Mr. Fravel's Junkyard

A story by Keith Croes

There wasn't any garbage in the junkyard. Maybe the garbage--rotten food and cigarette butts and stuff--went to the incinerator. I'd watched them back trucks into the cinder-block building that summer and had seen the circular mouth of the pit in the concrete floor. A fire raged within it, beneath the building with a smokestack so tall you couldn't even see it all at once from the gravel road. It always reminded me of an Atlas rocket--the sheer size and thinking that men actually made it.

Away from the incinerator, down the gravel road where all the good junk was, the building and smokestack could be seen cresting a mountain of waste, as if they rode a huge wave made of litter. The gravel road widened there into a crescent-shaped parking lot overlooking the most amazing collection of paraphernalia my young eyes had ever inhaled. And it's a wonder, because it was all produced by one small town in central Pennsylvania.

There were dented medicine cabinets, twisted wire wine racks, washing machine agitators, control panels with dials and knobs and soldered switches, cathode ray tubes, galvanized metal cylinders with holes in patterns, towel racks, light bulbs, pipes with elbow joints, thin metal packaging straps, ceramic insulators, bed springs, bird baths, refrigerators and old hand-cranked washers, copies of National Geographic in twine-bound stacks, rotting flannel shirts and cotton aprons, rubber fittings and tangled cords, jutting angle-iron frames, car parts and tool boxes and oily rags, tables and chairs, boxes and bottles, buckets, clothes hangers and ironing boards, toasters, ovens and electric mixers, everything broken and battered and left for dead. Ten acres of it. And if you made your way down to the base of the hill, you'd find there were paths through it punctuated by scrawny brush and, farther away by a marshy area, cattails.

The summer we were 13, Tim Whiteside and I used to go there to shoot rats. We'd take our .22s after lunch when the town was quiet, easing up to the edge of the bank, scanning the chaotic landscape for any movement, taking careful aim and firing through the heat-shimmered air. After a few minutes and too few casualties, they'd wise up and stay hidden. Then we'd shoot just about anything--knobs, bottles, light bulbs, projecting antennae--until we'd both depleted a box of 50 cartridges. I had a Remington pump; he had a Winchester semiautomatic.

Tim wasn't there the day I met the junkyard man. His parents had hauled him off to go swimming or something and I was the kind of bored that seems to freeze time, as if the day would never end, as if the baking summer sun were stuck high in the sky. Walking past the incinerator with the rifle over my shoulder, I kicked a stone and it hopped away in a vacuum of some type where it continues to hop, to a place where it is always hopping.

After checking the position of my shadow, I inched toward the edge of the parking lot, the rifle butt pressed into my shoulder and my neck stretched to see down the cluttered slope. I spotted a rat slipping along the front of the open mouth of a leaning refrigerator about 50 feet downhill and I squeezed one off, sending the rodent into a satisfying flip.

"Hey," the refrigerator yelled, "I'm down here! I'm down here!"

"I...I m sorry." My thumb found the safety as the junkyard man's frizzy head poked out from behind the refrigerator. Tim and I had seen him a couple of times, usually to the left where the gravel road turns into a dirt road that leads back into a small valley, or far down the paths that lead away from the hill where the junkyard levels off. I guess we thought he worked here. "Don't worry, I see ya!"

The man stumbled out from behind the refrigerator and paused, wavering, then held his head in both hands and sat in a yellow commode. I scrambled down to him.

"Are you all right, mister?" Still holding his head, he nodded. "Look, I'm sorry. I was shooting at a rat. Got him, too."

The man looked out of his unshaven face through the saddest eyes I'd ever seen, and he seemed familiar somehow. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and dark blue pants that were smudged and torn here and there, but I could tell they had been good clothes, dress clothes. They hung loose on his bony frame.

"You're Jerry Taylor, the sheriff's son," he said finally, taking his hands from his head and holding the rim of the toilet.

"Mr. Fravel?"

He nodded and reached out a hand. "Help me up, will you?"

I took it and it felt as rough as a dog's paw. He stood and steadied himself, then let go.

"Are you old enough to be using that?"

I glanced at the rifle in my left hand. "Well...sure, I guess. I'm 14. Or will be next week. My dad got it for me for my birthday. Gave it to me a little early." I hesitated. "No, he doesn't know I'm using it. You won't tell him, will you?"

Mr. Fravel laughed, then laughed some more, a sputtering, high-pitched whinny that forced his eyes shut. He started to sink back down into the commode, but I stopped him.

