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I told her… we’d had a close call in the woods. Some hunter had fired at what he thought was a deer… the bullet went between us.
Which version was true? According to the manuscript, neither of them. I think that was when I started to believe Pop’s story. Or… no, that’s not quite right, because it was still too fantastic. But that’s where the door opened to belief.
Did he ever tell her what he thought was the real story? Was that possible? I thought it was. Marriage is honesty; it’s also a repository of shared secrets.
He’d only filled half of the spiral notebook; the rest of the pages were blank. I picked it up, meaning to put it back in the bottom drawer, and a sheet of paper fluttered out from between the last page and the back cover. I picked it up and saw it was a receipt from the Incorporated Town of Harlow, made out to L&D Haulage, a company I’d thought defunct for at least fifty years and maybe longer. L&D had paid property taxes for the years 2010 to 2050 (“at current 2010 rate”) for a tract of land bordering on Jilasi Creek in the unincorporated township of TR-90. Paid it in a lump sum.
I sat back in Pop’s chair, staring at the amount tendered. I think I said holy fuck. Paying in advance at 2010 rates was probably a terrific deal, but to pay forty years in advance—in a town where most people were behind on their taxes—was unheard-of. According to this sheet, L&D Haulage—Laird Carmody and Dave LaVerdiere, in other words—had forked over 110,000 dollars. Of course by then they could afford it, but why?
Only one answer seemed to fit: they had wanted to protect their little hunting cabin from development. Why? Because that otherworldly glasses case was still out there? It seemed unlikely; my guess was scavengers had long since stripped the cabin of anything even remotely valuable. What did seem likely—and now it was a little easier to believe—was that my father and his friend had decided to preserve the location where they had met beings from another world.
I decided to go out there.
The network of woods roads Pop and Uncle Butch used to get to Jilasi Creek was long gone. There’s a housing development and a trailer park there now, both called Hemlock Run. Nor does TR-90 exist. These days it’s the incorporated town of Pritchard, named for a local hero who died in Vietnam. It’s still the 30-Mile Wood on maps and GPS, but now it’s just ten miles of forest, if that. Maybe only five. The rickety bridge is long gone, but there’s another one—narrow but sturdy—a bit further downstream. Its raison d’etre is Grace of Jesus Baptist Church, which sits on the Pritchard bank of the creek. I drove across it and parked in the church lot, although that day the Jilasi was so low I could almost have walked across it, had I thought to wear my waders.
I made my way back upstream and found the broken stubs of the old bridge sunk deep into weeds and ferns. I turned and saw the path to the cabin, now badly overgrown with bushes and brambles. It was marked by a sign that read NO HUNTING NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF GAME WARDEN. I went (carefully, fearing poison ivy or poison oak) through the bushes. A quarter of a mile, Pop had written, and I knew from my own trips out here (only a few; I had little interest in shooting creatures that couldn’t shoot back) that was about right.
I came to a locked gate I didn’t remember. There was another sign on it, this one showing a frog over the words HIPPITY HOPPITY GET OFF MY PROPERTY. One of Pop’s keys opened the gate. I walked around a curve, and there was the cabin. No one had maintained it. The roof hadn’t caved in from years of snowfall, probably because it was partially protected by the interlaced branches of old-growth pine and spruce, but it was swaybacked and wouldn’t last much longer. The board sides, once painted brown, were now a faded no-color. The windows were bleared with dirt and pollen. The place was the very picture of desertion, but it apparently hadn’t been vandalized, which I thought was sort of a miracle. Lines of some old poem, probably read in high school, occurred to me: Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread.
I found the right key on Pop’s ring and went inside to must and dust and heat. Also to the scribble-scrabble of the current tenants: mice or chipmunks. Probably both. A deck of Bicycle playing cards had been scattered across the eating table and on the floor, likely tossed by gusts of wind down the chimney. Once my father and his friend had played cribbage with those very cards. A fan of ash lay in front of the fireplace, but there was no graffiti and no empty cans or liquor bottles.
A circle was woven around this place, I thought.
I told myself—scolded myself—that I was being ridiculous, but maybe I wasn’t. Hemlock Run, both parts of it, was close. Surely kids would have explored this far into the woods, and surely HIPPITY HOPPITY GET OFF MY PROPERTY wouldn’t have kept them away. But it seemed they had kept away.
I looked at the sofa. If I sat on it now, dust would puff up in a cloud and mice might flee from beneath, but I could imagine a young man with blond hair sitting there, a stranger my Uncle Butch had drawn with stars for eyes. It was easier to believe it had actually happened now that I was out here, in a cabin Pop and Uncle Butch had paid to keep safe (if not sound) until the middle of the century.
