Stranger Will

by Caleb J. Ross

  “Looks a bit like a family tree,” Mrs. Rose says backing away from the wall, studying her manipulations and corrections.

  William agrees, but is distracted by the answering machine blinking in jolts of two. One for the call from Philip they just heard and the other, William guesses, for the call Philip referenced. He starts toward the machine, but Mrs. Rose grabs his wrist.

  “Your hand,” she says and pulls it close to her face. “Does it hurt?”

  William nods. He has thought little of the dog’s bite lately, but now that Mrs. Rose pulls, the pain sears.

  “It’s starting to get a little black,” she says and runs to the bathroom yelling about hydrogen peroxide.

  “It was all in the van,” he says. “We use it on carpets,” but she doesn’t come out.

  William presses the button on the answering machine. “Hey William. We got a call for a bad wreck on fifty-one…”

  William knows already what this message is about. He squeezes his wrist to tame the throbbing.

  “…Only one body. Shouldn’t be too bad…”

  Mrs. Rose yells about gauze. William says to “just cut up a towel,” that he used all the gauze already.

  “…real big girl, though. Might be a mess. You know what the large ones can leave behind. It’s like when they die pieces of them just go on living. Melted fat even looks alive, you know…”

  She comes running in with scissors and a blue towel William recognizes as a house-warming gift Julie bought for him when they first moved to Brackenwood. She was the only one of the two ever to use it.

  “…If you don’t get back to me I’ll take my car out…”

  Mrs. Rose holds one end of the towel in her mouth and slices the cloth into strips. Through the embroidery, through the lockstitched hems. She holds William’s wrist, rubbing the infection with a yellow cream deep enough to hurt when though the answering machine Philip says, “let me know when Julie pops. I want to be there for everything.”

  Mrs. Rose smiles and ties the towel strip tight around William’s palm.

  “Who was that?” she says. “A recording.”

  The answering machine clicks and the quick hum of rewinding tape fills the room. William rubs his bandaged hand, massaging away the pain. “Can we see Julie?”

  “We’ll see her tomorrow,” Mrs. Rose says. “For now, stop shaving. Until you grow a passable beard we’ll have to give you a fake.” Then she looks down to the yellow notebook page in William’s hand, grabs it, and reads. “Marty’s right,” she says and turns back toward the wall. “Get some more family pictures on your walls.” She pins the note and connects it with red thread to a group of messages titled Homeless.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wednesday morning arrives, though Mrs. Rose warns, “the weekend is already here to most of the kids.” She gives William a fake beard, a Santa Claus, bleach-white, polyester disguise with tight, bouncing curls. William accepts a tattered vest, too, and a t- shirt that reads ‘Blood Donor ’ in faded and peeling iron-on letters. The armpits come pre-stained. She gives him a duffle bag and tells him to fill it with found objects. “Rocks, interesting sticks, a stuffed animal, anything someone might see and use as evidence of a mental condition, something not worth feeling threatened by.” She admires the playground outside the car window. “One of my guys fills his with receipts. We each have our own brand of crazy…”

  Collecting these things, he can do, pawning himself as insane, too. But the beard, he fears, wouldn’t fool even a child.

  Before the kids arrive at Harold Straton Elementary, Mrs. Rose takes William on a brief tour of the area. She identifies corners where children congregate during recess. She has him take note of the fence over which playground balls most often escape. She points out the most popular equipment, the most used swing set, the areas around which William’s presence would be most effective.

  She parks her car after a single lap, kills the engine, and straightens William’s fake beard. “As of this moment you have no name,” she says. “You have no job. You have nothing,” and she nods toward the door. “You’re a homeless man just blending into the surroundings.”

  William steps out and surveys the empty school ground through a weak chain link fence. Today is dedicated to staking his claim. He must be visible, though he must hide all intent, becoming a point of interest noted only by distant pointed fingers. The children won’t come near him today. Mrs. Rose has assured him of this. Despite the abundant homeless population, the children maintain distance for days, often longer, to get used to the idea, waiting until he becomes a constant.

