Mr. Mayor

One day at a stoplight, a man rolled down his window and asked if I liked buttons.

It was a Saturday, I think, and I was out on an aimless mid-morning drive. It was the time of day when people had already made it to their destination and wouldn’t be heading back home or anywhere new for a while.

I didn’t respond. I pretended to not hear him—actually, I pretended I couldn’t hear anything at all, and I produced a kind of stunned catatonia—and he threw into my open window a purple button in support of Alzheimer’s. Or rather, it was a button in support of ending Alzheimer’s. I held it in my hand as I rolled through the light, feeling good that something had happened on my drive, but after a while, I got bored of it and thought about throwing it away in a Lowe’s parking lot waste receptacle. Instead, I walked inside the store.

In addition to the button, I was toting an old metal coffee container I’d found in my great uncle Albert’s attic—now my attic. Inside was fifteen pounds of change, which I knew because I’d weighed it on the bathroom scale. The coins were old and rotted together like they’d been lying in battery acid, and the short girl behind the counter shook her head as she counted and picked apart each quarter and dime, every nickel, every single penny. To pass the time, I read the buttons on her Lowe’s apron. I asked her if anybody in her family had Alzheimer’s and I showed her the button and handed it to her. It felt right. Without much thought or direction, I was suddenly the new owner of a staple gun, and I felt compelled at that moment to return home.

My great uncle Albert’s house was small and simple. One bedroom, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. There were drawers full of old-people knickknacks like clusters of polaroid pictures and wide-eyed dolls dressed in pin-striped pants. Toenail clippings under all sorts of ledges and tables. The shower had a kind of support handle I liked to use when stepping in and out of the tub. An empty hummingbird feeder hung outside the living room window. The TV was large and old with little wheels beneath it. I liked using my great uncle’s things—he’d left a distinct smell, as if instead of being carried out on a board by a father-son funeral home duo, he’d been cremated and dusted, dispersed throughout the house.

There was a dog, too. My great uncle Albert had named him Hector, and he and I were not a great match. It was a Cocker-spaniel. Or a Shih Tzu, maybe. I’m not good with dog breeds. It was an old, brown rodent, low to the ground with big, floppy ears. Oftentimes, I would unknowingly step on him, and he’d make this noise that sounded like pushing the air out of a squeaky toy. In the mornings, he woke me by scratching my chest. Sometimes, just to get a reaction out of him, I poked his paws. Then one day, while out on a walk, he saw a stray cat and took off. I just let him go, I said sayonara. I walked back to the house a free man.

Before all this, before my great uncle passed, I left work each day to spend my evenings with him and his dog. I had nothing better to do. I was twenty-five and had just moved back to West Virginia. I was teaching at this new middle school where I expected all the young girls to make heart-eyes at me simply because I wasn’t old and mean. None of them ever did. At the house, we watched TV and ate Vienna sausages straight from the can. When the sun went down, he referred to Hector as his girlfriend. If the weather was nice, we would stand in the backyard and count the leaves on the neighbor’s trees. This was my life.

~

I went around town stapling Hector’s face to bulletin boards and telephone poles. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the dog. It just seemed like the thing to do.

It was a clear afternoon, except for a patch of clouds in the west that, like the impression of a single shoe print in the mud, looked entirely out of place. I was surprised at how much fun I was having driving all about and marking the town with fliers, acting as if this place was still my own, though it never really was mine to begin with. I never did quite fit in. If you had seen me in my earlier years, you might have thought I was in the band—I’ve heard I look like I play the cello—or co-sponsored a chess club, or you might think I, with a posse of others, smoked cigarettes in the bathroom—but I did nothing. I went to school. I went home. Still, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was doing a good thing on my own accord in my own town.

I was in the AT&T parking lot stapling the last flier to a telephone pole when a man approached.

“Quite the reward,” he said and twitched an eye—an attempt, I was pretty sure, at winking.

This time I decided to act as if I could hear but couldn’t speak. This was an act I often practiced, and if I stood silent too long, I’d close my eyes and move them back and forth as if I were looking around inside for some inventory of words that might pop up or pass by. I nodded.

“Dogs leave like it’s nothing,” he said, raising his knee, extending the leg into some strange yoga or karate position. “People, too. People leave like it’s nothing. Trust me.”

