Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  One afternoon in August, Grey came home from taking Freda to the pediatrician in Ashton to find a calling card of a familiar design wedged in his screen door.

  “‘Just stopped by to see if you were in town,’ it said.”

  “Wow, what’d you tell Callie?” I asked him.

  “Some siding salesman.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Natch? No.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “Fifty grand of his money and a boatload of drugs are missing. I’m thinking he might drop by the house again, when I’m home.”

  Two weeks later Grey’s hangar burned.

  It was after dark. Pop and I were working late. Grey had gone home hours earlier. I said, “Do you smell smoke?” Pop looked at the cigarette burning in his ashtray and shrugged.

  Thinking there might be a fire in the state forest, I walked out on the porch but saw no flames rising above the ridge, though the smell was stronger. I walked around the side of the house, noticed an amber glow through the window of the hangar, and ran back into the shop.

  “Call Grey,” I told Pop. He looked at me and blinked, so I went to the phone myself and called him.

  The fire trucks got there before Grey did, though not before the flames had breached the windows.

  Grey pulled up in the pickup, with Callie, and Freda wrapped in a blanket. He cursed and ran for the sliding door.

  “Don’t open that,” one of the firemen yelled, but Grey was opening it up as he did.

  “I got to get my boats out. Tom,” he shouted as I ran after him. The far half of the building was in flames, swallowing boat hulls as it came toward us. Rolling waves of heat slapped at us as we both stepped through the doorway. Grey grabbed the handle of the cart with a new dinghy on it and dragged it toward the door. “Get that stuff,” he yelled, pointing at a tool belt and some tubes of diagrams. I did and leaned into the back of the boat as he pulled, until I felt the night air cool the sweat on my neck. Grey went in again and came out seconds later, choking and empty-handed. Callie pulled the blanket over the baby’s face to shield her from the floating embers. The airport firemen had run a third line up from the lake and were hosing down the side of our house, where the heat had already blistered the paint.

  “Give me a wet rag or something,” Grey said, hands on knees, breathing hard, his white T-shirt stained gray with soot, his hair smoky. Jack had arrived and yanked Grey by the shoulder and said, “No, son,” just like that, and Grey sank to the ground, knowing everything he had was gone.

  The fire burned so hot and fast that by the time word had reached Friendly’s and the patrons had made the walk up the hill, still carrying their drinks, the flames were already letting up. As the hoses got the better of the blaze, a dozen or more people stood watching as blankly as if they were staring at a test pattern on TV.

  The next morning, Spires drove by in the patrol car, his eyes shadowed by the broad brim of his trooper hat. In the daylight the damage looked many times worse. The air smelled like a doused campfire. Ultimately the heat had melted the steel roof at the center, and it settled in the middle like a whale with a broken spine. The Sarge stood with his hands behind his back in military at-ease position and asked, “Anything combustible inside?”

  “Shit,” Grey said, “I refurbish wooden boats. It’s all combustible.”

  “Did you tell him about the card?” I said.

  “What card?” Spires asked Grey.

  “Some guy came by the house and left a card. Tom thought it was weird.”

  “What did you say to him?” Spires asked.

  “To the guy? I didn’t see him, just the card.”

  “Can you show it to me?”

  “I tossed it.”

  “What makes you think he’d do this.”

  Grey looked my way, warning me with his eyes not to contradict and said, “No particular reason. Like I said, Tom thought it was strange.”

  Spires took his cap off and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Well—I’m awfully sorry, Grey. This is just terrible. You insured for fire?”

  Grey laughed.

  Spires shook his head. “That’s a lesson some people learn the hard way.”

  Grey sold the twisted steel for scrap. A truck with a giant mechanical claw came over from the mainland to load metal onto a flatbed and cart it away. When it was gone, what had been Grey’s business was a scorched rectangle on the grass. The rescued dinghy sat in our back yard under a tarp through a week of overcast days. Then one morning the sun came out and Grey poked his head in the back door of the shop and said, “I’m putting her in the water.”

  I walked out on the porch and Pop followed, wiping his hands with a rag. Grey pulled the cart behind him, bracing himself against the incline of the street, so it didn’t roll away from him.

  I helped Grey roll back the tarp. The varnished white paint of the hull reflected the noon sun like a mirror.

