by Jeffrey Ford
“What happened to the hermit?” asked Jim.
“During a bad winter, someone found him in the middle of the field by his cave, frozen solid. In the spring, they buried him there among the wild asparagus.”
After lunch, we put George on the leash and took him out in the backyard. Mary didn’t go with us because she decided to have a session with her make-believe friends, Sally O’Mally and Sandy Graham, who lived in the closet in her room. Once in a while, she’d let them out and she would become Mickey and they would go to school together down in the cellar.
Jim had the idea that we could use George to track the pervert. We’d let him smell the ladder, he’d pick up the scent, and we’d follow along. David Kelty joined us in our backyard where the ladder again lay propped against the side of the toolshed. For a while, we just stood there waiting for the dog to smell the ladder. Then I told Jim, “You better rev him up.” To rev George up all you had to do was stick your foot near his mouth. If you left it there long enough, he’d start to growl. Jim stuck his foot out and made little circles with it in the air near George’s mouth. “Geooorgieeee,” he sang very softly. When the dog had enough, he went for the foot, growling like crazy, and fake biting all over it—a hundred fake bites a second. He never really chomped down, but he worked a sneaker over pretty thoroughly.
When he was revved, he moved to the ladder, smelled it a few times, and then pissed on it. We were ready to do some tracking. George started walking and so did we. Out of the backyard we went through the gate by Nan’s side of the house, over the slates and under the pink blossoms of the prehistoric mimosa tree to the front yard, and then down the block.
Around the corner was Southgate school, a one-story structure of red brick, which was a big rectangle of classrooms with a courtyard of grass at its center. On the right-hand side was an alcove that held the playground for the kindergarten—monkey bars, swings, a seesaw, a sandbox, and one of those round, turning platform things that if you got it circling fast enough, all the kids would fly off. The gym was attached on the left-hand side; a giant, windowless box of brick that towered over the squat main building.
The school had a circular drive in front with an elongated, high-curbed oval of grass at its center. Just west of the drive and the little parking lot there were two asphalt basketball courts; and then a vast field with a baseball backstop and bases, where on windy days the powdered dirt of the baselines would rise in cyclones. At the border of the field was a high barbed-wire-topped fence to prevent kids from climbing down into a crater-like sump. Someone long ago had used a chain cutter to make a slit in the fence that a small person could pass through. Down there in the early fall, among the golden rod stalks and dying weeds, it was a kingdom of crickets.
Behind the school were more vast fields of sunburnt summer grass cut by three asphalt bike paths. At the back, the school fields were bounded by another development, but to the east lay the woods: a deep oak forest that stretched well into the next town and south as far as the railroad tracks. Streams ran through it, as well as some rudimentary paths that we knew better than the lines on our own palms. A quarter-mile in, there lay a small lake that we had been told was bottomless.
That day, George led us to the boundary of the woods, near the pregnant swelling of the ground known as Sewer Pipe Hill. We stood on the side of the hill where the round, dark circle of the pipe faced the tree line. Some days a trickle of water flowed from the pipe, but now it was bone dry. Jim walked over to the round opening, three feet in circumference, leaned over, and yelled, “Helloooooo.” His word echoed down the dark tunnel beneath the fields of the school. George pissed on the concrete facing that held the end of the pipe.
“X marks the spot,” said Jim. He turned to David. “You better crawl in there and see if the prowler is hiding underground.”
David rubbed his head and stared at the black hole.
“Are you my right-hand man?” asked Jim.
“Yes,” said David. “But what if he’s in there?”
“Before he touches you, just say you’re making a citizen’s arrest.”
Kelty thought about this for a moment.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
Jim glared at me. Then he put his hand on David’s shoulder and said, “He saw your mom’s ass.”
David nodded and moved toward the pipe. He bent down, got on his knees at the opening, and then shuffled forward into the dark a little way before stopping. Jim went over and lightly tapped him in the rear end with the toe of his sneaker. “You’ll be a hero if you find him. They’ll put you in the newspaper.” David started crawling slowly forward and in seconds was out of sight.