This was Mr. Mayor, I realized. “Why wouldn’t I trust you?” I asked. I could never stay quiet very long.

He shrugged.

Mr. Mayor wasn’t the actual mayor. He earned that title by exhibiting an eclectic authority which he presented every day in a public domain. He liked to stand on the side of the highway and pantomime as a traffic coordinator, pointing left, then right, limping on a prosthetic leg too tall for his stature. On Monday mornings, he stood outside the middle school and pumped a pair of light green five-pounders. I’d been keeping an eye on him, both at school and in this present moment as he maneuvered his leg into this obscure position. Finally, he brought the prosthesis back to the earth and leaned against the telephone pole, watching me staple the last corner. I had an array of splinters, impressively scattered in various zones of my body.

“Well,” I said, “if you see him, his name’s Hector.” I poked Hector’s face with my finger and realized I’d misspelled “reward” as “rewad.”

“That’s a car right there,” Mr. Mayor said. He was turned around with his hands at his sides, a single feather, more than likely from a pillow, hanging from the crown of his hair. I waved it off, and it danced downward until it landed softly on the asphalt.

The car was the last and most important item inherited from my great uncle Albert. It was an old Honda Civic, baby blue. The hood was diseased with rust and grime. CDs lay in sporadic nature throughout the backseat, all gospel and old country, a few Al Green. The seatbelts were electronic, automatic. They buckled themselves.

I thanked him, uncertain whether he was complimenting the vehicle or insulting it, and got in. As the engine turned, he walked around the front of the hood, both hands pulling tufts of hair from the sides of his head. He walked to the driver’s side and gave me a thumbs up, which I returned. As I rolled down the window, he tapped on the glass with his long and gnarled nails.

“Most guys wouldn’t go for this light blue color,” he said, “but you? You do.” He was bent over, giving me sight of nipple.

I nodded. “I got to get going,” I told him, and even though I had nowhere to be, I really did have to get going. I had more driving to do before the day ended.

“What if I took this thing for a spin?” He twirled his pointing finger, which was surprisingly clean. Rings sat below each knuckle, some of them loose against the skin, some scarily tight. He didn’t have any tattoos, or at least I couldn’t see any, but he or someone else had drawn smiley faces on his hands with a green marker. 

“Maybe next time,” I told him.

“Come on, Big Dog.”

“Sorry.” I eased forward, watching him disappear in each mirror. He was further away in some and closer in others.

~

I liked the sound the school copier made. Sometimes when I needed to clear my head, I made blank copies or copies with a single word—“apple” maybe, or “petroleum.” The machine whirred and silenced the other teachers who waited on me with their materials piled in the basket of their arms.

In class, I drug the chalk against the blackboard while a student passed out fliers of Hector. “If you find my dog,” I told them, “you get an A in this class.” But everyone already had A’s. I was an easy grader. It was quicker that way, and I wanted my students to like me.

After school, I drove to Kroger, stood at the entrance, and placed a folded flier in the small cubicle—the area where a child might sit—in each shopper’s cart. Some of these shoppers included my students, who walked alongside their parents. They gave me quick, undecided glances. “Please help me find my dog, Hector,” I told them. Days had gone by where I had nearly run into Mr. Mayor, and there he was again, limping down the hill into the Kroger parking lot. I’d been acting as if I had bad eyesight and would head in the other direction. No matter where I went, he was there. I left my station and headed for the car, but he was headed toward me with such velocity and earnestness, I had to appreciate the determination.

Yellow crud pasted at the sides of his mouth glistened in the immaculate early evening sunlight. He was wearing the same clothes as the other day.

“I do believe in good-looking cars,” he said, and inefficiently windshield-wiped his mouth with the small creature that was his tongue. Rolled up in his fist he had what appeared to be an assignment he was turning in—a wrinkled and dismayed set of papers with several cuts, dimples, and dog-ears. A round glop of ink in the center, I came to realize, was Hector’s face.

“What are those?” I said. “Are those my Hectors?”

Mr. Mayor unraveled his scrolls and presented me with my fliers. “They were in the wrong spots,” he said. “I know where lost dogs go.” He pressed them against the car and smoothed the edges with the backs of his hands. “You wouldn’t believe how much I know about this town.”

