Some Enchanted Place, Chapter Seis

If you just stumbled in, I’m apparently writing a book or something. Start here: Some Enchanted Place
Then here: Some Enchanted Place, Part Three
Then here: Part Three, Episode Two
Then here: Part Three, Episode Three
Then here: Episode Four
Episode Five

Old Pecksniff gave me one of those little chuffs that won him his nickname, spun on the ball of his foot, or his cloven hoof, or whatever he had in his shoe, and went back up the stairs. I made a quick pact with myself, promising to immediately cut my own throat with my putty knife if he switched off the light out of habit or malice when he got to the top of the stair, and so save myself from suffering at the hands of whatever pack of chimeras or gorgons or rabid minotaurs they kept down here. The light stayed on.

When I was little, my father sent me out to the woodpile, alone, at night. It was the middle of the winter, clear, cold, and moonless. Dad lied like an accountant and said the flashlight was dead. I hinted I’d rather not go. He hinted I’d better.

“Just keep looking all around and you won’t be afraid.”

The door clicked shut behind me, and the wan pool of light at the step didn’t reach very far. I ignored the advice and tromped out through the windscoured drifts, my footfalls squeaking in the perfectly dessicated snow, to the big pile of oak and maple splits out by the edge of the trees. By the time I had gotten there, I had accumulated an enormous retinue of monsters, cutthroats, spectres, werewolves, and a herd of kelpies strung out behind me — or so I imagined. I stood there a long time, stoopshouldered and shivering, the wind whispering odd things into my ear and watering my eyes, neither of which needed any encouragement at this point. Your mind can conjure up anything in a place like that. It took all my strength to look over my shoulder. Nothing. I learned my lesson; never save up cowardice hoping for a courage dividend later.

So screw Pecksniff. I walked around and shook all the doors and looked around. I’d tell him I was looking for a place to plug something in or get a pail of water if he came back.

Most of it was padlocked, or nailed or painted shut. I found a pail and stood on it and looked through the lattice here and there. If Sotheby’s did flea markets, Luxor could fill the tents. Old creels and bamboo rods, leather suitcases left in the damp too long, paintings of crabby great-uncles, a fiberglass fish. There was one locked paddock that had a sort of oversized Dewey decimal system-looking bank of drawers against one wall, trailing off into the gloom.

On the back of one of the doors that swung freely, there was a posterboard with an odd assortment of symbols on it. It was a club coat of arms, I guess, but looked like a doodle designed by a schoolboy that ate paste when the teacher wasn’t looking. Noah’s Ark. A skull and bones. What looked like a pyramid fringed with candle flames. Everything in it was familiar, but didn’t add up to anything much arrayed on the same page. It put me in mind of my father’s membership certificate in the Ancient Order of Hibernians — or as my friends and me who also had dads in the AOH called it: The Real IRA; Irish Republican Alcoholics. Our dads were all supposed to be mowing the lawn, but they snuck down to the hall and passed a hat to cobble together ten bucks to buy dynamite for Ireland. Nine-and-a-half bucks of which was used to buy a round to celebrate the solidarity of the thing. None of them had ever set foot in Ireland, and never would. We left all that shite behind. Mom hung dad’s Hibernian membership on the back of the bathroom door, forever to be obscured by damp towels.

I had a bad habit of reading everything that was put in front of me. My first boss learned the hard way not to give me old newspapers to use as dropcloths when I painted the inside of cupboards. Obituaries, racing results so old all the horses were dead, bridge columns, didn’t matter; all typefaces and topics were like waving a red rag in front of a bull to me. It’s not my fault. This poster was worse. It was a puzzle.

A rooster. A beehive. A trowel and a sword together, of all things. Alexander, the Great Bricklayer?

Oh for pity’s sake. The compass and the square. The all-seeing eye. Like a little boy that can’t wait for the teacher to call on me, bursting with the answer, I said it out loud: “Lord of the Manor is a Freemason. Figures.”

I was the kid at the woodpile again.

“He most decidedly is not.”

