“What are we doing?” she asked, eyes darting between her windows and mirrors.
“Going back to my farm. Fast as you can.”
She threw the car onto the road before she started asking more questions. Anne would have made a great soldier. No hesitation and no arguing when taking action. Of course, if I knew anything about good soldiers, the latter would change at the first opportunity. We merged smoothly onto the long, empty highway before she spoke.
“It was the same men, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. I think that van was coming from my farm, and the men who killed your grandfather wouldn’t have had time to get there and back since we saw them. Was the smell the same?”
“Will you stop with that? I couldn’t have smelled anyone on the highway from inside the diner.”
“You smelled them right before you picked out the van. We both know it wasn’t the pie. It’s not even a smell, according to your grandfather, it’s just your brain trying to interpret information from a sense you don’t have an organ for. Now, was it the same?”
She paused to think. “I don’t think so. It was the same kind of smell, like garbage and swamp gas or something, but it was different than back at the home. Like bad fish and bad steak both smell like rotten food, but not like each other. Why?”
“Patty used to say that they all smelled different. He could always tell if the same one came creeping around.”
“The what came around? The baitbags or whatever?”
“Them, or things like them.” I shrugged in the dark car. “Unnatural things, I guess.”
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me! What does that mean, unnatural? They’re people, right? Why do you call them baitbags? Is that some kind of army slang?”
I glanced at the speedometer. She was keeping a steady but brisk eighty on the highway, even while she was frustrated and scared. Patty would have been proud.
“It’s a nickname that Shadroe came up with. Shad was with your grandfather and me in the squad.”
I looked out into the familiar darkness. Each day was different, but every night was the same one, stretching back forever. You might leave it during the daylight hours, but it was always there, waiting for you to come back.
“It was nighttime, and we were hunkered down in a farmhouse outside of Warsaw. The owners had left after artillery had blown off one corner of the building. At least I hope they left, there was part of a bedroom in that corner. Anyway, that had happened months before we got there.
“So we were trying to get out of the rain for the night in the part of the house that still had a roof, when somebody started shooting into the house. Well, wartime etiquette being what it was, we shot back. This went on, back and forth, for maybe ten minutes. Felt like an hour, easy.
“The funny thing was that we were pretty sure it was only one guy, and like a crazy person, he would come right up close to the house to shoot in through a window. We would wait, rifles pointing at all the windows we could see, and sometimes we would get a shot off just as his silhouette appeared. We’d swear that he was hit, but a couple of seconds later, he’d come right back up at another window. Never said a word. Just one guy running from window to window, shooting into the room, keeping us pinned down and helpless.
“Now don’t get me wrong, we were pretty hard by that point in the war, but it scared us. Shadroe threw down his rifle and pulled out a grenade. Yanked out the pin and tossed it away before we knew what he was doing. That should give you an idea of how scared he was. How scared we all were.
“He was planning on throwing that goddamn grenade out the window, but nobody in his right mind would even think of doing that. Miss that window by a hair, and that potato is going to bounce right back into your lap.
“So now we’re scared of the shooter outside and of Shad with the grenade inside. His face is all white and he’s trying to look at all the windows at once to see where the guy is. I’m thinking about tackling him to try and get the grenade away from him before he lets go of the spoon, because I know that if the shooter does pop up in a window, the grenade will just bounce off of him and roll back into us anyway.
“All of a sudden, Patty points at the wall and keeps pointing. He moves his finger slowly towards a window, and Shad tosses that grenade out of it right before the finger gets there.
“After the smoke clears, we run outside and we see the guy. That grenade must have practically landed at his feet, because he’s really tore up. I’ve seen guys blown to bits by every piece of bloody-minded ordinance you can think of, but this was worse. One of his legs was off and he was split all up the belly and chest. That part I expected. But the crazy part was that what spilled out of him wasn’t just his workings, it was something else, too.
“There were long black wormy things in there, and they were thrashing around like crazy in the open air. Jumping and flipping around like fish out of water, only faster and harder. Like a movie reel sped up. You could hear this kind of snapping sound when they whiplashed around in the mud.
“Shadroe said the guy must have been a lousy fisherman, because he ended up having to eat his bait, and we all broke up. I know it sounds crazy, standing in the rain and laughing at a dead guy, with those worms all over the place, but we laughed until we cried. After that, when Patty would point out that it was one of them, we’d call ‘em baitbags, cause they were just sacks of fishing bait on two legs.”
“Oh my God, that’s disgusting. What were they?”
“Dunno,” I lied. That conversation goes places that I haven’t talked about for sixty years. After tonight, only one other man besides me knows anything about them, and that’s plenty.
“But why don’t they stop when you shoot them? Is it because of the worms or whatever inside them?”
“I don’t know. But it’s not true that you can’t stop them by shooting them. The worms seem to need the brain to drive the body, so headshots work pretty well, and of course you can always slow them down by hitting them in the knees and hips. Pain won’t stop them, but they need joints to move, same as we do.” I didn’t tell her about my preferred way of dealing with bags. She was upset enough already.
She didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the trip. The both of us just went quiet and listened to the wind and the engine, trying to keep the fragile feeling of calm intact. We were both hit pretty hard by Patty’s death, and everything else on top of that just seemed to make things spin around out of control. We sat there trying to keep it together and hoping the other wouldn’t bring the whole house of cards down with the wrong words.
It worked pretty well until we got within a mile of my farm. By then we could see the ruddy orange glow reflecting off of the low clouds overhead. It was a fire, and it looked like a big one. I could feel my heart clench up in my chest.
7
We slewed and bounced up the dirt driveway, the glare from the roaring house blinding us. When the car finally crunched to a stop, I threw the door open, letting in the continuous low thunder of the fire. As I got out, I could feel the heat pressing in on me, like it was trying to push me back into the car. My eyes and throat started to sting, even though there didn’t appear to be much smoke at ground level, just a kind of foggy haze, but huge ashy clouds of it were rolling out of the top of the house, made up of everything Maggie or I ever owned.
I couldn’t look away. Every letter and picture, every scrap of cloth or furniture that ever adorned our lives, was rising up in a billowing black column full of cherry sparks.
As they spiraled up and became cold and invisible, they took the weight of the incinerated bits and pieces of my life with them, leaving only the imprint behind on my soul, finally becoming the past in the way that I always imagined memories existed for everyone else.
Weightless.
I hadn’t been sitting in that chair with my gun because I was depressed, or not just that, but because that was the only thing left to do. My life was a single track, bounded and fenced by
my past.
I wasn’t just some guy named Abe. I was Abe, Maggie’s husband. Abe the old man. Abe who came back from the war. After losing Maggie there was nothing left in front of me, only a past and no future. That Abe’s track had only one stop left.
But watching the things that defined me drift away into the forgiving sky, I felt myself getting lighter. In that moment of complete loss, I was free. For the first time in nearly a century, I felt like I did when I was a boy leaving the farm for the first time, seeing the future expanding out in front of me. A quiet bittersweet exultation, but exultation all the same, filled me and lightened my body from the inside out.
I drew in a deep breath, full of scorching air and wood smoke, and when I exhaled, all my tired hopelessness seemed to flow out with my breath. It felt good. The east wall of the house crumpled just then, and a fierce bloom of heat tightened the skin on my face, pulling me back to the present.
“Back up the car,” I shouted over the roar. “You need to get further back!” I heard the engine rev and the tires bite as I slammed the car door shut. When I judged that Anne was no longer in danger of having things melt off of her car, I ran towards the house, cutting a wide circle around to the side.
My farm was built by my father in 1908, before electricity and refrigeration came to the countryside. That meant a big root cellar for storing preserves under the house. I hoped that the fire hadn’t eaten the foundation supports and let the house collapse into it just yet. I had things other than fruit preserved down there.
I saw immediately that that the cellar doors set into the ground were thrown open, and the padlock was laying on the ground, reflecting red and copper against the scorched grass. The shackle had been neatly severed with bolt cutters. I sucked in as much relatively smoke-free air as I could and hustled down the steps with my hand and forearm shielding my face from the heat.
The cellar was a surreal, hellish environment. Yellow and orange flame clung to the wooden ceiling in a rippling sheet. It looked like an upside-down lake of fire, rolling and boiling. Smoke filled the top half of the room, forcing me to shuffle crablike along the earthen floor, which was littered with shattered glass from broken jars of preserves. The air was a reeking stew of burning wood, plastic, insulation, and fruit.
I lifted the neck of my shirt over my mouth and moved as quickly as I could towards my workbench. The heat was suffocating and insistent. Hot glass crunched under my boots, and more than once I had to catch myself with an outstretched hand to keep my balance, earning me deep cuts and burns in my palms and fingers from the scorching glass and bubbling, tar-like preserves which stuck to my skin like peach and strawberry napalm. I wanted to laugh at the idea of weaponized fruit, but the pain kind of sucked the funny out of it.
Under the workbench was the large metal toolbox that I was looking for, also sitting open with the lid thrown back. I was already seeing spots from the smoke and my throat was burning, so I flipped the lid closed and fumbled with the hot latch until it closed. Then I burned my hand again grabbing the handle and dragged it painstakingly across the floor and up the stairs.
I managed to stagger a few yards away from the cellar doors before dropping the box and myself on the cool grass. We were both steaming and smoking in the night air. In between coughing fits that produced bitter black phlegm, I could hear sirens approaching in the distance. Since the nearest fire station was in town proper, I figured my neighbors must have called them at least fifteen minutes ago.
The steel toolbox that had started life a glossy gray was now a brownish sandpapery gray, thanks to the patina of rust covering it. It was over two feet long and probably weighed twenty pounds empty. I had long since taken out the metal tray of tools inside of it, so now it contained only a few old cigar boxes and a long bundle wrapped in cloth.
“What the hell is wrong with you, running into the fire like that? Are you crazy? You ran under a house that was on fire.” I hadn’t heard Anne approach. “You could have died over that stupid box, you fucking idiot!” She knelt down next to me and punched me in the shoulder, hard.
