“crazy as a shithouse rat.” He had taken to wandering out to urinate by the side of the road instead of walking back into the woods where his privy was. Sometimes he shook his fist at the Cresswell while he relieved himself, and more than one person passing in his or her car thought Uncle Otto was shaking his fist at them.
The truck with the scenic White Mountains in the background was one thing; Uncle Otto pissing by the side of the road with his suspenders hanging down by his knees was something else entirely. That was no tourist attraction.
I was by then wearing a business suit more often than the blue jeans that had seen me through college when I took Uncle Otto his weekly groceries-but I still took them. I also tried to persuade him that he had to stop doing his duty by the side of the road, at least in the summertime, when anyone from Michigan, Missouri, or Florida who just happened to be happening by could see him.
I never got through to him. He couldn’t be concerned with such minor things when he had the truck to worry about. His concern with the Cresswell had become a mania. He now claimed it was on his side of the road—right in his yard, as a matter of fact.
“I woke up last night around three and there it was, right outside the window, Quentin,” he said. “I seen it there, moonlight shinin off the windshield, not six feet from where I was layin, and my heart almost stopped. It almost stopped, Quentin.”
I took him outside and pointed out that the Cresswell was right where it had always been, across the road in the field where McCutcheon had planned to build. It did no good.
“That’s just what you see, boy,” he said with a wild and infinite contempt, a cigarette shaking in one hand, his eyeballs rolling. “That’s just what you see.”
“Uncle Otto,” I said, attempting a witticism, “what you see is what you get.”
It was as if he hadn’t heard.
“Bugger almost got me,” he whispered. I felt a chill. He didn’t look crazy. Miserable, yes, and terrified, certainly... but not crazy. For a moment I remembered my father boosting me into the cab of that truck. I remembered smelling oil and leather... and blood. “It almost got me,” he repeated.
And three weeks later, it did.
I was the one who found him. It was Wednesday night, and I had gone out with two bags of groceries in the back seat, as I did almost every Wednesday night. It was a hot, muggy evening. Every now and then thunder rumbled distantly. I remember feeling nervous as I rolled up the Black Henry Road in my Pontiac, somehow sure something was going to happen, but trying to convince myself it was just low barometric pressure.
I came around the last comer, and just as my uncle’s little house came into view, I had the oddest hallucination—for a moment I thought that damned truck really was in his dooryard, big and hulking with its red paint and its rotten stake sides. I went for the brake pedal, but before my foot ever came down on it I blinked and the illusion was gone. But I knew that Uncle Otto was dead. No trumpets, no flashing lights; just that simple knowledge, like knowing where the furniture is in a familiar room.
I pulled into his dooryard in a hurry and got out, heading for the house without bothering to get the groceries.
The door was open—he never locked it. I asked him about that once and he explained to me, patiently, the way you would explain a patently obvious fact to a simpleton, that locking the door would not keep the Cresswell out.
He was lying on his bed, which was to the left of the one room—his kitchen area being to the right. He lay there in his green pants and his thermal underwear shirt, his eyes open and glassy. I don’t believe he had been dead more than two hours. There were no flies and no smell, although it had been a brutally hot day.
“Uncle Otto?” I spoke quietly, not expecting an answer—you don’t lie on your bed with your eyes open and bugging out like that just for the hell of it. If I felt anything, it was relief. It was over.
“Uncle Otto?” I approached him. “Uncle—”
I stopped, seeing for the first time how strangely misshapen his lower face looked—how swelled and twisted.