The Occupied Read online

  Krim stood hunched over and pointed to my father’s casket, which had yet to be lowered into the ground, and spoke. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Even overloaded and shell-shocked, I still found this statement exceedingly odd.

  “You’re thinking,” he went on, “that’s all there is. Dead is dead. Gone.” Then he bent toward me, closer to my face, his breath filling my nostrils with the scent of something rotten and barely camouflaged with peppermint. “Just make sure you keep your mind wide open to anything. There’s things out there you don’t know yet. Things that can happen. Even when you can’t see them.”

  Krim looked down at the blooming rose in my hand and reached out, as if asking to take it. For some reason I felt compelled to lay it in his palm. He closed his hand slowly around the soft, ruby-red petals of the rose and held it there for a few seconds. Then, with a crooked smile on his lips, he opened his hand and offered the rose back to me.

  I held it by the stem, and at first just stared at this very strange man with the bent-over posture. Then my eyes drifted down to the rose. The petals that had been red and velvety were black and brittle. It was as if that flower, full of color, had been instantly transformed by Krim into something lifeless. As dead as some forgotten plant on an untended grave.

  The sight of that was so startling that I dropped the rose and took a step backward. “Are you a magician?”

  “The magic you’re thinking of, that’s for tricksters. I’m no trickster. I told you, there are things that can happen.”

  My mother must have spotted the interchange, because she had started to approach. As she did, Krim turned, gave her a curt nod, and then slipped out.

  I had little comprehension what Krim was talking about and no idea how he did that with the rose. But in the midst of my grief and the swirling confusion of my young life, I knew that it had actually happened right in front of me. And it had to do with death, and things that I didn’t know yet, things that were mysterious and inviting, and it was whispering a story to me, like a fairy tale about how, with the right secrets, the departed might be within reach, and the land of the dead could be tamed.

  2

  Manitou, my hometown, was located in central Wisconsin. Back then it had a population of thirty thousand and was surrounded by farmland. By late March or early April, you could tell that spring was coming because the snow and ice would start thawing and the melt would rush down the streets and the curbs, and the scent of manure from the fields would come drifting in.

  It had the look of a relatively safe town, nestled in the heartland with a turn-of-the-century main street, quiet homes, and leafy avenues. On the surface, just one small cog in the slowly turning wheel of the natural order of things. But the visible things tell only part of the story.

  My mother was a nurse, and for a while after my dad died and until she finally collected on his workers’ compensation settlement, she had to pull double shifts to keep food on the table. She carried a wearied look on her face most of the time, but did the best she could for me. I had this distinct feeling that I could have pitched in more to help, but I didn’t and worked hard not to think about that, trying to shuck the guilt.

  With Dad gone and Mom working all hours, there was nothing for me at home but empty rooms and watching rock bands on MTV. So gradually, I gravitated to a gang of new friends, most of them following in the mold of brothers or uncles serving jail sentences. Over a span of almost two years, they showed me the finer points of shoplifting from record stores, garage thieving, vandalism, and smoking Camel cigarettes. Street fighting was their thing, not mine. But I did end up joining the boxing club for a while so I could take out my inner turmoil on the other kid in the ring. Living with abandon had a certain appeal.

  In the end, my misdemeanors caught up with me. When my mom received a second call from the officer in the juvenile squad, she read me the riot act, cut off my questionable associations, and grounded me for three months.

  During my home internment, I was surprised to find how little I missed the gang I’d been hanging out with. And only slightly less surprised that they never came asking after me. So during long stretches of solo evenings and weekends, I had plenty of time to wonder what else life had to offer. I would lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling and listening to music on our Crosley portable turntable that had to have been almost twenty years old. That is when I discovered the soul-rending sound of the blues harp—the deep-throated, soulful, scale-running harmonica that typified the sound of blues greats like Paul Butterfield, a man who became my music hero during high school.

  My mother was talking all the time about how the Berlin Wall had just come down. But I couldn’t be bothered with that. I had managed to get my hands on a copy of an old Butterfield album called The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw. I hadn’t the faintest what that weird title meant, but I knew what his music meant: his music ripped into subjects on heartbreak, trouble, running out of time, and bells tolling for things I couldn’t describe yet, but could somehow feel deep inside when I listened.

  When I stopped showing up, my old friends all too easily cut me loose, but as soon as my long “house arrest” finally ended, I probably would have looked them up if it hadn’t been for Dan Hoover. He was a classmate of mine, someone I had known since junior high. He was crazy serious about music—took guitar lessons twice a week and was in two different rock bands until our junior year. Just so happened, the first week I was allowed out of the house, he needed a player in his second group, called Nagasaki. I could play basic rhythm guitar chords, nothing fancy, but the real reason Dan wanted me in was because I had taught myself how to play the blues harp, which he thought was cool. Plus, I could actually sing on key. But after I’d been playing with them a few weeks and Dan asked me to break out the blues harp, the other guys in the band called it lame and said rhythm and blues music sucked, which Dan and I took to be heresy.

