My uncle epitomizes the freewheeling postwar American spirit. When he came of age, he rebuilt a beat-up motorcycle in my grandfather’s backyard and hit the open highway. He rode from the Midwest to the West Coast, hopped a boat to Hawaii, and spent some time living in a tree house.
In time he returned to the mainland, made his fortune, and settled down with a wife and family around him. The spiritual disease that claimed many of his generation spared him. He worked for every cent he earned, and I’ll have no man begrudge the fruits of his labor.
I heard the tale of his coming-of-age journey to paradise many times. Only the last time did he disclose a dark turn taken along the way.
My uncle arrived in Los Angeles in the late 60s. Soon after he rolled into town, he did a stint working odd jobs to pay for passage to the islands.
Covering room and board while trying to sock away enough money for a ticket proved difficult, so it came as a relief when a local contractor hired him on for a relatively lucrative one-time piece of work.
My uncle was told to show up at a certain downtown address at a certain time. There he’d be filled in on the details.
Arriving at the specified time and place, he found that the site was a rather nondescript boxy building much like the others on the block, most of which dated back to the 20s. All signage had been stripped from the outside.
The contractor met my uncle in the alley out back and explained the nature of the work. The client wanted the building, which he’d recently purchased, totally gutted. No trace was to be left of the business that had formerly occupied the property. My uncle was to strip the basement down to the bare walls and floor, including tossing out a bunch of stuff the previous own had left behind. He’d get his pay when he was done.
My uncle headed down to the basement, crowbar in hand, sure he had it made. The pay on offer for such straightforward work promised to make this job well worth his time. As he descended the creaking steps into a basement redolent of mildew, he banished the gloom by imagining the tropical beach where he’d soon be resting from his labors.
The stairs led down to a narrow hallway. An open doorway gave on a large, long room beyond. The only light seeped in through narrow basement windows, but my uncle could make out some junk clustered throughout the room, including a few long boxes set against the white-paneled walls.
He stepped from the last stair and into the hall. It was the last forward step he’d take on that excursion.
Not because he saw or heard something that made him turn back. My uncle remained fully intent on reporting to his work site and doing his job.
He simply couldn’t.
Some invisible, irresistible force kept my uncle from taking another step down that hallway. He described the feeling as trying to walk through a vertical wall of sand.
My uncle returned upstairs and tried to make sense of what he’d experienced. In the final analysis, he decided he had a job of work to do that needed doing.
He marched back downstairs. Again the phantom force stopped him. More annoyed than afraid, my uncle–a lapsed cradle Catholic–invoked the intercession of higher powers.
And went lurching forward as if a rope tethering him to the stairs had been cut.
The unseen obstacle–whatever it was–removed, my uncle set to work. He finished the job set out for him and presented himself to his employer.
The contractor looked impressed as his bent fingers counted out my uncle’s pay. Neither of the two previous men he’d hired to clear out the basement had lasted an hour. Both had quit with hardly a word and fled the property as if chased by wild dogs.
My uncle mentioned the difficulty he’d had at the start and reported the constant feeling of being watched, but otherwise, he said, things had gone smoothly.
The contractor took my uncle aside, swore him to secrecy, and confided what he didn’t dare tell the other men working on site.
The old building had been a mortuary notorious for its owners’ less-than-ethical practices. Those shady owners had finally been forced to close up shop following scandalous goings-on that had been hushed up at considerable expense.
That basement room guarded by the unseen force had been a private viewing room reserved for funerals involving closed caskets, corpses produced under questionable circumstances whose families wanted no-questions-asked services, and mourners with reason to hide the proceedings from the press.
“Well,” my uncle said, “that explains all the coffins I hauled out of there.”
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