The Eraser Mill
The manuscript is sent back by my agent, and the verdict is the same as always: a heaviness, a plodding narrative, things inserted into the story without sufficient description. “Overall, I love it,” wrote Jack in the margin of page one. “Just bolster it up a bit with some more vivid imagery. When your character climbs that apple tree and takes a big bite, I want to see it, taste it, feel like I’m actually there.”
An apple’s a fucking apple, I mutter. Everyone knows what an apple looks like. Same goes for cars, tits, toes and birds. Can we just move on with the story?
I put the manuscript back into the large envelope and toss it onto the kitchen counter. Patting my hip pocket, I feel the cigarette pack, pull one out and light it. I smoke, oblivious to the other occupants of my small house. I live alone.
I push through the screen door onto my small back deck, the brown one I stained a few weeks ago. I can always go back to painting, right? Rolling and brushing and cutting in. Simple tasks with simple beginnings and simple ends. Get paid, go home.
It’s nighttime, around 8 o’clock, and I stare into the darkness. I see lights through the woods, the lights of an adjoining neighborhood I used to live in. It makes me a little sad, knowing I had lived there once, with a family in a house twice the size of the house in which I now reside. I push the sadness away, knowing it would lead only to drinking too much wine and ultimately ruining my next day.
I realize I haven’t yet eaten dinner, and had finished a pork roast for lunch. I wanted meat. Kroger would be open for only another hour. I walked back inside the house, grabbed my keys and wallet, headed out to the minivan, and drove off towards the sprawling outskirts of the city.
Winding my way out of the neighborhood, I see the Toyota SUV that has been the bane of my existence for a few months now. It is being driven by an elderly man who thinks he’s performing a service as a sort of neighborhood watchman with a preference for white, upstanding men, good-looking women of any color and, judging by the plastic bottles I keep having to pick up while walking my dog, Canadian Club whisky.
For hours most every day, he putters around the subdivision at speeds upwards of 15 mph, scanning the road and landscape for any odd or suspicious behavior, and conspicuously letting everyone know he’s doing so. My ex-wife thinks he performs this task only as a cover for his alcoholism, which apparently is news to his wife, a tombstone-shaped woman often seen pouring gasoline on ant mounds in her front yard.
He’s driving in the center of the road, and I’m faced with the decision either to make a production of passing him, or to delight him by tailing him impatiently as he goes about his business. I follow for a while, but gun it past him just as Kings Road widens before reaching the highway. It feels good, as if I have perfunctorily informed him not everyone recognizes his stature.
I’m a little on edge by the time I pull into the Kroger parking lot. I fumble around the floorboard for my mask, find it, and head toward the sliding doors. Before I get there, however, I’m intercepted by a stooped man in a fedora, dark glasses and a cane. Remembering William S. Burroughs is dead, I try to pass him just before reaching the doors, but he blocks my way with his cane. “Excuse me, so sorry to trouble you,” he says. “Could I have a moment of your time?”
I reflexively reach into my jacket pocket for change, but then he continues, “As you have probably noticed, I am bereft of sight.” Blind, he’s saying. He’s saying he’s blind. As it dawns on me that he’s asking for more than money, I panic and contemplate just ignoring him and moving on into the store.
But then I remember something a grand-uncle once told me. “It’s a privilege to be asked to help someone who needs it,” said Chickie during one of his all-too-brief visits to our house. “He’s supplicated himself already, indicated to you he’s acknowledging your competence, and you’re going to pass up that opportunity? What a waste.”
I have long wondered if Chickie watches me from somewhere, judges me for my cold actions, tells others about it and creates a bias amongst his cohorts against my admittance to that fine place in which his soul likely dwells for eternity. I am a good person. I wish nearly everyone well, even if he or she does not vote, act, behave, treat the downtrodden, spend money or appreciate polka music like me. I decide this is a chance to turn the tide.
“Oh!” I exclaim to the man. “I didn’t realize….” As if it’s a compliment to a blind man that he looks like a normal jerk. “Do you…need my help for something or other?”
