Rise

by L. Annette Binder

  The clock chimed in the hallway, and it sounded like a church bell. He folded up the paper and set it aside. It was better not to know. He wasn’t fast the way he used to be, and things kept moving anyway. They were pulling him along. His boy would be almost forty. He’d have gray hairs of his own.

  Helen came in from the garden with cut roses and tiger lilies. She whistled while she filled the vase. She jumped when she saw him sitting in the chair. “I didn’t know you were in here,” she told him. “You gave me a little scare.” She tilted her head, and when he didn’t say anything she came to him and put her hands on both his shoulders. He wondered if she ever thought about their boy. He wanted to know, but he would never ask.

  •

  They were up on the corner when they first heard the sirens. Fire trucks lined both sides of their street. He parked three houses up, and he hadn’t unlatched his seat belt yet and Helen was off running. She was quick even in her stockings and her church shoes. By the time he caught up, her eyes were red from the smoke. She was stopped in the middle of the street. They stood together in front of their house and watched it burn. Sparks fluttered in the air and fell back down. The firemen uncoiled the hoses. They ran for the hydrant, and one of them shouted and waved his hands.

  Helen pulled him. “We’ve got to move,” she said. “They’re telling us to go.” He let her take him by the arm, and they went to the bail bondsman’s porch and stood there on the steps. The engine driver was on top working the panel, and the others ran with the nozzles. It didn’t even take a minute and the water arced high over their roof. The streams met and crossed, and it was almost like a fountain how they danced in the air. She was telling him something. He could hear her voice and how calm it was. She pointed and shook her head, but he didn’t listen. All he could see was the firemen and how they ran across his grass in their boots and trampled his blooming lilies.

  It began on the deck. He learned this only later. Travis must have waited for them to leave for church, and then he’d jumped the fence one last time. The cushions on the loungers must have gone up first and then the firewood they’d stacked against the deck. The junipers in the rock beds would be next and the ponderosa pine that grew beside the house. It was dry that tree and always dropped its needles. He should have cut it down. Helen had said so more than once, but he’d left it because it was beautiful.

  The wind blew the sparks upward. It carried them to the roof tiles and into the attic vents, and that’s where they must have found a place. They shuddered and grew, and the house burned from the inside out. The windows broke one after the next. The beams burned and the interior walls and only the brick was left untouched, those pale gray and pink bricks that nobody else had, not on any of the streets.

  The firemen moved faster now. They were running around like soldiers. The hydrant wasn’t enough anymore, and they used the tanker and all the pumps. Everybody from the nearest houses came out to the street and watched. Everybody except the Fishers, whose truck was gone. The neighbors’ kids ran along the walk. They shouted and pointed. It was better than fireworks or a carnival seeing those trucks up close and how the flames moved in the wind.

  “They’re wrecking all my lilies,” he said. “Look how they’re crushing them down.”

  She shook her head at that. She looked a little worried. “Sit,” she said. “You need to sit for a while.” But he didn’t move and he didn’t budge and he watched the flames instead. The wind gusted beneath his jacket. One of those dry mountain winds that come in May and last until August and dry out all his beds. Always blowing. Always bending the treetops and clearing the clouds from the sky.

  The fence was burning, that picket fence he’d just built. It burned before he’d even painted it, and the old tarp that covered the boat went next and then the boat itself. The fuel tank and the lines went up because Travis hadn’t drained them. Burning pieces of fiberglass went high into the trees, and the steering wheel flew like a Frisbee over the street. Sweet mother Mary, Helen was saying, sweet Mary look at that. Her hands were over her mouth.

  The firemen added more hoses, but all their water didn’t stop the flames or the smoke cloud that mushroomed over the treetops. Blacker than asphalt that smoke and he could taste it in his throat. Every time he thought they had the fire doused, it began to burn again. He’d never seen anything burn like that boat, not even in the army. It must have been the resin in the fiberglass. It turned into a powder.

