Gringo

by Cass J. McMain

  “You have a fireplace. Why don’t you light a fire?”

  “Oh. No, no. I’m afraid of the fireplace. The flue’s clogged up anyway. Haven’t had a fire in years. Not since Herb was here.” She tapped the thermostat and turned briskly back to Daniel. “Now then. Would you like some tea? Coffee?”

  He declined. Promising to be back on Wednesday, he left. On the way out he looked for the For Sale sign Ellie had said was out there, and spotted it. For Sale By Owner. No wonder he’d never seen it before: it was buried in the weeds and debris. Certainly no surprise she’d had very little interest. There was no phone number that he could see.

  Could she seriously think people were going to stop and knock on the door? Apparently. But since she never answered it…

  No, that’s not true. She’d answered it today, so sometimes she did hear the door. Still, if she only showed the house on the rare occasion that she heard someone knocking, that wasn’t likely to be very many people. She was never going to sell it, this way.

  Daniel kicked a few weeds away from the sign to make it slightly more visible. Gringo got up and watched him. When Daniel finished and crossed back over to his own house, Gringo lay back down under his tree, apparently content.

  An hour later, though, he looked out and saw that Gringo wasn’t there anymore. He figured the dog was sleeping on his porch again, but he didn’t bother to look.

  Chapter 17

  The bar was a shambles. The kitchen was a shambles. The whole place was a shambles, except for the dish station. Freddy had left that neat as a pin.

  Good for Freddy. “What the hell happened here last night?”

  “Mark called in sick, and they said Kiki wasn’t here either.”

  Daniel blinked. Mark was the new guy who’d taken his nights. Kiki, whose real name was Enrique, was a “floater” who worked variable shifts and covered days off. Why Kiki was a nickname for Enrique, Daniel wasn’t sure. “He wouldn’t come in? Why didn’t they call me?”

  “Don’t know,” Margie replied. “I wasn’t here. But Gina said they had no bartender. So I guess the kitchen guys had to help.” She scanned the bar and leaned far over to see behind it. “Doesn’t look too bad, really. Kitchen’s worse.”

  Not looking too bad was a relative thing, Daniel decided. The old bar was pretty small, and this mess seemed almost to fit into the décor—or what they were pleased to call the décor, which was a mishmash of sentiments, mostly advertising gimmicks that were given to them by vendors, including the blow-up beer bottle with the wrinkled velveteen bow on top. There wasn’t much thought given to how things looked or should look or might look best; things were just laid out or taped up or hung wherever seemed to be handy at the time. The end result was that the bar looked a mess even when it was clean, and happily camouflaged most of any real mess within that chaos. The kitchen would be another story.

  Hector came out of the kitchen as if to testify. “Man,” he said. “They didn’t clean nothin’. They didn’t even take the trash out.” Daniel shot him a look and he added, “I’m on it, I’m on it. Don’t get so worked up, Danny-boy. Geez.” He leaned over the bar and grabbed a cherry, then peered at it closely. It was left over from last night. He popped it in his mouth anyway and grabbed the tub of dirty dishes Daniel handed him.

  “Don’t eat the damn cherries,” Daniel said. “I’m sure you know that.”

  “You’re throwing them out anyway.”

  Daniel opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. It was true. He started cleaning the bar, disposing of the little handfuls of onions and lemons and cherries that they’d left out last night, finding clean tins to put in their place. Slicing new lemons and oranges, unbottling new cherries and olives. The old lullaby about the church bells ran through his head. Oranges and Lemons. He added a new line: Olives and Cherries say the bells of St. Mary’s. He had no idea if there was a St. Mary’s. Maybe there was.

  Margie returned to the bar with a rack of clean glasses for him. “You look tired. That dog still keeping you up?”

  “No… not really. Just can’t sleep. Insomnia, I guess. It’ll pass.” He hoped it would. But by now he was beginning to wonder. He snapped awake at midnight every night as though he’d been stuck with a pin. Some nights, he got back to sleep pretty fast. Most of them, he didn’t. Last night, after thrashing around for a while, he’d gotten up and pulled his curtains back, and Gringo had been right there under his window. Awake, and looking back at him as though he’d been waiting there for him all night.

  Margie reached over and grabbed an orange slice off his cutting board. “You need a vacation.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Well, not now. When Bud comes back, though.” She finished the orange slice and flipped the peel into the trash. “At least do something relaxing on your day off. Go to a movie.”

  “I’m helping my neighbor paint this week.”

  “That’s sweet of you.”

  Daniel shrugged. “I guess.”

  “It is. You can come do my house next.” Margie grinned, wiped her hands on her apron and went back to the kitchen.

  A man seated himself at the bar, glanced at the available taps and placed a order. Daniel poured his beer and brought it to him, along with a bowl of pretzels. The man passed over a five and sipped his beer, eyes on the television. Two more customers came in and sat down, placed orders, ate pretzels. They glanced at the television at intervals.

  “Lookit that one. Holy hell.”

  The other man looked up and grinned. On the television, a busty girl was promoting fried chicken.

  “Wouldn’t throw her out of bed.”

  “You wouldn’t throw anybody out of bed.”

