[This is the second installment of a story I've been working on when the spirit moves me to do so. I'm not sure what's gonna happen in it yet, but if you missed the first part you can read it here.]
Ive always had a good sense of direction and of distance. And as long as I’m tooting my own horn, I’ve also always had an uncanny knack of guessing the time, though I don’t just guess. I’m a creature of habit. It doesn’t take more than a couple of days for me to wake up at about the same time that I woke up the day before. I sleep lightly. I’ll jolt to attention if a mouse farts while I’m sleeping. Even if I’m drunk. Well, maybe not if I’m really really drunk. Anyway, there are good odds that I’ll know upon awakening what time it is within a ten minute margin of error.
Back when we were all traveling aimlessly around the country, I also paid closer attention to the position of the sun in the sky and was pretty damn good at gauging the time of day as long as it wasn’t too cloudy. Jeff had a Timex with no wrist band on it that he kept in his pocket. We had a little running game where somebody’d ask what time it was and he’d scramble and fumble around in his pocket for his watch. Meanwhile, I’d calmly say, ¨it’s about 2:37.¨
Jeff would produce his Triathlon or whatever his watch was from his front pocket shortly thereafter as we stared each other in the eyes as if it were high noon at the OK Corral. The crowd would go silent. Even the crickets would stop chirping. He’d look at his watch and shake his head like he’d just lost a dollar bet. ¨Eh. It’s fuckin 2:41¨, he’d sigh in mild annoyance. ¨How the hell do you do that?¨ I would emerge victorious almost without fail. We’d play this game almost daily.
¨I have the Force¨, I’d say in a matter of fact voice with a little shrug and a smirk. “As a matter of fact, I just made you ask me that question.”
¨Yeah whatever, dude¨, he’d say as he brushed me off with a backhand motion.
“I just made you say that, too.”
He'd playfully cock his arm back as if he was about to sock me in my mouth, the primary source of his annoyance. Jeff was fun to fuck with.
So yeah, I was a real champ at knowing what time it was, and I was like Magellan if you wanted to know about how far we’d come along and I was The Amazing Human Compass if you wondered whether we had cut south a little bit or whether we were still heading due East. I had killer eyesight, too. I could tell you what bus was coming from 4 blocks away.
But not at night. Holy shit. I have terrible night vision. The sky was clear but the moon was nothing more than a white sliver dangling over the southern edge of the earth. I couldn’t see a goddam thing. Grandpa’s cock-eyed headlights allowed us to see what was dead ahead but blinded us to all that lay beyond. As many times as I’ve ever been through Nebraska, I’ve noticed that the roads are generally about as straight as roads ever seem to get. But the little, two-lane that we were on actually had a few curves in it. Julie was driving at a sensible speed, relying on me and Rich to keep our eyes peeled for the big rock that was supposed to be on our left. I was awkwardly sandwiched between the two of them, trying to not knock poor ol Grandpa out of gear while simultaneously avoiding snuggling any closer to King Kong than was necessary, squinting into the void in an effort to see a rock that looked like Bill Clinton. I saw a few good-sized boulders, but none that looked very presidential. I’m pretty sure that Rich didn’t know who the president of the US even was, much less what he looked like. The guy was a fuckin moron. At least he could see, though.
Grandpa’s odometer had crapped out on us back in July, so he was no help navigating. Julie had him jogging along at about 40 mph. His speedometer didn’t work, either. Poor grandpa. Plus, his fuel gauge always cheerfully reported to us that his tank was full, even if we were running on fumes. So we generally played it safe by adopting the motto, “When in doubt, put some gas in the damn truck”. We’d make mental notes of what mile marker we had seen the last time we gassed up and assume that we could probably make it 250 miles before we’d be in danger of hitch hiking to the next truck stop with a gas can.
“Hey, I think that might be it”, Rich suddenly said with a vague tone of urgency. I didn’t see what the hell he was talking about, but Julie slowed Grandpa to a more cautious speed. A few seconds later, a one-lane dirt road appeared in the headlights. So I guess Rich was good for something besides being a grouchy, retarded cave bear. We came to a near stop and then pulled off of the pavement and onto the rutted road that lacked any kind of identification whatsoever.
