Latest Writing Assignment

Here's the latest thing I'd written for my writing group.  It's still first draft.  I haven't incorporated any of their comments yet.  UPDATE:  This is the edited version of the story.  It incorporates the critiques from my writing group.  I welcome you comments.

 

PAINTCREEK LANE

 

 

What have you been up to?  Have you been tormenting old Miss Brodie again?  Don’t think I don’t know.  Come here.  Sit down.  Let me tell you a story.

He lived in a run-down, one-story house squeezed between two sprawling ranches of post-war prosperity.  How his shabby little bungalow came to be there I’ll never know.  It was actually more like a cabin than a bungalow.  Something like you’d see on the banks of the Wabash where fishermen would camp over the weekend.  It was white . . . or at least it was once before weather and age did what they always do to things that are fresh and new.  The most distinguishing feature of the house, though, was a deep and dark front porch.  This was where I first saw him.

The kids in the neighborhood shared a common fear of him borne from a source that I never knew.  I don’t exactly recall the details of the legend because each time I heard it the details changed.  History, for children, can’t be something fixed or static.  It’s living and subject to change.  That’s what keeps it interesting.  It’s not the facts as they were, it’s the facts as we knew them.  That’s true for adults, too. 

Anyway, the story goes that he didn’t like trespassers, especially young trespassers.  He would sit on his front porch guarding his property, and, as a deterrent, he always had a gun next to him propped up against the house.  Once, a kid from outside the neighborhood, who didn’t know what we knew, wandered into his yard.  So, of course, the old man took his gun and shot him.  The results of the encounter varied wildly depending on who was telling the story and sometimes who the audience was.  They ranged from a warning shot over the kid’s head to the boy being shot through the heart instantly killing him.  For ten-year-old kids, this was a powerful story.  It didn’t matter that there were tenants of jurisprudence that made certain features of the story problematic.  We were ten years old and hadn’t taken Latin in school yet.

For us, all that mattered were the facts as we knew them, and there were many that supported the story.  Take, for instance, the fact that he seemed to always be sitting on the front porch, in the shadows, the gun at his side propped against the house.  Take the fact that no one was ever seen setting foot in his yard.  Even the mailman would walk out onto the street rather than step on his property.  Of course, for us it didn’t matter that the mailbox was curbside.   Take the fact that his yard was littered with baseballs and kick balls and other toys that had gotten away from kids, found their way onto his yard by accident, and now were fixtures on his landscape.  There were all facts that, for a neighborhood of ten year olds, made the legend true and chilling.

Ten year olds can be cruel.  I’m not sure why that is.  We use to ride our bikes on our way to someplace or another, and we’d look for him sitting on his porch.  If he was there, someone would invariably shout out some sort of slur, like “freak” or “weirdo” or some other powerful-for-a-ten-year-old word, and then we’d pedal as fast as our little legs would go, laughing a nervous, hold-off-the-demons, laugh.

One time, though, the cruelty went a little too far.  It was Halloween and a bunch of us were trick-or-treating.  Johnny Musgrove was with us.  I think he’d recently become enthralled with the idea and the word “murder.”  He’d use it all the time; even when it didn’t make sense. 

I remember Dad had made me a mask for that Halloween.  It was brilliant.  I was a one-eyed space creature.  The mask, made from chicken wire and paper machete, was painted green with one big eye, a whiffle ball painted like an eye, inset into the paper machete.  Its mouth was a long alligator-looking snout.  I saw the world from the back of the space creature’s throat.  It was the best costume of all.

We had finished getting a popcorn ball from the house next to the old man’s and were being careful to avoid his property by walking in the street.  The lingering twilight and street light was enough to see him and his gun sitting on his porch.  For some reason, we all stopped and stared.  That’s when Johnny shouted, “Murderer!”  As soon as the old man heard that he stood up and took his gun in hand.  That was enough for us.  We bolted, running down the street feeling certain that we would hear the explosion from a gun and one of us would fall dead.

