The Little Sleep Page 14

  On the way to the basement, I do a quick run through the bathroom. I look inside the toilet tank, leaving no porcelain cover unturned. Then back to the kitchen, and it’s grab a flashlight and pound the stairs down into the basement.

  The basement, like the house, is small, seemingly smaller than the bungalow’s footprint, though I don’t know how that’s possible. The furnace, washer, and dryer fill up an alcove. There’s less clutter than I expected down here. There’s a pair of rusty bed frames leaning against the foundation walls, a set of metal shelves that hold a mishmash of forgotten tokens of home ownership, and an old hutch with empty drawers. It looks like Ellen was down here recently, organizing or cleaning. I check the exposed ceiling beams and struts; the take-home prizes are spiderwebs and dead bugs, but no film.

  A tip, an edge, of panic is starting to poke me in the back of the head, now that I haven’t found it yet. The bungalow doesn’t want to let go of its secrets.

  Back to the alcove. Behind and above the washer and dryer is a crawl space with a dirt floor. I climb up and inside I have to duck-walk. Not wild about this. Dark, dirt floor, enclosed space: there’s a large creepiness factor, and it’s very easy to imagine there are more than metaphorical skeletons stuffed or buried here.

  I find a Christmas-tree stand, boxes of ornaments and tablecloths, and one of my old kiddie Halloween costumes, a pirate. Christ. Everywhere I turn in the damn house is stuff that doesn’t need to be saved, but it’s there, like a collection of regrets, jettisoned and almost but not quite forgotten.

  I use the flashlight to trace the length of the dirt floor into the corners and then, above me, on the beams and pipes. The film is not here. Is it buried? I could check, get a shovel and move some dirt around, like some penny-ante archaeologist or grave robber. Indiana Jones, I’m not. Goddamn, that would take too long. Time is my enemy and always will be.

  Maybe the missing film isn’t here. Maybe the DA and his goons already found it in my apartment or the office with their quaint search-and-seizure operation; it would explain why they haven’t torn this place apart. But that doesn’t work. Ellen’s parents were still alive and living in the building when Tim died. He wouldn’t have hidden film at their place. Even if he did hide it there, too much work and change has happened to the interior of the building in the intervening years. The years always intervene. It would’ve been found.

  It could be anywhere. It could’ve been destroyed long ago, purposefully or accidentally. It could be nowhere. Or it’s here but it’s lost, like me. Being lost isn’t the same as being nowhere. Being lost is worse because there’s the false hope that you might be found.

  I crawl out onto the washing machine ass first. I’m a large load, wash in warm water. Brush myself off and back upstairs to the kitchen. I sit heavily at the table with the newspapers. I want a cigarette but the pack is in my coat and my coat is way over in the other room. My legs are too heavy. My arms and hands are too heavy. If I could only get around without them, conserve energy, throw the extra weight overboard so I could stay afloat. Can’t get myself out of the chair. You never get used to the total fatigue that rules your narcoleptic life, and it only gets more difficult to overcome. Practice doesn’t make perfect.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The sun shines bright, just like the ones in cartoons. Cartoon suns sing and wink and have toothy smiles. Do we really need to make an impossibly massive ball of fire and radiation into our cute little friend?

  Tim and I are in our backyard. Everything is green. It’s the weekend again. Tools go back in the shed, but he keeps the hand trowel, the special one. We’ve all done this before.

  Tim is still in the shed putting things away. I take a peek inside. Along with the sharp and toothy tools are bottles of cleaners and chemical fertilizers, their labels have cartoon figures on them, and they wink at me, ask me to come play. I remember their commercials, the smiley-faced chemical suds that scrub and sing their way down a drain and into our groundwater. Oh, happy days.

  Tim closes the shed doors and locks them, even though he’ll just have to unlock them again later. A loop of inefficiency. The doors are newly white, like my baby teeth. I can’t go inside. He tells me I’m too young, but maybe I just don’t know the secret password. There are so many secrets we can’t keep track of them. We forget them and shed them like dead skin.

  I stand next to the doors. The doors are too white. Brown paper bag. Pat on my head. Good boy. It’s time to clean up the yard, again and again and again.

