Carl vs. The Nazis Ch.4 Damon the Evil

"Carl vs. the Nazis: Ch 2 Lost" 
Damon the Evil Caretaker

Fall was beautiful, but soon the trees were bare. It was gray, muddy and cold. The local ice cream and perogie stand closed for the season. Joe returned to New Jersey, and even the retired people migrated to Florida to kill or be killed by time. I had nothing to do with the townies at school. They left me alone, and I was grateful. Every day I walked to and from school on the muddy roads through the bare woods. Soon it grew too cold to sleep in the shed, so I had to sleep on an inflatable mattress by the rattling furnace in the cottage.
To make matters worse, Damon, Bachland’s caretaker, often harassed me when I walked home from school. I hated the guy. Even though I walked the same way home and he knew darned well who I was, he would stop his truck in front of me and blind me with his spotlight, and ask me who I was and where I was going.
One dark November afternoon he stepped out his truck to ask the same stupid questions. He patted his holster that was tucked under his half-bare, fat, hairy belly. “If you’re gonna make any trouble, we’re ready for it,” he added. He spat tobacco juice near my boots.
I lost my temper. “You know who I am! You ask me almost every night! Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“I know who you are, all right,” he said scornfully. “You know you don’t belong her with all the working people. Why don’t you and your Dad go back to Indiana where you belong, tourist boy?”
“Why don’t you go bother someone else?”
He laughed. “There isn’t anyone else.” He climbed into his truck. “See you tomorrow.”
I’d like to pretend I wasn’t afraid of Damon. I was. He had a firewood business he ran, selling the resort’s wood of course. Moving logs gave him a powerful build, with huge brown arms. He was a tall, stout man, with reddish-brown beard and a full head of hair. His entire corpulent body was hairy, giving him the appearance of a bear that the zookeepers had negligently allowed the children to feed their peanuts and cotton candy.
I hated Damon. He hated me. He hated everyone. He was a Nazi, and proud of it.
According to the old timers in Bachland, Damon didn’t start out mean. He had been a sweet little boy, although always a little slow. He was such a pretty child, with fat cheeks, blue eyes and curly hair, that his relatives fought for a chance to baby sit him. His parents were wealthy, educated people who had hopes that he would be a famous doctor, lawyer, or insurance actuary. He just wasn’t smart enough to please them, and his parents often scolded him and punished him for his poor grades. They called him lazy and stubborn, so he became lazy, stubborn and lonely.
Like lots of people, he found it was easy to get attention by swearing, insulting and bullying. It became a way of life. It became a religion. Proud of his German heritage, Damon began by collecting German coins. His parents were so encouraged by his intellectual interest, they never noticed almost all of them were minted in the Nazi era. As he grew older his collection expanded to include guns, swords, knives, bombs, red and black posters, and survival equipment.
Damon made friends with equally miserable kids and started a local chapter of Nazis. His parents were eventually unable to ignore, deny or stop his activities. Ashamed, they gave up on him, and used their influence to land him the caretaker’s job for Bachland, which he supplemented by selling copper pipes and brass doorknobs he stole from the defunct resort.
He liked to kill things. When the bats flew in clouds from the roofs of the hotels to feed on the insects over the lake, he met them with his shotgun. He had an orchard in his backyard. He let the apples fall to the ground to attract deer. He let the deer eat in peace through late summer and early fall. On the first day of hunting season, he shot them and sold the meat to gourmet restaurants and specialty shops. If he saw a snake in the lake, he insisted it was a water moccasin, although there isn’t one around for five hundred miles, and beat it to death.
I learned to avoid Damon. His was the only truck on the resort roads in the winter. When I heard it rattling down the road, I stepped into the woods to walk home. I guess he was disappointed, maybe even lonely, because he began driving back and forth shining his spotlight into the woods, vainly hoping to find me. Pitiful.
Someone more mature than I might have put up with Damon. I was going to get even, and I figured out how while I was exploring the resort’s buildings, which was my only pastime that winter.
The hotels and camps were boarded shut, but it was easy to pry open a board and pull it back over after I had entered. Walking the rooms alone was exciting. Imagine discovering a lost city that had been suddenly evacuated. The hotel was my own Titanic or Pompeii. I thought about uniformed busboys carrying piles of bags for rich ladies in fur coats, waiters bringing trays of stuffed mushrooms and scallops wrapped in bacon. How about the doormen! That was a job! Imagine getting a fist full of green just for holding a door open for someone! Don’t polite people do that for free?
My favorite room was the library. I would sit reading for hours in a rocking chair reading books by the gray light from the window on Saturdays, eating my brown bag lunch. Here and there, I was surprised to find several tables dusted, or a floor neatly swept. These spots seemed almost lived in. I knew Damon had not been tidying the hotel. He rarely cleaned himself, much less anything else.
Most mysterious of all was the courtyard of the old Manor. Surrounded by the four-story red hotel on all sides, the only way to enter it was through the building. Here used to be a gravel path, flower beds and a few fruit trees to provide flowers and shade. This was a private spot for resort guests to read, nap and feel sorry for themselves. On a warm October afternoon, I thought I would do all three.
The courtyard would be even more private, now that all the windows that had looked out on it were boarded shut. It took me quite a while to even find a way in. The doors to the yard were nailed and chained. By descending into a basement and forcing open a bulkhead, I managed to get it. Climbing up the steps, I stood shocked by the change.
Every square foot of what was a flower garden was now used to grow food. Now there were far more fruit trees, most of them small and young. Gold and red leaves clung to the branches. Apple, plum, cherry, pear and peach trees stood in stately rows. Someone had expertly pruned each tree and sealed the cuts with brown paint. Except for a few apples and plums rotting in the branches, all of the fruit had been harvested. A row of tiny, freshly planted blueberry bushes grew near the south side of the courtyard, where used to be the gravel path. A trellis supported clusters of fat grapes. Raspberry bushes filled the south corner. A tangle of pumpkin vines crowded the ground between the trees. There was even a row of cabbages, protected from the frost by cabbage frames made from the windows.
I waited in the garden a long time, sipping my birch beer, eating my tuna sandwich and contemplating the mystery. Then I carefully cleaned my mess, I went back inside the resort and rearranged the furniture. That was a fun way to scare Damon.
Damon was brave with his truck and spotlight, but he hated walking through those dark, empty corridors for his inspections. I would hide and watch his reaction as he stared at a cluster of chairs and sofas.
“I thought the love seat was on the other side of the fireplace, and how did this end table get here?” he said aloud. “This is really weird. This is Charles Manson Helter Skelter stuff! I’m getting out.”
Damon may have been on to me. Or maybe he was just being his mean, greedy self, but he did something to break my father’s heart.

"Carl vs. the Nazis Ch. 5 The Chase"