U n c l e O t t o's T r u c k
by Stephen King
It's a great relief to write this down.
I haven't slept well since I found my
Uncle Otto dead and there have been times when
I have really wondered if I have gone insane - or if
I will. In a way it would all have been more merciful
if I did not have the actual object here in my study,
where I can look at it, or pick it up and heft it if I
should want to. I don't want to do that; I don't want
to touch that thing. But sometimes I do.
If I hadn't taken it away from his little
one-room house when I fled from it, I could begin
persuading myself it was all only an hallucination -
a figment of an overworked and overstimulated brain.
But it is there. It has weight. It can be hefted in the hand.
It all happened, you see.
Most of you reading this memoir will not
believe that, not unless something like it has happened
to you. I find that the matter of your belief and my relief
are mutually exclusive, however, and so I will gladly tell
the tale anyway. Believe what you want.
Any tale of grue should have a provenance
or a secret. Mine has both. Let me begin with the
provenance - by telling you how my Uncle Otto, who was
rich by the standards of Castle County, happened to spend
the last twenty years of his life in a one-room house with
no plumbing on a back road in a small town.
Otto was born in 1905, the eldest of the
five Schenck children. My father, born in 1920, was the
youngest. I was the youngest of my father's children, born
in 1955, and so Uncle Otto always seemed very old to me.
Like many industrious Germans, my grandfather
and grandmother came to America with some money. My
grandfather settled in Derry because of the lumber
industry, which he knew something about. He did well, and
his children were born into comfortable circumstances.
My grandfather died in 1925. Uncle Otto,
then twenty, was the only child to receive a full
inheritance. He moved to Castle Rock and began to
speculate in real estate. In the next five years he made a
lot of money dealing in wood and in land. He bought a large
house on Castle Hill, had servants, and enjoyed his status
as a young, relatively handsome (the qualifier "relatively"
because he wore spectacles), extremely eligible bachelor.
No one thought him odd. That came later.
He was hurt in the crash of '29 - not as
badly as some, but hurt is hurt. He held on to his
big Castle Hill house until 1933, then sold it because a
great tract of woodland had come on the market at a
distress sale price and he wanted it desperately. The
land belonged to the New England Paper Company.
New England Paper still exists today, and if
you wanted to purchase shares in it, I would tell you to
go right ahead. But in 1933 the company was offering huge
chunks of land at fire-sale prices in a last-ditch effort to
stay afloat.
How much land in the tract my uncle was after?
That original, fabulous deed has been lost, and accounts
differ . . . but by *all* accounts, it was better than four
thousand acres. Most of it was in Castle Rock, but it
sprawled into Waterford and Harlow, as well. When the
deal was broken down, New England Paper was offering it
for about two dollars and fifty cents an acre . . . *if* the
purchaser would take it all.
That was a total price of about ten thousand
dollars. Uncle Otto couldn't swing it, and so he took a
partner - a Yankee named George McCutcheon. You probably
know the names Schenck and McCutcheon if you live in New
England; the company was bought out long ago, but there are
still Schenck and McCutcheon hardware stores in forty New
England cities, and Schenck and McCutcheon lumberyards
from Central Falls to Derry.
McCutcheon was a burly man with a great
black beard. Like my Uncle Otto, he wore spectacles. Also
like Uncle Otto, he had inherited a sum of money. It must
have been a fairish sum, because he and Uncle Otto together
swung the purchase of that tract with no further trouble.
Both of them were pirates under the skin and they got on
well enough together. Their partnership lasted for
twenty-two years - until the year I was born, in fact - and
prosperity was all they knew.
But it all began with the purchase of those
four thousand acres, and they explored them in McCutcheon's
truck, cruising the woods roads and the pulper's tracks,
grinding along in first gear for the most part, shuddering
over washboards and splashing through washouts, McCutcheon
at the wheel part of the time, my Uncle Otto at the wheel
the rest of the time, two young men who had become New
England land barons in the dark depths of the big Depression.
