Stranger Will

by Caleb J. Ross

  The kid sniffs the air again. William can hear him stirring the animal’s skin, studying the corpse instead of fearing it. “Where is all the blood?” he asks, curious the way Mrs. Rose teaches. Death like a social studies lesson. History is pain. Biology is a session on innate survival.

  “That stuff that looks like jelly—that’s it. It’s coagulated. That means it doesn’t work anymore.”

  “Did Mrs. Rose teach you all that stuff?” “No.”

  “Who did?”

  “My dad taught me some, but he’s dead now.”

  “Mrs. Rose says stuff like that. She says moms and dads will die. She says everyone dies.”

  “Mrs. Rose is right.”

  “Yeah. I like Mrs. Rose. She’s nice.”

  “She can be,” William says, unsure if he means it.

  The scene quiets except for William’s feet through fallen leaves and a slow grunt each time he bends down for a raccoon. These are the sounds of his age or the sounds of his homelessness, either meaning nothing to this child who stays despite the calling all around them. The dim screams of children playing games rattle the air.

  “Why do you do that?”

  William turns fast to see an eye peeking through an open knothole. “Why are you touching them?” Eugene asks, his mouth replacing the eye for the words but back to the eye as soon as they finish. Lips, eyes, lips, eyes.

  “Because,” William says.

  “Mrs. Rose says you shouldn’t say just ‘because.’ She says it sounds like you’re stupid.”

  “Why don’t you go play or something? Go play with your friends.”

  The mouth: “those games we play are too hard,” then back to the eye.

  “Well,” William says. “Try again.”

  The eye steps away. For a second William hears footsteps decrescendo, but they stop. Then, breaking the sky, the raccoon soars back over the fence and hits William on the cheek before falling into the stained grass. He tastes decay.

  “Now you throw it back,” Eugene says, excited, his voice high and ready. “It’s easy.”

  “Go away,” William says and starts to walk away. The bag is full, so he throws the returned raccoon over the fence. “Give it a name and play with it. Maybe, George.”

  “Roger sounds better,” and it comes sailing back. “Roger was my grandpa’s name. He’s dead.”

  William stops, realizing that building community around death is just a way to show desperation without so many phone calls. Over the years he’s heard many voices speak on trivialities as he rips up carpet saturated by a dead mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, sister, all of them saying, tears in their eyes, “how about this weather,” meaning “so we’re all gonna die, huh? I’m not ready to die.” William walks back to the fence, raccoon in hand. “Keep it or you’re not getting it back.”

  It comes back.

  As much as he wants to keep walking, to keep his word to Mrs. Rose regarding conversation focused on moral tests, William has an urge to force the animal onto the kid. Eugene just being a part of this school means Mrs. Rose has faith in him, so as a full participant and believer, William tries to as well. He throws.

  “Grandpa was the nicest man ever,” Eugene says. “My mom says that. I never met him though.”

  “Then you can’t agree with her.” The raccoon comes back.

  “How do you throw a baseball?”

  “Just like this, I suppose.” William returns the animal with heft.

  “One time I found a baseball on the ground. I was going to take it but it wasn’t mine. Mrs. Rose says not to steal.”

  “That’s a good idea,” William says.

  “She says if I steal, my dad will be mad at me.”

  The raccoon comes back over. William snags it with an index finger, hooking under the stomach, around its ribs.

  “What would your dad do?” William asks, wiping his finger on his pants.

  “Nothing. He’s dead.”

  He tosses it back over. “What about your mom?”

  “She doesn’t say a lot. She mostly just goes to work and watches TV. Sometimes she has friends at the house, and I can’t sleep.”

  William wants to explain limits to Eugene. He wants to teach him humility and silence, but instead he looks up to the sky and waits for it to be broken by a falling raccoon. He keeps his knees loose. But, loud enough to hurt, a bell rings from somewhere closer to the school.

