Memories are fascinating tools of human ingenuity; Many carry the weight of childhood nostalgia and a ghostly reassurance in the symbolism of our lives. Others are obstacles.
The story of Mr.Eckhart is one of those obstacles.
It starts with a transition, from a time of stagnant chill to one of celebration, from winter’s claw to spring’s hammer. I suppose others may have similar tales about the monumental figures of their childhood, people that were just a passing but vital messenger. It’s funny how we often get fuzzy on the good things but remember every single camera pan of the bad ones.
I can see its golden hew in the deepening evening sky. I remember that spring just as I am now turning thirty, and I’m just as scared now as I was then, if I’m being honest. How do I begin to tell you about the yellow snow, or the evil intent of a man?
When it first began, I was ten or eleven -I don’t recall my exact age. It began the last days of March, when spring’s warm grasp turned the midday sky into an opaque golden, worshiping the treetops and churning the charismatic life smoke from stalk to stalk. I was too young to recall many specific details of that spring in ‘02 or ‘03. Mr. Eckhart lived in a faraway realm from my mind. I was swinging on vines in the woods behind my house with my friends and building lackluster forts with rotten two-by-fours. On the back porch on Saturday afternoons, I listened to dad’s high raspy voice and his acoustic guitar forming the enamel of some songs that would eventually take his band to a new level.
The bane of Mr.Eckhart’s existence was his loneliness. Anyone who ever knew a single thing about the man knew that. He lived a solitary life up on a hill outside of Fairview, half a mile from the town dump. He was the “strange old man”, the mantra townsfolk assigned to him like a scarlet letter. Back then, people treated him like a copperhead, but from what I had heard, he never bit. All he did was carry its sign.
I was okay with the lonely Mr. Eckhart. He never disturbed my magical world of nerf guns and flag football. So what was the problem, mom? Dad? And without pause or reservation -before mom could squeeze dad’s lips shut with her eyes- he’d say: “Fucking Jerry.”
From the stories I overheard, when my parents thought I was not around, the first days of spring were always generous to Mr.Eckhart. Its lustrous yellow spread covered his property at a depth of one inch in some places. I’ll admit that the idea of this swirling Crayola yellow nightmare frightened me. But, if ever I ventured near his property and witnessed this, the years have done well to repress such memories. The mind, as such, is a powerhouse for self-preservation; Sometimes the bad things stick like congealed pollen in a rain gutter.
In ‘09, when I was finishing up my junior year of high school, I met the man for the first time.
On a day in March, I stopped on the left shoulder of River Valley Road, peering over my handlebars at the mangled mess of a cat on the blacktop. We didn’t own a cat back then, but we had a chocolate lab puppy. I remember imagining Rocco in the dead cat’s place, seized up and stiff. The horrible intensity of it is a memory I recall well, the cat’s intestines splayed amid the fresh yellow powder of spring. It was reduced to a grotesque road marker. So caught up in my observations, I didn’t notice the figure striding down the long driveway on the other side of the road.
“Hello.”
I swung around.
The man enjoyed my surprise or was ignorant of it because he kept smiling as he approached the nasty road-kill scene. He appeared to walk fine but punched a gnarled cane into the pavement every three feet. It was Mr.Eckhart in the flesh, his house just up the slight hill. How I could have been so oblivious to my surroundings puzzled me.
“My cat,” he remarked in a German accent, sounding subdued but not showing it. “Poor thing, I see.”
Mr.Eckhart was still dressed for winter: thick blue jeans, heavy-duty boots, brown wool jacket zipped up, camouflage hat pushed down on his crown. He was a shriveled man, the slivers of youth in his motions seemingly withering by the moment. He stopped just short of his mailbox. In addition to those peeling lips, his black sunglasses were smiling high up on his smooth, pale face.
The man raised the twisted cane and motioned towards the yellowing heap of torn black fur near me.
“Looking all day for him. His name was Aldo. My mess. I’ll go and clean him up.”
