The Art of Disposal (40 page)

It was hot, humid, and the trees were so still and quiet they looked like someone had painted them. I saw a lot of grasshoppers, flying or stuck to the sides of buildings; the kind you only see in the Midwest or the South. Dark green, the size of a lizard. The kind of grasshopper that would scare nine out of ten women—and six out of ten men. They reminded me of Dan the Man. One of them landed right on my windshield, while I was driving out toward the Hallot house, and he hung on there for quite a while. I pulled over to the side of the desolate two-lane country road and helped him back into the grass. Along another long stretch of road, I saw a yellow and black box turtle waiting patiently in the berm; his head held up high in the hot sun.

The man who lived at the house was out on the front porch before I'd even turned off my car. He leaned on a shotgun like it was a cane. “You lost or somethin'?” he said.

“Something,” I said.

“Where you tryin' to get?”

“Just got there,” I said, walking toward the porch.

He'd heard enough. He raised the gun.

“I like you better a few feet away,” he said.

“You heard of Jim Hallot?” I said, and looked up at the iron rooster weather vane.

“Nope,” he said.

“Used to live here, long time back.”

“Learn somethin' new everyday,” he said, and sniffled. The shotgun barrel stared at me.

“Sure do,” I said. “You mind lowering that thing?”

The screen door opened a bit, and a woman peered out: not bad looking in that rustic sort of way. Her hair was dirty blonde and messy, and she was wiping her hands with a dish towel. I like a woman who's not afraid to wash dishes and run a clothesline. Nowadays you almost get hanged for saying something like that, like it's some kind of terrible insult. But I play it fair and square. I'll cook and clean, too. I don't expect a woman to be June Cleaver. But you won't find me settling down with some broad who thinks she's too good to make dinner or sweep the floor.

“What's he want?” she said.

“I told you to stay in there.”

“He looks all right,” she said. Then she pushed out onto the porch and said to me, “what is it you want, mister?”

“There's something very important I need to tell you.”

“Something bad?”

“Something good. See, my Grandpa Jim used to live here.”

“Oh yeah?” she said.

“There's money hidden in this house.”

“Money?” she said.

“Money,” I said.

“Money?” the man said.

“Money,” I said.

He lowered the shotgun a bit, but then thought better of it and brought it up quick.

“I grew up around here,” I said. “I'm a good man, I swear it.”

“Money?” the man said again.

“And a lot of it,” I said.

If you want to win someone over, show that you're one of them; that you care about the same things they do. So I told them stories about the old days, growing up a town over on Stella and Carl's farm. I told them how I fished all the same lakes that they did, even though I hadn't been back here in years. I told them how the city can wear a man down. I told them about my Grandpa Jim, and how he lived in that Air Stream trailer after he'd given the house, their house, to his brother Jewell. And before long, the man was holding a flashlight instead of a shotgun, and we were laughing, having ripped the pipe off the basement wall, and dumping out so many silver and gold pieces you'd've thought that Bluebeard himself had passed through here and hidden his treasure.

We carried them up to the living room, and put them into twenty-some stacks of fifteen or so each. There was also a small leather coin purse, with a few others inside. The wife was crying, jumping up and down, twirling around the living room with a couch pillow held snug to her face to check the tears.

Their son, a sweet bowl-cut hairdoed kid with freckles, had cystic fibrosis, and it was plain to see that everything for this family had been a financial struggle. The only people who say that money doesn't buy happiness are the ones who've never had to pick which bill to pay.

“How much they worth?” the man said.

“A lot,” I said.

The man inched toward the shotgun he'd left near the front door. The woman looked at me, and her mouth got flat and grim. They were afraid again: they'd seen those Sunday movies where the stranger kills the whole family and drives away.

“I'm not here for the money,” I said. “I just want one silver dollar, a souvenir, to remember my Grandpa Jim by. He was a swell guy.”

“He sure was,” the man said, smiling again, looking at those stacks of coins.

