by Brady Udall
He slammed the door. “This ain’t as big a problem as it looks. Just going to have to apply ourselves, nothing some elbow grease won’t fix.” He pointed his wooden cane at the Indian, who was floating smoke rings into the shadowy reaches of an ironwood tree. “What about him?”
With a conviction that surprised me, I said, “He won’t tell anybody.”
Art took a billfold from his jacket and offered the Indian a couple of twenties.
“Everybody wanting to give me money,” the Indian said.
“This is neither bribe nor charity,” Art said gruffly. The hand that held the money shook as if another invisible hand was trying to wrestle the bills from its grip. “This is for your trouble. This is for looking after this boy when he needed help.”
The Indian looked at both of us, his eyes bright in the darkness, and laughed. He took the money, shoved it into his sack, and tossed his cigarette, which arced like a meteor into the weeds. He slung the sack over his shoulder and ambled away down the hill, laughing the whole way.
Art watched the Indian go. “I can’t see to save my life,” he said. “So you’re going to have to do the driving.”
Art showed me how to pull the seat up, adjust the steering wheel and mirrors, and signal when I turned. “Steady now, steady, that’s the way,” he said as I braked at the bottom of the hill. First, we stopped by his old house, where he had lived with his family before the accident. It was an avocado-colored rancher with a brick facade and a sign out front that said Dirk Fondley Realtors. The lawn was a tangle of dead weeds, and a huge elaborate spiderweb full of sticks and the empty carapaces of insects encased the front doorway.
Art chuckled. “I’d never give a thought to selling that house, but I can’t live in it neither. Put it on the market to keep the neighbors from howling, city codes and all that. Guess what it’s listed at? Quarter of a million bucks. I guess there won’t be a Sold sign going up anytime soon.”
He took out a key ring from his pocket, his hand shaking so the keys jangled with a steady tambourine rhythm, located one in particular and instructed me to go into the garage and get a pair of bolt cutters that were hanging on the wall next to the pickax. “Yellow handles,” he said. “Can’t miss ’em.”
I entered the garage through a door at the side of the house. The door’s hinges gave a series of rusty squeaks and then I was standing in the dark garage, inhaling the smell of old motor oil and gasoline and dust. I flipped the light switch and nothing happened. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the murky, predawn light and I could see that the garage was still crammed with the entire range of out-of-doors family paraphernalia: roller skates and sleeping bags and rosebush fertilizer and two old tricycles and a Big Wheel hanging from hooks in the ceiling. In the far corner hunched an orange barbecue grill tangled helplessly in a volleyball net.
The silence had a texture to it, a heft, and I could sense the uneasy presence of ghosts in that place, could feel them watching me. I located the bolt cutters as quickly as I could, holding my breath as if I had entered a room full of poisonous gas. Outside, pulling the door shut, I saw at my feet two small handprints pressed into the cement walkway. Emily 6 yrs, it said under one of them, and under the other, Sally Sue 9 yrs.
I got into the car and Art was still staring out the window at the house. He turned to me, surprised as if he hadn’t heard me get in.
“Everything okay in there?” he said, his eyes moist and unblinking.
“Fine,” I said, trying to suppress a shudder. “No problem.”
“Nobody’s been in there? Nothing disturbed?”
I shook my head. “A little dusty.”
He looked out at the house again. He was seeing years and days I had no way of knowing. He let out a breath that was almost a gasp and then he slapped his leg. “Okay. All right then. Let’s go get this done before there’s too much light.”
Art had me circle back around the Polar Bear Motel and then we were on a dirt road that passed a brick factory, a gravel pit and a wrecking yard before things opened up and we hit a two-track that looped through a scrub-dotted plain hemmed in on one side by the Ildicott mines and slag piles and smelter, and on the other by the rambling sandstone edifice up on a hill that had once been St. Divine’s. We rumbled over a cattle guard with a posted sign that said PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT.
“See that little circle of fence over there?” Art said. “That’s Bob’s Drop. An old mine shaft, I think I might of pointed it out to you once upon a time. It don’t look like there’s a road that goes out there anymore. We’ll have to take it cross-country.”
