The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

The banging came again, more insistent now. Colt picked up a candle and brushed past his wife, heading for the foyer. Through the glass he could see someone standing on the porch, holding a flashlight.

  “Hello?” he called.

  The response was too muffled to make out. Colt, city-cautious, opened the door a crack.

  “What did you say?” he asked. “Can I help you?”

  “I—I just come by ta check up on the place,” said the person. It was a small man, wearing a thick snowsuit of the sort that utility

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  maintenance workers wore. He was shining his flashlight at his feet, and his face was lost in shadow. “Live just up the road there. Flebberman. I seen you movin’ in earlier. You, ah . . . you the new folks?”

  “Yeah, that’s us,” said Colt. “The new folks.” “Oh. Right. Well. Hi, there.”

  “Hello,” Colt said.

  The man was clearly uncomfortable, as if he were performing an unpleasant but necessary task. He cast several glances back ward over his shoulder, plotting a quick getaway.

  “Well, ah... the juice ran dry, so I thought I might as well come down and check up on ya. See how yer makin’ out.” He cleared his throat nervously and stomped his feet on the porch, which sounded as hollow as a drum.

  “Oh,” said Colt. “You’re the neighbor.”

  He opened the door wide, remembering the name he’d seen on the truck that had passed them when they were first looking at the house—FLEBBERMAN TOWING. There’d been a man who’d stared at them, not exactly hostile but not exactly welcoming, ei ther. So this was Flebberman. Colt had thought, without know ing why, that he would be bigger.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  Flebberman stepped in shyly and followed Colt through the foyer into the living room, where his features were illuminated by the gentle glow of the fire. He looked about fortyish; his spade- shaped face was covered with three or four days’ worth of beard, and his shoulders and head were covered in snow, which he made no move to brush off. Francie and Michael came in together and stood at the entrance of the kitchen hallway. She’d dried her eyes in record time, Colt thought.

  “Hello,” Francie said calmly, in a tone that chilled Colt’s bones. “Mister—”

  “Randy.”

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  “Mr. Randy.”

  “No, I mean Randy Flebberman,” said Flebberman. “Nobody calls me mister. Just . . . Randy.”

  “I’m Francie. This is my brother Michael, and . . . Coltrane Hart.” She spat his name out like a poison seed.

  “Hi,” said Michael.

  “Din’t mean ta startle ya,” Flebberman said. “Saw yer movin’ truck earlier, an’ I thought, uh-oh, this ain’t no time to be movin’. With the storm comin’ an’ all. An’ then the power goes out. Ah, well.” He shrugged philosophically. “Waddaya gonna do?”

  “We were just making dinner,” Francie said. “Would you like to stay?”

  Colt shot her a look that went unnoticed, but it was not neces sary.

  “Naw, thanks,” said Flebberman. “Wife has dinner ready. I just come down real quick ta see how things was goin’.”

  “We were making dinner,” Colt said. “But then the power went out.”

  “You got a gas stove,” said Flebberman. “You can still cook. Don’t need power for a gas stove. Jus’ gotta light it yerself, ’cause the pilot’ll be out.”

  “Oh,” said Colt, sheepishly. “Right.”

  “How’d you know we have a gas stove?” asked Francie.

  “Bank hired me ta take care a the place,” said Flebberman. “I been lookin’ after it since I dunno when. Long time.”

  “Right,” said Francie. “That’s why there was so little dust.

  You’ve been keeping it clean?”

  Flebberman looked at the floor, scuffing his foot. “Yuh,” he said.

  They waited, but he offered no further explanation.

  “Any idea when the power ’ll come back on?” Colt asked. Flebberman shrugged again, and laughed wryly. “Could be fi’

  minutes, could be tomorra,” he said. “Y’never really know. Power never does go out on a nice summer day, after all. Always at night,

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  in weather like this. Haw haw. Crew’s gotta come out from all over creation. Takes ’em at least an hour just ta get mobilized. I oughta know. I useta work for the county.”

