He went through his closet looking for something to wear. He picked a decent pair of bleached Levis out of his stash, a soft cotton shirt, white gym sox, and a pair of penny loafers he hadn’t worn since high school graduation.
He brushed his teeth and combed his hair. He walked through the house twice, turning wall switches on and off and checking the windows to make sure they were still locked. He went outside and stood in the patio and looked down at the ocean and the tide that rode into the rocks of La Jolla Cove. The house was on a high cliff and the thunder of the incoming waves was baffled by distance. He took a deep breath, smelled the cool briny air.
The ocean was gray, the sky above it was gray. On the horizon the sun was wrapped in a silver scarf of fog. He decided to walk down to the beach, to revisit the sound and feel of it, and in the same instant realized he was stalling. Back in the house he dialed the number for M.A.L. Gunlocke.
“What now?” a weary female voice said.
“I’d like to speak to Orson Gunlocke,” he said.
“So would I,” she said. “Orson Gunlocke was killed in the war. If you think this is a smart thing to do or that I am amused by it then you are sorely mistaken, whoever you are.”
“My name is Gus Reppo.”
“You and the vipers you work for have no hold on me.”
“Mrs. Gunlocke? Is this Mrs. Gunlocke? Orson Gunlocke’s widow?”
She hung up.
That should have been enough. It wasn’t. It only increased his curiosity. Gus redialed the number but she didn’t pick up. He jotted down the address on a scrap of paper. He locked up the house and headed south to Chula Vista on the Goldstar.
The house just off Kearney was a 1940s tract house—small, shallow-roofed, visibly out of plumb, and in need of paint. A hastily made government-financed bungalow built with barely cured wood, one of many in the area meant to house the influx of defense plant workers during the war and returning veterans after. A weedy patch of dirt that passed for a lawn fronted the house. A bent TV mast rose from the middle of the roof like a long skeletal finger. There was no antenna on it. Black cable, like a rotten vine, swung out from the mast in the ocean breeze. An old lopsided two-door Ford sedan sat in the driveway. The front right tire was flat, the windshield on the driver’s side was cracked. The tire looked like it had been flat for months. Stickers in the back window of the Ford said, “Jesus is Lord” and “He is Our Mainstay.”
Gus took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
The woman who opened it said, “No again to you sir, I do not want …” Her mouth yawned open. A meaningless sound came out of it. She swayed and staggered. Her eyelids fluttered. She took a step back. Her knees locked, unlocked, buckled. Her arms flew out from her sides like windblown rags. Gus reached for her, grabbed a handful of her dress. The dress tore and she sat down hard and flopped, knocking her head on the carpetless floor.
Gus crossed the threshold and knelt down beside her. Her eyelids fluttered open; her breathing was noisy and fast. Gus got an arm under her shoulders and raised her to a sitting position. He got behind her and hooked his elbows under her armpits, dragged her toward a sofa. He propped her up against it. She reached up and touched his face.
“Orson,” she said.
“Gus,” he said into her searching fingers.
“I must have toppled,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, you sure did.”
He helped her get to her feet, then eased her down on the sofa. She leaned back into the cushions, staring at him. Her breathing was audible. She was a slight woman in her early forties with pale hair cropped unevenly below the ears. She had the face of an undernourished Dust Bowl refugee—angular, thin-lipped, sharp featured. Her eyes were a startling arc-welder blue, uncomfortable to meet for more than a few seconds. The skin around them was etched with deep crow’s-feet. Gus believed her crow’s-feet did not come from habitual smiling.
“Orson,” she said. “You come back.”
“I’ll get you a glass of water, ma’am, then I’ll go,” Gus said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
Gus found the kitchen and let the cold water run for a minute before filling a glass. There was a picture of Jesus thumbtacked to the wall above the sink, the standard picture available in most five-and-dime stores. A neighborly, kindhearted Jesus with perfect Painless Parker teeth. His beard was trimmed and combed as if someone had gotten him ready for the portrait painter.
