by Jeffrey Ford
“Tell him he’s a dilapidated sack of shit,” said Fran. When no one responded, she yelled, “Tell him.”
Will blurted out, “You’re a dilapidated sack of shit.”
“Oh, sure,” said Uncle Jake. “You know me and so forth. Go ahead. Happy Thanksgiving and all. Pass the pearl onions.”
“You’re a liar and a creep, Uncle Jake.”
“I heard that before once when the weather was warmer. You know how it goes and so forth. Sure. I mean, why not?”
“Where’s your home?” asked Tina.
“On the corner of Currier where it runs behind the Stop and Shop,” said Uncle Jake, nodding.
“I went and checked, and Currier doesn’t run anywhere near the Stop and Shop,” she said.
That’s when it became evident that Uncle Jake was melting, his flesh like hot wax. All the time he sloughed himself in bright rivulets, he mumbled random snatches of Thanksgiving pleasantries and inanities, and profanities. His chin became his fists and his eyeballs slid down the melting mass of his body to the floor. His last words before his head caved in entirely and became one with the rest of whatever he was becoming were, “Sure, sure. You know. Absolutely!”
All five of them stood and gathered around Uncle Jake’s steaming chair.
“What the fuck happened to him?” asked Sue.
“We denied his existence,” said Fran.
“Rough justice,” said Tina, holding her nose with thumb and index finger.
“He stinks like melted Uncle Jake,” said Jerum.
“The waiters are gonna come in here and think we all pitched in and shit on this chair,” said Will.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Tina. She grabbed her coat from a hook near the front of the room and grabbed Will’s and Sue’s and Fran’s as well. Jerum, wearing a cardigan sweater, left his jacket behind. She led the way into the darkness behind Sue’s chair, found the door, and pushed through it. The hinges gave a squeal. Night had fallen while they were melting Uncle Jake. Each went immediately to their respective cars and left the parking lot.
Eventually the restaurant caught up with Will and Sue, who erased the problem of the ruined chair by throwing money at it. The owner of the Colonel’s Wife told Sue on the phone, after all the details had been worked out and the bill had been paid, that she and her party would no longer be welcome in the establishment.
“Solid,” said Sue and hung up.
Although they all seemed free of Uncle Jake, they didn’t feel as if they were. No one was satisfied with his demise. All had misgivings, but more importantly all had theories of what he was and where he’d come from. Nothing about the affair made sense and so they clutched fiercely to their individual explanations.
Fran, of course, was certain Uncle Jake was an evil entity, the kind her guru had warned her about. Some kind of manifested demon of middle-class rage gone mute. She would never accept the argument that he melted of his own volition.
Sue talked it over with Will on New Year’s Eve as they got slowly plastered on whiskey sours. “I’m betting he was a ghost of someone who had once lived in this house,” she said.
“I never thought of that,” said Will. “I’ll ask around the neighborhood and see if any of the old-timers remember anyone dying here.” Both he and Sue did that for the next few months whenever they’d see someone out shoveling snow or working in the garden when the weather got warmer. Almost all of their older neighbors told them that there was a pet dog who lived there that passed away in its sleep one day. “Nice dog, a big black Lab/Shepard mix” said the woman next door. “Was its name, Jake?” asked Sue. “No, Shadow,” said the neighbor.
Jerum fretted the least about it. His theory revolved around the idea that Uncle Jake was only ever half there, that he’d come together from the thoughts of the Thanksgiving crowds of the earlier parties and, more or less, “stayed too long at the fair.” When Tina told him his explanation didn’t add up, he shrugged and said, “At least I won’t have to see that asshole on the street anymore.”
It took Tina a long time to come to her own understanding. Two years after that last Thanksgiving at the Colonel’s Wife, the last she and Jerum shared with Will and Sue and Fran, she woke from a dead sleep one night with the idea rattling in her head that the five of them were merely ancillary characters in a world whose center was Uncle Jake. It had all always been about him and they’d missed it. When he melted before them, they never perceived that he was blowing them off, abandoning them to a shell of a reality he no longer had use for. And truth be told, since he was gone, the world had lost focus and fire—a plate of turkey bones, a cold sweet potato, a few pearl onions.
