It was a pleasant autumn day, the kind of day where you wake up and you’re not sure why, but you start getting the feeling everything is going to be alright. It rarely is, of course, because things usually aren’t, but you can sit back for a while and just look at the sky and imagine that maybe they could be.
That’s what Tom Brower and I were doing that one afternoon in autumn, just sitting on my back porch drinking cans of Bud and kicking around the paper takeout bags our Chinese food had came in. Roseanne would probably have a fit when she came home, ready to fire off a comment about how it wasn’t in the budget. It would pass though, every storm has to eventually.
Tom and I were friends mostly through happenstance. I’d see him at the lake sometimes on his aluminum jet boat and after a couple of beers, along with the inane and boring conversations men tend to make friendships out of, it was impossible to get rid of him.
I didn’t mind. Tom was a decent enough. He was about four years ahead of my twenty-five and he had a long, jagged scar across his face that I he’d never give you a straight answer about.
“You been hanging any more dry wall since I saw you last?”
I took a swig of beer, both of us still fixated on the clouds. Tom flicked open his penknife and started getting to work on the rough carving of a ship he’d been working on, out of a block of wood he carried with him everywhere he meant.
“I’m not hanging any less.”
Tom chuckled and I couldn’t help but crack a smile myself. It’s rare that you get along with your neighbors, at least it is for me, but sometimes it just works out.
“You know, Paul. I’m not just here to talk about work and shit like that. Money’s been tight for the both of us, lately. I think I found a way we could both scratch up a couple of dollars.”
I chewed on it for a minute, making a big show out of reaching in the breast pocket of my cord jacket and pulling out a pack of Lucky Strikes. I struck a match on one of the metal legs of my patio chair and touched the flame to the end of the cigarette. There was no real point in the whole ritual and Tom knew it. He had me hooked.
At least Roseanne and I could eat out every once in a while without it being the end of the world.
The thought sat there in my mouth, the way they sometimes do when you stop yourself just before you accidentally say them out loud. It tasted sour, not in a pleasant way, but in the way that vomit is sour even after you’ve rinsed your mouth out. The kind of stuff I kept a bottle of Listerine under the bathroom sink for.
“What is it?”
To this day, I still regret that I decided to hear him out and I regret even more that I decided to go along with it. But as my father used to say, hindsight is one fickle son of a bitch and you never know when it’s going to bite you. I should have known better at twenty-five years old, but it took me until I was sixty-five to realize it.
I regret it to this day, and I probably will for the rest of my life. But back then I was young and dumb. Roseanne and I had just married, work was slowing down and all I used to think was that it was no way for any bride to live, but certainly not Roseanne and certainly not a newlywed. All I can do is thank her, because she stuck with me, even through the rough, even when it got downright horrific.
Tom kind of snickered and set the half-ship, half chunk of wood aside. His chair slid across the concrete patio with a loud scratch as he picked it up and swiveled it in a half circle and set it down so he could talk to me face to face instead of side by side. He leaned in real close, his voice a barely audible whisper.
“I’m talking free money, my man. Free money and that’s all.”
He leaned back in his chair as if he was very proud of himself. Very proud indeed. Almost like a king, I remember thinking, sitting there in the patio chair, his back ramrod straight and his chin tilted towards the clouds as the autumn sun splayed golden rays across his face.
Then the clouds blocked out the sun for a moment and the illusion was broken and Tom Brower was just my friend and nothing more. Not a king, not even close. Just a broken kid from a broken home in New Jersey. It’s downright cruel how life always decides to break an illusion just when you were getting close to starting to believe.
“Free money how?” I asked, draining the beer. “There’s no such thing.”
“Not free,” he admitted. “But mostly.”
He turned around and kind of gestured with his arm.
“What’s past those trees?”
I lit another cigarette and took a few meditative puffs as I thought about it. Not what was past the trees, exactly. I knew that much. Mostly I was trying to figure out what he was getting at and which answer he wanted me to give.
“The road, I’d wager.”
