by Sean McGinty
“Thanks for the advice. Hold on, I’m writing it down.”
“I’m serious,” she said.
“Me too. I seriously want some power and light, or I seriously want a ride back into town.”
“I told you. Call Dad.”
So I called Dad.
“The power’s out. I called the power company and they said they don’t have a record of this place. I called Evie and she said to call you.”
“You sound upset,” he said. “Is this about the Katie thing?”
“No. It’s about power and light. I want the power back on. No one told me there wouldn’t be any power. Do you or do you not know what the solution to this problem might be?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s easy.”
“What is it?”
“Your grandpa wasn’t on the grid. He used a generator. My guess would be that’s where your problem is.”
“Where’s the generator?”
“In the basement.”
“The basement?”
“Yeah. Go down there and I’ll walk you through the troubleshooting.”
But that was the whole problem. I couldn’t go down to the basement until I had some light. That was the whole point.
“So get a flashlight,” he said.
“There isn’t a flashlight. I just searched the entire house.”
“Nah, I know where you can find one.”
“Where?”
“The basement. There’s one on the fuse box. I left it there after they took his body out.”
Ugh. I opened the storm door and headed down the concrete steps, feeling along the cold walls until I came to where the fuse box was supposed to be.
“It isn’t here. There’s no fuse box.”
“Yeah, there is. Don’t you see it?”
“I don’t see shit, Dad! Remember? It’s dark down here.”
“It’s right there on the eastern wall…maybe ten feet from the door? About chest level? It seems highly unlikely to me that an entire fuse box would just disappear.”
Finally I found it. And YAY! for the flashlight on top, its thin, milky beam nowhere near the piercing candlepower of a Maglite® XL 1000 LED flashlight with patented FocusBeam™ technology (YAY!)—but anything was better than darkness.
I followed the hazy beam to the little room in the corner and ran it across the generator, the wires and hoses and pipes and other things I didn’t have names for, the product of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge—and yet the whole thing was a mystery to me.
“Don’t worry,” said Dad. “It’s easy. Designed by geniuses to be run by monkeys. Look to your left. You should see a control panel. There are three settings: OFF, AUTO, and TEST. What’s it on right now?”
“OFF.”
“Well, there’s your problem right there. Flip it to AUTO.”
So I did. There was a clicking sound—click, click, click—and then a ragged cough like it was trying to start—and then nothing. I toggled between AUTO and OFF a couple times, but whatever was supposed to catch would not catch.
“It’s broke.”
“Nah, diesel engines don’t break like that. The odds that you’re going to have some major mechanical malfunction are pretty slim. The design as a whole is way more simple than your common gasoline engine, and—”
“Dad! I don’t need a lesson on generators! I’m not trying to build one—I just need it to run again.”
“Well, that’s just the problem, isn’t it? Nobody wants to know how anything works anymore. They just want everything to magically run when they flip a switch.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
I just wanted it to work—and clearly the switch was not working. Clearly, the whole thing was beyond my abilities, and if we were ever going to get it fixed, Dad needed to make a trip over to Grandpa’s place. But no, he wasn’t having it. He was enjoying this, his foray into tech support. He walked me through a series of steps to troubleshoot the problem, and at the end of it I flipped the switch again. The generator coughed and sputtered. And then—nothing.
“It’s broken.”
“It’s not broken. There’s something we’re missing here. Hold on. Let me think. You checked the fuel drums?”
“Yes! They’re full!”
“And the fuel filter?”
“I took it off and shook it out like you said.”
“And put it back?”
“I screwed it on tight.”
“But not too tight—you don’t wanna bust that seal. Hmm. There’s gotta be something I’m not thinking about here.”
I didn’t like being down there, what with the flashlight casting strange shadows every which way, and I was on my way back up the stairs when Dad spoke again.
“Ha! Wait! I bet I know what it is! You see the fuel line? Where it connects with the engine? There’s a butterfly valve there, right? Check to see if the valve is closed. Turn it so it’s parallel to the line. You get what I’m saying?”
I followed his instructions, and this time, when I flipped the switch to AUTO, the whole thing came roaring to life. Incredible. And noisy. I closed the door, but even so I could barely make out my dad’s words at the other end of the line.
“Great,” he was saying. “Problem solved.”
I felt along the wall back to the fuse box and I flipped on the light switch. A flicker and then, lo and behold, the whole place was illuminated. Power! Hot water! I took a couple steps and stopped.
There was something there. Something dark. A stain on the earth at my feet.
Holy shit.
Here it was, ground zero. The place where he’d taken his last breath before pulling the trigger, the spot where he’d fallen, where he lay on the ground with the blood pooling out of his head.
I scrammed right out of the basement.
So that was day one. The sun came out the next day and melted the snow while I continued my search for the portrait of Mary, doubling back on everything I’d already checked over. The bedrooms. The dressers. The closets. The living room. The washed-out brown painting of deer in a field, the smaller painting of a steamship on a stormy ocean, the Northern Nevada Auto Parts calendar turned to December.
Where was the portrait?
Back in the kitchen, under the kitchen sink, I found something else.
