The Natural Order of Things (21 page)

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Though he gives the matter some thought, Tom elects not to go home right away. Instead, he stops at the corner store.

Behind the counter, watching him with a weary expression, stands the Tanzanian shop owner, ready as always to reach beneath the cash register with the dexterity of a gunslinger. Heavy drops of sweat cascade over his perpetual five o-clock shadow and sink into a deep crevasse of flesh at the base of his neck. His shop has been robbed many times, but during the last incident, the owner managed to shoot and mortally wound the thief, a teenager from the projects along the river. The boy, drenched in blood and surrounded by shards of glass that sparkled under the streetlights, shielded his face with his hands and begged for his life. The residents of the neighborhood now regard the owner as a hero. “The police are of no use to me,” he tells his customers. “I am not a man of the book. I am a man of the gun.”

Not wishing to test his patience, Tom finds the latest edition of his favorite comic book buried behind the porno magazines on a rack near the front counter. He flips through the pages and briefly studies the vivid images. In some ruined city, not unlike the one in which Tom lives, dozens of terrified citizens run screaming through the devastated streets, their clothes set ablaze by a pack of chortling, green mutants, slimy-skinned humanoids, half-man, half-frog, with giant webbed feet and sharply defined buttocks. The monsters leap effortlessly across the cratered landscape to burn the remaining survivors with torches dipped in tar and oil. Inspired by these gruesome drawings, Tom puts the comic under his arm and then selects a bottle of lighter fluid from the bottom shelf. He brings these items to the register and produces several bills from his wallet.

The owner scratches his stomach and coughs. “This will be all, young man?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will be needing a bag?”

“If it’s no trouble.”

The owner smirks, lets his eyes linger for a moment on the boy’s face. “It’s no trouble.” He places the items in a paper bag and gives Tom his change. “Please, come again.”

After leaving the store, Tom walks three blocks to the small public park and slips past the iron gates. Stealthy as a sewer rat, he creeps toward the circle of benches and slides beside one of the shivering women whose oily hair is buried beneath a bundle of newspapers and stinking rags. The arctic wind scrubs the air clean but cannot disguise the malodorous tentacles of piss and madness that waft toward him. He leans in close, hoping to sniff something more elemental, things barely remembered—sour milk, perfume, booze, painkillers crushed into a fine powder.

A police cruiser rolls by. He can’t stay here for long without arousing suspicion. Quickly, he stuffs more newspapers under the woman’s shoulders, her back, her thighs, then he removes the bottle of lighter fluid from the bag, tears off the cellophane wrapper along the perforated edge, and, with an expert flick of his thumb, pops opens the red cap. He squeezes the sides of the bottle, sending a perfect parabola of fluid arcing through the artificial light. He searches his pockets but finds only lint and dirty tissues.

The woman struggles to come awake. She touches her damp hair with her small hands and chewed cuticles.

“What time is it?” she asks.

“It’s late,” he tells her.

She raises her head. “Damn, I have to get back.”

“Get back where?”

“To Zanzibar.”

“Zanzibar? How exotic.”

“There’s a party. Important job.”

“You still have time,” he assures her. “Go back to sleep.”

“Maybe you’re looking for a little fun, a nice gentleman like you.”

“No, not tonight, thank you.”

“Such a fine-looking young man. You got something there to drink? I’m so dry.”

He gives her the bottle of lighter fluid and continues to search his pockets until he finally finds the book of matches he stole from the principal’s office earlier that afternoon. He waits for the wind to die down. Five seconds, ten seconds. He is patient. Somewhere nearby, dogs are barking, getting closer, hunting their quarry. Suddenly there is a small break in the clouds. A tight pool of pale moonlight fills the park. The wind melts away. Everything is eerily still. Tom lifts the matchbook cover, feels the stiff paper sticks, the phosphorus tips. He strikes a match, holds it to the newspapers and to the loose threads dangling from the hem of the woman’s purple dress. The advancing blue flames give a quick whoosh. Sparks soar heavenward. Fire licks the sky. A burnt offering. The woman flails her arms, rolls into a pile of dry leaves, but unlike so many of his other victims she does not scream.

