The Death of Wendell Mackey (18 page)

So Wendell began to laugh, with tears welling in his eyes. He clamped his mouth shut to keep it at a snicker, but he couldn’t keep his shoulders and chest from pumping up and down, the tears streaming down his cheeks. This couldn’t be happening. This was impossible. But there it was, that toe, floating along and staring up at him. That couldn’t be denied. So he laughed.

“It’s gonna be quick now,” he whispered, calming himself and biting at his lip, feeling his teeth shift in their places.

Wendell continued to stare at the toe, sitting on top of the water, then hovering under the surface, and then sliding down to rest at the bottom. And in it he saw his future, where feet became talons, or hooves, and the abomination staring at him in the mirror begged to be named. The tiny stump on his foot where the toe once stood now looked like a jagged piece of charcoal. He knew he wouldn’t last. In the city, outside the city, he was done. The urge to laugh came back.

“But I can’t die here, not here.” He looked up at the bathroom’s walls, the sink, the single bulb over the vanity. “Please God, don’t let me die here.”

Then leave
, he thought.

Wendell pulled the plug out of the tub’s drain, and the black toe whirled around and dropped down it. He stood up and stepped gingerly out of the tub.

“Leave,” he whispered. “Not much of a plan.” But it had to work. If it didn’t, he would force himself to die trying to leave the city. Wendell limped out of the bathroom and into his mother’s bedroom, where his clothes sat in a pile on the bed. He dressed, then fell into the bed, desperate for a night without dreams.

Outside the apartment, worlds away from Wendell, the sun had set behind an oncoming line of thunderheads, and another day died.

DAY SIX

S
UNLIGHT STREAMED THROUGH THE CRACKS
between the drapes. Wendell awoke.

Up, out of bed. Socks on—
delicately
. Then shoes. To the kitchen for—

No food
.

He knew that. Still, he hoped he was wrong, somehow. But there it was, the kitchen, as dead and empty as the day before.

Get the trench coat
, he thought. He slipped it on.
And the gloves
. On the table, which he pulled over his skeletal fingers.
Gun. And the key
. Top of the refrigerator, and then dropped into the coat pockets.

And then to the door. For the last time, he hoped.

Still limping—and thinking of his little toe shooting through rusted plumbing like a stony minnow—Wendell made it down the stairs and out the front doors. He was met with a muddy sky that erased the street’s shadows and soaked the neighborhood in a viscous gray haze. The fat men were on the sidewalk again, working on another pile of pistachio shells. The air was thick and the traffic slow, as all things struggled through the morning, but Wendell felt a new energy. The sun would emerge and burn away the haze before him, his feet would be light and his back straight. He would walk, reach the city limits and continue on. He would see the country. It was, at least, a satisfying dream.

Down the block to Wendell’s left, outpacing everyone else on the sidewalk, despite her bowed legs and bent back, was Sister Agatha.

“Of course it is,” he said. “This is gonna hold me up.” Still, he couldn’t say he was entirely disappointed to see her.

Agatha looked up at the front doors, at Wendell, and smiled. She hopped up the stairs and stopped next to him.

“Our paths cross again,” she said.

“Convenient. Like one of us is following the other.”

“So I’ll have to ask you to stop stalking me,” Agatha said, and laughed. “Just home from Mass,” she added.

“Looked like you were talking to yourself.”

“What? No. Just mumbling to God. People on the street just aren’t as talkative anymore.”

“Does he listen?”

“Yes.” She cocked her head, curious at the question. “He’s not always easy to hear, but he does listen. I do hear him at Mass.”

“Mass?”

“Yes. You know, what we Catholics do. You aren’t Catholic?”

“No.”

“Then Protestant.”

Wendell thought back to the churches he had attended in his life, a list memorable but short. “I don’t think so.”

“You ever go to church?”

“There was this healing assembly over on Mortimer Street we went to sometimes.”

“I remember that place. So you were a Pentecostal then. They used to put on quite a show.”

“That’s why Mom went, for the show.”

Agatha paused, looked down at the fat men on the sidewalk, then out at traffic. “It’s a bowling alley now. Or was. Even that shut down. That church eventually moved to the suburbs.” She turned to Wendell. “So you’re packing it up and heading out, right?”

“Yeah. Gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Out. Just out.”

“Not content with becoming part of the scenery,” Agatha said, pointing to the two fat men below them, “like those two.” She absently tapped the small wooden cross hanging around her neck against her chest. Wendell noticed that some of her knuckles were oversized, as if the bones themselves had swelled.

“Do they hurt?” Wendell asked, pointing to her hand.

“These?” She looked at them. “Rheumatoid arthritis. The thorn in my flesh. When it’s flaring, it’s not pleasant. But you learn to live with it.” She brought both hands up in front of her face, bent and relaxed her fingers, and dropped them both at her sides. “What about yours?” she asked, nodding at Wendell’s hands.

Instinctively he put both gloved hands behind his back.

“An accident at work. Chemical burn.”

“That so?” He could see that she didn’t believe him. “Anyway, I rent a space in a garage a few blocks away for my car. I could give you a ride to the airport, or the bus station, if you—”

“No, thanks.” His own words surprised him. Refuse a ride?

“Okay then.” She readjusted her purse on her shoulder and hooked a line of gray hair with her finger and set it behind her ear. “Well, if you were going to be around for another day, I’d invite you over for lunch. But you look like a man ready to move.”

“Yeah, I should probably get going.”

“But no ride, no lunch?”

“No.” He took a step down, and stopped. “Listen, about last night…”

“I’m just glad to see you now. People have their pain, Wendell.”

“Do you?”

