by Dean H Wild
CHAPTER FIVE
“Listen,” he said after they unpacked their lunches at the garage desk. The open bay door let in a sweet-smelling spring breeze. “I talked to Cy this morning. Axel Vandergalien is going to help us with the lawn cutting. He starts tomorrow.”
Harley shook his head as if the whole thing was inevitable. “Isn’t that a little like pissing over the dam?”
“I’m sorry. I should have asked you first because I meant what I said last night. You’re still the boss.”
Harley bit off a chunk of his chicken salad sandwich, ruminated a little, then said, “He’s a goldbricker, and he’ll be a pain in the backside. But maybe Cy will cut us some slack if we have his nephew on the crew, so there’s an upside. Now, let’s talk about something else. Cleanup going okay?”
“Lots of paper waste, newspapers galore, but it’s a secondhand education for me in a way. Did you know there was a suspected TB outbreak in this town in the thirties?”
“Heard of it. Whatever swept through town nearly emptied her out, the way I remember my granddad telling it. And right after is when the name of the town changed and we were known as just plain old Knoll.”
“A dark handshake.” The words fell out, a lurking thought made manifest.
“A what now?”
“Something somebody said to me once.”
“From your days at the school?”
Days at the school, indeed. The Robbie Vaughn days, with Robbie’s words—dark handshakes. It was Robbie’s assessment of Shelley’s Frankenstein, and how the doctor and the monster come to accept one another and reach their individual resignations with mournful loathing. A brilliant analogy, in Mick’s opinion, energized by discovery and a bit of self- congratulations as the rest of the class looked on, reverently silent as one of their own took a valid, scholarly leap before their eyes.
“Yeah.” He snatched up his paper lunch sack. “Old stuff.”
“Can’t discount the old stuff,” Harley said, his eyes suddenly sharp. He wadded up his lunch wrappers and a majority of his sandwich and tossed it in the trash barrel. “It’s there whether you want it or not.”
“Well, I’ve got a truckload of Knoll’s old stuff I need to put someplace else. But let me ask you something first. Did you see anything odd right after Judy and I left last night? A flash of light, kind of green in color?”
“Nope. Not sure what it would have been, either. Transformer blowing out would be my first guess.” Harley gripped his side again, his face set with painful concentration. “Damn, that’s a bad one.”
“Two in one day is too many,” Mick said. “Go home and rest.”
Harley flashed him a defeated expression. “It’s passing. Besides, I need to get the Swisher tuned up for the friend you’re bringing on board tomorrow. I gotta be good for something around here.”
“Always will be and you know it. But I’ll feel a lot better if you’re out of here when I get back from Baylor.”
As Mick stepped outside, he thought about dark handshakes.
CHAPTER SIX
The Crymost was no more than a glimmer far back in his thoughts. That changed when Mick drove by Pitch Road and saw Kippy Evert up there, tooling his bicycle past the dump gates.
He turned in, and slowed to a crawl, feeling every bit the stalker. Once Kippy slipped through the barrier of tall shrubbery at the top of The Crymost path, Mick shut the truck down, climbed out and strode up the path with slow cautious steps. Rude and ridiculous, he thought, spying on an old man during what was likely a very private moment, but a sense of fascination kept him going.
He stopped where the parted shrubs stood like sentinels and he crouched down to watch. Kippy’s bike lay on its side, its back wheel twirling lazily in the sun while its owner trod the hundred foot expanse of limestone toward its termination point. Mick remembered how the sheerness of the drop off captivated him the first time he’d seen it; such a clean and angular end as if the shelf of rock was trimmed by an enormous blade swung from the heavens. And then he’d felt what The Crymost exuded like a rolling, enveloping wave. He’d felt it then, and he felt it now.
Some places inspired awe with their beauty, or granted serenity by means of their visual and perhaps aromatic offerings. What The Crymost offered its visitors was a sense of melancholy. The localized heaviness in the air was what no doubt inspired the town’s founder, Josiah Mellar, to declare it an official place of weeping. The quote Mick heard one of the town’s geezers recite went something like: “We shan’t build upon or otherwise deface the land herein, but reserve for weeping this most lachrymose of places.”