“You see,” and then it seems to me that this is either a monologue he’s done before or something he’s rehearsed in front of a mirror — though why a blind man would own a mirror is one of the great mysteries of mankind. Ray Charles shaved in the dark, a disgraced comic once said. Or probably said many times, because it’s kind of a funny story. Ask a blind man why he shaves in the dark, and, well, it’s a punchline that punches itself.
“You see,” the man continues, “I have in the past bought some items here that I soon regretted purchasing. I’m supposed to be an expert on how food feels in my hand, and how it smells, but of late these functions have failed me.”
“I get it,” I say, not quite getting it. The automatic door keeps opening and closing because of our presence there. A woman in a green blouse makes a big deal of squeezing past us, and now it’s as if we’re a hindrance team that showed up here only to impede others. I wonder how I can coax the man out toward the parking lot or inside while maintaining the appearance of continuing to listen to his rehearsed story.
“It was when I bit into a bad plum and got the runs, real bad runs for a whole night” — and then I’m picturing a blind man sitting on the toilet for hours with nothing to read, just sitting there with no stimuli save for the putrescence of his worst excretions, unless he’s got some books in braille that he keeps around the commode, which is a real possibility I hadn’t considered before —“that I realized I need to let people help me.”
I don’t realize until just then that my helping him is something he is letting me do. He reaches for the bag I had brought and kneads it in his hands as he speaks. “And I’m going to let you help me,” he concludes, and for a split second I feel grateful.
“Well, I,” I stammer, and I know I appear to him as someone fumbling for an excuse not to help, so to prove him wrong I adjust my answer mid-sentence, “guess I could help you find the good stuff.”
“Wonderful!” he exclaims, and off we go through the doorway; he snatches someone’s cart and shoves it toward me. The man who had just procured it and let it go briefly to search his pockets to make sure he’d remembered his wallet stretches out his hands to his sides as if to say, “Really?” I pretend not to see him, and now the blind man and I are actually a team, a duo blithely oblivious to the mores of the common supermarket. With me pushing the cart, and the blind man clutching my arm, we shuffle to the produce section. “I’m thinking I need nectarines,” he announces, and he seems to know exactly where the would-be peaches are located.
He grabs one and thrusts it into my face. “Smell this,” he commands, and I sniff while thinking “this is odd, this man is not smell-challenged.”
I hold the fruit up to my face and use it as a kind of screen to obscure the fact I am ogling the derriere of a woman in yoga pants standing near the turnips. I sniff it (the nectarine). It smells like a nectarine. “Smells okay,” I say, and then the man asks me about the intensity of the color.
“Is it a chalky orange, or deep like a winter sunset?”
Orange is orange by any other name, I think fleetingly, before replying, “Somewhere in between.”
“Look harder,” the blind man implores. “Harder.”
I roll my eyes. But then a picture flashes in my head. A short film, really. I’m twelve years old and I’m walking in the snowy field by Reeds’ Mill, about a half mile from my family’s Pennsylvania house. It’s the final sled run of the day for my brother and I, and everything is still. The footfalls are crunchy, and there are no sounds of motors or birds or mothers calling children home. My brother expels snot from his nose and I swivel around at the sound. Behind him I see the array of windows on the east face of the old mill. The three top windows are a deep orange so intense I stare and admire for a few seconds before turning west to regard the source. The sun is mostly obscured by long, purple clouds at the horizon, but just above those clouds is a crimson-orange so intense it seems to make my eyes water. I want to share it with my brother, but he’s a year-and-a-half older than me and I fear he might call me gay. So on I trod up the hill while stealing glances at the ever-changing spectacle poised over the cobalt-blue arc of snow stretching west. My knees buckle.
At the nectarine bin, my knees get a little weak. “The reds are very red, and, yes, the oranges descend on them like a Pennsylvania winter sunset,” I murmur, surprised at my emotional reaction to a piece of fruit.
The blind man smiles as if he were there sledding with me and my brother. “Ah, so you see.”