  The sky is such a light shade of blue, it looks like water, and it shimmers. I don’t much feel like singing for Tim today, but I will. He’d be devastated if I didn’t.

  I sing the old standard, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Tim switches the lyrics around and I put them back where they belong. It makes me tired. It’s hot and the poop bag gets full. Tim never runs out of names for the dogs, the sources of the poop. We never see the dogs, so he might as well be naming the dog shit, but that wouldn’t be a fun or appropriate game.

  We dump the poop in its designated and delineated area, over the cyclone fence and into the woods behind the shed. It smells back here. As he dumps the bag, Tim says, “Shoo, fly, shoo.”

  We walk around to the front of the shed and Tim opens the doors. It’s dark inside and my eyes need time to adjust. Tim says, “So, kid, whaddaya think?”

  My hands ball up into tiny fists, no bigger than hummingbirds’ nests. The five-year-old me is pissed off and more than a little depressed that Tim was the photographer for those pictures, and for more pictures I can’t find, some film that is a terrible secret and resulted in the death of his friend Brendan. Say it ain’t so, Tim.

  I say, “Where’s the film? Who is she, Tim?”

  Tim laughs, he loves to laugh, and he bends to one knee and chucks my chin with his fist, so fucking condescending. I should bite his knuckle or punch him in the groin, but I’m not strong enough.

  Tim says, “I don’t know and I don’t know.” He gets up and moves to lock the shed doors, but I make my own move. I jam my foot between the doors so they can’t shut. I’m my own five-year-old goon, and my will is larger than the foot in the doors.

  I say, “Who are you?”

  Tim looks around, as if making sure the coast of our yard is clear, and says, “You don’t know, and you never will.”

  He lifts me up when I’m not looking. I am all bluff and so very easy to remove from the doors. There’s always next time. Tim puts me on his shoulders. I land roughly; my little body slams onto his stone figure. A sting runs up my spine and makes my extremities tingle. It hurts enough to bring tears.

  I’m too high up, too close to that cartoon sun, which doesn’t look or feel all that friendly anymore. My skin burns and my eyes hide in a squint that isn’t getting the job done. The five-year-old has an epiphany. The cartoon sun is why everything sucks.

  Tim walks with me on his shoulders. I’m still too high up. I wonder if he knows that I could fall and die from up here.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Full body twitch. A spasm sends my foot into the kitchen table leg. The table disapproves of being treated so shabbily and groans as it slides a few inches along the linoleum. My toes aren’t crazy about the treatment either. Can’t please anyone.

  I’m in the kitchen and I’m awake. Two states of being that are not constant and should probably not be taken for granted. As a kid, I thought the expression was taken for granite, as in the rock. I still think that makes more sense.

  All right. Get up. I go to the fridge and keep my head down because I do not want to look out the kitchen window, out in the backyard. I need to let the murk clear from my latest and greatest little sleep, to burn the murk away like morning fog before I’ll allow a eureka moment. I don’t want to jinx anything, not just yet. It’s 3:36.

  I make a ham and cheese on some whole-grain bread that looks like cardboard with poppy seeds. Tastes like it too. Everything sticks to the roof of my mouth. I eat one half of the
sandwich and start the other half before I let myself look out into the backyard.

  There it is, the answer as plain as my crooked face. Down at the bottom of the slanted yard: the shed. The missing film is hidden in the shed. It has to be.

  I finish the sandwich and gulp some soda straight from the two-liter bottle. What Ellen doesn’t know won’t gross her out. Then I go into the living room for my jacket, my trusty exterior skin, and then to the great outdoors.

  The sun is shining. I won’t look at it because it might be the cartoon sun. I light a cigarette instead. Take that, cartoon sun. I ease down the backyard’s pitch.

  The shed has gone to seed. It’s falling apart. Because of the uneven and pitched land, the shed, at each corner, sits on four stacks of cinder blocks of varying heights. The back end is up a couple of feet off the ground. The shed sags and tilts to the left. A mosquito fart could knock it to the ground. My ham-and-cheese sandwich rearranges itself in my stomach.

