Growing Things and Other Stories, page 4
The ground shakes worse than ever because they’re all around us.
My stomach is dead and it hurts to talk, but I tell Julie to stop looking out the window. I tell her that they’ll see her. I say it in my quiet, I’m-sorry voice.
I tell Julie that I’d been walking by Gran’s house for a while now and I’d heard Gran yelling at her, calling her stupid and so bad, like she used to yell at me, and it’s why I’d always run away to the Ewings—remember the Ewings?—and they’re not here anymore, you know, so that’s why I went and got her out of the house tonight, got her away from Gran.
Julie hasn’t said anything to me since we got here, but then from under the pile of blankets and the pile of bones that are my arms and legs, she asks me if I still have the gun.
I tell her my mom became Gran to me the day they let her take you away from me.
And then I tell Julie about that first time, a little more than seven years ago, I went and got her when she was only eight months old. I was downtown by myself, and Joey, that prick, him and his bleeding gums and cigarette burns, he was so long gone it was like he was never even there, and I remember not being able to see Julie at all, right away, and worse, not being able to remember what she looked like or what her chubby little hands and feet felt like, how that must’ve been the worst pain in the world, right?—I mean, what else could’ve mattered to me?—so when the pain wouldn’t go away I went over to Mom’s house, Gran’s house, and I can’t remember if I really remember because what I remember now is how they explained it all when I was in the courtroom, how the lawyers talked about me and what I did before me and Julie went south where everything was green. I remember them saying how I walked into my old house, calm as a summer’s day (was how the lawyer said it, someone objected), me and a big knife, scooped up Julie out of the crib, though I don’t know how it was I held her and a big knife at the same time, right? That doesn’t make sense to me. I’d be more careful than that. So yeah, Mom wasn’t my mom anymore but your gran, which means she became someone else, and her stupid twelve-pack boyfriend, whoever he was, the one with the junky red truck and a rusted plow blade hanging off the grille too low, the one with the easy greasy hands, the one who’d walk in on you if you were in the bathroom, he wasn’t there, I was there, so was a knife, apparently, and this new Gran, she looked so angry, tough as a leather jacket, fists clenched, hair cut too short and tight like a helmet, and no, wait, she looked like she wanted to give up, so old, thin, dry-boned, but she was screaming at me fine, like she was fine, just fine, like normal, or no, that’s not right because then she was crying about how she couldn’t take it, any of it, anymore, saying that she had cancer in her liver now, and go ahead she said, go ahead and do it she said, do it, and I ask Julie if she remembers Gran saying that and, and dammit I’m mixing up what happened when Julie was a baby with happened tonight. How do you keep everything that happened in order anyway? Doesn’t seem like order matters much because it doesn’t change what happened.
I tell Julie that swim didn’t think this was going to happen.
We listen to sirens coming closer and we listen to breathing and stomping and everything outside. So loud, it’s like we’re in their bellies already.
I tell Julie there’s nothing to be afraid of. I tell her that when it’s morning everything will be all done. I tell her that all the houses around us and in the rest of the world will be gone, stomped and mashed flat, but we’ll be okay. I tell her that we’ll ride on the back of one of the monsters. Its back plates and scales will be softer than they look. We’ll feel the earth rumbling beneath us and we’ll be above everything. I tell her it’ll know where to go, where to take us, and it’ll take us where it’s safe, safe for swims. I tell her that I know she doesn’t remember the first time but we’ll ride it south again. The monster will follow the dotted white lines and instead of trees lining the roads there’ll be all the rest of the monsters destroying everything else, watching us, leading the way south, not sure why south, swim south, but maybe it’s as simple and stupid as that’s where everything is green, because south isn’t here, because south is as good or bad as any other place.
Outside there’s flashing lights, sirens, pounding on the doors, walls, and roof. Dust and chunks of plastic rain down on our heads and we fall and roll into the middle of the room. Julie’s yelling and crying and I brush away hair from her ear with one hand so I can whisper inside her head. Tony’s gun is in my other hand.