A bucket.
A white plastic paint bucket, half-full of water.
And swimming in the water? A live, real-life mouse.
Yech!
You’d think that after seeing my grandpa’s brains all dried up on the floor I’d toughen up, but—I don’t know. Mice are just so—how can I even explain it? Shiver. That’s all I can say. Double shiver. And there it was, doing laps in the water in the bucket. I’m serious. It was swimming laps. Around and around and around it went. How long had it been in there?
I couldn’t just set it free—everyone knows the first thing a mouse is going do when it escapes a bucket is head straight for the nearest human, climb up that human’s leg, and, if that human is male like me, take a big ol’ bite out of his sack of Planters® special mixed nuts (YAY!). That’s the nature of mice. It’s just what they do. So instead of dumping the bucket, I took it outside, set it a ways from the house, and draped a towel over the edge like a big, fuzzy escape ladder, then leapt back out of the way so the mouse couldn’t get me. I squatted behind the porch and waited.
I was squatting there, my whole being on highest mouse alert, MouseCon 10, when Homie™ popped up.
> u have 1 call(s) from unidentified original boy_2!
“Send it to voice mail!”
> yay! here it is!
“Hi,” said Katie. “It’s me. I got your number from your dad. You left your bag in my truck.”
“No, you drove away with it.”
“We need to talk.”
I told her sure, that was fine, and she asked what I was doing at the moment, and I said at the moment I was at my grandfather’s, hiding behind the porch, waiting for a mouse to crawl out of a b
ucket and hopefully not chomp off any of my bits.
Katie was quiet a moment. “OK,” she said. “Well, maybe I’ll just head out there….Is that OK?”
“Sure. See you soon.”
I resumed my crouch behind the porch, eyeing the bucket and the towel ladder from a good safe distance, but after, I don’t know, another ten minutes, the mouse had not emerged, and my fear was beginning to give way to impatience. Come on, you stupid mouse. It isn’t that hard. You grab onto the towel with your disgusting little claws. You climb out. How hard can it be?
Finally I worked up the courage to check the bucket again—and guess what? The mouse was gone. When I was distracted by the call from Katie, it had climbed out—no doubt heading right back to the house to set up camp under my bed.
Katie showed up with my bag, and we sat on the porch.
“You know,” she said, “Aaron is a lot better than Arnold.”
“I guess so.”
“Look, I want to apologize. I should have said something about your dad sooner. I really should have. Only—I didn’t know Jim was your dad. I thought he was your uncle. But that doesn’t matter. I should’ve said something. And I tried—I really did. When you were at my place that evening, I tried to tell you. But it was just so complicated. You know—the Space Amazon and all that.”
“Space Amazon, my ass. You could’ve said something. How hard could it be?”
Katie pinned me with her blue eyes. “Well, you weren’t exactly up front with me, either. What about all the Arnold stuff? What about your age? I served alcohol to a minor!”
“Yes, and I called the police, so you better watch out.”
“All I’m saying,” she said, “is you could have told me, too.”
“Fine. OK. So tell me what happened between you and my dad. You slept together?”
Katie’s eyes widened. “What? No!”
“Well, what about the undies on the record player?”
“The undies?”
“The black undies!”
She blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“The lacy red undies with the see-through crotch!”
“Wait. You mean from the play?”
“So, they are yours!”
“They’re from the play!” she said. “They were a prop!”
“So, you didn’t sleep together.”
“No! God, no!”
I took a breath. OK. “So, what happened, then?”
She just looked at me. Two blue eyes. “You really want to know?”
“Yes!”
“Fine. We…made out a couple times.”
“Made out? Oh my God, I’m gonna throw up!”
Katie just sighed.
“A couple times—that’s like twice, right?”
“Um, more than that.”
“More? How much more?”
“I don’t know—maybe twenty.”
“Twenty?!”
“It was part of the part, Aaron.”
“What part? What are you talking about?”
“The play! Romeo and Juliet! The guy who was supposed to play Romeo got put on house arrest, and your dad was the next youngest guy in the cast. I’m telling you, this town is geriatric. So there he was—and I was Juliet. Let’s just say having a forty-five-year-old Romeo really added an unintentional dimension to the play. To top it off, two days before opening night, Tybalt quit and was replaced by a sixty-five-year-old woman. The whole thing was a shit show.”
“So, that’s all it was? You made out in the play?”
“Well, and he asked me out for dinner.”
“And you said yes.”
“It’s a small town! I was lonely! There’s no one here my age! We had dinner. I thought it was as friends. But at the end of the night he kissed me and it was just so—awkward. I had to tell him I just wanted to be friends, and it was all just so awkward, OK?”
“I’m gonna throw up. I really am.”
Suddenly she was glaring at me. “You think this is easy for me? I thought you were someone else! Look.” She was standing now, pacing around in the gravel. “Can we just agree that we both screwed up? I don’t have a lot of friends in this town, and I’m just—I’m trying NOT to be the Space Amazon, OK? So, can we just be honest with each other?” Katie paused. “You shouldn’t have lied to me about your age. And, yes, I should’ve told you about Jim. I’m sorry. If you want, maybe we can figure out how to be friends.”
