PLEASANTVILLE by George Choundas
In Pleasantville, in the first week of September, a madness sets in: autumn. Squirrels overrun porches to harass the stray nut. Raccoons bustle in quivering ovoids, prevented from fealty to any one route by the urgency of all others. Crickets know something’s about to end; they misunderstand, and think it’s them, and so announce themselves day and night. Panic means flight, and flight means roadkill, and the roads are lengths of black bone erupting everywhere in soft red rot.
Woodpeckers, for their part, claim the lintels and dormers and eaves. What they crave most is a place under the angled meeting of two rooflines. If these can nestle, they reason, why can’t we? They perch for hours at a time, peck staunchly at these historic homes. The pecking is scandalous. The birds work two houses away and you’re certain a judge and his gavel have convened court atop your kitchen ceiling. The damage is real. A single peck, though undetectable from street level, suffices to remove paint. Three pecks: a gouge easily observable to the passerby who happens to look up, and certainly to Mrs. Oldmixon, whose craning and peering are the essence of her walks, because her walks are one part nosiness and two parts being nosy.
In the autumn when I was twelve years old, Pleasantville had its particular ways of dealing with the woodpeckers. I don’t know what ways it had before that autumn; before age twelve I was a coil of spastic and oblivious cartilage. I do know what ways it had after that autumn. They were decidedly not the same ways, for reasons you’ll soon and surely appreciate.
First way: the homeowners made a point of referring to the birds as “peckers.” Unsurprisingly this disparagement did nothing to address the problem. Like clapping at the birds, like whistling and banging trash can lids and blasting air-horns at the birds, like turning a hose on the birds (these were the second through sixth ways, the sixth being DJ Holt’s idea, and the first and last time he executed thereon the Hardins and the Parases and the Ketchums and the Scarozzas and the Lanes all came out to watch, also the Gibsons, but though they silently wished Holt well, they stopped short of getting their hopes up or cheering him on, careful to remind themselves this was at best a partial solution, because even if it chased away it could never deter altogether, and in the end even these restrained expectations were catastrophically dashed, because the birds did not leave, and instead took flight and circled just out of reach of the spray and brazenly -replaced themselves so soon as Holt let the stream die down, and no matter how many times he surged it up again or, with surprising frequency, made frank contact with the brutes, they simply went aloft and waited him out and returned, and finally Holt, looking as if determined to chew one of his own molars to bits, dropped the flaccid hose where he stood and disappeared into his house, in the same direction from which, moments late – just after the birds, comfortably re-roosted, delivered an especially resounding peck – came the sound of something crashing not accidentally), it didn’t work.
You, reader, know the power of language. It will not surprise you that, if anything, the name-calling proved counterproductive. The birds had always annoyed. But now that they were “peckers,” they were flapping sacks of affront. The calumny inflamed frustrations and stoked a jingoism that enabled these events which, in retrospect, seem outlandish.
Rich McCabe talked hooded falcon for a solid month.
“You walk a falcon along Bedford Road, okay, those peckers are gone and they come back never.”
But he made some calls – this in the days before one could simply navigate to wingeddeathdirect.com and consult the FAQ page – and learned the price tag for a respectably trained specimen hovered in the thousands of dollars, and never talked hooded falcon again.
Seventh way: The homeowners armed their sons (and two daughters) with slingshots. This was precipitous, perhaps, but not heedless. The parents also dispensed instructions to always use pebbles, never rocks, to not let fly while any human stood between the slinger’s 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock, and – because the line of windows just below where the birds liked to congregate had done nothing wrong – to err on the side of missing high.
Days, then a week, and the kids hit not a single woodpecker. The birds were wily and agile and, between pecks, unfailingly alert to danger from beneath.
Days, then a week, and the kids scared off not a single woodpecker. Inadvertently their parents had battle-hardened these birds. It was this generation’s first inheritance: a flock of trouble trained in recalcitrance, startle-proofed and inured to threat.
Single pebbles had about the same effect as oxygen. The kids learned to launch two pebbles at a time. Twin pebbles missed just as often, but occasionally they perturbed. When a bird yielded perch, the kids gave shout and celebrated. When a bird fluttered and flailed, if only for a few moments, you’d think someone’s mother had brought out a tray of parfaits.
But to everything there’s a dark side, and this was no exception. The kids, cowed by the novelty of sanctioned weaponry, worked peaceably together for a good three days. Like the explorers of history, they were daunted into cooperation by the unknown. By Day Four, however, they were arguing. This was inevitable, perhaps, not only because of campaign fatigue, but also forced proximity. Rather than spread themselves thin, the birds liked to mass on two or three houses at a time when actively pecking. This was a barn raising in reverse. And so the kids massed correspondingly, and conflict leached – as always it does – from the stretch and strain of finite resources. They competed for target time, and defamed each other’s ability in a covert bid to secure more target time, and exhorted each other to just get out of the way.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
“Stay out of my 9 and 3.”
