A Key to Paradise

by Barry Rachin

  “One down, twenty-eight to go,” Grace grinned and reached for the second sheet. At noontime they broke for lunch. The rear wall and half of one window was finished and, with the exception of a small patch under the window sill, they encountered no major problems.

  “What the heck!” Angie gestured ominously toward the kitchen window. Dwight Goober was sitting on the rusty, backyard swing staring through the window at them eating their lunch.

  Grace felt violated. She pulled on her coat and, grabbing the utility knife, wedged it in the pocket. “For God’s sakes, don’t do anything crazy!” Angie tried to restrain her mother, but Grace was already out the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Dwight just stared at her through bleary eyes. The bluish-red welts from his acne stood out in bold relief in the midday sun. “I ain’t bothering you.”

  “You’re on my property, you idiot.”

  Dwight rose and glowered at her, a cold-blooded, vindictive expression. She’d never seen such a look. The burnt out alcoholic at Adam’s Diner was physically repulsive; he had a foul mouth and violent disposition, but there was a critical difference between the two: the older man had a soul. Dwight’s eyes were dead - like looking into the soul of a monster, utterly satanic.

  His feet remained firmly planted on the frozen earth while his upper torso twitched and twirled in a spastic dance. Grace felt her mind unraveling. She reached for the knife, placed her thumb on the plastic nub and, while still concealed in her coat pocket, extended the blade full length. “Get off my property.”

  “Okay, bitch.” He rose from the swing and, in no great hurry, shambled off in the direction of the main street. “Wait a day or two. We’ll see who’s the idiot.”

  Grace went back indoors. “What happened?” Angie pressed.

  “Nothing. He just went away.”

  “So why are you shaking?”

  Her whole body was shimmering like jello. “I’m just cold, that’s all,” Grace said petulantly. “It’s getting late. Lets hang the rest of the paper before we lose the light.”

  ******

  In the morning Grace called in sick to work and went over to the courthouse. A line in front of the red brick building stretched down the granite stairs halfway to the Dunkin’ Donuts. “What’s the problem?”

  A boy with a stud in his nose and chipped tooth glowered at her. “Everyone’s got to pass through security.” Fifteen minutes later Grace made it to the front door.

  The security guard ran her purse through a scanning device. “I need to speak to someone in probation.”

  “Juvey or adult?” the guard asked.

  “He’s a minor.”

  “Second floor, turn right at the elevator.”

  Grace took a seat on a wooden bench next to the Magistrate’s Office and waited for the window to open. Built in the late forties, the courthouse was quite elegant in its day; now the building was just a creaky old dinosaur with a cracked marble façade and faded wainscot. A good thirty people were already milling about, all inner city types. Teenage boys with garish tattoos on their necks and body piercings sprawled on benches next to a motley collection haggard, middle-aged women. No adult men accompanied any of the youths. No fathers. None at all.

  A girl in her late teens took a drink from the water cooler. A silver hoop dangled from her nostril and her punk hairdo was dyed orange. The chesty girl wore stiletto heels and a tank top. Where her nipples mashed up against the thin, stretch fabric, a matching pair of nibs protruded.

  “A tank top in early December,” Grace mused. “Very apropos!”

  “Great news!” A balding man in a dark blue suit rushed up to the girl. “Judge tacked another year onto your current probation. Finito!”

  “No jail time?” the girl pressed.

  “Zippo!”

  The girl’s mother leaned closer. “We ain’t paying no goddamn restitution!” Her brown hair was streaked with grey, the horsy teeth caked with a grungy yellow film. Despite a sallow complexion, she wore no makeup.

  “No financial restitution. No jail time.” The lawyer waved a hand dismissively in the air. “Let’s go sign papers.” They marched off triumphantly toward a paneled door and disappeared into the judge’s chamber. The steel grate on the magistrate’s window rose with a metallic clatter. Grace approached the window. “I need to speak to someone in probation.”

