“I know,” Aubrey said quietly, still watching Hap play with the kids. Apparently he’d been listening after all. “I know I don’t owe you anything, Mick. I just thought, you know . . . we’re neighbors. It’s what neighbors do.”
* * *
The pictures in the album that had so impressed Aubrey were taken with the camera Layne gave Mick for his birthday right before Ben was born—a cheap 35 millimeter automatic, the kind that fit in his pocket. It was one of those backwards presents, like when a guy gives his wife a new shotgun because it’s what he wants. Layne wanted pictures, but she was a technophobe who didn’t want to mess with a camera. She just wanted to be able to sit and leaf through snapshots of her kids in their Sunday clothes holding Easter baskets, watching them grow from page to page.
A closet romantic, Mick had always preferred the memory to the snapshot. If he got to thinking about the striper he caught up at Lanier and went digging in the family album, the fish in the picture always seemed small. Snapshots were too uncompromising. It was that way with people, too—their pictures always looked worse than his memory of them.
He liked landscapes. He’d always had a soft spot for old barns and dilapidated houses leaning a few degrees out of plumb, with holes in the roof, gray wood curling up and peeling off—maybe with an old rusty truck parked up against one end, forgotten, tires flat and weeds growing out from under it. There were ghosts in places like that—stories hidden in the shadows and deep in the grain of old boards that real people with callused hands once measured and sawed and nailed together on purpose to make a home, boards that they sat on and leaned against every day for so long that now they were full of the memory of laughing and crying, the murmurs of lovers and the barking of dogs.
Old barns and empty houses, they remembered. Those were the pictures Mick secretly longed to take, and that’s what he was thinking about when he went home that afternoon with Aubrey’s camera. He sat down at the desk and opened up the photo album to The Picture—the one of Dylan in the light—and just sat there staring at it.
He could still hear the angels.
* * *
When Layne got home from work Mick was still sitting at the desk fiddling with the camera, looking through the viewfinder, snapping the shutter. He really hadn’t been paying attention to the kids. They were in the den watching wrestling on one of the fuzzy channels. Mick didn’t even know Layne was home until he heard her talking to the kids.
He put the camera down and went to the doorway.
“What is this you’re watching?” She was standing over them with her arms crossed.
“Wrasslin’,” Toad answered without taking her eyes from the TV. Some guy with cartoonishly large arms and shoulders was right then body-slamming a bald-headed, tattooed fat guy. The one with the arms had his face painted in black-and-white tiger stripes. His hair was Elvis black and tied up like a shock of corn. Gothic.
“Turbo’s gonna win,” Ben said from the couch. “He’s got a very scientific technique.”
Dylan was sitting next to his sister, three feet out from the tube. He pointed. “He’s dot black fingernails and earrings in his fribbles. He’s the dood duy.” He just couldn’t make his palate wrap around a G. Fribble was Dylan’s word for breast—he had his own words for some things. When Layne saw Mick in the doorway she gave him one of those sideways looks and her tongue forced itself into her cheek.
“Change . . . the channel,” she said, turning to Mick. She grabbed him by the ears and locked onto his eyes while she spoke to the kids. “I can’t believe your father lets you watch that garbage.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know they were watching that. Now hear this!” he announced, “Henceforth, anyone caught watching professional wrasslin’ will be summarily executed. And then flogged.”
Ben giggled and changed the channel—he understood not only his dad’s words but also his sense of humor. Toad and Dylan stared open-mouthed from their father to their mother, waiting for a definition.
“Big trouble,” Layne told them. “No wrestling, okay?”
Mick didn’t say anything else, he just slipped away to the kitchen and started cooking dinner. He was late for that, too.
This stuff was all new to Mick. He had run lots of construction jobs, so he was used to having a crew under him and having to answer to the boss for what they did. Managing a crew of hardhats came naturally to him, even when half of them had done serious jail time for one form of mischief or another, so how come he couldn’t manage three little kids?
