When he had rested for a while, the stranger retied the laces of his shoes and untied the twine that bound his treasured package. He unfolded the brown paper wrapping, exposing his possession to the sun, the clouds, the high branches of the trees. He searched around for prying eyes and cameras, but found none, and lifted the thing in both his hands. I’ll tell you what it is and was, but that alone won’t tell you much. It was a weapon, but not like any other. In the overhanging shadow of the eaves, it looked almost dull, no color at all, no shine to it, not like the sexy things that sulk blued beneath the gunshop glass, but like something baked from clay or ash, or carved from lifeless flesh, which after all is kin to ash and clay.
The thing had a barrel short and snubbed, but with a twist and a shake of the wrist it telescoped out to cartoon proportions, longer than the stranger’s forearm and wider than his wrist. Its magazine swelled like a grooved balloon. It looked to have had a stock once, but it was broken off and jagged still at the break. The grip had been repaired with masking tape, now worn almost black with grit and sweat and ancient blood except here and there where it was newly patched with red electric tape.
In the light though, when the stranger stepped a few feet forward, the thing looked like it was made of glass, or of some crystal of impossible quality, reflecting every color in the spectrum and a few you haven’t thought of, and when the stranger flicked his wrist again it looked more sword than gun, long as a broomstick and edged so sharp it would slice your eyes to see it. And when he pointed it at a squirrel in a faraway tree, it was suddenly a fearsome ax, blade curled like the crescent moon and near as big, dripping light and weight and death. When he twirled it like a cheerleader’s baton between his fingers that blade condensed to a spearhead, black and slender but still boastful of its cruelty. And when he shifted it from hand to hand it shrank in size to almost nothing, something for a lady’s handbag, a little scratchy peashooter, good for fending off drunks and the smaller variety of muggers. He spun and tossed it like a TV Wyatt Earp, but what he caught was just a penknife with broken blade and rusted hinge, capable of spreading tetanus if no quicker death. The stranger closed his fist, and if you had the strength and opportunity to pry it open, you’d find inside those long fingers nothing more than a plain old stone, a flat dull pebble, a shard of bone, some earth.
Relief.
The bagman woke and found himself alone. He rose hurriedly and searched the perimeter of his camp, pushing clumps of reeds aside to look between them, sliding his bags across the concrete to inspect the ground beneath. He found nothing. The stranger had left nothing behind, and yet everything seemed changed. If the material world had before felt imperfectly formed to the point of actual satire, now, in the wake of this encounter, it felt shabbier than ever, cheapened. The bagman recalled the stillness with which the stranger had sat on the swaying bus, as if he were invisibly rooted to some anchor deep below the earth, or conversely, as if he were himself the weight of a pendulum suspended from the clouds, impervious to mere terrestrial inertia. And he recalled the thing the stranger had carried as if it had been some golden scepter or an emerald larger than his head and not a plain parcel wrapped in stained brown paper and tied with kitchen twine. It was perfect, the bagman thought, a perfect thing.
The bagman skipped his usual morning ablutions and immediately set about sweeping clear a larger square of concrete. He folded the newspapers on which he’d slept, tossed them in the bushes, and removed his possessions piece by piece from the plastic bags that held them. He laid them side by side in a wide circle around the camp and spiraled them in toward the firepit. Among quite a few additional objects, he produced a fan belt; a pair of sunglasses; a ballpoint pen; a pencil sharpener; a volleyball; a balaclava; two bungee cords, red and white; a coconut; a plastic fork; a skull-shaped stone; three varieties of seashells; an unrolled condom, dried to the consistency of beachstrewn kelp; a fez; a pair of mittens; a yellow legal pad; a purple bandanna; a maple leaf; a plastic owl; a postcard depicting three baboons; an aluminum hose-clamp; a box of sugared cereal; a small plush monkey, missing one ear; a rusted can opener; a plastic action figure gripping a scimitar with tiny yellow hands; the cast-off exoskeleton of a locust; the Book of Mormon; a magic eightball; a creased watercolor of a sunset; a paisley necktie; the dry stone of an apricot; a pornographic magazine, the cover of which bore the words “The Beaver Twins: Wide Open”; a lumpy pearl; three pebbles of unusual color and shape; a toothbrush still wrapped in its cellophane packaging; a pair of crew socks; a coffee mug that announced itself to be the World’s #1 Granny; a Y-shaped twig; the dried foot of a seagull; an empty green bottle that had once contained aftershave lotion; a spark plug; a magnifying glass; an unopened box of bandaids, a glass shaker filled with crushed red pepper; a dog whistle that had never been used to call a dog; a pair of handcuffs, sans key; the crushed ribs and vertebrae of a garter snake preserved in a ziplock bag; a hearing aid; a hand towel; a small, faded plastic pumpkin; two unmatching sandals; a sweatshirt advertising a company that manufactures sweatshirts; two wedding rings, one bent; and a single bobby pin.
