by Bruce Jones
He saw the big rock in the center of the clearing, feeling as if it should speak to him, say something, but seeing it meant nothing to him, nothing at all, unless abruptly feeling a little more chill was something, and he couldn’t imagine why that would be, why should that be, it was just a rock, a bigger than average whitish rock sticking up there in the center of the clearing like a… flag.
“John--let’s get out of here, huh?”
But Scroogie just stood there against the big sycamore staring into the clearing. Stood there like he wasn’t going to be going anywhere for a long time and he knew it. And when Richard began to feel the same way, he forced himself to his feet and came to his old friend, his dear friend, and took hold of his burly arm—then just as quickly had to will himself not to let go, not to pull back quickly and fearfully from the other ‘Ender’s badly trembling arm, trembling and clammy and white as a salmon’s underbelly.
“Scroogie? C’mon. Let’s go, huh? I don’t like it here. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the cancer and I’m sorry you’re broke but I think we should leave this place now.”
Scroogie didn’t move. Just leaned there against the tree and stared at the clearing in front of them, still trembling softly, almost as if not conscious of it, the way a horse’s flank will tremble. “I think,” he began at last, in a voice that was now hardly more than a whisper between them, as if something--
…run!…
--something nearby might be listening, “I think it was mostly just a mutt. A brown and yellow, dirty ole…mutt.”
Richard found himself thinking strange things, stupid things, like maybe his friend’s trembling was contagious, because it had spread to him now. Along with a very urgent need to pee. Fucking prostate, fucking goddamn prostate…
“What was, Scroogie?”
“That dog, remember? You asked me if I ever had a dog. I didn’t. But someone did. A brownish-yellow mutt that used to roam the neighborhood. Remember?”
Scroogie hesitated, frowning ahead at the clearing with the big rock and cocking his head a little like a robin, as though the big rock held a significance he couldn’t quite grasp.
Richard shook his head. “Not really. I remember just about everything involving the old neighborhood, our parents, school, the Deadenders, of course. But I don’t remember any brown and yellow old mutt.”
Scroogie turned to him, maybe with an air of surprise. “So why’d you ask me about it before?”
And it sounded to Richard like someone else’s voice, like a stranger’s, not like his old friend at all. He was walking with a stranger here in these awful, darkening woods.
run!
“Because I saw it. I saw a dog like that.”
And Scroogie did a strange thing, then. He stepped back a foot, maybe two. As if he were afraid of Richard. More afraid than Richard was of the woods.
“Saw it where, Rich?”
“At the foot of my bed. Last night.”
“Fuck.” Scroogie said softly and stepped back another foot, “fuck.”
Richard went after him, grinning, even though he didn’t feel like grinning at all. “Hey. Hey. Take it easy. It was just a dream.”
“Just a dream?” from Scroogie wanting so much to believe it.
“Yeah.”
Scroogie stopped backing up and made himself smile a little. “Oh.”
“You okay, man? You’re white as a—“
“Hey, Rich? Let’s get out of here, huh?”
Had he heard that? Had Scroogie heard the sound just then, just behind--
don’t look! run!
“Sure, okay. Let’s beat cheeks. Which way?”
“That way,” Scroogie pointed quickly, away from the sound.
Richard joined him and they were off again, picking up the pace this time, a little faster with each yard gained.
“Just a dream,” Scroogie repeated, maybe only to himself, “right?”
“Absolutely,” from Richard, “I’m certain of it.”
Though he wasn’t certain.
Not at all.
EIGHT
Richard made up his mind that night to tell Allie he had cancer.
He waited through her getting-undressed-and-peeing-and-brushing-her-teeth ritual, waited until she was through with her hand lotion and fussing and in bed beside him and she’d reached over and switched the nightstand lamp off. Then he turned to her there in the darkness, with the very best of intentions.
Only now he had to pee.
So he got up and padded to the bathroom and lifted the lid and stood there as a few unenthusiastic dribbles came out but it was soon apparent that that was all and that he didn’t really have to pee; he was merely stalling for time.