Some Enchanted Place, Chapter Five

If you just stumbled in, I’m apparently writing a book or something. Start here: Some Enchanted Place
Then here: Some Enchanted Place, Part Three
Then here: Part Three, Episode Two
Then here: Part Three, Episode Three
Then here: Episode Four

So I’m out in the driveway again, alone, with the house glowering at me once more. I looked right back at it.

I wasn’t afraid of being observed. No danger of Pecksniff pulling back a curtain and watching me. A dragon just sleeps atop his pile of gold and jewels. He doesn’t worry himself overmuch over passersby. No matter what Angel thinks, any true Irishman knows his dragons. Cuchulain was pulling dragon hearts out and showing them to the brutes as they died before Cape Verde was a twinkle in a Portuguese slave-trader’s eye. And after they lit out for America and the cranberry bogs, too, now that I think of it.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,

What stalked through the Post Office? What Intellect,

What calculation, number, measurement, replied?

We Irish, born into that ancient sect,

But thrown upon this filthy modern tide

And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,

Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace

The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.

Angel should know better than to make the Old Money mistake of lumping everyone outside your tribe together. They figure we all sit in the same Papist pews, and they can just file us all under: garlic eaters and save some trouble. The WOGs begin at Calais, they used to say, and pronounce it like callous to multiply the contempt intended. Doesn’t matter if Dover has white cliffs or the Charles River next to it. Guys sipping gin and quinine in Peshawar said the same thing.

Irish garlic eaters. That’s a good one. Dad would have gotten a kick out of that.

The house. Might as well have a real look at it since I’m out here. Around the side, the place has a fountain, too, left dry for the freezing season fast approaching. There’s a date, incised deeply into the stone or concrete or whatever it is.

L is fifty, right? X, ten. Been a while. I just let the movie dates roll by in the credits.

No, not a number. That would be mundane. The house has a name. These people always name their houses. When they were still pestering whales and had seaside shacks, they’d put a board on the side of their house with a name on it, same as the boat had, and the habit stuck. And the V’s not a V. It’s an incised U. Luxor. Odd way to write it. What the hell does Egypt have to do with anything around here anyway? Well if that loon Hearst can have a Xanadu, I guess a blueblood here on the other coast can have his Thebes.

Jayzuz again. It’s probably nine by now and nothing’s done. I lied of course; there’s no way I’ll rat Angel out to young Charlie. I’ll cover for him until the list is done or he comes back, and he knows it. I’ll finish it all myself if I have to pull Pecksniff’s heart out and show it to him.

I went around to the door again and paused for a moment, wondering if I should start a passion play all over again by knocking, thought the better of it and opened the door myself and went right on in. It’s always expected that once the the factotums let us in, they were no longer at our service. We weren’t being accorded respect, exactly. We were supposed to be invisible. That’s different.

Just when I thought old Pecksniff couldn’t get any creepier, he doubled down by reappearing at the corner of the big table in the kitchen, as if he hadn’t moved an inch since Angel and I had fled to the relative safety of the driveway. By god, this guy is a daisy.

“Is there some difficulty?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. Angel… my partner went to pick up some stock we might need,” I lied like a Turk in a bazaar. “We’ll just need a spot in the house to keep our tools and where we can work a little without worrying about hurting anything. Or a garage or something.”

He did it again. Said nothing, just listened intently to me like I was a lost foreigner mis-conjugating strange verbs, and then turned on his heel and walked off without saying anything. I hesitated a moment, and then realized he was giving me a second chance to make a fool of myself by standing there waiting for an invitation. I hustled to catch up, and he led me to a dark, wainscoted anteroom, a kind of hub for him, I think, but out of earshot and view of the lords of the manor. He clicked an old-fashioned switch to make a light, and you could almost hear the lightning jump across the terminals when he closed the circuit. Nothing ever gets replaced in these places. The light revealed a staircase headed down. He descended the treads in his peculiar way, and I followed him down, picturing in my mind’s eye him holding a torch over his head, entering a catacomb.

