Category: Novel yet unamed.

Chapter Twelve, Part 2

No need for chatter. Chap 12 continues . . .

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Will hated yard lights. He’d only been exposed to one in his entire life, and it was on this property. It had been in the back of the house, and actually very close to where the new power pole was placed. The room he stayed in during his visits—“his room”—had been at the rear of the house, on the other side of the bathroom as his mother’s. The light, a large, buzzing globe from within a tube of mercury vapor blazed with the intensity of nuclear fission. It was set at a height more or less even with the second floor windows. Even with the shade down and the wispy, curtains pulled, the light that bored into the room was bright enough to read by.

The supervisor never came back. Neither did the Sheriff, though Will sweated it out for a day or two. It was not at the idea of being compelled to install a hated means of exterior illumination, but that he’d have to sit through another sales pitch for the coroner job.

Will shuffled out of the parlor and into the kitchen. He stopped at the back door, opening it a few inches. It was raining, and literally in sheets. It was coming down so fast and so hard that the huge drops shone white. Even through the downpour, he could make out the last power pole. The lineman had taken down the light, but the bracket was still in place. If he were somehow compelled to put up the light, he would indeed go to town and purchase a rifle. There was a quick flash and an impressive bang of thunder. There would be no golf swings today. Nor would there be a run, which disappointed him. He was up to a solid weekly schedule, running three, six and nine miles spaced out over six days. That was a pace he hadn’t maintained since college.

Will paused a moment before closing the door. He was deciding whether to dash out to his truck for a trip into town and breakfast. He’d taken Bertie Blom’s advice and forced himself to make regular appearances in town. So far, it seemed, it was good advice. His banter with Wendy the waitress had progressed beyond the wetness of his feet. He’d had more than one spontaneous conversation with a local on the days there wasn’t an open booth. He discovered, with some surprise, there had been years of speculation regarding the ultimate fate of the “old Rijsbergen place.” He’d met more than one person who remembered his grandparents and, to his relief, nobody who remembered his mother— at least nobody had brought her up.

Too wet, Will decided. The thought also crossed his mind that, now that it had become a thing of the past, rekindling the saturation level of his shoes wasn’t anything he’d miss. He’d also made a few trips to the “Muni”, the only bar in Venlo’s city limits. Under the auspices of watching baseball, Will had slunk in, perched himself at what seemed to be the most inconspicuous end of the bar and sipped beer. The first night in, he got several hard looks, but never exchanged a word with anybody, aside from the bartender, a kid who looked scarcely old enough to drink himself. He wasn’t much of a talker, which had suited Will just fine. The place became quite crowded by the third inning, and while he got plenty of second and third long looks, the only conversation he engaged in was typical bar banter with whoever was sitting next to him at any given time. Will sat through the entire game, which turned into a three and a half hour slugfest. He managed to leave after only three and a half beers, never tipped more that a buck a beer—which the youngster had no problem with, and stopped himself from buying the house a round.

It wasn’t until his third visit that Will suffered a momentary shock and had to fight the urge to flee, and that was when the person minding the bar turned out to be Wendy, the waitress.

“Well, look who’s decided to join the neighborhood.”

Will had been tempted to tell her he’d just stopped in to use the bathroom. A moment’s consideration stopped that plan of action. He’d either have to never set foot in the place again, which essentially meant he’d given up on developing what never had much promise of more than a meager social life, or put up with whatever comments she’d have ready for him the next time he had breakfast at the diner.

“Ballgame,” was all he said, and took the same place at the bar as he had his first two visits.

As it turned out, he discovered she was a resource that rivalled Blom when it came to his “public image.”

When she plunked his second beer in front of it, she asked, “How’s that house coming along?”

She’d not said a word to him otherwise since he’s sat down.

“You tell me,” he answered.

“I heard it’s getting a real nice makeover.”

“Heard from whom?” he responded.

“Anybody you’d care to ask,” was her counter.

