People of the Dark (4 page)

"He'll be okay," she said, an edge to her tone that surprised me.

I started backing up; the jogger was lying motionless face down in the road, his arms wide and his legs straight.

"Jack." Erika said sharply, "he doesn't need your help. He'll be
all right
."

I looked at her, surprised: "What are you saying, Erika?—'Don't get involved'?"

"Oh, of course not!" She was angry, now; I had rarely seen her so quick-tempered.

The jogger pushed his upper body off the road, then, as if he were doing pushups. I stopped the car, watched him bring his knees forward so he was on his haunches, take a long, deep breath, and stand.

Erika said, "These people can take care of them—
selves
, Jack, you'll see."

"Thanks," I said testily, "for you old-time country wisdom."

She sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get angry with you." She reached, patted my belly yet again in an effort to lighten things up. "C'mon, let's go home and make love, paunch and all."

T
he area around the house is starkly rural. The road in front of it is paved but badly rutted, and our nearest neighbors, when we moved in, were an old German couple named
Alnor
who lived in a huge and immaculate white Victorian house a good mile and a half north of our house. The
Alnors
ran an antique shop in their small white barn, and we soon found that they were friendly enough if we looked to be on the verge of buying something, but became stiff and cool if we just wanted to talk. We never got to know them well. When the trouble started, they didn't come to us for help; they toughed it out for a while, all by themselves (I give them credit for that). Then one day I saw that their house had a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck on it and a distinct air of abandonment about it.

The nearest town is called Cohocton. Once a year the locals stage what they call the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival, which involves neither trees nor sitting. Local men stand for twenty-four hours at a time on small platforms at the top of fifty-foot tall wooden poles. Lots of beer and handicrafts are sold at these festivals, and everyone involved seems to realize the kind of gritty charm they hold for city people, which Erika and I were. We've attended the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival only once, shortly after moving into the farmhouse. It was a sublimely simple diversion from the confusion, of moving in and getting things straightened around. The men on the poles wore broad,
clownlike
smiles, as if they realized the idiocy of the whole event. There was no real purpose to it. No one won anything for the longest time standing on a pole. It was merely something pointless to do, and even more pointless to watch, and everyone enjoyed the hell out of it.

I
t wasn't until several days after Jim Sandy left with his backhoe that Erika asked me, "What kind of body parts, Jack?"

She was feeding our two cats their once-a-day can of Goff Pure Horsemeat
Catfood
(I'd once done some very good work for Goff, and as a kind of spiff they'd given me several years' worth of their cat food), and the kitchen smelled bad. "It's a hell of a time to ask something like that," I said.

She shrugged. "What's a good time?"

I shrugged, said, "None, I guess," paused, went on, "An arm. Some fingers. A few ribs."

"Where?"

"Where what?—Where'd they find the ribs?"

"No. Everything, Jack." Our cats—a wiry tom we called Orphan, because that's the way he came to us, and a big, orange longhair named Ginger—were rubbing against her ankles, now, telling her thank you, could they please have some more. "Where'd they find the other arm, and the fingers, and the ribs?" She leaned over, stroked Ginger, said to her, "No, that's enough."

"Various places," I said. "Here and there. They found part of a head, too. Did I tell you that?"

That was a bombshell. Her mouth dropped open, though very briefly; she closed it at once, leaned over again, patted Ginger, said "No!" to her again.

"Did you hear what I said, Erika?"

She looked up at me. "I heard."

"And?"

She looked down at 'Ginger again. She said nothing. "And?" I said again.

She shrugged, her head still lowered. "I don't know." She was clearly upset; her voice was trembling. "Fingers and toes I can deal with, Jack." A nervous smile flickered across her lips. "'Part of a head' —that's a different story, isn't it?" She straightened, looked very seriously at me. "Isn't it?" she repeated.

"It was a very small part, I'm told," I said. "Part of a forehead, and part of a nose—they were attached—"

She cut in, "Oh, give me a break, Jack! I really don't want to hear this!" And she stalked from the room.

T
he boy who swept toward me from behind that dying oak twenty years ago was a boy I recognized. His name was Harry Simms. He was my age; we went to school together, we even shared some of the same classes. Earlier in the day, we'd been on opposite teams in a game of battle ball. Battle ball was a game we all liked because it allowed us to vent whatever pubescent anger and tension had built up—I think it gave us nearly the same kind of relief as masturbation.

He screamed this as he swept toward me from behind that oak: "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Then he was gone.

In school three days later,
Harry's
seat was empty and rumor had it that he'd run away from home. On my way back from school that night, through the park, I went looking for him.

T
he farmhouse has thirteen rooms, including five bedrooms, a huge dining room, a library, powder room, music room, formal living room, and at the rear, facing our mountain, a good-sized spare room that Erika and I use as a storage area. The house's previous owner, a retired Kodak executive in his late sixties, had begun to renovate this room. He'd put fake wooden beams in the ceiling and had laid a blue-speckled no-wax floor, but death caught up with him before the job was done. The walls were a scarred and patchy yellow-with-age plaster; here and there, he'd started to take the plaster down altogether, and diagonal gray wooden furring strips were visible beneath.