I pointed the Crown Victoria in the direction of Bob’s Drop and gritted my teeth as we lurched and thumped over mounds of sagebrush and mesquite that raked at the underside of the car with a screeching sound like the metal hull of a submarine coming apart.
Bob’s Drop was not much more than a large hole in the ground surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence placarded with more KEEP OUT signs and a few that said DANGER and PELIGRO, the individual letters spitting lightning bolts for effect. I remembered the night, long ago, when Art showed me this place through his spyglass. We sat up on the hospital roof, waiting for a fireworks show that never came.
I helped Art out of the car and he surveyed the scene. Though the sun was not yet up, the eastern rim of the world was a burning violet wire beneath the bright little dot of a rising Venus. Overhead, thousands of flashing stars hung down like ornaments from a sky that was deep-sea blue. Pieces of broken concrete and half-buried rusted couplings and lengths of track littered the ground around our feet. Twenty yards away a decrepit ore car lay tipped over next to a huge flowering yucca.
Art navigated around the desert vegetation and took a good long look at the gate that was padlocked with a chain. “I was thinking we could snap the lock, do it easy, but that might be too obvious. I think I got a better idea.” With painful care he circumnavigated the fence and found a portion that was overgrown with sagebrush. I fetched the cutters for him, and while struggling to hold back the sagebrush with his leg, he snipped about two feet worth of the fence wire from the ground up.
“We’ll slide him under right here and nobody’ll be the wiser. We’ll get this done right quick, then we can put it out of our minds.”
He coached me how to slip my arms under Barry’s armpits and drag him the twenty feet from the car to the fence. Barry was heavier than I ever could have imagined. I strained just to pull him from the seat onto the ground, his zip-up boots thumping against the glove box and floor. I hugged him close to my chest, put my chin in his hair and pulled with everything I had. Twice I tripped over clumps of sagebrush, sprawling backwards with Barry’s full weight on top of me. Both times I lay back in the dirt, the smell of cigarettes and sweat rising from his hair, and squeezed him with such a force that he wheezed as if alive. By the time I’d made it to the breach in the fence, my lungs were boiling in my chest, my legs gone wooden with exhaustion.
“Heck, that was the easy part,” Art said with a forced cheerfulness. “Now we got to drag his sorry ass under this fence.”
With great difficulty he bent down and lifted part of the fence like the flap of a tent. I crawled through and, as quickly as possible, turned around and grabbed Barry’s wrists. I gave a solid yank, but now with his entire body laid out in the soft dirt and only his arms to pull him by, friction and inertia and gravity and all kinds of other scientific concepts I didn’t care to understand were conspiring against me.
Art struggled mightily to hold his piece of the fence up. His arms shook and the muscles of his neck were pulling the skin of his face into a taut, mottled mask. Through his teeth he said, “You got to get a little leverage. Brace your foot against that post and try it thataway.”
I did as I was told and was able to negotiate Barry through an inch or two at a time. Once we had him halfway under, Art had to lean against the fence and take a rest. We both wiped the sweat from our faces and gulped like winded hound do
gs at the cool morning air. I sat down with Barry’s needle-marked arms in my lap and looked up at St. Divine’s, where it perched up on that hill with its darkened windows and boarded-over doors like a horror-movie haunted house. Art turned to look at it too.
“Seems like a dream, don’t it?” he said, idly unhooking Barry’s shirt from the sharp, snipped-off ends of the fence wire. “Hell, maybe this here is a dream, what we’re doing right now. Maybe it’s all a dream, every minute, start to finish. Tell you the truth, I sure do hope so.”
We caught our breaths and went at it again. The tip of the sun came over the horizon, throwing long columns of dusty light that shot out for miles a few feet above the ground. I got Barry’s legs all the way through and Art let the fence down with a grateful groan. I found one last reserve of energy and reared back, hauling Barry the last six feet until my heel hit one of the creosoted timbers at the lip of the shaft, and I tottered there, Barry’s weight the only thing holding me back. “DON’T FALL IN THE HOLE!” Art shouted. I caught my balance and let go of Barry all at once so that his arms flopped out over the black void. His mouth was open now, his tongue and teeth caked with dust. With his eyes creased shut, he seemed to have been caught in the middle of a hearty laugh.
