Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 120, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 733 & 734, September/October 2002

The Brick Thing by Jack Fredrickson

Now retired, Jack Fredrickson wrote business books in the 1980s. This first work of fiction was inspired, he tells us, by the dialect of his Bohemian grandmother and mother, who frequently used “thing” to refer to what they couldn’t remember the name of. The Illinois writer is currently at work on his first mystery novel. His is a welcome new voice in the genre.

I don’t know what woke me. The silence, probably. All I know for sure is my eyes are open, my cheek is cold from the kitchen table, and outside it’s quiet. Dead quiet. The clock on the microwave says 4:00 A.M.

I lift my head, look out the window. I don’t see him. The beam from his flashlight is there, flat on the grass, but it’s dim, not moving. I try telling myself he’s taking a little break, but that’s no good. He doesn’t rest, not at night. Not anymore.

I give it up. I get my pants and a wool shirt from the bedroom and go out the back barefoot, telling myself I’m a fool. What am I going to say if he’s sitting on the ground taking a breather? That, since meeting with Mrs. Jablonski, I’m up every night, peeping at him through my kitchen window?

I open the wire gate, go into his yard. He’s facedown on the grass, a lump in the moonlight, the hand with the chisel still reaching toward what’s left of the brick thing. Like in that painting at St. Mary’s that’s scared me since I was a kid. Supplication, the little brass plate on the frame says. Begging.

The moon makes my shadow look like the devil in robes as I cross his yard. I bend down, make myself check for the pulse, but I’m shaking so bad all I can feel is the cold of his skin, like chicken parts before cooking. I hustle back to my kitchen as quick as I can move with the arthritis and call 911.

They’re there in four minutes — lights only, no sirens because the streets are empty. I point them to the back and get out of the way so they can wheel the gurney. They turn him over and bang on him, but it’s for the rules. He’s stiff.

They cart him out front. Some of the neighbors are on the sidewalk, in their robes. The flashing lights make red snapshots on their faces. Nobody’s talking.

Massive heart attack, the driver yells at me as he jumps into the ambulance.

Execution, I think. By a guy two years dead.

Mrs. Jablonski is on the other side of Willis, so it isn’t like we talk over the chain-link fence. Some shouts across Willis’s yard about the weather, or my roses, is usually about it. But two Saturdays ago, she yells she’s made strudel, and has extra. I don’t need strudel, not with my ticker, but my wife is into the nutrition, and strudel’s strudel, so I hustle out front before my wife hears and beat it down the sidewalk like I got wings. Mrs. Jablonski is holding the door, wearing a beige housedress she must have bought twenty years before her hair went white. We go through her front room — lace doilies and plaster saints — into the kitchen. Fresh coffee in a glass pot is on the stove, and the strudel, eight inches by a foot and a half, is on the yellow Formica table, lined up like a runway between the two plates. It’s a setup, but that morning all I’m seeing is the strudel.

We sit. She pours coffee into scratched white mugs and serves me up a four-inch slice with a spatula that looks like a bricklayer’s trowel. It’s the real stuff, butter and lard, and it goes down quick. We throw some sentences back and forth: my roses; her Mr. Jablonski, dead twenty years; my wife’s veggie class at the senior center. But after five minutes — timed by the wall clock, I think now — she puts another piece of strudel on my plate and starts talking about Willis, the guy in the house between us.

Strange, she says, like it just occurs to her, him working outside so late at night.

I haven’t noticed, I say. Ever since we moved in, a year now, I hear him inside, all the time hammering, remodeling. But outside? I haven’t noticed.

He starts around midnight, she says, when all the houses are dark. Pokes around with a flashlight, tapping, hammering. You haven’t noticed?

We have just the kitchen facing Willis, I say. Both bedrooms are on the other side.

She nods.

I make conversation so I’m not just a pig, eating. What is that gray brick thing at the back of Willis’s yard? I ask. Two feet wide, three feet high? Like a pillar for a gate, only short.

My husband wondered too, she says, when Mr. Angell — he lived there before Mr. Willis — built it in the spring of 1969. What’s to wonder? I told my husband. It’s a monument. She motions at the strudel with her trowel. There’s still a foot left.

I wave it off, sure the missus will hear my arteries banging like old pipes from two houses down.

A monument? I ask, but to be honest, I’m thinking more about a third piece of strudel than the brick thing.

