The Caretaker's Wife

by Vincent Zandri

  “Wait here,” I said.

  “Hurry it up, Kingsley,” Leslie said. “I want to leave this place.”

  I made my way across the small gravel lot to the tavern entrance. Stepping up onto a porch that ran the length of the single-story wood building, I tried to open the door. But it was locked. I pushed and pulled on it, but sure enough, it was locked. That’s when I noticed the brochures. Maybe two dozen of them stuffed into a wall-mounted metal mailbox. I pulled one out, glanced at it, and then shoved it in my coat pocket.

  I recall shaking my head and whispering something like, “Hell of a way to do business,” as I made my way back down the porch steps. “How do they expect to make any money if they don’t open their doors?”

  I got back in the Jeep.

  “It was locked,” I said. “No one seems to be here.”

  “Like I said,” Leslie mumbled. “Creepy. Like a Stephen King novel.”

  “Can we go already, Daddy?” Erin said.

  I turned the Jeep around and sped back over the two-track to Loon Lake Road. While I drove, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would one day come back here, and when I did, it would be without my family.

  My eyes still glued to the crumpled brochure, I couldn’t help but wonder what ever happened to that little place of peace and serenity on the lake. Maybe somebody had bought it and made it operational again. It might be a good place to escape to, to write a new novel, to get my career back in order. For the first time since arriving back home, I was feeling optimistic. I made my way into the kitchen, pulled the phone off the charger, and dialed the number that appeared at the very bottom of the brochure. It rang, and I waited.

  When someone picked up, it surprised the hell out of me.

  “Loon Lake Inn,” said a sweet voice. The voice of a young woman I immediately invented in my head. Tall, with perky breasts, beautiful brown eyes, and long hair to match. What Leslie looked like in her younger days.

  She asked me how she could help.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I didn’t expect anyone to answer.”

  She giggled. “And why is that?” she asked.

  I told her about my visit to the property all those years ago. She giggled once more.

  “That’s because there wasn’t anyone here,” she said. “That was the summer my husband and I were buying the place. It took forever for the lawyers to seal the deal. But in the end, it all worked out just fine. Now then, would you like to make a reservation?”

  Her question sort of shook me up. I guess subconsciously, I was convinced nobody would answer the phone. In my head, I pictured a wall-mounted phone ringing inside an empty tavern now filled with dust and cobwebs.

  “You’re married?” I said.

  Jesus, what a hell of a thing to say. I’d been away for too long. My social skills had suffered.

  She giggled again.

  “Is that a problem?” she asked pleasantly.

  I quickly gathered my wits.

  “Just joking with you, mam,” I said. Then, “Yes, I’d like to make a reservation for tonight if you have something.”

  She told me she did. When she asked me how long my stay would be, I sort of found myself looking around the kitchen and at the dining room beyond it, and the empty family room beyond that. My home screamed of loneliness and despair, and I knew in my heart that I would never be coming back here. I felt my eyes fill, and for a second or two I choked up.

  Clearing the frog from my throat, I said, “Looks like I’ll be staying for a while.”

  2

  We hung up, and I made for the front door off the vestibule. Grabbing hold of my bag, I was just about to make my way out the front door when something came over me. Turning, I made for the garage off the family room. Call it intuition, but sure enough, a big cardboard box had been placed by the door. A big box that once held rolls and rolls of paper towels. It had become moldy, probably from melted snow. During the time I’d been locked up in the joint, it had gathered lots of dust.

  I opened it to find a bunch of my old books. There were some unfinished manuscripts in there too, but I didn’t care about those because I knew they were garbage. What I was interested in was the typewriter that had been placed on top of everything. When I pulled it out, I could see that something was wrong with it. Some of the keys had been bent and broken, almost like somebody had purposely gone at it with a baseball bat. But then it dawned on me that someone could have just as easily dropped it by mistake while she was packing it up. The former was a definite possibility, but I wanted to believe the latter. I also searched for my laptop, but it wasn’t in there.

