Stranger Will Read online

  Misses. The pellets die thousands of feet away, and the bird continues, unaware.

  A second bird rises above the trees. It darts full seconds ahead of William’s aim but he shoots anyway; loose birdshot has no toll on his conscious. Thousands of feet away a kitchen window might break, a family pet may collapse, but this is thousands of feet away. William pulls a thick breath from his cigarette and falls for a moment into the philosophy of his shells, their origins, their ends, and the penetrated air between. But another bird crosses the first, eastbound, and William fires before thoughts get too deep. The bird drops into the clearing. He steps down the peg ladder, his shotgun strapped to his back, and he smiles, heading into the loose grip of overgrown grass and thorny weeds.

  At first, he didn’t care about finding the bodies. Wild bird populations were never something William concerned himself with; assuming numbers were plentiful for an animal whose daily objectives filled a very short list: eat, fly, breed. But when William, on a whim, first found the bodies, and the messages they would never deliver—realizing they weren’t a wild breed as he had thought—it birthed an obsession: to collect and build relationships of these information snippets. Undelivered, these private little details lack consequence; they are forgotten transmissions. People aren’t dying, here. People are going on with their lives, assuming a thunderstorm trapped their bird. Assuming, at worst, a lost friend. These messages are trophies more than they are necessities.

  Most of them are simple, harmless messages, brief confusions a phone call or letter via the post could clear up. Chess games are popular, bishop F2 to D5 and the like with a small postscript attached noting sports scores or questions about the health of a family member. Invitations are common around the holidays, recipes and phone numbers.

  But collected among these small-talk letters there are those with more private intentions. William has found bring three, four might not be enough, and alright, I suppose Jim doesn’t need to know, and I worry Donald may find out, and larger the pile grows after each hunting trip. William reserves a special section for these “inside jokes” within the threads of his collection.

  “It’s just a hobby,” he insists each time Julie brings the wall into one of their arguments. “Everybody’s got them.” A man named Buzz sends messages regarding the possible trade of toy trains. The details numb—serial numbers, model years, and the exact shade of crimson he needs—but the example stands. A woman named Carla Baucus speaks of her stance with God. She preaches damnation and hellfire one week, forgiveness and compassion the next. A seemingly infinite flock of pigeons dies for this cause. William’s pleading accomplishes little. Julie has her mind set about things, and helping her to see any other way is difficult.

  Often the birds peak for only moments above the trees, dropping just as quickly. William assumes for food, or maybe a mate, but how much really do homing pigeons know? He wonders if future pigeon generations will learn to avoid the space for no other reason than instinct. “The Karma Debates,” an ongoing discussion William has interrupted on a few occasions, isn’t a very lively thread—two, maybe three, hobbyists send messages back and forth, arguing over the influence of one life on another on another on another and so on. Two, maybe three, hobbyists aren’t enough to warrant a definitive, “yes.” Maybe pigeons will learn to avoid this space one day, he thinks. Maybe not.

  The bodies often endure weeks of ripening before William finds them. Six states of decay: intestinal bacteria to the smell of putrescine to a slippery mound of feathers and still scavengers claim sustenance. What’s left of the bird might be shredded or spread to a puddle. No wings. No head. At best, the bird is still recognizable. But the message keeps, even if feet away, consumed by mud.

  He parts the overgrown grass under the billboard, hand at his gun’s breech to keep it stable. To exploit the broken safety switch now—a caught grass stem or tree branch—would mean a hard crawl home. It’s not a trek to the clearing, just a short step across the highway, but it is difficult. The brush is thick and only densens as the open clearing gets closer.

  He is deep when twigs ahead of him snap. Branches sway. His gun slips under a sweaty grip.

  William has met people out here: legal hunters, hikers, outdoor adventurers. They stop for a breath or a handful of bellflower blossoms or for a scent their dog is begging to find and fill the time with obligated conversation. When two strangers meet in the woods, they don’t pass by with a nod. They don’t pretend something greater lies just ahead. They smile at company and make room for a few words.

  Nice gun, they say, or scoff, and comment on the beautiful day. Either way William has to do what he can to cover a nearby pigeon—to both lovers of nature and lovers of sport a dead pigeon is a waste.

  It is, he can say safely.

  Leaves rustle. A deep rumble resonates. The branches have calmed but the grass still moves—a reaction he credits to a dead wind fallen into the clearing.

  “I’ve got a gun,” he yells toward the sound as he tightens his grip.

  The noise continues despite his threat. William proceeds, parting branches and peering over bushes. The noise grows to growling becomes snorting, and dirt erupts from behind the front row of foliage.

  A dog, buried shoulder deep in a hole, throws dirt and grass through its legs. William brings his gun to his face and considers for a moment ending the dog. He contrives excuses, claiming his fear is reason enough, or maybe the dog attacked him. If asked he’d guess a territorial thing and the dog simply exploded, teeth lashing and spit—the whole deal. He would have to cut himself, maybe clamp the dead dog’s mouth around his forearm and press, to fully convince anyone with questions. Or he could just shoot and leave. Let someone else find the body.

