Platterland
by Rob Hunter
It was a real
nice laying-out—tasteful. Well, maybe not so much
tasteful
particularly,
but neat. They’d got Ed’s left
arm attached to his head and not his shoulder. And they had
the remaining right arm attached on the left side. To look
like them, I supposed. Ed’s critters had laid him out like
a guy caught in one of those exercise machines you see on
late night TV, an origami fold-up man, and without the
pretty girl. I noticed they’d braided his nose hair.
Artistic, a nice touch. His body was covered
with a dusting of early frost.
The Maine Warden Service always figured sooner or later
they’d be coming back with Flyin’ Ed Moholland in a body
bag. I used Ed’s phone to call the wardens; they’d been
looking for him for three weeks. No one expected Flyin’ Ed
to actually die; he was a monument to time—closing in on
eighty and keeping pretty much to himself.
I’m Phil LaPointe. Ask anyone about me: reliable, a
sober—well, usually sober—citizen and what the summer
people call “a local character.” I should have checked in
on Ed during the weeks he was missing but it wouldn’t have
mattered. I’ve been around and gotten pretty well
insulated against the nasty surprises life throws at me but
I scrambled up the stairs and threw up clutching the sides
of the kitchen door and bent over double. Between spasms of
half-digested home fries, I stumbled down the porch steps.
Down by the road a trio of crows squabbled on top of Ed’s
sign: “Platterland:
Thousands more
inside.” Sixteen shiny hubcaps hung from
the
sign, all from upscale cars: Mercedes, Cadillac, Tucker,
DeLorean. Flyin’ Ed kept the hubcaps shined up in case he
ever got a customer.
When Ed was a kid, back in the 1940s, his father’s hubcap
sideline generated maybe fifty dollars a year at best. Ed’s
regular business was selling and servicing vacuum cleaners.
The crows perched on the sign watched disinterestedly as I
up-chucked. “Shoo!” I clapped my hands and they flew
off.
***
It all started
with an expired vacuum cleaner. That good old Electrolux
that chugged away for years, even before I was janitor,
finally gave up the ghost. Pilly Hennicott left me a note
pinned to the door of the utility closet at the school:
“Get the vacuum fixed. We clogged it up after the eighth
grade dance. And for God’s sake, clean up the rug in the
pre-K room, it’s been six months now.”
I had been
janitor and bus driver at the Meddybemps Elementary going
on ten years. Pillsbury Hennicott was my boss and I
generally did what he said. I stripped off the vacuum’s
chassis and got around the switch assembly with a pair of
clip leads. Yep, the motor was fried. I set off up
Meddybemps Hill after Flyin’ Ed, the Electrolux man. I
figured a new motor and a beefed-up power nozzle would
fluff the rug where I couldn’t get the stains out. Shirley
Dilworth, our principal, suggested they were finger
paint.
Anyway, I
chucked the defunct vacuum cleaner in the school van and
headed up to Ed’s place. He was out back of the hubcap
museum tinkering with one of his flying machines. He
dropped his wrench and wiped his sun-blotched forehead with
an oily hand.
“Hiya, Phil. Come on around to the front porch, I got some
brewskis on ice.” I was on school time, driving the school
van, but I figured since it was summer vacation the beers
wouldn’t count. We passed the time of day and I finally got
around to the busted Electrolux. “Bring ‘er in,” said
Flyin’ Ed. I lugged the vacuum plus a carton of loose parts
I hadn’t bothered to put back in up the porch steps and
into the cool confines of the front room that doubled as
Ed’s parlor and repair shop. I plomped the disassembled vac
onto his worktable. Ed sighted down the hose, gave the pile
of parts the once over and looked relieved. He gestured to
the refrigerator next to a large screen TV. “I got a case
in there.”
Now neither Ed nor I were what you would rightly call
drinking men, but summer was new and fresh with another
Maine winter just behind us: reason enough. “Let’s pop a
couple and socialize.”
We sat and
drank, watching Ed’s TV with the sound off for fifteen,
twenty minutes.
“Phil, I got
things to say. Put your can back in the cooler and let’s
get airborne. Then we’ll talk. It’s been lonely since I got
banned from the school.” That was when I took my first and
only ride with Flyin’ Ed.
