3. Willie the Weirdo

Willie’s mom and dad thought their son was strange, with his careful study of dead birds and his collections of dead bugs and the way he might look at drifting clouds for an hour or more, but only Roxie would say it out loud. “Willie the Weirdo,” she called him one night at the dinner table while Willie was making (trying to, anyway) a clown face in his mashed potatoes with gravy for eyes. Willie was ten. Roxie was twelve and getting breasts, of which she was very proud. Except when Willie stared at them, which made her feel creepy.

“Don’t call him that,” Mother said. She was Sharon.

“But it’s true,” Roxie said.

Father said, “I’m sure he gets enough of that at school.” He was Richard.

Sometimes—often—the family talked about Willie as if he wasn’t there. Except for the old man at the foot of the table.

“Do you get that at school?” Grandfather asked. He rubbed a finger between his nose and upper lip, his habit after asking a question (or answering one). Grandfather was James. Ordinarily during family meals he was a silent man. Partly because it was his nature and partly because eating had become a chore. He was making slow work of his roast beef. Most of his teeth were gone.

“I don’t know,” Willie said. “I guess sometimes.” He was studying his mashed potatoes. The clown was now grinning a shiny brown grin with small globules of fat for teeth.

Sharon and Roxie cleaned up after dinner. Roxie enjoyed doing the dishes with her mother. It was a sexist division of labor to be sure, but they could have undisturbed conversations about important matters. Such as Willie.

Roxie said, “He is weird. Admit it. That’s why he’s in the Remedial.”

Sharon looked around to make sure they were alone. Richard had gone for a walk and Willie had retired to Grandfather’s room with the man Rich sometimes called the old boy and sometimes the roomer. Never Dad or my father.

“Willie isn’t like other boys,” Sharon said, “but we love him anyway. Don’t we?”

Roxie gave it some thought. “I guess I love him, but I don’t exactly like him. He’s got a bottle filled with fireflies in Grampa’s room. He says he likes to watch them go out when they die. That’s weird. He’s like a case history in a book called Serial Killers as Children.”

“Don’t you ever say that,” Sharon told her. “He can be very sweet.”

Roxie had never experienced what she’d call sweetness but thought it better not to say so. Besides, she was still thinking of the fireflies, their little lights going out one by one. “And Grampa watches right along with him. They’re in there all the time, talking. Grampa doesn’t talk to anyone else, hardly.”

“Your grandfather has had a hard life.”

“He’s really not my grampa, anyway. Not by blood, I mean.”

“He might as well be. Grampa James and Gramma Elise adopted your father when he was just a baby. It’s not like Dad grew up in an orphanage and got adopted at twelve, or something.”

“Dad says Grampa hardly ever talked to him after Gramma Elise died. He says there were nights when they hardly said six words to each other. But since he came to live with us, he and Willie go in there and talk up a storm.”

“It’s good they have a connection,” Sharon said, but she was frowning down at the soapy water. “It keeps your grandfather tethered to the world, I think. He’s very old. Richard came to them late, when James and Elise were already in their fifties.”

“I didn’t think they let people that old adopt,” Roxie said.

“I don’t know how that stuff works,” Mother said. She pulled the plug and the soapy water began to gurgle down the drain. There was a dishwasher, but it was broken and Father—Richard—kept not getting it fixed. Money had been tight since Grandfather came to live with them, because he only had his pittance of a pension to contribute. Also, Roxie knew, Mom and Dad had already begun saving for her college education. Probably not for Willie’s, though, with him being in the Remedial and all. He liked clouds, and dead birds, and dying fireflies, but he wasn’t much of a scholar.

“I don’t think Dad likes Grampa very much,” Roxie said in a low voice.

Mother lowered hers even further, so it was hard to hear over the last few chuckles from the sink. “He doesn’t. But Rox?”

“What?”

“This is how families do. Remember when you have one of your own.”

Roxie never intended to have children, but if she did, and one of them turned out like Willie, she thought she’d be tempted to drive him into the deepest darkest woods, let him out of the car, and just leave him there. Like a wicked stepmother in a fairy tale. She briefly wondered if that made her weird and decided it didn’t. Once she heard her father tell Mother that Willie’s career might turn out to be bagging groceries at Kroger’s.

James Jonas Fiedler—aka Grandfather, aka Grampa, aka the old boy—came out of his room (called his den by Sharon, his lair by Richard) for meals, and sometimes he would sit on the back porch and smoke a cigarette (three a day), but mostly he stayed in the small back bedroom that had been Mother’s study until last year. Sometimes he watched the little TV on top of his dresser (three channels, no cable). Mostly he either slept or sat quietly in one of the two wicker chairs, looking out of the window.

