Martin, Crook, & Bill Read online

  Martin, Crook, & Bill

  By Donna Nitz Muller

  Dedicated to Sarah and Bonnie

  Martin, Crook, and Bill

  A casket in the bedroom

  A wake in the parlor

  A lone oak tree as sentinel

  On a rolling rise of pasture

  Guarding the burning ember

  Who will step from the ashes

  Wrapped in a great coat

  Carrying the secret of life

  Martin, Crook, & Bill

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Martin watched the tall, skinny kid with loose jeans and a long navy colored shirt turn past the bus driver. He watched the kid pass the first rows of empty seats, and mumbled, “Do not sit here. I repeat, not here.”

  Refusing to even glance at the seat beside him for fear of giving the space some psychic power of attraction, Martin said, “No, no, no, no.”

  The young man walked toward him, appeared to count the rows, and squeezed in the space beside Martin. Despite the empty rows, despite Martin’s long legs filling every centimeter of leg space, the kid sat down, adjusted his body to fit around Martin’s elbow and looked straight ahead.

  “Why did you sit here?” Martin asked him.

  “Seven rows, left side,” the kid said.

  “What does that mean?” Martin tried to appear completely calm, the whole of him calm and easy.

  “Lucky for me,” the kid answered without turning his eyes from the front.

  Martin had thought it was him, something in his own manner or appearance that attracted the passenger to sit beside him. Relieved that he had not attracted the kid he asked, “How is it lucky?”

  This time the young man did turn to face Martin. He had to look up to meet Martin’s eyes. “You are one tall dude,” the kid said, and then continued. “It is lucky because seven is a lucky number, but it is a double lucky number on the left side in rows.” The young man smiled, showing even teeth and a charismatic face.

  Martin nodded and turned back to the window. He watched the jagged lightning flash through the sky above the squat buildings. The bus lumbered through the Sioux Falls streets, brakes screeching and frame moaning while turning west on Interstate 90. In the open country the storm raged outside Martin’s window. The wind rocked the bus and sometimes the gusts spit bits of rain around the aging window frame. What should have been August dusk was coal black night.

  “Scary,” the young man said, sitting slightly forward on his seat.

  “What?” Martin asked.

  “The weather,” he said. He gestured with his head toward the window.

  “Oh.” Martin looked again toward the window. “I thought you meant me.”

  The young man laughed, and Martin liked the sound of his laughter. Martin smiled, and the kid talked. “I’m heading to Rapid City to be a dealer in a casino. I start on Tuesday at Uptown Joe’s. Not exactly the top of the trade, but everybody starts somewhere.”

  Martin did not know what to say to that information, so he said nothing.

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going home,” Martin said.

  “What do you do, for a living, I mean?” the kid asked Martin with a genuine glint of curiosity in his lively brown eyes.

  “Guess,” Martin turned to look at the kid. In the dim bus light, he could see the kid’s focused expression, trying to guess a riddle.

  “Not sales or banking,” the kid said. “Maybe a farmer, maybe a musician. I cannot guess.” He shrugged and waited for the answer.

  “I’m mental. I mean I am seriously whacked, dysfunctional, but cured enough to go home to my farm.” Martin had to be careful not to get too excited. He hated when his stomach churned and his mind raced ahead of him.

  “Be quiet now,” Martin told the young man. He had nothing to lean his head against, so he hunched down and bowed his head and closed his eyes.

  “You look like a man on a mission,” the kid said quietly.

  “I do?”

  “Yes,” the kid said. “I met a guy at a carnival once who looked like you with the long,

  shaggy black hair and the haunted looking eyes. He walked around on stilts trying to scare

  people. He sang stuff in this soft voice.”

  “What did he sing?”

  The kid put his hands out full beside his ears, closed his eyes, and wiggled his fingers.

  “I see murder and mayhem.”

  The kid spoke in a sing-song voice like a carnival act. When he opened his eyes and

  looked at Martin he quickly added, “Joking, just joking.”