  “Here,” Eugene yells as he grunts behind a final throw. The body thumps hard against the fence. William looks through the knothole to see both the raccoon laying in the grass and Eugene’s escape, already too close to the school to be pulled back by William’s yell. He doesn’t bother with teaching him anything at this distance. The call of the school beckons.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Laughter boils like the world is susceptible to its ripples and all that matters is the message in transition. No matter where it lands, what ears pick it up, how it changes the air in between, the laughter, encouraged by alcohol, spills out from a fenced-in backyard, and William wonders if his half-empty bag of potato chips will carry him unaffected through the night. Or half-full, he says to himself, chuckling slightly where before he wasn’t.

  He walks into the backyard through an open door in the fence, it swinging as the clouds conspire behind the aging evening.

  “…and he ate the goddamned thing. All of it, right in his mouth,” a man with a real beard says, laughing so hard his chair moans.

  The first thing William learns about horseshoes with Mrs. Rose’s strangers is that horseshoes isn’t so much a game as it is a way for people to drink and share stories. “Update on progress,” Franks says.

  This is poker night, too. This is bowling on Tuesdays. This is darts at The Lariat.

  Frank leads William from the fence to the fire to the strangers who surround. He interrupts the heavy laughter, takes the bag of chips, and moves through the small crowd with quick introductions. They offer names, but behind the still bubbling fits of laughter, all William can really make out is “Mike,” the Story Man, a short man with a harsh, broken voice, muffled through his brown beard. Frank sits down on a blue party cooler and removes the rubber band from William’s chips, spilling crumbs onto the grass. He laughs and eats pieces from the ground.

  William leans over to Frank, Story Man still pushed by beer and ethereal laughter. “I want to know about the pigeons,” William says.

  “In a bit. Mike is good,” Frank whispers, spitting barbeque flecks from his mouth. “He’s been working on this project for a while.”

  “You listen, Poly,” Mike the Story Man says reaching over to snap William’s polyester beard, but sober William dodges the attempt. “And a gimp, too,” Mike says nodding to William’s bandaged arm. The man laughs it off and begins another story.

  “Tony Flecher,” he says, eyes wide and reflecting the fire. A few giggle fits spurt within the crowd; fits of recognition William assumes, but he stays silent, smiling though because it gets him close to inclusion. Mike the Story Man sets the scene on the school playground. He paints the crowd with a few other names: LaTonya Robbins, Jenny Riggers, Nick Herkins.

  “Outsiders,” Frank whispers to William. He leans close. “Known troublemakers. We’ve got to keep a close eye on these. Most likely to revolt in some way.”

  Mike the Story Man describes a tree in the center of the playground, his project as given by Mrs. Rose—training the children to be afraid of what they have been told to fear. As Mike the Story Man speaks to the crowd, Frank fills William in on relevant information:

  This tree, a tree like any other, but to the children it has the ability to poison. It is the reason for everything bad that has ever happened to them and should they go near it, everything bad that will ever happen to them.

  “I’ve seen the tree,” William whispers. “It’s beautiful.” Hundreds of years old and perfect for climbing.

  Frank continues, both ears to Mike.

  The children he mentions are tar
gets. The tree, he convinces them, will kill. Then he waits for broken rules. Anything at all he reports to Mrs. Rose.

  Eventually the fear maintained itself. “Sort of a self-perpetuating horror story,” Frank says. “Kids started making up stories about monsters and kidnappers and all sorts of evil things.

  Nobody would go near it.” Then, “listen,” he says and points to Mike. “Here it comes.”

  Mike finishes a beer, drawing the gulps out into exaggerated ceremony. He sets the empty can in a moist patch of grass.

  “Phenol—dry crystals of the shit,” he says. “I can get as much as I want at work.”

  Frank leans back in, “he does factory stuff down at the T.S. Morack plant in Alexandria. They manufacture lots of stuff there, throat lozenges, lotions, aerosol air freshener, disinfectants— stuff you gotta wear masks to make.”

  William knows phenol. When the fluids of a six-hundred- pound body saturate a carpet and its wood floor because the person it was had no friends, no family, no neighbors who would tempt the home, phenol saves. Neighbors claimed their disinterest in the man as a result of him being “a quiet person.” But William stays silent about his history, watching the strangers glow behind the flame’s vigor.