The room has a constant smell of fish to it. The smell varies in intensity from day to day—it seems to depend on the outside temperature and humidity. Erika and I decided that some hapless animal had crawled into the wall to die and that when we got around to finishing the job the Kodak executive had begun, we'd find the animal and give it a decent burial.

There were lots of small jobs to do at the house. The dining room needed painting; its teardrop crystal chandelier needed rewiring; several of the doors had to be
rehung
; a gutter on the northeast wall had to be replaced; a little bridge spanning a creek a hundred feet south of the house was in desperate need of rebuilding. We looked forward to seeing these jobs done. We were going to do them together. It was our first house, and we planned on being happy in it.

Of course, Jim Sandy's discovery got us off to a lousy start. I had hoped that it was the kind of thing that was so bizarre and so hard to believe that we could subconsciously deny it, that we'd be able to say to ourselves something like,
How could anyone find a man's arm in our side yard? How could anyone lose one?
And for a while that was precisely the attitude we were able to take. But at the same time that we asked the question we were able to answer it: "Yes, but it happened." And try as we might, we could not deny that. It happened. It was real.

I've lived in a few places since college: Baltimore; Syracuse; Rochester; Palmyra, New York (where Mormonism was founded); Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Dallas for a few weeks. I dearly love discovering a place I've moved to because all places are different. Two small towns within minutes of each other can be vastly different. And it's not just the people, though people are, of course, what make up a town and give it flavor. A valley town like Cohocton can be quite different from a hill town like Wayland or Dansville. Maybe because different kinds of people like to live in different kinds of places. Or maybe because the
place
molds its
people
.

So I looked forward to discovering what Cohocton was all about, to meeting its people, to finding out what their concerns were; I looked forward to seeing just what kind of life they'd made for themselves, to discovering the best roads to here and there, to finding landmarks along the way (an ancient barn with a tobacco ad on one wall, for instance, or a particularly old and gnarled oak tree, or an ancient, tumbledown farmhouse stuck by itself in the middle of a field lying fallow).

Some of this sense of discovery had to do with one of the ad campaigns I was working on then. It was for a company called Earth's-Way, a vitamin and mineral supplement manufacturer. They'd given me all the slogans—I could choose "Earth's Best" or "The Best from the Earth to You" or "The Best from the Earth's Kitchen to Your Table" or "From the Earth's Kitchen to You" or "The Best from the Earth's Kitchen." There were others, and they all had to do with the fact that the company's products were "one-hundred-percent natural and wholesome," a phrase that I had to work into the art. Some of the slogans were good, some were awful, and I was even given leeway to come up with something of my own, though I explained that I was strictly an artist, not a writer (although I think that it doesn't really take a writer to come up with a dynamite slogan; it takes a
salesman
with an ear for meter, and a jaded sense of the poetic).

So, my tours of discovery in and around Cohocton would probably go a long way, I thought, toward helping me with the art for the Earth's-Way campaign.

A
couple of weeks after moving into the house I decided that I needed some good, sturdy, waterproof hiking boots, so I went into Cohocton to buy some. I'd been in the town before, of course, several times, but always with that sense of happy confusion that I get from being in a strange, new place and hoping I can find my way out, back to where I've come from, without having to stop and ask one of the locals for directions. This time I fully intended on talking to the locals—because this time I was on a tour of discovery.

I stopped first at a place called Czech's Garage, at the southern end of Cohocton, on its main street. (There are no more than a dozen streets in the town, and probably ten of those have been named after trees—Maple Street, Elm Street, Birch Drive, Willow Lane, and so on. Czech's Garage, I found, was owned and operated by a slow-talking man of forty or forty-five named Jerry Czech. I decided at once that he was probably typical of most of the men in the area. He was a little overweight, though not sloppy, wore a cap that had the name of a tractor company imprinted on it—as Jim Sandy had—bib overalls, a red flannel shirt, ankle-high blue sneakers, and several days' growth of white-patched beard, though he apparently had no white in his close-cropped dark hair.

I pulled my Toyota Corolla up to his unleaded pump, got out, saw him come out the door of his station toward me, waving me away from the pump.

"Sorry," I said, and stepped back.

He smiled thinly, and quickly. "Ain't got no self-serve in Cohocton; never had, never will." He took the nozzle from the pump, went around to the back of the car. It looked like he was having trouble finding the gas tank, so I said, pointing, "It's under the license plate."

He waved at me again, with agitation this time. "I know where it is; I been pumping gas a long time, so I know where it is." He flipped up the license plate, stuck the nozzle in, looked questioningly at me. "Fill '
er
up for
ya
?"

I nodded. "Yes. Thanks."

He nodded.

I smiled at him, stepped forward, stuck my hand out. "My name's Jack Harris. I just moved into the Tanner house on Hunt's Hollow Road. I guess I'll be buying most of my gas here."

He shifted the nozzle from his right hand to his left, shook my hand briefly, said, "Uh-huh, good to
meetcha
," let go of my hand, locked the nozzle on, went around to the front of the car. "
Wanta
open the hood there?"

"The oil's okay," I said.

"You sure?"

"Yes. Thanks."

He nodded. "You know you got crazy people living across the road? What'd you say your name was?"

"Jack Harris."

"Uh-huh.
D'ja
know that—about the crazy people?"

I shook my head, smiled as if he were trying to tell me a joke. "No, I didn't know that."