It went no further than that, but it told Will volumes. It also opened the door to further interaction. Once he’d been seen talking to Wendy, several people who come to the bar from the tables for a refill or to drop off empties—Will’s preferred seat was next to the wait station, which had functioned as a buffer to his left flank, and he’d yet to see a server—they’d give him a hello and offer some idle chitchat. More than one had asked him “How’s that house going?”

Any further conversation he’d had with Wendy was neutral, generic, and only as personal as her revelatory statement of, “five days a week at the diner, three nights a week here.” The only comment Will had regarding his own business was his uncertainty of “how long I’ll stick around here after the work on the house is done.”

“Nice to have options,” she said.

Will had actually enjoyed the evening, and was surprised that, when he left, he had no idea of who’d won the game. He’d also limited his intake, however, not wanting to risk a lowering of inhibition. His purpose had been only to be seen, not understood. Closing the door on the rain and socializing for the day, went to the refrigerator and took out the makings for a frittata.

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Back before ya know it.

Chapter Seven (Pt. 3) A mystery!

Hello. I did mention things would be coming a little quicker this week, did I not?

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Will had hoped to meet Maartens, but wasn’t sure how long he could ignore the demands of his stomach. He’d tried to kill time by rearranging his campsite, which affirmed what a great job he’d done in minimizing his existence. He was back outside after fifteen minutes, deciding ogling his new kitchen floor wasn’t going to make time pass any faster. He strolled the shorn boundary around the house, worked his way down to the riverbank, threw a few sticks into the brown water, and took himself back to the edge of the of the windbreak. Closer inspection of the tended soil revealed row after row of tiny, green shoots. It didn’t take the eye of a farmboy for Will to recognize sprouting corn.

“Knee high by the Fourth of July,” he said aloud. It was a saying he got from his grandfather. He took a step into the bare earth and settled his weight on it. He stepped back and looked. He’d left a perfect cast for his shoe. He wondered how long it would take to cover the entire field with them.

As it went, the shiny floor in the kitchen may have lost its capacity as distraction and time waster, but Will found the cornfield as fresh and intriguing as a new toy. He walked  perimeter, crossing west, following the top of the riverbank, occasionally leaving the grassy edge to take a winding path through the turned soil, returning to the bordering foliage to turn back and admire his tracks. At the western edge, Will turned his attention to the property beyond the trees.

There was a yard, an acre of neatly mown grass. It surrounded a house that, in design, was not very different from his grandparents. It was another foursquare, though a smaller model. The roof was hipped, as was his, but shallower without the wide dormered windows. It was shingled in green. The house was bright white clapboard, as was nearly every house in Limburg County that wasn’t in a town. The yard was treeless, with a backyard garden, clothes lines and a swingset and slide. He followed the edge of the windbreak toward the county road. The front porch was open, roofed and posted at the corners. On either side of the stoop and lining the sidewalk were flower beds. There were large, circular flower beds on either side of the sidewalk just before it met the gravel driveway. A pole rose from the center of each. From one flew the American flag, the other supported a Marten house. Well up the driveway, several outbuildings stood on either side.

Will was tempted to move into the trees for a closer look. The bang of a closing screen door stopped him. A man about his age crossed the porch. Will watched as he walked down the sidewalk. Instead of heading directly to one of the outbuildings, he turned toward the windbreak. Will suffered an instinctive rush of panic as the man moved into the trees. He bounded away from the edge of the field and ducked behind an oak. Like a little kid, he peeked from a crouch, feeling a brief thrill when the man emerged. There wasn’t thirty feet between them.

The guy didn’t stand there long, maybe a minute with his hands on his hips before he turned back into the trees. Will stayed in his crouch and waited until he heard a large door open, a vehicle start and drive away. He waited a bit longer, until he saw a pickup truck moving along the road toward Venlo. The trip around the rest of the field was made at a greater pace moving almost at a jog until he came to the access from the county road. The grade from the field to the pavement was about half as steep as the ditch on either side. Something in the back of his mind brought him to a halt.

