Ford Knows What’s What
A special mention of a good friend and Substack fellow
and his reworking of the first short story he ever wrote—“And it was lost”—his unique alchemy of creeping horror and visceral detail working its magic. Check out the first three parts, starting with “The object inside.”
CURRENTLY READING:
’s Hype Yourself: A no-nonsense PR toolkit for small businesses - Lucy is my newest Substack crush, I just love her energy and all the great PR ideas on her Substack , so I snapped up her book for even more. Here’s a profile of Lucy by Liam Curley.
Start at the beginning:
We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01
Pump House
♣ ♣ ♣ 17 ♣ ♣ ♣
My parents were big drinkers so they never missed the stray bottles I pinched from their liquor cabinet, or from the cases of wine they’d haul back from one of their many Napa Valley wine tasting tours. They formed a couples’ darts league that usually met at our house, and my dad frequently hosted poker nights with the boys, so bottles of everything were always showing up, opened and then forgotten. One time I found three different open bottles of Smirnoff.
Dad and one of his buddies constructed a bar out of plywood and two-by-fours, and upholstered it in the same carpet we had on the floors from some leftover pieces. It was kooky as fuck, but when Mom sent out invitations for their parties—her notecards printed with “Have a Drink with Dick & Noreen”—there were always a lot of enthusiastic RSVPs.
They even bought a disco ball for the living room, and a fog machine that Dad loved to set up under one of the armchairs to scare the shit out of some unsuspecting wife or other who was just relaxing until this contraption suddenly started hissing out smoke from between her legs, his version of a fart cushion.
“Whoopie!” he’d yell. It was a big hit.
Thanksgiving vacation junior year at Wolcott, I grabbed a bottle of wine for a post-holiday party of our own, me and Lamb out on my balcony after lights out the first night back. He had brought some beer, and we were out there around eleven o’clock, smoking in the dark, waiting for our friend Adam to sneak up from downstairs after the house master checked all the rooms to make sure everyone was where they should be. Mr. Barth had already checked our rooms upstairs, so Lamb climbed around the screen dividing the balconies to come over to mine—we were right next door to each that year, convenient.
I remember I had just cracked open my bottle. “Ahh! Screw caps!” I said, which made us both giggle a little too much. I took a big slug, we passed it back and forth, and I was sitting there in my director’s chair with the bottle on my knee, smoking my cigarette, when the door to my room opened. The air current from the room door pushed the unlocked balcony door open a crack, and I said “Finally” to Adam as the curtains started rustling.
But it wasn’t Adam who emerged—it was Mr. Barth! My heart almost stopped.
Mr. Barth was a young guy, an alumnus of Wolcott who came back to teach after college—too goody-goody for my taste with his Bible study group. He was my faculty advisor the year before but I switched to Mr. Maxwell the music teacher as soon as I could.
There he was, standing in my doorway, and me frozen with a bottle of wine on my lap and a cigarette in my hand. Lamb quickly ditched his cigarette off the balcony, but I was skewered—no getting around it. Barth was actually smiling, like he was happy to have caught me.
“Put it out,” he said, and I dropped my ciggie into the Coke can I was using as an ashtray and swirled it around until it hissed in the liquid (it was pretty full of butts already, but he didn’t investigate it further.)
“Give me the pack.” I calmly set the bottle of wine down on the floor by my chair, handed him the pack of cigarettes, saying absolutely nothing but waiting for all hell to break loose. “What is this, the third time?” he asked, meaning me getting caught smoking. It was the fourth, actually, but I just nodded. Besides the drinking and the smoking, one of the only things my brother ever taught me was: “Do not volunteer information.”
“We’ll talk in the morning. Get back to your room, Broeder,” he said to Lamb, who booked it back over the balcony into his room. And then, without another word, Mr. Barth left.
Whoa. I couldn’t believe that in his excitement over catching me smoking, he had completely missed the open bottle of wine sitting on my lap. Forever after Barth would always give me this sly look like “What are you up to?” whenever I’d see him around campus, and I couldn’t help but laugh about what a goob he was.
Of course, an hour later, we were back out on the balcony finishing off that bottle, the six-pack Lamb had brought, and smoking most of the pack that Lamb still had. Epic night.
Two month’s detention. Basically, I couldn’t leave campus for two months, no trips into town, no weekends at home, and work duty every Saturday after classes for three hours. Lamb only got a month for being out of his room after hours. Barth himself admitted the next day he should have smelled his breath because Lamb was also caught smoking with me two of the three previous times. Thank God he didn’t or he would have smelled the wine we both swigged.
