The Tilting House

by Tom Llewellyn

  As soon as he left the room, Aaron whimpered, “I’m gonna die!”

  I had to agree. Aaron was going to die.

  I helped Dad in the kitchen, and then we went outside and started covering the bushes with drop cloths. Thinking about Mr. Peat’s visit distracted me so much that I kept fumbling with the corners and turning the cloths the wrong way. I could tell that Dad was trying hard not to yell at me.

  We found a wooden ladder in the side yard. All the rungs tilted, so we knew it must have belonged to the original owner. It made it a little tricky for Dad to stand on.

  “Hold the ladder steady!” Dad yelled from the top rung. He began to roll the first coat of gray-blue paint over the wall of the house. I could almost swear that Tilton House shivered with pleasure. I was surprised at how beautiful the color looked, and suddenly I really wanted to see what the house would look like when Dad was done.

  But I knew I couldn’t spend all morning helping Dad. There was no way to know how much time we had before the vultures claimed their victim. Somehow, I had to find a way to save Aaron. I was so preoccupied that it took me a moment to realize the ladder was tipping. I grabbed it tightly and barely managed to keep Dad from crashing to the ground. “Josh!” yelled Dad. “Please be more careful!”

  Please be more careful. Hadn’t Victor Peat said the same thing at Mrs. Natalie’s front gate? I thought of what else he’d said that day: “I’m nothing without my list. You could say we live and die by the list.” A desperate, crazy idea formed in my head. I let go of the ladder and ran to the front door.

  “Josh! Where are you going?” Dad yelled after me. I didn’t answer. I found Aaron still curled up on the couch.

  “Let’s go see Lola,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I think we can beat Victor Peat and his list. But we’ve got to ask Lola a question first.”

  A minute later, Aaron and I were knocking on Lola’s front door for the first time ever. She looked surprised to see us.

  “What do you want?”

  “Can we talk to you?”

  She stepped back wordlessly and we walked in. I knew our house seemed weird to her—even though she’d never been inside it. But her house—with its complete lack of dust and clutter—seemed weird to me. Someone had polished the bare—level—wood floors in the entryway to a high shine. By contrast, our entryway was always a tilting jumble of shoes, Frisbees, and skateboards. The furniture in Lola’s house, what little there was, looked brand new and uncomfortable. I stood up straighter and wanted to tuck in my T-shirt.

  “We can go up to my room,” she said. We followed her upstairs. The door to her room had a brass plaque on it that read DOLORES’S ROOM.

  “Who’s Dolores?” I asked.

  “I am.”

  “I thought your name was Lola.”

  “Dolores is my full name. Only my mom calls me that, so don’t even think about it.”

  “We wanted to ask you about your stepdad.”

  She opened the door. Her room didn’t look like it was part of the same house. The floor was buried in stuffed animals, CD cases, books, soccer trophies, stacks of drawings, and polished rocks. Aaron picked up a very round, black rock and turned it slowly in his hand.

  “My stepdad’s dead,” said Lola.

  “I know. I’m sorry. But Mr. Peat just came to our house this morning and he was looking for Aaron.” I explained to Lola about the visit and our theory about the list.

  Lola sat down on top of a stuffed elephant on her bed. She stared at me. “I’ve seen the list. Mr. Peat had Jerry’s name on it the day before he died.”

  “That proves it!” I said. “We need to get that list.”

  “I’m dead! I’m dead!” cried Aaron.

  “Shut up,” said Lola, but even Lola couldn’t keep Aaron from sobbing. Lola pulled him in front of her. She cupped his face in her hands and stared directly into his eyes. “Look at me,” she said, surprisingly gently. “We’re going to get that list. If we can destroy it, you won’t die. But you’ve got to stop crying, okay?”

  Aaron sobbed away.

  “If you stop, I’ll let you keep that rock your holding.”

  Aaron looked down at the rock and sniffled loudly.

  “Good job. Now you and Josh get your bikes. I’ll meet you in front of my house in five minutes.”

  I had to admit, when it came to blubbering little kids, Lola was pretty good.

  We rode our bikes to the address on Victor Peat’s business card—the same funeral home we’d been to twice before. There was a sign out front: PEAT AND PEAT. COMPLETE FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS.

