Long Hard Road Out of Hell (3 page)

Chad and I worked quickly and quietly. We knew what had to be done. Picking a rusted screwdriver off the floor, we pried the workbench drawer open wide enough so we could peek in. The first thing we saw was cellophane: tons of it, wound around something. We couldn’t make out what it was. Chad pushed the screwdriver deeper into the drawer. There was hair and lace. He wedged the screwdriver further, and I pulled until the drawer gave way.

What we discovered were bustiers, bras, slips and panties—and several tangled women’s wigs with stiff, mottled hair. We began unwrapping the cellophane, but as soon as we saw what it concealed, we dropped the package to the floor. Neither of us wanted to touch it. It was a collection of dildoes that had suction cups on the bottom. Maybe it was because I was so young, but they seemed enormous. And they were covered with a hardened dark orange slime, like the gelatinous crust that builds up around a turkey when it is cooked. We later deduced that it was aged Vaseline.

I made Chad wrap the dildoes up and put them back in the drawer. We’d done enough exploring for the day. Just as we were trying to force the drawer shut, the cellar doorknob turned. Chad and I froze for a moment, then he grabbed my hand and dove under a plywood table that my grandfather had his toy trains set up on. We were just in time to hear his footsteps near the bottom of the stairs. The floor was covered with train-set paraphernalia, mostly pine needles and fake snow, which made me think of powdered donuts trampled into dirt. The pine needles were prickling our elbows, the smell was nauseating and we were breathing heavily. But grandfather didn’t seem to notice us or the half-open drawer. We heard him shuffling around the room, hacking through the hole in his throat. There was a click, and his toy trains began clattering around the large track. His black patent leather shoes appeared on the floor just in front of us. We couldn’t even see as high as his knees, but we knew he was sitting. Slowly his feet began scraping against the ground, as if he were being violently rocked in his seat, and his hacking grew louder than the trains. I can’t think of any way to describe the noise that issued from his useless larynx. The best analogy I can offer is an old, neglected lawn mower trying to sputter back to life. But coming from a human being, it sounded monstrous.

After an uncomfortable ten minutes passed, a voice called from the top of the stairs. “Judas Priest on a pony!” It was my grandmother, and evidently she’d been yelling for some time. The train stopped, the feet stopped. “Jack, what are you doing down there?” she yelled.

My grandfather barked at her through his tracheostomy, annoyed.

“Jack, can you run to Heinie’s? We’re out of pop again.”

My grandfather barked back, even more annoyed. He didn’t move for a moment, as if debating whether or not to help her. Then he slowly rose. We were Safe, for the time being.

FIG
. 984.—Transverse section of the trachea, just above its bifurcation, with a bird’s-eye view of interior.

After doing our best to conceal the damage we had done to the workbench drawer, Chad and I walked to the top of the stairs and into the breezeway, where we kept our toys. Toys, in this case, being a pair of BB guns. Besides spying on my grandfather, the house had two other attractions: the woods nearby, where we liked shooting at animals, and the girls in the neighborhood, who we were trying to have sex with but never succeeded until much later.

Sometimes we’d go to the city park just past the woods and try to pick off little kids playing football. To this day, Chad still has a BB lodged beneath the skin in his chest, because when we couldn’t find any other targets we would just shoot at each other. This time, we stuck close to the house and tried to knock birds out of trees. It was malicious, but we were young and didn’t give a shit. That afternoon I was out for blood and, unfortunately, a white rabbit crossed our path. The thrill of hitting it was incommensurate, but then I went to examine the damage. It was still alive and blood was pouring out of its eye, soaking into its white fur. Its mouth kept meekly opening and closing, taking in air in a last, desperate attempt at life. For the first time, I felt bad for an animal I had shot. I took a large flat rock and ended its suffering with a loud, quick and messy blow. I was very close to learning an even harsher lesson in killing animals.

We ran back to the house, where my parents were waiting outside in a brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville, my father’s pride and joy since landing a job as manager of a carpet store. He never came into the house for me unless it was absolutely unavoidable, and rarely even talked to his parents. He usually just waited outside uneasily, as if he were afraid of reliving whatever it was he had experienced in that old house as a child.

Our duplex apartment, only a few minutes away, wasn’t any less claustrophobic than Grandpa and Grandma Warner’s place. Instead of leaving home after she married, my mom brought her mother and father home with her to Canton, Ohio. So they, the Wyers (my mother was born Barb Wyer), lived next door. Benign country folk (my dad called them hillbillies) from West Virginia, her father was a mechanic and her mother was an overweight, pill-popping housewife whose parents used to keep her locked in a closet.

