I have no idea what the point of this joke was. I don’t know if he was making fun of them or me. Uncle Walt wasn’t a particularly mean person, so it’s possible that he wasn’t making fun of anyone. He just thought that it was a good joke to intentionally get a person’s name wrong.
Now that the thought occurs to me, I’m pretty sure that the old man who lives here is not named Engel. It has to be an inexplicable Uncle Walt joke.
This time, I knock on the door.
As I suspected, the thing swings inward on the second knock.
“Hello? Are you home?”
I want to shout, “This is a WTOS wellness check on behalf of The Allman Brothers Band.”
Instead, I settle for another, “Hello?”
The gap between the door and the frame is about an inch and a half. Angling my head, I can see the couch, a small bookcase, a coffee table, and a chair. There’s a bar against the back wall. I don’t see any sign of Mr. Engel.
“Hello?”
With my toe, I inch the door open a little more.
The heat coming out of that place is unbelievable. It’s like opening the door of an oven. When I lean forward, I can feel the skin on my face tighten in response. I sniff at the air for signs of decaying flesh. It’s silly, if you think about it. Mr. Engel probably went to visit relatives. Maybe he has a camp even farther north on the shore of some lake. Maybe he’s visiting there.
But if any of those things are true, why is his front door open?
“Hello?”
(My imagination works overtime.)
My imagination works overtime.
I don’t need it to work as hard as it does. I would like to be the kind of person who can walk away and not think about the house or Mr. Engel anymore. It’s really none of my business. I stopped by, knocked, and even peeked inside. Isn’t that enough?
I can picture him though. He closed all the windows and went upstairs to take a little nap in the hottest part of the day. Then, the house got hotter and hotter, he started to sweat, and before he knew it he was too weak to stagger back down and out of the house into fresh air.
I whisper, “But why is the door open?”
It can’t be for ventilation. None of the windows are open.
There’s no sign of Erin around—ha ha.
“Hello?”
Another idea: he opened the door to go out, a pain shot down his left arm, he staggered backwards and fell down behind the bar. If I lean to my right, I could probably see his shoes sticking out from behind the bar.
When I lean, I see nothing.
Mom used to always accuse me of having an overactive imagination. When we lived in Virginia, I told her about the man with too many garbage cans. He lived in the house behind us, across the alley. There were just way too many garbage cans across the back of his house. They were metal and they were spray painted with different numbers on the cans.
Mom said, “So what? He keeps a tidy lawn, I’m sure he’s just a tidy person.”
But those weren’t the cans that he dragged out on Thursday nights for Friday pickup. The ones he dragged to the curb were greenish-black and made of plastic.
I think I was in fifth grade when I finally convinced my friend Matt that we should go check it out. He was supposed to stay at his father’s house on Saturday nights, but he hated it there so he would often spend the night at my house. His father didn’t mind. Not having Matt around meant that he could go out with his girlfriend. So, one fall night I said, “Let’s wait until after Saturday Night Live and then we can sneak over there and look in those cans.”
Matt didn’t want to. He liked the idea of sneaking, but hated the idea of staying up past SNL. The sun always woke him up in the morning—he couldn’t sleep if there was any real light in the room—so he preferred to fall asleep during the news. He would get mad at me if I laughed too hard. It wasn’t a problem that year. Only five cast members returned to the show in 95, and none of them were funny. The new cast, like Ferrell and Meadows, would eventually become favorites, but it was a rough start that year. I waited up through the show anyway and then shook Matt awake.
“Seriously?” he slurred. “I just fell asleep and you’re waking me up?”
He had been asleep for two hours, but I didn’t bother to point that out.
“Come on, he turned out the light.”
The porch light—a green bulb—had been turned off about midnight. Out there in the darkness, the cans were waiting to be examined. I put on my darkest pair of jeans and tossed Matt’s clothes to him. Once he woke up, his mood improved quickly. Matt liked the idea of sneaking around in the dark. My mom was no issue. Back then, she used to crash hard most weekends on wine and pills. She said that the pills were for her monthlies, but she took them any time she didn’t have to work in the morning.
“We’ll go along the garage until we get to the bushes, then hug the fence to the alley. If we climb over the fence through the bush, we’ll be behind…”
Matt walked right through the back door
