by Hamill, Ike
“That would be nice of you,” the man says.
They roll out fast, leaving me on the porch.
I watch the cloud of dust on the road. It just hangs in the air. There’s no wind to disperse it, so it remains frozen in time. That’s like Mr. Engel’s house, I suppose.
I pause at the doorway, having second thoughts. It was presumptuous to go into his house the first time, but the door had been open and I had heard a moan. It seems even more rude to go in a second time. What am I going to do, rifle through his possessions looking for a phone number?
“Yup,” I say.
I wish the paramedics had stuck around a little longer. Even better, I wish I had asked Mr. Engel who to call on his behalf.
“He’ll do that,” I say to myself.
As soon as he’s feeling a little better, I’m certain that they’ll ask him who to call. Old people know phone numbers, right? I would be hard pressed to come up with one, but I’m sure Mr. Engel has at least one phone number at his disposal. If not, the police will probably come over and do an official search for his address book, right? Who am I kidding, they won’t have to. They’ll be able to track down his next of kin.
I actually turn and start back towards my truck. The sun is searing.
The sun beats down on me as I slow to a stop. I’m running away. It’s that simple. The old man, delirious from the heat, has gotten into my head. It was a creepy situation. I shouldn’t be ashamed of that. However, I should be ashamed that I’m giving up before I notify his relatives that he is on the way to the hospital. It could be hours or days before he’s lucid enough to tell them who to call.
My shoulders slump and I turn back around.
I’m not going to let some childhood fear from twenty years ago stop me from doing the right thing, am I?
Then again, isn’t this how things always go wrong in the movies? You ignore a gut feeling and then you’re doomed.
(Upstairs is even hotter.)
Upstairs is even hotter.
It feels like I’m moving through superheated fluid that burns me as I walk. I can only take tiny sips of air. The dust upstairs smells like it’s roasting.
Mr. Engel’s address book is on a telephone table next to his dresser. I grab it and try to keep my eyes to myself. I’m doing him a favor, but it was an unrequested favor. It wouldn’t be right to let my eyes wander.
He keeps a very tidy bedroom.
A comb and a brush are aligned perfectly on his dresser. The seams of the summer quilt are parallel with the edges of his bed. A pair of shoes and a pair of slippers are tucked under a bench. My uncle had a similar bench next to his closet. It put him a little closer to the floor so he could tie his shoes more easily.
In Mr. Engel’s closet, the shirts hang on one side and the pants on the other.
I shut the closet door.
“What am I doing?” I whisper. Sweat is pouring off of me. Any longer and I’ll run out of sweat. Mr. Engel will find my mummified remains when he finally comes home.
I’m almost out the door when I remember one more thing.
“The fan,” I say, snapping my fingers. I turn for the kitchen. “That thing will burn the place down if I leave it running.”
The sign over the bar says, “Work is the curse of the drinking class.” I point at it and nod as I pass.
Wiping my fingers first, and then pinching the plug delicately, I work it loose from the outlet and the fan spins down without shocking me. I might as well mop up the puddle from the ice cube with the dish towel, too. With those things done, the kitchen is back in order. I hang the towel over the edge of the sink to dry.
The hook is no longer through the eye.
I stand there, blinking at it and trying to remember.
I latched the door to the cellar twice, didn’t I?
This time, I listen to my gut. Without turning my back on that cellar door, I break for the doorway and I don’t slow down until I’m out on the porch. Holding my breath and clenching my teeth, I shoot a hand back inside and pull the front door shut. I don’t leave it partway open, like Mr. Engel had it.
That house is closed up tight.
Home
(I'm very proud of myself.)
I’m very proud of myself.
Back at home—I’ve decided to call it “home” instead of “Uncle Walt’s house”—I sit down and play detective. The fans are spinning full blast and the Mountain of Pure Rock is supplying a solid block of Aerosmith.
Mr. Engel’s address book is flat on the table in front of me.
The reason that I’m proud of myself is because I have deduced a clever way of determining which of the phone numbers might be valid.
The older entries are written in pen with a steady hand. Some of those are just a name and four digits. Back when Uncle Walt moved in, you only had to dial four digits for a local number. The more shaky the handwriting, the newer the entry. I figure that if I’m going to find a living relative, it will be one of the penciled in numbers that’s hard to read. Also, friends and businesses are listed with a first and last name. I find the family in the E section, but no last name is listed.
I tap my temple and smile.
“E is for Engel. I knew all that education was going to pay off one day.”
The radio reminds me that I’m listening to the Muh-Muh-Muh-Mountain of Pure Rock.
I lean way back in my chair and pull open the refrigerator door so I can grab the soda that I stashed in the crisper. Uncle Walt’s refrigerator is practically brand new compared to Mr. Engel’s. Uncle Walt wasn’t sentimental about appliances, except his washer and dryer. Those things are both thirty years old, at least. They’re simple, white, and perfectly functional.
