For Stella

1

His given name was Monroe, but we all called him Hoboy because that was what usually popped out whenever he got stirred up.  He’d come home from the big war so twitchy and agitated that the girl who’d waited for him changed her mind and moved along. Hoboy had spent a couple of years trotting behind a tank, and maybe the racket of the shells got to him or the grim stuff they ran over.  I only know that people who knew him before said somebody else came back.

He delivered for the Rexall a little while and then drove a diaper truck until a nervous mother complained about his spasms and his flapping. She’d moved down from one of those places where they kept their nuts locked up while most of ours roamed free across the landscape. We had Willie P. who hauled an ax around and would chop kindling for a dollar, but he’d make it out of your side fence if you didn’t watch him close, and there was Eloise in her housedress and a pair of yellow snow boots who passed her days looking for a baby doll she’d mislaid as a child.

We had a couple of guys who’d occasionally take their trousers off in town.  One because he’d get itchy and the other due to a warped theatrical bent.  He’d go out in the traffic circle and wave at folks in the altogether until enough people had blown their horns to persuade him to cover up.

Hoboy was kind of his own thing.  He had the occasional spastic fit, but he took instruction well enough and was a tireless worker, so our father hired him on once Hoboy had lost his diaper route because our dad ran a grading and hauling business and could always use a fellow willing to shovel out a ditch.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that our dad’s favorite uncle had died at Monte Cassino and there wasn’t a thing in this world anybody could do for him.

By the time I came along, Hoboy had been on the payroll for nearly six years and had been living in our basement for maybe two. It was one of those temporary situations with a whiff of forever about it.  He’d been staying with his sister until she passed in her sleep one night, and it was plain to everybody he couldn’t keep on in her house alone.  So our father nailed up paneling and moved in Hoboy’s bed and dresser to give him a place to be until something permanent came along.

He took supper with us in the kitchen every evening and rode with us Sundays to church.  By way of a hobby, he pressed flowers in a musty book about the Suez Canal, and most nights he’d listen to ballroom music on his Emerson downstairs. Hoboy would hold me when I was a baby and our mom had cooking or laundry to do, and I remember he smelled of Clubman powder and butterscotch hard candy, and he’d sometimes sing me the Halo shampoo jingle or whistle the theme from Wagon Train.

He walked my brother to school most mornings, and occasionally I’d tag along. There was a kid in my brother’s class who used to say ugly things to Hoboy.  He’d stand out on the blacktop and shout, “Retard,” until the morning my brother went over and knocked out three of his teeth with a shoe. 

The kid was a Bascombe whose people farmed just north of town, and his grown brother came down to have a word with our father.  He was a scraggly sort and muddy to his knees. He beat on the door while we were eating, and our dad brought him right into the house where he promised to pay for any doctoring young master Bascombe might need and then cleared way for my brother’s apology.

None of it satisfied.  That muddy Bascombe had shown up peeved and determined to stay that way.  Once he’d said a few salty things to Hoboy and had made a rude remark to our mother, our father steered him out the back door and got inhospitable on the porch. He took his cobbler with one puffy hand shoved into a bowl of ice.

My parents and my brother were all decisive people who’d size up their situations and do what needed to be done while I was more of a ditherer and an unconstructive hothead, which folks around told me had come from my mother’s father, Mr. Frank.  He was the sort of man who could get himself in a lather reading the phonebook and appeared to be special built to enjoy a snit. Mr. Frank argued with squirrels in his yard and talked back to his television.  He fell out routinely with his neighbors and said the odd fool thing to his wife. 

That meant he’d sleep a couple of nights a month in the room he called his office, which had a card table in it under piles of junk and an ironing board and a couch.  Whenever Mama Peach had decided Mr. Frank had crossed a line, she’d hand him his pillow and point.

Mr. Frank didn’t approve of Hoboy living down in our basement, partly because he wasn’t family but chiefly because he was odd. Mr. Frank had little use for folks who were out of the road (he called it).

He wasn’t alone.  The bulk of people around thought our household arrangements were funny. That was the word they always used for stuff they wouldn’t ever do, and they’d often make mention of Hoboy’s aunt living a county over in a big old rambling farmhouse with plenty of room to take him in.  They didn’t know, of course, our mother had driven out to see the woman only to find her full of cider in the middle of the morning and wandering around her side lot doing violence to her chickens. Our parents decided being funny was something we all could stand.

It got for a time where we lived like a tribe and went fishing together a lot.  We started on the river just above the trestle bridge, but that spot reminded Hoboy of some grisly wartime business, which he let us know by flinging his pole down and running into the woods. So we moved to a pond our father had dredged and dammed up for a guy, which was stocked with bream and crappie that were chiefly fins and bones.  We’d hook them and yank them, admire them a little, and throw them right back in while we sat on upended buckets and talked about stuff.

That’s where I learned Hoboy had grown up in the ordinary way.  His parents ran a truck farm, sold mostly squash and pole beans, and when Hoboy’s brother joined the army, Hoboy joined it too.  Then his brother got killed at a British airfield when he stepped in front of a truck, which left Hoboy to cross the channel alone and chase around behind a tank.

“Rough over there,” was all he’d ever say about the fighting, though occasionally he’d mention curious, miserable things he’d happened to see. People living in bomb holes.  Whole towns blown to gravel. A pot of stew made from bones and leather.  A dead goat wearing a hat.

Hoboy flapped and shouted in a regular way, but there were plenty of times when he’d be as quiet and gentle as anybody. The day we put our cat down, the vet swung by to give her the shot. She’d been failing for a while, but we’d been late to see it because she lived primarily under the beds and well back in the closets and would as soon go for a swim in the septic tank as park for ten seconds in your lap.

We’d put her in a box for the vet’s convenience.  She was barely making it by then, and when he pulled out the needle, we were ready to let him end her right where she was, all of us but for Hoboy who picked her up and held her close.  He told her she’d been a fine cat and even got her purring a little before he glanced the vet’s way and in the needle came. 

When our dad won a contract to cut new roads through a subdivision, he took a chunk of the profits and built Hoboy a proper bedroom off the back of the house.  It had a bathroom attached for Hoboy’s use alone and an outside door for coming and going, but while Hoboy was touched and grateful, he only stayed there a couple of nights before he sought permission from my father to go back downstairs where he’d been.

“Got my places,” was how he explained it, so back into the basement he went. 

When my brother and I aged into having appointments we needed to keep, it got to where Hoboy was the one to drive us. The plan had been for Mr. Frank to do it, but he’d grown sloppy behind the wheel and had a close call with Mama Peach beside him.  So our dad gave Hoboy the keys to the old Bel Air in our shed and made Hoboy drive him to the Church of Christ and back as a kind of test.

Hoboy always gripped the wheel at ten and two and crept along as if the posted speed was just a reckless suggestion.  He didn’t care who piled up behind him or blew at him as they passed. He was steady and careful and reliably alert but also a two-footer, so our dad arrived home from the Church of Christ slightly queasy but satisfied.

After that, Hoboy did about as much chauffeuring as shoveling ditches and clearing culverts. He would carry us to trumpet and piano lessons, to ball practice and birthday parties while our father worked and our mother took care of our new baby sister who’d come into this world premature and fairly ill about it.

It wasn’t much of a stretch, then, for Hoboy to drive us up into the mountains once we’d missed the bus for our camping weekend with our local Scout troop because my brother had run into a fencepost and laid open his chin.  He got three stitches and then managed somehow to convince our mom he was still fit for camping. She jotted down directions for us, gave Hoboy some gas money, and off we went on the interstate where, on downslopes, we’d sometimes crowd fifty.

We were heading for a trail in a park four hours away up by Black Mountain, but it was dusk by the time we left the four-lane and got onto the curvy back roads.  We couldn’t exactly make out what our mother had written down. She’d used a sheet from her kitchen pad, the one with the cartoon pork chop on it, and the grease spots made the directions hard to read, so we ended up taking a turn we never should have made.

Things looked unpromising almost immediately.  We passed several junky houses with trashy yards that soon enough gave way to patchy woodlands all choked with vines and timbered half to death.

“Is this right?” I asked my brother.

He allowed he didn’t know, and if we’d been making an ordinary trip with an ordinary driver, that’s when we might have told him to slow down so we could reconnoiter, but we were hardly moving already before we crept around a bend to be met with a jackleg barricade where the road gave out and quit.

Luckily, there was a wide place where we could turn around.  Unluckily, there were a couple of fellows in it.  They were standing by a big, rusty trash bin sharing a butt and a bottle of something, and their truck was parked half in the clearing with the front end up in the woods. There was a pile of scrap lumber on the open bed held down by a sink and a shower stall, and each mud flap had the top bit of a busty woman on it, the parts that the road salt and rubber rot hadn’t yet reached.

“Let’s ask them,” my brother said as he threw open his door and rolled right out of the car.  My brother was bold that way, would talk to anybody.

Hoboy made one of his noises while we both watched my brother stalk right up to those guys.  He gestured with the sheet from our mother’s notepad and asked what he wanted to know.

Those two indulged in some leisurely study of my brother.  He was wearing his Scout uniform.  His shorts and knee socks and mink-oiled brogans. 

One of those guys said something like, “Well now,” and plucked at one of my brother’s merit badges in a fashion Hoboy decided he couldn’t just sit by and stand.

He left the car and crossed towards the dumpster.  He flapped a little on the way, and those two grubby hillbillies grinned at each other as they watched him come.  They must have thought they were due for a spot of lively fun with a flatlander and prepared by having a last toke each before flipping their butt away. Hoboy tugged my brother clear and made another one of his noises before he closed on those two men and laid them low.

He knocked them both over and kicked them around, particularly the nastier one of the two who indulged in a fair bit of profane commentary.  He had the scruffier beard and the grubbier clothes and fingernails like you’d find on a witch in the woods.  He informed Hoboy in some detail what manner of son-of-a-bitch he was.  The other one had the good sense to merely roll around and groan.

My brother was leery of getting up next to Hoboy, had never seen him violent before, so he hung back and called out to him, finally managed to turn him his way. 

“We ought to go,” my brother said.

Hoboy told him, “Hoboy,” twice.

He didn’t drive us any faster out of that place than he’d driven us in, and then we sat at the junction while Hoboy had a look in the rearview mirror.

“They’ll be mad,” he told us and then waited to hear which way he ought to turn.

Hoboy looked east.  He was clearly all for finding the four-lane again and us camping with our troop another time. My brother, though, couldn’t see the point of coming all that way and then turning tail on account of a spot of bother.

“Believe they were drunk,” my brother told us.  “Probably won’t remember a thing.”

Hoboy checked his mirror and said, “Hoboy,” once again.

My brother bargained with Hoboy and got him to drive us a couple of miles to the west with the understanding that if we didn’t find the place we were after pretty quick, we’d go home.  But we were hardly around the first kink in the road when we saw the state park sign and then took the turn up towards the trailhead we were after.  The bus from home was the only thing in the lot.

It was dark by then, and my brother pulled out our only flashlight to discover the batteries in it were pretty well spent.  We’d brought a couple of boxes of matches as well and there was a road flare in the trunk.  My brother wanted to light it and head up the trail to find the troop, but Hoboy declared we’d be passing the night on the bus.

He was emphatic so rarely we had to assume he meant what he was saying,  so we pulled our sleeping bags out of the Bel Air and then stood by and watched as Hoboy shifted it to a clear place well across the lot where he could be sure no acorns and busted limbs would drop down on it. Hoboy was never not particular about that sort of stuff.

My brother finagled the bus door open, and we climbed on board and talked about how we’d rise with the sun and catch our troop in time for breakfast. Then we wrapped up against the chill while Hoboy made his noises and walked the aisle.

We were just kids, so we didn’t dwell on stuff. The past was the past, and we had an adventure before us, which left us untroubled enough to stretch out on those cold vinyl seats and sleep until Hoboy woke us each up with his hand over our mouths.

There was a familiar truck in the lot over by our Chevrolet with scrap lumber and bathroom fixtures piled on the bed. Its headlights were pointed at our car, and we’d gotten rousted just in time to see a man flatten two of our tires by stabbing at the sidewalls with a knife. He must have been one of the dumpster guys, but we couldn’t see him well enough to know. Whoever he was, he’d brought along friends, and I counted five grown people and one kid the size of us.

I remember fearing they’d bring that knife on over and show us our intestines, but instead they did some rowdy hooting next to our Bel Air, and then one of them pulled some sort of lantern out of the cab of the truck and led the pack of them to the trailhead and into the woods.

“I say we go off and hide.”  That was my suggestion.  I was at that stage in life where being scarce usually struck me as a better than average option.

“Go off how?” my brother wanted to know.

Hoboy had an idea. 

