FICTION

Man in the Wall

By Theodore McCombs     VOLUME 58 No. 3

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In central Denver, on Columbine Street, east of the park, a man named Boettcher has lived, or rather, stayed dead, in the basement of his daughter’s house for seven years. Maybe he deserved to die, or maybe she thought so; violence often cycles. Definitely she poisoned him, then dragged him to the basement, to the crawl space under the wooden stairs, and buried him in concrete, such that five years later, when Jake and Elaine bought the house and found a door in the basement that opened to a solid, gray wall, they figured it for a decommissioned boiler room or an old beet larder or a candle cellar—one of those baffling appendix rooms old houses accrue. The trick door spooks their son, Wyatt. He hates the basement for it, and he will grow up leery of crawl spaces, deep closets, and scuttle attics, any furtive second house within a house, with its secret, second owners.

But houses turn out their owners, inevitably.



It’s a cold, bright March on Columbine Street, and Jake, framed in his front door, greets the police on his stoop goodhumoredly enough. He is thirty-two, white, his hair is weedy from his after-run shower, he wears a red brewery T-shirt, and his gray sweatpants print faint dick-lines in his lap. He makes a big show of reading the warrant start to finish, mouth twisting ironically, as if he’s in on whatever this is that’s happening to him, his finger tracing every line, without taking in a word of it—anyway, he’s too nervous. Behind the detective, two patrol officers and a man in a neon yellow vest carry coal miners’ picks. One has a jackhammer.

They tramp downstairs to the basement, and the cops swing at the wall in the crawl space. The concrete chips off over the flooring, and Jake watches helplessly. He wonders if he’s having a kind of near-death vision. At the top of the basement stairs, Wyatt peers down. Jake clowns for him: he sticks out his tongue, crosses his eyes, and rolls a finger by his ear, Isn’t this nuts? When the jackhammer goes in, the whole world becomes noise. A thick concrete wedge dislodges and shatters over the laminate. A sewery smell rolls through the air. One of the officers whistles; the other gags.

Inside the concrete block: a man’s shoe. Then, a mummified human ankle, puckered and taffy-brown.

Jake says, “I’m calling my lawyer.”

“You’re not a suspect, Mr. Eckhardt,” the detective says. He holds his tie over his nose.

Jake clarifies, “I’m calling my divorce lawyer.”

Upstairs, his divorce lawyer: That’s insane, Jake. Jesus. Her shock comes as a relief; Jake’s rising panic is, at least, earned. Jake asks her, She’s going to fuck me with this, Elaine is, this is bad, right? And his lawyer says, Jake, it’s not good, but Jake, please, don’t make it worse.

Crime scene photography is in the basement when Jake hangs up. He sticks Wyatt in the master bedroom with a healthy snack and goes downstairs with a hammer. Everyone freaks out. Jake wants to help break up the concrete, is all. When all you have is a hammer, every desiccated human foot in your crawl space starts looking like a nail. No one likes that though. Everyone’s yelling. “I know my rights,” Jake yells back.

In the master bedroom, as the house darkens, Wyatt tucks himself into his parents’ bed. Gloom settles on the pale green walls, and he pictures a man suspended inside them, two hands reaching out to hold him. “Goodnight, Man-in-the-Wall,” Wyatt says breathily, and twists into the quilts. “Goodnight, Wyatt,” says the gloom in the plaster.



The body gets two minutes on the local news. The man in Jake’s basement is Bill Boettcher, a retired craftsman of bridles and light saddlery, and his daughter is Greta Boettcher, forty-seven, unmarried, in custody awaiting arraignment. A news van reports live outside Jake’s house; its floodlights irradiate the striped drapes. At work, when friends bring up the wall-body, Jake shakes his head bravely: “It’s like a robber broke in and trashed the place, but in the past.” Jake works in tech support, meaning his life is already full of other people’s trouble, but a man’s home is his castle; it’s what everyone else’s tragedies happen outside of.

Computers were supposed to be Jake’s side thing. He used to run marathons. He trained and even won a few races, and he figured he’d work his way up into having made a career out of it. Then, it was over. His leg deteriorated—a stress injury—a burning pain in his right hamstring that nothing, not physical therapy, not pain meds or surgery could help. He tried being stoic. He told himself failure is a teacher and a career was always a long shot. The stars align only once or twice in most lives, and he figured meeting Elaine was his big stroke of luck. Then that was over too.

At home, the police excavation continues, stuffing the rooms with a smell so putrid it makes Jake sweat. Wyatt goes around with his T-shirt pulled over his nose and a startled look on his face. Jake calls up Elaine with the vague idea of talking things out. Divorcing couples are supposed to present a joint facade of normalcy for the kids. But when Elaine answers the phone, Jake’s mind goes blank.

