String People

THE STRING PEOPLE
by Michael Kroetch

It wasn’t quite light when they first arrived. We heard their many engines while still in our sleep. So in a way we weren’t sure if we were awake yet. Or still dreaming. At least not until we saw them. By the time they entered our vicinity, the majority of the neighbors on our block were already in their front yards: Slippers on the grass getting stained green by the dew. Mouths open. Hands limp at their sides like pieces of plywood. We had never seen anything like this. Never is a long time and it was long time before anyone said anything. Mostly it was just eyes staring straight as steel—straight ahead at the arriving vehicles. And the occupants.

To occupy space is to fill it—which is a strange way to have to describe these new arrivals to our neighborhood because they didn’t. Not in the usual sense anyway. Theirs was a nebulous realm and they had a nebulous way of filling it. At the time they drove up, no one but my uncle Fritz even knew what that word nebulous was. But we were all searching for a word like it, as our gaping jaws dragged across the dew-speckled grass.

Our new neighbors, all twenty-three of them, were made of string. Entirely of string.

You no doubt will think I’m speaking in a loose sense here. This is not the case. My father brings gifts to the cemetery – not for my dead mother as you might expect, but for her parrot. He says “That was a most wonderful bird when it was alive, so why the hell not offer him toys in the beyond?” To me, this is having a very loose sense of how things should be. And this is very much not how the string people were. They were nebulous, certainly. When you were talking to them, the place where their face was would change in a radical way from one sentence to the next – no doubt about it. But at the very same time such things were true, their family had amazing and singularly determined ways of giving order to the old Blanchet place they moved into. Every morning its grass got cut, every afternoon all eight of the string family’s cars were washed, and every night at exactly seven P.M. you could hear their prayers volley out the window and sail over the lake to that place beyond the hills where the string people came from…

My parents were nervous types to begin with. Having the string people across the street certainly didn’t help matters. Much to my step-mother’s displeasure I became friends with one of their kids, Billy. He didn’t seem to mind her lack of hospitality or that she would hide all the food whenever he was in the house. Billy apparently had become used to such behavior. My father would always have several sets of scissors out on the arm of his Laz-E-Boy recliner “Just in case,” as my father said, “Cause you just never know…” I never did know what he was talking about. But Billy wasn’t bothered by such eccentricity. Maybe Billy’s family would have done the same if I’d ever visited his house. But I didn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t allowed -- and if I even thought about it for an instant I might as well just take out a shotgun and blast my father’s head off. At least that’s what he said. And he was the kind of man with such things as this that it was best just not to argue. I had tried before on things he felt much less passionate about and found he always ended up shouting until he was hoarse and then would jump into his pickup and drive like a madman up to the graveyard to talk to my dead mother’s parrot.

My mother died a year before the parrot and put a clear and unbreakable clause in her will that the parrot was to be buried beside her when it died. And it was – but only after a long and protracted court battle pitched by my father, which he lost... Obviously. He wanted the parrot buried separately in a completely different part of town from my mother’s resting place. But in death, as in life, my mother always got her way.

And so it was that when the family parrot’s grave was found “ruffled” and the remains missing – there could be only one suspect in my father’s eyes. Yes, poor Billy.

With all of the town’s people out hunting for him -- scissors in hand – it was like a nightmare. Or a carnival. Or maybe both. His family was gone at the world’s fair in Spokane and he was staying with us. So when he ran away I had no idea where he would go. I tried all our usual haunts but could not find him anywhere. Last place I looked was where I probably should have looked first – the bowling alley – as it was his favorite place to be. But Sid with his teeth tattoos, vending machines full of Bibles, and tiny liquor bottles said nope, he’d not seen Billy all week.

My father was going around door to door with his backpack full of gleaming sharp scissors telling each door that opened to him to take a scissors, “Just in case.” My father said string, if you let it, could only lead to one thing… more string. And you know what that means! Pretty soon you won’t be able to go anywhere. Be so much string everywhere you won’t be able to walk down the street. Total chaos and ruin is what it’ll be. The end of civilization and TV dinners. My father was a big fan of TV dinners. It was his favorite thing besides plastic shiny toys to bring to my mother’s parrot. He would open up the foil at the corner and set it on the bird’s gravestone and say yum-yum-yum several dozen times very quietly like it was a secret prayer or military code.

The sad thing to me was finding Billy in our basement freezer among those TV dinners. It was months later. His family had already moved away, all twenty two of them – horrified by our town’s behavior and also by their own inability to find solid, lasting employment after the fruit harvesting season ended. They assumed, I’m sure, that my father had killed their son. And in most ways I guess they were right. Finding Billy’s sad form finally solid beside the Swanson Salisbury Steaks, it made me suspect my father’s hand pushed the freezer lid – although he insisted and swore on the missing corpse of his favorite bird that he was innocent.

And maybe he was of actually shutting the lid on Billy, but he certainly was the one who goaded the boy in there. I don’t care what he tells me. I know he did it. And I will never be able to forgive him. Especially since late that night, while I was sleeping, he burnt up Billy’s body in our fireplace and tried to tell me the next morning such was the custom of the string people.