We move on to the packaged fish bin. “I want a slab of good, reduced priced salmon,” the blind man says, still squeezing my arm. “I want it wild caught, a stunning red-orange, but no color added.”
For a sightless guy, he sure is obsessed with red-orange. I pull a package out and peer down at it. “This is very red-orange. Like the girl’s shirt,” I say before I can stop myself.
“What girl?” he asks. “Tell me about the girl.”
“There was a girl,” I say, as if in a trance. “I didn’t like college football, didn’t care much for the Georgia Bulldog culture, but this girl walking outside my dormitory window had the most curvaceous body. The top half was almost bursting out of a Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt. She moved without effort, like a serpent in the sea just after a large meal. It was the first time I fell in love and lust at the same time.”
“Put the fish in the basket,” he orders.
On our shopping trip goes. I have long forgotten what I was there originally for. By the time we near the registers, I have compared butter to my first dog’s glistening fur after a bath, orange juice to my favorite shirt in second grade, tortillas to a concrete porch floor hit by the morning sun, and a carton of eggs to the bald heads of the starting defensive line of the Philadelphia Eagles in 2005.
Somehow I end up paying the bill and carrying my shopping bag full of the blind man’s goods to his car. In a kind of daze, I don’t question it, but when he jingles his keys the sound serves as a kind of alarm. He opens the trunk like the lid to a dark, forbidden chamber, and reaches to take the bag from me. “Wait,” I say, having awakened. “Wait just a damned minute. You drive a car.”
The man snickers; I’ve been suckered.
“You’re not blind at all, are you?”
“Alas, no,” says the imposter, smiling. “I was sent to you on a kind of mission.”
“Do you by any chance know Burt Werdinger? A book agent?”
“He’s my brother,” concedes the now-sighted man.
I am incensed. Who, what kind of unhinged, demonic lunatic, would go to such lengths to hector me to be more descriptive in my writing? Is Burt not the self-assured professional I had long admired, a shield from the exploitive machinations of the 21st century book market — like the lean, tan assistant to my sixth grade gym teacher, who served as a kind and forgiving buffer from the bullying, humorless coach who terrorized sensitive kids like me, pacing the inspection line like a rabid lion while we, the captured Christians from the Bible, fell over ourselves trying not to be noticed?
My anger is not subsiding. Impersonating Elaine Benes from Seinfeld, and before I can curb my violent impulses, I shove him. Hard. Nectarines and keys flying, he falls full into the cavernous expanse of the trunk. Filled with shame under the scrutiny of those undoubtedly witnessing this brutally odd scene, I am not thinking logically. For what sort of logic would lead a man with no arrest history to lock a man in his own trunk, pick up his keys (and one nectarine) and proceed to enter his car with no discernable plan? He is my mess, I reason, and I must clean him up as efficiently as possible.
I start his car, a Nissan, and leave the parking lot and, instead of crossing 316 and heading back home, turn left onto the highway that eventually takes one to the hellish metropolitan area cited as most harmful to one’s health by a group of climate activists. To drown out the cries and pleas of the formerly blind man in the trunk, I bite into the nectarine, switch on his sound system and am hit immediately by a cacophony of syncopated beats and guitar bleats I later learn is a song from the album “Discipline” by King Crimson. Suddenly emitting dollops of perspiration, I figure out how to crank the air conditioning. Like the Joads, I drive westward.
Among my most pressing concerns is the fact that my own vehicle, the sadly unkempt minivan I’d left in the Kroger parking lot, will sit forlornly as I drive away in someone else’s automobile. In fact, starting tomorrow morning it will begin to arouse suspicion and work against me. Panic begins to weave its tentacles around me, first in my midsection, then creeping up my chest and finally wrapping around my head, which pounds in protest to a perversely illogical act. Looking down at the dashboard, I see I am driving at an unprecedented (for me) speed of 88 miles per hour. I depress the brake pedal and slow to 55. Getting pulled over by an overly zealous police officer would be the least prudent thing I could bring to this debacle.