But when Willie came in, he would close the door and talk. Willie would listen, and when he asked questions Grampa would always answer them. Willie knew most of the answers were untruthful and he was aware that most of Grandfather’s advice was bad advice—Willie was in the Remedial because it allowed him time to think about more important things, not because he was stupid—but Willie enjoyed the answers and advice just the same. If it was crazy, so much the better.

That night, while his mother and sister were discussing the two of them in the kitchen, Willie asked Grandfather again—just to see if it jibed with earlier stories—what the weather had been like at Gettysburg.

Grandfather rubbed a finger beneath his nose, as if feeling for stubble, and ruminated. “Day One, cloudy and mid-70s. Not bad. Day Two, partly cloudy and 81. Still not bad. Day Three, the day of Pickett’s Charge, 87 degrees with the sun beating down on us like a hammer. And remember, we were in wool uniforms. We all stank of sweat.”

The weather report matched. So far so good. “Were you really there, Grampa?”

“Yes,” said Grandfather with no hesitation. He passed his finger below his nose and above his lip, then began to pick his remaining teeth with a yellow fingernail, extracting a few filaments of roast beef. “And lived to tell the tale. Many did not. Want to know about July 4th, Independence Day? People tend to forget that one because the battle was over.” He didn’t wait for Willie to answer. “Pouring rain, boot-sucking mud, men crying like babies. Lee on his horse—”

“Traveler.”

“Yes, Traveler. His back was to us. He had blood on his hat and the seat of his britches. But not his blood. He was unwounded. That man was the devil.”

Willie picked up the bottle on the windowsill (Heinz Relish on the fading label) and tilted it from side to side, enjoying the dry rustle of the dead fireflies. He imagined it was like the sound of the wind in graveyard grass on a hot July day.

“Tell me about the flag boy.”

Grandfather passed his finger between nose and lip. “You’ve heard that story twenty times.”

“Just the ending. That’s the part I like.”

“He was twelve. Going up the hill beside me, Stars and Bars flying high. The end of the pole was socked into a little tin cup on his belt. My mate Micah Leblanc made that cup. We were halfway up Cemetery Hill when the boy got hit spang in the throat.”

“Tell about the blood!”

“His lips parted. His teeth were clenched. In pain, I suppose. Blood squirted out between them.”

“And it gleamed—”

“That’s right.” The finger took a quick swipe beneath his nose, then returned to his teeth, where one pesky filament remained. “It gleamed like—”

“Like rubies in the sun. And you were really there.”

“Didn’t I say so? I was the one who picked up the Dixie flag when that boy went down. I carried it twenty more running steps before we were turned back not a stone’s throw from the rock wall the bluebellies were hiding behind. When we skedaddled, I carried it back down the hill again. Tried to step over the bodies, but I couldn’t step over all of them because there were so many.”

“Tell about the fat one.”

Grandfather rubbed his cheek—scritch—then under his nose again—scratch. “When I stepped on his back he farted.”

Willie’s face twisted in a silent laugh and he clutched himself. It was what he did when he was amused, and whenever Roxie observed that knotted face and self-hug, she knew he was weird.

“There!” Grampa said, and finally dislodged a long strand of beef. “Feed it to the fireflies.”

He gave the strand to Willie, who dropped it on top of the dead fireflies in the Heinz jar. “Now tell me about Cleopatra.”

“Which part?”

“The barge.”

“Ah-ha, the barge, is it?” Grandfather caressed his philtrum, this time with his fingernail—scritch! “Well, I don’t mind. The Nile was so broad we could hardly see across it, but that day it was as smooth as a baby’s belly. I had the rudder…”

Willie leaned forward, rapt.

On a day not long after the roast beef and the mashed potatoes that made a clown face, Willie was sitting on a curb after a rainstorm. He had missed the bus going home again, but that was all right. He was watching a dead mole in the gutter, waiting to see if the rushing water would wash it into a sewer grate. A couple of big boys came along, trading arm punches and various profane witticisms. They stopped when they saw Willie.

“Look at that kid huggin’ himself,” one said.

“Because no girl in her right mind ever would,” said the other.

“It’s the freako,” said the first. “Check out those little pink eyes.”

“And the haircut,” said the second. “Looks like somebody sculped him. Hey short bus kid!”

Willie stopped hugging himself and looked up at them.

“Your face looks suspiciously like my ass,” said the first, and accepted a high five from his companion.

Willie looked back down at the dead mole. It was moving toward the sewer grate, but very slowly. He didn’t believe it was going to make it. At least not unless it started raining again.

Number One kicked him in the hip and proposed beating him up.

“Let him alone,” Number Two said. “I like his sister. She got a hot bod.”