“You’re doing it wrong.”
Most of the kids did the obvious thing and aimed at the birds. Orrin Androtti derided that method as hopeless. He insisted they should aim instead at the place on the house where the scatter of peck marks was most concentrated.
“That doesn’t make sense, Orrin.”
“You don’t make sense, Shires.”
It was to the boys’ credit that Orrin Androtti didn’t exert more influence over them than he did. A boy Orrin’s size typically wields disproportionate power among his peers. He wasn’t much taller than the other boys, but girthwise he rivaled most of their fathers: pork roast arms, chest like a laundry hamper. Also, his shoes were adult size 13. The autumn before, when Orrin wore a mere adult size 11, the boys learned during neighborhood football games that he could not be tackled (two-hand-touch was for babies) from the knees up, because those feet were like prop stands. You had to go for his ankles and cinch them up. He hadn’t started shaving, but by six years old his arms and legs showed bristle, and by eight his nostrils caught up, each a little vase arrangement of looping fur. Rumor was he had done something with Mrs. Cowen, the bus driver who always wore a green plaid skirt – notable among other reasons because on a public school bus it was the one article of clothing that the actual schoolgirls never wore – and Vivian Estrada whose mother was dropping her off late to school after a doctor’s appointment actually saw Orrin and Mrs. Cowen stepping down together from an empty bus, Mrs. Cowen stepping down first, and Orrin was cagey about what he had done with her, which of course was the solemnest confirmation it had been everything.
Orrin was no brighter than he was tall. Paul Shires was right: -Orrin’s targeting approach made no sense. There might have been logic to aiming where the notches were densest had the birds been hovering while making them, and shifting randomly and quickly from hover to hover. But these were not hummingbirds. These were woodpeckers. Invariably they perched in fixed positions as they pecked. To aim at no bird was to aim at exactly nothing.
So it was pure fluke when one Saturday Orrin was the first not only to hit a woodpecker, but to kill it. It was at the O’Rourkes’ house, where four birds had been perching for a day and a half. The felled bird hadn’t moved in reaction to Orrin’s pebble, but rather just before, or perhaps simultaneous with, its launching, and had shifted into what it couldn’t have guessed was that pebble’s trajectory. The bird dropped onto the ground and stayed there. It rested with its beak open, the way a bird might when barely alive and struggling quietly. This bird, however, was obviously and undoubtedly dead. What did Orrin do? He picked up a pebble – people in Pleasantville like to say it was the very same that had killed the bird, but that’s lore and not fact, and so I won’t pretend to report it here – and placed it in the bird’s mouth. Orrin surely acted out of impulse, but looking back on it now, it strikes me as perverse the suggestion that this small creature’s life, the sum total of all its struggles and perseverances, amounted to that prize in its beak: a negligible and useless rock.
That night was unusual. Typically the birds saved their pecking for daytime. But at three in the morning the pecking was so relentless at the Androttis’ house that Chrissy Androtti, Orrin’s mother, padded outside with a flashlight to see what was going on. (Mike Androtti, a county commissioner, was away on a business trip. There were stories that the only real business he had outside of Pleasantville was a woman in Yorktown, but everybody knew the stories were fabrications spread by Lily Sears in weird retaliation for the holiday party years ago at the Bernards’ when she exceeded her recommended nightly allowance and stood and looked up at Mike Androtti with a superfluous drink in her hand and snatched at his chest with four fingers of the other as if smoothing out his sweater, but saying each time, “I like you,” people noticing, and Mike grateful to see Bob Sears and saying “Bob, I think someone needs you,” his eyes indicating amiably but desperately the woman still snatching at him, the relief in his face evaporating on seeing Bob just stand there with the little crowd of guests watching, standing there and holding his drink, and looking at his wife with elsewhere eyes – you know, dead eyes, eyes with no shine to them at all, because though they’re apparently focused on something in the here and now, they’re in fact looking elsewhere, and in Bob’s case they were surveying the past and going, No surprises here, and they were glimpsing the future and going, Good, fine, the more shame sowed, the more humiliation harvested – and Lily still snatching like a kitty and still liking Mike aloud, and Mike finally resorting to a bear hug and less asking than proclaiming “Where’s that mistletoe when you need it” and laughing loud with his mouth but not his eyes and hug-moving her sideways in a kind of bear-crab hybrid motion over to her husband and absconding to the relative safety of the Bernards’ kitchen. There were too many claws out that night – feline, ursine, cancrine – for it not to have left a scratch on the memory of everybody in Pleasantville.) Chrissy saw nothing, a furtive rush of wings was all, before she turned back inside.