***
At his visits
to the Elementary Ed would stand before the whiteboard, a
dashing figure for all his seventy-plus years: jump suit,
safety helmet and goggles, ramrod straight. Flyin’ Ed
brought into that safe, snug schoolroom an element of
secret, forbidden things for kids who came into town once a
month, when their folks went shopping for groceries at the
Pick ‘N’ Pay. These were country kids. But, though not yet
allowed to cross the main road unaccompanied, they had been
raised on cable TV and weren’t easy believers. Ed had to
promise them a ride. His trailer with the powerchute on
board was parked out by the ball field.
In his late 50s Ed became addicted to flying powerchutes.
Powerchutes are motorized parachutes as their name
suggests, sort of a flying bicycle with a big sail up top.
Flyin’ Ed rode the rainbow, that’s how he described it to
the wide-eyed kids at the Elementary.
Word got around. The school board panicked about their
insurance premiums. Pillsbury Hennicott called an executive
session. Shirley Dilworth had allowed two kids to fly with
Ed on the strength of a parental consent form with
signatures the kids had faked themselves. The parents were
steamed. Seeing as how Shirley was their teacher, I felt
she should have recognized the sloppy penmanship.
It was a short meeting. Parental consent slips were not
worth the paper they were written on. The school could be
sued.
“Well, I think
Ed Moholland is a fine law-abiding man and no threat to the
children,” Shirley huffed at Pilly.
Pilly Hennicott
loved an attentive audience. “We are not impugning Mr.
Moholland’s character, Mrs. Dilworth, but we
have
considered any
impact he may have with the children. He obeys the laws of
gravity just like the rest of us.”
Flyin’ Ed was
grounded—stuck in Platterland with his vacuum cleaners as
far as the kids were concerned.
***
Ed and I were
up for about an hour on my first, last and only powerchute
ride. Ed spun in to set us down, chute fluttering out
behind him like neatly folded wash, and dropped the last
foot or so to a landing that drove a chill right up my
spine. It was a gentle hit, almost like getting out of bed
but, like I said, I was not meant to fly and I was pretty
shaky.
“Terra firma,” said Ed, opening the fridge and extracting
two fresh cans.
We relaxed.
The telephone rang. Ed ignored it. After a couple more
rings Ed’s recorded voice cut in, “Platterland, Flyin’ Ed
Vacuum and Repair. Leave a message at the
beep.”
Beep.
“Ed! I’ve got a thing
in
my vacuum and I can’t get it out. It’s dead in there.” A
woman, middle-aged and desperate.
Ed chugged down his can and smiled apologetically as he
went to pick up the phone. “This is Flyin’ Ed.” There was
an agitated chattering that I could hear but not
understand; the caller was talking fast and loud. “Yes,
Molly. Yes?” More excited babble from the earpiece. Flyin’
Ed sighed and cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “Molly
Guptill.” A woman we both knew. “This is the heart of the
problem,” Ed said. “Explaining.”
He removed his hand and keyed the caller in on the
speakerphone so I could listen. Ed spoke in tones of
calming reassurance. “Yes, Molly, this happens...
occasionally.”
Full speed and full volume, Molly’s voice poured out of the
tiny speaker in Flyin’ Ed’s fax-copier-answering machine.
“I tried to get the thing open. To see if there was a mouse
or something...? Let me tell you... remember that moose
died last winter over near Ayer’s Junction? Stuck in the
culvert? And no one knew until after the thaw? I mean by
August you had to take a twelve mile detour.”
“Yes, Molly.”
Molly would not be pacified. “A jelly—gooey and the
smell?
Stinks to high heaven. Is there a way anything
that
big
could get to the insides of a vacuum? Something that
grows?”
“Suppose I come over this afternoon. OK?” Molly
snorted assent.
Even across the room I could feel the clunk as the phone
slammed down at her end.
Ed’s shoulders heaved as he slumped back into his chair. He
gave a mighty sigh. “Phil, how long have we known each
other—ten, fifteen years?”
I said that sounded about right.
From the determined set of his jaw this was not going to be
about the lost loves and minor regrets that decorate every
man’s past. I made myself comfortable. Ed started right in.
“Back from the Navy, I was; I served an eight-year hitch.
That must have been ‘57. Mom had died three years before.
Her funeral was the only time I got home in all those
years. I caught the bus from Willipaq—they do that
afternoon run up Meddybemps Hill?—and there was the old
homestead, the house I grew up in, all gone to hell and
empty, weeds up to your ass in the
dooryard.”