  The lobby had dark carpeting, straight-backed chairs, and a black coffeepot oozing steam. I asked a frizzy-haired woman sitting at a desk if Victor Peat was there. She told us he and Ludwig were out calling on prospective clients.

  “They’ll be back this evening at five o’clock for a funeral but won’t be available to meet with anyone until Monday morning. Is there something I can help you with?”

  I mumbled, “No thanks,” and we went outside.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Aaron. “If we don’t get the list before Monday, I’ll be dead.”

  “We go home for now,” Lola said. “And we come back here at five o’clock, for the funeral. That’s our only hope.”

  When we got home, Dad was still painting. He’d made remarkable progress on the front of the house, tilted ladder and all. I told him I’d felt sorry for Aaron and had thought of a way to cheer him up. Dad still yelled at me, so I took my position at the bottom of the ladder again. I stayed there, helping him move the ladder, until four o’clock.

  At four thirty, Aaron and I were in our bedroom, putting on our dressiest clothes—black pants, white shirts, and clip-on ties. Aaron looked horrible. He’d been crying all day and his whole face was puffy and red. At a quarter to five, Aaron and I were sneaking out the back door when we heard Mom call us to set the table for dinner. We made a run for it. Aaron’s life was on the line. We had no choice.

  Lola met us in front of her house. She was wearing a dress and looked years older than me. We pedaled hard until we reached the chapel, where we hid our bikes in the bushes out front and went inside.

  The chapel was crowded, so we sat in the back row. A minister told us all about a man named Joe Lampkin. According to the minister, Joe had worked as a garbage collector, always remembered his nephews’ birthdays, and was a friend to everyone on his route. Between frightened sniffs, Aaron said the dead man sounded like a nice guy.

  “Everyone sounds nice at their funeral,” said Lola. “That’s the rule.”

  In a few minutes, Victor and Ludwig Peat entered the chapel through a side door. They watched the rest of the service quietly, and then Victor Peat went to the front of the chapel and invited all the guests to the reception area, where they could “enjoy some refreshments and reminisce with friends and loved ones.”

  “Ludwig keeps the list in his inside coat pocket,” I whispered to Aaron and Lola. “If we can get him to take off his coat, we can snatch it and get rid of it when we’re safe at home.”

  “How do we get him to take his coat off?” Aaron asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s go to the fellowship room and see what we can figure out.”

  When we entered the reception area, Aaron grabbed my arm and pointed to the punch bowl. “We could get punch and spill it on Ludwig’s jacket. He’d take it off if it was wet.” Lola and I followed him over and watched him fill a glass.

  “It’s too small,” Lola said. “Spill that on him and he’ll just wipe his jacket with a napkin. We need a bigger glass.”

  “No, we don’t,” said Aaron. “We just need more of them.”

  He filled three more glasses and barely managed to pick all four up at once. With four full glasses balanced in his stubby hands, Aaron was ready, but when we looked around for Victor Peat and Ludwig, they were nowhere to be seen.

  “You’ve got to find them!” hissed Aaron. “
I can’t carry these cups around all night! I’m about to drop them as it is.”

  “Follow me,” Lola whispered back. We left the reception area and went into the chapel. All the chairs were empty now. Even Joe Lampkin had been wheeled out. We went upstairs to the office, but it was empty, too. Back downstairs, I looked out the front door and saw the tall, thin man and the short, chubby man walking casually down the sidewalk toward their black Cadillac.

  “Mr. Peat!” I yelled out the door. “Wait!” Both men turned around. We walked quickly to them.

  “How can I help you?” said Mr. Peat, politely.

  Aaron answered by running up to Ludwig and throwing all four glasses of punch at his chest.

  “What are you doing?” Ludwig yelled. “You little brat! You’ve ruined my suit!” He began to remove the drenched jacket, but Victor Peat stopped him.

  “Don’t you see what’s going on here?” said Mr. Peat, his voice low and menacing. “We buried this girl’s stepfather not long ago. And we saw these two boys on our first visit this morning. This young one is Aaron Peshik. His name is on the list.”

  “The list?” said Ludwig. “Oh, I see. It’s the list you’re after. Trying to steal it, are you? Destroy the list and save yourselves? It’s been tried before, you know.”

  “Give it to me,” said Victor Peat.

