by Dan Chaon
The writer spends much of the first few paragraphs setting the scene, trying to make it sound spooky. “The tiny, isolated village of Pyramid, Nebraska,” is what the author calls the place where I grew up. I had never thought of it as a village. It wasn’t much of anything, really—it wasn’t even on the map, and hadn’t been since my father was a boy, when it was a stop on the Union Pacific railroad line. Back then, there was a shantytown for the railroad workers, a dance hall, a general store, a post office. By the time I was growing up, all that was left was a cluster of mostly boarded-up, run-down houses. My family—my parents and grandparents and my brother and me—lived in the only occupied buildings. There was a grain elevator, which my grandfather had run until he retired and my father took over. PYRAMID was painted in peeling block letters on one of the silos.
The man who wrote the story got fixated on that elevator. He talks of it as “a menacing, hulking structure,” and says it is like “Childe Roland’s ancient dark tower, presiding over the barren fields and empty, sentient houses.” He even goes so far as to mention “the soundless flutter of bats flying in and out of the single, eyelike window at the top of the elevator,” and “the distant, melancholy calls of coyotes from the hills beyond,” which are then drowned out by “the strange echoing moan of a freight train as it passes in the night.”
There really are bats, of course; you find them in every country place. Personally, I never heard coyotes, though it is true they were around. I saw one once when I was about twelve. I was staring from my bedroom window late one night, and there he was. He had come down from the hills and was crouched in our yard, licking drops of water off the propeller of the sprinkler. As for the trains, they passed through about every half hour, day and night. If you lived there, you didn’t even hear them—or maybe only half heard them, the way, now that I live in a town, I might vaguely notice the bells of the nearby Catholic church at noon.
But anyway, this is how the writer sets things up. Then he begins to tell about some of the train engineers, how they dreaded passing through this particular stretch. He quotes one man as saying he got goose bumps every time he started to come up on Pyramid. “There was just something about that place,” says this man. There were a few bad accidents at the crossing—a carload of drunken teenagers who tried to beat the train, an old guy who had a heart attack as his pickup bumped across the tracks. That sort of thing. Actually, this happens anywhere that has a railroad crossing.
Then came the sightings. An engineer would see “a figure” walking along the tracks in front of the train, just beyond the Pyramid elevator. The engineer would blow his horn, but the person, “the figure” would seem not to notice. The engineer blasted the horn several more times, more and more insistent. But the person kept walking; pretty soon the train’s headlights glared onto a tall, muscular boy with shaggy dark hair and a green fatigue jacket. The engineer tried to brake the train, but it was too late. The boy suddenly fell to his knees, and the engineer was certain he’d hit him. But of course, when the train was stopped, they could find nothing. “Not a trace,” says our author. This happened to three different engineers; three different incidents in a two-year period.
You can imagine the ending, of course: that was how my brother died, a few years after these supposed sightings began. His car had run out of gas a few miles from home, and he was walking back. He was drunk. Who knows why he was walking along the tracks. Who knows why he suddenly kneeled down. Maybe he stumbled, or had to throw up. Maybe he did it on purpose. He was killed instantly.
The whole ghost stuff came out afterwards. One of the engineers who’d seen the “ghost” recognized Del’s picture in the paper and came forward or something. I always believed it was made up. It was stupid, I always thought, like a million campfire stories you’d heard or some cheesy program on TV. But the author of True Tales of the Weird and Supernatural found it “spine-tingling.” “The strange story of the boy whose ghost appeared—two years before he died!” says a line on the back cover.