Tom checks his watch. Though he would like to stay and enjoy the fire, he really must be heading home. It’s his eighteenth birthday, and by now his father must be wondering about him. Guests will be waiting in the dark, whispering, giggling, eagerly anticipating that magical moment when they can turn on the lights and shout, “Surprise!” Everyone is sure to be there, everyone except, of course, his mother.

He puts the comic book in his coat pocket, and as he leaves the park he glimpses the gothic tower of the Jesuit school above the rooftops. The priests have always said that a young man with one set of ideas might, with age and wisdom, grow into an altogether different kind of man with an entirely new set of beliefs. Maybe so, but Tom suspects that the universe and the people who inhabit it are essentially static and hostile to change, that all things are headed toward one ineluctable destiny. Eternal stasis can only be achieved if there is good
and
evil. The powers and potentialities of darkness are not to be denied or suppressed. They, too, are essential parts of this cosmic equation. Some people are Creators, others great Defaulters and Destroyers, not unlike the Ancient of Days, who from the skies above a fated empire once railed, “I will smite your whole territory with frogs, which will come up and go into your house and into your bedroom and into your bed and into the houses of your servants and into your ovens and into your kneading bowls.”

These things Tom knows to be true—he has read about them in holy books, and as he hurries through the desolate streets and alleys, he thinks of Father Loomis and looks forward to the hour when he can retreat to the sanctuary of his bedroom where, amid the sounds of music and laughter, he can carefully craft a plan for tomorrow’s terrible ordeal.

On the steps of his front porch, resting his head against the top stoop, George Fenner smokes his last cigarette and marvels at the shifting shapes of passing clouds. The early morning rain that came sluicing sideways out of the sky has given way to brief glimpses of rusty sunshine, but in the distance, far out over the lake, an immense wall of dark clouds pushes ever closer to shore, rumbling weirdly with thundersnow. To George the soaring cloud tops look solid and muscular like figures masterfully crafted from massive sheets of steel, a three-headed hellhound, maybe, bounding toward heaven, eager to taste the tender flesh of angels’ wings. The vision seems all the more real thanks to the mangy dogs that trot up and down the narrow brick lane in front of his house, lifting their hind legs to mark their territory, shitting on the sidewalk, pillaging trash cans, competing for non-existent scraps of food. George feels no pity for them. Like every creature condemned to live among these streets, the dogs must learn to accept suffering. Winter is almost here, spring a million years off. Soon there will be no escape from the punishing cold and constant hunger unless, of course, death whisks them all away to an even colder grave.

The change of weather doesn’t seem to trouble Billy. In a red cape and blue tights, the boy runs back and forth across a muddy patch of lawn, chasing after the grackles that haunt the rotten windowsills and mossy roof peak of the vacant house next door. At his approach the birds flutter away, easily evading his desperate lunges. A few even make a game of it. From the low branches of a stately maple at the center of the yard, the birds hop up and down and screech at the ungainly biped that comes stumbling through a swath of dead yellow grass. Billy stops to study the birds, his eyes unblinking and inscrutable as a cat’s. He bobs his head as they do, makes little chirping sounds, tries to find a way to ingratiate himself with them, but his efforts only make the birds squawk all the louder. They run nimbly along the limbs of the tree and kick acorns on his head. With a grunt of exasperation the boy adjusts his Halloween costume, yanking the tights from the crack of his ass, and suddenly charges, his arms pin-wheeling, his shiny black boots slipping sideways in the muck.

Sensing disaster, George sits up and shouts, “You goddamn birdbrain, watch where you’re going!”

But the warning comes too late. The boy collides with a crooked fencepost, and for a long time he lies on the ground, his face buried deep in a pile of moldering leaves. He might be unconscious, he might be dead. George checks his watch and waits for a hopeful sign.

It’s only four o’clock. His wife won’t be home from the foundry for at least another hour. With a long yawn, he bundles the collar of his jacket around his throat and wonders how he will survive so many days tethered to this wretched madhouse. Trying to find different ways to idle away the dwindling hours of October daylight has become his sole occupation, or perhaps preoccupation, since boredom has become a living thing in his life, a chittering, winged serpent that coils on his chest while he sleeps and waits for him to open his eyes each morning. All day long it hovers over him, and because he has
no hobbies, no skills, no friends to visit, he cannot defend himself against it or silence the sound of its flapping wings.

