My father just thought I might like to sit in the cab of that old truck; he had seen the way I looked at it every time we passed, mistaking my dread for admiration, I suppose.
I remember the goldenrod, its bright yellow dulled by the October chill. I remember the gray taste of the air, a little bitter, a little sharp, and the silvery look of the dead grass. I remember the whisssht-whissht of our footfalls.
But what I remember best is the truck looming up, getting bigger and bigger—the toothy snarl of its radiator, the bloody red of its paint, the bleary gaze of the windshield. I remember fear sweeping over me in a wave colder and grayer than the taste of the air as my father put his hands in my armpits and lifted me into the cab, saying, “Drive her to Portland, Quentin… go to her!” I remember the air sweeping past my face as I went up and up, and then its clean taste was replaced by the smells of ancient Diamond Gem Oil, cracked leather, mouse-droppings, and… I swear it… blood. I remember trying not to cry as my father stood grinning up at me, convinced he was giving me one hell of a thrill (and so he was, but not the way he thought). It came to me with perfect certainty that he would walk away then, or at least turn his back, and that the truck would just eat me—eat me alive. And what it spat out would look chewed and broken and… and sort of exploded. Like a pumpkin that got squot by a tractor wheel.
I began to cry and my father, who was the best of men, took me down and soothed me and carried me back to the car.
He carried me up in his arms, over his shoulder, and I looked at the receding truck, standing there in the field, its huge radiator looming, the dark round hole where the crank was supposed to go looking like a horridly misplaced eye socket, and I wanted to tell him I had smelled blood, and that’s why I had cried. I couldn’t think of a way to do it. I suppose he wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
As a five-year-old who still believed in Santy Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Allamagoosalum, I also believed that the bad, scary feelings which swamped me when my father boosted me into the cab of the truck came from the truck. It took twenty-two years for me to decide it wasn’t the Cresswell that had murdered George McCutcheon; my Uncle Otto had done that.
The Cresswell was a landmark in my life, but it belonged to the whole area’s consciousness, as well. If you were giving someone directions on how to get from Bridgton to Castle Rock, you told them they’d know they were going right if they saw a big old red truck sitting off to the left in a hayfield three miles or so after the turn from 11.
You often saw tourists parked on the soft shoulder (and sometimes they got stuck there, which was always good for a laugh), taking pictures of the White Mountains with Uncle Otto’s truck in the foreground for picturesque perspective—for a long time my father called the Cresswell “the Trinity Hill Memorial Tourist Truck,” but after a while he stopped. By then Uncle Otto’s obsession with it had gotten too strong for it to be funny.
So much for the provenance. Now for the secret.
That he killed McCutcheon is the one thing of which I am absolutely sure. “Squot him like a pumpkin,” the barbershop sages said. One of them added: “I bet he was down in front o’ that truck, pray in like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin to Arlah. I can just pitcher him that way. They was tetched, y’know, t’both of them. Just lookit the way Otto Schenck ended up, if you don’t believe me. Right across the road in that little house he thought the town was gonna take for a school, and just as crazy as a shithouse rat.” This was greeted with nods and wise looks, because by then they thought Uncle Otto was odd, all right—oh, ayuh!
—but there wasn’t a one of the barbershop sages who considered that image—McCutcheon down on his knees in front of the truck “like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin to Arlah”—suspicious as well as eccentric.
Gossip is always a hot item in a small town; people are condemned as thieves, adulterers, poachers, and cheats on the flimsiest evidence and the wildest deductions. Often, I think, the talk gets started out of no more than boredom. I think what keeps this from being actually nasty—which is how most novelists have depicted small towns, from Nathaniel Hawthorne te Grace Metalious—is that most party-line, grocery-store, and barbershop gossip is oddly naive—it is as if these people expect meanness and shallowness, will even invent it if it is not there, but that real and conscious evil may be beyond their conception, even when it floats right before their faces like a magic carpet from one o’ those greaseball Ay-rab fairy tales.
How do I know he did it? you ask. Simply because he was with McCutcheon that day? No. Because of the truck. The Cress well. When his obsession began to overtake him, he went to live across from it in that tiny house…
even though, in the last few years of his life, he was deathly afraid of the truck beached across the road.
I think Uncle Otto got McCutcheon out into the field where the Cresswell was blocked up by getting McCutcheon to talk about his house plans. McCutcheon was always eager to talk about his house and his approaching retirement. The partners had been made a good offer by a much larger company—I won’t mention the name, but if I did you would know it—and McCutcheon wanted to take it. Uncle Otto didn’t. There had been a quiet struggle going on between them over the offer since the spring. I think that disagreement was the reason Uncle Otto decided to get rid of his partner.
I think that my uncle might have prepared for the moment by doing two things: first, undermining the blocks holding the truck up, and second, planting something on the ground or perhaps in it, directly in front of the truck, where McCutcheon would see it.
What sort of thing? I don’t know. Something bright. A diamond? Nothing more than a chunk of broken glass? It doesn’t matter. It winks and flashes in the sun. Maybe McCutcheon sees it. If not, you can be sure Uncle Otto points it out. What’s that? he asks, pointing. Dunno, McCutcheon says, and hurries over to take a look-see.
McCutcheon falls on his knees in front of the Cresswell, just like one o’ them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin to Arlah, trying to work the object out of the ground, while my uncle strolls casually around to the back of the truck.
One good shove and down it came, crushing McCutcheon flat. Squotting him like a pumpkin.
I suspect there may have been too much pirate in him to have died easily. In my imagination I see him lying pinned beneath the Cresswell’s tilted snout, blood streaming from his nose and mouth and ears, his face paperwhite, his eyes dark, pleading with my uncle to get help, to get help fast. Pleading… then begging… and finally cursing my uncle, promising him he would get him, kill him, finish him… and my uncle standing there, watching, hands in his pockets, until it was over.
It wasn’t long after McCutcheon’s death that my uncle began to do things that were first described by the barbershop sages as odd… then as queer… then as “damn peculiar.” The things which finally caused him to be deemed, in the pungent barbershop argot, “as crazy as a shithouse rat” came in the fullness of time—but there seemed little doubt in anyone’s mind that his peculiarities began right around the time George McCutcheon died.
In 1965, Uncle Otto had a small one-room house built across from the truck. There was a lot of talk about what old Otto Schenck might be up to out there on the Black Henry by Trinity Hill, but the surprise was total when Uncle Otto finished the little building off by having Chuckie Barger slap on a coat of bright red paint and then announcing it was a gift to the town—a fine new schoolhouse, he said, and all he asked was that they name it after his late partner.
Castle Rock’s selectmen were flabbergasted. So was everyone else. Most everyone in the Rock had gone to such a one-room school (or thought they had, which comes down to almost the same thing). But all of the oneroom schools were gone from Castle Rock by 1965. The very last of them, the Castle Ridge School, had closed the year before. It’s now Steve’s Pizzaville out on Route 117. By then the town had a glass-and-cinderblock grammar school on the far side of the common and a fine new high school on Carbine Street. As a result of his eccentric offer, Uncle Otto made it all the way from “odd” to “damn peculiar” in one jump.