There's a lot going on. Been trying to unpack around work and graduate classes. Now midterms are coming up. Am lucky if I get to sit down for a few minutes and write. But I have been writing...

Second shot at the "Wake" story. Renamed "The Dead Year."

***

Nate had the first name of one serial killer and the unusual last name of another. That was why lists of obscure killers kept coming up when I Googled his name. Believing, even for a moment, that I’d been alone with a serial killer inside his big old house took a year off of my life that could not be returned even after I figured out what was going on. Nate was no homicidal maniac even if he had more confirmed kills than either of his namesakes on the list. He would have appreciated the irony if I’d had time to tell him.

I stood in Nate’s study and looked around. There was no theme. He’d just put up a lot of stuff he liked. There were medals laid out on a bookshelf. Some of them were his, some were his father’s. A picture of his wife stood next to a battered old lamp. He’d arranged a lot of photographs and newspaper clippings under a sheet of Plexiglas covering his desk, but one in particular caught my eye: a self-portrait photo taken at arm's length. The grainy colors told me it had been taken in the 1970s or maybe the early 1980s. It was the only picture of himself beneath the glass. I'd known him during the last few years of his life, as a tired, faded man with a crippled shoulder, shaky hands, and an oxygen tank. His voice had been ruined by a botched surgery and his face by years of alcoholism: red veins and wax-paper eyelids. He wasn't yet sixty. Sometimes sat with him at the kitchen table. If there was something to say we said it. If not, we didn't. Smoke drifted up undisturbed from his cigarette (before his asthma got bad) and eventually he’d start to talk. Sometimes told me about the past. Generally he called himself a Vietnam vet. In truth he’d only seen Vietnam when he flew over it. He spent most of his tour smoking Thai stick and translating interceptions from the Red Khmer, both with equal intensity.
Then sometimes he'd try to tick me off by deliberately misunderstanding me and I'd grin and say something even more ridiculous. I'm not going to pretend we were closer than we were, but we both got the joke. That is how I knew him.

The man in the arm's length self-portrait had green eyes that looked down at the camera from heavy, smooth lids. His cowboy hat was tilted back to show longish red-gold hair framing a face that was all planes and angles. He wore the same style of moustache and beard that cavalry officers favored after the Civil War. A cigarette tilted lazily from his lip. That man did not look like someone playing cowboy, though. By the time he'd taken that picture he'd already been around the world and killed men and he liked the way he looked, yes he did. He was a beautiful, dangerous bastard, resembling a hawk in that he took his strength for granted. He thought he'd either soar or take a bullet.

Friends and relations I didn't know milled around and yelled at each other over the noise of other people yelling. I recognized an uncle who reminded me of an angler. He angles for future ex-wives. "I'll be here until a time. My car is a Hemi. My joke is a joke: only a shell, the nut is gone." The kind of person who talks without saying anything. He dangled his car in front of me like bait, then rubbed his eyes and squinted when I drifted away.

Nate's daughter and her husband Markie showed up in a purple El Camino with racing slicks. Markie had his first heart attack at twenty-six due to a meth overdose. They lived in a trailer park on the other side of town. Last I heard, he made his living selling scrapped car parts and only one half of their double-wide had running water.

Kids tore around in the yard. Nate’s wife poured zinfandel into plastic cups. She said to her daughter, "People kept telling me he would have loved this. They're wrong. It would have driven him crazy. All these people." She laughed. She was having fun. That's what counts. This kind of thing is for the living.

“Who were you?” she asked in my general direction. “Who were you, to him?”

At this point I fell more into the category of deceased - and she knew it. After all, she’d spent a lot of time (according to Nate) wondering just who the hell I was. Nate said he always laughed his ass off when she asked. I never asked him why he didn’t just go ahead and tell her that I wasn’t a mistress or illegitimate kid or blackmailer. I never asked because I understood why he did it. I would have done the same thing. It was like the curved mirrors he’d hung at strategic points around the big old house. He was not interested in his own reflection. Hadn’t been in a long time. The mirrors were there to alert him to movement in other rooms long before anyone knew where he was. We both had a sort of voyeuristic streak, wanting to remain secluded while seeing everyone else. We were, quite simply, two people who intrigued one another. We were unasked questions and unwritten rules. If I were his blackmailer, I’d be one who left her victim to guess the conditions for returning an half-revealed item. Perhaps there was no item. Perhaps I’d leave Nate’s conscience to conjure one. Information has a lot of power when it is withheld. Saying nothing is as just good as saying everything. Sometimes we just smiled at each other, each trying to read the other’s eyes until his wife dropped a piece of china.
Nate's place had a pond, but it did not drain into the orchard like it was supposed to. In the summer it turned into a big muddy puddle and in the winter it rose so high it flowed across the driveway and petered out in an icy swamp-delta in the yard. Every year I suggested putting in a drainpipe and every year Nate ignored me. He had to put new gravel in the driveway every spring.

