On a Tour of Chadron, Nebraska

 

On a Tour of Chadron, Nebraska

With my wife and a traveling companion, I was on a bus-tour of the garden spots in the Nebraska panhandle.  The bus was not particularly luxurious, more like an old school bus with hard bench seats held in place by metal pipes riveted to the vehicle’s floor.  I was born in Chadron, Nebraska and had not visited the town for many years and, so, I was excited to see that we had come to the city’s outskirts.  

We passed a small teacher’s college.  I mentioned to our traveling companion that my father had attended school at that college.  (I don’t know what moved me to say this: my father went to school at Iowa State in Ames, Iowa.)  I also said that the governor of the State of Minnesota had gone to that college – this was true, I think.  Next to the road, a big brick structure rose like a ziggurat, stepped back terraces ascending to a grim-looking tower.  The windows piercing the brick facade were all broken.  Fires had burned within the tower and soot stained the sills and window-frames.  A few hundred yards down the road, the new college stood on a steep hillside.  The buildings were made of dark cinder-colored brick, windowless with aerial patios jutting out of the structure beside long, sloping ramps.  The structures looked less like a college than an industrial facility, perhaps, a foundry.

Chadron itself occupied a crater, city streets forming a grid at the bottom of the pit where the town was built.  As tall as the Eiffel Tower, two buttes rose from the crater floor, steep pyramidal peaks.  Evidently, the city was much altered from when I had last seen it.  Of course, I remember nothing at all about my first couple months in Chadron – I was a new-born infant then.  When I was ten, my family stopped in Chadron before driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota – the Nebraska town is about 100 miles south of Rapid City.  Then, it was a sleepy village, an oasis of old elms and oaks gathered around an intersection downtown.  We visited the Lutheran Church where I had been baptized and my father took a picture of me standing next to a golden baptismal font, a streamlined vessel like one of Brancusi’s “Birds in Flight.”  Twenty-five years earlier, I drove through the town again, this time en route to Yellowstone.  The city had lost some of its old trees but was still a bucolic green place with flowering hedges and well-watered lawns.  The pine ridges with their evergreen seams and green-edged blufftops, loomed over the town, bare hay-colored slopes dissected by waterless and gravelly ravines.   

Things had changed.  Coal had been found in the hills and Chadron now had a bleak industrial aspect.  The town was full of smoke and the downtown, now a vast labyrinth of dirty warehouses and mining logistics (lots full of dirty excavators, piping, and huge trucks) lapped up against the two cone-shaped peaks.  Railroad tracks converged and diverged, crossing at the enter of big iron-laced yards full of boxcars.  Several elevated tracks ran along the length of the commercial streets and the houses looked small and besieged by the heavy industry dominating the town.  The only color that I saw in the cityscape was on a half-dozen red sedans, cars that seemed modeled on the vehicles in which gangsters made their escapes from crime-scenes.  The red sedans were taxis, apparently intended to be whimsical and I saw them lined up on there main thoroughfare under the iron stanchions holding up the elevated trains.  Some kind of monument had been raised atop one of the pyramidal peaks.  The summit of the other butte was concealed in a low-hanging fog of mist and fumes.

We lost the tour-guide on the ascent of the steep hill.  A trail, or, perhaps, road had brought us up the slope to within thirty or forty feet of the hilltop.  I scrambled up the side of the peak, climbing on all fours toward to the summit.  All went well until I turned around and looked down.  The side of the butte was sheer, a six-hundred foot drop to the base of the butte.  Suddenly, this seemed like a very dangerous place to be.  There was no way down except up – at least, this is what I perceived, so, turning away from the frightening declivity, I continued my climb and, at last, came to the summit.  A hedge of evergreens surrounded a cyclone fence that enclosed some kind of transmitter apparatus.  There was a tiny, closet-shaped hut next to the fence and the lattice of fins and antennae pointed up at the sky.  My wife had reached the top by some other, less arduous route.   She told me that she would meet me at the café at the foot of the peak, turned on her heel, and vanished.

I made my way down the hillside, skidding and sliding through the scree, then, at last, plunging down a sooty bank of coal, a vein of anthracite wrapped like a belt around the butte.  Coal dust rose under my heels jammed into the sheer hillside and I was covered in the stuff.

On the city street, traffic lurched around me.  It was so dark under the lowering storm clouds that the street lamps were illumined.  People were hurrying along the sidewalks, hustling here and there among the dismal, barren walls and lots full of pits and excavators.  The coal was close to the surface and, it seemed, that the people in Chadron were eradicating their own town to mine the stuff.  The darkness was spreading.  It occurred to me that I didn’t know the name of the café where I was supposed to meet my wife.  And it wasn’t obvious to me where the tour bus had gone.

I found a 24-hour around-the-clock breakfast place and had three eggs, bacon and sausage.

Elevator

 

Elevator

We were fighting a war in a distant part of the world.  So far as I could see, the war didn’t affect most people.  Planes landed and departed, more or less, on time.  Grocery stores were well-stocked and their shelves were full.  Sometimes, when I traveled, I encountered soldiers.  When the soldiers were in groups, they seemed jovial and cocky, talking loudly and pretending to bully when another.  But, when you saw them alone, dragging big khaki-colored canvas bags through the jetways, the young men and women looked distraught – they sat by themselves in the waiting areas, staring off into the distance or nervously fingering their cell-phones.

This happened a number of years ago, but I remember things vividly. 

The concourse leading to my flight ended in large waiting area with seats bolted to the floors in front of the gates.  TV screens were mounted over the passengers gathered there.  A food court with a Chinese restaurant, a taco place, and some convenience counters peddling bottled drinks and potato chips as well as paperbacks and magazines made a half-circle around where people were waiting for their flights.  I was traveling on a small regional jet – I can’t remember my destination.  A passenger van was pulled up to a gate on the tarmac where the larger planes were being loaded with luggage and trays of frozen food.  To reach the van, passengers had to take an elevator down one floor to the level of the runway where the conveyance to our plane, apparently on a remote runway, was waiting.

When our flight was called, about 25 passengers gathered near the two elevators under the digital sign identifying the gate on the level below.  I was traveling light (it was a short trip) with just a cloth duffle bag and a back pack.  After the announcement, I made my way to the elevators.  Both elevator doors opened at the same time, but, for some reason, all of the passengers crowded together to get into the left one.  People were pressed tightly around the right door, but, when it opened, they recoiled and didn’t enter, stepping to the side to queue for the left-hand lift.  

I was in no hurry.  Seats are assigned.  It doesn’t make any practical difference whether you are the first on the plane or the last.  But, of course, most passengers don’t seem to understand this fact and, so, they shove and push to reach the discomfort of the crowded regional jet. This has never made sense to me but I am, by nature, patient, even phlegmatic. 

The elevator door closed and the lift dropped and, then, after a minute, ascended again.  More people jostled one another, carry-on luggage bulked-up against hip and thigh.  The door slid open and, again, the passengers gasped and stepped to the side and, so, the way was clear for me to enter the elevator on the right side.  I stepped forward.  A figure was sprawled on the floor to the right of the doors under the bank of buttons.  The man was covered in rags and both of his feet and right arm were missing, raw bulbs of red flesh exposed where his extremities had been amputated.  On his chest and thighs, I could see burns, shiny and pink continents mapped on his skin. The air smelled of some sort of ointment.  I was startled and instinctively backed-up, off the elevator, and, then, the door soundlessly slid shut.

I wasn’t going to ride that elevator.  The man’s eyes were large and bright and, with the persistence of vision, I imagined them still staring at me through the elevator’s door.  

Moving to my right, to the other elevator leading to the tarmac, I took that lift down to the lower concourse.   The people standing around the gate were silent and appalled.  It was best not to speak of what we had seen. 

The Gill Family

 The Gill Family

The kids on the street welcomed the Gill Family to the neighborhood.  A week after the realtor’s sign was removed from the home’s front lawn, girls chalked a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk.  In block letters, they wrote the name of our town and the word WELCOME.  Because of our meat packing plant, the High School football team is called “the Packers.”  The little girls drew stars and asterisks on the sidewalk that led to the home’s front door and, then, inscribed the town’s initials next to the phrase VICTORY PACKERS.  The old concrete paving was rough and swiftly abraded the chalk pieces down to knuckle-sized nubs and, if you looked closely, you could see the pieces discarded at the edge of the lawn – the blunt bits of chalk were blue, yellow, and red and the colors on the sidewalk had the subtle, cloudy appearance that is characteristic of writing of this kind.

