joke, Wendell.”

  Wendell forced a smile.

  Agatha’s eyes said This is where you say something Wendell, and she tilted her forehead towards him, hoping to prod out the reason for his visit.

  “Yeah, I just wanted to stop by, say thanks.”

  “You’re soaked.”

  “I was out. Running errands.”

  “But you didn’t buy anything.”

  “No. Forgot my wallet.”

  “Would you like a towel? You can come in if you’d like.” She stepped to the side of the doorway and swept her arm into the apartment. It was dark inside, so Wendell couldn’t see much. But he felt cool air drift out from the doorway, followed by a subtle waft of flowers.

  “No, I can’t. It’s just that I was really hungry this morning, and the bread…”

  “You needed it. You still look hungry.” She closed her door behind her, looked down the hall to see that they were both alone, and looked up at Wendell.

  “So, nun stuff,” Wendell said. “Like reading the Bible and hearing confession, that kind of stuff.”

  “Nuns aren’t priests. We don’t hear confession. Do you want someone who can?”

  “No.”

  “I can recommend a priest.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re all sinners Wendell. We all need it.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Yo
u’re the one who mentioned confession, Wendell. My guess is it wasn’t accidental.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Not much is accidental.”

  Wendell saw the wheels turning in her head. She wanted more.

  She wants a problem to fix, he thought.

  “Guess we all got our problems,” he said.

  “My guess is you have yourself a doozie.”

  “Look, about the bread…”

  “A heavy one,” Agatha said. “You can see it on your face. Lots of darkness in that face.”

  “What?”

  “Something my father used to say. You’re carrying a heavy load; you’ve walked a long road; you’re troubled. It was just his way of saying it. ‘Your troubles bring you shadows,’ he would say.” She wrinkled her brow and looked into his eyes. “You’re not here just for your mother’s things. Deny it all you want, but it’s obvious enough.”

  Wendell looked at the floor.

  “So what’s the story?” she continued. “It’s there; I can see it.”

  “It’s all complicated.”

  “Do you think you’re going to scare a little old lady like me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I doubt it. You want to beat around the bush with me, that’s fine. But don’t minimize me. God carved me out of stone.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “There’s a heart in here somewhere, don’t worry about that.” She stepped towards him. “So you’re a runner.”

  Wendell took a step back. “A what?”

  “Like I told you yesterday, a runner. In my experience, you’ve got your runners and your chasers. Chasers are looking for that thing they can never catch: love, money, that one perfect high. But runners, runners are the ones being chased.”

  “Chased by what?”

  “You name it. Creditors, a jealous husband, the law. You tell me.”

  “And if it’s the law?” Wendell asked.

  “Then we have ourselves a problem, don’t we? Though my guess is it’s not the law in your case. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Wendell kicked one sneaker into the other and shrugged. “No, not the cops. It’s…it’s messy.”