But early the next morning Chrissy and the Dabrowskis and the Ralstons were gathered outside the Androtti house, gazing up, because what they saw was unprecedented. There were no birds around. But they had left behind a pattern. A picture, really. The birds had pecked out, there above the dormer window of the house, a circle. It was an O. And underneath this O they had pecked out two short lines, as if meant to support the O.
_O_
This image was very clearly rendered. Depending where you looked above that dormer window, there were either great densities of marks, or there were no marks at all. This was its most striking feature. Because great precision, of course, implied great purpose.
By mid-morning the grown‑ups had gotten their fill, and the Androttis’ curtilage was now dominated by gaping boys. The youngest, Garrett Thornwood – no relation to the town of Thornwood – was a boy who spent his Saturdays at the local library reading the kinds of books that do not circulate: morocco-bound tomes that contained secrets and pronouncements and none of the drudge in between, that spat dust into readers’ faces as the price for the privilege. Sundays, on the other hand, he’d go collecting: gneiss and schist and amphibolite. Construction sites were his main game: fresh cut ground was a loamy promise that generations of collectors hadn’t already plucked out all the good rock. He was done with garnet. In his life he’d encountered four specimens – one on the far side of Opperman’s Pond, one in the parking lot behind Jean-Jacques (surely this was no natural occurrence, surely some hapless child in nervous anticipation of the world’s finest French toast had dropped it, and Garrett tried not to think about that and instead trained his guilty mind on the lots of people he supposed would be more than happy to trade a garnet for exceptional French toast), and two in the rail bed just north of the Metro-North station platform, where he knew he shouldn’t go, where he knew he’d get into serious trouble if he was caught, even though he went only on weekends when trains were few and timed his hops down from the platform onto the rail bed to match one of the six times each weekend when there was in daytime a twenty-six-minute stretch with no trains passing either way, and of course all the risk and the effort had made the garnet more precious than diamond. But garnet was a child’s concern, and so was milky quartz – forget milky quartz, he could build a garage for a compact car out of all the milky quartz he’d accumulated – and he liked collecting because of the stones themselves, of course, but also because he’d been doing it for long enough that when he did it he felt mature, and strong, and veteranly, sure of himself and of what he was doing.
His favorite: norite gabbro (pyroxene and plagioclase feldspar, Mohs hardness of 6, luster dull to sub-metallic). In part because Sunday afternoons were when he did his best collecting and norite gabbro looked exactly like what Sunday afternoons felt like: pleasant but cheerless, mottled, a mix of fun and clouds. In part because the name of the rock sounded like the name of someone special. Special not in a big-hug-from-Grandma kind of way; special in a badass, get-the-f-out-of‑here-for-he-does-contain-too-much-awesomeness kind of way. The rock is Gabbro. Norite Gabbro. Perhaps Gabbro adventured with a sidekick named for muscovite mica (potassium aluminum -silicate hydroxide fluoride, also known as potash mica, Mohs hardness of 2 to 2.5, luster vitreous to pearly) who spoke in an extreme Russian accent. Perhaps they were long-lost brothers raised apart in far-flung sections of the world, but who later joined forces against boredom and evil, with the start of every episode depicting Muscovite “Potash” Mica all up in a lather to kill someone who had crossed them and brandishing some obsolete and garish weapon favored only by tundric nomads, and Gabbro knowing exactly what First World words of restraint and civilization, murmured in a sonorous baritone, would calm his loyal but twitchy brother and explaining why perhaps that was not a good idea in light of all that happened and still might happen, and so getting all the necessary exposition out of the way in the most comic-book-and-fantasy-adventure-loving-demographic-friendly fashion possible.
It went without saying that Gabbro and Potash kicked much ass.
Lately Garrett had reformed himself and was avoiding the rail bed and sticking to the construction sites around town. Garrett’s mother was not crazy about the construction sites. But she knew the shoulders of roads also beckoned – she did not know about the rail bed, God help Garrett if she ever found out about the rail bed, even Garrett’s big brother Kevin kind of freaked out and wouldn’t let up when Garrett told him about the rail bed after miscalculating that Kevin would be cool about it – and so she secured promises that he would not enter any site posted for no trespassing; he would not climb over, under, or through fences; and he would not touch any form of -machinery.