  Pop smiled and squatted to inspect the workmanship. “Very fine,” he said to Grey, which was unusual because he normally spoke to him through me.

  Grey hoisted the sail. “Brand new,” he said, “it’s canvas. The nylon didn’t seem right. Even if it did weigh half as much.” He backed the cart halfway into the water and led the boat off with a line.

  “Up for a sail?” he asked me.

  “Can’t,” I said. I probably could have. We weren’t backed up, and I doubt Pop would’ve objected, but I figured there’d be other chances.

  Grey hopped over the side, coming to rest seated at the tiller. “See ya, then, I guess.” He drew the boom sheet tight and a breeze caught the sail. The dinghy heeled and Grey shifted his weight up onto the gunwale to straighten her out. By the time he was a hundred feet away the dinghy looked no larger than a washtub on the vast lake, but she handled smoothly. Silhouetted against the sun, Grey turned and waved, a broad sweep of his arm. We waved back, the two of us, and we watched until he disappeared beyond the point.

  They found the boat two days later beached at the headwaters of the Mulberry River, the new canvas sail fouled on a fallen tree.

  There was one sign of hope.

  “No life jacket,” Callie said.

  “He didn’t take one with him,” I told her.

  Her posture sank and she propped Freda, who was twisting the strap of her mother’s tank top in her fingers, on her hip. “You sure?”

  “He never did.”

  So just as she had with her father, Callie was left waiting for word. She hadn’t gotten any better at it. I’d had experience waiting for somebody who never came back and still I had nothing to tell her except that I was certain that there was nothing anybody could say that would mean anything.

  “When should I give up?” she asked me a week after Grey went missing.

  “Doesn’t matter to anybody but you when that is.”

  “And maybe Grey.”

  “Maybe.” I wasn’t the one to tell her there wasn’t a chance. The Coast Guard had done that, and it had made no difference.

  “He really jerked us around, didn’t he?” she said.

  “Yeah, he did,” I said, “But we let him and we didn’t mind.”

  Callie looked at me and said, “I mind now. And if I ever see the son of a bitch again I’m not going to let him anymore.” Then after waiting to see if I had anything to say about that, she asked, “Did you ever wonder why it was me and Grey and not me and you?”

  I thought about that. “Nope,” I said, “I never did once.”

  The days got shorter without me noticing, until one night I looked at my watch and saw that it was 5:30 and dark already. I walked down to the lake and stood at the water’s edge long enough to see the constellation Orion rise above Otter Island.

  It was colder than the paper said it was going to be, and I didn’t know how much longer I was going to want to be standing around outside. If Harold was right, then out beyond the quasars and the plasmatic clouds of space gas,
Tomas Zimmermann was living a life I’d ridden my bike south to lead, just past the reach of my imagining, of love and wealth and no remorse. Good for him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Ragdale Foundation for a residency during which a significant portion of this book was written. Thanks also to the following people for their invaluable professional or personal support during the writing of this book: Susan Hahn, Fred Shafer, Gail Hochman, Donna Seaman, Mark Heineke, Linda Manning, Donna Shear, Rudy Faust, Stephanie Freirich, Joanne Diaz, Susan Herro, Esther Spodek, Michael Thomas, Richard Fox, Eileen Favorite, Enid Barron, Rochelle Distleheim, Ruth Smith, Gwen Ihnat, S. Kirk Walsh, Katherine Deumling, Louise Farmer Smith. Wilma, Sean, Clelia, and Marya Morris. Mary Zerkel, Joanne Zerkel, Ann Zerkel, and Zelda Zerkel-Morris.

  Of the many sources that were instrumental in the writing this book, I wanted to hold up two that were particularly useful. “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts by Timothy S. Good (University Press of Mississippi, 1996).

  IAN MORRIS grew up in a household filled with the sounds of opera and folk music. He played the cello, then the French horn, before settling on the bass guitar. In high school, he played in an album-rock cover band but was kicked out when he suggested they play songs by The Clash and The B-52s. In addition to Simple Machines, his second novel, Morris is the author of the novel When Bad Things Happen to Rich People and coeditor, with Joanne Diaz, of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America. He lives in Chicago with his wife Mary and daughter Zelda.

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