A freshening breeze swept around her table, bearing the fragile promise of long overdue moisture. The pages of the sketchbook riffled open.
She took out her Schlesinger #5 charcoal. The picture before her was almost complete. In its incompleteness, she thought. As an artist, to know someone meant to see and to draw that person. On the page was the image of a man’s back, his face turned away, an old fedora on his head and a worn backpack on his shoulders. In the distance, a startled bunch of kids stood around a motorcycle and looked at him. His telegram had touched something raw and needy. She longed to see his face just once. To behold, as an artist, her last living bit of family. She wanted to carefully study his image, now as indistinct as the little Polaroid. But it was all gone. The sketch before her was the thin essence, the best she could render. Call it Man Leaving. She drew a few lines, none offering a muse, and then closed the book and pushed it aside.
She had her real work to complete. Organized before her were two neat piles: corrected and uncorrected papers. Repeated in similar cycles over the next decade, such piles would order the stars for the lives of children in her South Central Los Angeles classroom.
Her classroom? Funny how easy it was to forget this was the last week of her temporary teaching assignment.
Up on the road, she could hear traffic increasing. The noise of the stream usually washed over the drone of cars at this spot, but the water had dwindled after months without rain. Sunlight waved through tree boughs across the table. The papers continued to move from one pile to another, transformed from unfocused products into solid, red-marked judgments. Grades etched on each two-page research paper. Generous grades, too, sometimes better than they merited, but determined by what would help that half-formed person move one step forward.
With the last paper shuttled to the done pile, she had before her a blank sheet. She thought of her predicament, of being stalled, of looking at unpaid bills, and … and … of the hidden room discovered two weeks ago in the attic of the Forest. Suddenly, without planning it, she scrawled on the paper:
In a pile of papers in the attic hides the key.
She sat and stared at it for a long time, feeling the first breeze of a coming storm.
The discovery had actually been of a second attic, hidden in the ceiling of the Forest. The first was above the front door and conspicuous with its red-painted plywood hatch cover framed by molding. Her first week there, she had gotten on a stepladder, pushed it open, and taken one obligatory 360° peek. That was all she needed. She saw a small, spider web-laced frolic room for squirrels and mice and birds. That checked out, she ducked down and retired from further attic exploration … until a month ago, when she finally started cleaning the back storeroom. Jess had let this space, perhaps once a bedroom, slide into junk collector’s depravity. But it wasn’t a hoarder’s manic nest. Its contents were a wild ruin of flea-market treasure, rising from floor to ceiling, and offering but a narrow and twisting footpath into its core. The path curved to things unseen around a column of boxes. It hinted that it might close behind an unwary intruder, shift and close and blend her into the junk, never letting her go.
Make of you a Watcher. The thought came clear and unbidden.
Drawing on the weighty depths of her twenty-something cynicism, Cadence decided she was too worldly to get the heebie-jeebies from this.
It was just a junk room.
… Until she entered the path and peered around the corner. Standing there was a leering six-foot sentinel. She recoiled even as she recognized him (as would any kid from her generation). There he was. Jasper Jowls, the giant standing Banjo Dog himself, with big, rolling, satanic eyes fixed on her. He was frozen mid-strum, his banjo gone, his skin wrinkly and his hound dog ears drooping.
She imagined he had fled from some long-ago foreclosed Chuck-E-Cheese franchise hidden deep in the San Fernando Valley. He stood there gape-mouthed and menacing. She was afraid to take her eyes off him. She could feel his vibes. Come in further, Cadence. You can be one of us!
Instinct guided her. Cadence carefully stepped backwards and retreated from the room as fast as she could and slammed the door. Later that night she listened for sounds from the room. Shuffling. Murmurs. But there were none.
It took her two weeks of sporadic afternoon work to clear a beachhead into the junk. She found green melamine mixing bowl sets, two dozen line-tangled fishing poles, and a hulking metal-bellied 1920 Pullman motorized washing machine with a bulbous metal top and hand-crank rollers, looking evilly robotic and worse for its fifty years in some roofless Midwest garage. Then, beneath a dust cover that made of it a brooding ghost, she found a freestanding Victorian-era oak and brass coat rack. She disrobed it. On it were slung an array of capes — superhero capes. As if it had once stood inside the entrance to some mysterious lair: a Secret Headquarters where a select group of Marvel and D.C. comic characters came to de-cloak and let their hair down. She fingered and lifted the strange dusty fabrics: red for Superman, light-robbing black for Batman, a ragged burgundy shawl … perhaps for Spawn? There was a dark gray cloak for the Shadow and a yellow garb for Thor. There were others of powers and provenance unknown.
Once the entry was secured and the escape path cleared, she personally freed Banjo Dog. She got a dolly and moved him and set him out at one of the front windows of the Mirkwood Forest, just to the left of the front door. He stood there, looking straight ahead like some veloured Kaw-Liga, leering at startled passerby. She wiped her hands together and put them on her hips and studied her work. She felt satisfied. Here she could keep an eye on him.
She returned to the junk room, expecting it to be cleansed of the creepy atmosphere exuded by Brer Jowls. It wasn’t. Behind and above where he had stood was a second attic hatch, which she now studied. There was a small black hole in the hatch cover that made her wonder if some further presence waited there, watching her. Scores of nails had been awkwardly pounded up to secure the cover to the frame. Some were bent and some were flattened, as if by desperate hammer-strokes.
She got a stepladder and a hammer and pliers and pulled out the nails. She wrapped a clothes hanger around the end of a pole to make a hook for the hole. She stepped back, pulling. The hanger held and the hatch creaked down on unseen hinges and rusty springs.
Within hours she was scrunched over in an attic space that had been covered, every inch, in closely fit pieces of flat metal, mostly washed and cut ten-gallon oilcans. They were all nailed tight and sealed at the seams with slathers of black caulk. The walls, the floor, the joists, everything was covered. The room was critter and bug proof.
And in that space was stored a lifetime’s worth of her grandfather’s writings. She spent hours scouring the journals with a fading flashlight. Some of them were stuffed with odd notes and clippings. They were stringtied with dates written on the covers in Magic Marker or pen or crayon or heavy lead pencil. June-September, 1984 and so on. The sheer density of it was impressive. It was an exhaustive codex of what? Stories, thoughts? Excuses?