The family didn’t move into the home for several weeks.  Evidently, extensive renovations were required in the house.  An elderly couple had lived there for fifty years and the kitchen and bathrooms must have been old and in disrepair.  The trucks of several tradesmen were parked along the curb in front of the house, a two-story wooden structure with small square windows next to an entry sheltered by a hoop-shaped barrel vault.  According to the writing on the trucks, dry wall was installed and the bathrooms remodeled with new showers and walk-in tubs.  Some workmen were observed hauling door-sized plates of glass into the house, big sheets of the stuff slick with reflections of the shade trees and grass constellated with dandelions.  The men passed the large panels of glass through the front door, gyrating and twisting to find an angle through which they could be tilted into the dim, marine shadows of the house.  The next-door neighbors, watching from behind their curtains, wondered about the sheets of glass.  There was a modest deck on the back side of the house and a sliding door there, but the glass didn’t seem sized to fit that opening and all the other windows were small, conventional, square panes set in wooden frames with the paint peeling a little on the sills. 

Flooring and carpeting tradesmen followed the workers lugging the big glass pieces into the structure.  A couple men dragged a rolled carpet out the front door and set the burden on the sidewalk in front of the house.  The carpet was soiled and folded up like a monstrous burrito, a big lump of grey-brown fabric on the edge of the concrete, angled over toward the curb.  Perhaps, the carpet had been rolled around a corpse and, when you walked by the bundle of rug, you sniffed instinctively, sensing a slight, foul smell coming from the dirty, wet fabric – it had rained several times since the carpet appeared outside,  Wasn’t Cleopatra smuggled to Julius Caesar rolled up in a rug?  But this thing wasn’t glamorous in any way and the sheet-rock workers seemed to have left plaster chipped off the walls adhering to the fabric and, for several weeks, the rug was prostrate on the sidewalk, limp and inert as a corpse and, then, the Gill family arrived, their moving van parked in the driveway and the carpet was suddenly gone, vanished overnight and we watched the movers carrying boxes and furniture over the sidewalk chalked with our welcoming inscriptions and that night, for the first time in a year, lights were lit again and shone in the windows of the house.  

A cheery little plaque posted beside the door read “The Gill’s”.  A big RV was parked along the curb and there was, also, a small car, a compact KIA, pulled up to the garage.  The KIA didn’t fit into the garage.  That space was blocked by some kind of pumping apparatus, plastic PVC tubes and hoses passed through the wall and an aerator with a table-sized filter attached to its side.  We glimpsed this apparatus from the sidewalk but couldn’t make any sense of it.

Rain fell for a few days, but, when it cleared, Mrs. Gill emerged from her house, carrying a folding lawn-chair.  She set up the lawn chair under a tree in the front yard.  Two small and pale boys came from the house and played with a soccer ball on the grass.  Mrs. Gill wore sunglasses and a yellow dress with tennis shoes.  Soccer?  I suppose it’s all right.  It doesn’t tell you anything about ethnic background or country of origin. Many kids play soccer these days.  It was a weekend and a few other children from the neighborhood went to greet the little boys.  After a while, Mrs. Gill went inside and, after a few minutes, emerged with a pitcher of pink lemonade and some dixie cups nested together.  A big, empty jug of distilled water sat on the front stoop of the house.  

Later, someone said that the Gill boys seemed fragile, perhaps, unwell.  Each boy had scars ribbing the sides of their necks, under their jaws but above their collar bones.  Apparently, the same condition afflicted both of them.  An older girl, one of the kids who had decorated the sidewalk to welcome the newcomers, squatted beside the pavement to draw with some fat pieces of chalk that she took from her pocket.  The boys observed her and directed her hand.  She searched in the grass for the stubs of the chalk pieces that she had earlier used to make the greetings.  The soccer ball lay under a lilac bush with big, scented clumps of purple flower.  Next to the front door, under the barrel vault, six big jugs once filled with distilled water were stacked along the wall.  

When I walked my dog, I passed over the pictograph on the concrete sidewalk.  It was schematic, depicting a family.  Six figures were outlined on the pavement.  Father was tall and slender with no neck and a head that was shaped like an old-fashioned diving bell or, perhaps, an astronaut’s space suit.  Mom was shorter with a flare of skirt above her stick legs.  The two boys were approximately the same height with round heads each marked with a zigzag of blonde hair, long torsos, and short legs with feet like a chicken.  Smaller than the two boys, but aligned with them, were two torpedo-shaped forms, evidently representing fish with whale-flukes instead of feet.  The chalk colors were beautiful, foggy pastels.  

One of the Gill brothers told the girl who made the family portrait under their direction that they had two twin sisters, but that the girls were fish.  They lived indoors in a large aquarium.  Because their sisters were fish, they couldn’t attend school.  

“They are different,” one of the Gill brothers said.

At first, none of the adults in the neighborhood were invited into the Gill family home.  But kids played there and, sometimes, went inside and there were, even, sleepovers.  The kids confirmed that there were four siblings, two boys and two girls in the Gill household.  The father never seemed to be around – either he traveled for work or he and his wife were separated.  The two girls were, indeed, fish with scaly cheeks and lips and fins instead of hands and feet.  They were yellow-gold and hovered in the water near the glass sides of their aquarium, watching a big flat-screen TV set up opposite their tank. 

Some of the parents in the neighborhood thought that it was a scandal that the fish-sisters didn’t attend school.  A woman whose son was autistic said the girls should be assessed by the special education teacher and that an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) should be made for them.  The mother of the fish-girls was very protective.  She told the neighbors that she was home-schooling her twin girls and that she was afraid that, if they were taken to school in their vats of aerated water, they would be bullied.

“Kids can be so cruel to those differently-abled,” she said.  

With time, the boys flourished.  They rode bicycles around the neighborhood and the scars under their chins were no longer red and livid but pale and hard to see.  The twins had a birthday party complete with cake and candles and party favors.  The girls were larger now, with muscular torsos and the tips of their fins were translucent.  Their faces were winsome, freckled with tiny gold and silver scales.  

Officials from the school district visited several times.  Proceedings were pending at the courthouse.

A month later, a semi-truck pulled up to the curb in front of the Gill home.  The truck was equipped with a hoist on the side of the semi-trailer.  The trailer was a long, cylindrical vat equipped with filtration systems.  A neighbor said that this sort of equipment was used for transporting sharks; he had seen similar semi-rigs in a documentary shown during Shark Week.  Four men carrying a stretcher went into the house and emerged with one of the fish-sisters.  She was thrashing violently on the stretcher and her fins splashed big sprays of water up into the air.  Using the hoist, the men lifted her to the side of the shark tank and, then, dropped her into the vat.  The same process was used to remove the second girl from the home to put her in the trailer’s tank.

The Gill boys stood silently on the sidewalk, aghast with red wet eyes.  Mrs. Gill came outside and stood on the porch next to the stacks of empty distilled water jugs.

Two of her neighbors came from inside the house and put their arms around her.

Mrs. Gill was crying.  She said that she had been able to care for her girls as long as they were minnows, but, now, they were half-grown and their aquarium was too small so that it was becoming a prison.  It had become difficult to feed them and keep their water clean.   

The men climbed into the semi-cab and the truck pulled away.  I never saw the fish-sisters again.  This was years ago. Someone said that he had seen the girls grown up to be shapely mermaids in a water-show in Weeki-Wachee in Florida.  Others doubted whether it was the same girls.  The woman who glimpsed the mermaids in Florida wasn’t sure whether they had arms or not.  

Just yesterday, as I walked my dog, I passed a home in the neighborhood that had been recently sold.  Contractors were re-siding the facade of the house.  Someone had sketched a human figure on the sidewalk in front of the house.  The figure looked as if it had been made by outlining someone lying flat on their back on the concrete.  The pictograph had outstretched arms and yellow and orange rays were drawn emerging from the figure’s biceps and shoulders.  Either the yellow and orange marks signified flames burning in a halo around the shape on the sidewalk or, perhaps, the garish feathers of wings.

    

Bledford

 

Carrington texted his agent about his script. No news, the agent responded.  In this case, no news was bad news.  He had written the script on spec, a low-budget feature called Old Mill on Blood River.  The agent didn’t like the title and wanted the word “zombie” in the name.  Carrington said that he didn’t mind what they called the thing so long as he was paid something for writing it.