Chicken wire and paper machete make great masks, but they’re heavy and fragile.  So, here we were, dashing down the middle of Paintcreek Lane as fast as we could go, careful not to spill candy from our plastic buckets.  I was falling further and further behind the others because of the monstrosity of a mask I was wearing.  To make matters worse, while I was running for my life, the jarring caused the mask to weaken.  Soon it began to come apart which slowed me down even more.  My sight portal through the creature’s mouth was gradually closing as the mask disintegrated.  When I heard the creature’s lone eye pop from its socket and bounce on the street, I stopped, put my hands on my knees to catch my breath, then flung the remains of the mask to the street.

That incident convinced us that he was certainly a murderer, probably capable of committing another one with the slightest provocation.  After that encounter and after the word spread of our experience, that was the last epitaph shouted at the old man.  Our fear of him and what he could do increased exponentially.

 

* * *

 

It was a spring weekend, after the Halloween incident, and I was going to trade baseball cards with Stewart.  I’d gathered my cards into a shoebox and put the box in the wire basket on the front of my Schwinn.  I left for Stewart’s which would take me past the old man’s house—a fact that didn’t cross my mind as I left. 

I was excited.  You see, Stewart liked the Cardinals.  I didn’t.  I liked the Cubs.  Stewart didn’t.  I was certainly going to come out ahead on this deal.  So, when I tried to pop a wheelie on a small bump in the road in front of the old man’s house, I wasn’t thinking about where I was.  The jolt of the front wheel returning to the pavement caused the shoebox lid to fly off and baseball cards scattered everywhere.  I pushed back on the pedals stopping the bike, kicked down the kickstand, and began to gather the cards from the street.  It was then that I saw a number of cards laying in his yard.

There, lying in the grass flat on his back, was Ernie Banks, my favorite Cub.  Over there, on the side of the sidewalk closest to the house, was Ron Santo.  Cubs were scattered all over his yard.  Well, all over the yard within ten feet of where I stood, my toes touching the curb.  I should be able reach down and pick up some of the cards without setting foot on his yard, but I couldn’t.  They were so close, within reach, and yet they may as well have been gone forever.

I was frozen with fear and sick with anger.  My Cubs, my favorite team, the pride of my card collection, begged for me to rescue them.  My fear said I should know better.  I was torn and it quickly took its toll on me.  I stamped my foot and was nearly on the verge of crying when a voice came from the porch shadows.

 “Go ahead . . . pick em up.”

I stopped breathing.  I didn’t move.  I couldn’t.  The voice of my doom had spoken inviting me to join him in the realm of death.  It paralyzed me.

 “Are you deaf?  I said pick em up.”

Still I didn’t move.  I saw through the shadows that he took the gun in his right hand and slowly stood up.  I nearly wet myself.  I was visibly trembling and could feel cold sweat beading in the small of my back.  I was going to die.  I knew it.  Yet I couldn’t move.  He was going to pull that gun to his shoulder and take aim at a ten year old kid who, despite himself, couldn’t make the shot difficult. 

He moved toward the center of the porch and  I could see a hitch in his slow gait.  A limp.  When he took the first step out of the shadows and onto the stairs leading off the porch, he put both hands on a shoulder-height stick, not a gun.  In doing so, he placed most of his weight on it to help him manage the steps.  At the bottom of the stairs he returned to having only one hand on the walking stick, though it was obvious he needed the crutch to walk.

I was still frightened.  This man that was limping toward me, was still the man we all believed capable of shooting at kids like me.  This was the same man that Johnny had called a murderer and I was sure he was going to prove it on me.  There was still the certainty in my wildly racing mind that he could beat me to death with that stick.

The fear and anger that had kept me frozen curbside had changed to fear and curiosity.  In that short span of time, I had forgotten all about the Cubs in the yard.  I now fixated on this thin, limping old man and what he might do to me.  I stayed right where I was, though I could’ve easily run away.  Although I still trembled, curiosity was beginning to take over.

