The Demolition
It was just an old barn. What could go wrong?
Herb noticed the man on the first day of the project. The demo was scheduled to take a week, but the crew had hit a snag already: their dump truck was having ignition troubles, and they’d started to load it up only to have to wait for a mechanic. Herb was sitting on an old bench near what had been the western wall of the barn when he saw a man standing on the ridge that looked down into the property. Even from that distance, Herb could see the unnatural thinnness of his limbs. The man had long hair that streamed around him in the wind, and while Herb watched, the man raised one hand to him in a sort of salute, then turned and disappeared down behind the ridge.
“Huh,” said Herb. He’d been eating a pack of sunflower seeds and now spat out the last of the shells and ground them with the heel of his heavy boot into the soft spring earth. He saw the foreman firing up the CAT. Looked like they were going in for another round while they waited for the truck to be fixed. Herb stood up and brushed shells and salt from his canvas pants and stretched. He almost jumped a foot when he saw the man again. He was standing near the hamstringed truck and staring at the crew, his head turning slowly from one man to the next as if memorizing their faces.
Herb looked at the foreman: he was busy over near the old silo, and Jerry and Mike were smoking cigarettes by their cars. Herb slowly walked over to the truck.
The man was emaciated, his eyes sunken into the jagged bones of his face. His hair was stringy and gray and hung down his back. As Herb approached, he seemed to cringe back slightly, his form shrinking into his oversized black overcoat. His eyes were so light they were almost opaque. There was something about him that made Herb uneasy. “You need something, buddy?” said Herb. “This here’s a work zone. Demolition.”
The man stared at Herb, then reached up to brush a strand of hair behind his ear. “You got anything to eat?” he asked. His voice was so faint that Herb had to lean forward to hear him.
Herb sighed and looked back towards the foreman, who was standing with the other guys now. Any minute they’d yell for him. He reached into his side pants’ pocket and pulled out a pack of beef jerky. It was supposed to be his lunch. “Here,” he said. “All I got. And don’t ask for money because you’re not getting it. Now like I said, this here’s a demo zone and we can’t have unauthorized personnel around. So you’d best be going.”
The man clutched the bag of jerky against his chest and stared past Herb at the crew as if transfixed. His tongue flickered out along his lips, then he nodded and whispered, “So you’re taking this barn down, then?”
“Yep,” said Herb. “Sure are. The thing’s rotten.”
The man seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he slipped the pack of jerky into his jacket. “Be careful of the wall,” he said.
“What?” said Herb. But just then he heard the foreman shout, and he looked over his shoulder at Jerry and Mike who were waiting for him by the barn. When he turned back, the man had slipped away and was heading swiftly down the dirt path towards Route 12.
“What a nutjob,” Herb muttered. He was irritated over the loss of the beef jerky and felt a lingering sense of unease, as if he’d found himself witnessing some strange and suspicious act. What the hell was he talking about the wall for? There wasn’t much of a wall left, anyway. As he walked back towards the site, he surveyed the remains of the barn: the interior structure had all but collapsed into itself, with a few remaining rafters standing like cornstalks against the sky. A corner formed by the southern and western walls was still intact, but it was the only wall that remained. The silo stood alone against the skyline but would soon be felled by the wrecking ball when it arrived, and all of the rotten lumber was to be taken to the dump.
“Hey,” said Herb when he got back to the crew. “Sorry about that. Some homeless dude asking for money.”
“Where’d he come from?” asked Jerry. “It’s farmland for miles around here.”
“Must be a camp up that ridge or something,” Herb said.
The foreman yelled for them to start and for the rest of the day they crowbarred and stacked lumber, but Herb found himself looking back towards the ridge every now and then. The skyline was empty of life save for an occasional falcon gliding across the grass, its shadow a giant reflection of its feathered wings.
At the end of the day, the wall and silo remained, and Herb walked over to the standing corner and looked around.
“We doing this tomorrow, boss?” he asked the foreman.
“Nope, we get the ball Wednesday so we gotta clear the silo,” the foreman replied. He had taken off his safety helmet and was mopping his forehead with a tattered handkerchief.
“Well,” said Herb. “I could stay a bit and get this part down if you wanted.”
The foreman gave him a look and slapped his helmet back on. “Fuck no,” he said. “No overtime. Get yourself home and be back at seven sharp.”
