The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

like we were in jail. This was no ordinary jail: the guards were so strict that they didn’t let the prisoners have anything—even clothes. When we were naked in the dumbwaiter, Mark would run his hands all over my skin and try to squeeze and caress my dick. After this happened a few times, I broke down and told my mother. She went straight to his parents, who, though they branded me a liar, soon sent him to military school. From then on, our families were bitter enemies, and I always felt that Mark blamed me for tattling on him and causing him to be sent away. Since he had returned, he hadn’t said a word to me. He just glared maliciously at me through his window or over his fence, and I lived in fear that he’d try to exact some kind of revenge on me, my parents or my dog.
    So it was somewhat of a relief to be back at my grandparents’ the next week, playing detective again with Chad. This time we were determined to solve the mystery of my grandfather once and for all. After forcing down half a plateful of my grandmother’s cooking, we excused ourselves and headed for the cellar. We could hear the trains running from the top of the stairwell. He was down there.
    Holding our breath, we peered into the room. His back was to us and we could see the blue-and-gray flannel shirt that he always wore, with the neck stretched out, revealing a yellow and brown ring around the collar and a sweat-stained undershirt. A white band of elastic, also blackened with dirt, clung to his throat, holding the metal catheter tube in place over his Adam’s apple.
    A slow, tense wave of fear shuddered through our bodies. This was it. We crept down the creaky stairs as quietly as we could, hoping the trains would cover up the noise. At the bottom, we turned around and hid in the stale-smelling alcove behind the staircase, trying not to spit or scream as cobwebs clung to our faces.

    J ACK W ARNER
    From our hiding place, we could see the train set: There were two tracks, and both had trains running on them, clanking along the haphazardly built rails and letting off a noxious electrical smell, as if the metal of the track were burning. My grandfather sat near the black transformer that housed the train’s controls. The back of his neck always reminded me of foreskin. The flesh hung wrinkled off the bone, old and leathery like a lizard’s and completely red. The rest of his skin was gray-white, like the color of birdshit, except for his nose, which had reddened and deteriorated from years of drinking. His hands were hardened and callused from a lifetime of work, his nails dark and brittle like beetle wings.
    Grandfather wasn’t paying attention to the trains circling furiously around him. His pants were down around his knees, a magazine was spread over his legs, and he was hacking and moving his right hand rapidly in his lap. At the same time, with his left hand, he was wiping phlegm from around his tracheostomy with a yellow-crusted handkerchief. We knew what he was doing, and we wanted to leave right away. But we had trapped ourselves behind the stairs and were too scared to come out into the open.
    Suddenly, the hacking sputtered to a halt and grandfather twisted around in his chair, staring straight at the stairwell. Our hearts froze. He stood up, pants sliding to his ankles, and we pressed against the mildewed wall. We couldn’t see what he was doing anymore. My heart stabbed at my chest like a broken bottle and I was too petrified even to scream. A thousand perverted and violent things he was about to do to us flashed through my mind, though it would have taken nothing more than for him to touch me and I would have dropped dead with fright.
    The hacking, jacking and shuffling of feet began again, and we let our breath out. It was safe to peer around the staircase. We didn’t really want to. But we had to.
    After several excruciatingly slow minutes, a gruesome noise leapt from his throat, like the sound a car engine makes when someone turns the key in the ignition when it’s already on. I turned my head away, too late to keep from imagining the white pus squeezing out of his yellow, wrinkled penis like the insides of a squashed cockroach. When I looked again, he had lowered his handkerchief, the same one he’d been using to wipe away his phlegm, and was sopping up his mess. We waited until he left and then clambered back up the stairs, vowing never to set foot in that cellar again. If