  “When you take a cough drop and your throat gets numb,” Mike the Story Man says massaging his own throat for effect, “that’s the phenol. The magic ingredient.”

  The guy at the end—Clifford, William thinks is his name—he nods. His mouth hangs open, and his pupils stretch so wide the flames reflecting around them fall to black.

  “At a low concentration it’s a topical anesthetic, or a cleaning agent. Get it high enough and that shit’ll burn right through you,” Mike says. “Down to the muscle if you let it.”

  William turns to Frank who nods, smiling.

  “Where’s this going,” William asks hiding his voice with a handful of potato chips.

  Frank just points back to the Story Man and smiles wider. “Last night, after school let out, I took buckets of the stuff to the tree,” Mike says. “Big buckets. Five gallon things, filled with it.” He stretches his arms wide to exaggerate their size. “Got a good swing going with my arms and just let loose. Covered the

  tree. Up as high as I could reach all the way down to the ground. Just like a snowstorm the way it packed into the bark and coated the leaves.”

  Every stranger sits entranced. They have all stopped drinking, stopped yawning.

  “Tomorrow,” Mike says snapping open a fresh can, “I teach them about love. I teach them the difference between feelings and necessity. I teach those kids that if they ever get lost, they should hug a tree.”

  Laughter erupts immediately. Suddenly, he can feel the pulse in his wrists throb. Mrs. Rose teaches tact and focus yet these people act with neither. They take their mission and distort it down to only a prank. This is the evolving dichotomy of progress. This is the underbelly Mrs. Rose doesn’t know about. This is the community that tries only because it has to, the community that plays a game it can claim as something greater. They are a superstructure to an ideology. It surprises even William, but he laughs. He laughs only as hard as everyone else because he doesn’t want to be known as Poly forever. He wonders how many of these strangers once sat, reflecting fire, learning to be like all the others.

  Frank stands, showing a firm smile to the group. “Come with me,” he says and grabs William by the arm. They make a swift exit as the laughing dies to a man’s voice asking “who’s next?”

  He takes William into the kitchen where he pulls out a cigarette. “The rest of them don’t like breathing it,” he says and offers one to William.

  He takes it fast, almost breaking it. “What do you think?” he says.

  William shrugs and pulls a lighter from his pocket.

  “It’s actually pretty good,” Frank says accepting the lighter after William. “He’ll tell the kids that Mrs. Rose said to hug the tree. If they don’t, they’re gone. If they do, they’ll have the burns to prove how devoted they can be. How promising they can be.”

  William breathes Frank’s exhaled smoke. “I thought we were just supposed to watch them,” he says.

  “We are.” Frank takes a long drag from his cigarette and touches its hot end to his tongue, extinguishing the red with a small sizzle. He puts the half-smoked leftovers into his breast pocket and pulls out a stick of gum, offering a piece to William who accepts and places the stick into his pocket. “It was actually Mrs. Rose’s idea. A few of us got to complaining about just sitting around and waiting for something to happen so she let us do this stuff. We get the failing kids out of the way a lot faster and everyone seems a bit happier being more engaged.” Frank tries a small bubble with the gum, but the candy falls limp to the ground. “Keep an animal locked up with nothing to do and eventually it will realize it is imprisoned.”

  “Failing kids?” William says, but Frank is already speaking a new thought.

  “Some of us believe in all this stuff Mrs. Rose teaches,” he says kicking the gum away from his feet. “Some of us only pretend. And some of us,” he pulls the cigarette from his pocket and rolls it between his fingers, spit still fresh and reflecting the weak fluorescent light, “some of us have our own ideas.”

  “Like who?” William asks.