  William drops a found candy bar wrapper into his duffle bag. The playground rests silent. William weaves through the jungle gym. He kicks wood chips to the asphalt and enjoys a few rounds on rusty swings. He explores his new post and searches for how best to become a part of it. He understands now Brackenwood’s reputation for homelessness. Dirty men with dirty shirts walk the streets. Dirty men with dirty beards occupy park benches. Dirty men with dirty shoes spend time watching downtown shoppers, watching crowded restaurants, watching children play at Harold Straton Elementary. Surely, they can’t all be Mrs. Rose’s strangers, though William knows the woman enough not to assume anything.

  All he has now are the instructions to find a perch and wait until a child breaks a rule. He is a nanny cam. William spots a bench three laps into the search. He tests it. He sits at both ends. He tries lying across its seat using his duffle bag as a pillow. The bench slowly comforts, almost enough to relieve the beard’s itch.

  Then a bell and they come stampeding from around the building. Each child claims a pack and each pack claims a piece of playground equipment. The slide William chose to sit in front of stays empty just as Mrs. Rose said it would.

  She insists on rules, rules she says are necessary to avoid “legal situations:”

  Don’t make any propositions. This includes, but is not limited to, coaxing the child off of school grounds, making promises that would lead to such coaxing, and the use of sugars—lollipops, gum, etc. These sorts of things lose court cases.

  Don’t use sexual references.

  And don’t touch. “Not a game of patty-cake or even a simple high-five.”

  “Other than that,” she says, “test them all you want.”

  William’s clothes smell of dustbin salvage. His hair remains its usual tangled mess, though with purpose today. It is important that he play the role of the stranger as described by Mrs. Rose’s teachings; fear must distance the children. These fears become life-governing rules, and these rules are ultimately what a child grows greater than.

  Games they play seem modified to hide survival strategy. Hopscotch plays like an apocalyptic scenario, jumping from safe zone to safe zone. Jump rope sets numerical goals equivalent to the ounces of water a body needs each day to stay alive. “I can live for six days,” yells a small girl, sweating and gasping for oxygen, stepping out of a tangle of rope, “You can’t do better.” Childhood games, to them, don’t mean play. They mean everything.

  William can tell the burden of Mrs. Rose’s curriculum on their minds by the way they play tag with more finely tuned sense of strategy, by the increased accuracy during long games of bombardment. These children dominate monkey bars like a training course. A girl, “Maggie” the children shout, races another child and the determination in her face lacks all the gapped-toothed smiles associated with play. Life is a mission to this child. These games are the same games William played as a kid, only focused. They are streamlined for an idealized effect.

  When the bell rings again, the children herd back into the building. The tight screams and pounding feet disappear quickly and without ceremony. William doesn’t know what comes next, so he waits. He falls into shallow naps, waking as a breeze stiffens, or a bird caws. Amid the naps, he sees Julie’s face pressed against the destroyed van’s window, the school bell’s resilient echo morphing into the van’s incessant horn.

  A change in the wind ful
ly awakens William, bringing the familiar smell of a ripened maggot and fly death. It’s a death to be acknowledged with a pinched nose and a weary eye, nothing more. At first, he assumes dog; strong meat decays with a sweeter attar. But once close enough to see the tiny head and stiff ears of a cat, hairless after weeks of weathering, weeks of mites and tineid moths, he silently reprimands himself for the incorrect assumption. When William gets to within reaching distance he grabs a stick and pokes. The sun has baked the carcass to leather. He takes a foot and carries the body back to the bench with him for a more thorough examination.

  With his head down to the animal, William almost collides with a man sitting at his bench. The man offers and outstretched hand and a blindingly white smile buried somewhere behind a grey beard, gnarled like the man himself appears to be.

  “Frank,” he says then takes a long look at William’s fake beard, so white it glows. “You’re definitely the new guy.”

