Print Edition Vol. 1 - Barn Finds

BARN FINDS

by Chris Kassel

When I was sixteen, I had a cockeyed view of what it meant to be free in America. Back then, my grasp of freedom transcended law and sense and merged on a two-lane blacktop road at one o’clock in the morning with swamp sours in the vents of my El Camino, a 40-ouncer between my knees and Stormbringer blasting from the subwoofers. On hot summer nights, bored witless on a level that only a rural teenager can understand, I’d give over to growth pains and adrenaline, and—paced by snarling, teeth-gritting jams—I’d drive idiotically fast through the countryside with all my epiphanies somewhere in the darkness up ahead.

I’ve learned more about liberty since then; more about restraint and accountability. It took an unfathomable family tragedy—lightning that struck from clear blue skies the day my sister was murdered—and it took hard months in boot camp, FTX and six years of active duty with the 2nd Armored Division in Garlstedt.

I popped through the far end of these experiences with less taste for driving drunk and less need for the masculine catharsis that echoed in the scooped tones of the music and the grinding gears of strip dragging. But even so, after I married and had children, after I forged a workaday career as Quality Director at Custom Tech Fabricating, after I settled begrudgingly into middle age, I did not forget the hormonal rage of my teenage years nor the intractable wilderness on either side of the blacktop. In my memory, those pungent night smells, the physics of torque and friction and vaporized rubber remained a holy place where childhood and death threatened to fuse, but never did. Sucking down a second quart of Mickey’s behind a big block Chevy, the rear window tint casting ghost light on my knuckles, concussive thuds from the stereo rocketing me through torpid towns with vacant storefronts, I confess it easily now: I’ve never felt freer or more American.

As kids, we’d learned to use our hands. Boys took Shop class and the girls went to Home Economics. This was a time when Lacelle High School still had a lifeline to the Greatest Generation and felt duty-bound in gender assignment roles. It’s changed now, in many ways for the better, but I think my storyline would have developed differently if my Shop teacher—a slow-drawl Texan named Mr. Montgomery—hadn’t had us disassemble a Volkswagen Beetle right down to the floor pan one semester, then reassemble it the next. At fourteen, I already knew my way around a tool box and had respect for machinery, but it’s fair to say that I was agog over cars. Not the anemic, counterculture hippie-lozenge we were dissecting in Shop, of course, but the muscular glamour of true Detroit iron. In this, I had plenty of company. Among my friends, the singular obsession involved bore-stroke ratio and stuffing the biggest engine into the lightest chassis that would hold it. So devoted were we to our pantheon of bowtie grilles, front chin spoilers and Holley carburetors that available girls, blast beats and hijacked booze were only background noise.

Armed with a basic understanding of the interface between a four-stroke engine and a drive-train, I started to dream, and that summer, I began a concerted effort to save my lawn-mowing and sheep-barn-mucking money in anticipation of the car I intended to restore in advance of actually having a driver’s license.

My dad—normally taciturn—offered some encouragement. He was ex-military, and although he’d found steady, secure work at the fabricating plant, he maintained a military demeanor. As a rule he didn’t have much to say to me, but one night, he unearthed some photographs of a ’32 Ford coupe that he had ‘souped up’ (his words) and said that if I could manage to save up enough money to buy an old beater (another of his words), he’d manage to build a bonfire out of the moldy plank-board stored in our wood shed to give me a place to work. By summer’s end, when I had banked about three hundred dollars, he told me that there was gearhead where he worked with a 1970 El Camino perched on blocks in his barn. It had a crumpled hood with a blown 350 underneath it, and he believed that the fellow might be willing to let it go for whatever sum I could offer.

Now, I knew about this vehicle, of course—half-car, half-truck, business up front and party out back, just like a mullet. It was not my fantasy rod by a long shot; my antennae perked up in the presence of Chevelles and Chargers. But the car wound up being mine, and what followed were several nurturing months that left me with the only truly touching images I have of my dad. On weekends, embedded in the light-starved wood shed, clad in greasy overalls, he showed me how to weld patch panels, blast off rust with baking soda and finally, with deeper pockets than he’d ever turned out for me before, he underwrote the donor engine: A 383 stroker engine with four-bolt mains and a modified Chevy 400 crankshaft I found at Tri-City Salvage.

He helped me drop it in and cinch it down, but in terms of our collaboration, that’s as far as the project got. My parents’ marriage didn’t survive that winter, and by the time it got warm enough to work on throttle linkage and front wiring, my father had moved to Tennessee to stew in his personal grief with no desire to compete with ours.