There was a screwdriver in the ignition slot of that truck with the shower stall on it, and the engine started once Hoboy had turned the handle just the once. The cab was powerfully aromatic and junked up all over the place with rags and shirts and jackets and caps.  There might have been two years’ worth of mail up on the dash.

Hoboy did a fair bit of grinding before he’d located reverse, but nobody ran from the woods to chase us.  We got out on the road soon enough and headed away from the park.  Away from the dumpster.  Away from home as well.

That was maybe the first time I noticed how brutally simple life can get. We’d planned on three nights of camping, hiking around and building fires, and there we were trying to save our skins in a big nasty truck we’d stolen. This was way back before you could fish out your phone and get some kind of help. We had a dark road and a sheet of greasy notepaper instead of a map. Things might have been thorny for us, but they sure weren’t complicated.

“You hear that?” my brother asked me.

I told him I hadn’t, but I had.  It sounded like it was coming from right behind the seat, the sort of rustling noises a snake or a rat might make. My brother pulled the seat back up enough to have a look because he always had to get to the bottom of things.  He got hissed at for his trouble.  I’m pretty sure I screamed.  Hoboy made three or four of his noises and very nearly stopped the truck.  We all bailed before we’d decided exactly what we ought to do.

“Possum, I think,” my brother informed us as we watched the truck keep going.

We’d just been coming to a downgrade, and the thing picked up decent speed but kept on straight where the road bent and plowed into the woods. We could see the tail lights.  The left blinker came on.  The engine roared, and the back wheels spun.

Hoboy made one of his noises. My brother said, “Might can back it out,” but just then we all heard something coming and scrambled up into the woods as headlights hit the road below us and an old Ford wagon chugged by. 

It stopped down by the tail lights and people poured out. We couldn’t tell if they were the ones from before or a fresh batch riding the roads, and I caught myself wondering if mountain country was given over to marauders who’d get liquored up and then tour around to make mischief all over the place. Slash tires. Rough up scoutmasters. Keep possums for pets.

I had all sorts of questions about upland living, but it was hardly the time to put them because that bunch from the wagon fanned out through the woods to look for the thieving fools who’d jumped out of that truck.  Half of them stuck to the low side of the road, while the rest of them came hustling up our way, so me and my brother each grabbed a belt loop and let Hoboy haul us wherever he pleased.

There was no moon to see by, just the scantest wash of starlight, and one of the guys who was looking for us kept striking his Zippo and putting it out.  We could hear the clatter of it and, at first, could see the flame until Hoboy had walked us through a crease and down across a hillside from where we heard two of those men shout and yelp once they’d rousted a bear. It came lumbering by where we were.  The humans went the other way.

I didn’t want to cry, but I wasn’t old enough to keep from it.  I’d been eleven for only three weeks.  This was May of ‘68, and I’d camped out in the back yard twice and had slept a few times with my brother on Mr. Frank’s screen porch. None of that had equipped me to wander around an old mountain forest at night in anything resembling a settled mood.

I’m pretty sure I blubbered, and I’m just about certain my brother ridiculed me for it. He never cried, even when he laid his chin open and they were sewing him up.  My brother schemed and strategized.  He swatted folks with shoes.

Hoboy had been, by Hoboy standards, remarkably quiet for a while, and I heard him whisper, “Hoboy,” while we stood there close together, while we waited until the time seemed ripe for us to move through the woods again.

I didn’t have a clue about where we’d go to find a working phone or if there was anybody in the vicinity we could trust to help us.  What if all the hillbilly rascals around were cousins to each other and there wasn’t a soul we could run across who wouldn’t turn us in?

We were in a fix, and since I couldn’t begin to tease out a solution, I had to work to keep myself from sitting down for a blubbering pout.  We heard night birds nearby and a deer (I imagine) snorting across the way but no bears as far as we could tell, and the mountain men seemed to have retreated, so we held to Hoboy’s belt loops and let him lead us farther on.

We were in one of those forests with towering trees and no groundcover much, and we walked for maybe a half an hour until we came to a thicket of laurels.  There was a hollow in among the bushes big enough to hold us all.

Hoboy made a noise to let us know we’d reached our camp for the night, so we settled onto the damp ground and squeezed in close together  —me and my brother and the man from our basement we never called Monroe.

2

We all slept fine.  Anxiety makes you weary, even if you’re given to flapping and being wrought up. I remember opening my eyes and wondering why I was outside under a bush during that blissful moment before the world horned in.  Then I was cold and hungry and worried about bears and grubby upland men.

My brother ventured out of the bushes to do what nature required, and then me and Hoboy heard him start in on his calisthenics.  He’d lately read about body tone in one of our mother’s magazines and had set his sights on making himself a specimen. My brother was the sort who could decide to do a thing and do it.  In this case, it was squat thrusts and straddle hops capped off with jumping jacks.

We listened, me and Hoboy, as we finished waking up.  Then I said, “Morning.”

He said, “Hoboy,” back.

Once we’d crawled out of the laurels to join my brother, the three of us did some extended standing around. We were in a kind of forest we didn’t have down in the flatlands. Ours were more pines and sweetgums than hardwoods and usually so much undergrowth you couldn’t wander through, but that stretch of mountain woodland was thick with ash trees and butternuts, tulip poplars and massive oaks of every flavor.  It was rocky in there with bluffs and slopes and no underbrush at all except for the odd scattered clump of laurel bushes.

My brother had a question for anybody who cared to take it.  He aired it out and let it sit there. “So?”

It was a weird situation to be in.  Our grown-up was dinged and damaged.  One of us was only thirteen and knew far less than he thought he did, and the eleven-year-old among us had to work to keep from whining. I wanted my mother in a powerful way, which I made a brave attempt to hide.

Hoboy picked a direction and pointed. “Road, you think?” he asked us.

“Naw,” my brother told him and pointed somewhere else. “And what if we went out there and everybody was one of them?”

That was the thought that had me rattled.  It was us three against all their crew, and we couldn’t say where their crew stopped and started.  As far as I knew, there weren’t any towns to speak of anywhere close, so out of the woods we’d be at the mercy of whoever we ran across us, and Hoboy had knocked two of them over and kicked them around.

“Phone in the park maybe.”  That was my suggestion.  “What do you figure they did to the troop?” They’d been on my mind as well.

My brother proved optimistic.  “Might have quit before they got there.  You know what Daddy says about trash.” 

Our father held a decidedly low opinion of trashy people because they couldn’t ever shoot you straight or find their gumption with both hands.  They also, according to him, rarely finished much at all, so I could well imagine that bunch getting partway up the trail and turning back.

“Think we can cut through and find everybody?” is what I wanted to know.

I was a new Scout and so had no practice much at orienteering while my brother was decent with that stuff at the kitchen table, but we were mapless and down to a general sense of direction from the sun.

“Park’s up here to the east.” My brother pointed. “I guess we’ll find them or we won’t.” 

At least that forest made for easy for walking. Deer would see us and run, and we treed some creature that looked like an over-ambitious muskrat, were standing around debating exactly what the thing might be when somebody fired a gun nearby, so we clammed up and headed off.

If I’m honest, I can’t be certain we didn’t walk in a giant loop, and I’ll admit I saw some trees and rocks that looked a touch familiar.  We made a pact to only speak in whispers and not do much of that, so we had little to distract us while we were tramping through the woods and stopping every now and then to see what we could hear.

Along about what I took for mid-afternoon, I learned what hungry meant. There’d been plenty of times in my life when I’d believed I was borderline starving because lunch had been scant and supper was a little late, but only once I hit twenty hours past my last vienna sausage did I get a feel for being something on the order of famished.

I was weak and shaky, and I sniveled, of course, so my brother stripped off some hickory bark and gave me a piece to chew as he acquainted me with the nutrients I’d be enjoying.  He failed, I noticed, to chew any bark himself. Hoboy fished out a linty butterscotch wrapper and handed it over to me to lick. Then the clouds moved in, and we lost the sun and all got kind of gloomy because we couldn’t tell any longer how to go even kind of east.

We never heard traffic, never heard people beyond that solitary gunshot, saw a bear cub way up in a tree and gave it as wide a berth as we could.  Then the breeze kicked up and the chill came on, and we got even glummer. 

In the version I tell these days, that’s precisely when we found her. I have us spying her up in a grove of white oaks scratching around in the dirt, but the homely truth is that me and my brother were arguing about shoelaces.  Mine kept coming undone, and he had a way of making his stay tied, which I didn’t want to hear about because I was tired and hungry and lost, not to mention unhappy my brother hadn’t stayed at home with his cut chin like most ordinary people would.

I got screechy and yelled at my brother about a slew of stuff until somebody yelled at me back in what turned out to be German. I know now it was “halt die klappe,” which means something like “shut up”.

I quit talking and looked around.  My brother did the same, while Hoboy, for his part, barked out something back.

“Zeige dich,” is what he said, which was surprising coming from Hoboy since oftentimes he was barely up to English.

Then some sort of human showed itself ahead among the oaks.  It was wearing an awful lot of clothes, shabby on top of shabby, and fingerless gloves and a big knit hat, green rubber boots to the knees.  It was holding a sack made from a jacket sleeve in one hand and a big kitchen knife in the other, and I remember thinking in my pouty way wasn’t it just our luck to come out in the middle of nowhere and find a troll.

It spoke again, said, “Was Jetzt.”

Hoboy went with, “Wir sind verloren.”

That earned him a grunt and then the creature turned and started to walk off.

Hoboy told us something in German because he was slow to switch, but he found his English soon enough and said, “Let’s go.”

Our troll gathered some kind of mushroom along the way, a bit of moss off the ground as well.  Everything went in the sack, and we got only the odd, sour glance until it paused to dig up some sort of root when it asked Hoboy, “Hat verloren?”

He nodded and asked back, “Du sprichst Englisch?” and got something on the order of, “Yes.”

But nobody spoke any English for a bit or any German either until we’d arrived at a white oak with a clump of mistletoe high in the limbs.  “Who climbs?” it wanted to know.

I raised my hand because I do that when I’m cowed and anxious. My brother was the one who ran into fence posts and did straddle hops.

“Mistel. You get for me.”

So I shimmied up the trunk and climbed through the limbs until I reached the mistletoe when I busted off a fair sized clump and dropped it. That went into the sack as well.

Our troll wasn’t in a hurry and just kept stopping and picking up stuff.

“What if he’s in with them?” my brother wanted to know.  He put it to me and Hoboy in a whisper.

Hoboy said, “Hoboy,” and I told my brother back that I didn’t care who he was in with as long as I got something to eat. 

We walked for probably half an hour, crossed two streams and navigated six or eight hills before we came to a plank fence with a climbing stile.  Over we went and down into a hacked-out clearing where there was a donkey and a run-in shed and what was hard to credit as a house.  It didn’t look much look any building I’d ever seen. There were windows in odd places and outcroppings all over. The roof had more angles than you’d find on a cathedral.  It was part tin, part slab wood and part rotten asphalt shingles with what looked like a poncho tacked up there as well.

There was a garden plot off to one side of the place, and it was dead lush but weedy.  I saw maybe four chickens in what passed for the yard. Our troll went straight to the front door where it kicked off its rubber boots and removed its cap to let its braid fall free and so became, certainly to my surprise, a woman.

“Come,” she told us, and we followed her inside

It was warm in there, and that house was packed with the sort of stuff I’d not expected. I’d figured the furnishings would be rude and ready, knocked together out of lap wood or woven up with twigs.  Instead, the place was full of proper chairs and proper tables, old ones for sure and worn from use, but probably nice in their day, and there were framed photographs all over, pictures of people mostly and big oil lamps with colorful glass shades.

“I am Anke,” the woman told us.

Since my brother and I finally knew for certain to say, “Yes, ma’am,” we said it and then introduced ourselves.  My brother did that duty for Hoboy, using both of his names.

“He lives with us,” my brother said.  “He was in the war, and it did him some harm.”

By then, I was finding all the chit chat a little exasperating and explained to Anke we’d been in the woods just getting by on bark. I get pushy when I miss a meal.

“You will have Buchtel,” she informed us.  “And tea.”

Then she stepped over to what served as her kitchen—an iron cookstove and cluttered table.  That house was all one big room with niches and crannies and alcoves where you could be around a corner, but that was as private as you’d get.

While Anke did whatever she needed to do, we all had a look at her stuff. I know now hers was empire furniture, but even then I could tell it was fancy while being run down and a little worn out.  Some of her chair cushions were held together with tape, and she had a stack of plank scraps leveling up a hutch that had lost a foot.  There were books all around, most of them in German, and something that looked like a bathmat with a head on her settee.

That turned out to be Ernst who was some kind of spaniel.  He had tumors all over, a wheezy airway, and eyes that were mostly crust.

“This your dog?” my brother chose to ask.

She said something loud in German, and Ernst roused himself and grumbled and then went back to being inert.

“Ernst ist uralt,” Anke told us.