I don't know where McCutcheon came by that
truck. It was a Cresswell, if it matters - a breed which
no longer exists. It had a huge cab, painted bright red, wide
running boards, and an electric starter, but if the starter ever
failed, it could be cranked - although the crank could just as
easily kick back and break your shoulder, if the man cranking
wasn't careful. The bed was twenty feet long with stake sides,
but what I remember best about that truck was its snout. Like
the cab, it was red as blood. To get at the engine, you had to
lift out two steel panels, one on either side. The radiator was
as high as a grown man's chest. It was an ugly, monstrous thing.
McCutcheon's truck broke down and was
repaired, broke down again and was repaired again.
When the Cresswell finally gave up, it gave up in spectacular
fashion. It went like the wonderful one-hoss shay in the Holmes
poem.
McCutcheon and Uncle Otto were coming up
the Black Henry Road one day in 1953, and by Uncle Otto's
own admission both of them were "shithouse drunk." Uncle
Otto downshifted to first in order to get up Trinity Hill. *That*
went fine, but, drunk as he was, he never thought to shift up
again coming down the far side. The Cresswell's tired old
engine overheated. Neither Uncle Otto nor McCutcheon saw
the needle go over the red mark by the letter H on the right
side of the dial. At the bottom of the hill, there was an
explosion that blew the engine-compartment's folding
sides out like red dragon's wings. The radiator cap rocketed
into the summer sky. Steam plumed up like Old Faithful. Oil
went in a gusher, drenching the windshield. Uncle Otto
cramped down on the brake pedal but the Cresswell had
developed a bad habit of shooting brake fluid over the last
year or so and the pedal just sank to the mat. He couldn't see
where he was driving and he ran off the road, first into a ditch
and then out of it. If the Cresswell had stalled, all still might
have been well. But the engine continued to run and it blew
first one piston and then two more, like firecrackers on the
Fourth of July. One of them, Uncle Otto said, zinged right
through his door, which had flopped open. The hole was big
enough to put a fist through. They came to rest in a field full
of August goldenrod. They would have had a fine view of the
White Mountains if the windshield hadn't been covered with
Diamond Gem Oil.
That was the last roundup for McCutcheon's
Cresswell; it never moved from that field again. Not that
there was any squawk from the landlord; the two of them
owned it, of course. Considerably sobered by the experience,
the two men got out to examine the damage. Neither was a
mechanic, but you didn't have to be to see that the wound was
mortal. Uncle Otto was stricken - or so he told my father -
and offered to pay for the truck. George McCutcheon told him
not to be a fool. McCutcheon was, in fact, in a kind of ecstasy.
He had taken one look at the field, at the view of the mountains,
and had decided this was the place where he would build his
retirement home. He told Uncle Otto just that, in tones one
usually saves for a religious conversion. They walked back to
the road together and hooked a ride into Castle Rock with the
Cushman Bakery truck, which happened to be passing. McCutcheon
told my father that it had been God's hand at work - he had been
looking for just the perfect place, and there it had been all the
time, in that field they passed three and four times a week,
with never a spared glance. The hand of God, he reiterated,
never knowing that he would die in that field two years later,
crushed under the front end of his own truck - the truck which
became Uncle Otto's truck when he died.
McCutcheon had Billy Dodd hook his wrecker up
to the Cresswell and drag it around so it faced the road.
So he could look at it, he said, every time he went by, and
know that when Dodd hooked up to it again and dragged it away
for good, it would be so that the construction men could come
and dig him a cellar-hole. He was something of a sentimentalist,
but he was not a man to let sentiment stand in the way of
making a dollar. When a pulper named Baker came by a year later
and offered to buy the Cresswell's wheels, tires and all, because
they were the right size to fit his rig, McCutcheon took the man's
twenty dollars like a flash. This was a man, remember, who was
then worth a million dollars. He also told Baker to block the truck
up aright smart. He said he didn't want to go past it and see it
sitting in the field hip-deep in hay and timothy and goldenrod,
like some old derelict. Baker did it. A year later the Cresswell
rolled off the blocks and crushed McCutcheon to death. The
old-timers told the story with relish, always ending by saying
that they hoped old Georgie McCutcheon had enjoyed the twenty
dollars he got for those wheels.
