Mr. Was (5 page)

“That looks like an old Amish quilt up in the blue bedroom,” he said, making a bright yellow mustard scribble on his sandwich.

Mom stood with her back to the sink, watching us. She shook her head.

“Could be worth a lot of money,” Dad said, biting into his sandwich. All afternoon he had been wandering around the house with a notebook, writing down all the stuff he saw. “We got a key for that third floor?” he asked.

“It's around here somewhere,” Mom said. “I haven't found it.”

“We don't need it,” I said.

They both looked at me.

“I know how to pick the lock,” I told them.

Dad laughed. “Studying to be a burglar?” he asked.

“It was just something to do.”

He pushed the last of his sandwich into his mouth
and stood up. “Let's go check it out, champ. Maybe the old man left us a chest of gold or something.”

I caught a look at my mother's face. I couldn't tell if she was mad or ready to cry. I didn't want to know, so I followed my dad up the stairs and went to work with the coat hanger.

This time it only took a few seconds.

“Way to go, champ,” he said. “Let's see what we've got.”

We climbed the stairs, and it was just like Mom had said. One bedroom was crammed with a bunch of junky old furniture, a trunk stuffed with motheaten clothes, and a wooden toolbox containing a bunch of bent nails and a rusty hammer with one broken claw. The other bedroom had nothing in it but a saggy iron bed. I found a yellowed
Life
magazine with Franklin Roosevelt's picture on the cover. We checked all the closets. One of them contained a dried-up dead bat, but we found no chest of gold, no mysterious doors.

Back in the kitchen, my mother was sitting at the table nibbling at a sandwich. Dad grabbed another beer for himself and sat down across from her.

“Just a bunch of junk up there,” he said. “All the good stuff is downstairs. I figure an estate sale could net us about nine or ten thousand. We'll have to talk to a realtor about the house and property.”

“Ron, he's only been dead three days,” Mom said. “Let's not be counting his money so soon, okay?”

Dad glared at her and licked a bit of foam from the corner of his mouth.

I said, “Can we go home pretty soon?”

Mom's shoulders dropped. “First thing in the morning, Jack.”

“The sooner the better,” Dad said. He tipped his beer and poured half of it down his throat.

Mom said, changing the subject, “It was good to see Mr. and Mrs. Wahl at the funeral. I haven't seen them since I was in college. Mrs. Wahl looks good for her age, don't you think?”

Dad belched. “Which one was she?”

“The elderly woman sitting across from us.”

“They were all elderly. I never seen such a collection of walking dead. I thought that one old guy was going to die right there in the chapel. You see him? With the patch on his eye? Who was he?”

Mom shook her head. “I don't know. He looked like he'd been in an accident, didn't he?”

Dad laughed harshly. “He looked like his face met up with a lawn mower is what he looked like.”

I didn't know who they were talking about. There had only been a dozen or so people at the funeral, and I hadn't seen anybody with an eye patch or a messed-up face. I asked who they were talking about.

“There was an old man there, Jack,” my mom said. “You didn't see him? His face was horribly scarred. He was wearing a black suit.”

“I didn't see anybody like that.”

My dad said, “Sometimes I think you can't even see
the nose in front of your face, champ. The guy was sitting right behind us, talking to himself.”

That night they had another fight. I couldn't sleep. My father would start yelling, and then they would both be yelling, and then their voices would lower, and then they'd be quiet for a few minutes, and then Mom's whine would start up and my father would start yelling again. I couldn't understand most of what they were saying, but eVery now and then I'd catch a few words.

“You want me to leave you? You want us to be poor? Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you want?” One of the things my father would do when he got really mad was to scream the same thing over and over again. I could see the scene in my mind's eye. She would be sitting down, he would be leaning over her, beating her with words.

“Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you want? Huh?”

Her head dropping lower and lower until he stopped, then she would say something and her whine would lash him into a renewed attack.

“You want me to hit you? Huh? Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you want?”