  “The youth’s name?” The man was in his sixties with blond hair and a pleasant smile.

  “Dwight Goober.”

  “Tall kid, ... awful complexion.”

  Grace nodded.

  “Your son?” Grace looked horrified. “You’re out of luck.”

  What?”

  “Dwight Goober turned seventeen a little over a month ago. He’s no longer technically a minor so he’s off probation.” Grace groaned and put her head in her hands. She told the officer what had happened. “You could get a restraining order,” the magistrate counseled, “but then it’s nothing more than a civil process. The bum gets a slap on the wrist and you’re back to square one.”

  “I have a teenage daughter.” Grace was emotionally worn out, tired to death. Nothing made any sense. “This kid is terrorizing my family, running amok, and nobody cares.”

  The older man stared at his hands with a sober expression. “Next time Dwight screws up, he’s off to the big house.”

  “Next time?” Grace laughed convulsively, making a snorting sound through her nose. “It’s the next time that worries me.”

  The man stared at her blankly. “He’s a nasty creep, but it’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  Grace went out onto the courthouse steps. As she exited through the metal detector at the front of the building, the grey-haired mother and her daughter with the protruding nipples came skipping down the courthouse steps. They looked absolutely triumphant, delirious with joy. No jail time. No restitution. Grace was curious to know what crime the sluttish little felon committed but didn’t think either one would readily volunteer the information. The feisty, in-your-face defiance of both women was vintage Dwight Goober. The glacial eyes and brazen sneer that played at the corners of the lips branded them kindred spirits. At the bottom of the stairs the mother paused to light an unfiltered cigarette. She breathed in deeply blowing the white smoke out her nose in a thick plume. The woman offered her daughter a cigarette from the pack and lit it from the burning ash of her own butt.

  Grace felt defiled, physically unclean. She would have to soak her weary bones in a shower of scalding water for at least a week to wash away all the fetid crud from a morning at the Brandenburg District Court.

  ******

  As the winter progressed, Mrs. Shapiro obsessed with feeding the few remaining diehard birds. She sent Carl regularly to the feed and grain store to purchase supplies - a mixture of black sunflower seeds, cracked corn and millet for the jays and cardinals, thistle for the finches plus blocks of greasy suet for the woodpeckers and other, insect feeders. She occasionally asked Grace to help her restock the feeders. “Hard to believe,” the old woman said, letting a feathery-light thistle sift through her fingers, “there’s nourishment in such tiny seeds.” Mrs. Shapiro tended to stuff the feeders to overflowing.

  “Except for the most common varieties, people don’t know their birds,” Grace said. “Recognizing the differences among species - the downy woodpecker, let’s say, from its close relative, the ladder-back or a goldfinch from a pine siskin - that’s a bit harder. But still, what’s the pleasure of bird watching if you don’t know what to look for? It’s like giving a house party and not bothering to remember your guests’ names.”

  “I think,” Mrs. Shapiro protested warily, “your analogy’s a bit thin.” She pointed out the window in the direction of a tall pine tree in the back yard. “A pair of cardinals were here earlier. A male and his brown mate. They only stayed a short time. I think the hungry jays scared them off.”

  Grace placed blocks of peanut butter suet in a rectangular,
wire cage then wiped the greasy mess from her fingers. “Did you know that in winter, a black-capped chickadee can raise its body temperature to 107º Fahrenheit?” Grace was constantly collecting fragments of incidental trivia from various birding magazines and newsletters she subscribed to. “Their bodies become feathery furnaces, internal combustion systems to ward off the extreme cold..” She took a sip of tea and put the cup aside. “At night while they’re resting, their temperature can drop as much as 30º, a survival mechanism to preserve energy for daytime foraging.”

  A loud din floated up from the basement. “I think the planer blades are getting a bit dull,” Mrs. Shapiro said. “Your daughter already knows how to set the thickness gauge, so Carl tells me.”

  “She’s a quick study,” Grace replied.

