Does Burny contemplate these woods, is he enlivened by what he sees in them? Or, for that matter, is he in fact still asleep, and does Carl Bierstone caper behind Charles Burnside’s peculiar eyes?
Burny whispers, Fogzes down fogzhulls, radz in radhulls, hyenaz over embdy stomachs wail, oho aha dis iz mozt-mozt gladzome my frenz, more an more de liddle wunz drudge drudge drudge oho on bledding foodzies . . .
Let’s blow this pop stand, okay?
Let’s sail away from old Burny’s ugly mouth—enough is enough. Let us seek the fresh air and fly north, over the woods. Foxes down foxholes and rats in ratholes may be wailing, true, that’s how it works, but we are not about to find any starving hyenas in western Wisconsin. Hyenas are always hungry anyhow. No one feels sorry for them, either. You’d have to be a real bleeding heart to pity a creature that does nothing but skulk around the periphery of other species until the moment when, grinning and chuckling, it can plunder their leftovers. Out we go, right through the roof.
East of Maxton’s, the woods carpet the ground for something like a mile or two before a narrow dirt road curves in from Highway 35 like a careless parting in a thick head of hair. The woods continue for another hundred yards or so, then yield to a thirty-year-old housing development consisting of two streets. Basketball hoops, backyard swing sets, tricycles, bicycles, and vehicles by Fisher-Price clutter the driveways of the modest houses on Schubert and Gale. The children who will make use of them lie abed, dreaming of cotton candy, puppy dogs, home runs, excursions to distant territories, and other delightful infinitudes; also asleep are their anxious parents, doomed to become even more so after reading Wendell Green’s contribution to the front page of the day’s Herald.
Something catches our eye—that narrow dirt road curving into the woods from Highway 35’s straightaway. More a lane than an actual road, its air of privacy seems at odds with its apparent uselessness. The lane loops off into the woods and, three-fourths of a mile later, comes to an end. What is its point, what is it for? From our height above the earth, the track resembles a faint line sketched by a No. 4 pencil—you practically need an eagle’s eye to see it at all—but someone went to considerable effort to draw this line through the woods. Trees had to be cut and cleared, stumps to be pried from the ground. If one man did it, the work would have taken months of sweaty, muscle-straining labor. The result of all that inhuman effort has the remarkable property of concealing itself, of evading the eye, so that it fades away if attention wanders, and must be located again. We might think of dwarfs and secret dwarf mines, the path to a dragon’s hidden cache of gold—a treasure so safeguarded that access to it has been camouflaged by a magic spell. No, dwarf mines, dragon treasures, and magic spells are too childish, but when we drop down for a closer examination, we see that a weathered NO TRESPASSING sign stands at the beginning of the lane, proof that something is being guarded, even if it is merely privacy.
Having noticed the sign, we look again at the end of the lane. In the darkness under the trees down there, one area seems murkier than the rest. Even as it shrinks back into the gloom, this area possesses an unnatural solidity that distinguishes it from the surrounding trees. Aha oho, we say to ourselves in an echo of Burny’s gibberish, what have we here, a wall of some kind? It seems that featureless. When we reach the midpoint in the curve of the lane, a triangular section of darkness all but obscured by the treetops abruptly defines itself as a peaked roof. Not until we are nearly upon it does the entire structure move into definition as a three-story wooden house, oddly shambling in structure, with a sagging front porch. This house has clearly stood empty for a long time, and after taking in its eccentricity, the first thing we notice is its inhospitability to new tenants. A second NO TRESPASSING sign, leaning sideways at an improbable angle against a newel post, merely underlines the impression given by the building itself.
The peaked roof covers only the central section. To the left, a two-story extension retreats back into the woods. On the right, the building sprouts additions like outsized sheds, more like growths than afterthoughts. In both senses of the word, the building looks unbalanced: an off-kilter mind conceived it, then relentlessly brought it into off-center being. The intractable result deflects inquiry and resists interpretation. An odd, monolithic invulnerability emanates from the bricks and boards, despite the damage done by time and weather. Obviously built in search of seclusion, if not isolation, the house seems still to demand them.
Oddest of all, from our vantage point the house appears to have been painted a uniform black—not only the boards, but every inch of the exterior, the porch, the trim, the rain gutters, even the windows. Black, from top to bottom. And that cannot be possible; in this guileless, good-hearted corner of the world, not even the most crazily misanthropic builder would turn his house into its own shadow. We float down to just above ground level and move nearer along the narrow lane . . .
When we come close enough for reliable judgment, which is uncomfortably close, we find that misanthropy can go further than we had supposed. The house is not black now, but it used to be. What it has faded into makes us feel that we might have been too critical about the original color. The house has become the leaden gray-black of thunderheads and dismal seas and the hulls of wrecked ships. Black would be preferable to this utter lifelessness.
We may be certain that very few of the adults who live in the nearby development, or any adults in French Landing or the surrounding towns, have defied the admonition on 35 and ventured up the narrow lane. Almost none so much as notice the sign anymore; none of them know of the existence of the black house. We can be just as certain, however, that a number of their children have explored the lane, and that some of those children wandered far enough to come upon the house. They would have seen it in a way their parents could not, and what they saw would have sent them racing back toward the highway.
The black house seems as out of place in western Wisconsin as a skyscraper or a moated palace. In fact, the black house would be an anomaly anywhere in our world, except perhaps as a “Haunted Mansion,” a “Castle of Terrors,” in an amusement park, where its capacity to repel ticket buyers would put it out of business within a week. Yet in one specific way it might remind us of the dim buildings along the ascent of Chase Street into respectability from the riverbank and Nailhouse Row. The shabby Nelson Hotel, the obscure tavern, the shoe store, and the others, marked with the horizontal stripe drawn by the river’s grease pencil, share the same eerie, dreamlike, half-unreal flavor that saturates the black house.
At this moment in our progress—and through everything that follows—we would do well to remember that this strange flavor of the dreamlike and slightly unnatural is characteristic of borderlands. It can be detected in every seam between one specific territory and another, however significant or insignificant the border in question. Borderlands places are different from other places; they are borderish.
Say you happen to be driving for the first time through a semirural section of Oostler County in your home state, on your way to visit a recently divorced friend of the opposite sex who has abruptly and, you think, unwisely decamped to a small town in adjacent Orelost County. On the passenger seat beside you, atop a picnic basket containing two bottles of a superior white Bordeaux held tightly in place by various gourmet goodies in exquisite little containers, lies a map carefully folded to expose the relevant area. You may not know your exact location, but you are on the right road and making good time.
Gradually, the landscape alters. The road veers around a nonexistent berm, then begins winding through inexplicable curves; on either side, the trees slouch; beneath their twisted boughs, the intermittent houses grow smaller and seedier. Ahead, a three-legged dog squirms through a hedge and barrels snarling toward your right front tire. A crone wearing a teensy straw hat and what appears to be a shroud glances up red-eyed from a listing porch swing. Two front yards along, a little girl costumed in dirty pink gauze and a foil crown flaps a glittery, star-headed wand over a heap of burning tires. Then a rectangular placard bearing the legend WELCOME TO ORELOST COUNTY glides into view. Soon the trees improve their posture and the road straightens out. Released from anxieties barely noticed until they were gone, you nudge the accelerator and hasten toward your needy friend.