by Steve Amick
A few weeks after Marita and Jack moved into the little house, Von pulled into the turnaround and saw Marita out on the front porch, painting the front door red. She’d gotten about halfway down the door.
Von stared from the cab of the truck. What the hell was that girl thinking? Never mind that you remove a door before painting—pop the pins and lay it out on sawhorses and do it right. Never mind that. But red?
He climbed out and as he got a little closer, now saw it was a crusty quart can she was working off of, the leftover tractor paint. He realized in that moment that he’d never explained to her about the traditional color scheme at vonBushbergers’, how they were still trying to find something to match the Clear Dawn Yellow. He hadn’t bothered explaining this to Marita because (A) she didn’t have any paint, and (B) he just didn’t think of it. If anything, he would have assumed she would be too busy getting the inside of the house orderly and cozy and setting up a nursery. There was a chronic carpenter ant problem in the little kitchen, a cracked window in the back, and the bathroom could use new wallpaper, like maybe some that would stay put on the wall. So who knew she’d go out in the barn and poke around in the old paint cans? Priority-wise, it didn’t make a lick of sense.
But maybe a red door meant something in her land. He had to caution himself about making a scene, especially if he was possibly stepping on some multicultural toes here. He thought of the Amish in Pennsylvania, with those round hex signs painted on their barns, and was damn glad he wasn’t Amish. That was the kind of thing they’d expect him to preserve once he got the Centennial Farm designation.
He cleared his throat and said, “Look, I don’t want to be the one to question your superstitions, but—maybe this is some sort of Guatemalan thing, but—”
“Nooooo . . .” she said, mocking him. “Is not a Guatemalan thing, not a superstition thing. This is a . . . what you say? . . . ‘cheery’ thing.”
“A cherry thing?” Maybe she didn’t want to call it superstitious, but if she was thinking it would bring a better cherry crop this season, well . . .
“Cheeeeery!” she repeated. “Cheery! I say it wrong? Happy-looking! You understand ‘happy’ around these place? Que pendejo . . .”
“Hey! I understood that last bit, okay? We’ve only had migrant pickers up here every summer since before I even had ears to hear such garbage, so watch it!”
Her eyes closed and stayed that way. She breathed deeply, nostrils flaring, and her hands came together, as if in prayer; she spoke much slower and more deliberately now. “I am very truly sorry for the slip of my tongue. It was so very disrespectful to mi suegro. I am so very sorry, but I am very homogenized right now—”
“Hormonal.” The way she was behaving, he had no doubt it was the word she meant.
She threw up her hands and walked into the little house. He followed her in. She flopped down on the old kitchen chair with a wheeze of exasperation and a loud groan from the legs scraping back against the floor. “Hormonal. Fine.” She waved her hands in surrender. She looked like she was going to cry. “I just want to make it pretty.” She studied him for a moment and tried it again: “Cheery.”
“Look,” he said. “Honey. I want the place to be cheery, same as you, but there’s a certain paint—a certain color—that we need to use. All three of these houses? They’ve always been this one special yellow color. My great-grandfather painted that first one, then my grandfather added these two houses and painted them the same, and my father and I have been keeping it at that same yellow. Now, I just don’t feel right suddenly—”
She stared at him dumbfounded. “And you think I have the superstition?”
“It’s not superstition that we want to use the same color,” he said. “It’s just . . . tradition.”
She shook her head, then flopped it down hard on the kitchen table, like a weary rag doll. “My English is maybe not so good but I don’t understand how those are different, tradition and superstition. I don’t get it!”
He was going to try using the word cohesive but thought better of it. “Just wait for me to locate the color we use, okay? It’ll be plenty cheery, believe me. You can’t tell now because it’s so faded and chipped, but it’s a sort of lemon meringue. You’ll like it, Marita. It’s very . . . understated. But pretty. In the meantime, please don’t start painting things.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “Can I just ask how long you’ve been trying to find this special paint?”
He didn’t appreciate this line of interrogation. “It’s taking a while to locate, that’s all.”
Leaning back, she crossed her arms, resting them on the lump of her belly. “How long have you been looking for this paint? A simple question!”
“I really don’t know. A while.”
“More than one year?”
“Oh, yeah.” It had been three years actually, but she didn’t need to hear that. “This is tractor paint, anyway. This stuff you used. You know what it would cost to paint this entire house in tractor paint?”
She shrugged. “It’s paint. Paint is paint! How is it different?”
He wanted to say, For one thing, this house doesn’t heat up to 200 degrees, nor does it slog through mud and kick up rocks . . . but he thought he would be wasting his breath. So he just said. “It’s different, okay? It’s not cheap.”
Besides, he didn’t want to have one red building. Or really even one red door. But when he got up to leave, passing through the half-painted door, he stopped and stared at it, taking a deep frustrated breath and letting it out through his nose. Marita must have heard him. She called from inside, “So do I finish the door or paint it over?”
“With what?” Hadn’t he just told her there wasn’t any more of the Clear Dawn Yellow. “Just—finish the door, I guess. But that’s it.”