By way of translation, Hoboy informed us Ernst was very old.

Smelly too.  At least I decided the worst of it was coming from the dog.  The whole place had a musky bear-den aroma, and part of that had to be the upholstery and all the clothing hanging on pegs. 

“Are we near a road?” my brother asked.

Anke gave the question some thought, appeared to factor in what my brother might mean by “near” before she told him, “No.”

“Where do you go for food and stuff?”

“Drausen,” she said and did her own translating.  “Outside.”

She pointed Hoboy to her flatware and directed him to set the table, which he couldn’t really do until she’d moved some pots and junk.  The whole time she nattered on in both English and German and left room for us, if we pleased, to say the odd thing back. She seemed like a creature delighted to have some ears to pour talk into.

Anke served us what looked like big dinner rolls, but hers were full of jam, and we had tea that, as best I could tell, she’d made from twigs and leaves.  It tasted all right once I’d put enough honey in it.

“How’d you get all this stuff out here?” my brother wanted to know as he looked around at the chairs and the settee, the pair of corner cupboards, the carved bedstead across the way in the back.

“Karl,” she told us and fetched a photo, a small black and white one in a silver frame, a picture of a young man standing on a city street somewhere. A trolly car was rolling up behind him. “His house,” she said.

“Your husband?” my brother wanted to know.

She shook her head, told us, “Bruder.”

Then she reached across and removed the bandage from my brother’s chin. Anke eyed the wound and the stitches like a doctor might and plucked a jar off a shelf nearby that looked half full of mud.  Green mud.  She dug some out with her finger and smeared it on the cut. The stuff smelled well wide of medicinal, had a rotten, barnyard stink.

Anke watched as Hoboy used a knife and fork to cut up and eat his bun.  My brother and I were used to seeing that from him.  Hoboy was awfully particular about his dining, bordering on prissy.  He always cut his food into tiny bits and then speared it like a grand duke with his fork in his left hand.

“War, yes?” Anke asked him.

Hoboy nodded.

“In Deutschland?”

He nodded another time.  A moment passed, and then he twitched. There wasn’t much help for it.

“You from over there?” my brother asked Anke.  I noticed there was something sticking out of the slop on his chin that looked like a cricket’s leg.

Anke nodded. “From Passau.”

“Dreiflussestadt,” Hoboy told her.

“Du warst da?” she asked him and got a nod.

We waited for them to fill us in, and after a while they did.  Passau was a town where three rivers met, and Hoboy had been through the place once.

“Were you there for the war?” my brother asked Anke.

“A little, but came here.”

I blotted my crumbs up with my finger.  Anke watched me at it and then went into a cupboard off against the far wall and came away with a sizeable lump of something wrapped in greasy burlap.  It was a joint of meat, and she sliced off pieces for me.  They were salty and delicious but tasted way too wild for pig.

“Now,” she said to us generally, “you.”

We let my brother do it because he’d reached an age where he could nearly tell a story straight.  He started with the fence post he’d run into and the stitches that he’d gotten and had us up in the mountains at fifty miles an hour in only a little while.

My brother showed Anke the directions our mother had jotted down and pointed out the grease spots that had made them hard to read.

“And it was getting dark, and my flashlight was only half working.”

When my brother reached up to scratch at the dried goo on his face, Anke clicked at him like you’d do to a horse and said, “Verlassen.”

He menaced up the men at the dumpster more than they probably rated since they’d been chiefly grubby and drunk and, by way of offense, had only touched one of his merit badges.

“Pawed me a little,” my brother said and then had a glance Hoboy’s way. “That’s when he showed up.”

Hoboy wasn’t keen to describe his part in the thing beyond telling us two times, “Hoboy,” so my brother filled in Anke. “He knocked them over. Kicked them around.”

“They cut our tires,” I added but got huffed at by my brother who, like I said, had reached the age where he’d be getting to that in time.

It was nearly dark in Anke’s house by then, so she went around and lit the lamps. The light from the one nearest to me brought out the details of a picture I’d not been able to really make out before.  It was a photograph like from Civil War days of a man with a beard and a woman with a bonnet and a child in some kind of smock who was perched on both their laps. I knew right away there was something off about them, but it took a bit for me to recognize that those people were all dead.

Anke noticed what I’d noticed.  “My brother collected,” she told me, “Posthume bilder, they call it.” Then she gestured kind of everywhere at all the other pictures of dressed-up posed dead people (I had to think).

I believe I said, “Oh,” while feeling a gush of fondness for the shrubbery where we’d slept.

Then my brother carried on with the rest of the saga.  The flattened tires, the truck, the restless possum, the station wagon, the spooked bear.

“We slept on the ground in a clump of bushes. He ate some bark.”

By then I was wondering what sort of man would hack a clearing in the forest so he could build a house to put his fancy furniture and his pictures of dead people in and then live there away from everybody with a donkey, a dog, and his sister. Funny wasn’t quite the word for that.

But Hoboy distracted me right about then by making one of his noises, the lone noise of his, in fact, that only ever meant one thing.

“He needs to do his business” my brother told Anke.

“Badezimmer?” she asked Hoboy, which earned her a nod and a “Ja.”

Anke had an outhouse off across the chicken yard, and she lit an old railroad lantern and walked the three of us over to it, though Hoboy looked like this was something he’d prefer to get up to alone.  It turned out, though, there was a process and a protocol for making use of the jakes.  First, you banged the side of the outhouse with an ax handle handy for that purpose to give snakes and such the chance to slip away.

Then you stepped in and shook the magazines you’d getting your paper from in case there were spiders or something hanging around.

Anke tore out a page and lit it, dropped it down into the dung hole while she told us about a woods rat she’d found in the slurry once.

Hoboy got to keep the lantern when we left him on his own, and he hardly looked like a man fully primed to be productive.

Ernst the dog slept on the sofa.  Anke claimed her big carved bed, while me and my brother and Hoboy stretched out where we could on the floor.  Hoboy had been issued a proper blanket.  My brother slept underneath a topcoat while Anke had given me a tablecloth and a pillow from the couch.

Ernst snored and broke noxious wind.  Anke muttered in her sleep in German.  Hoboy groaned and twitched and flapped a little while I wondered of my brother if he’d ever seen pictures of pretend-alive people before.

He said he’d found a shoebox once in Mr. Frank and Mama Peach’s attic that was crammed full of snapshots of a house they used to live in and dogs they used to own, and he said there was a picture in there of somebody dead in their parlor.

“On a table.  Wearing a suit. Had a flower in his hand.”

I meant to say something like, “Weird,” but it came out,  “I want to go home.”

3

Anke was happy for the company, that was the thing, and we were too polite at first to push her much about our troubles, so we ended up gathering eggs and helping Anke peel some tree roots she stewed up in a tonic to give to Ernst.

After that, me and Hoboy and my brother replaced a section of Anke’s fence that a tree had fallen onto and knocked down.  That meant we had to cut the tree up first, stick in a post and saw some planks, all the while discussing ways of putting Anke on our case without coming off as inconsiderate and pushy.

Naturally, being around a German was agitating Hoboy, and we’d noticed he was flapping a little more than he usually did.  He never could not flap entirely, but when life was more settled and serene, Hoboy could go for most of a day with only a twitch or two. We were in a fix, however, and were staying with this German stranger whose house was full of pictures of people posed to be photographed dead.  Once you threw in the stink of her ancient dog and her tea that made our tongues numb, then it seemed a small miracle my brother and I weren’t flapping a little ourselves.

We got enlisted to help the woman doctor on her donkey.  He had an abscess on one of his back legs, and she punctured it with a nail and drained it while she told us about leaving Bavaria and coming to live with her brother in the woods.  She had to talk over the racket the donkey was making while we all tried to not look at the pus, and then she walked us over to the spot where her brother, Karl, was buried.  He was underneath a mound of rocks hard by a droopy bush.

She said she’d dug the hole herself and had wheelbarrowed her brother out to it but had kept him in the yard for the afternoon to make sure he was dead.

“I almost left then,” she told us but shook her head and eventually added, “Didn’t.”

Then she said we were welcome to weed her garden while she put something together for lunch.

We felt safe back in there at Anke’s place, and that put us off from bothering her much about our stuff.  We might have hoped, I did anyway, that those two men from the dumpster would see their rage and indignation drain away if given time. Back then, people didn’t stay exercised the way they do today, so it wasn’t altogether foolish to think that things would settle out. In the meantime, we’d do some work for Anke, get ourselves fed and rested, and after another night or two we’d fix our flat tires and go home.

We had lunch auf dem hauf (Anke called it) out in the yard between the chickens and the donkey pus. She served dense bread she’d baked from (if you looked at it close) maybe silage, and cheese she’d made from the milk of a goat we’d yet to see.  His name was Claus, and he was (she pointed, sort of) over there somewhere.  Then we got cured meat again (venison, I’m pretty sure) and a salad that was mostly mustard greens, the sort that gives your sinuses a scour. Anke’s twig tea numbed our tongues some more, and then there was some kind of fudge (I hoped).

We sat on the tablecloth I’d used for cover, and Ernst even lumbered out to join us after a while.  He was a sight upright, a blend of shaggy bits and hairless places where his mats and tangles had been snipped away. He’d shown up for the cured meat and stood prepared to help himself no matter how much bossy German Anke leveled at him.

“He is deaf,” she told us, “sometimes.”

We had a great aunt like that who could rarely make out what you were visiting on her to her face but could hear you whispering fifty feet away. Anke warned Ernst off to no visible effect, so she fixed him a regular luncheon plate, and he even ate the mustard greens.

“Now,” Anke said once Ernst was seen to.  “Tell me about these men.” 

“They had a big truck,” my brother said as if that would key something for Anke, as if the whole territory wasn’t filthy with locals driving big trucks around. Then my brother decided to mention as well the possum in the cab but left out the part where we jumped into the road.

“What shall we do?” Anke asked.

My brother, the strategizer, admitted he’d given some thought to that. So we sat out in the yard on that tablecloth working through our various options while Ernst tried to lick the glazing off his plate.

My brother started, like usual, with his most complicated schemes, the kind that called for luck and timing and were certain to not work out.  That was how he limbered up for almost all his enterprises.  He’d float his fancy ideas and then get around to the plain ones after a while.  So we heard from my brother about two or three capers no humans could ever pull off before he scaled back and wondered of Anke, “Where’s the park from here anyway?”

She didn’t appear to know.

“Can’t be far,” my brother told her, and he described the lot where the bus had been along with our Chevy and its two flat tires.  He placed the turnoff for her on the two-lane, and I helped him give a fair accounting of the look of the state park sign.

“I don’t,” Anke told us, “ever use the roads.” Aside from her wheelbarrow, she had no vehicle, and she said she only ever walked through the woods and rarely went where people were.

Ernst by then had given up on his plate and had wandered over to sniff at Hoboy who made a variety of discouraging noises, but none of them appeared to work. There were bits of Hoboy Ernst meant to smell, and (by God) he was going to smell them.

Watching Hoboy squirm and twitch, Anke was reminded of a thing she’d intended to do, and she dug around in one of her pockets and brought out a lump of something.  It was chunky and fuzzy, about the size of a gumdrop, and she handed it to Hoboy and told him, “Eat.”

Hoboy was not in the habit of popping fuzzy things into his mouth, and he was enduring as it was the snouty attention of Ernst, so he made at Anke a noise that meant he might eat her fuzzy thing later.

“Eat,” she said and then said it again in German.

So Hoboy tossed the thing into his mouth and chewed. He didn’t twitch or flap at all for the rest of the afternoon, and I know that because I spent most of it walking behind him.  He was just like anybody up there stalking through the woods.

Our brother had persuaded Anke to lead us to where he’d decided the park might be, and it was surprising to me that Anke knew so little about the place. We asked if a ranger worked there, but she couldn’t begin to say, and the farther we got away from her house, the more she was just like us. She’d wander.  She’d stop.  She’d reconnoiter and then pick a direction and go.

I brought up the rear to keep company with Ernst who followed us for a stretch, but he was slow and wheezy, creaky at the hinges, and soon enough lost interest in us and went off to sniff a stump.

We walked for close to an hour before we came to a kind of road.  It was too overgrown to be the sort traveled much, more like a logging route or a fire lane that was ready to take a truck provided the thing was high enough to clear the ruts and shrubs. 

Anke stopped and stuck at the edge and wouldn’t go across it.

“I don’t know,” she said.

The thing she didn’t appear to know was if she could clear that road and keep going.  She didn’t say as much outright, but we all put it together because she kept on staying exactly where she was. We went over to the far side and waited for her, but she failed to come across and join us.

“What is it?” my brother asked her.

Hoboy went with, “Gibt es ein problem?” and then didn’t bother (like usual) to twitch or flap.

“I don’t go places,” she told us and looked up and down that fire road.