Five-Pointed Spell
The Black Pickup
I was freshly moved from South Jersey to the farm country of Ohio in the midst of a frozen February, 2012. I’d given up my job, my friends, my close proximity to New York City, to the shore, so that Lynn could have her dream job.
We had a big hundred-plus-year-old farmhouse out in the middle of nothing but corn and soybean fields. The property had a fruit-tree orchard, some land for a big garden, and a few acres of fields off to the side, separating us from the farm next door. There was a little shed just beyond the kitchen door and, at the end of a fifty-yard driveway, a big old hangar of a garage.
In the midst of winter, the place was desolate. The fields, as far as the eye could see, were a stubble of harvested stalks and perpetually overcast. Frigid wind sliced across the emptiness and late at night I sometimes heard whispering although everyone else was asleep.
Lynn was off at work all day, and I was home doing nothing. I was supposed to be writing, supposed to be searching online for another teaching gig. In fact, dozing was my thing. The place sapped my consciousness. Any task was too much for me except going to the kitchen to make sandwiches. The other thing I did a lot of was put my sweatshirt and coat on and go out on the porch to smoke a couple of cigarettes and stare off into the distance across the empty fields.
Eventually I ran out of cigarettes and had to get dressed like a human being, not just shorts and a T-shirt, and go out in the car. I remember that’s just what I did, actually happy to have a mission. It was around one in the afternoon. I pulled out of the driveway in my CRV and headed east. Town was eleven miles away, and to get there I had to take narrow, impossibly straight roads lined with telephone poles spaced out judiciously to mark infinity.
I rarely passed a car coming or going. The deep country was a place I’d always wanted to live until I actually did. There was a peregrine falcon on the telephone wire, and off across an empty field I saw the hunched forms of two coyotes. For some reason I looked up into my rear view mirror, and there was a black pick-up truck right on my ass.
Tailgating wasn’t the word for it. I had no idea where it’d come from. I’m not a brave driver or a fast driver to begin with, and I was unfamiliar with the roads, which made me more leery. Besides there was still a rime of ice on the cracked asphalt from a snowstorm two days earlier.
I did what I always did when I encountered a sudden problem driving; I slammed on the brakes. Not a great idea. I don’t know how the truck didn’t hit me. The high beams flashed on and off and the horn blared. In my rearview mirror, I saw a hulking figure behind the wheel. My inclination was to give him the finger, but the last thing I needed was to be run off the road and beaten senseless by some corn-fed hodunk. I pulled slowly over to the side, and he flew past me, horn blaring. Once he was out of sight, I started again for town.
At the convenience store, I bought a couple of packs of butts and a twleve-pack of beer for that night. Driving down the main street, I looked around to see if the black truck was parked anywhere. The town is small, three tanning salons, a closed bank, a dive bar, a gas station, the convenience store, and a little park where they had a yearly ox roast that attracted more flies than people.
I look
ed everywhere for the truck. I’m not sure what I expected to do if I found it. Luckily, no luck. I headed back home, window cracked halfway, smoking a cig and daydreaming about breaking into the beers and smoking a joint on the porch that night. Every once in a while, I peered up at my rearview mirror just to see that the coast was clear,
I was about halfway home when off in the far distance of that long straight road I spotted a vehicle moving swiftly, gaining speed on me. “No way,” I said aloud and pushed down on the accelerator a bit. I looked up again to see if I could make out the model of car. It had drawn close enough for me to see that it wasn’t a car at all but a pickup truck. “Fuck,” I said, and in that instant it took for me to say it, it had become clear that not only was it a truck but it was a black truck.