He stopped five feet from me and surveyed the display of cards on his yard.  Lifting his walking stick, he swung it to his left and dropped the stick’s butt next to Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks.

 “Is that Ernie Banks?” he asked.

I responded with a blank stare that must have looked to him like I was about to cry.

 “Mr. Cub,” he continued.  “He’s my favorite player.  Say, if you don’t want him, do you mind if I keep him?”

Now I did start to cry.  I didn’t fall on the ground blubbering uncontrollably, mind you.  I was too afraid to take my eyes off the old man.  Still, my nose started running.  My throat hurt and my eyes burned.  My guess is that when the first tear seeped out of the corner of my eye, my lip started quivering.  That caused him to lean heavily on his stick, look away while rolling his eyes and sigh deeply as though this was such a bother.

He looked back at me, shook his head and said, “Look, just pick up the cards, okay?  Go ahead.  I’m not going to beat you.  I promise.”

He stared at me.  I stared back not sure what I should do next.  I wiped the trail of tears on my cheek and sniffled.  He continued to stare at me.  I slowly leaned over and, careful not to lose sight of him, picked up the card closest to me.  His position leaning on his walking stick didn’t change.  His stare didn’t shift.  I picked up another, then another.  No movement from him.  When I picked up the last I could reach without stepping onto his yard, I stopped.

“The rest of those mine?” he asked unceremoniously.

This was going to be a monumental step for me.  Probably the most important I’d taken since my first.  With my first step, I was stepping into life.  The next step I was considering could possibly be, for all I knew, my last.  Yet the feeling that he wasn’t going to do anything was working its way from my brain to my gut.  So I took the step from the street onto his yard still fearful of what might happen, yet more firmly believing that nothing would.

He continued watching me and leaning on his walking stick.  I began picking up cards.  It wasn’t long before I’d retrieved them all.  As I was putting them back into the shoebox in the basket on the bike I said the only thing I could think of to say.  I said what I’d been taught to say.  From my bike, I looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you.”  He nodded and looked at the ground.  I moved to mount my bike.

“If you want to show them to me, I’d like to see the rest of your cards.”  He didn’t look at me when he spoke.  It was as if he was embarrassed to ask.  As if he was ashamed to be admitting that he wanted company.

I stammered telling him that I was on the way to a friend’s house.

“Sure, I understand,” he turned and started back to his house with that pitiful limp.

Watching him struggle with each step and with his plea for someone to talk to still in my ears, I suddenly felt intensely sorry for this man.  It stuck me how wrong I and all my friends had been about him.  At that moment, I no longer saw him as a menace, but instead as a lonely old man.  I pitied him.

I guided my bike onto his yard, leaned it against its kickstand, grabbed the shoebox from the wire basket and ran up behind him as he was climbing the porch stairs.

“I’ve got some time,” I said.

Without turning around he looked over his left shoulder and asked, “You sure?  I don’t want to keep you from nothing.”

I nodded.

“Well, come on up here.”  He moaned while taking the last step to the porch.  He moved straight to the old metal porch chair where we always saw him sit and slowly eased himself down.  The walking stick took its place to his right where before his gun had always been.

He looked around after sitting as though looking for something he expected to be there.  “I guess I don’t have a chair for you.  Uhh . . . see that wood box over there?  Drag that down here to sit on.”

I put down the shoebox and went for the old ammo box.  There were rope handles turned gray and fraying from age on either side, so I tried to lift it.  It was too heavy.  Using one of the handles, I drug it, rather awkwardly, across the porch until it was in such a position that I could sit on it facing him.  After retrieving the shoebox, I sat down on the ammo box and started pulling out cards.

The cards on top were rather jumbled from my ill-fated attempt at popping a wheelie, while the cards on the bottom were still orderly because they were bound by team with rubber bands.  These were the cards I rarely looked at or rearranged.  Teams like the Tigers and Senators.  The result was that when the lid flew off the shoebox, the loose cards were free to seek their escape while the bound cards stayed put.

