The Death of Wendell Mackey (19 page)

Wendell huffed, wondering if the past was better than the present. He looked at the school and froze, sensing something behind him.

Someone.

He turned around slowly and there they were, stepped out of his mind and onto the pavement, the three boys who led the prowling pack of grammar school thugs who sought out limp gazelles like young Wendell. The neighborhood had changed but they were the same: same ball caps cocked to the side or turned backwards, same soft features that lent to the false impression of dull-wittedness. They stared at him with eager eyes and hungry grins. For figments of his imagination, they looked real.

“You guys can’t touch me now,” Wendell whispered. “You’re not real.”

The three boys stood motionless and kept staring.

“None of you made it out of high school,” Wendell said to them. “You,” and he pointed to the boy on the left, “you got shot when you were sixteen. Almost felt sorry for you. And you guys,” he said to the others, “you were just followers. You’re probably prison meat now.”

“What’s in your backpack?” asked the boy on the left.

They took it
, he remembered,
they just took my backpack and pushed me into the street sign’s pole. A few kicks. And laughing, like it was a birthday party or something.

“Or maybe you’re all dead,” Wendell said, “all getting what you deserve.”

“What’s in your backpack, kid? Your momma give you any money?”

The boys stepped towards him.

“C’mon, you gonna share, right?” said the boy in the middle.

“You guys and Drake,” Wendell said, “all dead. Good for you.”

Figments of his imagination or not, Wendell wasn’t going to stick around. He turned and walked across the street, no longer feeling their presence behind him, and headed down Madigan Avenue towards the school. Lenz Elementary looked no different than it had when he was there. Windows that needed washing, the front steps that sagged to the left halfway up, the rusted jungle gym climbers like modernist dinosaur skeletons. Wendell slowed, remembering how each day began with the children lining up behind their teachers in front of the school, and marching in together. There was the lunch lady with the lazy eye and black hairnet, smiling behind a ladleful of buttered corn. There was the janitor with the neck beard and horn-rimmed glasses. And there were the teachers, Mrs. Somethingorother and the rest, good and bad, all seeming exasperated, looking down at little Wendell as if they knew he would always be the limp gazelle at the back of the herd, wishing they could do something to make him faster or stronger, but knowing that it was out of their hands. Wendell was good at school, scoring well and showing high aptitude in a number of subjects, even after the trauma of his father’s death, and his teachers recognized it. But, like many of his classmates, there was little support outside of the school’s walls to foster any ability that he showed. School was something to survive more than to enjoy, and good intentions by the staff always had a short lifespan.

Wendell stopped, trying to remember some of the other teachers’ faces, all of which just made his head throb more.

Shuffling. Behind him. He turned.

They’re still there.

The three boys, still smiling.

“Where you going?”

“You’re not real,” Wendell said, turning and walking away. But he heard them following.

Get out of my head
, he thought.

“Daddy ain’t here to pick you up,” said one of them. “So just give us your money.”

Wendell walked faster, as did they.

“Leave me alone,” Wendell said, louder now.

“Just give us what we want then.”

“No.” Wendell stopped, feeling his hands shake. He turned towards them.

Then came the laughs, throaty and low. They elbowed each other and cracked their knuckles.

“You gonna love this, kid,” said the one on the left, the one who had died years earlier from a gunshot wound over a few ounces of heroin.

“No,” Wendell repeated, his voice lower.

More laughing.

“Just give us the backpack,” the boy said, “an’ we’ll be quick.”

“You shouldn’ta left,” said the boy in the middle.

The laughing stopped. The three boys nodded together.

“What?” Wendell asked.

“Shoulda stayed there. Now they gonna get you and they gonna make it hurt.”

“They who?”

“Following you right now,” said the third boy. “They wanna get you before you
change
.”

“No one’s gonna get me,” Wendell said, wanting them to race at him, wanting to do to them what he wished he could have done as a child.

“Can’t stop ‘em.”

“Then just leave me alone.”

“You dead already,” said the gunshot boy.

“Gonna make it hurt,” said the one in the middle.

“Leave me alone.” Wendell was almost eager for them to charge.

“Just like with your daddy.”

“I said leave me—” and Wendell jabbed his fist into the brick wall next to him “—
alone!
”

He looked up. He was alone. Two blocks away from him was the school. He reached up to rub at his chin stubble with the back of his hand, and felt the dust. Red brick dust, covering his glove. He looked to the wall and saw a round hole an inch deep where his fist had struck. On the ground was a little pile of red rubble. But there had been no pain, which was surprising. Wendell pulled off the glove, still moist with sweat, and examined his knuckles. Two had lost their skin; the other two had split their skin, which Wendell pulled off. Below was the rigid black skin like charred wood. He looked around, saw no one, pulled his glove back on and continued to walk down the sidewalk.

He saw no one, but someone saw him. At the corner with the bent street sign appeared a head—wearing a gray knit cap—then shoulders, cautiously at first, then a person popping out in full view. The man coughed into his hand, then jammed his fists into his pockets, walking in whatever shadows the sun allowed, and followed Wendell at a distance.

He did it every few minutes: slow down, then turn, scan the street, and see no one following him. No bullies. No ghosts. It was all in his head. Still, with his headache and the passing bouts of vertigo, he wondered if they would return.

Wendell passed houses, first the multi-family two- and even three-story sorts with wooden staircases running diagonally up the fronts, and then rows of single-family homes and the occasional sandstone brick apartment complex. He would walk up a street for a few blocks, then turn and opt for another street, periodically looking behind him and up at the downtown city skyline, making sure it was continuing to recede.

