The Tilting House (6 page)

“You’ve got to find them!” hissed Aaron. “I can’t carry these cups around all night! I’m about to drop them as it is.”

“Follow me,” Lola whispered back. We left the reception area and went into the chapel. All the chairs were empty now. Even Joe Lampkin had been wheeled out. We went upstairs to the office, but it was empty, too. Back downstairs, I looked out the front door and saw the tall, thin man and the short, chubby man walking casually down the sidewalk toward their black Cadillac.

“Mr. Peat!” I yelled out the door. “Wait!” Both men turned around. We walked quickly to them.

“How can I help you?” said Mr. Peat, politely.

Aaron answered by running up to Ludwig and throwing all four glasses of punch at his chest.

“What are you doing?” Ludwig yelled. “You little brat! You’ve ruined my suit!” He began to remove the drenched jacket, but Victor Peat stopped him.

“Don’t you see what’s going on here?” said Mr. Peat, his voice low and menacing. “We buried this girl’s stepfather not long ago. And we saw these two boys on our first visit this morning. This young one is Aaron Peshik. His name is on the list.”

“The list?” said Ludwig. “Oh, I see. It’s the list you’re after. Trying to steal it, are you? Destroy the list and save yourselves? It’s been tried before, you know.”

“Give it to me,” said Victor Peat.

Ludwig reached inside his sopping wet jacket and pulled the roll of yellow paper from his pocket. Victor Peat snatched it from him and shrieked.

“It’s ruined!”

Punch and ink dripped from the list. From where I was standing, the names looked completely illegible.

Victor Peat frantically unrolled the paper, spreading it out on the hood of the car. It was nothing but a smeared, soggy sheet. He turned and faced us.

“Well, young man,” he said to Aaron, “it appears you’ve succeeded. Your name is no longer on the list. I do not know what will happen to you now. You might live forever. Now scat!”

We scatted. We grabbed our bikes and pedaled home as fast as we could. We were riding so fast, we didn’t slow down for
the busy intersection at Eleventh Street. We didn’t see the brown pickup truck barreling toward us. The driver laid on his horn, slammed on his brakes, spun sideways, and slid right at us. We slammed on our brakes, too. I braced myself for the crash.

The truck stopped two inches from Aaron. The driver yanked open the door.

“You kids okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You need to be more careful. You could have been killed.”

“We know,” Aaron said. “Sorry.”

We pedaled slowly the rest of the way. Aaron thanked Lola for her help. “You’re welcome,” she said, before riding off toward her house. When we opened the back door, Mom and Dad were waiting for us. They were already mad that we’d run off without saying anything, so we didn’t tell them about Aaron’s near miss with the pickup truck. By the time they’d finished yelling at us and hugging us, they’d also forbidden us from riding our bikes for two weeks.

“I
DON’T FEEL SO GOOD
,” I said the morning after the incident with Mr. Peat.

“You don’t look so good, either,” said Mom. She placed her hand on my cheek and frowned. She set me on the couch and snuggled a blanket around me, which I didn’t mind. When Mom left the room, I told Aaron I’d probably gotten sick from all the stress of the day before. He shrugged.

“I feel great,” he said. “I’m gonna go get some cereal. You want anything?”

Mom and Dad let Aaron stay home from church with Grandpa and me. Aaron and I sat on the couch watching TV all morning.
I nodded in and out of sleep while Aaron swung his feet and sang along with the theme songs. The couch was level now, like nearly all of the furniture in our house. We’d stuck books under the legs at one end, and as long as you sat still, the books stayed in place.

After lunch, Grandpa limped in and stood in front of the set, blocking our view. “Still not feeling well, eh, kid?” I shook my head. “Seems to me you need a good story to cheer you up. Did I ever tell you how I ended up with this here wooden stump?”

“Yes,” said Aaron, “but tell it again.”

“Wasn’t talking to you. Talking to sicko, here.”

It was Sunday afternoon, which, according to Grandpa, was the part of the week set aside by God Himself for smoking, swapping stories, and taking naps. He shut off the TV and sat himself down in the green chair he’d brought with him when he moved in with us years ago. He pulled out his pipe and began stuffing it with tobacco.