But some Sundays Garrett left the rocks alone and ran with the older boys. He didn’t do this often. Nor did he have a consistent reason. Once it was because in the early part of the afternoon he’d found nothing but conglomerate and more conglomerate, and to make it interesting rather than frustrating he had imagined that the clasts – dense, insidious, adulterating – were the warts of the rock world, rampant and infectious, but after a while the conceit grew too vivid and stuck in his mind and flourished there and each time he put his fingertips on a specimen it seemed obvious that the nearest clast was sending tendrils into his phalange bones, and that conglomeration was inevitable, and that resistance was futile.
Once it was because it started to rain, and rain meant grayness and mud, which meant the finding was hard and the searching was hard, and the way the older boys ran wild made it seem like a great time and put the rain on notice nobody gave a crap about it.
Garrett could rove with the bigger boys because his older brother Kevin was for the past year more or less friends with Orrin. Garrett’s first few Sundays with the older boys repaid with the fleeting but intense pleasure of novelty – later not so novel, but stake out a role for yourself and inevitably you fill that role, in youth as surely as in adulthood – and Garrett justified his remora status by fetching cans of Lipton Iced Tea for the other boys from the refrigerator that Byron’s grandfather kept on the screened‑in back porch.
So the boys stood that morning in a jumble at the Androttis’, staring up at that pecker picture, long enough that a few had floated ideas about what it looked like, dullard ideas, but not so long that the shoving that invariably erupts in a jumble of boys had yet broken out.
That’s when Garrett said the pattern looked like an omega.
“Carrot says what?” said Todd Schrader.
“An omega,” said Garrett.
“What’s an omega?”
“Last letter of the Greek alphabet,” Garrett said. “It looks like an omega. Except it’s got no ankles.”
“Hey, Parrot,” said Bobby Minton. “Isn’t your dog named Mega?”
Garrett could have said, I don’t have a dog. But Garrett was no idiot, not in the library and not in the schoolyard, and certainly not when hearing it from punks like Bobby Minton. So he said nothing.
Bobby said, “Yeah, you got a dog named Mega, and every night you’re like, ‘Oh, Mega! Oh, Mega!’ ” and Bobby with disturbing bravura pantomimed what he supposed was Garrett squatting behind a dog, hips bucking and neck twisting, eyes shut and mouth writhing.
This was typical. This was the special savagery of the half-formed male. This was why Loretta and Ellen Sheridan, who also had slingshots, preferred to work alone.
“Bobby, don’t hurt yourself,” said Kevin, Garrett’s brother.
“Maybe I’ll hurt you,” said Bobby, to Kevin, which was just dumb, because Kevin was a head taller and no joke .
“Okay,” said Kevin. “Now you got two assignments. Don’t hurt yourself, and don’t be a fucking fuckwad.”
Were there other occasions, ones in which Kevin did not intervene on his brother’s behalf? Were there times when Garrett might as well have not had a brother? Like when the boys took turns hurtling on their skateboards down the long decline of the country club’s entry road, during that era when the membership director still ventured out to investigate before the era when he didn’t bother and just called the police right off the bat, and when Parkinson – which is what Jamie -McCabe, Rich McCabe’s son, liked to call Garrett when he skateboarded for all the jerking and jittering he did to keep his balance and, self-defeatingly, his dignity – wiped out with a spectacular upflailing of limbs, and Orrin in a feint at commiseration brushed the mulch off Garrett’s jacket with one hand and then grabbed Garrett by the hair with the other and asked, “Do you like yourself?” and seeing Garrett nod rigidly (Garrett laboring against the grip on his hair, Kevin saying nothing, Garrett looking only more plaintive for attempting stolidity) paused a moment, and grimaced, and asked “Why?” And tossed Garrett’s head aside like something to wash up after. Yes, but this is a specific story that I’m telling and I’m not getting into that.
Bobby did not react. He noted he had no audience and decided he did not need to. Instead he joined the other boys, who still gazed up at the pecker marks. The boys crowded there, all fuss and fidget.
Through all of this Orrin hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t said a word despite the fact that the other boys, stranded in suburbia and eager to make their own excitement, were whispering that the O was for Orrin, that the two pecks underneath were Orrin’s giant feet, and that the birds had it out for him.
“Here they come,” said Todd Schrader. One woodpecker, then two more, alighted on the Androttis’ house.