Halloween was approaching.  A friend making content for WatchMOJO – nine to ten minute videos with sponsorship released straight to YouTube – offered Carrington a gig.  “Something to tide you over,” the friend said, “while you’re waiting for a nibble on your script for the horror picture.”  

Carrington asked about the assignment.  “It’s creepy pasta,” his friend told him.  They were in a tea house in Sawtelle.  

“Cut and paste a list of the top ten scariest small towns in America,” his friend said.  

“Budget?”

“There’s no budget – just ransack the web, loot other sites.  There are a million lists like this.”

Carrington’s friend took out his phone and emailed him the link to WatchMOJO.

“It’s all there, format, an engagement letter and so on.”

“Don’t tell my agent,” Carrington said.

“My lips are sealed.”  

There was an upfront stipend on offer, then, a payment when the creative content was delivered by download to WatchMOJO site.  Carrington had an option of a lump sum payment or a passive income arrangement, that is, payment at an agreed-upon rate for each click on the site, with a supplement for time that the user clocked on the link.  Carrington’s rent was coming due and he was cash-strapped so he elected for the advance with the lump sum payable on download.  

Carrington thought he could knock out a script in a half-day, some spooky innuendo with murky ambient mood music in the public domain.  WatchMOJO’s content marketer sent Carrington a link to a digital template.  The company wired the advance to his bank and told him to prepare an outline and, then, write a ten minute script, devoting 50 seconds to each of the ten villages that he featured in the YouTube video – the balance of the time would be for a commercial and some intro provided by the company with a “subscribe” offer.  The company had an AI voice program that it would use to sync the narration to the images.  

Carrington wondered if there were any real people working at WatchMOJO.  All his interactions with the creative director and marketing were digital, text messages or template downloads, with periodic and formulaic computer-generated inquiries as to his progress on the project.  He estimated that he could assemble the images from other sources on the web in about a week.  He had an idea for another script for the spec market, something nostalgic about his childhood in the small Minnesota town where he had grown up.  “The concept is like The Fabelman’s by way of Little House on the Prairie,” Carrington told his agent.

“I don’t want you to get disappointed,” the agent said.  “Let’s get ‘old mill zombies’ sold first.  Then, we can chat on something less genre.  Maybe, more personal.”

Carrington spent four or five hours watching internet slide-shows and videos on scary small-towns.  There was plenty of material and Carrington book-marked drone shots and atmospheric images of abandoned buildings.  He wrote some copy about not visiting the places identified on the video.  “You won’t be welcome.  These places don’t like visitors and more than one curiosity-seeker has vanished without a trace,” Carrington typed on his lap-top.  He, then, backspaced and deleted “without a trace” – redundant, he thought.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, of course, was one of the ten towns: rotting buildings on a wooded slope in Appalachia, driveways and lanes and streets to nowhere with fumes leaking from the burning underground coal mines.  Whittier, Alaska where all the inhabitants live in one big apartment building directly across from a predecessor structure abandoned to the elements, some silvery waterfalls plunging down fjord cliffs above the gaunt ruins.  Slab City, California, featured in Nomadland and Gibsontown, Florida (where circus people and carnival freaks winter), the polygamists at Hilldale, Utah, Ed Gein’s hometown in Wisconsin (Plainfield), the axe-murder house at Villisca, Iowa, Villaviciosa in Nevada, and the empty, debris-strewn streets at Cairo, Illinois. – Nine, Carrington counted. One more needed. He thought it would be fun to feature his own Midwest town, Bledford, the place in southeast Minnesota where his parents still lived.  Carrington thought it would be like affixing his signature to the piece.  

Most of the Bledford footage was cribbed from Google street view shots in various small towns in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  The municipal website provided Carrington pictures of welcome signs at the city limits. He found a drone shot on Bledford’s Facebook page, the airborne camera gliding over the white escarpment of a grain elevator with a litter of steel grain bins crouched in its shadow.  Another short drone sequence showed the dam on the Raccoon River with two old mills standing sentinel over a spillway from which the waterwheel had been removed (or, perhaps, washed away in a flood) a hundred years earlier. Carrington sampled a four second shot from a no-budget horror movie with some extras with red goo running out of their mouths and down their chins waving limp hands at the camera.  He edited some video cut and pasted from a news report on a church fire into the segment.  The billowing red flames and shadowy pillars of smoke made a nice contrast to the shuffling zombies and the ominous drone shots gliding over the rooftops of the small town.  His script said that Bledford was founded by a religious sect persecuted for their bizarre beliefs everywhere that they settled, but left unmolested in this small remote village far from the interstate, distant, even, from state highways – “Visitors will see bygone customs, strange rituals of shy secretive people in this tiny burg, if, in fact, you see anyone at all.  But don’t worry, they will be watching you.”  Carrington added “from the shadows” to the last sentence.

It’s a post-truth world, Carrington thought as he edited the video clips together. 

When he was done working on the bit, Carrington went outside for a walk.  He thought that he might stroll as far as the tea house.  Late October was dry and warm, sixty at sunrise and about 80 at midday.  The leaves on the eucalpytus trees were dull with dust.  It hadn’t rained for a dozen weeks and the canyons were dry and yellow.  Carrington looked at his phone to see if there was any update on the spec script.  His agent had texted him that he was taking some meetings earlier in the afternoon and that there were promising signs but... 

Nothing.

His weather app showed LA and, then, Bledford.  In his home town, it was 41 degrees with rain falling.  Dry fronds dropped from a palm tree blanketed part of the sidewalk.  The air was cool with sea-breezes that had wandered inland from the beaches at Santa Monica.  For just a moment, everything seemed like a dream to him.  But the mood passed.

*****

Billy’s older brother joined the Marines after High School.  His three-speed bicycle hung in the garage on several hooks screwed into the stud-wall.  When Billy outgrew his little bike, he took the three-speed down from the garage wall, walked it to the tire pump at the Casey’s station uptown, and, after inflating the tires, rode around town.  At first, he was a little shaky, teetering atop a seat that seemed too far above the pedals, but, with each block, his confidence increased and the shape of the bike seemed to fit him better and better and, soon enough, he could even ride without hands.  

The cicadas buzzed in the trees arched over the streets and the sidewalks were dappled with light and tremulous shade.  Sometimes, Billy pedaled around town with friends; on other occasions, he cruised the quiet streets alone.  There was always something to see: a new puppy, limbs and branches fallen after a thunderstorm, older kids working on their jalopies in the shade of the trees, girls in leotards practicing dance-line routines on the dewy grass next to the high school, big puddles of rain water in the potholes after the hail and wind, the taut surfaces of those pools reflecting the weave of leaves and boughs overhead.  

Downtown, the open door of a bar scented the sidewalk with the odor of beer and cigarettes.  A man with a wrinkled face and big droopy ears was sweeping the concrete outside of the tavern.  The sun was bright outside and so the cool dim interior of the bar, glimpsed as Billy pedaled past the place, seemed dark as a cave, a dense gloom in which a scroll of red lights advertised some kind of booze.  A cat sat in the window of the hardware store and some old ladies were gossiping in front of the post-office.  The town’s name was spelled-out in aluminum block letters on the post-office’s brick facade: in the morning, the letters bolted to the wall cast shadows in one direction – in the afternoon, the letters were outlined in black shade rotated in the opposite direction.  Billy paused on the bridge over the Raccoon River.  He stood against the iron rail lining the sidewalk on the bridge deck.  Old stone buildings flanked the stream where water was gliding in a dark sheet over an apron of dam.  When it rained, the water didn’t cling to the apron to glide smoothly into the lagoon at its bottom but rather rushed in white ribbons leaping from the concrete in pale jets that splashed below.  Three blocks of commercial buildings, most of them bearing dates from before the First World War stood around the river crossing that was decorated with six cast-iron street lamps vaguely antique in form that illumined the bridge.  The grain elevator with a baker’s dozen of bins bolted together from corrugated steel stood at the edge of downtown where empty lots and an ridge of pinkish gravel marked the location of a railroad siding now long abandoned and, indeed, its tracks and sleepers removed from the road bed.  The old railway trestle, its arches broken down, crossed the river in the wet flood plain where the ruins of several warehouses were overgrown with ivy and golden rod that was slowly chiseling away the red brick walls.  Kids sometimes clambered down the river bank to the base of the stone piers reared above the river to support the train-tracks.  Everyone knew that a kid walking his dog on the trestle had been mowed down by a train – the dog dived off the bridge and swam down the river and was, later, retrieved dragging its leash between its hind legs.  Dismembered parts of the kid drizzled down into the stream – at least, this is what people claimed.  Teenagers painted names and dates on the bland canvas of the old concrete piers, big billowing fields of blue and red and yellow.  Although there was a municipal swimming pool, complete with toilets and showers in a little bathhouse in the town park near the courthouse, daredevils dived from the ruins of the trestle and paddled around in the river’s murky water.

