The call came a little after three in the morning, which didn’t surprise me; I was usually awake then. I was parked outside the nursing home on Cleveland Road for the laundry pickup. It was early October, chilly. I didn’t recognize the voice—jittery, hoarse, not really listening to me. “Zak,” he finally said. He was at an old township maintenance yard on a road I knew well, out by Orrville; he needed to be picked up—he was adamant. He didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. I’ve wondered about that since. On some level, I must have been primed for it. Already, when I turned the van in his direction—I’d gone in for the laundry as soon as I hung up—it felt like there never was a break between us.
At that point I was living with a girl who worked at the vet clinic on Lincoln (my first serious relationship, and the most disastrous). Christina only made so much, and she felt strongly that we shouldn’t pool our resources until we were “totally, totally sure”—a reasonable opinion on the surface, though it hit my wallet hard when we went out. Most nights, I was driving: evening cab work in a Prius (mainly to the airports in Cleveland or Columbus—sometimes the one in Akron), then, after midnight, the laundry route in a white Ford Transit. Once in a while someone would tell me they’d run into Zak at the supermarket or a bar, looking better or worse depending on how they felt about him. That was all I knew. If he occurred to me, it was on those nighttime drives out through the townships, where the road signs gave way to lantern reflectors and the lights came from solitary houses that didn’t look quite real. It was the quiet, flat, dark land he’d always spoken of. Sometimes, on a stretch out past Mount Eaton, an Amish buggy fell into my headlights without warning—the dull glow of the battery lamp they hook on now, a pale bearded face staring straight ahead, the black bonnet of a woman beside him, and then it was gone, swallowed up by a night broken only by the red flash of a cell tower. Once, taking a wrong turn looking for a restaurant outside Smithville, I came up on a barn with its door standing open to the road. I could see a whole row of buggies packed inside, black and identical, like a stable of sleeping horses.
When Zak was evicted after Shannon left, he’d stowed his remaining books with friends and carried his things in a green duffel bag, living out of it on couches (mine more than once). He’d show up late and sleep in his clothes; I’d hear him shuffling in the kitchen after I went to bed. I was picking up shifts, saving a little—which he noticed. I bought him a lot of food and drinks. When he found a new place, a single room in a house on Bever, five roommates, I came over less. If I did, it was because he was hosting one of his poker games, which I enjoyed at first, though we didn’t talk much. He was busy making everyone laugh and grabbing drinks. But it got old when he started raking. He’d take a few dollars from each pot to cover snacks and alcohol, plus a little extra for dealing. Once, when someone dropped out, he phoned me up. When I got there, he told me he’d raised the buy-in from $5 to $20 (“Deeper stacks for more interesting play,” he said more than once, as if he’d scripted the line); it was a different set of players, guys who knew what they were doing, and I didn’t have the nerve to leave. I stopped going after a few nights like that. I didn’t answer his calls or reply to his texts for a long time.
He used to explain his novel, Shadowboxland, as a psychogeographical text, with the palimpsest of the Wooster-Akron region for its subject; another Ohio buried beneath the present one, the Ohio dead people had aspired to make. Unrealized though it was, traces existed—nodes on another map, places where life had gone cold. The field out by the Meijer where a Lenape war band had been massacred. Houses along the abolition routes and industries asset-stripped in the Reagan era. And macabre places, like the railroad cut where a fur-covered man slept. A bridge where, if you turned the engine off, you could hear something pass that sounded like it was covered in leaves. A meteorite had fallen out by Brown’s Lake kettle bog in the seventies. He’d been to those places. Shannon, too. They’d drive at night, park in one of those lonely spots, sit on the bumper and pass a flask as they waited for phenomena to begin. There was always something. Rustlings, movements in the trees or along a ditch.
I must have taken the two-lane past Apple Creek, where the ditches—black and oily under my headlights—were swollen with the weekend’s downpour, and then the intersection where the county cars idled almost invisibly. Then came the farmhouses where no one was up, white porch lights in the darkness, and the brick shell of the old tile works, standing in what had become a field of weeds, windows shattered, exactly as it had been since I was a kid.