“And down the road?”
“Depends on which way you’re turning, I guess. Left or right?”
“Left, up over the hill and round the corner.”
I cracked open another beer and thought about it.
“Not much of anything.”
Tom was nodding excitedly as he opened another beer of his own. His hands were shaking and I didn’t know what it meant at the time. I still don’t, truth be told. But what I tell myself is that he was just nervous and most nights it’s enough to get me to sleep.
Still, the older I get, the more my mind wanders and the more I start to wonder. If maybe, just maybe, he saw exactly how it was going to end. Sometimes I think that I could see it in his eyes in that moment, that he had seen exactly what was going to happen long before I did. And sometimes I have nightmares, but there’s not much to be done about that.
“Not much of anything, exactly,” he agreed, almost babbling in excitement. “But there is something.”
Sure as hell, it dawned on me then. Crazy Old Mcnulty’s house. The old hermit had been living up there for some fifty something years and hardly any of us had seen him.
When we were young, our mothers all warned us that he was crazy as a loon and the older kids in school would tell stories about Herman Mcnulty, how he was a cannibal and he loved kids the best because they tasted the sweetest. We avoided his house like a plague. At twenty-five he still unsettled me, though I still had yet to see him, and I’m not ashamed to admit that at sixty-five he still haunts my dreams.
“You see,” Tom explained. “I actually caught a glimpse of the bastard when I was in town yesterday buying gasoline for the boat. He came up to me and asked if I wanted to make a quick buck.”
He paused for a moment to set the beer can down and stomp it flat, then he dropped it into the cardboard box with the rest of the empties. The wind whistled through the trees, followed by nothing but silence. One of those moments where everything is frozen in time and no wants to move, because no one wants to shatter the stillness.
Still, someone must, so eventually he reached a hand into the box and withdrew the last can of beer triumphantly. He swallowed back a mouthful but it was still a long while before he was ready to talk again.
“You see, he told me that the court granted his daughter guardianship over him. They tried to say he’s not in right mind.”
Crazy as a loon, even. Ain’t that right ma?
I hoped she was looking down from me up there in heaven and smiling. Lord knows it was about time I remembered something she’d told me. I only wish I’d had the sense to think about what it meant.
“Okay. And the free money?”
“I’m getting to that. McNulty says he is in his right mind, but there ain’t a damned thing he can do about it. So before they ship him off to the old folks’ home, he’s decided that his last act as a free man is to clear his house out of any stuff his daughter might want.”
“He’s afraid she’ll steal?”
Tom nodded.
“They don’t want much to do with each other, but that ain’t the best part. See, he told me he’s got about two thousand dollars worth of gold stashed away somewhere in that house and if we find it, it’s finders keepers.”
I took a cigarette out of the pack but this time, I didn’t light it. I just kind of rolled it around in my mouth then took it out and tucked it behind my ear.
“Why give it away?”
Tom chuckled. “Hell if I know. Probably figured he wouldn’t need it where he’s going.
Oh, hindsight, you fickle bastard. If only I’d stopped to think. But who does at twenty-five? I never ask anyone though, I just keep it to myself. There could be plenty of people who would have thought it through, but I don’t want to know. Knowing means being alone.
So we agreed that we would meet at the same spot on my back patio tomorrow at three in the afternoon and drive over there together. We said our farewells, then I picked up the cardboard and the takeout bags and I buried them in the outside trash can, underneath a couple of bags where Roseanne wouldn’t find them.
That night, when she got home from work, I didn’t mention anything about going to clean out the McNulty house. At first, after it all happened, she used to ask why I didn’t. It wasn’t an accusation though, she was just curious. I can’t blame her for that. Mostly, I’d tell her that I wasn’t sure and she could tell it was the truth, so she’s learned to just leave it alone.
Instead, I kept my mouth shut and I didn’t say a word about it. There was a pot roast in the slow cooker and we sat at the table and ate.
“How was work?”
She glanced up from her dinner.
