If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (14 page)

The woman shrugged. “Well, it’s empty now.” She pointed at the windowboxes and then waved her hands at the overgrown lawn, as if to prove her point. “Are you house-hunting? I’m not the realtor. I’m with the bank. But I’m fairly certain you could buy this place now for a song if you wanted. Have you spoken with the realtor?”

“No,” I said. “I just admired it. The house. I met the woman who lived here, and her child. We can’t afford a house at the moment anyway. Not yet. I just thought it was so—”

“When?” The woman eyed me suspiciously. Her lips were pursed. “When did you meet the Bells?”

“I didn’t know their name was Bell,” I said. “I never even asked her name. It was only one time. Last weekend. Last Saturday.”

The gray-haired woman waded toward me, her heels catching in the soft ground and the long grass. She tucked the clipboard under her arm. She licked her lower lip, seemed to think for a moment before she said, “Then it wasn’t the Bells. Do you know what happened to the Bells?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you didn’t meet the Bells last weekend. After the foreclosure, they sold all their furniture and things. The house was completely empty, and they only had twenty-four hours to get out, but they never got themselves another place to live. They were sleeping on the floor, it seems, since they sold their things. When the bank came to change the locks, they wouldn’t leave.”

I held up a hand. This was none of my business. And it was also a lie. Or I was in the middle of some mistake. No point in hearing the erroneous details. I had the wrong house. The wrong time of day. It was no longer summer. A year had passed. Or two. I was simply confused. I’d read this in the news. Some sort of horror that occurred
to desperate people. I’d had a bad dream. I would wake up from this dream. We were all having the same dream. Those of us without houses, and those of us with houses. Things were changing. It would take a while to get used to this new order of things. We saw their yellow stickers, of course, all over town, and their For Sale signs, but surely those people bought other houses after they left those houses, after we bought their houses for a song.

In other neighborhoods. Or other towns.

And so on, and so on.

Surely, their lives went on.

“It’s quite a tragedy,” the woman from the bank said. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.”

Had I heard?

I took the hand that had been resting on the gate, then, and covered my mouth. I had to keep my hand over my mouth for several minutes while the gray-haired woman watched me anxiously before I trusted myself to take the hand away, and to speak again without singing a song.

T
here was a child on the porch, a boy. He had a dog on a leash. The boy and the dog looked up at me. The boy was smiling. The dog was panting as if it had been running. I said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Rentz?”

“Yes?” I said.

“Don’t you remember us?” the boy asked.

Behind him, a tractor rumbled by on the gravel road. A cloud of dust rose behind the tractor. A young farmer in a white T-shirt took one hand off the wheel and waved. I lifted my hand to wave back, but the farmer had only glanced in my direction for a second, less than a second, before rumbling away.

“
What?
” I said, leaning down to the boy.

Of course, I’d heard what he’d said, my hearing was perfect, but I’d already forgotten what it was I’d heard. The dog—some kind of terrier—had begun to wag its tail, whining excitedly on its leash, as if it were anticipating something from me, as if it expected me to open the door.

“I just asked,” the boy said, looking a bit amused, “if you remembered us.”

“Oh,” I said.

Behind the boy, on the other side of the gravel road, there was a young girl running bare-legged, leaping through the field. She had a handful of clover, or something blurred and purple, and she was shrieking. I watched her for a few moments, and then, as if she’d slipped into a hole in the earth, both she and her shrieks were gone.

I looked back down at the boy and his dog.
Yes,
I thought, there was certainly something familiar here. The boy’s chipped front tooth. But also that dog.

“We were in the neighborhood,” the boy said, “and we remembered your house, and wondered if you wanted to come out, if you could come out and play.”

I snorted a little, of course.
Come out and play.
I supposed this was supposed to bring it all back—those childhood years, those carefree summer days! I supposed this boy was supposed to be some hallucinated version of me. I supposed that dog was supposed to be my dog, way back when, and here was Death at my door, beckoning me outside “to play,” and I was supposed to step out there and follow the boy into the field, and maybe later he’d get me to take his hand, and we’d find ourselves back at my mother’s table with a big ham at the center and all my dead relatives would be shiny-eyed and happy to see me, and in a startling epiphanic moment of ambivalence and ecstasy I’d suddenly understand that the boy, who was me, was dead. But I’d never had a dog.

And my mother had packed me up by the age of four and sent me to live with Aunt Elizabeth, who was an all-out drunk. The kind of drunk who’d manage to get dinner on the table every few nights, and then would stumble into the table and knock it all onto the floor, then chase me and that girl, Francine, and that other orphan, whose name I’m not sure I ever even knew, around with a broken bottle screaming that she was going to kill us all. When Uncle Ernest would get home, he’d sock her in the mouth, and we’d all go salvage whatever we could from the floor for supper. If there was ever a dog, it would have run off.

“I’m busy,” I said to the boy, and the dog sat down then, as if on cue, on its haunches. The boy narrowed his eyes. Yes, there was
certainly something sinister about the kid. Anyone could see that, even a confused old man. I knew right away that he wouldn’t be taking no for an answer.

“That’s too bad,” the boy said. His voice was lower this time around. Overhead, a plane came barreling out of a cloud, crashing in only seconds somewhere over the horizon, never making a sound. He hooked a thumb in over his belt buckle as if he might yank his pants down. As if he were planning to take a piss or a shit right there on my stoop. The little dog curled his lip a bit, like he was thinking about growling.