I had the urge then to shove him or throw a fist in his gut. I thought I might even yell, which somehow seemed worse.

“I’ll show you.” One eye met my gaze while the other headed just to my left, beyond me and into the world. He breathed on me, and I could see the profile of a peppermint lodged somewhere in the back of that mouth. He had the look of a giant, dirty toddler.

The sun was about to land on top of Kroger. On clear evenings like this one, I would watch it sink into the hills and burn the world. “It’s getting late,” I said. “I think we both ought to go home.”

It was quiet for a moment, and not knowing what to do, I looked down, examining our feet. When I looked up, he’d somehow cleaned the rest of his mouth. He smiled.

“Let me take you home,” I said.

His directions were exact and immediate. Turn right here, stop at this light, go thirty through here. Halfway through the drive it occurred to me he could very easily pull a gun from any of his multiple pockets and hijack this vehicle, rearrange his face into a sinister scrunch. He could request money. Or he could simply end my life. It became clear, though, he had zero intentions of harming me. He spent most of the ride complimenting the cup holders and, with great focus, eating a banana.

We ended up at the Salter Mental Facility, an old, abandoned building which once housed over two-hundred patients at a time. The building was twice funded by the state on separate accounts—first as the mental facility, and second as a tourist attraction, a kind of historical remembrance meant to exemplify the horrors that took place when it was in the business of housing crazies. In middle school, for some unknown reason, we were brought here to learn the history of multiple murderers and schizophrenics. 

“Much appreciated,” Mr. Mayor said and opened the car door.

“Wait,” I said, “this is where you live?”

For the first time, he gave me a look of disappointment, and I felt the balance of power tip his way.

The lawn leading to the front door was unkempt, addled with empty bottles and fast-food wrappers flopping in the breeze. Most of the windows had perfectly nice baseball-sized holes. Behind the building, the trees were pink and orange, like a suicide slushy.

“What do you do when it’s cold?” I asked.

“I got blankets. I got supplies.” Mr. Mayor fixed the rearview mirror toward himself, pursed his lips as if he might kiss me, and attempted to tame his hair by mashing down the cowlick in the back. “Okay,” he said and squinted his eyes. “You handsome devil.” He pushed the mirror toward me and got out, waving goodbye. The way he walked served as a constant reminder that something was missing from his lower half. I wanted to know how he’d lost the leg, and where it began, or ended, but I was sure that if I asked questions something would change.

I looked at myself now, hoping to find that I’d turned into a handsome man, someone that my students would marvel at, maybe whisper about in the hallways.

Mr. Mayor stopped and turned around. “You want to see it?” he asked. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

I hesitated. I was still looking in the mirror. Then, without thinking, I found myself getting out of the car and walking alongside Mr. Mayor.

“You’re a beautiful man, Big Dog.” He rested his elbow on my shoulder and smiled at me until we both grew tired of the arrangement.

We climbed the porch stairs, and Mr. Mayor opened the front door, which wasn’t really a door at all but a board blocking the building’s front entryway—the kind of large, sand-colored board you’d use underneath tile, not heavy but awkward to hold. Once inside, he pulled it tight to the frame by tugging the twine wrapped around the middle. There weren’t any doors at all actually, not even on the inside. They’d been unscrewed from the frames and piled into one of the cinderblocked rooms, a few of which held sleeping or unperturbed folks sitting Indian-style on naked mattresses. The halls lay barren except for a few buckets that sat near doorways.

Without my realizing it, Mr. Mayor was introducing me to these people—“That’s Henry, there’s Juliet, no one messes with Juliet, not even me”—and then I was being led to a narrow, spiraling stairwell and up to a second floor where here, a door in full operation led to a single bedroom. In the middle of the floor was a bed, made with a fresh quilt, the design of which displayed stoic stags bedding down in heavy snowfall. He had night tables and candelabras. A chest of drawers stood in the corner of the room, a three-piece suit covered in plastic hanging from the top knob. The lone window faced dusk. 

“But what do you do when it’s hot?” I asked. 

“I know how to take off my clothes.”