  The roof is missing shingles, a diseased dragon losing its scales, tar paper and plywood exposed in spots. The walls need to be painted. The doors are yellowed, no longer newly white, just like my teeth. Looks like the doors took up smoking. The one window is covered with dust and spiderwebs. It’s all still standing, though. Something to be said for that.

  The shed was solely Tim’s domain. Ellen is a stubborn city dweller with no interest in dirt or growing things, other than the cosmetic value live grass supposedly gives to her property. Ellen does not mow or rake or dig or plant. Even when I was a kid and we had no money, she hired landscapers to take care of the yard and they used their own equipment, not the stuff that has been locked in the shed for twenty-five years. After Tim died, the shed stayed locked. It was always just a part of the yard, a quirk of property that you overlooked, like some mound left by the long-ago glacial retreat.

  The shed doors have a rusted padlock as their neglected sentinel. It has done the job and now it’s time to retire. I wrap my hand around the padlock and it paints my hand with orange, dead metal. The lock itself is tight, but the latch mechanism that holds the doors closed hangs by loose and rusted screws. Two quick yanks and it all comes apart in my hand. The doors open and their hinges complain loudly. Crybabies.

  Might as well be opening a sarcophagus, with all the dust and decay billowing into my face. One who dares disturb this tomb is cursed with a lungful of the stuff. I stagger back and cough a cough that I refuse to blame on my cigarettes.

  I take a step inside. The floorboards are warped, forming wooden waves, but they feel solid enough to hold me. There’s clutter. The years have gathered here. Time to empty the sucker. Like I said before, I’m not screwing around anymore.

  I pull out rakes and a push mower, which seems to be in decent shape despite the long layoff. Ellen could probably sell it in her antiques store. Shovels, a charcoal grill, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, extra cyclone fencing, bags of seed, fertilizer, beach toys, a toddler-sized sled, a metal gas can, an extra water hose, empty paint cans and brushes. Everything comes off the floor and into the yard. There’s a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t take long to carry it outside. The debris is spread over the grass; it looks like someone is reconstructing a Tim airplane after it crashed.

  Shelves on the side walls hold coffee cans full of oily rags, old nails, washers, and screws. There’s nothing taped underneath those shelves. The shed has no ceiling struts like the basement did, but I do check the frame, the beams above the door. Empty.

  The rear of the shed has one long shelf with all but empty bottles of windshield washer fluid, antifreeze, and motor oil. Underneath the long plank of wood is a section of the rear wall that was reinforced with a big piece of plywood. There are nails and hooks in the plywood. The nails and hooks are empty, nothing hangs, but it looks like there’s some space or a buffer between the plywood and the actual rear wall of the shed, certainly room enough for a little roll of film, says me.

  How much space is there? I knock hard on the plywood, wanting to hear a hollow sound, and my fist punches through its rotten surface, out the rear wall of the shed, and into the sunlight. Whoops. I pull my bullying fist back inside unscathed. There’s less space between the plywood and wall than I thought, and it’s all wet and rotted back there, the wall as soft as a pancake from L Street Diner.

  Ellen won’t notice the fist hole in the wall, I don’t think. When does she ever go behind the shed? I try to pry off more of the plywood, but another chunk of the back wall comes with it.

  Dammit. I’ll demolish the shed looking for the film, if I have to. Can’t say I have any ready-made excuses to explain such a home improvement project to Ellen, though.

  Take a step back. The floorboards squeak and rattle. Something is loose somewhere. I back up some more, pressing my feet down hard, and in the rear left corner of the shed, where I was just standing and punching a second ago, the flooring rises up and off the frame a little bit and bites into the crumbling plywood above it. Maybe X marks the spot.

  I go back out onto the lawn and fetch a hand trowel. It might be the poop-scooping shovel of yore, it might not. It ain’t Excalibur. I use the thing like a crowbar and pry up that rear corner until I can grab it with my hands. The floorboard isn’t rotted; the wood is tougher and fights back. I have a tight grip on the corner, and I pull and yank and lean all my weight into it. There’s a clank and the hand trowel is gone, falling into the gap and beneath the floor, making a suitable time capsule.