That night, after a few stale beers and a soggy McDonald’s hamburger, Herb had trouble sleeping. He lay on his narrow bed and stared up at the ceiling. For some reason he kept seeing the gray-haired man’s face, the angular features and shadowed eyes. What could be at that barn, anyway? Herb didn’t usually care to know much about the properties he did away with: he loved the wrecklessness of the demo and then the meticulous care to clear all traces after the rubbish and debris was gone. There was nothing about the barn that seemed much different than other places he had worked on. It was just the man who had unsettled him. After tossing and turning for awhile, Herb finally drifted into a restless sleep.
But the next morning started off even more inauspiciously: Jerry didn’t show up, and the foreman was livid and cursed Herb and Mike out for five minutes. Then they discovered a rat infestation in the silo. Mike got himself bit and was convinced he would get rabies, so he went off to the clinic. Herb and the foreman worked in grim silence for the morning. The rats had run off into the field grass, leaving behind mounds of shit and fouled straw. Herb and the foreman tied towels around their faces and dug the debris out by the shovelful. Once Herb tried to ask the foreman about the property, but he only grunted at Herb to keep moving. Mike came back at noon with a bag of doughnuts, and they took a break to stand in the damp grass by the bench, chewing in silence.
Suddenly Herb saw the man again. He was crouched behind the dump truck, his gigantic black coat unfurled like wings behind him. Mike and the foreman had their backs to Herb and were lighting up, so Herb grabbed an extra doughnut from the greasy sack and went to the truck. When he saw Herb, the man jumped to his feet, arms outstretched. He was muttering something that Herb couldn’t make out.
“Hey there,” said Herb. “You hungry again?” He held out the doughnut.
The man shook his head. “Three now,” he said.
“What?” said Herb.
The man pointed at Mike and the foreman. “There were four yesterday,” he said.
“Oh,” said Herb. He felt the uneasiness return. “Yep, we had a no-show. Not a problem though. We’ll get this thing cleared out in no time. In fact, we’re ahead of schedule.”
The man shook his head. He’d tied his hair back with a band, and in his long coat, he looked like a figure from folklore. But today his eyes seemed sharper, and he seemed to take in every feature of Herb’s face before he spoke again. “Leave the wall there,” he said. “Leave this place be.”
Herb felt the back of his neck prickle. “What, is it the curse of the Bambino here or something? You think it’s haunted?” He tried to laugh, but the sound seemed forced in the quiet air.
“It’s not haunted,” said the man. “It’s mine.”
Herb looked around hopelessly. Of course it was just his luck that he’d gotten himself mixed up with some nutcase. He should have stayed back there with the guys and let this man spy on them all he wanted. What was it to him?
“Look,” he said. “Maybe you’d better leave. I’d give you some food but you’re not hungry, and I think it’s time for me to get back.”
The man was silent. But suddenly he smiled, a horrible, Cheshire-cat smile.
Herb stepped back. “Get out,” he said. “Seriously dude, get out of here. You’re freaking me out now.”
Without a word, the man turned and went back down the dirt path, his coat flapping behind him.
Herb’s hands were shaking. “I gotta talk to the boss,” he said. “This dude’s fucked up.” He almost ran back to Mike and the foreman. “Hey,” he said. “That homeless guy came back and was saying all sorts of weird shit. I think we should tape this place off.”
“What guy?” said the foreman. “Where was he?”
Herb pointed at the truck. “He likes to hang out there. He was there yesterday too.”
The foreman shrugged. “Some prick wants to hang around, that’s fine. We gotta get this done.”
Herb looked again at the corner that remained of the barn, it’s wood blackened like char and slitted with stripes of sky that shone between the cracks in the boards. “Let’s take that part down,” he said. “The last wall.”
“You the boss now?” said the foreman. He spat a glob of saliva into the dirt. “Get your shovels, boys. Break’s over.”
But as Herb worked for the rest of the day, he found himself feeling weak and spent. The shovel seemed too heavy, and he couldn’t get the dump truck to start again, much to the foreman’s rage. The wall stood like the hull of a wrecked ship rising up from the cold depths of the ocean, ominously intact. When Herb would straighten to stretch, he’d find himself looking towards the wall as if he expected to see some phantom materialize from behind the cracked boards.
That night he didn’t have an appetite, so he sat in his faded armchair, turned the TV to a basketball game, and poured himself a vodka and orange. He didn’t usually drink heavily during the work week, but he felt he needed to still his nervous energy and racing thoughts. He was dreading the next day, somehow. He thought again about the barn: the silo that tomorrow would be torn down; the wall and rafters leering towards the sky, the harsh call of the crows that circled above as they worked. They’d been told the property had been abandoned for years and the owners wanted to sell the land to a developer. A fire had broken out a few months ago, rendering what was left of the structure ruined.