Gus went back to the woman in the living room. He handed her the water. She set it aside and stood up. There was another picture of Jesus on the wall above the sofa. It was almost the same as the one in the kitchen, except this Jesus was not smiling. This Jesus was troubled, and less comfortable having his portrait painted.
The woman took a framed picture off a radio console and showed it to Gus. The man in it was small boned, his smile more smirk than smile, his flinty eyes hard but also touched with amusement at someone else’s expense. He was standing next to the Ford out in the driveway. In the photograph the car looked new. Gus was looking at himself in a navy blue jumper and bell bottom pants. The picture was signed, “Orson.”
“Was Jesus brung you back,” she said.
Gus took a step toward the door. “You’re not thinking straight, ma’am,” he said. “I’m Gus Reppo. Airman Gus Reppo. I’m stationed at an air force radar squadron in Montana. Seems that Orson, uh … worked for my mother, before the war.”
“Orson,” she said.
“Gus,” he said. “Gus Reppo. Me and my friend, Lyle? We took some leave-time to spend a few days in LA and so I thought I’d drop by and say hello since I had the opportunity.”
She turned her head sidelong and studied Gus aslant, her eyes narrow. “I bet you’re hungry,” she said. “I’ll get up some eggs and grits. Don’t have much else in the house right now.”
“That’s okay, ma’am,” Gus said. “I had something to eat before I came here.”
“They told me the Fisk went down off Guadalcanal,” she said. “It was torpedoed by a Jap sub. All they was doing was taking supplies to those poor bogged-down marines. The Japs had no reason to sink the Fisk since it was unarmed. But that’s how they was back then.”
She waited for Gus to agree. “I guess they didn’t split hairs over such things during the war,” he said.
“The King of Heaven took him for his own reasons,” she said. “That’s how it was and how it still is. So if he was brought back to me, there must be a reason in that, too. Nothing happens in this world without the Lord put his stamp on it.”
“There’s no reason needed for things that can’t happen, ma’am,” Gus said.
She laughed harshly. “You talk like an idiot,” she said. “I guess you’re just joking me like you used to. Is that right, Orson?”
“Gus,” he said.
She whirled around and stalked into the kitchen. The thin cotton housedress she was wearing flared and light from the kitchen windows silhouetted her skinny legs.
Gus headed for the door. There was no need to prolong this. But she came out of the kitchen on the run and grabbed his arm. Her grip was strong. “No sir,” she said. “You can’t just up and go. That would not make any sense, can’t you see? Come sit at the table with me. Don’t be afraid, if that’s what you are. Is that what you are, afraid? Do you feel that I am haunting you instead of you haunting me? Is that how this is going to work?” She laughed at this preposterous idea. Her laugh made Gus want to bolt.
Gus said, “I’m not afraid, I just—”
“Then come set. Where’s the harm?”
She towed Gus into the kitchen and pushed him down into a chair. She fried him an egg and dipped warm grits out of a tin pot. She poured him a cup of coffee.
“Eat up,” she said. “You come a long way, Orson.”
Gus searched for something to say that would make things seem ordinary.
“Something happened to your TV antenna,” he said.
She touched her thin lips with h
er finger and narrowed her eyes as if deciphering the hidden meaning of his words. “TV is a tool of Satan,” she said.
“But you have a mast on your house,” he said.
“I sometimes wanted to see what he’s been up to,” she said.
“But you can’t, with no antenna. Do you even have a TV?”
“The TV is in the bedroom closet,” she said. She said this with deliberate indifference and Gus could tell she wanted her TV out of the closet and working again.
“I can get it working for you,” Gus said.
“Is that so?” she said. “And why would you want to do that?”
“Because I can,” Gus said. “No other reason.”
“You think not? Reasons sometimes hide themselves in the dark, unbeknownst to them that thinks they got it all figured out.”
“It’s still light” Gus said. “I can probably get it working before dark.”
“That’s not half of what I meant,” she said.
