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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/throwawayaracehorse on 2024-07-01 18:48:31+00:00.
Back when my parents were trying to make it work, back when they had their weekly “meetings” to help try and get along, before the separate apartments and holidays, and well before the divorce dust had all settled, my parents sent me to stay with my grandpa for the summer.
He was a quiet man—my grandpa—and this kept me from being closer to him than I ought to have, especially since I was his only grandson. So, when I discovered I’d have to spend an extended stretch of summer with him, I was less than thrilled. Everything distills down to a single week in July. That week we were spending a lot of time in cemeteries all across northwestern Arkansas and parts of Missouri, taking winding roads through the back corners of the Ozark Mountains.
At the time with my twelve-year-old frame of reference, I thought maybe we were doing this because grandpa was close to the grave himself. Grandma had died a couple years earlier after all. But looking back and doing the math, that couldn’t have been it. He had quite a ways to go, still.
What we were doing was chasing ghosts. More or less. Remnants of ancestors. We’d pull into a graveyard in the middle of nowhere, markers a hundred years old, and he’d pull out his little notebook, thumb through the pages. Then he’d step out and with his hands on his hips give the plot of land a good looksee, really survey the place.
“That’s not it,” he’d mutter to himself, then get his bearings again.
We would crisscross the rows of graves until he found the desired headstone. Then, he’d pull out a piece of butcher paper and a disk of black rubbing wax. Using these tools, he’d make a rubbing of the grave, the imperfections and engravings etched onto the paper.
This whole journey wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. I yearned for my usual summer routine of sleepovers, swimming pools, bicycles, fireworks, and movies with friends. But I tried to be on my best behavior and act gracious, even though I was quietly going insane with boredom.
After stopping at a couple more nondescript cemeteries, we found ourselves at the end of the day. We headed back east, the blue evening and the twilight haze and the disappearing sun at our backs.
“Gonna find us a place to stop off for the night.”
It would be our fifth overnight of the trip. I had lucked out once (and only once) when we found a place with a swimming pool, but it was near the interstate. That perk seemed unlikely out here in the country, running through small towns on two-lane highways.
We pulled up to a joint called The Huckleberry Inn, a park-by-the-door motel with a couple strips of single-story rooms all in a row. It looked plenty vacant. I waited in the car while Grandpa went to the front office and paid for a room. He returned to the car with a keychain, and we crept around to our room, unloaded our luggage.
I belly flopped onto the bed. The stiff comforter felt like dead skin and the mattress was lumpy. I found the remote to the TV and flicked through some channels. I wanted to watch MTV or Nickelodeon or something, but I felt too self-conscious to watch something like that with my grandpa here. Instead, I left it on an episode of Bonanza while I took a comic book to the bathroom for a bit. After I finished, I wandered off outside to find my grandpa.
He was just standing in the parking lot, staring out into the dark and smoking a cigarette.
He heard me come up behind him, turned to me. “You get the ice?”
“Not yet,” I said.
It had become a ritual. No matter where we stopped on this trip, there was always a bucket of ice that we filled from the motel ice machines. It didn’t matter if neither of us opened the individually wrapped plastic cups and helped us to a glass of tap water on the rocks. It didn’t matter if we just had dinner and weren’t thirsty. No matter the situation, we had to fill the little plastic tub full of ice and leave it on the plastic tray atop the dresser until morning came, until it was nothing but a flimsy bag of cold water.
I headed to where the ice and vending machines were, in a little alcove between the rooms and the motel office. The Pepsi machine gave off an ethereal glow. I pressed all the buttons and checked the change slot. Such habits could yield treasures like a free soda or fifty cents, but I came up empty that night.
The ice machine whirred and groaned as I tried to get it to dispense. I bumped it with my shoulder, looked up into the little dispenser hole, even snaked my hand up there to see if I could feel the cold. Nothing. I shrugged and went back to the room with an empty bucket.
Grandpa was lying on his back with his shoes off, twitching his toes through his socks. His eyes were half-closed. I set the empty ice bucket down.
“Get ‘er filled up?” he asked.
“Nah. Machine was busted.”