Wild territory wasn’t off limits, but the tame spots were trouble for her, to the extent a neglected and overgrown muddy fire road can be tame.  Anke had a sad and slightly panicked look, like somebody who’d gone all the way to the beach but was too scared to step into the ocean. Then Hoboy went back across that road and offered her the crook of his arm.  Still not flapping.  Still not twitching at all.

She grabbed him and let him squire her into the road where Hoboy stopped so Anke could see how ordinary standing there was.

“Bis du gut?” he asked her, and she nodded and told him she was fine.  She even turned loose of Hoboy’s arm and came the rest of the way on her own.

“After my brother,” Anke explained to us, “I’ve been too much at home.”

So we were taking her on her first trip into the settled world for a while with the promise ahead of maybe Boy Scouts and possibly peeved hillbillies.

“Ich brauche das,” she said to Hoboy and then translated for us.  “I need this.”

Anke stayed fairly normal and very close to all right after that, but she was not a lot of help about where we were and where the park might be. That upland forest didn’t give us an awful lot to go on. There were plenty of trees and rocks and rolling terrain but not much you could call a landmark, so we were just wandering when we finally came across a well-worn path through the woods.  It took us straight back to the parking where we’d left our Bel Air, which was sitting there all by itself because the bus was gone.

“Thought they were leaving tomorrow,” I told my brother.

“Maybe not if they got beat up.”

I hated to think harm might have come to our brother Scouts because we’d taken the wrong road and Hoboy had knocked a couple of guys over.

“Where’s our bumper?” my brother wanted to know. 

He was circling the Bel Air by then, and sure enough there were just bare brackets where our rear bumper had previously been.  We still only seemed to have two tires flat, the Keys were under the floor mat where Hoby had left them, but when he tried the engine, he couldn’t get it to start.

We raised the hood for a look, since that’s what men do, but none of us knew anything about car engines.  It was Anke who noticed the shiny brass nipple on top of the distributor cap.

“Wast ist dort hingegangen?” she asked Hoboy and pointed.

“Oh,” he said, “they took a wire.”

“Wasn’t enough to have two flats?” my brother wanted to know. Because he’d just gone thirteen, he was prone to be sour on people, and the idea of hayseeds going the extra mile truly rubbed him wrong.

“We can buy another one, right?” I decided to ask, and Anke said she kind of knew where a service station was, but when Hoboy pulled out all the money he had left from what our mother had given him, it only tallied up to fourteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. That was wasn’t much even back in those days no matter what people might tell you.

Then we heard an engine and all dashed into the woods from where we watched a rusty pickup truck roll into the lot.  There was a man and a woman in it who’d come out to the park for recreation but not, apparently, the sort they needed to leave the cab to get. So we kind of looked on as they groped and shucked some clothes and then argued for a while because of some remark the guy had made that the woman wouldn’t stand for.  He apologized and pleaded with her while she put her clothes back on, and then she relented and got half undressed again.

We had plenty of time to go over and try to get some help from those two, but we couldn’t say who they were or who they knew or what maybe they’d heard about us.  It was a peculiar spot to be in, to worry that every local stranger had some kind of obligation to beat you up. 

We eventually retreated into the woods and left the path where we got on it. Anke gathered roots and moss and fungus along the way back to her house, and I climbed a tree or three for additional mistletoe.  She used it in poultices, she told me, and in healing teas.

“You learn this stuff back home?” I asked her.  “You some kind of doctor?”

She said she hadn’t and she wasn’t but had merely picked it up.  Then she pointed out mushrooms we shouldn’t eat and moss we should avoid, and she told us about the various curing potions she’d concocted from what nature offered even in fallow seasons out in the woods.

Anke was convinced everything she needed was available to her in the forest if she knew where to look for it. She’d treated her brother’s infections and what she called his “grave internal complaints.”  That was the English of it anyway.  It came out a half-mile long in German, and she said she’d doctored considerably on Ernst the dog as well. 

“Come,” she said to my brother and invited him into a patch of sunlight where she tilted his head up and inspected his chin.  “Better,” she announced and maybe it was.  It was certainly green and crusty, and he appeared to have shed his cricket leg.

We eventually strayed onto a grove of trees that was familiar to Anke.  They were apricots and lady apples that had been part of somebody’s homestead, and she pointed out a couple of timbers that hadn’t yet finished rotting through, which was all that was left of a house or a barn or possibly a corn crib. 

Down where we lived, stuff sat empty and then got kudzued over in time, but up in the mountains with all the mist and the rain and everything growing gangbusters, places people abandoned all got reclaimed and erased.  A timber here.  An iron hinge there.  Every now and then some barbed wire, but it was hardly a challenge to walk through and see nothing human at all.

My brother strategized as we made our way back towards Anke’s house. He figured our troop had probably already gone home and were telling people about the crew of upland roughnecks they’d run into, and he imagined word had reached our parents that we’d not actually shown up. That meant our father would be coming up to the mountains, maybe with Mr. Frank, and they’d scour around.  Find the Bel Air.  Get the law involved.

“What if that bunch just stole the bus?” I asked him, and I could tell immediately that was a kink he hadn’t thought of yet.

“Why didn’t you say that while we were over there?” my brother wanted to know.

“Just thought of it, I guess.”

He blamed me for being late to speak up, blamed me for a lot of stuff back then because it was hard (I suppose) to have one foot in manhood and still be tripping into fence posts, so it was easier to flog me for a while.

Anke tolerated it until she couldn’t and told both of us, “Genug!  Beende es!” which Hoboy saw fit to translate as, “I’d stop.”

I did stop, and immediately.  My brother persevered for a while because being angry back then was his way of feeling responsible and mature.  He picked up a stick and peeled the bark from it, dragged along behind us in a pout muttering how stuff was harder for him than it ought to be and how he wished we’d stayed home or he’d maybe missed that fencepost, and he wondered why mountain people were so bound and determined to be mad.

We saw Claus the goat by happenstance, which served to cheer us up a little.  He looked to be right at home loose in the woods. He was wearing a collar with a bell attached to it, so it was hard for him to shift around and be discrete.  He wouldn’t come near us, looked especially leery of Anke like maybe he’d had one too many abscesses drained and more poultices than he could stand.  She called him.  He snorted and jumped straight up and kicked the way goats sometimes will.

“Claus,” Anke told us, “is eine personlichkeit.” She looked to Hoboy for a better word.

Hoboy said, “That goat’s a card.”

We fiddled and wandered is how I remember it, and Claus soon enough went his own way.  Anke had brought along her sack made out of a coat sleeve, and she’d pick up oddments and put them in it.  Sometimes she’d tell us how she used them and what they did, but occasionally she’d just say, “Oh!” with a kind of delighted surprise and snatch up whatever it was she’d found.

Even my brother was strolling along happily enough and not actively working up plans by the time we left the woods and climbed the fence into Anke’s clearing where the chickens came over, like chickens will, to see what we were about while the donkey said, “Hey here,” from across the way and stayed well out of reach. 

Anke announced that she’d be making a stew for supper, something full of delights (is what she said).  My brother tended to the fire in the hearth while I went around lighting the lamps, and as I was fooling with the matches and adjusting the wicks, I got a better look at all the pictures Anke’s brother had collected.  I’d worked through them before in a rattled way, but I felt like I was ready for a round of sober study.

He had a photo of a husband, a wife, and a baby all together in one casket.  They weren’t so much laid out as snuggled up.  The man’s nose was against his wife’s cheek.  The baby was wrapped in a blanket between them, and their arms and hands had been posed so artfully you’d think they were asleep. 

The worst was probably a couple of brothers, twins, with several bullet holes in them, and whoever had set them on a bench and posed them leaning against each other, seemed to only be out for proof those rascals were dead.  There were live men in the picture as well, but none of them were posing, so they’d all gone a little blurry while the film was being exposed, which had the effect of making the dead twins the only thing in focus.  They were slouched against each other and looking nowhere much.

There was a dead girl on a yard swing with what looked like a live dog on the ground beside her.  She was wearing a fancy white dress and shiny black shoes and had a hair bow as big around as a dinner plate with ringlets hanging down all over. She was also looking at nothing and came off as bored and glum.

My brother found a photograph that had been turned over, had been placed face-down on a shelf with a couple of books on top of it.  Two dead men in a rowboat.  Four dead fish on a stringer and a live pony at the waterside looking at it all.

“Something wrong with this one?” my brother asked Anke.

She was firing up her cookstove, and all she needed was a glance.  Anke told us she had a bad personal history with boats. So the dead guys were okay with her but the dinghy was a problem.

Hoboy and I moved the eating table over near the hearth and Anke insisted we use the fancy bowls that had been passed down from her mother, which were blue around the edges and probably had been lovely once.  We used her mother’s silver too, fancy stuff but tarnished.

We all took a touch of some fermented drink that Anke had in a jar. It tasted like something you’d get from a gutter, only with bubbles, and then we ate Anke’s stew and silage bread while Anke told us about the boat she’d fallen out of as a child and how the water had filled her boots that carried her straight down to the bottom.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“Mein bruder,” she said, and Anke showed us again the snapshot of Karl with the trolley car behind him.

That sort of talk, somehow, did its work on Hoboy, and he told us about a lake he swam in once in Belgium or somewhere, even though it was November and there was ice along the edges.

“Never been so dirty,” Hoboy said.  “Never been so cold.”

“He went behind a tank,” I told Anke.  It was kind of all I knew about Hoboy and the war.

“We caught a fish.” Hoboy held his hands apart a foot and a half at least.  “They said it was a pike.”

Then my brother, at that moment, took an interest in Ernst who’d been (even for him) uncommonly stationary. My brother got up and went to the sofa.  He poked the dog.  I saw him do it.

Then he said to Anke mostly, “I don’t think he’s all right.”

4

Ernst was dead, but he fit right in with the decor because his cloudy eyes were open and he was looking nowhere much. He was half on his back with a leg sticking up.

“Oh, baby,” Anke said.  She wiggled his leg and made a Hoboy noise, the one he usually loosed when he was tired from shoveling ditches, but it worked well enough there sofa-side for grief.

“How old is he?” my brother wanted to know.  He had a head for numbers and liked to quantify every stinking thing.

Anke couldn’t say. “He was here already,” she told us, “when I came.”

The practice Anke had observed with her brother would apply, she told us, to Ernst as well, which meant we didn’t dig the dog a grave straightoff or move his carcass out to the yard because Anke wanted to make sure he was gone for good and ever.  She told us about a story she’d heard of a dead woman waking up.  And we couldn’t put him outside since scavengers might get him.

So we had dead people in the photographs and a dead dog on the sofa, which served for a while to make our evening less chatty and jolly than before.  We ate our stew and gnawed our bread.  Anke shored herself up with an additional dram of spirits from her jar, and my brother told her about the dog we’d had when he was little.  He was gone already before I got there, but I’d seen pictures and heard stories.  His name was Pete, and he ate tomatoes and understood a bunch of words.

“He went where you told him to,” my brother explained, “even if it was ‘go in the bathroom and sit in the tub’ or something like that.”

Anke said Ernst was kind of the same, except he always went to the sofa, and then she shared with us lively delightful stuff that Ernst had gotten up to in the years before he grew fat and lame and started looking like a bathmat.

I slept under the table cloth again, eventually anyway.  At first, my brother and I were restless and fooled with the fire in the grate because we were kids and found fire fascinating, which meant we troubled the coals until Anke called out to us, “Nicht.”

Ernst was just as dead in the morning as he’d been the night before but quite a lot stiffer at it, so we had to dig an extra-wide hole.  It was that or do more violence to his stiff leg than we could stomach.

Anke wanted him out by her brother, so that’s where me and Hoboy dug while my brother helped Anke make up a marker for Ernst. Not any kind of cross.  Anke was generally down on Jesus, so instead they found a big, flat stone they liked and painted it over with his name while Hoboy and I were making our slow way into the hard ground.  Rocks and roots.  Roots and rocks. We were excavating scant inches at a time.

“Think Daddy’s on his way up?” I asked Hoboy as we worked.  Or as he worked really.  He’d found a mattock and was going to town with the thing while I stood clear and troubled him with questions.

Hoboy made a noise to let me know he couldn’t say.

“They can’t still be mad, right?  Those two guys.”

That earned me the racket from Hoboy that usually meant, “You can’t know what people will do.”

Hoboy didn’t do anything halfway, which meant we laid Ernst nearly four feet under and covered him with dirt and then stones on top like Anke’s brother beside him. After that the marker went up.  Anke had painted Ernst’s name on that big, flat rock above the words Guter Junge.

She left Hoboy to tell us, “Good boy,” because she’d gone weepy by then.  And out of all of us, it was Hoboy who laid an arm around her and drew her close in a way that wasn’t funny at all.

