Part 6:

I turned from my ruminition of my town’s history, and saw Willie Walker staring at me through the glass door of the newspaper office. I’d wondered if and how I was going to get the kid’s attention, if he had been hip-deep in sorting out the answers to the town’s football pool, headphones filling his head with whatever noise they were calling music nowadays.

He twisted the lock out of place, and stuck his head out of the door, catching his earphones in the process. He took those down.

“Can I help you, Mr. Wells?”

“I’m 29, Willie,” I said. “I’ve not cottoned to that Mr. Wells bullshit, yet. Nobody calls me that unless they’re collecting for a bill.”

Willie digested that. Let me say this: I’ve known Willie Walker very nearly as long as he’s been alive. It’s one of those small town things. There’s one school, there are but five or six churches to attend (depending on whether that Pentecostal church that meets in the storefront across from the courthouse is up on its rent or not). Willie and I went to the same school, same church. Even if he was 7 years younger...chances are, we’d met.

Add to that the fact that I dated Willie’s sister Melissa for a couple of years when we were both just coming back to town from our college lives.

Willie was simply the type to take a second to think about both everything said to him, and everything he was about to say. A lot of people took him for slow. I always took him for having some manner of disconnect up in his brain....a low grade autism or something like that. He didn’t same to have the same filters that a lot of us do in our brains that let us read the tone of somebody’s voice. Willie seemed to need an extra second now and then to analyze what was being said, to sort out the whats and hows of what was coming toward him.

“Well,” he said after a moment’s consideration, “Can I help you with something? You’ve been standing there for a little bit.”

Jeez. I know my history of the town was long-winded. Was I daydreaming?

“Just thinking, Willie.”

“Oh.”

“How’s everybody down your way?”

A pause: “They’re fine. Melissa’s married now.”

Melissa had been married for three years, now. There was some consternation that I hadn’t attended the wedding. But despite my non-attendance, and the fact that she was living in Nashville, I was well aware that Melissa was married.

“Yeah, Willie. I know. How’re your folks?”

“They’re fine.” Everything Willie said had a matter-of-fact tone to it, that I’ll tell you I actually found kind of funny in. He spent most of one Christmas afternoon explaining to me over and over again about the Playstation he and his brother had gotten for Christmas, the fact that he was saying the same thing over and over again being the only indication of his excitement, otherwise untraceable in his monotone.

I also thought about the time I’d been at their home when Melissa’s younger and Willie’s older brother Jimmy had managed to fall out of one of the hickory trees in the back yard, breaking both legs–and how Willie had announced the horrific incident with a sort of bemused detachment....’Jimmy fell out of the tree. His legs are twisted underneath him.”

While everybody ran to help the kid, who was screaming his heart, lungs and spleen out, Willie watched from a distance, calmly drinking a Mountain Dew.

“Came by to ask you a question.” (Except, I don’t think I asked it like that...I think I stammered a couple of times, trying to find a way to break into the next part of the conversation.)

A pause. Then: “Okay.”

“I got told that Lyndon Waverly passed away earlier this week, but I couldn’t find an obituary. Mark told me you wrote the obituaries.”

“Yeah,” Willie said. "Mostly I just edit what the funeral home or the family sends me." I noted that though I’d moved forward early in the conversation to be friendly, Willie was standing in the door of the newspaper, holding the door open just enough to stick his head out, almost like he was ready to slam it shut at a second’s notice. In case this dude that Willie’d known almost literally his entirely life had decided to rush the door.

I waited. Don’t know if I thought Willie’d be able to use that journalistic training he’d picked up at the university to put two and two together, but we both stood there in the autumn breeze staring at each other.

Willie squinted, and ran a hand through his longish brown hair, and before he could speak his question.

“Was there a death notice for Lyndon Waverly, or something from a funeral home, or anything saying that he’d died?”

He stared, and then shook his head. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.” He stared his wide-eyed, unblinking stare at me.

“Did anybody from his family maybe ask that they not print anything about the funeral.”

