New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  “You can’t live without no icebox,” Mr. Poxley told him. “You’ll leave a can of potted meat out too long on the windowsill and think you can eat it the next day. Then you’ll get to throwin’ up all over the place. You’ll get the sick headache.” Mr. Poxley raised a blue-veined hand to his forehead.

  “All right,” Julian snapped. “I’ll take the damned thing.”

  “You better,” he said.

  “When can you deliver my items?”

  “Where you live?”

  He told him and watched for his reaction.

  “Law. Is that old place still standin’?”

  Julian sniffed and raised his chin. “Not only is it standing, I’m going to restore it the way it was.”

  Mr. Poxley scratched the back of his head and squinted. “What way was it? Ain’t nobody alive ever seen a drop of paint on that place.”

  “That’ll change soon,” he said, plucking his receipt from the old man’s fingers.

  “You ought to get you a nice little brick house on a half acre, somethin’ you can keep up. I don’t think you understand how much that place’ll cost to fix.”

  “The house is part of my family’s history.”

  Mr. Poxley seemed to think about this a moment. “Well, I hope history can keep you out of a draft.”

  The next day, the old man and two high-school boys delivered Julian’s purchases. Upstairs, Mr. Poxley stared at the sagging bedroom ceiling. “Say, what you do for a livin’?”

  “I sell and service typewriters on a business route in Memphis.”

  “Typewriters,” Mr. Poxley repeated, as if Julian had said buggy whips or steam engines. “We threw our last one out ten years ago.”

  “Some places need reliable old models to fill out forms and such.” Julian spread open a sheet over his new mattress. “Antique shops want rare models restored.”

  The old man gave the house the once-over, looked down the flaking hall, across the warped pine flooring, gazed up at the cloth-covered wires snaking along the ceiling. “For your sake, I hope typin’ comes back in style.”

  For the next three weeks, Julian scrubbed down the rooms and galleries and thinned out the fallen limbs in the yard, the end of each day finding him tired unto sickness. He bought an electric saw and some lumber to patch the second floor gallery, but every time he was halfway through a board a fuse would blow in the spider-haunted circuit box in the kitchen. The first time he fired up his double hot plate, the fuse-box door was open and he witnessed a cerulean flash and a rattail of smoke, the first of four fuses it took to fry one egg. He had no idea how to upgrade the wiring, and in the following days he began to eat his food cold.

  Every day, he wandered through his rooms, calculating how long it would take to patch the fractured plaster, paint the blotched walls, and glaze the windows.

  Julian understood that he would have to hire cheap help, a broken-down old carpenter desperate for work, or some rehabilitating wino or mental case, and the thought elevated his spirits, as if such servitude would echo the history of the place. There was an ancient kitchen house in the back yard, left over from the days when kitchens were built separate from the main houses in order to prevent fires, and the hired fellow could stay there as part of his salary. The rural living and the hard work would bring the man back to health, so the job would be like granting a favor.

  He drove in to see Mr. Poxley, who, as usual, was standing at the end of his business counter, his left elbow holding him up. “What can I do for you, Mr. Typewriter Man?”

  Julian frowned at the greeting. “I need to find somebody to do electrical work, simple carpentry, and painting.”

  Mr. Poxley’s eyebrows flew up. “So do I.”

  Julian crossed his skinny arms. “But I can offer a place to live.”

  “You say you want this worker to live out there with you? What on earth for? You’ll have to feed him, and he’ll have lots of chances to bum money. After a few months on the place, he’ll be the same as a brother-in-law.”

  “I want an employee, not a relative.”

  Mr. Poxley flapped his limp hand at him. “You want a sharecropper, son. Them days is over, gone to history.”

  Julian suspected that Chance Poxley had little grasp of history. He was just a desiccated old man who specialized in opinions. Still, he probably knew everyone in the county. Julian leaned in and lowered his voice. “I thought maybe I could find someone with a weakness. You know how people go out of circulation because they gamble too much or drink.”

  “Oh, you want a drunk sharecropper,” the old man said.

  “No, no. Maybe somebody just down on his luck. I could help turn him around.”

  “He gets drunk enough, he’ll turn around plenty.” Mr. Poxley slapped his leg and bent over laughing.

  Julian had little patience with uneducated people and turned to walk out. He caught sight of a large corkboard tacked over with hand-printed messages, a community bulletin board. “Can I at least put up a little notice there?”

  “Hep yourself.” The old man limped off toward the restroom as Julian searched along the counter until he found pen and pad.

  “Wanted: handyman to live on site and repair house. Ask Mr. Poxley for directions.” Succinct, that was the way to be, Julian thought. He looked back toward the restroom, and added, “No drunks.” He chose a black thumbtack out of a pile in an ashtray and stuck the note in the middle of the board, next to one offering a free rattlesnake to a good home.

