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 paper-
white, 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