It wasn't until several days after Jim Sandy left with his backhoe that Erika asked me, "What kind of body parts, Jack?"
She was feeding our two cats their once-a-day can of Goff Pure Horsemeat Catfood (I'd once done some very good work for Goff, and as a kind of spiff they'd given me several years' worth of their cat food), and the kitchen smelled bad. "It's a hell of a time to ask something like that," I said.
She shrugged. "What's a good time?"
I shrugged, said, "None, I guess," paused, went on, "An arm. Some fingers. A few ribs."
"Where?"
"Where what?—Where'd they find the ribs?"
"No. Everything, Jack." Our cats—a wiry tom we called Orphan, because that's the way he came to us, and a big, orange longhair named Ginger—were rubbing against her ankles, now, telling her thank you, could they please have some more. "Where'd they find the other arm, and the fingers, and the ribs?" She leaned over, stroked Ginger, said to her, "No, that's enough."
"Various places," I said. "Here and there. They found part of a head, too. Did I tell you that?"
That was a bombshell. Her mouth dropped open, though very briefly; she closed it at once, leaned over again, patted Ginger, said "No!" to her again.
"Did you hear what I said, Erika?"
She looked up at me. "I heard."
"And?"
She looked down at 'Ginger again. She said nothing. "And?" I said again.
She shrugged, her head still lowered. "I don't know." She was clearly upset; her voice was trembling. "Fingers and toes I can deal with, Jack." A nervous smile flickered across her lips. "'Part of a head' —that's a different story, isn't it?" She straightened, looked very seriously at me. "Isn't it?" she repeated.
"It was a very small part, I'm told," I said. "Part of a forehead, and part of a nose—they were attached—"
She cut in, "Oh, give me a break, Jack! I really don't want to hear this!" And she stalked from the room.
The boy who swept toward me from behind that dying oak twenty years ago was a boy I recognized. His name was Harry Simms. He was my age; we went to school together, we even shared some of the same classes. Earlier in the day, we'd been on opposite teams in a game of battle ball. Battle ball was a game we all liked because it allowed us to vent whatever pubescent anger and tension had built up—I think it gave us nearly the same kind of relief as masturbation.
He screamed this as he swept toward me from behind that oak: "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Then he was gone.
In school three days later, Harry's seat was empty and rumor had it that he'd run away from home. On my way back from school that night, through the park, I went looking for him.
CHAPTER THREE
The farmhouse has thirteen rooms, including five bedrooms, a huge dining room, a library, powder room, music room, formal living room, and at the rear, facing our mountain, a good-sized spare room that Erika and I use as a storage area. The house's previous owner, a retired Kodak executive in his late sixties, had begun to renovate this room. He'd put fake wooden beams in the ceiling and had laid a blue-speckled no-wax floor, but death caught up with him before the job was done. The walls were a scarred and patchy yellow-with-age plaster; here and there, he'd started to take the plaster down altogether, and diagonal gray wooden furring strips were visible beneath.
The room has a constant smell of fish to it. The smell varies in intensity from day to day—it seems to depend on the outside temperature and humidity. Erika and I decided that some hapless animal had crawled into the wall to die and that when we got around to finishing the job the Kodak executive had begun, we'd find the animal and give it a decent burial.
There were lots of small jobs to do at the house. The dining room needed painting; its teardrop crystal chandelier needed rewiring; several of the doors had to be rehung; a gutter on the northeast wall had to be replaced; a little bridge spanning a creek a hundred feet south of the house was in desperate need of rebuilding. We looked forward to seeing these jobs done. We were going to do them together. It was our first house, and we planned on being happy in it.
Of course, Jim Sandy's discovery got us off to a lousy start. I had hoped that it was the kind of thing that was so bizarre and so hard to believe that we could subconsciously deny it, that we'd be able to say to ourselves something like, How could anyone find a man's arm in our side yard? How could anyone lose one? And for a while that was precisely the attitude we were able to take. But at the same time that we asked the question we were able to answer it: "Yes, but it happened." And try as we might, we could not deny that. It happened. It was real.