Will had been over this place dozens of times, riding on a tractor or in a truck with his grandfather. “Hold on and here we go, Willy!…” He put his hand to the back of his head and rubbed, trying to make the connection, and it was suddenly there. Culvert. It was the most persistent and repeated argument he’d ever known his grandparents to have. “What do you say we make it back out of here alive, just to disappoint your Nan?” They’d argued endlessly about putting a culvert in, his grandmother—with sound reason—insisting the drop from the road to the field was too steep to negotiate safely.

“Someday you’re going to roll the tractor’” she’d scold. “I’ll leave you to lay out there until the buzzards pick you clean. Go and get yourself killed, but you’re not taking that boy to the devil with you.”

His grandfather always answered with a wink at Will before telling his grandmother, “Then let me put that cut in behind the machine shed.”

“And tear a ragged hole through my lilacs. That’s a fine thing for people to look at on the way to the house.”

Will had always stood in silent agreement with his grandmother. He’d taken a few trips on the tractor, first settled in the lap of his grandfather and, a few years older, leaning on a fender, when he was certain he was destined to end up as a vulture’s dinner. Whenever it had gotten to the point that her dire predictions stood a chance of coming to fruition, his grandfather would make a concession and have a dumptruck load or two of gravel added to the ditch. And while Will may have found a great deal of merit in his grandmother’s concerns, he never once spoke up. Any minute spent with Gran was worth the risk of grisly death or dismemberment.

His grandfather never did put down a culvert, not even when Nan became so exasperated she’d threatened to call the County to put one in at their expense. Will had quit riding tractors by then, and Gran didn’t cave, even under the threat of writing a check to the local government. The argument had finally been dropped, for all he knew. His time at the farm had greatly diminished by the time he’d reached his teens. And when Gran died, it was a clogged artery that killed him. Will had no doubts he rather have wound up buzzard bait.

Just before reaching the road, Will stepped into the ditch. Under the gravel slope, it was there, the dark mouth of the tube. He dropped to a knee, then lower, until he was almost lying flat. He saw a circle of light at the other end. Gran had died in March, at least a month before he’d prep the field for a crop. Nothing had been put in that year, or any year after. A farmer’s retirement, he’d heard Nan say. If Gran died never putting in a culvert, Nan wasn’t going to, either. She’d never done anything against his wishes or behind his back while he was alive. She wasn’t about to start just because he was dead.

Will stood and looked back at the house. He wasn’t one to jump to conclusions. He felt no primordial tie to eighty acres of dirt or a fierce need to defend it. He wasn’t about to get territorial over a piece of property he’d not set foot on in more than twenty years. But, there was no way in hell he was about to let some fucker pull one over on Gran and Nan.

So, a puzzle, it seems, for our hero. Ah, but more changes, difficulties, complications and, unfortunately, unpleasantry is coming his way… Yes, indeed…

 

Chap. 4, Pt. 1. Will gets dirty. Will gets clean.

To give you an idea of how much fun this can be, I’d had 1500 words pounded out over the weekend and was  about to put it up Monday. Read it, decided it stunk, and tossed it out. ALL of it… What follows is a better job… or had fucking better be…

FOUR

Will pulled the filter mask below his chin, pushed the goggles to his forehead. From where he stood he could see every one of the ruined windows on the second floor. In front of those windows were piles of lathe, broken plaster and shredded yards of ruined wallpaper, heaped to the sills. The walls around the windows were naked brick. All that remained of the interior were wall studs and ceiling joists. The doors hanging in the frames looked ridiculously out of place. In the hallways outside those doors lay the woodwork trim from each room, numbered and stacked in the order he’d removed it. Beside them was the trim he’d pulled from the hallways. He’d just finished sweeping the floors, which had been in better shape than he would ever have allowed himself to believe. He’d just add the sweepings to the piles at the windows. Impressive. It had taken him three weeks, and now there was nothing more he could do up here. He took one last look around his skeletal second floor, then took the broom and his industrial sized dustpan downstairs.