The strudel’s got raisins.

Monument, she says. Been there over thirty years. Why would Mr. Willis work outside in the middle of the night? she asks again.

In her lap, she’s twisting her paper napkin into rope, and I realize she’s not just making conversation to go with the coffee. She’s afraid. I try to think of something that will explain the nocturnal Willis.

Maybe he can’t take the sun, I say. All this talk about skin cancer, holes in the ozones. Probably he’s finishing up inside, now he’s got stuff outside. He’s being careful, staying out of the sun.

It’s weak, what I’m saying, but she’s about to shred the napkin.

Her hands relax maybe just a little. Mr. Angell, she says, now there was a careful man. Nice man, too; a shame about his daughter.

I shovel up the third piece of strudel. The missus is making vegetable burgers with organic germs for supper.

His daughter? I ask.

Lynette, she says. Pretty girl; maybe not the smartest, but sweet. Popular in high school, pom-poms even, had a boyfriend the same age. Stuck on each other — stuck to each other, Mrs. Jablonski says, making the small joke — always holding hands. Fall of 1967, they go off to the University of Illinois downstate — him on a football scholarship, her on what Mr. Angell can do without.

Mrs. Jablonski lowers her eyes, starts twisting again on the napkin rope. Figuring backwards, she says, Lynette comes back pregnant at Christmas. No more university. Stays inside, never comes out, until after the baby. July sometime.

Mrs. Jablonski looks up, her eyes wet from the memories. Remember that 1968? she asks, dabbing at her eyes with the napkin rope. Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, the riots? Things aren’t bad enough, that July it’s so hot you can fry kielbasa on the front steps, and back then, of course, no one can afford the air. These bungalows are ovens. All of us got our windows wide open, praying for the breeze. Except for Mr. Angell; his are shut tight. Even so, a couple of times, I hear a baby next door.

Mrs. Jablonski looks down at her lap. The napkin is starting to shred. First of August, she says softly, the windows come up. No more baby sounds. Mr. Jablonski and me, we figure adoption. Quiet, so Lynette can have a fresh start.

I nod. Makes sense.

That same time, Mrs. Jablonski goes on, I notice the tiny new garden in the back of the Angell yard, under the tree, where there is no sun. Next time Mr. Angell is outside and Mr. Jablonski is at work, I ask. Lynette’s, Mr. Angell says, for the tulips next spring, but then he hurries inside like he hears the phone.

Mrs. Jablonski picks up the pieces of napkin, tries to press them together. They fall apart back onto her lap.

Lynette kills herself that Thanksgiving, she says. The carbon monoxide. No covering that up. Police, ambulance, two fire trucks — one red, one yellow — an hour before my son and his girlfriend are coming for turkey. Mrs. Jablonski balls up the napkin shreds, drops them behind her in the garbage. The next spring, she says, no tulips come up, and Mr. Angell builds the brick thing on Lynette’s garden. Pours the base, lays up the bricks, puts on the cement top. Takes him nights and two weekends. Mrs. Jablonski picks at a speck of napkin stuck to her hand. And that’s the story of the brick thing, she says.

We sit for a minute, listening to the hum of the electric clock on the wall. I don’t know what to say after such a story. I need to get out in the sunshine, back to my roses. Besides, I need the bathroom. I make to get up.

Wait, she says; there’s the boyfriend.

I sit back down. Five more minutes, to be polite.

He never came to Lynette’s funeral, she says. Thirty-one years, he stays away.

That stops me thinking about the bladder. What do you mean, thirty-one years? I ask. The boyfriend comes back after thirty-one years?

The week after Mr. Angell’s funeral, she says. Moves in, year before last, she says. She’s looking at me close to make sure I’m following what she’s saying.

The strudel is expanding in my stomach like a lard sponge. I’m following.

Not Willis, I make myself say.

The very same, she says. Mr. Angell willed him the house.

Why would Mr. Angell will him the house?

He must have had his reasons, she says.

He must have been fond of Willis, you mean.

Quick, she strikes the wood handle of the strudel trowel on the table, loud, a gunshot, like Sister Agnes in the third grade when I’m not using my noodle. Young Willis impregnates his daughter, his daughter kills herself from the shame, she says, almost yelling. How fond would you be?

