Nathan Hill - The Nix

FAYE DID NOT ALWAYS SUFFER SO. She was once a normally social, normally functioning kid. Then one day something happened to change all that.

It was the day she learned about the house spirit.

It was 1958, a late-summer barbecue, light fading purpley in the west, mosquitoes and lightning bugs, kids playing tag or watching the bug zapper do its frightening business, men and women outside smoking and drinking and leaning against fence posts or each other, and Faye’s father grilling food for a few neighbors, a few guys from work.

This was all his wife’s idea.

Because Frank Andresen had a reputation: He was a little intimidating, a little standoffish. There was the matter of his accent, sure, that he was a foreigner. But more than that was his manner — melancholy, stoic, inward. The neighbors would see Frank outside gardening and ask how he was doing and he wouldn’t say a word, just simply wave with this expression on his face like he had a broken rib he wasn’t telling them about. Eventually they stopped asking.

His wife insisted: We will invite people over, we will let them get to know you, we will have fun.

So here they were, all these neighbor guys in his backyard, having a conversation about some sports team Frank knew nothing about. He could only listen and stand on the conversation’s periphery, because even after eighteen years in the States there were still some words that eluded him, and many of them were sports-related. He listened and tried to have the correct reactions at the appropriate moments and, thus distracted, he let the hot dogs burn.

He motioned to Faye, who was playing tag with two neighbor boys, and when she came to him he said, “Go inside and fetch some hot dogs.” Then he leaned over her and whispered: “From downstairs.”

By which he meant the bomb shelter.

The immaculately cleaned, brilliantly lit, fully stocked bomb shelter that he spent the previous three summers building. He had constructed it at night — only at night, so the neighbors wouldn’t see. He would leave and come back with a truck full of supplies. One night it was two thousand nails. Another it was eleven bags of concrete. He had this kit that showed him how to do it. He would pour the concrete into plastic molds that Faye loved touching because while the concrete was hardening it was also hot. Only once did Faye’s mother ask him about it, early on, asked him why on earth he was building a bomb shelter in their basement. He stared at her with these horrible hollow eyes and gave her this face like Don’t make me say it out loud. Then he went back to the truck.

Faye said yes, she would fetch the hot dogs, and when her father’s back was turned she ran to the two neighbor boys and, because she was eight years old and desperate to be liked, she said, “You want to see something?” To which the answer was of course yes. And so with the two boys Faye entered the house and took them downstairs. Her father had dug up the basement’s stone floor so that the shelter looked like a submarine surfacing right out of the ground. A rectangular concrete box with steel-reinforced walls that could withstand their own house collapsing on top of it. A small door with a padlock — the combination being Faye’s birth date — that Faye opened and took the four steps down into the structure and flipped on the lights. The effect here was like a single aisle from the grocery store had been magically transported into their basement: the brilliant white fluorescents, the cans of food that lined the walls. The boys gasped.

“What is this?” one of them said.

“Our bomb shelter.”

“Wow.”

Shelves crowded with cardboard boxes and wooden crates and mason jars and cans all turned identically label-out: tomatoes, beans, dehydrated milk. Ten-gallon jugs of water, dozens of them, stacked in a pyramid near the door. Radios, bunk beds, oxygen tanks, batteries, boxes of cornflakes stockpiled in the corner, a television with a cord that disappeared into the wall. A hand crank on the wall labeled AIR INTAKE. The boys looked around astonished. They pointed to a locked wooden cabinet with a frosted glass cover and asked what was in there.

“Guns,” Faye said.

“Do you have the key?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

Upstairs, the boys were delirious. They could not contain their excitement.

“Dad!” they said, running crazily into the backyard. “Dad! Do you know what they have in the basement? A bomb shelter!”

And Frank looked at Faye so hard that she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes.

“A bomb shelter?” said one of the fathers. “No kidding?”

“Not really,” Frank said. “Just supply closet. Like a wine cellar.”

“No it isn’t,” said one of the boys. “It’s huge! And it’s concrete and full of food and guns.”

“Is that so?”

“Can we build one?” said the other boy.

“You get one of those kits?” said the father. “Or did you do it yourself?”

Frank seemed to consider whether he wanted to engage this question, then softened a bit and stared at the ground.

“Bought the plans,” he said, “then built it myself.”

“How big is it?”

“Thirty by twelve.”

“So that fits, what, how many people?”

“Six.”

“Great! Russians drop the bomb, we’ll know where to go.”

“Funny,” Frank said. His back was turned now. He placed the new hot dogs on the grill, moving them around with long metal tongs.

“I’ll bring the beer,” the father said. “Hear that, kids? We’re all saved.”

“Sorry,” said Frank, “no.”

“We’ll bunk it up for a few weeks. Be like we’re in the service again.”

“No can do.”

“Aw, c’mon. What are you going to do, turn us away?”

“I’m all full.”

“It’ll fit six. You said so yourself. I only count three of you.”

“No telling how long we’ll be down there.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

“You’re pulling my leg. You’d let us in, right? I mean, if there really was a bomb. You’d let us in.”

“Listen to me,” Frank said. He put down the tongs and turned around and put his hands on his hips. “If anyone comes near that door, I will shoot them. You understand? I will shoot them in the head.”

And everyone was quiet. Faye heard nothing but the air hissing out of the sizzling meat.

“Okay, jeez,” the father said. “I was joking, Frank. Settle down.”

And he took his beer and went into the house. And Faye and everyone else followed, leaving Frank out there alone. She watched him that night from a dark upstairs window as he stood over the grill and silently let the meat blacken and burn again.

This would be an enduring memory of her father, an image that captured something important about the man: alone and angry and hunched over with his arms on the table like he was praying to it.

He stayed out there the rest of the evening. Faye was put to bed. Her mom gave her a bath and tucked her in and filled her glass with water. It was always there, that glass, in case she got thirsty in the night. A short, wide tumbler, adult-size with a thick base. She liked to hold it on hot summer evenings, wrap her hands around it and feel its solidity and heaviness. She liked to press it against her cheek and feel its smooth crystalline coldness. And this was what she was doing, holding the glass to her face, when, after a brief and gentle knock, after the door swung slowly and silently open, her father appeared in her bedroom.

“I have something for you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass figurine: an old man, white beard, sitting with his legs around a bowl of porridge, wooden spoon in his hand, wrinkly face full of satisfaction.