I stared blankly at my shadow stretched out thirty feet in front of me, trying to hold myself steady, the yawning hole breathing its moist subterranean air up into my face. Every bit of my strength was gone and I wavered at the edge, as hollow as an echo. I felt so weak I could not make myself move. I closed my eyes and did my best to keep down the sob that was trying to rise out of my throat.
“Just a little push, son,” Art said. “Then it’s over.”
I could feel the dawning sun on the back of my neck and it seemed that it might be a good idea to stand there and do nothing for at least an entire day, if not forever. Then, like a jolt in my brain, I remembered the mailman’s address. I bent down to take the yellow paper out of Barry’s shirt pocket and slipped it into my jeans. It was that folded square of paper, like a piece of warmth against my thigh, that gave me the strength I needed to pick Barry up by the ankles and roll him into the dark tunnel of air. There was a single, ringing thud a second after he went in and then nothing. Art and I held still, our heads cocked, listening, but there was no sound at all, and Barry was simply gone, vanished in a single breath, as if he had never existed, as if he had never walked this earth, never tasted this air or been touched by this brilliant morning light.
THE YELLOW PAPER
BACK AT ART’S house, I fell into his narrow twin bed and slept all that day and the entire night. When I woke up it was morning again and Art had breakfast going full swing in the kitchen. “I’ll run a bath for you,” he said. “Have to apologize for no shower. Never could work them nozzles anyhow.”
He took my filthy clothes and told me he’d have Lucinda give them a good washing. I soaked in the tub for half an hour, not a thought in my head, and got out to find some of Art’s clean clothes on the chair by the door. The shirt was a starched white button-up, only a size or two too big, and I cinched up the green twill pants with a belt whose copper buckle read Isringhousen Industries Employee of the Year.
When I came out into the front room he turned from where he was forking slabs of bacon onto a paper towel. “Lookit here,” he said. “Slick as an otter.”
My trunk sat in the front room, wedged between the recliner and the produce crate that served as a coffee table.
“I had someone come get rid of that car for us,” he said from the kitchen. “I took a peek inside to make sure that trunk was yours. Looks like you’ve run that old typewriter through its paces.”
We sat down together at the rickety card table by the window and ate huevos rancheros, bacon, hash browns and deep-fried scones with honey. It looked like enough food to feed six people, but by the time we were done the plates and serving dishes held only crumbs.
“More where that came from,” Art said. “I’ll whip up another batch before you can blink twice. Living alone like this, a man’s got to learn his way around the kitchen.”
I held my gut and forced a smile to show him that I couldn’t take any more. He cleared the dishes, leaning on his four-legged cane, each step a wearisome enterprise, but would not let me help. Once he had everything cleaned up he settled back into his chair, his lungs rasping. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow, then dabbed at a line of spittle on his chin. “Already hot as billy heck in here, ain’t it?” He folded the handkerchief with the formality of ritual, put it back in his pocket, and placed both hands on the table, his fingers meshed together like the teeth of gears. He said, “You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like.”
I gazed out the window where a barefoot little girl walked at the edge of the road, making a trail in the dirt with the broken-off end of a TV antenna.
“I think maybe I got somewhere to go,” I said.
Art nodded, looking away, and got up to limp across the front room, his bad leg clumping on the wood floor. He opened a curio cabinet where there was a stack of sheet paper a couple of inches thick. My old urinal puck, still swathed in black tape, sat on top like a paperweight.
“Got something I wanted to say to you,” he said. He rested his cane against the recliner and carefully took the sheaf of papers down. “After that one time, I never wrote back to you because I figured you’d come to forget about me and that hospital and everybody in it and that it would be the best thing for you. But you never stopped writing, you never did.”
