Okay. It will be easy to judge me, I know. But I have a situation to deal with, so I have to sort out my thoughts. It all started six years ago.
We�d just bought our new house, and it was perfect. It had four big bedrooms, a rec room downstairs, and you could have placed two of the buildings my old apartment was in on the lot. Needless to say, I had visions of gardens and rosebushes dancing in my head. Getting the septic pumped seemed like a minor detail. It turned out to be the biggest of complications and the freakiest thing I�ve ever known.
The previous owners said it had been done two years ago but couldn�t produce a receipt. It was a little soon, but my husband and I agreed we should be cautious. I called the guy, and he showed up at our front door the next morning, a middle-aged man with a scruffy beard. I was home alone.
�Good morning, Ma�am. You called to have your septic pumped.�
�Yes, I think the tank is buried in back.�
�All righty. I�ll pull the truck around and have a look.�
He did. Curious about the process, I watched as he used a metal rod to locate the tank. He then dug a hole and pulled off a concrete lid.
He immediately started coughing violently, like an old smoker or asthmatic. He went about his work without seeming to recover. He hooked up his long hose and pumped out the filth. He unhooked the hose, reset the lid and refilled the hole. I met him out back with a bottle of water and his check.
�Thank you,� he said between coughs. �I don�t know what�s come over me. Maybe I�m allergic to something back here.� He looked around, with his expression a mixture of physical discomfort and incredulity. I wondered if he were thinking what I was thinking. What could possibly be in my backyard or in my tank that was different from all the others he had visited.
When he turned to look at me again was when I thought I saw something. It was something kind of hard to describe. It was just that look you sometimes see in people�s eyes, like they�re seeing what�s in front of them but so much more. I told myself it was my imagination.
I thanked him, and he thanked me again. He left, and I basically stopped thinking about it after a couple of hours. That night, his face was on the news. Evidently, he went home that afternoon and killed his family. He then went to the mall of a nearby town and opened fire on strangers until police showed up and killed him.
Okay, here�s the part where you can judge me. Cops and reporters showed up at my house, a lot at first and then less and less as time went by. I basically told them that he pumped the septic and nothing strange happened. I didn�t mention the coughing or what I saw in his eyes. I kept telling myself that these things didn�t matter anyway, that they had nothing to do with what he did later that day. I really just wanted to be left alone and to start planning my gardens and what I was going to put in the rec room and so forth.
Well, here�s my dilemma. That was six years ago, as I said. They recommend you get the septic pumped every three or four years. I keep finding excuses to put it off. My husband is about to make the call himself.
Yeah, that�s right. I never even told him. I haven�t told anybody. I just don�t want to risk what might happen to my backyard, and I don�t want the reporters coming back. It�s going to have to be opened up again, though. What am I going to do?