As single-family homes began to dominate, Wendell noticed increasingly abandoned streets with houses fallen into complete disrepair. Windows were long ago broken or their glass stolen, front doors were gone or splintered, porches had rotted and collapsed in on themselves, mossy holes had opened in roofs. A row of three short houses all sagged to their right in a collective sigh, as if their block had alone been the victim of an earthquake. One monstrous home with blue shingles and a multi-gabled roof had a hole knocked in its foundation, making it easier for thieves to remove the copper plumbing, as the front door and windows were boarded shut. It was like walking into a new world, a dead one, apocalyptic.

But something had filled the vacuum in those empty neighborhoods: the plants and trees had taken over, as if in some botanist’s nightmare.

At their yellow colonial in the suburbs, there were a few stubborn weeds left alone for a few seasons in the side yard which grew into small saplings, prompting his father to dig them out before selling the house. Those skinny saplings, if left unattended for years, Wendell thought, might have turned into what he was now seeing: porch-crushing trees, trunks that had broken through mildewed boards and had grown up alongside homes and snapped lines of siding in half, with limbs like gangly arms reaching into windows and running their leaved fingers down gutters. English ivy, once used as ground cover, had metastasized into doorless entryways and up walls, guaranteeing that in another month, when the ivy’s leaves would hit their peak, some houses would lose all semblance of their former selves and die behind walls of green.

Up ahead of Wendell and to his right stood a house, once beautiful, its wooden porch dropping into the ground, hacked off from the rest of the house by neglect and a few scrub trees growing up as if out of the concrete foundation itself. Across from it were two other hollow hulks, one torn open between the two first story windows, no doubt by thieves and vandals, with ivy pouring out of the hole like bacteria growing on a Petri dish. The other had its entire front door frame hanging awkwardly by a few nails, with chunks of siding and brick torn from its front and green branches popping out of a gaping hole in the roof. Even in an empty lot where lay a pile of timbers and concrete—the result of a house fire left alone to complete its destruction—two low trees sat atop it all like conquering flags.

Wendell surveyed it all, family homes turned crack dens turned uncontrolled terrariums. Abandoned neighborhood blocks were left to victorious nature, which, with the absence of anyone who would play defense, needed little time to take over. If nothing changed, in the centuries to come, Wendell thought, these neighborhoods would be the ruins unearthed by very disappointed explorers. Should it have made him happy? Oddly, it did.

From time to time there would be a rubbish pile at the curb, collected by some industrious and idealistic city worker trying to resurrect what would never live again, waiting for the city public works department to start cleaning up the mess. But Wendell saw a garbage truck speed by, oblivious to all. He laughed, shook his head, and continued to walk.

Or limp. Now it was his left foot. Wendell stopped and sat down on the curb, removing his shoe and sock. What he saw didn’t surprise him. It was his left little toe, hanging like a broken twig much as the right had done the night before. With a sigh Wendell snapped it off, examined it between his thumb and forefinger, and flicked it into an overturned garbage can. The other toes didn’t look far behind. In fact, everything from the ball of his foot out to his toes looked brittle, making him wonder again what the finished product would look like. But none of it
hurt
, which it should have, he thought, but which reminded him that it was all dead tissue already; his feet just hadn’t recognized themselves as vestigial parts yet. He pulled the sock and shoe back on, stood up, and tried to hide his limp as best he could.

After another forty minutes of walking, the dead neighborhoods, while still ramshackle and beaten, began to show more signs of life: a pack of dogs digging in the corner of a lot, a deer and her fawn nibbling on shrubs, homeless men picking through piles of garbage. In four more blocks there were inhabited homes again, still empty of any real neighborhood vigor, but with a few women sitting on front porches and cars idling in driveways. Wendell passed on with a few disinterested looks.

After another ten minutes of walking, beyond an empty gas station and a liquor store, a crowd was gathering. Life had returned to this neighborhood, but of a particular sort. People were walking out of front yards, or out the doors of a nearby apartment building, or parking cars at the abandoned gas station or along the street and joining the crowd. Their focus was a group of men assembling in the middle of the street; one of the men had a bullhorn. Four men milled about near the leader—Wendell assumed the man with the bullhorn was the leader—all of whom stood behind a line of men, ten long, spread out in front of the gathering crowd as a human blockade. All the men, including those in the line, wore black suits; most had bowties. Wendell approached slowly, keeping close to the front of the liquor store.

The leader turned on the bullhorn.

“Y’all can hear me, can’t you?” he asked.

The men around him nodded. The men forming the line nodded.

“Brothers and sisters,” the man with the bullhorn began, then stopped, cleared his throat, feeling that his voice was too soft. “Brothers and sisters,” he repeated, louder now, “I greet you in struggle with words of peace.”

A few odd claps. The crowd was still growing.

“And I greet you, my brothers and sisters, in troubling times,” he continued. “Times that test our wills, and prompt us to further action. Because lines are being drawn, right now, and you need to choose which side you’re on.”

He continued for a few minutes, using many words to say little, Wendell thought, but doing it all for effect, to introduce his theme by building suspense like any good stage performer would. The theme began to emerge:

“This is not your doing,” the man said to the crowd. “Your poverty, your drug-infested streets, your failing schools. They think that because it’s your neighborhood, that it’s
yours
, then you’re to blame. But it’s not your fault.”

The men around him nodded more vigorously. More people began to clap.

“Come on over,” the man said, waving over people from the curb, “come on over and listen. Everyone’s gotta hear. Because it’s about where you live,” he said. “And it’s about those who make the rules about
where
you live and
how
you live. You need to understand that we live in a sewer because we’re governed by rats.”