He tried not to look at it after that. It looked ridiculous. Especially from a distance, out on the road. He caught a glance of it the next day heading down 31 and it flashed in his periphery like a goddamn sore thumb. He did his best not to think about it, but it was hard not to know it was there. It reminded him way too much of the Revels dairy farm, about five miles to the east. When Burton sold it, the new guy painted the silo cap purple. Purple! A deep funky grape. It was the laughingstock. Forty years of farming and how was Burton Revels remembered now? With cracks about “The Farmer Formerly Known as Prince.” Jesus god.
32
WITH TIME TO SPARE, just nineteen days after being served, Kurt Lasco entered the village offices to file his response. It didn’t overly surprise him to see Bear Eckenrod at the desk, but it was a relief: they’d shared an ice shanty out on the other lake at least since before his divorce and hell, he’d power-rodded the guy’s main line at least a dozen times and barely charged him the standard price, let alone the summer people price.
“Bear,” he said, slumping in the chair in front of the man’s desk. His what-they-called “answer to the complaint” had become kind of a tube in his hands, a scroll, and he tossed it onto the desk, where it rolled off the man’s lunch, what appeared to be a leftover pasty, wrapped in tin-foil. Bear’s wife made great pasties, being from the U.P., and Kurt wondered sometimes if that’s where he himself made a major mistake, marrying a woman from downstate rather than farther north.
Bear’s bushy brow wrinkled as he picked up the three single-spaced pages that had felt to Kurt awfully like a term paper and unrolled them on his desk, scowling for a long spell, then eyed him levelly over his scrub brush mustache. “You actually read the complaint, Kurt? And the instructions?”
“Sure,” he said, feeling like he was back in high school, slouching across from the principal or guidance counselor. “But it’s not at all like he says. I explained all that pretty good, I think. It’s all in there.”
“It is, huh? ’Cause I fail to see where you even responded to the counts. You have to answer each count, Admit or Deny. All’s I see is counterclaims here. The judge’ll—”
Kurt cut him off
. “Look, Bear. I know I’m no lawyer or great writer, but I spent like three hours on it and I spell-checked the hell out of it. I know it’s a little choppy, but—”
Now it was Bear’s turn to cut him off. “‘Choppy’? I tell you right now, the court’s not going to view this mess here as a valid answer to the complaint. This isn’t small claims, it’s a regular civil case.”
It was the same guff Janey Struska gave him, but he still didn’t get it. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re probably going to need to hire a lawyer.” He flipped through the curled pages again. “I’m looking at this ranty mess here, Kurt, I’m guessing more than probably . . .” With that, he tossed it on the desk, clear of his pasty. “Jesus.”
Kurt picked up the form. “It was a little confusing,” he said. “I didn’t really get all the terms and stuff . . .”
Bear stretched mightily, then said, “Why don’t you just replace the man’s trees, Kurt? Gonna be cheaper than getting into it with the guy in a civil suit, with you paying some shyster whatever-an-hour and it’s costing him basically nothing.”
“Fuck,” Kurt said, feeling totally in over his head now, which he rubbed, running his fingers up under his cap. “Fuck a fucking duck.”
Bear sighed. “Tell you what—I’ll file a continuance on your behalf. Buy you a little time. But that’s it: from here on in, I am not acting as your attorney.”
“Thanks.”
“You need to get your act together, Kurt. What the hell you doing out there—Your daughter’s here, right?”
Kurt nodded.
“She’s a teenaged girl, Kurt. The world is already terribly, terribly embarrassing for a teenaged girl. It just is. You think she enjoys the way you heaped this Hatfield and McCoy shit on her plate?”
“I guess not.” He hadn’t thought about that.
“You guess not. Get it together, Kurt, and get this thing settled. And lay off the fucking chainsaw.”
Kurt got up to leave. At the door, he turned, still feeling that his side hadn’t been heard. “The thing is, he’s not even from here, Bear. I mean, Christ!”
Bear let out a wet raspberry and looked at him sideways, his head tilted, like he was gazing upon an idiot. “Do you know what kind of taxes we collect from the outsiders—those big second homes? Seriously, Kurt, I could get up right now and pull a couple files and show you what the village rakes in from these summer people and I swear it would make you rethink exactly whose town this is now and who’s lucky to even live here. But you’re not going to make me get up and do that now, are you, on account of I’ve got one of my wife’s delicious pasties to wolf down in the ten minutes between now and the Sumac Days committee meeting. Right?”
“Right,” Kurt said. “I’m not going to do that.” But he still didn’t know what the hell he was going to do.
33
IT WAS A FRIDAY EVENING and the sky was so clear, the stars looked like ice, like they might crack and shatter. It was just the sort of night to take the radio out on the porch and see if he could pick up the Tigers.
