by Jeff Parker
“Hey neighbor,” the guy says. “Why the eye patch?” They have never spoken before.
“Work injury,” Sam says.
“Workman’s comp. That’s my secret.” He grabs his thigh and says, “Oh my leg!” He hops around in his foyer. “If you know what I mean.”
Sam delivers the exact same lines the Red-haired Girl used on him, and the guy upstairs responds at first pretty much as he had.
“Loudness is a subjective thing,” the guy says.
“I can hear everything that goes on up here,” Sam says.
“Everything.” He tries to approximate the Red-haired Girl’s expression. And he thinks the guy upstairs gets it, just as he had gotten it. Unlike Sam though, he pushes.
“Give me an example?” the guy says.
“Oh, I can, you know, just about everything. You walking around. Opening the refrigerator, listening to music, the boob tube.”
“Like what? What was I watching at two a.m. this morning?”
“I don’t actually log,” Sam says.
“Sure you’re not just an asshole?” the guy asks, sincerely Sam thinks.
“No, look, it’s just that these apartments suck. I can hear everything all right.”
“To travel, sound requires a medium of transmission. For instance, solid, liquid, or air. I suppose I could convert my apartment into a vacuum of space. There is no sound in a vacuum of space,” the guy says.
Sam goes back downstairs. In a little while, just as Sam is thinking about quietly jerking off, the guy upstairs starts in. He clearly isn’t trying to hold it down any. Sam can hear him talking to the monitor. Sam blushes, picturing the Red-haired Girl hearing him saying very similar things.
Instead Sam sends out emails to old clients, offering them Proven Customer Discounts. You Know Who to Call, When You Need a Haul: Brotherman’s, he writes at the end of each. Most of them come back asking to please have their addresses purged from this list. Many simply write, remove. The guy upstairs orgasms. He goes off like a bear. There is brief silence, then Bob Barker’s muffled voice fills the room.
Sam eats a Pepcid and goes outside to walk around the apartment complex with his hands behind his head to try and get rid of the cramp coming on in his gut. The bad thing about the Red-haired Girl is that she has a dog, an ugly little English bulldog named Lusya. She walks it constantly with all the other women in the complex who have dogs. She’s told them about Sam. He imagines her telling them about him going at it up there, three to four solid hours. Every woman with a dog in the complex avoids him. When he walks past them in the halls they look at the floor and allow their menacing dogs to the farthest reaches of their leashes, close enough to feel their hot breath on his marinated fingers.
The Red-haired Girl, however, being complicated, does talk to him. She has this nice thing. She wanted to let him know that she could hear what he was doing by telling him she could hear him doing something else, in order to get him to stop doing what he was doing so loudly, but in a way so he thought she really didn’t hear what he was doing, because that kind of embarrassed her. And when she sees him with the patch over his eye, she feigns concern. He doesn’t know her name and she doesn’t know his.
He keeps his hands in his pockets—women notice hands—and tells her that he scratched the cornea at work. It’s funny, he thinks, the loss of an eye doesn’t really even bother him; the addition of a penny does. When they talk, while it is obvious she is trying to be nice, she maintains a nervous glance in her eye. Sam wonders if she has this with everyone. Lusya donates a half-hearted jump at his leg. Even her dog pretends to like him.
Evolutionarily speaking Sam considers himself a fluke. He is short, not tall. Like his fingernails, his toenails are bad, though he has never bitten them. He is not particularly smart; is weird looking; and no good at sports or fighting. He compulsively has bad idea after bad idea, such as starting this hauling company now dying a brisk death. There’s not much propulsion behind his orgasm.
“You were right you know,” he says. “These apartments really do suck. I mean. I don’t know if I should tell you this. But the guy upstairs from me…” Sam leans toward her. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”
“Yeah,” she says, and steps backward.
“He masturbates all day,” Sam says. He takes his hands out of his pockets but resists the urge to use the universal hand signal for jerking off. “For hours and hours. It’s so loud.”
“Are you kidding me?” she says.
“No. It’s terrible, like he’s in the same room with me, which you have to admit if you’ve ever seen him, it’s a scary thought. But I don’t want to go up there and tell him I can hear that, you know.”