I grew up in Castle Rock. By the time I was born
my father had worked for Schenck and McCutcheon almost
ten years, and the truck, which had become Uncle Otto's along
with everything else McCutcheon owned, was a landmark in my
life. My mother shopped at Warren's in Bridgton, and the Black
Henry Road was the way you got there. So every time we went,
there was the truck, standing in that field with the White
Mountains behind it. It was no longer blocked up - Uncle Otto said
that one accident was enough - but just the thought of what had
happened was enough to give a small boy in knee-pants a shiver.
It was there in the summer; in the fall with oak
and elm trees blazing on the three edges of the field like
torches; in the winter with drifts sometimes all the way up
and over its bug-eyed headlights, so that it looked like a
mastodon struggling in white quicksand; in the spring, when
the field was a quagmire of March-mud and you wondered that
it just didn't sink into the earth. If not for the underlying
backbone of good Maine rock, it might well have done just that.
Through all the seasons and years, it was there.
I was even in it, once. My father pulled over
to the side of the road one day when we were on our
way to the Fryeburg Fair, took me by the hand and led me
out to the field. That would have been 1960 or 1961, I suppose.
I was frightened of the truck. I had heard the stories of how
it had slithered forward and crushed my uncle's partner. I had
heard these tales in the barbershop, sitting quiet as a mouse
behind a _Life_ magazine I couldn't read, listening to the men
talk about how he had been crushed, and about how they hoped
old Georgie had enjoyed his twenty dollars for those wheels.
One of them - it might have been Billy Dodd, crazy Frank's
father - said McCutcheon had looked like "a pumpkin that got
squot by a tractor wheel." That haunted my thoughts for
months . . . but my father, of course, had no idea of that.
My father just thought I might like to sit in
the cab of that old truck; he had seen the way I looked
at it every time we passed, mistaking my dread for admiration,
I suppose.
I remember the goldenrod, its bright yellow
dulled by the October chill. I remember the gray taste
of the air, a little bitter, a little sharp, and the silvery look
of the dead grass. I remember the *whisssht-whissht* of our
footfalls. But what I remember best is the truck looming up,
getting bigger and bigger - the toothy snarl of its radiator,
the bloody red of its paint, the bleary gaze of the windshield.
I remember fear sweeping over me in a wave colder and grayer
than the taste of the air as my father put his hands in my
armpits and lifted me into the cab, saying, "Drive her to
Portland, Quentin . . . go to her!" I remember the air sweeping
past my face as I went up and up, and then its clean taste was
replaced by the smells of ancient Diamond Gem Oil, cracked
leather, mouse-droppings, and . . . I swear it . . . blood. I
remember trying not to cry as my father stood grinning up at
me, convinced he was giving me one hell of a thrill (and so he
was, but not the way he thought). It came to me with perfect
certainty that he would walk away then, or at least turn his back,
and that the truck would just eat me - eat me alive. And what it
spat out would look chewed and broken and . . . and sort of
exploded. Like a pumpkin that got squot by a tractor wheel.
I began to cry and my father, who was the best
of men, took me down and soothed me and carried me back to
the car.
He carried me up in his arms, over his shoulder,
and I looked at the receding truck, standing there in the field,
its huge radiator looming, the dark round hole where the crank
was supposed to go looking like a horridly misplaced eye socket,
and I wanted to tell him I had smelled blood, and that's why I had
cried. I couldn't think of a way to do it. I suppose he wouldn't have
believed me anyway.
As a five-year-old who still believed in Santy
Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Allamagoosalum, I also
believed that the bad, scary feelings which swamped me when
my father boosted me into the cab of the truck *came* from the
truck. It took twenty-two years for me to decide it wasn't the
Cresswell that had murdered George McCutcheon; my Uncle Otto
had done that.
The Cresswell was a landmark in my life, but
it belonged to the whole area's consciousness, as well.
If you were giving someone directions on how to get from
Bridgton to Castle Rock, you told them they'd know they were
going right if they saw a big old red truck sitting off to the left
in a hayfield three miles or so after the turn from 11. You often
saw tourists parked on the soft shoulder (and sometimes they
got stuck there, which was always good for a laugh), taking
pictures of the White Mountains with Uncle Otto's truck in the
foreground for picturesque perspective - for a long time my
father called the Cresswell "the Trinity Hill Memorial Tourist
Truck," but after a while he stopped. By then Uncle Otto's
obsession with it had gotten too strong for it to be funny.
