Over the Hill, Under the Hill

Cliff Aliperti

Grandma was just buried, but ninety-year-old Gramps looked so completely together while lapping up his consolatory lasagna that I could only thank goodness for the good genes.

I returned from the buffet that had mysteriously appeared in Gramps’s kitchen while we were at the graveyard and sat down in the seat left open next to my wife, Amber. My cousin, Bill, was on the other side of me.

Baked mac and cheese, some green salad slathered in vinegar, the rock-hard corner of a roast beef hoagie, and, of course, the lasagna, surprisingly wet and sloppy, the weightiness of it all threatening to soak right through my doubled-up yet still wobbly paper plate. I stabbed a forkful of lasagna as I glanced at Gramps.

“I can see why you’re all over this lasagna, Gramps,” I said through a mouthful of pasta and cheese.

“Darling, please,” said Amber. “Not with your mouth full.”

I shrugged.

“So, Gramps. You going to be able to keep on here?” Cousin Bill asked.

“I do okay, Billy,” Gramps said, a bit of sauce dribbling down his chin. “Got a pretty girl comes in to make sure I’m still alive.”

“Um, Dad,” my father said. “That was Mrs. Janice. From hospice. She came in to look after Mom. Towards the end.”

Gramps swallowed a mouthful of lasagna. “She won’t come for me?”

“No, Dad. I’m sorry.” My father took a quick sip of his soda and looked away from his father. “We can look into getting someone to check in on you though.”

“Jeez, Frankie,” Gramps said, addressing me. “I thought she’d come for my fine personality.” Gramps chuckled. “I thought I was a-courting.”

“I think you’ll do all right, Gramps,” I said, suppressing a shudder while realizing that the surely lovely Mrs. Janice had only visited Gramps while his wife of sixty-six years clung to life under the same roof. My grandmother.

After putting away that entire plate of heavy food, I excused myself from the table and went out to the backyard for a smoke.

It was late August, and it felt like it, but there had always been a chill just outside my grandparents’ back door, and unless it was twelve-noon with the sun directly overhead, a bit of darkness as well. This was because of the six-foot high concrete retaining wall immediately facing the back of their house, just enough gap for a slate walkway to pass in between. This imposing wall had somehow held a surprisingly steep hill in place in for many years, dating back to before my father had even been born. The hill extended up a couple hundred feet to another street altogether, and was all but submerged by trees, bushes, and other foliage, dotted with pinks and purples and the occasional baby blue—the only exceptions being the well-worn paths that formed a sort of crazy maze through all that jungle. I had spent a lot of time getting lost up there in my youth.

I stepped around to the side of the house and found Cousin Bill sitting at the dirt-stained plastic picnic table with the forever-filthy flaccid umbrella poking from its center. I honestly couldn’t recall any of us ever sitting at or around this table at any point in my life. Bill exhaled a cloud of smoke as I approached and sat next to him.

“You too?” he said.

“Come out the door, that damn wall is just on top of you,” I said.

“I meant the smokes,” said Bill.

I shrugged. “Had quit for a while, but you know … life,” I said. “At least we don’t need to sneak up on the hill anymore,” I said, throwing my shoulder in the obvious direction.

“God,” said Bill, taking a final drag off his smoke as he stood. “Lucky we didn’t burn the damn thing to the ground.”

Bill leaned over and rolled the head of his cigarette through a little puddle that had formed in the stippled surface of the picnic table, stuck the dampened butt in his shirt pocket, and departed without a further word. I finished my smoke in silence, flicked my own butt against the retaining wall to watch its cherry explode and cascade to the ground, and then returned inside to the dining room table.

Gramps was still eating lasagna. Old boy had an appetite. I sat back down next to my wife. Amber grabbed my hand and squeezed.

“Gramps asked if you’d come by to cut the lawn next week,” she said.

I couldn’t read Amber’s tone. Should I or shouldn’t I? How could I not?

“Sure thing, Gramps. I’ll be by a week from Saturday.”

“Billy was just mentioning the hill,” Gramps said.

“A misspent youth,” I said.

“You boys loved it up there. What’d y’all get up to?”

“Just sort of adventuring,” Bill said. “You know, we were only here so often, and there was a lot of ground to cover.”

“Or so it seemed to our smaller selves,” I said, thinking how that retaining wall had once seemed so tall. There was a time when we were both no more than half its height.

“Always amazed me,” I said. “Even just now, how damn chilly it gets out back, but always hot as hell up on the hill.”