Three churches were lined up at the foot of Barn Bluff.  The bluff was loaf-shaped with gouged-out limestone chutes on its sheer side.  Trespassing on the bluff was forbidden – the heights were said to be very perilous with undercut cliffs and narrow paths that skirted the hill’s edges, dense brush tangled with poison ivy that concealed the drop-offs that snared unlucky hikers. (Innumerable paths trampled through the tangle of trees crowning the hill proved that the ‘no trespassing’ signs were not a deterrent to exploration but, in fact, an incentive.) Each year a couple of kids had to be rescued from haphazard perches in treetops below the bluff’s cliffs, bowers into which trespassers had dropped upon losing their footing on the tricky trails overhead.  (Injuries were usually minor, but, sometimes, there were broken bones and, once, a boy was impaled on a sharp branch and had to be transported to the hospital with the tree-branch spear still piercing him.)  From clearings on the bluff’s summit, Billy could see the roofs of his little town, the church steeples under the hill and the white thumb of the grain elevator with its round bright bins and the serpentine curve of the Raccoon River where it meandered through the village.  Across the hollow in which the town was located, more hills arched upward, “goat-prairies” as they were called, sheer steep meadows studded with limestone outcrops.  Several vee-shaped Indian mounds, perhaps depicting birds in flight, marked the grassy terrace beside the river.  The mounds were only 18 inches tall and invisible except at dawn and sunset when the raking light cast the little embankments into relief sufficient to be seen.  Above the mounds, a conical hill showed a bare spot like a marquee on which a large “B” was displayed.  The “B” was formed from fist-sized white rocks studding the meadow and city crews mowed around the insignia on the slope to keep it clearly displayed  Carrington recalled thinking that the “B” initialed the town with the first letter of his first name (not “William”, but “Billy”) – this was his place.

From the patio at the tea house, Carrington could see three or four bicycles locked to the iron staves of a bike rack.  Despite a lock made from forged carbon steel, someone had stolen Carrington’s brand new bike a few months earlier.  Carrington looked at the bikes and their locks and recalled that, when he explored the heights at Barn Bluff, he just left his three-speed in the ditch resting on its side next to other bicycles from which he could identify the kids who were currently clambering around the steep hillsides.  Jeremy would be above him on the hilltop somewhere.  He was a cruel kid who placed toads atop ankle-high mounds made by red ants.  The toads were always moist from peeing in the palm of your hand and, when Jeremy put them on the ant-hill, the creatures just blinked with their bulbous black eyes, twitched a little, and, then, hopped away into the grass.  The red ants lived in mounds with scuffed, denuded surfaces along the trail that switchbacked to the top of the bluff.  On a ledge a dozen feet below the ridge, a fissure shaped like a canoe opened into the hill.  If you slipped inside at the height of summer, there was a small chamber with black mud oozing around a dirty sliver of ice.  The ice lasted all summer but when it was winter, for some reason, the cave dried-out and the ice vanished.  This seemed paradoxical to Carrington and, as he sipped his tea, he wondered if he remembered this accurately.

Time had softened his memories and rubbed away the sharp edges.  At the end of his childhood, Bledford was peaceful, as he recalled it, a little boring, always summertime, it seemed, with school out for the season.  Some bad things had happened to Carrington when he was a teenager, awful events but remote now and vague except for the dull aftermath of pain that he couldn’t quite escape.  But the town wasn’t to blame for what had happened to him.  Everyone suffers.

The sky wasn’t wide or threatening over the town.  The bluffs and wrinkled hilltops supported the blue and yellow heavens like a overturned cup.  It was hot and sticky and the trees (and even the utility poles) were shrouded in tangles of wet-looking green vine.  On the first street crossing the county road where the Rotary Club had erected its welcome sign, a famous architect had built a warehouse shaped like a Mayan Temple.  It was the architect’s maiden project, the first building erected from his plans.  Of course, the architect immigrated to the city and, then, designed projects all over the world, including Los Angeles where one of his mansions hung like a hammock in a cleft in the Santa Monica mountains.  Carrington remembered tourists with sunglasses standing on the sidewalk in front of the warehouse taking photographs.  The sun was always shining as Billy rode his bike around town, over the Raccoon River and past the grain elevator, along the gravel country roads where the bicycle was a little unsteady as its wheels coursed over the pebbles.  He sat in a small cemetery among soft eroded stones and low grassy mounds. (Why had he spent so much time alone?)  He saw cows in the fields, grazing along the fence-lines, looking curiously at him as he rode past.  He climbed on Barn Bluff and lit firecrackers that exploded erratically in the alley ways and waded across a sandy creek that drizzled down, one step at a time, into the river.  A snake crossed the asphalt.  The Summer was warm and the heat made him thirsty, very thirsty, but Carrington recalled that sensation with pleasure – such thirst made that first gulp of cool water wonderfully delicious and refreshing.     

*****

With the some of the money from the settlement of his lawsuit, Ridley bought a motorcycle.   He put a change of underwear in a backpack and drew up an itinerary based on some internet sites promoting “dark tourism.”  Ridley was scouting locations where bad things had happened, paranormal encounters, sightings of ghosts and cryptids and UFOs.  He downloaded cell-phone videos, notes, and narration to his blog Morbid Curiosity.  At present, he had no sponsors but people’s appetite for the eerie and weird is insatiable and Ridley thought that with the proper click-bait, he could attact enough eyes to his site to support two or three advertisers and turn a small profit.  

On a warm and sunny day, perfect motorcycle weather, Ridley visited a river town in a lovely green valley.  The courthouse dome had metal ribs that glinted in the morning light and brick church steeples like smokestacks pointed at the sky from terraces on the river bluffs.  Where the water in the river-bed bent sharply below rational and elongated embankments built by the Army Corps of Engineers, a couple of bridges spanned the stream and the site of the hanging was marked by monuments between the road decks.  Traffic coughed and chugged over the river and a bison carved from white slippery-looking marble stood at the location where the scaffold had been.  The public library was across the street where a stone Indian warrior shaped like a over-sized chess piece gazed sadly at the bison commemorating the place where the hangings had taken place.  Some flower beds colored the grass lawns with streaks of red and daffodil yellow.  Ridley parked his motorcycle at the library and, then, limped across the boulevard in the direction of the bridges and the monument.  Birds darted from under the bridge decks and spun in circles overhead exploring the cool pockets between updrafts from the concrete road surfaces.  It was all very sad and dignified.  The City Fathers were in a war with local kids to keep graffiti off the marble bison, the explanatory marker, and the stoic Indian with fluted feathers crowning his brow.  Ridley could see the ghosts of letters and words scraped off the stone, names and numbers.  The site was matter-of-fact, prosaic, bordered by moving trucks and cars – it was the opposite of eerie.

The prairie above the river valley was flat with grids of trees in old shelter belts.  Ridley rode east on empty open roads. His plan was to reach Plainfield, Wisconsin by sunset.  Ed Gein’s house of horrors was gone, of course, but there was a clearing where the place had once stood and several cemeteries at the outskirts of the small town from which cadavers had been stolen.  And midway between the monuments to the hanging and the Wisconsin village, there was another remote and evil village, reputedly the home of a sinister religious cult, a scary place recommended by a video that Ridley had seen on WatchMOJO.

