Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  And except for the occasional once a week romp my relationship had hardly changed from the time when we lived a thousand miles apart. We still spent far more time on the phone together than we did in close quarters. When we did spend time together it was wild and intimate and incredible, but she would inevitably leave me in the wee hours of the morning and I would wake up alone; or worse yet, rushing to cover my nakedness as I heard Sarah approaching.

  Melanie was disappointed when we moved out of her house, but we had spent a month there and Amber was finally able to rent a house for us. Much as I came to enjoy Melanie’s company and her cooking I was happy to have a place of my own away from the temptation of her subtle advances. I went with Melanie on a few more jobs and her naked beauty only made my fidelity to Amber more difficult, but she eventually found a replacement for me as I had requested. Working security was obviously not the kind of work to which I was well suited. I worried about my blackout. I wondered if I had developed a brain tumor. I wondered, if someone could clump me on the head and cause me to go berserk, what else I might I be capable of in such a state. Such work was not for me. Besides I didn’t need to draw any unwanted attention to myself. If I had gotten pinched for fighting I was going home to Willoughby in handcuffs.

  The house that Amber had rented for us was just a few blocks from Melanie’s home. It was actually the second floor apartment of a two family unit, a white colonial with a two story front and back porch. The house was far from modern in its finish with its beige paint and its plaster and plastic tiled walls both in the kitchen and the bathroom, not to mention the old white painted cupboards in the kitchen, but the rent was cheap (four hundred dollars a month) and the neighborhood was safe enough. The floors were oak and cold to the bottom of our feet in the mornings and the bathroom tub was a squat, but deep, claw-foot cast-iron antique, but Sarah loved the tub because she could fill it to her neck and almost swim in it. For me it was too short and caused me to bump my knees to my chin when I sat, but as there was no shower I resigned myself to get used to this little discomfort.

  The apartment came furnished with beds and dressers and the drabbest of plaid living room furniture which we were welcome to replace if we wished so long as we didn’t discard the old (but rather stored it in the basement). As funds were dwindling and I had not yet found a cash-paying job I resigned myself to the poverty of our situation indefinitely.

  We celebrated that Christmas at Melanie’s house as well. Sarah helped Melanie in the kitchen while I sat lazily in the living room watching holiday movies in between stoking the fire. Amber had promised to stop by, but as I expected she failed to show and once again I felt like the forlorn lover. But with Melanie at my side and Sarah sandwiched between us we almost seemed like a family. Melanie’s actual family had discarded her as the black sheep after she left what she described as an abusive home life as soon as she turned eighteen. She had no family to speak of except for the dysfunctional fraternity of girls with which she danced, and of course

  Amber. So the holiday was a bit melancholy for all of us as Sarah and I mourned our first Christmas without Catherine. By the end of the night, filled with a glorious turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and cheese covered cauliflower and too much spiked eggnog, I fell asleep with my head on Melanie’s lap, her fingers stroking and combing through the hair on my head, and Sarah asleep on my lap; the three lost shepherds.

  After the holidays I began to look for work. I wondered what sort of work I would be able to find with my undocumented status. I was worth little more than an illegal immigrant. I had no skills to speak of when it came to manual labor. Sure I had assisted my father while he did electrical wiring when I was a boy but I had learned very little besides pulling wire and installing receptacles. Furthermore, it was such hard and grueling work and I watched my father get zapped with electrical current on many occasions and although he took it like a man I could tell by his grimace that the experience was not a pleasant one. But truthfully there were few options. I could go back to guarding Melanie but that whole affair was a time bomb waiting to explode.

  I scoured the newspaper for labor ads and called one after another from the house phone that Melanie had put in her name (the apartment was also leased in her name as were the other utilities). As I phoned potential employers I disregarded all of the companies that had receptionists to answer their phones. I knew that those companies were too big to consider paying me under the table. When I ran out of ads from the newspaper I scoured the phone directory. I dialed number after number until I heard a grungy sounding workman-like voice.

  “Tony’s Electric.” It sounded to me as if I had called him on his cell phone as I heard noises in the background (the shrill high pitched squeal of a circular saw and the pounding of a hammer) that indicated that he was at a construction site.

  “Are you hiring?”

  I heard an extended breath, “I might need a laborer.” He said with a Bostonian sounding accent.

  “How much does it pay?”

  “How many years have you worked in the trade?”

  “Four summers…with my father.” “Maybe ten bucks an hour for the right person.”

  “Can you pay cash?”

  “Are you from the labor department? No, I can’t pay cash.”

  “I really need the job.”

  “When can you meet me? I gotta see if you got what it takes.”

  “What does it take?”

  “Hard work. Show up on time. Don’t ask, just do. That’s what it takes!”

  I met Tony at a fast-food restaurant about twenty minutes from my house. He was a large hulking Italian man with a wide squat nose and a broad bull face. He had dark skin and a husky build. I was immediately intimidated by him. My interview consisted of Tony grabbing my wrists and looking at my “pussy” hands and telling me that I wasn’t cut out for the kind of labor he needed; to which I replied with a tone of desperation:

  “I need the job.”