Ed scrunched
his beer can in one huge
hand as he reached for another. “Plowed ground gone fallow
under last year’s rye grass and the yard overgrown. And the
Electrolux vacuum cleaner.”
“What about it?” I was on my third beer and I guessed this
was the hook to Ed’s tale.
“It was sitting in the middle of the driveway smack dab
under my dad’s old Platterland sign and waving its hose at
me. All frantic it was, like it had been waiting for me to
come home. Like Lassie would, in those Lassie movies,
when someone was in
trouble. So I spoke to it, What’s the matter little fella?
And it turned on its wheels, ran partway towards the house,
waited, then ran back to me and waved its hose.
“I said Okay, little
fella, I’m coming. The vacuum gave a sort of whir from its
power nozzle like it understood and headed out behind the
well house.”
“As it turned out, it had a companion—another
Electrolux—and it was in trouble. Well really, it was dead.
The poor little thing was some broken up. I sat and stroked
its hose there beside the corpse until sunset thereabouts.
The little one circled around—sniffed, like. Waiting for me
to do some magic. When it started to stink, the dead one
that is...”
“You buried
it.” Here I was drinking Ed’s beer, and he believed he had
space aliens on the old homestead. The beer made the story
easier to accept.
“No, I put it
in the freezer. Come along downstairs. And watch that first
step.” I got to my feet, not as wobbly as I thought I
should be about now.
“Phil? That
little vacuum, the one that met me in the dooryard?” Flyin’
Ed beckoned me to follow him.
“Yes?”
“Turns out she was pregnant. Sure enough, come fall, she
comes out from under the barn, tentative-like, with two
little ones, just like her, in tow.”
Ed led; I
followed.
It was a large cellar, some of its walls carved out of
solid ledge, slate and granite, the way they did with those
old Maine farmhouses. There must have been twenty freezers
parked about in a circle. Ed had them on old wooden
shipping pallets, the kind you see piled for burning out
back of the forklift depots. Mostly Sears—the freezers that
is. I asked Ed about his preference for Sears products.
“Sears minds its own business. Till they went local anyway.
Sears used to deliver out of Bangor, different driver every
time. No busybodies asking why I wanted a new freezer every
two years without bitching about the old one.”
“And the freezers?” I had an idea where all this was
heading but I wanted to hear it from Flyin’ Ed.
“Full of critters. Dead critters. They don’t have a lot of
little canisters, just enough to replace themselves with a
few left over to cover accidents. And they age and die. And
once every year they come down cellar and visit their
ancestors, like. I open the freezers and we have a silent
moment together.”
“And what do you get out of all this?” I asked.
Ed turned, amazed that I hadn’t caught on. “They run the
farm. And I get paid when I rent them out, sell them and
fix them. I get the regular maintenance calls—a new hose,
lube job, cord and switch. I sell a line of bags and
attachments. They can spray paint, too, but not too well.
They’re no trouble. They tend the fields—at night of
course. God! If the neighbors ever got wind of that!” Ed
drained his can and scrunched it. “I got a bottle
somewheres,” he said hopefully.
“Bottle it is,” I replied.
We made it back, pretty well lubricated by now, to Ed’s
porcelain-topped kitchen table. He retrieved a quart of J.
W. Dant from the flour hopper of his late mother’s Hoosier
breakfront.
“Thanks for sitting down and listening to me talk. I’ve
been carrying the secret alone for way too long. I didn’t
realize what a burden it was till now. Us talking and all.”
We drank and talked like two men will who are past the age
of having to impress one another. This was an uncommon
event—our conversation as well as Ed’s space aliens—and we
paused to savor it.
“Something else I got to show you. I call it the Rug
Suckers’ Ball.” He held one finger to the side of his nose,
like Santa Claus in The Night
Before Christmas. This was
going to be top secret stuff. I tossed back what was left
in my glass. Ed’s chair scraped the linoleum as he beckoned
me back down the cellar steps. “I dug a tunnel out to the
barn, so’s I could watch without disturbing them. This is
their time, their mating time.” Ed fetched a lantern.
“Don’t rightly know how they figure their mating season.
They all answer some call and come together here, probably
something to do with the moon, the tides. Like the
horseshoe crabs. Watch your head.” We were almost sober
enough to navigate the steps.
I collided with a low ceiling beam.
“Ouch!”