I can’t tell you when I stopped writing, which is itself a kind of answer, because the people who truly want to write always know what defeated them. For them, it’s a tragedy; they’re compelled to write—they’ll lose their minds if they can’t. As it turns out, I wasn’t one of them. I had my notebooks, cheap from a hobby store, but I stopped writing in them, which meant I stopped buying them. For a long time I didn’t even notice I’d stopped. I just got a job that demanded more attention, and another on top of that, and the time I used to give to writing went to sleep instead, or to Zak’s porch. The truth is, I’d been writing for him.
By then Shannon was gone. She took the cats and some of the books sometime in the winter. Others turned up at the used bookstore with Zak’s immaculate signature on the flyleaves; I still own a few. Some of his records, too, which he started selling to a shop in town. When I visited, he drank nonstop. Shannon had left some old props in the house, and he hadn’t touched them. A bright orange cat gathered dust on top of the refrigerator, its newspaper coat sagging inward until it looked less like a cat than a cat’s shadow, featureless and thinned out. He didn’t mention Shadowboxland anymore.
I saw the maintenance yard light from the road and found the gate open when I turned onto the gravel spur. Vehicles were parked everywhere, a mix of rusted pickups and pristine black SUVs. You could tell who belonged to what. There were young men in black T-shirts and baggy jeans, and some neater-looking guys in designer clothes who might’ve come from Columbus or Cleveland. They turned away from my headlights. Nobody waved or came toward me. Farther back, between two other men, I could see Zak. An older man in a brown Carhartt jacket held him by one arm, and some young fat-ass with a shaved head and a beard had him by the other. Zak was squirming in their grip, talking fast. No one else was moving. The preppy guys by the SUVs watched with the nervous silence of people who didn’t want to be around and couldn’t go.
A slim figure in a corduroy jacket, jeans, boots—that’s how I first saw him under the parking lot lights at Wayne College, a cigarette in hand, bugs swirling and diving into his smoke. We were taking night classes in English comp. I ran into him a year later at a reading behind Loganberry’s, where he shared a few excerpts from the book he was writing. (He’d already chosen an epigraph from Joyce: “—What is a ghost? One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.”) The sections he read were brief and sharp. My own stories were much longer, not nearly as vivid. “You’re too close to your material, you’re forcing it”—that’s how he told me they weren’t so good. His work was brilliant. I believed this completely. I was only twenty-one, twenty-two when I met him—if I read it now, it might come off as purple, artificial, though I’m sure he’d have improved in time.
The men let Zak go when they saw me coming, and he staggered toward the van, staring at the ground. The fat one kept his eyes on us the whole time, folding his arms like a bouncer, which I guess he was. Up close, Zak looked worse than I remembered, eyes too wide, jaw clenched, sallow (this might have been an effect of the sodium lamps in the yard; I never saw him in daylight again). We didn’t speak until he’d crawled around to the passenger door, keeping one hand on the van the whole time, like I’d drive off if he let go.
For a long while—maybe even a couple years—I used to visit him at the house he rented on Spink, just to hang out and drink beer, listen to records (he had a lot of Dylan, a lot of jazz), sit on the porch and chat. He was funny and relaxed around me. He seemed to anticipate my interests and have something ready whenever I came by—some worn paperback he’d pull from the shelves where Shannon’s cats hunched to watch me like gothic waterspouts. Shannon would sit cross-legged in the kitchen, barefoot, in a ratty shirt and sweatpants, building animals out of wire or rebar she coated with damp newspaper and painted. Little pots of the most vivid primary colors lay at her knees, the bright reds and blues of schooldays. The house fumed with her projects, props she made for live theater in the cities. She’d chime in occasionally to show she knew what Zak was talking about—better, certainly, than I did—and the places he mentioned, lonesome houses and dilapidated factories on Route 3. That was his favorite theme: decay and failure—the failure of communities and what remained afterward.
Inside, when I started the engine (now everyone was watching us, but nobody moved), he thanked me. His voice was shivery, with a hint of laughter behind it like people talk after something has scared them, when they’re just beginning to feel safe again. I asked where I could take him. He told me, the same place on Bever, with rising confidence, as if he was trying to summon up his old charisma. He turned to stare out the window as I wheeled the van around, maybe so they’d see how dignified he could be. Then we were out of there.