  He was running on nervously, it seemed to Colt. He attempted to interject, but Flebberman went on.

  “Worked plowin’ the roads for ’em, sorta freelance, y’know, ’cause they were always short-staffed on purpose to save the bud get, but then a course when it actually snowed they’d be screwed. They might even call me out for this one. Who knows? Gov ’mint’s run by a buncha goddamn morons. Pardon my French.”

  “Would you like a glass of wine, Randy?” Francie asked.

  Flebberman seemed taken aback. “Wine?” he said, almost laughing. “Naw. Everything else’s awright? Water on?”

  “Yes,” said Colt. “The water ’s on.”

  “Well,” said Flebberman. “I grew up in this house, y’know.”

  This admission startled them all, since it seemed to come out of nowhere. Francie smiled at the little man.

  “Really,” she said. “How interesting. I didn’t know that.” “Well, I din’t really live here. But I spent a lotta time here when

  I was a kid. My old Aunt Helen was the last one to own the place. Great-aunt, actually. My mother useta leave me with her some times, when she was workin’. Nice old place. Lotta history to it. Woulda bought it m’self, if I coulda ’forded it.” Flebberman shuf fled his booted feet again, pondering his own poverty; then, abruptly, he appeared to become embarrassed. “Nice car you got out there,” he said, almost wistfully.

  “Thanks,” said Michael.

  “He was talking about my car, you dumbass,” Colt said.

  “The Camaro?” Flebberman said. “Nineteen-seventy? ’Bout two hundred horses?”

  “The man knows his cars,” said Colt.

  Flebberman flushed and scuffed his foot again; then, realizing he was leaving marks on the floor, he abruptly stopped and put his foot over the streak he’d left.

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  “You folks got any plans for redoin’ the place?” he inquired ten tatively. “Any renovations er whatnot?”

  “Not really,” said Colt. “Not yet, anyway. Hadn’t had the time to think about it, actually. Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious, is all.”

  “It’s in pretty good shape, for such an old place,” Francie volun teered.

  Flebberman appeared gratified. “Oh, yuh,” he said. “I been keepin’ it up, like I said. Takes a lotta work ta keep an old house like this in any kinda condition.”

  “You did a wonderful job,” said Francie. “It’s almost like it was waiting for us. We appreciate it. Really.”

  This compliment seemed to embarrass Flebberman almost be yond speech. He ducked his head and nodded. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’m startin’ ta melt all over yer floor here. I’ll be gettin’ back home. We’re just up the road there, you know, at the top of the hill. Give us a holler if you need anything.”

  “We will,” said Francie. “Yeah,” said Colt. “Sure will.”

  Flebberman gave them all a curious sort of two-fingered salute as he clomped back down the hall and down the stairs, back into the teeth of the blizzard. The three of them watched through the window as he got into his tow truck and headed up the road. They were left alone again.

  “I don’t know if we just met Barney Fife or Gomer Pyle,” Colt said.

  “Fuck you,” said Francie, leaving the room.

  12‌

  White Men from the Future

  With the cold fingers of betrayal firmly wrapped around her heart, Francie headed upstairs to the attic. All she wanted was to

  be alone, l
ike a dying dog—for that was how she felt. Like her guts really had been ripped out her middle. Small flames guttered in the saucer that she held, waiter-style, on her fingertips, and her rip pling shadow followed her at a discreet distance, keeping to the wall. So he didn’t want children with her, ever? All right, then. If he felt that strongly about it, why didn’t he just say so? What kind of a man would willingly have his scrotum sliced open rather than risk having to share his life with other people?

  And, as long as that was the case, why were they still married? Let’s not go there just yet, Francie told herself. One thing at a time. You’ve only just had a mental breakdown, and now there’s

  this. Should we file divorce papers tonight, too? I think not.

  That could wait until the morning, at least.