  Ludwig reached inside his sopping wet jacket and pulled the roll of yellow paper from his pocket. Victor Peat snatched it from him and shrieked.

  “It’s ruined!”

  Punch and ink dripped from the list. From where I was standing, the names looked completely illegible.

  Victor Peat frantically unrolled the paper, spreading it out on the hood of the car. It was nothing but a smeared, soggy sheet. He turned and faced us.

  “Well, young man,” he said to Aaron, “it appears you’ve succeeded. Your name is no longer on the list. I do not know what will happen to you now. You might live forever. Now scat!”

  We scatted. We grabbed our bikes and pedaled home as fast as we could. We were riding so fast, we didn’t slow down for the busy intersection at Eleventh Street. We didn’t see the brown pickup truck barreling toward us. The driver laid on his horn, slammed on his brakes, spun sideways, and slid right at us. We slammed on our brakes, too. I braced myself for the crash.

  The truck stopped two inches from Aaron. The driver yanked open the door.

  “You kids okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You need to be more careful. You could have been killed.”

  “We know,” Aaron said. “Sorry.”

  We pedaled slowly the rest of the way. Aaron thanked Lola for her help. “You’re welcome,” she said, before riding off toward her house. When we opened the back door, Mom and Dad were waiting for us. They were already mad that we’d run off without saying anything, so we didn’t tell them about Aaron’s near miss with the pickup truck. By the time they’d finished yelling at us and hugging us, they’d also forbidden us from riding our bikes for two weeks.

  “I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD,” I said the morning after the incident with Mr. Peat.

  “You don’t look so good, either,” said Mom. She placed her hand on my cheek and frowned. She set me on the couch and snuggled a blanket around me, which I didn’t mind. When Mom left the room, I told Aaron I’d probably gotten sick from all the stress of the day before. He shrugged.

  “I feel great,” he said. “I’m gonna go get some cereal. You want anything?”

  Mom and Dad let Aaron stay home from church with Grandpa and me. Aaron and I sat on the couch watching TV all morning. I nodded in and out of sleep while Aaron swung his feet and sang along with the theme songs. The couch was level now, like nearly all of the furniture in our house. We’d stuck books under the legs at one end, and as long as you sat still, the books stayed in place.

  After lunch, Grandpa limped in and stood in front of the set, blocking our view. “Still not feeling well, eh, kid?” I shook my head. “Seems to me you need a good story to cheer you up. Did I ever tell you how I ended up with this here wooden stump?”

  “Yes,” said Aaron, “but tell it again.”

  “Wasn’t talking to you. Talking to sicko, here.”

  It was Sunday afternoon, which, according to Grandpa, was the part of the week set aside by God Himself for smoking, swapping stories, and taking naps. He shut off the TV and sat himself down in the green chair he’d brought with him when he moved in with us years ago. He pulled out his pipe and began stuffing it with tobacco.

  “Are you going to smoke that in here?” I asked.

  “You think anyone’d notice?” Grandpa said, looking up at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. “Oh, I guess I’d better not, but it’s awful hard for me to tell a story without a pipe to smoke.” He settled back into his seat. “Well now, I been thinking about this ol’ story for a few weeks now, what with Nat’s passing and all. Good man, Nat, but it was his fault I traded in my pink flesh for this here chunk of maple.” Grandpa rapped on his wooden leg with his pipe. “Was his fishing hook that caused all the trouble.

  “It was back when your dad was just born, when I was sharing that little one-bedroom house over in Milton with a baby and your grandma. Needless to say, I was always on the lookout for an excuse to go fishin’. Anyways, it was round about June and we were having a real warm year, so I called Nat and asked if maybe him and me could head out to the Dosewallips and try our luck with the brook trout that had escaped us thus far.”

  “Were you both serious fisherman?” I asked.

  “Oh, Nat was. I’ve never been all that interested in catching fish. All a fish on your line means is that you have to wake up from a perfectly good nap. So we went to our favorite spot, near Brinnon, just as the sun was coming up. I set up under this old cedar tree that had roots growing into the water. Right off the bat, Nat sees a fish jump, so he drops his tackle box, pulls on his waders, and he’s off. Me, I kinda lean back, stick a few salmon eggs on my hook, and cast it out into the water. Next thing I know, I’m snoring away.

