The Man in the Window (6 page)

Louis opened his eyes and Big Bill was there. Not pressing his nose against the window, but reaching for the door handle. Louis hit the lock before he could open it, then whirled around and hit the other three. The sunlight sparkled on the parking lot and Louis could see tiny flames.

Big Bill backed away, smiling. “No harm, son. Easy now. I just wanted to have a look at you,” the words muted by glass.

Louis crouched below the window, and wondered why. Who would want to look? But Big Bill was a looker—at all things dead and terrible. He had seen the worst faces Waverly had to offer. Big Bill was a chronicler of the ugly, a connoisseur of the forbidding. But Louis was not dead yet, so Big Bill would have to wait. Louis saw himself dead, then, and imagined those fat fingers tugging at his scarf, the eager grunts of anticipation.

Big Bill leaned on his cane, still smiling. Louis could feel him, feel the horrible weight of him. The car began to heat up. Louis closed his eyes and saw Big Bill as the devil, his cane a pitchfork, standing in a sea of flames. And then suddenly, through the glass, Gracie’s voice. He looked out the window and Big Bill had vanished. Or had never been there at all.

He unlocked the door and Gracie got in. “You didn’t miss a thing,” she said. “I’ve been crying all morning, but in there, in that awful place, I was dry as a stone. It’s the most neutral place I’ve ever been—it sucked the emotion right out of me. People were shedding tears, but I was just so furious, Louis. Having left Atlas there for two days—it was worse than leaving him in a McDonald’s. And you know how he felt about McDonald’s. ‘Gracie, don’t you ever take me into a restaurant again where they talk into microphones.’ He couldn’t tolerate that, ordering a hamburger, then having them repeat his words over a
microphone. ‘Makes you feel like you’re wearing your underwear on the outside,’ he said.”

She suddenly grabbed Louis’s arm. “Oh Lord. I gave Jim Rose those clothes, remember? Only I didn’t give him a pair of Atlas’s underwear.” Now she began to cry. “Do you think they put a pair on him, Louis?” Louis put his arm around her.

Up ahead they loaded the casket into a white hearse. The car started up, and Louis leaned back in the seat, away from the window. Everyone knew by now that he was there. The procession to the cemetery snaked down the streets of Waverly, the hearse first, then Gracie and Louis, and a long tail of cars. A lot of people liked Atlas, although very few of them understood his sense of humor. For instance, he probably would have thought it pretty funny, poor Gracie’s tears aside, that all these dressed-up people were going to all this trouble to bury a man who wasn’t wearing any underwear.

Louis watched the funeral from inside the car. He had whispered something to Gracie, and then she’d told Jim Rose to park in the shade and apart from the others after he let her out. Now Louis sat up, and even rolled the window down. Most of the guests were trying very hard not to look in his direction, some trying harder than others. Kitty Wilson, staring, tripped over a folding chair. Others were more discreet, shooting quick glances at the car. Louis clutched the armrest but didn’t hide. The pallbearers eased the coffin out of the hearse, and the eyes left him for a moment. Sixteen years had passed since he had seen the men who now held Atlas’s casket. They had become old men, pale as ghosts, six ghosts carrying Atlas to his grave. Fred Nistle, who used to own the bakery next to Malone’s Hardware. Jim and Bob Madison, Madison Brothers’ Grocery. Ben Hoy, Hoy’s Five and Ten. Sam Lester, Sam’s Barbershop. And Yank Spiller. Yank was Atlas’s assistant at the hardware store, and he was known as “slow.” Louis knew that Yank was slow, but that he was wise, too, in things that mattered.

Fred, Jim, Bob, Ben, and Sam were all members of the Rotary Club, as Atlas had been, and they were attempting to honor one
of their dead by marching in a kind of dignified military unison. They had either not told Yank Spiller they were going to do this, or, and Louis knew this was more likely, they had told him so many times, and so carefully, the instructions were still whirling around in Yank’s brain and not making it down to his feet. The casket moved along like a centipede with a limp. Yank was getting it all wrong, and Louis could see the mourners cringe every time the casket received a particularly strong bounce. At last they got the thing where it was supposed to be and everyone looked relieved, except Yank, who looked a little disappointed because he was just starting to get his steps right.