The parlor had become his base of operations. It had taken a couple days for his hands to heal up after his assault on his mother’s old bedroom. He couldn’t slip a pair of gloves on, much less grip the maul. Instead he cleaned up the parlor as best he was able, knocking the loose plaster from the ceiling and sweeping it into the living room. That was the first time he was able to appreciate the quality of the oak flooring. Stained and rough as it was, it was solid. It didn’t even squeak. He laid out the ground tarp and set up the tent, brought in the cooking stove and the lanterns. The rest of the contents of the box of the truck were stacked beside the fireplace. His tools were lined up on the other side.

There rest of the time spent allowing his ravaged hands to mend was spent marking the trim upstairs. Some was warped, some was split, and some of the interior window framing on the west side was just plain rotten. He labeled them regardless of condition. Well more than half of it was salvageable. If he got that far, it would be easier to replace what was lost if the originals were back where they belonged.

By the time squeezing a pry bar or tugging on the ripping tool didn’t bring tears to his eyes, he had a solid, methodical plan in place, not only for destroying most of the second floor, but also for how he was going to conduct himself for however long he was going to be in this forgotten and God forsaken corner of the planet. One job at a time. Know the job before you start. Plan the job before you start. Finish the job. If, in doing that job, another task, project or obligation should pop into your head, ignore it until what you are currently focused on is finished. Finished. If, at any time you are engaged in a task you have sworn to see through to completion, you suddenly come to your senses and decide to put Limburg County and all within it behind you forever, you will not jump into your vehicle and seek the comforts and amenities you can now afford if not deserve, you will not pick a destination until the job at hand is complete. Above all else, Mom, Dad, Gran or Nan will not get inside your head until… whenever. At least not when you’re in the company of anyone else.

It had been three weeks. He’d lived on bottled water, canned soup and peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwiches. He resupplied twice a week, doing all of his shopping in Maastricht. Too much Venlo in one day had gotten this started. He feared another visit before he’d accomplished anything substantial would provide him with an excuse to turn tail. Vanity had played its part as well. Spending twelve to fourteen hours a day in a cloud of grime and nothing but a saucepan to bathe in was an effective deterrent to socialization. Taking a dip in the Wahpekute was out of the question.

The weather had also been a factor in keeping him to task. A day or two after his first in Venlo, the weather turned. Over the first two weeks, the skies clouded over, and the temperature during the day hovered consistently around forty degrees. Most nights brought the thermometer below freezing. It had snowed twice, once leaving three inches on the ground. In the middle of the first week, after a couple miserable nights in a fetal position under the sleeping bag and seeing his breath in the first light of day, he’d added a small gasoline generator and a space heater to his shopping list.

The weather, in typical Midwest fashion, had turned completely these last few days. This morning he’d been sweating well before noon.

Will propped his broom and dustpan with the other tools. Despite the warmth of the day, the west wind coming unobstructed through the living room windows prompted him to start the generator. He lit the camp stove, debating for a moment whether to fill the pan with water or soup. He decided the wash rag could wait until morning. It had gotten to the state that Will wondered whether it now added more dirt that it removed. He poured a can of chunky minestrone into the pan and slapped a peanut butter sandwich together as it heated. The sun had fully set and there was no light save the blue flicker of the flame dancing at the edges of the pan. That had been his evening entertainment, watching the flames, and it had no way caused him to miss television.

