The phone rang three times. The person who picked up the phone didn’t answer with “Hello” or any other traditional greeting. “You’re going,” the voice on the other end said, followed by a click.
One hour later, Brad was strapped into the cream-colored passenger seat of the Lincoln Navigator and rolling along state route 33.
“I guess you knew it was me from the caller I.D.,” he offered.
“Nah,” Vi replied, her eyes never leaving the road. “I don’t believe in it. I knew it was you. I told you, I don’t have any friends, and even the telemarketers take Thanksgiving off. Was it at least going to be a good excuse?”
“Now you don’t know that I was calling with an excuse," Brad said, his eyes avoiding hers. "I might have been calling to ask if I should bring something. My mom taught me never to show up to a dinner party empty handed.”
Mrs. Enderrin smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve already been to Marie Callender’s. The ‘Thanksgiving-In-A-Box’ is in my trunk.”
Brad looked at the driver, a note of surprise on his face. “What? An old fashioned girl like you? You’re not going to slave over a hot stove for a few hours?”
“Honey, I’m not old fashioned, just old,” she replied. “And my stove slaving days are over. Besides, even in my prime I couldn’t whip up a meal half as good as these cook-by-numbers places. Nowadays, my two favorite kitchen utensils are the microwave and the telephone.”
“And Mr. Enderrin is okay with this?”
Vi paused before answering.
“Jimbo and I had an agreement. When it came time to retire, it meant we both got to retire. It’s always seemed so unfair that a man works his 40 years at a job, then gets to kick back for the rest of his days. The wife usually has to keep doing what she’s been doing for the last 40 years; cooking, cleaning, laundry. My retirement is that I don’t have to rattle those pots and pans anymore.”
“Speaking of your husband, where is he?” Brad asked.
“He and Denny are at the cabin.”
“Is this okay? I mean, my coming along. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
“It will be a very welcome surprise. Jimbo and Denny will be glad to see a new face at the dinner table.”
“You mean, you didn’t tell them?” Brad asked, becoming even more uncomfortable with his new role in “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.”
“I couldn’t call them even if I wanted to,” Vi replied. “We’ve never had a phone at the cabin, nor a TV or even a radio. Spoils the rusticity.”
They drove on, enjoying the multi-colored leaves bordering the ground on both sides of the two lane highway. Northern Pennsylvania usually got the early preview of the fall colors before the rest of the country each year. By turkey day, most of the trees were barren, showing off skinny, naked limbs like anorexic models parading up and down the runways in Milan. Snow usually made its first appearance before the third week of November, although it had been dry so far this season.
“I thought most of the cabins up here were closed by this time of year,” Brad said after enjoying nature’s silent performance for a dozen miles.
“This is always our last hurrah for the season,” she answered. “We spend Thanksgiving together at the cabin, as long as the roads are still passable. Then Mr. Berube closes everything up for the winter. He’s been our caretaker there for over 30 years. Our place, and most of the others around the lake.”
“I guess you’ve got a lot of good memories at the cabin.”
For the first time, Brad saw the hint of sadness in the old lady’s eyes. “And some bad ones,” she said, then briefly took her eyes off the road to quickly look at Brad. “That’s one of those lessons that you usually don’t figure out until you’re old. By the time the game is done, you’re going to have some good ones, and you’re going to have some bad ones. It’s the yin and yang of life. You can’t have one without the other.” Her eyes returned to the empty road. “And you’re cheating the good times if you try to anaesthetize yourself during the bad times. It cheapens them. Sometimes I think the bad times are the cover charge we pay for the right to experience the good times. You can’t sneak in on the good times without paying at the door. Otherwise you end up spending a lot of that good time looking over your shoulder, wondering when you’re going to get caught. I guess that’s what you would call guilt. Make any sense to you?”
Brad considered this for a moment. He thought about the guilt he often experienced in the light of day for the drunken erasure of the previous night.
“Yes ma’am. It does,” he answered.
