VIII
The scrap of paper from the clock tower didn’t move from underneath the Sport magazine the next day, for a week, maybe two weeks. I finally slipped it between the pages and shoved it in a desk drawer, hoping it would just go away without my intervention.
The summer, one steamy day after another, dragged on, giving lawns around the neighborhood a twinge of brown and putting a crimp in my little mowing business. Eddie’s family had rented a cottage at the shore in Wildwood for the summer and invited me down for a few days. That got me out of town and we had a blast, Eddie, his brothers and me, body surfing the cool waves, picnicking on the beach. At night we trooped up and down the boardwalk, where the evening breeze sent a thousand scents of popcorn, cotton candy, fried dough, kielbasa, hot dogs and sauerkraut, and other delights into our noses. We squandered the money we’d saved on rides in target-shooting galleries and on silly games of chance like crazy ball, where you put your dime or quarter on a color and see if the ball lands on the same shade. I was amused by the name: "Lou’s Crazy Ball." Mostly, we did lose, and when we didn’t, the prize was generally a pack of cigarettes. We would sneak a few, but before long we ended up choking and feeling woozy and just threw the half-empty pack away.
Back at the cottage we talked about playing around the railroad tracks, putting pennies on the rails and watching the trains squash them, then being chased by the railroad men.
"Whatever happened to that kid, Doolan?" Eddie asked me. I had wondered myself.
"I don’t know, it’s almost like he disappeared." I was careful not to mention the last time I’d seen Doolan, after our big scare in the clock tower. "He must’ve moved or something. I never knew where he lived in the first place. But there’s a lot of kids from grade school who went on to different high schools, you know, Ed?"
The subject quickly changed, but memories of the night of the headless silhouette and his weird visage in the barber shop rushed back. I still had the button he had returned to me, and the Hessian buttons from Soldier’s Field. I knew I hadn’t dreamt it. I even checked the newspaper the next morning to see if it had all been a dream. No. There it was in print, the Phillies lost 9-4 to the Mets, just as I had seen on TV.
It was raining the day my mother came to pick me up at Eddie’s, which made leaving a lot easier because there’s not a lot to do on a rainy day at the shore. She told me it had rained a couple of nights while I was gone, too, and the grass was starting to turn green again and grow, so maybe I could recoup some of the money I’d spent and do some lawns.
The weather had cooled slightly at home as clouds blocked the sunshine, but it was still muggy as ever and pretty much dead in town. Dad had left a list of jobs to do, weeding the gardens, pulling crabgrass from the lawn and raking dead leaves and twigs from under the hemlocks in a corner of our property. A few of my lawn mowing customers called and, prompted by a small amount of nagging from Mom and an empty wallet, I got on task, one or two lawns a day. With raking and a little weeding, I could make five or six bucks per lawn.
The best place to blow my earnings was the newsstand. It didn’t have a sign or special name, everybody just called it the newsstand. It sold all brands of cigarettes and cigars, four Philadelphia papers and the local Times. Scads of magazines of every sort from sports to saucy were hanging from clips on wires suspended over a tilted front base, a small marketplace for every kind of gum, candy bar and snack ever invented. Occupying a tiny spot on the ground floor of an old 1880s structure, the newsstand sat directly across the street from St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Once in a while, the priests, perhaps catching a glimmer of the Playboy or Gent magazines in eyeshot from the pulpit, would rail against the trash that was being sold right in our very midst. But after Mass, people would flood across the street to buy their Sunday Inquirer.
My weaknesses, especially after a hard day of mowing, were Pepsi and Tastykakes, usually butterscotch krimpets or cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. Inside the newsstand, there was room enough for maybe a half-dozen people, no more, usually older high school guys who talked about sports, girls and cars. It was OK for someone new in the high school to be there, as long as I kept my mouth shut, which was all right with me except for when I had to open it to take a bite of my Tastykake or wash it down with soda.
Cars were the subject of the day on one of my stops at the newsstand, as I sat on the ice cream case with my Pepsi and Tastykakes. I was only half-listening as one of the older guys, Sid, was talking about buying a car. Sid had the Times classified section open and read aloud, ’54 Chevy Bel Air, two-tone green, 2 door, $250. I listened quietly with only mild interest as the other guys bantered about the pluses and minuses of Chevys, the price and so on until one of them blurted out, "I’ve seen it. Seen that Chevy. It’s right on someone’s lawn on Crown Point Road."
I looked up. "Where?"
There was silence as one head after another turned toward me.
"What do you care? You gonna buy it?" Sid said. They all laughed and I took a swig of Pepsi.
They kept talking but I had become fixed on the name Crown Point Road. That was the rest of it, I thought. Then I must have said it aloud: "Red Bank to Crown Point Road."