  He climbed down the steps and across the bondsman’s lawn and stood beside the For Sale sign. More sparks were coming. The trees were shedding them like leaves. Firebrands fell over the Fishers’ yard and onto their sloping roof. He knew what would happen next. Travis was lazy with his gutters. Ponderosa needles were up there and dried bird nests and the accumulated leaves of a dozen years. They burned now with a popping sound like a thousand cap guns, and the flames swayed in the wind and moved across to the wooden eaves. For the first time the firemen were really shouting. The leader ran for the truck. They turned their cannon toward the Fisher house because it was wood that house and so was the next one up. They swiveled it until the aim was right, and the water came out like fifty hoses combined.

  The foam came next. The firemen filled both houses like cream puffs. Some of the neighbors came and shook his hand or patted him on the shoulder. “We’ll be alright,” he told them. “We’ll build her back better than she was.” He talked about adding a gazebo this time and a covered porch out back, and they’d put metal screens on all the attic vents. It wasn’t true, he knew this already. In September he’d be eighty-four, and Helen had started circling ads in the real estate section and leaving them by his chair. For planned communities with recreation centers and art tours of the city and bus trips to New England to see the falling leaves. “By Christmas we’ll be back,” he said. “Maybe even sooner.” The neighbors looked doubtful, but they nodded anyway.

  The firemen had begun to coil their hoses. A few were in his yard again and stepping on his lilies. They were breaking all the rose plants, and his lawn had turned to mud. Only the maple tree behind the Fisher house was untouched. Not even its crown was scorched. Another day or maybe two and the crows would come back in its branches. He looked at the tree and the twisted husk of the boat. It was too bad Travis hadn’t stayed to watch.

  She came up beside him. “I’ve talked to the Musselmans,” she said. “They’ve got the air bed ready.” She stepped back and gave him a hard look. “Why are you smiling? You’re scaring me.” She touched his forehead with her fingertips, and they were cool against his skin. It was time to leave. It was time to go, but she looked so young just then. She looked how she did when they’d first met in school, and he reached for her hand and held it.

  Tremble

  His hands began to shake again in the Safeway checkout line. The woman in front had eighteen items when the limit was fifteen. Diapers and canned soups and a shabby head of lettuce. Comet and ten different Weight Watchers dinners, and her baby was crying in its seat. It wailed just like a siren. His hands shook so hard he almost dropped his wallet. The regular cashier was gone, the pretty Korean lady with the long black hair. This new one had a goiter. He looked around at the other aisles, but they were just as busy. He had to stay because he needed turkey to make his chili. That’s the only reason he came. Turkey and kidney beans and a fat green pepper, but not any spices. He ordered those on the Internet because he didn’t like those cheap glass bottles. The light stripped out all their flavors. Might as well use wood shavings the way they tasted.

  The mother up front was looking for her Club Card. “It’s in here somewhere,” she said. “I can never find things in this purse.” She wore a blue down parka that was torn at the collar. Her boots were wet from the melting snow. Her baby was still crying, and people two aisles over were starting to look, but she didn’t seem to care.

  She started to empty out her bag, a dirty suede bag that needed the brush. She fished out a Kleenex wad and a pair of rusty nail
clippers, a cigarette lighter, and a comb. She put these things on the little platform where people signed their checks. “I saw it just the other day,” she was saying. An asthma inhaler came next, some baby wipes, a Ziploc bag with coupons. She lifted up her bag sideways so she could see inside it better, and it was too much, the mess she was making. He felt a throbbing behind his eyes.

  He reached inside his wallet. He took a five dollar bill and set it on the belt. “Here you go,” he said. He looked at the lady but not the crying baby with its perfect little fists. Her hair was oily and stuck to her forehead. It was blond in places, but the ends were brown. No telling what color it had been when she was little. “Forget about the card.”

  The mother looked at the crisp bill. “I don’t need your money.”

