"Thanks," I said.
"There were POSTED signs everywhere, but the place was deserted, so I drove through." She shook her head, scowled. "God, it was awfully grim. Remember Love Canal, near Buffalo, Jack?"
"Yes," I said. "Entire little community all deserted and boarded up, right? Didn't it have something to do with a chemical dump?"
She nodded. "This was the same kind of thing, I think. Several of the houses—and these were nice houses, Jack; I mean, these were $150,000 houses, at least—several of these houses had burned, but most of them looked like they'd simply been abandoned."
"And no one was there, Erika?"
She shook her head. "Not a soul. Lots of wildlife. I saw six or seven deer, a whole mess of squirrels, and Blue Jays, and I think I saw a raccoon, too. But no people." She popped another forkful of fettuccine into her mouth and chewed very deliberately.
"Sounds . . . intriguing," I said.
"It was, Jack. It really was. I mean—it was spooky, sure—"
"Spooky?" I cut in, and nodded to my left to indicate the area where Jim Sandy had made his discovery. "Like
that
was spooky?"
"No, Jack.
Good
spooky. Like going to a horror movie. It's at a distance, so it's not real. I could drive away from it. It's
there
"—she pointed quickly to her left, to the east—"I
know
it's there. But it's not
here
, is it?" She pointed stiffly at the kitchen floor.
I grinned.
"Is it?" she repeated.
"I don't know," I said. "How do you know it didn't follow you home?"
"Shithead!"
"Just trying to scare the pants off you, that's all."
She grinned a big, playful, inviting grin. "Maybe you did," she said.
"Oh?" I said. "Can I find out?"
"Sure," she answered. "Any time."
"How about now?"
"Yes," she said.
So I did, and I had.
"S
ort of like what you imagine people wore to royal costume parties, huh?" she said at breakfast several mornings later.
"What are you talking about, Erika?"
"I'm talking about that 'part of a nose and forehead' you said were found here."
"Oh." We were seated at the kitchen table, a glass top on a steel pedestal that we'd bought at a restaurant supply house several years before. There was a saucer with a couple of pieces of whole wheat toast on the table, a coffeepot, a pitcher of orange juice. I lifted the coffeepot. "More?"
Erika nodded. I said as I poured, "That's pretty grim. You surprise me."
"It was a joke," she said.
I smiled, set the coffeepot down. "We won't do too much digging around here, okay?"
"I was thinking of starting a garden, Jack." She took a quick sip of her coffee. "In that little flat open area near the privet hedge, in the spring. And if I find anything . . . tacky, I'll mark it with some string and save it for you."
"Save it for me? What am I going to do with it?" This was a tense sort of humor we were sharing. "Start a collection?"
She broke a piece of toast in half, studied it a moment, took a tiny bite of it. "Sure," she said. She took a larger bite. "You can start a collection, Jack. A body parts collection. And one day you can put a whole man together." She stuffed what remained of the toast into her mouth and said something unintelligible.
"Huh?" I said.
She swallowed, grinned. "We'll call you Doctor Frankenstein." She pronounced
Frankenstein
"
Fronken-steen
," the way Gene Wilder did. "Jack
Fronk-ensteen
and his whole man from the earth." Another grin, broader and stiffer. She shrugged. "Or maybe it's a woman, Jack. Did you ever think of that?"
"No," I said.
"I mean, an arm that looks like a rolled-up grocery bag doesn't necessarily have to be a man's arm. It could be a woman's; it could be a man's; it could be a child's."
"Maybe," I said, and grinned.
"What are you grinning about, Jack?"
My grin broadened. I said in deep, sepulchral tones, "Out of the
earth
and into your
bedroom
, ha, ha, ha!"
She said, eyes closed, and a little shiver running over her, "Let's drop it, okay?"
"Sorry?" I said.
"I said"—her huge brown eyes popped open and she stared hard at me—"let's drop it. That's not funny!"
"Sorry," I said again, though in apology this time.
T
wenty years ago, in the park through which I walked home from school five nights a week, I called to Harry Simms, "Harry, it's me, it's Jack Harris. Come on out, Harry, what are you
tryin
' to prove, anyway?" I'd thought of running away a number of times, though mostly just for the hell of it, and I'd thought that the park would make a good starting point. So, if Harry had run away, as everyone thought he had, he might still be there. And besides, I'd seen him; I'd heard him scream, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe!" as he swept past me, which I thought was a kind of a joke because it was the same thing he'd said earlier in the day, when he'd taken it hard in the gut during battle ball. He'd gone to his knees, hands pressed into his stomach, mouth wide, and he'd whispered, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe!" It scared the hell out of everyone, of course, but it turned out that he was only being melodramatic, that he really could breathe but that for some damned reason, he'd forgotten how.
"Harry,
goddamnit
!" I called in the park three days after seeing him there. He wasn't what I'd have called a good close friend, but he'd been to my house a couple of times, and I'd been to his, and I figured that if
he
thought he had a good, close friend at school, it was me.
That evening in the park it was sharply colder than it had been three nights earlier, although the air was dead still. I called to Harry Simms a number of times, and, of course, I got no answer. I heard only a high whining noise like the noise mosquitoes make. And that's what I thought it was, in fact, although the night was far too cold for mosquitoes.