The men began arranging themselves in the six seats set apart for them, and the rest of the mourners grew quiet. The Reverend Plant opened his Bible and had his mouth around the first word of the eulogy when Yank squinted into the distance and spotted Louis at the car window. He smiled brightly, the smile he always used to greet him with when Louis worked at the store on Saturdays and after school.

“Hey!” he shouted happily, and waved. “Hey, Louis.”

Sphincters tightened, lips were bitten, fingers dug into palms, but no one uttered a sound.

“Louis, how you been?” He waved again.

Louis slowly reached his arm out the window and waved back. Yank no longer sat at the graveside—he stood in the middle aisle of the hardware store. Yank waved hello, and Louis returned the wave, hello, hello. It was Saturday morning, a June morning, and the hardware store was the best place in the world to be. This was their secret. The roofing nails came in, said Yank, and he held one up, the prize roofing nail of all roofing nails anywhere. And then Yank, who was slow, but never slow in the store, put the boxes in exactly the right place. He looked over at Louis and smiled. This is what I can do, the smile said. And though Louis knew the store as thoroughly as Yank, knew it right down to the dust on the planks of the wooden floor, at least once a day Louis said to him, Yank, where is it we keep the quarter-inch
staples? Yank, could you help me find the glazing compound? Yank would look at Louis like he was kind of sorry for him, even shake his head, but Louis could see him trembling slightly, so happy was he to perform. They spent the day going up and down the three aisles, helping the men who came in the store, one by one. And Yank, who was slow, but also wise, said, You see, we help them with their dreams. They come into the store with a dream: If I can just find this spring, my back door will be fixed, and if my back door is fixed then all will be right in the world. A man will want an extension hose for his wife’s washing machine. If I get the extension hose, I can fix the washing machine, and if I can fix the washing machine, then my wife will love me, and if she loves me, then all will be right with the world. You see how it works? We’re part of it, Louis. Everything that comes out right, the dreams that come true, we make it all happen. See how happy they all are when they walk out of here? That’s the look of dreams coming true. At the end of the day, Yank would put on his hat and coat and stand for a moment in the doorway, the sun lighting him from behind. He’d take a last look around, and then inhale deeply, as if drawing in an essence that would sustain him through the hours away from the store. He’d say, Good night, Atlas, and shake Atlas’s hand like it was good-bye forever, and Atlas would go along with it, and then Yank would give Louis a look, the look of the shared dream, and lift his hand, and wave farewell. Louis reached his arm out the car window and waved to Yank, and they waved back and forth as all the funeral guests watched silently, transfixed.

Ben and Sam quieted Yank down and Reverend Plant cleared his throat a few times, and gradually, after much shifting and whispering, the guests returned their attention to the matter at hand. Louis listened to the reverend’s words and then lost the sound of his voice among the summer drone of insects and the noise of birds. Once upon a time, he thought, there was a man in a casket, a woman in black, and their son wrapped in purple and hidden from all eyes. Once upon a time, a young man and
his bride lay on a bed in Atlantic City and dreamed of a beautiful son they would call Louis. Once upon a time, Atlas, Louis, and Gracie had a picnic out in the backyard. Louis listened to the drone of insects and stared at the distant casket.

“Atlas?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” said Atlas. “I’m here.”

Once upon a time, a boy whose face was swathed in white dressings called out to his father.

“Atlas,” he said again.

“I’m here.”

“Flames,” he whimpered, and squeezed Atlas’s hand. Louis smelled the smoke that had worked its way into his flesh and felt the heat of his blackened skin.

“No flames,” whispered Atlas. “The fire’s out. They put the fire out.”

Louis had squeezed his hand harder, as if reassured, and then fainted. But no, Louis was trying to tell him the fire wasn’t out, that it crackled still beneath his dressings. In the daytime the nurses changed the dressings. They would not allow Atlas and Gracie to stand outside the door, but took them to a room at the far end of the hall. Each time the nurses worked on his face, they stirred the glowing embers and reignited the flames, and Louis cried out. At the end of the hall his parents wept. To help him fall asleep at night, the nurse with the green voice—he could not see the nurses so he gave color to their voices—turned on the faucet at the bedside sink. Do you feel that? she said. A cool waterfall, the ocean on the shores of Maine, the bluest lake in Colorado. But Louis imagined the Waverly Volunteer Fire Department pumping water out of Waverly Lake, Bernie Stratton manning the hose, dousing his face, for hours, for days. When they pumped the lake dry, Louis would finally fall asleep.

