by Amy Hempel
Obie turned his head toward the back door and looked as if he might speak, but the only sound that drifted up to Julian was the click of the flashlight and then the invisible creaking of the hallway’s boards.
On Wednesday, he drove to Chance Poxley’s store to buy a night table. Mr. Poxley leaned on the end of the counter and watched him walk in the door. The old man screwed up his face as though he smelled carrion.
“Do for you?”
“I need a small inexpensive table to put beside my bed.”
“Uh-huh. That Parker boy still workin’ for you?”
“He is, slowly.”
“How much you payin’ him, anyhow?”
Julian turned his head toward the store’s cheap furniture, then looked back. “Has he been complaining to you?”
Mr. Poxley focussed on Julian’s eyes. “That boy’s a good worker. I believe he can fix a broke horse.”
“He’s all right.”
“What you payin’ him?”
“That’s between me and him. He ought to pay me just to put up with his spooky ways.”
“You bring him into town today?”
“He’s over at Setumahaven’s.”
“I heard he had them on the bottoms of his feet. That must hurt like fire to have one took off there.”
“I don’t think about it.”
Mr. Poxley blinked. “What do you think about, Mr. Typewriter Man?”
Julian looked at him. “What do you think I ought to think about?”
“How about payin’ somebody does good work a livin’ wage.”
“Look, I admit he’s a good worker and not bad to have on the place, but he doesn’t bear the expense of commuting or of owning a car. Again, has he been complaining?”
Chance Poxley swung his head away. “That one won’t complain.”
“Well, by damn, show me a table, then.”
He finished at the furniture store long before he was supposed to pick up Obie at the doctor’s office. He parked his Dodge, angrily thought over Mr. Poxley’s criticisms, and then went into the red brick city library, where he found a small Bible and walked into the stacks with it lest someone see him. He turned to Psalm 64 and read:
Hide me from the conspiracy of the wicked,
From that noisy crowd of evildoers,
Who sharpen their tongues like swords
And aim their words like deadly arrows.
He slammed the book shut, holding the cover down as though it might spring back open accusingly. Between two musty stacks of dog-eared history books, he waited for the words to have some effect, but he felt not a thing, no change at all, though he couldn’t resist touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
When Obie climbed into the Dodge that afternoon, he was bent forward with pain. Julian looked at him intently. “I wouldn’t give anyone money to hurt me. If I were you, I’d have saved up for an automobile instead.”
Obie closed his eyes and leaned his head against the cracked window. “What do I have need of a automobile, with no place to go?”
“Which one did they finish up today?”
“The battleship. Feels like he dug it out of me with a pocket-knife.”
Julian checked his rearview mirror before backing up. “Will you be able to work on the upstairs porch?”
“Gimme a couple hours. I’ll see.”
He drove into Memphis the next day, delivering refurbished typewriters and picking up dirty, nonfunctional machines from three behind-the-times businesses and two antique shops. He collected a few accounts and added up his money. The weather had been unseasonably warm, and he considered buying Obie a small electric fan but decided against it, because it would just make him unhappy if he ever had to live without one again. It was cruel, he thought, to make things too comfortable for someone going down in life.
Two weeks later, Obie walked up to Julian where he was working on an old gray Royal on the front porch and told him that he had an appointment with the doctor on Wednesday.
“I’m not going into town that day.”
“It’s important. I got to get the big one on my back burnt off.”
He put down a slim screwdriver. “You have one on your back? What for?”
“It’s a long story.”
Julian straightened up in his tin chair. “Let me see it.”
Obie unbuttoned his denim shirt and let it down and turned.
Julian put a hand to his chin. “Good Lord, it’s Jesus.”
“He cost me a lot.”
He adjusted his glasses. “It’s a good job for such a large image. Too bad I can’t skin it off you and frame it or something.”
Obie jerked up his shirt and began buttoning It. “Can you take me to town Wednesday or not?”
“Maybe so. If you pay my gas.” Obie stared at him and Julian wondered how he could be such a mooch, expecting him to ride him around like a free taxi. “Now, what do you think about that railing up there?”
“I reckon it ought to be changed,” Obie said, tucking in his shirt. “You might lean on it and fall and break your neck.”
Julian waited outside the doctor’s office, dozing behind the wheel, dreaming of tall gleaming pillars and him standing between them in an immaculate white suit. When the door on the passenger side opened, he woke up feeling sore and sour. He looked at his watch and frowned. “What did your red-dot doctor think about erasing God off you?”
Obie sat with his back away from the seat. “He only took him off the outside,” he whispered.
“Are you sure he didn’t replace him with Buddha?”
“Can we go on to the house?”
“Aw, can’t you take a joke?”
Obie rolled his burning eyes toward him. “Do you have any aspirin?”
“There’s a tin in the glove compartment. But don’t ask me to stop and buy you a Coke.”
In late October, the money finally ran out. Julian announced that he couldn’t pay Obie anymore, but he would let him live on the place for free if he painted the outside. Obie walked out onto the front lawn under the two-hundred-year-old oak and stared. Julian stood between a pair of crazed pillars, watching him. After two minutes he called out, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m figurin’ it would take me sixty gallons of primer and paint and a full year to do it myself. It needs to be sanded, washed, and scraped, and I’d have to live here three years past the end of the job to take the value out in rent.”