Then Anke announced we’d spend the day out finding remedies for our troubles because she couldn’t bear, she told us, to be at home.

She packed food and handed out jackets and wool hats since the weather was breezy and gray and then led us off her property a way we’d not gone before, out past the chickens and the weeded garden and along beside her compost pile and then up a bit of a bluff and down and over into deep forest.

There was no trail, no trash, no sign at all that people had ever passed through, but Anke largely appeared to know just where she was going.  Every now and again she’d stop and have a thorough look around but more by way (it seemed) of confirming we were headed where she wanted.

We stopped for honey cookies and tongue-numbing tea on a rock slide in the middle of the woods.

“Where are we going?” my brother asked Anke.

“I think I know a place,” she said.  “It’s been some time, but things here don’t change.”

I wanted to know what kind of place.  I wanted to know who’d be there.  I wanted to know how we’d get our mess all fixed for fourteen dollars, but my tongue was numb and I had a mouthful of cookie, so I just figured I’d go where they went.

I’d say we walked for over an hour and didn’t do a lot of talking.  I saw two deer and some kind of ground bird that disappeared once it sat still, and we heard a man yelling for a dog (I guess) well off and away from us.  Otherwise, that forest was entirely ours, and Anke pointed out mushrooms she’d gather and plants she pick up coming back.

Then I saw a bottle and part of a box, some rusty chunk of kitchen appliance right where we climbed a slope that put us on a proper, asphalt road. There was thick forest on either side but a line painted down the middle like this was a route that people took in a regular way.

“It’s this way.”  Anke pointed, and we followed her down to where the road curved and bent just as a fellow came through in a fancy van. Not nice fancy necessarily but loaded with custom touches and adornments like a ladder on the back and a porthole window and some kind of airbrushed creature on the big side door that appeared to be a dragon about half passing for a cow.

The thing was moving at a stately speed the way that sort of van often is, so the driver hardly needed to slow down to get a leisurely look at us.  He eyeballed us but good, so we eyeballed him back.  I did anyway.  He was awfully scruffy, was wearing a greasy cap and had more beard than a human should be allowed, especially a human who’d never think to comb the thing or shake it out.

After he’d passed us, he hit the gas hard as if he suddenly had someplace he needed to be.

Once we cleared the curve, I could see up ahead an honest-to-god service station.  This was back before you pumped your own gas and your car had a motherboard in it, back when you’d go to a station like this one for both your fuel and your repairs.

There were tires stacked up by the lone garage bay and a tow truck parked beyond the pumps. We could see a man in coveralls fooling with a trash barrel. His head was mostly bald spot, and he only had one arm.  Instead of pinning the empty sleeve up, he’d gone ahead and whacked it off.

“Him I know,” Anke said and then thought to add, “a little.”

At first, he sure didn’t seem to know her.  He stopped what he was doing and just stood there and watched us come. The closer we got, the more he squinted Anke’s way until she arrived within hailing distance and told him, “Hallo.  Guten tag.”

It was the German that rang a bell for him.  He said Anke’s way, “You her?”

She nodded and asked him, “How are you going?”

He had a glance where his arm would have been and shrugged.  “And your brother?”

Anke told him, “Dead.”

The guy made the Hoboy noise that means “Isn’t that just the way.”

We learned he was a Greider raised so far back in a hollow that he was nearly from Tennessee, and he’d allowed Anke’s brother to leave a shipping bin’s worth of furniture with him for as long as it took to move it a piece at a time into the woods.  The cupboards and the hutches and the chairs and the tables, even the big oak bedstead and all the fussy lamps. 

“I’m guessing you don’t need gas,” he said to the four of us standing there without a car.

That’s when my brother stepped forward to shake the only hand that Greider had and tell that gentleman every little thing.  He started (yet again) with his chin and the fencepost and did an admirable job of carrying through to the Scout bus and the park.

“He hit ‘em?” That Greider pointed at Hoboy.

“Pushed them, I’d call it,” my brother said.  “And maybe kicked them some.”

“I’m guessing they didn’t like that.”

“No sir.  Didn’t like it quite a lot.”

“Big white truck, you say?”

“Yes sir.  Had stuff on it.”

“A shower and a sink,” I volunteered.

“I know ‘em,” that Greider told us.  “Tall one’s a Maddox.  Other’s a Pratt.  Those two don’t know how to do much but stay half drunk and mad.”

“We just want to go home,” my brother said.

“Best place for you probably.” He did a bit of scratching and told us while he had a phone inside, it hadn’t worked for a couple of years.  “Which of y’all’s got the money?” he asked.

I was waiting to hear how my brother was going to make fourteen dollars spread, but Anke spoke up and headed him off as she drew from one of her pockets a substantial clump of bills.

“You say a tow and two flats and some kind of wire?”

Me and my brother and Hoboy all nodded instead of maybe doing the polite thing and discouraging Anke from paying for our stuff.  Sometimes you’re in a spot where you can’t really be polite, so we just nodded, and that Greider spat and told us, “All right. Let’s have a look.”

My brother and Hoboy rode in the tow truck with him, while me and Anke stayed back at the service station with instructions to tell anybody who came through for gas to leave their money on top of the pump.  It was that kind of world back then.  Worthless people were just as worthless, but we were generally given to thinking the best of most everybody else.

We sat out front on two stacks of tires, and Anke told me a little about the part of Bavaria she’d come from.  She said she’d left when the fighting was only just beginning and had crossed over on a ship to what sounded like maybe Baltimore or somewhere. She was starting in on the part where she’d found her way down to the mountains when we both saw trouble coming up the road.

That fancy van from before was in front with a truck I knew behind it, and that van was moving at such a decent clip this time that it skidded a little when it stopped.  The truck behind it came to a lurching halt as well.

Anke leaned close and told me, “You have no English.” Lucky for us, I was far too scared to speak.

The two dumpster guys rolled out of the truck as the scrubby boy left his van, and they all looked at us and then talked to each other.

The one with the fingernails started in first.  “Thought you said four.”

“Was.”

“Where’s the rest of you?” fingernails asked us while his dumpster buddy squinted at me hard.

I was pretty sure I hadn’t left the Bel Air back when Hoboy was kicking those gentlemen around, so I couldn’t believe they’d have much of a fix on me. Better still, I was wearing one of Anke’s brother’s coats and a fuzzy hat that made it seem like I might yodel any second.

Anke told them something in German and said it in a bubbly way.

“Wouldn’t you just know it,” Scruffy declared and studied us like we were rancid.

Anke smiled his way and said another bubbly German thing.

“Where’d they go?” That from the dumpster guy who knew a little about hygiene.  Then he asked it louder Anke’s way like you do.

She told him a lot of German back and pointed up along the road and then launched briefly into what I had to imagine was a Bavarian folk song.

That chafed those fellows pretty good.

“Knock it off,” fingernails told her, but Anke had another verse to sing and carried on to the end.

“They know what we’re saying,” the scruffy van guy insisted.  “Look at ‘em.”

They all gawked like maybe that’d be enough to tell what we were up to.

“What about you?” fingernails asked me and leaned in so close I was swamped by his sour stink. I made the sort of necknoise I guessed a rattled Bavarian child might make.

Anke, for her part, told fingernails quite a lot in German while she pointed at my throat.  I got the feeling she was explaining to them how I’d come to be a mute ragamuffin perched atop a stack of tires.

“I don’t like it,” the cleaner fellow declared before Anke had quite finished.

“Where’s Greider?” scruffy van guy asked just generally into the air.

Anke proved more than happy to take the question, and she chattered at him back.

“Truck’s gone.”  Fingernails pointed with his nose at the spot where the tow truck had sat.

“Probably hooking up that Chevy,” the other one said.  He wasn’t just cleaner but seemed a bit more on the ball as well.  Fingernails was just a rank bundle of animosity, while scruffy van guy was trying to make what proved to be seven dollars.

“Look here.”  Scruffy van guy pointed at that tow truck coming down the road.  It was hauling our Bel Air that was chewing up a flattened tire along the way.  It was shedding strips of it as they came but still not quite riding the rim by the time Greider turned into the service station lot.

My brother was sitting between Greider and Hoboy, barely visible over the dashboard, but I could see the dread and panic in his eyes.  Hoboy, I could tell, was saying, “Hoboy,” one on top of another like a chant.

Things promised to get ugly, and scruffy van boy decided he wanted no part of that and so pressed the two from the dumpster for the seven dollars they’d promised, but he ended up being satisfied with four singles and a little change. Then he went towards his van as he explained to any of us who cared to hear it that he’d usually be all in with a beat down but he had a court thing coming up.

He raced away from Mr. Greider’s station at about nine miles an hour.

“All right then,” fingernails said and stepped over to fetch about a foot of rebar off the bed of his truck.  His colleague went for what looked to me like a piece of shovel handle.

“We got business with them,” fingernails yelled Mr. Greider’s way and then said to Hoboy chiefly, “Get on out.”

I saw Mr. Greider say something to Hoboy and my brother, and then he alone climbed out of that tow truck with a mallet in his only hand.  It had a big wooden head and a stout wooden handle, and I would have needed three of me to swing it.  He, however, looked perfectly capable of banging around with the thing.

“Heard what happened,” he said.

Fingernails told him, “Just their end.”

“You wasn’t there,” the cleaner one added.  “Was you?”

Mr. Greider shook his head.  “I’m here though, and these folks are paying me for work.”

I can look back now and be cynical, say it was only about him doing business, but it didn’t feel exactly that way at the time.  More like Mr. Greider had been through just about everything he could stand, was down to running a service station in the middle of nowhere with one arm.  Maybe that day had started like any other, and he’d expected it to finish that way, but then we’d come along and played him straight, engaged him for a gainful purpose, and he wasn’t going to let a pair of local lowlives foul that up.

There was something potent about Mr. Greider and that mallet that the pair from the dumpster couldn’t begin to match.  Sometimes it isn’t enough to have a piece of rebar and a buddy if you’re lacking the appetite to get caught up in a fight.

The one with the shovel handle was already backing up by the time fingernails told Mr. Greider, “I guess we hear you.” Then he said to Hoboy mostly, “We’ll be seeing you later, friend.”

With that, they got in their truck and indulged in a spot of theatrical glaring as they rolled slowly out into the road.

Anke knew to say, “Thank you,” to Mr. Grieder before we could settle on it and do the same.

He wouldn’t have it and shook his head, tossed his mallet into the cab.

“I just get up to here sometimes,” he said and dragged a finger across his forehead.  Then he had a look around at his shabby station, his junky truck, his missing arm, and he loosed a breath and shook his head.  “I’ll have her fixed for you tomorrow. Can’t do much about that bumper.”

Anke handed Mr.Greider her entire clump of cash, but he only peeled off a couple of bills and gave the rest of it back.

“‘I’d stay off the road,” he told us. “They won’t have gone far.  They’ll quit on every kind of thing before they quit on something like this.”

I didn’t understand him at the time, but I’ve certainly seen enough since to know he was right. People with no measurable drive or even a hint of industriousness can nurse a slight and fret over a wound like nobody’s business.  They’ll build everything they do around getting satisfied.  If you want a man to truly remember you, do him any brand of harm.

“Can you get where you’re going through there?” Mr. Greider asked us and tipped his head towards the woods behind his station.

Anke assured him that we could and then led us down a slope that was littered with rusty rims and chunks of transmissions, old oil filters and soda bottles, but we were in the forest again soon enough among just the leaves and the limbs.

My brother said to me and Anke as we walked along, “He told us about his arm.”

Hoboy made a noise that could well have meant that was a story he didn’t much wish to hear again, but that wasn’t about to stop my brother.

“He said he was working on a tractor and got his hand caught down in the motor somewhere when it started to roll.”

Hoboy made another noise, which sounded to me like the first one, only again.

“It’s all steep around here, so it picked up decent speed and carried him right along with it. He said he was hanging off the side and stuff.”

This was just the kind of story to excite my brother at that time.  He’d aged into being sort of a ghoul, and the bloodier a thing was the better, which was a big change from him from collecting matchbooks and just having a head for math.  I was still thinking twice about cutting fishing worms in half.

“So it’s flying down this hill,” my brother told us, “and him still stuck and flapping around on the side when it goes through a bunch of trees, and it was one of them that got him.  What did he call it?” my brother asked Hoboy who was past even coming up with a noise.  “Scraped him off.  That’s what he said, and only part of his arm went with him.”

I’d picked up a stick and was trying to close my ears and peel the bark clean.

“He showed us what he had left, rolled up his sleeve and all.  Didn’t he?” my brother asked Hoboy but didn’t wait for any racket.  “Kind of lumpy and stuff.  Guess that’s how they do things up here.” My brother walked in blessed silence for a moment before he added, “Bet it hurt.”

Nobody felt the need to say anything else for a pretty considerable while.  Instead, we just followed Anke wherever she chose to lead us, and it took her a bit before she felt dead sure of where we were.