“I was at Mass this morning, wasn’t I? I try to leave any of my pain at that altar.” With Wendell a step below her, she looked at him at eye level. “Whatever it is, it’ll keep following you. It’ll burn you up.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Everyone says that, Wendell.” She rummaged through her purse for her keys, which were hooked on a metal ring that she let slide down her index finger and stop at one of its swollen knuckles. “Police’ll be here today.”

“Why?” Wendell’s heart froze.

“Our mutual friend Drake.”

Now his neck tightened, and he balled his hands into fists.

“A friend of mine at St. Jude’s told me that they found his body late last night. Some gangland thing, they’re saying, since he was pretty chewed up. These drug dealers aren’t content with just killing anymore. They have to torture too. So, I’d expect them any time, ready to check out his apartment, and discover a shrine to his bald-faced lunacy. Evil begets evil, you know. I guess it was just a matter of time.”

“A matter of time?”

“Before Drake crossed the wrong people. He was a brutal man. Cruel. I’m thinking he got an earful from Saint Peter last night, right before he…” She dropped her eyes.

Four police officers, two patrolmen and two plainclothes, approached the apartment building from Wendell’s right. Their patrol car and black sedan were parked across the street.

And behind them was another sedan with darkened windows.

“They’re here already,” she said.

“I gotta go,” Wendell said, taking one more step down and eyeing the sedan with darkened windows. If one of its doors opened, he would bolt, most likely snapping the rest of his toes off in the process.

Agatha kept talking, but Wendell wasn’t listening. She went on about cleaning up the streets and broken homes and open running sewers, speaking truth but with no one to agree, her tinny reproaches sinking into the fevered morning air. Wendell watched the car, and for a moment his vision swam when the headache returned, like sledgehammer hits over his eyes. But the car didn’t move—and more importantly, nothing
within
the car exited. Agatha continued on about corrupt politicians and urban blight, and Wendell imagined himself, infused with a horrible energy, launching himself into the air, landing like a meteor on the car’s hood, and thrusting his fists through the windshield, grabbing all that he could and pulling it all through the spider-webbed safety glass. Men with ghost faces, their hands grabbing at Wendell’s arms. The police, powerless. Pedestrians screaming. Agatha, unconscious on the steps.

“Wendell,” Agatha said. “Hello in there.” She tapped his shoulder and he turned to her, then back to the car.

“I should go,” he said.

“You could slow things down a bit. Take some time to think about where you’re headed. It’s too hot to just be wandering the streets with no direction.”

“I’m good, Sister.”

“Just come on up and let me get you some food.”

He didn’t move, just stared at the sedan, and the two of them spent the next minute in silence.

“So, you think he listens,” Wendell finally said.

“Who?”

“You said that he’s not easy to hear, but that he listens.”

“God? Yes, he does.”

Then Wendell tried to smile, for Agatha’s sake and not his own, trying somehow to reassure her that things would be okay, or rather, that things would soon end and that she wouldn’t need to worry about him anymore, because he saw the worry in her face. He stretched his lips up at the corners; it was clearly forced, and she knew it. But she returned the smile with one of her own.

“You’re a nice lady,” he said.

“And you, Wendell, are—”

But he was gone, bounding down the last three steps and hurrying down the sidewalk. He didn’t look back.

For the first fifteen minutes Wendell kept on a straight course, turning frequently to see the apartment building recede behind him. The sidewalk traffic thinned out, then quickly increased as he passed a three-block commercial district, then promptly thinned again. Two blocks later and the street terminated at a T, forcing him either right or left. Looking up to his right and seeing the city’s downtown skyline hovering overhead in the near distance, he turned left. Traveling away from it, he assumed, was the best course of action. Every time the sun peaked through the clouds behind him—painting construction sites and delivery vans yellow with its rays—it didn’t last, as the clouds swallowed it again. The sun would disappear, but the heat remained. Oppressive, wilting heat. Wendell would wipe his forehead with his gloved hands until the gloves themselves became saturated with sweat. At the end of the block he slowed, estimating that, with his left turn at the end of the previous street, he hadn’t yet managed to put very much distance between himself and the apartment building. Much of the scenery looked familiar: the low red brick buildings with fenced-in, yellowed front lawns; the corner post office, later a night club, now a struggling corner store with a haphazard collage of liquor ads and weekly sales posters plastered on its front window. Wendell saw the street sign at the corner, Madigan Avenue, which was cocked slightly at an angle after a truck had backed into it years ago, and a memory flooded back. He approached the corner, looked down Madigan to his right, and there it was.

My school. Lenz Elementary School.

“He dropped me off,” Wendell said to himself, “parked at the curb and walked me to the front door, holding my hand and telling me jokes to lighten the mood, and the teacher was there at the doors, my teacher, Mrs. Somethingorother, smiling through too much makeup…”

He reached out for the Madigan Avenue sign to steady himself.

“…and he just kept telling jokes and laughing, squeezing my hand, and we stopped in front of her, and he put his hands on my shoulders and looked in my eyes and said ‘Things’ll get better from here.’ And then she took me in.”

That first day had been brutal, with the children looking at him as if he were under glass. Mrs. Somethingorother did her best with Wendell, repeatedly glancing down at him in the front row, as if afraid that the first day jitters would turn him into a puddle on the floor. He felt the children’s eyes, and the teacher’s good intentions didn’t help; more than anything it singled him out even more. He remembered eating his lunch in a bathroom stall and counting the minutes until the final bell.

Wendell looked up at the street sign. It was there, at the intersection, that the older children would stop him after school. Stop him to mock him. Or rough him up. Or rob him. Sometimes all three. He was an undersized boy beneath an oversized backpack, pasty-faced and scrawny and always waiting for the perpetually late bus. Sometimes he would hide in the storefront of the bakery that used to be near the corner. Outside of it, he was exposed, a frail, front-of-the-class teacher’s project in unmatched socks. He was easy pickings, shark chum.