“No,” he said, after that pause, which I granted really might get on your nerves if you were working close with the boy, even if you’d allowed that he wasn’t slow.

“This is getting weird” I said, more to myself than to Willie.

Willie took everything as matter-of-fact. And while I wondered at the wisdom of putting this kid in charge of dealing with any potentially angry, bereaved folks complaining about misprints in obituaries, I had to figure that of anybody possibly working at the newspaper, the person least likely to get burnt out on it probably was Willie.

“It’s weird?” Willie asked.

“Umm, yeah. I don’t know. You’d know more about this than I would. Have you ever heard of a reason for somebody’s obituary not being in the paper?”

“No obituary at all?”

“No obituary at all,” I said.

Willie’s eyes shifted down at the sidewalk for a second, and then returned to mine.

“No,” he said.

I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except that this was the first time in the 20 plus years I’d known the kid that he’d not looked me in the eye, whether he was telling me about video games, his brother falling out of a tree, or the fact that he needed only the Gary DiSarcina and Shawon Dunston cards to complete 1995's set of Topps baseball cards, and telling me that 193 times.

“Willie, is there something you’re not telling me?”

You know how you’re expecting something without realizing that you’re expecting it?

I’d expected Willie to just say “No,” in that matter of fact voice of his, leaving me to wander back down to the Wells Homestead confused and resigned to heading to the funeral of Lyndon Waverly, a funeral that, as far as I knew, was of neither public nor private knowledge.

“Yeah,” Willie said.

“Can you come in?” he asked me. It was probably the most human reaction I’d gotten from Mr. Willie Walker in the whole time I’d known him.

I followed Willie inside, and he locked the front door behind me.

I was always struck by the offices of the paper.. Up until a few years earlier, I’d only seen what Hollywood had wanted me to see. Every time I came into the offices, which wasn’t often, but it happened regularly enough, I was taken by the complete lack of hustle or bustle. I was taken by the workmanlike attitudes of those who write at the desks, hunched over their computers. I had thought once that they looked a little like cavemen, down in their cave, only instead of inventing the wheel or perfecting the harness of fire, they were writing about some ‘grinding car crash’ that had taken place when somebody didn’t have the good sense God gave most farm animals to slow down in the rain.

Granted, the Trainersville Herald-Frontier wasn’t the New York Times, and this was a sunny Saturday afternoon in the middle of football season. But the small, windowless pit area spoke even more of a cave or some manner or animal’s den than it did a small-town newspaper when there were none in the cave but me and Willie.

Willie didn’t have the florescent tubes lit overhead, and was working instead by a couple of floor lamps at a desk stuck in the corner of the Herald-Frontier’s pit.

And they call it a pit for a good reason. You have to decent four steps into it. I always felt like Cecil Reece, the longtime owner and publisher of the paper, had designed the room that way so he could, even at 5'3" tower over his staff, addressing him from his bully pulpit at the head of the pit.

Willie descended into the pit, and I followed. He took me to his desk, and pulled a chair up for me. He looked once up at the television he had playing–it struck me that I wished I had a job where I could watch football while I was working, and then at me.

“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said, voice rough. “I’m not supposed to tell.” He was bursting at the seams with his responsibility in a conspiracy.

He pulled a brown envelope from his desk and handed it to me.

“You aren’t going to have to kill me when I see what’s in here, are you?” I asked, smiling in spite of myself. I like to believe that Willie and I got along so well earlier in our lives because subtlety has never been a strong suit of mine, either. I hoped he knew that I was kidding him.

“No,” Willie said. He didn’t return the smile. “I printed these off this morning, before Cecil deleted them.”

I opened the brad on the envelope, which was marked “football pictures,” and pulled a small stack of pictures printed on normal 8 ½" by 11" paper.

Again. Do you know how you’re expecting something without realizing it?

Well, I don’t know what I was expecting when Willie handed me the pictures, what I’d expected to be in the envelope. I think since it was marked as such, I expected “football pictures,” maybe from the previous night’s high school games. Trainersville had played Hopper County the night before.