The argument ebbed and flowed. It had all started over Skoro's house. My father wanted to sell it right away, but Mom wasn't ready to do that. I couldn't figure her out. Why would she want to keep a place
like this? I didn't blame Dad for getting mad, but I wished he would quit yelling at her. I thought about going downstairs to see if I could stop it, but I was so mad at both of them myself I was afraid I'd start yelling, too.

After a while, I couldn't take it anymore, so I got dressed, grabbed my blanket, dragged it up to the third floor, spread it out on the old iron bed, and lay down with all my clothes on. The mattress was so saggy my butt nearly hit the floor.

Even with the whole second floor between us, I could hear them. I forced myself to think about things other than my parents. Pretty soon, I was remembering my dream about the door.

Now, I was never one of those people who think that dreams tell us the future. I've dreamed about lots of things that never happened. I've dreamed I could fly, and that I was a dog, and that my mother was made out of cardboard. All kinds of crazy things. But that door dream had me going. I couldn't stop thinking that it was somehow real.

When I'd been up there with my dad I'd sort of rushed from closet to closet, not looking all that carefully. Now I thought I remembered something about one of the closet walls. The more I thought about it, the more I had to look. I rolled off the squishy mattress. Was it the closet in this room, or one of the others?

I opened the door and tugged at the light cord. The old bulb flared yellow. I could see footprints in the
dust, from when Dad and I had checked it out earlier. The closet had been empty then, and it was empty now. But I was looking at the end wall. The other walls were plastered smooth and painted gray, but the end wall showed a faint wood grain pattern through its coat of paint. I had seen it before, but I had been looking for a door and it hadn't really registered in my mind. Now, I recognized it as a piece of plywood. I could see the nail heads where it had been hammered into place.

I tried to get my fingers around the edge to pull it loose, but the nails held firm. I would need a pry bar or something. Remembering the tool box we'd found in the other bedroom, I ran across the hall and grabbed the hammer.

When I look back on my life I still have to ask myself whether it is all in my mind. I can see now that I used the door to insulate myself from my parents. In fact, I still wonder if, in some way, I actually created it myself. Was the door real? Am I insane? Did any of this really happen? How do I know I am not sitting in a dark room in a strait jacket staring sightlessly into the convolutions of my own twisted brain?

But then Andie brings me a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies, and rests her cool hand for a moment on the back of my wrinkled neck, and I know that it was real. All of it.

I jammed the one good claw under the edge of the
plywood and pried. With a satisfying screech, the nails came loose. The board fell toward me. I stepped back.

Behind the plywood, set a few inches into the wall, was a door. It was not the exact door I had seen in my dream, but it was a door that someone had chosen to conceal.

My heart was going like crazy. I could hear the blood gushing in my ears. Shaking, I grasped the knob. It was cold, and it turned easily. I pulled, but nothing happened. I tried twisting harder, with no result.

Part of me wanted to get out of there. Another part of me could not. To abandon the door would be to go back to listening to my parents, to hear the ugly, muffled sounds of their lousy marriage echoing through the dead halls of my grandfather's home.

I tried pushing. The door swung open with the gritty creak of long unused hinges.

Beyond lay a narrow wooden staircase leading down into darkness. A torn spiderweb, its silken threads dusty and brittle, wafted in the opening. Warm air, soft and stale, swirled over me. I could see by the closet light that the stairway turned to the right after about ten steps.

I started down, still gripping the hammer. I could still hear my parents fighting, but the sound was faint, like poodles barking in the distance.

When I think of myself entering that staircase, without hesitation, without even a flashlight, I
wonder what I could have been thinking. What I remember most vividly is the sound of my shoes on the steps, a soft crunching sound, the dried husks of long-dead insects crumbling.

I reached the turn in the stairs. The steps continued down into deeper darkness. I moved down slowly, using the last echoes of light from above to reach the next turn. After ten steps I came to another landing. I stopped. The stairs continued to the left, the blackness below so total that I could see nothing but the little gray spots and squiggles in my own eyes. I had to feel with my feet for each new step, keeping one hand on the wall, one probing the darkness with the hammer, sweeping away the ancient cobwebs, counting each invisible, crunching step.