I picked through the coin purse and found the one I was looking for: the 1892 S Morgan Silver Dollar. It was one of a few that were wrapped up extra nice in tissue paper, surrounded by a layer of brown paper bag wrapped with twine, and it looked like it had just rolled out of the U.S. Mint a week ago. Flawless. That pipe must have been nice and air and water tight, and it made me smile just knowing that my Grandpa Jim had probably spent considerable time making it that way.

I put the coin in my pocket, and made my way back out of their lives and onto the lonely two-lane road; no cars or trucks or tractors for miles around.

The 1892 S Morgan Silver Dollar, in mint condition like my Grandpa Jim's, is worth somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The rest of Grandpa Jim's coins, all together, are worth sixty-five grand on a good day. I'm a nice enough guy, but I'm no dummy. Eddie Sesto taught me that only a chump gives away the whole farm.

Carl and Stella's farmhouse looked tired. The roof sagged like the house had exhaled and never breathed back in again. But the land was about the same. Hills and rocks don't change. I could hear the frogs croaking in the weedy pond when I got out of the car. The chickadees were singing their rattly electric songs from the depths of the tangled blackberry bushes. Uncle Carl had fought valiantly against them, but it was clear now, in the end, that the blackberry bushes had won.

I went over to the old stone where Uncle Carl had hidden a front door key, and it was still there when I turned it over. I climbed up onto the sunken front porch and put the key in the lock, and that's when I heard them: a girl shrieked, there was some terrified laughter, and then I was inside, watching three teenagers scramble around like fugitives amid a stench of marijuana smoke.

“Easy, easy,” I said. One of them was half-out of a broken window, and another one sat there against a wall, a joint still burning between his fingertips. The girl was hugged up close to him, looking up at me like I was a grizzly bear that might decide to maul all three of them.

“You a cop?” the kid in the window said.

“He's a ghost,” the girl said.

“He don't look like a ghost,” the kid in the window-frame said. He'd decided to crawl back in and go down with the ship. He walked across the creaky floorboards and sat down with his friends.

“I'm with the county,” I said. “Abandoned House Division.”

“You gonna call the cops?” the girl said.

“I don't think that'll be necessary,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets and puffing out my chest. “Did you guys break this goddamn window or what?”

“It's been broke,” one of the boys said.

“Gimme that,” I said to the kid with the burning joint in his hand.

He held it up. His hand shook like he'd had a dozen cups of coffee. I took the joint, put it up to my lips, and took a small hit. It went down pretty rough, and as soon as I'd done it, I wished that I hadn't. I don't even like the stuff. All it does is make me nervous.

I handed it back to him.

“This is a dangerous structure,” I said, exhaling the smoke.

“You ain't really with the county,” one of the boys said.

I reached in my pocket, opened my wad of bills, pulled off three fifties and handed one to each kid. “That's payment. To stay away from here.”

“Sweet,” the kid with the joint said. “Are you, like, a bank robber?”

“I'm a ghost. Now get lost.”

The walls seemed a little bit more wobbly; the house smaller; the floors were so creaky it was all I could hear. The kids sat there, staring at me like hungry dogs.

“Boo!” I said. They jumped up and shuffled out, not sure what to make of me. The girl looked right at me when she passed by. Her face had some glitter on it, a light gold dusting, and I could imagine her with dragonfly wings, darting around in the cat-tails of the frog pond.

“Are you a bad guy?” she said.

“I just gave you fifty bucks.”

“You can give someone fifty bucks and still be a bad guy,” she said.

I hate teenagers. Especially smart ones.

“Come on, Trish!” one of the boys yelled from out in the yard.

I slept that night on the floor, on a mattress made out of my own extra clothes. I worried about those kids; about them telling everyone they knew about a man from out of town who broke up their pot party. Hell, by the time the local Jim-Bobs bent the story this way and that, I'd be cast as some creepy old man who'd lured them to the house, provided the pot, and paid them for entertainment. I decided I'd better just stay the one night, and then get a motel room back in Rittman. I was too old for this kind of hobo camping anyway. Nostalgia is nice, but not as nice as a hot shower, a real bed, and cable television. I thought about the last time I saw Aunt Stella, right before she died, at the nursing home. An orderly led me to her. She was playing Bingo in the cafeteria. I pulled up a chair and sat next to her, and the orderly brought me a Bingo card. I told Aunt Stella who I was, but I may as well have told her I came from Mars. She played her letters, and her hands trembled, and her mouth had a bubble of spit that wouldn't go away. So I sat and played Bingo with a stranger who used to be my Aunt.