The ledge area was known as The Lachrymose for many years, and even though its name was simplified and reformed through the decades into Crymost, its designation remained sacred. Widows in black gowns and high button shoes wept there as they dropped loved one’s possessions into the spring-fed cauldron far below. Parents parted with medals from two world wars, Korea, that dastardly surrogate mother and eater of young Vietnam, and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq. Grandchildren flung hair ribbons and baseball cards. The jewelry of the sick, the toiletries of the dead—the pond floor was surely lined with strata of those things, scoring the decades. And the people of Knoll still came whenever their hearts wore a wrapping of sorrow. And so, here was Kippy.
He watched Kippy inch close to the drop off and fling out his bunched hands. A smallish wooden box sailed outward from those hands, yawned open on tiny hinges as if releasing a silent scream, then flipped end over end, out of sight beyond the ledge.
“There you go, old boy,” Kippy said. “You sleep now. I’ll try to do right.”
And that was it.
Mick hurried to his truck feeling suddenly obvious and guilty. To drive away would seem ill-timed and rude, so while Kippy emerged with his bicycle at his side, Mick fussed with the tailgate in a nothing-to-see-here-just-minding-my-own-business sort of way. He tipped the old man a casual wave.
Kippy waved back. “G’day, Mick. Say, you’re not dumping trash here are you?”
“Not here,” he said and dusted off his hands. “I’m on my way to Baylor.”
Kippy’s gaze was cutting and yet comforting. “Last I heard, you got to Baylor by staying on The Plank for about twelve miles or so. Less’n there was some business you had up at The Crymost first.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, Kippy. I’m not sure what was going through my head,” Mick said. “I saw you and I got a little curious. I’ve seen some odd stuff in this direction lately.”
Kippy grunted. “You saw last night’s flash, too, huh?”
In that instant Mick realized he was more than comfortable around the old man. The easiest way to put it: they were on the same wavelength. “Have you ever seen the dump light up in your years here? Or the marsh? Anything up here?”
Kippy considered the handlebars of his bike for a moment. “My suspicion is it wasn’t the landfill or the marsh, t’ be honest.”
“Does it have to do with double barrels?”
Kippy made a near-smile. “I guess my lips got a little loose yest’idy. I do appreciate the ride, by the way. You’re a good man. Probably why I feel so open with you. And why, since there’s some old stories I need to share with somebody, I’m figuring you’re a good, solid person who will keep them well.”
Wavelengths. Yes indeed.
“Tell me, then.” He rapped the side of the truck. “This stuff can wait.”
“Not here. Not now. I’ve got a dear friend to bury tomorrow. My thoughts will be quieter once Orlin’s in the ground.”
Mick thought of the wooden box sailing through the bright air. The burial process had, in a way, already begun. “Understood. You know where to find me when you’re ready.”
“I do.”
“And, I’m sorry.” Mick had a cruel vision of Orlin Casper’s funeral, attended by only two mourners: an addled wife who endured the ceremony with all the emotion of a potted plant, and Kippy with a dark suit jacket thrown over his fad
ed flannel shirt.
“Me, too,” Kippy said, then mounted up and pedaled away.
After a few seconds, more distantly: “Hey Mick.”
“Yes?” Mick shouted after the old man.
Kippy pedaled on, unheeding. He was soon a small dot navigating Pitch Road to its end.
The voice came again, behind him. Louder. “You. Mick Logan.”
He whirled around. The green slopes of the landfill met him. No one stood in the broad expanse. The vent pipe with its shepherd’s crook top held court to an empty plane. Still, an expectant heaviness radiated toward him.
“Logan.” The voice again. Almost goading as if to dispel the underlying thought a trick of sound might be at play.
He ducked under the landfill gate with part disbelief and part fascination, his gazed fixed on the vent pipe and its twisty strand of midday shadow. Part of him understood he’d pinpointed the source of the voice even as a more rational side attempted to wrestle it down.