In the E section, I find entries for Greg, Denise, and Amber. My finger pauses under Amber. Her number is mostly fours, eights, and twos. In Mr. Engel’s handwriting, those digits are the most discernible. If I have to try Greg, I’ll be guessing between threes and fives.
The phone rings and I plug my other ear against the noise of the fan.
I talk to Amber for a couple of minutes. At the beginning of the call, she sounds suspicious that I’m trying to sell her something. It gets awkward again when I don’t know where they actually took him. She gets on top of her emotions and manages to thank me several times. Then, she’s off to make arrangements for one of the family members to come visit. I tell her to stop by if she makes the trip. She politely blows off that invitation.
I never found out where she lives or how she’s related. I didn’t even find out Mr. Engel’s first name.
When I close the address book, it crosses my mind that I should put it back where I found it.
I laugh out loud, tilting my head back towards the ceiling.
“No, thank you,” I say.
There’s no mailbox to drop the address book in, so I’ll probably put it in a big envelope and mail it back to Mr. Engel. I don’t even plan on slowing down the next time I pass his house.
The Mountain of Pure Rock starts to play a Beach Boys song and I raise my eyebrows and nod appreciatively. Before it can get to the chorus, there’s the sound of a needle scratching across a record and they blast Metallica at me.
I sigh.
(How do you know what to throw away?)
How do you know what to throw away?
I’ve always lived fairly unencumbered. When I was growing up, Mom and I moved around several times. She never had a great reason, as far as I could tell. The grass is always greener I suppose. It would be the middle of summer and she would come home with pictures or pamphlets of some place that was a few hundred miles away.
“Doesn’t it look wonderful?” she would ask.
Nobody would put out a pamphlet for a place that didn’t make it look wonderful. They don’t photograph the dirty grocery store with the water-stained ceiling and dusty shelves. They wouldn’t write about how the police have given up trying to keep the drug dealers away from the elementary school. Tourist pamphlets lie
, and they’re not meant to entice people to move to a place anyway. They’re meant to get you to spend a vacation hiking up to the top of Mount Syphilis, or whatever. That’s not something a local person would ever do anyway.
But that’s what she would use to try to get me excited about an upcoming move.
I have to admit that I was always pretty willing to move regardless. A move to a new neighborhood and a new school is like a fresh start. I wouldn’t have to worry about the bad impression that I had made with the principal of the old school. I wouldn’t have to worry about the fact that I had shoplifted from the drug store and wasn’t allowed to go in there anymore.
We tossed most everything—furniture, clothes I had grown out of, and toys that I didn’t play with—and we moved. This happened several times when I was growing up.
I took that family tradition and kept it going after I graduated from college and lived on my own. I would work in some generic cubicle for a company that did whatever. Then, a couple of years later, I would pick up and go to the next place. It wasn’t until Kimberly that I felt the need to put down roots and build a life in a place. That was over in New York. When she died, I was set adrift again.
Now, I don’t know what to throw away and what to keep.
My uncle kept all this stuff, so he must have thought that he would want it one day. He had VHS tapes of how to train a colt. As far as I know, he had never trained a colt. Maybe he was planning to one day. I toss them out since I got rid of the VCR on the last trip to the dump.
He had a stack of Fine Furniture magazines. Each one was tabbed with sticky notes that had little messages to himself.
“For the foyer,” he wrote about a blanket chest.
I’m not sure whose foyer he meant. His house—my house—doesn’t have a foyer. The front door, that I have never seen used, opens to the living room. The side door opens to the kitchen. If you come in through the shed, you are in the back of the pantry.
“Foyer,” I say. I toss the magazine in the recycle bin.
I could throw everything away, I suppose.
Nobody will ever care about any of this stuff. All the memories associated with this place are going to die with me. I don’t have anyone to pass them along to. Uncle Walt never had any kids. Me and my mom were the last of his family. Now, it’s just me.
I lean back against the wall. I’m surrounded by piles of memories, trying to decide which ones to discard. I don’t have to make the final decision tonight. For the moment, I’ll get rid of anything that doesn’t resonate with me personally. Uncle Walt is dead. His plans for a blanket chest should be buried too. I keep the magazine that has plans for a weathervane. That’s something that I was going to help him build. He taught me how to weld and hammer metal into different shapes. We discussed the most appropriate symbol for his farm. In the end, we decided that the weathervane should be two animals rearing up on their hind legs, like you might see on a coat of arms. I said it should be a horse and a deer. Uncle Walt had wanted a pig and a ram. We had settled on horse and ram. He already started to pound his ram out of a sheet of copper. I drew the outline of my horse, but I haven’t cut it out yet. The magazine will tell me how to make the base and the swivel.
That one, I keep.
I’ve had enough sorting for the night. All the windows are open so the cold air might infuse the house while I sleep. I walk around, making sure the doors are locked and lights are out.
Uncle Walt never locked the doors.
I stop and look through the kitchen window. Everything is perfectly still out there in the moonlight. It would be a good night to go up to the deck on top of the barn and look at the stars. That’s the kind of thing that should be shared with someone else though. I’m afraid that if I go up there alone, I won’t know what to do with the odd thoughts that occur up there. If you have someone to share them with, they aren’t so frightening.
