It’s the spooky time of year. The time when the barrier between the living and the dead is thinnest. It’s my favorite time of year. To celebrate its arrival each year, me and a few of my family members used to write appropriately themed short stories and then read and compare them on Halloween. We haven’t done that in a long time, but I still get in the mood for it.
This year, I decided to go it alone. The House is what I came up with. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you have a fun and spooky (not too spooky) Halloween.
Thanks for reading.
-SAW Staff
Mingo was about to give up and reel his line in. He reached down and grabbed the Schlitz can between his flip flopped feet, shook it to see if there was any left, and downed the last swallow of warm beer. He tossed the empty can on the bank with the others, shielded his eyes, and looked out at the brownish water. The little spherical red and white bobber floated up and down on the surface of the still river. The sun was almost directly overhead. Almost lunchtime, he thought. If he didn’t catch a fish soon, he would have to find someone to mooch a meal off of.
He tried to think when he’d last imposed on his sister Ruby. Was it earlier this month or last? Tammy would probably feed him, but she was almost never home. She’d taken a job at a salon in Houston back in February, and she spent most of the week at her friend Cheryl’s apartment off of Dairy Ashford.
He’d hitched a ride down there with her once in April. He’d lied and said a friend had gotten him an interview at one of the plants in Pasadena, but he was really just going to get stoned. He’d spent a couple of weeks staying with a guy named Slick he’d met through an old girlfriend. One night, he and Slick and Slick’s girlfriend Tish stayed up snorting coke and partying. After a bunch of beers and a bunch of dope, Slick had gone in the backyard to piss. When he came back, he found Mingo on top of a half naked Tish and had run him off with an ax, promising to kill him if he ever came back.
Mingo had hitchhiked home, tail tucked between his legs, and spent the next month on his abuela’s couch until his cousin Esmerelda sent her shithead husband Johnny over to tell him he had to leave.
He was trying to remember what day it was when the rod jumped in his hand. It almost slipped out of his loose grip, but he managed to hold onto the cork handgrip as he stumbled out of the mesh-backed folding chair. The red and white bobber was nowhere in sight, and the pole was arched over, the tip nearly touching the surface of the muddy water. The sand shifted as he tried to set his feet against the tug of the fish, and one foot slid out of a black and green flip flop. Mingo barely noticed the loss of the shoe as he fought to reel the fish in, but the next step brought a sharp pain that made him cry out and drop the rod. Despite the pain, he found himself in the water desperately groping for the pole. The pain was coming from the arch of his right foot, so he tried to stay on his toes and not put weight on it, but the beer and the slight current in the water unbalanced him, and he lurched sideways, planting the foot and coming down hard on whatever had embedded itself in his foot.
Mingo screamed, dropped the pole again, and fell backward into the shallow water. Eventually, he scooched up out of the water and onto the sandy bank and lifted his foot up to try to see what he’d stepped on. His vision was blurry from all of the beers and the pain, but the treble hook sticking out of the arch of his foot was unmistakable. Mingo cursed whomever had been so careless (not realizing it was his own hook), and then started to think about how he was going to walk out of there with his foot in the shape it was in.
He looked around for his flip flop, saw it floating about 30 feet away in the river, and cursed again. His foot was bleeding, and his head had begun to hurt. His long black hair was soaked, either from sweat or river water or both, and strands of it hung down in his face. Mingo wiped his sand-coated hands on his cut off jean shorts and pawed lank clumps of hair away from his eyes. He lifted his foot up again and tried to get a better look at the hook. He gingerly touched it to see how far it was jammed in there. The pain was sharp and immediate. That ain’t gonna work, he thought.
After rinsing the blood and sand off in the water, he slowly stood up again, taking care to only let the ball of the injured foot touch the ground. He shielded his eyes and looked around. He could hear the rattle of some machinery close by. The railroad company was replacing the stretch of tracks to the west of him, but they would never hear his yells for help over the noise of their machines. The old two storey house stood out against the clear blue sky, and Mingo thought maybe if he could reach it, he could sit on the steps and work the three-pronged hook loose. Then he could get back to town and get Ruby to dress it for him. The hot meal and warm bed (and sympathy) that would come after flitted through his mind. She wouldn’t turn him away injured like he was.
The old house had a deep porch and a pair of double hung windows in the dormers. Blood weed grew right up to the eaves on all but one side, and the air around it was thick with humidity and the smell of river mud and creosote. The house was a hodgepodge of architectural styles and looked like it was held together by chipping lead paint and rotting lap siding, sections of which had been patched with pieces of unpainted plywood. The crawl space beneath the house was larger than it needed to be and betrayed no sense of purpose–no trace of hanging pipes or duct work–as if the space had been built to hold only darkness.
In the winter, the bloodweed turned to desiccated, brown husks that made a sound like death rattles when the wind came blowing out of the north. The house seemed to change its posture (and sometimes even its shape) in different seasons, sitting up higher in the summer. Watchful. In the colder months, it crouched beneath the gloom of the winter sky. Brooding. Hibernating.
Train tracks crossed the property on the house’s southern border. The trellis bridge that carried the tracks across the river was like a gateway to a vast, heavily-wooded tract of land where town gave way to country. The land must have belonged to someone, because cows grazed on parts of it. But the neighborhood kids treated it like a giant playground, crossing its rickety barbed wire fences with no concern for the fact that they were trespassing.
If you made it to the bridge, you were safe. But if you lingered too long in the vicinity of the house, anything was likely to happen, according to local folklore. The stories weren’t anything new. Mingo’d heard them from his cousins and uncles when he was a kid. Hell, he’d told some of them himself, embellishing them along the way to try to frighten his younger cousins. Some said a black dog haunted the place and would grab kids who came too close and drag them under the porch. The kids were never heard from again, the story went.