  I told them what they really wanted was for Mickey Mouse to sprinkle magic on them and turn them into Duran Duran or A-ha—groups that Dan and I couldn’t stand. A blowup followed, and Dan and I stood by each other. Nagasaki had a less-than-amicable breakup, and Dan and I decided to take the road less traveled and become blues men.

  We put together another band called The Soul Assault, which later morphed into simply The Assault, and played Marvin Gaye, the Butterfield Blues Band, James Brown, Muddy Waters, and even some classic acoustic stuff from Mississippi John Hurt that we jazzed up.

  Bobby Budleigh was our drummer. Smaller than me, but with an athletic frame, he had a square, handsome face and a blond shock of hair. He was a heartthrob with girls, engendering envy among the rest of us.

  Augie Bedders, our bass guitarist, was a first-string lineman on the football team. We put up with it during the football season, though Dan and I continually threatened to replace Augie on bass with someone else. But Bobby stuck up for Augie and argued us down.

  To my surprise and delight, The Assault started making some money on the weekends, playing private parties and frat house beer bashes, first around our county and later in different parts of the state. Things really took off during our senior year, when we entered a statewide “Rising Stars” pop music festival that was held in the Milwaukee arena, and I got a taste of how fantastic success and fame could feel. The Assault ended up winning first place by nosing out a black soul band called The Royals—a dance-stepping, sax-playing, tightly melded seven-man ensemble from an inner-city church with a female lead singer who could belt a tune like Aretha Franklin. By all accounts we should have come in a very distant second at best, but in the middle of their second number, The Royals suffered from a blown amp and obnoxious feedback on the mic. It was as if their electronics had been bedeviled.

  Back at the home front, though, things had become strange. Our neighborhood, though not affluent, was well maintained. No peeling paint. The yards were mowed.

  Mason Krim’s home was different. It was a dilapidated mansion that got worse as
the years went by. A Spanish motif castle with crumbling turrets and spires and terra-cotta tiles missing from the roof. The yard remained uncut and sprouted tall, stalky weeds and bushes that had grown into vegetative monstrosities.

  By the time I was a senior in high school, Krim, who was then in his eighties, had suffered a stroke. He was back home from the hospital and was apparently semi-mobile, but needed to be checked periodically. As a nurse, my mother had the inside scoop on all of that and told me, because Krim didn’t have any relatives in the area, checking on him would be my job.

  I tried to weasel out of it, but my mother insisted it was our duty to be “charitable,” even to someone as peculiar as Mason Krim. “He was nice enough to come to your father’s funeral,” she said. “His wife and daughter both died a while ago. He lives alone. Let’s try and return the favor.”

  Right. I certainly remembered him from the funeral. His strange reputation had only continued to grow over the years. I wasn’t looking forward to my encounter with him.

  On Friday afternoon, I stepped up to Mason Krim’s front door and clanked the big iron knocker that was shaped like the head of an ugly animal, like a jackal. After hearing someone yelling for me to come in, I entered his mammoth house for the first time. The place was full of dark-purple curtains pulled shut, frayed velour furniture, and mahogany paneling. Every wall sported weird art, some of it abstract.

  On one wall there was a large painting that showed the pale corpse of Christ, lying dead, face up, and bearing a visible chest wound, having been lifted off the cross so his body could be readied for burial. There were sad angels on both sides of him.

  Floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with books, and on the coffee tables and in curio cabinets were a few strange objects that looked like archaeological relics. The place had the musty smell of an untended museum or a library that had been closed for a decade. And the air felt thicker somehow, like how it must feel inside a pyramid where the mummies are buried. There was the aura in Krim’s house of my being watched by things that were not living and not visible, yet they were there in some nonphysical way, just beyond reach.

  I found Mason Krim bending over his walker in the middle of the large foyer, with his head jutting out like the figurehead of a ship, and staring at me. His pale, saggy face had a droop on one side, and his head sported a few wispy hairs on top. He addressed me in a loud voice that quavered a little bit. “You checking on me?”

  “Yeah. Mom told me to come over.”

  “You’re Black’s kid, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

  I reminded him.

  He nodded with recognition. Then he gave me some wacky instructions. “Always knock six times. Then six times again. That way I know it’s you.”

  I nodded.

  He asked, “You’re not a Lutheran, are you?”

  I didn’t know exactly what I was, but I certainly was not that, so I shook my head no.

  He added, “And don’t stick your nose in my business.”

  I said okay to that too. Actually, I wanted no part of his business, whatever it was.

  He kept going. “And don’t ever intrude where you’re not invited. Ever. You’ve been warned.” But just as quickly he gave me a creepy smile. “Now if you mind your own business, I might have something for you.”

  As I started toward the door to leave, Krim began to follow me with his walker thudding on the ground, then halted with a jerk and looked up at the painting of the dead Christ. He said, under his breath but loud enough for me to hear, “It’s on the wrong side.”

  I asked him if he wanted me to take the picture down and to put it up on another wall, somewhere else in the house. Mason Krim didn’t respond, but just stared at me with eyes that, for the moment, looked black and lifeless.

  I took that as my cue to exit and hustled out the front door.

