Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

DOLORES

  The next morning the sun came up across the lake, like it did every day, but nothing was the same. Callie’s dad was dead. I stood at the kitchen window, leaning on the cane Pop had used on me the night before and watched a procession of two vehicles, a white pickup and a green LeBaron, roll through the morning haze to the ferry dock. In the murky light, I could pick out Callie in the passenger seat of the Chrysler, and Grey riding shotgun in the Ford. I watched as the ferry arrived and lowered its gates.

  Pop had come into the kitchen and was pouring a cup of coffee. Sometime during the night he’d picked up the bottles and cans and had taken a dishcloth to the liquor on the floor, which was still sticky. The smell of peppermint lingered.

  “They’re leaving,” I said.

  He sipped at his coffee and made a sharp face as it burned his tongue. He looked at my leg, then at the cup in his hand, and said, “Who was he to you?”

  That made me nuts because he was right. I’d only met Professor Darling once in my life. Grey and I were fishing and Callie brought him down to the dock. He’d come up from his college to retrieve Callie’s little sisters because Ray didn’t want them around anymore. Callie’s father wore a gray wool jacket and blue slacks, even though the temperature was over ninety. He was very tall and thin, like Callie, with the same narrow chin, and darker than Callie but not as dark as I might have expected. He stood, looking over our shoulders at our red and white bobbers rocking on the swells, not one drop of sweat on his face. We fished, and he watched silently, until Grey pulled in a perch, at which point Professor Darling clapped his hands together and said, “There, so,” as though the catching of one, puny fish signaled the end of the show.

  “Catherine,” he said, and Callie said goodbye to us and they walked up the hill. I felt sad as I watched them go, the only time I’d ever seen them together.

  Grey said, “We’re almost out of grubs.”

  “He was Callie’s father,” I said, sounding melodramatic, even to myself. Pop shrugged as though the point had been made.

  I looked out the window again in time to see the ferry disappear in the fog. When I turned again he’d disappeared too, as quietly as he had come, and I thought, if he’s going to keep that up, he’s going to give me the creeps.

  I called Grey’s house. His mother answered.

  “It was a car accident,” she said.

  “When are they coming back?” I asked.

  “Jack wasn’t sure,” Agnes said. “Two days, I think. He went off a bridge.”

  When I got down to the shop, Pop had split and would be gone the whole day. There were about thirty-five bikes waiting to get fixed. I snared the first in line, a kid’s banana bike, set it in the repair stand, and read the complaint on the manila repair tag tied to the handlebar, which said in Pop’s scratchings “Nchts vrnd, 2nd,” meaning in his Anglo-Germanic shorthand, “Won’t shift into second gear.”

  I went to work.

  The problem was easily fixed by cleaning some dirt out of the indicator chain and oiling the transmission cables. It took only ten minutes.

  By noon I’d finished eight. It hurt to stand on my leg, and I only managed to stay on my feet by shifting from one foot to another. I clipped the cable on a brake job, capped it with an aluminum ferrule, and slammed open the handle on the workbench, letting the bike bounce on the floor. By the time the sun hit the front window, I’d finished twenty repairs. There was still no sign of him.

  It was after dark when I finished the last of the repairs, a little girl’s one-speed with baseball cards clipped to the frame with clothespins and a fatally dented back fender. I wheeled it to its spot in line and went to the phone.

  Ashley answered on the first ring. I said, “What are you doing?”

  “Sitting here, wondering when you were going to call.”

  “Well, I’m calling.”

  “Want to come see me?”

  “You mean at your house?”

  “Don’t be dumb.”

  “Where?”

  “The statue?”

  “Okay.”

  She said, “Poor Callie, huh?”

  As I was hanging up, I heard the back door slam and turned to see Pop and Trudy coming into the shop, each of them carrying a bag of groceries.