We’d stopped for cookies and some tongue-numbing tea when Anke decided she had a thing she wanted to say about Mr. Greider.

“He’s a kind man,” she told us, “but he doesn’t care for you to know it,” which put my brother right back on his stump.  He said it was wrinkled and puckered too.

For my part, I sat there feeling like somebody was maybe watching us, and, as it turned out, somebody actually was.

5

We could have worked an awful lot harder to find a phone and call our parents, which our mother told us nearly every day for maybe a month, but we’d decided they hadn’t likely met with awful much cause to worry. Or rather, my brother had decided and had talked me and Hoboy into it as well.

Hoboy was kind of our grownup, but we were sort of his boss, which meant my brother would tell him stuff, and Hoboy would make his noises, but he wasn’t the type to insist on much, wasn’t in a fit spot to do it.  So we were one of those democracies that let everything go to hell.

What we didn’t know—what we found out—was our troop came home with a story.  It was a story about a pack of marauders that terrorized them their first night out. They’d gone up past the shelter and had found a grassy spot to camp, and the troop leaders—Mr. Dwight and Mr. Womble—got in a “discussion” about plans for the following day. That’s to say they were arguing over who should do what first because almost all they ever did was quarrel.

Mr. Dwight was what, at the time, most everybody called a bachelor because that was simpler than grappling with what he got up to and what he was.  Mr. Dwight was a big one for driving clean to Atlanta or up to D.C. and then bringing home some bachelor friend he’d met while he was away. They were almost always wiry and loud, would never stay more than three or four days, the sort of men Mr. Frank had a word for that nobody would let him say.

Mr. Dwight was not an outdoorsman and probably should never have been in Scouting and not because of the flavor of man he was but chiefly due to the fact that nature tended to make Mr. Dwight uneasy and he seemed to have volunteered because he was a khaki fiend.  He liked the uniform and the badges, the socks you could pull up to your knees, but he was woeful at fire-building and tying knots and orienteering and could hardly tell a cowbird from an owl.

The trouble was we’d lost our previous Scout leader without much warning, and Mr. Dwight was next on the list.  He’d replaced Mr. Kirby who insisted we call him Matt and who devoted quite a lot of time and energy to talking Scouting with our mothers.  It turned out a couple of them were ever so keen to talk it back.  One was the wife of our orthodontist, a gloomy woman who wore capri pants all year and everywhere, and the other was a widow with a son named Merlin whose daddy had fallen asleep in his Oldsmobile and crashed into a bridge. 

Mr. Kirby—Matt—was a hound dog, and he had his way with both of those women even though there was a Mrs. Kirby and a baby girl back at home. Because he was a hound dog, Mr. Kirby was usually far more eager than careful, and the widow found out about the orthodontist’s wife along about when the orthodontist found out about Mr. Kirby.  Things all came to a head one evening at the fellowship hall where our troop met when the widow and capri pants and the orthodontist all showed up along with Mr. Kirby’s wife and little girl.  They were there because Mr. Kirby’s Dodge was in the shop, but everybody else had sparkier reasons for coming.

It was a troop night to remember.  The grown-ups tried to be polite and stood there watching us make a relief map out of clay.  We were attempting to reproduce the Rockies to scale on a sheet of plywood with a couple of volcanoes thrown in so, once it had all set, we could do that vinegar and baking soda thing.  Mr. Womble was the one who helped us mix and shape the clay while Mr. Kirby stood by with his wife and his two conquests and the orthodontist husband who endured the whole business in silence for as long as he could stand.

“I know what you did,” he finally shouted straight in Mr. Kirby’s face, and we stopped what we were up to so we could hear what Matt might tell him back.

By then we all knew Mr. Kirby was more of a friend to women than he should be because we’d seen him catching rides home that were slow to leave the lot, and how much Scouting (after all) could most grown women talk?

Mr. Kirby, of course, wasn’t anxious to engage with the orthodontist.  He was far more of a do-things-on-the-sly sort of guy, so he pretended to be confused about what the orthodontist was saying and just stood there with his eyebrows raised like he was mystified.

“My Carol,” the orthodontist got out before his emotions took over, and instead of detailing his complaint against Matt, he blubbered for a bit.

That was interesting too because (most of us anyway) had never seen a dental professional weep. I think we all knew why he was upset.  The trashy truth was hard to avoid once big Kevin had left off long enough with shaping the slopes of Mt. Elbert to make the sort of vulgar gesture that was designed to clue us in.

Merlin’s mother had a thing or two to say to Mr. Kirby as well, which Mrs. Kirby took issue with because she was the kind of woman built to believe in her husband’s honor and mettle no matter what. That was pretty much how Mr. Kirby made things hang together. He could follow his urges and always depend on getting square with his wife.

Aside from Merlin’s mother, nobody that evening said exactly what they meant, and the orthodontist finally slipped off to cry outside. We knew he was hanging around because, every now and then, he’d stick his head in and call to his wife.  She went to him eventually, and Merlin’s mother told Merlin early, “Let’s go.”

So it was down to Mr. Kirby and his wife and little girl when Mr. Womble, who was wearing dried clay clean up to his elbows, went over and told his co-Scout leader that he’d had quite enough.

That was big news because Mr. Womble was not an emphatic man, and once he drew the line at tolerating Matt’s behavior there wasn’t much for Mr. Kirby to do but withdraw from the troop for a while.  That’s how we ended up with Mr. Dwight, the next name on the list, while Mr. Kirby joined a self-help group the Presbyterians were hosting.  He was supposed to be working on his personal discipline and shoring up his moral fiber, but he ended up cultivating a couple of girlfriends there as well.

Mr. Dwight was bound to seem an improvement in the wake of Mr. Kirby, and nobody worried themselves much over his bachelor lifestyle, except maybe Mr. Frank.

“I don’t like it,” is what he’d tell us and then remind us he’d been in the navy and knew what men could get up to.

That’s when Mama Peach would usually say, “You were in the coast guard,” and she’d tell us he worked in Richmond in kind of an office park.

The troop approved of Mr. Dwight.  He was enthusiastic while Mr. Womble was just an adult with a current license to drive. Our mothers were certainly safe anyway, and we could do all the Scouting we wanted as long as Mr. Dwight and Mr. Womble both showed up.

They were not the kind of men, however, equipped to tangle with hillbilly trash, and the story the troop was telling once they’d gotten back to town had to do with them being overrun by a bunch of roughnecks who showed up out of nowhere and made a slew of threats.

They caught Mr. Dwight and Mr. Womble arguing about the cuisine.  Mr. Womble had overseen the making of our campfire packets, the food we wrapped in foil and then cooked in the coals the first night out. Mr. Dwight had taken pains to remind Mr. Womble to include plenty of seasoning on them, but Mr. Womble had ignored him, so those packets were all bland.

I’m sure the troop didn’t mind.  It was usually just a hamburger in with some carrots and potatoes and a quarter stick of butter, but it was still something that Mr. Dwight and Mr. Womble could disagree about.  So apparently they were arguing out by the campfire when a whole gang of guys—they insisted fourteen—rushed up on them out of nowhere.

The way we came to understand it, a couple of them made the snap decision that Mr. Dwight was Hoboy, and they were shoving him around before fingernails and his buddy had even shown up.

Mr. Womble tried to intervene, yelled, “Hey!” and “Stop!” and stuff, but then he got knocked over and sat on for a while.

By then all the guys in the troop had come pouring out of their tents to see what the racket was about it.

It seems Mr. Dwight was loudly objecting to being shoved around, and at some point said, “Unhand me!” which stopped that pack of hillbillies cold because it sounded exactly like the sort of thing a bachelor might say.

Then Mr. Dwight probably ballyhooed and warbled in a theatrical way, because that was the brand of outburst he was often given to.  As bachelor gentlemen go, our Mr. Dwight was pretty much standard-issue.

So he’d revealed himself to the extent that even those roughnecks had caught on, and they decided they needed a word with fingernails and his dumpster colleague to find out if a creature like Mr. Dwight had, in fact, beat both of them up.  When those two failed to recognize Mr. Dwight or Mr. Womble either, they decided to have a close look at the boys.

I can’t imagine fingernails and his buddy were the sort to know one kid from another, so eventually fingernails asked the troop, “Who of you’s with the Chevy?” That got him nothing but a bunch of blank looks back.

The way we heard it, there was a little girl with them.  We’d kind of seen her in the lot, and Brad from our troop tried to talk her some while they were all standing there getting quizzed. It seems she showed Brad a knife she was carrying and mentioned stuff she was keen to slice off.

Brad was still a little in love with that girl even four or five months later.

That gang failed to do the sort of harm you’d need to see a doctor about, but they knocked a couple of tents down and made a few colorful threats. Then they went off where they’d come from, back down the trail into the dark.

Nobody did much sleeping that night.  Instead, they posted guards and got the campfire roaring again and relived all the excitement they’d known.  Mr. Dwight and Mr. Womble, of course, quarreled about what to do next.  Mr. Dwight was all for an evacuation and wanted to alert whatever authorities they could find while Mr. Womble took the view that they should stand up to those bullies, which he held out as a valuable lesson for the troop at large.

“They’re probably not going to kill you,” was Mr. Dwight’s response, and he let it be known he didn’t feel that Mr. Womble was being supportive, which Mr. Womble objected to, and they argued about that for a while.

In the end, they packed up all their gear and, come morning, hiked back down to load it on the bus and head home. The first figure of authority they turned up was a deputy in a Stuckeys who heard Mr. Dwight out and then said, “You look all right.  Just let it go.”

Mr. Dwight stayed indignant about it all and told the story in a colorful way as soon as they got back, which meant our dad heard it from Kevin’s father that very afternoon, and instead of alarming our mother, our dad paid visits to Mr. Womble and Mr. Dwight. He learned soon enough that my brother and I had never hooked up with the troop and got a breathless account of their entire ordeal straight from Mr. Dwight and then went home to alarm our mother, tried to anyway, but she was tough and hard to agitate. 

Our father was more excitable and far more of a fretter, which our mother lacked the leisure for because she had a house to keep and children to raise. Of the two of them, she had the better sense of what rugged little nuts we were, and she instructed my father to get on the phone to police stations in the uplands just to see if we’d run into some kind of trouble cops would know about.

While he was doing that, she went next door and used the Crowder’s phone to dial up the hospital in Asheville and the one in Hickory as well since she figured that’d be too nerve-wracking a thing to make our father do. Then she went back home to learn from him that we weren’t anywhere.

“I ought to go up,” he told her.

She wanted to talk to Mr. Dwight.

It’s almost certain our father got irritated because he’d talked to Mr. Dwight already and had floated a course of action that our mother had simply ignored.  That was her general technique.  If he proposed something she didn’t truly care for, she would usually just pretend he hadn’t spoken. It worked well enough, but all his gears and widgets still got hot.

Then he wanted to go with her to talk to Mr. Dwight, but she didn’t need all that edgy testosterone clouding up the proceedings, so she had him stay where he could take a phone call if one came in.

Mr. Dwight, of course, proved delighted to run through the events again, and I’m sure my mother made all of the appropriate noises in all of the proper places and allowed Mr. Dwight to give her the story in full without interruption, which was nothing a man would ever permit him to do.

Our mother appreciated a good performance.  She’d endured our bad ones often enough, so she would have almost certainly complimented Mr. Dwight on his story before she wondered if she could ask him about the bus. More specifically, she was eager to find out where they’d decided to park it and if, when they went down to pack up, there were other cars around.

Mr. Dwight wasn’t remotely a car enthusiast.  He drove a Nova, and it had quite a lot of rust, so it was kind of a triumph that he could recall a sedan parked across the lot.

“I believe it had a flat tire,” he told our mother.

She’d thought to bring along a snapshot, a picture of my brother holding our baby sister with a bit of that Bel Air just behind them.

“This car maybe?” she asked him.

But since Mr. Dwight wasn’t a car guy, the best he could manage was, “Maybe.”

Then he offered to tell the whole thing again and our mother stood by and let him before she went back home to have our father send police to that state park.

That’s probably when she brought in Mama Peach and Mr. Frank.  She didn’t really need them both, but they came as a joint package.  Our mother and her mother were very much alike, and they were reliably good around each other.  Never frantic.  Never nervous.  They both knew how to have a think, while Mr. Frank could only function as an active antagonizer. 

The way it usually worked was Dad would drive Mr. Frank around in his truck, and they’d say to each other all the stuff they didn’t dare say at home. While our dad and Mr. Frank toured the county, our mother and Mama Peach stayed by the phone.  People were used to finding out nothing in good timely order back then, so it wasn’t like they expected a call or were overly anxious about us, though I’m sure they were reconsidering letting Hoboy drive us around beyond ball practice and trumpet lessons and stuff.