So much for the provenance. Now for the secret.
That he killed McCutcheon is the one thing of
which I am absolutely sure. "Squot him like a pumpkin," the
barbershop sages said. One of them added: "I bet he was down
in front o' that truck, prayin like one o' them greaseball Ay-rabs
prayin to Arlah. I can just pitcher him that way. They was tetched,
y'know, t'both of them. Just lookit the way Otto Schenck ended up,
if you don't believe me. Right across the road in that little house
he thought the town was gonna take for a school, and just as crazy
as a shithouse rat."
This was greeted with nods and wise looks,
because by *then* they thought Uncle Otto was odd,
all right - oh, ayuh! - but there wasn't a one of the barbershop
sages who considered that image - McCutcheon down on his knees
in front of the truck "like one o' them greaseball Ay-rabs prayin
to Arlah" - suspicious as well as eccentric.
Gossip is always a hot item in a small town;
people are condemned as thieves, adulterers, poachers,
and cheats on the flimsiest evidence and the wildest deductions.
Often, I think, the talk gets started out of no more than boredom.
I think what keeps this from being actually nasty - which is how
most novelists have depicted small towns, from Nathaniel
Hawthorne to Grace Metalious - is that most party-line,
grocery-store, and barbershop gossip is oddly naive - it is as if
these people expect meanness and shallowness, will even invent
it if it is not there, but that real and conscious evil may be
beyond their conception, even when it floats right before their
faces like a magic carpet from one o' those greaseball Ay-rab
fairy tales.
How do I know he did it? you ask. Simply because
he was with McCutcheon that day? No. Because of the truck. The
Cresswell. When his obsession began to overtake him, he went
to live across from it in that tiny house . . . even though, in the
last few years of his life, he was deathly afraid of the truck
beached across the road.
I think Uncle Otto got McCutcheon out into the
field where the Cresswell was blocked up by getting McCutcheon
to talk about his house plans. McCutcheon was always eager to
talk about his house and his approaching retirement. The partners
had been made a good offer by a much larger company - I won't
mention the name, but if I did you would know it - and McCutcheon
wanted to take it. Uncle Otto didn't. There had been a quiet
struggle going on between them over the offer since the spring. I
think that disagreement was the reason Uncle Otto decided to get
rid of his partner.
I think that my uncle might have prepared for
the moment by doing two things: first, undermining the
blocks holding the truck up, and second, planting something on
the ground or perhaps in it, directly in front of the truck, where
McCutcheon would see it.
What sort of thing? I don't know. Something
bright. A diamond? Nothing more than a chunk of broken
glass? It doesn't matter. It winks and flashes in the sun. Maybe
McCutcheon sees it. If not, you can be sure Uncle Otto points it
out. *What's that?* he asks, pointing. *Dunno*, McCutcheon says,
and hurries over to take a look-see.
McCutcheon falls on his knees in front of
the Cresswell, just like one o' them greaseball Ay-rabs
prayin to Arlah, trying to work the object out of the ground,
while my uncle strolls casually around to the back of the truck.
One good shove and down it came, crushing McCutcheon flat.
Squotting him like a pumpkin.
I suspect there may have been too much pirate
in him to have died easily. In my imagination I see him
lying pinned beneath the Cresswell's tilted snout, blood
streaming from his nose and mouth and ears, his face
paper-white, his eyes dark, pleading with my uncle to get help,
to get help fast. Pleading . . . then begging . . . and finally
cursing my uncle, promising him he would get him, kill him,
finish him . . . and my uncle standing there, watching, hands in
his pockets, until it was over.
It wasn't long after McCutcheon's death that
my uncle began to do things that were first described
by the barbershop sages as odd . . . then as queer . . . then as
"damn peculiar." The things which finally caused him to be
deemed, in the pungent barbershop argot, "as crazy as a
shithouse rat" came in the fullness of time - but there
seemed little doubt in anyone's mind that his peculiarities
began right around the time George McCutcheon died.