He shook his downcast head, beginning to turn back.
I don’t know if there is some unknowable entity that forces us all along specific paths, but I know I would not be the type of man I am today if I hadn’t spoken.
“Have you got a shovel?” He continued to shake his head, but not to my question.
“Wheelbox,” he said, and I knew he meant ‘wheelbarrow.’
I took his mumbled queue and followed, pushing my dusty yellow bike with me. I was unsure about what I thought I was doing, but I knew two things. First, I was bigger than Mr.Eckhart if bees took to honey. Secondly, I felt obligated to ensure the cat had a proper burial since I was the one who had found it.
Late Saturday mornings aren’t meant for the dead, especially those that are clear and full of birdsong, but I shadowed Mr.Eckhart’s retreat up the hill. The driveway meandered around the right side of his two-story home, bordered by the barren stumps and twigs of past living seasons.
“I hate spring,” Mr.Eckhart commented as he rounded the corner, and I would have, too, if the plants loved me as much as they appeared to love him. Our shoes left perfect prints on the pavement. Pollen absorbed the surrounding yard like a paper-thin blanket.
“Sir?”
“Ya?”
“The stories are true, aren’t they? About this time of year?”
He grunted, not responding right away. When he did, he just laughed.
“How old are you? Still in diapers, yus? Still believing in fairytales, yus?” And he laughed again. His dry crackle made me feel sorry for his advancing age.
I leaned my bike against the house, and we started across the yellow grass towards the barn. The barn was one hundred yards or so from his back door. He didn’t have a back porch, just a rectangular concrete slab with a single wooden chair and a grill on its yellow surface.
How that padlock chain dangled from those two wooden doors stirred worry to a liquid in my guts. I hated how that barn just sat there like a dead bug in the sun. Becoming ever so more confident that he didn’t need that cane, I saw every reason to be dishonest about my age and reason more to be wary.
“I’m eighteen, sir,” I said.
Mr.Eckhart stopped. He seemed to sniff the air, and turned. I saw that his nose was a bulbous appendage of white flesh. He made his point at me with a long wrinkled finger.
“In spring lies the torment, boy.”
He turned back around, leaving me scratching my head. We resumed our trek. He grabbed the padlock and got the key in without battle when we got to the barn. Inside, blades of light from the sun cut the shadows in sections, and the only remarkable object I saw was a vehicle covered in a worn-out gray tarp. Along the left wall was a workstation piled with a man’s equivalent of happiness: tools. In plain sight near the opposite wall was the wheelbarrow. I moved towards it but stopped. Did I want to be in front of Mr.Eckhart?
He pointed at it.
“You want to help, yus? You roll it.”
I swallowed.
“Okay.”
I got the wheelbarrow back down the hill. Mr.Eckhart handed me the shovel he’d taken and leaned back on his cane as I worked. He surprised me in a different tone.
“Thank you, boy. What’s your name?”
I was as delicate as possible with the cat, but it was -forgive me for the metaphor- like trying to flip a fried egg in a sticky pan.
“Sandy,” I said.
“Huh?”
“My name. It’s Sandy.”
“Right,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Sandy, do you know my name?”
I levered the cat off the shovel and into the wheelbarrow, wincing when the hanging viscera slapped the dirty surface. I looked up to find Mr.Eckhart’s black sunglasses smiling at me again.
“Eckhart,” I said and tried to be funny, even grinned a little. “Everyone knows you by your first, middle, and last name: Eckhart.”
All black sunglasses on me.
“My first name.”
I pretended to think about it but just shook my head.
“Josef,” he said. “Josef Lucius Eckhart the Third.” He was quiet as I wheeled the cat back up the hill. After rounding the corner, he motioned for me to stop at the garage entrance, which I assumed was a garage, intersecting the main house. He went in and started moving things around, twisting things, grunting. After a minute or so, he came back out with thick white gardening gloves, abruptly grabbed the dead cat by its stiff scruff, and hurried back in.
