Every night for three weeks we’ve been up here, on the roof of our house, our bodies embraced by harnesses we clip onto aircraft cable cinched and bracketed and screwed to each end of the ridge beam. For three weeks we’ve been up here, obliterating cedar shingles that date back to the Stone Age, replacing dry rotted rafters with new ones, removing entire sections of everything to frame a dormer and a three hundred square foot addition. And every time we’ve smelled it—the rancidness of rotting flesh.

At first, it’s faint and only an annoyance. Meat scraps in the neighbor’s garbage can, we think. But Friday rolls around and while the garbage is removed, the smell remains. We take to holding our breath when the breeze blows, working upwind of its assumed origin. But as the summer heat intensifies, the miasma tags along with it.

In passing, we’ve sniffed around, stuck our noses into the ever-growing wood debris pile consuming thirty percent or more of our backyard, and every time it smells clean. We’re too busy to go through the entire thing piece by piece. We’ve got a house to build, deadlines to meet. Fairly certain that nothing once living decided to make anything on our property its final resting place, we do our best to ignore it, thinking that eventually it will rot into nothing and go away.

When it doesn’t, Brian tells me there’s a stiff blue jay by the back fence, though he seriously doubts one decaying bird can account for all this smell. I sniff its perimeters myself, and though annoyed at its presence and concerned about West Nile virus, decide he’s right. But three days later, as we lay sheeting over our exposed roof, the stench is riper than ever. Maybe we should bury that bird, just to be safe, I say. Brian agrees it wouldn’t hurt, but by then, a cat’s chewed it to pieces and it’s nothing but feathers scattered around the backyard.

Soon, the reek becomes unbearable, gagging us to the point we can’t work. We unclip our harnesses, climb off the roof. My nose is sharper than Brian’s but for the life of me, I can’t figure out where this stench is coming from. The other day, as I sat outside, the odor raged pure and undeniable, on the opposite side of the house, so I’m no longer even sure about vicinity.

Still in our harnesses, our lanyards dangling, dragging across the construction torn yard, we stick our noses to the crawl access, under the metal wood shed. We dig around the debris pile, peeking cautiously beneath, but all we find is bare ground. At a loss, we sniff the wind, follow its trail along the wire mesh fence separating our back yard from the neighbors, where, a month ago, their son parked his 1980 something teal Mustang, which hasn’t moved since. On one tire is a spare donut. Over every other visible surface, swarms a herd of flies.

Brian and I eye each other. We eye the car and eye each other again and I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I’m having a hard time believing I’m thinking what I’m thinking, but I can’t say anything because we’re standing in front the their window, wide open to the putrid air. Their Quaker parrots, Pepsi and Pat, squeak to our silence, and rational or not, I feel the neighbors’ eyes watching me, daring me to question them about their decomposing car.

I shouldn’t be paranoid, I know. After all, these are the neighbors we visit with. They bring us Christmas cookies and feed us Easter dinner. They go to church every Sunday, probably during the week too, and though religion might not be more than a front for some people, for these two, it’s real. Besides, they’re an older couple, ready to retire to Kansas or Colorado, somewhere with less people and real snow.

Then again, this is their son’s car. Their son. The one who collects 80’s Mustangs and soops them up with stereo systems and go-fast engines. The one who likes Civil War era guns and who, according to Brian’s “mad detective skills” is the culprit behind the three BB gun holes in our upstairs windows. But he’s also the son who doesn’t like violent video games, who holds a steady job, has a home of his own.

At this point, I’m at a loss. I simply don’t know what to think or say or do. For a while, I even forget how to move. When I remember, I pull Brian around the side of the house and, in privacy, out of ear and eyeshot of our neighbors, I ask him what’s dead in their car, and what we’re going to do. Without question, we both agree that if it were anyone else, we’d call the cops and let them discover the secrets of this fly-ridden car. But it’s not anyone else. And if we called the cops, and they saw us contemplating its appearance through their back window, they’d know we called the cops. And what then?

I can only think of one thing to say: call Bruce. Bruce is Brian’s step-dad, the world’s foremost glorious generalist, otherwise known as The Man.

Bruce says call the cops, but when we tell him we consider these neighbors friends, he relents and tells us to knock on their door and ask them if something’s dead in their car. Ookaay. I picture it—the two of us, grubby and full of wood chips, tapping on their door, grinning because we don’t know what else to do, asking them how do they do before requesting them to kindly open the trunk of the Mustang parked in the back yard.

But we agree, the smell’s gotta go, and if being blunt is the only way to eliminate the odor, well, at least someone knows who to question if we suddenly disappear.

I knock on the neighbor’s door, but they’re not home. Brian says if that’s the case, he’s going to go have a look. He hops the fence and, without touching the car, peers through its windows. The back seat is down so he can see all the way through to the trunk. Which is empty. But still, there is the smell. And the flies. Brian bends down, looks under the car. Bingo. There lays a lump of dead animal something.

We both feel relieved and a bit foolish for being so suspicious and paranoid, but somewhere in the back of our minds, we’re both thinking: but you never know. Inside, I write a note to our neighbors, asking them to investigate the smell and fly situation around their car, and tape it to their front door. When they come home, they move the Mustang and discover a cat in the late stages of decay. They kindly dig a hole and bury it, and I can tell that nowhere in either of their minds did the thoughts that we entertained even occur to them. Or, if they did, they didn’t let on to us.

Filed Under: Remodel Stories |