  The wood snaps and I fall on my ass. The shed shakes and groans, and for a second I think it’s going to come down on my head, and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe another knock on my head will set me straight, fix me up as good as new.

  The shed doesn’t come down. The shaking and groaning stops and everything settles back. My fingers are red, raw, and screaming, but no splinters. I squeeze my hands in and out of fists and walk toward the hole in the floor. The sun goes behind a cloud and everything gets dark in the shed.

  I go into snake mode, crawl on my belly, and hover my face above the hole. I look down and see the ground and the hand shovel. Fuck it. Leave the shovel under the shed where it belongs. I don’t need it to tear up more of the floorboards. My hands will do just fine.

  Wait. There’s a dark lump attached to one floor joint, a black barnacle, adjacent to the corner. I reach out a hand. I touch it: plastic. Two different kinds of plastic; parts feel like a bag and other parts feel more solid but still malleable. I jack my knees underneath my weight and the floorboard buckles and bows out toward the ground under the pressure, but I don’t care. I need the leverage and both hands.

  I lean over the dark lump; it’s something wrapped in a garbage bag and duct-taped to the frame. My fingers get underneath, and it comes off with a quick yank. On cue, the sun comes out again. Maybe that cartoon sun is my friend after all.

  Things get brighter and hotter in the shed. I move away from the hole and stand up. There’s duct tape wound all around the plastic bag. I apply some even pressure and the inside of the package feels hard, maybe metal. Jesus Christ, my heart is beating, and—yeah, I’ll say it—I am goddamn Indiana Jones, only I’m not afraid of snakes. If this thing were a football I’d spike it and do a little dance, make a little love. But I’m a professional. It’s all about composure.

  Through the plastic, I trace its perimeter. I’m Helen Keller, begging my fingers to give me the answers. It’s shaped like a wheel, and it’s too big to be a roll of film. It’s a tin, or a canister, or a reel of film. A movie.

  It gets darker inside the shed again, but the sunlight is still coming in through the punched-out hole in the back wall. My back is to the door and I feel their shadows brushing up against my legs. I’ve been able to feel their shadows on me since the first trip to Sullivan’s house.

  “Whaddaya say, Genevich?” says one goon.

  “Jackpot!” says the other.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Looks like I was right about them choosing to wait me out, let me
do all the heavy lifting. Seems to have worked out for them too. They get the gold stars, but I can’t let them have the parting gift.

  I turn around slowly, a shadow moving around a sundial. The two goons fill the doorway. They replace the open doors. They are mobile walls. The sun might as well be setting right behind them, or maybe one of them has the sun in his back pocket. I can’t see their faces. They are shadows too.

  One of them is holding a handgun, a handgun in silhouette, which doesn’t make it look any prettier or any less dangerous. Its barrel is the proboscis of some giant bloodsucking insect. Its bite will do more than leave an itchy welt, and baking soda won’t help.

  I say, “If you’re a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, God isn’t in the shed and I’m a druid.”

  “Looks like you’re having a little yard sale. We thought we’d drop by, see what hunk of worthless junk I can get for two bucks,” says Redhead. “Whaddaya say, Genevich? What can I get for my two bucks?” He’s on the right. He’s the one with the gun and it threatens to overload my overloaded systems. Things are getting fuzzy at the edges, sounds are getting tinny. Or it could be just the echoes and shadows in a small empty shed.

  Even in silhouette, Redhead’s freckles are visible, glowing future melanomas. Maybe if I keep him talking long enough he’ll die of skin cancer. A man can hope.

  Baldy joins in, he always does, the punch line to a joke that everyone sees coming. He says, “Two bucks? Nah, he’ll ask for ten. He looks like a price gouger. Or maybe he’s selling his stuff to raise money for charity, for other retards like him.”

  I’m not sure what to do with the plastic-wrapped package in my hands. They’ve seen it already. Hell, I’m holding it in front of my stomach, so I nonchalantly put it and my hands behind my back. Nothing up my sleeves.

  I say, “What, you two pieces of shit can’t read the KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign out there?”