“Incinerator!” he said from inside.
A light wind had kicked up and created a formidable yellow cloud. I wanted to tell Mr.Eckhart that it was okay. I’d bury it, that I’d do it myself. I could have entered the garage to inspect what was going on, but when I stepped forward he shouted:
“Don’t come in! Sights like this shouldn’t be seen by a mere boy.”
Should I just grab my bike and leave? I thought it probably one hundred times when he stepped back out in the sun. I couldn’t see his eyeballs from behind his thick sunglasses, but I knew they had changed their tone as his smile had transitioned into a tight frown. If he was looking past me, I couldn’t tell. Black smoke filtered from the chimney into the blue sky.
“To Hell with it. My God.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“Look at all dis shit!” he shouted, raising his cane and hands to the sky, walking around me in agitation. “Every guddamn year, I’m made to suffer!”
Gooseflesh prickled on my arms, but I rubbed them out with my hands. His backyard was a thick haze of pollen, moving in one direction: left to right, like a river current. I remembered him asking me if I still believed in fairytales. I wanted to ask him why he was so superstitious. I could only marvel at the spectacle despite this -as I would soon find out- being the old man’s annual seasonal inconvenience.
“This is crazy,” I said, dumbfounded by the yellow air. “Why is it so much? Where’s it all coming from, Mr. Eckhart?”
I didn’t see him reaching into his pocket, but there was a fifty-dollar bill in my hand the next instant. A level tone fell from his curled lips, one full of hatred and wild fear despite the fertilized tears cascading over his cheekbones.
“Want a spring job, boy?”
Now that I think about it, it was the same as asking if I wanted years of swirling, Crayola yellow nightmares.
*
You’re probably thinking: Whatever happened to this Sandy kid, it’s his fault for going back to that property. And I wish there was a more eloquent way to explain myself, but there isn’t. He paid me well for a man with a home weathered bare and gray.
The following Saturday, the first one in April, I arrived at Mr.Eckhart’s house at ten in the morning to haul cut logs across the yard. Earlier that week, he had called a landscaping company to butcher three large oak trees, one in his front yard and two in the back. When I got there that Saturday morning, a mound of yellowing sawdust sat in the middle of the yard where the stump had been eaten away by metal. The tree was chainsawed, and the base pieces rolled into a pile off to the side. Mr.Eckhart was sitting in a chair on the front porch when I pulled up on my bike. The air was cool, but the sun was out, and there was no breeze.
He watched me pull up, goggles replacing his sunglasses. His shirt was off, and his torso was shrunk to the waist like a funnel. Skin tags riddled his flabby skin. His white chest hair had a dusting of pollen.
It was strange. The closer I got to his front porch, the more pollen there was.
“Good morning, Mr.Eckhart,” I said, dumping my bike near the steps.
Mr.Eckhart nodded once, reached shakily to his right, and picked up a pair of gardening gloves and goggles from a small table. He handed them to me. There were two cans of beer on the table, as well.
“What I need you to do is drag that mess, see..” he motioned towards the cut-up tree in the front yard with his chin. “..drag that bitch to the back and burn it.”
I said yessir, and just as I turned around, I heard him say:
“One hundred dollars for every mudder-fuck of a tree you get rid of.”
I worked until two or three that afternoon, dragging branches and logs to the burn pit Mr.Eckhart made earlier that morning. I made three hundred dollars that day. Dad was off on tour with his band around then, and the guitars he often left behind I played in lust. I suppose he made enough to snag any guitar in any guitar store I wanted, but I wanted to earn my first one.
I was rushing when it hit mid-afternoon. There was a girl I was taking to the movies that night, and I needed to wash some clothes for that evening. She was the epitome of first dates, but I don’t remember her name; many came and went over those years.