“I can do it,” Gus said.
“Do what you will, if you think it’s you who wills it.”
Gus found the wind-wrecked antenna in a backyard shed along with a wooden ladder. The antenna—a big one designed to pick up distant stations—wasn’t in bad shape. He straightened the elements as best he could, then brought it out into the yard. The double X-style antenna was bulky but not very heavy and Gus carried it up the ladder to the shallow roof. He loosened the turn-buckles that held the guy wires tight, unseated the aluminum mast from its roof mount, then telescoped the mast into itself so that he could get at the section that needed to be straightened. The rubber exterior of the coaxial cable was weathered but the copper wire inside, and the braided shield that protected it, look serviceable. Gus clamped the double X antenna to the top of the mast, aimed the array in the general direction of Los Angeles, then raised the entire apparatus to its dominant position above the house. The job took less than an hour. “Satan’s back in business,” Gus said, looking up at the quivering elements.
Gus went into the bedroom and opened the closet door. The TV set was buried under a pile of laundry. It was a late 1940s Crosley table model with a seven-inch screen. Gus carried it out to the living room and set it on top of the radio console after removing the picture of Orson Gunlocke. He brought the coaxial cable into the window closest to the TV.
He plugged in the Crosley and turned it on. It hummed as filaments and cathodes turned red. Dust, rising on convected air from the heated vacuum tubes, made him sneeze. A warped gray-on-gray picture sidled gingerly into the screen. Gus adjusted the horizontal stabilizer and contrast controls, then turned the channel selector until he found a stronger station. He rotated the fine-tuning knob until there was more picture than snow, more sound than noise.
He called her into the room. She’d been on the telephone, arguing with someone.
“You can get five channels now, Mrs. Gunlocke,” Gus said. “Three local, and two from LA. All but one comes in real strong.”
“I won’t have you calling me Missus. You call me Marva, as is proper,” she said.
“Marva,” he said.
They sat down together on the sofa and watched Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.
“Satan’s work,” Marva said, but her eyes belied her words. She was spellbound by the fuzzy puppets.
19
“They wear bow ties and talk like they are your friend, but I know them for what they are,” Marva said. She meant the bill collectors who had been harassing her over the past few weeks. The phone rang again but she didn’t answer it. It rang a dozen times before it stopped. It was early evening, not dark yet, but Gus hadn’t been able to leave. She’d found other chores for him and, for reasons he could not identify, he felt obligated to comply.
He got the spare tire and jack out of the Ford’s trunk and replaced the flat. The spare had only a few pounds of air in it but would probably hold up until she could get to a filling station.
Her toilet leaked. The reservoir tank lost its water a few minutes after flushing. Gus fixed that by reseating the flapper so that it nested on the drainpipe squarely, and by adjusting the rusted chain that pulled it up and lowered it. He unscrewed the ball cock from its corroded shaft and reset the float angle so that the tank would not overfill.
She asked him to look at the bedroom door. The jamb was out of plumb and the door wouldn’t close. It stayed inches ajar even if you put your shoulder to it. Gus couldn’t do anything about that, short of taking the door off its hinges and planing the edges to match the warp. Gus didn’t ask her if she had a plane. He was sure she didn’t. The kitchen table needed to be repainted, but he was sure she didn’t have paint, either.
“You always been a good man around the house, Orson,” she said.
“Gus,” he said.
She snapped a dishrag at a fly then sat down at the kitchen table. She peeled chips off the flaking paint with her fingernail. “I don’t know what I am going to do,” she said.
“I need to get back on the road before dark,” Gus said.
“They’re coming over with the truck,” she said.
“It’s not my motorbike. Lyle won’t want me riding it in the dark.”
“They got wind of my new Shelvador. They got people who find out such things, like what you got and when you got it and what it might be worth.”
“I’d hate to wreck it,” Gus said. “The Goldstar’s a beautiful machine.”
“They got no conscience. They take it away, no matter how sorely you need it. You listening to me?”