They went on their way. Willie waited until they were out of sight, then got up, pulled the damp seat of his pants away from his butt, and walked home. His mother and father were still at work. Roxie was somewhere, probably with one of her friends. Grampa was in his room, looking at a game show on his TV. When Willie came in, he snapped it off.

“You’ve got a bit of a hitch in your gitalong,” Grampa said.

“What?”

“A limp, a limp. Let’s go out on the back porch. I want to smoke. What happened to you?”

“Kid kicked me,” Willie said. “I was watching a mole. It was dead. I wanted to see if it would go into the sewer or not.”

“Did it?”

“No. Unless it did after I left, but I don’t think so.”

“Kicked you, did he?”

“Yes.”

“Ah-ha,” Grampa said, and that closed the subject. They went out on the porch. They sat down. Grampa lit a cigarette and coughed out the first drag in several puffs.

“Tell me about the volcano under Yellowstone,” Willie proposed.

“Again?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well, it’s a big one. Maybe the biggest. And someday it’s going to blow. It’ll take the whole state of Wyoming when it does, plus some of Idaho and most of Montana.”

“But that isn’t all,” Willie said.

“Not at all.” Grampa smoked and coughed. “It’ll throw a billion tons of ash into the atmosphere. The crops will die worldwide. People will die worldwide. The Internet everyone is so proud of will go kerblooey.”

“The ones who don’t starve will choke to death,” Willie said. His eyes were shining. He clutched his throat and went grrrahh. “It could be an extinction event, like what killed the dinosaurs. Only it would be us this time.”

“Correct,” Grandfather said. “That boy who kicked you won’t be thinking about kicking anybody then. He’ll be crying for his mommy.”

“But his mommy will be dead.”

“Correct,” said Grandfather.

That winter, a disease in China that had been just another item on the nightly news turned into a plague that started killing people all over the world. Hospitals and morgues were overflowing. People in Europe were mostly staying inside and when they went out they put on masks. Some people in America also put on masks, mostly if they were going to the supermarket. It wasn’t as good as a massive volcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park, but Willie thought it was pretty good. He kept track of the dead-numbers on his phone. Schools were shut down early. Roxie cried because she was missing the end-of-year dance, but Willie didn’t mind. You didn’t get a dance at the end of the year when you were Remedial.

In March of that year, Grandfather began to cough a lot more, and sometimes he coughed up blood. Father took him to the doctor, where they had to sit in the parking lot until they were called because of the virus that was killing people. Mother and Father were both pretty sure Grampa had the virus, probably brought into the house by either Roxie or Willie. Most kids didn’t get sick, it seemed, or at least not very sick, but they could pass it on and when old people caught it, they usually died. According to the news, in New York the hospitals were using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies. Mostly the bodies of old people like Grampa. Willie wondered what the insides of those trucks looked like. Were the dead people wrapped in sheets, or were they in body bags? What if one of them was still alive but froze to death? Willie thought that would make a good TV show.

It turned out Grampa didn’t have the virus. He had cancer. The doctor said it started in his pancreas and then spread to his lungs. Mother told Roxie everything while they were doing dishes, and Roxie told Willie. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have done that, usually the kitchen after supper was like Vegas, what got said there stayed there, but Roxie couldn’t wait to tell Willie the Weirdo that his beloved grampa was circling the drain.

“Daddy asked if he should go in the hospital,” she told Willie, “and the doctor said if you don’t want him to die in two weeks instead of in six months or a year, take him home. The doctor said the hospital is a germ-pit and everybody who works there has to dress like in a sci-fi movie. So that’s why he’s still here.”

“Ah-ha,” Willie said.

Roxie elbowed him. “Aren’t you sad? I mean, he’s the only friend you’ve got, right? Unless you’re friends with some of your fellow weirdos at that school. Which—” Roxie made a sad wah-wahh trumpet sound. “—is now closed, just like mine.”

“What will happen when he can’t go to the bathroom anymore?” Willie asked.

“Oh, he’ll keep going poop and pee until he dies. He’ll just do it in bed. He’ll have to wear diapers. Mom said they’d put him in a hospice, only they can’t afford it.”

“Ah-ha,” Willie said.

“You should be crying,” Roxie said. “You really are a fucking weirdo.”

“Grampa was a cop in a place called Selma back in the olden days,” Willie told her. “He beat on Black people. He said he didn’t really want to, but he had to. Because orders is orders.”

“Sure,” Roxie said. “And back in the really olden days, he had pointy ears and shoes with curly toes and worked in Santa’s workshop.”

“Not true,” Willie said. “Santa Claus isn’t real.”

Roxie clutched her head.

