Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  The plumber put the lid back on the tank, got down on one knee, and twisted the valve open. They listened. When the tank filled, the water stopped running and did not start up again. Her house once again grew cavernous with quiet. He stood and looked at her.

  “It was just a seal,” he said.

  “A seal?” she said, thinking suddenly of ice, of some man in a fur parka looking through binoculars.

  He blinked a couple of times, then grinned. “They’re bad this time of year,” he said. “Them seals.”

  She covered her face with her hands. Her cheeks were hot. Too much merlot. She wondered if her lips were purple.

  The plumber sat down on the toilet and began putting his tools into a canvas bag. He looked up at her and smiled again.

  “I’m so stupid,” she said.

  His brow dipped once, but he didn’t stop smiling. “Don’t say that,” he said. “No reason you should know anything about seals.” He jerked his head at the tank. “That kind, anyway.”

  She wanted to change the subject and—even though she already knew the answer—asked, “Why do you call yourself ‘the High Lonesome Plumber?’”

  He said, “Oh, it’s because I sing a little bit every once in a while. Bluegrass mostly. Some karaoke. I’m a high tenor. You know, like Bill Monroe.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  The plumber zipped the tool bag, but made no move to stand. Here it comes, she thought.

  “Cammie Carson,” he said. “Aren’t you—”

  “Mrs. Keith Carson?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s me. That’s me for now, anyway. I mean, it’ll still be me, I guess, but we’re getting divorced.”

  “I read about that.”

  She had until recently occasionally appeared in magazine and newspaper gossip columns, as in “Keith and Cammie Call It Quits.” Now she wasn’t anybody important. She shrugged, slapped her hands on her thighs, picked up her wineglass.

  “That song was quite a hit,” he said. “How long was it number one?”

  “Eleven weeks.”

  The plumber whistled. “Eleven weeks,” he said.

  The house seemed so unnaturally quiet whenever they stopped talking that she found herself wishing he hadn’t fixed the toilet.

  “But it’s a stupid song,” she blurted out. “‘I Keep My Hat in My Truck.’ I mean, what kind of song is that?”

  “I wasn’t planning on singing it.”

  “Good. When Keith wrote that song, we didn’t even have a truck.”

  They paused for a moment, listening to the song play inside their heads.

  “I don’t care where he keeps his damn hat,” she said.

  “All right then,” said the plumber, standing up. “If you don’t care where he keeps his hat, I don’t care where he keeps his hat. That’s just the way it’ll be.”

  She turned, walked into the hallway, and motioned for him to follow. “Right this way,” she said. “I keep my bag in the kitchen.”

  She grew self-conscious crossing the living room with the plumber in tow and fought off the urge to break into a run. The room had a floor big enough to hold a basketball court, with a cathedral ceiling high enough for, well, a cathedral. She had noticed that, even when the living room had been crammed with furniture and ficus trees, people had tended to talk in whispers and look for a way out. Ahead of them, down the long hallway on top of the kitchen island, sat the squatty statue of Millie and Joe. Roughly carved out of limestone, about the size of a gallon milk jug, it was her most prized possession.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “Did you get it in Mexico or somewhere?”

  “That,” she said, “is Millie and Joe. They’re the reason I don’t have any furniture.”

  “How’d that work?”

  “Well, when we split, Keith said we had to sell it, and I told him there was no way in hell. Then one thing led to another, I lost my temper, and he got the furniture. And he didn’t even want it, the jerk. He stored it.”

  The plumber leaned over and stared closely at Millie and Joe. “I believe I would’ve rather had the furniture.”

  “Have you ever heard of William Edmondson?”

  The plumber shook his head.

  “He was a sculptor, from Nashville, and he was the first black man to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, back in the late thirties. He did this.”

  “Well.”

  “He was a genius,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” the plumber said, “but it looks to me like he could have done some more carving on it. This thing just barely seems carved out at all.”

  “That’s the whole point,” she said. “I mean, look at those two. You can tell they’ve been married forever, that they can’t imagine waking up without the other one lying right there, but, like you say, they hardly seem carved out at all.” She reached out and touched Millie’s face with a finger. “Edmondson could do the grandest things with the smallest gestures. I don’t know. I just think that’s wonderful.”

  The plumber walked around the island and looked at the statue from the back, then returned to where he had started. The old couple sat with their hands on their knees, their shoulders touching, and smiled as if they had just eaten a particularly satisfying meal.

  “I don’t know nothing about art,” he said, “but they seem happy.”

  “They are happy. And they make me happy. After that damn song went number one, Keith and I bought a whole bunch of stuff, and spent a whole lot of money, but this is the only thing we ever bought that meant anything at all to me. I keep it here because that recessed light up above it is the brightest light in the house.”

  The plumber placed both hands on the counter and turned and stared at her. She thought he looked as if he were in the middle of realizing something important. She imagined he was beginning to understand the gorgeous incongruity of William Edmondson’s primitive modernism.

  “What’s it worth?” he asked.