He slinked out of his shirt and shoe. At the end of the prosthetic was a rubber sole, which did not appear as though it could be removed, nor did it seem like anything could go over it. He was in good shape for a homeless man, for any man, really. I could see the outline of his abs. His trapezoids lay on his collar bones like ancient burial mounds. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tried to better my body.

“This is crazy,” I told him. “I can’t let you sleep here.”

“Hey, man. This is my home,” he said. He took off his pants and threw them at me, playfully, I think. They ended up in my arms, and I held them like a baby, rubbing patches of dirt into the seams, until I let them drop at my feet. He was taller and older, but I felt the urge to care for him. 

“You should stay with me,” I said. Mr. Mayor stepped in front of the window where the evening light landed directly on him. White Fruit of the Looms clung to his thighs, and I saw that he was only missing the lower half of the leg, just beneath the kneecap. There was an unplugged TV sitting in the corner of the room, where I could see myself standing with my hands at my sides, thumbs hidden inside loose fists. 

He gripped his chin and massaged the spotty, peppered stubble. “I don’t know.”

“Come stay with me. You can drive the car.”

Mr. Mayor walked to the bed and eased into it, bouncing up and down for just a second. “You’re crazy, man,” he said. “You don’t even know me.”

“And,” I said, “if you help me find my dog, you can have the thing.” I was confused and excited by my own proposition. It was the type of extraordinary offer that, when you say it, a wave of goosebumps covers your body, as if you are so in awe with your magnanimity that your physical self can’t comprehend it. 

“I don’t want no dog.”

“I mean the car.” 

He slipped out of the covers retrieving his clothes, slowly sliding them back on as though he were beginning the day. Before he put on his pants, I got a good look at the leg, the fake one. It was light pink, like salmon, and plastic-like. I liked the way it strapped to his knee, how without it, he’d be standing in front of me on one limb, the other thigh hanging below him, useless.

~

Mr. Mayor liked the TV, he liked the small machine that would vacuum on its own command, and he liked my great uncle Albert’s chair, which leaned back and lifted your legs with the push of a button. It was similar to the way the seatbelts moved in the car, he pointed out. Slow and mechanical, outdated but comforting. I liked watching Mr. Mayor do whatever he wanted. Once seated, he removed his pants and prosthetic and sat it on the arm of the chair. “I’m cooked,” he said, and closed his eyes, just like that.

On the couch beside him, I ate saltine crackers and peanut butter, dipping the thin squares in the jar, mixing and collecting crumbs from past scoops. The fridge was filled with moldy cheese and yogurt, some of which was still good. There were four skinned and headless squirrels in the freezer, each in their own Ziploc bag. But I didn’t know how to cook squirrel and I didn’t know how long it had been since my great uncle Albert had shot and skinned them—a while, maybe. Years. Each evening, he would try to get me to cook the things. “You always made the best squirrel gravy,” he whined. He sometimes thought I was his mom, I think. Instead of cooking, I’d order a pizza and freeze the leftovers. Or we’d eat the Vienna sausages, which I’d now completely taken care of. I’d been trying to see how long I could live on things that were passed onto me, like this car, this flat two-liter of diet RC-Cola, this house. I pictured myself spending the rest of my life here, not changing a single thing.

In the early morning, we squeezed into the car. Mr. Mayor traced the speedometer’s arch with his finger and pretended to shift gears like this car was a manual, which it was not. He allowed the seatbelt to buckle itself, slid on a pair of crooked aviators he’d retrieved from his pant pocket, and turned toward me. “Bond,” he said. “Mr. Bond.”

He circled the neighborhood, pushing the prosthetic to the side and working the pedals with his left foot. He had the seat about as close to the steering wheel as it would go. For a one-legged man, he did alright. The last time we rounded our way, a goose waddled toward the main road, and Mr. Mayor stopped the car, watching the goose take flight. Then we sat in silence for a short moment.

I told him to help me find Hector now, and he pulled out of the neighborhood and onto the main road, singing old Johnny Cash songs jumbled with the wrong lyrics. I closed my eyes, I pretended to fall asleep in my leaned-back chair. Mr. Mayor rolled the windows up and down, up and down. The button tired, which it did when overworked, and the windows came to a stop, half-up, half-down. When I opened my eyes, we were at the top of a small, leveled mountain—a place I’d known growing up, where people left their old radios and furniture. Whatever you left would disappear, one way or another. 