As I worked, I often caught Mr.Eckhart waving a lighter in the air like he was trying to catch the sway of a ballad at a rock concert. He would angrily kick at the yellow dust with his bare feet and mutter curses. Towards the end of the day, he walked up to me in the backyard as I threw the remnants of twigs and branches into the steady flame. He still only wore his shorts and goggles, and he was delirious in the day’s warmth.
He had a wad of bills in one hand, the lighter in another.
“Bullshit fuck! I hate this! I hate…” he paused, gazing up at my face. The goggles made me want to laugh at him. “You know, boy, sometimes I live to see the night. Give me the night! Here you go, my sweet Sandy boy!”
Before I could move, he tucked the bills into my pocket, jumped back, threw his face up to the sky, and laughed, a terrible grin breaking the skin along his lips. I pretended to understand the situation, but this frightened me.
I liked how the wad of twenties felt in my pocket though.
*
For the next few weeks, the pollen count over the county dropped, as it naturally does. But it got worse on Mr.Eckhart’s property. I know this because Mr.Eckhart had me take his beaten-up Toyota pick-up to a Home Depot to get twenty gallons of liquid grass killer and a bed-load of orbit sprinklers for the yard. He had alcohol on his breath as he shakily hashed out the money I was to use for the supplies. His words, “I’m done fucking around.”
I’m not proud of my swift, joyful attitude towards the decimation of Mr.Eckhart’s yard. If he wanted me to kill every blade of grass, I was prepared to do it. I think I tried; There was plenty of green growth in the world, but Mr.Eckhart wanted his dead.
I set all the sprinklers up in his yard in a circular pattern, all relatively close to the house. For these jobs, I wore boots and jeans despite the gaining humidity and a mask in addition to the goggles. The stubborn yellow ejaculate was several inches deep along the foundation, obscuring my heels. On Mr.Eckhart’s roof, it was a thick unearthly blanket.
While the sprinklers spurted the poison, I was either disposing of the limbs of other trees Mr.Eckhart had his landscaping cut down, or doing my best to wash away the yellow madness on the exterior walls of his house, the cement walkways, the porch, or the driveway. One day I even got on a ladder and attempted to rid the roof shingles and second-story windows of Mr.Eckhart’s hell. After that, I spent a week straight after school and all day during the weekend digging a shallow trench from the house to the barn, then followed that to a steep embankment at the tree-line. I noticed aberrant indentations in the earth where Mr.Eckhart had most likely resumed digging when I was gone. I layered that same trench with over a thousand pounds of concrete I mixed in the wheelbarrow I had used as the cat’s hearse earlier that spring. This task alone cost me precious hours normally spent practicing guitar scales but made me one thousand dollars richer.
But here’s the thing. It always came back. After an arduous day’s worth of work, the pollen would be back the next morning, and I would have to labor it away with the hose or the shovel. Mostly the shovel as time went on.
The ground would be saturated with an inhumane concentration of RoundUp from the previous day. But yet, the yellow drifted in the wind like food coloring in water, a solid sheen of unforgiveness. By the last week in April, I knew what I had been seeing was for me somehow. I knew the spring had eyes for Mr.Eckhart, and it was making me watch.
On a late April afternoon, I had all sprinklers on, soaking the torched soil. Nothing grew, but the pollen was an everlasting tide seeping forward. The porch steps were steeped in half a foot of it. Mr.Eckhart no longer sat outside. Understandably.
As I was spraying the trench banks, mesmerized by the turbulent flow of dirty yellow water, I saw him stumble out of the barn bare naked. He hauled a gas canister in both hands. I felt the bright tremors of alarm in my head and strolled over to him quickly. His mouth was moving, and he was crying, saying he wished he had done things differently, praying to God that what he had done would just kill him already. When I reached out to grab the canister, I saw it and shrunk away immediately. Directly above the base of his shriveled penis was the tattoo of a swastika, faded and gray with time but distinct. I looked into his face and tried to see his eyes through the fog of his goggles. I had torn mine off in the run-over.
