The Porcupine of Truth

by Bill Konigsberg

  “How do you know?”

  “The box. It was open. It was next to his desk chair, and it was open.”

  We stay up late formulating a plan to get a chance to look at the box. It’s tough, because there’s no conceivable way to get Aisha and him talking while I sneak back to his office.

  “Maybe you could do an exotic African dance for him?”

  She shoots me a sideways look, and I realize that she can joke about race. I can’t.

  We simply can’t come up with a way to get me in there.

  “We need to see the box when he’s not around,” I say, and Aisha nods.

  “How bad do you want to see it?” she asks.

  “Pretty bad,” I say. “I mean, the fact that he’s actively lying is creepy.”

  “Well. What if I told you we could get in without breaking and entering?” she asks. “Did he have an alarm system?”

  “The dude doesn’t have a computer. I’m sure he wouldn’t know what do with an alarm system.”

  “Up to you,” she says. “I have a feeling there’s an easy way to get in.”

  I have trouble sleeping, and I wake up around three in the morning and curse myself for not having a glass of water nearby. I go upstairs and pour myself one, and I drink it by the light of the moon, next to the open window over the sink. I stare up at the gray-black Billings sky, barely lucid, and I let my eyes wander over to the pastor’s place, where, tomorrow — today, really — we will be entering-but-not-breaking. How? And what will happen if we get caught?

  My eyes scan over a small, round, second-story window, right under an arch. I see what I swear are eyes, staring back at me.

  And then, just like that, they are gone.

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER the pastor leaves for work in the morning, Aisha leads me to his front door and illustrates her devious plan. She turns the doorknob and pushes open the door.

  “This is Billings. Lots of people don’t lock their doors here,” she says as we walk into the living room. It feels weird to be in there without him knowing, but on the other hand, at least we haven’t broken and entered; we have simply entered.

  The door to his office is closed. She pushes the door open.

  She exhales. “Shoot.” There is no box there.

  “Damn,” I say back.

  We wander the house, peeking into other rooms. The box is nowhere to be found. I begin to wonder if she was seeing things yesterday. We scour his bedroom. No box anywhere. Then I think about last night, and seeing him in an upstairs room. I know it’s a two-story house, but we open all the doors and don’t come upon a staircase.

  “There has to be a way upstairs,” I say, leaving out the part about me seeing him last night. I don’t need to make this any creepier than it already is. Aisha takes the lead, wandering until she comes to a stop next to the bathroom. We look up. A string dangles from a square in the ceiling.

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, there is.”

  She pulls the string and slowly a hatch opens. A ladder comes down, and we climb up. She goes first, and I follow, staring at her apple-shaped ass.

  The room upstairs has such a low ceiling that we both have to hunch our shoulders. At the far end sits a window alcove with a brown, high-backed, weathered leather chair facing the attic. I maneuver behind it to the window and see that it looks down into our house, through the window above our kitchen sink. As I do, the chair swivels a bit.

  Next to the chair is a small table with a half-full coffee cup on it. Probably from last night, when I saw him up here. There is an album cover next to the cup. At the mouth of the alcove is a record player with a record on it. I’ve never seen one in real life before.

  “Uh,” Aisha says, pointing across the room. I turn around. The “2” box. A shiver runs through me.

  She opens the box, and I walk over to the pastor’s chair. On the table next to the coffee cup, the album cover reads “Steve Forbert” in big red letters. Mr. Forbert has a mullet and a pug nose. He looks like no one who is alive in the world currently. The eighties. Wow. I pick up the album, turn it over, and a name is scrawled across the top in black Magic Marker:

  Smith.

  “My grandfather’s,” I say, almost like I’m croaking out the words, and Aisha comes over and takes the album cover from me.

  “It was just out on the table?” she asks. I nod. The album itself is on the record player.

