by Hamill, Ike
I wish I could remember the name of the man who used to live here.
Every time we passed, my uncle would say, “Wave hello to Mr. Such-and-such.”
It was an old-sounding name. I can remember that much. There’s no mailbox to help me out. Mr. Such-and-such and my uncle are the only two houses at the end of this long dirt road, so there’s no mail delivery. Uncle Walt and Mr. Such-and-such had to go pick up their mail at the post office that’s built into the back of the grocery store. Well, Uncle Walt doesn’t have to anymore. I guess that’s my job now.
I don’t see any cars or trucks outside. Maybe on Monday I could go to the town hall and look up the property tax records or something. There has to be a simple way to find out if Mr. Such-and-such is still alive and kicking.
“Or I could knock on the door,” I whisper to myself.
Of course, that could lead to an actual conversation with a human. Wouldn’t want to risk that.
This is all the Good Samaritan’s fault. If that guy hand’t stopped to help me change my tire, I wouldn’t be out here looking at Mr. Such-and-such’s house. I would be back at Uncle Walt’s, separating junk from keepsakes.
The other day, I was listening to the radio. It was a station that calls itself, “The Mountain of Pure Rock.” Apparently, “Rock” consists mostly of deposits of Molly Hatchet, sediments of Black Sabbath, and the occasional lode of Led Zeppelin. It’s roughly the only radio station that I can receive during the day. During a “Solid Block” of George Thorogood, a public service announcement came on between songs. The announcer reminded me that, “Every heat-related illness and death is one-hundred percent preventable. Do your part. WTOS encourages you to check on people in your community today.”
It is a really hot day. It isn’t South Carolina hot, but for Maine, it’s hot. And Mr. Such-and-such has all his windows closed. He has a pair of big trees flanking the house, but they’re not doing anything to prevent the sun from streaming in his front windows.
I take a step through the tall grass. I’m sure legions of ticks are hitching a ride. I’ll have to check myself carefully later.
Sweat is dripping down my back and rolling off my forehead again.
Six windows are looking at me: one from the attic, three on the second floor, and one on either side of the front door. My eyes keep going to the attic window. It’s small compared to the others—just four panes over four panes. It has to be a thousand degrees up there, easy.
“I’ll just knock, wait two-seconds, and then go home,” I whisper to myself.
It’s weird to talk oneself into something, you know? Who is speaking and who is listening? I guess it’s my heart telling my head what to do.
My heart says, “Have some compassion. There could be an old guy in there, cooking from the heat. He used to be Uncle Walt’s friend.”
My head says, “If someone is in there, they’ve probably been dead for months, probably years. Do you really want to be the guy who finds the body? You just moved to town. Nobody knows you. Is this how you want to meet the local police?”
I actually don’t have any idea if Uncle Walt was friends with Mr. Such-and-such. Aside from making us wave, Uncle Walt never talked about the guy. But they were the only two houses on this unnamed road. How could they not be friendly?
Sometimes if I take things in small steps, I can overcome my anxiety.
Step one—get to the door.
I walked through the most-likely-tick-infested grass and climbed the splintered steps.
In the shade of the porch, it was even hotter. It felt like the house itself had a fever.
Step two—knock.
(What qualifies as probable cause?)
What qualifies as probable cause?
Before I can get to step two, the knocking part, I notice that the door isn’t latched. It’s not technically open by any stretch. I can’t see through a gap into the inside of the house. But there’s too much space between the door and the frame, you know?
Back when I lived in New Jersey, I had this friend who would drop by all the time. Erin was my upstairs neighbor. I had a dog then. Or, maybe I should say that I lived with a dog. The dog came with the apartment and Erin came with the dog, so to speak. She had been friends with the previous tenant and she used to walk the dog for him. Anyway, Erin was sweet, but every time she let herself out of my apartment, she closed the door in the worst way. She would turn the handle as she pulled the door shut. When she let go of the handle, it was an absolute crapshoot if the latch would actually catch or not. So, sometimes I would come home and find my front door wide open.
Over the course of years, I found no way to train Erin to shut the door without turning the handle. She admitted that she was doing it. Even she had no explanation for the behavior. The closest we found to an explanation was that she, “Thought it was rude to slam the door shut.” There’s a huge gulf between pulling a door shut and letting the latch do its work and slamming it shut. It was weird.
I’m looking at this door, clearly not properly shut, and all I can think is that Erin must have visited. If there was even a breath of wind, it would blow the door open. Probably, I’m going to accidentally push it open when I knock.
To avoid that intrusion, I knock on the doorframe as loud as I can. The house looks like hell, but the doorframe is certainly solid. It absorbs my knock easily and barely conveys any sound into the house from what I can hear.
With a sigh and a deep breath, I prepare myself.
“Hello?”
The name comes back to me, echoing up from the back of my head.
“Mr. Engel?” I shout.
