Old Man Death

“I want to see where Mister Death’s house is,” said Alaina Keane. “Will it be…” she struggled to find a more palatable term, then relented, “as spooky as I’m afraid it will be? Matty?”

Fifteen-year-old Matthew Keane squinted into the distance, gauging just how far a distance they would need to ride a bicycle to arrive at the fearsome destination in her mind. He was not as annoyed by his sister’s question as he was pretending to be, but he had to make it look good. She was only thirteen, after all — made her feelings known at every drop of a metaphorical pin. Why couldn’t she just be sulking and silent, like a normal teenager? “I'll say this about that,” the boy was moved at length to reply. “You may wish I hadn’t brought you, in which case… I apologize, for the good scare you’re about to get, Pear. Let’s ride.”

“I hope it’s not close to us,” she said with a feline shudder, and they shoved off on their bikes. The neighborhood in which they rode was lined with trees, the leafy honor guard of that portion of Council Bluffs, Iowa into which they were daring to penetrate. Alaina tried humming one of her favorite K-pop tunes, as Matthew just focused on working his foot pedals and taking the lead. He was expecting she would crap out, before they arrived at old man Death’s place, a victim of her own fear — he would understand that and, probably, forgive her for it. “It’s bad enough he’s even in our town, but what if we see him, all of the time?”

Her brother’s grin was pitiless, but he was riding up ahead, where she could not see it. “You meant to say: What if he sees us?” he called, as they took the next right-hand turn, and propelled themselves down another tunnel of big trees. Two more freaking months, he thought. I’ll take that stupid driver’s test, and she can beg me for rides around town. Before he could savor that notion, he was the first to arrive at the crucial twist in their current narrative…

They reached, fittingly enough, a dead end. Though a crossing street offered them their only avenue of escape — they screeched to an unannounced halt, Alaina almost thrown off of her bike by the sudden force of stopping behind her brother’s motionless ride. He stared for a long moment; she watched as his chest expanded and contracted with his breaths. “There he is,” Matthew gasped, for extra dramatic effect. “Old Man Death.” He pointed to a house.

She followed the length of his arm, of his pointing finger, with her gaze, and was… baffled, frankly. The house was one story tall; nice and cozy-looking, not at all possessing a macabre flavor. She didn’t notice the binoculars until Matthew waved them in front of her and said, “Here, get a look. From a safe distance. Hurry!”

Alaina felt a warm rush of blood. Accepting the binoculars, she trained them upon the window her brother indicated to her. Within the living room of the house, a man, the age of their grandfather, sat in a chair, staring at what she guessed was his television set. He wore a short-sleeved work shirt, tan slacks; he reached for his eyeglasses, sitting upon the folding table to his left, and at that moment, the light in his room seemed to dim, as a cloud passed over the setting sun. If he had lived even one day, he had lived sixty-five years, at least. Matthew seemed delighted by the unconscious shudder that had passed over her. “Bet you’re good and spooked,” he crowed.

Alaina frowned at the image. The old man — no, the Grim Reaper — watched a program. At length he began to move forkfuls of his dinner from his plate into his mouth. He never once smiled, or laughed. He seemed to be more bored by his program and his meal, than satisfied by either of them. “You suck, Matty,” she said. “He’s just an old man. He can’t do anything. He can’t make anything die.” She raised the binoculars again, for another look.

“Boy, you’re not in the ‘gifted’ class, are you, Pear?” He seemed unfazed by her disbelief in ‘his’ boogeyman. He reminded himself: ‘Pear’ is short for ‘Parasite’. “He’s called Old Man Death, because he’s the one who’s going to—”

^^^^

Alaina screamed. It was no modest yelp of shock, but a full-throated shriek; he was genuinely impressed by her terror. Matthew shot a glance at the old man’s house. Mister Death was peering back at them, through his window blinds, and he was scowling. “Matty, let’s get out of here, right now!” she yowled.

The door to his house creaked open. The old man stepped out onto his porch. He did not seem as infirm or as feeble as he might have looked, to adolescent eyes. With surprising vigor and a decided lack of warmth in his voice, he was able to project at them, “Are you two lost? Can I help you?”

“I don’t see how,” Matthew sneered, spinning his front wheel around to face in the opposite direction, back the way he and Alaina had come. “Don’t come at us, sir. Come on, Alaina.” He made it maybe a quarter of a block before it hit him: no sound of another bicycle’s wheels turning reached his ears. He came to a halt and looked over his shoulder: to his horror, she was pushing her bike, as she walked closer to the sidewalk in front of his home.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, to the old man. “Have you lived here, for any sort of… long time? We are local students, and we are doing a project on the history of Council Bluffs.” She wasn’t lying; this project was a standard one given by eighth-grade teachers at her middle school. She was talking with him, and he didn’t scare her at all, Matthew realized. Would Grandpa like this dude?

