Mr. Was Read online

  Hermie—I remembered his name, too—set his pool cue on the table.

  “I s’pose I could do that,” he said. “Only I got to tell you, Ole, I ain’t gonna be too terrible sad if he don’t make it.” He turned toward the other pool player. “How ’bout you, Harry?”

  Harry shrugged.

  I remembered Harry now, too.

  Ole said, “Doggone it, you boys let him die on my floor, you’ll be driving all the way to Red Wing every time you want a drink. You understand me?”

  Once Hermie and Harry got moving, they had Skoro into the back of the van within two minutes. Ole and I stood in front of the Quick Stop and watched their taillights disappear up the road.

  Ole shook his head. “Those boys ain’t got the sense of a dead dog between ’em,” he muttered. “How they got to be that old being that stupid, I’ll never know.”

  “You think he’ll be all right?” I asked.

  “Skoro? Couldn’t say. He’s a tough old bird.”

  “He lives in town here?”

  Ole gestured with a thumb. “Up atop the bluff. Big old place. Boggs’s End, we call it.”

  I looked up the bluff and saw the shape of a big house backlit by a half-moon. A closeup of its weathered gray clapboard siding swam into my mind’s eye. I was sure I had been there before.

  “Does he live alone?” I asked.

  “You kidding? Who else would want to live in a spookhole like that?”

  “I was wondering if we should notify someone.”

  “Well. . . he’s got a daughter, lives down in Illinois. I don’t imagine there’s much she could do from down there, but I’m sure folks at the hospital will call her.”

  “So how long has Skoro lived around here?”

  “He ain’t never lived anyplace else, far as I know.”

  Although I could see Boggs’s End from Ole’s, it was still a long way off, and the roads in this part of the country are twisted up like a pail of worms. I was prepared to get lost, but it seemed like as soon as I started the car, I just knew which way to go. Ten minutes later I was parked in front of the wide, sagging veranda. The feeling that I was walking backward through my life overwhelmed me. I remembered everything I saw, but nothing else.

  I didn’t bother to knock. The doors were unlocked. I stepped into Boggs’s End, each step echoed in my mind.

  The foyer with the cold marble floor. The cracked leather sofa. The smell of old wood. The chandelier.

  My hunger to recover my early years grew with each shred of recaptured past. I had been there before, many times. My hands were shaking. I stood beneath the chandelier and closed my eyes and listened to my pulse throbbing in my ears. Was I excited, or afraid?

  I must see it all, I told myself. I must remember everything.

  Then I heard a soft, repeated clicking sound. I turned my head from side to side, trying to locate the noise. It was coming from the back of the house. I moved toward it, past the white marble staircase, down the short hallway, into the library that looked out over the bluff.

  I remembered the room, and the books.

  But I did not remember the big man in overalls sitting at the desk working at the computer.

  Too surprised to move, I stood in the doorway and watched his thick fingers rattling the keyboard. He was a large man, broad across the back, with black curly hair tumbling from beneath a wide-brimmed black hat. A matching beard sprouted from his weathered face and spilled over his chest. As I watched, he peered intently at the numbers on the computer screen, frowned, and muttered to himself. “Primitive, it was. I will be glad when it hasn’t been invented yet, I was!” He typed furiously for several seconds. Rows and columns of digits flickered. “Will be too many parts. Those blasted doors. Too complicated. Too complicated.” He continued to type, muttering all the while.

  I cleared my throat.

  He turned his big bearded face toward me and fixed me with a pair of eyes so dark they looked like holes. “Good day, sir,” he said, grinning. He had one of those voices that you can feel in your chest. “You don’t remember me, I see. It had been a long time.”

  “Been a long time since what?” I asked.

  “Know you what tomorrow is?”

  I shook my head.

  The man laughed. “Tomorrow was the day you became.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ll have to write it down,” he said, “to read it.”

  “Write what down? Who are you?”

  “I was nobody yet. But you can call me Pinky.” He returned his attention to the computer.

  Even if I knew what was going on here, I thought, it wouldn’t make sense.

  “This man Skoro, he cheats.” Pinky pointed at a square of wrinkled, yellowed paper taped to the wall beside the desk. “Have you seen?”

  I stepped closer and looked. It was a piece of newspaper covered with tiny print. Some kind of statistics. Stock tables.

  “You will have looked at the date,” Pinky said.

  I looked. The paper was dated 1996. Three years in the future.

  “A misprint?” I asked.

  “A cheat sheet,” he said. “An anachronism. Out of place, out of time. A very bad thing, very bad indeed. He makes much money using this paper. Stocks and bonds are not for knowing, they are for guessing. But he knows for years and years which companies will still exist, which little investments will grow. You call it something in this time. You call it insider trading. This is what I am saying. Your grandfather cannot do this thing. He cannot steal time yet to come.”

  “My grandfather,” I said. “Skoro is my grandfather. I remember now.”

  “You will remember more, though you may think it too late. Still, you will have what life I could allow you. Your role must have been played out.” He hit several keys, and the numbers on the computer screen jumped. “Neither he nor his offspring may profit,” he said under his breath.