But they wouldn’t have panicked even after what Mr. Dwight said the troop went through, and there wasn’t any way they could know those hillbilly roughnecks were looking for us.  Our mother had decided me and my brother were just being thoughtless boys and that our minder was not quite normal enough to know that we should check in.

“I’ll be explaining a few things to them,” our mother likely told Mama Peach.

Then probably Mama Peach baked something once our mother had offered her cookies out of a box. By then, Mr. Frank was almost certainly inflicting on our father the story of the Allis-Chalmers tractor he’d driven into a pond.  It had belonged to his father’s middle brother, and Mr. Frank wasn’t meant to be on it and then had pretended for nearly a week he had no idea where it was.

We’d all heard that story.  Our father more than most, so he was probably stewing and simmering while Mr. Frank rattled on.  We’d been gone two nights by then and were closing on a third, so once Mr. Frank gave him a gap for it, our father probably wondered where in the name of sweet creeping Christ we were.

In the forest, as it turned out, following a Bavarian woman name Anke who was as much a friend to us by then as any friend we’d ever had. She was picking up supper on the way, or what of it the woods might provide her, which was morels and some kind of crimson berries that were growing on bare stalks.  She spied a clump of mistletoe way high but decided not to send me for it because she could probably tell that I was dragging a little by then.

My brother and I were used to sitting in school and playing in the yard a while after when we didn’t have some kind of practice or lessons to eat up our afternoons. That didn’t put us in hardy shape for awfully much. So I was beat, and my brother was looking a little worn out as well, but it was the kind of good tired you get when you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Mr. Greider was going to fix our car, so we seemed about set to head for home, and the Mr. Dwight in me was already putting a version of things together, a spiel I could use for a class report or maybe a lesson in Sunday school where ordinarily, when I got called on, I just made some rubbish up.

We’d had a genuine adventure, had been pursued by enraged roughnecks who we’d only escaped by fleeing into the woods where we’d met an awfully curious woman who lived in a tumbledown house with furniture your granny might have used and dead people in photographs.  We’d eaten root soup, and my brother’s cut had gotten a mistletoe poultice.  We’d fixed a fence and weeded a garden, had even buried a dog.

It was a heck of a story, and I felt confident it would play out with us heading east off the Blue Ridge to find our parents waiting at home.  They’d be so relieved to see us that they wouldn’t be angry at all and would serve us onion rings and burgers on buns with no trace of silage in them.

We reached Anke’s place on the cemetery side and so stopped with Anke while she told Ernst about the day we’d had and how a man who’d been helpful to her before was being helpful again.

“People will only disappoint you,” Anke told Ernst, “if you let them.”

That seemed wrong.  I’d been disappointed plenty with no part in it at all, but I guess maybe that was something Anke and Ernst had chewed on before, and they were  free to come to their own conclusions about people.

She didn’t say anything to her brother.  I had to think they’d covered it all.

We all three pitched in and were helpful in ways that we rarely were at home.  Our mother would ask us to set the table or put the dishes away from the drainer, and we’d treat it like a labors of Hercules sort of thing.  I don’t believe we ever once failed to mutter and grouse, but I think my brother and I both felt like we’d grown up a little at Anke’s and so could set the table and light the lamps and stoke the fire in the hearth like those were things we were happy to do because they needed to be done.

We were both old enough by then to have gotten ourselves into all grades of trouble, but we were new to getting out of it as well.  So we felt like we’d accomplished something and were rather pleased with ourselves.  As my brother set a log on the fire grate and I poked at the coals, we hashed through the thorny details of our trip up to mountains like a couple of grizzled frontiersmen who’ve already come out on the far side of a thing.

“Look at him,” my brother said and tipped his head towards Hoboy who was over with Anke in the kitchen.

He was doing something I’d rarely if ever witnessed Hoboy up to.  He was having a conversation with no flapping or twitching at all.  It might have been the result of the fuzzy gumdrop Anke had fed him, but it seemed just as likely that Hoboy had found somebody he could be relaxed around.  Whatever the cause, he looked to be at his ease, and he worked peeling and chopping while they had a chat we couldn’t quite make out, and Hoboy even loosed a noise we’d never heard from him before.

“What does that one mean?” my brother asked me.

“Sounded,” I said, “like he laughed.”

We had more stew with mysterious nuggets in it and more bread studded with hulls and husks. Everything was fine and jolly for us if a little melancholy since our group would soon enough be breaking up.  We’d be leaving Anke behind with her brother and dog both in the ground, her goat running loose, and her donkey slightly lame. She’d go back to being that strange woman in the forest who dresses like a scarecrow and goes around gathering mushrooms in an overcoat-sleeve sack.

We were happy, then, but a touch sad as well and were having a rolling chat about everything there at the supper table when Anke tuned in to some noise from outside and raised a hand to quiet us down.

“The chickens,” is what she told us.  “They’re . . . unzufrieden.”

6

Unhappy.  That was what it meant.  The chickens were unhappy and not in the usual fussy, persistent way that chickens can be put out.  These chicken were, we’d come to learn, excellent judges of flesh on the hoof, and they were squawking at a pack of interlopers who’d stepped into the yard.

Anke opened the door with Hoboy at one shoulder and me and my brother at the other.  Enough light from inside fell out to give us a look at fingernails.

“Well now,” he said and spat for effect since his repertoire was scant.  “Ain’t y’all way back out here in the woods.”

He had company.  We could see most of them from maybe the knees down.  One of them was holding a lantern, but his juice was nearly spent and his bulb had gone the color of fingernail’s teeth. 

“Y’all eating?” fingernails asked us.  “We come at a bad time?”

His buddies all laughed, in particular the one I knew for his dumpster colleague who stepped out of the pack to show himself.  Of course, the tears came for me.  They were what I had instead of pluck and nerve.

“What’s for supper?” dumpster buddy asked and took a step towards the doorway, but he lacked the sand to push on in and had to wait for fingernails who was meaner and more depraved.  He was the sort to value nothing decent people had a use for, primed to go where he wasn’t invited and do what nobody wanted done.

He stepped up to the door, and we could either yield to him or find ourselves in a tussle, and I remember Hoboy grabbed me and my brother and pulled us well aside. Fingernails didn’t seem to mind at all having to shove Anke a little.

“You remember me?” fingernails asked Hoboy.  “Because I sure remember you.”

If there was ever a time for Hoboy to twitch and flap and say his word, that was surely it, but instead he just told fingernails, “I do.”

While that was going on, dumpster buddy was having a look at the decor.  He’d not trekked through the forest expecting to end up at anything like Anke’s place.

“What in the world?”  He said it twice.  “You seeing all this?” he asked.

But fingernails had no use for appearances and atmospherics.  He’d been embarrassed by a big flatlander and had come to set things right.

“Ain’t so funny now, is it?” fingernails said, which seemed to me odd and unnecessary since Hoboy had done a fair bit of shoving and kicking at the dumpster, but I felt sure he’d never laughed.

“What do y’all want?” That was my brother chiming in, and he didn’t sound to me like he would have a mere three or four days before.  His words had some heft to them and a fair bit of starch, enough so that fingernails and his buddy failed to cackle right away but looked around to locate my brother in all the furnishings and clutter.

“Him first,” fingernails said in time as he tipped his head Hoboy’s way and started tugging up his sleeves like he meant to show us what a thrashing was.

Things could have gone a fair number of ways from that point forward.  We could have apologized to those two and offered them some silage bread or handed over fourteen dollars and thirty-seven cents in change.  That might have been enough or they could required Hoboy to take a punch or two before they felt satisfied and went back out in the yard.

That all could have happened, but it isn’t what did because Anke chose to throw in with Hoboy with the aid of an iron Dutch oven that was still half full of stew.  I wasn’t sad to see it wasted since, to my taste, Anke was a far more accomplished forager than a cook, so it was fine with me that she shot that stew all over fingernails and then thumped his dumpster buddy with the pot.

And then, as if by magic, we weren’t frightened anymore.  I wasn’t anyway, and it didn’t even cross my mind to snivel.  Instead I grabbed the fire poker and used it to whack the first guy through the door.

He said, “Ouch,” or something like it and then decided to stay outside.

That left us four against fingernails and his dumpster buddy who didn’t offer to fight so much as simply tear the place to pieces.  They threw nic nacs at us and books and photos of dead people posed to look alive, and all the while they said vile, profane things because that’s how it went with them. They were anxious for us all to rot and suffer, and then dumpster buddy pulled out rebar and fingernails produced some manner of gun.

It was an ancient revolver he’d probably never oiled even once.  As soon as I saw it, I hit fingernails hard twice with the poker because that seemed the only suitable response.

The trouble was on my backswing I caught one of Anke’s lamps and swept it onto the floor where the whole thing busted to pieces.  The kerosine spilled out everywhere and immediately caught fire.

I can still hear fingernails cackling as he and his dumpster buddy retreated.  They were the kind who’d take retribution almost any way it came, so it didn’t matter if they worked over Hoboy or burned down the house he was in instead.  Either way, they were instruments of ruin.  Any brand of destruction would do.

Better still, as that whole roughneck crew went slinking back into the woods, they could tell themselves our bunch had gone and caused all of our trouble by turning down that dead-end road when we should have kept on straight.

Anke’s house wanted to burn, was ready to be a pile of ashes.  We went after the flames with every spread and blanket we could find, but they wouldn’t be smothered.  The clothes caught, the books, the pictures, the floor planks, the walls.  Soon enough everything around us was burning, but we were still game and flailing when Anke decided this world was talking to her, and she drove us all outside.

The chickens had fled.  The donkey was gone because that crew had kicked down some fencing, and then flames jumped across to the outhouse, and it started burning as well.  I knew it was all my fault in a literal, technical way since I’d busted the lamp that started it with one swing of the poker, but then if we hadn’t turned down that dead-end road or if my brother hadn’t cut his chin, we would have never been in the woods and met up with Anke anyway.

There was all that math to work out, and it was taking hold in my head, so I have to imagine my brother and Hoboy were chewing on something like that themselves, but Anke wouldn’t let us apologize.  I was the first one to attempt it.  She stopped me with some German and then grabbed me up and held me close.  I can’t say I knew a lot.  I was only eleven years old, but Anke struck me at that moment as a woman relieved.

She wouldn’t hear any glum talk from Hoboy or my brother either while we kept backing up to keep clear of the heat and the spitting sparks and the flames.  There was little to do but hope the forest failed to catch and burn, and though some of the leaf litter lit and smoldered here and there, it must have been too damp in the woods for any real fire to take hold.

All the outbuildings burned.  There was a shed and a kind of barn, and sparks showered down and set both roofs ablaze.  Anke didn’t appear to mind any of that but just had us all sit in the grass along with her and watch everything go up.

“Die Welt hat ihren Weg,” Anke told us and then did her own translating:  The world has its way.

We were all in our shirtsleeves, and Anke was wearing the slippers she’d put on whenever she’d come inside and kick off her boots. Anke’s money had all burned up in the house, but Hoboy still had his fourteen dollars. I had my Scout knife and a whistle I’d made out of a hickory twig, while my brother was down to the lanyard he carried with our back door key on it.

It started drizzling in the small hours, so we all crawled under a fir tree and squeezed up together like we had that first night to try to beat the cold. Anke sang us a German song about a wood nymph and a soldier who said to each other all sorts of peculiar things, and then Hoboy sang a French song he’d learned in the army, which turned out to be mostly about fast women, brandy, and cigarettes. 

Those two were over stirring the ashes by the time my brother and I woke up, and Anke was fishing out bits and bobs and piling them in the grass.  Kitchen stuff mostly and stray pieces of metal that the fire hadn’t quite destroyed, but she soon caught herself in the middle of setting aside a dinner fork, which stopped her short and caused her to mutter to herself in German.  Anke didn’t bother to pull anything out of the ashes after that.

I don’t know that we had a plan beyond walking to Mr. Greider’s station to see if he had our Bel Air ready to go.  All we could take with us was the clothes that we were wearing.  The donkey had fled and the chickens were gone and the goat was already a stranger, so Anke would be leaving her long-dead brother and her just-dead dog behind, but none of us had quite worked out who she knew and where we could maybe drop her.

Anke said her goodbyes at the graveyard and then led us through the forest while we failed entirely to talk through some kind of plan. In fact, we didn’t say much of anything. We were a weary, grimy bunch who smelled like smoke and had soot on us everywhere you might.  We had no food.  Almost no money.  Along the way, my brother’s mistletoe poultice broke loose and fell from his chin, and I could see his cut was all but healed.

Mr. Greider was balancing the last of our tires as we came dragging up to his station.  He fixed a weight on the rim and then had a leisurely look at the four of us.

“Her house burned down,” my brother told him, and there was plenty more he could have said, but by that point the grubby details hardly mattered. Anke’s house was gone for a whole slew of reasons, and there was nothing we could fix.