This happened when I was fourteen. My early brush with tragedy, I guess you could call it, though by the time I was twenty-one I felt I had recovered. I didn’t think the incident had shaped my life in any particular way, and in fact I’d sometimes find myself telling the story, ghost and all, to girls I met at fraternity parties. I’d take a girl up to my room, show her the True Tales book. We’d smoke some marijuana and talk about it, my voice taking on an intensity and heaviness that surprised both of us. From time to time, we’d end up in bed. I remember this one girl, Lindsey, telling me how moved she was by the whole thing. It gave me, she said, a Heathcliff quality; I had turned brooding and mysterious; the wheatfields had turned to moors. “I’m not mysterious,” I said, embarrassed, and later, after we’d parted ways, she agreed. “I thought you were different,” she said, “deeper.” She cornered me one evening when I was talking to another girl and wanted to know if I wasn’t a little ashamed, using my dead brother to get laid. She said that she had come to realize that I, like Heathcliff, was just another jerk.
After that, I stopped telling the story for a while. There would be months when I wouldn’t speak of my brother at all, and even when I was home in Pyramid, I could spend my whole vacation without once mentioning Del’s name. My parents never spoke of him, at least not with me.
Of course, this only made him more present than ever. He hovered there as I spoke of college, my future, my life, my father barely listening. When we would argue, my father would stiffen sullenly, and I knew he was thinking of arguments he’d had with Del. I could shout at him, and nothing would happen. He’d stare as I tossed some obscene word casually toward him, and I’d feel it rattle and spin like a coin I’d flipped on the table in front of him. But he wouldn’t say anything.
I actually wondered, back then, why they put up with this sort of thing. It was surprising, even a little unnerving, especially given my father’s temper when I was growing up, the old violence-promising glares that once made my bones feel like wax, the ability he formerly had to make me flinch with a gesture or a well-chosen phrase.
Now, I was their only surviving child, and I was gone—more thoroughly gone than Del was, in a way. I’d driven off to college in New York, and it was clear I wasn’t ever coming back. Even my visits became shorter and shorter—summer trimmed down from three months to less than two weeks over the course of my years at college; at Christmas, I’d stay on campus after finals, wandering the emptying passageways of my residence hall, loitering in the student center, my hands clasped behind my back, staring at the ragged bulletin boards as if they were paintings in a museum. I found excuses to keep from going back. And then, when I got there, finally, I was just another ghost.
About a year before he died, Del saved my life. It was no big deal, I thought. It was summer, trucks were coming to the grain elevator, and my brother and I had gone up to the roof to fix a hole. The elevator was flat on top, and when I was little, I used to imagine that being up there was like being in the turret of a lighthouse. I used to stare out over the expanse of prairie, across the fields and their flotsam of machinery, cattle, men, over the rooftops of houses, along the highways and railroad tracks that trailed off into the horizon. When I was small, this would fill me with wonder. My father would stand there with me, holding my hand, and the wind would ripple our clothes.
I was thinking of this, remembering, when I suddenly started to do a little dance. I didn’t know why I did such things: my father said that ever since I started junior high school I’d been like a “-holic” of some sort, addicted to making an ass out of myself. Maybe this was true, because I started to caper around, and Del said, “I’d laugh if you fell, you idiot,” stern and condescending, as if I were the juvenile delinquent. I ignored him. With my back turned to him, I began to sing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in a deep corny voice, like my father’s. I’d never been afraid of heights, and I suppose I was careless. Too close to the edge, I slipped, and my brother caught my a
rm.
I was never able to recall exactly what happened in that instant. I remember being surprised by the sound that came from my throat, a high scream like a rabbit’s that seemed to ricochet downward, a stone rattling through a long drainpipe. I looked up, and my brother’s mouth was wide open, as if he’d made the sound. The tendons on his neck stood out.
I told myself that if I’d been alone, nothing would have happened. I would’ve just teetered a little and then gained my balance again. But when my brother grabbed me, I lost my equilibrium, and over the edge I went. There were a dozen trucks lined up to have their loads weighed, and all the men down there heard that screech, looked up, startled, to see me dangling there with two hundred feet between me and the ground. They all watched Del yank me back up to safety.