  “A few of us, but Clifford over there, mainly,” and he points out the window to the quiet man with pupils still large enough to fall into, “he has this theory that all of us—you, me, Mrs. Rose, our children—for all of us everything started perfect. Everything existed at its pinnacle. This is before even birth. But then, two faulty people decide to have kids. They decide to let ego get the best of them, thinking they needed something to share the wealth of the world with, so they have a child. They pull it right from heaven and give birth to it here on earth. Heaven, like a garden of perfect souls, a buffet from which every pregnancy steals.” He still rolls the cigarette tight and so wet the paper dissolves into his fingers. “Think of Adam and Eve like entrepreneurs, kidnapping as new way to spread market influence. They steal a child from paradise and suddenly everyone thinks they need one too. But the worst part,” he says dropping the cigarette back into his pocket, “is that they never knew what they did. They set into motion a trend that lasts until this day, and will last forever even though Clifford has it all figured out. Everyone is perfect until born. Then, after birth, we count on people like Mrs. Rose to return us to promise.”

  William drops spit to his cigarette. “That’s fucking crazy?” The sizzle fills the silence until Frank answers.

  “It’s not a bad idea, really? But it means the human mind is innately imperfect.”

  “How so?” William asks.

  “Do you remember pre-birth?” Frank says. William ponders the question for a moment.

  “Me neither ” Frank says. “The human mind cannot comprehend pre-birth. Hence, the human mind cannot comprehend perfection. For those years until we generate memories we are experiencing simple denial.”

  William waits. Crickets bivouac in the tall grass, tricked by the silence into believing they are alone, that they are free to sing the degrees of the evening. Frank moves slowly for a rock and throws toward the sound, silencing the night. He opens a satisfied smile. “Unless you’re Dali,” Frank says. “Fucker said he had memories of intrauterine life. Remembered it all.”

  William smiles, familiar with the artist, fond of his work. “So The Persistence of Memory is heaven?”

  “And this,” Frank moves his hand to the window, his knuckles the scope of a long barrel, the strangers standing and organizing themselves to the dying glow of the fire, “this is all the ‘horrible traumatism of birth’ he would say.”

  William flicks the wet butt of his cigarette to the grass. “Scares the shit out of me, anyway.”

  “It should.” Frank stands, brushing ash from his pants into the wind falling through the kitchen window. “Who are we to teach those kids anything?”

  William grabs Frank before he st
eps away, pulling himself up by the sleeve. “Why are we teaching them anything? Mrs. Rose doesn’t believe in perfection. She says that there is no such thing—”

  “—as finality,” Frank interrupts. “I know what she says. But imagine how much easier perfection is to attain if not everyone believed—if we didn’t believe. The fewer the competitors, the easier the contest.”

  William suffers a long moment robbed of breath.

  “Some of us agree with what Mrs. Rose says.” Frank continues. “Some of us want to believe, and some of us are just plain in love with what we can do here. We’ve got anonymity and we’ve got resources. The only two things a person needs to be truly happy.”

  “But what about Clifford? He doesn’t believe in this.”

  “None of us are innocent, Will. Not even those of us who pretend otherwise.”

  Outside, Mike still laughs, yelling about mosquitoes and the dying fire. Clifford watches the flames slowly dwindle, sipping at a can, and joining in laugher when prompted by a storyteller ’s expectant stare. Other strangers sing or dance or yell over the idle chatter like they have something worth saying. And perhaps they do, William thinks, but even then, the words will die away, and what is left in their place?

  “Frank,” William calls again as he walks toward the open kitchen door. “Do you have a project?”

  “Nothing I plan on using,” he says, “and no matter where you stand it might be a good idea to come up with something in case someone asks.”

  “What will happen if I can’t?”

  “The projects started as just a way to pass some time. Before long, we were seeing it as a means to really ground the grand scheme of everything, to get everything straight. Mrs. Rose had this great idea about homeless people sitting outside a school playground, an idea she talked about with contagious passion. She knew where to find us, knew we would be up for it, and before we knew it, there were four of us, then eight, now about twenty-four if I can think right. All of us have something going on. And all of us will swear to be faithful to their execution no matter what we may truly believe.” Frank steps one foot out into the backyard. “And considering the deaths that brought each of us here we really aren’t in any position to negotiate otherwise.”