“Now, look,” I said. “I do know you. I know all about you, and you can stand out here on my stoop all day and do whatever foul thing you can think up to do, but I’m not coming out …” and then I added, sarcastically, “
to play,
” so he’d know I wasn’t quite the sentimental old doddering fool he’d taken me for.

He frowned. And then he shrugged. He started to turn around. “Fine,” he said. “Have it your way.”

He headed back down the steps. The dog turned to follow him.

I couldn’t help it. I’d been expecting trouble. All my life, there it had been, every time I opened the god-damned door. First Aunt Elizabeth, of course. And then the disastrous marriage. Anne with hands like claws within two years of the honeymoon, twisted up like a crabapple tree in the rollaway bed, the whole house smelling of death, and still a hundred chores dawn to dusk to be done. And the children. A limb now and then. A shovel brought down accidentally on some neighbor kid’s head. “You just wait a minute you little bastard,” I said.

He turned back around, slowly, and this time he had a whole new face. The face of an angel! His voice was as sweet as a girl’s. The dog had cocked its head, sweetly. And then it vanished. Just a blank space on a limp leash. The angel said, “Yes, Mr. Rentz?
Yes?
”

It was hard not to give right in. But I knew what this was about. I hadn’t avoided this encounter for eighty years just to walk straight into its booby trap now. I hadn’t forgotten the way Duke and Erma had signed over that insurance policy to their son just before the
thing in the ravine. Duke with his foot in a coyote trap and a plastic bag over his face. Erma … and them making it look like a rape, but nobody would have raped poor crippled Erma. The devil, maybe.

No. Not even the devil.

I took a step backward. I raised up both fists. I said, “I know you know I can fight. I know you’ve fought me before. And you remember what happened then.”

“Oh, Mr. Rentz.” He said it as if he were tired of this particular fight.
Yes, yes, yes.
Those nurses with their pockets full of pills. Those prostitutes down on Division Avenue, tapping on the window of your car. I’d fallen for this once or twice, but whoever that poor fellow was, I was not him anymore. The farmer on the tractor came chugging by again, but he came from the same direction he’d come from the last time. They couldn’t even get this part right. They were just running the same film twice. Trying to save money, I supposed, thinking an old man wouldn’t notice. This time, when he waved, I didn’t bother to raise my hand.

The boy seemed to be trying to stifle a laugh.

I’d always had a bad temper.

Of course, it made me mad.

And then the girl again. The clover, the bare legs, the hole. I was shaking. It was like that copy of the copy of the copy of the letter my mother had written to me, dug up out of the trunk by my daughter, which she’d mailed off to everybody and their cousin before she thought to bring it over to me.
Daddy, I found this in the attic, and I thought you’d want a copy.

And my own mother’s handwriting, like a retarded child’s.

And she couldn’t even spell the name of the month.

Which was February.

And something about when I get you back I’m going to get you that little dog.

That little dog.

It was back. But it was behind me. It was smiling up at me from my own rug. And then it was on the couch. And then it was under the coffee table. Pissing on the leg of it. Taking a crap on the carpet.
Then lunging in my direction. Then snapping at me heels. Then tearing at the cuffs of my trousers with its teeth.
Get outta here, get outta here.
I was kicking at it, and the girl was screaming,
Help help, someone get him offa me.
But I didn’t care about that. I was going to have her if it was the last thing I ever had. My pants were down around my ankles, and I was sure as hell going to stick it inside her, and then some fat woman in white stepped out into the waiting room and said, only her eyebrow twitching a little,
I’m sorry to tell ya the baby has died.
I shrugged. I said,
D’ya tell my wife?

Soon enough, I’d stumbled out the door, just as I’m sure they’d planned it. The dog sobered up and started whining to be petted. The little boy said, “I
knew
you’d come out to play, Mr. Rentz. I knew it! I knew it!” The tractor and the farmer and the little girl, as if someone up there just kept hitting
rewind rewind.
That girl stood up and I could see my seed trickling down her thigh. I stifled a laugh, chuckling behind my hand,
How stupid do you think I am?

Well, that’s how stupid I am.

And then I heard the door slam behind me.

And then the boy turned to look at me with those big serious eyes and said, “I’m sorry to have had to mislead you, Mr. Rentz.”

And I said, “Oh, kid, forget it. I understand.” And then we shuffled off into the dust, the two of us—the beautiful boy I might have been and the dog I might have had—in search of the old lost man I had become.

O
ne Wednesday a barge got stuck beneath the bridge. We were children, and we loved this fateful accident, this trouble occurring to others, this summer entertainment conducted under a bridge, just for us. We stood on the bridge all day looking down, waving our little stripes and stars at their hammers and sickles.

The men on the barge were patient with us. They had children of their own. They’d been stuck many times on barges under bridges in their own country in the past—which was a gray woolen blanket behind them, sodden with memories, like the sea.

They smoked cigarettes, ran their hands over the tops of their heads, waited for something to happen.

Rag-Anne was with me on Wednesday on the bridge.

Rag-Anne had been with me since the beginning.

I’d woken up in this world behind bars in a crib with Rag-Anne beside me—back when she was new and all her stitches were pulled tight and her yarn hair was blond and I wore a ribbon and called my father Daddy. She was as real to me as the friends around me on the bridge that day—with their dirty faces, eating candy they wouldn’t let me taste on sticks—but she was a doll. Gray and limp and made of thinning cloth. I’d long since swallowed her button eyes. There were grease spots on her apron.