  Martin said, “Did I murder someone?”

  The kid gaped at him but did not move away or answer the question so Martin

  asked, “Does the murder come after the mayhem or before?”

  The kid beside him had turned away. When Martin did not move or talk for several

  minutes, the kid finally settled deeper into his seat. Martin could feel the young man’s energy.

  “Not far now,” Martin said. “I’m almost home.”

  He was a young man once, but even then he did not ride the bus. He flew to places, first class. Now, at age thirty-nine and one half, he rode the bus. There would be no high school band or waving pom-poms to welcome him, just an old, empty farm house. He forced calmness through his veins like dye for a cardiogram. And he thought of Crook. The cragged, tough, enigmatic visage of Crook provided peace and motivation.

  The old Greyhound crawled west on I-90 into a vast and empty cavern as though some crazy wizard had put the bus into an alternate universe. Nothing was visible through the sheets of rain, and Martin said, “Welcome to the Twilight Zone.” The bus sliced through the deep South Dakota darkness.

  Looking across the row to his right, Martin watched the green interstate signs loom out of the darkness as the bus lights moved across them. He saw Buffalo Ridge and Hartford, Humboldt and Montrose and Canistota. As the Canistota sign passed, Martin stood and indicated for the kid to let him pass.

  “We aren’t anywhere,” the kid told him, annoyed, but he slid his feet into the aisle and made himself small.

  Martin, pulling his gym bag from under the seat, squeezed past the kid, and then turned back, “Remember the house always wins.” A stupid thing to say, Martin thought, but he was sure he had said it out loud and that was satisfying.

  Martin stood, very tall, behind the driver. Due to the confined space, Martin found it necessary to bend his head forward and lean into the driver’s space. “Do not miss the Wheaton exit,” he said, his soft measured voice almost menacing. Martin noted the fear that passed across the driver’s expression, and Martin wondered at it.

  The Wheaton town stop was better than three miles from the exit, so the driver asked Martin to sit down. It was not easy for Martin to explain things, so he kept standing. His hands began to wave at his sides as though pushing through water. The gym bag hit soft against the iron railing. When the bus sloshed and creaked to a halt at the stop sign, Martin stepped down and faced the door. “Here,” he said. The door split in two and opened.

  Martin faced the thick, wet darkness and yelled, “Kid!”

  He heard the steps stop behind him. Martin remained looking straight ahead, through the open door, “Remind the driver that I have a chest in the luggage compartment. He might drive off with it when I step out.”

  Martin’s tall body filled the doorway. He braced himself with his right hand and held the gym bag in his left. He could neither step out nor turn around.

  “He heard ya,” the kid’s voice rising above the weather. The driver squeaked in his chair, and pulled out plastic rain gear. Martin nodded and said, hopefully out loud, “Thank you.”
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br />   Martin heard the driver’s cough, held his breath and stepped into the black night.

  Protected by the bus from the wind and driving rain, it took both men to heave Martin’s trunk onto the road. The driver shut the baggage area door, glanced from Martin to the trunk, shrugged, and climbed back to his seat. Then Martin watched the taillights of the bus cross the highway to the interstate on-ramp and disappear, carrying the young man with his new job further west.

  The tool chest was two feet by four feet. Martin pulled a flashlight from a side pocket, held it in his mouth, and detached the dolly from the top of the chest. It was all his design. Martin recalled guiding the hand of Tobias, the welder. He saw the blue flame and the thin line of silver like hot glue, attaching the retractable wheels. He could not remember how long ago that was. Crook told him many times not to dwell backwards in time.

  Martin braced the dolly with his feet. It took several tries at full strength, but Martin finally heard the click that meant the box was firmly fixed onto the wheels. Distant lightening flashes provided a neon light. The wind and rain could not maintain such ferocious energy; still gusty, still dark and wet, but less threatening and more embracing. He pulled the handle from its place, attached it, found his sopping wet gym bag and plopped it on top.

