The Death of Wendell Mackey (10 page)

“It’s all labor Wendell,” she once told him. “Been in labor with you for years. Since those late night cramps, when Daddy brought me to the hospital. It’s just that they never went away. I birthed something that keeps hanging on to me.”

Mother loved her boy, with a pythonic fervor.

“Glad she’s dead,” Wendell muttered. He closed his eyes and saw her behind his eyelids, her back to him as she rocked slowly in the rocking chair, facing the wall next to the bathroom door. He opened his eyes and she was gone. He turned back to the photograph.

That’s strange
, he thought. He thought the baseball bat had been over the other shoulder in the picture.
I’m losing it
. He turned and walked to the windows.

They were still nailed shut, had stayed that way for years, but one of the faded plaid drapes had caught on a loose nail, revealing part of a yellowed window. The sun, occluded by years of grime, winked through a corner of the glass. Wendell drew closer, spat on it and rubbed with the side of his fist. Better. The sun now claimed its own dinner plate of white space on the floor. Wendell moved his hand through the beam of light, feeling its warmth and watching a mist of dust dance in it. He leaned down to look out. Outside his cocoon was a dark city on a sunny day. The afternoon was escaping towards the horizon, and a long stretch of low hills where the sun would soon bury itself rested miles beyond the city limits. Miles beyond brown and black, where things grew in unchoked air. It was far enough away to still live in fantasy, and Wendell imagined the farms and trees and neighborhoods. Out there was something beautiful. Wherever it was, he needed it. And for a moment, serenity found a place.

A noise. The hallway. Footsteps.

Wendell snapped his neck towards the front door.

It was him again. The drunk. Had to be.

“I need that gun.”

There was a knock on a door down the hall, some muffled conversation through the door, then silence. The footsteps stopped at another door. A few knocks followed by silence. It repeated. A pause, footsteps, and again the knocks and no response. But it was getting closer. Something was said at the next door about food, or a delivery, and a door opened, followed by a curt response to the person knocking. The door slammed shut.

The mere mention of food moved Wendell towards his door. Apprehensive, he rubbed his jaw, stopped to weigh his options, but realized that with a stomach throwing its acidic tantrums, he had no real options.

The footsteps stopped. Wendell leaned towards the peep hole. The man outside was immense, wearing a white t-shirt too small for his frame, and with tufts of black hair—absent from his shaved head—sprouting from the neck line. His back was turned to Wendell’s apartment as he began knocking on Sister Agatha’s door across the hall. In his left hand was a stack of flyers. Next to him on the floor was a brown paper bag with the top rolled shut, a growing grease stain on its side. The door opened a crack and Wendell saw Agatha’s diminutive shape in the shadow.

“Chinese food,” said the man. “Here’s your menu.” He handed her one of his flyers. “Read it and get a complementary egg roll.”

Agatha took the paper, brought it close to her face—a face still hidden from the abrasive hall lights—and returned it to the man. “No thank you,” she said, with a voice neither angry nor welcoming. Tired perhaps, a bit irritated. The door closed.

“See you next week,” said the man. He turned, and in the peep hole, Wendell saw the man’s eyes swell like lava lamp wax as he leaned towards the peep hole from the other side. Before knocking, he turned to grab the greased bag, dropping it to his side yet again.

Egg rolls will do
, Wendell thought. He would lick the bag clean, given the chance.

The man knocked. “Chinese food. Check out the menu, get a free egg roll.” It was said with the rhythm of a cold call salesman whose opening line had been whittled down after countless rejections.

Just think for a minute
, Wendell told himself.

And then:
Nothing to think about. Just do it.

Wendell was desperate, for both food and security, but lacking the former would eventually force him to take too many liberties with the latter. He needed to eat, and so the door needed to open.

He opened it a crack, and the bag’s smell struck him. Chicken. No, shrimp. Desperation must have honed the senses, he thought. He remembered being allergic to shellfish, but at this point, Wendell would have shoveled live crabs into his mouth.

The man towered above him, back lit by screaming white bulbs. He had a broad face with its features small and oddly set close together at the center, making the rest of his face a range of fleshy cheeks and chin.