  “Mr. Jones. Be ashamed. I know your mama raised you better than that.”

  “Well,” said the plumber, “all I can say is, Mama tried.”

  “She didn’t try hard enough, apparently,” she said, hoping that she had sounded light, but realizing that she hadn’t. She almost told him what it cost, by way of apology, but caught herself in time. Millie and Joe had cost $108,000. Telling him would have made her afraid.

  The plumber stared into space for a moment, then swallowed. A blush appeared from beneath his shirt collar and rapidly rose up his face. “You know what?” he said. “I know where one of these things is.”

  The next morning, in the plumber’s truck, she stared at the red bandana tied around her right wrist (it matched the one tied Dale Evans–style around her throat) and just felt like crying. She felt as if she had become, at only age twenty-eight, the kind of silly Brentwood housewife who dressed up for plumbers. She could not believe she had tried on more than one outfit. What was wrong with her? She was, she reminded herself, extremely pretty—she had even been declared “gorgeous” by more than one tabloid—and she was rich. She was married, for the time being at least, to a famous singer who was as pretty as she was.

  The plumber made her sad, too. He wore a starched white shirt and jeans with creases pressed down the front. A Windbreaker zipped halfway. Tasseled loafers. Date clothes. His truck, not the work truck he had driven yesterday but what she realized now was his good truck, had been freshly vacuumed and smelled like pine trees growing in a field of cigarette butts. God, she thought, we deserve each other.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday,” he said. “About how that Edmondson man did big things with small gestures. You know, Hank Williams wrote songs like that.”

  She nodded. Keith, like all country singers, paid public fealty to Hank Williams, but privately found his music simplistic and twangy.

  “The only thing
I know much about, besides plumbing, is music, and I had to put what you said into music terms to understand it. But it makes sense.”

  The plumber glanced at her. “I burned you a CD,” he said.

  Please, God, she thought, not a CD. Once Keith’s single took off, he hadn’t been able to go to the men’s room in Houston’s without bringing back somebody’s demo. Now they were coming after her.

  He pointed at the disc sticking out of the dash. “Push that in,” he said.

  The song was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The sound was muddy, and the plumber had tuned his guitar sharp, but he had a high, clear, actually lovely voice. She wondered how many times he had sung the song into his computer before he was satisfied with it. When the track got to the part about the silence of a falling star, he tapped waltz time on the steering wheel and softly sang high harmony along with his own melody.

  When the song finished, they sat and listened to the CD hiss. The plumber pushed the eject button. She knew this was the part where she was supposed to say, God, that was incredible, can you send some copies over, I know some people, they’re going to want to hear this, this is going to blow their minds. But the sad fact was that she didn’t really know anybody, except Keith, and the plumber was thirty years too old. She said, “That’s a gorgeous song.”

  The plumber nodded.

  She could tell by the look on his face that she had disappointed him, so she added, “You have a nice voice.”

  “Well, thank you,” he said.

  “I really don’t know anybody,” she said. “And they probably wouldn’t talk to me if I did.”

  “That’s not why I played it for you,” he said. “I know there’s not much demand in the industry for fifty-six-year-old bluegrass singers. My ex-wife reminds me of that every time she gets a chance. I just wanted you to hear it.”

  “Oh. How long were you married?”

  “Twenty-seven years.”

  “What happened?”

  “Karaoke, I guess, is the short answer. Too much singing. Too much drinking. Too many women. Too much fighting about drinking and women. Singing don’t seem to be a good thing for marriage.”

  “Singing isn’t the problem.”

  “You’re right about that, I suppose. What about you? If I remember right you and Keith got together in high school?”

  “Hardin High in Carthage, Tennessee.”

  They had become “Keith and Cammie” for the first time when they started dating sophomore year. All of this was pretty much public record. Keith’s publicists had seen to that. Tiny town. High school sweethearts. The perfect origin myth.

  “And you’re a nurse, right?”

  “Nurse-practitioner. I was a midwife.”

  She had supported Keith while he bartended and played open mic nights and hung around on Music Row. Then he got his deal at Sony and the song hit. She thought the phrase sounded ominous, like an automobile accident, but decided that was appropriate. She had quit work because of how often she had had to fly to LA with Keith. What a waste of time that seemed now, all that flying to LA.

  “So tell me,” the plumber said, “what were you like in high school?”

  She didn’t like his tone and shook her head. This wasn’t going to turn into a date.

  “Then what was Keith like?”

  “Well, he was a band nerd, he played the trumpet, although now he’s got God knows how many people trying to keep that hushed up. It’s that whole ‘Garth Brooks was a decathlete’ thing. Apparently you can’t be a band nerd and keep your hat in the truck.”

  “I guess,” the plumber said. “Band nerd. What else?”

  “What else,” she said. “Okay, after Keith got his driver’s license, he would come over to my house real early on Saturday mornings, and my parents would give him my car keys, and he would drive my car to his house and wash it. And I would stay in bed and pretend to be asleep until he brought it back. Every Saturday morning he did that. And he did it all winter long, no matter how cold it was.”