“Yeah, it’s awkward, or something.”
“You’re telling me. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you could hear him straight through to your apartment.”
“Hours and hours and hours?” she says.
“At least. And talking to the screen. Oh baby, oh yeah baby. It’s enough to, I tell you. Freaking pathetic. I’ve heard him—and you know he’s the only one up there—going Rock with me. Rock with me. Suckle, suckle…”
“I have in fact. Well, talk about embarrassing. I thought that was you.” Her skin turns the exact shade of her hair and freckles, causing her freckles to temporarily disappear.
“Oh, no. No! You should—you can come up some time and listen. I mean just to prove it.”
She immediately gets all apologetic. Her skin color deepens and deepens until it begins to brown. The shade of her skin overtakes the freckles and they resurface. She checks him out, seems to see him in a new light. She leans in, as if they’re chuckling a secret. The dog rubs its butt against his boot.
“Do you smell hot sauce?” she asks.
There is an immediate, marked transformation in the way women with dogs around the complex relate to Sam. When he leaves that afternoon to pick up Jeremy, a blonde with a Newfoundland the size of a Yugo, a dog which she’d just yesterday allowed to plant both its front paws on his chest as he backed into a corner, waves hello at him, and when the Yugo goes for his hands, she jerks it back. “He’s nothing,” she says, “an absolute vagina monologue.”
So Sam is as upbeat as a guy with a foreign body in him can be until they cruise around town checking their flyers. They discover all of them—at the gas stations, the COTA stops, the dump, the post office, fish camp, the industrial parks, in the Port-O-Lets at construction sites, Skyline Chili, Payless Shoes, the comic book store—covered up with Two Men And A Truck flyers. They append their flyers with super sticky double-sided tape, which ruins the Brotherman’s flyers underneath.
“The miracle is we still have enough pennies to Xerox our own flyers,” Jeremy says when they check the Community Bulletin Board at the PriceChopper, “with you going around eating them all.” Jeremy scribbles on the Two Men flyers. On one he draws a little caricature of two stick-figure men buttfucking in parentheses. On others he writes: I take umbrage AT your two frigging faces. I take umbrage AT your hauling. I take umbrage TO the Two Fags And A Buckity-Buck.
“You’re not getting what I’m saying,” Sam says. “It worked. I should have blown that breath reader off the charts. All the tequila I put back. It could have been fifty percent I’m telling you.”
“With your drunk driving ability then, it had to have been the signs. Just take off the signs.” Jeremy knows what a terrible drunk driver Sam is, but, knowing what pride Sam takes in his supposed prowess, he keeps it quiet and never goes out for the serious drinking with him after work. The truth is Jeremy has been talking to some guys at the dump who haul things around the landfill about bringing him on. There is no shortage of things people don’t want at the dump like there seems to be in the rest of the world.
“I’m not talking about why I got pulled over. That seems pretty obvious. I’m saying the penny fucked up the test.”
Jeremy staples the new Brotherman’s flyers over the defaced Two Men flyers.
/> “I don’t know anything about a breathalyzer, brotherman. Or for that matter what a penny will do about it. What I know is if you’d blown one one-thousandth more, there’d be no business right about now. Then what would we do?” Jeremy would step up the pressure on the guys at the dump is what. Jeremy can’t drive, but can the bitch haul. The guy is built like a small forklift. When not carrying anything he moves about as if he’s falling backwards. He slants at forty-five degrees from knees to waist. He’s five foot four with arms that bear hug a Barcalounger. When he picks something up he sinks into himself; it’s the only time his feet and head are in line. Sam interprets these qualities to mean that Jeremy can fight.
Jeremy can haul. Jeremy likely intimidates. Jeremy cannot fight.
“If one single person on one single night sees these signs, and we get a job out of it, that’s one job more we’d have than now. I’m not taking off the signs. I’d just like to pass this penny.”
“It will pass,” Jeremy says. “Have faith in that much.”
Sam doesn’t know.