  “What are you, like forty? You said you worked two summers with your old man. I thought you was a kid. Don’t you have nothing you know how to do at your age?”

  “Four summers…and I’ve been away.” “Ohhh no! I don’t hire ex-cons!” He said, rolling his eyes, and he abruptly stood up and started to walk away.

  I reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. When he turned back toward me I thought he was going to clump me on the head. I timidly spoke, “I wasn’t in prison.” He brushed my hand from his back like he was shooing away a fly, “I’m an alcoholic. I was drunk for most of the last twenty years but I’ve been sober for over a year.” I felt bad for telling such a blatant lie, but I couldn’t very well tell him the truth.

  “Why do you want to get paid under the table?”

  “I got an ex-wife who will garnish my wages for alimony if she finds me. At ten bucks an hour I’ll barely make enough money to feed myself.”

  “I got one a those too!” he said pursing his lips and furrowing his brow in an exaggerated sympathetic frown.

  “A what?”

  “A ex-wife.” He shook his thick head indicating that he thought he was about to make a huge mistake, “In cash the job pays eight-fifty an hour. If you can’t make it to work on time I’ll can ya. If you’re lazy I’ll can ya too. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you tomorrow at seven in the morning with an address. I start at eight. Don’t be late. And no drinkin. I smell alcohol on your breath and I’ll can ya too.”

  He turned and left and that was the end of my interview. I was so giddy that I had landed a job and that I could continue to survive that I hurried home and I took Sarah out for an ice-cream sundae, the first splurge since we had arrived in Kansas.

  The work-days were long and the work was hard but I made enough money to pay my bills. And Tony, despite his direct and hardnosed approach, was a nice guy. He said that he had worked by himself for ten years until I called him. “You caught me on the right day.” He said. He had received a few dozen phone calls
a year from people looking for work but I was the first he had hired. He didn’t want to run a company, he said, he just wanted to do what he knew how to do and get paid for it.

  He hadn’t initially intended to teach me anything. He figured he would just use me to run for tools and to be an extra set of hands, and by the looks of his hands, hard and course and nicked and scarred in so many places, he needed an extra set of hands; but he took a liking to me and he started to show me how to fish wire with fiberglass rods; that is long plastic sticks the thickness of a pencil screwed together. We would drill a hole in the floor and shove the rods into the wall and then we would cut a box out where a receptacle would eventually go and we would retrieve the rods and pull the wire up to our opening.

  Tony also showed me how electricity is constantly seeking the ground, literally, and how the electricity chases the ground through the filament of a light bulb and down to the grounded wire and in so doing heats up the filament until it glows. He showed me how to bend metal tubing into nice neat shapes and to connect the tubing with threaded connectors and to insert them into junction boxes where we would eventually pull our wires together and tie our circuits with red and yellow wire- nuts. He showed me how to land the wires inside of an electrical breaker-panel and to tie them into circuit-breakers and grounded bars. He showed me how the wires had to have neat bends so that the work would be distinguishable from amateur work. He taught me how the different size breakers corresponded to different thicknesses of wires; how amperes were the equivalent of heat and that thicker wires could handle more heat and so they were protected by the breaker according to how much heat the wires could tolerate; if the wire got too hot the breaker would sense too high a temperature and shut the electricity off to that wire. Tony showed me how to tie an electrical service into the service lines coming in from the street. He touched the energized wire with his tongue to show me that it wouldn’t hurt me so long as I was not grounded, and then he crimped the wires together using a large crimping tool and some butt-splices; hollow aluminum tubing used to join the wires together. For the most part, though, I did the grunt work. I pounded copper colored eight foot ground rods into the hard earth with a sledge hammer and I pulled wire and crawled into tight soot filled attics and drilled holes. In short, in just a few months I had learned enough to get hurt working by myself, but I had absorbed enough knowledge to warrant a raise to nine dollars an hour cash.

  I was a fast study and I came to enjoy doing the electrical work with Tony. I appreciated the satisfaction of being able to look back at my work and actually seeing the fruit of my labor, a feeling I never quite felt while pushing paper. I even enjoyed the physical workout and I started to develop a toned physique. I also began to have aspirations of being able to do some of the more complicated tasks without supervision; and Tony let me try tying an electrical panel on my own. When I was finished he told me what a good job I had done, but then went on to critique my work pointing out some small mistakes I had made and showing me how I had to really tighten the screws that held the wires so that they didn’t come loose; “Loose wires cause fires!” he said looking into my eyes with a dire expression. Still I was as happy as a schoolboy to get a pat on the back and to accomplish what at one time seemed like an unachievable task.

  The downside to doing the electrical work with Tony was that we worked until Tony said it was time to quit and sometimes we worked until well after sunset and I was left to face my fear of darkness alone. I was safe enough walking to my car as I always waited for Tony to leave with me so that I would not have to walk alone; but I was spooked during the drive home alone and while walking, or rather sprinting, from my car to the house. During the drive home I drove with the interior light on in the car and the radio playing to give myself a false sense of security. Once home I would sprint from the car to the door of the house and on up the stairs until I reached the safety of my apartment with a basting of sweat pouring from my pores and my heart racing like a stock-car engine.