In the distance, I hear the train whistle.
“Nope,” I say.
I close all the windows on the first floor and lock them.
(The night is long.)
The night is long.
It seems to get hotter and hotter throughout the night. When I wake up at three, I’m covered in sweat and the moonlight coming through the window is so bright that I swear I can feel the heat on my skin.
Uncle Walt’s last bedroom in this house was down on the first floor. There was a period of time there, just before the end, when he couldn’t use the stairs reliably. He had his bed set up in the dining room. After he died, I moved it back upstairs. I offered to come stay with him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“I’m sure you have plenty more important things to do,” he would always say.
Back then, I was lying to him. I was lying to myself, too. I always thought that things might turn around any second. In reality, my career had been over for a while. I never thought that Uncle Walt would die. He was always the strongest person I knew.
I wonder if that’s how Amber thinks of Mr. Engel.
Of course, as soon as his name pops into my head, I remember the hook and eye. That cellar door refused to stay shut. It must have been something odd about the framing of the house. There’s probably a twist in the doorframe that puts pressure on the door and makes the hook wander out of the eye.
Yes, I know. These are the kind of things that one tells oneself at 3am. In a movie, this type of denial inevitably leads to death. But what’s the alternative? Even if I admit that there might have been a murderer down in the cellar, how would they have unlatched the hook from the eye from the other side of the door? To do something like that, they would have to be a supernatural murderer. If something like that exists, then there’s no sense in fearing it.
Hear me out.
It makes sense to fear and take precautions against an axe murderer or a serial killer because those are the types of threats that someone might defeat. But if there really are vampires down in Mr. Engel’s cellar, and they really can unhook latches from the wrong side of the cellar door, then what’s the point in fearing them? How can I survive a monster who possesses telekinesis? Being afraid of vampires is like being afraid of asteroids. You’re going to die whether or not you acknowledge their existence, but at least ignorance is blissful.
Unless.
Unless vampires are very territorial and I could just move away.
My original plan was to clean out Uncle Walt’s place and then sell it. It’s only the last day or two that I’ve considered maybe moving here permanently.
Perhaps that’s the decision I have to make.
If I want to stay, then I should deal with the vampires.
If I decide to move, then the vampires can be a problem for the next owners.
I laugh in the darkness and get out of bed.
I need one of the downstairs fans.
(I guess I always liked the strangeness.)
I guess I always liked the strangeness.
One thing I always hated when I was a kid was how my mom was always telling me that I was wrong. It’s like with the neighbor and the trashcans—even after Matt and I brought home the foot, she never really apologized even though I had been right all along.
She said something like, “You could have been seriously hurt. Don’t you dare do anything like that again.”
He was a murderer living right across the alley.
“That’s a matter for the police. You shouldn’t have gotten involved.”
But she wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell her. How were the police supposed to get involved when my own mother wouldn’t listen?
“Listen,” she said, “Am I glad that he has been apprehended? Yes. Am I glad that you involved yourself? No! Next time, no sneaking.”
We never saw eye to eye about that incident. Not once.
For me, the world was full of ghosts, strange phenomena, killers, and UFOs. From my mother’s point of view, I had an overactive imagination and a lot to learn about the world.
It wasn’
t like that at Uncle Walt’s place. He knew that the world was a strange place and he didn’t shy away from any part of it.
One time, my mom and I were visiting him in the winter. It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mom got us really cheap plane tickets somehow and we had used them for a mini-vacation. Sitting around the little table in the kitchen one night, the light above the table had flickered.
“Something wrong with your bulb, Walt?” Mom asked.
He put a finger to his lips and pointed at the light over the sink. This time, the light over the table stayed constant but the light over the sink flickered. It was the same pattern—blink, blink, pause, blink. Next, he pointed at the lights in the living room. My chair legs squeaked on the floor when I whipped my body around to watch. The lights in the living room flickered in exactly the same way.
“For heaven’s sake, Walt, your wiring is so bad that this place is going to burn down one day.”
Uncle Walt waited for the light show to finish before he responded.
“After it’s done in the den, it moves upstairs. I’ve chased it a few times,” he said. He took a sip of his hot chocolate. He made it from scratch with real cream. It was as addictive as heroin.
“Get a qualified electrician out here,” Mom said.
Uncle Walt shook his head. “I haven’t decided if it’s fairies, sprites, or maybe aliens. It’s some kind of visitor and it seems to be harmless enough.”
He pointed to me. “Just remember, foreign and hostile are not synonymous. Don’t judge before you know a thing’s nature. Stay vigilant, but don’t be xenophobic.”
“What’s xenophobic?” I asked.
“Fear of the unknown,” Uncle Walt said. “Some people will simplify it down to fear of foreigners, but it’s actually fear of the foreign. That’s more than just people from another country.”
“It’s an electrical problem, Walt. Stop messing with my son.”