I’ll make it brief because it doesn’t need to be long: That same year, on the day after Thanksgiving, my older sister Janet was raped and strangled while babysitting Carl and Ona Olsson’s four-year-old daughter. The child survived; my sister was found with a telephone cord wrapped around her throat and puncture wounds in her temple that were made by a mechanical pencil.

That Sunday morning—for the first time ever, I recall—we missed church. I sat in my bedroom at stared at car posters and angelfish in an aquarium while incredulous, clumsy people tried to console my inconsolable mother and my dad sat outside smoking cigarettes in the sleet. Lacelle was a town of thirty thousand and that weekend, its little world imploded. Gone was any vestige of post-War innocence, and for me, gone was the belief that moral ambiguity could exist anywhere on earth.

On Monday, classes were canceled, but by the time the 3:20 bell rang, they had a confession. Leroy Sparks was a security guard at Blue Line Industrial Supply, and the State Highway Patrol had brought tracking hounds to the house where Janet died. The trail they followed led to the Blue Line warehouse at the end of Industry Boulevard, less than half a mile away. They obtained a warrant and inside Spark’s locker, they found a bloody mechanical pencil and the poodle necklace that my dad had given Janet for her sixteenth birthday.

Sparks wound up at Gus Harrison Correctional Facility with a life term, but it didn’t take quite that long before the deed caught up to him. I won’t dirty this up with details, but it’s enough to say that street justice prevailed inside the prison and today, he is no longer alive.

What made the business even more nightmarish was that I’d known the guy. Not well—he was a few years older than me, but he showed up at some of the local car shows and he was a floater among the pit crews at the stock car track. Janet told me he’d pestered her for a date, but I never followed up, never told him to cut it out. And I never told my parents: He was a stringy, clingy fucker, and there was nothing about him I recognized as red-flag dangerous. After the murder, my oversight plagued me, but I didn’t tell anyone about it then either. My parents were blaming each other and I did not want them shifting their focus to me, so I bottled it up and drove it into the dark ravines inside me.

If it surfaced, it was in the fury with which I worked to finish my car restoration—alone. My friends came, but rarely, and when they did they were standoffish and half-hearted. Truth was, I had been transformed into someone with whom they no longer could identify: I had blood-knowledge of total grief and they did not. In ways that baffled them, they became terrified of me, as though tragedy was lightning that could leap through ether if you stood too close to it. Their estrangement didn’t last forever, but it lasted long enough, and I finished the car by myself. And once I had finally freed the exhaust valves and turned the big mill over for the first time, and once the smoke cleared from the wood shed and the idle smoothed out, I had a meltdown moment wherein I was able to upchuck a river of clogged emotions.

With Dad gone and my mother emotionally elsewhere, I suddenly had free reign of my life, and that summer, I shook down the Elco’s driveline every chance I got. During the day I cut and baled hay at nearby homesteads, and at night, I took increasingly reckless jaunts into the dark maw of the country. The allure of risk and speed was not new—by age eleven most of us had been tearing up sandlot diamonds and cornfields on minibikes and 90 cc Hondas, but this was a whole new dimension. And it wasn’t just the danger I found intriguing: The aftereffect—the profundity of stillness—was just as remarkable. It’s a residue sensation that lingers like the ground hiccupping underfoot when you get off a trampoline; it is the peripheral overdrive of a brain that has just survived imminent death. Suddenly, you see everything with distinct granularity; you see the fractions.

The chaos I created down those backwoods highways was my emancipation from grief; it was my way of channeling pain instead of burying it. I was busted only once and the sheriff gave me a lecture on the effect that losing another child would have on my mother, but he didn’t have the heart to arrest me or impound my car. That first summer, my father came back to town and only stayed a single day. He’d lost weight and refused to talk about his new life down South, but by then we were too far apart for his stoicism to have any meaning—we could no longer bridge our distances. He didn’t show sustained interest in the finished Elco and spent most of his time alone at the cemetery smoking Kools.

At that time, though, Lacelle had a local hero called Cager Maxon who filled in some of my emotional blanks. At six-foot-four, with muscles that rippled like a horse’s flank, it’s fair to say that he dominated the town’s hotrod scene. For me, he was not necessarily a father figure—no more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I turned sixteen—but he was a specimen of bigger, badder and wiser masculinity, and he monopolized my awe.