The conversation at dinner didn’t help matters much.
“I’m glad I’m not a baby penguin,” Ben said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.
Toad stopped pushing English peas around her plate and looked at him. “Huh?”
“They have to eat their mother’s barf,” he explained.
Toad nodded, real slow. It was a serious conversation. Layne put her fork down and leaned forward to say something, but she got in a hurry and choked so that nothing came out.
“They prolly like it,” Dylan said, staring cross-eyed at a forkful of meatloaf, as if it were covered with fungus.
Toad started laughing, warming to the subject. Layne’s eyes bugged out, and she still couldn’t talk. She grabbed her iced tea to clear her throat.
“Yeah,” Ben giggled. “The penguins probably brag about it when they’re old like Dad. ‘My mom had the best barf!’”
“‘Your mom!’” Toad hollered. “‘Nobody could barf like my mom!’”
Mick was having a big time. He was laughing right with them, thoroughly enjoying his free-spirited and originalthinking children, when Layne got her voice back and shouted down the rebellion. Silence held for a second or two while she turned and gave Mick the slit-eyed look, but right in the middle of that little silence Dylan reeled off a letter-perfect imitation of a cat coughing up a hairball, and Layne lost it. Putting down a rebellion required dignity, and not even Layne could pull it off while she was laughing.
* * *
The next day, while Ben and Toad were at school, Mick got a fresh roll of film for the camera Aubrey had given him, and he and Dylan went to shoot some pictures of an old abandoned house down the dirt road a ways, back in among some old ivy-covered oaks. The light was all wrong, but Mick couldn’t figure out why. When he got the pictures back he thought about showing them to Aubrey, but he just couldn’t make himself do it. He was beholden enough. It was clear that Aubrey knew something about photography, and he said he’d be happy to share it with him, but Mick just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make himself give that much ground. According to Hap, Mick always had been an independent cuss.
12
* * *
The Man With No Hands.
IT TOOK a while, but by the time Mick got done rebuilding Hap’s house he was beginning to get used to the whole stay-at-home-dad thing. His fifteen-year routine had finally begun to fade and he rarely even thought about the high steel, or the crane, or the Man With No Hands. But in the first week of February they called him back up to the job for a hearing. Mick wouldn’t have even bothered to go except that Bingham, the project manager who called him, said if a review panel found that Mick wasn’t negligent he could end up getting back pay. He figured he could use the money, so he went. The hearing turned out to be a waste of time—nothing but office politics, and completely one-sided. It was all about covering their butts. Mick never had a chance.
It was cloudy and dreary when he got out of the meeting, the kind of damp cold that crept down the back of his neck. He zipped up his coat and was heading for his truck when he saw a raggedy little man in a hard hat shuffling off through the parking lot with a brand new right-angle grinder on his shoulder. When the guy looked back and saw Mick his pace picked up a bit. Obviously, he was stealing the grinder and heading back home with it—to Overpass Plantation.
The little grin on his face when he looked over his shoulder instantly reminded Mick of the Man With No Hands—the way he was looking o
ver the wall and smiling when Mick was swinging. He decided on the spot to follow the guy, just wander down to Overpass Plantation and see if he could look up the Man With No Hands. He never realized until he found himself following the raggedy man down through weedy lots and shadowy places toward those bridges that he was actually a little bit afraid of the Man With No Hands, but there was something in him that always reacted to a deep-down fear by walking straight at it. He couldn’t help it. Besides, Dr. Lethal was watching Dylan for him and he hadn’t told her when he’d be back. He had the afternoon off. No need to hurry home.
Overpass Plantation was a regular small town of boxes and tents thrown together up under a couple of parallel bridges. They were good-sized, stout concrete bridges with a broad street running under them, but the traffic was all on top. Not many cars passed through underneath, which was probably why such a big homeless community was allowed to exist. Mick followed the guy with the grinder all the way down the slope by the nearest bridge, down to the edge of the street. He would have followed him right on across, but he got intercepted on the near side by a very tall woman in a very short red-sequined dress. She stopped right in his path, a few paces ahead, and waited for him. Mick couldn’t help noticing the too-broad shoulders and the too-narrow hips as she slipped her pocketbook to the crook of an elbow and held up a hand, palm out.