  William accepts the handshake. Frank nods to William’s wrapped hand. “I like the towel. Makes you look a little deranged. That will work just fine around here,” he says. “Nice cat, too. That your thing?”

  William looks to the stiff animal and starts to explain, but Frank interrupts. “Clever. Couldn’t stand the smell, myself,” he pulls a blue bag from under the bench and opens it wide for William to see. The man has filled his bag with Frisbees, deflated soccer balls, and a few mismatched tennis shoes. “I go for all the stuff those kids leave lying around. It’s not as creepy as what you got, but it gets the job done.”

  William introduces himself. “You know Mrs. Rose?” “Of course. I’m not a pervert. Just another stranger.”

  It sounds like a title the way he says it: Stranger—with a veiled mysticism. It comes out as a tactile breath, heavy, built with smoke.

  “I didn’t see you earlier,” William says.

  “Just got here. It’s a little early, but necessarily so. With afternoon recess the kids are at their brightest. They can tell if you try to fake something like permanence. I have to be a staple here, you know. I have to make it seem like we don’t come in shifts.”

  William drops the cat into his bag. “Shifts?” he struggles with a caught zipper.

  “You’ll get morning recess. Veterans like me get afternoons, and in a few months, you’ll get late recess. That’s the transition time. You’ve got to be good for afternoons. No offense, but you’re not good yet.”

  From around the wall the herd starts again. In a blink, Frank fakes disorientation. His eyes glaze over and his hands begin to tremble. He leans to William, says he’d better get going, but first invites him to poker night. “Wednesday nights the strangers get together,” he says. “Play some cards. You in?”

  “No, but thank you. I have to visit someone in the hospital.” “Oh yeah,” Frank says with an added slur to his speech, forcing a tiny stream of drool over his bottom lip. “I heard about that whole thing. Sorry.”

  “No. It’s fine. She should be okay.”

  “I hope,” he says and greases his hair with the falling spit. “Congratulations, by the way. You’ve made a wise choice. You have heart.”

  William turns without responding, leaving Frank to his fake hand tremors and his forced drool. The dead cat stinks though the broken zipper. The stench, not blocked by a respirator or masked by chemicals, hovers and only thickens as he breathes deep in search of comfort.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The neutral hospital air incites envy. With a job like his, William fights for air this clean, but even a natural breeze, free of rotten flesh, feels contaminated when compared to air this sterile. Sitting down in the waiting room, William drags his nose through the open space and whispers, “amazing,” conscious of his display.

  The waiting room television cuts news coverage between clips of emergency vehicles huddled in the center of the screen. An attractive anchor with lipstick strengthened by a primer coat, shined by a gloss coat, stares into the camera.

  Philip claims a stiff chair in a corner of the waiting room and focuses on a word search he lifts from an overflowing table. William drifts close and watches Philip finish a word— environment—half-circled by what William says was a “grieving mother.” He points to the ink saying, “This half-circle marks the end of a happy woman.”

  This is after a car ride filled with Philip’s apologies, his insistence on being rude with yesterday’s phone call—“she’s not that big,” he keeps saying. This is after Philip pulls to the side of the road upon William’s insistence, and leans close into the man’s face, teeth bathed in spit, and tells him “one more ‘sorry’ will mean your face through the windshield.” William apologized for the outburst, as sincere as he has ever been with Philip.

  “And that mother,” William says still staring over Philip’s shoulder in the waiting room, “will affect both of us in ways we will never understand.”

  “You don’t know that,” Philip says. The circle is split between the supposed-mother ’s blue ink and his own red. He makes laps until left with a muddy loop.

  “She was just filling time,” William continues. “Searching for words, capturing them, and then a doctor comes, a doctor with a clipboard and a stethoscope and he looks deep into the mother ’s eyes—the eyes already dipped in glass—and delivers the news of her son’s death. Who would finish circling a word after that?”

  “No. How will she affect us?”

  “We’re talking right now aren’t we?”

  The newscast anchor tosses to the ambulance behind her. The top of the screen reads “Earlier Broadcast”.