Velocitized as I am, it feels as though I am crawling, and that causes me to feel especially vulnerable, like a lone, shell-less tortoise in a desolate field inhabited by coyotes. In between songs on the King Crimson album, which I enjoy in spite of my current plight, I hear my agent’s brother screaming in muffled outrage and fear. His cries do little to allay my own fears; in fact they cause me to scan the passing landscape for blunt objects with which to bludgeon his lying skull.
I feel my cellphone buzzing in my pocket. It causes me to wonder if my captive has his own device, and if he does, whom he has contacted re his predicament.
Does he have a phone? It would be an odd accessory to his blindman’s costume; however, it wouldn’t be difficult to conceal.
Because I’ve known him only briefly as a sighted man, I keep forgetting he can actually see. He can see, he can see, I chant quietly to myself. And then the infectious song “Thela Hun Jinjeet” begins, and my chant turns into “Hey-man-he-can-see, hey-man-he-can-see….”
If he can see, he can dial numbers on the phone I assume he possesses. If he can dial numbers, he has most certainly dialed 9 and 1 and, again, 1. And has reported this kidnapping to authorities.
The panic tentacles tightening like a vice that has no torque limit, I pull onto Dials Mill Road and head north. It is fortuitous, my decision: as I meander down that country route I see in my rear-view mirror two police cars speed past westward on 316, blue lights blazing and jutting into the darkness. My question about the cell phone is answered.
As for my own phone, I wrench it from my pocket and peer down at the list of text messages, the first one being “WTF!!!!!!??” A question, quite appropriate I’d say in this instance, sent to me by my agent. By now he is wondering, understandably, if his client has ventured willingly and completely into the dark abyss of madness.
I have not, at least not quite. I am aware of how rash and out of character my recent actions must appear to those not in my seat, and to those in trunks. I place the phone down on the console between the seats but find little consolation in that act. Hope comes, however, glimmering in the light cast by the screen. It illuminates a crowbar lying prone on the passenger seat’s floorboard. I place it on my lap and look for a turn-off more remote than the serpentine road down which the car I operate slides slowly.
Then I remember: There is a mill on this stretch of Dials Mill Road. An old mill called Dials Mill. It once produced pencil erasers. Oh, if only I could erase my recent impulsive actions! Alas, even the foreboding and towering mill I now approach could not have churned out an eraser so effective!
So I’m left with the other way of erasing my actions; unfortunately for me — and yes, for him too — it involves bludgeoning. The implement I hold feels comfortable in my right hand. The pen is mightier than the sword, someone said, but the crowbar? The crowbar! The mightiest of all!
I pull the car around to the back of the mill, the area where the eraser-makers likely took their breaks. As I shut off the car, the final song of “Discipline,” “Discipline,” has just ended. It seems timely. I sit in silence for a while, and my prisoner seems also to feel the moment and stays quiet. It’s apparently all up to me to make the next move. I cradle my weapon, trying to quickly familiarize myself with its heft. It occurs to me then the crowbar is shaped unmistakably like a question mark from which someone has made off with the dot.
I get out of the car and take in the welcome darkness. It is rare in my area of town to be able to perceive stars so vividly. I see them and admire their sharp features, their subtle differences in size and hue. I am hoping, if things go the way I am planning, my captive will soon see many of the same, swirling about his battered head like drunken gnats.
I walk slowly to the rear of the car, my eyes adjusting more to the darkness by the second. Still, I have to acknowledge the human threat in the trunk has bonded fully with the night, as for the last fifteen minutes darkness has been, presumably, his only friend. Time on my side, I circle the car a few times, occasionally striking it with the crowbar to show it (and its owner) I mean business and I am in charge. After all, do I not hold the keys?
I do not. I go back to the driver’s side and pull them from the ignition. Feeling fully in charge now, I walk to the rear of the vehicle and sit on the trunk. I bounce on it a bit and sing a little song in rhythm to my bounces. “Hey hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you dance, gonna make you groove.” Led Zeppelin. The band with songs to fit every occasion, even murder at an old eraser mill.