We passed one lonely farmhouse with one light on in the second-story window about a half a mile down the road to nowhere. I imagined that I could see the dense blackness of a cluster of trees off to the south. We were still moving slow in order to find the place that Angela had told us about. I looked over my shoulder into the bed of the truck but I couldn’t see much besides the nearly invisible silouhettes of the rest of the gang. We had turned off the music as it had become a distraction rather than an asset. Not long after we had passed the lonely little farmhouse, I could see the hulking shadow of what almost certainly had to be the Hillston house in front of me to the left. I had already cracked and nearly finished a can of Hamm’s. It’d be nice to open a few more while we sat by a fire and listened to Rich and Dave play their guitars. I guess Rich was good for something else too. His voice sounded kinda like Glen Danzig and he could play his scratched up Alvarez as good as Johnny Cash.
Grandpa’s high-beams panned across the Hillston ranch as Julie limped Grandpa into the long-neglected gravel driveway. Two giant weeping willow trees grew in front, their now-leafless branches hanging drearily to the ground like an H.R. Giger painting of some kind of undead jellyfish. Their tentacles gently slithered with the breeze, diverting attention from the monstrous grey house that loomed behind them. Julie stopped the truck for a minute in the driveway with the headlamps shining so that we could get our bearings a bit. We had a couple of flashlights between us, but broadcasting the brights at the place was really the best way to see what this place looked like on a nearly moonless night out there in the empty black heart that’s known as the midwest.
As young as we all were, each of us had had no other choice than to grow up fast. We all had our own unique stories. Everybody does. But when you see some filthy kid who’s drunk out of his or her mind on the sidewalk and asking you for money, don't be so quick to judge before you realize that these people’s short histories are likely littered with pain and tragedy. Jeff’s old man had come out of the closet when Jeff was ten. His mother was a heroin addict and had left when he was small enough to only barely remember her. His dad would come home drunk with guys he had picked up from the bar and beat Jeff senseless in an effort to impress whichever one-night-stand he might've met. Jeff had been on the streets at the age of 14. Dave’s mom had finished her bottle of vodka and washed it down with rat poison with the blinds drawn while Dave was playing kickball at recess in the first grade, after which he spent the next 9 years bouncing around the foster care system. He had never met his father. Shelly’s step-dad was a detective in an affluent suburb of Houston. He had molested her until she was 15, after which he offered to pay her for sex with the intent to buy her silence without having to discontinue raping her. She got the hell outta there. We all have our stories, but the displaced youngsters who live on the sidewalks in your city often have heartbreaking ones.
I had been on my own since I was 17. I had spent the previous year living under a bridge with my schizophrenic father who did his best to provide for me but who was certainly not an angelic adult male role-model. I had smoked my first hit of crack with him when I was 16. By the time we had arrived at the Hillston ranch, I was no stranger to entering abandoned houses. None of us were. We had all just come from Boulder, which was a pretty tame little town. Before that though, we had been in San Francisco, living in a four-story apartment building in the Tenderloin that had rightfully been condemned years earlier. Our little group of close friends had managed to more-or-less secure a room in that place, but we shared the building with all kinds of terrible freaks: tweakers, junkies, crackheads and some idiotic skinhead couple whose male half had done time in San Quentin for attempted murder. Those two were scary. They intimidated me into shooting meth with them once, after which I avoided them if I was alone.
The Hillston house wasn’t the Hyatt, but we’d all seen worse. Plus, I could see my breath. I’d rather have walls around me and a roof over my head in the middle of October than to wake up covered in frost. The house looked grey in the headlights, the old paint chipping and peeling. The windows on the first floor were boarded with what was now rotten planks. The windows on the second floor weren’t boarded but they had been smashed out, probably by bored teenagers who I would guess chose the place as a Saturday night party zone. The battered front door was hanging inward, precariously attached only by its lower hinge. The porch had been robbed of its floor and was now only a foundation consisting of a short wall of cinder blocks that housed vacated spider webs. The driveway went along the left side of the house and dissappeared around the back. On the left of the driveway towards the back were the blackened, charred remains of the grain silo that Angela had mentioned back at the Citgo. Huge shards of tangled, rusted sheet metal jutted up from the chaotic mess.
We had only examined the house for maybe thirty seconds or so when we began to hear the muffled shouts of impatient aggravation from the back of the truck. Somebody banged angrily on the window and a male voice hollered “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOIN?!!!” Jake was attempting to make a break for it out of the back of the camper shell and Dave was yelling at him to sit down. Rich bellowed in my ear, ordering whoever said it to calm the fuck down. Julie let her foot off the clutch and rolled the battle-scarred old Ford further up the driveway and around to the back where she brought it to a halt, leaving it in first gear while she turned the key towards her and shut off the lights.