  Philip drops his pen into the book’s crease before tossing it to the ground. He then turns away to thumb through a stack of magazines, wafting the scent of slick paper; celebrity gossipzines to medical journals; movie stars to lupus victims; famous singers to children with fibromyalgia. All of them equally unimportant to a mother with a lost son.

  “And things will keep moving,” William says pulling away from the TV screen. He sinks back into the waiting room chair, breathes slow, breathes loud enough to pull stares from passing nurses. “Who would finish circling a word after that,” he repeats, but Philip is already ignoring him in favor of an article about the rising trend of celebrities naming their children after fruit. William waits for more, waits for confirmation that he just might be on to something.

  “Apple,” Philip says under his breath.

  William often says of Philip that he cares enough to keep a person interested but too much to keep them distant. He lives in the context of other lives, never really staking one of his own. It is this mentality, and the knowledge that it will never go away without direct confrontation, that brings William back to his fiancée. “You didn’t know it was Julie,” William says. “It’s what we’ve always thought of the dead. Nobody likes to clean. Spaghetti or fat, left outside it all smells.”

  Philip says to himself, “Peare,” commenting quietly on the superfluous ‘e’.

  “I wasn’t really going to hit you,” William says. “A lot is happening right now, you know.” He grabs the magazine in Philip’s hand.

  “You shouldn’t have said it then.” Philip reaches again to the magazine pile.

  William thumbs through the stolen pages, stopping on a full- page print of a woman, her face painted with makeup. He pulls a pen from his pocket. “I wouldn’t have,” he repeats again filling the woman’s forehead with thick black eyebrows. He lowers the pen to her gut, begins to draw tiny eyes, tiny nose…

  “I know,” Philip says. “I’ve just never seen you that way. I understand that everything involving Julie and the baby is tough. Just don’t let it kill you.”

  William apologizes.

  “Alright,” Philip submits, then looks down to William’s markings on the magazine model. “You’re ruining her.”

  He’s back to the woman’s face, filling her chin with short strokes of hair. William says “impossible,” popping at the ‘o’ loud above all other sounds. “Nothing can be
ruined,” and before he can finish a full set of two horns the news anchor tells the world. “Authorities are still looking for the owner of the van.” William leaves Philip to his magazine in favor of the suddenly compelling newscast.

  Then the testimonials start. The citizens are “angry,” they are “dumbfounded.” One man with hair bleached so white the camera translates only a flare for his head is, “flabbergasted,” he says, wiping sweat from his chin.

  They ask the same questions: “how could anybody do this? How could somebody just leave a woman here?” They shake their heads and frown. They point, cry, shield children’s eyes. To outcast, to protest, to furrow your brow on local TV and be appalled by something you haven’t given the chance to understand doesn’t make you innocent, William thinks. It makes you ignorant. Blind. Content with what you have been given, not with what you have searched for.

  One woman shows compassion for the pain Julie—“the woman,” she says—must be feeling. Behind her, a blanket of pigeons rises above a horizon full of trees. She pleads for a vigil, “or something to keep her in our thoughts,” repeating the word “pain” until it loses meaning. William thinks of his wall, of a note asking about abnormal bleeding, the word “pain” repeats throughout. William has always respected the passion of this note.

  The woman on screen has flaming red hair and glasses. From this moment on William will think of the Vigil Woman when he reads this note about pain. A neighbor for his neighborhood.

  William peeks over to Phillip who remains enthralled by his magazine.

  The next to condemn is a man with a shallow beard thicker than the hair on his head. He demands that William’s life be spent forever in jail. He spits for the camera, owing words like “murderer ” and “evil.” William remembers a small cluster of notes regarding jail time and the semantics of the word “murder.” “It isn’t killing,” one note reads. Another one mentions “the animal kingdom does the same thing with weak young.” This mustachioed man, this angry man who only wants to tell the world of an evil-not-him will forever be the face of these notes about jail time. Another neighbor. Another neighborhood.