This was not unique in my circle; we all shared a man crush on Cager Maxon. Nor of course was it restricted to the boys: In that long gone era, every girl I dated viewed Cager Maxon as the consummation to be wished—in clichéd podunk parlance they referred to him as ‘easy to love but impossible to trust’. With his insolent, swimming-pool-blue eyes, shoulders tanned the color of a walnut and platinum-tinted hair, he was the high priest and resident beefcake of the car shows.

That was fine; in looks, we accepted that he was above our pay grade. But his ride? That genuinely got our boy parts cranked and put rhythm in our conversation because it was something toward which we could collectively aspire. By then, most of us had the critical chops to handle hot tanking, bore honing and freeze plug installing and lacked only the bank account to put such a genuine demon together. So we ogled and oohed, and on the strength of that car, we thought that Cager Maxon hung the moon.

It was a high-octane ‘69 ½ Barracuda fastback, painted Ice Blue Metallic, with the 440 de-burred, bored and stroked to 496. For reasons we neither understood nor needed to, he’d named the car Hellfish, and with the hood up, it displayed so many performance parts that it looked more hyperbole than mill. But brother, when he started it up, the peal was a perfect synthesis of defiance and might, and compared to the throaty, off-key muscle we were cobbling together, it was—to my ears, anyway—as precise a sound as a machine could make. The car, the physique, the persona and the lore made Cager Maxon our centerpiece.

I was a shy kid then, too tongue-tied and intimidated to ever have initiated conversation with him, so the solitary occasion wherein he’d condescended to seek me out in the wake of Janet’s death became a sort of driving force in my search for self-validation. The encounter was ludicrously brief: I’d shown the El Camino at the annual Muscle in the Park Fest in downtown Lacelle and won Pick of the Litter in the category called ‘Barn Finds’—the term we used to describe abandoned autos somebody has found and restored.

As usual, Cager Maxon took Best of Show—nobody around Lacelle could really compete with the ‘Cuda—and as I was packing up to leave, he crossed the fairgrounds and asked me to lift the hood so he could take a look the cross-ram intake I had hacked together using a circular saw, a plumber’s drill and a router.

He flicked away a cigarette butt and leaned his head over the shaker scoop and growled, “Wouldn’t have figured this could work.”

“Me neither,” I shrugged and stammered through a goofy grin. “Prolly why it did.”

He looked me over and I thought that something close to commiseration flashed behind the ice-blue metallic eyes. He opened the door and slid inside and sat behind the wheel. Other than the purple tint, it was nothing special, but he remained in the car for an extraordinarily long minute, nodding. He got it, and I knew he got it! There was masculine authority in the driver’s seat, even when the well-endowed engine wasn’t throbbing—will to power. I couldn’t count the times I’d simply sat inside the Elco before I even had it running. But there was something there less sinister too, and it was many years before I could put a name to it. Shell to drive-train, the car was phallic, but the interior was as soft and supple as a womb. I believe the desire to rediscover that place of primordial safety is universal and explains why a car like this is compelling even when it is still.

I thought he was about to say something—toss me another crumb, perhaps—but the moment passed and he detached himself and moved on. In his wake, I had a bizarre wash of ecstasy. I couldn’t quite get my head to stop humming. Nothing sexual behind it—I think I’m honest enough to admit it if there was. The sensation was nearly spiritual; almost as if I’d made real contact with higher-order reality. It sounds silly now, but then, it seemed like I had shimmied up the social totem pole a notch. My buddies certainly thought I had.

###

Three things happened toward the end of that summer that nudged my train onto a different set of tracks. In the first week of August, the house in which Janet died burned to the ground. The Olssons had moved out of state shortly after the crime, leaving the property abandoned, and for a while it took on the dreadful status of being the local spook house. I was hurt, although to be fair, had the victim not been my sister, I would likely have been alongside the vandals and the daredevils with Ouija boards. They’d never own it to my face, but I’m sure I knew everyone who broke into that house, and I probably recognized the name of whoever doused the house with kerosene and dropped a match.

No one was ever charged, and as far as I know, I’m the only person who the police even interviewed. The sheriff assured me it was routine since it could be argued that I had a motive, but I told him honestly that I had no idea who’d done it and he never brought it up again.

After that, a kind of bittersweet relief washed through Lacelle, as though it had exhaled its lungful of fetid air and saw a path forward. I looked at it that way too. I went a single time a stood among the wet ashes and satisfied myself that nothing of Janet remained there, and that she existed only in the quiet burrows of my mind. It was a spiritual release, perhaps one that my father experienced during his lone, lonely cemetery vigil.