When I started handing him cards, I noticed how frail he looked.  He had thin, white hair, but it covered his head.  It looked like he hadn’t shaved in over a week.  In fact, now that I think about it, it looked as though he’d cut his beard and hair as close as he possibly could using scissors.   Even back then I noticed that his beard was rough and uneven.  The skin on his face, neck, and arms was loose and leathery, like it had once covered a larger body that had spent hours outdoors.  His movements were slow and measured.  He had an unconscious habit of rhythmically pushing his tongue out so it minutely emerged between his lips.  It reminded me of my baby brother who would do the same sort of thing with his tongue while he was sleeping, his blankie in hand.

I showed him most of the loose cards I had.  We spent a long time looking at the Cubs.  He recognized many of the older players, but not many of the more recent team members.  He’d ask about them and I’d tell him all I knew for a ten year old.  He’d smile and nod.

“I saw the Cubs at Wrigley right after I came back,” he said handing me back my cards.

“Neat.  I’ve never been to Chicago.”

“You’d like Wrigley.  It’s a palace to baseball.  It’s what a ballpark should be.”

“Who’d you see?”

“Who else?  Cubs and Cardinals.”

“Holy mackerel!” I exclaimed.  I’d have given all my cards to see a Cubs vs. Cardinals game at Wrigley Field.

“Yeah, but the Cubs lost.  I think it was seven to two.  But Mr. Cub got a hit.  That was his first full year with the Cubs.  We all knew he’d be something special.”

“You saw Ernie Banks play?”

“Sure.  I think it was 1954.  I’ll tell you what, if you promise not to tell a soul, I’ve got something I think you’d like to see.”

“Scout’s honor!”  I held up three fingers since I was still only a cub scout.

“I’m going to have to ask you to get it for me.  Inside, on a table against the wall, is a box.  It might be a little heavy, but see if you can bring it out here.”

There was hardly anything in the house.  An upholstered chair faced the center of the room from the front wall.  On one side was a small table with a lone candlestick.  On the other side were well-read paperbacks stacked on the floor.  On the opposite side was a metal kitchen table with two candlesticks and two chairs that didn’t match.  The only light in the room was the daylight filtering dimly through drawn paper shades.  On the right wall was a door and just beyond was the table with the cardboard box.  As I passed the door, I could see that his bed was a thin mattress on the floor.  I saw no bedding.

Mind you, we didn’t have a lot when I was growing up, but we were comfortable.  I had a bed with sheets and blankets.  We had a television, a sofa, bookcases and lamps.  In his house, I was standing in a different world.  I’d never seen anyone live like this before.  It made me uneasy, so I grabbed the box off the table and took it back outside to the world where I was comfortable.

“Ah, good,” he said as I came out the front door cradling the box.  “Bring it to me.”

I put the box in his lap and stood by his side anxious to see what was inside.  He smiled seeing my eagerness.  To keep me in suspense he stuck his hand through the folded top.  After fishing blindly inside the box for a few moments, his smile widened and he slowly drew out his hand.  In it was a baseball.  It still looked new.

“I got this ball at that game.  It was a foul ball Ernie hit.  It came floating right to me.  Caught it in my right hand.”

“Ernie Banks hit that ball?”

“Yep, and look here.”  He twisted the ball and there, like it was written yesterday, was Mr. Cubs’ signature.

“What do you think of that?”

I was speechless.  It was 1967 and Ernie Banks had much earlier cemented his position as the quintessential Cub.  Everyone loved Ernie and I certainly counted myself in that number.  At that point in my life, no possession could have been as treasured as that ball.  It was Fort Knox material.

The old man held out the ball.  I took it in both hands and held it as though it was pure crystal, as though it was a Faberge egg, as though it was my baby brother.  I dared not touch the signature, though I badly wanted to.  I began feeling nervous holding something so precious so I handed it back to the old man who quickly returned it to the box.

“Have you got anything else in there?” I asked bending over to try and see in the box.

“Not really.  Just some army stuff.”

Now, if there was one thing I loved more than baseball, it was playing war.

