“What’s in the package?”
The stranger was silent for a moment. “I think you know,” he answered. “But what was I saying? Oh yes, your car. And your degree. You’ve worked so hard. Law, was it? Brilliant. Such delicate things, laws. Like little origami doves. Those ones about parking and whatnot, so interesting, have you learned those already? Or are those just regulations? Oh well, you’ll shine, I’m sure. A nice office somewhere. A secretary. Free coffee all day long. Big windows, prestigious firm, a bonus if you bill enough hours. And maybe someday you’ll make partner! How about that! Your name in polished brass. It’s a fine metal, brass. I’m a little jealous. I’ll bet a year from now you can afford to pay someone else to mow that lawn, some strapping neighborhood lad. Better keep an eye on the little lady, huh Michael? Watch out!”
The mockery dimmed in the stranger’s eyes. His voice softened. “It’s like I said. I’m not here to convince you I could give you anything better. I’m here for another reason, Michael. I’m here to remind you: You Made an Oath.”
He hissed: “An oath, Michael, that binds you still.”
For the first time since the stranger’s arrival, Michael smiled. He tapped the mower’s handle. “Do you remember if you wrote that down somewhere? That oath? I mean, did I sign anything? Because I don’t remember that I did. That would make it an oral contract, which is fine, that’s no less binding. It’s just that without any witnesses, you might have a difficult case. Not to mention that a contract cannot be considered binding if it requires either party to convene the law in any way, or if it requires of either party any goods or services that they cannot be reasonably expected to provide. Remind me, what was the content of that oath you mentioned?”
The stranger smiled, patient. “You are not clever, Michael. You shouldn’t try to be.” He took a breath. “I am starting over. I will not make the same mistakes again. Come with me. Leave this behind. Or be left behind.”
Michael tapped a finger against the mower’s plastic grip. “And if I don’t?”
“You know what I can do,” the stranger said, and rested his palm on the package beside him.
Michael shook his head. “I know you won’t.”
The stranger’s lip curled. “You don’t know anything,” he said.
Michael’s glasses had steamed, and he wiped them on his shirt. He hit the power switch on the lawnmower and the play button on his cassette player. He retrieved his headphones and, his eyes on the task in front of him, commenced to mow the weeds and sand.
Sweetness.
The old woman’s lower lip quivered in sleep. Her gray tongue darted in and out behind it like some blind and hungry rodent unconvinced of the benevolence of the world beyond its hole. And rightly so: the boy held a caterpillar between his pudgy, nailbit fingers. He let it hang just above his grandmother’s lips. The caterpillar was brown and each segment of its back was intricately marked with an oval of red inside a black-bordered band of white inside another red oval. It had ceased wriggling hours ago, and swayed limply back and forth in time with the old woman’s breathing and the to-and-fro-ing of her tongue. He lowered it until its black face just touched her fallen lower lip. The tongue shot out. He pulled the caterpillar quickly up and away from her face and began to put it in the pocket of his t-shirt. He thought better of it, and laid the caterpillar on her shoulder. It didn’t move.
The old woman snorted and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her clouded eyes blinked open, sightless though they were. “That boy,” she muttered to herself. The boy, fat, with an uncertain, shifting gaze, tiptoed three long steps backwards.
“Sweetness,” she croaked. “You home?”
“I’m right here grandma.”
“Come here and give your grandmother a hand.”
The boy helped the old woman to stand, his eyes on the caterpillar beside the collar of her blouse. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Just point me at the kitchen and I’ll be fine.”
She counted her steps until she was standing in front of the small stove. On the third step, the caterpillar tumbled from her shoulder onto the floor. The boy leapt out and grabbed it, then ran with it into a back room. The old woman took the kettle from the burner to her left, filled it with water from the sink, and lit a match to ignite the gas. “You eaten yet?” she asked.