That annoyed me a little. I prodded him to explain what was happening—Good time with your buds?—in a conspiratorial, sarcastic voice, one that also, I hoped, said we were friends. He laughed a little too loudly. “That was crazy. I can’t even tell you. So, you know how I like to bet—that’s what you saw back there. A gambling thing. It’s gambling.” He said that word like he was trying it on. You’ve been alone a long time, I thought. I asked, What is it—fighting? Cockfighting? In the middle-of-ass-nowhere? “It’s true,” he said, “it’s fucking crazy what’s out between here and Orrville.” What are you even talking about? “Man, I don’t know. I heard you were doing these routes or I wouldn’t have called so late. I owe you. I’m sorry.” You don’t owe me, I said, we’re friends—if you’re in trouble, I want to help, I don’t mind doing it. “No, no. No, I’m sorry.” You owe those guys? How much?
He told me. I said, You got it? “No, man.” Well, I don’t know what you’re gonna do. “I could try and borrow it. And pay it back, with interest. It’s just about timing.” Not from me, man, I don’t have that. “No, I know.” He sank down in his seat. “I don’t mean you.” He was quiet until we were back in Wooster.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “About this shit. And I know it got weird last year. I’m sorry about that, too. How weird it got after Shannon.” I know, dude, I know that, I said. When we parked, he sat there like he needed something more before he could get out, not just money, but that’s what he ended up asking for—$30 for food over the weekend, which I gave him. Then we exchanged numbers (no need, they hadn’t changed). Zak watched on the porch as I pulled away, hunched over with his palms on his head.
For a week, I thought, he’ll contact me again. He’ll explain what happened, or at least tell me he’s found help, he’s out of trouble. When he did text, it was to thank me briefly, and then, two days later, to ask for another, smaller amount, which I Venmo’d him without much thought; it was too minor to argue about. “You’re a lifesaver,” he wrote then, and would write whenever he made a similar request over the next two months. He never invited me by, and I never suggested meeting him elsewhere, because I wanted him to do the work.
In a way, I took a little satisfaction from watching his requests increase in number and amount. It would be $20, $25 usually. The first jump was $40 for utilities; he was about to get his electricity cut off, he said. I’ve got you, I thought. That’s what went through my head. You really do owe me now.
Sometimes he’d chat a little first, almost cheerfully. He even texted once to ask if I was still writing. No—was he? No, not really. Not in a meaningful way. He still took notes, but… He’d go on like that, especially if it was late—if I was on the road, say at 2 in the morning. Finally the ask would come, almost sarcastically. I know I’m a little bitch, he’d write. I’d send him slightly less than he wanted. That satisfied me, too. By Thanksgiving I was ignoring him completely.
He’ll call with some other problem, I thought, but it was almost mid-December before I heard something—not so late this time, between midnight and one maybe—and it wasn’t him who called. I didn’t know the number. I went back to readying myself for the laundry run, bundling up at the apartment (I was with Christina still; we made it through the holidays, if only just). I had a black aviator jacket on—I liked it a lot, the leather was real—and an orange wool hat. I was scraping the windshield when the same number called again, and, as I opened the door to climb in the van, the phone lit up a third time, so I answered. The voice was older, unhurried. He asked if I was Zak’s friend; unhesitatingly I said yes. “There’s a barn behind the old Wayne County Tile Works, if you know where that’s at.” Sure do, I said. “Well, I think you better come check on your friend.” Then he hung up. My breath showed in the cab. I started the engine; I didn’t want to think too much. The road tumbled by automatically. Snowflakes arced into the windshield while the yellow lines sleepwalked under me. By then, I was so used to the drive that I barely noticed it anymore, not the ditches past Apple Creek nor the dark windows of the white farmhouses. The purplish brick of the old tile works rose out of its field a little sooner than I expected, as if it had come down to the side of the road to meet me.