The second milestone happened when Cager Maxon split for Southern California, the self-contained, narcissistic terminus of American car culture. Among ourselves, we agreed that the move was a no-brainer for him and that he was a suitable representative from the land where high-performance muscle was born. We’d miss the vicarious energy, but we liked to think of Hellfish glinting in the Western sunlight. We knew that Detroit was the material base for SoCal dreaming, and if they supplied the beaches and year-round tops-down, we’d supply the steel.

None of us expected to hear from Cager again, and though his departure didn’t touch me directly, it made me restless. I lay awake at night while crickets sang and sometimes, far off, I could hear some young hot-dog throwing gears down a distant country highway. I felt childhood zooming away at breakneck speed and I considered the convoluted majesty of the world, and this became the catalyst for me to approach the recruiting booth at the county fair. I finished out my senior year, and shortly after my eighteenth birthday, at one o’clock in the morning, my usual cruising hour, I guided Mom through her lip-biting hysterics and boarded a plane for Fort Benning, Georgia.

During the thirteen day leave I was granted before starting my OCONUS assignment, I sold the El Camino. I also married Jordelle Vermilion, my history teacher’s prettiest daughter. She came with me to Germany and mastered the language in six months, and in the meantime, made us a baby. When we came back, I used the GI Bill to earn a degree in Quality Control Management and went to work at Custom Tech Fabricating, a Christian-owned concern with enough horse sense to diversify when the economy went sour.

Between then and now, the weighted years are dusty and delicate, with much to share and no time to do so: I’ll say I prospered, though not unreasonably so, and once my salary nudged six figures, I began to get wistful and nostalgic. With Jordi’s eye-rolling approval, I joined the Mid-Michigan Veterans Car Society who met a couple times a month at the American Legion arranging picnics and going en masse to car shows, though most of our time was spent drinking Bell’s beer and swapping stories the way we used to swap gauges and non-crash fenders.

By then, Jordi and I owned acreage on Crystal Lake with an unused boathouse toward the rear, and when I floated the idea of picking up an old pony car and restoring it, she was four-square in favor of it, thinking that without something to do, my impending retirement would drive me bonkers. I began to scan the classifieds, and it wasn’t long before something caught my eye: A 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, blue with black vinyl bucket seats, a Go-Wing spoiler and a 440-cid four-barrel V-8.

My breathing quickened and I had a strange sensation; there were only a few hundred of these vehicles ever made. My ears began humming again.

I called the number—three times in fact, since it wound up belonging to a crotchety, old-school dairy farmer up in Duplain Township who didn’t own a cell phone. There was earth crust in his tone, and I listened to him rail about the falling price of milk; fourteen dollars per hundredweight, down from $25, and I didn’t interrupt. When he got around to the car, he said that he’d had to evict a rental property tenant after taking the title as collateral for back due rent. He told me that the ‘Cuda was sitting out back in a bank barn. The car’s owner had never paid up, and now—behind the eight-ball of fuel costs and interest rates—the farmer needed to generate some cash flow.

I asked him if the car had any distinguishing marks and he said, “You mean, like dents? A few dueling scars, a gravel crack in the windshield. Nothing recent—the car hasn’t moved in years. This is a rescue vehicle, like one of those dogs from a no-kill shelter.”

“You don’t know if it runs?”

“I know it doesn’t run. I took the distributor cap so the fellow wouldn’t come back and repo it. You’d get that along with the title.”

“I meant, is there anything painted on it?”

“The hood’s black and there are black racing stripes along the body.”

“Anything on the back, under the spoiler? A name? Hellfish?”

“Might be. It’s pretty dusty. You interested, I’ll let it go for $2800, same amount the loser owed me.”

“Let me ask you something,” I asked tentatively. “Was the guy you evicted called Cager Maxon?”

“Why?” said the salty old farmer. “You know him?”

###

Next day, in the low light of the autumn afternoon, I drove out to Duplain to speak with the farmer and to see if Hellfish had measured the years with the same mellow endurance that I had. The day was a paradox, hovering between seasons, with fire just beginning to touch the leaves of maple trees.

When I got there, I thought that the farmhouse poked too conspicuously from pastureland and looked unkempt. The man had mentioned that he ran a herd of one hundred seventy milk cows, which at one time had been enough to keep a family’s head above water. Now, he’d told me, he was considering selling out. I knew that such an admission was shell-shock, like telling a stranger in the check-out lane that you have terminal cancer.