There was a door at the very bottom of the stair, a no-no in any modern house but common in these old shacks. The door was locked, but he produced a key immediately from thin air and opened it. It took every ounce of courage I had to follow him in there, and I immediately wished I hadn’t.

The place smelled of worms and corruption and the grave. I knew the peculiar smell of lime underground, from all the patched parge coats of mortar on the rubble foundations to the nasty ropy calcimine whitewash everywhere. It makes you think of Tom Sawyer if you’re out in the sunshine, and a pauper’s grave down here. There were pens or rooms of some sort sectioned off and sort of caged in with lattice and rude doors fashioned from whatever lumber was unsuitable for anyone but the most menial help to look at. There were ancient hasps and padlocks on everything, which suggested keeping things in as much as out, which didn’t improve the mood any.

“The old laundry. You may make whatever noise you like down here. No one will hear it, and it will cause no trouble.”

I thought it would be considered bad manners to run screaming out of the house and into the woods, so I resisted the urge. I used to think I was smarter than Angel, but I got over that right then and there.

Some Enchanted Place – Chapter Four

If you just stumbled in, I’m apparently writing a book or something. Start here: Some Enchanted Place
Then here: Some Enchanted Place, Part Three
Then here: Part Three, Episode Two
Then here: Part Three, Episode Three

Jayzuz, not the Portuguese.

Angel would get this way every once in a while when he was really loaded. He’d start in with the rat-a-tat dialect that doesn’t signify much to anybody that was born even one island away from his family’s stony portion of Cape Verde. His people had lived in the US before it even was the US, I think, but his mother still spoke that weird creole mess that’s officially Portuguese, but sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard. Angel learned it backwards and forwards from her. It would probably sound the same backwards or forwards, now that I think of it. Even the Brazilian guys couldn’t understand him. I’d just tune it out, order another round, and wait for him to slur out something I could understand: Te vejo segunda-feira — see you on Monday — and then I’d head on home. Lapsing into it sober, in broad daylight, was a bad sign.

“Look, Angel, I admit that guy looks like a voodoo doll made from a dragon’s earwax, but let’s be adults for a minute. All these places give me the willies, to tell the truth. There’s always a stack of corpses in their bank accounts somewhere. Slave traders. Opium wholesalers. Bronze age arms dealers, for Christ’s sake. I don’t much care, as long as some of the corpses’ dandruff ends up in my bank account eventually. Get a grip.”

He gave me an odd little look, like a guy that had put a frog in your lunchbox and was waiting for noon for the payoff.

“You don’t know jack about dragons, you stupid harp. I’ll tell you about dragons.”

I looked back at the blank face of the house. There was no sign of the butler from hell, or anyone else for that matter. These people are never home. They’re like royal retinues, squatting in their own possessions now and again and then leaving a few of the help to keep pedaling while they go off to another of their haunts. It’s like the whole world is their tram and they get on and off on a whim. The hell with it.

“OK, you little troll. What the hell are you on about?”

“Listen, I know you goddamn Irish. You’re always bowing down in front of anybody with an English name. You shoot up barrooms full of Protestants at night and then shine their shoes the next day. Well, my people were here taking Nantucket sleighrides and humping Indian broads when the WASPs you hate and worship were still kissing King George’s ass for a handout. “

I thought the animated corpse that answered the door was kinda creepy, and Angel was one of my best friends, but he had a look in his eye right there that made me want to go in the house and sit in Pecksniff’s lap.

“Dragons? You talking to me about dragons? The dragon tree is on my island, you stupid jerk. My people humped under the full moon in the shadow of the dragon tree. They’d cut the bark and smear themselves with the red goo that came out, dragon’s blood, and make their deal for a baby. They’d pass that stain on down, oh yes. When my father died before I was born, my mother knew I’d come out touched, man. She put her coat inside out over me in the crib, put the ivory finger around my neck on a ribbon, and lit candles in church for my dead drowned daddy, but that shit’s no good. I got the second sight, brother. O mau-olhado. The evil eye. It works coming and going, and I’m telling you that guy, that house, and whatever demon owns the whole mess is bad, bad, bad.”