The boy reappeared at the edge of the linoleum that separated the kitchen from the small, uncarpeted living room. He held his hands cupped one over the other. He was panting slightly from his sprint across the house. “No, grandma,” he said.
“Well fix yourself a sandwich if you’re hungry. There’s ham in the icebox. You know what to do.”
The woman took four slow steps to her right and extended a hand until she felt the formica tabletop. She pulled a chair out, lowered herself into it and waited for the water to boil.
“You need anything, grandma?” asked the boy.
“You’re very sweet,” the old woman said. “Just bring me the teacup from the drainboard.”
Closing his left fist with care, the boy placed a cup and saucer in front of the old woman. He fished a teabag from the box on the counter, and emptied his left hand over the cup, freeing a thumb-sized beetle. The bug lay on its back at the base of the cup, its feet scrambling for purchase on the air. The boy laid the teabag on top of it. “Are you gonna want cream?” he asked.
“Thank you. You know I will.”
The boy pulled the carton from the door of the refrigerator, placed it on the table beside the sugarbowl, and took a seat behind his grandmother. He leaned forward to stare into the bottom of her teacup to watch the bug struggle to right itself.
“Do you have much homework?”
“No, grandma,” the boy lied. “I did it on the bus.”
The kettle whistled. “I’ll get it,” the boy said.
“You’re a dear.”
The boy stood beside his grandmother, the kettle steaming in his hand. The beetle’s antennae slithered against the smooth white china. The teabag twitched above it as he watched. He returned the kettle to the stove, lifted the teabag and shook the insect back into his palm. Replacing the teabag, he poured hot water into the cup.
“What is it dear?” his grandmother asked.
“There was something in your cup.”
The boy ran again into the back room. With the beetle wriggling against his palm, he covered the lens of the video camera on the wall with his ball cap and pulled a cookie tin from beneath the small sofa that served as his bed. It contained a pair of sewing scissors he’d stolen from his grandmother; an old bone-handled penknife that he liked to think had belonged to his father, though in fact he nicked it from another boy at school; a sealed plastic bottle of butane; a .22 cartridge he’d found in a field; a scallop shell and a disk of violet-colored beach glass he brought home from the shore years before; a black-and-white photograph of a young man in military dress; a yellow plastic cocktail sword that was the one thing he possessed that his mother had given him, originally impaled with three sweet cherries dripping bourbon; and seven red matchboxes, worn from overhandling. He removed the topmost matchbox and shook it to make sure that it was empty. He slid it open, shoved the beetle inside, and slid it closed. The matchbox beneath it contained four white grubs crammed against one another, none of them displaying any signs of life. The boy considered them for a moment — just this morning, they had been wriggling still — but a tap at the window distracted him.
“Tubs!” said a voice from outside, barely constrained to a whisper. “You coming out?”
His grandmother called from the kitchen. “Sweetness,” she said.
The boy hastily closed the matchbox, put the penknife in his pocket, and shoved the tin back beneath the cushions. “What is it grandma?” he shouted.
“Tubs,” the voice from outside called again. “We’re leaving.”
“I’d like you to read to me, dear,” his grandmother said.
“Read to me, Tub
by,” the voice outside mocked.
The boy grabbed his cap and scrambled back to the kitchen. “I gotta go now, grandma,” he said. “I have practice.” His fist was already on the doorknob.
“Oh,” his grandmother answered. “Perhaps later then.” But the boy had left the house. The screen door squeaked shut behind him.
The old woman sipped at her tea. On creaking knees, she raised herself from the table, took four steps to her left until she could feel the rim of the sink in front of her. She twisted the tap until the water ran warm, then rinsed the cup and saucer and returned them to the drainboard. “The man on the radio said it’s going to rain,” she announced to the empty room. “And it does feel like rain, don’t you think?” She waited a moment for an answer. None came. She closed the tap, but the faucet still dripped, pinging every third second against the steel basin of the sink.
He raises the dead.
