by Jeffrey Ford
Sewer Pipe Hill lay at the edge of the woods, a pregnancy of naked dirt that rose out of the ground and was a perfect launching spot to test out racers. We made go-carts with bicycle training wheels, old baby carriage wheels, the wheels from shopping carts, and wooden milk cartons with one side banged out for a seat, rope for steering, and two-by-fours rescued from the demolition of the dead witch’s shack deep in the woods where the sassafras grew. When we took the boards from her partially dismantled home, we set what was left standing on fire and ran like only we could through the trails and over the fallen trees, through the sticker-bush tunnels.
The witch was in my dreams after that for a while. She really did look like a witch—pimply face and a long nose. She yelled at us in a foreign language and came out of her place with her cane and kerchief and long coat to chase us. When we were just about out from under the trees and sprinting across the school fields, I always heard her laugh, an urgent bird call, an icy hand on the back of my neck. How long had she lived there? A long, long time.
The racers we made weren’t too fast and they invariably crashed at the bottom of the south slope of the hill where it dipped into a three-foot straight drop. It wasn’t about who had the best time but who had the most glorious crash. My brother was in the lead because he was the most dramatic. Whereas Bill Gorman and Lorel Manzo survived worse hits and wipeouts, my brother screamed, flailed his arms as he fell, and followed it up with copious moaning. We were all doubled over, laughing at him. The other kids were even willing to hand him the victory. We ran down the hill to help him out of the wreck of our racer.
That’s when Regina Manzo called out, “Hey, David, what are you doing?” There was David Gorman, bare chested, sneakers and socks already off, removing his khaki shorts. He stood before the maw of the sewer pipe, staring into that big, dark, hole. His brother yelled at him to put his pants on. The older Manzo girl, Lorel, covered her eyes and turned away, but Regina stared and smiled. David walked up to the sewer pipe, knelt into it on all fours, and robotically proceeded to crawl forward into the darkness.
“Come back or I’m telling Mom,” his brother called after him. By the time we made it to the opening of the pipe, all we caught was a flash of his white underwear before he disappeared into the black. “Come back,” we called. “Come back.” “There’s spiders in there.”
“I like spiders,” his voice came quietly echoing to us.
“I’m gonna call the cops,” yelled Lorel.
“What a knucklehead,” my brother said to Bill Gorman.
Bill was in a panic. His parents left him in charge of David all day and were pretty unforgiving if things went wrong. Tears ran down his face. He screamed, “Shut up or I’ll beat you.”
Regina Manzo said, “We can catch him up at the manhole cover.” She took off running up the hill to the field and followed the asphalt walkway that led toward the school’s playground. We tried to catch her, but she was the fastest girl on record. When she reached the spot in the walkway where the round, rusted cover was, she dropped to her knees, leaned forward to put her mouth close to the small hole cut at the rim of it, and shouted. I think she called out his name. When we showed up, she’d turned her head and put her ear to the hole.
“What’d he say?” asked Bill.
“He said to leave him alone,” said Regina.
Bill told Lorel to get on her bike and go tell her mom to call the cops.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” said Lorel. “You’re not my husband.”
“Quick,” Bill cried, “before somebody flushes and he’s drowned.”
My brother took off back toward the hill to fetch his bike.
Bill shoved Regina out of the way and yelled down into the pipe,” What are you doing?”
David must have been right beneath us then. I heard his reply squeeze through the small opening in the manhole cover. His voice rang like an echo in a tin cavern. He said, “Figuring.”
Regina, me, and Lorel all laughed. Even Bill laughed for a second, and then he threatened us that we better shut up.
We stood there in the autumn breeze and sharp sunlight beneath a blue sky in silence until a little while went by and the police showed up. They came in the eastern side entrance to the school fields, having traveled down the packed dirt trail that was Cowpath Road, an ancient route through the woods. They rolled over the remains of broken bottles recently shattered by Bobby Lerner and his gang. Everyone but the adults knew Bobby had a gun and a pocket full of bullets and him and Bobby Shaw and Cho-cho and Mike Wolfe took target practice on forty-ounce Colt 45 bottles they’d emptied. My brother told me just that week he was surprised no one had been shot yet because, as he said, “Lerner’s a totally crazy motherfucker.”
The cops came on, and I was hoping they’d flash the lights, but they didn’t. As they inched across the field (good thing nobody was dying), Regina ran toward them waving her arms over her head, her braids bouncing. When she reached them, they stopped and told her to get in the back seat, and she did.
There were two cops. We all knew them. They were often at the school to give talks about not getting into cars with strange people or not smoking cigarettes. The big one with the dough face, Officer Flapp, seemed stupid as the day is long, even to me at ten years old. The other was taller, thinner, with a kind of rodent face. His upper teeth hung over his bottom lip and he wore murky glasses. They weren’t sunglasses, you know, with lenses that look black in the sun. They were sort of light brown. You could still see through them to where his beady, weasel eyes rapidly shifted back and forth. We called him Officer Weezer, because he looked like a weasel. He spoke first as they got out of the car. Flapp opened and held the door for Regina.