His wife answered on the second knock. She was a squat, sallow woman with hefty shoulders and teeth too even to be real. She glowered at me a minute and said, “You here for the sports car? He said seven.”

“I’m pretty sure we said six.”

“Well, you’re early even for six.”

That was true: I had left myself spare time in case I got lost, although I wasn’t likely to have gotten lost. These were my old stomping grounds—the same county straightaways where I used to toss up tailings. I found them less mesmerizing by daylight with talk radio on the sound system and Levatol running through my system instead of malt liquor—all this from behind the wheel of my geriatric Buick Lacrosse, which (for the record) was missing only an AAA sticker and a box of tissues on the parcel shelf to be a total concession to now being someone’s granddad.

Her voice was gravelly and twanged in the way of Midwesterners with roots in Dixie, but there was dignity in her diction. “He’s gone to see the Northstar fellow to see if Washington is willing to let us just disappear. Anyway, he’ll be around directly and I suppose you might as well come in and wait.”

Beside the door hung a welded sign that read ‘Boom, Not Bust’. Over her shoulder, the interior of the house was too dark to make out detail. The silence was oppressive; even eerie.

“No thanks. It’s a nice day; I’ll wait out here.”

She closed the door and overhead, a turkey vulture teetered on the wind. I kicked around the anemic front lawn for a while, then headed up the pitted driveway to the rear where an old greenhouse stood surrounded by the brilliant yellow heat of untended forsythia. The greenhouse was missing panes and the breeze soughed in the framework, pushing through the afternoon’s waning warmth. 

Beyond it, a pump-jack stood in the center a forage field. The horse-head was immobile and a languid, one-horned steer lay beneath it. The property backed into a belt of hardwoods rising to the Upland Hills, and I could see an old barn with overhanging bays built directly into a hillside. I dated it to the 1880s; the earthen slope had once allowed wagon-loads of hay to be delivered to the upper floor while livestock was kept below. This type of barn was rare around here where the terrain is mostly flat. It was called a bank barn, and that’s where I’d been told the Barracuda was stored.

Old farmers can be weird about trespassers, especially when you start poking around outbuildings. The retired postmaster of Lacelle (of all people) was busted with nearly a hundred marijuana plants inside his pole barn; one of his former carriers had turned him in. At his trial he said, “I don’t even smoke the stuff. I just grow it because somebody said I can’t.”

At the time I thought: That’s freedom in a nutshell, especially when he pled down to a misdemeanor, paid a fine, and everybody got on with life. Now, I had several thousand dollars in a drive-up banking envelope in my jacket pocket, and I figured that the transaction was predetermined. I was on time and that gave me prerogative to go take a peek, I thought. Keeping a wary on the steer, I crossed the pasture and passed beneath the forebay on which an American flag had once been painted, although so long ago that now it could only be recognized from a ringside seat.

In the far end of the barn, in the bowels, among the shadowy stalls and old air compressors, the kerosene cans and bed trailers, beside a wheel-less tractor draped in a tarp and lit by broken rays of sunlight slinking through the slats, was Hellfish.

The years had treated us both with rational respect, but unlike me, the car remained an icon, a primeval concurrence of form and spirit, and it held its ground even under the spindrifts of barn dust and the weight of debris. Two generations had passed since I’d last watched that rear end rise with sexual energy when it was revved, one leaden foot on the accelerator, the other on the brake. My heart leaped; I had butterflies. Here, back from California, within reach, was the climax of a lot of bloodthirsty teenage horsepower libido, and I approached the machine with the awe of a wedding night.

It sounds corny—and mea culpa, I knew it did at the time—but suddenly, I was seeing through the finely-honed vision of someone just hopping off a Super Glide. I detected details, the things we cared about before we ever got to the alchemy beneath the hood; the side-marker reflectors, the shape of the tail lamp housing, the raked angle of the rear window. I touched the trim—the ’69 chrome more subdued than the year before—and ran my fingers along the silken accent stripe that traced the body’s contours.

I was to the front of the car before I realized that there was a man sitting behind the steering wheel.