Muttering beneath his breath, the stranger stared at his feet as he walked beside the tracks. He kicked a rock in front of him. Gabriel and Michael had both refused him. How to start all over? To take hold of the world and the forces that bind it, that suture time to space, gravity to hunger to greed?
When he rounded a bend, the air grew suddenly rank, sharp and sweet with drifting rot. Instead of bouncing to a stop in the dirt, the rock the stranger had kicked thudded into something soft. It was green, bulky. A sleeve. The sleeve of an army jacket. An arm in the sleeve of an army jacket. The arm of a man lying on his face in the dirt, the neck of a broken bottle gripped in one gray hand.
The stranger stopped. He nudged the jacket with his foot. There was no give to the torso beneath it. The man had gone stiff. The stranger kicked him over on his back. The man’s heart had long ceased pumping, and, with nowhere else to go and nothing much to do, his blood had drained down into his face. The red blood cells had all expired, and none kept their color long, so the face was clotted bluish black. On the brow above one eye a wound had been carved, perhaps by a lonely drunken stumble, perhaps by a blow from a bottle or a stick, a pair of brass knuckles, a railroad spike. No matter, it did what it did, whatever it was, leaving now an ugly open slit, dried and crusted with pebbles, leaves and grass.
The stranger drew himself up, his spine straight, his chin high. He kicked the corpse again. “Stand,” he said.
But the corpse did not stand.
He kicked at the torso, where the ribs and beneath them the idle lungs and heart were hidden by the heavy jacket. “Rise,” he said.
But the corpse did not rise.
He kicked at the blue-black head. His shoe and broken toe ripped through the corpse’s cheek. “Rise!” the stranger said again.
But the corpse did not rise, again.
He pulled away his foot. The dead lips fell and curled into a mocking grimace. He ignored the pain in his own broken toe, and kicked at the head again, smearing the grin from its mouth with mud. He kept kicking, and when he had kicked enough, he commenced to stomp. He flattened the corpse’s face, tore it in putrid pieces. With his heel he crushed the skull, and kept stomping until he had stomped it flat. He shattered the ribs and with them pierced the organs. He broke the spine, the pelvis and the hips. The stink worsened, and the stranger, panting, stopped. His breath ragged and quick, he untied his parcel, stepped back and aimed at the trampled remains.
In the time it takes to close one eye and open it again, all evidence of the stranger’s fury was undone. The corpse pieced itself together, regained volume and integrity. The gelled blood drained from its face. The flesh turned back to pink. The wrinkles, furrows and scars were smoothed. The hair went from gray to brown and finally to tow-head blond, as the skin grew fresh again and bright and the bones shrank to child-size and finally it was a frightened boy who opened his eyes, lifted himself from the ground and stood. The stranger tried to reach out to him, to take his hand, but he wasn’t fast enough by far, and the boy, arisen, shattered like a bottle toppled from a roof, not to shards but to dust that fell again to the earth, a sprinkling of dirt on dirt.
The stranger stood there for a moment, saddened and somehow calmed, then retied his bundle and moved on. The stink clung to his clothes.
I threaten him.
The stranger sits beside me on the couch. He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, his head cradled in his palms. A newspaper lies folded at his feet. He looks paler than usual. His lips are whiter than his beard. I can’t see his eyes at all.
I point to the paper. “Is that today’s?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Are you reading it?” I ask.