I tell Julie, Shh, baby. Don’t you worry about nothing. Your mom’s here.
Something About Birds
The New Dark Review Presents “Something About William Wheatley: An Interview with William Wheatley,” by Benjamin D. Piotrowski
William Wheatley’s The Artist Starve is a collection of five loosely interconnected novelettes and novellas published in 1971 by the University of Massachusetts Press, the book having won its Juniper Prize for Fiction. In an era that certainly predated usage of YA as a marketing category, his stories were told from the POV of young adults, ranging from the fourteen-year-old Maggie Holtz, who runs away from home, taking her six-year-old brother Thomas into the local woods, during the twelve days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the last story, a near-future extrapolation of the Vietnam War having continued into the year 1980, the draft age dropped to sixteen, and an exhausted and radiation-sick platoon of teenagers conspires to kill the increasingly unhinged Sergeant Thomas Holtz. The Artist Starve was a prescient and visceral (if not too earnest) book embracing the chaotic social and global politics of the early 1970s. An unexpected critical and commercial smash, particularly on college campuses, The Artist Starve was one of three books forwarded to the Pulitzer Prize board, who ultimately decided not to award a prize for the year 1971. That The Artist Starve is largely forgotten whereas the last short story Wheatley ever wrote, “Something About Birds,” first published in a DIY zine called Steam in 1977 and oft-reprinted, continues to stir debate and win admirers within the horror/weird fiction community is an irony that is not lost upon the avuncular, seventy-five-year-old Wheatley.
BP: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Wheatley.
WW: The pleasure is all mine, Benjamin.
BP: Before we discuss “Something About Birds,” which is my all-time favorite short story, by the way—
WW: You’re too kind. Thank you.
BP: I wanted to ask if The Artist Starve is going to be reprinted. I’ve heard rumors.
WW: You have? Well, that would be news to me. While I suppose it would be nice to have one’s work rediscovered by a new generation, I’m not holding my breath, nor am I actively seeking to get the book back in print. It already served its purpose. It was an important book when it came out, I think, but it is a book very much of its time. So much so I’m afraid it wouldn’t translate very well to the now.
BP: There was a considerable gap, six years, between The Artist Starve and “Something About Birds.” In the interim, were you working on other writing projects or projects that didn’t involve writing?
WW: When you get to my age—oh, that sounds terribly cliché, doesn’t it? Let me rephrase: When you get to my perspective, six years doesn’t seem so considerable. Point taken, however. I’ll try to be brief. I will admit to some churlish, petulant behavior, as given the overwhelming response to my first book I expected the publishing industry to then roll out the red carpet to whatever it was I might’ve scribbled on a napkin. And maybe that would’ve happened had I won the Pulitzer, yes? Instead, I took the no-award designation as a terrible, final judgment on my work. Silly, I know, but at the risk of sounding paranoid, the no-award announcement all but shut down further notice for the book. I spent a year or so nursing my battered ego and speaking at colleges and universities before even considering writing another story. I then spent more than two years researching the burgeoning fuel crisis and overpopulation fears. I traveled quite a bit as well: Ecuador, Peru, Japan, India, South Africa. While traveling I started bird-watching, of course. Total novice, and I remain one. Anyway, I’d planned to turn my research into a novel of some sort. That book never materialized. I never even wrote an opening paragraph. I’m not a novelist. I never was. To make a long, not-all-that-exciting story short, upon returning home and very much travel weary, I became interested in antiquities and, in 1976, bought the very same antique shop that is below us now. I wrote “Something About Birds” shortly after opening the shop, thinking it might be the first story in another cycle, all stories involving birds in some way. The story itself was unlike anything I’d ever written; oblique, yes, bizarre to many, I’m sure, but somehow, it hits closer to an ineffable truth than anything else I’ve written. To my great disappointment, the story was summarily rejected by all the glossy magazines and I was ignorant of the genre fiction market, so I decided to allow a friend who was in a local punk band to publish it in her zine. I remain grateful and pleased that the story has had many other lives since.