“What if he gets lost in there?” I said.
“We’ll just have everyone in town flush at the same time and he’ll ride the wave out into the sump behind the baseball field,” said Jim.
Every few minutes, one of us would lean into the pipe and yell to David, and he would yell back. We couldn’t make out what he was saying, and his voice came smaller and smaller. Then we called a few times and there was no answer.
“What do you think happened to him?” I asked.
“Maybe the pervert got him,” said Jim, and he looked worried. “He could be stuck in there.”
“Should I run home and get Pop?” I asked.
“No,” said Jim, “go up to that manhole cover on the bike path by the playground and call down through the little hole. Then put your ear over the hole and see if you hear him. Tell him to come back.”
I took off running up the side of Sewer Pipe Hill and then across the field as fast as I could. Reaching the manhole cover, I got on all fours and leaned my mouth down to the neat round hole at the edge of it. “Hey,” I yelled. I then turned my head and put my ear to it.
His voice came up to me quite clearly but with a metallic ring to it, as if he were a robot. “What?” he said. “I’m here.” It sounded as if he was right beneath me.
“Come out,” I called. “Jim says to come back.”
“I like it in here,” he said.
In that moment, I pictured his house, his sister Jean with the crossed eyes, his mother’s prominent jaw and horse teeth, her crazy red hair, the little man figures his father fashioned out of the wax from his own enormous ears. “You gotta come back,” I said.
A half-minute passed in silence, and I thought maybe he had moved on, continuing through the darkness. Finally his voice sounded. “Okay,” he said, and then, “Hey, I found something.”
I found Jim sitting on the lip of the sewer pipe, reading a magazine, while George sat at his feet, staring up at him. As I eased down the side of the hill, he said, “Look what George tracked down over by that fallen tree.” He pointed into the woods. “There were some crushed beer cans and cigarette butts there too.”
I came up next to him and looked over his shoulder at the magazine. It was wrinkled from having been rained on and there was mud on the cover. He turned the page he was looking at toward me, and on it I saw a woman with red hair, black stockings, high heel shoes, a top hat, and an open jacket but nothing else.
“Look at the size of those tits,” said Jim.
“She’s naked,” I whispered.
Jim picked the magazine up to his mouth, positioning it right in the middle of her spread-out legs, where the little hedge of red hair grew over her pussy, and yelled, “Hellooooooo.”
We laughed.
I forgot to tell Jim that I had made contact with David. Instead, we moved on to the centerfold. Three full pages of a giant blonde, bending over a piano bench.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Jim, and rapidly saluted her ass four times. Then we flipped the pages quickly to the next naked woman, only to stare and swoon.
As I reached down to pet the dog for his discovery, we heard David inside the pipe. Jim got up and turned around and we both stared into the opening. Slowly, the soles of his shoes appeared out of the dark, then his rear end, as he backed out into daylight. When he stood up an
d turned to face us, he was smiling.
“What’s your report?” asked Jim.
“It was nice and quiet in there,” said David.
Jim shook his head. “Anything else?”
David held out his hand and showed Jim what he had found. It was a green plastic soldier, carrying a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. I moved closer to see the detail and noticed that the figure wore no helmet, which was unusual for an army man. He wore strings of big bullets over his shoulders and his mouth was open so that you could see his teeth gritted together.
Jim took the soldier out of David’s hand, looked at it for a second, said, “Sergeant Rock,” and then put it in his pocket.
David’s brow furrowed. “Give it back,” he said. His hands balled into fists and he took a step forward as a challenge.
Jim said, “Let me ask you a question. When the prowler saw your mother’s ass—”
“Stop saying my mother’s ass,” said David, and took another step forward.
“—did it look like this?” asked Jim, and flipped the magazine so that the centerfold opened.
David saw it and went slack. He slowly brought his hand up to rest with his palm on his cheek and his fingers partially covering his right eye. “Oh, no,” he said, and stared.