Still Orrin said nothing. This is what he did instead: he bent down, and grabbed a handful of pebbles, and threw them hard enough to reach the highest parts of the house. A couple of boys tried doing the same thing, but they failed, lacking the arm to clear the second story, let alone threaten the roof. This gave Orrin the wrong kind of confidence, and once, twice, he demonstrated and cleared even the roofline with his barrage of handshot. On his third go, he abandoned his professed method of aiming at nothing, and instead aimed at an actual bird, which perched on the peak of the dormer, and one of the pebbles appeared to nip the bird’s wing. This set the bird to flight, and Orrin to laughter, and the boys to jubilation, but Garrett kept silent as he watched the bird settle into a wide and descending and accelerating loop, starting roughly at the boys’ one o’clock and continuing counterclockwise through their nine o’clock and gliding lower and lower through their six o’clock and at four o’clock the bird suddenly cut in toward Orrin’s head and dug its two feet into his cheek and pecked once, just once, into his right eye and flew away with something in its mouth.
Orrin screaming.
The other boys stood stunned. One boy, taking a stumbling step back and tripping and falling, sprained his wrist but did not notice.
The bird had taken Orrin’s right eye.
The pattern on the Androtti house wasn’t Orrin and his big feet. The pattern was Orrin’s right eye and the two notches carved alongside by a bird’s wrathful, vengeful, fleeting perch.
For two months after the attack, Orrin never left his house except for hospital visits. The first month he had gauze and bandages, the second an eyepatch, and once a week the doctors cleaned the socket. They did not want anything migrating to the brain and polluting it further.
After the first two months, Orrin did the opposite of never leaving the house. He stayed on the streets, all hours, marauding and antagonizing. No eyepatch. One eye and one chapped red gully. He was a poisonous young man. Whereas before he was rude and obstreperous, now he was destructive. Evil, even. Bedford Road School got its wall-mounted cameras only years later, so no one knew who broke seven ground floor windows. But the consensus rumor was that it had been Orrin. The Science Club after manning a fundraising table for an entire Saturday afternoon outside Key Food discovered fifty dollars missing from the till – only ten minutes after Orrin happened by, appearing to listen as the kids discussed background radiation more loudly than necessary. (The club moderator, Mr. Eggert, was sufficiently convinced of Orrin’s guilt that he did not react, and even relaxed his lower face in the teacher’s universal sign of tacitly admiring humor without endorsing it, and did so notwithstanding the deficits of the hypothesis from a scientific standpoint, when the kids observed they were lucky Orrin had only the one eye or they’d be out a hundred dollars instead.) Roy at Village Books swore it was Orrin who’d defaced the frosted-window depiction of Santa – teetering on a library ladder and stretching past a stocking to reach for a book – by key-cutting the words “Merry” and “Kissmass,” respectively, on Santa’s red baggypanted buttocks, but each time he steamed about it to another customer Yvonne tapped his wrist a gentle reproof and said “We don’t know that” and Roy, staring off ahead of him at a private horizon, the way Roy does, retorted each time, axiomatically, irrefutably, “I know what I know.”
And then there was the day that Orrin, waiting behind the library, forced Garrett Thornwood to lower his pants, crouch down in a corner, and show Orrin what it looked like when he pulled down the underwear too. Orrin giving directions in a flat voice. It was later that day – the chronology is inarguable – that walking near his house, the Androttis’ house, long abandoned by woodpeckers, not a single report of a woodpecker for months, Orrin had his other eye pecked out.
Was it the same bird? Again: I will not abet the myth-making. It’s strange enough what actually happened.
They say Orrin did more to Garrett behind the library that day. That’s what the people in Pleasantville say. But they don’t know. No one knows, except Garrett’s family. And except the authorities – whom Garrett’s family alerted that evening, when they found out. Ree Ree Godulio, who was engaged to Bobby Crenshaw when he was still with Pleasantville P.D. and had not yet moved out to Suffolk County, and who supposedly cheated on Bobby with the FBI agent who came to interview her as part of Bobby’s background check after he applied (unsuccessfully) to join the Bureau, used to talk like she had inside information and went on about how Orrin tied Garrett’s wrists before doing horrible things to him. As usual Ree Ree Godulio was half right and half wrong and entirely obnoxious. What everybody knows, however, is that when Garrett came home from the library that day, his parents and certainly his brother knew something was off, because Garrett, a quiet boy, could not stop talking. He was weird. He confessed and confessed, reciting misdeeds he had perpetrated months and years earlier – Metro-North rail-bed collecting, clambering onto a giant red backhoe, stealing Sean Duffy’s baseball mitt, returning Sean Duffy’s baseball mitt by secreting it back into Sean Duffy’s gym bag at soccer practice but only after it had shrunken a little from being left out in the rain the week before – but con-spicuously omitting even with this new garrulousness any mention of what, if anything, had happened that day. His parents, and certainly his brother, figured out something had.