“Mr.Eckhart,” I said. He was speaking in German now, staring past me at the house. I didn’t know if the RoundUp was flammable by itself or its reaction with gasoline. That’s why I had moved the burn pit further back away from his residence in the first place. And Mr.Eckhart was moving away from the pit, directly towards his back door.
“Josef,” I tried again, looking back at the tattoo and wishing I hadn’t. He was getting erect. I took a hurried breath and jostled the object from his horribly-callused hands. It wasn’t hard, and he didn’t seem to care. The foreign words he sputtered sounded to me like attempts to dislodge dirt.
I couldn’t help my panic.
“Dude, what the hell? You’ll burn everything down!”
I convinced myself. I would call emergency services. Even in my disgust at Mr.Eckhart’s physical demeanor, I felt a transient obligation to care for him.
Mr.Eckhart grabbed a tuft of my soaked shirt. I cried out in surprise, wrapping my hand around his wrist. His deep tone overlooked the grimace on his face.
“Down…stairs,” he said. “Downstairs.”
“Downstairs…” I said, relieved I could hear his normal voice again. “Mr.Eckhart, why are you naked?”
He let me go and retreated to the barn, shutting the door behind him. I decided to go home to wash this interchange off of me. I was afraid Mr.Eckhart would resume his questionable pursuit of arson, so I took the gas canister with me. As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait long for the paralyzed sleep. It came for him the next day.
*
The following morning I went back to inform Mr.Eckhart that I had done everything in my power to alleviate his stresses but that it seemed like an unexplainable malevolence had shadowed his property. The truth -something I wouldn’t tell him- was that he had made me uncomfortable.
I didn’t understand the whole thing, but I no longer wanted to be caught in the middle of a battle between man and nature. I would thank him for paying me so well, of course. I still had my manners.
Despite my sore body, I pedaled that Sunday morning and made the right turn off River Valley Road and up the dusty yellow driveway. When I got to the top, I pedaled in deep pollen the consistency of fine-powdered snow. When I saw what was on the front porch, I stopped and sat there for however long it took me to find the strength to move again.
Something shifted in the trees nearby, and a thin but disruptive yellow veil cut through the air; It was conclusory, and I wanted to scream at the deep blue sky. Mr.Eckhart’s hell had thickened the air, riding a subtle current, and turned my vision and body into a chalky pastel yellow. I engaged the kick-stand and hopped off.
As I came up the steps, which weren’t steps at all now, just a yellow slope, I greeted Mr.Eckhart, knowing he didn’t have that capability anymore. The madness had ended him.
He was in the chair. The madness had ended him through multiple orifices, it appeared. His eyes had been diseased by the terror, stiff and bulging through puffy yellow sockets. It had clogged his nostrils, which were swollen. It had taken advantage of his screams, his mouth open wide, wider than any mouth should have been allowed to open, and the terror had run in, had no doubt ceased his breathing. I moved up the steps cautiously, searching for each step. Mr.Eckhart looked like a slug, his neck large and twisted, gut protruding from his stained shirt. There was no blood. Then, I saw the dark trails underneath his clouded eyes. I understood what really killed Mr.Eckhart.
The madness had brought him to a whimpering boy of himself.
I would not be writing this if his front door hadn’t been open. I think the nightmare would have been more manageable had that entrance been unwelcoming. Pinned to the door with a nail was an envelope with Sandy scratched in black marker.
I shuffled forward, inadvertently kicking pollen everywhere, cursing, shaking. “Jesus Christ,” I said, touching the envelope but withdrawing quickly. Wasn’t this a crime scene?
But the interior of Mr.Eckhart’s everything was inches away, and I had to see. Something told me he had shut this door before sitting in the chair, maybe even going so far as to lock it. Who had opened this door? Could they still be inside?
I stepped into a living area that had the aroma of old age. Two couches, gray and used, formed a right angle with the wall. I could hear an air vent’s rattle, but I could feel no current.
Fearful the door would shut as soon as I made my way deeper inside, I pushed the door all the way to the wall and propped one of the couches against it.