“Well, you know what they say,” She said with a small smile. “It was work. How was your weekend?”
“Too short. After tomorrow, it’s over. Damn shame, that.”
Roseanne laughed. It was amazing how someone could be so pretty when they laughed. Even now, it might be my favorite thing about her.
We had a few glasses of wine, then retired to the living room to watch a movie. It wasn’t very good and I still couldn’t tell you what happened. That night we had sex and Roseanne fell asleep almost immediately, but I couldn’t get there. I just laid there in the dark, listening to her snore and the sound of her face sliding gently down the satin of her pillowcase.
The next morning, after Roseanne had left for work, Tom and I loaded a case of beer into my beat up old Pontiac Bonneville and drove up to Herman Mcnulty’s house. The distance was deceptively short if you just looked at it from my back patio. It looked like nothing more than a stone’s throw, but really it was about forty five minutes out past the middle of nowhere, where the land was too undeveloped to build any houses.
Rumor was, McNulty had bought up all the land out that way, specifically for that purpose. That whole drive I remember thinking that you had to almost admire a man that dedicated to being alone and you almost had to feel sorry for him that it was all being taken away.
Tom was silent the entire way, and another thing I wonder from time to time is if the closer we got to our destination, was Tom starting to see his eventual fate clearer and clearer with each passing mile? The shrink I was going to for a while said that ultimately it’s not important because it won’t change what happened, but I think I at least owe it to Tom to turn it over in my mind every once in a while.
As for me, I was thinking about the case of beer in the backseat because my throat was dry, and I also thought about how nice it would be to walk away from the deal with an extra thousand dollars in my pocket. Enough to get the noose off my neck a little bit. Roseanne would wonder, of course, where the money had come from. I’d figure it out when that came around. If only we all could be preoccupied with such innocent thoughts on our way into the lion’s mouth.
We began pulling up to the junction where the road we were on met the dirt road leading up the McNulty house and Tom held up his hand.
“No point in spooking the old bastard. I’m pretty he’s asleep around this time, if he’s even home.”
I’ll give you one piece of advice right now. It’s up to you to take it, but all I’ll ask you is to keep in mind that every day since, I’ve wished that someone would have given this advice to me and even more so, I wish that I would have taken it.
You know that feeling when you’re about to do something and suddenly everything just seems wrong? Where your skin prickles with goosebumps and all the hair on your body seems to be standing on edge?
I knew a kid in high school who got that feeling once. He was sitting with his girlfriend under a tree and suddenly, out of nowhere, he got that sinking feeling in his stomach. He tried to tell his girlfriend that they needed to leave, but she wouldn’t listen. As he moved from under the tree he tried again to convince her, but it was too late. A branch damaged from a storm a few days ago finally broke free from its proverbial mooring and hit her with enough force to snap her neck.
So that’s my advice to you. When you get that feeling, turn around and walk. It’s not worth it. As it stands, I never got that advice. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken it to heart, or maybe I would have. Maybe I would have turned and walked, or maybe I would have tried to convince Tom it wasn’t worth it. Maybe he would have listened, maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It won’t get you very far.
I put the car in park and cut the ignition. Tom and I walked up the dirt road to the house—it must have been about a half mile long—and as the house loomed in our vision I realized that I had never even seen the McNulty house for myself. It was a dilapidated, teetering, broken down, ugly thing, all gray and peeling with the roof threatening to collapse in on itself.
We got to the porch and stepped up the stairs carefully, avoiding holes that seemed big enough to swallow a man if he were to step wrong. They might have been. The front door was open and the screen door didn’t even have a latch, so we swung it open and let ourselves in.
Inside, the air was thick with dust and cobwebs. Worse than that was the humidity. There didn’t seem to be air conditioning and although I assumed there was no electricity due to the dim exterior, a ceiling fan circling lazily overhead suggested otherwise.
Tom held a finger to his lips, which seemed reasonable. If the old loon was home, there was no point in startling him from his nap. It made sense to me at the time, though every now and again I wonder if that’s just something I say to assure myself that I didn’t actually know what was going on. Who knows?
