LUDIC LOG

I was the one who finally got the courage to knock on Old Man Tillman's door. They said I should be the one who did it because I ain't afraid of nothing. The other kids, they call me Johnny Fearless, because I'm supposed to have been born without fear. It's really the drugs that I take for my reading disability; they have some kind of side effect that suppresses my fight-or-flight instinct. But I don't tell nobody that because Johnny Fearless is a pretty cool nickname, especially considering that some of the other kids are nicknamed Fagmo and Shittypants.

Old Man Tillman lives right on the edge of the county line. He's just inside where the town is incorporated, so technically he's in Weaverville, but nobody considers him part of the town. When they talk about him, they always say how he lives in that house out in the sticks. Ain't none of us ever seen him except Cindy Heller who works down at the Piggly Wiggly and brings him his groceries and she swore an oath not to talk. At least that's what Mitch the Bitch, who's Cindy's boyfriend, says. I personally think that Cindy just don't know nothing about Old Man Tillman. She lives over by where they leech all the batteries, and the ground ain't so good there and a lot of people in that part of Weaverville talk like they got dirt in their mouths and they don't remember things so good.

Anyway, there was all these rumors always goin' around about Old Man Tillman. People said he was half a robot, and that he was the oldest man in the county, and that he used to best friends with Hoxley the Monster, and that he ate blood, which the Piggly Wiggly would make special for him or else he threatened to blow it up with a grenade. We would ask Cindy Heller about this and she would just say "maybe" and suck her thumb until Mitch the Bitch gave her a piece of Dubble Bubble, so she wasn't no help. Personally, I didn't believe none of the stories. How is a fella gonna be half a robot? There ain't no such thing as a whole robot, anyway except in the auto parts factory up in Craigworth. The other kids said I was just a big know-it-all who thought I was smarter than them because I could read.

"Well, sure," I'd say. "Of course I'm smarter'n you because I can read. I mean, that's pretty much how it works, ain't it?"

They would all gang up on me when I'd say stuff like that. So I set out to prove I was right.

When I come up to the house the first thing I noticed was that there weren't none of that chemical smell you get in town. It took me a while to notice it because it's hard to notice something that ain't there. The next thing was that his mailbox was full of bills, some of them going back to before I was born. One thing was for sure about Old Man Tillman: he didn't have no power, nor phone, nor cable in that house of his.

I steeled myself up and hit the doorbell. About five minutes passed when I remembered, no electricity. I knocked on the door and that got better results. I have to admit when I heard the clanking I was a bit taken, thinking maybe he was a robot after all, but when the door come open, he was just an old man with really loud leg braces.

"Yeah?" he says, in this raspy old man voice. "You ain't that retarded girl from the Piggly Wiggly."

I couldn't think of a goddamn thing to say once I actually seen him. After about a minute of standin' there staring (he didn't seem to mind), I asked him: "How come you ain't just oil them braces on your legs?"

He looked at me forever. At first I thought he might be gonna blow my fool head off. He had these eyes that looked like death: black and small and final. But after a while he said, "You know what? I never thought about that. You got any machine oil?"

Of course I didn't have none. But he invited me in for Cokes just the same. The Cokes weren't so good because like I thought there was no power, and they was warm, but they was at least better than the brown tap water we got at home. The first thing I asked him when he set me down on the couch is if he ever got bored. I figured I'd make nice with him before I sprung the big questions on him.

"Hell, no," he says. "Why would I get bored up here? I got the telephone, the internet, the TV and the radio. I got books. There's plenty up here to keep me occupied." There wasn't no power, of course, and his phone was yanked out of the wall, and I didn't see no books except a pile of old Time magazines from the 1980s, but I had bigger fish to fry at this point.

"Is it true," I asked, "that you're the oldest man in the county?"

"Shit, boy," he says. I told him my name was John but he called me boy just the same. "People start sayin' that when you're an old man. They think you're the oldest when all you are is old. I ain't no more than 93 this year."

"Hell, Mister Tillman. That probably makes you the oldest man in the damn state."

"No kidding? Well, maybe I am the oldest then. What's it to you? That don't make you special," he says.

"What don't make me special? That you're the oldest man in the county?" I didn't get it, and said so.

"Look, boy. You got another question for me or not?"

I had plenty, all right. The whole blood thing and the grenade, that turned out to be he ordered blood sausages and Lik*M*Ade, which he liked to eat together, and Cindy Heller just heard him wrong. Although to be honest I found the idea of eating blood sausage and Lik*M*Ade pretty disturbing on its own. I mostly wanted to ask him about Hoxley the Monster.

"Is that what they call him?" he asks, all scoffing. "Bill Hoxley weren't no monster. He was my best friend for forty years and a hell of a plumber. When you're kinda eccentric you get a reputation, just like me. But you see me, boy. I ain't no crazy robot, and he weren't no monster."

I was a little relieved and disappointed at the same time. "See, 'cause we all heard that he was always cutting up drifters and hanging their skin from his back fence."

"Well, he did that," he admitted. "I mean, if you think that makes a guy a monster, then I guess he was. If that's your definition. Back in my day, we didn't judge people quite so harsh-like. We forgive a man his little quirks and faults. Not that I'm one of them what thinks the old days were so much better than today. That's just wishful thinkin'."

The hell it was, I thought. Back in his day there wasn't battery acid all in the groundwater and the tire plant hadn't put that black cloud over the schoolyard and I ain't seen no census statistics that proved it, but I'm pretty sure the epilepsy rate weren't close to 38%. But I didn't want to gainsay the man, on account of I had one more question: "How come you stay here, Mr. Tillman? What keeps you in Weaverville? How come you don't get off to the city where you can get better care of yourself and all?"

"Well, boy," he says, all serious and almost a little weepy in his voice like, "I tell you. I got roots in this town. I know that it's alive. It's like the Lord God: I can't just get up out of my chair and see it nor feel it, but I know it's there just the same. This town keeps me going, like that statue of Henry Clay in the town square. Knowing it's there gives me life, whether or not it's in my vision."

In the end I didn't tell the kids the truth about Old Man Tillman. I told them some story about him chasing me around with a butcher knife. It was a better one than the truth. If I'd have told them the real thing, just as if I'd told Mr. Tillman that Clay statue got torn down back in '91, what kind of a man would I be?