by Morris, Ian;
Our house looks pretty much the same after thirteen years as it did the day we moved in, between what used to be a Sinclair station and was now a cafe on the south and the corrugated metal boat hangar, deserted as long as we lived there, where Grey would be building his boats. More of the green paint had peeled and faded from our house. In the spring shingles fell like fish scales off the gambrel roof that stretched over the enclosed porch. The screen door, rusted and patched many times, sagged on its hinges underneath the old sign that Pop painted over in white with the words ZIMMERMANN CYCLES in red block letters. There was a smaller sign in the window in Pop’s Magic Marker scrawl on a cardboard box bottom that said, “Flats fixed while you wait.”
The bulb over the back door was out again. That made even more difficult the business of finding the lock with my key. Shoving open the rickety, particle wood door, I was hit with the smell of the shop, dust and grease and cigarettes, that has become part of the woodwork. I stumbled in the dark through the tangle of bikes awaiting repair that took up every available corner of the back shop this time of year, and up the narrow back stairs. I opened the kitchen door to more darkness and flipped the light switch. There were dishes in the sink. I was glad to see that Pop had gone ahead and had supper without me, because he didn’t always. On the table was a small package, maybe four inches square, wrapped in red paper and tied with a black bow. I picked it up. I shook it. I was sure it was the watch. I set it back where it was so Pop could see me when I opened it. Looking into the darkened living room, I saw his head lolling over the side of his easy chair, mouth open, snoring. He’d pulled his coveralls down to his waist as he did in the evenings, a sweat-stained white sleeveless T-shirt hanging loose from his knotty shoulders.
Next to him was the quart of schnapps he’d bought for a graduation toast that he never made. Half of it was gone. Next to that was an open box of spokes, a wheel rim, a tube of chrome polish, and a can of Pabst. The light from the kitchen gave his skin a yellowish cast—as though he’d been cured in sulphur—except for the white crescent scar on his left shoulder, the reminder of an operation twenty years ago to repair one of the five broken collarbones he’d gotten in his career as a professional bicycle racer. Cradled in his right fist was a wheel hub. This time of year it was normal for him to bring the kind of menial work you don’t need a lot of space for upstairs to finish, and no less normal for him to fall asleep in the middle of it.
My father wasn’t a handsome man. I say that reluctantly because it was from him and not my mother that I got my broad nose, my narrow jaw, and my gaunt, wiry build. I’d been taller since I was sixteen, and the years of professional cycling had hobbled him permanently. His legs were bowed and his knees arthritic. He’d always reminded me of a tangled knot of sea rope you see coiled on the dock, clinging seaweed dried to the consistency of corn silk by the sun. You could only attribute the success he had with the divorced ladies of the island, which was considerable, to the law of supply and demand.
The light wasn’t on and it’d been dark for three hours, which meant he must have been asleep at least that long. Trying not to make the floorboards squeak, I slid the hub out of his hand. He stopped snoring. I hesitated, but when he didn’t wake up, I took up the rim and the box of spokes and went back to the kitchen. Sitting down at the table, I pushed the wrapped present to the far corner and slid a spoke through the eyelet on the hub and attached it to the rim with a screw, continuing the three-cross pattern that my father had taught me when I was eight. I’d just fixed the last spoke in place when I heard the scuff of Naugahyde and the sound of Pop’s feet on the floor. He squinted as he stepped into the light and stood scratching the cropped brush of hair on his head with the pinky of his right hand.
We’d come to this island from Chicago, a city that I remember as a cartoon dream of shiny hubcaps, square lawns, and fat relatives, Uncle Karl, Aunt Berthe, my cousins Hilde and Silke, who dressed me in girl clothes and carried me around the house like a doll. For five years, my ma and pop slept on a sofa bed in Karl and Berthe’s living room and I had a cot in the corner, which was like camping out every night. I liked the closeness of our lives when I was four, in spite of the whispered bickering I heard penetrating the blackness from my parents’ side of the room every night. As I got old enough to understand the nature of the words they hurled at each other, I grew scared. Each threat of mayhem made my blood run cold beneath the covers. But as the years went by and still we hadn’t found a house of our own, as my mother demanded my father do, I got used to the insults and even became comforted by their nightly certainty, until the one night that the whispers stopped.
She’d told no one that she was leaving: there was no one she could’ve told, no one who wouldn’t have scorned her for even thinking of it. “There should have been a note,” Berthe said. “She should have left word for Tomas.” To her, this was the most unpardonable of offenses, though I thought at the time the fact she hadn’t left word was a good sign, that it meant she would be back soon, that she might have gone down to the corner shop for cigarettes. The next day, I stood outside in the rain for an hour, partly waiting for her to come back and partly to see if anyone cared. When I finally gave up and came inside, Aunt Berthe put me in a hot bath and gave me dry clothes. I ate potato soup at the table. “So, Tomas,” she said, “was it cold outside?” Like Pop, she pronounced her w’s like f’s—“fas it cold outside in the rain?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then,” she said, “you fill know better than to ever do it again.” And she was right about that. I never did.
“Thanks for the present,” I told Pop.