“What?” Gus said.
“The church got me a new Shelvador refrigerator on sale for a hundred dollars,” she explained. “I had a old wartime icebox, but you can’t hardly get a twenty-five pound block of ice anymore, and then you got to go ten miles to fetch it. Even then stuff spoils. Milk will turn after four days. Bacon will show mold in two weeks. If you forget to empty the drip pan, like I often did, the overflow warps the floorboards. The good people of my church took up a collection and got me the Shelvador.”
“And the bill collectors want to take it?” Gus said. “Agency men are on the way over with a truck. Those are the ones who don’t wear bow ties and don’t pretend to be your friend.”
Gus met the collection agency men at the door. “She can’t give up the Shelvador,” Gus said. “Her food will spoil.”
The collector was a big man in work clothes. His name was stitched over the shirt’s single pocket: Frank Keller. Another man in denim stood behind him leaning on a yellow hand truck.
“You her boy?” Frank Keller said.
“He is my husband,” Marva said, stepping next to Gus and taking his arm in hers.
The agency man looked at Gus, then at Marva. A grin struggled at the corners of his mouth. He turned to look at his partner. His partner covered his mouth with his hand and looked away.
“How much does Mrs. Gunlocke owe?” Gus said.
Frank Keller opened a leather-bound account book. “Nineteen dollars and ninety-seven cents on three accounts. Five months past due on all three.”
“So you come into her house and take anything of value you want?”
“That’s how it works, Bud.”
Gus took out his billfold. He had twenty-six dollars. He gave the man twenty.
“There’s another payment due in a month,” Frank Keller said, digging in his pocket for pennies.
Gus closed the door.
“You were directed to do that,” Marva said.
“A simple thanks would do,” Gus said.
“You took on the responsibility like you were meant to, even if you did not mean to. You going to deny that?”
She pulled Gus into the living room and made him sit down next to her on the sofa. The TV set was still on. “The Show of Shows,” a comedy revue, had just started.
“There’s nothing funny about that man,” Marva said of the TV comedian. “He makes me want to bite the heads off nails.”
Then someone was at the door, tappin
g out what sounded like the rhythm of a secret code.
“That’ll be Josiah Comfort and Becka,” Marva said. “I forgot to remind you. This is the night we take stock.”
Gus started to get up but Marva pulled him back down. “Wait,” she said. “I want to watch this first.”
It was a beer commercial. A man and a woman sitting in deck chairs under palm trees drinking Lucky Lager while Mexican trumpets played a hat dance. The announcer said, “Really now folks, can life get any better than this?”
“You see?” Marva said. “They make it seem God-sent instead of what it is, hell-sent.”
Josiah Comfort at the door tapped out the coded rhythm again. The commercial ended with the beer-drinking couple toasting the good life by clinking bottles. They lit cigarettes, and turned to the camera, their smiles inviting the viewer into their pleasant world.
Marva got up and went to the door. Josiah Comfort, in black suit and hat, stepped into Marva’s living room—a craggy man with furious eyes set in dark hollows. His wife, an exhausted-looking woman, with a worried forehead and sparse white hair, followed him in. Behind them an overweight boy of six or seven bulled his way over the threshold. The boy wore short pants and knee-high socks. His lips were cherubic but he had the sour expression of an old man with gout. The Comforts went directly to the kitchen and sat at the table. Marva drew Gus into the kitchen after them.
“This is our Saturday evening Take Stock meeting,” Marva explained to Gus. “We’re Mainstays of the Lord. Josiah is our pastor. This here’s Becka, the pastor’s wife. They visit the flock one door at a time, Saturdays. I would not have the Shelvador if it was not for Josiah and the flock.”
She pulled out a chair for herself and sat down.
“Do we have a new supplicant?” Josiah said, looking, finally, at Gus.
“It’s Orson come back!” Marva said.
Josiah weighed the possibility. He studied Gus, studied Marva. “It’s like Orson come back,” he said.
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