The Death of Wendell Mackey (20 page)

More clapping. Some began to cheer.

“Letting you live here, floating around in this filth,” he said, “brothers and sisters shooting each other, poisoning each other, abusing and backstabbing each other. Because of them rats.
Rats
.”

Now the crowd was set; now only their emotion grew. People shouted. Pumped fists. Wendell shrunk back against the liquor store wall. Cell phones came out to snap pictures. Video cameras rolled. All the better for him, Wendell thought. More eyes on the men in the street meant fewer eyes on him.

“And you know, you
know
, how it ends,” the man said. “They snatch up your husband or your brother or your son, they hold a press conference and say that they’re cleaning up the streets, and they cast that poor man into one of their dark cells. And all is right with the world, isn’t it?”

The speaker got the answer he wanted: a resounding “No!” erupted from the crowd.

“It’s not all right,” he continued. “Never has been, never will be. Many of our brothers are
right now
in those torture chambers they call prisons, and it’s not all right.”

Wendell watched the men in the street, focused on their faces, their gestures, and let the voices fade out until they became muffled sounds. He didn’t need to hear their voices, just see the lines in their faces stretch and tense to feel their message. He stared, and the colors quickly became more vivid, the lines of the suits and ties sharper. The muffled sounds merged into a loud buzzing and the sharp images, almost cartoonish, grew in his eyes.

They’re gonna turn
, Wendell thought,
they’re all gonna turn at once and see me, and then I’m toast
.

“You lost?” asked a voice next to him. Wendell popped out of his stupor. He looked down and saw an old woman, sitting in a folding deck chair, holding a pipe between her lips. “You ain’t from around here.”

“I’m not,” Wendell said. “Just passing through.”

“We all lost, apparently.” She pulled her pipe out of her mouth and pointed it at the men in the street. “That’s what they saying. That we all lost, and they the ones finding our way for us.”

Even with the heat, she wore a full sleeve blouse and a dirty patchwork skirt. Her white socks were pushed down her ankles and balled up at her brown shoes. Black flesh moles covered her cheeks, and thick loose skin pulled down on her face, including her eyes, and drooped under her jaw. She reached into her chair’s cup holder for a traveling mug of coffee, took a sip, then set it back down and put her plastic drug store pipe—which held no tobacco—back into her mouth.

“Kinda hot today for those suits,” Wendell said, pointing to the men.

“Kinda hot today for that trench coat,” she said, looking up at Wendell. She chewed on the pipe. “First it was them Jehovah’s Witnesses, all dressed up, towing little kids behind ‘em, those men in pressed gray suits four sizes too big. They told me about the judgment, the coming fire, and choosing their side or ours. And I figured I couldn’t trust a man in an ill-fitting suit.” She scowled, like she tasted something bitter. “Then it was them clean-cut boys, starched shirts and black ties, them Utah whities. Mormons.” She spat, and something brown hit the ground. “Telling me about their third level of heaven and their Indian Jesus.” She took the pipe out of her mouth and pointed at the crowd again. “And then come these boys, ‘cept they been around a long time, since I was a little girl, these bowtie men and their angry faces. Now I gotta get saved another way,
their
way, ‘cause what everyone’s selling is a way to save me.” She looked up at Wendell, and gestured around her. “But what’s worth saving is what I wanna know. They look around? Nothing left, at least nothing worth saving.”

“So they’re recruiting for their church?” Wendell asked.

She looked up at Wendell again. “Boy, you
must
be lost. If you don’t know
them
, then this ain’t your city.” She smiled, which on her face almost looked painful. “You best be on your way. I don’t mind you, but they,” and she looked out at the men, “they see things different.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“Don’t matter. You look at that guy up front,” she said, “the one with that bullhorn. You see that strained and constipated face? You got a man there that needs him some bran. They all aggressive, ready to fight, blaming everybody but the people in this city. And the way you look, you gonna get yourself some blame, if you stick around.” She leaned back and took another sip of coffee. “But in the end, they a death rattle, and this city is what’s dying.”

As the man in the street talked, the crowd grew more agitated, with more fist pumping and shouts. Wendell knew he had to leave.

“We don’t seek to demonize,” the man continued, “but the truth is,
they’re
out there watching, sipping their drinks by their pools, on the phone with their Jewish bankers, buying their box seats and BMWs, trading in lies and theft, and
we’re
all here, suffering and starving in the streets! The money
they make
is money
they take
,” he said, a line he delivered while smiling broadly, knowing it would be a crowd pleaser, something quick and clever and easily repeatable that he and his associates had written earlier, destined for a thousand posters. The man nodded his head, slapped the side of the bullhorn with his free hand. “But we got what you need,” he added. “Just stick around and y’all will get what you need. We got the answers to the questions y’all are asking.”

The crowd ate it up, with everyone all smiles; ironic, Wendell thought, as the faces of the men in the street were now all hard, fierce. Still, the speaker’s vituperation, with a distinctive edge that hinted at a future for violence on the streets—directed at that great and evil
they
, Wendell thought—kept the crowd rapt. It was as if the crowd had been awakened from an artificial slumber on that street in the gray slurry of the late morning, to feed off a bilious brew of militancy and resentment. The heat of the day was no match for what stirred in those bowtied men, eyes lit with a strange fire, content not with finding apathetic hands to take their pamphlets, but hands to hold placards, or even grab bricks. Wendell worried that things could get dangerous quickly. But no one was yet eyeing him suspiciously; a few of the men forming the human line, though, kept returning their glances to him.

“We will rise up,” the man yelled through the bullhorn, “rise up together in the liberation struggle, defend ourselves and take what’s ours. Because in the end, y’all don’t need to be listened to, y’all need to be feared.”

The crowd roared. Wendell started to walk away.