Julian stepped into the yard and looked up at the complex eaves, the paint-sucking galleries. “We can work something out.”
“No, we cain’t. I’m finished with my treatments. Setumahaven give me some fading chemical, and Monday I’ll go to that tanning parlor by the cornmeal plant.”
Julian took a step backward, startled. “What are you talking about? You can’t leave.”
Obie spread his arms like a gaunt bird ready to take flight. “The old me’s gone. The new me’s got to move on down the road.”
Over the next several days, Obie’s color changed from a mix of blood and ink to a mildly unhealthy skim-milk hue, and after several sessions at the Red Bug Tanning Salon his skin turned an even, rosy manila. One night, Julian decided that Obie might stay and work for him if he went into his meagre retirement savings and paid him a real salary.
The next morning, Julian got out of bed and fried a ham steak for breakfast, Obie’s favorite. After the table was set, he went out into the yard, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw that the door to the old kitchen was wide open. Inside, the cot was empty, and Obie’s duffel bag, always in the same spot under it, was gone. He began to panic and stared up at his sickly house, which loomed over him, leprous and crippled. He raced into Poxley, but no one at the bus station had seen him, and Dr. Setumahaven’s office was closed. After driving around the town’s narrow streets for half an hour, he parked and went into Chance Poxley’s store.
The old man came out of his office and squinted at him. “What?”
“I ca
n’t find my hired man.”
“Well.”
“He just left without a word.”
Mr. Poxley leaned over and pressed the Clear button on his adding machine. “That so?”
“Have you seen him?”
The old man shook his head. “It’s been a while. He did tell me he’d finished up with the skin doc. I don’t think he had much need of your job anymore.”
“He told me he used to stay with a cousin. Where’s he live?”
“He’s not there. That boy pitched him out to begin with.”
Julian stared at the store’s broad plate-glass windows, emblazoned with shoe-polish lettering: CASH TALKS. “I’ve got to find him.”
“Unless I miss my guess, you can’t afford him anymore.”
“What are you saying?”
Mr. Poxley looked down and his voice softened. “What do you need him for, anyway?”
Julian’s mouth fell open a bit and he focussed on a new gas range to the right of the counter. He could fix a typewriter, but nothing else in the world, and he didn’t know if he could continue living in the old mansion, unable as he was to keep it nailed together. But the real problem came upon him as suddenly as thunder. He’d be alone. The house and its canyon rooms would swallow him up, the only sound would be his own footsteps thrown back in his face, and when he stopped moving he’d meet a silence as vast as night.
In the middle of November, a freakish weather pattern set in—howling wind with ice in its teeth. Julian was adjusting a Royal 440, and around sundown his hands began to shake. The single-pane windows and the shrunken doors shivered in their frames. There was no insulation anywhere and what little residual heat there was soon leaked through the ceiling lath. He put on sweaters and two jackets and remembered that the house had no functioning heating system. The squatters had used tin trash burners, running the stovepipes through the windows, but all that had been thrown out. Obie had told him that the fireplace flues were no longer safe, that the chimneys were falling apart in the attic. He climbed into bed under every sheet and quilt he owned, deciding that the next night would be warmer.
The next night brought a whip-cracking gale, and a weatherman on his car’s radio announced that a solid week of unusually cold temperatures was on the way. Julian drove into town and bought an electric heater, but under the fifteen-foot ceilings the device was like a spark at the North Pole. The third night, he slept in his car with the motor running, but, when he checked the gas gauge on waking, he knew he couldn’t afford to do that again. He got out of the backseat cursing the oil industry and the whole Middle East and loaded up five repaired typewriters for delivery in Memphis.
The fourth night, he became ill and for two weeks suffered through a cold, which turned into influenza. After a teasing warm spell, December’s weather came back mortally cold, and he moved out of the mansion into Obie’s little kitchen house. The electric heater and the old wood-burning range together would keep the room at fifty degrees, and he could sleep. But it was a miserable place to stay, its attic full of manic squirrels, its floor a dull smear of ground-in soot and dirt, its walls impregnated with the oily emanations of ten thousand meals.
One day in mid-December, there was a knock at the kitchen-house door and he found Chance Poxley standing in the tall dead grass, wearing a small tweed fedora, shading his eyes with one hand.
Julian held the door open only a little. “What can I do for you?”
“Can I step in? This wind is about to freeze me female.”
He backed into the room, and the old man came up the three wooden steps. When his eyes adjusted, he looked around. “My God, you’re livin’ like a jailbird in here.”
“Next year I’ll arrange to keep the big house warm.”
Mr. Poxley shook his head. “I hear in the old days it took three servants workin’ full time to keep all the fireplaces going with coal. You can’t even buy coal anymore.”
“Did you come out here to discuss my heating problems?”
“No.” The old man handed him a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?”
“You’re two months behind on your payments.”