“Friends?”
“Yes. You’ve got my number. If you decide that works for you, then feel free to give me a call sometime.”
After she was gone I sat there on the porch thinking about what she’d said. Funny how quick things change. Like at first I’d thought they’d slept together, and would’ve given anything to make it not so—but now that it was not so, I was still pretty skeeved. Making out. Twenty times.
But the worst part was the part about friends. Friends? I didn’t want to be friends. One second I’m Arnold and I’m 22 and everything is cool—and the next second I’m just me again and it’s all a huge mess. What about the way our eyes had met? What about the electricity I’d felt? Friends? I sat there, mind swimming around and around in circles at the strangeness of it all, around and around in an endless loop with nowhere to go, around and around like, you know, a mouse in a bucket.
I woke the next day with Katie on my mind and spent the morning doing not much of anything except thinking about what she’d said. Friends. I tried logging into Tickle, Tickle, Boom! just for the hell of it, spent an hour half-assing another search for the portrait of Mary again, and then to top it off, Homie™ popped up with a newsflash on the Avis Mortem.
> yay! big news!
scientists release new projections!
according to latest computer models avian extinction rate has been upgraded to 54.4 percent over the next decade!
:/
Upgraded? That was one way of putting it. Faced with the oncoming dead-bird disaster, the great scientific minds of the world had gathered in a race against the clock—not to offer a solution but to see who could bum out the most people the fastest. It was like, See you at the apocalypse, mofos.
I sank deeper into my mood. I tried taking a nap, but I couldn’t get to sleep, and finally, with the loneliness pressing down like a pile of bricks, I called Katie.
“Hi. Listen. I thought about what you said. And, well, OK.”
“OK, what?” she said.
“OK. We can be friends if you want.”
Hell, it was better than nothing.
“OK,” she said. “Great! Friends it is.”
“You wanna come over or something?”
“Now? I’m at school.”
“Maybe after school, then? Maybe you could help me look for treasure. I’m really at a loss here.”
She showed up later all bright-eyed in her school clothes like everything was OK. Friends. Why is it that women always think you can be friends?
“So, what’s going on?” she asked.
I handed her the will, and she read through it a couple of times.
“Wow. Cool. A real live treasure hunt!”
“Not really. So far it’s just a bunch of dead ends.”
“Well, are you sure you’ve searched everywhere? It’s got be somewhere, doesn’t it?”
No. Not really. It didn’t have to be anywhere or mean anything—except that the old man was crazy and the birds were all going to die and Katie was going to be my friend. I sank into the recliner and kicked up the footrest. “I’ve checked everywhere. There’s no portrait. Look around for yourself. There’s a picture of deer, and a picture of a boat, and a calendar. And that’s all there is.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know much, but I do know this: whenever a hero sets out on a journey, there’s only one thing that sustains him to the end.”
“Nachos?”
“Faith. You’ve got to have faith, Aaron.”
“Screw faith. I just want the treasure. He didn’t
have to make this so frickin’ complicated.”
Katie paused. “Look,” she said delicately. “Before we go any further, you’ve got to understand something: treasure won’t make you happy.”
Yeah, I’d heard that one before. I wasn’t buying it.
“It isn’t about treasure,” she said. “It’s about the journey.”
“Right. And you would know.”
“I would. Remember how I was telling you about my dad? When I was little he was making all kinds of money. We were rich. Well, not rich rich—but it felt like it. And I’ve never been so miserable in my life. Papa was never home, and when he was, my mom and he were always fighting—and it wasn’t until he lost it all in a real estate scam that he finally got his priorities straight.”
“No,” I said. “This is different. I need the money. To pay back my dad and sister. To pay off FUN® and get out of FAIL. And maybe, yeah, to buy some cool shit. And once I get the money and do those things, it will make me happy.”
Katie just laughed. “Believe what you want. But I’m serious, Aaron. I’ve seen it—it’s like there’s a hole in all of us, and whatever you try to fill it with, that hole has no bottom and can’t be filled—”
“A hole that can’t be filled,” I said.
“Right. Exactly.”
“Sounds like another one of your riddles.”
She ignored me and started looking around the living room. The picture of deer. The boat. The calendar. Then back to the boat. Her gaze lingered there, and then she started looking up something on her phone. She stayed there a long time, looking back and forth between her phone and the picture on the wall.
“Hey! I think I’ve got it!”
“What, the boat?”
“It isn’t just a boat—it’s a steamship!”
“So?”
“So I think it’s the RMS Queen Mary! It was, let’s see, an ocean liner in the twentieth century that sailed the Atlantic Ocean.”
She showed me her phone, and the picture there, and the boat in the picture was exactly like the boat in the painting—dark hull, white top, three big smokestacks. YAY! for the RMS Mary, flagship of the Cunard Line, roamer of the oceans, whose home is now a permadock in Long Beach, California, and whose stately Art Deco compartments serve as a full-service floating hotel, one-of-a-kind fine-dining experience, and wedding/events venue, open seven days a week.
