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 stiffness 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.”
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 targets. 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.