Okay, not fond, I’m quick to say. But then why leave Willis the house?

Mrs. Jablonski calms, looks out her window at Willis’s backyard. One night, last of that 1968 July, she says, when Mr. Angell’s car is gone, I’m coming into the kitchen for ice tea. I’m reaching for the switch when something outside moves in the light from the house behind. I look around the curtain. It’s young Willis and Lynette, she says, pointing through the window.

Back by the brick thing? I ask, looking.

The brick thing wasn’t there yet, she reminds, but that’s the spot. Anyway, that night, I see Lynette on her hands and knees, sobbing. Young Willis is pulling at her, trying to get her up, but she’s fighting him, digging her hands into the dirt to stay down.

Could you hear what they were saying?

No, just the crying. I’m thinking I should stick my head out, or at least call the police, but just then young Willis lets go. Drops her, leaves her on the ground, stomps past my outside light on the way to the front, mad, like a bull. Such a dirty face.

What do you mean, dirty face? I ask.

Dirty, muddy, she says.

Probably working construction or landscape for a summer job and comes to see Lynette right from work, I suggest.

Mrs. Jablonski shrugs. Maybe, she says, but he was wearing khaki pants and a button-collar shirt.

That doesn’t seem important.

How long after that night did the baby go away? I ask.

I never hear the baby after, she says.

And Lynette kills herself the following Thanksgiving?

She nods.

Guilt from the baby for sure, I say.

For sure, Mrs. Jablonski agrees.

But something still nags. I hold up my hand for patience before I speak, so Mrs. Jablonski won’t squawk. I understand why Mr. Angell leaves Willis the house, I say; Lynette’s pregnancy, her suicide, they were young Willis’s tragedy, too. Got to be Mr. Angell saw that. It’s the only thing explains why he leaves Willis the house.

Mrs. Jablonski shakes her head, biting her tongue.

What makes no sense, I go on, is why Willis moves in. Sell the house. Take the money. But move into a dead old girlfriend’s house? That I can’t understand.

Mrs. Jablonski nods. I’m getting smarter.

He didn’t need the money, she says. The day he shows up, he’s driving a big Mercedes Bendes...

Benz, I say. With a Z. Expensive.

Cost a lot for sure, she says. Tell you what else: I’m a seamstress fifty-one years, and even with my cataracts I can see the thousand-dollar suit he’s wearing. Size 52.

Not 52, I tell her. That’s way too big.

Two hundred fifty pounds, the day he comes in his fancy car.

Willis is a beanpole, one-fifty tops, I say, trying to remember the last time I saw him. It’s been months.

Not two years ago, she says. He’s lost a hundred pounds, all that hammering. Anyway, when he arrives he’s got one small suitcase, like he’s staying just long enough to get a real-estate lady.

So what happened? I ask.

The sign never goes up, she says. Instead, he pulls the blinds, starts hammering: tap... tap... tap... Slow. Not like Mr. Jablonski when he’s redoing the kitchen. Then it’s Bang! Bang! Bang! Like living in a drum for three weeks, but it’s quick, then it’s over. But not Mr. Willis. He’s going slow, like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and I’m all the time wondering: Why is Mr. Thousand-Dollar-Suit remodeling a bungalow in a neighborhood like this anyway? My son says his Mercedes Bendes is worth more than the house.

I never see the Mercedes, I say.

Gone, she says, waving her hand like she’s shooing a fly. Third or fourth week, he leaves it on the street with For Sale in the window. Best Offer, the sign says. The car is gone in one day. Took what he could get quick. You notice his trash? Mrs. Jablonski asks.

I’m thinking if she drove an automobile like she talks, God forbid, she’d all the time be making left turns without signaling.

Trash?

Mr. Willis sets out seven, eight bags of trash every garbage day night before.

Remodeling, I say. Out with the old, in with the new.

Mrs. Jablonski’s eyebrows go up. I stay up late, she says, watch Jay Leno. Sometimes, after, I take a walk to the end of the block and back. There’s streetlights, and the air’s good for sleeping. Once, maybe twice, the night before garbage, I try to lift one of his bags. Too heavy, so I poke a hole. Guess what I find?

I shrug.

Plaster chips. Big ones, small ones. He’s pulling the plaster off the walls. She makes it sound like she discovered the ancient tomb of King Tut.

Remodeling, I say again. Out with the old.