The first picture was that of a trail, gravel, and mostly dirt, that led into the woods. The picture was taken on a fine sunny day, and the color of the leaves told me that the pictures were taken sometime around now, when folks were coming from all over the country to our neck of the woods to look at the colors the trees put off this time of the year. It had been a reasonably wet and temperate summer, and we’d had our first frost a week and a half or so before. The leaves were in fine display.

The next picture shown a similar view. More fall colors with a lake in the forefront. The beach on the righthand side of the photo told me that the photographer was visiting Lake Erin up near Monmouth Point. I also recognized the drain station, installed by FDR’s CCC, back in my grandfather’s days, on the left edge of the picture, mostly cut out, but with the bright red safety bars peeking around the edge.

I thumbed through the other pictures. There were 27 pictures, all told. Most were of the leaves. Whoever had taken the pictures was going for a hike, most likely up toward Monmouth Falls, and was going simply mad with the digital camera.

I wasn’t seeing anything remarkable about the pictures, as I thumbed through them, until I’d gotten about three quarters of the way through the stack. Even then, I had to stop my progress, and go back to the previous picture. I wasn’t sure of what I’d seen that made me go back, but a little voice barked at the back of my mind, told me to stop.

The picture, designated 0018.jpg, might have been another unremarkable shot of leaves–maybe I’m biased and jaded having grown up this close to the display, but I never really understood taking pictures of the leaves. I really felt that a.) if you’d seen one picture of leaves changing color, you’d seen them all, and b.) pictures didn’t do the real thing justice, anyway. And I’d passed #18 by, but something bothered me.

It was out of focus, for one. Which may or may not be weird enough. I’ve never claimed to be a photographer...most of my pictures looked like #18, to be honest. But this one was strangely out of kilter, when you consider that the others pictures in the stack thus far had been the crisp, competent pictures of somebody who knows what they’re looking for, and what to do with a digital camera.

And then I saw, it wasn’t that the picture was out of focus. It’s that the automatic focus mechanism of the camera seemed to be focusing on something else.

And well, I’m not eloquent enough to say what it is I saw. There wasn’t enough
substance to it to call it anything more than a shape. And that’s what I’ll go with: In the upper right hand corner of the picture, there was a shape. My eye had disregarded it at first. It almost looked like the remains of a fallen tree that had fallen seasons before, and because of its close proximity to the camera, I’m thinking the camera must have focused on the log.

I looked at the log, and considered it.

Awfully big for a log, I said.

Thirteen or fourteen years ago, we had a vicious arm of springtime thunderstorms sweep through the area, bringing six or seven tornados with it. I’d been in high school a the time, and we spent most of the afternoon in the hallway, head tucked between our knees (to kiss our asses goodbye, we’d said). Meanwhile, at the school, we got hail and some wind. Across town, one small twister tore apart houses across the street from my parents’, and left Molly, our golden retriever with such a paranoia about storms that even a clap of thunder would send her pissing and shivering across the lawn.

The hiking trails at Lake Erin were closed for the summer after that, and the campsites for three.. Probably the worst of the storm had ripped a 2 mile swath of trees apart, almost complete obliterating the area. Friends and I had wandered up there a few weeks later, and it looked like pictures you see of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or that picture of the trees in Tunguska, in Russia, after they had their weird blast a century or so ago. The ground was basically flattened, for almost a mile in either direction, with trees twisted and torn down everywhere. Nothing had withstood the storm.

I say that to say this: All the trees knocked down from that storm had been taken out of the area. Some had been sold for timber, by the Forest Service. The proceeds were used in part to rebuild the campgrounds and hiking trails.

The forest was now creeping back in.

It was old forest in that area, so the forest was having to decide whether to replace itself with grassland or more forest. Ithad skipped a beat or two in the forest cycle....old deciduous trees were managing to replace themselves with young, deciduous trees.