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  It wasn’t that she’d wanted children all that badly. Sometimes she did, of course; that was only natural. It would hit her, at random moments, that she was missing something indefinable, that she was not just bored but unfulfilled, that she had more to offer to the world than just sitting around in the apartment in a state of creative constipation. But there were other times when she was glad she didn’t have them, usually when she was tired and frustrated and frazzled by the ten thousand and one complicated things that were involved in living in a modern city. For example: when she was try ing to get her Metro card out of her purse to run it through the subway turnstile, avoiding being jostled from behind by impatient commuters, avoiding the homeless man up ahead who always seemed to single her out of the crowd no matter how hard she tried not to catch his eye; after which she would have to push her way onto the car, always ending up between some ancient woman who was only five foot four on one side and a sweaty construction worker covered in a natural hair suit on the other, so that she was forced to stand curled sideways, like a question mark, and she would think out of nowhere, Imagine lugging around a baby on top of all this, and she would wonder how it was ever done at all.

  Yet, from time to time, she treasured the possibilities contained within her womb. It was really just the idea of babies—for she did like to think about them sometimes, and he had held out hope to her, time and time again, when he had known that there really was none. And that was a lie.

  He’d lied to her. He might as well have cheated on her.

  Francie probed her abdomen as she ascended the stairs. The chicken hole, briefly healed, seemed to have been reopened by the argument. She fancied that she ran her fingers lightly over the bottoms of her lungs, feeling the ragged area where the chicken’s beak had pecked away at them. She caressed her liver, thumbed her pancreas, became intimate with the half-hidden nubs of her kidneys. And here was her uterus, tiny and triangular, dangling like an empty purse.

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  It was all madness, of course. She knew full well that only crazy people felt this way. But she couldn’t escape the impression that this wasn’t a delusion; or, if it was a delusion, it was a very good one. The most convincing she’d ever had, in fact.

  “I’m crazy crazy crazy,” she whispered.

  The attic was where she was headed, and she knew it would be freezing up there, so she stopped in the master bedroom on the third floor, where she put on a sweater, jogging pants, a pair of wool socks. She put her bathrobe back on over all of this, added a knit hat, and continued upward, watching her breath spout out before her in a plume of white, as if she were a walking teakettle. Climbing the final set of stairs, she set the dish of tea lights on the attic floor and opened one of the boxes she’d noticed when they’d first come through with Marge Westerbrook. Anything that would distract her now was welcome. Too much thinking at a time like this could drive her back over the edge over which she had only just clawed herself.

  Reaching in blindly, she came up with a double handful of comic books. With a connoisseur ’s nose, she sniffed their bouquet of decaying newsprint and antiquated ink. Someone had wanted to preserve these old things; someone had thought they were worth saving.

  Francie had been a great fan of science fiction in her early teens. It was just another thing about her that had concerned her par ents, and had made other girls hesitate in inviting her to parties. Girls were not supposed to like science fiction, which was pre cisely why she did; or half the reason, anyway. She’d never under stood why boys were so fascinated with Mars and ray guns and rocket ships and alien beings, while girls ignored such things. The only possible answer was that boys were keeping it all for them selves, because they didn’t want to share. Typical. Boys were dolts—it was their fault the world was not a nice place.

  In rebellion against this fact and others, Francie had read every thing she could get her hands on, from the classic works of H. G.

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  Wells to the comic-book adventures of Rom the Spaceknight. She’d particularly liked Rom, who had been turned into a cyborg, the poor dear, and as if that wasn’t misfortune enough, he also suf fered the indignity of being practically anonymous in the world of comic book superheroes. No one else had ever heard of him; Rom never made it into the pantheon of critically accepted do-gooders. She’d found him one day in the comic book rack of an Indianapo lis convenience store, hidden away behind Sgt. Rock and Easy Com pany and The Unknown Soldier. Here, Francie felt, was someone who deserved her sympathy, a neglected galactic savior she could nurture. She’d bought the first issue for fifty cents in 1978, so new it was still damp, and she hoped vaguely it would become a classic someday. As far as she knew, it was still somewhere in her child hood bedroom back in Indiana—the only first issue of anything she’d ever bought. When it had sat in obscurity long enough, per haps it would become a classic. This was the same curious di chotomy to which Francie found herself subjected. The world would not be ready for her poetry until she had suffered in silence throughout her life, and then died, alone.