“Today, on the bus,” he tells her, “I saw a woman try to give the man across from her a slice of chocolate cake.” He waits for Elaine to laugh. “On the bus! Isn’t that great? It was a big slice too. She had it in a Tupperware.”

“I don’t want to talk about it without the lawyers,” Elaine says and hangs up.

There’s a way in which good limbs wear into bad ones and marriages into custody battles and pain meds into dependencies; Jake can draw it in the air. Like this: splat. So sad.

Off the clock, Jake does freelance web design. He does home repairs over craigslist. He’ll walk your dog at any hour; the app is called Leesh. He keeps three hundred dollars rolled up in a drawer. Money is tight. Kindergarten’s a racket. Divorce has eased him out of the middle class and into this new, cramped space where everyone does a little bit of everything they hate. Elaine drives a Lyft now and gets low marks for conversation.

Wyatt is his full-time job though. He came out of the womb all boy, Jake’s mother says: grabbing, gripping, and yanking on the world. Breakables wander apart in his hands, lunch pails unhook, and plates and cups just sadly, soundlessly divide. His cousin locks up her dolls when he visits. Elaine still keeps some clothes at their house, and one day, Wyatt strolls into the living room in his mother’s blouse and heels, doing a loud, unhappy impression of her Midwest accent: “Hm ooh, can I getchoo some pop? Oh, won’t you stay for a bear? Hm?” His face is pancaked in flour and his eyebrows drawn in boot black.

Jake is flat on his back on the rug, his burning leg propped on the couch. Wyatt rises over him, a clown moon. Jake shuts his eyes. “Get that crap off your face, Wy.”

Wyatt, distraught, tries harder: “Hm, won’t you stay? Won’tchoo stay-y?”



The basement stairs are webbed in KEEP OUT tape. Police boots thump through the hall all day. Elaine’s lawyer pounces on the situation. Emergency custody hearing: Wyatt is out of that house so fast, his hair is still pillow-wild.

The lawyers remind Jake and Elaine not to fight at the hand off, but they do. They’re civil until Wyatt gets inside his aunts’ place, and even that brief act is such a strain that conflict comes as a release. “Christ, Elaine, you wanted that house,” Jake shouts. They’re parked in the alley with their hazards flashing. Jake, in his blue court suit, stinks of cologne and flop sweat. Elaine asks what he’s trying to say, and what Jake is trying to say is that no one’s to blame for all the horrible things in the world, but if someone is to blame, then it’s her. “Is this what the rest of our lives is going to be?” he asks. “This?”

“I don’t know,” Elaine says, squaring her jaw, glaring. “Is it going to be?”

Okay, that. Tell them, Jake. So: a year ago, he came off his pain meds too fast, and the results were dark. Almost very dark. Jake was suicidal, is what happened. He’s better now—it was just chemical, he keeps telling her; turns out when you cold-turkey off opioids you literally want to die, that’s all. But the urge passes, for Christ’s sake. Elaine won’t accept that though. Their custody war has turned her into a law-monster and emptied both their savings.

Elaine lives with her sister and sister-in-law, Sarah and Sarah Warden, and their daughter, Mackenzie. Elaine sleeps on the living room couch, in white drifts of sheets. Mackenzie’s room has a bunk bed, which she shares resentfully with Wyatt. Neither child follows the scale of time in custody orders, so to Wyatt, the apartment is a sort of weather overhead, and to Mackenzie, he is just sometimes there in her room, humped on her top bunk, and when his bare leg dangles off the side, through the gap between the frame and mattress, she goes nuts; she goes to her mothers in tears and demands they get rid of him. The Sarahs regard her adoringly and sigh, “Now, what in the world could be so wrong?”

But now, Wyatt fascinates her. Specifically, his Man-in-the-Wall. And one body implies a cosmos of bodies, as if every building could be studded with strange men. Mackenzie leads her little cousin through the apartment, and they knock for wall-people together. They find a Wikipedia page on immurements through history: punished nuns and unlucky stonemasons and attendants buried with their khan. Mackenzie draws in crayon a house made of bodies, roofed in arms and legs, eye-walled, every truss wary with faces, and her inside it. Her figure on the page is cruder than intended, and Wyatt sees instead his father, swallowed.

Wyatt tells his mother frantically, “We have to dig Dad out of the body-house,” but Elaine, without blinking, answers, “Oh, honey, it’s no use.” Wyatt works himself into a tantrum, and Elaine plugs her ears. In the bathroom, Wyatt empties his mother’s purse over the toilet; he flushes her Imodium and eats her money.

•     •     •


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THEODORE MCCOMBS is a writer in San Diego. His debut collection Uranians won the Colorado Book Award for short fiction and was a finalist for the Octavia E. Butler Award. His short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and published in Guernica, Washington Square Review, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His essays and interviews have also appeared in Slate, The Baffler, Guernica, and Electric Literature.


VOLUME 58 No. 3