I've lived in a few places since college: Baltimore; Syracuse; Rochester; Palmyra, New York (where Mormonism was founded); Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Dallas for a few weeks. I dearly love discovering a place I've moved to because all places are different. Two small towns within minutes of each other can be vastly different. And it's not just the people, though people are, of course, what make up a town and give it flavor. A valley town like Cohocton can be quite different from a hill town like Wayland or Dansville. Maybe because different kinds of people like to live in different kinds of places. Or maybe because the place molds its people.
So I looked forward to discovering what Cohocton was all about, to meeting its people, to finding out what their concerns were; I looked forward to seeing just what kind of life they'd made for themselves, to discovering the best roads to here and there, to finding landmarks along the way (an ancient barn with a tobacco ad on one wall, for instance, or a particularly old and gnarled oak tree, or an ancient, tumbledown farmhouse stuck by itself in the middle of a field lying fallow).
Some of this sense of discovery had to do with one of the ad campaigns I was working on then. It was for a company called Earth's-Way, a vitamin and mineral supplement manufacturer. They'd given me all the slogans—I could choose "Earth's Best" or "The Best from the Earth to You" or "The Best from the Earth's Kitchen to Your Table" or "From the Earth's Kitchen to You" or "The Best from the Earth's Kitchen." There were others, and they all had to do with the fact that the company's products were "one-hundred-percent natural and wholesome," a phrase that I had to work into the art. Some of the slogans were good, some were awful, and I was even given leeway to come up with something of my own, though I explained that I was strictly an artist, not a writer (although I think that it doesn't really take a writer to come up with a dynamite slogan; it takes a salesman with an ear for meter, and a jaded sense of the poetic).
So, my tours of discovery in and around Cohocton would probably go a long way, I thought, toward helping me with the art for the Earth's-Way campaign.
A couple of weeks after moving into the house I decided that I needed some good, sturdy, waterproof hiking boots, so I went into Cohocton to buy some. I'd been in the town before, of course, several times, but always with that sense of happy confusion that I get from being in a strange, new place and hoping I can find my way out, back to where I've come from, without having to stop and ask one of the locals for directions. This time I fully intended on talking to the locals—because this time I was on a tour of discovery.
I stopped first at a place called Czech's Garage, at the southern end of Cohocton, on its main street. (There are no more than a dozen streets in the town, and probably ten of those have been named after trees—Maple Street, Elm Street, Birch Drive, Willow Lane, and so on. Czech's Garage, I found, was owned and operated by a slow-talking man of forty or forty-five named Jerry Czech. I decided at once that he was probably typical of most of the men in the area. He was a little overweight, though not sloppy, wore a cap that had the name of a tractor company imprinted on it—as Jim Sandy had—bib overalls, a red flannel shirt, ankle-high blue sneakers, and several days' growth of white-patched beard, though he apparently had no white in his close-cropped dark hair.
I pulled my Toyota Corolla up to his unleaded pump, got out, saw him come out the door of his station toward me, waving me away from the pump.
&nb
sp; "Sorry," I said, and stepped back.
He smiled thinly, and quickly. "Ain't got no self-serve in Cohocton; never had, never will." He took the nozzle from the pump, went around to the back of the car. It looked like he was having trouble finding the gas tank, so I said, pointing, "It's under the license plate."
He waved at me again, with agitation this time. "I know where it is; I been pumping gas a long time, so I know where it is." He flipped up the license plate, stuck the nozzle in, looked questioningly at me. "Fill 'er up for ya?"
I nodded. "Yes. Thanks."
He nodded.
I smiled at him, stepped forward, stuck my hand out. "My name's Jack Harris. I just moved into the Tanner house on Hunt's Hollow Road. I guess I'll be buying most of my gas here."
