Stranger Will

by Caleb J. Ross

  “She might be right.” William leaves for a mop of his own and a few seconds of air free of the name Shelia.

  He digs into the car trunk, past the suit for a latex glove when Philip yells from the bathroom. “She’s right about a lot of things. I’m really happy with everything, you know.”

  William inhales. He takes the air deep. “We’ll do alright,” Philip says. “I know it.”

  William reaches for a second glove, snaps it over the gauze of his healing hand. The second glove he helps over his fingers with his teeth. Outfitted, he lugs a dry mop head and a hose to the kitchen and begins filling his bucket with water. As he waits for the level to rise, he checks out the refrigerator, filled with condiments and lunchmeat. He opens cabinets, shuffles through cereal, canned vegetables, and a stock of powdered baby formula. “That was a waste,” he says holding a can of Enfamil.

  “Shelia is definitely the one,” Philip says from the bathroom. “She’s great to be around and she has direction to match. The stuff she does at the school—I couldn’t do that.”

  Not knowing exactly where the confrontation will take him, he begins with “about Shelia…” but stops. Catching sun, strategically placed in the beam’s path, is a cage, rusted but smooth enough to shine—a bird cage William doesn’t remember the couple having—one he remembers seeing at Mrs. Rose’s house.

  “What about her?” Philip yells.

  William approaches the cage. He breathes in the stink, more painful than any chemical. Bloated at the bottom of the cage, atop fresh newspapers and pellets of food scattered, perhaps by struggle, perhaps by hunger, is a dead pigeon. Attached to its leg is a small, metal canister.

  “I really want to know what you think,” Philip says. The sound of a sturdy bristled brush working against tile echoes to the kitchen.

  “She…” but William has changed direction. He opens the cage and lifts the bird by its leg. The head dangles. William pulls the canister away, opens it with his teeth, the taste of blood rich in his mouth.

  “It’s really important,” Philip says. “This is what I want to talk with you about.” His scrubbing has stopped.

  William unrolls the paper inside. In familiar handwriting, neat with age and intent, the words float for a moment before William can settle his eyes by the glow of the shallow sunlight:

  More powerful than teaching is showing you that lessons are never unlearned. Only when we are all dead will this stop. Until then, we die one imperfection at a time. We learn one life at a time. I have failed with you, and for that I will fall away, but failure in itself reverberates forever. When something moves…

  “Come in here,” Philip says. “I’ve got to tell you the news. I need to say it now.”

  …everything moves.

  He limps toward Philip’s voice, never pulling his eyes from the paper.

  Like a van swerving into a tree, dodging a head-on collision.

  William supports himself by a brick wall. He trips over a mess of supplies, chemicals, rags, bags, all of it binding each step.

  A tree may teach the driver to drive more carefully...

  His arm burns against the wall, the abrasion wearing him thin.

  …or a tree may teach him that he was never meant to drive on that road.

  At the bathroom doorway, William looks down to Philip who smears dots of red to an opaque pink mask on the linoleum floor. He draws a quick face in the blood like finger-paint then yells again as he stands and smashes his print with a saturated mop. “Please,” he says and jumps when he turns to see William standing so close. He doesn’t even look to the paper in William’s hand. Instead he confronts eye to eye and states that he’s waited too long to say it already.

  “Shelia and I,” he starts, trailing off for the right word. Behind him the bloody print of Janice is giving birth to Philip’s finger- painted face. “We’re close. You’ve seen the ring, right?”

  William nods. His palm sweats through the paper in his hand. “I meant to tell you earlier, but I couldn’t find the right time. Not that this is the right time either but…things are going to be different. A lot different. Shelia, she’s—she might be…”

  But William already knows the end. He stands, as eager as he can pretend, and moves his own lips to the word as Philip lets it spill.

  “…pregnant,” they say in unison.

  “That’s great,” William says. He buries the note in his pocket. “Really.”