Sure enough, there was a rusty tin barn behind the tile works (up close a much larger structure than I’d ever realized from the road, and less dilapidated; most of the upper windows were intact and glazed over with a salt-like frost). Harsh white light leaked around the edges of the barn doors, which opened as I pulled in. Two young men in parkas stepped out to smoke and polish off a couple cans of beer. They were armed. Jesus Christ, I thought, but I stopped myself. If I think too much, I’ll get the hell out of here. Vehicles were scattered everywhere, just like at the yard—maybe fifteen in all, another mix of pickups and SUVs, probably the same ones. I steered past and parked under a willow tree, where I sat for a while, though I could see the young men eyeing me as they chatted and drank. The engine ticked as it cooled, and the barn light filtered through the snow-tipped weeds. When the cab went cold, I got out. The young men didn’t stop me at the door, or acknowledge me at all. The barn, too, was bigger than I’d realized from outside; the lights (work lamps, mounted on tripods) made the shadows look more concrete, the glow rising only halfway up the corrugated walls. You couldn’t make out the ceiling. Everybody’s shadow was long and clumsy on the packed dirt floor, and the faces that turned to me looked overexposed and washed out. It smelled like a mechanic’s bay—oil, ozone, and some sweet, artificial tang I couldn’t place: it made me think of vending machines. Thirty people, probably, were sitting in a big circle around a low pit in the floor, or else leaning on the walls; they’d obviously sorted themselves into their own little groups. Older men in canvas jackets and seed-corn caps chatted languidly over a row of coolers; a few younger guys, heavier, close-shaved, hovered at the space heaters—keeping watch, I guess; and off to one side, preppy men in their twenties or thirties stood checking their phones.
Zak was near the middle of the room, on a metal folding chair, talking to some soft-looking, chubby-handed city kid. He spotted me before I’d taken the room in fully. “There he is,” he said, standing to hug me. He was wearing a blue down jacket and a black baseball cap, eyes puffy and red. “My man, you better sit. You need to see this. I swear to God, if you’re writing, you’ll never write again. Not when you watch this. Whatever you’re working on right now, in your head, it’s gonna feel like the biggest load of crap.” The words kept tumbling out of him. He sniffed loudly and tried to yank me into a seat, but a couple of the older men peeled away from the coolers to approach us. “Shit, we can’t even talk first?” Zak said, but he only got a shake of the head from a man I recognized from the yard, the one I’d seen holding his arm: wiry, gray-eyed, maybe sixty, in a brown Carhartt. He quickly covered up his silvery crew-cut with an old Cleveland Indians cap. “We talked,” he said to me. “Thanks for coming on down. You’ll step outside a bit?”
Outside again (the snow had stopped) he lit up and offered a cigarette, which I declined. “Appreciate you doing this in the weather. I know it’s a little tough to find. When I was a kid, you know, they used to do poultry auctions in this barn. Whole long rows of cages’d be lined up. And there’d be singing, too. All that’s done at the county fair now.” He cleared his throat and spat with a touch of embarrassment. “Well, as to your friend Zak—staking bets, chasing losses. Sometimes comes out okay, but not for long.” Bets on what? “The kind of game we got going here.” The man with him, a squat, red-faced guy, waved his finger. “He said you’d cover him, you know that? If it came to it? And he’s in deep as hell.” The man in the Cleveland Indians cap winced and sipped his beer.
That’s not true, I said. I never agreed to that. I gave him a ride home once, plus some money, but that’s the whole of it. The red-faced guy opened his mouth, but Mr. Cleveland Indians said, “Hope you won’t mind us double-checking.” He waved over the two young men I’d seen at the door. “Let us take a look?”
The young men emptied my pockets, flipped through my wallet, and took the van keys—I heard one of them slide the door open. A kind of weariness settled over me, a longing for nothing particular. “That’s fine, then,” said Mr. Cleveland Indians, squeezing my arm. “Appreciate your patience. What you should do now is come in, warm yourself up with a beer. Get a look at the old guy while you’re at it.” By now, Zak was outside too; the young men had taken his green duffel bag—the one he’d lived out of—and emptied it in the snow. I kept my eyes down as I passed. They pushed the items around with the tips of their shoes: greasy clothes, a charger, a toiletry bag, a couple blue notebooks. Zak stared curiously, fascinated, maybe, by how little he had with him. Mr. Cleveland Indians and the red-faced man followed me in. The barn was full now of that sweet smell I’d noticed before, mixed up with something else, midway between loam and sweat. The crowd had thinned out a little, so I could see the wide, cinder block-lined pit in the middle of the dirt floor. It was full of damp clay. A country boy was pulling up a small step ladder while one of the expensively dressed guys remained in the pit on a metal folding chair. He had his hands flat on his thighs and his jaw was set as if holding back a nervous laugh, like he was about to sing for everybody. A burlap sack the size of a big legless dog was drifting around in the clay.
