sludgo’s Mile Markers: Mile 203

This is Part Three of a multi-part series. Click the links to read Part One and Part Two.

I threw my hands up in the air. Instinct. Tried to speak but my voice caught somewhere in the back of my throat and I choked on whatever it was I was going to say. Found out it’s true that you see your life pass before your eyes when you’re facing death but since I was only twelve my retrospective went by pretty quickly and just like that I was back in the here and now, August of 1973, standing in Old Man Granger’s dark and dank and dingy garage, staring straight up the barrel of his shotgun.

“What in tarnation you doin’ in my garage, boy?!”

I swallowed hard and opened up my mouth but all I could get out was a raspy “I’m sorry.”

He backed slowly out of the doorway into the golden-orange daylight, warily keeping the shotgun trained on me. Told me to come on out and when I did he told me to stop. Sized me up from head to toe then softened a click. Pointed next door to Grandma Lettie’s house.

“You’re Lettie’s kin, ain’t ya?”

I nodded.

“Well, I reckon she’ll be mighty interested in what you’ve been up to today. Let’s go tell her all about it.”

“Sh..sh..she’s not home, sir,” I stammered.
“What?”

“She’s not home, sir,” I repeated more firmly. “I don’t know where she is. Probably downtown shopping at Montgomery Ward or having coffee with her friends at the Two-Spot Café. She does that sometimes.”

“Well then we’ll call up your house and have a word with your Pappy.”

I shook my head and cleared my throat.

“He’s not home either, sir. He’s out on the lake fishing. He always fishes on the lake Saturdays. Gets up early and doesn’t come home ’til the afternoon.”

“Well then a talk with your Momma will have to do.”

I shook my head again.

“She’s not there either, sir. I know for a fact she’s downtown at Arlene’s Twirls and Curls getting her hair and nails done up because she’s going out with Dad tonight for dinner and dancing at the Elks Club. It’s their anniversary and she’s been talking about it all week.”

He squinted at me with disgust. Contempt. Then motioned the barrel of the shotgun toward the back door of his house.

“Inside then. We’ll wait for Lettie to get home.”

My world stopped for an instant. I couldn’t hear the birds singing anymore or the wind rustling through the trees or the sounds of the cars driving by out on the street. By then I’d learned all about that Stranger Danger stuff but he had the gun and I didn’t so I turned toward his house. Started walking.

My hands were shaking as I pulled open the rickety screen then pushed through the heavy wooden back door. I paused on the narrow landing for a count or two to let my eyes adjust to the deep-brown darkness then stepped further into the bowels of the creepy old place. Old Man Granger was still following me closely but at least had dropped the barrel of the gun from the middle of my back to the floor.

It didn’t take long for me to notice the inside of the house was a lot like the outside—frozen in time, suffocating under the dust and debris of decades of neglect. We walked a couple steps up into the green-and-white tiled kitchen, me first. There was a faint smell of bacon grease and bread but a stronger smell of mildew and mold. He muttered for me to keep moving and we shuffled through the crystal-chandeliered dining room and past the mahogany-lined den then entered the cavernous two-story front room.

I looked around wide-eyed. It was a glorious space even in its disrepair, its darkly stained wooden floors wearing faded Persian rugs and its walls covered in peeling flowered wallpaper and enormous painted portraits of people I didn’t know. A sweeping side-staircase leading to the second floor was opposite the twin-pillared foyer and standing next to the stained-glass windowed front door was a towering grandfather clock forever reading quarter-past three, its grey-tarnished pendulum having stood stone-still through years of quarter-past threes. There were wing-backed chairs and overstuffed sofas and Queen Anne-legged tables spaciously placed about and next to the marble fireplace one of those old-timey phonographs with the big horn rested on an equally old-timey radio console. And pushed deep into the far corner was a giant grand-piano, its top crowded with dozens of expensively-framed vintage photographs of a certain young redheaded woman.

He pointed me over to one of the wingbacks and told me to sit down and I did as he asked, still not entirely sure I was going to make it out of the situation alive but as I watched him pad around the room in his weary leather moccasins and tan suspender-ed trousers and crisply ironed white-collared shirt I calmed down a bit. Struck me that he didn’t look at all like the monster his reputation would have had me believe. To me he just looked wrinkly and weathered and skinny. Had a bit of a shoulder droop and long floppy ears and tired brown eyes and wispy threads of silvery-white hair combed neatly over his chrome-dome. Hardly the stuff of nightmares.

Sooner than later he stopped at the sofa across from me and put down the shotgun, carefully standing it against the side-table. Then he took a seat and looked me straight in the eye.

“So, I’ll ask you agin, young’un. What were you doin’ out in my garage?”

I blinked hard then took a big breath and told him the story. The one I’d heard from Marky. The one where his boomerang had blown into the garage and he’d went in to get it and had seen a dead body sitting in one of the Cadillacs.

Old Man Granger belched out a laugh that ended with a rattly-wheezy coughing fit. He deftly pulled a handkerchief from his front pocket and wiped his mouth clean from the spittle then grinned a yellow-toothed grin at me.

“I was a tailor back in the day, Sonny. What you and your friend saw is a fitting mannequin that I shoved into the backseat of the sedan clear back in the ’30’s after seeing a client and for whatever my reason I never took it back out. There’s a couple more like it in the sewing room upstairs if it’s your intention to continue being a busybody and snooping around in my affairs.”

I shook my head shamefully. Never felt dumber in my life.

We sat there in an awkward silence for ten or fifteen minutes more until we heard Grandma’s trusty blue DeSoto chug-chug-chugging up the alleyway. He gave me a nod toward the back door and I didn’t need him to give me another. I hopped up from my chair like it was on fire and out the door we went, back into the warm and bright NoDak autumn sunshine.

When the Oldsmobile Man came home that afternoon from the lake and heard the whole story from the Beehive he got plenty mad. He even yelled at me, saying I was lucky I didn’t get my dad-blamed head blown off except he didn’t use the words ‘dad-blamed.’ Told me grounding me from TV or my bike or my friends wouldn’t teach me the lesson I needed to learn—to respect other people’s property—so my punishment would be that I’d have to mow and trim Old Man Granger’s lawn every Saturday. Keep all his leaves raked up too. And come December when the snow started to fly I’d need to shovel his walk and driveway whenever necessary. And I’d have to keep doing all that until I received further notice from Headquarters.

Okeydoke.

So the next Saturday around noon I rode my bike over to Grandma’s house, pulled her mower from her toolshed, and mowed Old Man Granger’s lawn. Pruned the bushes and edged the sidewalk and rooted out a bunch of the dead vines on his fence for good measure. Pulled a couple pailfuls of dandelions and cleared out some clover patches then hooked up his crispy-crackly-leaky garden hoses and got them sprinkling on the brown spots in the yard. Did the same thing the next Saturday and the Saturday after that and the Saturday after that but the next Saturday when I showed up and knocked on his front door Old Man Granger didn’t answer. I knocked again, harder. Still no answer. Rang the doorbell then rang it again. Crickets.

I scratched my head and scrunched my nose up into my face, trying to remember if he’d told me he wasn’t going to be around that week. Didn’t think he had so I stepped back down the stoop and walked around to the big picture window in front of the house. Pulled out a shirt-tail and wiped a fist-sized circle of grime clean from the bottom pane then leaned in to take a peek and gasped at what I saw. There was Old Man Granger, lying sprawled-out and face-down in the middle of the living room floor.

He wasn’t moving.

(Next time: Part Four)

Peaceful travels…

sludgo