“What have we got here?” His eyes were going a mile a minute behind his shitty glasses.
“David Gorman’s in the sewer pipes,” blurted Lorel Manzo.
“He’s down there?” said the Weeze, pointing at the ground.
“He’s moved on,” said Regina. “He was here a few minutes ago. Who knows where he is now.”
“You gotta find him, please,” said Bill to the cops.
Weeze told Flapp, “Call the fire department.”
“Aye, aye,” was the response, a lot slower than it’s supposed to be.
“Why’s he doing this?” asked Weeze.
“He’s figuring,” said Regina and laughed.
“Jesus,” said the cop and shook his head. “Flapp, tell them to bring Porkchops,” he called to his partner.
A few minutes later the firetruck pulled through the front gates of the school and up over the curb with my brother following on his bike. The siren whooped twice as they approached. I thought they were gonna bring lunch from what Officer Weezer had said, but Porkchops turned out to be this stout, fat hound, like a black and white beer keg on legs. The driver of the firetruck didn’t get out of the cab but rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette. Two other firemen climbed off the back of the truck, all done up—boots, helmets, yellow jackets. Flapp and the Weeze told the firemen what was going on while we listened in. Then Weeze led the way toward Sewer Pipe Hill, Regina Manzo running out in front of them, skipping, doing cartwheels.
It was afternoon by then and the sun was warm even though it was early October. We gathered at the big dark hole and gazed in. Without anything being said, Porkchops walked up to the concrete face the sewer pipe was set in and pissed on it. Then he crawled up into the hole and proceeded forward at the same rate as David Gorman.
“Does that dog know what it’s doing?” asked Officer Weezer.
The fireman with the big mustache shrugged.
A minute later, we heard Porkchops barking in the distance beneath the ground.
“If someone flushes, will he drown?” Bill asked, tears in his eyes again.
The cops and firemen cracked up. Officer Flapp said, “Your mother should’ve f
lushed.”
Come that evening, they weren’t laughing anymore. Me and my brother eventually went home for dinner, and when we returned to the field there were three cop cars, two more firetrucks and an ambulance. The local tv reporters were there, Mr. Torey was there, and most of our neighbors who lived by the school. At one point they had a dozen men crawling through the sewer pipes, cops, firemen, special rescue workers.
Mr. and Mrs. Gorman were there too. By that hour Bill had a black eye and a split lip for his trouble. Mrs. Gorman, crazy red hair, horse teeth, and a jaw that didn’t quit, was smoking like a machine and yelling at the chief of police to stick his ass in a meat grinder. Gorman’s old man, with his watery eyes and drooping earlobes, stood there peering into the hole like he was contemplating maybe taking a powder himself. All I knew about him was that he crafted tiny statues from his own ear wax. I saw a yellow-brown man on horseback brandishing a sabre. He kept it in a matchbox on a piece of cotton.
All through that night, into the morning, and then through the entire next day into the night again the search continued. I overhead one of the firemen say to Mr. Torey that the sewer system beneath the school stretched out for miles in all directions, like a labyrinth beneath the neighborhood. That was the word he used, and when we went home, I tried to look it up in the dictionary, but I couldn’t figure out how to spell it. I asked my mother when she came in to kiss me goodnight, and she said, “It means ‘a maze.’” I thought she meant “amaze” not “a maze.” All I saw were so many pipes going every which way for miles. It made my head spin and left me “amazed.” I fell asleep with that image—a bureaucracy of sewer pipes that reached down to Hell and at the edges of their existence slowly propagated more of themselves.
Funny thing, about a month after all this happened, a miracle occurred. Mr. Boyle, the maintenance man over at Our Lady of Persistent Faith, was down in the distant third basement of that centuries-old church and heard a whimpering noise in the dark. He spun around and trained his flashlight in its direction. It appeared to be the ghost of a dog, and Mr. Boyle said the sight of it made him jump. Boyle was also a volunteer fireman, and as he got closer to the dog he recognized it to be Porkchops. All the creature’s hair had turned pure white. After he was taken to the fire station, it was discovered the dog had gone blind. He was very weak and could barely get up to go outside. He died a few days later and was buried with full honors. My father decided Porkchops must have survived “on a steady diet of mice and turds.”
“But why’d all his fur turn white?” I asked.
“Some crazy shit,” said the old man, shrugged, and went back to reading the Telegraph.
By then pretty much everybody had forsaken the vigil and all hope of ever seeing the lost boy again. Only Bill religiously went to Sewer Pipe Hill and called into the big dark hole, always threatening, hoping for an answer. During that winter, I tried to figure why David Gorman had crawled out of our lives. My mother said of him, “That kid was never right.” He was quiet, one of those people who couldn’t look you in the eye but just give you a bashful glance every now and then. He blushed deeply and chewed on the skin of his thumb knuckle. My father said he caught him one day, knocking his head repeatedly against the wall of the Gorman’s house. They lived next door to us. “He was really banging it,” my father said. “His fucking head must be like a coconut.” David got in trouble back in fifth grade, ’cause he showed his dick to Regina Manzo at recess one afternoon. She kicked him right in the nuts. It turned into a big deal. Torey had Mr. and Mrs. Gorman in and the cops showed up at school. He got beaten black and blue with a strap by his father and was suspended for three days.