He shifted the nozzle from his right hand to his left, shook my hand briefly, said, "Uh-huh, good to meetcha," let go of my hand, locked the nozzle on, went around to the front of the car. "Wanta open the hood there?"
"The oil's okay," I said.
"You sure?"
"Yes. Thanks."
He nodded. "You know you got crazy people living across the road? What'd you say your name was?"
"Jack Harris."
"Uh-huh. D'ja know that—about the crazy people?"
I shook my head, smiled as if he were trying to tell me a joke. "No, I didn't know that."
The gas stopped pumping; he went back, took the nozzle out, checked the pump. "Eleven-forty-three. That cash or charge?"
"Cash. What about these crazy people?" I was still smiling.
"And you got rattlesnakes up there, too. You said you was up on Hunt's Hollow?"
"Yes, that's right."
"You got rattlesnakes, then. On the hills especially, and in the rocks." I thought I saw a smile flit across his lips.
I said, "Bears, too?"
He nodded. "Yep. We had a bear up there once. It mauled a goat and a ten-year-old fat boy named Freddie Wilcox. Came down from Canada, I guess. I shot it. Me and a friend. Got it stuffed and in the laundry room." He went around to the front of the car, got a bottle of Windex from the top of one of the pumps, pulled a soiled rag from the back pocket of his overalls. "Get your windshield, Mr. Harris?"
"No. Thanks."
"Part of the service; might as well take it."
"No. I cleaned it at home."
"Didja?" Another quick smile appeared on his lips. He put the Windex back, held his hand out. "Eleven-forty-three."
I gave it to him, got in the car, said thanks again, and drove into Cohocton.
A quick tour of the main street confirmed that there was only one clothing store in town, a place called Buckles, Boots, & Buttons, which, considering the character of the town, I thought, wasn't quite right. I parked in front, went in, was greeted almost immediately by a short, thin, fiftyish woman wearing a long blue dress and horn-rimmed glasses.
"What can I do for you?" she asked pleasantly.
"Hi. I'm looking for some hiking boots."
"For hiking?"
"Yes."
"Or for climbing?" She'd been standing in front of a counter filled with men's dress pants. She stepped forward, gestured down a narrow aisle to her right that led to the rear of the store. I looked, saw a small display of men's leather boots in a far corner.
"For both, I guess," I said.
"Then you want a pair of hiking boots and a pair of climbing boots."
"Can't one be good for the other?"
She shook her head earnestly. "No, sir. Your basic hiking boot has got to be lightweight, while your basic climbing boot has got to be tough and thick-soled. We got both—you buy both and you'll be okay."
"I'll buy the hiking boot, then."
She was still holding her hand out. "Suit yourself," she said, and started down the aisle first, her gait quick and stiff. She glanced back as I followed her. "You buy a place in town?"
I smiled. "How'd you know I lived here?"
"You wouldn't be shopping here if you didn't."
I told her that was pretty logical. I told her about the house I'd bought, started to say I thought Erika and I would be happy in it, and she cut in, "It's haunted, you know."
"What's haunted?" We were standing next to the men's boot display now. It was only one step away from being dismal.
"Your house. The Tanner house. It's haunted."
"By what?"
"By spooks."
She said it with a kind of casual intensity, as if she were talking about a hole that people regularly fell into. "You're serious?" I said.
And she said, "Not that I believe in spooks, of course. They're probably geysers or something."
"Geysers?"
She nodded. "Boiling water shooting up outa the ground. Geysers. Like Old Faithful. They shoot up outa the ground and they look like spooks, especially at night."
"You're joking with me, aren't you?"
She smiled very broadly, much too broadly, in fact, for my question. "I don't joke much, but I do joke some," she said.
"And you're joking now?"
"I'm telling you what I've heard. Maybe I'm passing on a joke; maybe I'm not. Here's the hiking boots; I got your basic ankle-high, your mid-calf, and your knee-high. Which one would you like?"
I bought the mid-calf, which she approved of. "Rattlesnakes can't get you, then," she said.
