The Croning (23 page)

“We don’t discuss it, really. Over my head.”

“Hrmm. You’ve got rocks for brains, is why. I hope she publishes her findings. The work is quite intricate. Her piece regarding the demographical data of her ancestors’ principal migratory trajectories is remarkable. Admittedly, I did collaborate on particular bits of procedural documentation—”

“If you look closely, you’ll note my eyes are glazing.”

“Bah. How’s Kurt doing?”

“Fine, fine. I called him yesterday. He’s laid up at home. Says Winnie’s rubbing his feet and feeding him grapes.”

“Hah! I hope she doesn’t hear him running at the mouth or I’d bet good money he’s a dead man.” Argyle sucked on his pipe. “If Kurt’s okay, then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m happy as a clam at high tide. The weather is marvelous, yeah? The house is all mine for a while—”

“About that.”

Don waited and when it seemed as if his friend wouldn’t continue his thought, he said, “What about it? Afraid I’ll go stir crazy? No chance of that, not with tending Michelle’s vegetables and puttering about.”

“Yes, it sounds swell. But that’s not what I meant. What I mean is, it’s a shame you two inherited this place.” Argyle swallowed some beer and gestured vaguely with his pipe. “Let’s face it, with the exception of Michelle, the Mocks are seriously strange. You’ve never even met any of them, thus there’s absolutely zero familial attachment. Must be like living in a cheap, bizarre museum. You’re more curator than owner.”

“Not true. I met Babette, once.”

“For about thirty seconds, sure. Didn’t that dame stay at the Samovar instead of here? There you go. Anyway, back to you and your lovely wife. I’m thinking you two are looking like a couple of silver foxes—”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Really, though. If your back gets much worse, those stairs will be impossible. When you go senile and start drooling into a bib Michelle will have to set you up with a gurney in the parlor, because she won’t want to jog back and forth. And that’ll just be tacky. People will be too embarrassed to visit—”

“Ah, at least there’s a silver lining.”

“You think so now. Michelle will be forced to meet her friends at their houses, the Kiwanis club, or, sweet Lord, bingo—”

“Michelle doesn’t like bingo.”

“The hell she doesn’t. See, that’s the problem. She’s got interests you don’t have the foggiest notion about. It’ll get worse. Pretty quick she’ll be shacking with the pool boy from the Broadsword hotel and spending your retirement on the slots at the Happy Eagle.”

“If I’m senile, I don’t think any of this is a problem.”

“Trust me, lad. What you two need is to sell off this place and get into a nice updated rambler in town, close to the bus lines so when you become incompetent and lose your license you can still go fill your little canvas bag at the supermarket. Hell, you’re a stubborn goat—I know you aren’t listening to a damned thing I say. Try this then: get that no-account son of yours and do it up right. Cart off a mountain of the junk, slap on a coat of paint and some trifles you’ve got in storage, and
voila!
It’ll seem more like home. Think on it. I know a guy who’ll take most of this crap off your hands.”

Don laughed and poured Argyle another beer.

2.

That evening after his company had gone home, he repaired to the parlor and rested in his favorite chair, a compendium of subterranean geophysical studies resting heavily across his thighs, and conceded that Argyle had raised a valid point. The house
was
a museum. They’d never gotten around to boxing things up or shipping unwanted items away to the Salvation Army, or Goodwill, for the bald fact four months a year seemed too short and there were numerous, more pressing tasks, the inevitable backlogs of work-related business, and the torpid apathy that accompanied hot weather. Now he had no such excuse. Nine months they’d lived here full time; nine months of him picking about the edges, wary of tackling the Herculean Labor, his greatest obstacle being Michelle’s diffidence. If and when they decided to overhaul the décor, she insisted upon itemizing and meticulously cataloging everything down to the last spoon, the last shred of paper.

Well, he could handle something as simple as that, couldn’t he?
I’m a grown man—a PhD, for Pete’s sake! And I’m not afraid of my wife
! Which wasn’t quite true, but nice to believe, if half-heartedly. A faint doubt nagged him, however; this doubt forced him to question whether he harbored an ulterior motive. He’d long sublimated a growing desire to poke about the place in depth, and, horrors of impropriety! peruse the materials in Michelle’s study, the books she pored over with indefatigable determination, yet never brought to bed or spoke of with any candor.