  “There he is,” Trudy called out and started my way, but Pop handed her the bag he’d been carrying and steered her toward the stairway. Pop looked at me, and then at the row of finished repairs. “Clean this mess up and take out the trash before you come upstairs,” he said.

  “I was going to,” I said.

  He glared at me like he thought I was lying to him and walked away. When I heard his footsteps on the stairway, I said, “Fuck you.” The footsteps stopped for a second. I guess he was deciding whether to come back down and let me have it. Then they started again, heading upward.

  I sat on the front porch, my feet dangling over the end, looking down toward the statue of the Founder ringed by begonias in the middle of the drive leading up from the ferry dock. The last tourists of the day idled in line, their taillights glowing red. I lit a cigarette and listened to the crickets and the occasional splash from the harbor that might have been an anchor or a jumping fish. The ferry arrived and no one got off. The lines of cars went down in orderly rows, the gates went up, the ferry rumbled out of the harbor. Then it was quiet.

  A second later a car rounded the bend. I thought, Sorry, buddy, you just missed it. The Marina Hotel made half its money off these jokers who stay just a minute too long at the beach. But then the car went under a streetlight, and I saw that it was Sitwell’s black Dodge Dart. It amused almost everyone in town to the point of hatred that a man of such means would drive so hideous a car as the Dart, though among the kids it had acquired a kind of retro cool.

  Reaching the driver’s door, I glimpsed an old woman’s flowered scarf and dark glasses. I climbed in the passenger seat. “What’s with the getup?” The car smelled queer, like an old woman’s perfume mixed with rubbing alcohol.

  “I’m incognito,” Ashley Sitwell said and laughed.

  The cracked vinyl rustled underneath me like paper. “Smoke?”

  “Uh-uh, not in here,” she said. “My dad’d piss a kidney.”

  I put the pack back in my pocket.

  “No—give me one. I come back home and pick up all sorts of bad habits.”

  “You’re blaming me?”

  “I’m blaming you for a lot of my problems.”

  The car’s lighter wasn’t working. She stared at the coil like she was trying to heat it with her eyes. “Have you thought any more about us going away?”

  “No, ’cause I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “How would that go? You dragging me around and paying for everything.”

  “You make it sound bad. There’s lots of stories about people who started out that way.”

  “And where do they end up?”

  “They get what they want,” she said and pulled off the scarf, pushed her shorts down to her ankles. She lay back, sliding a shoulder beneath the steering wheel, glasses still propped on the bridge of her nose.

  I didn’t move.

  She sat back up. “What’s the matter?”

  “You can’t just make me,” I said.

  “If I was Callie, I wouldn’t have to make you.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You should have seen yourselves the other night, holding her like she was a piece of glass that would smash into pieces if anyone let go. A glass vase—brown glass.”

  “Jeez,” I said, “her dad just died.”

  “So what? I mean really. Do you think everyone would be crowding around me if mine did?”

  “No and maybe that’s the point.”

  She socked me hard on the shoulder. “Shut up.”

  “Because you hate him,” I yelped, massaging the spot.

  “Who says?”

  “You do.”

  “Who doesn’t talk l
ike that about their folks sometimes?”

  “Grey doesn’t.”

  “I know he doesn’t. That’s because Jack and Agnes are so fucking special.” I put my hand on the door handle. “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Great, so I’ve fucked everything up.” She was crying. The glasses fell on the floor and Ora Sitwell’s scarf was tangled in her hair. I tried to touch her and she went hysterical, shaking and crying until her nose was dripping. “Forget it,” she said.

  In the dark hall at the bathroom door, I nearly ran into a body in the doorway.

  “Excuse me,” Trudy said, holding my father’s robe closed at the neck with one hand and a cigarette a couple of inches from her mouth with the other.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Need to get in here?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you do.” She turned and flicked the butt into the toilet. An impressive shot considering the seat was down. I decided I liked her and I would be sorry to see her go. “My daughter’s your age.”