Once they replace their fliers they do what they usually do: They buy a six-pack of Hollandia tall boys and go drink them at the park with their feet propped on the rearview mirrors. The end of Brotherman’s may be near anyway. Jeremy hands Sam his hot sauce from the glove compartment, and he upturns it into his beer. He drinks the beer in hopes it will make him feel normal.
They wait for the mobile to ring. Jeremy searches phrase books and novels and newspapers from the library for passages quoting umbrage at something. Periodically he steps out and does pull-ups on the jungle gym. Sam worries about the penny and tries not to chew his nails. He rubs under his rib cage to see if he can feel anything and stains his T-shirt orange.
“You’re worth more now,” Jeremy says. “Think of it like that. Sam plus one cent.” Then Jeremy says, “Tomorrow, let’s go in early and ambush the Two Men at PriceChopper.” Sam understands this to mean they will be kicking some Two Men ass in retribution for having one of their cop buddies pull him over, but Jeremy intends only to clarify a grammatical point.
“What time?” Sam says.
“Early, make sure we don’t miss them,” he says.
“Sixish then?”
“Sixish.”
Sam purchases sample packs of Metamucil and Ex-Lax and a single packet of apple and cinnamon oatmeal from the Dollar Store on the way home. That night he panics the panic of a man who may have something seriously wrong with him medically but does not have insurance. His jowls quiver. He’s sweaty and pale in the bathroom mirror, white as the gauze eye patch. He washes his hands and he wants to bite them so bad they tremble. He rushes into the kitchen and soaks them again in the two bowls of hot sauce, beating his head on the table to the Jeopardy tune. He mixes fiber, oatmeal, and laxative in a bowl of boiling water. He breathes the steam, and when it’s cool enough he eats.
Afterward he powers on the computer and finds a yellow plastic glove for dishwashing under the sink. He coats it in Vaseline, goes to one of the free movie sites and cranks up. He talks to the screen, imitating the voice of the guy upstairs, and when it’s over he collapses into the lawn chair he uses as an office chair, then spends an hour on the toilet pushing, concentrating, pushing, before admitting failure, swallowing half a Xanax and falling deeply to sleep.
The Red-haired Girl hears Sam as she prepares for bed and watches the Weather Channel, slightly concerned by the TV’s constant beeping because of severe incoming weather. She believes that it is the guy two floors up jerking off while talking to the screen, even though the sound seems to be coming from directly over her head. The walls and ceilings are thin enough, she believes, which is why the severe incoming weather concerns her.
Sam wakes to weather sirens and the taste of vinegary fingers. In his sleep, the fingers of his left hand—his favorite to chew for reasons having to do with angle and bent—have migrated to his mouth. Outside it sounds like a bombing raid. He opens his window and the wind and rain whip through the room. Sirens are interspersed with a garbled message. He sticks his head out into the dark to hear better. Weather-warning megaphone speakers in the distance blare something that sounds like: Lorena Bobbitt in area. Seek lover.
He can barely hear knocking at the door. It’s the Red-haired Girl, standing there holding a vanilla-scented candle.
“This is your wake-up call,” she says. “The severe incoming weather is income. The whole building’s in the basement.”
Sam disappears to find his shoes. He slips his bare feet into his work boots. When he comes back she is standing in his living room. In the lightning flashes, he sees the hot sauce bowls on the kitchen table, the open tub of Vaseline and the glove on the computer desk.
“We have the exact same space,” she says. “And there is where the magic happens.” She points to the ceiling.
He makes to get her out of the room fast, taking her by the waist. She interprets this as a forward move. She likes forward. They take the steps carefully in the dark, stopping only to let the guy upstairs brush by with a flashlight, his feet smacking the stairs like soft tomatoes.
The Red-haired Girl enters the basement first. Her candle illuminates their neighbors and a goldmine of junk. Sam simply marvels for a moment. The remnants of who knows how many years of tenants’ leftovers, rotten and mildewed from the moisture, well beyond any desirable condition. The mess is arranged in aisles. Their neighbors are situated among the aisles in little cliques. The women with dogs smile nervously and wave. Every person secretly chastises himself for saving the however-much per month to live in the flimsy-walled apartment building they all live in. An AM radio reports multiple tornadoes spotted in the area.