When he had emptied all three bags, the bagman’s possessions lay helixed about beneath the overpass like a crop circle, but even this impressive arrangement gave him no pleasure. All spread out like that, the pale tawdriness of his things — and of all things, not just the pumpkin, the monkey and the twig, but the concrete they lay on, the cracks in it, the pillars that supported the highway above him, the highway itself, the reeds and trash-strewn bushes — seemed only to have multiplied. He considered rearranging it all in a pyramid, or something close to a cube, but dismissed both ideas as futile. Nothing could redeem these things. There was no magic order, no code to break or secret lock to pick. All context was equally empty, for all its possible components were empty too. They were already their own ghosts, these things, their own crinkled husks. But the bagman knew one thing that wasn’t.
He turned and walked away. He could not remember the last time he had taken three steps without his bags. He felt almost weightless. He wanted to skip. His eyes seemed to allow more light into his brain. He remembered the name of this sensation. It was not quite freedom: it was called relief. He kicked a rock from his path and broke into a bent, lumbering sprint.
He made it halfway across the field. The light had grown too bright inside his skull. His heart thumped. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t breathe. He was a large man, and far from young, so maybe it was the effort of running fast. But maybe it was something else. Maybe he could no longer allow himself to live unburdened. A wave of nausea overtook him, and he remembered. He had made a deal. What was his was no longer his. It wasn’t even his to leave behind.
The bagman recovered his breath and walked back with eyes downcast. He retrieved the things from the ground and stuffed them into the bags, but not with any care and not in any special order. He just stuffed them in.
He is challenged.
The stranger sat there kneeling, the stained brown paper empty at his ankle beside him. Between his palms he held the thing. His mouth hung agape and his eyes shone with something very much like love. He stroked it as you might caress an infant, caressing not just the humble thing itself but the luminous and empyrean future that it promised to call forth, and the past it could not fail to redeem. He was lost in it. The voices, when at last he heard them, arrived as if from somewhere far away.
“You old bum!” said one voice.
“Faggot!” said another.
“Stinking perv!” a third voice said.
“Dirty old bum!” the first chimed in again.
Across the yard the stranger spied a clump of boys in windbreakers and baseball caps worn backwards. He grinned and counted them. One. Two. Three. The fourth a fat one. The stranger rose, his eyes dancing with delight. Four boys. Foul-mouthed boys, ill-bred and nasty-minded. Nothing more corrupt than children. As good a place to start as any. He lifted the thing in his fist and with a steady hand took aim first at the on
e farthest from him, a fat boy hanging back a bit, fumbling in the pockets of his baggy shorts. But before the stranger could execute his wishes, something hit him in the ribs. As he stepped back a second stone struck him hard in the wrist. He tripped over the log behind him and, falling, lost his grip on the thing in his hand. It fell in the grass out of his sight. He hissed a curse.
“You got him!” said the first voice.
“I got him too!” said another.
“Hit him again!” the third boy said.
“Don’t be a faggot, Tubs. Throw the fucking rock!” yelled the first boy to the fourth.
The boys let loose another volley of stones and it was the fat one this time who hit his mark, striking the stranger on the temple with a chunk of granite as big as a fist.