  The following Monday, Julian was outside on the lower gallery, cleaning up a geriatric Underwood on a plank table he had dragged from an outbuilding. In each room of the house, a single bulb hung from the ceiling, and the big spaces drank up all the light, so he’d begun to work outside in the morning sun, weather permitting. Around ten o’clock, he sensed movement in the periphery of his bifocals and raised his head to see a man standing in the heatstruck privet at the roadside, watching him. Julian called out, and the fellow struggled through the weeds and came up to the house. He seemed about fifty, a lean, fairly tall fellow wearing triple-seam blue jeans and a matching heavy denim shirt with the sleeves cut to the armpits. His baseball cap was of the same material, a plain-billed dome with no inscription. Julian had never seen a cap with nothing written on the front of it. “Where did you come from?” Julian asked.

  “Town. I seen your note.”

  “What? Oh, yes.” He stood up and began to look him over.

  The man’s yellowed eyes darted up the side of the building. “I can carpenter good. My name’s Obadiah, but people call me Obie. It used to rile me when they called me that, but nowadays I just go along.”

  Julian studied him, looking for signals. “Can you paint?”

  “Your name.”

  “What?”

  “You ain’t told me your name.”

  “Julian Godhigh. Right now it’s Smith, but I’m going to change it to my ancestral name when I get a chance.”

  “Some men can change like a porch lizard switches colors,” Obie said, focussing on Julian. “And some cain’t.” The man leaned off to the side and his skin was a cloudy blue-gray, as though he were ill in some exotic way. “I can paint a wall like a artist.”

  Julian smirked. “Really. Like Michelangelo?”

  Obie looked away. “I reckon. Only I use a roller.”

  “What about electrical repairs?”

  “It ain’t nothing I cain’t pick up. I can do one thing as good as another.” He spat into the grass.

  When the man turned, Julian glimpsed part of a tattoo, half a spider crawling out of the collar of his shirt. Again he saw that the skin on his arms was a smudged cyanic color, mottled in incoherent patterns, as if the flesh had been cooked all over. “Are you from around here?”

  “Over in Georgia.”

  “Can’t find work there?”

  “My wife and me been havin’ trouble, so I was stayin’ in my cousin’s travel trailer. Except now he wants to sell it.”

  The
men walked around to the wasp-haunted kitchen house and forced open the cocked door. Julian said he would buy a cot and the man could sleep there. They would try a working relationship for a few days. The one-room building contained a table with a porcelain top and a hide-bottomed chair, both sitting under an unfrosted lightbulb hanging from the ceiling on a long cord, and Obie went in and scraped dust and fallen dirt-dauber nests off the table with the side of his hand. Julian returned to the big house and brought back bread, block cheese, and lunch meat, and they came to terms.

  Obie stepped over to a window. He rubbed a hand over the cloudy glass and cleared a view out toward a collapsing shed. “You ever been married?”

  Julian suddenly wanted a drink, and he sat down on the single chair. “One time. It lasted about four years, and then it was time to leave.”

  Obie reached over his shoulder to scratch his back. “I married a religious woman and did all I could to please her. I even got saved and tithed out of what little pay I made. She run me off even though I done things for her no other man would of.” Obie looked down at the floor as though contemplating a scene of great sorrow. “It was a mystery why I did it.”

  Julian bobbed his head. “Mine asked me to make more money, but I wanted to keep doing what I was doing. A manual typewriter and I were made for each other. I can make the big old Smith Coronas tap-dance like Fred Astaire.”

  Obie looked up. “You left her, or she left you?”

  “I think the motions were mutual.”

  Obie leaned against the beaded-board wall. “You traded a woman for typewriters.”

  At first, Julian felt insulted, but the way Obie made the comment suggested that he understood, that he himself had made some unusual trades in his time.

  “I needed to follow my talent.”

  Obie nodded. “I know about what a man thinks he needs.” And with this he began unbuttoning his shirt. “You think you need to make a statement in life. But it don’t seem like nothin’ you do gets taken serious.”

  Julian felt a slight rush of panic as Obie opened his shirt wide to reveal a tattoo of a tailless dragon over his liver and one of a disarmed battleship across his hairless chest. Below the vessel was a dolphin jumping out of the sea, but its fin and its eyes were blurred, as though by an industrial accident. All the skin from his shoulders down to his waistband was fine-line tattoo work partially eaten away, the flesh abraded and inflamed. “It’s a sight, ain’t it.”

  “What in the world happened to you?”

  “My tattoo collection. I’m gettin’ it burnt off. I got my arms did already. I found a cut-rate Indian doctor to do it over in Poxley, but those treatments still cost like the devil and I’m about tapped out. It’s why I got to go to work.”

  “What changed your mind about those things?” The colors, he noticed, were garish and the designs incongruous.

  Obie stood up and looked out the door toward the big house. “Maybe 1 don’t need ’em no more. Get a little older, you need less and less.”

  Julian jabbed a finger at what was left of the dolphin. “Well, there’s enough work around here so you can afford to burn yourself white as toilet paper.”

  The night was warm and Julian turned in his damp sheets, waking briefly at gray dawn and hearing someone walking, inside and out. When he got up at eight and made coffee, Obie came to the big house’s kitchen door and waited outside the screen looking in, as if knocking were beside the point.