As I said before, a great many people were there and this meant a great many vehicles. Early arrivals said their goodbyes and climbed into their cars. Uncle Hemi had parked in the grassy bed of the stream across the driveway and realized he couldn't get out. So Markie took a piece of rope about a quarter of an inch thick, tied it to Uncle Hemi‘s car, and stepped on the gas with the El Camino. I'm no logistical genius but I have unstuck my car several times and have formed an idea how it works. It isn’t practical to use a sports car to tow a truck, especially if that sports car has racing tires, which have no tread. This goes double if said tires are a couple of inches in watery grass and the car has to go up to reach the driveway. After spinning the tires enough to carve out trenches, I would call it a day. Apparently Markie did not think so.

The drive was narrow enough that no one else could get past unless they wanted to take the chance of Markie getting free and ramming them like some kind of purple trireme. Aged aunts wandered across the driveway, weaving back and forth as they picked their way over the icy streams of water. I stood on the steps watching all this with an empty cup in my hand and tried not to have a headache under the clear, flat sky. A crowd of relatives had gathered. Some of them were wandering across the path the El Camino would take. Markie announced that he needed more weight in the back to get some traction. Two men immediately hopped on the bed of the car and started jumping up and down. Traction is understandable. That is why people put sandbags in the back of a truck if they have to drive during a flood or some such. Why anyone would want to jump up and down and bury the tires deeper in the mud, though, I did not understand. The two men were still jumping around when Markie punched the gas so hard a rooster-tail of mud sprayed up from the tires. Blue smoke poured from the exhaust and the engine made the high, tinny noise that heralds a blowout. Markie wrenched the wheel to one side, trying to gain purchase on new ground. The men in back grabbed at the radio antenna, trying to keep their balance. At this point it occurred to me that if by some chance Markie freed the car he would spin out and the antenna would not be enough to save his relatives when the El Camino barreled into the cars parked on the other side of the driveway.
Nobody had cleared away the wandering aunties.

I absconded to the cellar with a bottle of wine after deciding that I couldn't deal with Markie’s exercise in futility or its alternative. The main room was large enough for a washer and dryer and speed-bag and a work-table. The single bare light bulb overhead threw unforgiving light across his basement. Every crumb of dirt cast its pencil-line shadow across the floor. Nate’s cellar was no rumpus-room affair. It was a warren of halls, rooms, and cubbyholes. It was perpetually unfinished. A lot of it was bricked in with cinderblocks but the newer places - from just before he started to deteriorate - were raw dirt. He hadn’t even gotten around to putting mirrors up.

Even at the end of his life Nate was a tough old gentleman bastard. The only time he ever came close to crying in front of me, it was not about the past. It was about the present. He muttered a few things about being able to jump from stone to stone without faltering. He tried to explain how it was to know he could do anything, and then slowly realize that all he could do was bluff and keep a gun under the table and trust that he‘d be able to reach it with his good arm.
“You know what I’m saying?” He looked at me across the table, his mask slipping, his eyes a muddy hazel.

Even Nate suffered from self-doubt. When he did, he dug another passage, albeit slowly, grinding his teeth. He’d even put a bathroom in so he would not have to go upstairs until he was ready. The soap was the same blue and white flecked sort that had been there since I‘d first met him. When I picked up my bottle of zinfandel my hands smelled like Nate and I realized that this was what seeing a ghost must be like. No... I'd been seeing the ghost of a 30-year suicide and between the photograph and the scent, I had finally caught a glimpse of the man himself. It was just a fleeting glimpse, but it nearly knocked me breathless. I dropped backward onto a pile of tarp and closed my eyes in an effort to recall it, but the moment was already fading. Soon I was just reconstructing my own memory of it. Re-membering.

That day I dreamed Nate was dead and it felt real. Not because of the funeral or all his female relatives who made me uncomfortable or that I went down in his cellar to look for him and all his stuff was there but he was still dead. It was that the repeated shock of remembering did not wake me up. The dream went on for months and it had nothing to do with him after that. I went back to work, annoyed my boss and was annoyed by her, read books, and paid bills. Long stretches went by without a thought for the house I used to haunt. Every now and then I’d think, Nate would appreciate this irony, but then I’d remember, Oh, he’s dead. Days rushed by so fast I could barely count them. This was the year I had lost, the dead year, on fast-forward.
When I woke up in the cellar, bottle of wine at my feet, he was still dead and I was under the ground in the earthy cellar, watching friends’ and relatives’ feet through the little window near the ceiling. Markie’s El Camino roared.

During the dead year I watched them through the reflections of mirrors. I heard the clamor of their conversation from under the floor as I followed their footsteps from room to room.

***

Questions, comments and smart remarks always welcome. Also thank you to everybody who has been patient with the fact that I last commented on their sites when dinosaurs roamed the earth.