The mark on the Androttis’ house: It wasn’t an omega. It wasn’t an O on feet. Birds can’t read. It wasn’t an eye with claw marks alongside.
It was what a woodpecker sees upon taking flight from a nearby roof and, in one swift movement, perching atop a foul boy’s head and tipping forward and bowing over and plucking fast and surveying for a lightning moment, from that upside down vantage, what justice looks like, freshly wreaked: two sightless slits where eyes should have been and a wide screaming mouth.
Today, decades later, Orrin is a different person. He is, to all appearances, a humble person, a gentle person. Those who knew him in adolescence and in his twenties have something to say about whether these incidents were what changed him, or whether it was instead the soft improvement worked by life’s steady erosions. No doubt Orrin would still be telling the story, no doubt leaving out the most important part, regarding his listener earnestly, maybe needily, and pointing out the two neapolitan scars (white center, pink border, brown frontier) alongside his right eye socket and saying, “If you look closely you can still see where the bird landed on my face.” Except that the birds robbed him even of the opportunity to extend this bonhomie, because it is superfluous. You don’t need to be told where to look. The damage is easily observable to the ambling passerby.
Garrett dropped out of college and became a writer. Serious enough to file taxes under a business name. He even had a few commercial successes. The book he was proudest of was not one of them. Gabbro and Potash Wage Infinite War. It is, first and foremost, a vehicle for villains, unsubtly and unapologetically rendered villains, tremendous villains, each one a living breathing casus belli (one is actually named Cassius Belly, yes, a boxer who early in his career surrenders to gluttony), a beautiful pretext for battle scenes and modes of destruction that just sprawl. On page 166, Gabbro appears to abandon Potash in his time of need. It is a short scene, a micro-scene lasting a single paragraph, but the reader is made to understand that Potash has fallen prey to the foulest of these villains and suffers unspeakably. Of all the things Garrett wrote, it is my least favorite.
We were close as kids. Calling us close as grown men would be overstating it. Our relationship fell more in line with keeping in touch and getting together some. Garrett never came back to Pleasantville. Which was understandable. He moved down to the city, then back up and across the river to Neversink, in Sullivan County. When the parents were still around we traveled to see him every Thanksgiving as a group. And Christmas, though not usually Christmas Day, but the weekend after, so we’d have plenty of time with him. And the two times he checked himself into Catskill Regional, the mental health unit, which of course were his lowest points.
Chronic challenges almost always mean something biochemical. There were plenty of indications this was true of Garrett, including a diagnosis or two. But the world takes its people as it finds them. And if you’re a sensitive type, chances are you’re absorbing what’s happening to you including the toxic, especially the toxic, and if you’re a quiet type, chances are you’re letting it collect and intensify and germinate undisturbed.
I once tried to talk to him about it. It was after his first hospital stay, and because I didn’t get it together until late in the week we ended up spending New Year’s together. Just him and me – my wife home with the newborn – watching way too many movies.
You’re supposed to talk about stuff. I don’t recall exactly how I asked him. But it was that New Year’s that he paused and looked at his hands, and then looked up with this sweet smile and said, “I’d rather think about other things.” It was a strange smile. It was a carefree smile. Strange coming with those words.
Orrin uses a cane. I’m pretty sure he uses it wrong. He stabs at the air with it, rather than sweeping and tapping from side to side. Good for keeping rodents from one’s ankles, not so good for walking.
People who lose their eyes often replace them with glass facsimiles. This is, as I understand it, what people in Orrin’s circumstance routinely do. But he never has. I don’t know why. Perhaps they run too expensive, perhaps he feels no need. Ree Ree claims that she once asked him, and that Orrin said glass eyes were cosmetic and so an option for douchebags, his word. But I am finished listening to Ree Ree.
Instead he wears sunglasses. Brown ones, not black, with some kind of very subtle leopard-type spotting along the arms of them. The leopard spots are apropos by one remove, because some of the kids in Pleasantville are notorious: they stalk the man like hunting cats when they encounter him, circling around him, sidling up against him, hoping to glimpse those raw gaps in his head. These are almost exclusively middle-schoolers. The elementary-school-age children are too timid and polite to try this, the high-schoolers either too indifferent or too conscientious. The middle-schoolers have little compunction and no self-restraint, and they stiffen their heads and necks (as if this will deter others from observing them) and walk tinily in a direction other than where they’re looking (as if this will grant them further invisibility) until they are in line with the corner of Orrin’s face and, with enough luck, a light source beyond.