I don’t want to have to kill him. But what are my options? The state’s case against me, already fairly strong, would be airtight bolstered with the testimony of the man I locked in his own trunk. A convincing cripple, he’d no doubt make a fine witness. “I wanted only to help him,” he’d testify, voice cracking. “He couldn’t describe things. I changed that. I didn’t expect to be….” Unable to finish, he would be dismissed from the stand by the judge, he himself wiping a tear from his eye. The mob in attendance would then cast its disapproving eye my way, having made up its mind I’m unfit to walk amongst decent people.
Is there another option? I’m a writer — surely I can spin a yarn snaking my way out of this. Can I let him out and tell him it was all merely an ill-advised joke? A game of one-upmanship? “Ha ha — got you! Now let’s go get a drink and forget all this happened! Now, now — let’s not be a sore loser!”
An owl appears from the night and buzzes me, its infernal breeze chilling my very soul. Was that a whispered command I heard as he passed? “Kill him, idiot!” Easy for him to say. He’s certainly not sticking around for the dirty work. Yep, he’s just caught a juicy rat in his daggered claws and has seemingly forgotten about me and the grisly task at hand.
My sighted captive stays silent. Biding his time, no doubt. I lower my head to the trunk and press my ear to the metal, listening for a clue as to his condition. Is it his bated breath I hear, or the winds approaching from the west? I look up; the trees refuse to sway. The stars still twinkle, each winking to me in its own way. “You have got this, brother,” they seem to chime, not quite in unison.
Stars on my side, forgotten by owls, the wind still far away, I free the keys from my pocket and select the one I suspect is most likely to open the trunk. I plunge it into the trunk’s keyhole — but as with intercourse with a less than perfect physical match, it doesn’t quite penetrate with satisfactory snugness .
It is the ignition key.
I find the key on the chain most similar to that accursed imposter, fondle it between my now-quivering fingers, and thrust it into the primed hole. Success! I turn. Success again! The trunk door pops open, revealing a rectangular crevasse of jet blackness. As my eyes adjust, forms within the rectangle begin to take shape and form. I gradually make out the dimensions of a man, a decidedly still one, devoid of any characteristics with which one would describe a living being. Has he stifled within the confines of the trunk?
I stand back and shine my phone’s light on my subject. I see him now: a bluish cadaver, twisted and frozen in the final throes of a mortal struggle arrested by defeat in that struggle. He’s a stiff, and now I stand back and acknowledge my role in this tragic mishap. It didn’t have to end this way. He could have apologized and we could have had a civil discussion about his misdeeds. I am not impervious to sincere contrition; I have been known, in the face of sincere expression of regret, to resist my rightful urge to “shove my tormentor into his trunk,” as it were.
I haven’t always been this way.
But here we are. I am sad. After paying due respects, I close the trunk, only slightly — good to leave the man some air , even if a few minutes too late — and walk somewhat dispiritedly toward the entrance to the mill. I feel a sense of, well, lack of closure. In the distance I hear sirens, yet again, and this is good. The authorities, or someone, should come to collect the body. His family shall be notified and, with time, recover from grief, and, who knows, perhaps learn a valuable lesson.
Still wielding the crowbar, I pry myself into the old building and, using my phone’s last light, find my way to the uppermost floor. I spare myself the details of the innards of the factory — seen one eraser mill, seen ’em all is what I say.
Once I’m standing before the window, my last window, I feel the breeze that long ago, it seems, announced its pending arrival. I breathe it in. I have never breathed so fully; is the ethereal sound enveloping me a north wind, or simply a man breathing? It seems not to matter. They are the same.
But are they? I am tired of these questions. As I leap out the window, I hear my agent screaming “Nooo!”
No?
I look down. Beside him is his brother, that rapscallion, perfectly alive and fine. You win, this time!
The leap I take leads me to my death. But how did I write the story during all this mayhem, this kerfuffle?
It’s amazing what one can accomplish when faced with a deadline.