The morning was cool and misty, and the distant trees looked like vanishing spirits. I put on my sweats and went out for a run. I'd been doing more of that lately, ever since Doc Brillman told me it would help. Doc Brillman was right about running. It clears your head. By mile three the world seems like a better place, and you're almost floating.

I ran along the edge of route 73, and I watched the dewy fields turn hot and bright and dry. Crows sat on branches and croaked at me as I passed. The asphalt country lane was freshly tarred, and it stretched out ahead of me, like a winding snake; and at certain angles the sun turned the coal black road into a shining band of white-hot metal. On each side of me the deafening buzz of a vast and secret world of insects filled the fields and trees, more beautiful than any human song.

I'd look up into the bright white light, and there would be Dan the Man, stretching that Low-E string taut, a smirk on his face. But he was a transient figure, made out of tree branches, mailboxes, and my own imagination.

I was in this state of mind, drifting around in the ethereal world where Swedenborg's angels congregate, when I saw, far ahead of me and coming my way, a flesh and blood woman, walking with a white stick along the edge of the road. I blinked a few times, expecting her to vanish the way Dan the Man always did when I conjured him up, but she remained.

It was Blind Shannon. Her stick went from side to side, jittery, like a hunting dog on the scent of a rabbit. The years had wrinkled her face and pushed her around. Time has always been beauty's enemy, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you snake oil. But her head was still held high.

I slowed down to a walk, and I swear I saw hazy rings of blue and gold behind her head. It's embarrassing, but I started to cry when I saw her, I felt so all alone, and here was someone who really meant something to me.

She stopped and twisted her head; she'd heard me walking.

“Hello?” she said, guarded, her hand clenched tight around the stick. The world must be a scary place if it's always dark.

“Shannon,” I said. “Long time.”

She turned her head, quick as a sparrow.

“Ronnie? Little Ronnie Lynch?”

“None other.”

“Sweet Jesus,” she said. “You scared me half to death.”

“Good to see you too,” I said.

She laughed, and I walked toward her and touched her arm. She placed her cane flat on the ground and took both of my hands.

“You moved back?” she said.

“Passing through.”

“Me too.”

“Serendipitous,” I said.

She smiled. She rubbed my hands, then she reached up and touched my face and felt along my jawline, up to my right ear, and through the hair on the side of my head.

“You're old,” she said.

“And here I thought I was glad to bump into you.”

She hugged me. I hugged her back. And in that three or four blissful seconds, all of the bad things I'd done never happened.

“I'm even older than you,” she said.

“You're still the hottest thing in this hick town. Where you headed?”

“My mother passed away,” she said, and chewed her bottom lip.

“Sorry.”

“She was ninety-two.”

“Not bad.”

“We should all be so lucky,” she said. She paused, but she looked like she wanted to say more, so I waited.

“Remember how you'd drive me to Rittman, to the grocery store?”

“Do I ever,” I said.

“It was so sweet.”

“You didn't even need my help.”

“Of course not.”

“Taking advantage of a lovesick teenager,” I said.

“Old Jim said it would be good for you.”

“And it was,” I said. I could feel my ears getting hot.

I picked her cane up and handed it back to her, and then I offered my arm to her the way they do in those old-fashioned movies, and we walked along the road.

“You want to drive me to Rittman again?”

“Do I ever,” I said.

I could get lost in this scene. The way she titled her head just so, and really listened to me talk about my life in the city; the large silver ring with the blue stone on her left hand, the same one she'd worn all those years before; how good it felt to walk along the road with her, to be the man that I used to be, back when the worst thing I'd ever done was to steal Sid Fletcher's Swiss Army pocket knife.

We walked back to her house, and Shannon gave me the keys to the pick-up truck, and we drove to Rittman along the same roads we used to travel.