In 1965, Uncle Otto had a small one-room
house built across from the truck. There was a lot of
talk about what old Otto Schenck might be up to out there
on the Black Henry by Trinity Hill, but the surprise was total
when Uncle Otto finished the little building off by having
Chuckie Barger slap on a coat of bright red paint and then
announcing it was a gift to the town - a fine new schoolhouse,
he said, and all he asked was that they name it after his late
partner.
Castle Rock's selectmen were flabbergasted.
So was everyone else. Most everyone in the Rock had gone
to such a one-room school (or thought they had, which comes
down to almost the same thing). But all of the one-room
schools were gone from Castle Rock by 1965. The very last of
them, the Castle Ridge School, had closed the year before. It's
now Steve's Pizzaville out on Route 117. By then the town had a
glass-and-cinderblock grammar school on the far side of the
common and a fine new high school on Carbine Street. As a
result of his eccentric offer, Uncle Otto made it all the way
from "odd" to "damn peculiar" in one jump.
The selectmen sent him a letter (not one of
them quite dared to go see him in person) thanking him kindly,
and hoping he would remember the town in the future, but
declining the little schoolhouse on the grounds that the
educational needs of the town's children were already well
provided for. Uncle Otto flew into a towering rage. Remember
the town in the future? he stormed to my father. He would
remember them, all right, but not the way they wanted. *He*
hadn't fallen off a hay truck yesterday. *He* knew a hawk
from a handsaw. And if they wanted to get into a pissing
contest with him, he said, they were going to find he could
piss like a polecat that had just drunk a keg of beer.
"So what now?" my father asked him. They
were sitting at the kitchen table in our house. My mother
had taken her sewing upstairs. She said she didn't like Uncle
Otto; she said he smelled like a man who took a bath once a
month, whether he needed one or not - "and him a rich man,"
she would always add with a sniff. I think his smell really
did offend her but I also think she was frightened of him. By
1965, Uncle Otto had begun to *look* damn peculiar as well as
act that way. He went around dressed in green workman's pants
held up by suspenders, a thermal underwear shirt, and big
yellow workshoes. His eyes had begun to roll in strange
directions as he spoke.
"Huh?"
"What are you going to do with the place now?"
"Live in the son of a bitch," Uncle Otto snapped,
and that's what he did.
The story of his later years doesn't need much
telling. He suffered the dreary sort of madness that one
often sees written up in cheap tabloid newspapers. _Millionaire
Dies of Malnutrition in Tenement Apartment_. _Bag Lady Was
Rich, Bank Records Reveal_. _Forgotten Bank Tycoon Dies in
Seclusion_.
He moved into the little red house - in later
years it faded to a dull, washed-out pink - the very next week.
Nothing my father said could talk him out of it. A year afterward,
he sold the business I believe he had murdered to keep. His
eccentricities had multiplied, but his business sense had not
deserted him, and he realized a handsome profit - *staggering*
might actually be a better word.
So there was my Uncle Otto, worth perhaps
as much as seven millions of dollars, living in that tiny
little house on the Black Henry Road. His town house was
locked up and shuttered. He had by then progressed beyond
"damned peculiar" to "crazy as a shithouse rat." The next
progression is expressed in a flatter, less colorful, but
more ominous phrase: "dangerous, maybe." That one is often
followed by committal.
In his own way, Uncle Otto became as much
a fixture as the truck across the road, although I doubt
if any tourists ever wanted to take *his* picture. He had grown
a beard, which came more yellow than white, as if infected by
the nicotine of his cigarettes. He had gotten very fat. His jowls
sagged down into wrinkly dewlaps creased with dirt. Folks
often saw him standing in the doorway of his peculiar little
house, just standing there motionlessly, looking out at the
road, and across it.
Looking at the truck - *his* truck.
When Uncle Otto stopped coming to town, it was
my father who made sure that he didn't starve to death. He
brought him groceries every week, and paid for them out of
his own pocket, because Uncle Otto never paid him back - never
thought of it, I suppose. Dad died two years before Uncle Otto,
whose money ended up going to the University of Maine Forestry
Department. I understand they were delighted. Considering the
amount, they should have been.
After I got my driver's license in 1972, I often
took the weekly groceries out. At first Uncle Otto regarded
me with narrow suspicion, but after a while he began to thaw.