It was dark, the curtains impenetrable, but the light from the front door engulfed the place and turned it into an unsettling gray hue.
Had I been confident Mr.Eckhart was really dead? I decided to look back at the sitting bloated version of him, the lower half of his calves hidden beneath the yellow tide. Did I expect him to suddenly rise? At one point, I think I did.
It crossed my mind that I was almost done with high school, a year left to go, and wouldn’t it have been funny to have been murdered by a dead man? What would my parents think, what would they believe?
On the right, next to the living room, was a dining room. Boxes with some of their spilled contents littered the table. I found a wooden slide door and entered the dead man’s kitchen.
I expected to see something unsavory there, but the kitchen was tidy and clean. The marble counters reflected light from the window above the sink. I moved on through the door. I could go directly to my right into a brief corridor-like space that ended with the backdoor, straight ahead towards what looked like a lounge or go up some stairs that went up to my right further down. Squinting, I could see the lounge-like room twenty feet or so away, and my blood ran cold.
I stood at the entrance to Mr.Eckhart’s cozy memorabilia room. For awhile I was confused, biting my lip, turning it around in my head. Could Mr.Eckhart have been in the war? The lamps in this one space were on, and I could clearly see what was on the walls.
Nazi flags plastered the walls, the ones with the sharp-edged swastikas on red backdrops. Old black-and-white photographs were blown up in huge, decorative frames on all sides. A fireplace sat like an eternity to my left, its brick foundation slightly blackened and soiled. It wasn’t until later on, during a college history course, that I fully understood the symbolism of the death-head, the skull with the cross and bones. At seventeen years old, I didn’t recognize the Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, in the four by four frame in front of me. I didn’t know who the wiry man next to the Angel of Death was, either. For all I knew, they were two guys having a comical conversation, guys who wore really cool uniforms and talked of women and dreams. At seventeen years old, I didn’t know who that man was who posed in front of a tough battalion of men. The Beast of Belsen, Josef Kramer, names and infamous murderers I had never heard of before. They all surrounded my ignorant statue.
By the far right wall, tucked in the corner, was a surly oak desk, its surface polished and unperturbed by the masses of stationary stacked on the red velvet rug near it. I meandered around a long, low-lying table decimated by thick books with yellowing pages, and pulled the heavy wooden chair away from the monstrous desk. I think I thought about running my fingers over the surface, just to prove to myself I wasn’t scared of this place. But then I thought about the dead man outside and temporarily backed away.
A thick white binder was sitting on one of the wooden desk’s shelves. I sat down in the chair, hesitated, reached and grabbed it, and frowned as the front cover wobbled in my fingers; the seam had ripped three quarters of the way down. The thing was old. It was a memory photo book.
On the inside of the cover was a date I assumed described the inception of what I was about to see:
July 14th, 1941
The next few pages showed a baby cradled in a crib. Under each one:
Josef Lucius Eckhart III
Most of the text that I would see would be written in scribbled German, but it didn’t matter that I couldn’t read the damned words; what matters is what I saw.
I turned the page over. Here was Mr.Eckhart as a toddler, shrouded in a big white diaper, crawling on the floor. Here was Mr.Eckhart with a bubbly grin on his baby lips. Here was what I assumed was his father, holding his son out to the unknown photographer.
A few photographs were so distilled with age and wear that I could only make out a knee here or a tree there. Soon, I got to the other guys. In one, I remember seeing what I now know to be an SS officer cradling his own baby, an MG-42 machine gun. He was blowing smoke towards the photographer. And laughing. I shivered.
Three men huddled together. Mr.Eckhart’s father among them, cigarette in mouth, oblivious of the camera.
Towards the end of 1942, I came across some intriguing photos. I don’t remember much of what I saw, but I do recall seeing a group of children standing at attention to the photographer. They had all been frowning, backs straight, palms planted flat to their sides. The next few photos were of them doing some kind of training exercises, running around and around in a large open field.