"Look," he said, "I better get inside and rest for awhile. I think this sun is getting to me. How'd you like some lemonade?"

"You live around here?"

"Just up the dirt road a bit." His sad eyes searched me. "You don't have to come, Jerry. It's just a thought. But I have to get out of this sun."

"No, that's okay, Mr. Fravel," I said. "I'd love some lemonade. Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'll make it."

If you can't trust your sixth-grade science teacher, who can you trust? Mr. Fravel had taught me about how the continents were once tucked together, about barometric pressure, about freezing points and Newton's laws of motion and atoms and molecules and more neat things than just about any other human being I knew. There wasn't one part of me that was the least bit afraid of having a lemonade with Mr. Fravel, and more than a little of me that was curious about what happened two years ago and why he was spending a summer afternoon ducking .22 longs and grubbing around a junkyard. We fumbled our way down to the path at the base of the slope and took it to the left. The path circled around and joined the road just past where the road turned from gravel to dirt. Tim and I had taken the dirt road far back into the valley, until the valley narrowed several miles up and the road was swallowed by the steep slopes of a pine forest. Up there the road overlooked a twisting brook and sunlight seldom found its way through the high trees to the brown-needle carpet. Down here the valley was unkempt fields and sporadic stands of a variety of trees, and the brook was almost a stream that you could sometimes see from the road and sometimes couldn't. One thing we had never seen was a house.

We had walked only a quarter of a mile or so when Mr. Fravel nodded to the right and launched himself down a small path that took quite a drop, then cut back to the right. There, hidden by the thick overgrowth, was a shack of weather-grayed planks with a peeling skin of tarpaper on the roof.

The inside was better. Small but better. Mr. Fravel yanked open the heavy door of an old refrigerator and I leaned the rifle in the corner by the door, where it nudged a muddy pair of rubber boots. There was a brown Philco radio on top of the refrigerator, which stood next to a stained sink that had a hand-pumped spigot. In the middle of the room was a Formica table and one chair, and not more than two feet away, against the wall opposite the refrigerator, was a bed like the kind they have at camp, a frame lined with little springs attached to an interlocking grid of metal wires holding up one of those four-inch-thick gray-striped mattresses. I couldn't see this, of course, but I knew it was there under the opened sleeping bag that served as a bedspread. The place had two windows, one with a cracked pane against the far wall above an overstuffed chair, and one to the right next to the refrigerator. A light with a beige shade was suspended in the middle of the room over the table. There were piles of books everywhere--next to the refrigerator and the overstuffed chair, at the foot of the bed, behind the door. In this place, that was everywhere.

"Have a seat, Jerry." Mr. Fravel motioned toward the table, and I sat. He had retrieved two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade, which he placed on the table as he scooted around to sit on the bed. "Don't worry, the glasses are clean."

''You have electricity."

He nodded and poured. "Yeah. Solar. Enough for the fridge and the radio and the light. I store it in car batteries and convert it to AC with a little gizmo I made. One of these days...well, I could use a water pump, hot water, central heating...and, uh, something to heat centrally." His hand shook as he set the pitcher down. "I guess I'm...a little rattled."

"Photovoltaic," I said.

"Yeah. Damned inefficient. Damned inefficient." He seemed to see me for the first time. "You were always pretty bright. Must have gotten it from your mom."

I shrugged. "Dad gave you a pretty hard time?"

His body tightened like setting plaster for a second and then he let go a whooshing exhale, as though he had to make room for the truth. "He did what he had to do."

"Mr. Fravel, what happened?"

He took a sip of lemonade. "What have you heard?"

"Only that you had problems with your house or something. And then you went into town and tore up a bar."

He nodded. "My wife always loved flea markets--you know, the junk." He laughed sharply and rose, walking to the drooping cupboard over the sink. He came back with one of those little bottles of liquor--I don't know, maybe a pint--and poured some in his lemonade.

"I went to a million of them with her, to Williamsport, Lock Haven. Once she even dragged me down to Lancaster, to Renniger's. And in all the years of looking at all the junk--the gewgaws and knickknacks and gimcrackery--I never once saw anything that I wanted. I never wanted things. I was never...acquisitive. Do you understand?"

That was his pet phrase: Do you understand I'd heard it as many times as he'd been to flea markets and I could only smile. He took a long slug of lemonade.

"One day, right here in town, we went to a yard sale. I was trying my best to watch girls without appearing to watch them."