  I dropped the now useless machine back into the box, stepped into the family room and closed the door. Making my way across the dining room and kitchen, I headed down into the basement and into the laundry room. I sometimes used the place as a kind of writing studio. My laptop was set on the small desk next to the dryer. It was still plugged into the outlet. That was my good luck. I unplugged the machine, rolled up the chord and shoved the laptop under my arm, then headed back upstairs.

  Back in the front vestibule, I shoved the laptop and the chord in my bag. I was ready to leave, but a strange feeling made me want to turn around one more time. A voice inside my head told me to take one final look at what had once been my entire life.

  I headed for Erin’s bedroom. The room was clean, the bed made, the many pillows and stuffed animals covering nearly the entire bed. Posters of boy bands were thumbtacked to the walls. The room had been painted pink, and it was very much a teenage girl’s room. Her dresser was covered in makeup kits and hair brushes. Closing my eyes, I tried to remember her voice, her smell, her smile. As hard as I tried, nothing would come to me.

  Stepping back out of the room, I went to the master bedroom, and stood in the open door. I locked eyes on the big bed where Leslie and I had made love hundreds of times. I saw us on the bed naked, locked in an embrace. In my head, the room was bright and filled with sunlight. But in reality, the shades were drawn, and the room was dark and foreboding like a funeral parlor.

  I thought about everything that had happened in my life up to that point. Everything that had led to where I was standing right now, all alone. My whole life flashed before me in the span of an instant. I saw myself being born, saw my mother giving me up for adoption, saw the room I shared with two other boys who were not my brothers, saw myself wearing the ill-fitting hand-me-downs I wore through grammar school and most of high school. But then I saw myself growing, getting stronger. For the briefest of moments, I relived kicking some ass on the high school football field, relived mowing as many lawns as I could to get through college and then joining the Army and becoming a Ranger. I saw the platoon I lead into Falluja and I saw my men dying. In my head, I relived the hand-to-hand combat, and I recalled the black-bearded Al Qaeda fucker who cut my chest with a knife and how I used my strength to turn the knife on him. My thoughts drifted to my Army discharge and meeting Leslie, marrying Leslie, publishing my first novel—and a second and a third. Then coming up with my greatest creation of them all—Erin.

  But the memories turned sour when I saw myself sleeping alone in our marriage bed while Leslie moved to the opposite side of the house…while she was cheating on me with the carpenter. I recalled the afternoon I was seated inside Lucy’s Bar and I saw the carpenter walk in, and I saw myself putting him down with one solid punch. I saw myself tossing him out that window, and then I saw myself behind bars.

  “So long and farewell,” I said under my breath.

  It was loud enough to raise the fine hairs on the back of my neck. I teared up again, and my stomach felt like someone had kicked it. About-facing, I practically ran for the front door.

  I drove my Jeep to the pawn shop over on Central Avenue. There was a big neon sign outside that read, We Buy Gold and Silver. I parked in the small lot. As I was getting out, I was suddenly sorry I hadn’t stuffed my pockets with more of Leslie’s jewelr
y. I needed it more than she did at this point, and what the hell, most of it I’d purchased on her behalf. I made my way into the shop. It was filled with all sorts of junk stacked on shelves. Everything from electric guitars to full sets of used luggage. Some of the more valuable stuff like jewelry and handguns were kept inside a long glass counter.

  A man appeared from out of the back. He was a big man, his round face sporting a goatee and mustache. He was chewing something like I’d caught him in the middle of a very early lunch.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  I reached into my coat pockets, pulled out the jewelry I’d snatched from Leslie’s drawer, and set it all atop the counter. He swallowed whatever was in his mouth. Then he looked at the jewelry. He fingered the pieces with his sausage-thick fingers. When he was through, he looked into my eyes.

  “What do you want for this stuff?” he said.

  I cocked my head over my shoulder.

  “I was hoping three-hundred,” I said.