  And childless, apparently.

  But she had decided to put that out of her mind.

  Many of these books featured astronauts on the covers. Despite herself, she had to giggle at these clean-cut white men from the future, with their military-style brush cuts, their perfect, twenty- fifth-century teeth, their form-fitting suits that somehow pro tected them against the depressurization of outer space while sacrificing nothing of comfort or athleticism. Francie flipped through idly, discarding them when the action failed to grab her. Going deeper into the box, she found even older books, boys’ ad venture stories in hardcover: The Iron Boys in the Steel Mills. The Dreadnought Boys. The Boy Allies. The original Hardy Boys series. Tom Swift and His Amazing Flying Machine. These books contained no illustrations, save for an engraved frontispiece; they were from the era before comic books. Checking the publication dates, Fran

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  cie saw that some of them were over eighty years old. Automati cally she checked the flyleaves, a habit she’d picked up over a life time of browsing books to see if any former owners had left their mark. The name RANDALL FLEBBERMAN had been inscribed into each one, in careful, uneven block letters.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  She’d not been up there more than five minutes when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Turning, she saw Michael, bearing more candles, light puddled under his chin and illuminating the search ing tendrils of his scraggly beard. Francie drew her robe more tightly about her.

  “Hi, Sissie,” said Michael. “Came up to see if you’re okay.”

  “I was reading,” she said. Michael sat next to her. “How’s your nose?”

  “It’s fine. Way to lay into him. You showed him a thing or two, I guess. You, uh . . . you really okay?”

  She nodded, pressing her lips together.

  “I just wanted to tell you . . . I don’t know. Sorry, I guess. I never knew you wanted a baby that bad. But I guess it makes sense. I mean, you’d be a great mom and everything.” He cleared his throat. “Uh . . . you do know
that vasectomies can be undone, right? Like, they’re not permanent? I think I saw that on the Dis covery channel.”

  “No,” said Francie. “It’s better this way.” “What d’you mean?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. It just wasn’t meant to be, that’s all. Not with him.”

  Michael nodded. “He wouldn’t be much of a dad.”

  “And I wouldn’t be much of a mother,” she said. “Not in the condition I’ve been in.”

  Michael’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”

  Francie sighed. “Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it.”

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  “All right. Holy crap, look at these old books!” Michael said, switching gears without a pause. Francie had always envied his ability to drop things once they became boring, without a mo ment’s guilt or hesitation. “They gotta be worth a million bucks by now!”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I hardly recognize any of them. It’s only the famous ones that are worth anything. This Tom Swift, maybe.” She passed her fingers over the cool cloth-covered card board. It was in decent condition. Walter would know something about it, surely.

  “What are you gonna do with them?” “They’re not mine.”

  “Yes, they are. It’s your house, isn’t it?”

  “Randy Flebberman’s name is in them. They must have been his when he was a kid. I guess they got left behind here.”

  “So?”

  “So, they’re still his,” said Francie. “If he wants them.”

  Michael opened a comic book and held it close to his candle. He scanned the dot-matrix images, pulling yet another joint from be hind his ear like a magician, wetting one end of it on his tongue. He interrupted his reading to hold the joint to a candle and take a deep drag, the dried flowers inside popping and crackling. He of fered it to Francie, who surprised him—and herself—by taking it. Normally she steered clear of the stuff. But what did she have to lose now? she thought. Nothing. She could be dying, after all. No one could survive what she’d gone through tonight. The harsh smoke spilled into her lungs and began almost immediately to leak out their perforated bottoms. She pulled her robe even tighter and handed the joint back to Michael.