Much easier.
Had either of them come out here again, possibly to retrieve a case that looked like it might contain spectacles? Not Butch, at least not once he went off to the West Coast… but I don’t think my father had, either. They were done with it, and although I was Pop’s heir, I felt like an intruder.
I crossed the room and looked on the mantel, expecting nothing, but the gray case was there, covered by a scrim of dust. I reached for it and winced as I closed my hand around it, as if afraid it might give me an electric shock. It didn’t. I wiped away the dust from the top and saw the wave, bright gold embossed on what might have been gray suede. Except it didn’t feel like suede, nor did it precisely feel like metal. There was no seam in the case. It was perfectly blank.
This has been waiting for me, I thought. It was all true, every word, and this is now part of my inheritance.
Did I believe my father’s story then? I almost did. And had he left the case for me? The answer to that is more difficult. I couldn’t ask the two talented bastids who’d come out here to hunt in November of 1978, because they were both dead. They had made their mark on the world—paintings, stories—and then left it.
The young man who wasn’t a man said the gift was for them, because Pop had shot the not-woman up with the EpiPen and Uncle Butch had given her his—I quote—“precious breath.” He didn’t say it was just for them, though, did he? And if Pop’s breath had opened it, might not mine do it as well? Same blood, same DNA. Would it open-sesame for me? Did I dare try it?
What have I told you about myself? Let me see. You know that I was Castle County School Superintendent for many years, before I retired to become my father’s amanuensis… not to mention the one who changed his bedding if he wet himself during the night. You know that I was married and my wife left me. You know that on the day when I stood in that decaying cabin, looking at a gray case from another world, I was alone: parents dead, wife gone, no kids. Those are the things you know, but there’s a universe of things you don’t know. I suppose that’s true of every man jack and woman jill on earth. I’m not going to tell you much, not just because it would take too long but because it would bore you. If I told you I drank too much after Susan left me, would you care? That I had a brief romance with Internet pornography? That I thought of suicide, but never seriously?
I will tell you two things, even though both of them embarrass me almost—but not quite!—to the point of shame. They are sad things. The daydreams of men and women “of a certain age” are always sad, I think, because they run so counter to the plain-vanilla futures we have to look forward to.
I have some writing talent (as I hope this memoir will show), and I dreamed of writing a great novel, one for the ages. I loved my father and love him still, but living in his shadow became tiresome. I daydreamed of critics saying, “The depth of Mark Carmody’s novel makes his father’s work look shabby. The pupil has truly outshone the teacher.” I don’t want to feel that way, and mostly I don’t, yet part of me does and always will. That part of me is a cave-dweller who grins a lot but never smiles.
I can play the piano, but not well. I am asked to accompany the hymns at the Congo church only if Mrs. Stanhope is out of town or under the weather. I’m a plodder and a thumper of keys. My ability to read music is on the third-grade level. I have polish only on the three or four pieces that I have memorized, and people get tired of hearing those.
I daydream about writing that great novel, but it’s not the most powerful daydream I have. Shall I tell you what is? Having come this far, why not?
I’m in a nightclub, and all my friends are there. My father is, too. The band has left the stand, and I ask if I can play a tune on the piano. The bandleader of course says yes. My pop groans, Oh God, Markey, not “Bring It On Home to Me” again! I say (with appropriate modesty) No, I learned something new, and start to play the Albert Ammons classic, “Boogie Woogie Stomp.” My fingers are flying! Conversation ceases! They stare at me, amazed and admiring! The drummer resumes his seat and picks up the beat. The horn guy starts blowing a dirty alto sax, like the one in “Tequila.” The audience starts to clap along. Some of them jitterbug. And when I finish, standing for the final right-hand glissando like Jerry Lee Lewis, they get up on their feet and yell for more.
You can’t see me, but I’m blushing as I write this.
Not just because it’s my most treasured fantasy, but because it’s so common. All over the world, even now, women are playing air guitar like Joan Jett and men are pretending to conduct Beethoven’s Fifth in their rec rooms. These are the ordinary fantasies of those who would give anything to be chosen, and are not.
In that dusty, ready-to-fall-down cabin where two men once met a being from another world, I thought I would love to play “Boogie Woogie Stomp” like Albert Ammons just once. Once would be enough, I told myself, knowing it would not be; it never is.
I blew on the wave. A line appeared in the middle of the case… held for a moment… and then disappeared. I stood there for awhile, holding the case, then put it back on the mantel.