  She hands the album cover back to me, and as she does, an envelope falls out. Its corners are frayed and yellow. I pick it up, and the first thing I see is that it is addressed to “Pastor John Logan, 923 Rimrock Road, Billings, MT 59041.” There is no return address, but there is a postmark in the upper right corner, on top of a twenty-cent stamp with Eleanor Roosevelt on it. The postmark reads, “Thermopolis, WY, 7/19/82.” The envelope has been opened carefully with a letter opener, with the letter neatly folded inside.

  I remove the letter from the envelope. Even the paper feels old.

  I turn the letter over and back again, scanning for a name. I find it on the bottom of the second page: R. S.

  “Those are my grandfather’s initials! Holy crap!”

  We look at each other, amazed.

  “Well … Read it,” Aisha says.

  I read the letter out loud.

  I look at Aisha and crack up. She looks horrified, so I keep reading.

  “My dad and my grandma,” I say.

  Aisha nods. I look back at the letter and speed up my reading.

  I look up at Aisha and hiss, “What the …?”

  “Wow,” she says. “Just, wow.”

  Suddenly, I’m very aware that we’re in the pastor’s house without his permission, and I am in possession of something he surely does not want me to have. A piece of information, maybe, but there are more questions than answers in it.

  “It was in the album the pastor was listening to?” Aisha asks.

  “Yup.”

  “He must have been rereading it,” she says.

  I think about him watching our house last night, and I get this chill, like he’s been thinking about me. It’s super creepy. “Well, we’re definitely taking this,” I say.

  She nods slowly. “Just know, if we take this stuff, he’s gonna know it’s missing. You were just asking about your grandfather and the divorce. He’s gonna know you took it.”

  I think about that, and then I stuff the letter into my pocket. My grandfather had a secret. A nightmare and a secret we take to our graves? I have to find out what this is.

  She goes back over to the “2” box and opens it. Inside are neatly stacked envelopes, a notebook, several folders, and a couple cassette tapes and albums. It’s my grandfather’s stuff. I just know it.

  Aisha rushes to the window as if she hears something. She peers as far right as she can.

  “Shit shit shit,” she says.

  “What?”

  “That would be the pastor’s car,” she says, panic obvious in her voice.

  We rush into action. I repack the box as neatly as I can, and Aisha dashes over to the stairs. She pulls them up with all her might. They barely budge.

  “They’re stuck. Maybe they don’t close from up here,” she says, sounding desperate.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says. “Hang tight.”

  Before I can even react, Aisha leaps down the stairs, and in one quick movement she pushes the stairs up and slams them shut. I stare at the closed attic hatch like an idiot, thinking, What the hell just happened? Then I run over to the window, and, to my right, I watch the pastor slowly ambling toward the house from his car. I quickly shut the box, turn off the attic light, and hide behind the chair. The back door creaks open downstairs, and I glance out the window to my left just in time to watch Aisha scamper from the back door to the front yard of our house. She’s safely out.

  That’s a lot more than I can say for me.

  I SIT MOTIONLESS behind a leather chair in a window alcove of my neighbor’s attic, thinking about be
trayal.

  If I ever get out of here, Aisha is gone. She couldn’t have taken one extra second to explain to me that we were going to leap down the stairs? She had to lock me in? I am so pissed with her that I don’t care where the hell she sleeps. Just not in my basement. I’ll go back to being the guy with not too much going on, stuck for the summer with his crazy, dying father and his weird, psychobabbling mother.

  I take out my cell phone. I make sure it’s on vibrate, and then I text Aisha.

  wtf???

  She doesn’t respond. My blood boils.

  seriously. wtf.

  Nothing.

  If I’m stuck here for a full day, or worse, overnight, I’m in trouble. There’s no bathroom up here, and I already have to pee, damn it. I could crawl across the floor to the box and go through it. But when I press down on the flooring below me, it creaks. I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck behind this chair.

  Finally, after seventeen minutes, my phone buzzes.

  Didn’t want to text you when I got out cause I figured your sound was on. Forgot to keep my eye on my phone. Trying to get you out.

