by Chris Bauer
The cop deposited me in my truck, told me I should leave, then he wandered off to get a closer look; I could still hear what was going on. The supervisor looked over the newer storm sewer map while his tunnel scouts climbed out of the hole. He waved them over to him. “See here?” he told them. “This sewer tributary was fed on a straight line at one time. Then it was walled up and a newer one was put in at an angle. After thirty years of water pressure, the north wall might have been weak.”
“Weak, but it had some help,” another of the scouts said. “I grabbed this from the floor before the wall gave way.” He showed his boss a brick. Half a brick, actually. “Looks like it was chiseled out. Some of the others looked the same way.”
The water guys thought they were onto something, but much as I’d have liked to have seen what they came up with, I had church folks waiting on me. I checked the truck’s rearview mirror before I cranked up the engine.
Christ. Leo and Raymond.
“Wump!” Leo called, and with one push on the handles of Raymond’s wheelchair, the two of them were at my side window. “The water smells real bad, don’t it, Wump?” He rubbed his nose again like something had tickled it.
“That it does, Leo. Such is the offending nature of sewage. Shouldn’t you be on the bus for school, son?”
“Yep. But don’t you think it smells funny, too? Not just from the, ah, you know, poop? Like maybe rotten eggs?” His head bobbed in agreement with himself.
Leo never cursed, had trouble saying near-curses as well. I told him yes, it had a distinct smell. As bad as a whole farm full of rotten eggs, I told him, me smirking. A simple comment like this most times gave him anywhere from a glimmer of a smile to a major laughing fit. Today I got a stone face, one that seemed bent on waiting me out, like he was expecting me to get just as serious.
“What? What is it, Leo?” He still didn’t blink, instead stayed quiet, deadpan as a dress dummy until—
An idea drifted into my head from out of nowhere, and damn if it wasn’t simple but good: have Leo get a sample of the sewage. He’d been in the hole once already, to retrieve what he got from the hardware store, and no one paid attention to him while he’d been down there.
“Tell you what, Leo. In the back of my truck, why don’t you get a—”
“Canning jar! For a sample! Sure thing, Wump!”
“Yes,” I managed, “that’s right. One of Viola’s canning jars. How’d you…?”
Leo stumbled over the tailgate and into the payload. I squeezed out the truck door and slipped past Raymond in his wheelchair. When I got to the rear of the truck, Leo had already scampered off toward the hole.
I’d been hustled. Couldn’t say I knew how he did it, but that’s what had happened.
Leo wandered unnoticed down the dirt ramp, stayed on the fringe of the pooled sewer water. He scooped up some of the muck.
Raymond was strapped tight into his chair and leaning to one side, his head against the chair’s silver rail, his wavy blond hair parted and plastered flat on top with hair cream. His eyes were open but pointed in different directions and vacant as a cadaver’s. He’d be a tall man if he got to grow up, but he had so many medical problems a person might pray for God to take him early. Viola told me last night about his newest diagnosis: leukemia. It was what killed our son.
Viola and me, we’ve had good cries on a regular basis over Harry. It’s a grief we’ll carry to our graves. My heart sank for this kid.
Leo was back at street level and closing in. “What a pair you two make,” I said out loud.
Raymond’s afflictions made it so people didn’t expect him to be able to reason much neither, but Leo said different. Said he was smart, and that Raymond gave him advice all the time. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Raymond’s right hand raise a few inches off his lap and give the thumb’s-up sign. To me or to Leo, I wasn’t really sure, but either way it showed he was paying attention.
Leo chattered at me, getting all tongue-tied until I put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “Take a deep breath, son, and start over.”
“Just smell it, Wump! Open it up and smell it!”
He had the glass jar filled near to the top with diluted slop that looked all light brown and mucky yellow. I unscrewed the lid. Floating on the oily surface were a few thick hairs. I smelled what Leo smelled. “Bleach.”
“Yeah, Wump. Smells like bleach. Don’t it smell like bleach, Raymond?”
Raymond raised his right thumb again.
