Skeleton Crew

"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.

The truck with the scenic White Mountains in the background was one thing; Uncle Otto pissing by the side of the road with his suspenders hanging down by his knees was something else entirely. That was no tourist attraction.

I was by then wearing a business suit more often than the blue jeans that had seen me through college when I took Uncle Otto his weekly groceries—but I still took them. I also tried to persuade him that he had to stop doing his duty by the side of the road, at least in the summertime, when anyone from Michigan, Missouri, or Florida who just happened to be happening by could see him.

I never got through to him. He couldn't be concerned with such minor things when he had the truck to worry about. His concern with the Cresswell had become a mania. He now claimed it was on his side of the road—right in his yard, as a matter of fact.

"I woke up last night around three and there it was, right outside the window, Quentin," he said. "I seen it there, moonlight shinin off the windshield, not six feet from where I was layin, and my heart almost stopped. It almost stopped, Quentin." I took him outside and pointed out that the Cresswell was right where it had always been, across the road in the field where McCutcheon had planned to build. It did no good.

"That's just what you see, boy," he said with a wild and infinite contempt, a cigarette shaking in one hand, his eyeballs rolling. "That's just what you see."

"Uncle Otto," I said, attempting a witticism, "what you see is-what you get." It was as if he hadn't heard.

"Bugger almost got me," he whispered. I felt a chill. He didn't look crazy. Miserable, yes, and terrified, certainly... but not crazy. For a moment I remembered my father boosting me into the cab of that track. I remembered smelling oil and leather... and blood. "It almost got me," he repeated.

And three weeks later, it did.