Mr. Greider put on our tire and started our car.  He’d thrown a new set of plugs in and had tightened up the belt, had filled us up with regular but had taken all the money he would take.

“Y’all,”  he told us,  “go figure something out.”

We were getting in the car and Anke wasn’t when Hoboy made one his noises, and it was enough to let my brother know what to say.

“Come on,” he said to Anke. “We’ve got an extra room and stuff.”

She rode in the back with me, and I tried to imagine how she felt, forced out of the woods because her possessions were all incinerated.  I held her hand part of the way.  It seemed like the thing to do.  We stopped down around Hickory for something to eat, but they wouldn’t let us in the diner because of how we looked and smelled, and they had a boy from the kitchen bring us the two bacon sandwiches we shared.

In the third hour so, things loosened up, and Anke asked us about the towns we passed and the stuff we saw on the roadside, and she was curious about why everybody else was driving by us so fast. 

We were playing cow poker after a while and a version of I-spy with rules my brother kept changing up. Then a quarter hour out I asked him if he was going to do all the talking because he was already cagey enough to explain most things away.

“Might be too big for that,” my brother told me, so I started thinking of ways to admit I’d burned a house to the ground.

They must have all been in the front room and saw us pull into the drive because we’d barely arrived when our parents and Mr. Frank and Mama Peach came rushing out of the house and down the porch steps into the yard.

Nobody cried but me because I didn’t come from blubbering stock, and only Mr. Frank proved ready in that moment for an explanation. 

He asked my brother, asked me, asked Hoboy even, “All right now, what went on?”

All of them kind of pretended at first that Anke wasn’t even there. She got a few glances but nobody came out and asked us where we’d found her.  We hadn’t left with a sooty upland woman, but we had certainly brought one back, which they all let go initially because they were so relieved to see us. A couple of cars passed on the road and both drivers blew their horns.  People around back then were always aware when there was trouble afoot, and they were quick to be pleased when bad stuff settled out.

“Anke,” Hoboy finally said by way of introduction.

“She fed us and all,” my brother added.  “Then her house caught fire.”

Nobody said anything except our mother who said, “Oh?”

My brother veered off.  He’d do that sometimes.  “I’ve been wearing,” he told us, “the same underpants for something like four days.”

Then Anke spoke, and they all discovered she wasn’t just a sooty stranger but was a foreign sooty stranger who was sorry to impose.

If it had been up to Mr. Frank, he would have left her in the yard because he was resolutely down on Germans and the Japanese as well, but nobody anywhere ever left anything up to him. 

“Please,” my mother said to Anke and motioned to welcome her to the house.

“Meine unterhose,” she told our mother, “wearing two days only.”

Our parents didn’t need us to ask them if Anke could use the spare room they’d built off the back.  They took her in there straightaway while Mama Peach drew me and my brother a bath.

“Who is that woman?” Mr. Frank demanded while we were waiting for the tub to fill.

“The towels are in the hall,” Mama Peach told him, and when Mr. Frank went out to fetch some, Mama Peach closed and latched the bathroom door.

She didn’t care that we were old enough not to want to be seen naked but just sat on the toilet and made sure we scrubbed all the spots we’d usually neglect.

“Your mother’s been worried sick,” she told us.  “Ever think of that?”

“Wasn’t any phones,” my brother said.  “We were kind of getting chased. And that lady of ours didn’t even have electric.”

“Lady of yours?”

“Wild up in there,” my brother told her. He was veering off again.  “Pretty though.  All those trees and stuff.”

That put Mama Peach in mind of a trip to Gatlinburg she and Mr. Frank had made a few years back, and she did some sighing and almost all of the talking after that.

My father had Hoboy on the back porch by the time we were clean and dressed, and we joined them out there because we always knew what to make of Hoboy’s noises.

“What dumpster where?” our father asked us, so my brother started in.  He skipped the fencepost and his stitches and went ahead to the turn we’d made and how the road had ended at a bunch of planks with reflectors nailed up to them.

“These men,” my father wanted to know, “did they . . . handle you or anything?”

Nobody had any words back then for what some grown-ups did to children, and not at all because it didn’t happen with any frequency but more due to the fact that people generally did quite a lot less talking beyond fondly remembering the details of trips to Gatlinburg and stuff.

“No, sir,” he heard from my brother and then got me to say it as well.

“He grabbed one of my badges,” my brother said.  “Hoboy wouldn’t have it.”

My father glanced Hoboy’s way and Hoboy told him, “Hoboy,” back, which served to clear the way for my brother to describe the scuffle in exhaustive detail.

“I was right there in the middle of it.  He put them both away.”

“I saw it,” I told our father.  “He kicked those fellows too.

Hoboy nodded by way of confirmation and made a couple of noises.

“Guess they didn’t like that,” our dad volunteered.

“No, sir,” my brother said.  “Didn’t like it a lot.”

My father offered his hand to Hoboy who did so little of that sort of thing that he couldn’t quite figure out at first just what he ought to be up to.  So I took him by the wrist and steered him right, and our father grabbed and shook.

Our mother had made some phone calls to let worried people know that we were home and safe.  Mr. Dwight and Mr. Womble both swung by the house because we were Scouts of theirs. We got a partial performance from Mr. Dwight, but Mr. Womble cut him short since he didn’t believe the time was ripe for anything but gratitude.

Then Anke came in from the back of the house wearing one of our mother’s dresses, and she hardly looked like a troll in the woods anymore.

Our mother told Mr. Womble and Mr. Dwight, “The boys brought home a friend.”

They couldn’t think of what to tell her back but, “Right.”

Our dad and Mr. Frank put the leaf in the dinette table so there’d be room for all of us around it, and our mother set out food she’d made herself and food some of the neighbors had brought back when there seemed a decent chance that things would turn out poorly.

So we had chicken and we had pork roast, and we had about four kinds of potatoes, two plates of deviled eggs, a bowl of watermelon pickles, maybe a quart of succotash, a saucepan full of green beans, a crusted casserole and a plate of biscuits.  No salt-cured deer haunch.  No silage bread.

Our baby sister fussed in her playpen while our mother assigned seats for us.  I didn’t get my regular one but was put between Mr. Frank and Anke, and then we all joined hands while our father gave his usual brand of thanks. 

After that Mama Peach said to Anke, the way she always did whenever she was breaking bread with strangers, “You’ll tell us if there’s something you don’t eat.”

Anke looked desperate to ask Hoboy to clarify a thing or two in German but instead she got distracted by the sight of our father spooning Jello mold onto his plate.

Our mother gestured generally at the four of us with her fork, the ones who’d rolled up sooty in the Bel Air and had failed to call her even once.

“Ok,” she said and speared some beans.  “Explain.”

7

I can’t say I’d even once thought of Hoboy and Anke as some kind of romantic match until those two had figured it all out for themselves. Hoboy had an intended when he went off to war, but she’d been leery of the Hoboy who’d come back and so had shifted to a Ludlow who’d done his service in Louisiana and mustered out as dull as he went in.

They still lived in the county, and Hoboy sometimes saw the woman around. I was with him once at the Hop-In when she pulled up for gas, and she was all chatty and bubbly, had a crusty toddler with her, but Hoby was pretty much his blank self back.  I wouldn’t have known from looking that she’d ever been his betrothed or that he was still equipped to have such feelings for a woman because slight variations on blank Hoboy was about all we ever got.

I’d seen him angry a time or two, especially up in the mountains. I’d routinely seen him embarrassed and uneasy in his skin, and I’d watched him flap and twitch to varying degrees, had even known him to get dead peaceful in front of the TV and for that stretch at Anke’s house up in the woods. But I can’t say I ever suspected Hoboy would know what to do with a woman. 

On top of that, we couldn’t say how old any adults actually were and so weren’t in a spot to have any notion of who might be right for whom.  My brother and I knew kids’ ages right down to the decimal, but grown-ups were just ancient and not worth doing math about. 

Our mother, on the other hand, took a lively interest in matchmaking and decided to work on Anke and put her together with a man. She gave Anke clothes to wear until she could take her shopping, and she taught her how to use eyeshadow and just the right amount of blush.  She even treated Anke to a salon day down at the beauty shop where the woman who did our mother’s hair worked some of her magic on Anke while the rest of the ladies there marveled over the state of Anke’s feet. 

She had the indoor/outdoor sort, and they were leathery all over.  The pedicure girl tried to work her standard improvements with a file, but (the way we heard it) she probably would have needed a planing saw.

From the ankles up, though, Anke got dramatically transformed, and our mother had it in her head that Anke would be right for a man they knew from church.  He was a building inspector and volunteer firefighter and played the accordion just well enough so didn’t want him dead.  He had a full head of hair and a little too free a hand with his aftershave, and he was one of those men who’d tell you a joke no matter how little you needed to hear it.

He’d never been married and his last girlfriend had drowned herself in the ocean, so he’d stuck just to his accordion for a while. I can’t imagine what our mother thought Anke might see in him, and once Anke got wind that she was being prepped for a romance, she had kind of a heart-to-heart with our mother when she scotched the guy from church and confessed she was stuck on Hoboy instead.

Their thing happened right in front of us, but it was slow to come, and it was never like they were sneaking around and cuddling. Anke was staying in the room our father had built off the back of the house while Hoboy still pressed his flowers and listened to ballroom music downstairs.  But he and Anke would sometimes sit together on the sofa or the glider, and over time that’s when they must have worked things out.

Hoboy had saved all of his ditch-digging money, had let it pile up in a passbook account, and Anke had gotten on at the feed store where they sold bedding plants as well.  She had a knack for making every sort of green thing take and thrive. Our dad co-signed the lease on the house they rented, and there was the usual sort of talk that we’d all stay close and make sure to have meals together and regular visits.  Maybe we even did for a little while.  It’s hard to remember now, but it got to where Hoboy and Anke were like most everybody else. We’d see them around and catch up with them for a minute or two and then would go for stretches when we didn’t see them at all.  Our dad would give us scraps from what Hoboy passed along at work, but that was about all we had and what we knew.

They never married, which was a local scandal for people like Mr. Frank who had what he called “old-fashioned ideas” about too many stinking things.  Most of us didn’t care.  They didn’t drive much, so we’d see them out walking places with Anke holding onto to Hoboy’s arm in a way that made it hard to think of those two as trashy and low. 

The years rolled on the way they do.  Our dad turned over a motor grader and ended up underneath it.  He hung on broken and diminished for a while but finally went in his sleep one night, and our mother sold the house and bought some shack out in Kitty Hawk where she walks the beach collecting glass and makes earrings and stuff out of it.

I caught on down in Georgia as a county deputy while my brother threw in his lot in with some outfit up in Roanoke where he ran a boiler room pushing all grades of shady investments and outright fraudulent deals. I can’t say I ever really knew our sister all that well.  She was ten years younger and had her own strange friends and her own peculiar ways. She moved out west and met her end in Corvallis with a needle in her arm.  I remember getting the call about her and not knowing how to feel.

I got married, and we had a daughter and quite a lot of pointless friction.  My wife was black Irish from up around Wheeling, and it used to seem to me that she flat lived to be contrary while, given my nature, I far preferred to sulk.  So I’d go around feeling put upon, and she’d go around feeling neglected.  It was clear early on we weren’t building anything to last.

We were making a trip up to see her family when I got word Hoboy had died.  I knew he’d been sick with one of those cancers they kept driving down but couldn’t kill, so I’d been expecting the call for a while by the time it came.

We were due to be in the vicinity in time to make the viewing, and I drove my family around the town where I grew up (like you do).  Our old front yard was junky, strewn with kid stuff around a rusty Toyota up on a jack.  I drove us by a suburb with lots my father had cleared and graded, past my grade school and our old church, and finally out to the funeral home.

Our daughter was fairly grouchy by then.  My wife was, if anything, worse, so I didn’t try to change her mind once she’d said, “You go in.”

Except for Anke, I didn’t recognize anybody. She looked maybe a little baggier but otherwise just the same, and she knew me straightaway and walked me over to the casket while she told me what they’d been up to in the last few years.

Hoboy was wearing a suit, from the waist up anyway, and I have to say he looked very nearly distinguished.  He was drawn a little on account of his cancer but otherwise came off as the sort of man who wouldn’t flap and wouldn’t twitch and who you’d probably call Monroe.

When Anke went off to greet some folks, I stayed there next to Hoboy.  I was sifting in my head through all we’d known and done.  I had a fuming wife in the parking lot and a brother who needed arresting, a mother soldering jewelry on the Outer Banks, and the rest of them dead and gone.

Now Hoboy too.  I straightened his tie.  They’d left it a little cockeyed, and as I gave him a pat on the chest to send him off, I remember thinking that sometimes, though surely not often enough, it’s the good and decent stuff that leaves a mark.