Back went the lid, and with my last twist something floating in the muck bumped the inside of the glass, something solid, the size of a rabbit’s paw. I raised the jar above my head, turned it around in my hand, then shook it once; still couldn’t tell what it was, but it made me uneasy. I shook it harder, brought it in closer to my face so’s I could study it, all swirly yellow and brown.
C’mon, I know you’re in there, just give me a peek…
One more shake—
Quick as a strike fish, a plump but tiny human hand suddenly snatched at the glass from the inside, its pink palm a half inch from my nose. The jar tumbled from my grip and shattered on the pavement, leaving a brown splat of oily liquid and jagged glass crystals that sparkled in the low-level morning sunlight.
Leo and me leaned over the mess on the sidewalk. Inside the muck were bones and bone fragments laid out in the shape of an infant’s tiny palm and fingers, none of them attached, with no flesh left on any of the pieces. After a few deep breaths, my breathing evened out again.
“Leo, why don’t you—”
“Get another jar from the truck and get another sample. Be right back, Wump!”
Yeah, Leo. Do that.
I put my Willys into reverse and backed away from the curb, a new jar sitting next to me on the seat and filled with more sewer gunk and the bony hand parts Leo had fished out. The way I had it figured, the sludge was what made them bones snap up tight to the glass like they did—like the hand was alive—maybe even made the other muck-solids in there look like the bones had meat on them. Yeah, that was it.
I paralleled the construction site in my truck, turned the corner, then double-parked. This gave me a good view of a doozy of an argument between the overweight Philly coroner fresh from climbing out of the hole and the sleek, silver-haired Hugh Volkheimer. Restaurant entrepreneur, businessman, and second-generation owner of the tannery, plus all-around, gen-u-ine prick; this was Hughie Volkheimer. The two men stomped down the sidewalk, closer to where I was double-parked. Hughie’s knee-length camel-hair topcoat was soiled by black mud-slop splotches dotting his backside.
“You’ve collected your evidence,” Hughie said to the retreating coroner. “I demand you release this crime scene.”
The coroner finally stopped and turned. “Look, Mr. Volkheimer.” The heavy guy slid a pack of Pall Malls from a shirt pocket, shook out a smoke then lit up. “We’ll be done by the end of the day. Then, and only then, will you get your construction site back. Your demanding anything of me or these police officers or the water department workers will only slow our investigation.” With a raised eyebrow, he casually removed the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled away from Hugh’s face. He tapped the cigarette to loosen ashes that hadn’t formed yet. “Much like your arguing with me is doing right now.”
Their discussion was of major interest to the crew working inside the hole, since I could see now they’d suddenly decided to take a group cigarette break, too. I was beginning to like this guy.
“Do we have an understanding, Mr. Volkheimer?”
Hughie noticed the men were now milling around, some smoking, some with their hands in their pockets, none of them doing any work. “Damn it, I’ve got a construction crew here waiting to start their day!” he said, pointing at the rear of the property while glaring at the coroner. “A work stoppage like this costs me thousands of dollars. You hustle these men up or it’s going to cost you”—Hughie poked a finger into the man’s chest—“your fucking medical license. Now,
I do believe, we have an understanding.”
Wasn’t my argument so I stayed out of it, though old Hughie and me had had worse over the years. “’Scuse me, Doctor,” I said, calling over. I reached my hand out of the truck window so he could see the canning jar I was holding. That pretty much got his attention, although my guess was he’d have looked for any reason to put some distance between him and old Hughie. The heavy guy waddled up to me.
“Wump Hozer,” I told him and reached through my open window to shake his hand. “My young friend back there”—I pointed behind my truck—“came away from your crime scene with what’s in this jar as a souvenir. Thought you might need it for your investigation.”
He gandered at Leo and Raymond farther down the sidewalk, accepted the jar with the bone specimens floating in sewer muck, and thanked me. I let out the clutch and put the Willys into first, goosed the gas a little, then ground second gear hard on purpose for the attention the noise would get me. The truck backfired, stuttered forward, then eased into second, which was where I kept it as I glided past the quick-striding, pissed-off Hugh Volkheimer. I stared ahead, rested my elbow on the windowsill then turned my hand upright and let Hughie know how one of my fingers felt about him.