He might have been dead, but he wasn’t. He was asleep. Through sleep, he coughed, and the cough made a phlegmy, wet-drum sound in the yawning belly of the barn. The arm draped over the driver’s window looked like a ham; it was a tub of muscles that had not atrophied but fleshed out, and was covered in the kind of red welts that a clumsy welder gets. I could see what made him clumsy: There were empty Old Kentucky bottles on the seat beside him. He was wearing faded Carhartt coveralls and an old purple sweatshirt, and although the platinum tresses had gone brittle—I doubted there was much left on the pate beneath the hood—and the tan on the bristled cheek had faded, it took no time at all to recognize him.

But it took time to adjust, and in that time, he woke up and peered up at me through his private cobwebs.

So, I adjusted, and this conviction was part of the adjustment: If you live in the area where you grew up, where your touchstones and yardsticks exist on every corner, among the most unsettling thing you  will witness is a slow bleed of the familiar. If your place is gentrified, the hardware store on the main drag becomes a trendy bistro; if it succumbs to rural blight, the store is boarded up. Blue Line Industrial Supply closed down two decades ago, and shortly after that, my elementary school was repurposed as a retirement villa. You may not notice a quarter-panel as it begins to rust, but you understand that corrosion, however subtle, is relentless. It happens to people: Self-recognition bleeds away. I’d seen it happened many times and there was no reason that it wouldn’t have happened to Cager Maxon.

I said, “I’m sorry. This car is listed for sale.”

“How much?” he asked.

“Three grand.”

“Three grand,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Yeah, I don’t have that.”

“Do you live out here?” I asked. “In the car?”

“Naw. Well, I was reclaiming an empty farmhouse out on Round Lake. Spent two weeks nailing ceiling squares to the split lathe before I gave up. Had a Medicaid card for my back, but then they popped me for taking off-the-book roofing jobs.”

I tried not to stare, but something about him nagged me; something that ran deeper than the decay of his physical essence. I’m not sure why—perhaps it was a sanity check at the onset of an insane meeting—but it became important in that brief moment to identify it. He rambled on, likely still drunk:

“People I knew that never worked a lick in their lives are living off disability incomes and they’re healthier than I am. I don’t mind saying that it annoys the crap out of me.”

I answered, “It’s tough. I get that.”

“Tough enough,” he said. “Sold the ‘fridge at Odd Lots along with the rest of the furniture and I didn’t realize how badly I needed it. All that crap spinning around in my brain? I used to stick my head in the freezer just to suck cold air into my lungs. Two arteries one hundred per cent closed and another at ninety per cent? A rotten, irremediable heart; that’s what they told me before they took my card.”

With that, I found the missing piece: The short-fuse menace that had trailed behind him everywhere he went was gone. He’d once exuded danger in weird abundance, a sense unrelated to anything he’d actually done. It had been key to his celebrity and had made him the Lord of the Dragstrip, squirting by you in the speed trap and making your white-trash girlfriend moan. And now, as subtle as rust, he was defused. It startled me and as soon as I saw it, I wished I hadn’t.

At the same time, I had the bizarre idea that it was me about to cuckold him by stealing his mate out from under him, so I made up a line of rapid-fire bullshit: “I wasn’t necessarily thinking of buying the car. I know this maniac at the club who’s having a time with the jets getting too much fuel to the cylinder. I wanted to see the carb, see if I should recommend a different one or have him recalibrate the one that’s there.”

“What’s there?”

“750 on a 305 small.”

He blinked at me and I could tell he didn’t believe me, so the question hung with the chain hoist, three feet over the car. I stared over him to where some old truck plates were nailed to the wall alongside a seed corn calendar. The calendar had been there a while; it showed the right month but the wrong decade.

When it became awkward and I said, “You probably don’t know who I am.”

“But I do. Your sister, Janet.”

I was startled and I stammered, “A lot of water under that bridge, but yes. I’m surprised you remembered.”

But then again, why should I have been surprised? The murder had been the biggest thing to hit Lacelle in our lifetimes and it stood to reason that those of us intimately connected to it had been unwitting standouts with our own repulsive celebrity. At the time, I was so lost in myself and the private mechanics of coping that I didn’t notice. It occurred to me for the first time that this might have been one of the reasons my father left.

“You had an Elco with a jerry-rigged cross-ram manifold.”

“The persistence of memory,” I snorted. “My old hillbilly hotrod. It was amazing what we tried to pull off without software or a CNC back then. But do you know what I remember? The summer after Janet died, you stopped by the Muscle in the Park show and congratulated me . You offered the engine your blessing. That was a pretty big moment coming from a dude with your cred—someone we idolized. That whole day was the highlight of a pretty brutal year.”

He sank lower into cracked black vinyl. “I didn’t give a damn about your manifold.”