“That’s it,” the voice rang in the air, hollow, sounding locked up but very loud. “You’re just about here. Come on.”
Sweat broke out on Mick’s forehead and trickled down his back as he stood in front of the vent pipe. He crouched and then craned his head up to look into the downward facing outlet, to validate the impossible. The interior of the pipe was a lightless, empty throat. He pushed up close. Closer.
The voice burst from the pipe’s interior. “Just. About. Right!”
A bloodless hand pushed out of the pipe’s dark maw and stretched open like a ghastly blooming flower. It snatched at him. Cold fingers skittered along his cheek. Mick flinched and stumbled back. The pipe rocked to and fro, taking on the appearance of an oversized metronome. Old metal flaked and broke loose at ground level. A bony crunch followed, and the pipe toppled to the ground with the sweeping grace of a felled tree.
“What the hell is going on?” He directed the question at the fallen pipe, more precisely at the open outlet end which was only a lightless (and handless) hole once again.
“You’ll get it,” the voice from inside was patient, and perhaps a little bit familiar. “You’re a bright guy. And I don’t want to see you hurt by what’s coming, so you better listen. There’s not a lot of time.”
“I don’t—”
The pipe shuddered once as if from a passing blow, and he sensed the change in it. Coldness. Vacancy. He gazed at it as if dumbfounded by its sudden stillness, confusion joining his other emotions. Hallucination. A quiet suggestion drifted toward him as he backed away.
Mick got into the truck and leaned his head back, his teeth planted firmly on his lower lip. If what he’d just witnessed was indeed a hallucination, it was a very real one, which made it bad, as bad as the one he’d experienced at Robbie Vaughn’s funeral. The time since Robbie’s burial, a ten-year barrier of acquired confidence that was as much cocoon as it was armor, threatened to drop away with hopeless ease. What made the mind so cruel unto itself? Why mock the senses and conjure such phantoms? The voice from the passenger seat made him jump.
“Better get moving.”
Peter Fyvie sat next to him, gas bloated and dripping, blind-white eyes agleam. Greenish water blurted from his mouth and splashed on his chest. “It’s close, Mick. And it’s hungry. It took me. And it will take you, too.”
He goggled at the shape next to him, unable to follow the urge to leap from the truck and equally helpless to act upon the baser instinct to strike out. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut. Hallucination. His inner voice was no longer a suggestion but now a demand. Better to accept that which presently sat at his side as hallucination than accept it as real. It was an old affectation, a Robbie’s funeral affectation. Hallucination is better than real. Better than real.
When he opened his eyes, he was alone in the truck, drawing deep whistling gulps of air. Hallucination, came the demand again, but the word’s meaning and impact crumbled into nothing when he looked to his right. The seat next to him was soaking wet.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The drive to Baylor and back gave him the opportunity to work through what he’d seen and attempt to find some reason in it . . . to no avail. Back in Knoll he rushed into the village garage, located the number of the state inspector’s office next to the desk phone and dialed it. He was told Peter Fyvie was unavailable, which he interpreted as government-speak for “on vacation”. Real Garrison Keillor stuff, remember? He hung up a little too heavily and Harley looked up from his work on the Swisher engine.
“Something going on?”
“Trouble at the landfill. The methane vent pipe isn’t . . . what it should be.”
Harley straightened up with some effort. “Cy is going to shit his pants when he hears about it. Do you think that Fyvie fellow has called him yet?”
Mick gulped. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I, uh . . . ” He ran a hand through his hair. It shook.
“Mick, are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said, finding some of the rational Mick coming back at last in the safe and familiar surroundings. Rational enough to know he wasn’t ready to talk to Harley, or anyone else, about hallucinations or suspicions that said hallucinations might be something more. Something real. “Just a long day. Let’s close her up.”
Harley nodded and squatted by the Swisher to finish up. He gripped his side when he did it and made an exasperated sound deep in his throat. “I can call Cy, if you want. Tell him about the pipe.”