I see Orrin around. Everybody does. He haunts Pleasantville. He shifts through that subset of its establishments that do not require much money to stay a while. I see him at the library sometimes. He does not visit for the books – they have no Braille section, and in any event I once heard he never learned Braille – but to socialize with the librarians. Which, and please understand that I have a surpassing affection for libraries and librarians, is like traveling to England for the weather. The librarians do not know what to do. The ones at the Circulation Desk grasp the edge of the counter, and visibly collapse into a tighter hunch, and look at him uncertainly and follow his lead and make a nervous attempt at prattling along. The ones at the Reference Desk, intent on exuding authority, survey the room as he speaks at them and ration out replies of under five words.
For my part, when I encounter him, I fall somewhere between Circulation and Reference. I play off my interactions with him just fine – very casually, I think, very straightforwardly. Except my mouth fills with spit, and the flavor of this spit is not good, which is odd because a person as a rule does not taste his own spit. The first few times this happened, I chalked it up to nervousness. But this man does not make me nervous. That is not the right word.
Most often I see him at L&L’s. L&L Deli, across the street from Michael’s Tavern, gets a modest trickle of business in the Old Village. It’s first choice among Pleasantvillians from whom hurry has wrested choice: eggless housewives with batter in the bowl, undercaffeinated workmen with morning shifts. No one goes to L&L’s for comfort. Beyond shelves, coolers, and a register counter, it offers only a pair of saucer-on-stick tables, one chair each, smashed against the snack-item endcaps to make room for the strip of all-weather carpet that runs from the entrance along the foot of the counter like the sick rangy hide of a big-game beast put out of its lupus misery. By contrast, Jean-Jacques has all that space and all those tables, every one of them a four-top, stay as long as you like, but you’ll never see Orrin at Jean-Jacques. It is, of course, more expensive than L&L’s, but still plenty reasonable, and in fact a fantastic deal given the quality of the food and the painfully good French toast – but this is the difference: sitting at a table at Jean-Jacques, bereft of sight, one might not be able to tell when each customer enters or leaves. One might not feel the outdoors on his face each time someone walks in. Orrin likes to sit at L&L’s, facing the door, head up and expectant, at the table farther from the door as if to suggest he is open to company but not anxious after it. Sometimes his posture suggests the opposite – a pining for every person who happens inside to stop and talk. Other times it looks like he’s minding his own business, and just doing his best, and listening as acutely as possible so that he won’t miss the little to which he is privy.
Months ago I stopped at L&L’s on the way home for a gallon of fat-free. I saw Orrin there, at his usual table, and I said nothing. I headed straight back to the coolers, fished out a gallon of two-percent because they were out of fat-free, they always are, and went to the counter and paid. I kept my head down all the while to discourage Vincent, the owner’s nephew, who gets all the early shifts and all the late shifts because he is the baby of the family, from any conversation, because if Orrin heard my voice he’d know it was me, he’d know I’d decided not to acknowledge him. I left without saying a word.
I kept my head down even between the counter and the door, even though the transaction was done and Vincent could no longer entangle me in talk. Why? Some childish presentiment that Orrin could somehow see me with those chafed orbits of his? A kind of embarrassment that I was being so ugly, that I was effectively lying to a disabled man?
No. Head down is the easiest position for setting the jaw with conviction against doing what one badly wants to do.
I think Orrin knew it was me. Ever since that day he’s strange with me. Now when he talks to me he presents more guarded, as if hedging his bets against everything in general, and he pauses each time it’s his turn to say something, weighing what he knows about me, con-sidering things. This may be my imagination. But I don’t think so.
And every time Orrin sees me, without fail – it was this way before the two-percent milk pick‑up, it has been this way after – he asks how Garrett is. And like every other person in Pleasantville, I lie to him. I say my brother’s fine. I say Garrett’s doing the usual, working hard. Because Orrin still does not know about Garrett. We’ve kept this knowledge from Orrin. Everybody in Pleasantville. There was no meeting at which this was decided. No flyers were handed out, no notice posted just inside the west door of Key Food. Just came to be that no one told him about Garrett’s passing, and no one’s going to tell him.
You might suppose this is an act of generosity. Like the reassurance of a smile that looks carefree but can’t possibly be. I don’t know about everybody else. For everybody else, maybe it is. It’s certainly an act of inadvertent brutality, though. Because I speculate that all Orrin has left is his conversations with people. And I keep mine short so that I don’t have to lie more than necessary. I know other people do the same – I overhear their conversations with Orrin at the Farmer’s Market, where he positions himself equidistant from the popsicle stand and the falafel booth, like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, where people debouching at that end of the market onto Manville Street have to pass him and so see him and so talk to him. They keep their interactions short, because they’re fundamentally good people, and though I imagine the subject of Garrett rarely comes up in their conversations with Orrin – he was my brother, not theirs, no reason why he should come up – they know this has been kept from him, they feel themselves guilty by this knowledge alone, and so they avoid -extended interactions with Orrin.
