by Sam Starbuck
So, I dug my umbrella out of the closet and hung up the closed sign on the door. I followed the main street south and then turned onto one of the residential roads, ambling along until I'd left the houses well behind. Halfway across the wide field that led from town to The Pines, the asphalt ended abruptly where Low Ferry's municipal authority did, and turned instead into a dirt road carved up with tire tracks. The cottage was just barely visible as a blot on the side of the hill.
The fields had long grass to catch some of the water; it might get my pants wet but it would mean avoiding the oil-slick mud on the road. I set out at an angle to the dirt track, heading directly for the hill and the small building clinging to the side of it.
I was almost at the incline when I realized there was a figure on the roof: Lucas, in a pair of thick-soled boots and several layers of clothing, kneeling on the shingles. He had a rope tied around his chest, the other end hitched to the chimney to keep him from breaking his neck if he slipped.
"Hi-ya!" I called, when I thought I might be close enough to be heard above the steady patter of the rain. He looked up and over his shoulder, curiously.
"Hi," he called back. "Are you lost?"
"Not at all! I've brought you some tools," I replied. The words were just barely out of my mouth when I decided it sounded kind of absurd, but Lucas didn't seem amused so much as grateful.
"Thank god," he answered, and untied the rope from around his chest. He walked carefully to one edge of the roof and, before I had time to be surprised, he dropped over the eave and was hanging with one hand on the guttering, measuring the distance down with a glance. The roof was only about fifteen feet off the ground to start with, and he fell into the soft soil below with hardly a grunt. It wasn't graceful, but he did land on his feet.
I held up the bucket by the handle. He let out a short, sharp bark of laughter, startling me.
"That's not what I expected," he said, and then blushed. "I mean, thank you. Would you – uh, come inside? Out of the rain?"
He gestured to the back of the house and I followed him, through a weather-battered door and into a bright yellow kitchen. We stamped the mud off our boots on the mat just inside and Lucas removed an enormous ragged coat, revealing a corduroy shirt buttoned up over a turtleneck underneath, the collar and wrists dark where they'd gotten wet. He threw the coat on a chair next to the little breakfast table and invited me with another spare gesture to set my umbrella out to dry.
The kitchen didn't look exactly lived-in. There was nothing on the walls but a few pans hanging on hooks, and no visible food on the counters. The only personal touch was a small planter box filled with green sprouts. They didn't look like they'd survive another week, let alone the winter. The door to what I assumed was the living room was closed tightly.
Lucas went to a high shelf at the back of the kitchen and took down two mugs, back turned to me as he spoke.
"I telephoned the shop to ask what I was missing," he said. "I was told someone would bring out what I needed. They didn't say you would do it."
"I volunteered. I wanted to see what you'd done here," I answered.
"Not much," he said, taking a pan off a hook and setting it on the stove. "I have cocoa or coffee."
"Cocoa?"
"Yeah. I...like cocoa?" he ventured.
"That's fine then."
He nodded and took a bottle of milk from the fridge, pouring it into the pan. "Sit down if you want."
I pulled out a chair and sat, stretching my legs towards a heating vent while he lit the gas on the stove.
"Live alone out here?" I asked.
"Yep," he answered shortly. He took a makeshift hammer out of his belt, a wooden mallet wrapped in leather, and set it on the counter, replacing it with the hammer from the bucket I'd brought. Next he studied the caulk-gun for a while, then picked up the tube of caulk and fitted it in with a single, efficient gesture and a soft snap.
"Not your first time fixing a roof?" I asked.
"Oh, yes it is," he answered. "It's not something I've run into a lot, in my life."
He disappeared into the living room and returned with a wide piece of thick cloth, wrapping it around the aluminum snips before shoving them in his pocket.
Is this the first time you've lived alone?" I asked. He stopped and looked directly at me.
It wasn't that he seemed particularly malicious. There was a touch of innocent surprise in his stare. At the same time, however, it was almost as if he were trying to look past me – searching for another version of me, another kind of Christopher who had asked a different question altogether and had gotten a much more satisfactory answer than I was likely to get.