Narrow highways writhed over a complex landscape of densely wooded ravines and ridges checkered with small fields of tasseled row-crops.  Abandoned farmhouses were decaying next to big accordion-shaped barns collapsed into themselves, some stalwart brick and tile silos sturdily resisting time and decay.  Small creeks emerged from under tunnels of tangled undergrowth and where the streams undercut their banks, squat limestone cliffs stood like pale ghosts in the thickets.  Ridley saw a dead fox squashed on the centerline of the county road.  At the bottom of a long slope, the town clung to the edges of a muddy river, some old, angular mill buildings defending a single bridge that crossed the stream near a dam slick with feathery falling water.  The name of the village was inscribed on a sign sponsored by the local Rotary Club.  Ridley made a couple turns in the town, crossed and recrossed the river and, then, pulled into the shade of some trees at a roadside park next to a big box-shaped bluff wild with foliage and vines and the bleached, pale trunks of dead ash and elms still standing like the columns of a Greek temple on the sheer hillside slopes.  Some garbage cans smelled of rotten food and spilled beer, bee and flies buzzing in sunbeams falling through the leaves, and a noisome privy slouched against a flare of cypress trees.  Ridley knew that the town was infested with cult members from some sinister religious sect and he wondered if there were ritual altars on the upper slopes of the square bluff.  In his initial survey of the town, he had noted a strange-looking structure, standing apart from the other buildings, and modeled, it seemed, on a Mayan pyramid – perhaps, this was the cult’s headquarters.  High-pitched hooting sounds came from the brush plastered along the steep hillside.  Ridley saw some bikes lying in a heap next to a picnic table.  A trio of churches, all alike, stood across the street from the little park.

The plates and screws in Ridley’s legs ached as he labored up a narrow, crooked trail leading toward the top of the bluff.  The hooting continued, voices from invisible people sounding from the undergrowth, and Ridley thought he heard a throbbing undercurrent, faint chanting, perhaps, coming from the other side of the hill.  Perhaps, this would be a true adventure.  He was on edge, hyper-alert to the sounds emerging from the twists and drifts of brush.    

The path emerged from the green gloom and led Ridley to a scuffed, bare clay shelf hanging over the tree tops.  The village was spread out below, lit by the sun mirrored in the steel bins flanking the grain elevator.  Ridley took his camera from his pocket and scanned the valley.  This was the domain of the devil.  A white, shriveled cliff, twisted like a smirking lip, was underfoot.  Ridley felt something on his ankles and calves – it seemed that a small twig or branch there was tickling him.  He looked down and saw that he had planted his left foot in the middle of a bald hump of twigs embedded in sand swarming with ants.  The little red creatures were crawling up his leg.  Ridley hopped up and down and kicked with his leg and, then, lost his balance.  At first, he slid very slowly down the bare, gravel-strewn slope but, then, his speed increased and he was rolling, bouncing against a wall of jagged rocks and, at last, for a second, airborne, falling free from the side of the bluff.

Ridley found himself draped over a tangle of big limbs that storms had knocked off an old tree.  There was blood in his mouth and running into his left eye.  The hillside sloped down and away from where he was suspended, a steep drop-off in the green shadow.  He extricated himself from the sharp broken branches that had gouged and cut him and took a step downhill, but his leg collapsed under him and he fell, rolling again on the slope.  It was level at the bottom, a thicket of thorns and tall brown grass and slender bushes flaring with small yellow and white flowers.         

He crawled for a long time, head down, dragging himself through the rot and debris beneath the bluff.  The phone was no longer in his hand.  At last, he saw a pile of pale gravel ahead of him, the side of the narrow, asphalt road.  He reached the warm black asphalt and rested there panting.  A grain truck appeared at the bend in the road and rolled toward him and Ridley thought that the driver was distracted or that the sun was in his eyes or that he was malignant, malicious, cruel with the intent of driving his big wheels over his broken body.  But the truck gasped a little, let out a sigh of hot air, and stopped in the middle of the road.  

The driver climbed from the truck and approached.  Ridley imagined that he was at the man’s mercy and that soon he would be sacrificed in some horrible ritual.  He remembered the Indians hanged on the banks of the river.  The truckdriver had his phone in his hand.  He knelt by Ridley and asked him about his pain.  A few minutes later, an ambulance appeared to take him to a nearby town where there was a small trauma center at the local hospital.  

Laurel Wreath

 

Joester wasn’t able to sleep.  Something was bothering him.  He rose before dawn, swallowed three ibuprofen with tap water, and, then, took his dog for a walk.  Because it was early, he wasn’t in any hurry.  He let the dog linger where the scent interested her.  He walked slowly, the dog switching sides in front of him, right to left and back again every few feet, nose to the ground.  The way was longer than his customary route.   This loop passed through a residential neighborhood, then, down along the edge of a park where there was a shelter and bandshell between the river and a small pond against a wooded hillside.  He found the laurel wreath on the lawn near the bandshell.  The dog sniffed sweat on the wreath but was only briefly interested.  Then, the sun rose.

Joester had just finished a short story that he planned to send for publication.  After walking the dog, he expected to work on revisions to the story, improving it so that it could be printed.  He didn’t often send out his stories to magazine editors.  The rejections were too painful.  Once, an editor wrote to him that his story was poorly written and that, if he wished to continue with this craft, he should attend a MFA program: “Your prose isn’t good enough to be published in its present form, but with some additional refinement, perhaps, you could write something that would interest someone.”  The dog pulled against her leash.  The memory was irritating and Joester tried not to think about his failures, at least, not this early in the day, before the sun was even above the horizon.  

At first, the route through the houses had been a bit gloomy.  A white-tailed rabbit started from within a bush along the stucco facade of a home.  The dog tugged so hard that Joester was almost pulled off his feet.  The sidewalk was dark and the increasing color and brightness in the sky wasn’t yet an influence on the terrain around him.  At an intersection, a pickup truck turned and its headlights swept across the green lawn.  On the hill leading down toward the picnic shelter and the bandshell, Joester saw mist rising off the river flowing in its murky trench along the side of the road under trees still solemn and winter-bare.  A number of trucks and SUVs were parked in the small lot behind the picnic shelter.  Hammer blows sounded inside the stone walls of the shelter.  The building had once been a small church but was too close to the river and, therefore, frequently flooded.  The city park authority acquired the ruined sanctuary, tore down its Sunday school wing, and poured a utilitarian concrete floor between the heavy ashlar walls of building.  Gothic windows that had once supported stained glass were converted into entry-ways with gates that could be padlocked shut.  Pounding continued in the shelter but Joester didn’t see anyone.  Perhaps, Joester thought, someone was removing decorations from a festival from the night before.    

The bandshell was about sixty feet away and his dog first discovered the laurel wreath.  It had been dropped beside the sidewalk.  The laurel leaves were no longer green but greyish brown and withered.  The wreath had a celebratory shape, the kind of thing that a hero or poet might wear on his brow.  Joester followed his dog onto the grass and took a couple steps toward the wreath, then, prodded it with the toe of his shoe.  The dog smelled traces of geese that lived in the park in the green under her nose and she tugged again.  The pounding in picnic shelter seemed to be coming from far under the ground.

Joester thought that if he were ten years younger, he would stoop to retrieve the laurel wreath from the dewy grass.  But bending over might be hurtful at this time of the morning and his joints felt raw and sore and, so, he turned away and yanked the dog back to the sidewalk.

The way home was uphill for another two hundred yards and the sun rose behind him.  The raking beams of light cast Joester’s shadow far ahead of him.  The shadow was slender and immensely elongated, stretching, perhaps, 80 feet with a strange pointed angle atop the dark column of his body.  As he walked up the hill, the angle of the sun’s rays changed and the shadow shrunk to a moving blade of darkness tapering to an anonymous cone.     

Joester didn't know what the laurel wreath meant. Many of the things that we see are mysterious.  Maybe, we aren't supposed we aren't supposed to see such things. 

The Rabbit-People's Chritmas

 The Rabbit-People’s Christmas

The rabbit-people lived on a busy street.  Although the neighborhood was residential for ten blocks in both directions, the thoroughfare linked downtown with a sector of shopping malls and churches among large cemeteries on the outskirts of our city.  At most hours of the day and night, traffic on the street made backing out from garages adjacent to the homes challenging.  The rabbit-people were fortunate; an alley behind their two-story brick house provided access to their garage, also a square cottage-like structure brick-built and windowless with a pyramid-shaped roof, the detached outbuilding equipped with a two-car-wide aluminum door that rode up and down on a grooved track.  When the garage door was open, passers-by in the alley could scent ammonia and fetid vegetables inside, the stink of several obese rabbits confined in plywood hutches shoved against the car-port’s back wall.  