  “It’s more than you’d get if you used your card.”

  “How would you know a thing like that?”

  “You’re holding up the line,” he said. There was nobody behind him.

  She pushed her cart forward. “I don’t want your money.”

  The cashier reached for a metal ring with cards hanging from it. “Ma’am,” she said. “I’ve got a blank one right here.” She swiped the card over the scanner.

  There wasn’t any checker so the cashier bagged the groceries herself. She mixed the lettuce with the Comet, but the mother didn’t complain. The cashier set the bags in the cart and looked at the receipt before handing it over. Her goiter was big as an apricot.

  He set his items on the belt while the mother gathered up her things. He dropped his basket on top of the others and straightened up the stack so people wouldn’t trip. He had only three things and look how long he’d waited. He pointed to the Express Lane sign. “Next time pay attention,” he said to the mother, who was zipping up her parka. He stepped a little closer. “Can’t you read the sign?”

  “Don’t go pointing at me,” she said. “You need to learn some manners.” Her baby was wheezing. It hit the handlebar of the cart like a tiny drummer, and she squared her shoulders and pushed her cart past the aisle and through the double doors.

  She was in the parking lot when he came out with his bag. She was only a few cars down. She drove a rusty Datsun that might have been green once. She strapped her baby in its seat and left her empty cart pushed up against another car. She was a sign of how things were going, another symptom of a general disease. He set his bag in the passenger seat. He scraped the ice from his windshield, and his hands shook even harder from the cold. People didn’t pay attention to the rules. They made right turns from the left-hand lane, even when it snowed. They pulled out into the street without looking because what did it matter if somebody had to hit their brakes. What did it matter if they used the parking lane to cut their way to the front. Pornography on the billboards. Ladies with their mouths open and their hair looked bleached and ironed flat like the bristles of a broom, and he didn’t want to see them.

  She took Circle all the way to Highway 115 and then east toward Fort Carson. He could see the sticker on her window now that he was close. She was married to a soldier and she should shop in the commissary and not at Safeway. She should stay where she belonged. They passed the new apartments that were coming up on both sides of the highway. Mushroom-colored buildings with names like Gold Rush and Wildridge Meadows. She turned left at the gate and the MPs waved her through, and he kept on going. It was another half mile before he could turn around.

  The checker at King Soopers with the scar above her lip. The Mexican girls walking home from Mitchell. They wore short skirts even in December. The lady selling roses outside the Guadalupe Church. Nothing was better than their Aztec hair. Those slanting indio eyes. All the mothers pushing their strollers around Memorial Lake. They were fifteen, sixteen, they weren’t even twenty. He wanted to warn them the trail wasn’t safe. They needed to walk in groups.

  He used his mother’s copper pot. She’d never measured anything. She went only by taste. You have to cook with love and not with those recipe books, she’d say. She taught him how to make the stock when he was eleven. They stood together in front of the stove, and her skin was shiny from the steam. Her hair was long back then. She wore it in a bun, but the ringlets came loose from the band and curled against her neck. He was on the step stool and she was there behind him, and he could feel her breath against his cheek while she told him what to do.

  He chopped the bell pepper and the onion and he minced the garlic on his board. He worked in his white undershirt because it was warm inside the kitchen. He didn’t skimp on heating. He’d kept it warm for his mother when she was sick, and he kept it warm now that she was gone. He rinsed the beans, and he seeded the jalapeño and chopped it superfine. His shaking stopped when he worked the knife. His hands were always steady once he knew what he was doing.

  Sweet Deepa with her shiny hair. Look at her by the sink. Washing those containers from her lunch and the whole office smelled like incense from the spices. That’s the way her house probably smelled, too. Her house and her skin, and he wanted to follow her home. She lived in an apartment off Murray. She kept a bicycle on her balcony, but he’d never seen her ride it. He stood by the vending machines and pretended to look at the chips, but he was watching her instead and how she’d pushed her sleeves back to her elbows. Skin dark as chocolate and the water ran down her forearms. Deepa and Loretta with her strawberry hair and all the girls who walked between the bays. They smelled like shampoo when he came close. They smelled so clean until they got engaged.

