‘Of course,’ Oddodd said. ‘Of course I am your friend.’
McUlney sighed peacefully and did not breathe again. Oddodd felt his spirit depart.
The homunculus stood for a time as he was, allowing himself to be sad, though he was also gratified that he had provided some measure of comfort in his friend’s last moments. Despite having been so long detained in that room, he felt in no hurry to depart. He was determined not to allow McUlney’s body to suffer indignity. He retrieved the hasty will from the floor and set it on the table beside McUlney’s chair. He found a pen and wrote, with some difficulty, the address of the beneficiary mentioned in the note at the bottom of the page, which his former master had failed to do. He was unsure how to notify anyone that the body awaited retrieval. The house had no phone, and mail was retrieved on extremely rare occasions from a box at the post office.
As daylight bloomed, Oddodd made several trips from the house to a spot near the roadside, where he built a pile of papers and wood. When he thought it a satisfactory height, but not so large that the house might be endangered by wayward ash, he set fire to the pile. He retreated behind the house and watched the plume of black smoke rise in the clear morning air.
A white Range Rover, the third vehicle to pass, pulled over to the side of the road. A man got out and circled the fire. He seemed about to leave, but thought better of it, turning back to the house and calling, ‘McUlney? Are ya in there?’ He called twice more before he stepped onto the porch and saw the open door.
Oddodd watched two men from the coroner’s office load the stretcher and the vinyl-bagged body into the van. After they were gone from sight, he went back into the house. He put a few items of doll’s clothing into a sandwich bag. He didn’t want to risk damaging the bonsai, so he left them inside the curio, but he did not shut the door. He placed the key on the chessboard. He was surprised by the weight of nostalgia as he did so. It seemed to him he should want to separate curio and key as far as possible. Had he some perverse, lingering hope to return to how things were, even if he knew that could never be? The recliner was empty, the glass beside it empty, the house empty.
Oddodd began to cross the fields towards Roseberry Topping, towards the moors. He had no hope that he would see anything different from what he had seen the day before, from the hill or in the vale or on the flat fields, but he had to try. What else could he do? Where should he go? Perhaps this time, he would see something. Perhaps this time, the ley lines wouldn’t be dark. Maybe somewhere in the world there really was a huntsman’s bogle, or an intractable hob, or even a terrible barghest waiting to chase him up a tree. What could he do but search for the hidden portal that led away from his vast prison of fields, forests, mountains, oceans?
A BLOOD WITHOUT BLOOD
A comrade-in-arms at The Akron Beacon-Journal once defined ‘human interest’ for me as ‘all the news that’s not news’. I had no reason to take offence at the time. I was just another grunt a few years out of college soon to go from chasing an exposé that would change the world to fighting for his job during a down economy and the digital transition. Dreams of winning a Pulitzer for your twelve-part ‘Righteous Justice for the Downtrodden’ series take a back seat to questioning your own ethics when you’re clawing for assignments or embellishing wire stories enough to justify your byline. The official line handed down from the publisher was ‘last in, first out’, but it soon became apparent that the more seasoned and more expensive writers of the ‘Old Guard’ were just as likely to be shown the door. After enough Monday mornings found me still at my desk, I started to believe that the sky might not fall, or, hell—maybe I had a little talent. Or maybe I was just cheap enough to keep around.
As relative calm settled over my professional life, I was afforded the opportunity to become cynical. I admit this development lacked novelty. The dubious blessing of an insider’s view had been conferred upon me. Seeing what goes on behind the scenes can be disheartening, especially when you can’t report on it, though no frustration compares to watching the public ignore what you are able to spotlight. When you hope to incite outrage and fail, the anger stays home. I did not want to hate humanity, but I was losing my will to fight on their behalf, and, as my commitment to crusading wavered, my work suffered. I wanted to be one of the warriors of my profession; I discovered I was not. At least I can be proud to have considered one option untenable: I refused to embrace a future as a curmudgeon at such a tender age.