It was three years later, in 1975, when he told me for the first
time that the truck was creeping toward the house.
I was attending the University of Maine myself
by then, but I was home for the summer and had fallen into
my old habit of taking Uncle Otto his weekly groceries. He sat
at his table, smoking, watching me put the canned goods away
and listening to me chatter. I thought he might have forgotten
who I was; sometimes he did that . . . or pretended to. And once
he had turned my blood cold by calling "That you, George?" out
the window as I walked up to the house.
On that particular day in July of 1975, he broke
into whatever trivial conversation I was making to ask
with harsh abruptness: "What do you make of yonder truck,
Quentin?"
That abruptness startled an honest answer out
of me: "I wet my pants in the cab of that truck when I was
five," I said. "I think if I got up in it now I'd wet them again."
Uncle Otto laughed long and loud. I turned and
gazed at him with wonder. I could not remember ever
hearing him laugh before. It ended in a long coughing fit that
turned his cheeks a bright red. Then he looked at me, his eyes
glittering.
"Gettin closer, Quent," he said.
"What, Uncle Otto?" I asked. I thought he had
made one of his puzzling leaps from one subject to another -
maybe he meant Christmas was getting closer, or the
Millennium, or the return of Christ the King.
"That buggardly truck," he said, looking at me in
a still, narrow, confidential way that I didn't much like.
"Gettin closer every year."
"It is?" I asked cautiously, thinking that
here was a new and particularly unpleasant idea. I glanced
out at the Cresswell, standing across the road with hay all
around it and the White Mountains behind it . . . and for one
crazy minute it actually *did* seem closer. Then I blinked
and the illusion went away. The truck was right where it had
always been, of course.
"Oh, ayuh," he said. "Gets a little closer every year."
"Gee, maybe you need glasses. I can't see any
difference at all, Uncle Otto."
"'Course you can't!" he snapped. "Can't see the
hour hand move on your wristwatch, either, can you?
Buggardly thing moves too slow to see . . . unless you watch
it all the time. Just the way I watch that truck." He winked
at me, and I shivered.
"Why would it move?" I asked.
"It wants me, that's why," he said. "Got me in
mind all the while, that truck does. One day it'll bust right
in here, and that'll be the end. It'll run me down just like it
did Mac, and that'll be the end."
This scared me quite badly - his reasonable
tone was what scared me the most, I think. And the way
the young commonly respond to fright is to crack wise or
become flippant. "Ought to move back to your house in town
if it bothers you, Uncle Otto," I said, and you never would have
known from my tone that my back was ridged with gooseflesh.
He looked at me . . . and then at the truck across
the road. "Can't, Quentin," he said. "Sometimes a man just has
to stay in one place and wait for it to come to him."
"Wait for what, Uncle Otto?" I asked, although
I thought he must mean the truck.
"Fate," he said, and winked again . . . but he looked
frightened.
My father fell ill in 1979 with the kidney disease
which seemed to be improving just days before it finally
killed him. Over a number of hospital visits in the fall of that
year, my father and I talked about Uncle Otto. My dad had some
suspicions about what might really have happened in 1955 -
mild ones that became the foundation of my more serious ones.
My father had no idea how serious or how deep Uncle Otto's
obsession with the truck had become. I did. He stood in his
doorway almost all day long, looking at it. Looking at it like a
man watching his watch to see the hour hand move.
By 1981 Uncle Otto had lost his few remaining
marbles. A poorer man would have been put away years before,
but millions in the bank can forgive a lot of craziness in a
small town - particularly if enough people think there might
be something in the crazy fellow's will for the municipality.
Even so, by 1981 people had begun talking seriously about
having Uncle Otto put away for his own good. That flat, deadly
phrase, "dangerous, maybe," had begun to supersede "crazy as a
shithouse rat." He had taken to wandering out to urinate by the
side of the road instead of walking back into the woods where
his privy was. Sometimes he shook his fist at the Cresswell
while he relieved himself, and more than one person passing in
his or her car thought Uncle Otto was shaking his fist at *them.*
The truck with the scenic White Mountains in
the background was one thing; Uncle Otto pissing by the
side of the road with his suspenders hanging down by his knees
was something else entirely. *That* was no tourist attraction.
