The selectmen sent him a letter (not one of them quite dared to go see him in person) thanking him kindly, and hoping he would remember the town in the future, but declining the little schoolhouse on the grounds that the educational needs of the town’s children were already well provided for. Uncle Otto flew into a towering rage.
Remember the town in the future? he stormed to my father. He would remember them, all right, but not the way they wanted. He hadn’t fallen off a hay truck yesterday. He knew a hawk from a handsaw. And if they wanted to get into a pissing contest with him, he said, they were going to find he could piss like a polecat that had just drunk a keg of beer.
“So what now?” my father asked him. They were sitting at the kitchen table in our house. My mother had taken her sewing upstairs. She said she didn’t like Uncle Otto; she said he smelled like a man who took a bath once a month, whether he needed one or not—”and him a rich man,” she would always add with a sniff. I think his smell really did offend her but I also think she was frightened of him. By 1965, Uncie Otto had begun to look damn peculiar as well as act that way. He went around dressed in green workman’s pants held up by suspenders, a thermal underwear shirt, and big yellow workshoes. His eyes had begun to roll in strange directions as he spoke.
“Huh?”
“What are you going to do with the place now?”
“Live in the son of a bitch,” Uncle Otto snapped, and that’s what he did.
The story of his later years doesn’t need much telling. He suffered the dreary sort of madness that one often sees written up in cheap tabloid newspapers. Millionaire Dies of Malnutrition in Tenement Apartment. Bag Lady Was Rich, Bank Records Reveal. Forgotten Bank Tycoon Dies in Seclusion.
He moved into the little red house—in later years it faded to a dull, washed-out pink—the very next week.
Nothing my father said could talk him out of it. A year afterward, he sold the business I believe he had murdered to keep. His eccentricities had multiplied, but his business sense had not deserted him, and he realized a handsome profit—staggering might actually be a better word.
So mere was my Uncle Otto, worth perhaps as much as seven millions of dollars, living in that tiny little house on the Black Henry Road. His town house was locked up and shuttered. He had by then progressed beyond
“damned peculiar” to “crazy as a shithouse rat.” The next progression is expressed in a flatter, less colorful, but more ominous phrase: “dangerous, maybe.” That one is often followed by committal.
In his own way, Uncle Otto became as much a fixture as the truck across the road, although I doubt if any tourists ever wanted to take his picture. He had grown a beard, which came more yellow than white, as if infected by the nicotine of his cigarettes. He had gotten very fat. His jowls sagged down into wrinkly dewlaps creased with dirt. Folks often saw him standing in the doorway of his peculiar little house, just standing there motionlessly, looking out at the road, and across it.
Looking at the truck—his truck.
When Uncle Otto stopped coming to town, it was my father who made sure that he didn’t starve to death.
He brought him groceries every week, and paid for them out of his own pocket, because Uncle Otto never paid him back—never thought of it, I suppose. Dad died two years before Uncle Otto, whose money ended up going to the University of Maine Forestry Department. I understand they were delighted. Considering the amount, they should have been.
After I got my driver’s license in 1972, I often took the weekly groceries out. At first Uncle Otto regarded me with narrow suspicion, but after a while he began to thaw. It was three years later, in 1975, when he told me for the first time that the truck was creeping toward the house.
I was attending 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 “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.