I began to realise my expectations and my approach might be at issue. I started to wonder if the ‘smaller’ news items didn’t carry greater truth and that their slighter touch might connect more universally. The headlines were disposed towards fear-mongering; it was the prevalence of this emotional bludgeoning which made me think other messages needed to be shared. I began to think that ‘news’ could obscure truth; the general upswing of partisan reportage only strengthened my conviction. I found myself frequently contemplating a passage by Kundera, ‘she knew nothing of the major problems of our times, the problems she lived with were trivial and eternal’.
I came to understand that my crisis of confidence in my role as a journalist was rooted in my conceit. Shouldn’t the public servitude of the fourth estate be both the root of its existence and its greatest aspiration? If so, then my job was to serve in the manner in which I could excel. I found that to share stories of people with people, to show humanity their humanity, was to tell them, ‘You are not alone’; with every other inch of column space warning them to be on guard against a world they were powerless to influence, the message seemed one of great worth.
Soon, I was eagerly accepting the smaller items others were glad to be rid of. It was refreshing to interact with people who were guileless. I discovered a breadth of experience I hadn’t known existed. I wasn’t writing about the mundane, but rather the everyday exceptional. It was not long before I was pigeonholed by my bewildered editors. For some reason I was shocked to hear that I was now the ‘human interest’ guy in the newsroom. I realised that my definition of ‘human interest’—hearts and flowers purple prose from shit-grinned syndicated columnists and staff writers dodging controversy while chasing retirement—needed revising.
Key to adjusting my attitude was accepting that I need change little in my writing style. A certain flair for verbosity that should have steered me towards features to begin with (which the reader has doubtless noticed I’ve given free rein for this piece) was well-suited for the subject matter. Conversely, I found maintaining the ‘straight news’ habit of eschewing loftier interpretation still served the stories. It was better to set the scene and introduce your subject with reserved judgment; a pithy summation might complete the piece, but any moral conclusions to be drawn from it were best left unstated.
I hope this lengthy introduction has instilled some confidence in the reader regarding my perceptions of self and my surroundings, has dispelled any notions of prejudice against my subject, and has demonstrated my sound reasoning. To no degree does it serve my story but to establish my veracity, but I think it essential for that purpose and I am gracious for your patience. Because, Brother, have I ever buried the lede.
All stories are about people. The subject might be the hero dog that saves a drowning boy, but the story is about the gratitude and relief of the boy’s parents and our admiration for the dog’s dedication (or, if you prefer, selflessness—the awarding of which anthropomorphism is proof that the dog only serves to reflect our values). Most ‘hard’ news stories involve how people relate to other people, through politics, religion, business, violence, etc. Human interest stories tend towards showing the relation of the individual with the ‘softer’ concepts that inform his or her life—community, service, or family. Not infrequently, however, I’m called upon to investigate how a person relates to things, often through a peculiar hobby. That’s when the story can get weird.
Collectors are common subjects, but present little mystery beyond their obsession. They are the same the world ov
er, regardless of the objects that arrest their passions. Some guy somewhere has got a lot of something, and a few of those somethings are his favourite. You want to write a good story about a collector? Take good pictures.
Inventors can be more troublesome to profile. That new product you saw on TV or at the supermarket? It turns out a couple of drinking buddies two towns over invented it in a garage. Unfortunately, they moved the hell away as fast as their money could take them and are too busy now to even bother rubbing it in their former neighbours’ noses. If you get to them before the product takes off (or as it waits in interminable purgatory at the U.S. Patent Office), or if the product is only so useful, then you have a feel-good ‘that thing you thought of?—maybe someday this could be you’ story to accompany a photo of that irrepressible, galumph-y smile splayed across the face of every civilian first-time newsmaker. The ‘lifers’ can be damn depressing, though. These are the inventors who come up with things that serve no consumer niche, like the cuckoo toaster (and, hey, I liked that one) or that couldn’t possibly work, like the luck amplifier (complete with no moving or electrical parts or explanation of function). It’s hard to write about that breed without sounding condescending, and I’m not helping anybody with that sort of story.
