Sunday, May 3, 2009

Houses

Jonesy couldn’t see the point. It was a house in the middle of endless wheat fields. Why put a fence around it? Half of the walls were caving in, and, though barely standing, it functioned more like a graveyard than a threat. Why station a perfectly able police officer to guard it for half the night?
Jonesy picked up a rock and threw it over the fence. It sailed through one of the empty window blocks, hitting something that echoed inside with a deep and hollow thud. It was the only sound for miles and the only one he’d heard all night. He turned his back on the house and leaned against the pliant chain-link fence.
He had four more hours. Four more hours of watching nothing, doing nothing. Jonesy had been put on a lot of bullshit details before, but this one irked him in a way that even he couldn’t quite come to grips with. Who the hell even builds a house a half an hour away from anything? Jonesy knew who. Thickheaded assholes. Thickheaded assholes build huge houses in the middle of nowhere and then abandon them. Thickheaded assholes let their property fall to shit. Then other thickheaded assholes kick down their doors and use the place for drugs and sex and all the other kinds of bullshit that puts Jonesy out guarding a ghost house at two o’clock in the morning.
Jonesy turned and threw another rock over the fence. It hit the overhang of the door, chipping off a corner. Jonesy smirked.
He liked hurting the house.
A dry wind whipped over the fields around the lonely domicile.
Jonesy thought about all the places he’d seen this house before. In the middle of "Great Expectations" when that old rich woman was walking around her mansion in her dusty wedding dress. In that Edgar Allen Poe story where the house sinks into the bog after a crazy guy gets scared to death when he sees his undead sister coming at him. And two blocks down from where he grew up in Oxford, Illinois. The Crouse family. They stood out like a sore thumb; a run-down lot right in the middle of a story-book neighborhood. The family was rude and standoff-ish, and their son, Jeremy; he was the nastiest. He was the one who smoked and offered Jonesy’s brother a cigarette. He was the one who broke the church windows. He was the one who landed in jail after getting caught trying to rob the Lutheran school. Another thickheaded asshole and his family made him that way. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe it was the house.
Jonesy turned and stared at the empty stone building.
Maybe it was the house that made that rich woman walk around in her wedding dress. Maybe it was the house that scared that guy to death. Maybe it was the house that made the Crouses the nasty people they were. Jonesy’s suspicion was tingling through his senses. If houses had done all that, what had this house done?
Jonesy picked up a rock and threw it. Then another. And another. He threw a rock for the crazy lady and the dead guy. He threw a rock for Jeremy and the Crouses. He threw a rock for how this house made him feel and all the anger boiling inside him. He threw as many as he could find and as the last rock left his fingers he gave a slight sigh of relief. The last rock flew through the same window as the first and made the same hollow sound as it landed. The sound echoed as a terrible voice erupted from inside.
“WHO THE FUCK IS THROWING ROCKS AT ME?”
Jonesy froze. Fresh sweat glistened at the nape of his neck and his hair stood on end. His breath drew quick and close as every heart beat jumped farther up his neck. He drew his gun and cocked the trigger. He slowly walked over to the gate and opened the rusty latch. The wind from the fields eased the flimsy door open. Jonesy, with eyes wide open, took one step forward.
He was going to kill whatever made that sound.

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