“Good for you man,” the man said. “Chinese food if—”

“How many?”

“What?”

“How many can I have?”

The man paused. “Give me ten minutes. It’ll change your life. And I’ll give you…three.”

“How many’re in there?”

“Okay, five. But no more. What matters is what I’ve got to say. It’s gonna change how you see things. What I’ve got here,” he said, as he waved the flyers, “this stuff’ll blow your mind, and—”

“Fine. Just come in, quickly.” Wendell opened the door wider to let the man pass, popped his head out into the hallway to check for curious neighbors, and then shut it behind him.

The man walked over to the wooden table and dropped the bag in the center. He peeled off one of the flyers from the stack, planted it down into the table with his thumb, and turned to Wendell.

“So, they say I’m crazy,” the man said. “Do I look crazy?”

Wendell kept close to the door, staring at the bag.

“They say,” he said again. “They. You ever met the ‘they’ in they? They say all sorts of things. But it’s just another trick. Just another way for them to get you to drop your guard.” He smiled, revealing uneven yellowed teeth. He extended a hand and stepped towards Wendell. “Name’s Andy. You?”

“It’s Wendell.” Wendell stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I’ve got the flu, so…”

Andy’s hand dropped, but the smile stayed. “No worries,” he said.

Both stood silently, and Wendell studied Andy’s face, his closely set eyes under the shelf of his forehead, which was smooth like a river stone. On his left forearm was a tattoo of a man, arms and legs tied to what looked to be a giant arrow, but with one of the man’s arms pulling free from its restraint. On his right forearm was tattooed the number 88 surrounded in barbed wire.

“So what do you want?” Wendell asked.

“You don’t waste time, do you Wendell?”

“I guess not.”

“Well then,” Andy said, tapping at the flyer on the table. “I look crazy to you?”

“I guess not.”

“No matter what they say, right?” His eyes stayed on Wendell and his mouth hung open slightly, like a loose hinge, like he was trying to coax a response out of Wendell, like he knew something that Wendell should have known. But seeing that Wendell wasn’t getting it, he closed his mouth and smiled between tight lips. “You know,” he continued, “they’re watching us. Right now.”

Wendell’s throat tightened.

No smell from the bag. No sound. No feel of the door behind him. Only those closely set eyes, ink stain eyes.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me,” Andy said.

How can he know?
Wendell clasped both hands together in front of him, unsure of where to move next.

“Or, I should say, they
can
watch us,” Andy continued. “They got unmarked cars, roaming in every city in America. Guys with ear pieces around each corner. Helicopters without insignias or tail numbers. Spy satellites miles above the earth,” and he pointed his finger up towards the ceiling, “able to read our magazines over our shoulders. Maybe able to read much more than that, if you catch my drift.” His finger turned and pointed towards his head, which he tapped lightly. “So…” He looked down at the table, fingering the words drawn into its surface by Wendell. He mouthed the words that he read, disinterested in what they could have meant. He turned back to Wendell. “So, you understand that what I’ve got to say is important. Vital even.”

“The food, please.”

“Yeah, sure.” He unrolled the top of the bag and stuffed his meaty paw in. He pulled out five egg rolls at once and dropped them into a pile on the table.

Wendell took large steps from the door to the table, snatched the pile up and, oblivious to any decorum that might exist, even in their own grimy corner of civil society, began stuffing chunks of fried dough and cabbage into his mouth. The grease was heaven sent and coated his lips and chin. He sucked each finger clean, keeping the last bit of food in his mouth, savoring for as long as possible what he might never taste again.

“It’s just that I’ve gone a while without dinner,” Wendell said, “and this is all—”

“Yeah, anyway. So I think you should take a look at this.” Andy slid the flyer over towards Wendell. “Things are getting weird around here, and you should know about it.”

