sludgo’s Mile Markers: Mile 201

It was my twelfth August. 1973. Late on a Friday evening following another wretchedly hot and humid day in sludgoville. The sludgos didn’t have air conditioning—only rich people had that—so I was trying to beat the heat by soaking in our bathtub, which was filled up to my shoulders with cold water and every ice cube I could find in the freezer. I was listening to KSLG-AM on my trusty Panasonic transistor enjoying the scratchy-staticky country sounds of Donna Fargo and Mel Tillis and Charley Pride when the top-of-the-hour hit and the news came on. The tersely-toned broadcaster introduced himself—‘Doug Dickerson,’ or something like that—then dove in to his report, eagerly noting there was plenty happening in the world that night. Said that the war in Vietnam might actually be over for good. That something was up between President Nixon and a hotel in DC with a funky name. That one of the astronauts on Skylab 3 had doubled the world-record for length of a space walk. That Willie Mays—the Say Hey Kid—had hit his six-hundred-sixtieth home run. And so on and so on and so on, but as I laid there in the tub with the ice cubes melting and my fingers and toes getting pruny I couldn’t have cared less about any of that junk. I had only one thing on my mind—the dead body in Old Man Granger’s garage.

Stanley Emil Granger. That was the name scrawled on his mailbox but we all just called him Old Man Granger. He was my Grandma Lettie’s next-door neighbor—an ancient, wiry, balding, bent-over curmudgeon saddled with the long-held reputation of being the orneriest and angriest and meanest man around. Notorious for hating everyone and everything. Men, women, and children alike. Horses and cows and pigs and birds and dogs and cats too for that matter. He lived by himself in the creepiest house in town—a once-grand Victorian that had fallen into disrepair following decades of neglect and now sported peeling white paint and sagging black shutters and a warped front door and cracked pane windows shielded round-the-clock by heavy black velvet drapes. The yard was creepy too, filled with weeds and yellowed grass and patches of bare dirt all surrounded by a worn and weary fence with broken and missing pickets and a creaky, rusted gate overgrown with half-dead vines.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have the money to keep the place up. Everyone knew Old Man Granger had money. Big money. Old money. Money he’d been gifted back in the ’30s from some rich aunt when he and Ruth were married. Enough money for the happy young couple to pay cash for their big Victorian house and fill its garage with two brand-new Cadillacs. But then tragedy struck, unexpectedly as it often does. Ruth passed suddenly only months after their wedding and neither of those Caddys were ever driven again. Sat in the garage from that point forward, frozen in time, slouching on flattened dry-rotted tires and covered in layers of chalky brown dust, glimpsed only when Old Man Granger would take out his trashcan for alleyway pickup and forget to pull the overhead door back down.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to think about the guy. He’d never done anything bad to me. I’d asked Mom and Dad about him one night at supper but they both just gave me a weird look then shrugged their shoulders and told me to stay away from him. To let him be. Grandma Lettie said the same thing. Told me he never spoke to her and she never spoke to him and that it had been that way ever since she could recall. But there was a big part of me that felt kind of sorry for him. More than anything, he seemed like a sad figure, spending every moment—every second—of his life alone. And there’d been those couple times that summer when I was out on Grandma’s porch late in the evening trying to catch a cool prairie breeze and heard soft music coming from somewhere deep within the pitch-black confines of his house. A weeping violin playing over a gentle piano. It choked me up and gave me goosebumps all at once.

Now, to be clear, on that Friday night I hadn’t actually seen the dead body in Old Man Granger’s garage. I’d only heard about it from my friend Marky Potsdam who, with respect, wasn’t the most reliable source of information in the world. Marky was one of those kids who liked a lot of attention so he’d do goofy things like swear up and down that his distant uncle was Yul Brynner or that his folks were secretly millionaires but didn’t want anyone to know for fear of looking snooty at church. But earlier in the day, about an hour after school had let out, there I was, downtown at the Arcade blowing every penny of my seventy-five cent allowance on a new Archie comic book and a melty-sticky Eskimo Pie and a sweaty-cold bottle of Nesbitt’s orange when Marky burst through the big glass front door, panting and trembling and pale as a new cotton sheet from Sears. Didn’t look to me like he was acting. Not one bit.

When he saw me he rushed at me and the story gushed out of him like water from a firehose. His blue eyes flashed wildly above his chubby freckled cheeks as he told me how he’d been taking a shortcut home down the alley behind Grandma Lettie’s after his piano lesson and was trying to get the hang of the Wham-O boomerang he’d gotten for his birthday and he’d given it a good hard toss but a strong gust of wind caught it and carried it straight under Old Man Granger’s half-lifted garage door. My eyes snapped open wide and I gasped, shuddering at the thought.

Marky nodded at me then breathlessly continued, saying he immediately ran over to the garage and scuttled under the door to retrieve the boomerang and that’s when he saw it. The Body. A woman, sitting in the back seat of one of the Caddys, slumped against the window and gazing at him with an icy-cold death stare. Said that it made him scream like a little girl and that he quickly snatched up the boomerang and dashed back under the door then ran away as fast as his Chuck Taylors would carry him.

Yep. That was Marky’s story about the dead body in Old Man Granger’s garage. And I believed him. Or at least wanted to. So that night after I got done with my bath and had put on my pajamas and climbed into bed I decided I’d check out Marky’s story for myself first chance I got. As it happened, I got that chance the very next day.