  “Your wife.”

  “Fuck you.”

  They drank beer in silence for a few minutes, watching the game.

  “Hey bartender, you should get a pool table in here or something. This place is boring as shit.”

  Daniel smiled a thin smile. “We’ll keep that in mind.” He looked around the bar, in which there was clearly no space for a pool table. It was the week before Christmas, and the ornaments still felt out of place.

  Chapter 18

  He knocked, and was surprised when Ellie answered the door almost immediately.

  “Thank you again for coming to help.” She was wearing the same stained sweatpants and a threadbare flannel shirt with holes in it. “Would you like some coffee?”

  He nodded and she went to get it. He moved to the painting area and began taping. When she returned with the coffee, he’d already taped half of the trim. She found him on his knees and handed him the coffee, laughing. She told him it looked like he was begging for the coffee, the way he was kneeling in front of her.

  He sipped it and it was good. She’d put just the right amount of sugar without even asking if he wanted any. Creamer, too.

  “If you can reach the stuff I can’t do, then I’ll do the rest of it,” Ellie said. That was what she said, but it soon became clear to Daniel that Ellie wasn’t really doing much painting. She loitered in the background mostly, smoking cigarettes and making small talk. She rolled paint on a little bit of one wall, and she did bring him things and help him with rags and tape. Around eleven, she went to the kitchen to make lunch for them both.

  He finished the section he was working on and stood straight to stretch. Well, he couldn’t really blame her for not doing much. She was no good on the ladder, and she couldn’t really kneel either. And her hands, judging by the state of affairs in the areas she had tried to paint, weren’t very steady. Probably she’d only be in the way if he tried to get her to do much more than she was doing already.

  It was looking pretty good now, though. Better than before, anyway. He picked up a putty knife and scraped at some paint left on the switch from her previous effort. The other room would go faster, he was sure. He hoped to get that done today, but if he had to he guessed he could come again next week, to finish that and may
be do the entry area. Then, though, she was going to be on her own. He wasn’t planning to spend all of his days off painting this old woman’s house.

  She appeared with a tray of sandwiches. “I hope you like this,” she said as she set the tray down. “This is one of my favorites. I don’t get to make these very often. Takes too long, just for one.”

  Daniel sat and looked at the sandwich. “I’m sure I will.”

  “It’s a Monte Cristo. You ever had one before?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Ham and cheese, with jelly. And powdered sugar. Like French toast, see? But with ham and cheese inside. They’re good. Try it.” She bit into hers. Jelly oozed out of the corner and stuck to the side of her face.

  He took a hesitant bite and licked jelly and powdered sugar off his lips. They ate quietly for a few minutes.

  “My mother made these for parties. She said they were decadent so she didn’t have them normally.” Ellie wiped her lips with a napkin and took a sip of coffee. “Do you think they’re decadent?”

  He shook his head.

  “She made tiny ones. Bite sized, almost, much smaller than these. I always looked forward to her throwing a luncheon, because I loved the little sandwiches. Then she started making this other thing I didn’t like as well. It had egg salad and tuna salad and some other stuff all in layers, and she covered it all with cream cheese. It made it look like a cake with frosting. It was pretty, but I didn’t like the tuna.”

  “My mother made egg salad all the time too. I didn’t mind it, but it wasn’t my favorite.”

  “Tuna’s cheap. I wish I liked it better. It’s supposed to be good for you, too, tuna. Good for your brain.” Ellie reached for the other half of her sandwich and laughed. “I guess ham and cheese fried in egg and butter isn’t good for you, is it? But at my age, who cares?”

  “I was never a fan of tuna either.”

  “Plus there’s the dolphins to worry about.” When Daniel only looked at her blankly, she went on, “They get caught in the nets. Tuna fishing is murder on the dolphins.”

  “I thought they had new methods. Don’t they? I saw ‘dolphin safe’ tuna, I think.”

  She swallowed her last bite and stacked the plates on the tray. “Maybe. But I don’t trust them. People will say anything. They say stuff is good for you, and then it’s not. They say stuff is safe, and then the next day they’ve got the class action lawsuits. Like those hips. Everyone got new artificial hips, and then, bam. They’re making people sick.”

  Daniel nodded and rubbed his eyes. “I guess.”

  After lunch, he went back to the painting job. Some time later, Ellie came in behind him with some cookies on a plate.

  “A little dessert.” She looked around the room. “This looks so much better! Thank you again.”

  He took a cookie and moved to the other room. Ellie had cleaned it up some since the last time he was here. Daniel began masking off the windows. There was a toy car on the windowsill. Ellie came in with supplies and he pointed the little car out to her, but she just shook her head at him.

  Soon, the room was all ready for paint except one wall that had a large, framed painting of roses on it. She asked Daniel to set it in the hallway for the time being.

  “When the paint dries in the other room, I think I’ll hang it there instead. This room is really too small for it, don’t you think?”

  “It’ll look good in there. Did you paint it?”