“No? Well, I can’t say I blame you. It wasn’t much—I never said it was. You did. All I had to work with was a TIG welder and a drill. It had lot of performance issues and that’s God’s truth. Like steering the Queen Mary. And it looked as bad as it ran.”

“I came by that day because I wanted to check up on you.”

I shrugged and nodded and said, “ I mean, thanks. People did that. They meant well—they didn’t know what else to do. You have to learn to chug passed shit like that.”

His voice sounded mashed, growing strangely urgent: “I did know what to do, though. I tried to do it, too. I came by in the park because I wanted to tell you something.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. But I couldn’t do it.”

“Why?”

“Because…”

His voice trailed away, and in a minute he unearthed another pint of Old Kentucky from the map pocket and handed it over to me. I turned him down—I’d left whisky in my rear-view twenty years before. He took his mouthful, set the pint between his legs and closed his eyes like a baby nodding at the breast. I knew this sensation; the quickening comfort, the coursing relief, the warm blanket tugged up around the ears. But we were a long way from mother’s milk and I waited until he started up again: “Oh, my diseased head. I couldn’t do it then, and I couldn’t do it later. Went by your house a few times. Sometimes the Elco was there and sometimes it wasn’t. But it didn’t matter either way.”

“Why not?”

“Because I couldn’t get out of the car.”

Catastrophic events reshape lives; that’s hardly breaking news, but I’d seen the look that Cager wore at AA meetings: It was the expression of people who would never again see the world in living color. These folks would stay sober and they’d become responsible, but they’d never again be happy—and that was something that, thorough all the prayers and all the resolutions and all the repaired relationships, they could not hide. Not all of them had this look, but enough of them did that it was spooky. Most of them could be honest, though, and I believed that Cager was honest when I asked him, “Why couldn’t you get out of the car?” and he answered, “I don’t know.”

It was a bizarre phenomenon, for sure—odd and unlikely happenstance. But thinking about it later, I could never call it coincidence. I had come for Hellfish, not Cager Maxon, but in my imagination there was no realm in which they did not exist as co-dependents. I had intentionally interjected myself back into this orbit, and that much couldn’t be helped. Now, beneath the weight of time and accession I had no need to hear what he had to say, and I would have been more than justified to hightail it back to my Buick and speed away.

And I should have. But I didn’t. I backed into a table and pressed the small of my back into a rusting vice that still held a foot of rebar. I did not want to touch the car again. I was by no means repulsed by it, except in the way that two bar magnets push each other apart.

The overhead chain hoist overhead swayed slightly as the wind kicked up with the evening. I said, “Well, you’re in the car now. So, why don’t you tell me today what you couldn’t tell me then?”

I assumed I wouldn’t wait long; when people are starved for conversation, their sluicegates open easily. It’s a side-effect of liquor, of course, although ironically, it can be worse when they’re sober—it’s one of the reasons I no longer attend AA meetings at Gateway Assembly. When a haunted penitent is offered a forum, there’s generally a lot of incoherence and irrelevance to sit through before they arrive at their most ghastly revelations, if they ever get there at all.

But with Cager Maxon, it spilled out immediately: It turned out that he once lived in a foster home with the punk who had murdered Janet.

I suppose in the aftermath I’d heard something about the killer’s broken childhood, his endlessly shuffling addresses and motherless anger. I dismissed it as off topic since I could not see it being a mitigating factor, and if you could, you didn’t dare say it within earshot of me. But this was the first time I’d heard of any family connection between him and Cager Maxon, even the foster kind. In retrospect, it had never occurred to me to speculate on how Cager had grown up—he was simply there, an eternal, a numen standing tall in the sunshine. Who wonders what Apollo was like as a kid?

So now I knew. Cager said, “When I was thirteen years old, my mom was busted for some outstanding warrants, misdemeanors, traffic tickets she hadn’t paid, nothing major, but when Protective Services came by the house, I was alone and there were blackened bananas on the counter, empty pizza boxes or something like that, and they took pictures and used it to charge her with child neglect. My sometimes-dad was useless—all about the Quaaludes, you know, and she did what she could—she was a Tastee-Freez cashier, for Christ sake. She was transferred to county lock-up and I was funneled into a group home in New Lothrop, and that’s where I met Leroy Sparks.”