His thoughts drifted briefly as the leafless trees blurred past his side window. Before the first stabbing internal gremlin could start its fork work on his heart, Brad began a mental list of the car’s interior, beginning with the leather seats and working around the passenger compartment like a mental copy of the recently-removed window sticker: six speaker stereo system, digital speedometer and gauge cluster, leather-wrapped gear shift. His eyes drifted down to take in the footwell on the driver’s side, his list machine stumbling when it reached the lonely single leg currently depressing the gas pedal.
“God damn diabetes,” Vi said, her eyes never leaving the road. “I wish I had a better story, like a shark bit off my leg while I was surfing in Maui, but the truth is a lot more…pedestrian.” A smile skittered across her lips at her own morbid reference.
“I didn’t mean to stare,” Brad said, directing his eyes straight ahead through the windshield to parallel Vi’s view. “And I certainly wouldn’t be so rude as to ask.”
“I never understood how some people could consider seining for the truth to be rude,” Vi said. “The deal is, I don’t get offended by questions, so long as the askers don’t get offended by my answers. Unfortunately, too often the nosy pricks don’t hold up their end of the bargain.”
“When did it happen?” Brad asked. “Your leg, I mean.”
“About 1990,” Vi answered. “And I miss the damn thing. Okay, maybe I don’t miss the leg as much as I miss the attention the pair used to get when I found myself walking around a construction site when I was younger. Just goes to show that math and long division have no place in the real world. If I used to get 10 wolf whistles for the two legs, simple algebra would dictate that I should still get five whistles while stumping around the same work site on one. These days, the only way I can get a man to give a second look at my pins is if I show up at a DME convention.”
“DME?” Brad asked.
“What, you don’t sell health insurance at your office?” Vi fired back. “Stands for ‘durable medical equipment.’ Walkers, crutches, wheelchairs, that kind of stuff.”
Brad laughed.
“Oh hell, who am I kidding,” Vi said. “I haven’t caught a decent wolf whistle since before Reagan got shot. But it does make it hard on me whenever someone plays the song ‘YMCA’ at the ballpark. Ever try to make an ‘A’ with one leg? Enough to give everybody dyslexia.”
Obviously, Mrs. Enderrin was a lot more comfortable than the rest of the world with her lack of an appendage.
“So how did it happen?” Brad asked.
“Stupid thing, really,” Vi said. “I’m probably the only person on the planet to lose a leg from trying to get a suntan. I was laying at the end of the dock behind the cabin early that summer trying to brown away a particularly white winter skin. I’ve never been one of these old broads that obsess over melanoma. When I started to get up, the towel slipped, and I caught a nasty splinter in my calf from one of the wood two by fours. I didn’t think much of it at the time, just pulled it out with some tweezers when I went inside, slapped a Band-Aid on it, and went on my merry way. A few weeks later, the damn thing wasn’t healing. In fact, it got downright ugly. Doctor tried all kinds of treatments, including hyperbaric oxygen. By the time they decided to take the leg, about the only thing worse than the pain was the smell. Doc said the diabetes just wouldn’t let it heal.”
“You seem to be pretty ok
ay about it,” Brad observed.
“You learn to live without the things you love. Otherwise, you wind up losing more of them,” Vi replied. “You’re going to learn that hard lesson. I just don’t want you to learn it the hard way.”
Another two dozen miles later, Mrs. Enderrin began slowing as she approached a cut-in which led to a dirt road. Like most private lanes, there were no signs marking the name or address. She turned right onto the path, brushing past tall pine trees on both sides. The suspension under the new luxury SUV was immediately being put to the test, with potholes, rills, and even small downed tree branches challenging the shocks and springs. It looked as if Mr. Berube hadn’t bothered with this part of his job in a while.
“Only bad part about these fancy trucks,” Mrs. Enderrin offered. “Not made for this kind of highway.”
“There are Bradley tanks that aren’t made for this kind of highway,” Brad replied.
Mrs. Enderrin laughed. “This is nothing. You should see the mess after a good snow.”
