Stranger Will

by Caleb J. Ross

  Shelia’s bird chirps. It sounds hungry.

  With the two butts in the toilet, floating as desperate survivors, William opens the door, allowing the two worlds of air to establish equilibrium. His smoke and Shelia’s clean air dilute each other until the entire house is unable to satisfy either of them. She coughs and William can’t find use for the clean air.

  Philip pulls William to the kitchen, and William hangs onto an angry stare as far as his neck will pivot.

  “Look,” he starts, and William rolls the word around in his head, a word that means ‘one option’ when a changing situation looms. “Shelia is uncomfortable around you. I don’t know why, and she won’t say anything about it, but until you find somewhere easier to stay each of you are going to have to deal with it.”

  “Everything I own is gone, Philip.” Philip, due to his own history involving all possessions suddenly vanishing, is unimpressed.

  “And I’m sorry. But you can’t throw around accusations like you are.”

  “Smell her.” Philip turns.

  “Just like gasoline, Philip.” “I won’t have this—”

  The bird throttles again, an interruption fitting to the way William feels.

  “—in my house. You’re a friend and I don’t want to turn you away, but I will if I have to. You’ve got to deal with each other. Talk to her or something. Get to know her.”

  “Then will she unburn my home?”

  William steps past him, out the kitchen, before yelling starts. “I want to start this over,” he says following William into the front room where Shelia waits with the bird and the doll. He turns to each of them.

  “Shelia, meet William.” She smiles a mouth full of average teeth, extends her hand, but pulls back when she realizes that she still holds the bird. She crams the animal into the same hand as the doll and offers the empty palm. The bird groans.

  “William, meet Shelia.” They shake hands. When Philip turns to her, William uses his free hand to fan the smell of gasoline from his nose. She squeezes his hand to white.

  “Now talk,” Philip says.

  Neither initiates conversation, similar in their discontent. “Just fucking say something, one of you.”

  William abides. “Why did you burn down my house?”

  She parts her lips, but Philip interrupts. He tells William to “get the fuck over it.”

  “What is it about me? You know I saved you, right?” “Yes,” she says. “It’s what I’ve been told.”

  Philip squeezes between them, and begins the rhetoric of communion—paradise, a romanticized impossibility. He talks about peace, he emphasizes community, he begins to paint the utopia of their newly established household family, but William cuts him off. “So why my house?” he says. Philip disappears.

  “I was with Mrs. Rose.” “Bullshit.”

  “She’s helping me with everything,” she says. “She has a way with words. Always has for as long as I’ve known her. How long have you known her?”

  “A while.”

  “Has she helped you…?” Shelia holds the word for a second. “…along?”

  “She’s been there,” he says. “Coffee and the phone. We used to talk together all the time when I had a phone…and a house.” “A phone—” Shelia starts, but the bird won’t let her finish. It screams and claws at her palm, red, its creases filling with blood.

  “It’ll stop soon.”

  “What’s with the bird?” he asks, but Shelia just smiles, hands full of animal and doll. Feathers fall from struggle. The bird appears exhausted and sick. Shelia kneels down to pick the feathers from the ground but cannot situate the load. “Hold this,” she says and puts the doll in William’s arm.

  Close-up William sees how incomplete the doll is. Handmade and quaint. No plastic. No cotton. This doll is dirty, leather. William holds it by a foot, watching it hang from improvised joints. Garbage bag ties. Pipe cleaners. Thread joining pieces. The neck is not so much a support for the head as it is a loose web of yarn keeping the body just logical enough to look human. He pulls the doll back and tries its fit in his elbow. He moves it from arm to arm wondering how a parent learns. It is folk art maybe, a discussion piece never meant for affection. It looks crafted from found twigs for tourists. Thick thread and bad knots. One leg. Half a face. Human eyes.

  Real skin.

  A child, he says quiet as a thought and wants so badly to erase the sandpaper skin from his memory.

  It hits the floor with a dense thud. Shelia abandons the feathers to smack William across the neck. She spits in his eye and accuses him of being a terrible father. “You could have given her brain damage,” she says.