“Where you goin’, man?” The voice, not to mention the adam’s apple, didn’t belong to any lady.
The guy with the grinder had already crossed the street, and he glanced back with a little grin when he saw Red Dress intercept Mick.
“Nowhere,” Mick shrugged. “Well, actually I was kind of looking for the Man With No Hands.”
“Preacher? He up there.” He pointed to the slope of concrete under the second bridge, on the near side of the street. “What you want wi’ him?”
“Just talk. Just wanted to see him.” Mick kept his hands out of his pockets, in plain sight.
Red Dress was watching his face closely. “Okay, you go on then. But you best not do no dirt to the Preacher, you hear me? And I wouldn’t go over there if I was you.” He pointed across the street. “The devil stay over there.”
Mick wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but he hesitated a little too long and Red Dress sashayed on down the street, pocketbook swinging. Mick took his advice and didn’t cross to the other side.
There were people all over the place—mostly men, but a couple of women and a few kids. Most of them were pretty scruffy and a few of them had to be either drunk or crazy, but for the most part they were just people. Their houses, if you want to call them that, were mainly wooden boxes built out of scrap lumber, but there were also a couple of tents and a few cardboard boxes—cast-off people and cast-off junk, all jumbled together and packed in under the bridges where at least the rain didn’t get to them. Mick saw a recliner with the footrest missing from the frame, the seat piled with rolled-up clothes and plastic bags of what looked like loaf bread. Behind that was a grocery cart full of paint cans. The paint cans were shiny clean, the labels all peeled off—no telling what was in them.
There was a bigger than average box near the bottom with a little makeshift stovepipe sticking out the top. A toothless old woman wearing a mound of blankets stood next to it, pulling down a dirty sheet that looked like it might have been hung on the side of the box to dry. Mick asked her where he could find the Preacher. She pointed. The Man With No Hands was sitting in front of a small campfire near the bottom of the weedy shoulder of the second bridge. Mick had already looked there, but didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t wearing a hard hat. He wore an old-fashioned felt hat like men used to wear in the Depression, and it suited him. There were two other guys by the fire with him, all of them sitting on inverted fivegallon buckets they must have pilfered from the job. One of them rose from his bucket when Mick walked up, and he just kept unfolding. Mick figured he was about seven feet tall. The giant had a sock hat pulled down low over his eyes so that he had to lean his head back a little, even from that height, to look Mick over. He wasn’t wearing a belt and his hands stayed busy constantly hitching his pants, front and back, while he stared at Mick like a boxer in an opposing corner.
“Mick!” the Man With No Hands called out, to give him safe passage, most likely.
“I’m surprised you remembered me,” Mick said. “We only met that one time, but come to think of it I guess it was a pretty memorable meeting.”
“That it was,” the Man With No Hands said, and smiled. “That it was.”
The giant hitched his pants one last time, then sat back down and quit staring at him.
A little guy with a red face and puffy eyes got up and left. The Man With No Hands motioned for Mick to take his bucket, so he sat down by the fire and acted like he was warming his hands. Somebody had made a little grill out of rebar and tie-wire, and a sooty aluminum coffeepot perked over the coals.
“Not too many outsiders have the nerve to come down here,” the Man said. “But then, if I remember right, you do have a backbone.”
“More backbone than brain, most of the time,” Mick chuckled.
“I never did hear how you came out. None the worse for wear, I see.”
Mick clicked his partial plate out with his tongue and grinned his missing teeth at him. The old man laughed, and the giant looked confused.