“Hah!” the fat boy yelled, pumping his chubby fist, “Who’s the faggot now?”
The stranger groaned and groped in the weeds. At last his fingers found what they were searching for, but by the time he stood and blinked away the blood in his eyes enough to be able to aim, the boys had scattered through the trees.
“Bum!” yelled one boy, his voice trailing off as he dived over a hedge.
“Old bum!” yelled another, diving after him.
“Who’s the faggot now?” howled the fat boy with glee as he followed his friends to safety.
Mice.
The slenderest of the three sat shirtless over his needlepoint. He was quite tall, and heavily tattooed with lightning bolts and crosses. A panther crawled up his arm. An eagle spread its wings across his shoulders. A cartoon woodpecker winked just below his navel. He sat on a trunk, his pale collarbones jutting, red suspenders hanging at his sides. As he stitched, a flush of pride spread across his cheeks and upwards, even to the peak of his shining, hairless skull. “Almost done,” he announced in a whisper that barely contained his excitement.
In front of him, a short and rotund but solid man, similarly inked but with his red suspenders pulled up over a sleeveless undershirt, shaved the cratered, pink scalp of a third man, tall, thick-necked, and fat. The taller man sat on a metal folding chair, which, beneath him, looked to have been burgled from a doll’s house. He was dressed like his companions in black jeans and high, shiny, red-laced boots.
“Where do you get that?” the seated man said, suddenly annoyed by the tall and skinny man’s pronouncement. “It’s not one yet. It’s not even nine.”
“Stay still,” scolded the short and fat man. He stood back to examine his work and hone his razor across a leather strop. “If you keep moving I’ll chop your scars off.”
“Go on,” said the tall and fat.
“Your scalp,” went on the short and fat, “has more potholes, pimples and pockmarks than your mother’s carbuncled ass. Did you know that?”
His comrade responded obliquely: “Did you know that a moray eel’s teeth are so filled with rotting bits of fish-flesh that if one bites you, you’re sure to get septicemia and die within moments of an agonizing death? Did you know that? Did you know you look like one, that if you only had a neck you’d look exactly like a green moray eel?”
The tall and skinny guffawed. “Tell him about the sea snakes.”
“They don’t live in lakes, idiot,” replied the tall and fat. “They live under rocks in the ocean. Twelve feet long. Covered in slime. The green morays have blue skin, but they appear to be green due to the slime that coats them. Lots of funny fishes in the sea. Sea snakes, for instance. Most common marine reptile there is. Closely related to their terrestrial cousins. Can be nine feet long. They hunt underwater, surface for air. Sailors sometimes see big balls of them, hundreds of them smarming about in one humongous ball. Ouch.” He slapped at the short man’s calf and rubbed at his head, checking his fingers for blood. “Watch that. I have a blemish up there.”
“A what?” the shorter man inquired. “I hope you didn’t say you have a blemish. Your whole head is a blemish. A blemish balanced on top of a blemish that blemishes about on two long, bloated blemishes.”
The tall and thin looked up from his stitching. “Flemish,” he said, and giggled to himself.
The tall and fat continued. “They travel in hordes, sea snakes. Big messes of them, bands one hundred feet wide and seven miles long across the water, nothing but snakes by the millions slithering through the waves. And their poison, get this, is eight times more poisonous than the venom of a king cobra. Ten times more than a rattler’s. One drop is enough to kill three men and most times they bite they inject five drops at least. So you’re done for if one gets you. Sea snakes. God’s creatures. Wonders of the deep.”
He ran a palm over his scalp, scouting for nicks and missed patches of hair. The shorter man smacked it away.
“Then there’s the blue-ringed octopus,” the tall and fat went on. “No bigger than a golf ball but it carries enough venom to kill twenty-six men. Maculotoxin, it’s called. Like tetrodotoxin, that the puffer fish have. Ten thousand times more deadly than cyanide. Blocks the neural pathways. You don’t stand a chance. Pretty little things though. They glow blue when they’re excited. You can’t imagine a more attractive cephalopod.”