Ed held a
finger to his lips. “I find good homes for ‘em,” Ed
whispered. “Their real home must be far off. I figure
they’re just waiting for a lift. They wouldn’t survive long
on this world; they haven’t seen all the movies we
have—alien invaders, and all? ‘Take me to your leader’ and
total destruction follows. I figured the best way for them
was to go under cover, as themselves, or close to it. They
don’t seem to mind that I sell them. They eat dirt, stuff
they suck out of folk’s rugs. They don’t really require
plugging in but I figure all that electricity gets ‘em
hopped up. They sure do love a good housecleaning. And when
they need some companionship, they stop working and their
owner brings them back home to me. Shhhh.”
An eerie dance was taking place. No music, but instead, a
whir of pulleys and belts, servomotors from ecstatic power
nozzles and an underscore of flap
flap from their
vacuum hoses as they twined, untwined, and stroked one
another. And the light reflected from their chrome trim
made things wild and passionate even with the silence.
“They come to Meddybemps Hill to make little baby
Electroluxes?” I asked in a hoarse whisper. I had to ask
even though I felt silly from the moment I opened my mouth.
“Yep. From all over the world—the universe for all I know.
They just like
me.
Most of the year they’re your normal, everyday vacuum
cleaners. The canister type—a lot of folks prefer those.”
Ed threw an arm across my shoulder, not unlike a proud dad
at his daughter’s dance recital.
The dance stopped. The assembled Electroluxes pivoted
towards Ed and me. There was a long moment of what I could
only call respectful silence. They then turned their backs
and reformed their circle, completely ignoring us.
“We’d better go,” Ed said.
***
Ed believed he
had space aliens in his cellar. Well, I had
seen them. And
the Electrolux community seemed to appreciate Flyin’ Ed.
They ran his farm for him. Stranger things had happened in
Willipaq. Well, no... maybe they hadn’t. I took another
pull at my can.
Ed bent over
his workbench saying, “Tsk, tsk,” as he removed a
continuity checker from my old motor.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You call up with a customer’s
vacuum all fixed up like new, but a different one actually
goes back to the happy housewife.”
Ed installed a rebuilt motor as he talked. “You got it,” he
said. “They don’t mind getting separated and they’re
generally
well-behaved away from home. That’s here with me, I guess.”
Ed removed his Willipaq Historical Society baseball cap and
wiped his speckled forehead. A trickle of sweat ran into
one red-rimmed eye.
“Damn!” Ed rubbed away the salt sting. Going on eighty
years in the out-of-doors had decorated his face, neck and
forearms with spots, splotches and furrows.
“Have you asked about those white spots?”
“Yep. The doctor cautioned me and said it might be good if
I had a biopsy. Or two. What would that change? I’d still
have it. Cancer. Or not. And I’m 78 years old. Why
worry?”
“But...”
“When their time comes, they
die.” Ed bowed
his head, a slight incline, showing respect. Ed was that
sort of guy.
“That woman on the phone,” I said, “Molly.”
“Yep.”
“Molly’s old vacuum will go in one of your
freezers?”
“Yep.” Ed snapped the vacuum shut and picked
up a rag. He popped a blemish on the chrome polish of the
donut-shaped cord winder that straddled its rear end.
“Done. Good as new.” He gave my carton of leftover parts a
shake. “But it has issues.” He looked thoughtful. “Now what
do you think? Do you want your plain old mechanical vacuum
cleaner like it came from the factory? Or would you like
your very own living unit?”
He was offering the Meddybemps Elementary an organic vacuum
all its very own. If Pilly Hennicott ever twigged there was
a space alien living in the janitor’s closet, I was going
to be in for some heavy-duty explaining. I opted for what I
already had: the traditional wheels, cogs and pulley unit
that plugged into a wall.
Ed reached down a factory-sealed carton with a brand new
power nozzle assembly. “It’s yours. No living tissue
inside, guaranteed. My gift to the school district.”
“Sorry, Ed. Got to pay you for it.” The purchase order was
already made out. I handed it over.
“Bye, Phil.”
“Bye, Ed.”
It had been a full day. I had that all-over queasy feeling
you get after a lot of beer and cut-rate bourbon on an
empty stomach. I thought about hitting Ed up for dinner but
saw his eyes were drooping. Nap time. With a man like Ed
you tend to forget his age.