“Oh, yes,” said Jim, and then took the magazine and ripped off the bottom fold of the center section, the page containing the big ass, and handed the sheet to David. “This is your reward for bravery in the sewer pipe.”
David took the torn page in his trembling hands, his gaze fixed on the picture. Then he looked up and said, “Let me see the magazine.”
“I can’t,” said Jim, “it’s exhibit A. Evidence. You’ll get your fingerprints on it.” He rolled it up and put it under his arm the way Mr. Mardinella carried the newspaper as he walked down the street on his way home from work every evening.
We spent another couple of hours looking for clues all around the school fields and through the woods, but George lost the scent and we eventually headed home. Every other driveway we passed, David would take his piece of centerfold out of his back pocket and stop and stare at it. We left him standing in front of Mrs. Grimm’s house, petting the image as if it were flesh instead of slick paper.
When we got home, Jim made me go in first and see if the coast was clear. My mother wouldn’t be home for about two hours and Nan and Pop were in their place. I didn’t see Mary around, but that didn’t matter anyway.
Up in his room, Jim slid the loose floorboard back and stowed the magazine. Then he got up and went to his desk. “Here,” he said, and turned around holding a black-and-white-bound composition book. “This is for the investigation.” He walked over and handed it to me. “Write down everything that happened so far.”
I took the book from him and nodded.
“What are you gonna do with the soldier?” I asked.
Jim took the green warrior out of his pocket and held it up. “Guess,” he said.
“Botch Town?” I asked.
“Precisely,” he said.
I followed him out of the room, down the stairs, through the living room, to the hallway that led to the first-floor bedrooms. At the head of this hall there was a door. He opened it, and we descended on the creaking wooden steps into the dim, mildew waft of the cellar.
The cellar was lit by one bare bulb with a pull string and whatever light managed to seep in from outside through the four window wells. The floor was unpainted concrete, as were the walls. The staircase separated the layout between a right and left side, and there was an area behind the steps that allowed access from one side to the other. Six metal poles, four inches thick and six feet apart, supported the ceiling, positioned in a row across the center of the house.
It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer down there in the underground twilight where the aroma of my mother’s oil paints and turpentine mixed with the pine and glittering tinsel scent of Christmas decorations heaped up in one corner. It was a treasure vault of the old, the broken, the forgotten. Stuff lay on shelves or stacked along the walls covered with a thin layer of cellar dust, the dandruff of concrete, and veiled in cobwebs hung with spider eggs.
On Pop’s heavy wooden workbench, complete with crushing vise, there sat coffee cans of rusted nuts and bolts and nails, planes, rasps, wrenches, levels with little yellow bubbles encased to live forever. Riding atop this troubled sea of strewn tools, seemingly abandoned in the middle of the greatest home repair job ever attempted, was a long curving Chinese junk carved from the horn of an ox, sporting sails the color of singed paper created from thin sheets of animal bone, and manned by a little fellow, carved right out of the black horn, who wore a field worker’s hat and kept a hand on the tiller. Pop told me he had bought it in Singapore, when he traveled the world with the Merchant Marine, from a woman who showed him my mother as a little girl, dancing, years before she was born, in a piece of crystal shaped like an egg.
Leaning against the pipe, that ran along the back wall and then out of the house to connect with the sewer line, were my mother’s paintings: The Snows of Kilimanjaro; a self-portrait of her standing in a darkened hallway, holding me when I was a baby; the flowering bushes of the Bayard Cutting Arboretum; a seascape and view of Captree Bridge. All of her colors were subdued, and the images came into focus slowly, like a phantom approaching out of a fog.
Crammed into and falling out of one tall bookcase that backed against the stair railing on the right-hand side were my father’s math books and used notebooks, every inch filled with numbers and weird signs, in his hand, in pencil, as if through many years he had been working the equation to end all equations. I remember a series of yellow journals each displaying in a circle on the cover the bust of some famous, long-dead genius I would have liked to know more about, but when I pulled one journal off the shelf and opened it that secret language told me nothing.
