The Homeless Millionaire

Roch left late in the morning, after we'd eaten a big breakfast of hamburgers, bread, and leftover salad. Both of us had forgotten to buy any eggs, and we both hated cereal with milk. I don't like milk or cheese for that matter, while for Roch eating cereal with milk equated him with the moronic kids in ads that show them wetting themselves with joy at the sight of a bowl of Fruity Loops or whatever.

As we ate, Roch told me how it came about that such an isolated house was connected to the power and water grid. He said:

"This place was supposed to be huge. Hundreds of summer homes, a restaurant, a marina, even a golf club. But the developer went bankrupt after completing just three houses. Ours, the one you can see across the lake, and a third one in between, at the end of the bay."

"I didn't see a third house."

"It burned down a couple of years back. Most likely the guy who owned it set it on fire himself, to collect on the insurance."

"How do you know all this?"

"My father was one of the investors in the whole goddamn scheme. He lost a packet. He doesn't talk about it much, but from what I've heard there was some funny business along the way."

"Who owns the house across the lake?"

"I don't really know. Some guy or other. No one ever comes there, at least I haven't seen anyone. Maybe you'll get lucky."

After breakfast, we spent an hour or so doing this and that. We checked out the bicycle, and pumped air into the tires. The rear valve was leaking; if I wanted to go anywhere, I'd have to stop and use the bicycle's hand pump every few miles. Roch also showed me the fishing rods, they were cool, and there was a selection of lures to choose from. He told me the small rotating ones were best for catching bass. There was a pair of binoculars on the shelf above the rods: I could amuse myself by spying on wildlife if I got bored out of my skull, Roch said. He added:

"I'll try to come over on the weekend. Can't promise I'll make it, but I'll try. If not, we'll see each other a week Friday."

"Remember to get some eggs," I said.

"I'll bring tons of eggs. Millions of eggs! We'll have an egg fight."

We embraced and then he drove away and even though I'm not a kid I felt a prickling under my eyelids. I didn't exactly get tearful but it was close, not least because the dear guy left me a lump of his black hash. It was a good-sized lump too, enough for a dozen joints.

A few minutes after his car disappeared from view my paranoia kicked in: I started to wonder why the hell he was so nice to me. I chased those thoughts away with a beer and a joint, and went to have a look at the famous vegetable patch. It consisted of two beds of luxuriant weeds, weeds that were bursting with health and vitality from all the fertilizer originally meant for the vegetables. It looked a full afternoon's work and it wasn't afternoon yet, well, a few minutes past noon, so I went back into the house, got my sketchpad and the box of broken charcoal sticks, and tried to draw the wooden pier jutting into the lake.

It got very frustrating, because my hand just wouldn't obey me that day. Every single line I drew went wrong, sometimes right at the start, sometimes at the end. I tried to blame it on the fact that I was using little stumps of charcoal, I hate having to draw with tiny pieces like that, but I knew that wasn't the reason for my repeated failures to capture the contrast between the wood beams and planks and the water. The fact is, sometimes certain parts of my body refuse to do what I want them to do. Everyone has that happen from time to time, no need to panic. But I worked up myself into a state and went on a worry trip, smoking cigarettes while walking about the deck and glancing at the unfinished drawing lying on the picnic table. I was no good, I'd already shot my bolt as an artist, the half-assed effort on the picnic table was the best that I would be capable of, hereon.

I decided I'd go for a walk in the woods. Picking my way through the trees would force me to focus on something different from my twisted insides, and I might even get to see something interesting. I put away the sketchbook and the charcoal and, after a short hesitation, decided to take my knife. I have this Finnish knife that I got while in Stockholm, it's really quite beautiful: the wooden handle ends with a small metal wolf's head, very intricately made. Atypically for Finnish knives, it also has a short metal crossguard atop the handle. The blade is about four inches long, and it's amazingly sharp: it's made of high-quality steel. I thought that if I could find a good piece of bark, preferably pine bark, I would whittle a little boat out of it - I used to do that a lot when I was a kid. Please note my repeated use of the phrase 'when I was a kid'. I wasn't a kid anymore, I was done with being the f.u.c.k.i.n.g Ryman kid. I was an intrepid explorer, armed to the teeth with Finnish knives and shit.

I had to find and put on my narrow brown leather belt to hang the knife in its scabbard over my right rear cheek. Then I set out on my exploratory trip. I'd made up my mind to go and have a look at that burnt-out house Roch had told me about over breakfast. It couldn't be seen from the deck, I guess a couple of years were long enough for vegetation to grow over whatever remained from the fire.