“Drugs’ll kill you, boy,” the woman said. Wendell stopped and turned to her. She was looking intently at his face.

“No, I’m not—”

“That face of yours says it. Cracks and scabs. Them teeth too. They worse than mine, and that’s saying something.”

Wendell touched his face, but the gloves prevented him from feeling any changing contours in the skin.

“If you don’t blow yourself up with it,” she added, “that meth’ll rot you from the inside out.”

“Look, I’m no…”

“It’s a hillbilly death sentence. That’s what they say on the
60 Minutes
. You hillbillies blow yourselves to pieces with that stuff.”

“It’s not drugs.”

“But it’s something. Normal people don’t look like you.”

Wendell stepped past the woman, as his head began to swim, with the crowd in the street now seeming to tilt slowly on its own independent axis. Wendell reached out to the liquor store wall for balance.

“Drugs,” he heard the woman say, now behind him and fading into the increasing din on the street, “them drugs’ll end you. Ended my two boys. They daddy had the bottle, but it’s them drugs…” and her voice disappeared. In the coming days, passing dreams had Wendell seeing a dark skeleton, on the porch of a deserted house, rocking expectantly in a rocking chair, chewing on a drug store pipe.

Wendell staggered along, his vertigo drawing his path left and forcing him to stop, take a deep breath, and try to walk normally again, or at least as normal as possible. He bumped past a few people in the crowd, but no one seemed to notice. The crowd thinned, with a few latecomers running toward the action like firefighters to a fire. With a quick glance behind him, Wendell scraped his shoulder along a brick wall as he walked, following the sidewalk, watching it lift out of the ground and rotate before him, his brain telling his body to move in the opposite direction to balance things out. But balance was impossible and Wendell went to his knees, his stomach now heaving. He held his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and waited for the wave to pass.

And in a flash, he saw her again, his mother. Her papier-mâché face, that arm raised, he a child, up against the wall. She was going to hit him.

Eyes opened. The street looked paler, more washed-out. Perhaps his eyes were deteriorating now as well. But Wendell forced himself up, forced himself to walk, even as another wave of vertigo threatened to take him back to the ground. Still he continued on, knowing he needed to make more distance. There came a hodgepodge of commercial and residential buildings, like the city zoning board had used whiskey and darts to plan the streets. A tall apartment building stood as a sentry to the entrance to a treed pancake of fenced lots, some with houses, others without. All of it kept that otherworldly, apocalyptic air, with its few men and women scurrying about like the remaining victims of a plague. One home, surprisingly painted and manicured to a level unseen in that neighborhood for years, stood at a street corner, as if it had emerged on that spot magically but unfortunately. It had American and Marine Corps flags flying together from the porch, windows intact, and a grinning Rottweiler like a fanged horse sitting at the chain link fence, waiting for a junkie to devour. More life, Wendell thought, albeit curious, even bizarre, considering its context.

The Rottweiler barked, and immediately Wendell’s vertigo merged with another explosive headache. Again he held his head in his hands and shuffled past the Marine Corps house. Blue spots appeared and then melted like snowflakes in his vision.

Another block. An overturned sandwich cart. Two children standing and watching. Wendell stumbled.

Two more blocks. He felt like crawling. There came the distinct feeling that he was being followed.

Just stop, just close your eyes and—

One final block, pushing himself along against the concrete wall of an abandoned warehouse. Eyes open, seeing blue spots and furious yellow lightning bolts, but
eyes open
, holding out hope that in one more city block he’d be dropping into a verdant lawn or a sparkling pond.

Eyes open.

Just close them. Be done with it.

Just a little fight left.

There it was, in front of him, a line of train tracks—

It’s over, all over
.

—with a passenger car, rusted in place on the tracks, like an ancient gray whale.

Feet failed. To his knees.

And then the noise of someone stopping behind him.

The blue spots would swell, blinding him, then fade to reveal the train car.

Someone laughed.

Wendell fell to his elbows, and let his eyes close.

They called his name. He awoke.

The headache promised to split his head open and pour out onto the ground whatever had been growing in it. The sun reflected off the passenger car’s silver exterior and into Wendell’s eyes.

They called again.
They
. Wendell feared turning around and seeing them, the nurses with hairy and knotted forearms and guns on their hips, bearing down on him. His gloves were off and he scratched at the ground; whatever fingernails had remained were now off, taking pieces of skin with them. He wanted to scream in pain, his back full of daggers, but nothing came out.

“Wendell…”

“What do you want?” he whispered.

It came from the train.

Yes, the train. He would get on it, take a seat, relax, and wait for the willow trees and red barns, lemonade stands and flea markets. On that train, rusted in place, like it had been built on that spot, like it had never intended on going anywhere. The sun retreated behind the clouds, and Wendell looked up, at the row of windows, and saw them.

His father was in the window on the far left, then his mother just to his right, then a man Wendell didn’t recognize, and finally Drake. Drake turned and waved vigorously, as if in Wendell he saw the long lost friend waiting for him at the train station to return home. He was a child in a man’s body, overeager and ridiculous. The unknown man kept his eyes away from the windows, looking straight ahead as if nothing were happening outside the train. Wendell’s mother stared out, looking for someone but seeing no one. And Wendell’s father looked out and was the only one to see him, to actually
see
Wendell, a little boy, his little boy, who had become a man and who was now becoming something else, seeing him with long dead eyes and a peculiar look of concern across his face, like he knew Wendell was in danger, like he could see past that moment and into the future to what his little boy would soon become, a lab-borne chimera, a monstrosity. He was wearing the same polo shirt he had on when he died, blue with white horizontal stripes, but gone was the foolishness of a man who saw the city, their apartment, their new life, as just another opportunity to start over and make it big. He knew what was to happen, and his face showed it. He spoke, but Wendell could only see his lips move.