He stared at the table not understanding what I was talking about until his eyes settled on the wrapped box on the table, and he smiled slightly and shrugged. “Open it.”
I put the wheel on the floor and pulled the package toward me.
“Trudy did that,” he said as I tugged at the cord.
“Nice,” I said, tearing at the paper. It was a watch, a Timex, with a white face and a flimsy fake-leather band. Something less than I might have hoped for, but I needed a watch, and this one figured to do the job.
“I’ll think of you every time I look at it,” I said because that kind of stuff drove him nuts.
“It’s all right?” he said. “Jack Reed said that was the thing to get.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a good one,” but he wasn’t listening. He’d walked to the stove where he poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot I’d made that morning and lit a Pall Mall with a kitchen match. Then he came back to the table, sat the cup down, put the cigarette into the ashtray, picked up the wheel, and studied the workmanship. “When are you going away to school?” he asked.
“I told you already.”
He shaved the ash off the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, plugged it in his mouth and laid the wheel down on the table. “Tell me again.”
“August twenty-seventh.”
“You save your money,” he said. “I’m not paying you to go to school.”
“I’ve got it,” I said.
“You got it?” The smoke of his cigarette drifted toward the open screen, stopped, and blew back in on the wind off the lake.
“You got enough? Ray Dobbs peels twenty-dollar bills off a roll so fat that it does not fit in his trousers and gives to Callie. Forty, sixty, eighty—here is your books. Twenty, forty, one hundred, one hundred fifty—here is a coat. Three thousand, four thousand—here is a car to drive your books around.”
“She’s not going,” I said.
“What?”
“Callie says she’s staying.”
He didn’t know this, and it took him a moment to fit the news into his shouting.
“The money’s covered,” I said. “No sweat.”
“No sweat?”
“No sweat.”
He nodded in the direction of the hangar. “How is he getting on over there?”
“Grey? I haven’t been over today. He’s worki
ng hard.”
Pop knew Grey as well as I did. There were a lot of good things you could call Grey, but a hard worker wasn’t one of them.
He stared for a minute, his eyes soggy around the lids. I knew what the stare was supposed to mean and I ignored it, instead making a big production of setting my watch to the clock on the stove. “It glows in the dark,” he said.
On the bed in my room was an oversized envelope with a red seal like the many others that had come from the university. And like the many other red-sealed and thick, white envelopes that had come from the university, Pop had opened it. This was something he didn’t used to do—I suppose partially because outside of letters from Aunt Berthe I never had much mail to open before—but for some reason, he chose to see everything that came from the school as being for his eyes first. He didn’t read English well, and I wondered what he could possibly have made of the sample syllabuses and course codes. This one was a list of expenses for my first semester. Residence fees $1,143.50, tuition 12-15 credits $432.00, recreation fee $25.00, material fee $3.00 (I didn’t know what a material fee was, but figured I could swing the three bucks). All of that would have been clear enough to him. Numbers he understood.
The total for the semester was $1,603.50. You didn’t have to be good at math to figure that meant $3,207.00 for the entire year, not including summer school, which was probably out of the question anyway, and not including unexpected expenses, which I didn’t include. My scholarship covered two thousand of that. Since it was spring, Pop likely had a few hundred dollars in the bank. In the winter, sometimes days would go by without us bringing in a cent. One day in May four years ago, we took in close to a thousand dollars in a single day. Let that stand as a full history of my father’s prospects in business: one day four years ago we took in close to one thousand dollars.
I knew how much money came in, but I never knew how much went out. Pop was in charge of accounts payable. I’d say, “We’re out of brake cable,” or “If we’re going to do this work we’ll need a headset tool,” and a box of brake cables or a forged chromium VAR headset tool would appear via UPS in the next couple of days—or one wouldn’t. I don’t remember how much that worried me or encouraged me about the state of our money affairs—except that I knew from an early age that the day I left his house was the day I was on my own. Pop had chosen a life for us safe from the support of what family he’d left, and in doing so, had more or less condemned me to the same fate.
Actually, we might have lived in Chicago forever, as bachelors under my uncle’s roof, if we hadn’t gone on vacation when I was six years old. On a Friday morning in April Uncle Karl came home in a new Ford station wagon, hung a closed sign in the window of the butcher shop, loaded the lot of us into the car, and we drove north through the farms and woods of Wisconsin. Hilde and Silke and I sat in the back with the luggage, our eyes following each new sight, a red barn or blue Harvestore silo, until each disappeared over the hill behind us. And when Uncle Karl turned west along Highway 13, we crested a bluff, and I saw Lake Superior for the first time, glimmering like a candy wrapper in the afternoon sun.
Uncle Karl piloted the wagon through the curving, hilly streets of Bayview to where the road ended at the water.
“Why did we stop here?” said Hilde, who was seven and impatient.
“To wait for the ferryboat,” Uncle Karl said, and because I didn’t know what a ferry was, the images the word conjured in my head filled me with anticipation. And it was the first sight of the ferry that sets this day apart from the other days on the far horizon of my memory. Uncle Karl pointed, and I spotted the white rectangle of the bridge above the waves. I watched amazed as the bright vessel steamed into the harbor, pivoted smartly, and backed into the slip.