BP: Speaking for all the readers who adore “Something About Birds,” let me say that we’d kill for a short-story cycle built around it.
WW: Oh, I’ve given up on writing. “Something About Birds” is a fitting conclusion to my little writing career, as that story continues to do its job, Benjamin.
Mr. Wheatley says, “That went well, didn’t it?”
Wheatley is shorter than Ben but not short, and is broad in the chest and shoulders, a wrestler’s build. His skin is pallid and his dark brown eyes focused, attentive, and determined. His hair has thinned but he still has most of it, and most of it is dark, almost black. He wears a tweed sports coat, gray wool pants, a plum-colored sweater vest, a white shirt, a slate bow tie that presses against his throat tightly as though it were gauze being applied to a wound. He smiled throughout the interview. He is smiling now.
“You were great, Mr. Wheatley. I cannot thank you enough for the opportunity to talk with you about my favorite story.”
“You are too kind.” Wheatley drums his fingers on the dining room table at which they are sitting and narrows his eyes at Ben, as though trying to bring him into better focus. “Before you leave, Benjamin, I have something for you.”
Ben swirls the last of his room-temperature Earl Grey tea around the bottom of his cup and decides against finishing it. Ben stands as Wheatley stands, and he checks his pocket for his phone and his recorder. “Oh, please, Mr. Wheatley, you’ve been more than gracious—”
“Nonsense. You are doing me a great service with the interview. It won’t be but a moment. I will not take no for an answer.” Wheatley continues to talk as he disappears into one of the three other rooms with closed doors that spoke out from the wheel of the impeccable and brightly lit living/dining room. The oval dining room table is the centerpiece of the space and is made of a darkly stained wood, the tabletop held up by a single post as thick as a telephone pole. The wall adjacent to the kitchen houses a built-in bookcase, the shelves filled to capacity; across the top perch vases and brass candelabras. On the far wall rectangular, monolithic windows, their blue drapes pulled wide open, vault toward the height of the cathedral ceiling, their advance halted by the crown molding. The third-floor view overlooks Dunham Street, and when Ben stands in front of a window he can see the red awning of Wheatley’s antiques shop below. The room is beautiful, smartly decorated, full of antiques that Ben is unable to identify; his furniture and décor experience doesn’t extend beyond IKEA and his almost pathological inability to put anything together more complex than a nightstand.
Wheatley reemerges from behind a closed door. He has an envelope in one hand and something small and strikingly red cupped in the palm of the other.
“I hope you’re willing to indulge an old man’s eccentricity.” He pauses and looks around the room. “I thought I brought up a stash of small white paper bags. I guess I didn’t. Benjamin, forgive the Swiss-cheese memory. We can get a bag on our way out if you prefer. Anyway, I’d like you to have this. Hold out your hands, please.”
“What is it?”
Wheatley gently places a bird head into Ben’s hands. The head is small, the size of a half-dollar coin. Its shock of red feathers is so bright, a red he’s never seen, only something living could be that vivid, and for a moment Ben is not sure if he should pat the bird head and coo soothingly or flip the thing out of his hands before it nips him. The head has a prominent brown-yellow beak, proportionally thick, and as long as the length of the head from the top to its base. The beak is outlined in shorter black feathers that curl around the eyes as well. The bird’s pitch-black irises float in a sea of a more subdued red.
“Thank you, Mr. Wheatley. I don’t know what to say. Is it—is it real?”
“This is a red-headed barbet from northern South America. Lovely creature. Its bill is described as horn colored. It looks like a horn, doesn’t it? It feeds on fruit, but it also eats insects as well. Fierce little bird, one befitting your personality, I think, Benjamin.”
“Wow. Thank you. I can’t accept this. This is too much—”
“Nonsense. I insist.” He then gives Ben an envelope. “An invitation to an all-too-infrequent social gathering I host here. There will be six of us, you and I included. It’s in—oh my—three days. Short notice, I know. The date, time, and instructions are inside the envelope. You must bring the red-headed barbet with you, Benjamin. It is your ticket to admittance, and you will not be allowed entrance without it.” Wheatley chuckles softly and Ben does not know whether or not he is serious.