It was difficult for any degree of mystery to survive eons of marriage. Historically, he’d welcomed the enigma of his wife, cognizant they’d managed so swimmingly because of their frequent and lengthy separations due to work, and no less the professional compartmentalization they maintained even in these, their golden years. Lately, though, he felt dissatisfied and mildly resentful regarding this aloofness, perhaps goaded by the awareness that while his life and work were slowly succumbing to entropy, hers flourished magnificently as ever. She remained exotic and he had been relegated to pasture, effectively condemned to isolation in a house that unnerved and depressed him. And why? Why her fixation upon this plot of land, this building? He thrust aside the thought as unworthy and convinced himself his motives were altruistic, or at least pragmatic.

Girded by this new-found resolve to transform the house into a more agreeable habitat, he rang Kurt at home to request his support and physical assistance in the endeavor. Don prepared for his son’s inevitable protestations of business deadlines, domestic crises and the like. Thus it was to his bemusement that Kurt hesitated briefly and then said he’d drive down in the morning and stay for a couple of days. He promised to bring a truckload of boxes and packing tape, but on one condition. Don had to agree to a campout at the fishing hole about a mile up the creek from their house. Don opened his mouth to protest this ridiculous notion and the line went dead. He hadn’t gotten around to modernizing their communications system, so he repeatedly tapped the reset hook to no avail. Thule raised his head and growled. Raccoons came onto the porch for late-night snacks. Don listened for the garbage pail getting knocked about. Thule put his nose between his paws and dozed again.

A campout? What foolishness was this? He decided it was idle chatter, perhaps a way to invoke some semblance of the bond they shared during Kurt’s boyhood. Don stared into the fire and turned the conversation over, searching for clues to explain Kurt’s mysterious exhibition of philanthropy. Perhaps his son wanted first crack at some of the antique collectibles, although that seemed far-fetched and uncharitable of Don besides. Kurt hadn’t the slightest clue as to evaluating such things and he didn’t need money. His company paid exorbitant wages supplemented by lucrative retirement programs and medical benefits. Don scratched his head, then let it go, loath to look askance at good fortune. In the morning he’d zoom into town to stock plenty of Kurt’s favorite beer, mildly worried that maybe the boy had abandoned beer for white wine, or mineral water, or whatever affectation struck the fancy of his generation’s rich, Patagonia-clad suburbanites.

Before bed, he jogged around the house and made sure every single light was in working order and switched on. Heaven help him if Michelle ever checked the bill and put two and two together; he’d be blackened toast. He fell asleep with the massive geophysics tome weighing against his chest, soft light from the nightstand lamp warm across his cheek.

The thud of the book sliding from his lap and hitting the floor brought him to the surface. The room was dark as dark gets, although as his rheumy eyes adjusted, he discerned a blurry crack of light beneath the bedroom door. He groped for the lamp, upsetting the glass of water that soaked his dentures. Pulling the chain had no effect; it only produced the dry rattle that bespoke an open circuit. Sweat popped out on his face and he froze, trembling in his pajamas, inexplicably consumed by an image of the cellar door swung wide like a mouth skinned open to reveal a throat.

Water dripped from the overturned glass on the stand to the floor. Then new noises came: squeaking and rustling. He understood even in his blindness the closet door, a wooden panel that folded like an accordion, had slid on its track.

Oh, boy
. Adrenaline squirted into his blood. There was a presence in the room. Unless, oh, of course—the dog. Thule was a hunting dog at heart. He often nosed about, sniffing for vermin. Thule must’ve moved the panel after smelling one of those blasted rodents that hid in the walls. Don raised himself in bed to admonish his pet and floorboards shifted in the closet, followed by a low utterance, a cross between a wheeze and a drawn-out croak, although he knew instinctively that wasn’t quite it, but his mind couldn’t fix upon the proper description; it lay beyond his experience. Don’s heart skipped and he thought,
Here comes the big one
, as his chest tightened. Clothes hangers jostled and clacked. Something under the bed scraped, like nails gouging wood, and the groaning croak came again, slightly muffled and directly beneath him, a pneumonia victim’s burbling, gasping inhalation.