Grandfather didn’t last a year, or six months, or even four. He went down fast. By the middle of that spring he was bedridden and wearing Adult Pampers under a nightgown. Changing the Pampers was Sharon’s job, of course. Richard said he couldn’t stand the stink.

When Willie offered to help if she showed him how, she looked at him as if he were crazy. She wore her mask when she went in to change his diapers or give him his little meals, which were now pureed in the blender. It wasn’t the virus she was worried about, because he didn’t have it. Just the smell. Which she called the stench.

Willie kind of liked the stench. He didn’t love it, that would be going too far, but he did like it—that mixture of pee, and Vicks, and slowly decaying Grampa was interesting the way looking at dead birds was interesting, or watching the dead mole make its final journey down the gutter—a kind of slow-motion funeral.

Although there were two wicker chairs in Grampa’s room, now only one of them got used. Willie would pull it up beside the bed and talk to Grandfather.

“How close are you now?” he asked one day.

“Pretty close,” Grandfather said. He swiped a trembling finger under his nose. His finger was yellow now. His skin was yellow all over because he was suffering from something called jaundice as well as cancer. He had to give up the cigarettes.

“Does it hurt?”

“When I cough,” Grampa said. His voice had grown low and harsh, like a dog’s growl. “The pills are pretty good, but when I cough it feels like it’s ripping me up.”

“And when you cough you can taste your own shit,” Willie said matter-of-factly.

“Correct.”

“Are you sad?”

“Nope. All set.”

Outside, Sharon and Roxie were in the garden, bent over so all Willie could see was their sticking-up asses. Which was fine.

“When you die, will you know?”

“I will if I’m awake.”

“What do you want your last thought to be?”

“Not sure. Maybe the flag boy at Gettysburg.”

Willie was a little disappointed that it wouldn’t be of him, but not too. “Can I watch?”

“If you’re here,” Grampa said.

“Because I want to see it.”

Grampa said nothing.

“Will there be a white light, do you think?”

Grampa massaged his upper lip as he considered the question. “Probably. It’s a chemical reaction as the brain shuts down. People who think it’s a door opening on some glorious afterlife are just fooling themselves.”

“But there is an afterlife. Isn’t there, Grampa?”

James Jonas Fiedler ran that long yellow finger along the scant skin beneath his nose again, then showed his few remaining teeth in a smile. “You’d be surprised.”

“Tell me about how you saw Cleopatra’s tits.”

“No. I’m too tired.”

One night a week later, Sharon served pork chops and told her family to enjoy them—savor every bite was how she put it. “There won’t be any more chops for awhile. Bacon, either. The pork processing plants are closing down because almost all of the workers have the virus. The price is going to go through the roof.”

“A Day No Pigs Would Die!” Roxie exclaimed, cutting into her chop.

“What?” Father asked.

“It’s a book. I did a book report on it. Got a B-plus.” She popped a bite into her mouth and turned to Willie with a smile. “Read any good first-grade primers lately?”

“What’s a primer?” Willie asked.

“Leave him alone,” Mother said.

Father was on a birdhouse kick. A local gift shop took them on consignment and actually sold a few. After dinner he went out to his little garage workshop to build another one. Mother and Roxie went into the kitchen to do the dishes and jabber. Willie’s job was clearing the table. When it was done, he went into Grampa’s room. James Fiedler was now only a skeleton with a skin-covered skull face. Willie thought that if the bugs got into his coffin they wouldn’t find much to eat. The sickroom smell was still there, but the smell of decaying Grampa seemed to be almost gone.

Grampa raised a hand and motioned Willie over. When Willie sat down beside the bed, Grampa beckoned him closer. “This is it,” he whispered. “My big day.”

Willie pulled his chair closer. He looked into Grampa’s eyes. “What’s it like?”

“Good,” Grampa breathed. Willie wondered if he looked to Grampa like he was retreating and getting dim. He saw that in a movie once.

“Come closer.”

Willie couldn’t pull his chair any closer, so he bent down almost near enough to kiss Grampa’s withered lips. “I want to watch you go. I want to be the last thing you see.”

“I want to watch you go,” Grampa repeated. “I want to be the last thing you see.”

His hand came up and grasped the nape of Willie’s neck with surprising strength. His nails dug in. He pulled. “You want death? Get a mouthful.”

A few minutes later Willie paused outside the kitchen door to listen. “We’re taking him to the hospital tomorrow,” Sharon said. She sounded on the verge of tears. “I don’t care what it costs, I can’t do this anymore.”

Roxie murmured something sympathetic.

Willie went into the kitchen. “You won’t have to take him to the hospital,” he said. “He just died.”

They turned to him, staring at him with identical expressions of shock and dawning hope.

Mother said, “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Willie said, and stroked the skin between his lip and nose with one finger.