A man stands on a milk crate. He raises his arms to the sky and talks about damnation, hellish torment, the doom of the world. This is Lump. So named because of the warts that cover every inch of him. Even his tongue—she has noticed—carries a gray jewel of flesh at the tip. He wears layers of black, sweatshirts and jeans and jackets that have been scissored and torn and resewn in such a way that they appear like one ragged complicated cloak. The crows keep him company. One perches on his shoulder now—two others rest on a nearby sill. She once saw him on a park bench surrounded by twenty or more. They are his eyes, he says. Like spores he hurls to the wind to know the news of the city. She has used Lump as a source more than once. The street sometimes knows things before the rest of us.
The sidewalks are wet, the same dark gray as the buildings and the clouds above, the gray of Portland, its defining color. The sun tries to bully through but can’t manage more than a white splotch. This is early afternoon, and with the noon rush over, only a few people scatter the streets. A woman in low-slung jeans and knee-high leather boots walks a tiny dog. Two androgynous hipsters—one with blue hair, the other cardinal red, both of them skinny-jeaned and nose-ringed—lean into each other for a kiss. She spots a homeless teen—you can always recognize them, no matter their clothes, by their soiled backpacks—and a man in a black fleece talking excitedly into his Bluetooth headset. A bus knocks through puddles. Pigeons explode from a maple stripped of leaves. She heads to the north end of the Pearl between the Fremont Bridge and the Broadway Bridge, and finds a parking spot a block away from the Rue. Before she gets out of the Volvo, she pulls out a bottle of Adderall and strangles off the cap. She shakes out one pill. Then, after a moment’s pause, another. She drops them into the cup holder and crushes them with the butt of the bottle. She digs around on the floor for an empty fountain drink. She slides the straw from it. Bites it in half. Then uses it to snort the pills. Her eyes water and she sneezes. It would be easier to swallow them for sure, but she likes the brain-burning jolt she gets from sniffing them. She kicks open the door, checks her reflection in the side mirror, and wipes her nose before setting off. She drags her purse with her. It is fat-bottomed, made from canvas, the size of a small suitcase. She jokes that she could pull a lamp from it, a pogo stick, five dwarves, and a trampoline, like some demented Mary Poppins. Due to the shouldered weight of it, she has a habit of leaning to the left. She burrows through it now to make sure she has what she needs: pen, notebook, camera.
She can hear a MAX train rattling down a nearby street, and she can smell the mossy funk of the Willamette River, and she can see up ahead the cavernous space where the Rue once stood. She slows her pace. She wears a pair of hard-soled Keens, and they clop the pavement and make her realize how quiet the street is. In the times she visited this place before, she noticed the same, the quiet, as if some mourning shawl surrounded the block. But now it is a construction zone and ought to be filled with the steady tock of hammers, the boom of dropped pallets, the growl of backhoes and bulldozers.
A crow caws. She looks up to see five of them watching her, roosting on telephone wires, appearing against the gray sky like notes on an old piece of sheet music. She gives them a wave and wonders if they’ll pass the message along to Lump.
Now she stands before a temporary wall—made from tall sheets of plywood—that surrounds the acre lot. There is a Dumpster, two pickups, and a trailer. When she cocks an ear, faintly she hears what at first sounds like whispering. Or feathery breathing. She listens another moment and the sound clarifies into digging. The shush and clink of shovels, the heavy plop of dirt filling wheelbarrows.
When she wrote the article about the Rue—about its famous tenant, Jeremy Tusk—she rounded up some of the old neighbors, the ones who were willing to talk. They said they noticed the sounds long before they noticed the smell. The sounds of what turned out to be saws drawn along bones, cleavers severing joints. Some guessed Jeremy a hobbyist, a woodworker toying with some project. When the police kicked down his door, they found four plastic storage bins full of hydrofluoric acid with as many bodies bathing in them, dissolving slowly. More were stored in the fridge and freezer. Ten skulls grinned on the bookshelves. And a lampshade glowed on a side table and a jacket hung in the closet and curtains hung from the windows—all stitched from tanned flesh. There were designs chalked and painted on the floors and walls and ceiling. Black and red candles burned down to nubs. Gemstones, eggs, antlers, daggers. A crow mask and a deer mask and a wolf mask sitting on a shelf. He ritualized murder, communed with a darker frequency.
Lela walks the length of the barricade, past rain-smeared posters and black-and-white tangles of graffiti. Someone has spray-painted what looks like a hand, a red right hand, with fangs coming out of the palm, across the door. A padlock hangs loose on the latch. She slides the tooth of it out. She creaks open the door—with the same slowness and care that she opened the fridge in Jeremy’s apartment so long ago. It was still there, as though waiting for someone to plug it in, fill it with a gallon of milk, a bag of red apples. The interior released a smell so profoundly rotten, she felt fouled for days for having drawn it into her body.
Inside the construction site, she discovers a roughly hewn crater, several stories deep. The walls of it are cut flat and striped with concrete and stone and gravel and clay that looks like the firm red muscle of a heart. At the bottom of the pit, grayed by shadow, a dozen men lean on shovels or kneel with trowels and whisks. They are digging, unearthing, working around mounds of varying heights. An archaeological dig. This happens often. Construction begins and one of the workers discovers a shattered pot or seed cache or an atlatl dart, and a team of UO scholars drives up from Eugene to excavate.
Every mound glints with whites and yellows and browns, as if shellacked. It is then she recognizes the bones. They poke from the dirt, tangles of them, puzzles of ribs and femurs and skulls. She is looking at a graveyard, and she is looking at it now through the eye of her camera. She has drawn it from her purse, and she has thumbed the cap and twisted the focus without even thinking. It is ingrained in her, a part of her muscle memory, her constant need to document what she finds compelling.
Though it’s dark at the bottom of the pit, she turns off the flash. She doesn’t want to be noticed. Not yet. The camera clicks as she takes shot after shot, but none of the men turn toward her, focused on their task.
One of them—small, appearing almost like a child except for his old man’s face—wanders among the burial mounds. He looks so delicate and different from the other blockish men. She guesses him their supervisor. He is as bald as an infant, and what little hair he has springs in downy tufts around his ears. He says something—in a language she does not recognize, his words sharp with consonants—to one of the workers. Something reproachful that makes him hand over his trowel and step away from the mound.