  “I know,” I said. Dianne Schmidt was a sophomore and well on her way to getting a rep as a serious slut.

  “You know my DiDi?”

  “By sight,” I said.

  She eased past toward my father’s room. Too much mascara made her eyes into black hollows in the poor light of the hall. “There’s chicken salad in the fridge,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said and yawned.

  “Tired?” she asked, as she pushed the door to Pop’s room.

  “A little,” I said. “He keeps me busy.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said and pushed the door shut behind her until it latched.

  It had been more than a day since I’d eaten. I felt like throwing up, but I had a rule against that, so I crawled into bed and lay still in the dark until the feeling of nausea went away.

  The next day Pop wouldn’t even look at me, going so far as pretending to look for some phantom fallen screw, when I walked by his bench. There were enough repairs to keep the two of us busy until well after supper and on past dark, when he crushed the last cigarette of a four-pack day into the ashtray, swilled the dregs of the last can of the day’s six-pack, and went upstairs.

  The day after that, I woke up to an empty house. Pop was up and out riding without me. There weren’t many repairs to be done and fewer customers on an overcast day, so I thought up whatever I could do to look like I was working. I swept the floors and took the few bicycles we had for sale out on the front porch to be dusted and waxed. I was patching a tear in the screen door when I saw Callie and Grey coming up the street.

  Callie I saw first and had to look twice because I didn’t recognize her. The clothes were right—the sleeveless T-shirt and cutoff shorts—but her hair was cut short.

  “Hi,” she said, stepping under my arm at the screen door.

  Grey followed behind. “How’d it go?” I said, and he shook his head and blew air through his teeth.

  The trash cans were almost empty but the chore gave us an excuse to get outside.

  “It was a horror show,” Grey said. “Callie and her mother fought all the way to Rice Lake. We stopped to get gas and Dolores called Callie ‘an ungrateful little pill,’ and Callie says, ‘Well, you won’t have to worry about that anymore,’ and Dolores says, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ And Callie says, ‘Buy a giant clue.’ And it’s like that until Jack suggests that we switch around and Callie gets in the pickup with me, and Jack agreed to ride with Dolores, which pretty much means he doesn’t have to get me anything for Christmas, as far as I’m concerned. Then we get to the funeral home where you had rows of chairs over here, and rows of chairs over there, and the coffin in the middle. We come in. His other kids are over there with the new wife and all this family of hers that actually flew up from Jamaica. They don’t talk to Dolores, they don’t know who we are, and they’re all black, and so you got this black-white thing going on, which is the last thing we want, but what can we do? And Callie doesn’t want to leave her mom alone because she feels crappy about what they said on the trip down.”

  “I guess people do stuff for different reasons.”

  “I guess,” Grey said. “Then when we were leaving Callie does this weird thing. She went over to the casket. There was a picture of her dad next to this candle, and Callie picked up the picture and set it down on a table across the room.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Beats me. Callie sure doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to stay with Ray and Dolores. We’d like to get some money and get our own place. Jack and Agnes said she can move in with us until then.” Grey sees the bruise on my arm. “What’d ya do, crash?”

  “Pop hit me,” I said.

  “Aw man,” Grey said, “you really can’t stay.”

  “No choice,” I said, as I pushed the door open. “Anyway it’s just a few more weeks. How bad could it get?”

  Back inside, Callie was sitting on the counter and Pop was showing her how he could pick up a stool from the bottom with only one hand. A feat that never failed to kill down at the tavern, I’d never seen him try it in the shop. “All from here,” he said, standing and massaging his forearm. She obliged him by closing her thumb and index finger like a caliper around his biceps. “Ooh, strong, Ernst,” she said, looking confused and amused. “How do you like this guy?”

  “It’s pretty tough,” I said. And Pop stared like I was making a crack, but he didn’t say anything. In fact, Pop didn’t talk to me the rest of the day or the next day or—no harm in jumping ahead here—for the rest of the summer.