Don shouted and threw back the bedcovers. He clambered from bed and lurched to the door. He flung it open and light from the hall illuminated parts of the room. The closet appeared empty except for shirts and pants and jackets hanging neatly from their hooks. Clothing swayed gently. He couldn’t make out anything in the darkness under the bed. Poor Thule cowered on the opposite side of the room. He shook in brute terror; a pool of urine spread along the dips and warps of the floorboards. Don, not daring to reenter the bedroom, beckoned him with quavering reassurances and eventually the dog came, tail tucked between his legs, foam dripping from his muzzle as if he had gone mad. Together, they retreated to the kitchen and Don saw the cellar door was indeed open by several inches. He shut the door and wedged a chair under the knob, a trick he’d seen in the movies, along with using a credit card to pick a lock. He put on a coat and dialed the sheriff’s office to report a possible burglary in progress. The dispatcher promised to send a car right away.

3.

“Right away” turned out to be forty minutes. Don developed a migraine from squinting; he’d left his glasses upstairs. He finally calmed enough to boil coffee. Two sheriff’s deputies arrived in a Bronco and came in and took his report. The pair were amiable men who were duly impressed he was friends with old man Camby. They searched the house, clumping room to room in their heavy boots, shining flashlights while their radios squawked and crackled. They checked the cellar (refraining from comment about his wedging the door, although they exchanged looks) and performed a sweep of the barn. Meanwhile, Don waited on the porch, his arms crossed to ward the damp and chill. Frogs rasped in the black sea of grass. Don’s knees knocked and he spooked himself with the thought the men might not emerge from the barn, that he would huddle, petrified, until some unimaginable doom slithered forth to drag him from the face of the earth.

The officers returned and stood around awkwardly, uniforms smudged with cobwebs and dust. During their sweep, they spotted a raccoon in the eaves toward the rear of the house and startled a possum near the barn. Possums and raccoons were bitter enemies and a noisy fight could’ve been what Don heard, explained the younger officer, a round-faced farm boy who doubtless knew his nocturnal critters. Don served them coffee and apologized for the false alarm. In the stark light of the kitchen, he inwardly questioned whether it had indeed been a false start, the byproduct of paranoia and isolation, or, saints preserve him, incipient dementia. Already, the incident threatened to fade into the morass of regular bad dreams.

The veteran of the two asked why he had removed the lights in the bedroom. Don didn’t comprehend until the officer explained the bulbs were missing from the reading lamp and the overhead light. In fact the latter fixture had been unscrewed so that the globe dangled from the end of the threaded bolt and the wires were exposed. A definite fire hazard, the man warned, eyeing him sidelong as one might regard a potential kook.

Don was ashamed. He stammered another earnest apology, at a loss to reconcile this strange information with the lack of evidence of an intruder. The deputies assured him it wasn’t a problem—a senior home alone in a semi-remote setting…better safe than sorry, right? Would he care for an escort to a friend’s place for the night, a motel? He declined, professing foolishness at his overreaction.

It was three A.M. when their taillights dwindled into the black. His bladder had expanded to the size of a football and he fairly hopped into the bathroom to urinate, cursing his failing eyesight, his weak bowels and apparently diminishing numbers of brain cells.

He spent the rest of the evening in the parlor, sleeping in fits and starts, jolted by every tiny sound. In the gaps between dozing and waking he remembered the first night he’d ever heard strange noises in the house; 1962, the summer after they’d inherited the place. He’d awakened to creaking floorboards—the odd clink and scrape as of something small and metal dragging in the hallway. He’d sat up to investigate, when Michelle gripped his wrist.
Her hand was cold, wasn’t it? Like it had been in a meat locker. How unreal the white oval of her face hanging there in the gloom. Her hair floated black and wild and her fingers tightened until his bones gritted. A purple ring puffed his wrist the next day
.

Honey, don’t, she’d said in a soft, matter-of-fact tone, and pulled him against her breast. Don’t leave me. The bed is cold
.

No, she was cold; her hands, her body, frigid as a corpse through her thin gown. Yet he’d streamed with sweat, his chest sticky, his pajamas drenched and he’d been breathing like a man who’d run up a steep hill
.