The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

lawn mower trying to sputter back to life. But coming from a human being, it sounded monstrous.
    After an uncomfortable ten minutes passed, a voice called from the top of the stairs. “Judas Priest on a pony!” It was my grandmother, and evidently she’d been yelling for some time. The train stopped, the feet stopped. “Jack, what are you doing down there?” she yelled.
    My grandfather barked at her through his tracheostomy, annoyed.
    â€œJack, can you run to Heinie’s? We’re out of pop again.”
    My grandfather barked back, even more annoyed. He didn’t move for a moment, as if debating whether or not to help her. Then he slowly rose. We were Safe, for the time being.

    F IG . 984.—Transverse section of the trachea, just above its bifurcation, with a bird’s-eye view of interior.
    After doing our best to conceal the damage we had done to the workbench drawer, Chad and I walked to the top of the stairs and into the breezeway, where we kept our toys. Toys, in this case, being a pair of BB guns. Besides spying on my grandfather, the house had two other attractions: the woods nearby, where we liked shooting at animals, and the girls in the neighborhood, who we were trying to have sex with but never succeeded until much later.
    Sometimes we’d go to the city park just past the woods and try to pick off little kids playing football. To this day, Chad still has a BB lodged beneath the skin in his chest, because when we couldn’t find any other targets we would just shoot at each other. This time, we stuck close to the house and tried to knock birds out of trees. It was malicious, but we were young and didn’t give a shit. That afternoon I was out for blood and, unfortunately, a white rabbit crossed our path. The thrill of hitting it was incommensurate, but then I went to examine the damage. It was still alive and blood was pouring out of its eye, soaking into its white fur. Its mouth kept meekly opening and closing, taking in air in a last, desperate attempt at life. For the first time, I felt bad for an animal I had shot. I took a large flat rock and ended its suffering with a loud, quick and messy blow. I was very close to learning an even harsher lesson in killing animals.
    We ran back to the house, where my parents were waiting outside in a brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville, my father’s pride and joy since landing a job as manager of a carpet store. He never came into the house for me unless it was absolutely unavoidable, and rarely even talked to his parents. He usually just waited outside uneasily, as if he were afraid of reliving whatever it was he had experienced in that old house as a child.

    Our duplex apartment, only a few minutes away, wasn’t any less claustrophobic than Grandpa and Grandma Warner’s place. Instead of leaving home after she married, my mom brought her mother and father home with her to Canton, Ohio. So they, the Wyers (my mother was born Barb Wyer), lived next door. Benign country folk (my dad called them hillbillies) from West Virginia, her father was a mechanic and her mother was an overweight, pill-popping housewife whose parents used to keep her locked in a closet.
    Chad fell ill, so I didn’t go to my father’s parents for about a week. Although I was disgusted and creeped out, my curiosity about my grandfather and his depravity still hadn’t been satisfied. To kill time while waiting to resume the investigation, I played in our backyard with Aleusha, who in some ways was my only real friend besides Chad. Aleusha was an Alaskan malamute the size of a wolf and distinguishable by her mismatched eyes: one was green, the other was blue. Playing at home, however, was accompanied by its own set of paranoias—ever since my neighbor, Mark, had returned home on Thanksgiving break from military school.
    Mark was a roly-poly kid with a greasy blond bowl cut, but I used to look up to him because he was three years older than me and much more wild. I’d often see him in his backyard throwing stones at his German shepherd or thrusting sticks up its ass. We started hanging out when I was eight or nine, mostly because he had cable television and I liked watching Flipper . The television room was in his basement, where there was also a dumbwaiter for dirty laundry from upstairs. After watching Flipper , Mark would invent games like “Prison,” which consisted of squeezing into the dumbwaiter and pretending