  “I got a startin’ list for you.”

  Julian looked up from his coffee. “A list of what?”

  “Of things to fix the house.”

  “Come in here.” He took the smudged sheet where he sat at the wobbly table. “Good God, this is over a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. Where’d you get the prices?”

  “I borried the phone in the hall.”

  He shook his head. “That’s too much.”

  “Delivery is free above a thousand dollars. It’ll save you seven per cent, man said.”

  Julian saw that Obie was looking at the ceiling, already working in his mind. “Well, what’s on the schedule first?”

  “Electric wire. Then low-lustre paint for a couple of these rooms.” He smiled, showing big, evenly spaced teeth. “Hide the cracks and raise the spirits.”

  After the Poxley Lumber Company truck left, Obie began work. By Saturday, the difference in the place was palpable. In the kitchen, he installed a new gray breaker box, and two walls in Julian’s room were patched, sanded, and painted an airy antique white. Julian paid Obie in cash on the next Saturday morning and drove him to Dr. Setumahaven’s office in Poxley, dropping him off and then going shopping. When he picked him up after the treatments, the expression Obie wore was that of a martyr, his eyes misshapen and dark with pain.

  “You look like a boiled lobster,” Julian told him.

  Obie gently lowered himself into the passenger seat. “I got my money’s worth today, all right.”

  They rode along the dusty road without talking, and Julian imagined that he could smell the laser burn.

  That day, Obie mixed mortar and began patching the first-floor exterior wall. The next week, he worked on the downstairs bathroom, and the rest of the month he repaired the sewer line out to the septic tank and installed a cheap air conditioner in Julian’s room. The men tolerated each other and ate supper together on a card table set on the creaking floor of the big dining room. One rainy day, they sat under the wavering glow of a shorting light fixture while Obie feebly complained about how little Julian was paying him.

  “Yeah, but you’re getting cheap room and board.”

  Obie glanced up at the dusty brass disk holding a circle of twenty-five-watt bulbs. “I got to share it with the squirrels and the rats. You ought to charge them half the rent.”

  Julian motioned to Obie’s neck, where Dr. Setumahaven’s laser had reduced the spider to a dim blue shadow. “You’re still making enough to get rid of your collection.”

  “If you paid me more, I could get ’em burnt off faster.”

  “I don’t understand why you bother at all. I mean, who cares? The doctor’s gotten rid of all the ones people can see.”

  Obie rubbed his narrow face, his whiskers crackling like coarse steel wool. “I used your phone to call my wife. She said she might could take me back if I got rid of all my idols. She calls ’em idols.”

  “Take you back?” Julian gave him a startled look. “Didn’t you tell me that woman beat you with a broom?”

  Obie looked down at his plate and smiled a faraway smile. “Aw, she’s just a woman. Can’t hurt a man unless she buys a gun.”

  Julian stood up and began to clear the table. “Next time you go see Setumahaven, tell him to stick that laser in your left ear. Light up your brains.”

  Obie watched him leave the room and called after him, “Ain’t you never lonesome for some company?”

  Julian came back in and stood behind his chair. “I’ve got to the point where I can live alone. I’ve built up my business, and now I’ve got this big house to keep me busy and give me a place in the world.”

  The light fixture made a futzing sound, and Obie blinked. “So this here place makes you feel important?”

  Julian threw his arms wide to the echoing room. “I am important. What do you say to that?”

  Obie turned toward the window, where the antique glass distorted everything beyond. “I say I need another box of roofin’ nails so I can fix the tin on top of your importance.”

  The work went on through September, and Obie slaved over the corroded wiring and the slow-running plumbing. He ran his hands over every board in the building, finding where thousands of square nails had pulled free from the shrunken lumber. After Julian had gone to bed one night, he heard the back door to the main hall scuff open. Figuring Obie had come in for a drink of ice water, which was all he allowed him to have from the refrigerator, he dropped off to sleep. Soon, he was awakened by talking, just parts of words bouncing up the stairs to his single be
d. He crept to the head of the stairway and heard Obie use a soft and rhythmic voice he had never heard before. He listened hard and heard him say, “Save me, O God, for the waters threaten my life; I am sunk in the abysmal swamp where there is no foothold.” Julian walked down until he could see Obie seated at the old phone table, a flashlight shining down on an open Bible. He wondered if the call was long-distance, if he should yell out to stop reading Scripture into the phone at twelve cents a minute. Someone on the other end of the line must have said something, for Obie’s voice stopped, and then said, “I’m workin’, but I ain’t able to save much. He cusses me and charges me for everthing. Sent me to town in his car to get tar and took the gas out my pay. What? Read Psalm 64? It’ll cover him, will it?” Julian coughed, and Obie shined the flashlight up to the dark landing. “I got to go now. I’ll call you fore long.” He hung up and raised his face.

  Julian’s voice sliced down on him. “Was that that woman in Georgia?”

  “It was.”

  “You planning on reading the whole Bible to her?”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, but when I get the bill I’ll let you know the charges.”