"This is the first place that's been mine," he said finally. He jerked the pan's handle lightly and the milk hissed as it slapped against the hot dry sides. He turned off the heat and added spoonfuls of dark powder to the mugs before pouring precisely half the milk into each. He passed me one and leaned on the counter nearby, hip hitched just over the edge, blue light through the window picking out shine in his wet hair.
"The leaks don't seem to be serious," I said, to make conversation. "Did you need to be up there fixing it in the rain?"
"They aren't so bad," he allowed. "They'll rot the ceiling, though, and they come through here and there." He opened a cupboard by way of example. Water was dripping from the top of it down into a bowl on the highest shelf.
"Rain can't last that long, though," I answered. "You could have waited until it was clear, couldn't you?"
"It's better to do it this way. At least then I know if I've actually stopped the leak or not," he answered.
"And have you?"
"Stopped the leaks? Two so far. Some need sealing from the inside."
"You didn't climb up to the roof to begin with, then."
"There's a trap-door into the attic, and a gable-window on the far side lets out onto the shingles. I would have come to get the tools, you didn't need to bring them all this way," he continued. He seemed more confident, in his own kitchen and on relatively solid factual ground. "That could have waited until the rain was over."
"I like the rain," I said.
"Who's minding your shop?"
"Nobody. I closed it before I came."
"Will you lose business?"
"I doubt it. It's the middle of the day, and it's raining. There's hours until school lets out."
"The children like you," he said.
"They like my comic books."
"I need to give you money," he said, taking a sudden conversational swerve. "For the woman at the hardware store."
"She'll put it on account for you. I mean, she does know where you live," I said, "Or she'll...hold your change," I continued, even as he was pressing a few battered bills into my hand.
"I like to pay promptly," he said.
"Then Paula will like you," I answered, tucking the cash into a pocket. "Do you want some help with the roof?"
"No, there isn't much more to be done," he said. "You're welcome to stay if you want, until the rain stops. It'll only be muddier going back. But you have your shop," he added, more to himself than to me. "You'll want to get back to your shop."
"I'm used to the mud," I said. "I don't mind it. Sure you don't want help?"
"No, thank you," he said, and set his empty mug in the sink. "I'll walk you down to the field."
He left me at the base of the hill, in rain that was softening from vicious to merely steady. It isn't wise to ignore where one is going, walking across a muddy field, but I turned around every so often to see if he had gone back to his repairs yet. By the time he returned to his patching, I was halfway home and his coat was a dark speck on a distant roof.
When I arrived back at the shop I changed out of my muddy clothes, padding around the ground floor in clean socks and ancient blue-jeans while I waited for the mud on my boots to dry. The boy who was so curious about Lucas was there again with his friends, but he had wandered away from the table where they were doing their
homework (or at least where they were folding their homework into paper airplanes to throw at each other). He ducked one particularly well-aimed shot and leaned his elbows on my counter, hoisting himself up a little and then dropping down again.
"Have you gone to see Lucas today?" he asked.
I set down my sorting and looked across at him. "Yes, I have – how did you know?"
"I saw your boots," he replied. "Has he patched his roof yet?"
"You're quite the Sherlock Holmes," I said.
"That's the sort of thing people tell me when they think they shouldn't have to answer me because I shouldn't know enough to ask," he said solemnly.
"I'm sorry," I said, a little taken aback. "He was patching it when I left. He'll do better now that he has a real hammer."
"That's good. Are you going to buy firewood for winter?"
"Probably," I said. "Why?"
"Dad's got some split and seasoned cords for sale. Give you a half-cord for credit."
I raised an eyebrow. "What's your dad say about that?"
"He wants to shift it. He says I can sell to you for credit and it'll make me read more."
"Do you think it will?"
The boy grinned. "More comic books, anyway."
I laughed. "Done deal."
He offered a hand and I shook it.
"Do you think Lucas needs some?" he asked.
"I'd think so. He might not know he does, though. You're a salesman, sell him some."
"Okay, I will," he said, and went back to his friends, ordering them imperiously to be quiet.
Chapter TWO
I was pleased with the progress I was making on Jacob's bookbinding commission, as slow as it was. I could've worked on it during the day, but I also had a shop to run and shelves to stock. Even when nobody was buying there was always someone stopping by to say hello.