I was on the ground before it hit me. Harvesters were getting out of their trucks and ambling toward us, and I could see my father pushing his way through the crowd. It was then that my body took heed of what had happened. The solid earth kept opening up underneath me, and Del put his arm around me as I wobbled. Then my father loomed. He got hold of me, clenching my shoulders, shaking me. “My sore neck!” I cried out. “Dad, my neck!” The harvester’s faces jittered, pressing closer; I could see a man in sunglasses with his black, glittering eyes fixed on me.
“Del pushed me,” I cried out as my father’s gritted teeth came toward my face. Tears slipped suddenly out of my eyes. “Del pushed me, Dad! It wasn’t my fault.”
My father had good reason to believe this lie, even though he and some twelve or more others had been witness to my singing and careless prancing up there. The possibility still existed that Del might have given me a shove from behind. My father didn’t want to believe Del was capable of such a thing. But he knew he was.
Del had been back home for only about three weeks. Prior to that, he’d spent several months in a special program for juvenile delinquents. The main reason for this was that he’d become so belligerent, so violent, that my parents didn’t feel they could control him. He’d also, over the course of things, stolen a car.
For much of the time that my brother was in this program, I wore a neck brace. He’d tried to strangle me the night before he was sent away. He claimed he’d seen me smirking at him, though actually I was only thinking of something funny I’d seen on TV. Del was the furthest thing from my thoughts until he jumped on me. If my father hadn’t separated us, Del probably would have choked me to death.
This was one of the things that my father must have thought of. He must have remembered the other times that Del might have killed me: the time when I was twelve and he threw a can of motor oil at my head when my back was turned; the time when I was seven and he pushed me off the tailgate of a moving pickup, where my father had let us sit when he was driving slowly down a dirt road. My father was as used to hearing these horror stories as I was to telling them.
Though he was only three and a half years older than I, Del was much larger. He was much bigger than I’ll ever be, and I was just starting to realize that. Six foot three, 220-pound defensive back, my father used to tell people when he spoke of Del. My father used to believe that Del would get a football scholarship to the state university. Never mind that once he started high school he wouldn’t even play on the team. Never mind that all he seemed to want to do was vandalize people’s property and drink beer and cause problems at home. My father still talked about it like there was some hope.
When my brother got out of his program, he told us that things would be different from now on. He had changed, he said, and he swore that he would make up for the things that he’d done. I gave him a hug. He stood there before us, with his hands clasped behind his back, posed like the famous orator whose picture was in the library of our school. We all smiled, the visions of the horrible family fights wavering behind our friendly expressions.
So here was another one, on the night of my almost-death.
Before very long, my brother had started crying. I hadn’t seen him actually shed tears in a very long time; he hadn’t even cried on the day he was sent away.
“He’s a liar,” my brother shouted. We had all been fighting and carrying on for almost an hour. I had told my version of the story five or six times, getting better at it with each repetition. I could have almost believed it myself. “You fucking liar,” my brother screamed at me. “I wish I had pushed you. I’d never save your ass now.” He stared at me suddenly, wild-eyed, like I was a dark shadow that was bending over his bed when he woke at night. Then he sat down at the kitchen table. He put his face in his hands, and his shoulders began to shudder.
Watching him—this giant, broad-shouldered boy, my brother, weeping—I could almost have taken it back. The whole lie, I thought, the words I spoke at first came out of nowhere, sprang to my lips as a shield against my father’s red face and bared teeth, his fingernails cutting my shoulder as everyone watched. It was really my father’s fault. I could have started crying myself.
But looking back on it, I have to admit that there was something else, too—a heat at the core of my stomach, spreading through my body like a stain. It made my skin throb, my face a mask of innocence and defiance. I sat there looking at him, and put my hand to my throat. After years of being on the receiving end, it wasn’t in my nature to see Del as someone who could be wronged, as someone to feel pity for. This was something Del could have done, I thought. It was not so unlikely.
