Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (35 page)

I had just reached my fishing dock and put down the gunnysack of beer bottles when I heard their truck coming down the road on the other side of the pond.

Ah, now my evening would really begin.

I got my fishing pole and carried it in one hand, the gunnysack of beer bottles slung over my shoulder with the other hand, and started on around the pond, which was about ¾'s of a mile in circumference.

I think the origin of the pond had been to get dirt to build the overpass, so that the trains could run under it. Once this pond had been just another field but now it was an overpass and a place for me to fish and an open living room for furniture.

I walked around the pond in the opposite direction from the route I had taken to the sawmill night watchman's gold mine of beer bottles.

There was a finger of water that branched off the pond that I had to walk around. The finger was forty yards long and about twenty yards wide. The water wasn't very deep in the finger and it was a great place for bluegills to spawn. The fishing was very good there, but you had to have some courage to fish that watery index off the pond because a strange old man had built a shack there.

All the kids I knew were afraid to fish there because they were afraid of the old man. He had long white hair like General Custer in an old folks home, denied the dignity and ceremony of meeting a few thousand Indians at the Little Big Horn.

He also had a long white beard that had a yellowish streak down the center caused by a constant overflow of chewing tobacco cascading out of his mouth.

He was the type of old man who looked as if he ate little children, but I had absolutely no fear of him. I met him the first time I was taken to the pond by a brand-new friend who asked me if I wanted to go fishing. I noticed a shack on the little finger-like bay off the pond.

I saw a man standing in front of it.

He was in the distance a ways, so I couldn't figure him out.

He had built a very sturdy little dock on the bay and he had a small boat tied up to it. He walked over from the shack to the dock and stood there looking at the water for a few moments. He didn't look up.

"Who's that?" I asked.

"A crazy old man," my new friend said. "Don't go over there. He hates kids. He hates everybody. He's got a big knife. It's as big as a sword. It looks like it's got rust on it, but it's really dried blood from kids.

"The fishing is really good, but no one goes over there. If that old man caught you, I don't know what would happen to you," he said.

"I'll be back in a minute," I said.

That little statement got me quite a reputation for being very brave and also crazy. I didn't mind the reputation from either end you looked at it. The distinction made me a sort of cockeyed hero, but that was all to end in the orchard that coming February.

The old man was very surprised when I walked up to him in a very friendly and relaxed style and said, "Hello." He was so surprised that he answered like the flipside of a well-mannered coin: "Hello."

"How's fishing?" I said.

"Good," he said. "But I don't fish."

I looked down into the water and it was filled with spawning bluegills. The bottom of the pond was a ballet choreographed by courting bluegills. There were hundreds of bluegills there. I had never seen so many fish before.

I was really excited.

"Do you live here?" I asked, knowing of course that he lived there, but also knowing that it was important for him to say so because it would make him feel more comfortable, at ease to establish his own territory thus to make me a young, non-threatening guest.

"Yes," he said. "I've been living here since the Depression."

When he said: Since the Depression, I knew everything was going to be OK.

The old man had built a shack out of packing
crates. It was maybe eight by six feet and had a stovepipe coming out the side. It was summer and the screen door was closed to keep the mosquitoes out. I couldn't see into the shack because the way the screen door filtered, obscured the fading light of almost sundown.

He had a small table beside the shack with a bench that was a part of it. The table was made out of packing-crate wood and scrap lumber.

Everything was very clean and neat around the shack.

He had a small patch of corn, maybe forty stalks, and he was growing some potatoes and some green peas. There were also about a dozen tomato plants that were covered with small delicious-looking tomatoes.

He had built a small washbasin that was just a bucket stuck through a hole cut into a shelf that was nailed to the shack. When he wanted to wash, he just took the bucket from the hole in the shelf and got some water from the pond.

The shack had a flat tarpaper roof.

I talked to the old man for a few moments.

I think he was impressed by the fact that I wasn't afraid of him. Also, old people just tended to like me. I had a quality that appealed to them. Maybe they liked me because I was interested in them and listened to what they had to say. It could have been that simple.

I asked the old man if I could come back and visit him sometime. He responded by walking over and picking a really beautiful tomato and giving it to me.

"Thank you," I said, starting to take a bite out of the tomato.

"Wait, before you do that," he said, walking over to the shack and opening the screen door. I got a brief glimpse at the interior of his dwelling. All of his furniture seemed to be variations on packing-crate themes.

He came back out of the shack with the largest pepper shaker I had ever seen. "Tomatoes taste best with pepper on them," he said, offering me the shaker.

"You're not afraid that it's poison, are you?" he said.

"No," I said, putting some pepper on my tomato.

"You can come back anytime you want," he replied.

I took a bite out of the tomato.

"What do you think of tomato with pepper on it?" he said.

I've been eating it that way ever since.

He went and got himself a tomato.

Pretty soon tomato juice was mixed in with tobacco juice in his beard, which began to look like a poorman's rainbow.

When I got back to where I had left my new friend, he was gone. He came over to the cabin at the
auto court that evening to see if I was still alive. He was very surprised when I answered the door.

"Jesus Christ!" he said. "You're still alive."

Then he asked me if I had seen the sword covered with all the dried blood of thousands of pond-slaughtered kids whose bones were buried under his shack like millions of loose toothpicks.

"It's not a sword," I said. "It's a huge pepper shaker."

The kid didn't understand that, but he was very impressed anyway with what I had done.

I returned to visit the old man many times after that and to take apart and put back together his life like a huge puzzle in my mind, examining very carefully each piece and the totality of their effect.