  He steps forward, the gun still at his back, and parts a bush to get closer. A fallen branch snaps under his foot. The animal pulls from the hole. Something swings from its mouth—a hidden bird maybe—as the dog searches for William’s scent.

  “Hey boy.” William whistles.

  The dog bounces his nose through the air, frozen otherwise, so William creeps closer.

  “It’s okay.” He thrusts out a fist, shakes it, snaps his fingers, enticing the dog to limp forward. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Bald spots materialize—large patches of fur, shorn likely by the dog’s own aged teeth, as they pick and dig for ticks. The animal hobbles close, sniffing William’s hand and the ground around his feet. It never locks sight because, as William discovers, the dog’s blind eyes—opaque and blue as concord grapes—haven’t the power. William pulls his hand from his gun and reaches to pet the animal’s trembling head.

  The blind dog snaps, twice before latching on. William pulls, bringing the frail mutt with him. He fumbles with his free hand, swings a few times to its skull, to its ribs, kicking at its legs and throat. He reaches for his gun but can’t situate it until he pulls hard enough from the dog’s mouth to break weak teeth free. The broken canines burrow into William’s skin leaving the roots exposed as an extension of his own bone and blood. He pulls the gun’s comb to his cheek and steadies his aim, but the dog is already gone, dying somewhere within the woods. William fires anyway, twice into the trees.

  “Fucking dog.” William removes his shoe for the sock underneath. He wraps his wrist, leaving the dog’s teeth in for fear that the blood won’t stop.

  The sun sinks to the horizon. William replaces his shoe and stands tall to the pink sky. It’s been a day, he tells himself. The sun was high when he first arrived, heavy on his shoulders. Now he watches glow disappear and wonders for a moment how time works when he visits the billboard.

  He continues into the clearing, his hand swinging at his side and throbbing enough for pain but not enough for retreat. The setting sun stretches shadows along the grass. William steps over some stones, trips on others, focused not on the impediments but on what might lie just ahead of them.

  He almost passes a fallen bird. In the dusk, it so nearly resembles a shrub. The
message is dirty and unreadable without a full sun. He stuffs it into his pocket and continues.

  A second body appears—fresh, perhaps the bird he just shot. He stuffs the note in with the first.

  Sweat pinkens the sock on his hand, and he can feel the pumping blood hit between the beats of his heart. He is tired and satisfied. The messages in his pocket crease tight as he steps back toward the highway.

  The sock swells during the ride home. William dumps peroxide from the back of his van over the wound. By the time he climbs the steps to his porch he holds his hand above his head to keep the blood from spilling.

  Julie will be sleeping when he opens the door. Or at least very close. She will pretend not to be upset when he wakes her, pretend to have been worried about him for a moment, offering a slow sneer before detailing her day’s events. She will tell him about cravings and pains, hiccups and sore muscles, and all the trauma she’s had to endure to ensure a healthy child. She will have again altered the plans for a future home, and William will listen, nodding as he unbuttons his shirt and removes his shoes.

  But tonight when he opens the door she is asleep on the couch. William wants to wake her, to show her his wound and describe the situation, elevating the danger enough for sympathy, his own needy parasite, but instead he lets her sleep. He is tired and dirty. The drama can wait for morning.

  He piles his soiled clothes in the corner. Naked, he starts toward the bathroom, massaging the destroyed muscle below his thumb. The broken teeth dig into his hand. He is eager to pull them free, let the wound run pink under cold water, but he remembers the messages in his pocket. Careful to keep Julie sleeping he slides into the kitchen, finds a flashlight. It flickers before keeping a steady beam.

  The first message mentions a car, a Plymouth Fury, and immediately William conceives taping it next to the group of notes from a man who boasts about sexual conquests in the back of his car. William smiles anyway and shoves it under a loose piece of tape in the Fury Man’s already large neighborhood.

  Julie turns and moans.

  The second note belongs to a larger story William doesn’t recognize. It rambles on about regret. Either miscellaneous or start something new, he thinks and sets the note aside on a small table next to Julie’s head.

  All these words, all these stolen messages are pinned along the west wall of his home.

  When approached objectively, the wall appears decorative. Long stretches of multi-colored yarn twist and wrap around the pins. These lines connect similar messages William has come to assume represent similar people—his own little neighborhoods. Some strings are left hanging free in anticipation of new lives.

  What results from all of this is a massive network of colored veins flowing along the wall. The strands can change; they move to suit his mood. William might shift around entire communities, guessing, waiting for that moment when the Earth slows enough for him to latch on until his world and the real world move together, seamlessly as one.

  Until then, it’s all just patching sutures. Connecting dots.

  Julie doesn’t mind but insists the wall must be cleared once the baby is born. Daycare might be a valid option. Susan Reynolds offers her services via the pigeon ring and seems trustworthy enough. William has no reason to doubt otherwise. Such a massive network of enthusiasts warrants some open naiveté.

  He turns off the flashlight and steps into the bathroom to clean his wound, afraid, yet proud, of what disease or parasite might already be growing within him.

  Chapter Four

  At three o’clock in the morning, William prays for small talk.