I didn't realize until just a few months ago that what I was hearing was my sometime-friend Harry Simms weeping as he melted slowly and purposefully into the earth.
I think a lot of people had friends like Harry.
I
t was a while before we were able to take a walking tour of our property. Erika was spending long hours at her record store and I had my own work to do as well as lots of fix-up jobs around the house.
Also, it rained too much. It rained every day for two weeks after Jim Sandy gave up on his trench digging—a soft, gray, constant drizzle that became a part of the background noise and ambiance of the house. God, it was depressing. When we were home together and that dismal rain was coming down, we moved about as if in slow motion, as if the air itself were thickening and we had to work very hard to walk in it. We played cards; we listened to music—Erika liked Rachmaninoff, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen—we made love three or four times a week (less than usual, but still noteworthy considering the depressing weather and our overwork) and took turns cooking. My specialties had everything to do with pasta. I'm a whiz at making pasta dishes. Pasta is heavy, hearty food, and I like the feeling of fullness it gives me. Erika's tastes are more eclectic, and artistic. She likes bean sprouts, falafel, goose liver pate (and, of course, my homemade fettuccine Alfredo), and she treats the preparation of food with great respect and love. She said once, "We have only what the soil gives us," and then grinned, as if embarrassed, because it was the kind of deeply philosophical remark which, from me, would have embarrassed her.
But the rain stopped sometime early in January. The soil dried enough that we could walk on it without sinking to mid-calf, and we set off, up our mountain, with our wiry black tomcat, Orphan, following and talking to us constantly—a quick, high-pitched meow that sounded just like the word "now."
I was thankful for the hiking boots I'd bought, because I'd grown to believe most of the stories the locals had told me, especially the stories about rattlesnakes.
I'd been told many other things about life in the area—that there were bobcats and foxes, that the raccoons would tear our garbage up if we didn't hide it, that there were packs of feral dogs roaming about, and, of course, that crazy people lived high up on the mountain across the road from us. I'd come to the conclusion that it was best to believe most of what I heard. After a while I found that some of it was false and some of it was true, but by then it didn't make any difference.
Erika and I walked north first, down a wide, grassy path that skirted the foot of our mountain for three-quarters of a mile. This path had once been a county road and had been unofficially named Goat's Head Road by the people in Cohocton, though no one could say exactly why. On the survey map of our property, it's simply called
Old County Road Number 12/Abandoned
. It continues well beyond our northern boundary, but when we got to the place where the surveyor had put up his wooden boundary markers, we turned east and started to climb our mountain.
Erika said then, "Remember, Jack, if we find anything, it's yours."
And I said, playing the ignorant, "I don't understand."
"Body parts, Jack. If we find any hands or feet or legs or . . . or anything else, then you've got to deal with it. Okay?"
"We won't find any body parts," I said.
"Is that a promise?"
I nodded earnestly. "You have my solemn promise, Erika. I have searched every available inch of our estate with my new, soon-to-be-patented Body Parts Detector, and I can assure you—"
"Can it, Jack."
I canned it.
She was dressed very warmly in a blue ski jacket, a brown turtleneck sweater, jeans, her hiking boots, and brown leather gloves. I would have been sweating in an outfit like that—the temperature was well into the forties, and the air was damp from the recent rains. But Erika was always easily chilled. Most evenings that winter she spent an hour or so seated on the floor in front of the living room fireplace, her bare feet up close to the grating and a look of deep comfort and satisfaction on her face.
"How long's this been going on, Jack?" she asked after a while. We were about a hundred feet up the mountain then, and trying hard to find an area where we wouldn't slide two feet down for every foot of progress up.
"You mean the body parts thing, Erika?" I'd found some solid ground. She was trying, with much difficulty, to pull herself further up the mountain from it by clinging to the thin branch of a dead oak tree. I planted both my hands firmly on her rear end and pushed. It took her by surprise. Her upper body lurched backward; her arms went wide, and with a small, high-pitched squeak of surprise, she began to fall. I caught her, held her a moment with my arms around her chest, and noticed that her breathing had become quick and shallow, as if she were in shock.
I whispered to her, trying to sound playful, "Sorry about that, kiddo," but she made no response, so I continued, "Really. I'm sorry," and she shrugged out of my loose grip, turned halfway, and shook her head quickly.
"No," she said. I heard tension in her voice. "No, it's all right. It's just that for a moment I felt like I was being . . . swallowed up."
"Swallowed up. By what?"
She made a visible effort to bring her breathing back to normal. "I don't know, Jack. By this mountain." She smiled sheepishly, embarrassed. "By nothing."
W
e saw a man at the top of our mountain when we were halfway up. We yelled "Hello" to him, and Erika added, "Who are you?"—but he was a good distance from us, and we realized that he probably couldn't hear us. He was walking several feet back from the crest of the mountain, so we saw him only from the waist up, and I guessed that he was wearing jeans and a denim jacket, though from my vantage point it was hard to tell. Erika yelled to him again, "Who are you?" And added, "This is private property, you know!" I think he turned his head slightly when she said that.
I believe that he smiled.
"Yes," I yelled, "private property!"
And he was gone.