Funny, in its own grotesque way: he was the one dying and he was fearful for her, for her reaction to it. There was something vaguely consoling in it. Maybe, under all the years of fucking up, there was a good person down there at the bottom of the dung pile of his soul after all. That would be a nice thing to know. But he’d have to think about how much truth there was to that.
He was standing there before the bathroom mirror, white string in his mouth and around both index fingers--having forgotten to floss--when he looked up and saw the creature emerging behind him from the shadows...reaching for him…
Richard yelped, twisting his ankle painfully on the little carpet before the sink, and spun around.
That made Allie--who was the “creature” behind him--yelp too and step back and collide sharply--head and elbow--against the closet door with a hollow thump-bump and an ensuing pain that turned her surprised face to a wincing, angry one. “What the hell, Richard!”
He faced her barefoot and trembling with Johnson-and-Johnson minted waxed floss hanging from his left incisor. “I’m sorry, honey,” he begged, “you startled me!” His heart was still bouncing around inside his chest.
“I startled you?”
“I said I was sorry!” Thought that sounded maybe a little curt, and added with a quick grin, “What the hell were you doing standing there behind me anyway?”
Allie rubbed her shoulder where she’d collided with the closet. “I was watching you. Watching my husband. Thinking how handsome he is. So sue me. There’s string in your mouth.”
Richard retrieved it, didn’t bother finishing, and tossed the floss in the sink-side wicker trash basket. “Thrill a minute watching me attend my gums, huh?”
She didn’t answer. She was behind him again, on her toes, craning up to look at the back of his head; he caught her in the mirror. “Allie, what in the wide world of sports are you doing?”
“Not hiding things from you, for starters,” she accused vaguely.
His heart started in all over again. She knew!
But how could she know?
Maser! The bastard! Some friend! Some old pal Deadender! “Hiding what from you?” he inquired with lame innocence.
“The bottle of stuff. Where are you keeping it? With your stash of titty magazines?”
He turned around to her searchingly. “Stuff?”
She looked past his shoulder to catch his pajama-reflected back in the medicine cabinet mirror. “Don’t be coy. What do they call it…Rogaine?”
Richard frowned, totally at sea, trying to drag her attentive eyes from his back-of-the-head reflection. “What are you talking about, honey?”
Allie pointed past his shoulder at the mirror, sporting a wry crinkle of smile. “Your bald spot, sport. Or former bald spot. And yes, you look very dashing. Not that you didn’t already.” And she nudged his ribs with a coquettish wink, turned and padded back to bed.
Richard stood blinking for a moment.
Then he made a lot of noise in the pantry doors below the lavatory looking for her little hand mirror.
“Second drawer from the top left,” she called smiling from the bedroom.
Richard bent toward the sink and angled the little hand mirror until it caught the back of his head in the big sink mirror above him. The dar
kish brown hair at his crown did look fuller! His old friend the bald spot—the one he’d been scratching at for weeks—was virtually gone.
Please, his inner-mind begged, don’t say I’ll be frugged.
* * *
Sleep was pretty much out of the question.
Not for Allie, of course; she kissed his former bald spot, his cheek—hesitated, then pecked him on the mouth--rolled over, back to him, and went right off to dreamland as always; smiling, he presumed.
Richard lay there against the pillow waiting for his left foot to make up its mind if was too hot under the covers or too cold outside them, sliding it in and out, in and out.
He felt wired. Like a late night college student on coffee and caffeine pills, cramming for semester exams. Images floated before his retina in the darkened bedroom like an ad man’s slide show, one shunting away to make room for the other: new molar, cancer, Maser’s perplexed frown, blood tests, cancer, bald spot, cancer, Scroogie’s pale, plump face--
…the thing at the foot of your bed…
His left foot, suffocating, poked out from under the covers again.
“Fuck this,” Richard whispered to himself.
He drew back the covers carefully and eased quietly and slowly off the mattress and out of bed, checking over his shoulder to make sure Allie was still asleep. Her nightie-swathed back and exposed pink shoulder rose and fell in unconscious rhythm.