For me it isn’t an act of generosity. I’ve fantasized a thousand times about sitting down at that ridiculous mini-table at L&L’s.
This is how it goes:
“How are you, Orrin.”
“Kevin? How’s it going, Kevin?”
I wait.
“Well,” I say, “I suppose I like myself.”
I wait some more.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess that’s how I’d put it. I guess I like myself.”
“What?” he says.
And this is when I reach over and take those absurd sunglasses off his face and stare into the blank flaps in his head. These are, of course, the ultimate in elsewhere eyes. Eyes do not get deader. I wager if he had them back in his head they’d be no livelier, because to put on clothes in the morning and to talk to people about the river-wide aisles at the new Walgreen’s and to take breaths and expel breaths like a normal person, this perpetrator of cruelty must always be averting himself from – in fact denying – the central event of his life.
This one doesn’t deserve pity. The prosecutors, they pitied him. Blind, juvenile, disfigured. Son of a county commissioner. Do not pity him.
“My brother is dead,” is how I answer. “He had problems all his life because of you. He killed himself because of you. He died from what you did to him.”
I don’t know if that’s true. Garrett didn’t leave a note. You’d think a writer of all people might find the wherewithal. You’d think a brother of all people might take a minute.
Here’s another thing: I don’t know that it matters. Orrin deserves to think it does. He deserves at least to wonder.
I get up and leave. Likely it’s Saturday, because on weekdays I work in the city and don’t get the opportunity to visit L&L’s. So I go home and have myself a nice Saturday evening dinner with my wife and my son, perhaps watch some television, go to bed. The next day I pretend to do other things. It’s pretending because it’s a show of industry to distract me from the only thing that matters. Because on Sunday, after waiting until what I find myself suspecting is a reasonable time, and then putting that suspicion out of my head and setting my attention instead to emptying the basement dehumidifier and bringing up an extra two rolls of paper towels and collecting the recyclables that overnight have blown out of the bin into Gary’s yard, and then in early afternoon letting myself think yet a second time and therefore with unimpeachable reason that I have waited long enough, I get in the car, park it in the public lot behind where A’Mangiare used to be, cross the street, and turn right at the Sunoco. And I walk into L&L’s. I open the door and walk right in.
And one of two things is true. Possibly, but not probably, indeed more like merely conceivably, that man is nowhere to be found, because he went home the night before and, properly disabused, finally shamed, got a belt or a gun and did himself in. Or, more likely, that man is sitting there as usual, facing the door, waiting for me to plunge the knife I have brought with me straight into one of those sockets and finish what the peckers started and continue until I feel the blade knock knock against the back of his skull, knock once, twice, three times – each knock a different sound, progressively hollower for what I imagine, perhaps fancifully but I don’t care, is the liquefaction of those contents that initially gave it a solid, gavel-like timbre – against the back of that filthy skull.
This is why I keep silent. This is why I don’t tell Orrin Androtti what he’s done. Sometimes silence feels like cowardice. Sometimes I feel like I owe it to my brother to do otherwise. But I would kill him – I would – and rage is the reason, fucking rage, and maybe it is -cowardice that I don’t destroy that which Pleasantville spends so much of its time tiptoeing around. I’m not proud of any of it, none of it feels good, nothing born of horribleness can get good. But it’s at least a reason, and at least I know the reason, and so when Garrett appears to me in my dreams – never as a full-grown man, always a boy – that reason is one thing we don’t need to talk about because he knows already.
Pleasantville still gets woodpeckers every fall. As for Rich McCabe, he’s still around. He’s ancient now. You can ask him about hooded falcons. You can even just mention falcons, any sort of falcons, within his earshot. I know because I get a drink now and then with Paul Shires, and Shires, stranded in suburbia and eager to make his own excitement, has tried it. The way Shires tells it, Rich, he’ll shake his head, but only after bowing it first, so that the top of his skull moves like an undecided drill bit. And he’ll mutter “Hell.” His voice is a rasp now. And he’ll leave it at that. And because the old man can’t be made to say more, Shires says it’s even chances whether he’s thinking of the latest birds and venting frustration, or instead thinking of those strange days one strange autumn and naming the responsible party.
George Choundas’ stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The American Reader, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, and The Best Small Fictions 2015.