Something caught in his voice and he swallowed, his hands shaking so that the urinal puck skittered and jumped across the smooth surface of the paper. He turned so that he was talking to the wall. “These letters…” he sniffed and hawked, rubbed his hand roughly against the scruff of his face. “You can’t know how much they helped me. They were all I had, is what I’m saying. They kept me going when I didn’t have nothing left. You can’t know.”
For a time he didn’t move. He looked down at the stack of paper, gave it a couple of taps with the ends of his fingers, then set it back in its place inside the cabinet. He took up his cane and negotiated around my trunk and without looking at me, went into the kitchen, where he began to wash the dishes. Plates and bowls jangled in the metal sink and steam curled up over his head. I heard him say “Oh hell,” and he came to me and took my head in his wet hands and pulled my cheek against the cold steel of his belt buckle.
Then he went right back to the dishes. With a black wad of steel wool he scoured the griddle, two frying pans and a chipped ceramic coffeepot. I sat in my chair feeling blasted, unsteady, parched. Even after my long bath and three glasses of orange juice, my tongue was like paper, my veins full of nothing but dust and salt.
Over the splash of the dishwater Art said, “So where is it you’re off to?”
I gripped the table, pulled myself up, and went back into the bedroom, where my dirty clothes lay at the bottom of a hamper. I took the yellow paper from the pocket of my jeans. In a blocky, masculine script it said,
B—
This looks solid. If there’s a problem, you let me know—
Nicholas Petenko
107 Washington St.
Stony Run, Pennsylvania
—TC
In the kitchen Art was still obscured in a cloud of steam. He swabbed off the stovetop, put a Yuban coffee can full of bacon grease under the sink. When he turned to look at me, water dripped from the ends of his fingers onto his shoes.
I said, “Do you know where Pennsylvania is?”
STONY RUN
EDGAR ON THE ROAD
IN THE HEAT of a July afternoon, Edgar stepped out of the taxi and peered down the row of houses through the shadows of the trees. Everything was green: thick lawns and hedges and lilac bushes and creeping vines that smothered fences and birdbaths and swallowed chimneys whole. The trees’ roots had wreaked havoc on the sidewalk, grinding it into crumbs in some places and in others heaving it into large b
roken sections like slabs of arctic ice.
“Here we go,” said the cabdriver. “One-oh-seven. Bing bang boing. Okay then. Yessiree.”
The cabdriver was a small Italian man who had not stopped talking since he picked me up at the bus station. He had been called in special because his taxi—a sky-blue station wagon with mag rims—was the only one in town big enough to handle my trunk. Now he was standing behind the car with the back door open, looking ruefully at the piece of luggage it had taken him five minutes and a borrowed dolly to load up. We were parked on a steep incline and it seemed that the trunk, at any second, might slide right out the back of the car and go skidding down the hill like a runaway sled.
The cabdriver took a shiny steel comb from his shirt pocket and smoothed his thinning hair in artful waves across the top of his head. He wore a white T-shirt and metallic pants. Without a hint of anger or irritation he said, “I’m telling you right now I have handled a lot of luggage in my life but never have I handled luggage such as this luggage. I’m telling you right now.”
He set his feet and pulled on the broken straps of the trunk and, aided by gravity, eased it slowly out of the car. From where I was standing it looked like the car was giving birth to a boxy, smaller version of itself and the cabdriver was the attending doctor, coaxing things along. I tried to offer my assistance, but he held up his hand. “Dangerous,” he said. “We got dangerous luggage here.”
When the trunk finally clapped down hard onto the pavement, the cabdriver stared at it as if he didn’t know what to do next. He took the comb out of his pocket and made a couple more passes across his scalp. I helped him push the trunk to the side of the curb and told him I would take care of it from there.
“What your problem is,” he said, “is you got to learn to throw things out. You’s a pack rat, am I right? You keep everything, can’t toss nothing out. I’ve seen it before. My own son, Michael Vincent, he had this very problem. Kept everything. Gum wrappers, for chris-sakes. A whole drawer full of ’em. What is a person going to do with a drawer full of gum wrappers? See? I don’t understand it.” He gave me a friendly chuck on the back and took the money I offered him. “Throw something away once in awhile. That’s my advice. You’ll be a happier individual.”