But the most common tale involved an old man that supposedly lived in the house. Witnesses claimed to have seen him rocking in a chair deep within the shadows of the front porch in the late afternoon. Some claimed he was faceless. Others said that no one had ever seen his face, just hints of his shape obscured by ubiquitous shadow. The more lurid stories connected the man, once again, with the disappearance of train riders and children. Though, when Mingo thought about it, he couldn’t remember reading any stories in the paper about anyone going missing, let alone local kids. As an adult, Mingo knew the truth was more banal: the house was simply abandoned and used occasionally as a way station for hobos and probably more often as a place for local teens to drink beer and have sex. For Mingo, at the moment, it was simply a place to get out of the sun and figure out his next move.
A piece of smooth driftwood lay about 10 feet away from his tacklebox. Mingo limped over to it, slowly bent down, and grabbed it. He leaned on the stick, taking the majority of the weight off his hurt foot. He surveyed the scene: a pile of Schlitz cans lay on the bank, along with his tacklebox, a paper sack that he’d carried the Schlitz and worms in, and his mom’s lawn chair. There was no way he could carry the stuff back with him. He just hoped it would be there when he came back to get it. With the train tracks torn up, the steady stream of vagrants and drifters had stopped. That gave him a better chance that no one would even happen upon his stuff before he could come back and pick it all up.
The first few feet were the hardest, but after that, he got used to walking on the ball of his foot and began to pick up the pace. The house’s porch was in view, and Mingo hurried along as best he could, eager to reach its relative safety. But the ground was uneven there where mud had dried and cracked into puzzle pieces, and before long, Mingo tripped on one of the cupped up pieces of mud and fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
Movement in one of the second storey windows of the house caught his eye.
“Hey! Hey! Is somebody there! Help!”
Mingo lay on his side clutching his foot and watching the darkened house for movement. Nothing moved and the only sounds he heard were the sounds of the railway workers clattering away in the distance. After about another five minutes of lying on the ground waiting for someone to come along and help, Mingo began to crawl the final stretch on his hands and knees.
When he reached the porch, he had to crawl up the steps until he finally collapsed onto his side again. By now the pain in the arch of his foot was nearly unbearable. Mingo doubted whether he had the nerve to pull the hook out. He dimly wondered again if maybe someone was at home in the old house, but he knew the place was abandoned. Had been since he was a kid.
He rolled over to one side and sat up. The world wobbled a bit as he got used to being upright again. His pocket knife was in his right pocket, and Mingo had to lean back on his elbow to reach into his cut off jeans and fish it out. The knife looked small in the palm of his hand. Smaller than he remembered. It was silver, a relief image of deer and other wildlife was carved into the handle. Mingo squinted at the images. The knife had been his brother’s.
Paul had been the golden boy of the family. He’d gotten a full ride to Rice on a baseball scholarship in 1969 (the first of the Hernandez family to get into college) but was drafted the next year. When he was discharged in late 1973, he came back home with plans to pick up where he left off and pursue a degree in engineering. But he fell ill shortly after returning, and by the summer of ‘74 was bedridden. He’d withered away to almost nothing by the fall of 1975 and was in a grave by early ‘76. He never saw a college campus.
The knife was the only thing Mingo had left of his brother. He wondered where Paul would be now if he had lived. What he’d be doing. Would he be married? Have kids?
Sunlight glinted off the blade. Mingo gently tested the treble hook again, winced at the sharp pain, and wondered how he would get up the nerve to cut the thing out of his own foot. He closed the knife and leaned back on his elbows again, stared up at the porch ceiling. He looked out at the train tracks that crossed the deserted property, then west toward Front street and the Bus Station a couple hundred yards away. There was no way he’d manage to walk that far, and he definitely wasn’t going to crawl that far on his hands and knees. The ground between the house and the Bus Stop was littered with the shards of hundreds of Coke bottles that kids had hurled from the train bridge.
Mingo thought about all the times his big brother had been the braver of the two of them. All of the times Paul had told him that things would work out, to have faith, to not give up. All of the times Paul had dragged Mingo across the finish line through sheer force of will. He had been strong enough for both of them. Mingo wondered what his big brother would say now.
He shook his head, tried to clear some of the fog and drowsiness from the 12 pack of beer he’d drank that morning. He knew what Paul would say. He knew what Paul would do if he were there. Mingo opened the knife again. He wondered how sharp the blade was. He tried to remember the last time he’d sharpened it himself. Had he ever? There weren’t very many things he could think of that he had done since his older brother had gone away to fight in Vietnam. (And what had they been fighting for? It was all fuzzy in Mingo’s mind.) Mostly what he’d done was spend a lot of time on a stool at Jack’s Place. And when his welcome had run out there, at one of the other beer joints on the edge of town.
Self reflection wasn’t something Mingo made a habit of and especially not when he was drinking. If he had been the self reflective type, he might even recognize that he drank to avoid self reflection. And he wasn’t sure why this particular situation bothered him so much. Why it moved him to action, but it did.
With a surprisingly steady hand, Mingo moved the knife to the hook in his foot. Blood welled up where the blade met skin. Mingo didn’t flinch or even grunt in pain. A sense of peace had come over him, as if Paul were there again, telling him it would be OK, telling him that he could do it. That he would do it. That he would get it done and get back home and that it would all work out. It would all work out.
And for the briefest of moments before the black thing descended on him and took him far away, an image of a new life formed in Mingo’s mind like a scene from a movie. An image of a life where Mingo had things sorted out, where he pulled himself across the finish line, where he made his mama proud, where he didn’t mooch meals off his sisters and tias and grandmother, where he could show his face in certain places around town because he didn’t owe money, where he made his own way, owned up to his mistakes, rectified his failures.
And then, without even a whimper, Mingo was gone.