  “I wake up in an hour or so and it’s already hot in the sunshine, so I kick my shoes off and dangle my toes in the water. I can see Nat down about a hundred yards, and he’s like a war general executing his attack. My backside’s about numb by this time, so I stand up to stretch. Sure enough, my bare right foot lands on a fish hook. It’d spilled out when Nat dropped his tackle box. It jabs right into the fleshy part of my heel. I pull it out of my heel, barb and all, along with a chunk of my foot the size of a raisin. Hurt like the blazes, and blood is dripping into the water. So I stick my foot back in the river and pretty soon it’s feeling better and I forget about it. At the end of the day, I pull on my socks and shoes and we head back home. ”

  “Did you catch any fish?” asked Aaron.

  “Fish? Come to think of it, I did all right. Just sitting there on the bank, I caught one less trout than Nat that day, and my biggest was bigger than his biggest. I brought ’em home to your grandma, hoping she’d clean ’em for me, but she was too busy with the baby. So I did it myself and fed the innards to the cats.

  “A few days later, my foot started to hurt. I didn’t think much of it that first day. But when I woke up the following morning, it was hurting all the way up to my knee and I could feel my heart beating in my heel.

  “ ‘What’d you do to yourself this time?’ your grandma asked me. I said I didn’t do nothing except step on a little old fishhook. She makes me peel off my sock and takes a look. Well, my foot is swollen tight. The bottom of it is as red as the devil himself, and there’s this black line working its way up my leg.

  “When she sees that black line, your grandma nearly faints dead away. She gets on the phone quick and before I know it she’s driving me over to the doctor’s office. Same drill there: I peel off my sock and Dr. Bruell takes a look and lets out a low whistle. ‘Is it bad?’ I ask him. ‘It’s not good,’ he says. “Blood poisoning.” He makes a phone call and tells me we need to head over
to the hospital in Tacoma. ‘Today?’ I ask him. ‘Right now,’ he says. So your grandma, Dr. Bruell, and I head on over there. A couple of other doctors take a look. They step outside to talk, and then Dr. Bruell and this tall German doctor come back in. Grandma’s standing up and Dr. Bruell asks her to sit down.

  “ ‘Red,’ the doc says to me, ‘the leg’s got to go. You’ve got blood poisoning, and if we wait any longer, it’ll spread up to your heart and you’ll be dead. If we amputate now, we’ll only have to take the leg from the knee down.’

  “Well now, news like that can shake a fella. Grandma’s crying away, asking if there’s anything else they can do, but I knew the doc was givin’ it to me straight and there was no use arguing, so I told him to take it quick. Next thing I know, I’m in an operating room and they’re strapping a mask over my nose and mouth and then I’m asleep.

  “When I wake, I don’t feel anything, which is good, because during my nap the doctors had taken a saw and cut off a good chunk of my leg: bone, meat, and all. I’m so doped up that I can barely remember where I am. Then I do remember and I try to sit upright. I finally manage to reach to where my leg should be, but below the knee, there’s nothing there. All that’s left is a big stump of white bandages soaked red with so much blood that I can smell the iron.

  “Once the dope wore off it hurt like the dickens. It felt like my whole body was on fire. Let me tell you, boys, I was ready to go down to hell to cool off—that’s how hot it burned. They couldn’t give me enough dope to make it stop hurting.

  “I was in the hospital for about two more weeks, and then I finally got to go back home. I’d sit in a chair and stare at the wall and yell for your grandma to bring me things. I about drove her to the nuthouse.

  “I finally got so I could hobble around on crutches, and I made it back to the shop, where I could get along all right if I was sittin’ down. After work, I’d sit in my chair in the living room and growl at your grandma and at your dad, who was just a little baby who hadn’t done a thing wrong—leastways not that I knew about.

  “Finally your grandma couldn’t take any more of it, so she calls Dr. Bruell and he shows up one day for a surprise visit. He asks how I’m doing and I ask him how he thinks I’m doing, what with my leg cut off and all. He says he’d like us to go for a little drive, because there’s a guy he wants me to meet. I cuss back that if I want to go for a drive I’m still capable of driving myself just fine. Our Olds was an automatic, see, and it only takes one foot to operate an automatic, since there ain’t no clutch pedal to push. So Dr. Bruell, he says fine, I can do the driving and he’ll give me the directions.