It was easy going for the first hundred steps or so. Then I came across a mound completely overgrown with bushes and had to go around. There was a gully to the side of the mound and it contained some foul-smelling mud, so I had to go around that too. I did my best to get back on track - I wanted to keep the shore in view so that I wouldn't get lost. But getting back on track was difficult. The ground was a mixture of rocks and weeds and broken branches and I began to sweat. This acted like a magnet for all the insects that were sitting around bored to death, waiting for me to come along. Within a couple of minutes I was trailing a cloud of tiny flies, mosquitoes, and what have you. It was late in the year for black flies, which was good, because their bite hurts like hell. I was so busy waving the insects away from my face that I nearly stepped on a small brown snake; it wriggled into the fallen leaves and twigs in a blink of an eye, I didn't even have the time to get scared. Most likely it wasn't poisonous, but like most people I'm not very fond of snakes.

It turned out to be really difficult to find the burnt-out house; I walked past it, and noticed it only after another hundred steps or so. I'd found a way to get to the shore and happened to glance to my left - I was trying to get my bearings - and there was a glint of broken glass just a short distance away. I went to check it out, and when I got there I could see charred black beams among the plants a little further on. I immediately felt a little apprehensive, as if there were savages lurking in the woods, waiting to take my scalp. Places where something dramatic had taken place always have that effect on me. When I was living in Rome I was taken to see the Colosseum and told what had went on there. I stood there for several minutes, staring at it as if it were a monster; I was six years old at the time. It seemed to be full of ghosts of fallen gladiators, and Christians torn to pieces by lions and panthers, and so on.

The ruins of the burnt-out house felt similar. I went around it, as watchful and observant as an insurance claim adjuster looking for evidence that would invalidate the claim. I don't know what the hell I was looking for, but it definitely wasn't a tiny human hand.

It was sticking out from a small heap of dead leaves, o.b.s.c.e.n.ely pink, the fingers slightly curved. A greenish beetle was taking a nap in the middle of the palm; it didn't budge when I bent over it. The hand seemed to be made of plastic. I reached out and pulled on it, waking the beetle: it took off like a fighter jet, it could actually fly.

The hand turned out to belong to a doll still wearing a checked red dress and a pair of red shoes. One side of its head was crushed in, and most of the long blond hair was missing. The single eye that survived was startlingly blue, and it rolled shut and open again when I tilted the doll. If it had suddenly said 'mama' in a tinny, battery-powered voice, I think that I'd have screamed and dropped it and ran off into the forest. I stood like an idiot with that doll in my hand for quite a while - it felt wrong to throw it away, but I definitely didn't want to take it with me. Eventually good sense prevailed, and I flung it into some bushes.

"Moron," I said out loud. It instantly made me feel better.

The burnt-out house held no interest for me after that; it had satisfied my need of strong emotions for the day. I turned away from it and went home, and tried to be a smartass by taking a shortcut here and there. About half way home, I put my foot down into empty space, and fell over with a crackle of breaking twigs. I landed on my side without hurting myself in any way, and examined the ground when I got up. It turned out that I'd stepped into a sharp dip that had been filled with dead leaves. It also turned out that had I fallen a few inches to my right, I'd have landed on an iron spike that stuck out of the ground almost vertically. It looked like the end of one of those metal rods used to reinforce concrete, and I guessed it must have been left there during construction work, when the whole area was being turned into a resort. There were nearly two inches of metal sticking out of the soil, and had I fallen onto that, the results would have been gruesome. The nearest phone was miles away, the nearest human being was likely miles away. I guess I got a strong emotion bonus big enough to last me for the whole next day.

I was very careful the rest of the way, and it was late in the afternoon when I finally made it back. Roch had told me to turn the gas heater on only when I needed hot water, and it took me ages to find the box of big matches used to light the pilot flame. I took a shit, a shower, and shaved - I was starting to look like one of those guys that sleep on the street and rummage through trash cans. I clipped my nails and brushed my teeth and suddenly it was evening.

I heated a can of tomato soup for supper, and ate it with some crackers. Then I went out on the deck with a beer to smoke a cigarette, and saw that there was a light on in the house across the water. It hadn't been there the previous night, I was sure of that. Roch and I spent a lot time out on the deck, looking at the lake and talking. We would have noticed it for sure.

I got the binoculars from the closet with the fishing rods and took a look. It was already very dark and there was a mist rising from the water; all I could see was a single lit window. After adjusting the focus, I could look inside the room: I saw the edge of a commode, and a guitar propped up against the far wall. And then, totally unexpectedly, a curtain was drawn across the window. I didn't even see who did it. It happened in an instant.

I felt spooked. It was almost as if the person inside that house knew that I was watching. I put away the binoculars and smoked another cigarette, wondering if that curtain had remained drawn the previous evening. But no, even with the curtain drawn there remained a glow that I could easily notice, even without using the binoculars. Someone had come down to their weekend home on a Monday. It was odd.

I made a mental note to do some investigating the next day. Then I went to bed.