“Are you going to smoke that in here?” I asked.

“You think anyone’d notice?” Grandpa said, looking up at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. “Oh, I guess I’d better not, but it’s awful hard for me to tell a story without a pipe to smoke.” He settled back into his seat. “Well now, I been thinking about this ol’ story for a few weeks now, what with Nat’s passing and all. Good man, Nat, but it was his fault I traded in my pink flesh for this here chunk of maple.” Grandpa rapped on his wooden leg with his pipe. “Was his fishing hook that caused all the trouble.

“It was back when your dad was just born, when I was sharing that little one-bedroom house over in Milton with a baby and your grandma. Needless to say, I was always on the lookout for an excuse to go fishin’. Anyways, it was round about June and we were having a real warm year, so I called Nat and asked if maybe
him and me could head out to the Dosewallips and try our luck with the brook trout that had escaped us thus far.”

“Were you both serious fisherman?” I asked.

“Oh, Nat was. I’ve never been all that interested in catching fish. All a fish on your line means is that you have to wake up from a perfectly good nap. So we went to our favorite spot, near Brinnon, just as the sun was coming up. I set up under this old cedar tree that had roots growing into the water. Right off the bat, Nat sees a fish jump, so he drops his tackle box, pulls on his waders, and he’s off. Me, I kinda lean back, stick a few salmon eggs on my hook, and cast it out into the water. Next thing I know, I’m snoring away.

“I wake up in an hour or so and it’s already hot in the sunshine, so I kick my shoes off and dangle my toes in the water. I can see Nat down about a hundred yards, and he’s like a war general executing his attack. My backside’s about numb by this time, so I stand up to stretch. Sure enough, my bare right foot lands on a fish hook. It’d spilled out when Nat dropped his tackle box. It jabs right into the fleshy part of my heel. I pull it out of my heel, barb and all, along with a chunk of my foot the size of a raisin. Hurt like the blazes, and blood is dripping into the water. So I stick my foot back in the river and pretty soon it’s feeling better and I forget about it. At the end of the day, I pull on my socks and shoes and we head back home. ”

“Did you catch any fish?” asked Aaron.

“Fish? Come to think of it, I did all right. Just sitting there on the bank, I caught one less trout than Nat that day, and my biggest was bigger than his biggest. I brought ’em home to your grandma, hoping she’d clean ’em for me, but she was too busy with the baby. So I did it myself and fed the innards to the cats.

“A few days later, my foot started to hurt. I didn’t think much of it that first day. But when I woke up the following morning, it was hurting all the way up to my knee and I could feel my heart beating in my heel.

“ ‘What’d you do to yourself this time?’ your grandma asked me. I said I didn’t do nothing except step on a little old fishhook. She makes me peel off my sock and takes a look. Well, my foot is swollen tight. The bottom of it is as red as the devil himself, and there’s this black line working its way up my leg.

“When she sees that black line, your grandma nearly faints dead away. She gets on the phone quick and before I know it she’s driving me over to the doctor’s office. Same drill there: I peel off my sock and Dr. Bruell takes a look and lets out a low whistle. ‘Is it bad?’ I ask him. ‘It’s not good,’ he says. “Blood poisoning.” He makes a phone call and tells me we need to head over to the hospital in Tacoma. ‘Today?’ I ask him. ‘Right now,’ he says. So your grandma, Dr. Bruell, and I head on over there. A couple of other doctors take a look. They step outside to talk, and then Dr. Bruell and this tall German doctor come back in. Grandma’s standing up and Dr. Bruell asks her to sit down.

“ ‘Red,’ the doc says to me, ‘the leg’s got to go. You’ve got blood poisoning, and if we wait any longer, it’ll spread up to your heart and you’ll be dead. If we amputate now, we’ll only have to take the leg from the knee down.’

“Well now, news like that can shake a fella. Grandma’s crying away, asking if there’s anything else they can do, but I knew the doc was givin’ it to me straight and there was no use arguing, so I told him to take it quick. Next thing I know, I’m in an operating room and they’re strapping a mask over my nose and mouth and then I’m asleep.