He sat up with a start. “What? So, there’s no ice? Was there another machine?” He swung his legs off the bed and started lacing up his boots.
“I don’t think so.” I didn’t see what the big deal was. I’d never seen him rise above his emotionally flat baseline and here he was getting worried about ice?
“C’mon, let’s go see,” he said.
We did a perimeter sweep of the property, just a boy and his grandpa and a plastic bucket. His pace quickened the further we went. You wouldn’t say his behavior was frantic if you saw him but knowing him that was the word that came to mind. His version of frantic was anybody else’s calm mood.
At the front office, we rang the service bell, rousing the owner from some backroom. The overhead lights glinted off of her glasses as she greeted us with sleepy eyes and a tired smile.
“Excuse me. Y’all’s ice machine’s broke. You got another somewhere?”
“No, I’m sorry. Supposed to have a repairman look at it next week. But I guess that don’t help you now.” There was a sympathetic smile. Fake.
“You got anything in the back?” Grandpa asked, looking over her shoulder.
“No, unfortunately,” she said with a little frown that tried to cover up the fact that she couldn’t care less whether we had ice tonight.
“There a convenience store around here?” Grandpa’s mouth got smaller by a few millimeters.
“Up the road . . . but oh wait. What time is it? Nah, they’re closed. I’m really sorry to inconvenience you folks like this.”
Grandpa made a little clicking noise. “We’re gonna head out. Any way we can get a refund?”
“On account of the ice machine? Geez, you fellas must really like ice. I don’t know if I can do that. Did y’all step foot in the room? Lie on the beds? It’s not like there’s a sign out front that says ice guaranteed.”
“Look, we didn’t even . . . whatever. Forget it. Keep it. C’mon Daniel,” he said halfway out the door. I could only glance back at the front desk lady’s perplexed face. Grandpa was already halfway across the parking lot, marching with purpose.
“Here ya go,” I said, handing the front desk lady the plastic ice bucket.
“Look, you guys ever come back through. I promise we’ll have it fixed. We’ve been trying to get the guy in here for weeks.”
I only shrugged and jogged after Grandpa.
“Get your bag. We gotta get out of here. It’s important.”
He had already loaded his small suitcase in the trunk, and I went and grabbed mine. I had a nervous feeling in my stomach. For the life of me, I didn’t know what was going on. I had never seen him the slightest bit rattled, but there he was. Rattled.
But I had forgotten my comic in the restroom. I went back to grab it and pondered taking a leak for the road.
“Goddammit Daniel, hurry up!” Grandpa yelled from the doorway. I had never heard him curse before and he had never yelled at me, either.
My body flushed with shame and anger, and I ducked my head and sat in the front seat of the Sable, comic book in hand. He peeled out of the parking lot, and we drove off in a haste. Whatever he thought was chasing us was still out there in the night.
I didn’t talk, and he didn’t talk. Still feeling like a scolded puppy from him yelling at me, an anger simmered underneath and took over. My wounded pride took precedence over the burning questions I had. Primarily, just what in the hell was going on?
There was close to an hour of driving, the forest around us frightening and imposing in the dark, like it was something that wasn’t meant to be traversed at this hour. It triggered a primal fear. The fear was this: there were things out here that could kill you. Things that could drag you kicking and screaming out into the dark, never to be heard from again. Things that we had largely taken dominion over with guns and fire and electricity and extinction, but the fear remained.
We chanced upon a state rest stop. It was a mere pull-off parallel to the highway with a couple of 55-gallon drums and a picnic table or two. Grandpa pulled over.
“This’ll do just fine,” he said.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Pulling off for the night. You can sleep in the backseat. Could bundle up a towel for a pillow. I’ve got a blanket in the trunk.”
“But why? What was wrong with the motel?”
“They didn’t have any ice,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
He yawned like a cartoon character, stretched his arms as far as he could. “Look lil’ buddy. We better hit the hay while we can. Got a lot more miles to cover tomorrow. I’ll be fine sleeping up front.”
That was that. I sulked and curled down low in the backseat until sleep took hold.
I awoke to birdsong in the morning, shafts of s…
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