Julian reddened. He stood staring at the invoice for a long time as the squirrels began chasing one another above their heads. “Are you sure I haven’t paid these?”
“If you can show me the cancelled checks, we’ll know, won’t we?”
“I’ll examine my records, and if they indicate that I’ve missed paying you I’ll mail you a check.”
Mr. Poxley put out a hand. “I’d appreciate a check right now.”
“But I can’t do that. I might wind up paying you twice.”
The old man lowered his arm and looked over at the smoking stove. “Let me tell you some facts. People that take over a place like this have a lot of money. They can afford to hire a bunch of contractors to do a proper restoration.”
“My dream is to do just that.”
“At the rate you’re goin’, it’ll take you a hundred years just to make the place look second-rate. And if you stay out here it’ll kill you.”
Julian folded his arms. “It’s my heritage.”
“There’s people that’ll pay a bit of money for this property. With what you sell it for, you could get a tight little house with a shop out back.”
“And you’d get your money for the refrigerator and the air conditioner.”
Chance Poxley fixed him with his watery eyes and said in a low voice, “Look, if you don’t at least make up the payments, I’ll have to put a lien on the place. So will the folks down at the lumberyard, who I hear tell have advanced you considerable supplies on credit.”
Julian opened the door and pointed outside. “You’ll get your money.”
The old man looked into the weedy yard. “Well, I got to admit I’ve never been throwed out of a worse place than this.” He eased down the steps and turned around. “You know, I didn’t come here to cause you any trouble. But I got to tell you, when the sheriff found out an owner was on this property he checked into the tax records and told me he don’t care what the lawyers say, you owe county tax on this place back to 1946.” The old man’s hat blew off and his thin white hair was torn by the wind. “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”
Julian waved him away as though he were a stray dog. “Get off my property,” he yelled. “I can buy and sell every damned one of you.” He didn’t know where this cutting voice had come from, its load of arrogance perhaps conjured up out of the red dirt around him, the dead fields and parched lumber of his inheritance.
Julian sat down that night to balance his checkbook and found that he’d have to transfer money from his tiny emergency fund at the bank in Memphis to hold off his creditors for a week or so. After that, he was bankrupt.
One night of gun-blue sky, the temperature went down to nine degrees. Julian had stuffed the cookstove with scrap wood he’d scavenged and the stovepipe was glowing red halfway up to the flimsy ceiling. An old Remington manual was set up on the table and it refused to move when he hit the Tab key, the fresh oil on its parts turned to gum by the cold. At about eleven o’clock, he had to go to the bathroom, so he put on padded slippers and all the clothes in the room and opened the door to the night. The wind was a black punishment, and his bones were rattling by the time he reached the back door of the big house. As soon as he stepped inside, his feet began to sting, and when he turned on the hall light he could see water running deep on the floor. He splashed over to the foot of the stairs and looked up at a ladder of water coming down, a scrim of ice on the edges like a mountain stream. Upstairs, he found that a frozen toilet had shattered and fallen away from the wall, snapping off the feed line at floor level, and water was jetting up to the ceiling. He had no idea where he could turn the water off. And only one person could tell him.
He sat next to the phone table in the hall and hooked his feet on a chair rung to keep them out of the water. Pulling out his service receipts from the drawer under the phon
e, he studied the column of calls until he found a number in Georgia. He had done so much for Obie that the man should at least tell him where a valve was. Looking up, he watched lines of icicles forming where water sluiced through cracks in the plaster.
After many rings, someone in Georgia picked up the phone, and he asked to speak to Obie Parker. “This is his former employer,” he shouted into the receiver. “And I need to ask him a question.”
A woman’s reedy voice answered, sounding self-righteous and glad to be so. “Do you have any idea a-tall what time it is?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but this is important.”
“Obadiah is asleep, and a workin’ man needs all the rest he’s due, so I’m not a-goin’ to roust him out of a warm bed, Mister.”
Julian’s voice rose in pitch. “But I’ve got a broken water pipe and—”
“A broke pipe, you say? Mister, there’s people in the world got a whole lot worse than that wrong in their lives. They got the cancer, they got children sellin’ dope, they got trailers blown apart by the tornado wind that leaves them standin’ in the yard starin’ up at the stars. But you know what? Ain’t a one of them callin’ me up at twelve-ten at night to whine about no broke water pipe.”
“It’s eleven-ten.”
“Mister, you caught up in your own little world so much you think the rest of God’s universe is in your time zone. It’s twelve-ten in Georgia.”
A piano-size raft of plaster detached from the ceiling and fell at his feet, covering him with a surf of freezing water. “Good Lord, lady, I’ve got to talk to your husband.”
“People in Hell got to have strawberry shortcake, but they don’t get it.” She hung up.
He lowered the buzzing receiver and looked down the long, swamped hall toward the front of the house that was his glory. He knew everything about it, and at the same time nothing at all. The wind flattened the tall dry grass next to the pillars in a dead shout that told him not a thing that would help. Suddenly, he was startled by the jangling phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey. It’s Obie. I heard my wife a-talkin’ to you.”