“When I wake, I don’t feel anything, which is good, because during my nap the doctors had taken a saw and cut off a good chunk of my leg: bone, meat, and all. I’m so doped up that I can barely remember where I am. Then I do remember and I try to sit upright. I finally manage to reach to where my leg should be, but below the knee, there’s nothing there. All that’s left is a big stump of white bandages soaked red with so much blood that I can smell the iron.

“Once the dope wore off it hurt like the dickens. It felt like my whole body was on fire. Let me tell you, boys, I was ready to go down to hell to cool off—that’s how hot it burned. They couldn’t give me enough dope to make it stop hurting.

“I was in the hospital for about two more weeks, and then I finally got to go back home. I’d sit in a chair and stare at the wall and yell for your grandma to bring me things. I about drove her to the nuthouse.

“I finally got so I could hobble around on crutches, and I made it back to the shop, where I could get along all right if I was sittin’ down. After work, I’d sit in my chair in the living room and growl at your grandma and at your dad, who was just a little baby who hadn’t done a thing wrong—leastways not that I knew about.

“Finally your grandma couldn’t take any more of it, so she calls Dr. Bruell and he shows up one day for a surprise visit. He asks how I’m doing and I ask him how he thinks I’m doing, what with my leg cut off and all. He says he’d like us to go for a little drive, because there’s a guy he wants me to meet. I cuss back that if I want to go for a drive I’m still capable of driving myself just fine. Our Olds was an automatic, see, and it only takes one foot to operate an automatic, since there ain’t no clutch pedal to push. So Dr. Bruell, he says fine, I can do the driving and he’ll give me the directions.

“So we climb into the Olds and we drive all the way up Meridian Street to the town of Graham, where this friend of his lives. We pull up and I see it’s a furniture shop: Lennis and Company.”

“Lennis? That’s who made our dining room set!” said Aaron.

“Right. The porch swing, too, I bet. Anyway, we walk into the barn and there’s Lennis all covered in sawdust, working at a wood lathe, sawdust sticking to the sweat all over his bald head. He brushes off enough of the dust to shake hands with the doc and asks how the doc’s new kitchen cabinets are working out. Dr. Bruell tells him they’re wonderful, but that he wants to talk about a different kind of project. He goes on to tell Lennis my story and asks him if he can make me a wooden leg.

“Now, I’m not sure if I’m keen on the idea, but neither one of them seems to care much what I think. Old Lennis, he stares me up and down. He measures all over my good leg with complicated metal calipers, and he makes all sorts of notes in his little notebook. Then he rolls up my pants and takes a look at my stump. Asks me a few questions about where it hurts. He asks if he can take a look at my remaining foot. He draws a bunch of pictures of it and measures each toe with tiny little clamps and tapes and pieces of string. Dr. Bruell gives him one of my old right shoes, which he had brought along without telling me. Lennis says, ‘Got a nice piece of kiln-dried maple. Was going to turn it into a pedestal for a kitchen table, but it might work all right for this, too. Gimme a couple of weeks.’

“Sure enough, two weeks later, there’s a knock on the door and Lennis is standing there holding my wooden leg. This same one here. Same leather pad on top. Same straps. Same rusty metal hinge for the knee. Said he made the hinge out of an old saw blade. Carved the ankle and the toes and even carved in the toenails.
See? Took me a while to figure out how to use it without falling over, and I still hobble around like a three-legged dog, but ol’ Lennis and me, we do okay together. Heck, if I can walk around in this dad-blamed funhouse we all live in now, then I guess I got no right to complain.”

Grandpa looked down forlornly at his unlit pipe. He stood up and headed for the front porch. “In a funny way, you might say this ol’ leg has come home. To this house, where it has the company of the dining room set. This leg and that dining set are brothers, come from the same maker.”

“Is that a true story?” Aaron asked.

“You insult me, boy,” said Grandpa, striking a match as he reached the front door. “Course it’s true. Ain’t interesting enough to be a lie. Now hush up and let your brother get himself some rest.”