She shakes her head, like Sister Agnes when I’m being a doofus. When Mr. Jablonski is doing our kitchen, she says, the front room is loaded with new stuff. Boxes, tools, wood. Old stuff goes out, new stuff comes in, like digestion. Ever see any new stuff coming for Mr. Willis?

I try to think, but I can’t even remember seeing Willis going into Willis’s place. I shake my head. There can be explanations, but I’m out of time. My bladder has to leave. I stand up.

We go through the front room, past the doilies, past the little statues. At the door, she stops with her hand on the knob. What if he saw me watching, that night when he and Lynette were in the backyard? she asks.

It was thirty years ago, is all I can think to say. Even if Willis did see, he’s forgotten.

But I am not understanding, not then. I thank her for the strudel and beat it back down the sidewalk.

That night, there’s no sleeping. Too much strudel. I go into the kitchen for warm milk and am reaching for the switch when I see the flashlight bobbing in Willis’s backyard. I leave the light off and sit away from the window.

I’m shocked. He’s a bag of bones, with a wispy beard and hair down to his shoulders. He’s on his knees, lifting patio stones, poking underneath with a crowbar. At first I think he’s releveling, but he’s dropping the stones back crooked. In the glow of the flashlight he looks crazy, a stick man digging for who knows what.

After an hour I tell myself I’ll be just as loony as Willis if I don’t get back to bed. I go, but the sleep doesn’t come. I keep hearing Mrs. Jablonski’s voice, over and over like on the phonograph, telling the story of Lynette, her baby, and young Willis.

And Mr. Angell.

The next night, Willis is out with the ladder five minutes after Mrs. Jablonski’s lights go off. Mine have been out for an hour. In the moonlight, I watch him climb to the roof. He starts tapping the chimney flashing off with a hammer and screwdriver, slow, making no noise. Three hours it takes until he gets it off. He sets the bent metal aside and pokes inside the cavity behind with the flashlight, up, down, all around, looking at every inch. Finally, he sits up and looks at the sky in the east. It’s getting light. He presses the bent metal flashing back into place — loose, no caulking, no adhesive — and climbs down. He slips the ladder off the house and goes inside. Next time it rains, it’s going to be pouring buckets into his house.

I go off to bed. I got an hour and a half before the alarm. I fall asleep too tired to make any sense about what I’ve just seen.

Next day, at work, I can’t concentrate on the machine motor I’m repairing for thinking about Willis. He wasn’t up on that roof fixing anything; he was looking for something. But for what I can’t imagine.

All day, the clock on my bench gives up each minute slow, and it’s eternity until I get home. I tell the wife I didn’t sleep and head for the sofa. I need to be alert for later.

That night, as soon as Mrs. Jablonski douses her lamp, Willis is out with the ladder again, but this time he’s up in the gutters, scooping out leaf gunk, setting it on the shingles. For a minute I think he’s cleaning, but after feeling around, he brushes it all back down in the gutter. This I cannot imagine, putting crud back in gutters, and I watch until he moves the ladder to Mrs. Jablonski’s side and I have to give it up and go to bed. But tired as I am, I can’t drift off. I can come up with nothing that explains what Willis is doing.

There’s thunderstorms the third night. Lightning, sheets of rain, the works. But none of that stops Willis. He’s outside without a jacket, pulling back trim boards, looking behind with his flashlight, letting in the rain. I’m in the back of the kitchen where the lightning won’t show me, punchy from the not sleeping, starting to doubt what I’m seeing. All day I’m thinking of a couple of heavyweight fighters I saw once, both of them past their primes. They kept coming back, round after round, dazed, stupid, long after both should have quit. That’s Willis and me. But still I keep watching.

Two weeks, three days, I watch. Until this morning, when he finally goes at the brick thing. He’s been staying clear, but now it’s all that’s left. Tap tap, Willis starts removing the bricks.

I’m watching, but I’m dopey. I rest my head on the table, close my eyes, and I’m out like I’m clubbed. And sometime after, the heart attack comes for Willis.

After the paramedics take him away, I dress, go to work, but I’m shaking from finding him and from the too-little sleep. And from still not knowing. By noon, even my fingernails are itching. I take a half sick day, come home, and tell the missus I’ll be over at Willis’s, neatening up the mess for whoever inherits.