  I type back furiously.

  Well try harder. You abandoned me!

  Wtf choice did I have?

  I need to pee

  Well, pee. Mice probably do it.

  Mice?!?

  Sorry. Not good in a crisis.

  Wait. Is this a crisis?

  See what I mean?

  I put my phone away. Clearly I’m gonna need to figure this one out myself. How do you get out of an attic without taking the stairs? The window doesn’t open, and even if did, it’s a small, round thing, and it’s pretty high up.

  I hear a noise and I tense my muscles. It’s a sliding sound. And then the slide gets louder.

  Shit.

  He’s lowering the stairs.

  He’s coming up to the attic.

  Shit shit shit. How am I going to explain this? Oh hi, Pastor. I just enjoy crouching behind chairs in strangers’ attics. It’s my thing.

  Slow footsteps enter the attic, and then the light comes on. I crouch down low, and from my angle I can see the pastor’s shoes and the bottom of his pants as he walks directly toward me.

  I used to play this video game set in Nazi Germany where you hide from the SS guards. They march right at you, and you only see their boots and the bottom of their legs. Sometimes they stop before they get to you, and other times you hear them yell something in German and then gunfire, and you’re dead. This feels exactly like that.

  Pastor Logan strides slowly to the chair, and then to the left, like he’s going around it. I close my eyes, as if that will make me invisible when he steps on me.

  I brace for contact. But there is none. Then I hear some sounds coming from a speaker at ear level. He’s put on a record.

  I take a silent, slow, deep breath. The song starts with a harmonica, then a steel guitar comes up, and the beat starts. Then there’s a huge rustling noise. The pastor has sat down in the chair, inches from me. There’s no way this ends well.

  The pastor starts tapping his foot to the beat. It must be that album that my grandfather had put our last name on — Steve something. It’s old music. The lyrics are all about going down to Laurel to see a girl. I try to imagine the pastor being young enough to think about going somewhere to see a girl. Surely my granddad felt that way about my grandmother when they were young. It’s all so impossible to imagine, the past — when old people were young and had the pervy thoughts I have today.

  A cell phone rings, and I automatically tense up. But it isn’t mine.

  The pastor stands up and strolls over to the record player to stop the music. He answers the phone. I stay as still as I can and try not to breathe.

  “Hello? … This is he…. How can I help you? … Well, I should be heading back that way in an hour or two…. Oh my word…. When you say emergency, what do you — … Okay…. Of course…. I’ll be happy to — okay. Good-bye.”

  The pastor mutters, “Dadgummit,” and I watch as his lower legs carry him back toward the stairs. He takes a long, long time to climb down, and I find myself holding my breath longer than I need to. The stairs slowly rise up into the attic, and the trapdoor gently closes.

  I exhale. Out the window, the pastor ambles to his car, the car lights flash, and he backs up and pulls onto Rimrock Road.

  I text madly, Get here! Now! He’s gone!

  No response. Damn it. C’mon, Aisha. C’mon.

  I hurry over to the stairs and try to push the trapdoor open. It won’t budge. I check my phone again. Nothing. I call, figuring maybe she’ll hear the ring.

  And then I hear a ringtone — something sort of jazzy — playing within the house, and the stairs are pulled down, and there’s Aisha at the bottom, smiling at me.

  “Thank God,” I say. “He got a call and left.”

  “Who do you think made the call? Give me a little credit,” she says. I’m about to climb down when she adds, “We oughtta take the stuff — the box. Clearly can’t stay here. He comes and goes too much.”

  I figure, What the hell? I pass the box to her. I climb down, we close the hatch, and we run out the back door as quickly as we can.

  BACK IN MY dad’s basement, Aisha explains what she had to do to get me out of there. She wanted to call Pastor Logan right away, but she didn’t have his number. My mom was on the phone with someone back in New York, so Aisha bugged my dad, who was not too happy that she actually wanted to speak to the pastor. He almost didn’t give her the number, but finally relented, telling her she was crazy for wanting to talk to some religious dude.

