Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Dad said, “I could help you carry them boxes in, won’t charge you for that. But I do some handy work for cash, now ‘n’ then.”

“Don’t touch those boxes,” the man said. He had white hair cut real short, like he didn’t want to bother with it. Even though he had white hair he had a young face. But also when he frowned he looks older, hella older. You can’t tell a lot for sure about Mr. Tillinghast till you know him some.

“Well if there’s anything else I can do,” Dad said. “Glad to help. My name’s Lenny Forest. Live right next door.” He had his hands stuck in his pockets when he said it because it was cold. I could see his breath coming out like smoke. “I’m in trailer seven over there, in Cumberland.”

That’s exactly what he said, too. I remember everything, always. My mom says I’ve got a memory like flypaper. I remember what the emergency doctor said when I was two and I had that virus and I remember what people said when I was three and four.

When Mr. Tillinghast just frowned some more like he wanted my dad to leave, Dad said, “I sure was blown away, seeing you wheel this whole house out here. Look at that, you already got the crew to set it down on foundations, and she’s all set. Everything running okay?”

Mr. Tillinghast looked at the house with his eyes real squinty. “Fools didn’t get the pipes right. Water’s not right running.”

“You don’t say! I’ve done my share of plumbing and I got the tools. How about I hook it up for you, and you can pay me a hundred dollars, cash, if it’s done right and not before then. How’d that be?”

“And if you make it worse?”

“I won’t. But if I do, I’ll get people in to fix it.”

Even back then I wondered who that would be, who my dad could get in there to fix it. He was bluffing I guess.

“I have no time to fix pipes.” Mr. Tillinghast made a grunting sound. “So be it then.”

I never heard anyone say so be it but Mr. Tillinghast.

“You come in one hour,” he said, “and I’ll show you where the pipes are. You will come around to the back.” Then Mr. Tillinghast went on with hand trucking his boxes.

My dad turned around to go home and he saw me and got mad that I was standing there staring with my finger in my nose and yelled at me, “Get your ass home, Vester!” My name’s Sylvester, after Sylvester Stallone, but they call me Vester or Ves.

Dad was about to give me a smack but I ran home, wondering what was up with that man who trucked his big house into the lot on the other side of the maples. I was in a trailer park and I knew you could move those houses but I was amazed anyone could move a big one like that. It looked like it could tip over if you pushed it. Two and a half stories tall, and missing most of its white paint and all kind of squeezed together looking.

Now looking back, I wonder that Mr. Tillinghast trusted my dad, that day, because Dad had old sneakers on, and no socks, and his raggedy jeans and Iron Maiden T-shirt. It was cold but Dad didn’t have the sense to put his jacket on, and he was grownup. And he had all those tats on his arms and that beardy face. But then again, I found out later that Mr. Tillinghast didn’t trust anyone who wrote stuff down about him. You get some guy from a fancy-ass plumbing company — like Cumberland Glory has for maintenance — they always look like they’re writing things down.

Dad fixed that pipe all right and Mr. Tillinghast paid him and we went and had hamburgers and French fries and milk shakes that night. Sometimes Dad went over there and cut the grass on the lot, for twenty dollars, so the city people wouldn’t come and bother Mr. Tillinghast about the yard ordinance.

But I heard my dad say more than once, “That’s not a friendly man, that Tillinghast.”

My dad wasn’t always friendly neither, especially when he was smoking the glass pipe and drinking. He would do that and stop doing it and do it and stop doing it. He couldn’t just forever stop doing it. Sometimes he went to special meetings about it and then he’d stop smoking for a while. When he started again, my mom bitched at him about it and he would give my mom a “teaching smack” on the face. But then when he was in the stop-doing-it time, he was okay and he would do some work in construction. He took me to see The Expendables 4 at the mall when he got in a check, just last year. He’d drive me to school sometimes, because the bus stop is so far from here. I liked going to school and he told me once he thought it was good I liked it. “Me,” he said, “I never liked it. Wished I did.”

But he would start up smoking the glass again. So late spring last year, he got taken to jail, because of not wanting the repo to tow his truck off, and he hit that repo guy with the tire iron, and fought the police when they came, and broke a cop’s collarbone. They tazed him, and cuffed him, and I haven’t seen him since, except one visit with Mom.

He won’t be back till I’m twenty-seven because it was also some kind of probation violation, and because he was holding, and because of assault on a police officer, and assault on the repo guy, and resisting arrest.

My mom’s still around, but she likes to drink, and sometimes there’s pills, too. She’s asleep a lot. She has a boyfriend, part time, since last month. She goes to his apartment.

I have a sister, Dusty, who’s fifteen, but she left with Barron from Trailer 2, they took his dad’s old El Dorado and we haven’t seen them for almost a year. Mom hates Barron. She cries and talks about killing him when she’s about half a gallon into that red Carlo Rossi.

I saw Mr. Tillinghast many times, but didn’t talk to him till last year. I heard the humming from his house and the sound like way too many bees, but it didn’t bother me. Other people in the park said the humming and buzzing would shake their trailers and give them headaches. Mom didn’t seem to notice it but she used to live next to a stock car racetrack.

I could feel it when he was running machines that made the humming and that noise like too many bees buzzing. It was a weird feeling, but not so bad. It gave me dreams that were better than some movies I’ve seen. I called it the dream hum. I wasn’t even really asleep when that happened — just halfway. The hum and the buzz gave me ideas, too, but it’s hard to explain what they were. But I always liked to look in the back of televisions and radios and Bebe’s dad told me sometimes how they work and I looked up some on the school internet.

Now Dulesta Finch, she’s my Mom’s friend, from across the park. Her daughter is my friend Bebe.

On the Fourth of July, last year, I heard Dulesta say, when we were at their barbecue, that Mr. Greel who owns Cumberland Glory was going to send the police over to the Tillinghast house because he said it wasn’t zoned for some equipment, and that kind of gear could interfere with airplanes flying over. And she said she heard on the news some pilots were having radio trouble, when they were flying over here.

My dad was only a few months in jail, then. I was noticing him not being there, that night, on the Fourth of July. He used to take us to the free fireworks at the beach park every Fourth. But there was Dulesta’s barbecue and we had sparklers, me and my friend Bebe, who’s kind of my girlfriend but kind of not, and we had some firecrackers. Mrs. Finch got mad when we used a firecracker behind her trailer, it made her fuzzy little white dog hide under the doublewide and cry, so she yelled at us and we run off.

Bebe and I slowed down when we got to the fence between the park and the Tillinghast property. I was feeling wicked sick to my stomach, then, for running after eating too much barbecue and maybe something else that was just in the air.