I go to the garage for empty boxes. For the first time since I moved in, Willis’s blinds are up, probably from the cops looking for next-of-kin addresses. I can see all the way through Willis’s house. There are no inside walls, just naked two-by-fours, picked clean, and I see Mrs. Jablonski sitting at her kitchen table, looking back at me. She doesn’t wave.

I carry the empty boxes into Willis’s backyard. Willis’s hammer and chisel lie on the ground next to his flashlight, dead now, in front of what’s left of the brick thing. The cement top cap is in pieces on the ground behind, three dozen busted bricks scattered around it. I start breaking the rest of the brick thing apart with my little sledge, slow, so there’s no strain. Every ten minutes the missus comes out. Two weeks she’s worrying about my insomnia. She doesn’t know about the watching. You’re going to kill yourself, she says. Why do this?

To be neighborly for the new people, I lie. I keep on removing.

Something under the mortar chips inside reflects up. I pinch it out with my fingertips. It’s a plastic bag from Montgomery Ward’s Automotive, one of those shiny thick ones inner tubes used to come in. Nobody’s had tires that need tubes since the late sixties.

I look inside. Baby-fine strands of hair stuck to the stained head of a metal hammer. And young Willis’s fingerprints, for sure, and maybe Lynette’s, though I want to doubt hers. I set the bag on the ground and keep working.

I’m special careful breaking up the little base. I don’t want to go too deep. That July night, that night Mrs. Jablonski worried that young Willis had seen her watching, she only saw the end. Didn’t see the burying. Lynette and young Willis had been hysterical. No telling how shallow they dug in their hurry to be done.

I put the Ward’s bag in the bottom of one box, then fill them all with the rubble. As I haul them out for the garbage, I try to imagine the day Willis shows up in his fancy car to collect his inheritance. He’s figuring a few hours to hire a realtor and then he’s gone, but then he goes inside and sees the note. Maybe Scotch-taped to a kitchen cabinet, maybe thumbtacked to a wall, it’s where Mr. Angell can see it every day and be strong from knowing that someday Willis will read it and the air will be sucked out of the bastard that ruined his daughter: “Willis, I kept the tool. Enjoy the house.” Nonsense to anybody else; a bomb for Willis.

Like most things about that night in 1968, Willis has made himself forget the hammer. But he’s a big man now, a successful man; he can take care of this quick. He’ll find the hammer and dispose of it and there will be nothing to link him to the baby if it’s ever uncovered.

But the hammer is not in the cabinets, the drawers, or under the stairs. It’s not in any of the obvious places. So he has to move in, explore every inch. It’s slow, and the more he looks, the more desperate he gets. Who knows what other notes Mr. Angell left? Willis quits sleeping, quits eating. There’s time only to look. He chips off the plaster, pulls off the baseboards, rips out the cabinets. But it’s not there. Two years he picks at the ceilings, at the walls, like an animal in a cage, sucking dust. But it’s not there.

He has to search outside, but now he must wait for the houses around to go dark, and nosy Mrs. Jablonski stays up late, watches Jay Leno. The daylight minutes drag like hours as he paces inside the ruined house, waiting for the dark. He’s an animal now, living only for the night.

But it’s not outside. It’s not behind the trim or the chimney flashing, it’s not in the gutters, it’s not under the patio. It’s not in any of the hundred other places he looks. And then that part of Willis’s mind that hasn’t gone crazy understands. The brick thing. Mr. Angell knew that would be the last place Willis would look, knew that Willis would destroy himself looking everywhere else — anywhere else — rather than risk having to touch what was in that ground. But now Willis has no choice. It’s all that’s left.

He starts with the chisel, tap... tap... His heart, ruined from the not sleeping, the not eating, is out of control now, chugging rough from imagining what Mr. Angell, a careful man, built inside the brick thing. An explosive, maybe, or worse: an alarm wired from underground, placed next to the remains of the tiny corpse, loud enough to bring everybody running to see what Willis is doing. Tap... tap... Willis chisels away the bricks.

I set down the last of the boxes at the curb, carry back the piece of sod I bought after work. The new grass is darker, denser, but from ten feet, you can’t tell the brick thing was ever there. Maybe it’s wrong, there being no marker, but I’m thinking more of the memory of the confused young girl and the rage of the father who loved her. There should be no need to dig there ever again.