The Administrator (6 page)

He pictured George hanging by his feet over a fire. He watched the man’s eyes bulge with horror as he struggled to untie his hands from behind his back. In Billy’s mind, George’s body rotated slowly as he swung gently back and forth suspended from the black chain around his feet. George’s head began to swell from the heat, until it burst like a ripe watermelon thrown against a brick wall.
      

Billy opened his eyes wide, and suddenly his guts squirmed like a thousand snakes were writhing inside him. He was sweating. The whole scene had played in black and white, but then, Billy never had liked blood and gore. That’s why he watched the old reruns on TV. The blood was always black. Not real.

His mother screamed from the kitchen. A long, horrified scream that rattled in her throat like sewage draining through a clogged pipe.

Billy jumped to his feet and lunged through the kitchen door. “Mama! Mama!” His mother was backed against the refrigerator. He skidded to a halt, grabbed his mother around the waist and buried his face against her. “Don’t touch her!” He screamed into her skirt, afraid to turn and face the vicious George. He hugged her tighter and waited for the blows he knew were coming.

Nothing happened. No screaming, no swearing, no fists beating at his head—nothing. Absolute silence. He couldn’t even hear his mother breathing.

Slowly, he loosened his hold on her waist and looked up at her face.

She stared wide-eyed and horrified in the direction of the stove.

Billy’s gaze followed hers.

George was on the floor. His body burned scarlet. Ragged pieces of blistered skin opened into corrupted wounds. He gasped once, then lay silent. Blackened holes where his eyes had been stared sightless at the stained, yellow ceiling.

Suddenly, the stench of burned flesh registered on Billy’s senses. He felt dizzy.

Billy’s mother covered her mouth with her hand and whispered, “He ... he was coming at me ... and ... and he just—just burst into flames! Burst, I tell you, just started burning! Then ... then the fire stopped just like it started. Instantly! Oh, God. What happened here? Oh God! Oh God!” She stopped talking and started screaming.

The dizziness subsided, and the resiliency of the very young took charge. He called 911 and led his mother into the living room to wait for the police.

An hour later, the burly detective who had answered the call ran his stubby fingers through his almost nonexistent hair and sighed. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Must have been a gas leak from the stove. A freak accident. Can’t figure how it stayed contained in one spot. You’re lucky the whole building didn’t go up. As old and rundown as these apartment complexes are, I’m surprised any of them are still standing.”

Billy stood beside his mother as the paramedics carried the stretcher with the black, plastic bag on it out the door. The smell of burned flesh pervaded the room. Suddenly his mother covered her mouth with her hand and sprinted for the bathroom.

The detective shifted nervously from one foot to the other as sounds of her retching echoed. “Uh ... sorry about your mother, Son. Do you want me to call a doctor or something?”

“No. I’ll take care of her, Sir.”

“You’re awfully young to have to handle this, Boy. How old are you? About nine or ten? Sure you don’t want some help?”

“No. Mama will be okay. We’ve been alone before.”

The detective nodded and said, “Yeah. I guess you probably have. Where’s your dad, Son?”

“He died about two years ago.”

“Oh. Sorry. This guy ... he was her boyfriend?”

“Sort of. He hung around a lot.”
 

“Yeah. Well, if you need anything, here’s my card. Just call the precinct and ask for me.”

Billy took the card. “Thank you, Sir. I’d better see about my Mama now.”

“Sure.” The detective turned and followed the paramedics out.

Billy closed the door, looked at the card in his hand and dropped it in the waste basket on his way to the bathroom.

His mother opened the door at his timid knock and asked, “Are they gone?”

“Yes.”

“You okay, Baby?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Okay.” He sat down on the floor beside the bathroom door and heard the toilet flush, then the water in the shower began to run.

While he waited, he tried to remember what his dad had looked like. The face was fuzzy, but he remembered his bright blue eyes and white teeth when he smiled, which he did a lot. When he had told Billy that he was sick and had to go away, Billy had cried, and his father had taken him in his arms and cried with him.

He remembered his father telling him to be brave and take care of his mother. “You will be all she has for a while,” his father had said.

“I don’t want you to go,” Billy had cried.

“I don’t want to either, Son, but only God can decide who lives and who dies, who goes and who stays.” A far away look had come into his father’s eyes. “Only God can decide, Son, no one else.”

Billy stared at the linoleum peeling away from the wall and whispered, “Only God.” That’s when he knew. “I am God! I thought George dead, and he died. I am God.”

A giant roach crawled from under the peeling linoleum and began to march up the wall. Billy pictured him dead. The roach slowed its progress up the wall and dropped to the floor on its back. Billy watched its legs vibrate for an instant, then it lay still. Billy smiled.

Later that night, his mother asleep in the next room, Billy lay on his bed in the dark, staring at the black ceiling. He thought about the other men that had come and gone since his father died. He summoned up their faces from the darkness inside him where he had buried them trying to forget them. The first was Mike. He pictured him floating face down in the river like a carelessly discarded cigarette pack. He saw in black and white images Mike’s maggot-white face half eaten away by the hungry creatures that lived in the gray slime floating on the river’s edge.

Finally, he fell asleep with a smile on his youthful face, but he did not dream.

The next morning he was up before his mother. He ran to the corner and bought a morning paper. Stuffing it under his arm, he walked home leisurely, smiling and waving to the few neighbors who were up and out this early. He didn’t look at the paper until he was home and settled at the kitchen table. He spread it out over the table carefully and turned the pages almost reverently as if the gray paper dotted with black ink was a holy book of some kind. He found Mike’s picture on page three. A full face photograph of him alive and grinning sinisterly was next to a reporter’s photograph of his body floating face down in the river as rescue firemen pulled him onto the slimy river bank.