  The phone rings. He crosses his fingers hoping for a wrong number or a voice trying to sell him something. He would donate money to anyone speaking with confidence of a rare medical condition. He would switch phone companies, buy vacuum cleaners, even pledge his time for a fundraising walk on behalf of survivors—any survivors, breast cancer, a forgotten World War, AIDS—if this ringing isn’t a work call. But at three in the morning it’s always work.

  As the phone hits ring two, stumbles into three, Julie pulls the sheets tight over her head. “Answer it,” she mutters.

  William, half-awake, throws his arm to the nightstand and searches through the accumulated mess. Keys hit the floor. A near-empty mix of Alka-Seltzer and warm milk tips over, forcing him up to investigate. Nothing has spilled from the cup so he relaxes.

  The phone rings again. Julie replaces the blanket over her head for a pillow.

  William returns the cup to the table. A shallow milk film adheres to the inside of the glass, hard and defiant after this half- night of abandon. William counts this as the single relief to a day already blistered and sore. He is not in a mood to clean.

  He finds the phone in the middle of its fifth ring. “Hello.” His voice grinds deep with sleep.

  “Lowson, we got one for you.” And before William can ask for an address, this first-precinct officer recites numbers with the impassioned confidence typically reserved for Bible verse. “A big red house without windows. We need it cleaned by morning.” The years have taught William to dread where this voice leads him.

  “It is morning, Larry.”

  “You’d better hurry, then. Already called Filbert,” the officer says.

  “Philip,” William corrects him. “The stains will be there tomorrow. They don’t fade away.”

  “Nothing does, does it…?” Larry says, letting the moment steal the silence for a few breaths. William ignores Larry’s odd introspection and returns to his night table for a bottle of aspirin. Larry has been a desk officer since well before William and Philip signed on to clean city messes. Larry isn’t their boss, but he leverages the age gap to imply otherwise. An accident on the job left Larry with a split femur that doesn’t abide by fieldwork anymore.

  “The place sounds like a residence,” William says. “Couldn’t find any survivors,” and Larry hangs up.

  The morning begins. William chokes down two ibuprofen tablets, lubricating the gulp with only his own spit. Today might be the day, he thinks, the day I clean up a spilled life and tell myself the world grows stronger. The pill fights its way up his throat. He balances it on his tongue. Or it might be tomorrow. He massages a stimulated muscle in his neck and tries again.

  With an obvious suicide situation—a note covered in fingerprints; or a missing shoe, an exposed toe, and a large gun all married to a single body—Philip and William are called within hours. It might be a family member who discovers the body, calling under guidance of a police official suggesting William and Philip’s services as a “tragically necessary” means for cleanup. Because the city has no responsibility for residential tragedies— other than the body itself—the mess is a family burden. A father or brother or mother or daughter calls still crying, sometimes days after the death, unable to pronounce words like “blood” and “carpet stain” and “no face,” and William has to do the best he can to get an address. But when officials find no surviving family, the police have permission to take action, to get things moving before airborne particles become a public health issue.

  The early hour and the “by morning” deadline could mean the officials would rather the press know as little about the situation as possible: drug deal in a quaint suburban neighborhood gone violent, domestic thing, battery turned murder via passion. But this is all speculation. Law enforcement officers give Philip and William nothing to go by because legally they can’t.

  For seven years they’ve worked at the bottom of the cities, scrubbing away the remnants of failed lives. They understand the world at a base level, one that rarely gets acknowledged, because acknowledgement would be an admission of failure. And if there’s one thing crying families and grieving friends can teach it’s that failure is a hard concept to accept. Nobody needs it. Nobody wants it. Nobody asks for it, but we’re all born anyway.

  Julie doesn’t mind for now. She has warned William of the late nights and long days inhibiting a cohesive family. “Once our family s
tarts,” she has said. As her gut expands, she becomes more insistent on a solid family structure, refusing even a grain of sympathy for William’s thoughts regarding the absurdity of new life.

  William drops the phone to its receiver. Julie rolls over, asking if everything is alright. He lies to her, making the situation sound worse than it probably is: “a recently divorced man was just found baked to the kitchen floor of his apartment,” he says. “A heart attack left him dead for a straight week. It’s been hot out.” He says this only because in Julie’s feigned concern, foggy under the late hour, she has already forgotten the question.

  Julie insists that William keep every detail to himself. She asks about his day with superficial interest. “I’m asking,” she has told William, “because I read that you need to be involved in your partner ’s professional life for a happy marriage.” He pretended agreement, then at her happiest, reminded her: “as dictated by a magazine article you read when you were bored with me.” Julie didn’t talk to him for days after that comment.

  If William comes home covered in the brown insides of a methamphetamine dealer hollowed out by the explosion of drug lab built under the influence, he tells Julie it was raining. Got muddy.

  If he smells burnt, like a two-story house, ashes now for reasons vocal neighbors speculate might be arson, or insurance fraud, or an “unfortunate lack of precautions, and that poor child, and her mother and…” he tells her that he stopped for something to eat at the new barbeque place on Merchant. “I didn’t get you anything,” William would say, “you said pork is bad for the kid.”