May 1943. A very young Josef Lucius Eckhart III standing up, clothed in nothing but underwear, a toy duck fisted in one hand.
July 1943. A large structure with a railway passage cutting through it. The next one, a train billowing smoke and approaching the entrance, but from a different angle. This place looked familiar to me like I had seen it in an English textbook or something.
I flipped the pages in a fever, growing uneasy.
1944, still. Gaskammern von Auschwitz, read the description. I knew the word ‘Auschwitz’, and I remembered the word ‘gaskammern’ because it had the word ‘gas’ in it. I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. A German Shepard lunged for a young girl grasping her mother’s skirt. In the next photo, a Nazi was forcibly yanking on the same dog’s leash while it tore at the same girl’s lifeless body.
I flipped more feverishly, more frantically, unable to turn away, held in by its spell.
By October of 1944, all of the photos were of mangled corpses being ripped open by men in white lab coats. In more than a few, the mutilated bodies were being burned in a large bonfire. In two or three, a man appearing to loom over a body turned to face the camera and smiled. There was a gap between his upper middle incisors. The description read: Doktor Mengele. Dr.Mengele playfully showed off his scalpel in the next one.
November 1944. Bodies. Charred remains.
December 1944. Men in white coats. Bodies. Bulging dead eyes.
January 1945. Bodies. Bodies. Bodies-
I groaned and threw the memory book aside. I should burn it, I thought, thinking about my fingerprints. Oh, Jesus Christ, Mr.Eckhart’s father had been a murderer, a damned sadist. They all-
Something shattered to the floor near the kitchen. I drew back from the chair, knocking it to the carpet in my haste, and scrambled into the hallway again. To my left past the stairs, a ten-foot corridor led directly to the backdoor. Glass shards burdened the wooden floor and old rug, obscured by the frame and its occupant.
Was someone in this house with me? Yet surely they would have seen me, heard me in the lounge? I wanted to yell out but I knew better. The picture had fallen to grab my attention, steer me towards something.
I tiptoed past the mess and found myself looking stupidly at another door just to the left of the backdoor.
Downstairs, Mr.Eckhart had told me. My skin broke out in gooseflesh. He had been hauling the tools for fire. What had he intended to burn?
I went down two preluding steps and twisted the basement door knob.
Inside, it was actually cooler than upstairs. I flicked on the light and went down the flight of stairs, holding the railing the whole time. The steps creaked as my weight prolonged its stay.
It wasn’t obvious at first, but that cage in the back did some pretty nasty things, did some pretty nasty emotional things. I was sure of it.
The fluorescent lights were exceptionally bright, allowing me witness to the carefulness of this underground world’s creation. Mr.Eckhart’s basement wasn’t built with the lazy hands of a close drinking buddy, or during the duration of a season, for that matter. Mr.Eckhart’s basement consumed time and money alike.
Mr.Eckhart’s basement didn’t have cobwebs or spiders or bugs. It had perfect dimensions and white-washed walls. It had concealed, non-obstructing air vents and its own thermostat. It had immaculate marble floors, a terrible hardness that made it feel like a person was walking through an alien aircraft.
The metal surfaces of the tables lining the wall on my right were rigid and bare, polished, gleaming. A sink had been built in the middle. I went over to the sink, looked in, and saw a single piece of notebook paper residing in the dry basin.
The piece of paper was three-quarters filled with Mr.Eckhart’s large-printed handwriting. It was almost as if he had thought writing in pencil diluted some of its finality. It read:
Somewhere in this room are the tattered bones of three boys. Their ages were five, eight, and nine. The fourth boy was done after the floors were put in. He was thirteen. You’ll find him wrapped in plastic underneath the car in the barn. The car, I touched them in with my dirty hands. The cage, I washed them off in before putting them to rest. I’ve tried for forgiveness within myself in the past ten years since Johnathan, the fourth one. I have been reminded by such forces that it does not forget or forgive.