  Tina’s half shoulder. Eric’s knee.

  “I’ve got most of her,” she says brushing dirt from its back. “Mrs. Rose said having something like a doll helped her to understand things.”

  “You keep the fetus pieces?” William says almost gagging. “They are mine.”

  The ability to let go, to abandon what has become the definitive life, is a virtue seldom acknowledged without therapy. William looks to the leathery child and tries placing it within his professional library of human renditions. He filters through images of teeth buried in bed springs; of skin splintered and molded, filling the cracks between tiles and wooden floorboards; of fingers in flower pots; hundreds of images flash, all a leftover human shell, and nothing has the power of category. Nothing he has ever cleaned is a context for this fossilized child with threaded tendons. Everything has been a broken version. Every bloody outline has been a landmark to prove the past. But Shelia has a child made from parts. A salvaged automobile. A scale model of a real child.

  “Why?”

  She cradles the almost-child in her elbow. “Because I think I’ve changed my mind.” The bird yells again, shakes a few feathers loose from its balding wing. “Don’t tell Mrs. Rose, okay?”

  “What would Mrs. Rose care?” William asks.

  “She wouldn’t care,” she says just loud enough to part lips. “That’s my fear.”

  He sees a fear in Shelia’s eye, the first emotion not doctored by medications. William has questions, but Philip interrupts from the kitchen.

  “You finally getting along?” he says nodding and smiling. “Yeah,” William says, “except your fake sister burned down my house.”

  Philip retreats in a huff.

  Shelia watches him leave, a gloss to her eye. She brings the bird to her mouth and kisses so soft her lips don’t buckle. More feathers float to the ground and her eyes deepen their gloss almost to spilling.

  “Bird got a name?” William asks.

  “Mrs. Rose likes Victoria,” she says. “I like Ada. I might go with Victoria, though. Mrs. Rose has done a lot for me.”

  “She can do that,” William says.

  “I was thinking about Gerald,” she says, “but that was my first pigeon’s name.”

  The quickness of a final breath. The instant it takes for a woman to become a mother, for a thought to be buried, for belief to be obsolete, William understands that everything he has been through the last few days has been only a starting point. Just a middle. Far from an end.

  “Your first pigeon,” he says, but she is already walking away, an almost-child in one fist and a messenger pigeon in the other.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The weekend passed without ceremony, leaving William to this Monday morning, a day Mrs. Rose greets with a warning. “An entire weekend without me,” she said and shook her head with a coy grin like the concept of a break is a problem mid-extermination. She then left him at his playground bench.

  Upon arriving, William and the bench existed as separate constructions. But the stiff morning hours have bonded them into a single body of bones and skin, into a simple structure forced into contribution. Muscles, as they open eyes, as they lift his head, as they keep the wet morning air flowing into lungs, yearn to relax and refuse any impulse until given reason. “Why?” they would ask, if allowed fresh muscles to craft the
word. He is concrete. He is a statue, a Mrs. Rose original.

  His duffle bag sits near his feet, stuffed with fur and bones. Death waits abundant on these Harold Straton Elementary grounds, ready for collection. Give another week, and he will have to bring a second bag. But pigeons, so far William has not happened upon any. A few fly overhead, but it seems that to the birds the school is a cursed Bermuda to be avoided. Since learning of Shelia’s history with Mrs. Rose’s pigeons, every flying bird rouses suspicion. Their absence from the Harold Straton skies only affirms this mistrust.

  William waits after his shift for Frank who, William imagines, must know more. When Frank finally arrives, his beard sculpted to tangles, his shirt painted with dirt, but his teeth still so white they glow, he waves. But before he can speak, William asks about Shelia’s pigeon.

  “Yeah,” Frank says, his eyes glazed nostalgia. “Called mine Jasper. Daughter named it actually. Ironic I guess, huh? You?” William does not grasp the irony. “She never gave me one.”

  He slides over on the bench enough for Frank and his homeless layers. He makes room even for Frank’s duffle bag full of deflated playground balls.