Sometimes, I walked my dog along the alley.  Evidently, the rabbit-hutches and the barrels of food pellets along with water troughs had crowded out the rabbit-people’s vehicles.  A pick-up truck, battered van, and a big white boat on the scaffold of a pale trailer were parked in the alley, narrowing the right of way to a slender track between garbage pails and wood-slat fences and the other dark, ruinous garages.  Normally, I hustled my dog past the garage after sunset or before dawn, the animal straining against the leash and lunging in the direction of the rabbit-hutches.  Often, the garage door was raised and I could see into the enclosed space.  In the dark, the rabbits were mostly invisible in the shadows, some tufts of moon-white fur behind wire-mesh where huge, wet eyes glinted.  In the adjacent patio, behind a waist-high masonry wall, there was a grill shaped like a metal cigar, some planters in which the spidery, tangled wreckage of winter-killed flowers made a fringe atop the stone-work, and a big, oval hot-tub entombed under cedar slats.  Plastic toys that were red and orange and blue (some of them with small wheels) were strewn about the patio – the rabbit people had two boys who seemed to be twins and a little girl.  The children had shrill voices and I heard them squealing sometimes as their mother loaded them into the old van to take them to school or, perhaps, day-care. 

One Spring day, while walking my dog along the busy street in front of the rabbit-people’s house, I observed a small blue wading pool situated near the concrete stoop leading to the home’s front door.  Chicken-wire had been stretched along the iron stakes of the rabbit-people’s fence around their front yard.  Among the shrubs, I saw two shelters made from canvas stretched taut between metal rods pounded into the leaf-litter between small lilac bushes planted along the home’s facade.  The rabbits were lolling in the grass, stretched out on the lawn.  It was the first time that I had seen the animals clearly.  There were two black Belgian giants, heavy-set rabbits with upright ears, shallow, tilted pockets lined with soft white fur.  The ears were like the antennae of an insect, vaguely grotesque, and the big rabbits had muscular hind-quarters with hoof-shaped paws.  Three smaller rabbits with frayed floppy ears were daintily nibbling grass, noses twitching.  Two of the floppy-eared rabbits were female and the little, squat male sometimes amused himself by mounting one or the other of them.  The females seemed indifferent to his attentions.  The lawn was bright with dandelions and the grass was green, sprouting in tufts from where the rabbits had fertilized it, and the scene was idyllic.  The lady of the house, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat was trimming the lilac bushes heavy with purple grape-shaped blossoms.  

“I like your rabbits,” I said.

My dog trotted back and forth, pulling on the leash, along the chicken wire base strung along the base of the fence.  The rabbits weren’t concerned about the dog and ignored her.

“We decided to let them live out here,” the lady told me.  Her husband emerged from the side-door of the house, lugging tartan-colored bag of golf clubs.  “We are letting the rabbits be rabbits,” he said in a merry voice.  The little boys tagged along behind him.    

The big, boat, sleek and stream-lined like a space-craft was now parked along the curb on the busy street.  The van and the pickup were sheltered in the garage that the rabbits had previously occupied.   After the thaw, we had seen teenagers gathering in the alley between the garages after dark and there had been some beer bottles smashed on the asphalt.  Down the street, someone had painted the word Sur with some crooked-looking digits across the vinyl siding of one of the garages.  It seemed prudent to keep vehicles behind closed doors in the garages.  Perhaps, this accounted-for the transfer of the rabbits from the garage into the front-yard. Or, maybe, there was some sort of feud between the neighbors living next to the rabbit-people.  Transforming the front yard of the rabbit-people’s home into an open-air hare habitat seemed a bit aggressive, even an affront.  The lawns next to where the rabbits lived were very neatly maintained, sprayed with chemicals that could reputedly poison dogs and cats, and those lush green carpets were scrubbed and polished and devoid of the dandelions that grew in bright constellations all across the rabbit-people’s front yard. 

The thick green grass behind the chicken-wire in the front lawn didn’t last for very long.  Evidently, the rabbit-people didn’t know much about the actual habits of rabbits.  The creatures burrowed through the turf and reduced the grass to trampled, turd-brown dust.  After a couple months, the lawn looked an exemplary fragment of a First World War battlefield.  The rabbits had excavated narrow trenches along the fence-line, attempt to undermine the iron staves that kept them imprisoned.  In warm weather, they cooled their furry bellies in concave depressions rooted into the earth. (Fortunately, we were in the third year of a drought without respite and so the rabbit enclosure was mostly dry, but, when it did rain, the pits and craters filled up with water and the mud took on a particularly loathsome and greasy appearance.)  The rabbits chewed around the base of the lilac bushes and reduced them to bouquets of bare sticks and twigs.  Water in the toddler’s wading pool began to fester under a green-yellow scum that attracted green and black flies.  The little floppy-eared male relentlessly raped the floppy-haired females.  One of the Flemish giants lost an eye somehow and the pink socket was inflamed and oozing withe puss.  Someone saw a wild rabbit in the neighborhood and the hare had a flesh-colored growth, a stiff horny carapace above its eyes shaped a bit like a branching coral growing in the chest-deep water of some tropical sea.  People whispered that the deformed rabbit had acquired its illness from the impounded rabbits, possibly the big black and white Belgian with the missing eye.  Once, when I was walking my dog, another neighbor told me confidentially that he planned to make a complaint to the town’s animal control officer. 

“I want to be a good neighbor,” the man told me, “but...”

An old lady came twice a week and pitched raw carrots into the enclosure.  The rabbits sniffed at the carrots as if they were toxic and the vegetables, so brightly orange that they seemed to glow from within like flames on a birthday cake, were strewn all over the lawn, gradually decaying into black shriveled husks.

Then, it was Fall and the rabbit-people hung some skeletons outlined in fairy lights in their windows and set plastic pumpkins by their door illumined by small bulbs on cords plugged into an outside wall-socket.  The big white boat was retrieved from the marina on the river where it had spent the warm-weather months.  Once again, it was parked in front of the house for the season, also a violation of city ordinances.  The first snow fell and I wondered whether the white flakes would cover the ravaged lawn all pock-marked with rabbit burrows.  But the rabbits trampled and ground the snow into the dirty soil and there was never of the stuff to cover up the pellets and rotting carrots and dismal eroded bales of straw resting here and there in the mud.  

Three weeks before Christmas, the rabbits were gone.  The chicken-wire had been rolled into a bundle propped against the brick facade of the house among the shattered lilac bushes.  The droopy canvas shelters had been taken apart and the metal stakes uprooted from the lawn.  The noisome wading pool was no longer to be seen and the straw bales had been lugged off.

The rabbit-people replaced the four animals with an elaborate Christmas display. Colored lights were strung along the top of the fence just below the fleur de lis spikes crowning each iron post. Larger than life-size inflatable figures billowed up above box-shaped fans concealed at their bases.  The balloon-figures bounced slightly, pulsing as if with a pneumatic heart-beat. 

Of course, other houses along the boulevard were decorated for Christmas.  A balloon Santa was tethered to the front of one of the homes, clambering up toward the roof between second-story windows.  Some bare trees were outlined in blue bulbs and, a couple blocks away, an arc of red, flickering lights swooped upward to an illumined star hanging from the bottom bough of an old gaunt elm.  But the rabbit-people’s display far exceeded these adornments, a garish cluster of big colored balloons lit from within and wobbling precariously in the cold breeze.

On her afternoon walk, my dog paused and sniffed the air, still scented, I suppose, with the now-departed rabbits.  The hiss of the blowers and the twitching inflatables, writhing as the air filled them and straining against their pillowy rounded tops alarmed her.  Had the rabbits been transmuted into these giant figures tugging to escape their tethers?  My dog barked at the bobbing figures and, then, growled with fear.

The rabbit-people’s father came around the side of his house toting a pair of short, slick Nordic skis.  He nodded at me and said that my dog was full-grown now, no longer a puppy.

“What happened to the rabbits?”  I asked.

The man grimaced and said that his wife had relatives who lived on a farm and –

I nodded my head.

“Quite a display,” I said, gesturing to the inflatables.

“Well, the kids like it,” he replied. He leaned the Nordic skis against the iron fence with its spiked staves.  

At the center of the front yard, moored in a tub-shaped pit that the rabbits had dug, a balloon nativity scene flared upward like a grotesque flower blossoming from where it was rooted in a fan.  The figures were cartoonish and the Baby Jesus in the manger was an formless pale tumor, a bit like some sort of larval grub; the baby had red tousled hair in a cowlick.  The balloons were tinted in bright, primary hues, like Crayola colors.  Beside the manger, a row of nutcrackers eight feet tall with gruesomely gaping jaws loomed over the scuffed and desolate dirt.  A lime-green reptilian grinch with a broad gloating smirk hovered over a sleigh filled with gifts.  In a corner of the yard, a snowman stood near the fence.  The figure was contrived in such a way that a moving pattern of red, white, and blue snowflakes were displayed in its round belly.  Santa Claus with a team of straining reindeer wiggled a little under the impact of vertical jets of air in their torsos.  The deer had broad goofy grins as well and one of them had an inflamed nose.  The naked tree above the inflatable, a dignified, burly oak, was all tarted up with flickering loops and spirals of lights.   Close to the front of the lawn, nestled against the iron fence, I saw six globe-shaped forms, about the size of bowling balls with fist-sized protruding eyes.