“I am God. I decide who dies,” he whispered to the picture in the newspaper.

That week, he thought dead both of the other men that had come and mistreated him and his mother. One was found with his throat slit in an alley. The other died in a fiery, one car crash into an abandoned building.

The next week, Miss Harkness, his math teacher, reprimanded him in class for not paying attention, and later that afternoon, they found her in the teachers’ lounge cold as stone. A sad-faced associate came into the class and explained that their teacher, Miss Harkness, had died of a heart attack during lunch break.

That’s when Billy realized that since he was God, he couldn’t go around just thinking people dead because that probably wasn’t very god-like. I’m going to have to be more careful, he thought. He remembered his father telling him that God not only decided who died, but that He loved everyone and even sacrificed himself through his own son on a cross. That doesn’t make sense, Billy thought as he mulled it around in his ten year-old mind. If it was God’s son who died, how could he have sacrificed himself ?

He was still trying to figure the whole thing out when he got home from school that afternoon. He unlocked the door quietly and tiptoed into the living room. His mother was passed out on the couch again. She huddled in a fetal position wrapped in a dirty, green robe. Her unwashed, un-combed hair was a tangled mass around her face, and dark, puffy circles lay underneath her red-rimmed eyes as she opened them and tried to focus on Billy. She groaned, made a half-hearted attempt to reach for the vodka bottle on the floor beside her, groaned again and fell back onto the dirty pillow. She had been this way ever since the George incident.

Billy didn’t understand her. She should have been happy to get rid of the jerk.

He got a soda out of the refrigerator, turned on the TV and lay down on the floor. Thinking of the contradictions of being God gave him a headache, and he wanted to stop thinking for a while. He slid a game in the slot and reached for the joystick. When he reached level six in the game, he realized what he had missed. Being God is like a game. You have to go through all the levels before you know what’s really going on. He laughed aloud and decided what he should do to reach level two.

The next morning he didn’t go to school. He waited for his mother to wake up. He made her coffee and toast so she would be good and awake when he talked to her.

She stumbled into the kitchen about ten o’clock. “What are you doing here?” She asked. “Is it Saturday already?”

“No, Mama. It’s not. I just wanted to talk to you. To tell you something.”

“Oh, Honey, how sweet. You made coffee.” She poured a cup and sat down. “What do you want to tell me? Are you in trouble? Something happen at school?”

“Yeah, Mama, something happened, and I need to tell you something else that’s very important. Miss Harkness died yesterday.”

“Oh no! First George, then Mike and Charles. Now her. Dear God, who’s next?”

“Whoever hurts us, Mama,” Billy answered.

“What? What did you say, Honey?”

“I did it, Mama.”

“Did what, Billy?”

“Killed them, all of them. I wished them dead, and they died.”

Her face crumpled into tears. “Oh no, Darling. You didn’t do it. It’s not your fault.” She rushed around the table and hugged him to her bosom. She kissed the top of his head and whispered, “What happened to George was horrible. That you had to witness such a thing makes me sick. It must have affected you more than I thought. But you mustn’t blame yourself, Sweetheart.” She looked up at the ceiling as though beseeching it to help her. “Oh I have been so stupid and selfish. Neglecting you and drinking so much, wallowing in my own self pity.” She hugged him tighter and laid her cheek on his hair. “I’m so sorry, Billy.”

He raised his head and looked at her. “No, Mama. It was me. I did it because I am G....”

She shushed him with her delicate hand gently covering his mouth. “Shh, Dear. Don’t blame yourself. Oh, God, I wish your father was alive. He’d know what to do, what to say.”

“Do you, Mama? Do you really?”

“Oh yes. More than anything, but that’s not possible. He’s gone forever. We just have to do the best we can without him.”

The snakes were back in Billy’s stomach, writhing and squirming. His throat was dry. His heart pounded. Being God is hard, he thought.

He glanced around the room seeking something—an answer—anything. His gaze stopped on the old, yellowed, gold framed picture his mother had hung on the kitchen wall the day they moved in. It was his father’s before he died and was the only thing they could keep when they lost the house. After the funeral, there wasn’t enough money to pay all the bills, so he and his mother had moved to the tenements. Suddenly the snakes in his stomach stopped squirming, and he knew what he must do.

“Take care of your mother,” his father had said right before he died. Then he had said something about God loving the world and about God’s only begotten son dying so others could live.

But, Billy thought. I don’t have a son! Confusion raged in his young mind for a moment, then settled into gentle chaos.

He looked up at his mother’s pale, thin face. She hadn’t smiled in a long time. He hugged her tightly. He looked back at the picture and closed his eyes.

He pictured himself spread-eagled on the wall.

His small body made a loud “THUD” when it slammed against the plaster.

He felt his bones snap.

He thought the brutal, metal spikes into his hands and feet and cried out in surprise at the pain.

Blood poured from the wounds streaking the faded wall crimson.

Dimly, as if he was listening from under water, he heard his mother screaming, over and over, like one long eternal wail into hell.

A rustling-crunching sound like halting, shuffling steps on dry, dead leaves came through the door. A sickly-sweet odor of putrefaction and moldy earth flowed through the room.
 

 
His mother’s screams sliced through the air to a decibel beyond human hearing.

He opened his eyes. Through the opaque film of death glazing his vision, he saw everything in black and white.

He painfully turned his head to look at the worn picture of the crucifixion beside him on the wall, then gazed back at his mother and focused his eyes behind her at a point over her left shoulder. He smiled gently and gathered a final breath.

“Look, Mama. Dad’s home!”