  “No. I helped pick the roses, though. My grandmother painted that. She had this rosebush in front of her house… it bloomed all summer long. She said she wanted to paint them, so we went out and cut the roses and put them in a bowl in the kitchen. Old-fashioned ones, you see. They smelled so good. Roses don’t smell like that anymore.” She ran the tip of one finger along the edge of the frame. “Next time I saw her, she had it almost finished. See? Here’s where she signed it. Vera. That was her.”

  They looked at the painting for a few minutes and Daniel found himself thinking about his own grandmother. She’d had rosebushes, too. Had she ever painted them? He didn’t think so. He lifted the painting off the wall and leaned it carefully in the hallway. Heavy. He’d have to help hang it again when the paint dried. No way Ellie could lift that thing.

  “Did she paint others?”

  “Some, but none I liked as well. I guess maybe because I picked the roses, this one meant more to me.”

  “It’s really beautiful.”

  “Do you like art?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess. I never thought about it much. My ex had some framed photographs that were alright. They were good, artistic. At least she said they were good. I don’t know much about what makes art good or not.”

  “Did they make you think of something other than what they were about? I mean, other than what they were pictures of?”

  Daniel considered. He didn’t know how to answer that, and said so. “She had one that was just some people sitting on the floor, and there was a chair next to them…every time I saw that one, I wondered why they weren’t using the chair. But I don’t think that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. It made you think about their decisions. Not just about where they were, but why they were there. Right? Why they weren’t using the chair. Whether the chair was big enough. Or… one chair, two people… who has to sit on the floor?”

  He busied himself with the paintbrush while Ellie stirred the paint. His ex’s pictures had taken up a lot of space on the walls, and he’d walked past them every day for months. He hadn’t thought about them since he’d left her—or since she’d left him, depending on the way you looked at it. Now that he tried, he couldn’t remember any of them other than the one with the chair.

  “You look sad, Daniel. What are you thinking about now? Your ex?”

  He paused in his brushstrokes and looked back over his shoulder at her. “How can you tell I look sad? I’m facing the other way.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Just can. You were thinking of your ex, weren’t you?”

  He resumed painting. “Better off without her, really.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just stuff. People grow apart.”

  “Did you? Grow apart?”

  “No.” Now it was Daniel who shook his head. “It was… she left me. I moved out, but… she was the one who really left. First.”

  Ellie chuckled a little. “Yeah? That’s some trick. How’d that happen?”

  “She was cheating on me.” He stepped away from the wall and squinted at it, preparing to change the subject, but Ellie looked at him sharply.

  “Anyone you knew?”

  He adjusted the ladder and climbed, busying himself with the task at hand. But he felt her eyes on him, waiting for the answer.

  “Business partner. Alright? She was sleeping with my business partner. And before you ask, yes. It destroyed the business too. My end of it, anyway. He might still be in business, I don’t know.” He turned back to the painting.

  “Do you care?”

  “I moved away. I don’t know or care a thing about either of them.” His hands were shaking. He painted anyway. “I mean, I used to care. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I was just fine with everything. But it’s been a while. I’m over it.” That’s what he said, and had been saying for years. But he wasn’t. Not really. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could get over just like that. He had begun to wonder if it was the sort of thing he could get over at all.

  “Some things are hard to get over,” Ellie said, as though she was reading his mind. “But enough about that.” She moved to a new section of wall and they painted in silence for a while. When they talked, they talked about things that didn’t matter.

  When the room was finished, Daniel went to the kitchen to wash his hands. He came back out to find Ellie waiting with her checkbook.

  “One-fifty, you said. Right?” She held the pen ready. �
��What’s your last name?”

  He felt bad taking money from this old woman in her torn flannel shirt but he nodded and spelled his name for her.

  “Straub… Straub. I knew a guy named Straub, back when I was in school. They called him Strawberry.” She signed the check and handed it over. “Anyone ever call you Strawberry?”

  He lied and told her they hadn’t.

  Chapter 19

  When Daniel left Ellie’s to go home, Greg was crouched in front of his house, adjusting Christmas lights on his fence. Daniel waved.

  “Hey, Danny. All ready for the holidays?” Greg looked up from his crouch.

  Daniel had nothing to be ready for, really. He shrugged. “How about you? Putting up more lights?”

  “Bah. I thought these were all set, but one of them went out. Now none of them are working.”

  They’d been working last night, Daniel was sure. He’d looked out the window before he went to bed, to see if the dog was on his porch. And of course, he was. He was always there. Damn dog was always there. He’d forgotten to ask Ellie about that.

  “That reminds me— have you noticed the dog hanging around in my yard?”

  Greg tugged at the light string and shook his head. “I haven’t been here much. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Mary this week. You know, the lady up the street with the hernia. Why, you get a new dog?” He glanced up at Daniel and gestured. “Help me pull this end.”

  Daniel pulled. “Not my dog. He’s Ellie’s.”

  “Ellie Neal?” Greg straightened and dusted his knees, squinting at the fence. “You taking care of her dog for her?”

  “Not on purpose. I have been helping her some though. Painting.”

  “Yeah? Painting, eh? Well, that’s kind of you. I’m sure she appreciates it.” Greg looked over at Ellie’s house. “You mean the inside?”

  Daniel nodded. “She’s trying to sell it, you know. The house. So she’s fixing it up a little.”