Sam takes the candle and the lead now. He wanders through lanes of wooden crates, old doors, paintings, battered suitcases, porch swings, mattresses, and box springs. There’s ancient dressers and stacks of mismatched drawers, a foreign-looking shrunk, and couch beds—big, heavy, steel couch beds.
The Red-haired Girl takes Sam’s arm. Her nails dig into his bicep. He registers their crispy quality. He looks down and is excited to find that he can see them reflecting the candle, finely shaped, perfectly manicured, the kind with a whitewall across the top and a lavender body. The Xanax emphasizes everything.
The Red-haired Girl stops him in front of a basement window. She points to a blanket underneath two sawhorses, where her bulldog Lusya is sitting. “Kind of a cool spot right?” she says.
“A room with a view,” Sam says. Through the window they see the little shrubs lining the apartment building sideways in the wind.
The siren and the unintelligible announcement broken-records.
“What the hell are they trying to tell us?” Sam asks.
“The sky is plummeting,” she says.
“I don’t know your name,” Sam says.
“You see me all the time,” she says.
“I call you the Red-haired Girl,” Sam says.
“You’re the Creepy Cute Guy!” she says. “Let’s just stick with those.” Then she says, “Look.” The little sideways shrubs are gone.
When he wakes up, he is horrified to discover his hand clawing up the Red-haired Girl’s stockinged leg, catching and running as it goes. A purple light seeps in through the window, and the basement is quiet.
She interprets his gesture in a particular way and pulls herself out of the shredded stockings.
“Touch me,” she says. Sam retracts his hands out of habit.
“I don’t do touch,” Sam says. She interprets this in a particular way also. Sam is really shy and awkward about these things. She interprets him as forceful and direct.
She says something else then, which Sam cannot decipher: “Moose me,” maybe.
Sam does what he believes is expected of him. He is intrigued to discover she tastes like lemon. Leaned against the foreign shrunk in the back corner the guy upstairs begins masturbating, for the first time in his life, quietly, without even a whisper as he watches t
hem through the sawhorses.
Soon Sam desires different textures. He bites, which seems to be the thing. Her body flops around. He keeps on biting, all the way down her leg, her ankle for a while, back up, knee, hip bone, nipple one, nipple two, lip, ear, lymph node, neck fold. She goes for it. When he moves down her arm—shoulder, elbow, wrist—something tells him just to get what it is he’s after. He starts small, the hard, tender nail on the end of her pinky. He nips that off in two clean bites, no tearing, practiced. Then goes the thumb. He decimates her lovely nails, during which she orgasms thrice.
The Red-haired Girl, while genuinely liking this, does not however expect that it will constitute the main activity of a sexual relationship with Sam. The guy upstairs finishes all over himself, without making a sound.
Sam would say that he notices the penny less today. But no one is asking. Jeremy is writing on a piece of paper as Sam maneuvers the F-150 through the twilight, around fallen power lines and trees, to the PriceChopper. He parks at the other end of the parking lot, away from the automatic doors, where they have a clear view of the Community Bulletin Board.
Six-thirty rolls around and then seven. Sam calls the landlord on the mobile. He explains to him that he just happened to seek shelter in the basement last night and couldn’t help noticing all the junk. He also just happens to run a hauling company if he’s interested in getting rid of it. The landlord seems receptive, asks for the name of his business. There is a negotiating period. Sam wants two months’ rent. The landlord says he’ll meet him there to discuss it further this week, but right now, he could actually use Brotherman’s to haul away the detritus tornados dropped onto a number of his properties. Sam says he thinks they could find time in their schedules to do that today.
“We got work,” he says, turning to Jeremy. Jeremy is too nervous to answer.
A truck parks in the fire lane.
Sam and Jeremy look at each other. They get out. The Two Men—caught taping over their flyers—notice them from across the parking lot. They recognize the duo from having themselves once staked out the competition for the same purpose they are now being staked out. When they’d seen Jeremy, they’d called that plan off. Now they come toward them, full stride.