Wait, is that really his name, or some kind of weird joke that Uncle Walt was playing on me? Uncle Walt had a very dry sense of humor. Sometimes he would make up names for things and keep up the ruse for years and years. There’s a sandwich shop in town and my uncle always called the place Hendershot’s. Long after I learned how to read, I still thought the name of the place was Hendershot’s. Then, one day I was looking at the sign and I finally took the time to realize that it was actually Henderson’s. Even when I asked my uncle, he said, “No, no, it’s Hendershot. They probably got a deal on that sign and just didn’t care that it’s wrong. Go inside and ask Mrs. Hendershot yourself.
I have no idea what the point of this joke was. I don’t know if he was making fun of them or me. Uncle Walt wasn’t a particularly mean person, so it’s possible that he wasn’t making fun of anyone. He just thought that it was a good joke to intentionally get a person’s name wrong.
Now that the thought occurs to me, I’m pretty sure that the old man who lives here is not named Engel. It has to be an inexplicable Uncle Walt joke.
This time, I knock on the door.
As I suspected, the thing swings inward on the second knock.
“Hello? Are you home?”
I want to shout, “This is a WTOS wellness check on behalf of The Allman Brothers Band.”
Instead, I settle for another, “Hello?”
The gap between the door and the frame is about an inch and a half. Angling my head, I can see the couch, a small bookcase, a coffee table, and a chair. There’s a bar against the back wall. I don’t see any sign of Mr. Engel.
“Hello?”
With my toe, I inch the door open a little more.
The heat coming out of that place is unbelievable. It’s like opening the door of an oven. When I lean forward, I can feel the skin on my face tighten in response. I sniff at the air for signs of decaying flesh. It’s silly, if you think about it. Mr. Engel probably went to visit relatives. Maybe he has a camp even farther north on the shore of some lake. Maybe he’s visiting there.
But if any of those things are true, why is his front door open?
“Hello?”
(My imagination works overtime.)
My imagination works overtime.
I don’t need it to work as hard as it does. I would like to be the kind of person who can walk away and not think about
the house or Mr. Engel anymore. It’s really none of my business. I stopped by, knocked, and even peeked inside. Isn’t that enough?
I can picture him though. He closed all the windows and went upstairs to take a little nap in the hottest part of the day. Then, the house got hotter and hotter, he started to sweat, and before he knew it he was too weak to stagger back down and out of the house into fresh air.
I whisper, “But why is the door open?”
It can’t be for ventilation. None of the windows are open.
There’s no sign of Erin around—ha ha.
“Hello?”
Another idea: he opened the door to go out, a pain shot down his left arm, he staggered backwards and fell down behind the bar. If I lean to my right, I could probably see his shoes sticking out from behind the bar.
When I lean, I see nothing.
Mom used to always accuse me of having an overactive imagination. When we lived in Virginia, I told her about the man with too many garbage cans. He lived in the house behind us, across the alley. There were just way too many garbage cans across the back of his house. They were metal and they were spray painted with different numbers on the cans.
Mom said, “So what? He keeps a tidy lawn, I’m sure he’s just a tidy person.”
But those weren’t the cans that he dragged out on Thursday nights for Friday pickup. The ones he dragged to the curb were greenish-black and made of plastic.
I think I was in fifth grade when I finally convinced my friend Matt that we should go check it out. He was supposed to stay at his father’s house on Saturday nights, but he hated it there so he would often spend the night at my house. His father didn’t mind. Not having Matt around meant that he could go out with his girlfriend. So, one fall night I said, “Let’s wait until after Saturday Night Live and then we can sneak over there and look in those cans.”
Matt didn’t want to. He liked the idea of sneaking, but hated the idea of staying up past SNL. The sun always woke him up in the morning—he couldn’t sleep if there was any real light in the room—so he preferred to fall asleep during the news. He would get mad at me if I laughed too hard. It wasn’t a problem that year. Only five cast members returned to the show in 95, and none of them were funny. The new cast, like Ferrell and Meadows, would eventually become favorites, but it was a rough start that year. I waited up through the show anyway and then shook Matt awake.
“Seriously?” he slurred. “I just fell asleep and you’re waking me up?”
He had been asleep for two hours, but I didn’t bother to point that out.
“Come on, he turned out the light.”
The porch light—a green bulb—had been turned off about midnight. Out there in the darkness, the cans were waiting to be examined. I put on my darkest pair of jeans and tossed Matt’s clothes to him. Once he woke up, his mood improved quickly. Matt liked the idea of sneaking around in the dark. My mom was no issue. Back then, she used to crash hard most weekends on wine and pills. She said that the pills were for her monthlies, but she took them any time she didn’t have to work in the morning.
“We’ll go along the garage until we get to the bushes, then hug the fence to the alley. If we climb over the fence through the bush, we’ll be behind…”
Matt walked right through the back door and started across the lawn. I eased the screen door shut so it wouldn’t slam and then scampered after him.
“Hey,” I whispered. “He’s going to see you.”
“We’re still on your property,” Matt said. “Who cares?”
I ducked behind the garage. Matt kept going across the lawn until the got to the gate. Once he was in the alley, he took a right and it looked like he was going to head out towards the street. At the clump of bushes that I was planning to use for cover, Matt stopped.