  3

  Through the rest of our senior year in high school, as a result of our burgeoning fame as blues musicians, our band started attracting female groupies who followed us around. Bobby Budleigh was a chick magnet. But he was too polite to return the favor. Besides, he was dating a girl from a private Lutheran school, and Bobby was the true-blue kind of guy. Unlike the rest of us, who weren’t picky or loyal or anything else except ruled by the powerful subterranean streams of testosterone and hormones that coursed through our veins.

  I had my share of flings, all of them self-conscious tangles of sweaty, awkward bodies. I recall each time silently arguing the case to myself that it had been great, and there were no regrets, but I never could fully convince myself. Besides, there was only one girl that I had squarely in my sights. Her name was Marilyn Parlow, a curvaceous blonde who was the captain of the girls’ swim team. Whenever the swim meets were held in the high school’s Olympic-size pool, Marilyn, in her form-fitting red swimsuit, helped fill the bleachers with ogling boys.

  One Friday I stopped her in the hall on the way to the next class. “Hey, nice job at the swim meet.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re Marilyn, right?”

  She clucked her tongue, tilted her head, and said, “Uh, yeah.”

  Then I added, “Exactly. Marilyn. As in Marilyn Monroe.”

  She shot back, “And you must be Alec? As in the school smart alec?”

  I tried not to reel after the kidney punch to my ego. I played it cool. “So you really don’t know who I am?”

  “Yes, I know. You’re Trevor Black. Lead singer and blues harp player in The Assault.”

  The bruise was immediately healed, as if by some miracle.

  She tossed me a Mona Lisa smile and said, “I like your music.” Then the smile disappeared. “Just don’t use that macho, chauvinistic line with me. Ever. About Marilyn Monroe. She was a beautiful spirit who died because men used her and abused her. And threw her away.”

  I paused. Then I said, “Okay. Sure. But do me a favor. Next time tell me what you really think.”

  Marilyn laughed.

  I advanced, this time from the flank. “How about coming to our next gig? As my guest?”

  The bell rang for class. She hurriedly said, “Tell you what. I’ll come to your next music thing. Even stand right in the front. But not like a groupie or anything. Only you have to do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have to dedicate a song to me.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  We both ran in opposite directions to our classes. As I turned around to catch one more glimpse of her, I noticed that she had turned around too. That made my day, and it helped me forget, at least for a while, that after school it was my day to check on Mason Krim again.

  It was late afternoon when I did the magic knock on Krim’s front door: six knocks, then a pause, then six more. I heard the clump of his walker on the other side of the door. He let me in and then walker-shuffled himself to the middle of the room, with his back to me. “Come here,” he called.

  I walked around him until I could see his face.

  “Things have been happening.”

  I waited for more.

  “A couple of vases. Falling off my shelves.” Then he pointed to the far corner of his living room, to the right of the bookshelves, across from his easy chair, where there was a display case with an assortment of ancient-looking pots and figurines that looked like crudely fashioned women with multiple breasts. But the glass door was open, and there were two vases that were shattered into pieces on the wooden floor in front of the case.

  “Get a broom, in the kitchen closet. Dustpan. Sweep up.” He motioned to the shards of glass and pottery on the floor. “Throw the pieces away in the wastebasket in the kitchen. But do not let them touch your hands under any circumstances.” Then, like a cover-up posing as an afterthought, he added, “Wouldn’t want you to get cut.” He flashed the creepy smile.

  After I got the dustpan and bent down near the pieces on the floor, I felt strangely drawn to pick up one of the fragments and take a closer look, but I r
emembered Mr. Krim’s warning and thought better of it. As I stared at the pile of broken pieces, I thought I heard whispering. I looked up at Mr. Krim. “Did you say something?”

  He inhaled sharply. “I haven’t said anything. Just get it out of here.”

  When I was done, he asked, “Have you talked to anyone about me?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. You have any girlfriends?”

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  “That’s good too. You like school?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You like to read?”

  “When I have to.”

  “You need to change that. Books are good for you. The human mind is meant to be filled up. What is your mind filled with?”

  As a lusty teenager I knew exactly what my mind was filled with, but I wasn’t about to share it with Captain Creepy. So I lied by half. “Music. I play in a band.”

  He scooted across the floor, leaning on his walker, until he reached the bookcase. He bobbed his head around, looking for something, then pulled a book out of the bookcase. It was a thin book with no dustcover. The title was faded but still legible. He handed it to me. “Read this.”

  I nodded.

  Then he stared at me, and I noticed he was shaking a little. I thought maybe he was having another stroke. But he kept looking around, like something was about to happen. He stared hard at the painting of the dead Christ. Then he said, “One thing, and it’s important. Regular people can’t see them. They’re invisible, unless they want to be seen. You only see what they’re capable of, and only after they’ve done it. Then it’s too late.” Krim gave out a husky chortle, then dropped the creepy smile. “Just remember. You have to be the one in control. You. Not them.”

  I didn’t answer, wondering, How do you reply to something like that?

  His expression changed into something disturbing. “And one more thing. You ever tell anyone about what goes on in here, you’ll be sorry.”