  8

  JACK REED

  It was creepy at first, sharing a house with somebody who wouldn’t even talk to you. But after a few days of trying to trick him into talking to me, I got used to the silence, and after a few days more, I got to like it. Pop never had much to say on good days so the silent treatment wasn’t that much of an adjustment. Days went by and then weeks, and then the entire month of July. Neither of us cracked.

  Then one day in August, when we were closing up, Jack stuck his head in the front door. “Callie and Agnes went over to buy contact paper in Washburn. Who’s up for a beer?”

  Pop and I looked each other in the eye for the first time in days, both of us knowing that if one of us said yes, the other would have to say no. So I said yes because I wasn’t enjoying sulking around the house as much as he was.

  When I caught up with Jack in the bar, he was alone.

  “Where’s Grey?” I asked him.

  “Home,” he said. “He’s beat.”

  “You must be, too,” I said.

  “Not me,” he said, smiling, “just getting my second wind,” which was funny if you knew Jack.

  Friendly’s Tavern was a popular place, owing to the fact that Ben Friendly had a monopoly on drinking outside of the country club and the bar at the marina. It was just past five by the Hamm’s beer clock above the bar and the regulars were already two deep at the rail.

  Most everyone was on their first of the day and so the bar was quiet. Even the jukebox, which played mostly the kind of country songs that people like to hear after they’re drunk and feeling sorry for themselves, hadn’t been turned on yet. There was a considerable commotion going on in the back room. It was Monday, which was euchre night. I ducked into a booth along the wall. Jack got Greta Friendly’s attention with a wave and she brought over two bottles of Pabst. Greta never asked, “What’ll you have?” You always drank at Friendly’s what you drank the first time you came in, beer or brandy old-fashioneds, it didn’t much matter.

  “How’s the town scholar?” she said, as she set the bottles down on the Formica in front of us.

  “Oh, not feeling too smart, today, Greta,” I said.

  And she said, “Well, then you’ve come to the right place.

  Jack—”
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br />   Greta told him she wanted to run an ad for their Labor Day pig roast and they talked about that a little and when she left Jack said, “Actually, I’m glad it worked out this way. The two of us. Who knows how many more chances we’ll get to talk before you go.”

  “Sure, you can talk to Grey any time.”

  “True,” he said, laughing a little. He smoothed the zipper on his windbreaker and pushed his glasses back on his nose.

  “So the funeral was kind of tough?”

  He sipped his beer and thought. “What did Grey say?” Jack was always doing that. If Grey or I asked him what he thought of something he would turn the question around on us. I used to think this was because he held no strong opinions, but I’d come to see that it was because he wanted us to form opinions of our own, without having to worry that he might know more than us and disagree.

  “He said it was kind of sad.”

  “It was kind of sad.”

  “He also said that Callie and her mom had this huge fight and Callie was moving in with you guys.”

  He cocked his head, “Well,” he said, “if loving Callie like she was our own daughter was all we had to do to make everyone happy, then our job would be easy.”

  “How come it isn’t.”

  “Callie lost her father, but she’s not an orphan. And until she turns eighteen, we have to respect Dolores’s right to raise her child as she sees fit.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I said, a little too loud, and I thought I caught a rare flash of anger in Jack’s eye.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said. “Dolores is a proud and independent woman from a proud and independent family.”

  What he meant was Dolores Kraus had grown up doing whatever she wanted and getting away with it because she was pretty in the way rich girls can be: well-looked-after without being beautiful—and because she was a Kraus, and everyone on the island believed that the Krauses did as they pleased. When she was young she’d turned down a scholarship to a women’s conservatory in Oshkosh to go to college in Boston and study art history, and no one said anything because it was the privilege of the rich to educate their children in the East. Even when she got knocked up by a professor and dropped out to marry him the worst anyone said was, “Figures.” But when she came home the next summer with a baby girl the color of an oak leaf at Halloween, well, then they had something to talk about.