"Halloooo, Christopher!" Charles called, banging the glass door behind him as he entered. I put my head through the doorway from the storeroom.
"Just a minute, Charles," I replied. "Make yourself at home!"
"I already have," he said, and I heard him shuffling through the papers on my counter. "Had breakfast yet?"
"Ron ran toast and bacon over from the cafe this morning, and I had some of the eggs Jacob brought me a few days ago," I replied, tossing the last of the shipping boxes in a corner and studying the troubling books on the storage shelf, hands on my hips. "Was that an invitation?"
"Well, I can talk here just as well as I can there," he replied, as I emerged. "You look annoyed."
"My seller mixed up an order," I said.
"What happened?"
"Sure you want to know?" I asked. "I have twenty anthologies of erotica when I should have thirty-five assorted True Crime."
He grinned. "Six of one, half dozen of the other."
"I hate to think what your wife would say to that."
"It's all voyeurism, is what I mean," he explained.
"I'm shocked a church elder even knows that word."
"Oh, you kids think you invented sex and atheism!"
"Not concurrently."
Charles is a large man with a barrel chest, and when he laughs he scares flocks of birds miles away.
"I assume sex and atheism aren't what you came here to talk about," I continued, when the sonic boom had died away.
"Just thought I'd drop in. Keeps me out of trouble and the missus doesn't get suspicious."
"Ah! I'm an alibi."
"Well, no. But I was over at the hardware store buying saddle soap and some liniment – "
I held up a hand. "I want you to stop and think about what you just said."
"What? I was at the hardware store."
"Saddle soap and liniment. You're such a farmer."
"Oh, big city boy! Do you want to hear my story or not?"
"I want to hear your story, Charles," I said, in my best humble voice.
"That's better. So I was at the hardware store and I heard from Paula that you'd said Sandra and Michael – at the bank?"
"Yes, I know who Sandra and Michael are."
"Well, you'd said they were an item and I wanted to know your sources."
"Is this going to be a lecture about telling tales out of school?" I asked.
"No, but Sandra's parents'll hear about it, and I thought I'd set you right, because Cassie is talking about them. But everyone else says that Nolan's sister says she never said she saw anyone kissing on the loading dock."
"Oh, I heard it was the safety-deposit vault."
"See? My point is, Nolan's sister doesn't like the way Sandra's treating him, so she might not have told the whole truth."
"Sandra and Nolan?" I asked, surprised.
"That's only what I hear."
"But I always thought he was..." I hesitated.
"Was what?"
"Well, you know. Closeted."
"Come again now?"
"I'm sure we young whippersnappers didn't invent homosexuality, Charles."
"Oh! Nolan, do you think?"
"It's only a personal opinion," I said hurriedly.
"He was in the Navy..." Charles looked thoughtful.
"Now that kind of thinking is why people say we're backwards out in the country," I said, shaking a finger at him.
He shrugged. "Anyway, Michael's not going to boast but he's probably not going to deny it if someone asks him, even if it isn't true. I'd be careful who I tell."
"I'm going to need a chart for this soon," I remarked.
"Well, make sure you take a poll on Nolan."
"Charles! I'm not going to poll Low Ferry about Nolan's sex life. You sure Nolan's sister isn't just embarrassed she told Cassie and Cassie told the whole world?"
"It's possible. You'll keep your ear to the ground, won't you?" he asked.
"Of course. I promise you'll be the first one I tell if I find out Cassie's lying."
"Then I'll check in when you know more," he said, putting his hat back on. "See you on Sunday?"
"See me sleeping in on Sunday."
"Heathen."
"Evangelist. Have a nice day!" I called after him as he left. I returned to the back room, and to my dilemma.
I was sure that plenty of people in Low Ferry would be interested in dirty books, but none of them would admit to it and certainly none of them would ever come to Dusk Books asking for it. There were three or four people in town I could mention them to, on the sly, but that kind of activity could give all kinds of wrong ideas. Besides, some bookstore out there, probably in Chicago, was looking for them.
I could call the supplier, but that would be an endless parade of "please hold" and "press four for more options". I could package them up and ship them back, but I didn't want to pay postage for someone else's mistake.