In the middle of the floor on the right-hand side of the cellar sat an old school desk, with wooden chair attached, and a place to put your books underneath. Around this prop, Mary created the school that her alter ego, Mickey, attended. Sometimes, when I knew she was playing this game, I would open the door in the hallway and listen to the strangely different voices of the teacher, Mrs. Harkmar, her classmates, Sally O’Mally and Sandy Graham, and, of course, Mickey, who knew all the answers.
Back in the shadows where the oil burner clanked and whirred and gibbered, there stood a small platform holding the Extreme Unction box, a religious artifact with hand-carved doors and a brass cross protruding from the top. We had no idea what unction was, so could not conceive of it in the extreme state, but Jim told me it was “holy as hell” and that if you opened the door, the Holy Ghost would come out and strangle you, making it look like you just swallowed your tongue the wrong way.
To the left of the stairs, beneath the single bare bulb, like a sun, lay Jim’s creation, the sprawling burg of Botch Town. At one point my father was thinking of getting us an electric train set. He went out and bought four sawhorses and the most enormous piece of plywood. He set these up as a train table, but then the financial trouble descended and it sat for quite a while, smooth and empty. One day, Jim brought a bunch of cast-off items home with him from his early morning paper route. It had been junk day and the garbage men had not yet come. With coffee cans, old shoeboxes, pieces from broken appliances, Pez dispensers, buttons, Dixie cups, ice cream sticks, bottles, and anything else you could possibly imagine being pitched out, he began to build a facsimile of our development and the area around it. It became a project that he worked on a little here, a little there, continuously adding details.
He’d started by painting the road (a battleship gray) that came down straight from Higbee Lane and then curved around to the school, which was a shoebox with windows cut in it, a flag pole outside, the circular drive, basketball courts, and fields. Neatly written on the building, in black magic marker above the front doors was Retard Factory. The rest of the boar
d he painted green, for grass, of course, with the exception of the lake in the woods, whose blue oval was covered with glitter.
I sat at the desk in my room, the open notebook in front of me, a pencil in my hand, and stared out the window, trying to recall all of the details surrounding the prowler. There was the old ladder and the footprint, sitting, like a dirt layer cake, in a pink hatbox in the shed. I could have started with Mrs. Kelty and her ass, or just her scream in the night.
In fact, I didn’t know where to start and, although from the time I was six, I had always loved writing and reading, I didn’t feel much like recording evidence. Then, through the open window, from over at the Farleys’, I heard the back screen door groan open and slam shut. I stood and looked to see what was going on. It was Mr. Farley, carrying a highball in one hand and a towel in the other. He was dressed in his swimming trunks, his body soft and yellow-white. His head seemed too heavy for the muscles of his neck, and it made him look as if he was searching for something he had dropped in the grass.
The Farleys’ pool was a child’s pool, larger than the kind you blow up but no bigger than three-feet deep and no wider than eight across. He set his drink down on the picnic table, draped his towel over the thickest branch of the cherry tree, shuffled out of his sandals, and then stepped gently over the side into the glassy water.
He trolled the surface, inspecting every inch for beetles and bees that had escaped the draw of the noisy little filter that ran constantly. He fetched up blackened cherry leaves from off the bottom with his toes and tossed them into the yard. Only then did he sit, slowly, cautiously, the liquid rising to accommodate his paunch, his sagging chest, and rounded shoulders, until his head bobbed on the surface. Slowly, he dipped forward, bringing his legs underneath him. His arms stretched out at his sides, his legs straightened behind him, his back broke the surface, and his face slipped beneath the water, leaving one bright bubble behind in its place.
He floated there for a moment or two, his body stretched tautly across the center of the pool, and then there came an instant when the rigid raft of his form gave way to death. His arms floated down, and his body curled like a piece of dough in the deep fry. Mr. Farley could really do the dead man’s float. I wondered if he left his eyes open, letting them burn with chlorine, or if he closed them in order to dream more deeply into himself.