Rich was taking his sweet time getting out of the passenger side, so I mumbled something about him being a lazy fat-ass and slid out behind Julie. I was a skinny little fucker so it wasn’t too much of a problem. I stumbled out into the cold Nebraska night, immediately aware that I couldn’t see a goddam thing. I heard Shelly vacantly bitching at the dog as the folks in back clambored out of the truck. I downed the last swill of my beer and chucked the empty can into the darkness.
There were three more weeping willows behind the old house, plus an old apple tree that sheltered the decaying remains of its fruit beneath it. The stars were magnificent. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many stars as in the night sky outside of Sherman, Texas when I was a teenager, but the Universe was generously displaying her cold beauty over the chilly cornfields. Jeff and Shelly were in the back of Grandpa with their mini-mag lights, sliding our packs toward the tailgate so that they’d be accessible. “Hey yall?” I asked. “You see my Carhartt in there? I’m freezin my balls off.”
Jeff found it under a spilled bowl of dog water and tossed it to me. I cursed under my breath about my jacket being wet as I pulled it on. Dave asked if I wanted to check out the house real quick while the other folks got a fire going. Sure I did. He told Jake to stay and we walked back around to the front of the dilapidated old farmhouse, using his cop-sized mag light to guide our way. Jake followed us anyway until Julie asked him if he was ready for dinner, whereupon he spun around and ran at top speed back to the truck. Dave muttered something about Jake being Julie’s goddam loveslave. I said something along the lines of “takes one to know one” and we both laughed. “Dude, did you grab an extra beer outta the truck”, he asked. I pulled a Hamm’s out of my jacket pocket. I couldn’t see his face but I knew he wore a condescending frown as he said, “Hamm’s, huh?” I defended my poor choice in beer selection by telling him that it was the cheapest shit they had. When he popped open his beer it foamed a little. He raised his can to me and we cheersed each other.
We stepped over the ruins of the porch and walked a little cautiously to the doorway. Dave shone his flashlight into the house. Some kind of fabric, perhaps sheets, lay crumpled here and there on the floor, but the floor appeared to be solid. We set our beers in the doorway and climbed into the foyer. “Foyer” is actually a much more pleasant word for the tiny entryway than the room deserved. The ceramic tiles were cracked and smeared with some kind of brown sludge that had long since dried. The pale green tiles looked as if they had been installed in the 70s. Dave waved the light slowly across the living room, which surprisingly seemed reasonably neat other than the moldy linen scattered over the floor. There was a doorway to the left that led into a sizeable kitchen. I was blind. I put my left hand on Dave’s shoulder in order to easier follow him as he walked the few feet over to the kitchen and flashed his light through it. There were dirty dishes piled in the sink that were much too old to be disgusting. On the table was a disheveled stack of yellowing newspapers. The chairs that sat askew around the linoleum-topped table were tacky: yellow vinyl-covered monstrosities with rusted frames. Dave turned around and bumped into me. “Damn, homie, why don’t you watch where I’m going”, he joked. My eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness but between it being a nearly moonless night and the fact that the windows were boarded, I was helpless to navigate the place without Dave out in front of me.
The house had a vague musty smell to it that would probably be much worse in the summer time. I stepped aside to allow Dave to get around me and stayed close behind him as he led the way back across the living room. The place was furnished with a couple moldy arm chairs that looked terrible but intact that flanked a ratty, bright yellow couch that was missing its cushions. There were also two end tables with broken lamps laying next to them on the floor. No coffee table, but under the mess of filthy sheets was a large, dusty throw rug. The walls were deep brown, fake wood paneling that had probably once been decorated with pictures one might see in an old dentist’s office but which were now bare. On the opposite side of the room from the couch was a small table with an old rotary phone like the kind we had in my house when I was a little kid in the late 70s. Past the furniture was a closed wooden door on the left and a staircase on the right hand side of the room. In the center was a small bathroom that was missing a door.
The old, scummy wood floor felt solid but we still walked with caution. “Hey, man, why don’t we check out that door and then go upstairs”, I suggested. I took a slug from my Hamm’s and rattled the can, disappointed that it was approaching emptiness. “And let’s hurry up and figure out what rooms are cool to sleep in. I’m almost out of beer”.
“Yeah, okay”, he agreed, sounding a bit distracted in the gloom. He sounded as if he had snapped out of it when he asked a moment later, “How the hell’d you finish that beer already, man?”
“Well, you know me. I’m a fuckin ace”.
We stepped over the sheets, kicking a few of them aside as we bumbled across the living room to the closed door. “What’s up with all the sheets?” I wondered aloud.
“How the hell do I know, man?” Dave said. “What do I look like, a goddam nasty-sheet-on-the-floor expert?”
“No”, I replied, “you look like a fuckin jerkoff.”