I smiled, said, "Sure, thanks, and neither can the bears," and went to C. R. Boring Hardware to ask about gutters.
It was one of five hardware stores in Cohocton; they ran from slick to grim. C. R. Boring Hardware was somewhere in the middle. It was in a one-story red brick building that looked like it had been built within the past twenty years. That unlikely name (it still makes me smile) was painted in neat black block letters across the entire front of the store, above two large windows. The left-hand window had a display of gasoline cans in it—bright red five-gallon cans with spouts—and in the right window there were several dozen boxes of nails, screws, latches, and hooks. A crudely lettered sign hung on the window itself: END OF MONTH SALE: SERVE YOURSELF. It made me think of Jerry Czech and his animosity toward self-serve gas stations.
C. R. Boring was a very tall and perilously thin man, who was apparently well into his sixties; he was dressed in an ill-fitting gray suit. He'd pulled his white tie into a tight knot at his neck, so his grayish skin was pinched and folded there, and when I came in he looked up from behind the counter, at the back of the store, said "'Scuse me, Frank" to a man standing in front of the counter, and called to me, "Be with you in a moment, sir."
"Gutters?" I said, and looked around questioningly.
"In a moment, sir," he said again, in the same stiffly polite tone.
"Sure," I said.
"In a way," I told Erika later that evening, as we sat and watched the fifth network rerun of Children of the Corn, which bored me but seemed to absorb Erika, "I guess I was disappointed."
She glanced quickly at me, then back at the TV. "Oh?" she said, clearly not interested. "How?"
I shrugged. "I think I wanted something more . . . rustic, more bucolic—"
"Bucolic?"
"Countryish, pastoral—"
"And it wasn't?"
"No. It was kind of phony. I know that sounds harsh. And I guess I don't mean phony phony. I don't think they're trying to trick anybody; I guess they're just being . . . people—"
Again she glanced at me; she smiled bemusedly, said, "Of course they're just being people, Jack. What'd you expect them to be—porcupines?" She cocked her head to one side, added, "Huh?" then looked at the TV again and muttered, "I don't understand this," low enough that I realized she was talking to herself.
I said, "Sure. It would have been a lot easier to deal with porcupines," paused briefly, then continued on another subject, "What do you think of this, Erika?" I cleared my throat in prelude, held my hand up as if making a solemn pronouncement. She looked at me. "From Nature's Table to Yours—Earth's-Way 100% natural and wholesome vitamin and mineral supp
lements."
"It's cluttered," she said.
"What's cluttered about it?" My feelings were hurt. "It won't look cluttered in print."
"The last part. It's cluttered; it's unnecessary."
"The client wants it there. Besides, it really is necessary; it's important." I realized that I was whining.
Erika shrugged. "It's your client, your work, Jack. You asked my opinion; I gave it to you."
I shrugged. "How about 'From Nature's Table to Your Table'? That's pretty good, don't you think?"
"It's simpler, yes."
"Or maybe 'Out of the earth and into your kitchen.'" I paused, thought about that one, realized that I liked it quite a lot. I repeated it slowly, with feeling, "'Out of the earth . . . and into your kitchen.' Christ, that's great; that's really great! Don't you think that's great, Erika?"
She said nothing.
I repeated, "'Out of the earth and into your kitchen.' Don't you think that's great? I mean, don't you think that means something?!"
"I'd rather not discuss it now, Jack. I'm watching this . . . movie." She nodded briskly at the TV.
"Oh? Why don't you want to discuss it? I want to discuss it."
"I'd just rather not, Jack. I've got problems of my own—"
"You mean the store?"
"Sure. I mean the store. It gets me down."
"Are you selling any records?"
She nodded vaguely. "Of course I am." She stood. "I'm going to go do some reading, Jack. Okay? This movie makes me nervous; you make me nervous." She stopped, closed her eyes, shook her head, went on, "I guess I'm just plain nervous."
People of the Dark Page 3