  An aluminum walker was positioned next to the recliner. The elderly woman had fallen several times over the summer, and Carl purchased the device from a durable medical company. “The foreign film, Dersu Uzala, is coming to the Avon.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “A true classic. It makes the rounds every so often.” Mrs. Shapiro’s head bobbed up and down, an affirmation of some distant memory. “The Russian film is forty years old, but every time they bring it back, the theater sells out.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Three times. Once with each husband.” She played with the rail of the walker. A pair of yellow tennis balls had been cut and pressed onto the rear legs so that the device wouldn’t mar the floor. “Forgive my impertinence; I thought you and Carl might like to go. The Avon’s just over the state line in Providence, if you were feeling self-conscious about anyone from school seeing you together.”

  The basement door opened and Angie, covered with sawdust, approached. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Nothing,” Grace shifted gears. “How’s it going downstairs?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  The workshop was surprisingly small, but Carl had arranged the machines in an ingenious fashion. All the large power tools—the drill press, band and miter saws, router table and jointer were pushed up against the walls so that the space in the center of the room remained empty. Whenever Carl needed to use a particular tool, he lugged it into the middle of the room, made his cuts and pushed it back against the far wall. Though it seemed like drudgery, as Carl explained, he eventually got use to positioning the tools and could set up the cuts rather quickly. When everything was situated at arm’s length, there was little wasted effort.

  “You’re finished for the day?”

  “Just sweeping up,” He grabbed a push broom and began coaxing the sawdust that spread a gossamer film like dry snow the length of the workspace into a pile. “Feel free to look around.”

  Angie was stacking small wooden parts on a bench. The shelves above the bench held a collection of projects in various stages of completion. “Are these poem boxes?” Carl nodded and reached for a dust pan.

  Grace opened a box. A dainty haiku by the Japanese master, Kotimichi, was rimmed by a scaly, emerald-colored wood. “Sassafras,” Carl said. He took the box from her hand, rubbed the green wood with a piece of 220-grit sandpaper and raised it under her nose. A sweet, perfumed fragrance flooded her brain. The next box contained a pithy verse, translated from the German, by Rilke. There were two love poems— a sublime verse by Pablo Neruda and another from the Persian mystic, Rumi. Offerings from the French feminist, Anais Nin and e e cummings lay side by side.

  “This is precious,” Grace murmured. Carl put the broom aside and glanced over her shoulder. The author insisted that people lived their existence dogged by a whimsical fate. Avoiding danger was no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Security was a superstition that did not really exist in nature. The final stanza implied that life was either a daring adventure or nothing.

  A daring adventure or nothing.

  “Helen Keller,” Grace spoke so softly the words were almost inaudible. “Who’d have ever though ...”

  She felt the corners of her eyes burn and swallowed hard. Suddenly she was lightheaded, mildly disoriented. Grace turned to her daughter. “Go upstairs and say goodbye to Mrs. Shapiro,” she said. “I’ll join you in a minute.” When Angie was gone she turned to Carl, “There’s a foreign movie playing at the Avon in Providence. I was wondering if you’d like to go.”

  “That would be nice.” Carl picked a block plane off the table. Turning the thumbscrew clockwise, he retracted the blade below the bottom edge and laid the tool on its side. “Its not a problem for you?” The lanky man was talking in an oblique code.

  “A problem for other people, perhaps, not for me,” Grace replied.

  On the way home Grace told Angie about the foreign movie. “A date?”

  “According to Mrs. Shapiro,” Grace parried the question, “Akira Kurosawa is one of the finest Japanese film directors.”

  “Carl asked you out on a date?”

  “No,” her mother corrected. “I asked him.” Angie slid down on the seat with an idiotic smile plastered across her face, her knees rammed up against the dashboard. She didn’t stopped smiling the rest of the way home.

  ******

  Carl picked Grace up in his battered, Chevy F-10, pickup truck. They drove across town, located the interstate just outside of Seekonk and reached the Rhode Island line in ten minutes.