Anyway, work duty was over at the far side of campus clearing brush on the slopes of the canyon above the fire road, and around the pump house at the edge of the hill. This squat outbuilding housed the old industrial-sized pump and pipes which fed the reservoir and the avocado orchards further out on the Wolcott Ranch, and also a series of fire hydrants dotted around campus. Wildfires were always a threat, and we were tasked with clearing out the scrub and grasses so the pumphouse wouldn’t go up in flames and knock out the water supply for the fire department if they needed it.
It was way on the other side of the soccer field and we could see anyone coming a mile away, so we took a lot of cigarette breaks out there too. Mr. Barth would usually come out at the beginning to check on our progress, and we had to check in with him when we finished. The great thing was that there was all this wild white sage growing everywhere among the scrub, and its minty-woodsy smelling oil got all over our skin and clothes as we were working so he could never smell the cigarettes when we came back at the end—plus we hid a bottle of Scope out there.
“This is actually pretty cool,” Lamb said on the second or third Saturday we were working. We were taking a break, it was warm for December and I remember we were still in shorts and flipflops, pretty much the school uniform even in class until after Christmas break and the couple of cool, rainy months over the winter. We would end up sneaking out to the pump house frequently for the rest of that year and next, until Lamb had his breakdown and left early senior year.
That day, he was straddling this stone wall attached to the pump house, and I was balanced on the iron railing that ran along the edge of the hill and the sheer, rocky cliff below.
“Yeah, peaceful,” I replied. “Are you going to keep coming out after your detention is up?” I had a month more than him, and I wasn’t looking forward to spending it alone. “I’ll bring Oreos.” He chuckled and nodded, although I knew he would have come out anyway even if I didn’t bribe him with cookies.
We lit another cigarette, and launched into one of our favorite games, coming up with names of a nightclub that we decided we’d open after we got out of college—not sure where, probably L.A. because we didn’t know yet that we’d both end up in the Bay Area.
“Violent Void,” I said, imagining a dim, strobe-lit space painted black with chain-link fence to create different areas and rooms.
“Yes!” Lamb said, “That would be cool. How about Brennavaccaro—?” He ran it all together fast, this name that sounded funny but I didn’t quite catch it.
“What’s that, Dutch?” I said, but he shook his head.
“No, that actress, Brenda Vaccaro—I like her name.” It just so happened we had watched Zorro, The Gay Blade with my parents on a long weekend to my house recently so I knew who he was talking about. Dick and Noreen thought it was a fucking hoot, George Hamilton as “Bunny Wigglesworth” this flamer with a whip screaming and laughing while he’s dealing out vigilante justice.
(“He makes a convincing … fruit,” my mom had said, with her familiar whisper-wince like she was embarrassed to even say it, like “they” might be lurking behind the sectional and take offense.)
The actress was funny, but I curled my lip. “I don’t know about that—maybe just Vaccaro, that’s kinda cool—or Wigglesworth.”
“Wigglesworth!” Lamb liked that one, nodding enthusiastically.
I was just at that moment lighting a new cigarette off my old one, perched on top of the railing, when a thought jolted me—it was staring us in the face.
“Pump House!” I cried out, and choked on the smoke I had inhaled.
I guess I didn’t really have my foot hooked around the spoke of the railing, just the end of my flip flop and my toes, because right as I yelled and choked, all of a sudden my foot didn’t have hold of anything and I lost my balance.
Everything tilted, I went over backwards and slid off the railing.
All that life flashing in front of your eyes stuff? Bullshit. When you’re flipping over the railing at the top of a hundred foot cliff, your only thought is, “My cigarette!” Stupid, but that’s what ran through my head.
My legs caught the top of the railing behind my knees so there was a second when I could have probably stopped myself, but it took me another second to consciously drop my ciggie to save myself. It would have been too late.
I’ve never seen Lamb move so fast as that day he saved my life.
He jumped up, tripped, skinned his knee, but managed to grab hold of my legs in his arms and held on for dear life—mine!
Not kidding, I would have been split open like a melon on the boulders at the bottom of that fall, or skewered on the giant aloe plants growing all around them.
I wriggled around to get a good grip and pull myself back up, panting with adrenaline and relief. “Pump House,” I said, clinging to the railing. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me, and I didn’t want to forget it. So dumb.
“Pump House,” he whispered, and we both dissolved in hysterical laughter at I’m not sure what exactly.
This was a great shift in the story line.
So enjoy this story, Troy! I like the more relaxed tone in this one (not to take away from last couple weeks, just a nice contrast). Sorry took me ages to catch up.