“It’s just a barn,” he said to himself as he crunched ice from the bottom of the glass with his teeth. He reached for the vodka and poured a straight shot. “Just a goddamn barn in the middle of a goddamn field.” After another shot he dozed off, mouth slack and hands hanging over the arms of the chair. When he woke up at dawn, his head was pounding and his neck had locked up so he could hardly turn to his left side. He struggled into his heavy jacket and fumbled for his wallet and keys. He was already late.
When he got to the site, he and the foreman were alone, and although they waited for Jerry and Mike for ten minutes, the foreman finally cursed and motioned Herb to the CAT to finish the main site excavation. Herb’s unease had grown to outright jitters, and he fumbled at the controls so that the boom kept slipping. The foreman was furious. “What the hell’s your problem?” he yelled, but Herb could hardly hear him over the noise of the machine. It seemed like the foreman was a tiny action figure in the center of the empty barn, his gestures stiff and futile as he waved and motioned at Herb to move the excavator this way or that. Herb found himself imagining what it would be like to grind the foreman into the earth with the heavy bucket and just walk away from the whole place, free as the falcons that floated above the long flank of the ridge. “Jesus,” he thought to himself. “How hungover am I.”
“Hey!” yelled the foreman. “Cut the power!” He came over, holding his phone. “I just got a call from someone at the police station. Guess the boys went out for drinks last night and got in a bar fight. They’re at the station and I gotta bail them out if we’re gonna get this project done. Fucking morons.”
“Okay,” said Herb. “I guess I’ll just wait here then.”
“You better keep your ass moving,” said the foreman. “You can take that wall down before the wrecking ball gets here for the silo.”
Herb sat in the cab of the CAT and watched as the foreman swaggered off. He felt lightheaded, and when he went to climb out of the cab, he almost fell down onto his knees in the dirt. The beams of the barn loomed above him as he advanced across the old barn floor, walking carefully to avoid the jagged boards and half-shattered windowpanes that were strewn in crazy angles. When he came to the wall, he stood for a moment and stared up at it. Was it his imagination, or was the rafter that jutted out from the center set with a sharp and solid hook? Had some desperate soul once suspended himself from the roof and plunged into the darkness below?
“Or maybe it’s me,” he said to himself. In the strange fuzziness that had overcome him, he had a sudden vision of himself, arms outstretched like bat wings as he spun from space. The thought was more unforseen than frightening. And then the fuzziness dissolved to clarity as he turned and saw the man moving out from the shadows like a wraith.
In the half-gloom of the barn, he wasn’t surprised to see the noose clutched in the man’s gnarled hands. He wished his head wouldn’t pound so, or that he had thought to bring a crowbar with him. But somehow all of the pieces were coming together, and instead of turning and running, Herb faced the man.
“They’ll know what happened,” Herb said. “If you do this to me.”
The man shook his head. “No one’s known before,” he replied. His sibilant voice was almost pleasant, and Herb found himself standing patient as a cow as the noose was slipped around his neck.
“Was it you?” Herb asked. “Did you call the foreman about Mike and Jerry?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the man. “All I know is that I warned you, and you didn’t listen.” He had thrown the rope up to the rafter and was tying it tight. If Herb ran now, he could jump in the CAT, throw the bastard under, beat him with the bucket. But his legs felt strangely weak, and the man’s hands were fast and his opaque eyes all-knowing.
“Who else,” said Herb. “Who else is here. By the wall.”
“I don’t count,” said the man. “But you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. I’d burn this place to the ground before I’d see it taken away.“
“It’s just a demo,” said Herb. Now he looked towards the road as he was hoisted onto a mound of lumber, the rope heavy as a snake around his neck. The road was empty, the skyline clear. “Just a standard demo. I’ve done it a million times. Just a goddamn barn.” In a moment, all would be darkness, but he wanted one more breath of the rich spring air. Again he caught the feathered turn of a falcon as it dipped from sky to field.
“It’s gorgeous up here,” Herb said. “I never thought I could see so far.”
“I know,” said the man. “It’s my favorite view around.” Then he kicked at the lumber, and all was still, save for the turn of the rope as it needled back and forth as if caught in the gentle spring breeze.