At first, I thought it would end with my brother leaving, barreling out of the house with the slamming of doors and the circling whine of the fan belt in my father’s old beater pickup, the muffler retorting all the way down the long dirt road, into the night. Once, when he was drunk, my brother had tried to drive his truck off a cliff on the hill out behind our house. But the embankment wasn’t steep enough, and the truck just went bump, bump down the side of the hill, all four wheels staying on the ground until it finally came to rest in the field below. Del had pointed a shotgun at my father that night, and my father was so stunned and upset that my mother thought he was having a heart attack. She was running around hysterical, calling police, ambulance, bawling. In the distance, Del went up the hill, down the hill, up, down. You could hear him revving the motor. It felt somehow like one of those slapstick moments in a comedy movie, where everything is falling down at once and all the actors run in and out of doorways. I sat, shivering, curled up on the couch while all this was going on, staring at the television.
But the night after I’d almost fallen, my brother did not try to take off. We all knew that if my parents had to call the police on him again, it would be the end. He would go to a foster home or even back to the juvenile hall, which he said was worse than prison. So instead, he and my father were in a shoving match; there was my mother between them, screaming, “Oh, stop it I can’t stand it I can’t stand it,” turning her deadly, red-eyed stare abruptly upon me; there was my brother crying. But he didn’t try to leave. He just sat there, with his face in his hands. “God damn all of you,” he cried suddenly. “I hate all your guts. I wish I was fucking dead.”
My father hit him then, hit him with the flat of his hand alongside the head, and Del tilted in his chair with the force of it. He made a small, high-pitched sound, and I watched as he folded his arms over his ears as my father descended on him, a blow, a pause, a blow, a pause. My father stood over him, breathing hard. A tear fell from Del’s nose.
“Don’t you ever say that,” my father roared. “Don’t you dare ever say that.” He didn’t mean the F-word—he meant wishing you were dead, the threats Del had made in the past. That was the worst thing, my father had told us once, the most terrible thing a person could do. My father’s hands fell to his sides. I saw that he was crying also.
After a time, Del lifted his head. He seemed to have calmed—everything seemed to have grown quiet, a dull, wavery throb of static. I saw that he looked at me. I slumped my shoulders, staring down at my fingernails.
“You lie,” Del said softly. �
��You can’t even look me in the face.” He got up and stumbled a few steps, as if my father would go after him again. But my father just stood there.
“Get out of my sight,” he said. “Go on.”
I heard Del’s tennis shoes thump up the stairs, the slam of our bedroom door. But just as I felt my body start to untense, my father turned to me. He wiped the heel of his hand over his eyes, gazing at me without blinking. After all of Del’s previous lies, his denials, his betrayals, you would think they would never believe his side of things again. But I could see a slowly creaking hinge of doubt behind my father’s expression. I looked down.
“If I ever find out you’re lying to me, boy,” my father said.
He didn’t ever find out. The day I almost fell was another one of those things we never got around to talking about again. It probably didn’t seem very significant to my parents, in the span of events that had happened before and came after. They dwelt on other things.
On what, I never knew. My wife found this unbelievable: “Didn’t they say anything after he died?” she asked me, and I had to admit that I didn’t remember. They were sad, I told her. I recalled my father crying. But they were country people. I tried to explain this to my wife, good Boston girl that she is, the sort of impossible grief that is like something gnarled and stubborn and underground. I never really believed it myself. For years, I kept expecting things to go back to normal, waiting for whatever was happening to them to finally be over.
My parents actually became quite mellow in the last years of their lives. My mother lost weight, was often ill. Eventually, shortly after her sixtieth birthday, she went deaf. Her hearing slipped away quickly, like a skin she was shedding, and all the tests proved inconclusive. That was the year that my son was born. In January, when my wife discovered that she was pregnant, my parents were in the process of buying a fancy, expensive hearing aid. By the time the baby was four months old, the world was completely soundless for my mother, hearing aid or not.