Richard padded down the hall to his den, switched on the interior light and sat down at his familiar wooden swivel chair: Santa Fe style oak with Navajo seat cushion. Allie had decorated his entire study in Southwestern colors--browns and ochres and rich reds--even his computer hutch, file drawer, bookcase, right down to the running horse border motif circumscribing the walls, and the John Wayne movie poster prints and the bronze statue of Remington’s Bronco Buster adorning his “distressed” bureau. Allie had immediately redecorated as many rooms of his parents’ old house as they could afford, as if to announce (none too subtly) this may have been your house, but now it’s ours—redecorated every room she could, but made no attempt at the cellar.
Never the cellar.
Richard got the feeling she didn’t like it down there. He’d questioned her about it once. Sweet Allie had shrugged, back to him, and finally mumbled, “Mildew.”
His study, though, was another matter. She’d outdone herself here to make him feel as at home and relaxed as she possibly could in his little sanctum sanctorum where he came daily, every morning and some nights when sleep eluded him. Too many nights lately, maybe. And when he knew sleep wasn’t going to come, he applied an old trick he’d read about somewhere: when you can’t sleep, don’t attempt to lie there and force it—get up and move about, have a glass of milk, read or watch TV for a while; drowsiness will find you in its time.
He stood there now in the doorway to his den, staring at his wife’s valiant attempts to make him feel comfortable. And found, under the blank, turned-off eye of his monitor staring back at him, no comfort at all. Let alone the promise of sleep.
Have a glass of milk. Yes, but a glass of rum and Coke would be better still.
He turned from the study, padded down the darkened staircase without switching on hall lights (Allie had an uncanny sixth sense about suddenly turned-on lights, no matter the level of her sleep), made his way to the kitchen cabinet above the sideboard, brought down the bottle of Mt. Gay Rum from the top shelf, a diet Coke from the fridge, mixed it hastily, leaned back and sipped luxuriously there at the sink. After a moment he shrugged what-the-hell, picked up the bottle and added another healthy dollop, realizing with grim humor that the approach of death was good for something after all: it abolished the guilt of alcohol and tobacco use. He could take up smoking if he felt like it, for chrissake, why not? Maybe he would, just for kicks, one of the few kicks he had left to him. Thinking about this, its attendant irony, he began toying with the idea of working the concept into another story. He wanted so much to write something worthwhile before it was too late.
He snapped off the kitchen light and carried himself and the drink back toward the staircase. Something made him linger in the hallway, in passing, to stare at the dark rectangle of the closed basement door.
He stood there a long moment, feeling the spreading warmth of the rum in his middle, gazing with dull interest at the door, the old gateway to the cellar, to long ago memories of his childhood. It was in need of paint, the cellar door, like much of the home’s interior--he should really get around to it, not leave it up to Allie like he did everything else. Be a nice gesture before he bought the farm and said adios. Too bad you couldn’t fix human beings with just a coat of new paint the way you could a cellar door…and he realized the rum was beginning to think for him and knew why they called it a demon, a depressant.
But that wasn’t what had stopped him here by the door, given him pause.
In a moment he realized it was because the door was not shut. It was ajar.
No big deal in most households, but Richard was somewhat anal concerning doors at night, always keeping them properly shut and locked, had been that way since forever.
He reached out in T-shirt and pajama bottoms to shut it, and found himself pulling at the old knob instead, widening the dark crack at the frame, expanding it into a larger dark rectangle.
He stood a moment on the landing, gazing at the old wooden steps descending into blackness. He hadn’t been down there except perfunctorily since they’d moved in. Maybe scrounging around amid old memories would relax him, draw him toward sleep. And standing there on the landing trying to decide whether or not to flip on the basement light switch, he knew a faint pull of fear, a reproachful tug as if from a distance.
Now why was that?
Was it sleep he feared? That once-familiar and accepted ritual he’d never given a second thought to before now, he realized, was robbing him of the precious act of living, or at what was left of it. Living and awareness. But we all have to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. And if sleep is in its own way a kind of death, then we’re all dying a little bit along the long and winding road, aren’t we, along the way to The Big Sleep? He tried to find a smattering of conciliation in that and found he couldn’t. That’s what he got for mixing his metaphors.
