Vampires - Part IV
In the three years I lived in my Cambridge apartment, I don’t think I ever lost my fascination with the Hogans who lived directly across from me. The only time they ever seemed to leave their house was at night; during the day, the house was silent, unreadable.
THIS IS PART 4 of a FOUR-PART STORY
Image: Thom Masat
We pulled down the blinds and stopped watching. The house across the street had grown preternaturally quiet, no lights shining from within. The people who lived there would forever remain a mystery. Perhaps they had once been a functional family, but the father’s alcoholism had destroyed them. I don’t know what he had done for a living before he succumbed to drink. The mother, Eileen, was said to have once been a fine, educated lady. That was hard to believe, looking at her coarse, shapeless face, her matted grey hair and shambling body. My friend Jane and I were always talking about the Hogans in French, thinking we were hot shit as we sang out childish phrases that, to us, described the strange, freaky family to a T. What we didn’t know was that Eileen had been brought up by a French Canadian mother and understood every word we said. Despite our meanness, she held her head up high and was pleasant whenever she saw us on the street. What had happened to make her decline so badly? Perhaps at one time years ago, Joe had been a handsome catch with a house he owned and a future in front of him. Alcoholism, that sly killer of a disease, would have dragged him and the entire family down.
Now there was always trouble, the truant officer at their door because of the kids not going to school, creditors showing up, furious because of unpaid bills.
For some reason, the Hogans chose to be nocturnal, leaving their house on mysterious errands only after midnight, the light of day something to be feared and avoided.
I explained all this to Sander, who would have liked to march across the street and explore the Hogan’s house firsthand. Instead he offered to walk my dog, a sweet terrier mix my daughter and I had rescued from the pound. Once he was down in the street, he turned on his flashlight and casually crossed to the other side where he peered into the Hogans’ front yard. There, he told me later, lay Joe Hogan, flat on his back and sleeping soundly as a baby. He had the look of someone who slept comfortably outdoors every night, and perhaps that was so, perhaps Eileen grew so sick of him that she tossed him out on a regular basis and the front yard, which was really no more than a patch of dirt, became his bedroom.
And here’s the weird thing. Sander went out to walk the dog the following night at about the same time. There were no theatrics that second night, no yelled curses or slamming doors, but when Sander pointed his flashlight into the Hogan’s yard, what did he see but big Joe Hogan fast asleep, arms curled back beneath his head, mouth open as he snored up at the stars. This, we figured, was perhaps a regular thing -- the dad getting soused and difficult, the mom insisting he sleep outdoors. Whatever it was, these people were vampires, creeping out at night to feed off the goodies that offered themselves up in bins and dumpsters and garbage pails and unlocked cars all over town. To me, as I watched from the window, their eyes seemed to glow red in the dark.