“Really?!  Were you in World War Two?”  World War Two was my favorite war.  That sounds odd doesn’t it . . . having a favorite war.  It’s kind of like having a favorite method of execution.  There was something satisfying about having the Nazis as enemies though.

“No,” he said quietly.  “Korea.”

“Dad was in Korea!  Did you shoot anyone?  Dad was a medic, but he was there after the war was over.  Still, I tell all my friends that my Dad shot more people than their dads.  Get it?  My Dad was a medic.  He shot more . . . he gave people shots.”

He smiled and nodded.

“What kind of army stuff is in the box?”

He sighed deeply, then pushed the box toward me.  “Look for yourself.”

I put the box on the porch floor and greedily flipped open the top flaps like it was Christmas.  Inside, along with the Ernie Banks baseball was a treasure trove of military memorabilia.  There were spent rifle brasses, patches, many of which had a large number eight, rank insignia, and various uniform accoutrements.  There was a tobacco tin filled with dirt, some stones and a lot of newspaper clippings held together with a paperclip.  I touched everything.  The sergeant’s stripes, the stained patches, the broken marksmanship medal.  There were also three leather cases stacked on top of each other.

“What are these?” I asked.

He stared straight ahead without answering.

I took the first leather case out, flipped open the latch and slowly raised the lid.  Inside was a gleaming Silver Star medal.  The second box was stuffed with four Purple Hearts.  The third case had a Bronze Star medal.  I’d never seen anything like it before.  I’d seen the medals on TV, but that was black and white.  I’d also seen toy store replicas.  These were real.  The Silver Star was really silver, the Bronze Star I initially mistook for being gold, and the background around the four George Washingtons was the most regal purple I could imagine.

“Put them away.”  His voice was much deeper and hoarse.

“But . . .”

“Just put them back, please.”

I closed the leather lids, secured the latches and one-by-one placed them gently back in the box.

“Boy, if my friends could see this stuff . . .”

“What do your friends say about me?” still with a deep, hoarse voice.

“Huh?”

“What do you and your friends think I’ve done?”

Suddenly, I was deeply embarrassed by what we’d said about this man.  The time I’d spent with him had made me forget entirely about what we’d accused him of being.  Now it had come back voraciously.

“Nothing.”  I didn’t know what else to say.

We were at a sort of standoff now.  I was ashamed to tell him what my friends and I had been saying about him and he apparently insisted on hearing it.  He didn’t look at me at all.  Instead, his gaze was intensely blank.  His eyes were moist.  I thought I could see in the moistness reflections of images from a different place and time flickering like a movie reel.

Then, in a whisper he said, “I have killed.  I’ve murdered . . . men.”

Now the original fear was returning.  I imagined that he was confessing to me prior to doing me in.  Suddenly, I desperately wanted to leave and yet somehow was compelled to stay.

“I was in the North when the Chinese attacked.  There was so many of them.  They just kept coming.  Day and night.  I couldn’t sleep.  Here they’d come again.  It was cold.  December.  Snow.  Blood.  Fear.”

These few words evaporated my urge to flee.  I sat quietly and let him continue to talk, though I’m not at all sure he was talking to me.

“Dan, my best friend over there, the guy I did everything with, exploded.  Grenade.  Blew him to bits.  I had blood and flesh all over me.  I was washed in the blood of Dan.  I took some shrapnel.  In my leg.  They took me back and got most of it out.  Took some bone from Dan out of me, too.  Sent me back to the front.

“I didn’t want to go.  I was tired.  Sick from seeing my buddies die.  Sick of death.  I wanted to die to keep from seeing more death.  But, I didn’t want to die like this.  I didn’t want to die in agony, moaning in pain, gasping, gurgling blood trying to breath.  One shot.  Instant nothing.  Just to stop the death.

“We were falling back.  Rough ground.  Horrible ground.  Snow to our calves.  Snow covered with ash and dirt and blood.  We’d establish defensive lines.  They’d come again.  Hundreds of them.  Screaming, shouting, shooting.  We’d fall back more.