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Will was awakened by a crash he felt as much as heard. The thunder echoed back to silence. It took him a few seconds to realize what was happening outside, but when he was alert enough to gain full realization, he acted quickly. He threw off the sleeping bag, rolled from the sagging air mattress and crawled out the tent. He scrambled to the totes, tearing through them until he found a clean washcloth and towel. Before dashing outside, he grabbed a roll of toilet paper. When he hit the side door, he was thankful that for at least a bit longer, God was on his side. The sun had risen two hours before, but it could not penetrate the layer of dark, rain laden cloud above. He hadn’t slept this late in weeks. The morning was the color of twilight. The rain had not begun to fall, but Will could feel it in the rushing air.

As he dashed around the back of the house he ran headlong into a cold gust of wind that almost forced the breath back into his lungs. As he scurried into the windbreak there was a “hissss-bang!” and for an instant the world was bleached white. He decided crouching beneath the cottonwood that had been sheltering his makeshift latrine would be less than prudent. He squatted in a space without a branch over his head and took care of his business. The rain still held out through his return sprint to the house, but no sooner had he made it back inside than the clouds ruptured. He swapped the toilet paper for his bar of soap and in dashed into the downpour.

It was freezing, cold enough to paralyze his lungs for several seconds, but exhilarating as well. Soon he was numb enough that he could breathe and otherwise function. Will rubbed the cake of soap over every inch of his body, scraping his fingernails over the bar and clawing his scalp to work out the amalgam of plaster dust, wood fibers and just plain dirt that had taken up shelter there since that first swing of his sledgehammer.

When the cold had penetrated enough to start stiffening his muscles, and any more scrubbing might start raising blood, Will stutter stepped over the sodden ground and positioned himself in a solid stream running off the roof along a gable valley. He stopped rinsing when he started to cramp. Hunched over and shivering like a half-drowned puppy, he staggered his way back into the house.

Will scoured the towel over his chest until it stung His skin was flaming pink, but he felt clean for the first time in over two weeks; at least above the knees. His feet and calves were speckled with mud flecks and bits of plant matter, but the rest of him was scrubbed raw. After several minutes hunched in front of the space heaters, turned to max, he finally was warm enough to stand fully erect. The gunk had dried on his lower legs and with a couple of passes with the damp towel they were almost as clean as the rest of him. His skin tingled from head to toe. When he ran his fingers through his damp hair it squeaked. It was wonderful, and he had no desire whatsoever to do it again. Ever in his life. Never.

He stood, intending to move only when he felt his bones getting hot, but when he suddenly saw something, hanging right before his eyes, he was suddenly wrought with panic. What in Jesus name was the matter with him? Everything around him was coated with a fine layer of grime. Even in the weak light of the main room, he could see motes floating thick in the air. For a moment he stood paralyzed, afraid to move or touch anything, because he knew the crap would be transferred to clean skin. Even standing perfectly still, the shit in the air was attaching to him, recoating him. He snapped out of it.

Reanimated, he dumped one of his plastic totes and pulled out his last change of clean clothing and a decent pair of shoes. He dressed in a frenzy. He crammed as much dirty clothing as he could into the empty tote and snapped the lid shut. He looked at the sleeping bag, suddenly seeing how much filth had been transferred to it. Better to burn it. He’d never be able to bring himself to crawl back into it. He fashioned a serape out of a sheet of polyethylene, went out, killed the generator and moved it into the kitchen. He loaded the dirty laundry into the back of his truck, crawled in the cab and started it up. About to pull away, he threw it back into park and ran back into the house. He came out with his golf clubs. He heaved them into the back seat. Before pulling away, he shrugged off the plastic and tossed it out of his window. With the windshield wipers on high and the heater going full blast, he gunned it up his driveway. He turned toward Venlo, once again, he noted sourly, with wet feet. But… What a good idea he had. What a plan… but before he would be able to see it through, he needed to talk to Bertie Blom.

And there you have it… For those new here, or those who’ve forgotten, I’ve got an Ebook on Amazon… Something you don’t have to read in installments. Find it HERE: https://www.amazon.com/Lunacy-Death-perspective-developed-investigation-ebook/dp/B079DWFH9T/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528297541&sr=1-1&keywords=lunacy+and+death