Wendell looked down at the paper. Lines of tiny printed letters, with an almost grade school precision, as if each letter had been practiced on the penmanship practice paper with the dotted middle line to distinguish between capitals and lower cases, flowed across the flyer’s entirety. No line breaks, no indentations, just one tedious block of thoughts from Andy’s addled mind. “What you’re reading will save your life,” it began, and with a gnostic certainty it wove seemingly unrelated events into a fevered hodgepodge of conspiratorial ramble. The nation’s population—“sheeple,” to Andy—unknowingly lived in a prison from which there was no escape, whose wardens hid behind a metaphorical curtain of power, wealth, and secrecy. There was the necessary laundry list of darkly penned acronyms—CIA, FBI, UN, AFL-CIO, EU, IAEA, WTO—like grammatical explosions, or anchors for theories too light to be taken seriously. The front of the flyer attempted to give background to the reader, detailing items such as the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, Roosevelt’s foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, and a secretive meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev at a Holiday Inn in Newfoundland. The complicity of Israel—termed “the Jews” by Andy—in the 9/11 attacks rounded out the timeline. All of this was meant to bolster the case that a worldwide takeover—by bankers, politicians, assorted bureaucrats and, of course,
the Jews
—was imminent. Wendell read, then skimmed, then tried reading again, feeling Andy’s eyes on him.

“That part about the Hotel Bilderburg,” Andy said, “that’s been confirmed. It’s on the Internet. Can’t say any of it’s surprising, you know what I mean?”

“Umm…”

“None of it’s surprising. How’s that?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“I got more of this stuff. Back at my place.” He nodded to Wendell. “Keep reading. On the back.”

“What you can’t see can still hurt you,” it stated, detailing the local scene, highlighting the local police’s complicity with a shadowy and unnamed federal committee, itself funded by an equally shadowy international cabal, all to track individuals—“those of us in the know” it stated, haughty but seeming populist—and limit their civil liberties, or even imprison those “in the know” who had loose lips. Traffic cameras, predator drones, satellite feeds sent to a basement office at City Hall, RFID tags being injected into the arms of public school children and masked as flu shots, all of it was directed from a secretive compound outside of San Francisco. “It’s all connected,” wrote Andy, but Wendell didn’t see the connections. Couldn’t see them, or didn’t care to, or was too concerned about the size of Andy’s hands—balled into fists with knuckles knocking impatiently into each other—to bother. Andy was waiting for Wendell to see what he saw in all of it. “You might see, but you just don’t KNOW,” the flyer continued. “But they SEE you, and they KNOW you. It’s time for us to get educated, get organized, and fight back. It’s time for our salvation.” The flyer ended with a phone number, a P.O. Box, and a long website URL, all wedged at the bottom.

Wendell looked up. Andy looked proud, but whether proud of his own accomplishments, or just proud that Wendell actually got through the entire thing, Wendell didn’t know.

“More where that came from,” Andy said.

Wendell sucked on that last piece of food, sitting under his tongue. “I’m sure there is.”

“Like I said, Wendell, it’s been getting weird around here.”

“Getting weird?” Wendell asked.

“Yesterday,” he said, “just outside this building. You remember?”

I was here all day
, Wendell wanted to say but didn’t, afraid to give any reason for Andy—clearly accustomed to distrust—to take a second look at him. “Yeah, sure. Yesterday.”

“The guy the cops found. Murdered. Had to be, after the scene down there yesterday. Word is that the guy was gutted up pretty good. Nasty stuff, I heard. I also heard that it was precise, as in surgically precise. So I begin thinking, thinking about those cattle mutilations you used to hear about. You know, when the cattle got their livers and hearts taken out, and nobody knew why, but it was like whatever was opening them up, or ‘operating,’” he said, articulating the word and using the index and middle fingers from both hands to make air quotes, “was using some sort of super laser saw. So this guy gets himself killed yesterday, carved up is more like it, and there’s cops all over the place, putting up a cordon to keep the people away, and I see these guys in suits and trench coats all over, their eyes trained on the whole scene.”

Somewhere, off in the distance, Wendell thought he could still hear the institution’s siren, wailing for him to return.

“So, who are these guys?” Wendell asked, trying hard to swallow the remaining food in his mouth, now a congealing bolus of grease and cabbage.

“What do you think?” Andy stepped towards Wendell.

I think I need the gun.

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do.” Andy grabbed the now empty paper bag, crumpled it in his fists, and dropped the ball back onto the table.

Wendell wondered if the egg rolls were going to stay in his stomach.