“Don’t forget the vac,” Ed called after me. I loaded the
repaired vacuum with its brand new power nozzle in the van
and drove very carefully under the Platterland sign, under
its hubcaps, and
down the hill. And sure enough, the Electrolux was as good
as new. But I hired a commercial rug cleaner to shampoo the
finger paint out of the rug in pre-K. Pilly grumped but
signed the purchase order, no questions.
Summer faded into fall, and a new school session. The
refurbished vacuum cleaner died yet again—Pilly had been
using it to spray paint over at the fire station. I gave Ed
a call but got the answering machine for three consecutive
days. I figured he was off on a toodle with some of his
powerchute buddies. Not wanting to take any chances with a
possible dead alien in the vac, I locked it away in the
closet for a few weeks. When I checked back, there was no
smell. It was the genuine, factory-made variety Electrolux,
gathering dust instead of sucking it.
It was Thanksgiving break, a four-day weekend and no push
for immediate cleanliness at the Meddybemps Elementary,
when I headed up the hill with the school van.
***
The place reeked. And no Ed in sight. On a hunch I checked
the electric meter. It was locked off and sealed. The
freezers had been left to melt. The stench was appalling. I
got as close to the house as I could without gagging, then
headed to town. Sure enough, Eastern Maine Electric Co-op
had shut off the power. Non-payment of accounts, etc. The
buzz at the Co-op was Ed’s powerchute had been observed
hitting a power pylon in a freak upward thermal gust. The
Maine Warden Service was called to pick up what was left of
him. They returned empty-handed. I had the power turned
back on and visited a week later when the smell was under
control.
There were a few crows picking at what looked to be an
Electrolux canister vacuum cleaner in the weed-clogged
gravel driveway. I checked the electric meter out back
behind the kitchen. The seal was removed; it was spinning
at a furious pace. Service restored. I covered my face with
a bandana soaked in mineral spirits and started down the
cellar steps.
The smell was less powerful down among the freezers than it
was upstairs. The cellar was cold and damp, the air thick
with condensation. A rime of frost several inches thick
spilled over the bulkheads of the open freezers. It would
be a good day for the Electric Co-op’s shareholders,
dividend-wise, when and if I paid the bill. I did pay the
bill, by the way. Sort of a tribute to Ed.
Except for one, the freezers were empty.
I had feared what I might find down there. The reality came
as a welcome relief. It was a kind of spiritual moment, if
that’s what trips your trigger. It did for me and I stayed
on for a while. Then I was dizzy and made for the stairs
that promised warm air and sunlight. I sat on the porch to
get my bearings, just a little sick—probably more from the
mineral spirits than from the smell of death. The place had
gone to weeds just as it had when Ed’s mother died all
those years back.
I noticed an overgrown path, Ed’s route to behind the barn
where he launched his powerchute up and over the tall stand
of white spruce his dad had planted to celebrate his birth.
Tracks criss-crossed flattened patches of chickweed and
plantain. Tracks made by many tiny wheels, headed for the
cow pasture where a cover crop of rye grass was on the mend
from where something large and heavy had sat on it. Not
long enough to obscure the rain and the sun, not long
enough to kill the rye grass, but long enough to load some
freight, perhaps.
I returned to the cellar to pay a final farewell to Flyin’
Ed. This time I looked closely at the frozen,
reassembled corpse. The Rug
Suckers had got it right, by and large. The Rug Suckers he
had cared for in life and in death had returned him to
their own now emptied burial freezers, one last gesture,
and they’d done the best they could putting him back
together.
I headed back to
my truck and jumped at the creak of rusty wheel bearings
close behind me. It was one of Ed’s critters and it was in
trouble. It had lost its cord winder. A pair of eyes on
stalks, like a snail’s, stared intently out at me. The
pupils were yellow and the irises slits, more like a goat’s
eyes than a cat’s if
you’ve ever looked a goat in the eye. Spooky. But these
were more melancholy than spooky, all rheumy and runny at
the edges. Old eyes. It had been left behind, I guessed,
too sickly to make the trip. It wobbled to me on off-center
wheels, got stuck in a muddy rut left by my pickup and
rolled half over on its side. Its eyes were clouding over;
its hose lay limp in a spring rivulet of ice melt.
I carried it back into Flyin’ Ed’s cellar and placed it
gently beside his body. Showing respect.
Ed would have liked that.
Copyright 2007 by Rob Hunter