  “I think so,” he says turning back to Janice’s red ghost, “but Shelia…”

  And William feels the blood swell within his veins. “But Shelia, what?”

  “I want to keep it. I want to be a father, you know, but Shelia…she isn’t so confident.”

  Spoken like William all those months ago—hopeful, and two cups of coffee away from conviction—but William is here to interrupt. “What does she tell you?” he asks already preparing to tear it down.

  “Some smart things,” he says scrubbing Janice’s stain. The print fades, slowly with each stroke. “One thing that makes a lot of sense, she says that we are always controlled and only when we accept that can we ever be—”

  “Free,” William says. “Free. I know. I’ve been told that, too.”

  Philip keeps scrubbing. “When did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t,” William says and for the first time he understands the world as a vast system of signs; a conversation spoken over him, around him, through him, perhaps about him, but never with him. He is the product of experimentation—the man upstairs but without a gun propped under his chin.

  “Who did?” Philip asks, but William has found a different thread.

  “Remember the man upstairs?” he asks. “The guy we found with Shelia.”

  “Peter,” Philip says. “Yeah. Shelia told me his name.” “She ever tell you more?”

  “He wasn’t anybody much. Shelia didn’t like him. But for good reason, I suppose.”

  “Was he the father,” William asks leaning against the bathroom doorframe, “of her dead child?”

  “She said the man upstairs was just a bum, a weak bum.” Said with the learned spite of Shelia via Mrs. Rose via what William now recognizes as a lifetime of soured attempts.

  “Weak?”

  “He did it himself,” Philip says. “Pulled the trigger and that was the end of it. Shelia is a little shaken up by it—who wouldn’t be—but she is taking it pretty well. It’s for the better, though.”

  “For the better,” William says too low to echo off the hard tiled walls. He watches his friend recommit to the stain, scrubbing what he’s discovering is a simple step in a lesson plan. Philip will meet Mrs. Rose. They will share coffee. He will rid the world of his child, a step proving his weakness—her theory’s validity—and then what? Shelia will go again and again until her body stops producing, until Mrs. Rose finds another source. Another well. Another body to empty.

  “I’ve got to go,” William says. He throws his gloves to the floor.

  “Where are you going?” Philip asks. He yells that they have a job to do and that if they don’t clean this mess, who will? But William is gone already. I was not the first failure he says to himself as he turns the engine of Philip’s car, chemicals bleeding from the back, but I will be the last.

  Mrs. Rose kneels wrist-deep in her garden, pulling weeds, panting heavy enough for William to see from the road, her clothes expand. His first shotgun was lost in the van wreckage. This new one he picked up from a pawnshop just a few miles up the road, a dusty, no-questions-asked kind of place that buys cheap and sells expensive. He’s never believed in conclusion via a gun—the shots have always brought him more pieces to play with—but if there is one thing he has learned from Mrs. Rose, it’s that he has the power to steer outcome. The trick is to keep anyone else from believing it.

  Philip’s car vibrates the dust from the dirt road, its engine echoes against the ground loud enough to rouse the dying, but Mrs. Rose, she keeps her back turned and her knees to the dirt
. The plants in her garden have turned crisp and brown, drained by the cold weather. Mrs. Rose, too.

  He positions the gun, its weight resisted by his strengthened arm. He pulls the trigger. Mrs. Rose falls. Her birds panic in their cages. William breathes in the exhaust from his shot, the first truly satisfying breath he remembers taking.

  He then rides to the police station, embracing the idea of a prison cell. Containment, he thinks and smiles about the all that word implies: Control, refusing freedom. Acknowledging freedom. A janitor, mopping the granite floor of the entryway, opens the door.

  “Thanks,” William says, but the man in the uniform says nothing. He just mops.