The rocky, bouncing voyage continued for another half-mile, a long way for a driveway. Finally, the trees began to thin, then opened up to a spectacular view of a white two story clapboard cabin sitting next to a lake.
“This is it,” Mrs. Enderrin announced, pulling the vehicle up to the double sliding doors of a garage. Through the windows, Brad could make out what looked like an older SUV, built before the term “SUV” had become stylish. The red paint was gleaming in the angled sunlight.
“Time for you to earn your keep, Bradley,” Mrs. Enderrin said, pressing a button beside her seat which released the rear door before exiting the driver side. “Could you be so kind as to grab the grub out of the back?”
Brad opened the door and stretched his legs. It wasn’t as cold as he had expected, the humidity making for a pleasant November morning. He then got out and walked to the back of the Navigator, where a large cardboard box was waiting. He pulled the box from its resting place, closed the trunk with his elbow, then headed to the front door where Mrs. Enderrin was unhurriedly putting a key in the lock.
There was something odd about the front door, but Brad couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was.
“It opens outward,” Mrs. Enderrin said, noticing Brad’s puzzled look. She unlocked the door, and sure enough, it opened toward him. “The builder was drunk when he hung it, then was too damn stubborn to change it.”
“I hope you didn’t pay him for it,” Brad said, easing over the threshold.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t,” she said over her shoulder with a smile, leading the way.
He followed her inside, where the temperature wasn’t nearly as balmy.
Straight across from the entrance, it appeared that the entire back wall was a single pane of glass bisected by a large fireplace and hearth. Upon closer inspection, he confirmed that the left and right picture windows were actually two different sections, each comprised of four eight-foot by four-foot panes bordered by stone that extended from the sides of the fireplace and wide chimney to the corners of the room. The effect was a breathtaking view of the lake. At nearly three quarters of a mile long and about a half mile wide, it was big enough to accommodate a speed boat or bass boat, but too small to allow a decent sized cabin boat to come on plane.
Jutting into the lake like a primitive brown finger poking into an oblong blue-green bowl of Jell-o was a dock that extended about 20 feet out from the edge of a lawn that was losing its battle of reclamation by Mother Nature. Along the sides of the lake, Mama N’ture was winning that battle, as trees claimed the land almost right up to the water’s edge.
On the far side of the oblong lake, another short dock offered the image of an untended strip of brown carpet rolled perpendicular to the rounded curve of the water’s edge. The dock led onto the dead brown grass that served as the ground level dry moat around a larger, more modern two-story house.
Inside the Enderrin cabin, the décor was functional without being haughty, with plenty of wood in Early American style.
To the right, a doorway pockmarked the wall that led to the kitchen. Further back, another doorless entryway led to the dining room. To his left was the staircase leading to the second floor. Under the staircase was a doorway that opened into a long hallway which extended into the darkness.
Mrs. Enderrin led him to the kitchen, a cozy little setup with a gas range and oven, side-by-side refrigerator, and a large 1980’s vintage microwave sitting on the butcher-block counter. The cabinets were honey-colored pine.
Brad set the box on the small wooden dinette in the middle of the kitchen, then went to the double sink to wash his hands. A small double-hung window over the sink looked out at the front yard and dirt driveway, allowing him to soak in the beauty of this wooded setting.
A man’s voice came from the kitchen doorway.
“I was beginning to worry about you.”
Brad turned to see an older gentleman leaning against the doorframe, his powerful arms folded across his chest. He appeared to be several years younger than Mrs. Enderrin, wearing a maroon v-neck sweater over a pinstriped button-down shirt, open at the neck. He was obviously a man who had spent a lifetime outdoors, in spite of the paleness of his skin.
“Jimbo,” Mrs. Enderrin said, “this is Bradley Connerman, our insurance man. I thought he would like to see a good old fashioned Pennsylvania Thanksgiving out here in the wild.”
Brad looked around for a dishtowel to dry his hands. Finding none, he sheepishly nodded to the man.
“Hello,” he said. “I would shake hands, but I’m kind of dripping here.”
The man nodded, a warm smile filling his face. “It’s good to meet you, Mr. Connerman. I’m glad you could join us.”