“What are those?” I asked the man.

“Sugar plum fairies,” he said.

“Oh, now, I see.”  

The dog was whimpering.  The array of tremulous, wobbling inflatables was uncanny and her ears were flat against her head as we walked away down the sidewalk.

Three days before Christmas, a blizzard swept down from Canada and the Dakotas.  The snow fell, aslant at first in the gusts of wind, and, then, horizontally as the storm strengthened.  At the intersections, maelstroms of snow ascended to swarm around the streetlights and long, fin-shaped drifts formed along the sidewalk, white surf arrested just as those white waves were about to topple forward.  The wind boomed along the streets and rattled the windows in the houses and the Christmas lights in the trees flapped in the wind as if about to take flight in the storm.  

Of course, the rabbit-people’s inflatables were torn loose from their stakes and tethers and were flung against the pointed prongs of the fence.  The vinyl tore and the balloons deflated, collapsing into the snow like sloughed-off snakeskin.  When the sky cleared and the temperatures dropped far below zero, the rabbit people’s front yard was a scene of complete devastation.  Hip-deep scoops of snow covered fallen balloons.  Brightly colored scraps and pennants of vinyl peeped out from under the drifts.  The nativity scene seemed to have melted like a tallow candle into a colored puddle veined with ice and snow and the marching ranks of nutcrackers in their scarlet military coats were all fallen, casualties of the blizzard.   

The ruin was disheartening.  This was festivity’s bitter terminus, the end of Christmas and the demise of the holiday spirit.  The crushed idols were frozen to the ground, red and green and blue scuffs in the field of snow.  

Two days after the New Years, my dog paused on the sidewalk, tilting her muzzle toward something that she scented among the shredded lilac bushes.  Beyond the flattened colored vinyl, a small wild rabbit was half-concealed under the barren shrubs.  The rabbit had something wrong with its head.  It was wearing a horny crown of thorns, pink-orange lesions around thumb-sized keratinous growths extruding from its skull.  The rabbit moved gingerly, pushing its nose under the snow, indifferent, it seemed, to its deformity.    

  

   

The Sofa

 The Sofa

1.

In his heart, Randall thought that the bungalow on 6th street wasn’t comfortable enough for White tenants.  Times had changed.  Growing up in that little house, Randall and his brothers and sisters had been happy enough.  It was crowded and smelled of fried onions and sauerkraut and the toilet as well  and there were always dogs underfoot and sobbing toddlers.  The men and boys in his family showered in the basement among spiders and house-centipedes darting across concrete block walls moist with dark continents of mold that seemed to map out the family’s destiny and Randall’s mother and sisters bathed in an old cast-iron tub in the upstairs bathroom and the ancient furnace grunted in the winter like an angry sow and the pipes rattled with hot water coursing through the radiators and cold drafts made the air feel electrified around the loose-fitting windows.  There was next to no insulation in the attic so that in January and February the space was an ice-box; in the summer, the asbestos shingles absorbed heat and the attic became so warm that creosote and tar oozed out of the pine boards and joists framing the roof.  Randall’s father died and, then, his (Randall’s) siblings went away to school or married and bought their own homes and, at last, his mother was alone in the house, still cluttered with school souvenirs, framed pictures of family members and holiday reunions as well as winter coats and sweaters worn forty years earlier but now abandoned. At the end, Randall’s mother couldn’t climb the steps to the toilet any longer and, so, she moved into assisted living and a dumpster was parked at the curb to receive the heaps trash remaining in the house and, at last, when the rooms were empty and vacant, Randall rented the place to refugees, first a family from Sudan, then, some people from Ethiopia who worked at the plant, and, at last, to a couple with their children who had fled from either Burma or Myanmar or some other steamy place in southeast Asia.  Although Randall believed that most of his friends and neighbors would not be willing to live in the cramped and antiquated house, he believed that people from deserts or from the foreign jungles, poor folk who had cowered among ferns and vines in swampy places while planes bombed them, would be happy to have a roof over their head.

But immigration policy changed.  The new administration was less hospitable to asylum-seekers and, without much notice, the family from Burma or Myanmar disappeared and the house again was empty.  Randall’s tenants had abandoned a big sofa in the living room.  It was an unwieldy piece of furniture that required Randall and three buddies to wrestle the thing out of the bungalow’s side door – the sofa didn’t fit through the front – and the task was difficult, men moaning and complaining of back sprains and fingers pinched between the davenport and the door frame.  Muttering and cursing, they dragged the sofa to the curb and left it there, hoping that some other immigrant family with a pick-up truck would collect the thing and give it a new home.  (The landfill’s charge to accept the davenport made it prohibitive to take there.)  But the sofa, with overstuffed cushions, and a high upholstered back had a disheveled appearance.  A puppy had gnawed the veneer off the squat, stiff legs under the sofa, exposing white splinters under the dark paint, and there were sinister-looking stains on the pillows and one of the armrests was frayed, the work of a dog, or, perhaps, a cat.  The upholstery smelled of cocoanut milk and curry and the sofa sat like a beached skiff on the boulevard on 6th Street for a couple weeks without anyone showing interest in salvaging it.  Randall invited some friends to his house to watch the Superbowl and, at half-time, persuaded them to ride with him to the rental property and drag the hapless couch from the curb to along the side of the house to where there was an alley bisecting the block.  Randall and his buddies were a little drunk and the alcohol made light-work of the sofa – it was like lifting a feather, someone said, and this seemed strange because all of them recalled the agony of tilting and twisting the davenport to get it out of the house.  

Facing the alley and the neighbor’s backyards (where chained dogs bayed and growled), the couch rested on an ankle-high bank of lawn overlooking the scabby asphalt, split with fissures and pocked with potholes full of ice.  The upholstery was dark, even gloomy, but the massive davenport had a regal aspect – it was like a throne perched above the alley.  One of Randall’s friends sat atop the sofa, drinking a can of beer that he had smuggled outside in his winter-coat.

“You know,” the man said, “this is pretty comfortable.  You could fall asleep on this thing.”

“If your wife made you sleep on it,” Randall said.

The man with the beer shoved the can between the cushions so that it was concealed.  Then, they hustled to the pick-up and hurried over the Randall’s house in time for the second-half kick-off. 

2.        

Early in the morning, two hours before dawn, Randall walked his dog.  When it was below zero, he wore a heavy brown coat over several sweaters and a nylon jacket.  His routes varied, eight or nine blocks in one direction and, then, back home.  His house was in a subdivision that had been new thirty years before but was now folded into the city, a residential neighborhood among other newer (or older) tracts of housing.  Most of the blocks over which he traveled were lined with sidewalks, straight flat rows of pale concrete slabs lined-up like box cars between fan-shaped, sloping driveways.  Before and after Christmas, some of the houses were outlined in colored lights and the trees decorated as well, diagrams of branches and boughs above balloons shaped like reindeer or snow-men or billowy figures of Santa Claus glowing in the pre-dawn darkness.  Street lamps were scattered along the way, every couple blocks but it was mostly very dark in the sleeping neighborhoods.  Sometimes, the moon whittled to a wan curved blade hung overhead, changing location in a confusing way as Randall walked – either the moon couldn’t recall where it was located or Randall, keeping his eyes trained on the haunches of his dog and watching for ice on the concrete, lost track of either its position or, perhaps, the direction in which he was moving.  The wind swept out of the open country around the edges of town and coursed between houses and, on porches, wind chimes slapped together and filled the icy air with the sound of bells chaotically ringing.  

Sometimes when it was very cold, ten or fifteen degrees below zero, Randall felt the weight of his heavy coat and the sweaters packed around his chest and belly as a burden that made his shoulders ache and his legs feel sluggish.  The thick coat and the pace that he maintained, dragged forward by his large dog, caused him to feel winded, short of breath.  His chest ached a little, a tight feeling to the left of the base of his throat, and Randall thought that it would be prudent to pause, catch his breath, and, even, sit down.  But there were no benches anywhere along his route, no place to rest.  It seemed that the city was heartless, unconcerned about its pedestrians.  One day, Randall thought, he would be too old to walk in these neighborhoods without benches on which to rest.  The exertion would be too great.  