  “That sounds kinda sweet.”

  “It was sweet.” She touched the bridge of her nose with an index finger and closed her eyes and stood for a moment in the window of her bedroom in Carthage, peeking from behind the curtains as Keith pulled into the driveway.

  “A long time ago,” she said when she opened her eyes, “a long, long time ago, Keith Lee Carson of Carthage, Tennessee, was a very nice boy.”

  That morning, while settling on the bandanas, the chinos, the denim shirt, the leather jacket, and the hiking boots she now wore, she had begun to worry that the plumber might take her off somewhere and kill her. She had tried to dismiss the thought as paranoid—when Keith left he seemed to have taken all the crazies in Nashville with him—but when she saw the plumber’s truck pull through the gate, she scrawled his name on a Post-it note and stuck it to the mirror in the bathroom where he had fixed the toilet. She was fine on the interstate coming north. The plumber seemed normal enough, slightly sleazy in the way most of the divorced men she knew were, but, other than that, okay. Once they exited onto Dickerson Pike, though, she started to worry again. The motels they passed had bars on the office windows and signs advertising hourly rates. She saw a prostitute leaning through the window of a parked car. A man with a bright red face and vivid, stricken eyes staggered across all four lanes of traffic. She began to picture that pretty Greek reporter from Channel Four doing a live report from in front of the woods where somebody—deer hunters, probably—had found her partially clothed body.

  “It wasn’t always like this,” the plumber said, as if reading her thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Dickerson Pike. It wasn’t always like this. It’s always been working-class, don’t get me wrong, but you didn’t used to see all the whores and crackheads and shit like you do now. I wouldn’t have brought you over here, but this is where the statue is.”

  She tried to smile in a manner she hoped made her look brave and game, a formidable person, but in the distance behind the reporter she could see police tape strung through the trees. “Oh well,” she said. “I’m glad I dressed for adventure.”

  The plumber stopped his truck in front of an abandoned bungalow, the last house on a dead-end street in a sad neighborhood south of Dickerson. The windows of the house were boarded up, and somebody had spray painted obscenities and what she assumed to be gang graffiti, or satanic symbols, on the plywood. Briars and broom sedge and young trees grew waist-deep in the small portion of the yard that hadn’t been overrun by a marauding privet hedge. The plumber looked around carefully, studied his mirrors, then gunned the truck up over the curb, through the yard, and around the back of the house, where he stopped it out of sight of the street and cut the engine.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here we are.”

  She tried to remain calm, but had to concentrate very hard to keep from seeing what lay inside the police tape. Then the plumber reached over, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a shiny black handgun. She recoiled as if he had magically produced a rat, or a rattling snake. She yanked and yanked on the door handle, but her door would not open. When he touched her on the arm, she pushed herself as far back into the corner as the door would allow her to go and stared wildly at him.

  “Oh Lord,” he said. “Oh Lord. I’m sorry.” He flipped the pistol in his hand until the butt pointed toward her. “Here. You take it. You can carry it. Oh, darlin’, I am so sorry.”

  She looked down at the proffered pistol, and then up at his face. He appeared ready to burst into tears. Please don’t cry, she thought.

  “Darlin’, I didn’t mean to scare you, honest to God. But we just ain’t in the best neighborhood right now, that’s all. I promise. I got a permit.”

  Without taking her eyes off the plumber’s face, she slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “You keep it. I’m all right. I’m fine now.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. You can stop calling me darlin’.”

&nb
sp; The plumber smiled a little. “Okay,” he said. “Good. I’m sorry about that. I guess I should’ve told you, I keep my gun in my truck.”

  She didn’t laugh. He reached back toward his armrest and pushed a button. She heard the door behind her unlock. He stayed in the truck while she got out and sat on the bumper with her hands on her knees and concentrated on breathing. He didn’t open his door until she stood up.

  “Tell me where I am,” she said. Now that she had convinced herself she wasn’t in danger, the adrenaline still coursing through her body made her feel powerful, strong, like a cop at a crime scene rather than a corpse. She wanted to ask questions, get to the bottom of things.

  “This house here used to belong to Miz’ Louise Twitty. She was a black woman who used to keep me when I was little. Her mama helped raise my mama, and she helped raise me. I rode the school bus here every afternoon until I got old enough to stay at home by myself.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died seven or eight years ago. Fell and broke her hip. Almost starved to death before anybody came to check on her. Died in the hospital.”

  “That’s a sad story.”

  “It is,” he said. “It is a sad story. She was a good woman and deserved better.”

  “And she had an Edmondson?”

  The plumber nodded.

  “I’m not going in that house,” she said. “You can forget about that.”

  “It ain’t in the house. It’s back there.” The plumber pointed with his chin toward the far corner of the backyard, which, if possible, was more overgrown than the front. “It ain’t going to be easy to find, but that’s where it is.”