  He dug his hands deep in his pockets to stop them from shaking. He pretended to dig around for change. Even in the lunchroom he could hear the humming from the phones, all those voices saying the same things, and some were laughing and some tried to sound sexy, but Deepa’s voice was different when she worked her lines. It flowed like water. It rose and fell, and she was so serious when she talked. Sometimes he took the long way to the men’s room just to get close enough to hear. She’d come 8,445 miles from Bombay to Colorado. He’d looked it up on the net. She’d come halfway around the world, and now it was winter and she could be answering phones in India where it was always warm.

  She finished drying her stainless steel containers and packed them in her canvas bag. Her hair was loose today and not back in a braid the way he liked it. He came beside her and opened the fridge. He was close enough to touch her. He could brush against her shoulder if he wanted. She was wearing her pale blue sweater, and it had started to pile down the sides where her arms had rubbed. He could touch the wool of it and that long black hair. She didn’t gossip with the other girls or go outside for a smoke. She didn’t have a boyfriend. He knew these things. He tried to stand straight because that way he’d look thinner, but he was enormous, big as a house. If somebody cut him, he’d bleed gravy.

  He reached for his strawberry yogurt. He kept it in the back, and when he pulled it out it was lighter than it should be. Somebody had peeled away the foil. They’d eaten half his yogurt before putting it back inside the fridge. His hands shook at the wrongness of it. It was only a little thing, but his hands shook and he had to steady himself against the wall. He went to the Whole Foods on Academy just to get those Australian yogurts. They had pectin and not gelatin like the cheap ones they sold at Safeway. His legs shook, too, and he couldn’t still them. When he came back into the main room the voices hit him like a wave.

  His mother’s hair had been beautiful before the surgeons took it. Sometimes he’d watched her brush it. He held her braid when he first learned to swim. He was seven, almost eight, and they went to the outdoor pool at the Satellite every afternoon. She knew the doorman there, an old man from Madrid who didn’t care if they weren’t guests. She smiled and the doorman smiled, too, and opened the gate for her. Come on, Lenny, she’d say. Before it gets too busy. She carried him on her back and went below the water, and the world went silent in that moment. Her skin was waxy against his. He grabbed her braid, that fat black braid. It’s easy, she said. This is how we were a
million years ago. Just a momma monkey and her baby in the water. She laughed the way she sometimes did. Her hair was almost blue. She looked like a mermaid or those carvings on the front of ships. The olive skin she got from her grandma who came from Jalisco. She lay beside him on the lounge and talked about Nagual who could turn into a puma and Cihuacoatl who went to the crossroads at night. Poor Cihuacoatl who waited for her baby boy, but all she found there was a knife.

  They ate his chili next. He went to his table to pick up his thermos, and someone had eaten the chili from inside and left the dirty spoon. They’d taken his apple, too, and squeezed the jelly beans from the goose his mother had crocheted. He kept it beside his monitor. They emptied it out and didn’t refill it, and they did it because he was fat. They did it because the regular chairs weren’t big enough and he used a special rolling chair from Widebodies that didn’t pinch his thighs. He needed to get a hidden camera or maybe some ipecac to put in his thermos, and they’d be sorry then. He wanted to burn them with hot peppers.

  He sat down in his chair, and Loretta was laughing in the corner. She was waving her fat hands, and Deepa was working a call and her face was serious the way it gets, and someone had burnt their Lean Cuisine. There was shouting in the lunchroom. Dilman the next table over had taken off his boots again and now the room smelled like feet. He knew this place. All its sounds and its voices, the way the sun came through the windows at three every afternoon. He knew it when it was full with people and when he was there alone, and some day this place would burn or a shooter would find his way inside.