He must have been doing 90 on that poopy country road. I pushed down on the gas, to my mind, recklessly, but as wild as I thought I was driving, I didn’t stand a chance of outpacing him. I looked at the speedometer and I was only doing 55. “Jesus,” I said, threw the butt out the window and closed it. I inched up to 60 mph but felt as if the car was getting out of control. Then the truck was right behind me, flashing its lights and beeping.
I pulled over at almost exactly the spot I’d pulled over on the way to town. My heart was pounding, and as I hit the brakes to coast to the side, the car wriggled erratically. A dark blur blew past me and I saw the guy in the driver’s seat. He stared over at me with a dull expression while chewing on a cigar that looked like a piece of black rope. One detail I caught as he whipped out of sight was that under his orange cap in the back, the hair had been shaved from his scalp behind his ear and there was a big white Frankenstein scar like his head had been stitched back on. It matched up somehow in my mind with the decal on his back window—a spear point with a sword in it and lightning bolts shooting across it like scars.
For the next few weeks, every time I left the house, I’d warily check my rearview mirror, and not once was it in vain. That guy had to be spying on me. I asked the farmers on either side of my place if they knew who it was, describing the truck to them. Both of them more or less said the same thing, “Oh, yeah, that black truck, I’ve seen it before.”
I had no idea if it came from in the direction of town or west, where I pictured things were that much staler than where we lived. I asked around at the diner and convenience store if anybody recognized the vehicle. Then about three weeks after my first encounter with the pickup, I went out to get butts and couldn’t believe it when I’d made it all the way to Main Street in town without being tailgated. What a relief. The way back home, the same.
Days passed. A couple of weeks passed, and I saw neither hide nor hair of my nemesis. I figured he’d probably gotten fed up with me because I wasn’t about to race him, and I certainly wasn’t going to pull over and fight him. I could live with the shame.
A Cold Notion
The stories were starting to congeal between my ears, and I desperately needed some fresh air and exercise. I decided to hitch up the dog and drive over to this enormous piece of parkland not that far from our house. It was partially on the way to town but then a left and a trip down a two-mile straight road and then a right. The place was empty in the cold end of February. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, Fin the dog and I were the only ones there.
As much as I was down on Ohio, the landscape of this area was beautiful and varied. There was a lake that we could walk around; there was a place where they’d restored a few hundred acres to its original prairie state. There was a trail through the woods along a creek that as far as we’d followed it, it just kept on going. Those walks did a lot to start to bring me around, and we went religiously, seeing as there was nothing else to do.
One gray afternoon, early in March, we went to the park as usual. It was still freezing, colder than it had been in days. We made our usual transit around the lake and were heading for the parking lot when, just before we left the trail, I thought I heard the sound of someone’s voice. Fin stopped short and peered down the embankment where it led through the trees to the lake. As I approached I heard the voice distinctly over the wind. I sidled up and looked down. The sight startled me. There was a guy down there, his back to me. His head was cocked to the side like he might have known we were looking at him but he didn’t want to make full-on eye contact. He was talking to himself or praying or something, and then I saw the gun barrel next to his leg. He was holding a rifle.
I pulled Fin by the leash and double-timed it as fast as my bubble butt could carry me back to the parking lot. When I came through the trees and saw my car, I noticed the black pickup was parked a few spots over from it, the only two vehicles in the lot. We got in the car and split. As I pulled out of the lot, I saw the driver emerging from the woods. In my flight, I tried to identify him as the same guy who’d passed me on the road. For a moment, I was certain of it but grew less so the nearer I got to home.
Later it struck me that I might have smelled traces of that short black cigar on the breeze—an aroma somewhere between a horse blanket and the dark back part of a closet. The wind was blowing a clip that day, though, and I’m not sure the memory was real. Fin and I stayed away from the park for a few weeks, but eventually I really needed to get out, and the weather had gotten much nicer as spring came on.
