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There was a time where Jansen’s uncle was only his neighbour. He’d been his parents' neighbour really, then he was only Jansen’s. 

     ‘I almost made a friend once,’ the old man said. There were leaves falling by that time and one flittered down onto the arm of the old man’s lawn chair but he didn’t notice. The yard in front of them was coated in an orange and yellow layer, it would do to cover the mess until the snow came. Maybe they’d do something about the place in the spring. Maybe this spring was the one. 

      ‘You almost made a friend?’ Jansen said. He watched the dog walk in circles and nose through the woodpile after something that was too quick for him. 

     ‘Yeah, but I cut it off ‘fore it got that far. I wouldn’t let it get that far. People’ll get their claws in you.’

     Jansen remembered seeing the old man the odd time growing up. He had a sit-on mower that he brought down the dirt road to their place, half a mile away to tell Jansen’s father he’d heard them playing music over the fields on a friday night or he’d had to weave his truck around relatives’ cars when it was someone’s birthday. They never knew whether he was looking for an invite or a fistfight. Before they could ask him he was always chugging back up the road through the woods. Jansen remembered his father standing in their front yard one of those times. 

     ‘Yaknow. I think he’s got it in for us. He never did like us building this house.’

     ‘Why?’

     ‘Probably ruined his outlook or something,’ his mother said, shielding her eyes from the sun. She didn’t say if she meant the view from his window or his attitude to life. 

     Jansen wanted to ask him now, who’d ever had their claws in him? He’d never known his uncle to let anyone around him, claws or not. 

     His uncle sipped black coffee from a tin cup he’d welded a handle onto, while wearing oven gloves and standing on his head, by the look of it. 

     ‘You keeping alright?’ Jansen asked. ‘You ever need anything fetching from town, I can do it for you, I’m down there most days.’

    ‘I’m fine, thank you. I’m not turning a hundred forty for another two years. I still got some getting around in me.’

     ‘I wasn’t saying that-’

     ‘Don’t get upset. You just worry about you. You’ve got enough…’ His uncle trailed off. ‘I got that dog because I thought maybe he’d catch some of the rats, but nope. They don’t even know he’s chasing them. He’s eating me out of house and home though.’

     He had been the one who’d found him, his uncle. It was the lights on his truck that Jansen had seen, that he still remembered like it was a photograph. He’d stepped into the road, at 17, waving his arms above his head. It was his uncle, still just his neighbour then, who had pulled over. Jansen hadn’t needed to say anything, the car was still there, leaning to one side in the ditch. One intact headlight stretching across the field, resting on a utility pole and sending a beam of shadow across into the night.

     As his uncle closed his truck door and approached him, Jensen could still hear Witchita Lineman coming from their old car’s radio. 

     ‘Are you hurt?’ 

     ‘No, scraped up.’ Jansen tried to keep it together. For some reason right then, when it shouldn’t have, it mattered to him what this man, just their neighbour, thought of him. He cared about what kind of man he thought he was. What kind of a kid. 

     ‘Were you driving?’ 

      ‘No. Dad.’

     His neighbour stood for a second and glanced down the road, no lights for a mile back at least, you couldn’t see any further for the trees. 

     Jansen went to shimmy down the bank, to lead his neighbour to the car, but he felt a hand on his shoulder. 

     ‘I need you to stay here in case anyone else comes and flag them down, alright?’ 

     Jansen nodded, he felt his shoulder slump as something went out of him. His neighbour edged past him, and walked almost sidewards down the bank and through the low thicket, lit red like fire by the flickering rear lights. There was steam rising from the engine now, tumbling and whirling up into the night, mosquito shooting stars darting through it. 

     Jansen stood looking down the road waiting for another car that would never come. It led pretty much nowhere other than his house,  the place his parents had built themselves. The front step, made from one oddly flat stone, the hen house at the back that he had dug holes for, the fence they never finished,  the living room, bathed in blue light as some Saturday night show played. His mother’s favourite rug, his father’s legs crossed, drifting on the sofa and then saying he wasn’t tired yet. 

     It was a miracle his neighbour had come along. While Jansen stood looking into the dark he knew to expect anyone else was ridiculous. He didn’t realise until five or so years later that his neighbour never needed him to keep watch. He just didn’t want him to have to go back to that car. 

     Jansen watched him open the passenger door first, reach in, pause, wipe his forehead with the back of his arm, then cross in front of the lights, two eclipses over the field, before wrenching the drivers side door open into the dirt and doing the same on that side, as well as he could reach. 

     The single bulb above his neighbour’s kitchen table had been flickering. Jansen remembered that. He remembered that the house was so quiet he could hear his neighbour’s truck still ticking as it cooled down outside the open door. He could see nothing of the man but his shadow in the next room as he stood out of sight, mumbling into the phone. He didn’t have the dog back then but in Jansen’s memory of that night there were sacks of dog food on the kitchen floor. It was a false memory, but so much of that night had seemed like it couldn’t be true. It still did. 

     They’d waited, after that, not next to the crash, but a little ways up the road. His neighbour said he ought to turn their old car’s engine off, but Jansen asked him if he would leave it. 

     ‘I don’t want them to be in the dark,’ he said and the old man nodded. 

    ‘Alright.’

     People in uniforms asked them questions at the roadside, questions he didn’t have the answers to. They asked him his age, where he lived. The neighbour helped. They asked if he had a place to stay and Jansen panicked, he looked around in the dark for something to say. 

     ‘I’m his uncle, it’s all fine, he can stay with me awhile til family- more family show up,’ his uncle said. 

     ‘You’re his uncle?’