And then there are the folk artists, scattered about the countryside like weird seeds on unlikely winds, or hidden in their over-cluttered eyesore backyards, or lurking in dilapidated industrial buildings in lousy neighbourhoods that will never become gentrified. These are the people who spice the stew: painters who never once mixed a colour, found-object contraption-builders, and creators of gloriously primitive and often absurd ‘representational’ art. Every one of them is a character, whether taciturn or ebullient, playful or driven, talented or not.
When I heard rumours of a man in postage-stamp Brun, Ohio (south of Loudonville, with the Mohican State Forest between them), who might be a bit of an artist and an inventor, my curiosity simmered. My investigation became inevitable when, during a chance conversation, a curiously reticent Zanesville mechanic implied in unkindly tones that the man might be a sort of a collector, as well. With no grander plans for the weekend than beers and brats on Sunday, I drove out to Brun on the Friday before Memorial Day.
Brun is situated on a county two-lane road that modestly asks you drop your speed to 45 m.p.h. for a half-mile on your way through. An offset pair of single-lane drives on the west end of town each lead to a cluster of farm buildings. Not more than a dozen residences are visible along the south side of the road, opposite an abandoned gas station and a building that seems to serve as both market and diner and whose hand-painted roadside sign proudly advertises their ‘BAIT’. I thought about stopping in to soak up the local colour and get an observer’s opinion of my subject to go with directions, but as the last became immediately unnecessary, I decided to forgo the former until after the interview.
Clearly visible across the fallow fields on the north side of the county road was an enormous blister of twisted metal in the midst of a fortress of junk. There could be no question as to my destination. On the eastern outskirts of town a dirt road sprouted from the paved one and led back to the fenced cathedral of ruin. When I slowed and signalled to turn on to the dirt road, something curious happened—my car’s engine sputtered. I’d never had any trouble with her before. I’m no ‘car guy’ but, out of necessity, I spend a lot of time driving, so I’m always careful to keep to my maintenance schedule. Predictably, this occurred right after the warranty expired, but I was still surprised. (For the record—she was a Toyota Corolla (engine built in Buffalo, West Virginia, thankyouverymuch.)
After encouraging, ‘Come on, girl,’ my car resumed normal operation and we proceeded down the path to the junkyard. I thought it might add a nice touch to the article to include that my car was ‘scared’ of the auto graveyard and the imposing structure at its centre.
The fence around the compound was a horror in itself—Herr Frankenstein would doubtless have approved of the writhing patchwork of different heights of chain-link fence abutting each other and overlapping rippled, rusted sheet metal punched and tied with wire around jutting two-by-fours, the whole chimera tracing something like a circle. If there was a gate, it had been swung open. Proud pillars of fractured telephone poles loomed to mark the entrance. The pistons in my Corolla skipped unevenly as I idled between them. The lot covered a dozen acres or more, and though there was evidence of all sorts of accumulated trash (cords of warped wood, sun-bleached metal and plastic signs in a heap, a row of commodes that seemed almost embarrassed to be there, like garden gnomes at a shooting range), the main component of the yard was automotive—which is a charitable summation of ‘bent, burned, and otherwise brutalised cars, vans, and trucks’.
But the thing that dominated the yard was a sculpture of sorts, or a machine out of nightmare. The path from the entrance ran unobstructed to the monstrous mound before circling the forty-foot diameter base. I was aghast, enthralled, and yet mysteriously disgusted by the thing. I don’t remember turning off the engine, but I stopped.
I got out and examined the dark attraction more carefully. It was composed entirely of cars—bits and pieces and mangled slabs of cars, stacked atop each other or jammed together. Some of the vehicles were nearly whole, though those seemed to have suffered worst, compacted to a quarter of their original size, little more than malformed bricks. Most sections were only parts of vehicles vaguely assembled in odd formations: loose tyres and doors jutting at odd angles, single body panels resembling a loose carapace, rear-view mirrors affixed vertically in a long row like piano keys or teeth. Black-oiled engines and chrome struts were visible behind the outer shell, connected by wiring strung like nerves over flexible plastic arteries and wrapped around axles.