  But I had no idea what used jewelry was worth. All I knew was I needed the cash. Needed it bad.

  He picked at the food stuck in his front teeth with the long nail on his index finger. Then he snickered and grinned. It told me I was asking either way too much or way too little. Behind him, mounted to the wall, was a round mirror wrapped in a kind of ornate gold frame. I saw my face inside it. Round, shaven, my brown eyes looking sad. My hair had gone somewhat gray in prison. But at least I still had it. I also had strength. Prison was the perfect poison if you enjoyed nothing but time, and I used a lot of that time to hit the weight yard. I’d grown solid in prison. More than solid. My muscles had burst out of my skin, and I was proud of them now. In a word, I looked badass.

  “So, what’ll it be?” I said. “We have a deal?”

  That’s when I saw it displayed only a couple of feet away from the mirror. A typewriter set on a metal shelf. Three typewriters, in fact. But it was the one closest to the mirror that captured my full attention. I still preferred to write on a good old-fashioned portable manual typewriter than I did my laptop computer. There was something about the sound of the keys smacking the paper. The rat-tat-tat, machine gun-like rhythm. I wasn’t a typewriter expert by any means. But by the looks of things, the machine was a late 1960s era Olivetti.

  “How much for the Olivetti?” I asked.

  “What’s an Olivetti?” he said.

  From experience, I knew that a vintage Olivetti could run you five-hundred bucks. It was a stroke of luck that he didn’t know one typewriter from another.

  “The one on the far right,” I said. “Does it work?”

  He nodded. “Perfect working order. They all are.”

  “I’ll give you fifty bucks for it,” I said.

  He pursed his lips, went to the cash register, and opened it. He pulled out two Benjamins and a US Grant, which he set down on the glass case before me. He then went to the shelf, pulled down the Olivetti typewriter, and set that down next to the cash.

  “Three-hundred for the jewelry,” he said. “Minus the typewriter.”

  I took the cash and shoved it in my pocket.

  “You got a spare sheet of blank paper?” I asked.

  He told me to hang on while he made his way over to the copy machine. He opened the paper drawer and stole a sheet. He came back and handed it to me.

  “This thing is a relic, you ask me,” he said.

  I shoved the paper into the spool, then placed my fingers on the keys. I typed, This thing is a relic, you ask me.

  “You’re pretty quick with that thing,” he said. “You a writer?”

  “Used to be.” I smiled. “Hope to be again.”

  “How long you been outta the joint?” he asked. The question took me by surprise.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I can always tell. You didn’t get that build at the local Planet Fitness. Did seven years myself at Green Haven for two counts of larceny. But that was in another life.”

  “Just got out,” I said.

  “Thus the need for quick cash,” he said. “You got that look on your face that tells me you plan on going somewhere. Your parole officer know about that shit?”

  “I’m not going far,” I said. “Just up into the mountains.”

  “You ain’t gotta report to a halfway house?”

  “Lawyer worked out a sweet deal for me. Just can’t leave the country for a while. They want me to work, but who the hell hires ex-cons? That’s why I need the typewriter.”

  “Maybe you’ll write something that’ll make you famous. A prison memoir. That’s it, a prison memoir.”

  I pulled the typewriter off the counter, cradled it under my arm. It felt heavy and solid and wonderful. It was my portal to a new future.

  “Not a bad idea,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Keep your nose clean, pal,” he said.

  “It was never dirty in the first place,” I said, opening the door and walking out.

  Setting the Olivetti onto the shotgun seat, I took off my leather coat and placed it over the typewriter. Now down to a snug-fitting black t-shirt, I drove to the grocery store and bought two reams of blank copy paper, some lunch meat, white bread, a half dozen cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, a jar of peanut butter, a dozen eggs, a carton of orange juice, a carton of milk, and finally a twelve pack of beer—cans, of course. I paid with cash, left the store, and stored everything into the back of the Jeep. That’s when, out the corner of my eye, I spotted Lucy’s Bar at the bottom of the hill. The window I’d tossed the carpenter out of was now repaired. Had been for some time, or so I assumed. I don’t know why exactly, but I felt a smile growing on my face, because once upon a time, someone very special worked at the bar. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was still employed there.