Randall pictured the sofa sitting along the alley next to the rental property.  The home where he was raised was across town, on the other side of the athletic fields and the High School, too far away to reach on his morning walk.  His current address where he lived with his wife and children and his dog was in a newer neighborhood, more prosperous, 20 blocks from the brick-built center of town. 

In very cold weather, zombie cars were parked along the streets, lights on and engine running, but no one inside.  As he came near those cars, Randall could see into them, the glowing console, luminous controls and displays, a faint glimmer cast on the plastic seat covers, puffs of exhaust wafted from tail pipe and dissolving in the frigid air.  Apparently, these vehicles could be started remotely from inside the adjacent houses and the zombie cars were warming themselves in the pre-dawn darkness.  A few years ago, empty vehicles humming alongside the sidewalks were rare, even unknown.  But, now, it seemed, that there were many cars of this sort and, when it was below zero, Randall would encounter a half-dozen of them idling along the sidewalks. 

Sometimes, when his chest ached and the burden of his winter coat caused him to gasp for air, he thought about breaking into one of those cars and resting there on the front or back seat, the dog panting beside him, catching his breath in the warm air gushing from the front-seat vents.   But, he presumed that the idling vehicles were locked against trespassers and thieves.  The moon was slippery, shifting position again.  When he looked up, the moon had moved into some inaccessible quadrant of the sky.  One of the purring zombie cars had its radio turned-on.  Randall heard voices inside the vehicle, then, music, a mariachi band playing in the darkness.

3.

A neighbor to the rental house, an old lady who lived alone, called Randall.  He relied upon her to watch his house when there were no tenants living in it.  The old woman had been friends with his mother when she was younger and, of all the people who lived in the neighborhood when Randall was growing up, she was the last to remain.  The other people on the block didn’t speak English or worked night-shifts or long hours and, so, Randall didn’t know them.

The old lady said that the sofa would have to be moved.  It was attracting trouble.  Sometimes after midnight, the old lady said that she glanced from her upstairs bedroom window and saw that a figure was sitting on the davenport.  

“It’s a black man,” the neighbor said. 

“You mean an African-American?” Randall asked.

“I don’t know.  It’s too dark to see.  Just a shadow, that’s all I can make out,” she explained.

Randall asked what the figure did.  

“Nothing, he just sits there,” the neighbor replied.

“How long?”

“It varies,” the woman said.  “I never see him coming or going.  I just look out, down into the alley, and there is someone sitting right in the middle of the davenport.  Not every night, no, no...but sometimes twice or three times a week and always after midnight when decent people are in their beds sleeping.” 

“Well, you’re up,” Randall said.

“Have to go to the bathroom,” she replied.  “You need to do something.  We can’t have birds like that roosting in the alley in the middle of the night.”

Randall said that he would respond.

4.

A couple days later, Randall screwed a floodlight with a motion sensor onto the garage next to where the sofa sat.  He had been meaning to install a floodlight in that place for several years. At night, kids roamed the alleyway and graffiti in Spanish was smeared on the garage siding across the way. 

After dark, Randall came back to the alleyway in his pickup truck.  The floodlight snapped on as he slowly drove by the sofa and the bright beams made the couch shine brightly as if it were on the display floor of a furniture store.  By the time, he had reached the end of the alley and was turning onto the street, the floodlight behind him snapped off, and the narrow lane between the houses was dark again.  

Why didn’t he just enlist his friends again and haul the sofa to the dump?  That would have made more sense, but, of course, it was good to have additional light in alley, a bright, white glare that shone mercilessly, raking against the peeling paint on his rental house, casting a halo across the basketball backboard and rusting metal hoop hanging off the old garage.  (He recalled shooting hoops with his father from the driveway when he was a boy.)  Intruders would be frightened.  And the sofa could remain in case some wayfarer in the night needed a place to rest.

5.

Someone was seated on the sofa, half-reclining in the cold darkness.   The old woman living next to the alley looked down from her upstairs window.  Then, she glanced at the clock on her night-stand: the digital numerals told her that it was 2:45 in the morning.  The figure on the couch must have approached stealthily, moving so slowly that the motion sensor on the floodlight had not triggered.  Now, the shadow was completely immobile – a deep breath or a tremor in the hand or foot would have activated the light.  But it was dark and the figure seemed inert, an inanimate thing.  For a moment, the old woman thought that her eyes were deceiving her, that there was no one sitting on the couch, and that the bulbous, misshapen shadow was the product of an optical illusion, moonbeams and starlight interacting with the trunk of a tree or a pipe piercing through a shingled roof.  But, peering into the darkness, she thought she made out a torso with arms like flippers under a heavy coat and, perhaps, even a glint of a stray ray of light on an eyeball or tooth.  The thing’s legs ended in thick boots that were like tree-trunks embedded in the ground.  Sooner or later, the figure would have to move, shift position or, perhaps, cough or sneeze.  So she waited for some twitch or flicker of movement to illumine the scene.  But nothing happened.  The thing didn’t even seem to be breathing – she saw no sign of breath condensing in the icy air under the head of the figure.  Her eyes hurt from peering into the darkness and, after a few minutes (the digital display now said 2:52), she decided that she would call Randall in the morning and went back to bed.

The next day, Randall spoke to the elderly woman who lived across from the rental house.  He asked her what had caused her to look out the window.  It wasn’t the floodlight, she assured him: that never triggered.  

“Was it dogs barking?”  Randall asked.

“You know, that’s an odd thing,” she replied.  “I didn’t hear any dogs at all.  They never barked and that’s strange because the dogs here are always yipping and yapping.”

“What caused you to look out the window?” Randall asked.  

“I don’t know.  I was up to go to the bathroom and, then, I had a sense that something, you know, wasn’t quite right and, so, I looked out my window and saw what I saw.”

Randall said that he understood and would check on the motion-activated floodlight after dark.  When he drove down the alley a few hours later, the light triggered and spilled bright, white radiance on the couch.  

6. 

The temperature was almost 20 below, but Randall was well-bundled and his morning walk wasn’t too uncomfortable.  As people say, it isn’t the cold but the wind that pierces through you that makes winter-walking unpleasant and, in the pre-dawn dark, not a breeze was stirring.  

About six blocks from his home, Randall encountered two idling vehicles, both of them unmanned.  One of the vehicles was a compact SUV, parked along the curb.  The nearby houses were all dark, windows dull and black.  Perhaps, someone was eating breakfast or dressing for work in an unlit room.  The red tail-lights of the SUV grimaced at Randall as he and his dog approached.  A half-block farther along, a white pickup was parked illegally, facing the wrong direction along the side of the street so its bracket-shaped white headlights cast their light in Randall’s face.  The dog prancing ahead of him cast slender, elongated shadows back against the boulevard and sidewalk, the silhouette of a giant long-legged spider tugging him forward.  The glare of the lights falling directly on Randall’s face made it difficult for him to see ahead of him.  

The dog pulled up short and whimpered slightly.  Something was approaching, emerging out of the blinding glare thrown toward Randall by the zombie truck.  A figure backlit by the headlights was approaching on the sidewalk.  Who could be out this early in such lethal cold?  The form was heavily bundled, almost spherical and small straps and ribbons flopped around the edges of the approaching figure.  It approached silently, without so much as a breath sounding, and its feet, somewhere beneath the globular form, didn’t seem to be touching the pavement.  Randall couldn’t see a face; the bulge at the top of the round bundle was hooded and the darkness seemed deepest there.  The dog didn’t bark and didn’t strain at the leash.  Randall stepped to the side, taking four paces into the frozen lawn so as to let the figure pass unmolested on the concrete sidewalk over which it was gliding.  Perhaps, this was a homeless person, someone condemned to sleep outside in the deadly cold.  At that thought, Randall felt a nauseating sense of horror and grief.  

As the figure approached, Randall averted his eyes.  The dog was motionless, in a state of suspension.  There are some things that it is best not to see.  

After the apparition had passed, Randall returned to the sidewalk and passed the idling truck.  Exhaust spurting from the tailpipe of the truck parked the wrong way along the curb was blood-red.  The moon was somewhere overhead but Randall couldn’t quite locate it.  He wondered if he should turn his head and look over his shoulder to see where the figure had gone.  But the scarf at his throat restricted his motion and the heavy coat, hanging from him like armor, made it difficult for him to turn.  So he didn’t look in that direction.