  And Sarah, poor Sarah, was forced to stay at home all day. She had missed too much of the school year already and would have to make the entire year up the following Fall. On top of that I still needed to create a new identity for her so that she could go to school without drawing the attention of nosy school teachers that would bring the authorities down on me. I hadn’t given that problem a lot of thought but I figured we had until the start of the next school year to solve our problem. I knew that I would have to obtain the birth certificate of a mentally handicapped child or a child who was missing or who had died young. Some solution would present itself; I had heard that illegal aliens did it all the time. In the meantime I provided Sarah with an ample supply of children’s books and some young adult books. She was a voracious reader and I had a hard time keeping up with her appetite. I often stopped at used bookstores and thrift stores during my lunch hour to find books for her to read. When she returned to school she might be behind her piers in some subjects but she would be the best reader in her class.

  And Sarah seemed happy in her role as homemaker; too happy perhaps. She had learned to cook well enough, in the brief time she had spent in the kitchen with Melanie, and she had a warm meal waiting fro me at the end of every hard day of work. She was only seven; but she had learned to make a variety of incredible dishes. She made stuffed shells in tomato sauce, lasagna that would make any Italian chef proud, stuffed peppers, manicotti, chicken parmesan (we couldn’t afford veal), and spaghetti and meatballs that tasted better than Catherine had ever made. And she would accompany each entrée with a side of baked potato, or mashed potato with chives or gravy, or French fries, and always another vegetable such as green beans or Brussels-sprouts, or thick stalks of asparagus covered in a butter sauce (despite the fact that she hated these green vegetables herself). And she would pack lunches for me every workday; thick sandwiches piled with turkey and ham and Swiss cheese or provolone and mustard and mayonnaise, or corned beef on rye with mustard, and always a little bag of chips and a soda with a little note in the bag reminding me to pick something up from the grocery on the way home, and a reminder of how much she loved me or telling me that I was the “best daddy in the whole world” which made me want to work even harder to actually live up to her accolades.

  In addition to cooking Sarah also took care of the laundry and the housekeeping as well. Our apartment may not have been much to brag about, but it was always spotless. She kept the bathroom so clean that I hated to bathe for fear of leaving such filthy black dirt and grime, as I inevitably would, in such a pristine tub because I would leave it smeared with large black hand-prints and a film of the filthiest slime, the result of my labor; crawling through soot filled attics and dusty basements.

  In the evenings Sarah and I resorted to old habits watching old black and white movies together on the living-room sofa wrapped in blankets. Or sometimes when we grew bored with television we would both read. Since Sarah spent most of her free time during the day reading by springtime she had moved well beyond the basic children’s books of her age group and preferred reading the classics, revised for children to accommodate a less refined vocabulary, while I read the latest fiction by John Updyke or Alice Monroe or Andre Dubus or Nadine Gordimer.

  On Friday or Saturday nights Amber would stop by, telling her husband, who after a while had called off his private detective, that she was spending the evening with Melanie or with her sister and we would order pizza and play board games until Sarah grew tired and fell asleep. Then Amber and I would slip into my bed and copulate like wild animals.

  Afterwards I would fantasize aloud about her leaving her husband and coming to live with me, a sour subject for her to be sure because she knew that she would never do so. She couldn’t bear to leave her children and she couldn’t imagine raising them in my pathetic apartment or on my pathetic income. She was reluctant, too, to give up the lush house that she and her husband had built and that she had poured so much sweat into. She had no reservations at all about cont
inuing our affair indefinitely though. She said that we were so sexually simpatico that she couldn’t imagine giving me up.

  If it were to come down to making a choice between leaving her entire family behind or letting go of me, she said, that I would be her hands down choice. I doubted this was true, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and I owed her so much, and I so looked forward to our evenings together.

  Amber prided herself in being a great lover and she seemed to go overboard trying to prove that she was the worlds best. She did things that I could not have imagined, drawing on my body like a straw to a milkshake; reducing me to a puddle of sweat. During those short nights she used up all of the stamina that I had saved from the time she had last left me. And still there was something missing, a void that she discarded in her wake. And so, as was the norm, she would leave me to my cold and lonely bed at two o’clock or so in the morning, to stare at my ceiling longing for her warm body to be next to mine.

  Sometimes, after she had fulfilled her weekend stripping obligations, Melanie would stop by to see Sarah and I, occasionally accompanied by Amber or by her new guardian Christopher (a large handsome black man of whom I must admit I was a bit jealous), or sometimes Melanie simply came alone. When Melanie came alone, after Sarah fell asleep, we would talk for hours. We often flirted with each other as well but ultimately we would turn our backs on the attraction that we could not help but to feel for one another. I didn’t see myself as attractive and I didn’t understand her attraction to me. I was much older than she was, and I didn’t think that I looked very appealing at all in my black beard and mustache. But I often wondered how it would have been to have her as a lover; her warm Beautiful body next to mine for an entire night instead of the empty bed that I would have to endure after making love to Amber. But alas I could not betray Amber and I didn’t dare ask Melanie to do such a thing causing damage to their friendship.