  He pulled off the highway in Pawtucket, an old mill town that had seen the cloth trade gobbled up by overseas markets. At the far end of Hope Street they passed Brown University. Many of the residential tenements, which were protected by the Providence Historical Society, sported decorative trim and gingerbread molding. Homeowners couldn’t even change the color of their property without permission, insuring that the choice was in keeping with local preservation ordinances.

  The film, Dersu Uzala, was over thirty years old yet, just as Mrs. Shapiro had predicted the line at the ticket window wound down the street and around the corner to where a dark-skinned street vender was selling falafel wraps and humus from an open air kiosk. The crowd was mostly Brown University students, dressed in raggedy, torn jeans and funky tops - kids whose parents earned salaries in the comfortable six figures. “Les miserable,” Carl chuckled. “We should be so lucky.” There was no malice in his tone. The ticket countered opened and the line surged forward.

  The previous summer, Grace went to the movies on a blind date. The science teacher fixed her up with her cousin, also recently divorced. The guy seemed perfectly nice when she talked to him on the phone and on the ride to the theater acted perfectly normal. He sat quietly through the coming attractions then began pawing her five minutes into the main feature. On the pretext of using the restroom, Grace escaped to the lobby where she experienced a massive anxiety attack. A taxi brought her home. The boorish oaf never even bothered to find out why Grace had gone AWOL on a blind date.

  The movie, which described the friendship between Dersu, the hunter, and Arsenyev, the explorer, was in subtitles. Midway through the film, the two men were stranded on a barren plain, when the weather turned bad with a violent wind storm and snow. They built a makeshift shelter from twigs, leaves, fallen branches and anything else they could find in the frozen Siberian landscape. Grace glanced at Carl. He was sitting with his lips slightly parted, lost in the pathos of the scene.

  Afterwards they strolled over to the East Side Pancake House for dessert. The waitress took their orders and returned shortly with coffee and pastry. “Angie mentioned a neighborhood kid who’s been causing you grief.”

  Grace added a teaspoon of sugar and stirred her coffee. “How much did she tell you?”

  “Enough to know this troublemaker isn’t going join the Peace Corps or become a model citizen any time soon.” Carl sliced a wedge of apple pie and leaned forward. “There’s a bar a couple miles down the road on Federal Hill called The Ironhorse Tap. If you have a problem with a worthless punk, you go see one of the patrons,… prefera
bly a middle-aged man who wears several pounds of gold chains around his 20-inch neck and rings on either pinky finger.” Carl’s tone was flippant. “You bare your soul, tell the man how much you’re willing to spend to make the problem go away. And then you drive home and forget all about The Ironhorse Tap”

  Grace had an intimation of what Carl was talking about. Federal Hill in Providence was synonymous with the Mafia. People like the mob king, Raymond Patriaca and his near-do-well son, Ray Junior, ran the underworld. Tough guys with names like Buckles Mancini and Frankie the Moron Mirabelli - they ran prostitution, drugs, numbers and protection rackets. During the Feast of Saint Anthony, they strong-armed local merchants and extorted money from the street venders. God help the enterprising fool with the pepper and sausage cart who didn’t plan to cough up the dough!

  And if some troublesome dimwit like Dwight Goober was raining on your parade, you arranged a meeting with one of the regulars, some gentleman in good standing at the Ironhorse Tap social club, and they made the problem go away. No questions asked. It was curbstone justice at its finest.

  “What’s in it for me?” Carl finished his pie then extended his cup while the waitress freshened the coffee. “That’s all these hoodlums understand. Freud’s pleasure-pain principle.”

  “And whacking somebody on the kneecaps with a lead pipe,” Grace interjected, “falls into the latter category.” Carl cleared his throat as though he was going to say something but thought better of it.

  The door opened and more college students crowded into the restaurant. Grace brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Since Tuesday, we have been studying Gray’s Elegy. A masterpiece, for sure, but the kids can’t relate.” She broke into an impromptu recitation:

  'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,