My brother had a theory he laid out for me one night when we sat on the southern slope of Sewer Pipe Hill, looking up at the stars. He smoked a cigarette he’d stolen from my mother. The sun had just set and there was a strong cold breeze sweeping across the school fields and through the rattling autumn leaves. “So he crawls in and keeps going,” said my brother, getting ready to launch into his explanation, but I stopped him by asking, “Why?” He sighed, shook his head, and then continued. “So, he’s deep underground, and I’ll bet you he hooks up with the mole men.”
“The mole men?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Which mole men? The ones with a load in their pants, bug eyes, and a zipper in the back of their dirt skin suits? Or the dwarf ones that showed up on Superman—ass heads with a ring of hair like Julius Caesar?”
“The real mole men, with snouts and claws for fingers,” he said. “Not that fake stuff. He probably took over down there and is ruling the mole kingdom, inventing hot dogs and racing cars, machine-guns and sunglasses. He’s got a mole queen and an army.”
“David Gorman?”
“Just being human makes him king, right?
“So, what’s he doing?”
“Planning a revolt against the surface. When the day comes he’ll give the order and the mole men and women and children and their pet dogs will spill up into this world, eat everyone’s faces, and turn everything you know and love into dirt.”
My brother’s theory seemed a sign that we’d thought too much about the disappearance. And then, all at once, the mystifying idea of the escapade seeped out of everybody’s minds like old air out of a basketball in December. We went back to the reality we had before David left his conundrum in our lives. I’d pretty much forgotten it. Only when I was passing by Sewer Pipe Hill in the dark on my way home for dinner did the memory of the weird event spark a burst of adrenalin and set me running scared all the way home. Ignorance was bliss until the week before Christmas when Regina Manzo whispered to me at lunch. “Come over today, I have to show you something.” The brushing of her warm words against my earlobe made it hard to swallow.
Dizzy with curiosity, I went directly to Regina’s house after school. When I rang the bell, she answered and waved me in.
“Is it OK with your mother?” I asked.
Regina took my hand and led me upstairs. “My parents aren’t home,” she said.
“What about Lorel?” My heart had started pounding from the moment she took my hand.
“She’s at cello practice.”
When we reached the second floor, we didn’t turn at either of the bedrooms, but headed like a beeline for the bathroom at the end of the hall. I was blushing; my breathing was jittery. She pulled me inside and shut the door behind us. My legs trembled, and I wondered if she was going to make me watch her take a piss or something. She moved in close to me as if we were gonna kiss, but she was simply reaching around me to get to the light switch. She flicked it on and the place lit up so bright I squinted. Brushing past me, she went to a vanity built into the wall and opened a small drawer.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
She put her finger to her lips and then pointed at the toilet as if it were listening. “Come here,” she whispered.
Standing next to her, I could see the scraps of paper she was holding. Laying them out on the surface of the vanity, she quietly said, “There were a lot more, but I threw a bunch out.” I leaned down to get a better look. All of them were wrinkled, and the ink was blurred as if they’d been left out in the rain. One in which the writing was still legible read, “Come be with me.” Another bore a strange red blotch of a message. I pointed to it and Regina said, “It’s a heart, like on Valentine’s Day.”
I nodded.
“They come up in the toilet after I pee.”
“What?”
“I flush, and in the new clean water, a message bobs up from the dark hole. I try to snatch them out before the ink is smeared so much I can’t read it. I don’t know what some of them are trying to say.”
“Where are they coming from?”
She silently mouthed the words DAVID GORMAN. “He’s in love with me,” she whispered and shook her head like an adult, in resignation and weariness.
>
After that, my recall of the incident goes dry, and when I try to force a memory, all I get is a jumble of faces and voices and the rush of seasons out of order. The only other curio I can add to this cabinet is that thirty years later in a bar in O’Hare Airport on the night of a blizzard when nothing was leaving the ground, I met Bill Gorman. He looked like a sadder, larger version of himself as a kid. He drank fast and hard—double Jack Daniels each go-round. When he laughed, he made the noise but remained expressionless.
I found out that Bill had become a much-sought-after make-up artist in Hollywood, which actually made a creepy kind of sense to me. I asked about his parents, and his response was, “Dead, finally.” We went through the list of stuff either of us could remember from the old neighborhood. There was a lot of “Hey, remember . . . ?” He told me a few things I hadn’t heard, like the fact that Lerner, in a suicide attempt, shot himself in the head but lived to eventually become a priest and that Regina Manzo owned her own tech company and was a millionaire.
Finally, I asked him, “Was there ever anything more about David?” He rubbed his head like a chimp to soothe the bad thoughts and said, “No. The rescue guys finally decided he must have just crawled into one of the hundreds of little passageways down there, got stuck and couldn’t get out. They said that if you get nervous in a tight space your body tends to inflate. Scientists say it’s not possible, but these guys worked underground for decades and swore to it. David got stuck, blew up, and died. Rats ate him. Rushing water washed him away.