With enough distance in time, I was willing to chalk up the driver with the gun as just a product of my paranoia. I wondered if that’s what I’d really seen. Most days I didn’t interact with anyone except Lynn when she got home late at night from work. Anyway, there were a lot of people at the park with the better weather, so Fin and I returned. It felt great to get back to walking, and there was no sign of the pickup on the road or in the parking lot.
All through the end of March and into April and May we traipsed every inch of that park, building strength and health. One afternoon, making our way through a light drizzle along the stream, deeper and deeper into the woods than we’d ever been before, we came upon something on the ground set off from the bank a few yards. I’d not have seen it if there hadn’t been at that bend a number of large, orange-hued toadstools dotting the ground. I followed them to where they were thickest, and there, in an obviously constructed stone circle, I found evidence of a recent fire.
At the center of the pile of blackened ash were the bones of some animal formed into a teepee with the skull, that of maybe a dog or fox or coyote, sitting atop the teepee point. Smoke still curled up through the empty eye holes. The smell was sharp and sent a cold notion creeping up my spine. A sacrifice? I wondered. Some kind of ritual? My ears did that prehistoric thing when suddenly they prick up to listen for trouble.
I spun slowly around and looked everywhere to see if someone was watching me. Fin whined a little and walked a circle around me as if to herd me back to moving. On the ground, just outside the ring of stones, I saw a few half-smoked black cigars. I don’t know why I did it, but before I left the scene, I stepped into the ring of stones and kicked over the bones and skull. They clattered in every direction. And then we ran along the stream. We saw no one. Upon our return home, I felt exhilarated. Something about my insinuating myself into the remains of that ritual site energized me. That night, for the first time since I’d moved to Ohio, I went back to writing.
Pow-Wow
Having grown up on Long Island and lived in Jersey, the kinds of rituals I was used to were coffee and cigarettes in the morning while reading the newspaper, going to the bar Friday nights. I’d never been part of anything where animals were being sacrificed and burned, unless you count my old man’s barbecues.
There was a large Pennsylvania Dutch influence in Ohio. More Amish settled in Ohio than in Pennsylvania. The “Dutch” part of the equation didn’t mean these folks were from Holland; it meant they were from Germany—Deutch. The language group was Low German and some of them practiced a kind of ritualistic magic tied to the earth. Much of it probably began as a pagan religi
on in Europe and then was subsumed by the coming of Christianity. I read up on hex magic.
Supposedly it still survived in the area from Pennsylvania throughout Ohio and into Indiana. It dealt with the elements, the weather, the power of the earth. There were entities that needed cajoling and adepts that needed consultation if you wanted to work a curse on someone or set a charm to help a friend out of a bind. I was surprised that so much of it still existed. It took a little looking, but I found a real hex doctor nearby and went to visit. My meeting with the old man wasn’t cheap. From what I’d read online he was the real deal, though.
Averal Braun lived two towns over, back in the woods in an old house you’d miss a hundred times driving by on the road. He gave me a whole protocol to follow before I came to see him, so that no evil spirits followed me or something like that. The acts I was to perform seemed ridiculous, and I was sworn not to discuss them.
I had a sit down with him for the better part of an hour on his screened-in porch. He was a hard guy to read—a strict demeanor when composed but easy to laugh. His hairdo was munchkin-like—tufts erupting from the top and sides of his head. He wore old-fashioned spectacles with round lenses and wire arms.
There were certain things I asked him that he said he couldn’t answer, but he was forthcoming as to a lot of the history of the rituals and tradition, the nature of some of the symbols used. He had a lot of great local stories from the time he was a boy and the magic was more widely practiced—a corrupt physician taken by a death fetch, a woman who burst into flames, talking animals, and love charms galore.
The one thing he was emphatic about was that I not dig too deeply into it. I told him I might want to use the subject of it in a story, and he said that would probably be OK, as long as I was vague and didn’t name names or give away spells. “You don’t want to anger someone who really knows what they’re doing with this, though,” he said and nodded slowly. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a third eye taking me in through a scrim of throat flesh.
