If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories

  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.

  The Barge

  One 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.

  But, of course, I was also growing older. I had dirt on my knees that no amount of scrubbing could wash off. One day when I crawled into my father’s lap and called him Daddy, he pushed me off.

  “Ugh, does that thing have to sit at the table with us?” my father would ask, looking at Rag-Anne looking at him from her seat at the end of the table.

  “Oh, just a little longer,” my mother said in the small voice she only used when he was in the room. “Someone’s birthday’s coming up!”

  Oh, the birthday, the birthdaycomingup. There was a doll I’d seen at the department store a
nd wanted and been assured I would have. That doll’s human hair reflected the department store light, and her eyes were made of human glass and her skin of human plastic, like all the dolls at the department store I’d always wanted and had yet to have.

  But the doll on the bridge above the barge with me that day was named for my grandmother Anne, who’d died alone in a back room of our house two winters before, unraveling like a sweater or a shadow in her bed as I played with the doll by the fire and turned up the volume on the television so I couldn’t hear the other Anne struggle for breath on the other side of the wall.

  Anne, and Anne.

  On and on.

  But everything came to an end in the end.

  “Your doll’s never been on a barge,” my friend Rachel’s older brother said in a false baby voice. “She wants to give it a try.”

  Once, this boy had snatched a piece of watermelon out of my hand and eaten it in front of me while I screamed. Once, he’d grabbed the tail feathers of a dead bird in a ditch, and flung it at me. Once, he’d stuck a handful of snow down the front of my pants—keeping the hand there as the snow melted, staring into my eyes as if he were seeing into my brain.

  That bird he’d flung managed to fly, flapping its wings mechanically over my head for a few seconds before it fell in front of me in a soggy heap to die a second time, and the soggy heap of that bird was what he saw inside my brain.

  And the snow—I told my mother about the snow, and she put her dishtowel to the side of her head and said, “Oh dear, oh dear, don’t say another word about it. You don’t want Daddy to find out.”

  I expected Rachel’s older brother to grab the doll from my hands and toss her over the bridge. I realized in that moment that I had been prepared since the day I was born for this boy to grab my doll and throw her over a bridge. I wouldn’t even gasp, I knew, when he did it. I would let him. I would watch.

  But he didn’t.

  He just looked at Rag-Anne, at me, and then down at the men on the barge. They were patient down there, but they were also tired. This was no longer a game to them. The air was maritime gray. Rag-Anne looked at me with no eyes. Please, she said, speaking to me with no eyes. Please?

  She meant the bridge, the barge, the men below us. Please.

  What?

  Please, you know what.

  Please.

  She was trying to explain to me what I already knew but had not entirely believed. That she was getting older, as was I. That everything was about to change—whether we accepted the change, whether we set it in motion ourselves, or tried to prevent it, or not. That there was birthdaycomingup. That there would be a new doll with blond hair and human eyes, and what would become of Rag-Anne then.

  We knew. We knew. We knew.

  Why not?

  Why not, while there was still this chance. While there was still this barge below us on this bridge. Who knew how long until this chance, this barge, was gone forever from our lives. Could she not just, perhaps, please, give this other life a try?

  No, I thought, clinging to her more tightly.

  Rachel’s older brother smirked. The others watched.

  No.

  No eyes.

  When he touched her with a finger, she didn’t even flinch. His smirk, his dirty finger. It seemed she didn’t even mind.

  “Just let her try,” he said, almost kindly.

  Please, she said. Oh, please. How long anyway is any doll’s life? How long, anyway could any life go on. My grandmother had finally been taken from our house on a stretcher borne aloft by a muscular woman and a small man. They’d burned her up. I knew that much. I saw the urn, and overheard.

  “Toss her over,” my friend’s brother said. “Go on.”

  He didn’t need to speak to me like a baby now. Now, I understood the language we were speaking. Toss me over, Please. It was what she would have said with eyes if she still had eyes, if her eyes were not lodged deep inside me. I looked at her, at him, and then—

  Then she slipped, feathered death, over the railing of the bridge, sighing into the oncoming twilight below us, and my friend’s older brother poked me gently between my legs with his finger—a burning branch unfurling itself all through my body and sprouting out of the back of my skull when he did—while the other children laughed, and he said, “Good job, idiot.”

  For whom did I cry all the way home and into the bathtub that night?

  Rag-Anne?

  No.

  I’d cast her off on purpose. I’d hated her, and her decay, her frayed gray petticoat, her grease-stained apron, even her name.