I was by then wearing a business suit more
often than the blue jeans that had seen me through college
when I took Uncle Otto his weekly groceries - but I still took
them. I also tried to persuade him that he had to stop doing his
duty by the side of the road, at least in the summertime, when
anyone from Michigan, Missouri, or Florida who just happened
to be happening by could see him.
I never got through to him. He couldn't be
concerned with such minor things when he had the
truck to worry about. His concern with the Cresswell had
become a mania. He now claimed it was on his side of the road -
right in his yard, as a matter of fact.
"I woke up last night around three and there
it was, right outside the window, Quentin," he said. "I
seen it there, moonlight shinin off the windshield, not six
feet from where I was layin, and my heart almost stopped. It
almost *stopped*, Quentin. "
I took him outside and pointed out that the
Cresswell was right where it had always been, across
the road in the field where McCutcheon had planned to build.
It did no good.
"That's just what you *see*, boy," he said
with a wild and infinite contempt, a cigarette shaking
in one hand, his eyeballs rolling. "That's just what you *see.*"
"Uncle Otto," I said, attempting a witticism,
"what you see is what you get."
It was as if he hadn't heard.
"Bugger almost got me," he whispered. I felt
a chill. He didn't *look* crazy. Miserable, yes, and terrified,
certainly . . . but not crazy. For a moment I remembered my
father boosting me into the cab of that truck. I remembered
smelling oil and leather . . . and blood. "It almost got me," he
repeated.
And three weeks later, it did.
I was the one who found him. It was Wednesday
night, and I had gone out with two bags of groceries in the
back seat, as I did almost every Wednesday night. It was a hot,
muggy evening. Every now and then thunder rumbled distantly.
I remember feeling nervous as I rolled up the Black Henry Road
in my Pontiac, somehow sure something was going to happen,
but trying to convince myself it was just low barometric pressure.
I came around the last corner, and just as my
uncle's little house came into view, I had the oddest
hallucination - for a moment I thought that damned truck
really was in his dooryard, big and hulking with its red paint
and its rotten stake sides. I went for the brake pedal, but
before my foot ever came down on it I blinked and the illusion
was gone. But I knew that Uncle Otto was dead. No trumpets,
no flashing lights; just that simple knowledge, like knowing
where the furniture is in a familiar room.
I pulled into his dooryard in a hurry and got
out, heading for the house without bothering to get the
groceries.
The door was open - he never locked it. I asked
him about that once and he explained to me, patiently, the
way you would explain a patently obvious fact to a simpleton,
that locking the door would not keep the Cresswell out.
He was lying on his bed, which was to the left
of the one room - his kitchen area being to the right. He lay
there in his green pants and his thermal underwear shirt, his
eyes open and glassy. I don't believe he had been dead more
than two hours. There were no flies and no smell, although it
had been a brutally hot day.
"Uncle Otto?" I spoke quietly, not expecting an
answer - you don't lie on your bed with your eyes open
and bugging out like that just for the hell of it. If I felt
anything, it was relief. It was over.
"Uncle Otto?" I approached him. "Uncle - "
I stopped, seeing for the first time how
strangely misshapen his lower face looked - how swelled
and twisted. Seeing for the first time how his eyes were not
just staring but actually *glaring* from their sockets. But
they were not looking toward the doorway or at the ceiling.
They were twisted toward the little window above his bed.
_I woke up last night around three and there
it was, right outside my window, Quentin. It almost got me_.
_Squot him like a pumpkin_, I heard one of the
barbershop sages saying as I sat pretending to read a _Life_
magazine and smelling the aromas of Vitalis and Wildroot Creme
Oil.
_Almost got me, Quentin_.
There was a smell in here - not barbershop, and
not just the stink of a dirty old man.
It smelled oily, like a garage.
"Uncle Otto?" I whispered, and as I walked toward
the bed where he lay I seemed to feel myself shrinking, not
just in size but in years . . . becoming twenty again, fifteen, ten,
eight, six . . . and finally five. I saw my trembling small hand
stretch out toward his swelled face. As my hand touched him,
cupping his face, I looked up, and the window was filled with
the glaring windshield of the Cresswell - and although it was
only for a moment, I would swear on a Bible *that* was no
hallucination. The Cresswell was there, in the window, less
than six feet from me.