  It was twenty years since he left home, but Martin did not need light to walk this mile, half on highway, half on gravel, to the house of his father. Many visits of course, but this time there would be no one to greet him. This time, he thought, he would not leave. It was time to heal or die. The kid had said murder and mayhem. Then Martin remembered, the kid was joking.

  Martin felt the slight downgrade of the gravel road beneath his feat and, looking up, he saw the white light from the kitchen windows of his neighbor’s farm house. Bill Bendix lived in that house along with his wife, Tillie. As far as Martin knew, they had always lived there, were born there. Martin waved his hands at his sides as though paddling his way through the night, moving the night behind him. It was the familiar bitter-sweet recognition of Bill’s farm house, lighted in the night, which caused Martin’s lapse into deep unrecognizable thoughts.

  He rubbed his eyes and shook his arms and picked up the handle to his toolbox and started down the road. The road beneath his feet was so familiar to him that the final quarter mile to his own driveway slipped beneath him quickly and smoothly. He knew the driveway was there despite the weeds growing down the middle and leaving a barely visible two-wheel track that led to the old, abandoned house. He knew it in the dark as he would know it in the light.

  Martin considered leaving the chest at the end of the driveway until morning. As he was thinking about that, his legs kept moving and his body kept pulling until he was looking into the dark windows of the porch. The row of sagging porch windows looked like eyes into a black hole. This house was like no other Martin had seen or built.

  It was after midnight and Martin was tired. Exhaustion weighed him down and he could only think of sleep. How wonderful to feel so tired. Most people, he thought, did not know what a wonderful thing it was to feel tired, to want to sleep. It felt so good in fact that it gave him new energy.

  Leaving the chest at the bottom of the three cement steps, Martin climbed, one foot up and then the other. His breathing rasped and a chill played down his spine. When he pulled at the screen door, the whole door came off in his hand, swung by the handle and flopped lengthwise against the siding. “Jesus!” Martin gasped. He set the door against the siding and stepped onto the porch floor. The floor felt mushy under his feet; rotten wood.

  Martin crossed the eight feet to the door leading into the kitchen. When he opened the kitchen door, he was greeted with a sudden scurrying sound. He recognized the quick, rushing scamper of rats. His hands again fluttered at his sides. It took a long time to push his way past the scampering sounds.

  After awhile, he slowly pulled the flashlight from his pocket, feeling it in the utter darkness, heavy in his big hand. Silence now and darkness and a dizzy loss of direction until the flashlight worked under his thumb. With the flashlight he found his father’s stash of lanterns. The lanterns on the pantry shelf clanked and fell under his clumsy grasp, but he caught them. The wicks were dry but the kerosene in its small spouted can stood at the end of the shelf.

  He worked quickly, standing at the small, wood table in the pantry. He talked in a constant, soft flow of words. The sound of his own voice kept him company. A rat crossed his shoe and he sent it flying with a tiny scream that sounded a lot like the sound of the rat. He talked louder and heard the fear in his voice. He could not allow the darkness any closer. “Too long a day. Go to bed. Too long a ride. Find a bed,” he said into the circle of light around the flashlight which stood on end on the table.

  Carrying the lighted lantern, he moved cautiously through the long kitchen and the dining room and into the living room. He remembered a huge stuffed horsehair chair with arms as large as fat logs, its rounded edges several inches over the side of the chair. He sought it.

  Martin knew what happened as soon as the light fell into the room. Kids used the living room to party. Beer cans were stacked in pyramids along one wall. The light outlined cobwebs flowing from the beer cans like lines of frost on thin wires. Only the huge, stuffed chair remained of the furniture. The chair appeared to have drunk all the beer. It sat crooked and sloppy drunk. Martin did not approach it. Anything could inhabit the chair.