He still ignores me, so I reach down and take the paper from him. But he’s sitting in the middle of the couch and I just have this tiny corner here beside him, so I tell him to move over, but he doesn’t acknowledge me and doesn’t move at all. I elbow him a little, but it’s like he’s cast in bronze and welded to the cushions. I read the first page, skim the rest. It’s not today’s. I bought it yesterday and forgot it on the floor. My fingers smudge the headlines. The usual catalogue of horrors. A monsoon somewhere unpronounceable. Twelve thousand dead. An earthquake buries eight times more. These are estimates: the only people left to count are busy digging. A photo of a dusty leg. Something about a flood. Fires raging through slums. Bridge collapses. TV star gets drunk. Tidal wave. Ferry sinks with all aboard. Corpses ruin beaches, tourists complain. Aerial assault flattens ancient city. Again. The dead are dark and poor, oddly attired, too numerous to count. Sixty die in ambush. Line ’em up. Suicide bomb kills ninety-four as they kneel at worship. To whom should we pray now? survivor asks. Movie star is fatter than before. Tanks flatten village, house by crumbling house. Headless toddler declares self non-combatant. President auto-fellates and toasts to human misery. Husband cheats on wife. Man in fancy car farts, gets paid. Rain falls on the fields of the rich. Blame the starving that they have not to eat. Cop declares torture fun. These are fine lines, pundits agree. Is it genocide or just mass murder? Build more walls, public demands. A new vision for the nation: A cage for every soul. Race-sickness transmitted through blood and blood alone. But we all have blood, sighs expert. Don’t panic, government advises: Famine kills only the hungry. Superstar actor swears fealty to humanitarian ideals. This world of washboard ribs, rheumy eyes, lies and lies, sick pussing lies.
I throw the paper on the floor, kick it away, try to crumple it with my heel. But newspapers are unwieldy beasts. It won’t fight back, but it flaps open again, spreads itself wantonly at my feet. I kick at it again and rest my elbows on my knees. I cradle my head in my hands. The newsprint rustles lewd whispers at my toes. The stranger looks up at me and laughs.
“Nothing’s funny,” I say.
He chuckles, cracking the knuckles on his right hand one by one. “I know,” he says.
“Is that all you have to say?” I ask him.
“To say?”
I nod toward the paper. “To say. For all of this.”
He doesn’t answer at first, just sits there and stares at me, his eyes dripping slow contempt. At last he speaks. “You’re being childish. You don’t really mean to blame me?”
“Who else?” I ask.
He smiles, almost politely, but doesn’t answer. I didn’t mean to, but I think I may have flattered him.
“Move over,” I tell him, and elbow him again.
“No.”
“I’ll get you.”
The stranger snorts and feigns a yawn. He doesn’t move at all.
“I will,” I say. “Just watch.”
He encounters a setback.
Barely a hundred yards down the tracks from where the corpse had lain, three men stepped out from the bushes, buttoning their trousers. Behind the bushes was an old tin-roofed railroad shack, and the men had just finished painting it with their urine, which coursed down one wall in terraced stains at different heights. For though the men all three had shaved heads and all wore black dungarees, black nylon bomber jackets and shiny boots with thick, red la
ces, they were of markedly different statures. One was tall and skinny, another tall and fat, and the third was short and fat. They blocked the stranger’s path.
“Looky looky,” said the tall and skinny.
“What have we here?” said the tall and fat.
The short and fat said nothing, but only cracked his knuckles, scratched himself and spat.
“Good afternoon,” said the stranger to the men.
“Afternoon?” snickered the tall and fat. “He thinks it’s afternoon.”
“Afternoon!” echoed the tall and skinny with a guffaw.
The short and fat fished a silver pocket watch from the pocket of his jeans. “It’s three p.m.,” he said.
The tall and skinny flexed his brow, impressed. “Good afternoon,” he said, and bowed.
The tall and fat stepped forward. “This afternoon there is a toll.”
“A toll?” the stranger said.
“No,” said the tall and skinny. “Not a mole. A toll. You have to pay to pass.”
“And what is the toll this afternoon?” the stranger inquired, a grin spreading across his face.
“No, no,” said the short and fat, cracking the knuckles of his right hand. “A vole is a small, defenseless critter, blind and hairless, like a mole but with a v. There is no vole this afternoon. And no mole. You can’t get out of this so easy. There is a toll. You have to pay.”
“Yes,” the stranger said, loosening the binding of his package. “I understand. But what do you want me to pay?”
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