We rolled onto the car deck and were swallowed by the riveted steel of the superstructure. Once the ferry got underway, bullying through the swelling waves, we all got out of the car and stood along the rail and watched as the island grew larger. In spite of the signs of human life that were visible all along the shore, the piers, boat docks, and the occasional house, I felt like an explorer from a book. I had no idea at the time what would come of the discovering, but I was old enough to know that this was a significant crossing. The boat docked, the gates clanged down on the concrete dock, and we rolled into St. Raphael.
Once we set out on foot, the small town and the wind off the water brought out the Old Country in Aunt Berthe. She said hello to everyone we passed on the streets and led us to all of the souvenir shops. Inside she looked at every piece of bric-a-brac on every shelf, each time shaking her head and clicking her tongue at the price, then setting the item down carefully in its place.
We walked the town for two hours or more, until Aunt Berthe had run out of shops to go into. We were on the way to the beach when Pop yelled, “Wait.” He motioned with his hand for us to stay put and walked into a green, shabby two-story house. The paint was peeling and as faded as the red and white sign above the door.
CHALMERS LAWN MOWER AND BICYCLE REPAIR
We all followed Pop inside and saw that the place was dark, except for the rays of the sunlight that seeped through the gaps in the shades and lit up millions of flecks of dust floating in the air. Everywhere there were mowers and parts of mowers, bicycles and parts of bicycles. The girls looked confused, as it was obvious that their mother was not going to pick up anything in here. Aunt Berthe looked back with an expression equal to theirs plus a little extra she added for herself. I wondered too.
The little man in the chair didn’t get up as we came close. “Nothing to sell,” he said in a cracked voice that scared me and Silke so much we took a step toward the door. Pop turned and motioned us outside, where Berthe sat on the one low front step, drumming her cheeks with her fingers, watching her daughters chase me around the For Sale sign in the yard.
It was the second time in my life where adults would make a big ceremony out of telling me something I already knew. They were back at the kitchen table, Uncle Karl and Pop, just in from work, Pop looking tired and Karl curious and a little nervous. Aunt Berthe sewed while she talked so she wouldn’t have to look at me. “Your father is buying a store—with your uncle’s money.” She didn’t say anything more and I realized I was supposed to speak. I didn’t know what they wanted me to say. So I cried. I cried because I knew this meant the end of Aunt Berthe watching out for us and because I believed that once we moved my mother would never be able to find us.
Pop threw up his hands, “What is there for him to say?”
“It’s an adjustment,” Uncle Karl said. Again Pop made a gesture of frustration.
Sitting at my desk, I filled out the university form, faked a social security number for my father because he wasn’t a citizen, stuffed and sealed the return envelope, and propped it against my door so I wouldn’t forget to mail it.
I went over to my bed and unscrewed the brass cap on the right rear corner of my bedpost, snagged the protruding loop of string, and pulled. Out came five rolls of bills wrapped around the drawstring with rubber bands. I could have had Pop locked up for what he paid me, but it still adds up when you don’t have to pay for food and where you live, and you don’t squander your salary on useless things, and you keep an eye out for other chances to make extra.
There was no point in counting. I knew how much the rolls contained: five hundred in each, except the last, which had a little less. Which meant I was fourteen hundred in the black, money for books or clothes or bus tickets or anything else. Course I figured to get a job when I got to school, but I didn’t know how much I could expect to get out of that. Ten years working for my father had taught me to guess low. I took the rubber bands off each of the rolls. I loved doing that, lining up the faces of the presidents and then putting them carefully back where I kept them.
Before turning out the lights, I lowered the bills back into the bedpost and replaced the cap. Then I lay on my bed in the dark, staring at the glowing dial on the watch face. It’d been a
long day and it was still only five minutes to twelve. Matching my breathing to the ticking seconds, I watched the two green, glowing hands until they became a single arrow pointing toward the ceiling and the sky beyond it.
4
UP AND ABOUT
6:00 a.m. - pancakes and coffee
6:45 - a jaunt on bikes around the scenic roads skirting the shore of our island
9:00 - church
11:00 - work
8:30 - dinner: shell macaroni and sauce from a jar
9:15 - drop dead.
If we had a schedule for Sundays in the summer tacked up on the fridge—which we didn’t—that’s what it would look like.
That particular Sunday, though, was different because I was out of bed before Pop was. I had the coffee perking and the box mix and syrup out, when he came into the kitchen, his hair standing up in matted spikes after a hard sleep.
I tapped my watch. “The first day of my punctual life.”
We took turns cooking. Not on purpose, it just worked out that way. Pop applied the same grim precision to cooking that he did to his work in the shop. Each pancake came out of the skillet a uniform ten centimeters. Any that were asymmetrical or browned beyond the golden shade were cast into the trash. We had maple syrup in a plastic squeeze bottle and orange juice. There was no conversation at breakfast. Even if we had anything to say to each other, we had the whole day together and both of us knew the value of pacing ourselves in the area of talk.