  He tells an officer about Mrs. Rose, and about his child, about Julie’s hunt, about the wreck and says to “check the accident reports if you want.” From the back seat of car filled with shovels and gloves, William directs the car to the clearing. Officers dig in the spot William points to through plastic restraints. They find nothing. William points to three more areas, saying “try there,” and “I know it’s out here,” knowing really that they will find nothing if they didn’t find his baby the first time. They reprimand him for the hours spent searching through mud, saying, “We don’t have time for this. We’ve got criminals to catch.” They drive him back to the station for paperwork and a proper arrest.

  Back at the station, the janitor still mops. He pours, into a bucket, bleach so pure the fumes shape the air. William breathes the vapors deep until his lungs ache, until his entire body accepts the pain not as a burden but as a truth.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks first to Amy Sage Webb for showing me what story can do. Thanks to the entire Write Club family, especially the 2006 spin-off staring Mlaz Corbier, Jason Kane, Christopher Dwyer, Jason Heim, and Simon West-Bulford for enduring drafts of this novel that I would destroy today if you hadn’t already. Thanks to The Velvet for the binding warmth, especially to Nik Korpon, Richard Thomas, Jesse Lawrence, Gordon Highland, Logan Rapp, Pela, Stephen Graham Jones, and Paul Tremblay. Thanks to Alex Martin and Bohren und der Club of Gore, the former for introducing me to the music of the latter. Thanks to Phil Jourdan for being the best gatekeeper a friend could ask for.

  And thanks to you, the reader, the god-as-congregation, for lending your eyes and mind to these words. Without you this novel would be just a glorified diary, an ego-stroke at best. But you give reason for the caffeinated nights, the cigar-infused days, and the abused keyboards in between.

  One last favor before you reach for the next book in your to-read stack: please, if you have a few moments, continue your active role in the literary community by submitting a quick review/opinion of Stranger Will online, anywhere— Amazon.com, Powells.com, BN.com, Goodreads.com, Twitter, Facebook, your personal blog, or any online forum. Pretty please.

  Finally, please send me direct feedback or even just general thoughts. I love conversation. Find me at www.calebjross.com.

  Caleb

  About the Author

  Caleb J. Ross has a BA in English Literature and creative writing from Emporia State University. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared widely, both online and in print. He is the author of Charactered Pieces: stories, Stranger Will: a novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin: a novel, Murmurs: Gathered Stories Vol. One, and As a Machine and Parts.

  Visit Caleb all over:

  Homepage – www.calebjross.com

  Twitter – calebjross.com/twitter

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  Google+ – calebjross.com/google

  Appendix

  “Can I Still Defend Stranger Will?”

  A question was posed some years ago at Thunderdome Magazine, regarding Stranger Will: “Why would a healthy, perfectly normal and nice man, a happily married and loving father, write with this much gusto about apathy and abortion?” (Ignore that at the time I wrote Stranger Will I did not yet have a child). The question is valid, one I routinely answer with a quick, dismissive—and ultimately hollow—“I like reading gross stuff, so I like writing gross stuff.” Aesthetics. It’s a response we all accept, because we don’t want our own unique aesthetic leanings called into question. But aesthetics can’t be the entire answer.

  I’m writing this as my wife sits in the living room pregnant with our second child. Nobody but my wife and I know about this pregnancy. Not our parents. Not our doctor. Not our first child, 3-year-old Jameson. Just me, her, and you, the reader. Our decision to withhold the information for now has everything to do with a fear of miscarriage—and the likely resulting wave of sympathy—and nothing to do with shame, embarrassment, or any other such comparative triviality. Miscarriage, though it hardly ever seems the fault of the parents—or perhaps because fault is so elusive much of the time—maintains a powerful position near the top of death’s org chart. A child’s death, it seems, never belongs to the child.

  Communal misery as a coping mechanism has long interested me, and with it its converse—self-reflective bravery in the face of misery. These two concepts, though equally respected in most traditions, stand in contrast to one another. Sharing grief with a crowd—public tears, funerals, remembrance reunions—are celebrated as a source of power, of benefit for all involved.

