I doubted that any of the dead items had been hauled away as yet. He’d said this four or five years ago. I tramped on. I kept waiting for the outline of the house to impress itself on the shifting fog. But nothing. I was in the netherworld.
It took me a while to reach the house. I knew I was near because of the smells. These were smells of a meal cooked, a tobacco pipe smoked, of oil and metal rust and sweet sawn lumber.
I stumbled on the first porch step. I didn’t make much noise, fortunately. I went up the rest of the steps on my hands first, groping, exploring. Far within the house, I heard voices. But they were so muffled, I couldn’t tell who they belonged to, or what was being said.
When I was on the porch, I stuck my right hand out and began slowly walking ahead, one careful step at a time. No lights shone from inside. The fog was blinding even on the porch.
I touched a screen door, my fingers running down its coarse surface. The screening was loose enough so that I could push it against the inside door and feel if there was a window. I couldn’t remember what the wooden door looked like. It felt like a slab of pine.
If the screen door made noise, Jim would likely hear it. But I didn’t have much choice.
I stepped back and eased the door open a half inch at a time. Except for a faint thrumming sound made by the spring connecting door to frame, there was no sound at all. I put my hand on the knob of the inside door. It was locked. Great.
I had to go back down the stairs. Though I moved slowly, I still managed to slip on the edge of the mist-covered last step. Somehow, I stayed upright.
I went around the side of the house. The ground was muddy. The exterior of the house smelled of wet wood. My soles made the acquaintance of several plump, juicy pieces of what stank like dog shit. There’s nothing like the feeling of your foot telling your brain what you just stepped in.
I had to feel my way around the corner of the house. The fog seemed even more impenetrable back here. For safety’s sake, I continued to keep my hands on the house as I made my way across the back. After a few minutes, I bumped into the fruit cellar door. A lot of houses in the Midwest have them. The prairie wives would put up preserves, fruits and vegetables, and pickle certain kinds of meat and then stash them in the fruit cellar, where it was much colder than on the upper floors. A prairie form of refrigeration.
There would likely be steps from the cellar leading up into the house. Sneaking in through the cellar would be easier than getting in any other way. I decided to try it.
I groped my way along the slant of the exterior cellar door. I found a latch. No padlock. I undid the latch and raised the door.
I’ve never opened a grave so I can’t say for sure what they smell like. But the cold and sour rushing odor of the cellar reminded me of dead animals I’d seen rotting in scorching sunlight.
I crept downstairs, following the stuttering beam of my flashlight. There was no flooring, just hard-packed earth. The walls were covered with rotted wooden shelves that held ancient Mason jars containing the sort of indefinable but creepy stuff you see floating in large bottles in carnivals. The ceiling was a crosshatch of electrical wiring. For a handyman, Jim didn’t seem to worry much about fires.
A red-eyed rat watched me with malignant curiosity. He probably didn’t get many visitors.
I hurried across the wide basement to the sharply pitched wooden steps leading to a door on the first floor. My flashlight chose this moment to go dark.
I set a cautious foot on the bottom step and proceeded to work my way carefully up to the door. I was almost afraid to try the knob.
What if it too was locked?
But it wasn’t.
I turned the knob all the way to the right and opened the door. A refrigerator motor shuddered on and off; a faucet drip went pock-pock-pock. The kitchen.
The voices were louder and clearer now. One of the voices was Jim’s. The other’s was Ruthie’s.
I went left. There was a dining room, or what was supposed to be a dining room. It held four large tables. In the gloom, I could see that appliances of every kind, dozens of them, filled the table. The dust in this room started to make me sneeze. I slapped my hand over my nose and held my breath. I didn’t sneeze.
The room where the voices were coming from was on the west side of the house. No wonder I hadn’t been able to see the light. I tiptoed to the end of the dining room. A door was outlined in yellow light. Behind the door were Ruthie and Jim.
I moved up to it one slow step at a time. I kept waiting to step on a bad stretch of board -a loud squeak would fill the entire house.
All the time, they were talking.
“You sure you know what you’re doing, Jim?”
“If you don’t think I can do it, you shouldn’ta come out here.”
“Don’t get mad, Jim. I’m just scared, that’s all.”
“I done this when I lived up in Wisconsin and I done this when I lived over to Missouri.
I had me a lot of practice, if that’s what you’re askin’.”
He was saying all the right things to convict himself later on. I was glad I’d snuck in rather than barge in.
“All right, Jim. All right.” She sounded ready to cry.
“Now you just lie back and we’ll get down to work.”
Now was the time.
I got myself ready. Took a deep breath.
Reached down and grabbed the knob. Prepared myself to charge into the room. And found that the door was locked.
“I’m out here, Jim!” I shouted and started rattling the knob.
He shouted something that I couldn’t hear. The lights went out in the room.
“It’s my brother!” Ruthie said.
A pistol exploded. He shot through the door.
Twice. The sound was vast. I’d been to the side of the door, stripping off my jacket so I could grab him easier when I smashed inside. I hadn’t counted on him having a gun.
“No!” Ruthie shouted. “Don’t shoot him!
Please don’t!”
“Shut up, you stinkin’ little whore!” Jim shouted.
A moment later, more gunfire. One, two shots. I flattened myself against the wall.
Ruthie screamed at him, “You bastard!
Leave him alone!”
“You little slut!” he said.
I heard sliding doors being thrown open, slamming into their respective walls.
“He’s getting away!” Ruthie cried.
I finally understood the layout of the house. He had set up his abortion mill in the front parlor and was now going out through the sliding doors that opened on the hallway.
Ruthie turned the light on. I peeked in.
He had an old medical examination table in the middle of the parlor and two white glass-fronted cabinets filled with medicines of various kinds.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I’ll be back.”
I headed for the door and was immediately confronted by a wall of fog.
I wasn’t going to run. It was too dangerous when you didn’t know the terrain. But I went after him. Walking steadily, calmly, quietly as possible.
His footsteps receded. I kept moving forward steadily, touching a damp tree here, a fence post there, tactile reassurance that this was reality not nightmare.
And then, somewhere in the fog ahead, I heard a moaning sound. A human moaning sound. A Handyman Jim moaning sound.
“Aw, shit, McCain. You got to help me.
I broke my leg real bad.”
Not hard to imagine in this fog, tripping and turning your leg into several shards of angled white bone jabbing through hairy flesh.
It took me a few minutes, but I found him. I just followed the cries and the curses. I wondered if the girl he’d killed and put in the canoe had cried this way.
“Here I am, McCain. Help me.”
I could see the faint outline of him in the murk. The fog masked some of the pain on his face, but not much of it.