HYDE AND SEEK
by
JACK KETCHUM
Cemetery Dance Publications
Baltimore * 2000 *
www.cemeterydance.com
My thanks to Al Weller, Lance and Ellen Crocker, Alan Morrison,
Marjorie Shepatin, Philip Caggiano, David and Julie Winn, Ellen
Antoville, and especially Paula White.
My gratitude also to Russell Mullen, my first, fine, enthusiastic web
master and friend, who helped promote this book back into print.
To Robert Block, for bothering with kids.
There's a wheel in my hand, but I can't steer.
I don't believe in omens, but I think you can know when you're in
trouble.
Follow me on this, even if it sounds like bullshit.
I was working the stacks of two-by-four furring. What we needed was an
eight-foot length off the top. We were nearly into the next bundle
down but you could still see a couple of lengths left up there that
didn't look too weathered, so I climbed up after one. I had my hands
on one when the steel cable snapped on the bundle I was walking on. A
sound like a whip cracking. Damn near took my head off too. And
naturally I lost my footing. I fell ten feet to the tarmac in ash ower
of heavy lumber.
Not a scratch on me.
I was lucky.
But the boss gave me hell. You weren't supposed to go up there -though
everybody did--you were supposed to use the forklift There was an
insurance problem. So I was breaking the rules.
That was the first thing. Getting damn near killed breaking the
rules.
That same week I had the Chevy pickup on the coast road, doing maybe
sixty, when a big black tanker passed me on the downgrade. I let him
have the highway. But then on the upgrade he slowed to a
crawl. I swallowed diesel fumes behind him for a while and then
pulled out to pass.
But I guess the guy wanted to play.
He wouldn't let me by. He'd move over across the broken yellow line
just far enough so that there was a good chance of piling me into the
hillside if I tried. Then he'd pull back again. Out and back. I
could see him watching me through the rearview mirror.
It was very nasty.
I cursed him and waited for an opening.
It came on the downgrade again. By the time I saw it we were both of
us doing seventy. Already that was hard on the pickup. My wheel would
always wobble at sixty-five. Sol held my breath and told myself to
hell with it, you were only young once, and pressed it to eighty.
The pickup shook like it was trying to fall apart. I remembered the
old bald tires. The downgrade was long and steep and we ran it neck
and neck, he and I. I passed him just as the road turned up again. I
was sweating and my hands were trembling. I can see that bastard
smiling at me as I passed him even to this day- not so much the man,
but the wicked cut of the smile. A tanker is a very big thing on a
narrow highway when it's running a foot and a half away from you at
eighty for over a mile.
So that was the second thing. Being stupid and angry and taking bad
risks. I could just as easily have waited him out. It had been a
nice, sunny day.
Then I stepped in dog shit.
Coming home from work, half a block from Harmon's.
Now, I know that's nothing. Meaningless. Silly. Even though it was a
particularly big pile of dog shit, and fresh. But I'll tell you why I
remember it and why I put it with the other things. It's very simple,
wasn't looking where I was going.
Now, that's nothing either, unless you take into account the fact that
it's completely contrary to my habits. I stare at the ground when I
walk. I always do. I've been criticized for it now and then. My
mother used to say I'd get nearsighted and stoop-shouldered. She
lied, of course. I got tall and see at twenty-twenty. But damn it, /
wasn't looking.
I'm aware that these are all random events. And maybe it's just
hindsight.
But sometimes it seems to me that once in a while you can look at all
the random events you live through every day and see that suddenly
there's a mechanism that's just clicked on, you can see it right then
and there- and the events are not so random anymore. The mechanism is
eating them, absorbing them, growing larger and larger, feeding on the
events of your life. To what end? You don't know.
The mechanism is you.