A grudge in the hands of the rich and powerful is a terrible thing. Grudges in the hands of their hired help are no less terrible, but with fewer ways to satisfy them, they for sure have a longer life.
The year was 1935, and a skin rash that started on my right wrist, moved north onto my arm and chest, was what finally made me leave the tannery. This and Viola’s second miscarriage, plus one confrontation I’d had with Mr. Fucking-Laughing-Pile-of-Shit-College-Boy Hughie Volkheimer soon afterward, him a freshly minted graduate who his old man had made into a tannery supervisor, and me ten years older, just trying to make a living. Leaving the tannery was the best thing I could have done for myself. Best thing for Hughie, too, otherwise I might have killed him.
“You there,” he’d called to me on that last day, his finger tapping the air like a hen pecking a barnyard. “Hozer. Hop on down next to that bin, grab a shovel, and start loading up that truck’s payload. We’re short back here today.”
Me and him were the only two people on the tannery loading dock. I was dumping parts of a cow carcass into an open metal box, which was riling up the flies inside the box pretty good. It was then I seen that more than a day’s worth of waste was sitting under them buzzing flies, all mixed in with leaking cans of bleach-based cleaning solvent, plus other used leather tanning chemicals. I wanted no part of what he was asking.
“I’m a tanner, not a clean-up guy,” I said, shaking my tilted wheelbarrow. A pesky piece of unidentifiable cow scrap refused to budge; I pushed it off with my hand. More buzzing flies. “Get Otto to do it,” I told him. Except I already knew what an extra day of cow parts sitting in the box meant: today there wasn’t no Otto.
Out back of the tannery had been, and I expect still is, a half-buried lagoon of arsenic-based insecticides and tanning chemicals, plus hundreds of barrels of crud-eating machinery detergents and other tannery-process by-products, including lead and chromium. The industrial revolution by way of the Three Bridges local tannery industry was doing its damnedest to revolutionize the few small foothills and one green valley on this back section of the Volkheimer property, a couple of hundred acres or so that weren’t more than a football field away from a creek feeding the Wissaquessing River. The creek bank had turned into dead space, starting from the pits where animal hides and hair and other slaughterhouse wastes lay rotting, then fanning out across acres of what had once been scrub pine akin to them barrens in New Jersey. It wasn’t like the Jersey Pine Barrens scenery ever actually looked good, even though the earth was alive, but it for sure looked a whole lot better than the singed armpit of a spread hidden in the back of the tannery’s property.
“Otto’s under the weather today,” Hughie said. “I want you to do it.”
“Under the weather” the prick called it. Christ, Otto had been wheezing for months, which weren’t no surprise considering the chemicals he inhaled. Weren’t but a few years earlier another kraut fella who handled the tannery’s waste, the one before Otto, showed up dead in the north woods, found first by the local wildlife, then afterward, what was left of him at least, by hunters. Cause of death, a Mauser shot to the temple, self-inflicted according to his note. The real cause of death, or what made him pull the trigger, was tumors all over his lungs. The man was all of thirty-eight years old.
“Like I said, Hughie, it’s not my job.”
“You’ll address me as Mr. Volkheimer, and your job is what I tell you it is, Hozer.” Hughie unfolded his arms and gave a gentleman’s tug to the bottom of his vest with both hands, liberating his chunky neck from a starched shirt collar. “Start loading that waste and those solvent cans in your wheelbarrow and get moving. You know where it goes.”
The owner’s son was all Hughie amounted to, but this meant that compared to the rest of us, he shit lavender and roses. Still, I weren’t never one for ponying up to authority that hadn’t really earned it. “Sorry, Mister Volkheimer, but I won’t be doing that. I’m heading inside now to get back to work.”
I turned my back on him and started off, expecting maybe I’d get a biting comment or two, but what came out of his mouth stopped me cold.
“Do what I say now, Hozer, or I’ll have you sacked. Then you’ll wish for your wife to miscarry every time, since you won’t be able to support a family.”