  “I’m sorry,” she explains. “I know you must have been freaked when I left you up there.”

  “I was fine,” I say, lying.

  The first thing we take out of the box are a stack of letters, some opened and most not. Every single envelope looks like it’s been through a flood. In some cases, the ink has washed off entirely. In others, it’s just been smudged beyond recognition.

  On one, I can just about make out a postmark with the date October 19, 1988. The place it comes from, however, I can’t decipher — only what appears to be an S or an E as the first letter. On another, the month and day are unreadable, but the year appears to be 1985. The stamp is Duke Ellington, and it’s twenty-two cents.

  There seem to be about twenty of these letters. A few have opened from the moisture, but I can tell that the letters inside have never been removed or read. I take one out of an open envelope, and the ink has bled over the entire piece of stationery and dried.

  “Do you think these are from your grandfather to your dad?” Aisha asks.

  I don’t even have to answer, because I lift away an old, empty photo frame, and underneath, in a plastic baggie, is another opened letter. I grab it and just about tear the baggie open. Aisha takes the box and keeps digging.

  The letter is short, and it’s in the same handwriting as the letter my grandfather sent to the pastor. Unlike most of the other letters, this one has no water damage. I read it out loud.

  I look up at Aisha in amazement. She returns the look.

  “You think my dad ever saw this?” I ask.

  “He said he never heard from him again. And yet this is open,” Aisha says. Her eyes are wide. Wider than I’d expect, like she’s even more shocked by all this than I am. “You ready to get your mind blown?”

  “Um,” I say. “Try me?”

  Tentatively, she hands me another opened letter. It isn’t waterlogged, and it is very readable.

  “It was stuck on the side, like it was hidden away on purpose,” she tells me.

  It is postmarked December 21 of last year, no return address. I look at Aisha. “Holy —”

  “I know,” she says, blinking. “I know.”

  She watches as I open the letter.

  The handwriting is a little different now — maybe older, more shaky, the letters less controlled, perhaps. Like my grandfather grew up over the course of thirty-two y
ears.

  I feel my head go numb, and I struggle for air. “My grandfather is alive! And the pastor knows it. Holy …”

  “I know,” Aisha says. “This is crazy.”

  “You want to be there when I show it to my dad?”

  She shakes her head hard. “Not my drama. I’ll stay down here.”

  My heart pounds as I climb the stairs. My dad. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who takes things well, at least not without alcohol. But this is good news. Shocking news, maybe, but also good. His dad is alive.

  He answers his door bleary-eyed, and I quickly sniff. I don’t smell any alcohol on him, but I’m not sure which is better — him drunk or him not drunk — for something like this. “Hey, kiddo,” he says.

  “Hey.” Suddenly I’m at a loss for words.

  “Your lesbian friend wanted to talk to the pastor. I don’t know about that girl,” he says.

  I laugh. “She’s something, all right.”

  “Pretty, and nice,” my dad says, and I wonder if he knows just how pretty I think she is.

  “She’s cool. So I have to ask you something. Did you ever see this?”

  I hand him the letter from 1982 first. I don’t want to freak him out all at once.

  He brings the letter close to his face and squints, and then he holds it as far away from his face as he can and strains his eyes.

  Something registers. He looks up at me, shocked. “Where the fuck did you get this?” He thrusts the letter back at me, and I take it.

  “I … We found it in a box.”

  “How the …? What the …?” He stumbles backward a couple of steps.

  “Dad,” I say, walking toward him.

  He puts his arms out to stop me from following him. His face is a mask of pain. Agony.

  “Don’t you ever,” he yells, his voice thin. “Don’t you … Did I ask you to — fucking …”

  He grabs his chest and he starts to cough, and then he keeps coughing and coughing. I stand there, paralyzed. My mother comes running. By the time she gets to him, his face is turning slightly blue and I’m still standing there like a helpless moron.