Chad fell ill, so I didn’t go to my father’s parents for about a week. Although I was disgusted and creeped out, my curiosity about my grandfather and his depravity still hadn’t been satisfied. To kill time while waiting to resume the investigation, I played in our backyard with Aleusha, who in some ways was my only real friend besides Chad. Aleusha was an Alaskan malamute the size of a wolf and distinguishable by her mismatched eyes: one was green, the other was blue. Playing at home, however, was accompanied by its own set of paranoias—ever since my neighbor, Mark, had returned home on Thanksgiving break from military school.

Mark was a roly-poly kid with a greasy blond bowl cut, but I used to look up to him because he was three years older than me and much more wild. I’d often see him in his backyard throwing stones at his German shepherd or thrusting sticks up its ass. We started hanging out when I was eight or nine, mostly because he had cable television and I liked watching
Flipper
. The television room was in his basement, where there was also a dumbwaiter for dirty laundry from upstairs. After watching
Flipper
, Mark would invent games like “Prison,” which consisted of squeezing into the dumbwaiter and pretending like we were in jail. This was no ordinary jail: the guards were so strict that they didn’t let the prisoners have anything—even clothes. When we were naked in the dumbwaiter, Mark would run his hands all over my skin and try to squeeze and caress my dick. After this happened a few times, I broke down and told my mother. She went straight to his parents, who, though they branded me a liar, soon sent him to military school. From then on, our families were bitter enemies, and I always felt that Mark blamed me for tattling on him and causing him to be sent away. Since he had returned, he hadn’t said a word to me. He just glared maliciously at me through his window or over his fence, and I lived in fear that he’d try to exact some kind of revenge on me, my parents or my dog.

So it was somewhat of a relief to be back at my grandparents’ the next week, playing detective again with Chad. This time we were determined to solve the mystery of my grandfather once and for all. After forcing down half a plateful of my grandmother’s cooking, we excused ourselves and headed for the cellar. We could hear the trains running from the top of the stairwell. He was down there.

Holding our breath, we peered into the room. His back was to us and we could see the blue-and-gray flannel shirt that he always wore, with the neck stretched out, revealing a yellow and brown ring around the collar and a sweat-stained undershirt. A white band of elastic, also blackened with dirt, clung to his throat, holding the metal catheter tube in place over his Adam’s apple.

A slow, tense wave of fear shuddered through our bodies. This was it. We crept down the creaky stairs as quietly as we could, hoping the trains would cover up the noise. At the bottom, we turned around and hid in the stale-smelling alcove behind the staircase, trying not to spit or scream as cobwebs clung to our faces.

J
ACK
W
ARNER

From our hiding place, we could see the train set: There were two tracks, and both had trains running on them, clanking along the haphazardly built rails and letting off a noxious electrical smell, as if the metal of the track were burning. My grandfather sat near the black transformer that housed the train’s controls. The back of his neck always reminded me of foreskin. The flesh hung wrinkled off the bone, old and leathery like a lizard’s and completely red. The rest of his skin was gray-white, like the color of birdshit, except for his nose, which had reddened and deteriorated from years of drinking. His hands were hardened and callused from a lifetime of work, his nails dark and brittle like beetle wings.

Grandfather wasn’t paying attention to the trains circling furiously around him. His pants were down around his knees, a magazine was spread over his legs, and he was hacking and moving his right hand rapidly in his lap. At the same time, with his left hand, he was wiping phlegm from around his tracheostomy with a yellow-crusted handkerchief. We knew what he was doing, and we wanted to leave right away. But we had trapped ourselves behind the stairs and were too scared to come out into the open.

Suddenly, the hacking sputtered to a halt and grandfather twisted around in his chair, staring straight at the stairwell. Our hearts froze. He stood up, pants sliding to his ankles, and we pressed against the mildewed wall. We couldn’t see what he was doing anymore. My heart stabbed at my chest like a broken bottle and I was too petrified even to scream. A thousand perverted and violent things he was about to do to us flashed through my mind, though it would have taken nothing more than for him to touch me and I would have dropped dead with fright.

The hacking, jacking and shuffling of feet began again, and we let our breath out. It was safe to peer around the staircase. We didn’t really want to. But we had to.