“Please, call me Brad,” he replied. “I’m honored to be here. You have a beautiful place.”
Jimbo looked around the kitchen as if inspecting it for the first time. “Thank you. I built it back in ’72. Vi did a lot of the design work.”
The man’s powerful physique now clicked.
“You’re a builder?” Brad asked.
Removing her jacket, Mrs. Enderrin began to chuckle.
“That’s probably one of the more polite things I’ve been called. But yes, that was my trade. Custom houses mostly.”
Brad looked at Mrs. Enderrin, who winked before turning her attention to the Marie Callender box on the table. The ending to the tale of the out-swinging front door had just been told.
“Why don’t you boys go find Denny,” she said. “Maybe get a fire going while I warm up the feast.”
“This way, Brad,” Jimbo said.
Another man was entering the main room from the darkened hallway, carrying an armload of firewood just as Brad and Jimbo came out of the kitchen.
“Good timing,” Jimbo said. “Brad, this is my son, Denny Enderrin. Denny, this is Mr. Connerman. He’ll be joining us for dinner.”
The younger man smiled and nodded to the visitor as he headed toward the fireplace.
“Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Connerman.”
“I’m Brad. Can I help you with that?”
“That depends,” Denny said, carefully stacking the logs one by one in the holding bin next to the fireplace. “You ever a Boy Scout?”
“Excuse me?” Brad asked.
Denny grinned. “I need someone with a merit badge in rubbing sticks together. Mom moved the matches again.”
“They’re on the mantle, behind the clock,” a voice from the kitchen yelled.
Brad reached behind the silent wooden Howard Miller clock, which had stopped at 9:20, and found the long box of fireplace matches.
“Well,” Brad said, “My Webelos days are long behind me, but I think I can do some damage with these. Got any newspaper?”
As if on cue, Vi appeared from the kitchen carrying several balled up pieces of newspaper. “Once again, Mrs. Callender saves the day,” Vi said. “They had these stuffed in the box to keep the food from shifting.”
Brad took the newspapers, uncrumpled two sections, and placed them under the rack in the fireplace. Then he grabbed some of the smaller sticks from the bin that Denny had just filled and placed them on top of the rack. Taking a wooden match from the recently-found box, Brad struck it on the lid then placed the lighted match under the crumpled newspaper. Smoke announced the coming of warmth, followed by a low yellow flame that poked out of the Sports section. In seconds, the fire began to spread to the smaller sticks in the rack.
“I’m impressed,” Denny said. “First shot. Used to take me 20 matches and a gallon of gasoline.”
Brad looked up at the younger Mr. Enderrin. “Pyromania,” he replied. “It’s a family gift.”
“I guess everyone needs a hobby,” Denny said.
All four of them smiled at the comfortable banter, as if they had been friends for dozens of turkey days past.
Vi patted Brad on the back, then returned to the kitchen.
“Mr. Piss Outdoors probably didn’t bother to show you the bathroom,” Denny said, smiling at his dad. He pointed toward the darkened hallway. “It’s down that hall, first door on the left.”
“Thanks,”
As Brad headed across the room, Mr. Enderrin began smoothing out another section of newspaper as he settled into a recliner near the fireplace. Denny loaded a larger piece of wood into the fireplace, centering it in the rack.
The light switch just next to the doorway didn’t seem to work, so Brad had to strain his eyes to find his way down the hall. He could make out one door on the right, another door at the end of the hall, and two doors on the left. The further into the hall he went, the colder it got. Isolated from the sun, the dark corridor was like a winter cave.
Opening the first door, he found the bathroom. He entered the latrine and prepared to evacuate last night’s bourbon. "Even in the coldest clime," he thought while watching steam rise from the yellow stream arcing into the porcelain bowl, "nothing warms you up like a good piss."
Chapter Sixteen
"...Now with a look at the weather, it's WTRF-TV meteorologist Wilson Butler. Wilson, it's been pretty nasty out there."
Howl of a Thousand Winds Page 10