Angel was practically snorting and pacing back and forth like a panther in a zoo at this point. My morning’s gone from trying not to break any hummels while I’m attempting to scratch out a living, to choosing between working alone with a second-class vampire watching over me or dragging a guy that thinks he’s a fifth-generation witch doctor kicking and screaming the whole time. I had to think fast. When in doubt, dangle money.

“I’m not covering for you. You bug out on me, and I’m telling young Charlie you didn’t show. You need the money even more than I do.”

Angel took another look at the house, then me, and seemed to calm down a little.

“Money? You expect me to go in there for money? Si tchuba tchobe, morre fogadu. Si ka tem tchuba, morre di sedi.“

Angel walked past me, climbed into the cab of his pick-up truck, turned the key in the ignition, and slammed the door. I went up to the window and glared at him. His hand hesitated over the gear shift lever, and he rolled down the window.

“What in the hell does that mean, you little pygmy?”

“If it rains, we drown. If it doesn’t, we die of thirst.”

He turned his head away, murmured, “Good luck,” and sprayed me with gravel.

Some Enchanted Place, Part Three, Episode Three

I looked over at Angel, half expecting to see a little puddle form under him. His knuckles were white from gripping the table, his interest in staring at the paper had morphed from grabbing hold of a life preserver to clinging to the last piece of flotsam in the ocean. Pecksniff — this whole place — had gotten to him. I had to think quick or I was going to be working here alone for the rest of the week.

“Listen, er …”

I realized right then that I didn’t know his name, and was never going to. He wasn’t going to offer, and I wasn’t going to ask. Lord knows what would happen if I said it three times.

“We’re … going out to our truck and make sure we have all the tools we need for all this. We’ll be… right back.”

I picked up the papers and grabbed Angel by the arm. With the papers gone, he turned and looked up at me like the flotsam had gotten away from him and a big dorsal fin had arrived.

“Right back.”

I gave Angel my best it’s-almost-last-call-hurry-up look and pulled on his arm hard enough to hurt him. He ended up beating me out the door somehow. The driveway seemed like quicksand now, and we swam over behind Angel’s truck.

There’s a certain poise you gain from being summoned endlessly to fix things that are beyond the capacity of others to do for themselves. You can be dressed in rags, little ovals appearing on the worn bottoms of your old boots, unshorn and bedheaded, and people are still a little in awe of you if you can make a toilet flush. Doctors sit atop this totem pole of hidden knowledge, I guess. You sit there, shivering and shirtless, and wait for them to come in and scrawl a few runes on a scrap of paper and save you. They shake your hand and leave and you know they touch a flower in a pot the same way. A lawyer’s a little farther down, head filled with arcane tidbits that can pull your chestnuts out of the fire after your check clears. But we thumbsmashers make it way up the pole too. The townsfolk stand around waiting for you to fix things. You’re Clint Eastwood with a hammer.

Well, whatever mojo we brought had evaporated entirely, and we were just two schoolboys without our homework again, out in the playground, afraid to go in. Observed dispassionately, Angel and me must look a little absurd together. I’m a six-foot-three Irishman, rangy and pasty-faced to the point of borderline Ichabod Crane, and Angel was little more than five-foot tall, a little heavy, and swarthy. Four-foot-fourteen, I called him. We must have looked like Mutt and Jeff with callouses to Pecksniff, who was no doubt inspecting us from the window.

“There’s no way I’m going back in there.”

Oh boy, here we go.

I should point out here that Angel was no bedwetter. If you work shoulder to shoulder with a guy for years, in the trench and the tavern alike, you get to really know a fellow. He never acted silly, but he had a sort of bonhomie and self-assurance that made him a lot of friends and avoided unpleasantness with strangers most of the time. But like many of my friends, Angel was what we termed ” a serious man.”

I remember some guy in his cups running his mouth at Angel in a barroom one time. The guy was a foot taller than Angel and had a big man on campus athlete look to him. Angel finally told him to shut his pie-hole or he’d shut it for him, and Joe College surprised us all and pulled out a knife. Angel had five friends right there, including me, that would have killed that guy for a nickel, and lent Angel the nickel too, but we reflexively burst out laughing. The only question was where Angel would stick that knife after he took it away from the guy. Somewhere embarrassing, not fatal. Children shouldn’t taunt serious men.