  Frank sits and exhales a loud breath, bringing his eyes to William’s brilliantly white beard. “So then, how’d you communicate?” He grabs a handful of the beard and pulls, letting it snap hard to William’s face before Frank spills a hearty laugh.

  “Quit.”

  “So grow a real beard,” he says.

  A few children have stopped to observe the gentle fisticuffs. William straightens his beard and coughs the proof of bad health, of a life lived in the streets, a life that would mean only torture to the children should they approach with questions. The children turn back to the playground. “We had coffee. We used our mouths.”

  Frank grabs the fake beard and snaps again. “Don’t be a smartass.”

  “I’m not trying to be.”

  Frank reaches for the beard again, but William winces quickly. His fear seems to satisfy the veteran stranger. “I mean, how did you talk with Mrs. Rose about your child?”

  And with that, William forgets about the bird. “What do you know about my child?”

  “I know it’s dead.”

  William jumps. He closes his eyes and grabs for something, anything. Frank pushes him back at the forehead and stands, but not without William’s fingers tangled in a fistful of beard. The strength of the hair surprises him. Real oil. Real roots. William gets away with only two coarse hairs and his own fake beard again shifted to the side of his face.

  “What was that?” Frank asks, his voice heated. “How’d you know my child is dead?”

  “Will.” He massages the skin and muscle under his beard with one hand, keeping William back with the other. “All of our children are dead. It’s just part of being here.”

  The children scream. Maybe laugh or play. Either way, the world slows. But the loud gait of a child’s feet though wet grass interrupts. William expects Frank to push him away, to go into stranger mode, but even when the steps are close enough to annoy he stays plain Frank.

  “I got a football,” the child says.

  “You can’t talk to me,” Frank says. “I’ve told you this.”

  The dialogue surprises. Mrs. Rose instructs William to act dangerous. She says to engage in conversation driven only by the aim to study what would make this child aware of a world without finality. She expects her homeless soldiers to ask questions a child shouldn’t answer. She expects them to probe for names and addresses, goals and fears, so that she can form her lesson plans accordingly. But Frank seems more a friend engaging in an established relationship. William smiles under his fake beard, loving his role as the awkward company.

  “It’s already out of air,” the child says pushing the football into Frank’s face.

  Frank sighs submission, leans forward and takes the ball. “Thanks, Eugene.”

  “I’ll find more,” the boy says and runs off.

  Frank keeps his head down and unzips his already overstuffed duffel bag. He makes room and stuffs the deflated football inside. “You know I believe in what Mrs. Rose is doing out here,” he says before William has the chance to comment, closing the bag, grunting as the zipper tangles itself within loose threads. “But how is a little recreational talk gonna hurt anything?”

  William watches Eugene disappear behind a row of bushes along a fence at the far end of the playground.

  “The boy’s not right anyhow. Something happened when he was little, real little. Messed him up in the head. He’s smart enough not to realize it, though.” Frank reaches into a side pocket on his bag and pulls out a sandwich, turkey, no crust. He takes a bite and continues talking through the paste. “Sometimes just knowing is enough to realize how little of a chance you have. Ignorance, as they say, truly can be bliss.”

  William stands and swings his own bag over his shoulder. “Friendly conversation won’t hurt anything, Frank. It’s fine. This is Mrs. Rose’s thing, yeah, but we’re a part of it too.” He turns to leave, but Frank grabs him by the leg.

  “We missed you at poker.”

  William smiles and nods. “Julie, remember?”

  “Never said I didn’t. Tonight is horseshoes. Usually gets pretty wild.” He pulls out a sheet of paper and scribbles an address. “Across from the park,” he says nodding toward the center of town. “I think we’ve got some stuff we need to talk about, Will. Stuff we need to get figured out between us.”

  “The pigeons,” William says. “Our children.”

  “And more.”

  William shoves the paper into his pocket, careless with the message, wanting more to stay alone tonight. He doesn’t feel horseshoes to be a fitting background to what they need to discuss. “What about coffee or something instead?”

  “The other strangers will be there. You need to meet them anyway.”