Sometimes confessions come with a sense of detachment, like they are being delivered through a proxy. Not here; Cager Maxon was trapped in his own gravity. His voice was supremely focused: “I mean, that family was too far gone to deal with for long. The mother believed that there were angels in the attic carrying bowls of plague and when anybody messed up, she’d scream that they’d supped from a plague bowl. For doing that, the father would chain us to the dog house overnight.”

He said he’d shared a bedroom with Sparks for two years while his mother was wrestled with the system; after that, he’d run away and slept in the outbuildings of old foreclosed properties until he found a rogue garage in Weymouth willing to take him on to steal car batteries. He continued, “Now, Leroy was a lost kid and I covered for him when I could, but I had enough problems and I wasn’t cut out to be anybody’s big brother. When I took off, I left him behind and did not look back.”

If he was leading up to something, I knew there’d be a station break when he went for another tug on his pint, because that’s how it works. When he did, I’d interject, because I really didn’t need any more backstory. To be totally and painfully truthful, I could barely remember what Janet looked like. After a few years, even yearbook pictures and vacation albums didn’t help. On rare occasions when I thought of her, I had an image of her I’d never seen in life: Swaddled in the maternity ward, fresh upon earth, with my parents overjoyed at their firstborn back in the days when they loved each other. In my psyche, there was nothing left about the murder to work out and nothing more I needed to consider. The paranoid old man in front of me had his misery and secrets, but of all the people on the planet, I was probably the one least suited to be his sounding board.

He drank and I said abruptly, “That’s fine. Everybody has an excuse for who they are. I paid for the right to be judgmental, and anyway, it’s pointless. It’s a long time gone. The things you’re talking about happened a decade before Janet died.”

In a quick discharge he said, “Not all of them,” and then I pressed my back into the rebar and couldn’t hammer down the lid if I wanted to: “I knew Leroy Sparks was going to attack your sister.”

“How?”

“Because he told me.”

“When?”

“The day before he did it. I bumped into him on Thanksgiving at the only show in town that was open, the VFW Hall on Fluvanna Street. How pathetic is that? Neither one of us had a family and neither one of us had anywhere else to go. I drank with him because nobody else would. He talked a lot of trash that night—he was fixated on a girl he met while walking to the Blue Line warehouse where he worked, but she wouldn’t date him. So he followed her and found out she watched kids every Friday night at a house on Industry Boulevard. The next night was Friday, and if she wouldn’t go out with him one way, it was okay—she’d do it another way, on his terms.”

I was incredulous: “And you covered for him? Like when you were kids?”

“I didn’t know if he was serious,” he answered, his head beginning to tick back and forth like a metronome. “But he could have been, so the next night I went to see if anything happened. In those days, there weren’t many houses on Industry—it was mostly deer country, and I backed my car into a two-track where I could see the whole road. Around seven? I saw a Chrysler Newport drop off a young girl off at a ranch house on a hill.”

“That was Janet,” I whispered. “And my father.”

“I know,” he answered. “Fifteen minutes later, the couple from the house left in a Cutlass. Leroy’s shift ended at nine, and twenty minutes after nine, he came up the road on foot. I saw him climb the fence onto the roof and I saw him cut the phone lines. I saw him slit the screen and I saw him climb inside. I saw the lights go off and after a while I saw the Cutlass come back and I heard the screaming. The whole time, I was sitting there in the deer camp watching…”

Supple as a womb, blood warm, throbbing like a heartbeat. Context didn’t matter. I finished the sentence: “…but you couldn’t get out of the car.”

I had no wish to mollify his guilt. Why would I? What I thought was: We could probably do everything differently and still up end up in the same place we are.

I said, “You burned down that house, didn’t you?”

Of course he did. And maybe in some esoteric way that helped him. People seem to confuse sadness with depression, but they're opposite ends of the spectrum. Sadness is how you deal with situations you can' t process but somehow do. Depression is how you process situations you can deal with, but somehow don't.

I’ve found every single person I’ve ever met to be interesting. Very few have I found to be fascinating. Cager Maxon was one of them. But the picture I held in my head was a votive from childhood, not something trembling and composting inside a barn. I left him there, and halfway down the driveway I met the dairy farmer who had just gotten back from the bank. Instead of haggling, I gave him three thousand dollars for the Barracuda and another thousand if he’d let me store it in his barn until the following summer.

I took a long road home, and when I got there my wife was waiting for me and I had no trouble getting out of the Buick. But on subsequent nights I'll admit that I had trouble fighting the urge to go back to the old barn with the American flag on its gable to kick over a kerosene can and drop a match.