“One night, they came again.  Too many of them.  Too many.  They overran us.  We had to fight to retreat.  Hand-to-hand.  Knives.  Helmets.  Rocks.  Whatever we could find.  I can still feel the bayonet . . . entering.  I cut a man’s throat so hard I nearly cut off his head.  His blood was warm on my cold hands.  It melted the snow.  Shot a man about to throw a grenade.  I didn’t kill him.  He dropped the grenade.  It blew him ten feet into the air.  Squeezed a man’s throat so hard I could feel his windpipe crack.  The throbbing from a bullet poorly aimed.”

He paused for a moment.

“I’ve killed.  I’ve murdered.”

Even at that age, I think I understood the torment of living with the horror.  It’s always with you.  Like a heart beat.  It’s with you until it’s not.

He spoke no more.  Nor did I.  I took my box of baseball cards and went home.  I put them in the closet, lay down on my bed, on the thick quilt, and stared out the window.

 

* * *

 

From that point on, every time I’d pass his house, if he was on the porch I’d wave.  Sometimes he’d return my wave, other times not.  When he didn’t, I imagined that he was elsewhere and didn’t see me.  The word soon got around to all my friends that his walking stick was, in fact, not a gun and that he’d seen Ernie Banks play against the Cardinals.  He even had a foul ball Ernie had hit signed by Mr. Cub himself.  It took a while to convince them, but one day we were all riding our bikes past his house and I waved.  He waved back.  That’s all it took.  I didn’t tell anyone, not even my Dad, about the old man’s medals or war experiences.  I didn’t think he’d want me to tell.  It would be parading his private hell for all to see.

In November of that year, the week of Thanksgiving, it snowed.  Down in southern Illinois, we didn’t get a lot of snow.  Some years it didn’t snow at all.  On that November day it snowed enough to cover the grass and streets.  It was too exciting for an eleven year old.  I had to go get a friend, Steve, to see if he wanted to have a snowball fight or see if we could find a hill for sledding.  I started running from my house towards Steve’s until I came in sight of the old man’s house.  There were five or six cars and trucks parked out front.  People were walking in and out of the house.  Some were carrying things out and tossing them into the back of a big stake truck.

“Mister, where is he?” I asked a man who’d thrown one of the old man’s kitchen chairs in the truck bed.

“Where’s who?”

“The old man that lived here.”

“Oh, he died last week.”

It hit me like a wrecking ball.  I had a thought that became crucially important.  I shouted to the man who’d begun walking back to the house, “Mister, how did he die?”

“In his sleep,” he answered over his shoulder before disappearing into the house.

I remembered what he’d said about “instant nothing.”  I smiled.  If anything could be better than instant nothing, it would be moving from nothing to nothing.  Moving from the nothing of sleep to the nothing of death would be as close as you could get to not moving at all.  For once, he’d probably gotten more than he asked for.

Before the door closed, a woman emerged carrying the box containing all his treasures—the patches, the Mr. Cubs ball, the medals, his joys and sorrows.  The woman heaved the box onto the back of the truck.

“Excuse me.  What are you going to do with this stuff?”

She looked at me like it was none of my business and then said, “It’s going to the dump.  Why, you want it?”

“No.  Just asking.”

I waited for her to disappear into the house.  When no one else was around, I clambered onto the back of the stake truck, moved the treasure box to the end of the bed, jumped down, grabbed the box and took off. 

I couldn’t allow the treasures, the only possessions that seemed to matter to him, to end up in the dump.  Had these people no feeling?  Did they not know how much these things in this cardboard box meant to the old man?  Apparently not, but I did.  I knew that in this box was the life of a man few people understood.  A life of incredible pain and anguish, yet a life that contained moments of pride, belonging and delight.  I would somehow have to give it the respectful treatment that he’d only rarely received during life.  And I did.

So that’s my story about the old man we were certain was a child murderer.  Now, tell me again what you all say about old Miss Brodie.