“The hill blocks the sun from the backyard,” my father said, as though I were an idiot.

“Had its advantages in the days before we got air conditioning,” Gramps said. “Naturally cooled the entire rear end of the house.”

“Well, I guess that’s why we always went up there,” I said. ‘A summer day is really a summer day up there.”

“All those paths, but we always veered into the bush,” Billy said. “Playing ‘Nam, stuff like that.”

“‘Nam,” I said, with a chuckle. I looked to my dad. “Your generation really messed us up with all those damn movies.”

“Don’t look at me,” Dad said. “I was still a teenager when it was over.”

“Well, Oliver Stone’s generation then,” I said. “Billy, remember all the shit we used to find up that hill?”

Billy said nothing.

“Remember the stretcher?” I asked. “The hospital stretcher? Very strange.”

“Hospital’s just a little ways off,” Gramps said, as though we hadn’t all paid the occasional visit during Grandma’s sporadic stays in recent years.

“It was only part of a stretcher, right?” I asked.

Billy nodded. “All torn up,” he said. “Not much of a plaything.” At least he had answered me this time.

“Remember the skull?” I asked.

Billy sort of stiffened up.

“Oh yeah, the skull,” he said. Billy looked pained.

“That was weird,” I said. “We were always digging up there—I guess we reached an age where we had explored so much, it was time to dig down since we’d run out of land to go over.

“I don’t know the odds that we’d dig where we dug, but there it was.”

“Like I said,” Gramps said, staring daggers my way while slowly chewing his lasagna. “Hospital nearby.”

I had taken a sip of beer and it nearly shot back through my nostrils. “Hospital nearby?” I said, “What? They just went off and lost skulls?”

“It was a dog’s skull,” Billy said.

No, that wasn’t right. I remember Billy digging and yelling out that we’d found the treasure. I fell to my knees and began clawing into the soft earth with my bare hands, it’s all still very clear. Out of the ground popped a human skull.

“No,” I said. “Big piece sort of cracked out of it,” I said, mostly to myself. Billy was quiet, staring down at the tabletop.

“Yeah, Frankie. It was a dog’s skull,” Billy finally said, not even bothering to look up from the table.

“I meant it could have been a model skull,” Gramps added. “From the hospital.”

I looked at Billy, who finally glanced up in my direction. He looked scared. Terrified, even. He shifted his eyes back and forth, gesturing towards Gramps, and silently, but clearly, mouthed the word, “Stop.”

Gramps smiled at me, his chin stained red by the lasagna sauce. Then he winked.

I dropped Amber’s hand. Billy knew something. Something bad. How long had he known? Why wasn’t I ever told?

I guess my silence was contagious, because after a moment all I could hear was the tick of the big grandfather clock coming from the den.

“Frankie,” Gramps finally said. I looked up to him.

“It was a wild dog,” he said. “That skull. All foaming at the mouth. He preyed upon me, do you understand? Preyed upon your grandmother.”

*

I was back the following Saturday to cut the lawn, on my own with Gramps this time.

He still had the same old gas mower I had pushed around for him back in high school, when I alternated weekends with Cousin Billy and was paid with Grandma’s Italian meatballs and the occasional tenner.

It was hot as hell, had been all week, and I was covered with sweat by the time I had finished the front yard. I went inside to grab a beer, give a quick check on Gramps, and then came back out and sat on the moss-covered concrete steps that led up to the hill. On the lower steps, the retaining wall still offered complete shade, and the temperature dropped precipitously.

I finished half the beer and went to the shed. I came back and paused by the mower for a second. Then, instead of topping off the gas tank, I became distracted looking at those concrete steps. Hadn’t been up them in years. Decades. Looked up the hill. Decided to have a better look.

I walked every path I could recall, summer-dried dead and discarded leaves crinkling under my footsteps. The foliage was thick and overgrown, but the heat had already killed off most of the color I had noticed the afternoon of Grandma’s funeral. I made my way back and forth, ducking and swiping aside rude limbs, up, up, up to the other road at the very top, where I placed the gas can on the ground and lighted myself a cigarette.

I smoked and wondered. The neighborhood at the top of the hill was quiet. Nobody around. I startled myself when my foot clanged against the now empty gas can. I smoked and wondered which way I should flick my butt when I was finished. Down the road, or into the trail of gas that now snaked the entire hill?

I smoked and wondered if I should burn down our past.