…maybe it’s the cellar you’re afraid of…pretty dark and scary down there…
“That’s why God made lights,” he said out loud and switched on the one above the cellar stairs.
He looked down. Always with the same sensation. Or rather, the same movie moment in his head. It was a shot from Jack Arnold’s great “The Incredible Shrinking Man”. The one where Scott Carey, shrinking in size even as Richard was now shrinking in life, stood—all ten inches or so of him—looking down the ranks of wooden steps to his own dark basement with a common house cat now the size of a small Buick at his back. Which way to go: into the feline’s tigerish maw, or down the darkened stairs into permanent isolation and probable starvation. Hell of a writer, that Richard Matheson.
The wooden steps were cool under Richard Denning’s bare feet, cooler still the further he descended. “Descended into the basement’s mysterious cavern of mildew smells and looming huddles of bric-a-brac,” he said aloud, trying to sound like a writer but smiling despite himself.
Bric-a-brac. His late mother’s term for the barely navigable but somehow arranged-looking heaps of yesterday’s obsolete appliances, furniture, attic fans, armoires filled with animal fur coats and out-of-fashion men’s shirts (some in fashion again—collector’s items, probably), end tables, sadly leaning lamps with large water-stained shades like women’s hats, wooden shelves of kitchenware, earthen jars, Mason jars (some still filled with long ago put-up fruit), a scattering of mostly broken toys once belonging to some other Richard, the squatting mass of water heater with its octopus arms of silt-covered vents, the mountain of recording apparatus his father had collected over the years: record players, transistor radios, broken speakers, boxes of wires and RCA cables, c
ast off by Dad but never quite gotten rid of. And, conspicuous by its slightly newer (but somehow never finished, never sanded and painted sheetrock walls), the little add-on, make-shift office his father had worked in on summer weekends before the house had air conditioning because it was cooler down here, mildew or not. Dad’s own sanctum sanctorum. His old steel desk, gray and imposing and industrial strength heavy; its attendant gray and nearly-as-heavy steel swivel chair Richard had spun round and round in down here when Dad was elsewhere (probably upstairs in front of his big cherry wood speakers listening to Mario Lanza), had spun around in as a kid and had pondered, as an adult, moving upstairs to his own little den office, replacing his southwestern computer hutch and western swivel. Pondered it but somehow not done it yet. Maybe because he didn’t want to hurt Allie’s feelings after all her hard decorative work, but maybe too because he didn’t want, in some strange way, to hurt his dead father’s feelings. Not hurt them, exactly; but it just didn’t sit right somehow, the idea of taking something of his Dad’s out of here, especially his desk with its steel file drawers still brimming with ancient insurance forms and moisture-warped manila folders and cardboard dividers—the little cellar office would look naked somehow without the old desk. And maybe there was yet another reason; maybe upon muscling the metal goliath upstairs and through the house and into his den, he’d find not the warmth of nostalgia he’d imagined, but a sad wistfulness that would grow depressing sitting daily in furniture from another time, another world, really, suffused with its signature mildew odor no amount of cleaning would entirely remove.
It was why, he suddenly admitted to himself, he didn’t come down here to the cellar more often: in a mildly unsettling way—a way at once appealing and forlorn—his father still worked and wandered here, perhaps drawing his ghostly energy from the mountains of familiar antiquity around him, remnants that refused to die and rot as he had, just as they refused to move into the 21st Century.
Richard hit the bottom step and moved from cool wood to cold cement, his path nearly blocked by his mother’s upright ironing board leaning against the old ping-pong table. It was impossible not to see her bent before it, dutifully running the steaming iron across his school clothes. Or over one of the white shirts his father would wear to work or in the little office, tie loosened, shoulders bent to wrestle some garage liability or showroom display form. All his life his father had worked for someone else, so that Richard and his mother could eat and wear clothes and watch TV and laugh and talk and play. His quiet, self-effacing father--always there with a smile or a word--but essentially a private man.