Now he opens the plastic bag at his feet and tosses a handful of candy near the boy’s inert body. The birds ruffle their iridescent feathers but dare not swoop down to investigate. After a few minutes Billy lifts his head and from his bruised face peels away a mask of wet leaves. Had another child been injured—a
normal
child, thinks George—there would have been a high-pitched scream, inconsolable wailing and blubbering, but from his son there comes only a strangled, drawn-out hiss, the sound a vampire makes after it has been cornered in a crypt, its forehead seared by a crucifix, its glassy, black eyes maced with holy water. In his four years of life Billy has never uttered a word, not a single one, and seldom moves his lips with make-believe speech.

Sometimes George actually pities the boy. There are even moments when he wonders if he is personally responsible for Billy’s mysterious affliction, if he damaged the child during one of those infamous lost weekends—dropped him, shook him, put whiskey in his bottle instead of milk, vodka instead of formula. Sobriety should help George remember these things, so say his fellow alcoholics during the weekly AA meetings in the smoky church basement, but the past will not give up its secrets so easily, and for that he is grateful.

His wife, however, is not the type to forgive and forget and is only too happy to remind him of the terrible things he has done. A deeply religious woman, she believes in the redemptive power of shame and spends long hours recounting, often in meticulous detail, his innumerable failures as a father and husband. Without asking his permission, she goes to the rectory where she consults the Jesuits about their son, but the priests only offer their usual crackpot diagnoses, use the cryptic words “solipsism syndrome,” and suggest that Billy is merely speech delayed, nothing more. “Prayer will solve the problem, sure enough,” the priests tell her. They lounge in an enormous parlor, shielded from reality by ornate tapestries and heavy brocade curtains, as Ms. Higginson, their surly housekeeper, serves tea, pours the cream, counts out the lumps of sugar, attends to their every need, all the while listening to the conversation with special interest.

George does not approve of these clandestine meetings, and he isn’t particularly interested in the Jesuits’ armchair psychology. He believes the boy is disturbed, plain and simple, and he isn’t afraid to say so. The neighborhood has a tendency to breed monsters. Newspapers tell grisly tales of murder, incest, rape, a veritable decameron of horrors not to be believed. The people here are diseased, their brains warped from breathing the poisoned air and drinking the tainted water.

“I should have a say in these matters,” he told his wife that morning at breakfast. “I’m still the head of this household, and I believe the boy needs to see a proper physician.”

“Head of the household!” His wife laughed bitterly. “Well, aren’t you old-fashioned?” She crushed out her cigarette in an egg yolk, then laced up her steel-toed boots. “We can’t afford a doctor. We lost our medical insurance when you were fired, remember?”

“Laid off, you mean.”

“Right, laid off. Sorry.”

Trying to ignore his wife’s sarcasm, George focused on his plate, sopped up a pool of bacon grease with a triangle of burnt toast and crammed the whole thing into his
mouth. “Those priests are no better than witch doctors!” He had a bad habit of talking with his mouth full and sprayed his words across the table. “Mortal men claiming to speak for God. They can’t even look you in the eye and admit that the boy is daft, that he isn’t right in the head.
Look
at him. You’d think he was reared in the wild.”

Billy Fenner tugged violently on a scrap of overcooked sausage and slobbered down his chin but otherwise seemed to watch the scene with perfect indifference.

His wife tousled the boy’s hair. “He’s fine. He knows when to keep his mouth shut. It’s a sign of intelligence. He’s a prodigy.”

“Oh, sure, a real fucking genius!”

George chuckled, busy mopping up more grease with a fresh piece of toast, but he should have known what was coming; marriage had conditioned him to be aware of the dangers, but he didn’t realize what was happening until he heard the crash of dishes and felt the fork pressed firmly against his neck, the dull prongs dripping with egg yolk and puncturing his flesh.