I pretty much crapped out of boy scouts, but the one thing I knew is that old, deciduous trees don’t grow quickly. The one thing I’d noticed from the previous three or four pictures was that the picture taker, whoever they were, had wandered to that point of the trail that had been blown to kingdom come more than a decade before. The trees were still small. Most were no more than a foot or so in circumference, and I doubted that any had managed to reach much more than a dozen feet in height.

This thing on the ground, it could have been left over from that purge, but for some reason I doubted it.

Was it a rock?

And why did I have the unsettling notion that somehow, this formless, dark shape was regarding the picture taker? When I looked at it closely, I decided that there was nothing there to make me think that. Still, I had that tickle at the back of my skull.

I looked back at Willie, who had opened the top drawer of the desk, and was fiddling around with the contents.

I thumbed through the rest of the pictures. Numbers 19, 20 and 21 were pretty much plain, unremarkable.

22 gave me more pause. With the exception of the first picture, all the pictures had been of the foliage. This one was again of the trail. And I don’t know why, except maybe that I’ve walked that trail a couple dozen times in my life, but I felt like all the first pictures had been taken while walking up the trail toward the Monmouth Falls, all looking roughly forward.

I felt like this one was taken looking back down the trail, at the way the picture taker had come.

I studied the picture for a second more. I couldn’t see anything untoward. Just a picture of a trail.

Picture 23 was the same picture, only from perhaps a few steps up the trail. I saw the same trees, the same rock in the path, the same blue trail marker that had been spray painted on the trunk of one of the larger trees on the edge of the path.

Only it was out of focus. The weird thing with this picture was that there was nothing, no dark shape even, for the camera to be focusing on. The whole picture was just blurry.

Picture 24 was taken, I was assuming, later down the trail. Again, the picture taker was taking pictures of foliage.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, or overly frightful, I’ll say that Picture 25 gave me real trouble, even today.

Again, the camera was faced back down the trail (I was now sure of it...the logs lining the trail were stair-stepping down...the trail to Monmouth Falls runs vaguelyy up its two-mile path, as you head to the top of the falls).

The picture taker had just rounded a bend. They had moved back into the area of forest not hurt as badly by the storms all those years ago, and I could see in the background several large trees, with trunks big enough around to hide a man.

I say that, because I finally saw what my brain had been tickling me to see, what the picture taker had wanted to take a picture of.

There was something there, in the picture. It was large. That’s all I can say. The only reference I have is another of the blue trail marks painted on a tree trunk. Generally, they’ll paint those around five feet off the ground. Give or take. It didn’t matter how high, because the thing in the picture towered at least 3 feet higher than that.

It was vaguely man shaped. I thought I could make out arms and legs, and a head up top of what looked like two wide shoulders.

But I couldn’t make out any more detail than that. The camera was blurry, but I don’t think it was the camera’s fault, or the picture taker’s fault.

I studied the picture for a good long time.

Like I said. I don’t have a good description, because I’m not sure there’s anything else to describe in the picture. Except the eyes. There is a large, dark shape that towers at least a yard over the trail marker, and it is staring directly at the camera. With two red eyes. Two eyes that mark the only detail of this giant, formless shape.

I thought of the statue of Jesus that every church in the area ends up going to see in Gatlinburg...the one carved in concave. So that the eyes follow you everywhere you go.

Yeah. This picture would have been a much more effective way to get me to behave.

I pulled my eyes away from the picture, made myself flip past it.

Pictures 26 and 27 aren’t of anything, really.

I think the photographer was running, and had clicked a couple of pictures of the ground as they ran. Maybe their finger was on the shutter button, and they hadn’t realized it.

I leafed through the pictures again. I skipped #25.

I looked back at Willie, who was rifling through the contents of his top desk drawer.

“What do you think?” I asked, looking for something, anything to say.

Willie looked at me thoughtfully, with his wide, unblinking eyes. Then, he reached down into desk drawer with his left hand, and pulled out a large paper clip.

“I think that this is the largest paper clip I have ever seen,” he said.

I nodded.

“They used to use them to clip galleys together.”

“Oh.”

He smiled.