At the next landing, a faint illumination became visible from below. I could see the bottom of the stairs, and a rectangular shape of some sort. Was it
the
door? The proportions seemed right, but it was hard to see. I took a step, my foot hit something, and suddenly I was falling, my feet in the air. My butt hit the steps and I went sliding painfully down, following the clatter of the hammer and something else, whatever it was that I'd stepped on. For several booming heartbeats I lay crumpled and still at the bottom of the stairs. My butt hurt, and I'd whacked my elbow pretty good, but mostly everything seemed to be okay.

The door was right in front of me, soft green light emanating from its metal surface. Its squat shape was as I remembered from my dream.

I rolled onto my hands and knees and felt for the knob. There it was, high on the door, cold, textured metal, its raised design pressing into the flesh of my fingers. It turned with the same grinding sound I had heard in my dreams. I completely forgot the pain in my rear and my throbbing elbow. A sense of urgency propelled me, as if I knew I had to move quickly before common sense and fear could stop me. I tugged and pushed, but the door remained solid and motionless. Feeling its surface, I discovered a board had been nailed across it. Someone, sometime, had not wanted this door to be found, or to be used.

I felt around on the gritty floor, looking for the hammer. I found the thing I had stepped on first, a little car or something with four metal wheels. No, it wasn't a car. It had leather straps, and it was shaped something like a foot. An old-fashioned roller skate, like kids used to strap onto their shoes. The hammer had tumbled off to the left. I found it leaning against a wall.

It only took a second to rip the board away from the doorway. I grabbed the knob again, and pulled the door open.

Warm, moist, fragrant air flooded over me. I was looking out through a screen of large, dark leaves into a shadowy garden. A greenhouse? There was no greenhouse on the property. I could hear the buzz of insects, and the peeping of tree frogs. What was this place? I pushed the leaves aside for a better look.

If it was a greenhouse, it was bigger than any I'd
ever seen or heard of. But if it wasn't a greenhouse, then why wasn't everything covered by three feet of snow? Where had winter gone? The moon, as full and round and bright as it gets, beamed down on what looked like an overgrown field. Was I still in Boggs's End? I forced my way through the vines, stepped out into the knee-high grass. To my right, past the crown of the bluff, I could see a body of water glittering in the distance. I looked back at the doorway, at the vine-covered walls.

It was Boggs's End all right, but it had changed. The paint was flaking off the sides, the windows were boarded up, the grounds were overgrown with weeds, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that no one was home.

I
t's difficult to describe the feeling that came over me as I stood staring up at the impossible. I should have been terrified, but I felt no fear stepping through that vine-laden doorway. It was as though I had been pushed too far, as if entering this other world had pushed me beyond shock. What remained was simple wonder.

I was looking at Boggs's End, but it was not the Boggs's End I knew. Where the rows of apple trees had stood was now only a weedy expanse surrounding a collapsed corncrib. The barn was there, but the other sheds were gone.

Had I stepped into the future? If so, how many years had passed? A terrifying thought occurred to me. I looked quickly at my hands, half-expecting to see the wrinkled hands of an old man, but they were as I remembered.

What was this place?

I waded through the grass, circling the house. The moonlight was bright enough to see the cracked windowpanes, the flaking, powdery paint, the rusted steel gutters. Boggs's End looked as though it had been vacant for years. A broken-down tractor with flat tires and vines growing over its engine sat parked
in the weed-spotted drive. The tall pine trees that had stood at each corner of Boggs's End were gone, replaced by smaller trees. The front door was sealed with three boards nailed across it. I backed away from the dark house. A jumble of thoughts filled my brain. I wanted to go back through that door, but I also wanted to know where—or when—I was. I started toward the road. The driveway was so overgrown I was sure no one had used it in years.