The thin man pulled his needle down through the canvas and tied off the final strand of his design. “There,” he said, and turned it around for his companions to see. “What do you think?”
On a white background, surrounded by a crude border of death’s heads, pink carnations, and paired red lightning bolts, he had stitched two words in sharp Teutonic script.
The short and fat paused his barbering and scratched at the hinge of his jaw. “Judo Maus,” he said. “What’s that?”
“It means, ‘white pride,’ I think. Or ‘white power,’ ” the tall and skinny beamed. “Or ‘fuck all Jews,’ something like that. It’s German.”
“Who told you that?”
“Not Gujarat. Fuck no. In German. That one we met at the club last week who just came back from Leipzig, he kept saying it: judo maus. White power!” He shouted and punched at the ceiling for emphasis. “Where should we put it up?”
The tall and fat stood suddenly. All three men kicked their heels in unison, and threw their right hands in the air. The short and fat clenched his straight razor in his fist. Together they saluted, “Judo maus!”
The folding chair creaked as the tall and fat took his seat once more. He indicated the far wall of the room with a nod. “Hang it above the chaise lounge,” he said. “With the others.”
He is filled with wrath.
He could no longer see the boys. Even their shouts and giggles had faded, so the stranger aimed at the unkempt hedge over which the four had leaped. It shivered, and for a second it seemed to even bleed. It glowed orange for a moment, every last twig of it, then fell away, just ash. He took aim at a tree beside the hedge. Its leaves slipped from its branches and the bare trunk danced like a hair held over a flame, then disappeared. The stranger reduced every tree in sight to black and sticky dust. A cypress, two oaks, some pepper trees. He burned the grass and the weeds and the abandoned house behind him. With a screech that sounded as if it came from a living thing, the windows shivered, then burst. He burned the rocks and the fallen branches and fallen leaves and the snails and beetles and spiders and worms that made their homes there. He scorched the earth itself, every ditch and lump and pebble, until it bled and pussed and healed hard and sharp as glass, so that no living thing would ever wish to walk on it, and no seed would ever think to germinate there.
When he was done, he gazed around him at the smoking ruins. A breeze still blew. From somewhere he could hear a siren. He didn’t feel any better, so he kicked a hot and blackened rock, and broke his toe, then yelled and limped away before the fire department came.
I feel a little sick.
I’m halfway home when the stranger stops me on the sidewalk. It hasn’t been the best of mornings. I paid the rent and I’m pretty sure the check won’t bounce, but I forgot to pack a lunch so I’m walking home to save the five dollars a sandwic
h would cost me, plus another three bucks for round-trip bus fare. I’m almost dizzy from adding and subtracting numbers in my head, checking and rechecking columns, trying to figure out what it’ll take to get through the month, so I’m happy, in a way, for the distraction, if hardly in the mood to justify myself. But this is none of your business. Really. He stands in front of me, his arms akimbo. He’s whistling softly to himself and tapping his right foot.
I step around him. The stranger turns and walks beside me. He rests his left hand on my right shoulder. It is not an affectionate gesture. “Tell me something,” he says, and squeezes hard.
I twist away to shake his hand off. “No hello?” I say. “No how are you?”
“Hello how are you,” he says. He smiles flatly, a little too quickly to come off as nonchalant.
“Shitty,” I answer. “But thanks for asking. What do you want to know?”
“Where is this going?” he asks.
“This?” I say.
He waves his hand at the sidewalk to indicate the path before him. “This,” he says.
“Don’t you know?”
“How could I?”
“Because you’re the one who’s going there.”
“You’re not funny,” the stranger says.
I shrug. I didn’t mean to be funny. We reach the corner. The light is red. A few yards to our right, a dog in the yard of a transmission shop barks behind a chain-link fence. It’s a chow, its greasy fur matted in uneven auburn dreadlocks, black gums drawn back and howling. Clearly, it would kill us if it could. The notion of a world beyond the fence, of creatures free to move about the world at will, is apparently too much for it.
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