  I was getting irritated by Pinky’s weird way of talking.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “This is where the disruption began,” he said. “My fault, my fault, a door without locks is a fool’s door. A good thing your grandfather feared what he does not know. He fears the door so much he was never able to pass through, though he tried. His body stops itself from taking the necessary step. Had he passed, I might never have been able to bring the passageways back into balance. He was a coward, afraid of both the was and the will be. This was why he changed his name. He could not abide his past. He thought he could not stand to be his father’s son. But it was himself he could not stand to be. Like you, Jack Lund.”

  I said, “My grandfather?”

  “You are confused. It will have come to you later or sooner, once you have met your echo.”

  He touched a key. All the numbers on the screen flickered and became nines.

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  “I am going to have be draining it, I did, primitive thing, it spills knowledge like an overfilled dam.” The nines became eights, then sevens. “Neither he nor his offspring.” Sixes. “What goes around comes around, my friend.” His arm shot out and his chunky right hand slapped against the 1996 stock tables. The numbers on the computer screen continued to count down.

  Fours, threes. He made a fist and the yellowed newspaper disappeared into his meaty hand.

  Twos.

  Ones.

  Zeroes.

  The screen flashed and flickered with green snow.

  Pinky laughed. “All gone. Perhaps you had remembered something of me now. It mattered not.”

  In that instant, I saw him standing in a field of grass, a woman and two children at his side, thunderclouds filling the sky beyond.

  I squeezed my eyes closed, opened them, saw his wide back disappearing out the doorway.

  I heard the front door slam.

  The computer screen had gone dark but for a single line of type: WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.

  I looked at those words for a lon
g time. Maybe half an hour, maybe not so long, trying to absorb all I’d heard. Not for the first time, I wondered whether I was insane. Perhaps Salisbury Acres was a mental hospital where I had been confined to treat my delusions.

  Was I a madman, living in a reality that existed only in my mind?

  It was possible, and certainly easier to swallow than the notion that my grandfather and I were the same age. Or that, as the bearded man had implied, time had somehow become twisted and warped. But I didn’t believe that I was mad. A madman would have believed everything Pinky had said. I believed little of it.

  If anyone was insane, it was Pinky.

  I found a switch on the back of the computer and turned it off. The faint humming of the hard drive ceased, and the silence of the big house pressed in on me. I decided to get up, move around, see what other memories Boggs’s End might unleash.

  I walked down the hall to the staircase. I had a feeling that the upper floors contained my most important memories, but I was afraid.

  Don’t be ridiculous, I said to myself. That crazy Pinky has you spooked. I started up the staircase. After a few steps, I felt as if the soles of my shoes were not gripping the stairs, as if they had been oiled. I grabbed the banister for support and looked down.

  I was standing in a puddle of blood.

  I looked back. Behind me it flowed like a river of thick wine down the marble stairs. I looked up toward the landing. More blood, a red cascade running over my shoes. Slowly, I backed down the stairs, my shoes making a sucking sound each time I lifted my feet. I had to get out. Reaching the bottom, I turned toward the front entrance. The doors were not as they had been. They were shattered, one of them torn off its hinges. Black tire tracks scarred the white marble floor, and someone was screaming. Clapping my hands over my ears, I ran out through the shattered doorway, but the screaming only got louder. On some level I knew that I was the one who was screaming, but I couldn’t make myself stop until all the air from inside that house had left my lungs. I tore open the car door, tumbled inside, and locked the doors.

  Boggs’s End stood dark and silent before me, the front doors closed and undamaged.

  Now who’s the crazy man, I wondered.

  Memory, Minnesota

  February 20, 1993

  I have not been able to force myself to return to Boggs’s End. The very thought of it makes my heart shake. But I did attend Skoro’s funeral. I was not disappointed to find that it was to be a closed-casket service. I had no desire to look upon his face again. Apparently, he’d had few friends at the end of his life. There were fewer than a dozen people at the service, mostly people my age or older, people who would be sharing Skoro’s experience soon. One younger couple, a man and woman in their early forties, occupied the front pew. Both of them looked intensely familiar, and I was sure I remembered their faces from my childhood. Or, since that would have been impossible, the faces of some people who looked like them.

  I am certain they are related to me, and I fear they are insane.

  They seem to think they have an invisible child.

  First, I noticed they were sitting a good three feet apart from one another, which is odd for a married couple in public. When the woman spoke to her husband she would lean forward, as if trying to peer around someone. At times she would say something to the invisible person between them, or she would rest her hand on its invisible shoulder. The man had a haggard, hungover look. As I looked at him, I became unaccountably angry. When he tousled the head of the invisible child, I found myself wanting to reach over and strike him. For some reason, the words of the bearded man kept running through my head. What goes around comes around. At one point during the service, I realized with a jolt that I had been whispering the words aloud, over and over, like a mantra. I’m surprised I wasn’t asked to leave.