I laughed and he frowned.

"Yes, Jerry, teachers are people too." His rough hand rested around the glass and he gazed out the window by the refrigerator. "We lived in the development right over the ridge...over there." He pointed and I knew exactly where he meant. Nice houses. Split-levels. We lived in one over another ridge, a ridge in another direction.

"Anyway, I saw this lamp. For the first time, I wanted something I saw. I wanted this lamp. The lady was asking ten dollars, I offered five, it was mine. Simple, right?" He poured some more liquor into lemonade that had become mainly ice cubes.

I nodded.

"It was mine, all right." He straightened. "I put it on the end table next to our bed. It was a sturdy thing--that's one of the things I liked about it. It was pewter--or looked like pewter. Heavy. The shade, which was like a cone, seemed to be part of it. You could shake the thing and it seemed to be one piece. There was nothing loose about it. I thought it was maybe original Art Deco, 1925 or so. Do you understand?"

He drank.

"Not that I really cared. I liked it, pure and simple. But then the noises started."

I got goosebumps on my shoulders and upper arms. "Noises?"

"We thought they were mice. We'd be downstairs and we'd hear this carrying-on upstairs and I'd run up and walk down the hall and into the bedroom, primed for any movement, sensitized by fear--because I've never been a brave man. I never claimed to be a brave man. But I'm more afraid that someone will know I'm afraid than I am of any strange noises, so I went. And I'd walk into the bedroom and I wouldn't see a thing. But my eyes always came to rest on the lamp. The lamp sitting there on the end table."

"So there was something strange about the lamp," I said, sipping my lemonade.

"I don't know. Or I didn't then. I don't know what I thought." He drank again.

"The human mind is a complex thing," I said.

He chuckled, then laughed as he had up by the yellow commode. "There was nothing human about it." He said it flatly, nonchalantly, but the hair on the back of my neck bristled.

"The lamp was a spaceship," he said. "My wife was in bed one night--this was summer of two years ago, about two months after I bought it--and I was walking into the room wearing my pajamas when it took off. It went through the ceiling and the attic and the roof, leaving a circular hole and setting the end table on fire. Fortunately, we kept a fire extinguisher in the hall. I put out the end table and called your father."

I didn't know quite what to say, so I sipped my lemonade.

"He came out along with two of his deputies. They looked up through the holes to the sky. They went up in the attic and up on the roof and looked down through the holes. They looked up and down through the holes. I had a tarp in the garage, and they spread it over the hole in the roof and left."

He poured us both some more lemonade.

"Mr. Fravel, that's the greatest story I've ever heard. You had a real, live spaceship. And you slept next to it."

He shook his head. "There was something about it, Jerry, something I couldn't take. My wife, well, she was upset the first day, but then it was as if it had never happened. Just fix the holes and forget it, she said. But for some reason, I didn't want to fix the holes. I kept putting off calling the carpenters. At night I'd lay in bed and stare at the hole in the ceiling. One night the wind blew the tarp off the roof and I leaned over and looked up at the stars, a circular patch of stars, and I knew I'd never be able to forget it, I'd never be able to just shake it off. About two weeks later my wife called the carpenters, and that's when I started coming down here. "

"Why?"

His head hung and he spoke at the table. "About a week before the thing took off, I changed its light bulb. It hadn't burned out, I just thought maybe it would. And that's the first time I'd ever done that, too." He shook his head. "I just thought, well, the lamp was old, the bulb must be ready to go. And then I threw it away, just tossed it in the trash. It was a strange bulb. Heavy. I think it was original equipment. I think maybe the thing took off empty." He stood and picked up the liquor bottle, put it back in the cupboard and returned to his spot on the bed.

"So, I've been looking for it. All the trash in town ends up here. My wife couldn't take it, kicked me out, and that night...well, your father arrested me. And the school district can't have science teachers being arrested for drunk and disorderly." He slapped the table. "But, I can't stay here forever. Maybe I'll give it another year. Maybe I'll quit tomorrow. Who knows?"

Just then I noticed the charred end table next to the overstuffed chair. There was a pile of books on it. Mr. Fravel saw me looking and nodded.

Tim and I went back to the junkyard a couple more times that summer, but I never shot another light bulb and I made sure Tim didn't either. Mr. Fravel had told me that it would probably be unbreakable, but I didn't see any point in taking chances. Actually, I kind of avoided firing at a lot of things. There sure were a lot of household items there, including lamps, and, well, I guess you never know.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com