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Prose | Tulane Review | fall 2011
room. And then the breeze came up, ripe with menthol cigarettes and cedar. He pawed the ground and settled. Bit circles in the scrubby grass with the toe of his boot. Kicked a clod of dirt and decided. Pressed on. He came close enough to make out the edges of the door and the jagged lines in the shed’s plank façade. The burr-grass evened out, tamed into obedience by the endless passing of his grandfather’s boots. The iron door latch winked at him from the gloom. He paused and toed the dirt again as the limbs of a huisatche tree swayed above him. He didn’t really want to see the inside of the shed again, not alone or in the dark, but it was the only place his grandfather might still be – his real grandfather, not the wax figure in the parlor. He wiped his palms against his pants and left dark smears of sweat. He could almost touch the door latch, five feet, now two, now here it was within his grasp, close enough for him to make out the scars in the iron and the rust clinging to the handle. In his monster movie, the rust turned to blood and coated his hands in red and brown streaks. A madman stole up behind him to slit his throat. The boy’s father told him that movie people used ketchup for fake blood, but here, in the jungle of the backyard, it seemed real. Maybeblood. He reached for the latch. Behind him, a whippoorwill sang. He wrenched open the door. The shed gaped with a groan. Dracula, monster, alien; the boy peered into the dark, trembling, one foot, one knee, now hip turning to flee. The door creaked. Tree limbs whispered. Panic fell on him. He couldn’t move. His grandfather would never wake up to dump dominoes on the table and spit tobacco into a plastic cup and laugh when the boy spilled ice cream down his face and arms and had to wash off with well water to be allowed back into his father’s car. It was done now, the shed door open with its secrets spilling out and the boy frozen in life as the husk of his grandfather in death. The whippoorwill cried out and the huisatche rustled again and then settled with a final sigh. The breeze. The boy twitched and here it was again – menthols, tickling his nose. Breaking the leaden hold of terror. “Leave the boy alone,” his grandfather told his father. “Boys make messes.” Was that him now? A dark outline through the drooping curtain of huisatche. Nodding at him to get on with it already, stop holding up the parade. He squinted through the open shed door. Familiar shapes gained corporeal form. Along one wall, the long slab of his grandfather’s workbench, clamps poking off like rigging on a boat. The moon through the slatted windows glinted off the silver blade of the table saw. The sawdust on the floor glimmered like sand on the lakeshore. The smoothness of planed pine was silky under his hand like his mother’s cheek. He was too far away to see if the old man was inside. He shuffled forward