  The burial took place at a small nondenominational cemetery just outside of Memory. I watched from my car, confused, depressed, and feeling as if I knew even less than I had before. After the casket was lowered, as the mourners filed back to their automobiles, I got out and approached the woman, my presumed relative, with the intention of introducing myself and offering my condolences. I was only a few feet away from her when her face exploded. Blood covered her face, streaked her hair, soaked the lapels of her black wool coat. My knees went weak, and I staggered backward. She continued toward her car with her husband, whose hands were dripping blood, and their invisible child. I grabbed a tombstone for support and closed my eyes. When I opened them, they were climbing into their car, not a speck of blood on them.

  THE FOURTH NOTEBOOK:

  Memory

  This cardboard-covered, spiral notebook appears to be a continuation of the first notebook, written in the same shaky hand.

  —P.H.

  Andrea Island, Puerto Rico

  August 27, 1952

  Andie has asked me to finish my story. She says a story isn’t really a story until it is completely told. “But I filled up the notebook you gave to me!” I said. She gave me this new one. Ah, well. What else do I have to do?

  After Skoro’s funeral, I became convinced that I was insane, but I never once considered returning to the hospital. If a half century of confinement at Salisbury Acres had not restored my sanity, why should I consider going back? Instead, having nowhere else to go, I rented an old house trailer set back in the woods, a few miles outside of Memory. If I was a madman, I might as well be a free madman.

  In the mornings I would walk the countryside, searching within my own mind for the key to my past. Often, my walks would take me near Boggs’s End. I could not shake the feeling that my past lay within its walls but, even though it stood vacant, my fear would not allow me to enter that house of bloody visions.

  So I contented myself with absorbing the smaller, more easily digested memories that other parts of Memory had to offer. Memories of walking in the woods, of the pretty red-haired, green-eyed girl, of driving fast on narrow dirt roads.

  • • •

  Back then I believed that my lost memory existed as a whole and complete entity inside my skull. I believed that the right thought, the right reminder would cause the unraveled cloth to weave itself into a completed tapestry.

  But that is not the way it happens.

  Memories come back one at a time. I had a growing basket of multicolored threads, but no pattern. Places, people, and events from my early years floated about in my head, each one separate and distinct. Weaving it all together would be a tedious, prolonged process. I did not know what came first, or how much was missing, and I had only the faintest shadow of an idea of the shape of my past.

  Although I bought nothing for myself but firewood and food, the money I had stolen from Bobby Dennison quickly ran out, and I was forced to support myself by doing odd jobs for the people living in and around Memory.

  As the days and weeks passed, bits and pieces of my lost childhood appeared in my thoughts. One day I remembered my mother cooking dinner in a small kitchen with striped yellow wallpaper. I had seen her face before, at Skoro’s funeral.

  Those days passed quickly. I was prepared to live out the rest of my life as the hermit of Memory, and I might have had I not met my mother, face-to-face, in the summer of 1995.

  • • •

  There is a type of mushroom called a “chanterelle” that grows under old oaks. A gourmet restaurant across the lake would buy them from me for eight dollars a pound, and during mushroom season I spent as much time as possible scouring the coulees for the yellow fungus. On the day I met my mother I had been wandering the woods for some hours, finding only a few wormy chanterelles, but enjoying myself in a quiet sort of way. I reached the edge of a neglected apple orchard and realized with a start that I was only a few dozen yards from Boggs’s End. The familiar fear came over me and I turned to go back the way I’d come, when a woman’s voice called out to me. “Excuse me! Are you lost?”

  I shook my head, staring at her.

  “Are you all right?” sh
e asked, coming closer. She had a laundry basket in her hands. Behind her, a rope strung between two apple trees carried an assortment of shirts, pants, and underwear.

  “No,” I replied. “I guess I got turned around. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, looking at the bag in my hand. “What are you doing?”

  “I was hunting mushrooms,” I said.

  “My name is Betty Lund,” she said. “We just moved here last month.” She moved closer. “What kind of mushrooms are those? May I see?”

  I showed her one of the chanterelles, which look like small yellow funnels.

  “I’ve never seen a mushroom like that before. What’s your name?”

  I hesitated, then told her my name was Mr. Was. “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “I have to be going,” I said.

  “You look familiar.”

  I tried to reply, but at that instant a memory came into my mind so sharp and clear and real that the air turned solid in my lungs. I saw her on a linoleum floor, hugging her knees like a fetus, red blood soaking her green dress. I backed away, then turned, walking quickly, then ran.

  “You’re welcome to hunt your mushrooms here,” she called after me.

  Now I know I am insane, I thought.

  I remembered my mother now. I remembered her flowered cotton blouses, her slim hands, her tentative voice, and her sad face. And I remembered the small V-shaped scar high on her right cheek. And I remembered that it had been caused by a blow from a man’s fist.

  The woman in the orchard was my mother.

  But that was impossible.

  Therefore I was insane.

  I walked drunkenly through the woods, too preoccupied with my thoughts to avoid the fallen trees, the rocks, the face-slapping branches. I fell several times, losing my bag of mushrooms, twisting my ankle, scraping my palms. It was nearly dark when I trudged up to my rented trailer and let myself in and fell into bed.