The old man had been in World War I and was gassed by the Germans. Needless to say, when he mentioned the word gas, I was instantly fascinated and then he told me that it wasn't automobile gas or cooking gas, but poison gas and the Germans were sons-of-bitches for doing that to him because now he had only one lung and he couldn't do very much with his life except live here by the pond until one day the sheriff would come and tell him to move on and he'd have to find another pond somewhere.

The old man lived off a small pension that he got from The Government because he'd lost a lung in World War I. Other than this fact I didn't know anything else about him. He never talked about his family or ever being married or current and long-ago friends. I didn't know where he was born or anything about him. In his little packing-crate shack there were no personal items that gave a single clue to his past.

The old man had only things that he could use: clothing, cooking utensils, dishes and silverware, jars for storing food and some tools. He didn't have anything else.

He didn't have any old letters or a catfish postcard exploiting the possibilities of photography. He had made all his own furniture except for his stove out of packing crates and scraps of odd lumber.

The inside of his shack was so simple and honest that it was almost like a glorified kids playhouse. He was living the kind of hermit life kids dream about living. He was an ancient breathing statue of Huckleberry Finn.

The old man measured carefully every movement that he made. He didn't ever waste a single gesture. Maybe it was only having one lung that made him so premeditated. I don't think he even blinked without first thinking about whether or not it was necessary.

Sometimes for reasons that were completely unknown to me I wished that he had a calendar. I had a feeling that he didn't know what day, month or year it was. I thought that he should at least know what year it was.

What was wrong with that?

It wouldn't hurt him to know that it was 1947.

The two things that he took the most pleasure in and that were the only incongruity in the personal history that he acted out at the end of a tiny bay on a small obscure pond were his dock and his boat.

Perhaps once he had something to do with the sea.

But I would never find out because he never spoke of it.

The dock was a thing of beauty to behold. It was perfectly constructed like a harpsichord and polished like a silver plate. It was about nine feet long and a yard wide. The pilings were finely carved timbers. Each one of them looked as if it had taken a year to carve. There were six of them. That means he must have started work on them in 1941, or so it seemed to me when I looked at them.

The dock itself was three ten-inch planks that were about two inches thick. They were also hand-carved and then finely polished until a king could have eaten off them. It would have been interesting to watch a king eat directly off a dock.

I would imagine that each plank took perhaps two years' carving and polishing, so that's six more years and now the construction of the dock reaches back to 1935, when I was born.

Maybe he started it on the day I was born.

Once I asked him again how long he had lived beside the pond and he was very hard-pressed to give me an exact time. "I guess it's been a long time. Since the Depression," he said, finally and somehow confirming my idea that he had started the dock on the day I was born.

Then I asked him when he had started working on the dock.

After an equally long pause, he said, "About the same time."

Yup, that confirmed it!

Every time I saw the dock after that, I felt good and considered it an unknown birthday present from him to me, though I never mentioned this to him.

Now: I'll talk about the boat.

It was like a little brother to the dock. It was totally handmade from an elegant wood that was varnished to a beautiful sheen like finely diluted sunlight. It was a very small boat. Maybe 4 ½ feet long and was, as I said earlier, a kid brother to the dock.

Sometimes I felt as if the old man was too big for such a small boat, but that was only a theoretical curiosity because I never once saw him in the boat.

It was always tied carefully, meticulously up to the dock. So what he had created was a holograph of boating which was not intended to actually move. It was just something to look at that pleased him very much
and pleased me also because I thought it was another unknown birthday present from him to me.

In the background of the dock and the boat was a packing crate shack and a small patch of corn, green peas and tomatoes.

This was his life and time on earth.

The only vice the old man had was chewing a lot of tobacco. It stained his long white beard like a delicate garden constructed of a million tiny imperceptible daffodils.

Often when I looked at calendars back then, I thought about him lost in the geography of time, but finally not caring. Little did I know that I would end up the same way very soon:

 

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust

 

The old man saw me coming a few months later with my fishing pole and my sack of beer bottles. He was sitting on his little packing-crate picnic-table bench, eating supper. His dock and boat were at total rest, total peace a few feet away from him. If he had been listening to some quiet dinner music, it could not have been any more peaceful than his dock and boat.

It looked as if he were eating some variation on the stew theme.

"Hello, there," he said, cheerfully. "Come to catch some of my bluegills?" He did have the best fishing in the pond right there.

"No," I said. "I'm on my way to the other side."

He looked across the metal dish he was eating from to the other side of the pond where the people were still coming down the road in their pickup filled with furniture. It would take them a while to get there because the road was very bad and they always drove extremely carefully because they didn't want to lose any of their furniture.

At one place in the road, there were some miniature Grand Canyon ruts and the people took about five minutes to get through them and every time their truck just barely made it, but they drove the ruts so carefully that not even a lamp fell off.

Those ruts would give me enough time to be at their fishing place when they arrived, so I could watch them take their furniture off the truck from the very beginning piece. The first thing they would take off would be the couch and I would be there watching them.

"They're coming," the old man said around a bite of stew in his mouth. He did a good job of balancing the stew in his mouth, so that I could understand what he was saying.

"Yeah," I said. "They're coming."

"They come every evening this year," he said. "They came only four times last year, and they never came before that. Last year was the first year."

I was very surprised when the old man said last year.

I wondered if he knew last year was 1946.

"When they came last year," he continued. "They didn't bring any furniture with them. Just themselves. That's not a good place for catfish where they set all that stuff up. I wonder why they do that?"