handful of mud and slap it down across the crown of his head, like Stan Laurel at the conclusion of a pie-throwing skirmish. It wasn’t funny. “Okay,” Gesh growled, flinging down the wet cigarette and spreading his big hands across the indented bumper of the Toyota, “why don’t you see what you can do?”
I wiped my hands on the seat of my pants and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was musty and cold, the windows opaque with wet. I turned the key, took note of the answering roar (we’d lost the muffler apparently), and watched the wipers flail at the rain. Then I revved the engine, peeled the bark from the logs and hydroplaned up the road as far as I could go, my co-workers slogging madly behind me like refugees chasing after the Red Cross wagon. When I bogged down, the whole process started over again: heave, haul, crank, shove. Sometimes I’d manage to make a couple hundred feet; other times I’d come wheeling off the log grid and sink instantaneously in the mud. The rain was no help: it fell steadily all afternoon. And we were, as I was later to discover, climbing a vertical drop of something like six hundred feet from the blacktop road to the cabin.
Finally, after four and a half back-breaking hours, we reached a point at which the road began to level out, and when I came off the launching pad for what must have been the twentieth time, I kept going. The car fishtailed right and left, low-hanging branches swooped at the windshield, the cheers of my partners faded in the background, and I kept going. There was a short straightaway, a series of
S
curves and then a wide sweeping loop that brought me up into a rain-screened clearing about the size and shape of a Little League field. I didn’t know where I was going, slashing through swaths of waist-high weed and thumping over frame-rattling boulders and mounds of rusted machine parts, hooked on the idea of momentum …
Until I saw the cabin.
No, I thought, no, this can’t be it, as I slammed on the brakes and skidded into a heap of scrap metal that featured a rusted boxspring and the exoskeleton of the first washing machine ever made. I’d experienced hiatuses between expectation and actuality before—who hasn’t? But this was staggering. Hunting lodge? The place was an extended shack, the yard strewn with refuse, the doorway gaping like an open mouth, like the hungry maw of the demon-god of abandoned houses demanding propitiation. Someone—Vogelsang, no doubt—had nailed tarpaper up on the outer walls in place of shingles, and there was a ridiculous white cloud of sheet Styrofoam lashed across the roof (in the hope of forestalling leaks, as I was later to learn). One thing I was sureof, even then, sitting stunned behind the fractured windshield of the stalled Toyota: no one had lived in the place for twenty years. Or more.
Inside, it was worse. The roof leaked in eight places, the front door had blown in and torn back from its hinges, a furious collision of sumac and vetch darkened the windows. I dropped my duffel bag on the cracked linoleum floor (a floral pattern popular in the forties), and walked round the main room as if I were touring a museum. The room was L-shaped, roughly divided into kitchen and parlor. I paused over the .22 holes in the kitchen wall, the gas-powered refrigerator that had been nonfunctional for thirty years, the sink stained with the refuse of forgotten meals. There were two small bedrooms off the parlor, and a crude staircase that led to a third in the attic. The kitchen door gave onto a partially enclosed porch that connected with a dilapidated storage shed. Beyond the storage shed, a rust-pitted propane tank (Pro-Flame) and a grim, tree-choked ravine. I took all this in, shivering, and then turned to the stove.
There were two stoves, actually. One was a range—combination gas and wood, circa 1935—and the other was a squat wood stove made of cast iron. There was no wood. All the clothes I owned were soaked through,
I wiped my hands on the seat of my pants and slid into the driver’s seat. The car was musty and cold, the windows opaque with wet. I turned the key, took note of the answering roar (we’d lost the muffler apparently), and watched the wipers flail at the rain. Then I revved the engine, peeled the bark from the logs and hydroplaned up the road as far as I could go, my co-workers slogging madly behind me like refugees chasing after the Red Cross wagon. When I bogged down, the whole process started over again: heave, haul, crank, shove. Sometimes I’d manage to make a couple hundred feet; other times I’d come wheeling off the log grid and sink instantaneously in the mud. The rain was no help: it fell steadily all afternoon. And we were, as I was later to discover, climbing a vertical drop of something like six hundred feet from the blacktop road to the cabin.
Finally, after four and a half back-breaking hours, we reached a point at which the road began to level out, and when I came off the launching pad for what must have been the twentieth time, I kept going. The car fishtailed right and left, low-hanging branches swooped at the windshield, the cheers of my partners faded in the background, and I kept going. There was a short straightaway, a series of
S
curves and then a wide sweeping loop that brought me up into a rain-screened clearing about the size and shape of a Little League field. I didn’t know where I was going, slashing through swaths of waist-high weed and thumping over frame-rattling boulders and mounds of rusted machine parts, hooked on the idea of momentum …
Until I saw the cabin.
No, I thought, no, this can’t be it, as I slammed on the brakes and skidded into a heap of scrap metal that featured a rusted boxspring and the exoskeleton of the first washing machine ever made. I’d experienced hiatuses between expectation and actuality before—who hasn’t? But this was staggering. Hunting lodge? The place was an extended shack, the yard strewn with refuse, the doorway gaping like an open mouth, like the hungry maw of the demon-god of abandoned houses demanding propitiation. Someone—Vogelsang, no doubt—had nailed tarpaper up on the outer walls in place of shingles, and there was a ridiculous white cloud of sheet Styrofoam lashed across the roof (in the hope of forestalling leaks, as I was later to learn). One thing I was sureof, even then, sitting stunned behind the fractured windshield of the stalled Toyota: no one had lived in the place for twenty years. Or more.
Inside, it was worse. The roof leaked in eight places, the front door had blown in and torn back from its hinges, a furious collision of sumac and vetch darkened the windows. I dropped my duffel bag on the cracked linoleum floor (a floral pattern popular in the forties), and walked round the main room as if I were touring a museum. The room was L-shaped, roughly divided into kitchen and parlor. I paused over the .22 holes in the kitchen wall, the gas-powered refrigerator that had been nonfunctional for thirty years, the sink stained with the refuse of forgotten meals. There were two small bedrooms off the parlor, and a crude staircase that led to a third in the attic. The kitchen door gave onto a partially enclosed porch that connected with a dilapidated storage shed. Beyond the storage shed, a rust-pitted propane tank (Pro-Flame) and a grim, tree-choked ravine. I took all this in, shivering, and then turned to the stove.
There were two stoves, actually. One was a range—combination gas and wood, circa 1935—and the other was a squat wood stove made of cast iron. There was no wood. All the clothes I owned were soaked through,
Similar Books