We crept through the house, past boxes of old newspapers and bags of cat food. They had been gnawed open on the sides, probably by rats. There was an unnatural stillness to the place, not like the peaceful moment Tom and I had shared on the back patio that now seemed so far away.
“So you’ve come to steal from old Herman, have you?”
My stomach dropped into my throat as we turned to face the owner of the voice, but I knew, I knew, just by the rust and shakiness of vocal cords that hadn’t been used to speak more than ten words to another human being in as many years that behind us was Herman Mcnulty himself.
So we turned, coming face to face with a man, shirtless and emaciated, his lower body covered by a pair of overalls. He had a wiry, unruly beard. Underneath that beard his yellowed teeth were bared in a snarl and his eyes had clouded with cataracts long ago.
Tom went to say something, but his voice was drowned out by the deafening report of the shotgun. It rang out and bounced against the walls and at the time it seemed like maybe the ringing in my ears would never go away. But over it all, I heard the dull thud of buckshot hitting Tom in the chest and I watched as he staggered backwards. Not like the movies, where they fly backwards, just a slow, shocked movement.
He fell backwards and crashed into the wall behind him, staring up at me. His eyes filled with tears as he clutched his hands to his chest and stomach. Blood trickled out from between his fingers as he tried desperately to stop the bleeding, but it was fatal and we both knew it. That’s what I have nightmares about, more than anything. More than Herman McNulty, even. I have nightmares about Tom’s face and how pale and scared he looked as he lay there dying up against the wall of Herman McNulty’s house.
For a tense, horrible moment, it seemed like I was next. Then, Herman jerked the shotgun towards the door.
“Go on,” he said. “Get on out of here.”
I ran. God help me, I ran. I ran all the way down the half mile dirt road, then I got in the car and I pushed the accelerator down to the carpet, hard enough that I thought it might punch through the damn floor and snap off. Somehow I shaved fifteen minutes off the forty-five minute drive and the minute I got home I ran inside and called 9-1-1.
There were questions, of course. There’s always questions, even more so when there’s a homicide involved. Most of the questions were about exactly what happened that afternoon, but some of them were about what we were doing there. There was only one thing to tell them, so I told them the truth. Not the whole thing, I didn’t tell them about the gold, just that we were there to clear out the house for him.
Herman McNulty never did any time for killing Tom. I didn’t expect him to and truthfully, I don’t think I wanted him to. He made it to the old folks’ home eventually and that was hell enough.
At first, the police were going to charge me with robbery, only Herman McNulty was so off his rocker by the time they got there all he could really do was babble to himself and wave the shotgun around until they finally got him under control and they couldn’t get a testimony. After a long enough time of sticking to my story, which was entirely true, minus a detail or two, they let me go.
That just about wraps it up, or so you would think. But here’s the one thing I’ve never told anyone, not even Roseanne. Even though the police told me over and over again the same thing my mother used to tell me, that he was crazy as a loon and he probably didn’t even recognize Tom, they never looked into Herman Mcnulty’s eyes.
Because for a moment or two, right before he shot Tom, may God strike me down if I’m lying, I looked into Herman McNulty’s eyes and all the madness was gone. His eyes were clear as the glass of water that sat on Roseanne’s bedside table. They stayed clear all the way up until he pulled the trigger and they stayed clear when he told me to leave.
They weren’t just clear. They were happy.
Sometimes I wonder if I just imagined it, if it was just a trick of the light. Sometimes I think that I must have. Sometimes I wonder if there was actually any gold in the first place. The police never mentioned finding any, but who knows how hard they looked. Besides, there’s a million places you can hide things if you know all the places where people never think to look.
Sometimes I wonder if Tom ever actually had a conversation with Herman McNulty while he was out buying gas for his boat and if it actually happened the way he said it did.
Sometimes, even though I feel ashamed, I wonder if Herman McNulty even knew that we were coming at all.