     The first months were hard. They were always going to be. Some days he didn’t answer the door but his new uncle didn’t press him about it. Most days Jansen would hear the sit-on mower’s engine coming closer and dying off again. He’d find things, a dozen eggs, some bread, sometimes a little money on the bench outside their front door. The same bench his mother had loved to sit on, and that he still checked sometimes on the impossible chance she would be there again. 

     When people came to talk about the house and to ask where his relatives were, Jansen said he would call them, just hang on a minute. Men in suits stood in their living room, still in their shoes on his mother’s favourite rug. They sat in his father’s seat. 

     He called the number, paid no attention to his uncle answering. Instead talking to a his parents, explaining how there were people there to ask about the house, and would they be long? 

     ‘I got it,’ he heard his uncle say and the line went dead. Jansen stayed on it for a while, talking to himself, long enough to hear the sound of his uncle’s truck pulling up. The first thing he did was order the suits out of the house. 

     He stood next to Jansen in the empty living room and said he oughta ask for help when things were coming up like that, did he not know that? There are people around that get their claws into you. Not everybody was sorry when things happen, some saw it as an opportunity. His uncle was red in the face and he couldn’t keep still. 

     ‘You did right by calling. Don’t worry about those people. I know what to do,’ he’d said. 

When he was alone in the house again and the trees outside had fallen back into darkness, Jansen turned the yard light on and sat on the bench in the cool air, breathed the smell of rotting leaves, piling in yellows and oranges. He swept them up into a pile that night, working til after midnight and when he woke in the morning the pile was half scattered over the yard again. 

     Whenever the phone rang he mostly ignored it. When people knocked the door he didn’t answer, instead he sat in the dark and waited for them to go away. Business cards got pushed through onto the mat and he put them in a pile on the kitchen table, having no idea if they were important or not. 

     His uncle would know and when he got there he’d holler as well as knocking so that Jansen always knew it was him. 

     ‘Morning. Been thinking. You keep an eye on the road when you can, if you even see any lights at all, you call me right away and I’ll come down here.’

     He had started to believe they would never be back, that his uncle had cast them off for good. He’d started to realise that maybe he was going to have to find the other side of this whole thing and continue on into some kind of life. The idea of that was enough to weigh him down so he almost had to crawl from room to room in that silent house.

     He didn’t need the lights in the road. He desperately didn’t need them, but on they came. 

     They’re coming? I been ready. I’ll beat them to you.

     His uncle kept his word, and was standing at the open front door as they pulled into the yard and stepped out of their car, avoiding stepping in some places, looking at the wheel arches, thick with mud, putting their hands on their hips. 

     This time, his uncle didn’t bar them from the house. He didn’t swear, he didn’t raise his voice, he invited them inside. As they came in, he nodded to Jansen and he was hit with that feeling all over again. The one from the road. The one about the kind of kid he was. 

     ‘Take a seat for a second,’ his uncle said. To hear a pleasantry from his mouth was a unique kind of unsettling. 

     They were here about the estate, the property, they were aware the beneficiary was a minor, and unfortunately the-’

      ‘I believe I can save you folks some time,’ his uncle said. He reached into his coat pocket and drew out some papers and laid them flat on the rug, flattening them like a treasure map. 

     Jansen leaned over to see them better, as did their guests. 

     ‘You’ll see they’re deeds,’ his uncle said. 

     ‘Yes, but not for this property, in fact these are old, this property isn’t even marked here-’

     ‘I’m glad you saw that. What else can you see?’

     The men looked at the deeds again but didn’t say anything. Jansen didn’t know what he was looking at, what any of this meant or didn’t mean. 

     ‘I’ll help you. This red line is the border not of this property, but of my property,’ his uncle said. As you can see, my land stretches over this spot. Further, in fact. You’re right this is old, it’s fifty years old at least and that was just when the records was draw’d up.’

    The men said nothing. 

     ‘So, this house is on my land. If you folks mortgaged a house on my land, without looking at the proper paperwork, I wouldn’t like to imagine the kind of malpractice…or legal trouble you might find yourselves up to your necks in. What a mess. In fact, as the land owner, the fact that you fraudulently-’

     ‘Now if mistakes were made that’s one thing but there was…it wouldn’t have been fraud-’

     His uncle walked them to the door again, this time he didn’t need to push them. They watched together as the men drove away, taking their questions still in their leather folios. 

    Jansen wasn’t young enough to think it was that simple in the end, but it was good enough for now. 

     ‘Call me if they come again,’ his uncle said, heading for his truck.

     ‘Hey,’ he called after him. ‘Is that all true, is this your land?’

     ‘I’m no forger. Never had the penmanship or the schooling.’

     ‘So you just let us live here? This whole time?’

     ‘Someone always gets their claws into what you got. I knew that. Your parents were alright. It wasn’t no big loss to me.’

     Jansen would have said thank you, for helping me by the road, for throwing those guys out, for letting my parents build a house on your land, for not letting me starve, but he didn’t. He just nodded and watched as his uncle drove away. 

     ‘So who was it you almost made friends with?’ Jansen said, standing from his lawn chair.

      ‘Never got his name,’ his uncle said. ‘I know what car he drove though so I keep a look out.’

     Jansen nodded. 

      ‘There’s wood there, if you want to take a few bits. It’s gonna be cold this week. We’re not out of this shit yet.’

     Jansen knew if he didn’t take it, it would appear on the bench by morning anyway, so he hauled a few pieces under his arm and nodded to his uncle and set off down the dirt road. The dog came with him for a time, before he turned and trotted back, sniffing at the leaves. 

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