“If that was supposed to be first aid, you’re doing it wrong.” I took out a wooden cigar box with a picture of a matronly Cuban woman smoking a fat cheroot on the top. As soon as I picked it up, I could tell it was empty. I handed it to Anne. She opened the lid and then tossed it back to me. “You risked your life for an empty cigar box. Great. Good job.”
“Yesterday it had a piece of metal in it, just like Patrick’s.”
“You think those men came here to get it, exactly like at the nursing home, don’t you?”
“Except for the arson, yeah.” I took the box back and ran my fingers across the gently bumpy surface of the bottom and sides, as if to check the validity of what my eyes were telling me. The box stayed empty. The things that did this know who I am, and they wanted to hurt me. And they did. But I’ll bet you my last dollar that none of them stuck around after setting that fire. Like I said, they know who I am.
We sat on the lawn as gleaming county vehicles began to surround the house, reflecting the blaze in their chrome and glass. The inevitable flashing lights added hints of blue and actinic white to the mix. It didn’t take long to be surrounded by a swarm of determined and polite people going about their tasks in a controlled frenzy for the second time in one night.
After a quick checkout from the EMTs, we ended up sitting on a rough wool blanket well back from the house, supplied with bottles of water and instructions not to go anywhere.
After sixty years of silence, things were once again in motion. Everything in my sight was transformed. Flames from the inferno reflected off of the black glass surface of the lake behind the house, making it look like a hole full of fire.
The trees and grass had a macabre aspect in the blood red light. Even the hazy night sky bled and pulsed. Who could have guessed that the end of the world would start with a nursing home murder and a house fire?
I pulled myself to my feet and picked up the box. “Come on, I want to get this into your trunk before we become the center of attention.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Why are we keeping that? It smells awful, and they already got the thing out of it.”
“I guess because as of now this box is everything I own in the world, so I’m keeping it.”
“I’m sorry, Abe. Of course.”
The box went into the trunk. By dawn the fire was out, leaving the house a soggy, charred skeleton. Statements had been given, and paperwork had been filled out. Anne was sitting on the ground, leaning against her car and dozing while the swarm of vehicles drifted away in the pale morning light like bees returning to the hive. The dew in the grass shone like tiny diamonds, uncaring. I shook Anne gently and her eyes blinked open.
“Hey, we can go now.”
She yawned and stretched. “‘kay.”
“I’m pretty beat. Would you mind driving me up to the motel in town? I might be homeless, but I still have my wallet.”
“Sure, Abe. Not a problem.” She took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes. There were circles under them, and it wasn’t all because of a sleepless night. Neither one of us had been granted the time to feel the full weight of Patrick’s death, but it bore down on us nonetheless.
She followed my directions in a tired but companionable silence all the way to the shabby splendor of the Sweet Pastures Inn. Built in the fifties, it had served America’s glory days of highway travel, when the summer months were filled with family sedans packed with kids and luggage on their way to see the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls and stopping at motels and roadside attractions along the way. It was far past its prime, but still managed to be clean and to mostly avoid the “hourly rental” crowd that seemed to claim so many older motels.
We pulled up into one of the many vacant spaces in front of the lobby. White painted wooden railings ran along the front of the single-story building in an attempt to give the narrow walkway in front of the battered doors a homey, porch-like feel. It might ha
ve worked if not for the crude epithets scratched into the dingy white paint along the rough-cut two-by-fours.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, as we rolled to a stop. She didn’t reply. “Listen, I want to come to Patrick’s funeral. I don’t have a phone number or even an address now. But there’s a number I can give you for a friend of mine. Will you call me and let me know when to come?”
“Is this friend another one of your war buddies?” She was looking straight ahead out of the windshield as she spoke.
“Yes. I’m going to visit Henry Monroe, maybe stay with him for a while until I figure out what to do about my farm.” There was no sense in rebuilding as far as I could see, but it also didn’t feel right to leave it the way it was. I needed to think about it. Afterwards.
“Henry. That’s the Professor, right?” I nodded. “My grandfather kept a picture of you guys in the living room, and he used to tell me stories the whole time I was growing up. I must have heard about that time he ran you over with a jeep to keep you from getting shot by a sniper a hundred times.”
“We never did find his mystery sniper, if there was one.” I had to smile. Everybody had heard the crack of the rifle, but that didn’t stop us from riding Patty about it anyway. Shad spent an entire week diving out of the way every time Patty started a vehicle.
“Henry has one of those pieces of metal, doesn’t he?”
“He might, if he kept it all these years.”
“He has one of those goddamn pieces of metal, and he knows what’s going on just like you do. The both of you know all about these bait things or whatever, and you know why my grandfather was killed, don’t you? And you’re just going to sit there like an asshole and not tell me, is that it? So long, Anne! Thanks a lot for the ride!”
“Anne—”
“Hey, fuck you, okay? I’m not going to get a pat on the head and then drive home to be by myself in my apartment worried about smelling some smell that isn’t there, or if crazy men are going to kick my door down and stab me to death! I’m scared and I’m not …” She pressed her face into her hands. “I’m not going to be sent away to just hide in my apartment and not know what’s going on.”
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