“Kiss my ass”, he shot back in a bored tone. Our friendship involved quite a bit of good-natured antagonism. We had been best friends since we were 17 and only rarely had gotten into a serious argument. He and I had gotten into a drunken fist fight with each other once when we were both having a crappy day when we were about 19. It’s the only time that we had ever gotten truly angry with each other. The fight didn’t last very long and neither one of us won. I wound up with a black eye and a busted lip, and Dave’s ribs were hurting him for the next week. The short boxing match ended with me shouting at him to fuck himself as I staggered away. The following morning, we ran into each other at the coffee shop that we used to hang out at every morning. We sheepishly apologized and gave each other a hug. And that was the end of that.
The closed door in the corner was locked with a deadbolt. That seemed pretty strange. Normally, the only doors with deadbolts are exterior doors. And the door appeared to be solid pine rather than being a hollow piece of junk like I would’ve expected judging from the lousy decor I had seen thus far. “I wonder what’s up with that? We got a crowbar out in the truck…”, Dave offered.
“Aw Christ, Dave, who cares? Let’s check out the upstairs real quick and get the fuck outta here.” I killed my beer and let the empty can fall to the floor. “I’m thirsty and it’s fuckin cold and really, who gives a fuck? We can check it out tomorrow if it’s that important to you. Plus, I don’t like this place.”
He agreed, if not a little begrudgingly and gently brushed me back, mumbling for me to “look out” so that he could get out in front of me and lead the way to the stairs. When he illuminated them with his mag light, we saw that they were covered in hideous, pale green shag carpeting that was caked with what looked like the same ochre crud that we had noticed by the front door. There were five steps leading up to a landing where I assumed the staircase would continue around the corner. Dave put most of his weight on the first stair tread to see if it was sturdy. It was. We ascended, the steps softly and eerily creaking as we did. “Goddam, Mike”, Dave said in a low voice, almost a whisper. “I don’t know why but this place gives me the fuckin heebie jeebies.”
“I hearya, man. Maybe we should just sleep outside?”
“Nah. It’ll be alright once we’re drunk and tired. Still, man. I got the creeps. Nobody’s gonna fuck with us. Plus we got Jake and Rich. But yeah let’s find a good spot to crash and get the hell outta here.”
When we had gotten to the top of the staircase, I was able to see a little bit in the deep grayness due to the smashed window on the far side of a long hallway. The musty smell had been cut by the soft breeze that blew towards us from the window. We could hear the nearly inaudible voices of our friends in the back of the house. The flashlight revealed more dirty sheets that littered the hall. The floor was covered in the same repulsive shag carpet and appeared to have been saturated with the same foul brown stuff that encrusted the stairs. “OK, fuckin A, dude”, Dave blurted somewhat loudly, startling me. “What in the bloody fuckin hell is up with all the sheets? God, I’m about ready to freak out.”
“No shit, man”, I murmured. “This place is ain’t cool…”
There were three bedrooms on the second floor and a full bathroom. There was also a small door that led up a narrow staircase to the attic. The bedrooms were in various states of disarray, but each of them was still furnished with shabby dressers, nightstands and musty mattresses. We quickly decided that Dave and Julie could have the master bedroom, Shelly and Jeff could stay in one of the smaller rooms and Rich and I could sleep in the other bedroom.
“Hang on, man”, I said upon further reflection. “Let’s go check out the attic real quick. Personally, I’d rather stay up there if it’s cool. Rich snores and farts all fuckin night.”
“Damn, man”, Dave said, sounding a little exasperated. “Yall can get along for one damn night, can’t you? Jesus…”
I admitted that he was right, that Rich and I probably could deal with each other this one time. However, I thought to myself that I’d probably check out the damn attic later anyway once I felt a little braver after finishing my 12 pack. I’d probably bring Jake up there with me. Sometimes a big dog is the best cure for a bad case of the willies.
We felt our way back down the stairs and across the living room, enjoying the clean, crisp smell of the country evening as we hopped back down onto the hard dirt that lay under what had once been a porch. The rest of our friends had gotten a cozy fire going behind Grandpa and were chatting comfortably with each other as Dave and I walked up. They asked us what was up with the house. We reported that the place was cool, neglecting to mention that neither one of us liked the feel of it. We didn’t wanna worry anybody unnecessarily. To the west, clouds were now concealing the stars. It might storm, and the Hillston house would provide shelter even if it was creepy and musty. Rich sat Indian-style close to the fire with his guitar next to him. Later, he and Dave would wind up passing it back and forth to each other, entertaining us as we drank and enjoyed each other’s company.