Serious man or not, Angel’s fight or flee instinct seemed to be missing half its urges, and I started wondering just how silly we’d appear to old Pecksniff if I had to tackle Angel when he headed for the driver’s side door.

“A merda do diabo!“he sort of hissed under his breath. “I’m outta here.”

Some Enchanted Place, Part Three, Episode Two

Angel actually gasped. A short little inward chuff of breath, nothing more. But I heard it. I was a pillar of salt, myself. The panes of glass in the door were really old, each with its own brand of waviness and bubbles here and there. It had more of an underwater effect than true transparency. I felt like a fisherman who feels an odd tug on his line, leans over the gunwhale to peer into a limpid pool, and sees last month’s missing boater floating just below the surface instead of the expected carp.

The door swung quietly open and if anything, the effect was worse. A human waxwork had answered the door.

“Yes?”

I don’t know nothing, as they say, but I know my boss had been in contact with this house at least a dozen times between the phone and the mail to make an appointment for us to work here. But they’re always the same, these flunkeys and underlings. They pretend you’re just another waif wandering up the drive and expect you to explain yourself to the last jot and tittle. It is expected from them, and they expect it from you. Even the commonplace intermediaries do it, so it wasn’t that much of a shock when a fellow that looked like he was purchased from a Madame Tussaud’s catalog did it. His little imperious half-smile pushed my heebie-jeebies to the back burner, and my hackles came up in their place.

“We have an appointment. We’re here to fix everything. We were told the staff would be prepared for us.”

He made a little snuffling sound, turned on his heel and retreated back into the gloom of the kitchen. Mr. Pecksniff, I thought, and finally almost felt like smiling. I was ready for this maneuver, too. They walk away without saying anything, and you’re supposed to stand comically at the door until they come back and sort of harrumph and shepherd you through the house like kindergarteners. No dice, Pecksniff. This isn’t our first rodeo. I barged right in and followed him, with Angel hanging back a little.

We made it to an enormous table in the middle of the kitchen. There were four foolscap pages laid out in a perfect line, with perfect little handwritten lists on them. Each item had a dash before it, ready for Pecksniff here to make a mark when we completed it. He said nothing, stood stock still, and looked at a spot where we weren’t.

Angel started looking at the list like it was a life preserver and he was dog-paddling ten miles off-shore. Pecksniff had gone dormant, or into remission, or whatever a bat does all day. I looked around.

The room was enormous. People call the place they make food a kitchen. When they get their hands on a little money, the kitchen gets the Beverly Hillbillies treatment — same stuff, only four of everything. Different as different could be in here. The table our list sat on was a bowling alley on two dozen legs. There were stoves that looked like boilers from an ocean liner designed by Toulouse-Lautrec. Sinks like metal-lined canoes lined one wall, massive dressers lined another like a cityscape. Copper pans depended everywhere from the ceiling like stalactites. The word scullery came to mind, not kitchen. The owner of the house would never set foot in this room except to fire someone.

I started getting a weird feeling about being in there. The sun hadn’t cleared the trees yet, and the place was as gloomy as a crypt. Old Pecksniff wasn’t about to make a light for such as us. My mind started to wander to the poor souls that had spent their entire lives in this shadow world of drudgery right next to luxury. The sum total of their life’s work was marked only by the worn edge of the tables and the uneven gloss on all the metal.

“The morning room sill shall want a dutchman.”

Angel jumped and I woke up a bit. Pecksniff had been watching us without looking at us, another specialty of these underlings. When Angel’s eyes had moved to the second page, Pecksniff knew it and explained the first item without being asked.

Shall want a dutchman. Perfect. The cadaver was talking in 18th century lingo to us. Any normal person would have said: needs a patch. Calling patches a dutchman was code for: don’t spend any money buying anything and don’t spend any time you can charge me for, either.

Poor people are extravagant compared to the silly rich.