"What?" said Sid.
"Nothin’," I said.
"What are you talking about, Red Bank to Crown Point? What, you live in National Park?" Sid mocked with a grin. "If you’re coming from Woodbury," he leaned over toward me, "you just take Delaware Street."
The other guys chuckled, but this was a momentary distraction from the larger subjects of cars, sports and girls.
I went along with it all and just kept quiet, shoving the rest of my Tastykake in my mouth, swigging down the last few drops of Pepsi and then wiping the remains on my lips with the arm of my T-shirt. I hopped off the ice cream chest and nodded to the boys, who were sociable enough to tell me "see ya."
In truth, I had been trying to get the signs and messages and weird visions out of my head, but now, thanks to Sid, they all started to make sense and seemed less mysterious, I thought as I crossed the tracks and headed home. It was clear, I had to go the Red Bank Battlefield and come back by Crown Point Road. But why? Where did the twos fit in? Swei on the button, the two signal lights, two o’clock on the town clock, two skulls on the scrap of paper ... Two skulls on the scrap of paper. I had to piece together the ink-smeared words and see if I could make any sense of them.
I ran to my bedroom and slid my hand under the Sport magazine that had hidden the old notebook page and held it up to the light for a moment, long enough to see that the two skulls were still there. Then, once again, I went over the words, this time letter-by-letter. I got a piece of paper and pencil and started marking down the letters I could recognize: T-e dea- at t-e For- w-re, and so on, line by line. It became a word puzzle, like a newspaper cryptogram.
"What are you doing up there?" I could hear Mom yelling from the kitchen. "Your father will be home soon. Come down and wash for dinner."
My appetite had returned since my afternoon snack , and Dad insisted on cooking burgers on the charcoal grille when he got home. Dad brought some fresh sweet corn on the cob and we had a little summertime feast on the porch. We turned on the TV set after dinner and I watched the Phillies with Dad, but in truth, with each pitch, swing, hit and foul ball, I was thinking about the words I was in the midst of deciphering. The innings moved along and the Phillies pulled off a late-inning rally and won 4-3. A light breeze brought some relief from the day’s heat and I said I was tired and was going upstairs, maybe read a little bit and turn in. I went right back to the puzzle, motivated to find a link to Red Bank and Crown Point Road.
I stayed at for two, three hours, going back to try to read sense into the missing letters. Well into the night, the text became chillingly clear.
"The dead at the Fort were buried in trenches being laid alongsided one another," the words began. "Their long queues and odd dressings gave them a strange appearance, as they settled away in their last home ... within a few years by the wearing away of the bank some of these depositaries of the dead have been exposed, and the bones discovered."
There was more, but my eyes were bleary and it was late, so I lay in bed, going over the words again and again before falling asleep.
I woke up early the next morning and worked on, taking a break to attend to some chores before returning in the afternoon to piece together more letters. I was becoming obsessed, but the reward of deciphering each new line pushed me on to tackle the next, and the next. I borrowed the magnifying glass my father kept in his desk drawer to examine the twists of the letters and breaks between words, searching for imprints from the pen of whomever had scratched the text. This went on for three days, twice late into the night, until I finally had wrung all of the words I could reconstruct out of the soiled, ink-stained page. The story it told was incomplete, but it was clear, and it was all I needed to see. The page began, it seemed, in mid-sentence:
"she persuaded her sons to collect and rebury all visible bones left from the battle and thus the ‘haunt was laid’ in short order.
"Among these Hessians were two whose heads had been blown off. When they were interred the head of the one was buried with the body of the other, and the head of the other was buried with the head of one. This caused considerable consternation. None of these poor Hessians could sleep in their place of long rest.
"This caused the two to arise on moonlit night and wander through the countryside about the old Fort. It was reported, according to tradition, that they wandered as far as Haddonfield, far from their place of accident. Each was trying to find the other; each was trying to locate his own head."
The next block of script was badly obliterated, leaving only scatterings of words, but again, enough to convey the meaning: "They frightened old and young alike. Some times one of them appeared and (words obliterated) then too after the disappearance of the first the second would appare and in its phantome like movement would disappear.
"So for years these two unfortunates wandered through meadow, woods and floated over streams, all over the old battleground at Fort Mercer, with an occasional glance through the windows of the Whitall Mansion ... "
The rest of the words had been devoured by oil, grime and time, all except for the final few on the page which I was able to decipher: "One night both met," it said, "on Crown Point Road."
Those last words gave me a mid-summer chill as I stared at them and read them over and over. The messages were now clear: I had to go to Fort Mercer, the Red Bank battlefield. I held the paper up to the light and the two skulls were still there. I shuddered at the thought of what I might find -- or what might find me.