“Three minutes,” the country boy called. A kitchen timer was ticking down on an overturned bucket at the edge of the pit. Mr. Cleveland Indians let out a whistle and turned to me. “He’s not gonna last, watch now—old guy’s hungry.” The country boy took a package of chicken thighs from a cooler, snapped the plastic with metal tongs, and tossed the pale lumps into the pit. They lay at the foot of the chair as the burlap sack turned toward them into the glare of the lamps. It rolled over the chicken with a slight coiling of its loose, uneven folds, and when it passed on they were no longer there. The preppy guy in the chair was squeezing his eyes shut. It moved right up against his foot and lay as if basking in the light. It was not a burlap sack after all, but it had ragged folds like one—gray, wet folds with the sheen and bloom of old mushrooms—and the loamy, artificial fruit smell rose sharply when it moved. Nothing on it anywhere corresponded to a face, though one part of it lifted as I watched—not by much, perhaps only a couple of inches—and held there for a second, swaying slightly, as if to inspect the guy in the chair, before settling down into the clay. That was enough—he jumped from his seat and the country boy lowered the step ladder into the pit for him, then pulled it up again once he was out. He sat on the edge for a moment, holding his chest, while the older men laughed, not unkindly, and called for their winnings.
Mr. Cleveland Indians nudged me cheerfully. “The old guy—he came down in his egg in ’77, out at the kettle lake. Sound of it practically tore my ears off. But he’s been good to me since.” He leaned in close. “I don’t want to go on about it, but I have folks come in from all over for a good game by the old guy, and that’s my reason. Are you sure you won’t settle for your friend?”
I could barely think. Look at that thing, I said. He grinned and repeated the question right up against my ear. I might have started to cry. “I’m not holding you responsible for your friend, but him, I have to, so long as you won’t settle for him. You can understand that.” The red-faced man tugged my arm. “He’s really in it,” he said. “Deep, I’m talking. Listen—you listening?” I don’t know what to tell you, I said. “Something you might consider,” Mr. Cleveland Indians continued. “Paying in installments. If you pooled your resources? You could probably both do it. Then he could walk on out of here. There’s your friend.” He tried to break my concentration on the pit by pointing out Zak, who was now sitting between the two men who’d searched me. I closed my eyes and asked the amount. Oh God. Jesus. I could get maybe some of that. Not tonight. Over some weeks. Mr. Cleveland Indians nodded kindly as I babbled. “Sure, we could work with that. Let’s get some air.”
They led me back out—I think so I wouldn’t keep staring at the pit—and sat me down in a canvas chair. The red-faced man opened a beer for me. I glanced back in and saw Zak in his chair, tilting his head over his shoulder to make sure I was still there. They must have left one door open so I could see him. Each time I looked he was watching.
If I drained my savings, took loans, worked double shifts, picked up every extra run dispatch would give me. I could probably bail him out. And Zak would—
No, I can’t. I can’t, I said. Can’t do that. I stood up and felt for my keys. I can’t do it. “You can’t help your friend?” Sir, I can’t do this. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. No panic—I just wanted to talk it over.” The red-faced man touched my chest with one finger. “Listen, don’t think about him again. Don’t come back here and don’t think about it. This is real.” I understand. “You can go home, but if you do that…” He shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. Don’t look for this guy.”
“He understands,” Mr. Cleveland Indians said, quietly. “It’s not your responsibility. Go home, don’t think about it anymore, we’ll call it done.” He raised his arm in the direction of the willow, and my van under it. I probably sat in the cab for a minute or two, just staring at my sleeves. They waited for me to pull out before they went inside and closed the door they’d left open.
My jacket still reeked with the thing. I don’t think I saw the landscape at all.
-- Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio. His fiction appears in 3:AM Magazine, Burial Mag, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, minor literature[s], and elsewhere.