None of it made sense. There was no aesthetic reasoning to it, no pattern in its form, and no discernible form beyond ‘lump’. The savage intricacy of the interior seemed to indicate function, but how any part of the thing could be induced to move was entirely beyond me. (I wondered if any of the lights worked, but somehow I knew that the last thing I wanted was to see this foul aberration lit up at night.) I could not even trace a larger rhythm born of mania; despite the apparent obsession fuelling its builder, there appeared to be no consideration as to how each section might relate to the whole, and it was unclear whether the component parts had been damaged in accidents or in assembly, or if any attempt to undo damage had ever been made. It should have evoked no greater reaction than amusement, but I hated it and I feared it, even as I found it also curiously saddening and curiously right, which made it exactly what I came to see—a curiosity.
‘Yup,’ said a voice from behind me, as though agreeing with my mental assessment.
I turned to see a man in grey-tan, smudged coveralls and matching cap. He was tall and thin, early thirties, with sleepy eyes under bushy auburn brows. Three ‘o’s followed in a row—the bulb at the end of his nose, his small, slack mouth, and his knobby Adam’s apple. He didn’t look at me; he looked at the sculpture-machine. I wondered if he knew what I thought because everyone who saw it thought the same thing, or if it didn’t matter exactly what anyone thought and ‘yup’ was his unfailingly appropriate comment. He didn’t expand on it. It would have been easy to guess that I had been in awe of the thing as I had made no indication I saw him, despite the fact that he seemed to be in the middle of washing a red pick-up and had probably been doing so the whole time I’d been on the lot.
‘Well, that’s a helluva thing,’ I prompted, going so far as to jab a thumb back over my shoulder as though it were necessary to indicate the referenced object.
He passed on it, indicating instead my poor Corolla with a ‘yonder’ up-nod. ‘Car trouble?’
‘As a matter of fact, yeah—but not until right before I turned in here.’
‘Ayup.’ He tossed a soaked sponge absently into a bucket by the truck. ‘It’s got an influence. The cars around here are used to it.’
I acted
dubious even though I already half-believed him. ‘Do you mean to say that this—thing here, this caused my car’s engine to sputter?’
‘Couldn’t rightly say,’ he said after a pause.
I felt my tact was failing. If I wanted him to open up about the sculpture-machine (and I definitely did), then I’d have to play along; I got the sense he had no interest in conversing with an ‘unbeliever’. It was going to be a hard sell if I introduced myself as a journalist, but it would have been unethical of me to omit the fact.
‘Well, I have to say I find that fascinating—and I bet my readers would, too. Sir, I’m a reporter for the Akron Beacon-Journal. Charlie Wright. Pleased to meet you.’ I extended a hand and he gave it a damp shake. ‘It’s really incredible what you’ve built here. I’d heard about it but I didn’t believe it ’til just now. I mean, look at it! And now you tell me it’s got something even more to it than just being an awesome—well, you tell me: Is that there a sculpture or a machine or what do you call it? Hey—I didn’t get your name . . . ?’
‘Clint Boercher.’
I had him spell it for me. He still seemed wary. One trick I learned early: Prime them on the subject you want to talk about, then start them talking by asking about something more innocuous. ‘How long have you had the yard, Clint?’
‘Mmm.’ He kicked the dirt. ‘I usedta come out here after school. Didn’t want to go home ’cause mom was a drunk. She wasn’t too mean, really, but I didn’t like bein’ around her like that.’
I wisely remained silent as he chewed over that for a minute. He seemed to be thinking maybe he’d let on too much to a stranger, but then he raised those scraggly brown caterpillars as though he’d decided, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’.
The Hidden Back Room Page 14