BP: There’s so much wonderful ambiguity and potential for different meanings. Let’s start in the beginning, with the strange funeral procession of “Something About Birds.” An adult, Mr. H________, is presumably the father of one of the children, who slips up and calls him “Dad.”
WW: Yes, of course. “It’s too hot for costumes, Dad.”
BP: That line is buried in a pages-long stream-of-consciousness paragraph with the children excitedly describing the beautiful day and the desiccated, insect-ridden body of the dead bird. It’s an effective juxtaposition and wonderfully disorienting use of omniscient POV, and I have to admit, when I first read the story, I didn’t see the word “Dad” there. I was surprised to find it on the second read. Many readers report having had the same experience. Did you anticipate that happening?
WW: I like when stories drop important clues in a nonchalant or nondramatic way. That he is the father of one, possibly more of the children, and that he is simply staging this funeral, or celebration, for a bird, a beloved family pet, and all the potential strangeness and darkness is the result of the imagination of the children is one possible read. Or maybe that is all pretend, too, part of the game, and Mr. H_______ is someone else entirely. I’m sorry, I’m not going to give you definitive answers, and I will purposefully lead you astray if you let me.
BP: Duly noted. Mr. H_______ leads the children into the woods behind an old, abandoned schoolhouse—
WW: Or perhaps school is only out for the summer, Benjamin.
BP: Okay, wow. I’m going to include my “wow” in the interview, by the way. I’d like to discuss the children’s names. Or the names they are given once they reach the clearing: The Admiral, The Crow, Copper, The Surveyor, and of course, poor Kittypants.
WW: Perhaps Kittypants isn’t so poor after all, is he?
There is a loud knocking on Ben’s apartment door at 12:35 a.m.
Ben lives alone in a small one-bedroom apartment in the basement of a run-down brownstone, in a neighborhood that was supposed to be the next it neighborhood. The sparsely furnished apartment meets his needs, but he does wish there was more natural light. There are days, particularly in the winter, when he stands with his face pressed against the glass of his front window, a secret behind a set of black wrought-iron bars.
Whoever is knocking continues knocking. Ben awkwardly pulls on a pair of jeans, grabs a forearm-length metal pipe that leans against his nightstand (not that he would ever use it, not that he has been in a physical altercation since fifth grade), and stalks into the combined living area/kitchen. He’s hesitant to turn on the light and debates whether he should ignore the knocking or phone the police.
A voice calls out from behind the thick wooden front door. “Benjamin Piotrowsky? Please, Mr. Piotrowsky. I know it’s late, but we need to talk.”
Ben shuffles across the room and turns on the outside light above the entrance. He peeks out his front window. There’s a woman standing on his front stoop, dressed in jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. He does not recognize her and he is unsure of what to do. He turns on the overhead light in the living area and shouts through the door, “Do I know you? Who are you?”
“My name is Marnie, I am a friend of Mr. Wheatley, and I’m here on his behalf. Please open the door.”
Somehow her identification makes perfect sense, that she is who she says she is and yes, of course, she is here because of Mr. Wheatley, yet Ben has never been more fearful for his safety. He unlocks and opens the door against his better judgment.
Marnie walks inside, shuts the door, and says, “Don’t worry, I won’t be long.” Her movements are easy and athletic and she rests her hands on her hips. She is taller than Ben, perhaps only an inch or two under six feet. She has dark shoulder-length hair and eyes that aren’t quite symmetrical, with her left smaller and slightly lower than her right. Her age is indeterminate, anywhere from late twenties to early forties. As someone who is self-conscious about his own youthful, childlike appearance (ruddy complexion, inability to grow even a shadow of facial hair), Ben suspects she’s older than she looks.
Ben asks, “Would you like a glass of water, or something, uh, Marnie, right?”
“No, thank you. Doing some late-night plumbing?”
“What? Oh.” Ben hides the pipe behind his back. “No. It’s um, my little piece of security, I guess. I, um, I thought someone might be breaking in.”