  Rag-Anne, and also Anne.

  I’d hated them both—but especially my grandmother, who’d burned a hole in me by dying, by allowing herself to be burned alive. I could stick three fingers into that hole, wiggle them around—bloodless, painless, but also terrible. I’d wanted those two out of my sight.

  And, yet, I felt afraid. The men on the barge seemed not to have noticed that a doll had fallen into their midst. Who knew what they might do when they did. They might cast her into the water. They might set her on fire.

  That night, an enormous hairless zoo animal made of silence slipped into my dream, lay down on top of me, and stayed there, like a warm snow pile, until morning. Then, we all went back to the bridge and saw her: Anne!

  I knew it was her by the expression on her face. I had been looking at that face for years, and it had never changed, even without eyes.

  The boys whistled, but not loud enough for the men smoking on the barge to hear. The men on the barge were watching her, paying no attention to the children overhead.

  She was blond now, again, in a thin fresh flowered dress. No underwear, it seemed. I could see a black triangle between her legs, the button eyes of her nipples. There was a smear of fiery lipstick on her mouth. Where had she gotten it? Even my grandmother had never worn lipstick.

  She was laughing as she sat on their laps. One man’s lap, and then another’s. She was barefoot, black-eyed, very young. When one of the men on the barge pointed a cigarette in our direction, she looked up, holding a hand to her forehead.

  Was she saluting, or blocking the sun?

  She waved at us with her other hand, and we waved our little American flags back at her, and the boys stuck out their tongues. The men on the barge grabbed at her small breasts, and she just laughed and let them—and then she was gone, and then she was gone, down in the bowels of the barge.

  Anne, my grandmother, my rag doll animated by their new world down there below the bridge, on the barge, their wild new life, which was entirely my fault, my hideous idea entirely, my brave idea that had saved them from the fire.

  You know the rest.

  The bridge. The barge. A church bell clapping in the distance along with the echoing sneeze of a metal tool banging on a metal roof—as if it were a competition between heaven and earth, as if heaven had the slightest hope of winning.

  It was hot down there, and they took turns, and they came back out into the sun, pulling on their shirts, zipping up their pants, one by one, one by one, until each of them was done, and then the barge began to pull away, and all of it was gone.

  And all of it was gone.

  And I started to cry again, and he touched me with his finger between my legs again, almost tenderly, my friend’s older brother, and he said, “Shut up, you idiot.”

  It was Thursday. Nothing like that ever happened again.

  You’re Going to Die

  Their father had “only a short time,” as the doctors put it, and it had fallen to the eldest daughter to tell him this. “He would want to know,” the other three of his children said with certainty, “and he’d want to hear it from you,” and then they went back to their lives.

  She would take him out in the boat, she thought, on the river. She would row. He could lean back and watch the sky, watch the clouds slip around in it like afterthoughts—never the same cloud twice. Soft craters. Calm bombs. Floating. Dispersing. Reanimating and ref
orming. Surely, this was the place to do it. Here the news would seem less personal. Cosmic news. A part of the cycle of this life, there in the boat with his eldest daughter, his hand in hers. You are going to die, she would say, and he would nod, staring up into the blue inevitability of the sky.

  But that morning when she picked him up he looked fantastic. His hair was combed, and there was color in his cheeks. He was wearing a cap and a tweed jacket like some father out of a Russian fairy tale, not like her father. She found herself peering around him, as if for the ragged old man she’d expected, and glimpsed the little foreign nurse’s aide slipping out of his room like a ripple, or a giggle, wearing white. The aide’s name was something decorated with accent marks and vowels that made the opposite of the sound they ordinarily made, as if the name had been conceived as a way to shame her own, plain name. Jane. When that aide had to speak to Jane, she called her “Mrs.,” although Jane had never married.

  Jane’s father had a handkerchief folded into an arrowhead in his pocket this morning. Had the aide done this for him? It was embroidered with initials Jane didn’t recognize—not his own initials. His pants looked pressed. Perhaps he’d put on a bit of weight. He called good-bye to his aide, who called back to him in a language Jane didn’t speak, and her father didn’t speak, but which he seemed to understand.

  You are going to die.

  “Daddy,” Jane said. “You’re going to be too hot in that jacket. You should leave it in the car.”

  He looked at her blankly, and then he shrugged, as if he were the tracks shrugging off the train, as if he were the hero of a tale shrugging off his fate. He kept the jacket.