“Mick here is the ironworker I told you about who took a ride off the top of the building a couple months ago,” he explained. Now the giant laughed, a big rumbling laugh, rubbing his hands on his knees.
“So, what brings you down here?” the Man asked. He kept his hooks in his jacket pockets.
Mick stared at the fire, shook his head, shrugged. “I don’t know. Man, you wouldn’t believe what all’s happened since the last time I saw you. Up there.” Mick pointed with his eyes. The giant giggled, made a little swinging motion with his hand. “I guess I just wanted to make sure you were real.”
The Man took his hooks out of his pockets and spread his arms. “Well?”
“I don’t know. The guys think you’re some kind of spook—a miracle worker, or worse.”
“Do you believe in miracles?” He had that little half grin on his face again, like he was toying with Mick.
“No.”
“Well, then there aren’t any. There. That was easy enough.”
“Yeah, maybe too easy.” Mick shook a finger at him. “There’s something about you that makes people, I don’t know, scared or something. Like the guy in the red dress down there—”
“Oh, you met Sheila.”
“Yeah, he told me not to cross the street because the devil lives on the other side. What was that all about?”
“Oh, well, our little community has its social strata, the same as any other, except that the dividing line here is drugs. We’ve got our share of winos and potheads on this side, but the serious drug users live on the other side of the street.”
“And prostitutes,” the giant said. He rolled the R. Sounded Russian.
The Man With No Hands nodded. “It’s all about AIDS, really. There’s a lot of it on the street, especially among hookers and IV drug users. People are afraid, so they keep their distance.”
“I see,” Mick said. “So the devil doesn’t really live over there.”
“Sure he does. Unless you don’t believe in the devil.”
“No, I’m not gonna argue with you there. Matter of fact, I was in a meeting with him just a little while ago.” He had to admit the Man With No Hands seemed a lot more human and personable in his own world than on the outside. Made Mick wonder if maybe it was the outside world that had a problem.
“But you didn’t answer my question,” Mick said. “How come people are scared of you?”
“Is no fear,” the giant said quietly. “Is respect. Is love.” He reached over and squeezed the Man’s shoulder. “Tell story,” he said, and gave him a gentle nudge. “Tell story, please.”
“It’s kind of a long story,”
the Man With No Hands said, leaning forward, propping his elbows on his knees and gazing into the fire. “But maybe I can hit the high points. See, I used to live on the other side of the street. I know the devil well. In my first life I was a chef, and a good one. I was the youngest chef at the Chateau in those days, and my future looked bright. I made friends with a lot of pretty people who had money and time on their hands, went to a lot of penthouse parties. First it was just a little cocaine, but one thing leads to another. I had a good wife and a future, and in the end I sold it all for the next fix—same story as every other junkie, I suppose. It took a couple years to make the whole trip, but basically it started at a party and ended up in an alley, lying in my own filth, wondering how I got there and where my life went. Funny, I don’t much remember the years between the party and the alley. It’s all a blur. The devil shows you some sweet pleasure and you chase it to the end of the earth, but you can’t catch it. One day, there you are at the end of the earth, with nothing. It happens to you so easily—so incrementally, you know? You just never really see the spiral you’re in. After a while it’s all about the fix, and you’ll do anything to get high. Anything.”
So far, the story was nothing he hadn’t heard before, and Mick had never been prone to addiction of any kind, so he couldn’t relate. He shook his head. “Doesn’t fit. You don’t talk like any junkie I ever met.”
“Well, it can happen to anybody—trust me. You can take any road to any place. It just depends on where you turn.”
“But you’re clean now, right?”
“Oh, yeah, that was a long time ago. Another life.”
“So, what happened?”
“A predator.” He chuckled, pinching a red plastic cup out of his jacket pocket and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “There are predators out there, and they pick off the sick and the lame, like jackals. They’ve always plagued the homeless—everything from teenage boys clubbing winos for fun to twisted perverts who find guys passed out and set fire to them because they get off on the screams.”
Summer of Light Page 11