We walked different directions, each into our own mouth of the woods. Mr. Mayor snapped his fingers and called for Hector, sometimes whistling, sometimes saying he had treats, which he did, I guess—he’d brought with him the frozen squirrels. I tried to pick up my feet and not make a sound. Most of the leaves had already fallen. Back when my great uncle Albert would and could take me hunting, he’d tell me I walked as if I had pianos tied to my ankles. “Just watch me,” he’d say, and lift his legs real high with each step. When it came time to kill an animal, he’d let me take the shot, and without fail, whether it was unintentional or not, I always missed.

Then it all happened quickly. A rustle, the clanging of cheap metaled tags, choppy yips. Brown fur with a tongue and eyes, four legs—this thing came right to me, and I grabbed it and held on.

~

When we got back to the house, I undid the dog’s collar and stuffed it in a drawer. He roamed around and sniffed furniture and licked crumbs from underneath the coffee table. I dumped some dog food on the kitchen floor, then dumped some more into a bowl I never used.

While sitting in my great uncle Albert’s chair, Mr. Mayor unstrapped himself from the prosthetic and watched the dog eat. “He was hungry,” he said. “How about some water?”

I poured some tap water into a bowl for the dog and some into a cup for Mr. Mayor. Both drank.

He had positioned the leg across his lap, and he held it there carefully. I was hoping he’d have to use the bathroom and that, rather than returning the prosthesis to his knee, he would hop one-legged down the hallway—a thing I very much wanted to see—all the way to the bathroom. Then I could try the leg on for myself, extending the bottom half of my leg behind me.

When the dog was finished eating, he jumped onto the couch and curled up beside me. He was warm and seemed genuinely thankful for my rescuing him. Then the dog, unprompted, jumped off the couch and click-clacked his way to Mr. Mayor, who pet the dog, and in doing so scooted the leg forward, which resulted in a mistaken gesture. The dog took the prosthetic in his mouth with a fair amount of intuitive balance, trotted back to the kitchen, hiked a leg, and pissed on a cabinet.

“You dumb—,” I said, and they both looked at me, the dog and Mr. Mayor. “I mean Hector. Come here, Hector.” 

Mr. Mayor pulled the lost flier from his pocket, examining the picture, then the dog, going back and forth like that for some time. “I don’t know,” he said. 

I watched him piece it together. Still, he continued sitting in silence. He pulled a phone from his pocket, which I didn’t know he had, and asked if I had Wifi.

“I don’t,” I said, which was true. “How about I order some pizza?”

At this, Mr. Mayor stood on his one leg, an impressive move. “I think I need to get going,” he said, and plopped back down into the chair after a loss of balance. “Tell that dog to bring me my leg.”

I walked over to the dog and took the leg from him, and he looked up at me with disappointment. I gave it to Mr. Mayor and he strapped it back to his knee with a series of rips and crunches, the result of tearing and rejoining Velcro to fit the measurements of his leg. He stood again and headed for the door.

“What about the car?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “that’s alright. I got to drive it. That’s all a man can ask for.” 

“It’s a beautiful car,” I said. “You said so yourself.”

His face hardened, not so much considering his options but just thinking. “I guess if you insist,” he said and sat back down, waiting on my move. 

None of us said anything, but I think all three of us were somewhat disappointed in each other.

When a distant thundering ricocheted through the house, I went to the front window and stood there for a while, observing a mass of dark clouds storming our way. It wasn’t quite evening yet, but the sky was graying from the oncoming fury. “Look at that,” I said, almost to myself. “There’s a storm coming.” The sun lay behind it all, and the edges of the clouds burned with a heavenly fluorescence. Strong winds moved the world as if things could be easily placed here or there. An empty cardboard box, for example, which had originally belonged to my neighbor’s yard, scooted to my porch and held onto the pointed tip of a garden gnome’s hat. I turned around then, for no other reason than to sit on the couch and continue watching the storm envelop the town. In the excitement of it all, I had somehow forgotten them, the man and dog. They had these horrified looks on their faces, as if in that moment I’d plucked them from the giant wet world that was their home and placed them somewhere else.

“It’s okay,” I told them. “We’re okay. Just relax, make yourself at home.”