  Likewise, we often think of “staying strong” in the wake of hardship as a responsibility an individual must endure for the sake of communal strength (“stay strong for the kids,” “show the world you can keep on keepin’ on”). Polar reactions have never— and even more-so post-Stranger Will—satisfied me as the only valid reactions to death. We cannot be only sad or only brave (let’s remove, for the purposes of this essay, any open happiness associated with the fall of a national tyrant, as that happiness often comes as the result of previous deaths). Why can’t we be indifferent? And perhaps more specific to the themes of Stranger Will, why can’t we openly oppose the root of all death: birth? Or at least, why can’t this opposition be one of the many accepted and respected opinions on the subject of childhood and parenting. Even non-parents should be allowed to contribute to the larger discussion, right? But too often, at least empirically speaking, the child-less aren’t allowed a voice.

  When I began writing Stranger Will, I did so with multiple motivations. I was disenfranchised with the lack of political sway that I assumed was granted to me as a young, idealistic, and motivated college student (these motivations are explored further in Appendix A); I had a girlfriend (now my wife) who desperately wanted children even as I favored a life without them; and I wanted to be as viscerally affecting with my writing as possible, being at that time heavily influenced by writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Brian Evenson and an aesthetic I would later learn is called noir (a full exploration of Stranger Will as a genre novel in Appendix B). Now, nearly ten years after completing the original draft of Stranger Will, can I still defend the novel by way of its origins? I am letting it be re-published, after all. Or, has the motivation I once assumed, and insisted upon, given way to more deeply realized yet wholly more digestible motivation: a desire to simply allow a conversation about birth in which both parents and non-parents could participate.

  But why Stranger Will specifically? Why approach the desire for conversation at such an apparently hostile and grotesque angle?

  Perhaps I simply feared being a father. I didn’t know then (and barely know now) how it was done (more about my fatherless childhood in Appendices C and D). Not until my mid- twenties did I realize that I’d been subconsciously looking to every male figure in my life—both senior and peer—as a beacon of what it meant to be a capital-M Man. I picked up on car jargon via the 1990s cable sitcom Home Improvement; fell into, and out of sports, repeatedly throughout childhood; and just before my first client visit for my first job right out of college I was forced to approach one of my female co-workers for tie knotting help (which eventually lead to a second opinion via an internet how- to guide written by, I assume for the sake of what little testosterone
I can still claim, a man). Meet my father, the internet. I learned to shave one tiny red square of toilet paper at a time.

  So, fear perhaps drove the investigative angle of Stranger Will. I was free to explore themes that were never played out for me in a real-life domestic setting. The hostile and grotesque angle? I’ll have to retain the claim of simple aesthetics, perhaps with a touch of willed confrontation; a reaction was a reaction was a reaction to my early-twenties brain. Now, at thirty years old with a child and a half under my wing, I’ve molded and shaped from that simple reaction a larger desire: conversation. Everyone, I hope, will at least feel compelled to question the purpose of parenthood. Great literature forces us to ask questions. My hope is that I’ve created great literature.

  Appendix A

  In Defense of Stranger Will

  Originally published at The Nervous Breakdown, May 10, 2011

  I understand that an introduction to a novel, especially one written for a first-edition printing by a relatively unknown author, may seem egotistical; this of course presumes a reaction to this book passionate enough to warrant such a pre-defense. I am willing to gamble my humility on this presumption. Stranger Will is a book that will polarize readers, and I believe setting proper context for this novel is important.

  Stranger Will started with a newspaper article about dead bodies. I was in college and for the first time in my life open to outside influence. Sudden self-sufficiency coupled with my first completed year of university study forced me to open up to new ideas. Despite my historical defiance of the status-quo (or what I thought at the time was defiance), the university liberal arts program did its job and liberated me from my somewhat-rigid thought structure. Where before I would have read the dead body article and walked away simply satisfied with its morbid imagery, I instead walked away with a sense of possibility. The article had potential, though I wasn’t yet sure how to leverage it. That would come months later.