I had placed my fingers on one of Uncle
Otto's cheeks, my thumb on the other, wanting to
investigate that strange swelling, I suppose. When I first
saw the truck in the window, my hand tried to tighten into a
fist, forgetting that it was cupped loosely around the corpse's
lower face.
In that instant the truck disappeared from
the window like smoke - or like the ghost I suppose it was.
In the same instant I heard an awful *squirting* noise. Hot
liquid filled my hand. I looked down, feeling not just yielding
flesh and wetness but something hard and angled. I looked
down, and saw, and that was when I began to scream. Oil was
pouring out of Uncle Otto's mouth and nose. Oil was leaking
from the corners of his eyes like tears. Diamond Gem Oil -
the recycled stuff you can buy in a five-gallon plastic
container, the stuff McCutcheon had always run in the Cresswell.
But it wasn't *just* oil; there was something
sticking out of his mouth.
I kept screaming but for a while I was unable
to move, unable to take my oily hand from his face, unable
to take my eyes from that big greasy thing sticking out of his
mouth - the thing that had so distorted the shape of his face.
At last my paralysis broke and I fled from the
house, still screaming. I ran across the dooryard to my
Pontiac, flung myself in, and screamed out of there. The
groceries meant for Uncle Otto tumbled off the back seat and
onto the floor. The eggs broke.
It was something of a wonder that I didn't kill
myself in the first two miles - I looked down at the
speedometer and saw I was doing better than seventy. I pulled
over and took deep breaths until I had myself under some kind
of control. I began to realize that I simply could not leave
Uncle Otto as I had found him; it would raise too many questions.
I would have to go back.
And, I must admit, a certain hellish curiosity had
come over me. I wish now that it hadn't, or that I had withstood
it; in fact, I wish now I had let them go ahead and ask their
questions. But I *did* go back. I stood outside his door for some
five minutes - I stood in about the same place and in much the
same position where he had stood so often and so long, looking
at that truck. I stood there and came to this conclusion: the
truck across the road had shifted position, ever so slightly.
Then I went inside.
The first few flies were circling and buzzing
around his face. I could see oily prints on his cheeks: thumb
on his left, three fingers on his right. I looked nervously at
the window where I had seen the Cresswell looming . . . and
then I walked over to his bed. I took out my handkerchief and
wiped my fingerprints away. Then I reached forward and opened
Uncle Otto's mouth.
What fell out was a Champion spark plug - one
of the old Maxi-Duty kind, nearly as big as a circus strongman's
fist.
I took it with me. Now I wish I hadn't done that,
but of course I was in shock. It would all have been more
merciful if I didn't have the actual object here in my study
where I can look at it, or pick it up and heft it if I should want
to - the 1920's-vintage spark plug that fell out of Uncle Otto's
mouth.
If it wasn't there, if I hadn't taken it away from
his little one-room house when I fled from it the second time,
I could perhaps begin the business of persuading myself that
all of it - not just coming around the turn and seeing the
Cresswell pressed against the side of the little house like a
huge red hound, but *all* of it - was only an hallucination. But
it is there; it catches the light. It is real. It has weight. _The
truck is getting closer every year_, he said, and it seems now
that he was right . . . but even Uncle Otto had no idea how close
the Cresswell could get.
The town verdict was that Uncle Otto had
killed himself by swallowing oil, and it was a nine days'
wonder in Castle Rock. Carl Durkin, the town undertaker and
not the most closemouthed of men, said that when the docs
opened him up to do the autopsy, they found more than three
quarts of oil in him . . . and not just in his stomach, either. It
had suffused his whole system. What everyone in town wanted
to know was: what had he done with the plastic jug? For none
was ever found.
As I said, most of you reading this memoir
won't believe it . . . at least, not unless something like
it has happened to you. But the truck is still out there in its
field . . . and for whatever it is worth, it all *happened.*
"Uncle Otto's Truck" copyright © 1983 by Stephen King
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