When I dropped Mr.Eckhart’s confession back into the sink, I turned and looked at the steel bars in the corner through my tears, saw the faucet, saw the drain. In the time it took me to run, I thought about bones crushed by marble. I thought about the additional pressure my weight put on the bones.
I didn’t voice an angry shout or a strangled cry as I ran past the fallen picture in the corridor, back into the kitchen, stumbling through the living room with that couch propped against the front door. I sobbed with a full heart of alleviation, with a relief that summoned me to the envelope nailed to the front door and the money Mr.Eckhart had left for me inside. I cried silently for the forgotten bones underneath the marble, bones that would be forgotten no more.
I waited for my groans to stop. Then, when I could finally compose myself, I waited at the end of the driveway for someone to come.
**
We all have a duty to let those deserving of life not be forgotten. We often forget that there are forces we cannot understand, protectors of the wild that don’t wear our skin. But they have a consciousness of their own, and I believe that more than I have ever believed in any god. Maybe this is the God everyone gloats about. As my dad would say, “I don’t know, dude, okay?”
Swirling Crayola yellow nightmares plague me, as they have since that day. I don’t get them every night, Thank God, but they follow me regularly. Usually, it isn’t the yellow air that haunts me; it’s the man with the smiling sunglasses as black as obsidian.
“Downstairs,” he says, and I wake up screaming my head off.
Beth knows I like peace and the unfounded quietness of nature. Her father lives in a small ranch house near the mountains. Wide-open spaces, acres of rolling fields. So, when I told her I had an idea for a new book, expressing concern over this distracting city noise, she suggested I try the ranch house. Yes, her father would be there, but it would be a good bonding experience for us. I’d only met the man a handful of times. He had a bad leg, and was a man who waved off help to preserve his pride. We all know someone like that.
Beth has had things she’s had to deal with in her past, too, even though I’ve never told her about mine. I suppose one day I will, but my tone has always been balanced and calm when she talks about how her mother and her sister disappeared off the face of the earth one day when she was fifteen. The day they had gone missing, she had been spending the night at her grandparents’.
When my eyebrows rose, she caught my thinking and reassured me: “Dad was on the road when it happened.” Supposedly, he was hauling some freight across the country and would have been hundreds of miles away. His job had been driving what my fifteen-year-old self would have called ‘the big trucks’.
I’ve always had my doubts about Mr.Benningham. I never told Beth that, though.
I arrived at the ranch house in spite of Mr.Benningham’s stifled mumbling that he didn’t need “old people help”. It was something I reassured him I wouldn’t do, of course. He was too heavy to roll over, and at this, he flicked a glance at me and slowly smiled. He was supposed to use a cane for his bad leg, but I suppose the being seen with it at forty-eight years of age only ages you faster.
For the first few weeks, we played rummy on the front porch and drank beer that tasted like chilled piss from a cooler every night. Mr.Benningham -Dereck, he tells me- has seen just about everything there is out on the road. He tells me stories of drunken scuffles and tales of lonely adventurers out on the Ventura Highway. He doesn’t mention his missing wife and daughter, though. Maybe that’s his way of dealing with the loss. I figure it’s reasonable.
I was being serious, by the way. I can see spring’s golden hue in the evening sky out here. It’s subtle, see, and the yellow days have come and gone here in the piedmont, but something else concerns me.
As the season progresses, the weeds grow quickly, suffocating the bright green grasses into submission. Mr.Benningham has changed, too. I hear him lumbering around in the night like a lost vagrant.
I find myself cutting them back, these weeds. I’ve seen Mr.Benningham outside with the weed killer, too, spraying the outline of his home and cursing to high heaven.
In the blackness of these rural nights, I often wonder if my mother-in-law and sister-in-law are in these fields somewhere. I’ve watched as the weeds pile on top of each other, how they appear to be crawling forward like a sneaky green tide.
I plan to know what happened to the girls one way or another, even if it takes all summer.