This was something Von had been doing since he was a boy. It started with his dad—one of the very few enjoyments they shared—and then he picked it up in the years after he’d taken over the main house, and it became something he did with Jack. Even Brenda would listen in for most of a game, or as much of the broadcast as they could hear, and he didn’t begrudge her this. Early on in her life, she’d made it evident she wasn’t going to be the sort of girly daughter he’d imagined. It was supposed to be a father and son thing, but that was okay, he expected.
It was WJR, the AM station high atop the Fisher Building. Fifty thousand watts. Ernie Harwell was the guy, the voice they used to listen for—that nasal twang that trailed away, like he was talking to you from the bottom of a well. No mistaking Ernie Harwell. There was talk now of Harwell retiring, and Von wondered if it would be harder in the future to tell when he’d zeroed in on the signal, once they had a new announcer calling the game.
On a few rare nights it was clear enough for the signal to carry all the way over from Detroit, almost two hundred miles away. It was the rarity of tuning it in that made it such a treat, the nervousness that it might slip away any second that made it so precious. He knew that. If they knew for sure they could pick up the entire broadcast every night there was a game, it would take all the fun out of it. The whole event would actually seem dull, as pedestrian as a morning dump. Most nights, getting a steady signal was hopeless, but on a night like tonight, he had a shot at it.
Von set the radio down on the edge of the porch and attached the auxiliary antenna he’d designed just for this—a long spool of copper wire with an alligator clip on the other end so it could be snapped onto the metal fence that ran along the dog pen, creating an immense antenna. “Jack,” he said, holding up the clip end, knowing his son was sitting over on the glider. When he was little, Jack loved that part, being allowed to go clip it to the fence. Now it was just a matter of helping out, not making his old man do it.
“Dad,” Jack said. “We’re kinda . . .”
Von looked up to see what he was trying to indicate, squinting in at him on the glider. The girl was slouched against him, his arm was around her, his hand down on her belly and her feet were propped up on an overturned cherry lug. They were reading something in the narrow light of the kitchen window behind them that looked like a seed catalogue. He did look sort of pinned in, squashed. “We’re picking out seeds,” Jack said, “for next year. Some stuff Marita might like.”
Von grunted and walked the wire over to the fence himself. When he returned to the porch and started fiddling with the dial, his son was yakking about the seeds Marita was looking for. It was hard to concentrate on finding the ballgame with Jack yakking about oregano and cilantro seeds and hot peppers and all. It was as if Jack didn’t remember this part of it—the part where they just sat there in the dark and listened and shut the hell up. It was a damned important part of it.
“For next year,” Marita said. “No for now.”
“For the garden,” Jack said. “I never thought about it much before, but we don’t exactly have anything very exotic in our vegetable garden.”
“On account of we don’t live in an exotic land,” Von grumbled.
“We’re just looking ahead,” Jack said, like his ears were broken or something. “I know it’s a year off, but we want to add a few things to the order. Zest it up a little.”
Still bent over the radio, Von swung his head around to eye them there on the glider, cuddled up. The girl just stared back at him with those big dark eyes. Tougher than she lets on, he thought. “That garden,” he said, “is there to feed our family. It’s not there to tantalize the palate.”
“It’s not a matter of tantalizing, it’s a matter of—”
“I understand she’s got her traditional foods and she’s used to what she’s used to, but what she’s used to, for the most part, simply isn’t going to grow here, son. Ask your sister. Or hell, ask her little exchange student, even—he could tell you. For sure, not from a seed and not without a greenhouse and all kinds of special care. The point of the family garden is to eat economically, so we can keep turning a profit here. But if we have to design all manner of elaborate rigmarole to force a pepper to pop out, with maybe one out of fifty duds, how is that going to be eating economically?”
“I’m just going to order a few things,” Jack said, but he didn’t say it very loudly.
“We’ll stock up on some of those frozen burritos,” Von said. “Now please hush so we can try to enjoy the ballgame. All right?”
Jack shut up and let him try and for a few moments all Von could hear was the squeak of the glider behind him and the rustle of the seed catalogue as they continued to turn the pages. But the station was not coming in.
Brenda appeared from the murky shadows of the yard, approaching the porch with that blossom boy, Miki. They took a seat on the steps and listened for a while as he
tried to reestablish the radio signal. There were a few more squelches and yelps and a fuzzy shimmering that might have been it, but then it was gone.
The Jap scientist piped up with a brilliant suggestion. “We are closer to Chicago the Windy City, as the birds are flying, than Detroit the Motor City. Perhaps you could much easier find a station playing baseball that is coming from Chicago the Windy City.”
“Miki,” Brenda said. That’s all she said, but it sounded to Von like the same as if she’d told him “hush.”
In exchange for his suggestion, Von gave the Jap a sour face, though it was too dark on the porch, he imagined, for the guy to recognize he was doing anything of the sort. He considered launching into a geography lesson, explaining that this was Michigan, damn it. They lived in Michigan, not Illinois, and as dirty and remote and unappealing as Detroit may be, it was part of Michigan and Chicago was not. And no matter if the Cubs or the White Sox were playing on a barge floating right off Sumac Point, a hundred measly feet from shore, they would either listen to the Tigers or no one.