“No,” Mick said on his way back to the truck. “Let’s wait until I can . . . uh . . . let’s wait.”
***
When he got home, the smells of dinner filled the house, wonderful and rich. Judy met him in the front hallway.
“Hi,” she said, and her expression immediately tightened. “What happened?”
Even for his dear Judy, who could read him well, he was not ready. “Nothing much. Just anxious. Axel Vandergalien starts work for the village tomorrow.”
“Wow, give you guys a tip and you jump right on it.”
“It’s how things get done, lady.” He grinned and reached around playfully for her backside.
“Hey, go wash up. I’ve got to check the meatloaf.”
He felt better with fresh clothes and a clean face. When he came into the kitchen, Judy was transferring green beans from a pot into a ceramic serving dish. “Too bad about Orlin Casper,” she said.
“Kippy says funeral’s tomorrow.”
“Yes.” She paused. Funerals were a delicate subject. Always would be. “I placed an order with the florist in Drury so there will be something there from us.”
“Okay.”
“Something else is wrong, isn’t it?”
He sighed.
“I thought I saw something at the landfill today. Something weird.” It felt good to get it out, but mentioning it put the dripping horror of Peter Fyvie in front of him again and he hoped she wouldn’t ask for details. “But I’ve got it handled.”
“Do you?”
Her expression was like a cloudy stone flashing with multiple facets. You thought you had things handled once before, and you were wrong, one of those flashes said. You’re being foolish and stubborn, said another. Yet another asked, don’t you remember how awful it was back in Royal Center? Are you willing to put us through that again? Ignoring it won’t make it go away, you stupid, pigheaded man.
A mean flame began to burn in his brain and in his gut like a double-ended fuse. He stalked to the junk drawer, took out the chess pieces in their velvet bag and gave them a vehement shake. “It always comes back to this, doesn’t it? That one miserable, terrible incident is like some secret, festering sore in our lives, always there in the back of everything we say and do, and I’m sick to death of it. Yes, finding these things brought me a little closer to the old days, but it’s not a reason to haul out the Valium and call the shrink brigade. I had a bad day, Judy. Confusing as all hell. And coming home should be my shelter from it. Instead, I get the stink-eye and the thi
rd degree.” The moment seemed to balance on a pinnacle. The next words were out before he could stop them. “It’s goddamned humiliating and it’s the last thing I need from you.”
The wounded look on her face filled him with self-loathing. He stomped into the living room and flopped on the couch, searching for a perfect, healing next step. The answer, in his experience, was to wait. Let it settle was their unspoken motto in these matters. Maybe not the clearest path to resolution, but it kept them from having anything close to an all-out fight for eighteen years.
After a short while, Judy came into the living room and sat next to him on the couch. She rested a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I worry too much sometimes. Still friends, right?”
He took her hand, looked into her eyes. “Yeah. Always. God help us both. Things are okay with me, really.”
She got to her feet. “And I believe you. Do you want to pour us some iced tea while I finish setting the table?”
He smiled. Let it settle. “I’ll be right in.”
She glanced back before she left him. Her worry was still there, like a fine crack in her capable demeanor. She was turning his words over in her head. He sensed it as surely as he smelled the meatloaf in the other room or felt the copper-warm ray of sun streaking in the living room window. I thought I saw something weird, but I’m okay. His one relief: she didn’t seem to notice he’d put the bag with the chess pieces in the front pocket of his jeans. There was a strange soothing quality in knowing they were near.
At last he got up to pour the tea.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mick had the dream for the first time in years. It was always more memory than dream, and that made it cruel.
“Do you have time?” Robbie Vaughn stood in his classroom doorway and drew Mick’s attention away from the stack of ungraded assignments on his desk.
He said he did, thankful to disparage the endless essays proclaiming Robert Frost as the most influential American poet of the twentieth century. After an hour, he’d had enough of apples tumbling down and roads not taken. The chessboard was already set up near the window, a focal point in the glow of late March sunset. So they played.