We met there at the bushes and maneuvered ourselves until we could see through the branches to the windows of his house. The glass might as well have been spray painted black. We couldn’t see anything through it.
“Wait, what is that?” I asked. It sounded almost like something tearing very slowly. I couldn’t place where it was coming from until I backed up half a step.
“I’m peeing,” Matt said.
“Well, stop it!” I said out loud.
The stream broke into staccato bursts as he wheezed out quiet laughter.
I could smell it. I really don’t like the smell of urine—it has always bothered me. Before it could make me sick, I hunched over and darted to the next set of bushes. This wasn’t the alley anymore. The place where I crouched was legitimately on the neighbor’s property. I was trespassing.
Matt joined me a second later.
He made a series of gestures in the starlight and I understood. The bush covered us over to the picnic table and we crawled under that to get closer to the back porch. From there, we just had to dart across three yards of open space and we had our backs pressed against the side of the house. The trashcans were only six feet away.
Matt leaned close. “What’s that smell?”
For a moment, I thought that the smell was still coming from him. It was ammonia. The night breeze brought it to my nose in full strength. It was definitely ammonia, but it was strong like smelling salts. I got my “bell rung” in a soccer game one time when I collided with one of my teammates. They used smelling salts to snap me back to reality. The odor was almost that strong.
“Cat litter,” Matt said, answering his own question.
I didn’t buy it.
I scooted down the wall. The smell got stronger and stronger until I could barely breathe. Matt was still a few feet away. He had his nose buried in his hands.
Applying steady pressure on the lip of the lid, I popped it off and the metal clanked. We held our breath as we waited for the sound of someone stirring inside the house.
My heart pounded in my chest, sure that the light would come on and we would have to sprint. I should have talked to Matt about an escape plan. If we ran towards the house, we would be caught for sure. The only smart thing to do would be to run for the alley and then take a left, working our way back around to the front of my house before we hid inside. That would give us an opportunity to lose any pursuit. It was too late to convey that plan to Matt now. I hoped he would think of it on his own.
But the lights didn’t come on.
I had to summon enough courage to get up and look into the can.
We didn’t even have a flashlight.
(We should have been heroes.)
We should have been heroes.
“Mom! Mom!” I said, shaking her. Her hair flopped around as her head rolled back and forth. I clicked on the lights and shouted again.
“Mom!”
I shook her so hard that her teeth banged against each other. Her eyes opened one at a time. The right one locked onto me and the left one wandered aimlessly across the ceiling.
“Whuh?”
She squinted and blinked hard and then tried to push up to her elbow. On the third try, she got it.
“Mom, we went across the alley because we saw a raccoon trying to get into those trashcans and we wanted to scare it away.”
This was the best story we could come up with. The truth would have been easier.
“The raccoon opened up the lid and we found body parts in there, Mom. I told you that the guy was up to no good. He must be killing people and maybe eating them or something. Who knows how many people he has stuffed into…”
She cut me off by turning off the light.
“Go to bed,” she said into her pillow.
If I ever forget what it was like to be a kid, this memory brings it right back. Kids have exactly zero power and zero credibility. The most momentous, life-changing event can happen to a kid and a parent will just tell them to shut up or maybe try to mollify them with some platitude. What we found was legitimately the most horrifying thing either of us had ever seen in our lives. I don’t know what kind of life Matt has led recently, but I would be willing to bet that
he still thinks about what we found. I know I still do. And I still remember exactly how frustrated and helpless I felt when my mother wouldn’t even listen to me that night.
I turned on the light again.
With her eyes still shut, she reached to turn it off.
Matt pushed the plastic bag into my shoulder. I took it and shoved it into the path of her hand. Before, I hadn’t even wanted to touch the bag. What was inside, mashed against the clear plastic, was too horrific to contemplate. My mom’s hand hit the bag and she gave the thing a squeeze.
Behind me, Matt gagged.
Mom opened her eyes and jerked back.
I imagine that she cursed something, but her words were unintelligible. She jerked back, pushing her blankets and pillows into a tangled jumble as she retreated across the bed. I looked down at what I was holding and I dropped it. The seal on the bag split and the odor began to fill the room immediately.
Matt gagged harder.
“What?” she screamed. “What is it?”
Despite the smell, I forced myself to bend over to try to shut the bag before the disgusting fluids ran out onto the carpet.
Matt’s voice croaked as he gagged again, but he managed to say, “We think it’s a foot.”
There was absolutely no doubt that it was a foot. One might debate the age and the sex of the previous owner, but to doubt the nature of the body part was silly. We had found a severed foot, marinated in blood and brown goo, in a plastic bag. Matt had said “we think” because that was easier than being definitive. To admit that we knew for sure what it was, we had to admit the terrible circumstances that must have led to it being in a plastic bag.
“Get rid of it,” my mom yelled.
“Mom, we have to call the police.”
“GETRIDOFIT!” she screamed in one ragged burst of sound.
I sealed the top again. We used the same kind of bags sometimes when we picked strawberries and my mom wanted to freeze a bunch. The smell was already in the air though. Sealing the bag didn’t magically make it go away.