“Atlas,” he said, one day. “The store?”

“It’s okay, son. You got to it in time. There was only a little damage in the back room.”

And Louis squeezed Atlas’s hand harder, in relief Atlas believed, but he was wrong. Louis felt regret and sorrow, not for himself, because he did not know yet what lay beneath the dressings, but for the store, that any harm should come to it, even to the back room.

He had returned to the store after dinner, because he needed a jar of rubber cement to finish his senior high school art project. He had his own key, which Atlas had presented to him long ago. He valued it above all his possessions, and he kept it on a chain hooked to the belt loop of whatever pants he wore. The key had barely touched the lock when Louis knew something was wrong. He opened the door and stood by the cash register. The evening glow coming through the front windows turned everything in the store to gold—golden hammers, golden wire, golden pliers. He smelled smoke then, sharp and dangerous, and saw a gray haze seeping from beneath the door to the back room. He ran down the middle aisle, touched the door first to feel for heat, and then opened it. They mixed the paints there, and fixed lawn mowers and storm windows. The old cord to the paint mixer had started the fire, Louis knew—it was spring and they’d been using the machine all day long. A box of oily rags had been jostled too close to the frayed cord, and now the fire spread from there, sending flames curling up the wall in two or three places. Louis opened the door to the alley and yelled, Fire! Fire! Fire! Bob Madison poked his head out from the back of his store and Louis yelled, Fire! again. Then he grabbed a big piece of burlap and brought it down over the box of burning rags. Sparks flew everywhere, and the largest one, the one Louis watched as it moved across the room like a shooting star, landed on the edge of a glass jar half-filled with used paint thinner, teetered there, and then fell in. Louis heard a small explosion, and something bathed his face. That’s all he felt, as if he had dipped his hands in the coldest stream in the universe and bathed his face. He opened his eyes once after that and saw Bernie Stratton in his firemen’s hat, holding a fire
hose. Louis closed his eyes then, and felt the heat beyond heat, the flames that all the firemen in the world could not begin to extinguish.

Over the weeks of healing, the nurses began to leave areas of Louis’s face uncovered. Gracie could stand it, could move beyond it, but not Atlas. Each time a little more of Louis emerged, he’d turn his head, or avert his eyes, some imperceptible distance away. Louis refused to look at himself while he was in the hospital.

On his first day home, he went straight up to his room, pulled down the window shade, then slowly turned and faced the mirror above his chest of drawers. He stared straight into his eyes, and only his eyes, because the eyes were a part of himself he recognized. Yes, Louis, it’s you. Then he began to move slowly outward, taking in the new terrain of his face. The eyelids, scorched and askew. The eyebrows, the left one burned away completely, the right one half gone and veering crookedly like the broken wing of a bird. The forehead, smeared and waxy, some of it a violent red, some a sickening pale yellow. Down to the nose, what had been the nose. They had tried to fix his left nostril with a strange skin flap that partially covered a moist black hole. When he breathed, the flap jiggled and made a whistling noise. His right nostril was intact. His cheeks seemed to be covered with bunched-up chicken skin, parts of it that terrible red. The fire had burned deep craters into the fat and muscle, and the skin grafts had left lumpy scars. His lips had been drawn taut by the flame, pulled into a grimace that revealed several teeth. He could hardly bear the pain of bringing his lips together to say even the smallest word.

He said a word, finally, after the hour he spent staring at himself in the mirror. “Boo,” he whispered.

Louis returned to the hospital one final time. The plastic surgeon spoke proudly to him and Gracie and Atlas about what had been accomplished. “You’ve been through a lot of operations, Louis, and we have, for the most part, reconstructed your
face. Of course, over the years, there will be little things we can do.”

Louis stopped him with a question. “You believe you reconstructed my face?”

The surgeon hesitated, then said, “You’ve come a long way.”

“But not all the way?”

“No, not exactly, son.”

“Can you return me to what I was?”

The surgeon said quietly, “No. Only God could do that.”

Louis stood up and brought a hand to his face. “Well, God did this, don’t you think, and maybe we shouldn’t tamper any more with his work.” And then he left the room and returned home, where he knew he’d stay forever.