“You could say that,” Death… or rather, given the name on his mailbox — Mister Detwiler said. “My wife used to teach around here. Grew up here herself, and she knew the subject well. Until I got out of the Corps, and married her, I didn’t know much about the place.”

“Did you say… you were in the Marine Corps?” Matthew’s ears burned slightly. It had to be ruined, his wonderful prank, his shock-theater, to give his sister just the jolt he thought she needed. “Because I’m thinking of going into the Navy, once I hit eighteen. Get out of this town, see something cool for a change. Nothing ever happens around here.”

“That’s just where you’re wrong, kid,” Detwiler countered. “One of these days, when you’re old enough, maybe I could show you what this town is about, but you’ll have to excuse me now. You should… get on home now.” He returned to his chair, his meal and his television program, without a word of apology, and the Keane teens biked on home to their parents, returning to their dinner and their programs, one of which featured a local band, the Black Squirrels.

Eight months would, somehow, slip past them, before they would encounter Roy Detwiler again. Janice Keane had taken her daughter grocery shopping, an activity he was likewise engaged in at that time and place. He turned a corner, pushing his cart until it almost crashed into theirs. He flicked a recognizing glance at Alaina, then concealed it and with a gruff gesture of patience, waved them by, but fourteen-year-old Alaina was telling Janice the story of how she had met the old man. “Can we do… anything for him?” the girl asked her mother.

^^^^

Matthew was sixteen, licensed to drive, but still delivering newspapers to those few locals who still subscribed to them. Detwiler was a customer, of course, which explained Matthew’s awareness of the fellow. It did not, by itself, explain why a fresh piece of homemade apple pie, wrapped up in a paper towel, arrived on his doorstep, with every newspaper. Janice was a contributing factor to that, once Alaina mentioned that Detwiler had expressed a fondness for his wife’s homemade pies — though naturally, this conversation had not happened.

Days folded into weeks, which folded again into months. Old man Death/Roy seemed less irritable, more amiable, when Matthew came by. It did not strike either of them as peculiar that they should wish each other a pleasant day. He slowed down beside Detwiler’s house, instead of racing by it — even waved.

So it should not have startled Matthew so much to arrive home from school to find Roy Detwiler sitting in his family’s living room, chatting softly with David Keane, Matthew and Alaina’s father. “We named him after Commodore Perry,” David explained, “so I guess it makes sense he wants to be a sailor. You say you were a Marine? I bet you could give him some tips on what he can expect in that whole scene.”

The evening’s dinner, and the attendant conversation, were little short of epic. Roy Detwiler had been living alone in town, on a pension from his job as a civil engineer, since his wife had died; his sons lived in Ames and Davenport, with their families. “Of course, when Iowa State first offered training for what I do,” Detwiler said, with the scary smile that no longer bothered Matthew and had never bothered Alaina, “it was still called mechanical arts — it says, I am an artist. I quite like it. Oh, that was a great meal.”

David suggested that his family would consider themselves thanked in full if they were to make this a weekly event. Roy agreed to this condition, with unexpected enthusiasm. He would attend Matthew’s seventeenth birthday; Alaina explained to her brother’s dorky friends that he was “a close friend of the family’s”, who was teaching them about local history. He told them, “This is a good place. You don’t have to be in a big hurry to leave it.”

After almost two years of having known the man, David and his children got their first privileged look inside of the Detwiler home. A leggy blonde beauty was framed in a photo on the wall; Roy identified her as Zoe Ann Olsen-Jensen, a local girl who had won silver and bronze medals at the Olympics. “We have produced a lot of fine people around here,” said Roy. “Art Farmer, he’s into jazz, probably not your cup of tea, Matthew. We also produced the guy who directed King Kong, Ernest Schoedsack was his name, and the guy who was sort of the pioneer of television, Lee De Forest. They all left here and did big things. You will, too, Matty, and so will your sister. This girl who was for the women’s vote, she came from here, too; her name was Amelia Bloomer, Alaina.”

Matthew turned eighteen during his senior year. At his graduation from his high school, his parents and sister were cheering him on. Roy Detwiler, too, was there to enjoy the rite of passage. He was looking more frail in the last year, but he shunned offers of help from the Keanes as being ‘too much’ for him. He even confided in David and Janice that he was mulling an offer to relocate to Davenport, to be closer his grandchildren and their parents, something he had never expected to want to do — until recently.

“I am going to miss this place,” Detwiler admitted to them, with a soft smile. “I was lucky to make such good friends here when I thought I was, well, kind of invisible.” He pointed out Alaina to them, then Matthew, and just drank in the celebration going on with all the teens and adults in the room. He marveled: “I’ve got to tell you, they have really done something special — they’ve saved Mister Death’s life.”

© Eric Wolf 2022.