Hughie didn’t stay upright much long after that, and he was lucky to have come away with only a few fractured ribs and a sore jaw, and the gooey yellow contents of one of them open solvent cans stuffed down the pants of his vested management suit. It took three men to pull me off him that day, with the same three men escorting me out of that fucking tannery, me vowing never to return. I kept the vow for six years, right up to the day Otto’s wife asked me to collect her deceased husband’s work belongings. Cause of his death: tumors on his lungs.
3
I dropped off my tool belt, ready to call it a day, pulled down a note pinned to the chore board in the church basement. “Wump: Taking the baseball team to the Volkheimer fairgrounds after school today for practice. You’re welcome to join us. Father Duncan.”
Up till now the kids practiced on blacktop and cement in the schoolyard, and a person can’t really teach boys the basics of baseball without grass and dirt and open space. After I stopped by Mrs. Volkheimer’s place, I’d find Father and the kids.
Three Victorian homes sat on rolling green acreage that fanned out from the other side of the Wissaquessing River. Each lot converged southwestward toward its own sissy-colored bridge. What little foot traffic the bridges still got was deposited onto the backside of Our Lady’s church property.
When I was a kid, these three bridges were the only way across the river and into town for the Volkheimer families who lived in these houses. The river was wider up north but narrowed soon after it passed under the train trestle bridge that led to the Three Bridges rail stop, a commercial hotspot at the turn of the century because of all the tanneries the area had back then. The river ran southeast, past the fairgrounds and the Volkheimer Tannery, the only tannery still operating, eventually reaching the larger Delaware River another half mile south. The middle footbridge was the first to go up, originally an open-air job, built by Rolf Volkheimer, uncle to Hughie. The other two brothers liked what they saw, followed suit by erecting bridges on their own properties. A few years later, all three were put under roof and their walkways walled in. Northernmost was lavender, middle one charcoal blue, southernmost daffodil yellow, each brighter and sissier than their original colors from what I remembered. Problem was, they were all so damn close together they looked ridiculous; couldn’t have been more than five hundred feet separating the three of them. And all three had second stories like someone had dropped A-frames on them, their roof peaks high enough for two single-pane windows, one on each end.
Scalloped roof trim and the bright paint jobs made it easy to match them up to the main houses they belonged to. Local historical folks took to calling them unique displays of Victorian architecture. I felt they were just plain stupid-looking, and still they decided to name the town after them.
The three-story Volkheimer main houses had long white porches on the first floor and white widow’s walks on their roofs, and their fancy trim was now painted in soft colors that reminded a person of Easter. Pinks and yellows, more lavender, some light green, some baby blue. The houses were well maintained, the second one occupied by the original owner, Mrs. Werta Volkheimer, Rolf’s widowed wife, now in her eighties and the only survivor of any of the three Volkheimer marriages. Mrs. V had regular hired help, including a cook who was also her housekeeper, and a gardener who was the cook’s husband, plus she had me. I fixed things when they broke, soon as I could get to them. Mrs. V paid me real well, too.
“Wait on the porch,” the housekeeper said. She was a sour woman in her early fifties who thought her husband ought to be doing all the fix-up work around here. She headed back inside, let the screen door snap shut in my face. I never paid her no mind. One of these ladder-back porch rockers suited me just fine.
Wasn’t long before I heard the clip-clop-thump, clip-clop-thump of someone approaching the screen door from the inside. Most of Mrs. V’s shoes were too big for her shrinking feet, so when she walked they snapped up against her heels, every other step anchored by her rubber-tipped cane. The clip-clopping got louder; the screen door opened. “Afternoon, Wump. Come inside.”
Age had certainly caught up with parts of Mrs. V’s body but it hadn’t stolen all of her beauty. Her hair swept up from her neck and swirled to a curlicue, mostly all white but with some wide streaks of dark brown. It reminded me of frozen custard from Atlantic City, the twist kind. Her blue eyes were clear above her smooth, fleshy cheeks, with the skin a natural pinkish color that still blushed on occasion. Lately she’d had a tough time of it physically. Was a taller woman once but now stooped so much that each time I saw her it looked like her cane was growing.