the University of Maine myself by then, but I was home for the summer and had fallen into my old habit of taking Uncle Otto his weekly groceries. He sat at his table, smoking, watching me put the canned goods away and listening to me chatter. I thought he might have forgotten who I was; sometimes he did that . . . or pretended to. And once he had turned my blood cold by calling “That you, George?” out the window as I walked up to the house.
On that particular day in July of 1975, he broke into whatever trivial conversation I was making to ask with harsh abruptness: “What do you make of yonder truck, Quentin?”
That abruptness startled an honest answer out of me: “I wet my pants in the cab of that truck when I was five,” I said. “I think if I got up in it now I’d wet them again.”
Uncle Otto laughed long and loud. I turned and gazed at him with wonder. I could not remember ever hearing him laugh before. It ended in a long coughing fit that turned his cheeks a bright red. Then he looked at me, his eyes glittering.
“Gettin closer, Quent,” he said.
“What, Uncle Otto?” I asked. I thought he had made one of his puzzling leaps from one subject to another—maybe he meant Christmas was getting closer, or the Millennium, or the return of Christ the King.
“That buggardly truck,” he said, looking at me in a still, narrow, confidential way that I didn’t much like. “Gettin closer every year.”
“It is?” I asked cautiously, thinking that here was a new and particularly unpleasant idea. I glanced out at the Cresswell, standing across the road with hay all around it and the White Mountains behind it ... and for one crazy minute it actually did seem closer. Then I blinked and the illusion went away. The truck was right where it had always been, of course.
“Oh, ayuh,” he said. “Gets a little closer every year.”
“Gee, maybe you need glasses. I can’t see any difference at all, Uncle Otto.”
“ ‘Course you can’t!” he snapped. “Can’t see the hour hand move on your wristwatch, either, can you? Buggardly thing moves too slow to see ... unless you watch it all the time. Just the way I watch that truck.” He winked at me, and I shivered.
“Why would it move?” I asked.
“It wants me, that’s why,” he said. “Got me in mind all the while, that truck does. One day it’ll bust right in here, and that’ll be the end. It’ll run me down just like it did Mac, and that’ll be the end.”
This scared me quite badly—his reasonable tone was what scared me the most, I think. And the way the young commonly respond to fright is to crack wise or become flippant. “Ought to move back to your house in town if it bothers you, Uncle Otto,” I said, and you never would have known from my tone that my back was ridged with gooseflesh.
He looked at me ... and then at the truck across the road. “Can’t, Quentin,” he said. “Sometimes a man just has to stay in one place and wait for it to come to him.”
“Wait for what, Uncle Otto?” I asked, although I thought he must mean the truck.
“Fate,” he said, and winked again ... but he looked frightened.
My father fell ill in 1979 with the kidney disease which seemed to be improving just days before it finally killed him. Over a number of hospital visits in the fall of that year, my father and I talked about Uncle Otto. My dad had some suspicions about what might really have happened in 1955-mild ones that became the foundation of my more serious ones. My father had no idea how serious or how deep Uncle Otto’s obsession with the truck had become. I did. He stood in his doorway almost all day long, looking at it. Looking at it like a man watching his watch to see the hour hand move.
By 1981 Uncle Otto had lost his few remaining marbles. A poorer man would have been put away years before, but millions in the bank can forgive a lot of craziness in a small town—particularly if enough people think there might be something in the crazy fellow’s will for the municipality. Even so, by 1981 people had begun talking seriously about having Uncle Otto put away for his own good. That flat, deadly phrase, “dangerous, maybe,” had begun to supersede