  Getting back behind the wheel of the Jeep, I turned the engine over and backed out of the lot. I knew I should be hitting the highway since it was already past noon, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to make a quick pit stop to my old haunt. Rather, I felt the need to make a pit stop.

  I parked right in the front of the joint. It was spring. The air was still cool, but some folks were seated at the tables on the deck. As I walked in, some of them looked at me, but I didn’t recognize their faces, and I wasn’t sure they recognized mine. But it was a different story when I walked into the bar. It was dark despite the sunshine outside.

  A few of the regulars were bellied up to the horseshoe-shaped bar. Richie, the old Marine gunny sergeant, was one of them. He was dressed in a loose-fitting, flower-pattern Tommy Bahama button-down shirt. He might have been in his mid-seventies by now, but the solid as granite muscles in both his arms would have made Popeye jealous. Seated dutifully on the stool beside him was his longtime girlfriend, Sandie. She had short strawberry blonde hair and a perfect rack that was accentuated by a low-cut sweater.

  “Well, look at what the cat just dragged in,” she said as soon as she laid eyes on me.

  That got the bartender’s attention. His name was Stan, and he was a short but muscular Pollock who wore his white hair brush cut short. I knew that he played college ball, and he was every bit as tough as the pigskin he used to cradle into end zone after end zone. Stan had supported my side in the...let’s call it altercation...with the carpenter, so his eyes lit up at my presence.

  “Kingsley,” he said. “Word on the street was that you were dead.”

  I sat down at the bar, nodded at Richie and Sandie. The muscular gunny sergeant nodded back and immediately refocused on the Lotto Quickdraw playing out on the wall-mounted flat screen.

  “Maybe I am dead,” I said, “and this is heaven.”

  “Oh hell,” Stan said. “Because if this is heaven, I wanna get the hell out.”

  I ordered a beer. A draft.

  “Listen,” he said, leaning in closer to me, “I’ll serve you. But if Lucy comes in, you’re gonna have to leave.” Lucy being the owner of the joint
.

  I pictured the moment I tossed the carpenter through the window. The sounds of shattering glass and a heavy body falling to the pavement outside once more rang in my ears.

  The window alone probably cost Lucy fifteen hundred bucks.

  Maybe it was insured.

  “I get it, Stan,” I said.

  He poured me my beer, set it in front of me.

  “You here to see Theresa?” he asked a bit sheepishly.

  “She still working the job?”

  “Somebody’s got to put food on the table for her husband and kid,” Stan said.

  I felt like something poked me in the gut.

  “She got married?”

  “To the asshole,” Stan said. “Brian. If you can believe it.” I guess I could believe it. Why did grown men and women insist on falling in love with the people they should stay away from?

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Down in the basement counting out her tips.” He glanced at his watch. “Lucy ain’t due back for a half hour you wanna take a walk down to see her. I heard you got divorced while you were in the can. Means you’re free as a bird.”

  “News to me,” I said, seeing my empty house in my head.

  Were divorce papers on their way soon?

  Stan gave me a wink. I drank some beer, slid off the stool, and headed for the basement stairs.

  The basement was cramped and dimly lit. There were all sorts of kegs hanging around, plus some palates filled with cases of beer and wine. A small office was located in the back. The door was open so I could see her seated at the desk. Her back was to me, and the way her long dark hair draped her shoulders broke my heart. I knew she had it rough, and I knew the tips she was counting on to survive was like stacking pennies. You’d never get rich working for Lucy. But at least it was a job. Something her new husband, Brian, had trouble hanging on to.

  That was his reputation anyway.

  My footsteps were silent. Entering the office, I wrapped my hands gently around her eyes.