  Retracing his steps, Martin realized the claw-footed dining room table was gone and the window was missing. The lead glass dining room window with the colored pieces at the top was completely gone. Someone had put cardboard over the opening. The other window facing the porch was broken. He felt moist air on his cheeks and heard the crunch of glass and garbage and the suck of slippery stuff under his work boots. Still, the hardwood floor was solid beneath. He held the lantern down to double check.

  The furniture, strangely, did not matter to him, but the disrepair of the magnificently built house hurt like stabbing needles between his shoulder blades. Martin had not felt that kind of hurt for long months, even years. It reminded him both that he was alive and that it might not be a good thing.

  There was emotional release in pounding the dining room wall and feeling the old plaster give beneath his fist, and satisfaction in solid lathe beneath the plaster. “It can be fixed,” he told himself. “Nothing broken here that cannot be fixed better than ever.”

  Martin knew houses as he knew how to breathe. Knowing things was not the problem. In fact, his knowledge of design and structure was stronger than ever. Functioning was the problem, getting up in the morning, talking sentences, keeping the blackness away; that was the problem.

  He slowly found his way to the small room off the kitchen with linoleum flooring worn through to the black. His mother once used this room for washing both clothes and children. The room was turned into storage after indoor plumbing in 1962. But the ancient high-legged, sprawling bathtub stood where it had always been. It was easier to put stuff into it than to move it. Martin lowered the lantern into the tub and checked carefully for animal droppings or nests, at least animals big enough to see. Nothing but his mother’s canning equipment, strainers and pressure cooker, jar lids, and a cone shaped apparatus with a wooden tool used to squeeze every molecule of apple juice from the crab apples.

  Moving quickly now, Martin took the stairs three at a time. He used the back stairs to reach the winter closet which held his father’s greatcoat. His father wore this heavy, long, double-breasted coat over his barrel chest when he stepped from the ship. The cleaning label was printed in German. On his father, this coat flapped about his ankles when he strode the winter sidewalk to church. The coat commanded respect. So it was with respect Martin separated the coat from the other clothes on the rack. He pulled and lifted the heavy wooden hanger from the closet and tore the rotting plastic cover from the coat.

  Ignoring the scampers of feet, ignoring the raindrops plopping in the hallway, ignoring
cobwebs and grime that tasted on his tongue, Martin carried the coat down the stairs like the body of a beautiful woman. He set the lantern on a bench and laid the coat into the tub. It filled the bottom. In the poor light and deep shadows the coat seemed to float. He resisted diving into it.

  Before rest, he had to find his gym bag. The wet thing lay where it was dropped on the kitchen floor. Martin put it into the bathtub. Next he pulled and tugged and lifted his tool chest up the steps and across the porch and through the kitchen door. He shut the door hard and tight, pushing one more time with his backside. The darkness instantly closed in.

  “Don’t panic, Jim Bob,” he muttered as he yanked the door open and snatched his lantern from the porch floor. Again, he shut the door. No longer heeding the squeaks and scuffles he caused among the rodents, he stepped into the bathtub while holding the lantern above his head. He lay down still holding the lantern with one raised arm. Only then did the sensation of wet reach him.

  His hair was wet, his clothes and shoes were wet, and the gym bag was sodden. Standing up in the tub, he removed his socks and shoes and jeans. He molded the gym bag into a pillow and put it beneath the coat. He reached to extinguish the lantern and decided to let it burn out. Lying down and wrapping himself into the coat, he shut his eyes.

  “Goodnight Nancy, goodnight Carmen and Christie, goodnight Crook. Sounds like the Walton’s in here.”

  Martin was home.

  Chapter Two

  With his determined strides away from the house, the long coat slapped against Martin’s bare calves, causing a swishing sound. He focused downward, careful to follow the old path visible like a pencil line between thistles and pigeon grass gone to seed. His untied work boots slipped on his feet, and the sun was hot through the black coat.

  Martin noted the furious hammering of his heart. “Overslept, overslept,” he said as he rushed along the thin path. “Running on a tight rope,” he said. “Running a damn tight rope.”