  William nods and turns away, forfeiting a ‘goodbye’ like it’s an obligation. Each experience with Frank just seems to add weight. Mix in horseshoes and more strangers and William feels he could buckle by morning.

  “Before you go,” Frank says reaching into his bag. He pulls out a wad of hair. “A raccoon, I think.” He holds it to William’s face. “I was gonna just leave it here under the bench. There’s more back behind that fence. Must’ve been a war or something. Probably six or seven of them back there.”

  William takes the animal. It feels like wood. He could build a shelter with enough of these.

  “Here comes another kid.” Frank’s eyes pinch to slits; he transitions into disillusioned stranger mode. “Go on. I’ve got this one. Been working on her for a few weeks now. Give me another couple and Mrs. Rose will give up on her.”

  William leaves just as the small child smiles. He reflects the gesture, but the fake beard hides everything, so he settles for their brief moment of eye contact.

  The fence stands three long breaths away. At one in, one out William can smell the bodies. At two in, two out he can see enough to believe Frank’s war theory. “Wild animals,” William was told once by a zookeeper at a job site crying over the bloated body of a camel, “kill only when provoked.” He said that zoos are animal heaven—a protected territory, a constant source of food, and plenty of visual stimulation. The zookeeper described the camel as beautiful, as rare and exotic as he choked on his own tears, saying that whatever happened was “a new evolution in animal behavior.” As William mopped its blood that day he thought about those words, eventually leaving any deeper significance behind in favor of an act that the zoo administration would later call, in an office building behind a row of fake trees, “an immoral and unethical decision.” “But the children,” William said in his defense, “they had never seen a dead camel before. I wanted to show them.”

  Three breaths in, three out and William is close enough to prove war. His instinct is to reach back for a rag, but instincts are things he’s slowly learning to conquer. Instead he walks through the area, kicking the animals, noting stif
fness and searching for something else he can stuff into the bag. If for some reason Mrs. Rose decides to check up, he wants to be fully stocked.

  He inspects the quality of the bodies using his foot and a stick. If either sinks, he lets it stay. If the bodies are hard enough to lift without opening new pockets of stench, he collects them.

  After popping two eyes, and working on a third something kicks the fence, rusty nails scream and wood planks pop. He drops his stick, startled enough to scream, but holds back.

  “What are you doing?” A familiar voice sounds from the other side of the fence.

  The wood planks sit too tight to show him anything, but the voice is enough. “Nothing, Eugene.”

  “Why did you leave Frank? Frank is nice.”

  William grabs a new stick from a dying tree and continues digging at the third eye. “He is. I just had some stuff to get over here.”

  “Somebody killed some animals over there.”

  Holding a matted sheet of fur in his hand William entertains a child’s desire for storytelling. “Really?”

  “Mrs. Rose says people shouldn’t hurt other people, but somebody hurt the animals. I heard them.”

  “Yeah.” William slips a body into his bag. “Who hurt them?” “I don’t know, but I heard it.”

  The fur on the animals peels off in clean patches. The exposed skin is black and creamy. “Yeah.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “I don’t know,” William says. “You don’t know a lot.” “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” says Eugene, kicking more at the fence, shaking its entire length.

  “Have a look,” and William throws the muddiest raccoon body over the fence. He hears it land hard to the ground. Eugene spills out a tiny surprised squeak but little more. “That smell is the respiring fluids from body tissue broken down by bacteria. Methane, cadaverine, hydrogen sulphide. It stinks to you and me, but bugs love it. Especially the parasitoid wasps. They’ll show up later.”

  From behind the fence William hears Eugene inhale, long and hard. He coughs and says, “It’s all squishy,” tinged with laughter.

  “That’s the gas building up from the bacteria. In a few days, it will get flat as a soccer ball. It will smell like cheese—butyric acid, it’s called—and the bottom of the raccoon will get moldy. Beetles will come. Tineid moths, mites, and they’ll live there until all that’s left is bones. Whole families will live on that raccoon. Moms, dads, grandpas, grandmas, sisters, babies.”