“Don’t tell me you’re calling from the field?”
He forced a laugh. “Nah, we had a down day.”
That meant either no one showed up, or certain supplies couldn’t be coordinated, or they’d expected the rain.
“That little thing the other day,” he said. “Let’s let it go. I won’t even dock you. Tomorrow we got to have a good day, losing this one. So, hell, Hap. I can use you.”
“Man or woman’s got hands and isn’t in a wheelchair, you can use them.”
“Hey, I’m offering you a job. I didn’t call up for insults.”
“Maybe we can jump that shit pay a little. Another fifty cents an hour you’d almost be in line with minimum wage.”
“Don’t start, Hap. You know the pay. I pay cash, too. You save on income tax that way.”
“You save on income tax, Lacy. Wages like that, I don’t save dick. I’d rather make enough so I had to pay some taxes.”
“Yeah, well . . .” And he went on to tell me about his old mother in a Kansas nursing home. How he had to send her money every month. I figured he probably shot his mother years ago, buried her under a rosebush to save on fertilizer.
“Couldn’t your old mother whore a little?” I said. “You know, she’s set up. Got a room and a bed and all. If she can spread her legs, she can pay her way.”
“Hap, you bastard. Don’t start fucking with me, or you can forget the job.”
“My heart just missed a beat.”
“Listen here, let’s quit while you’re ahead. You come on in and I’ll get you working. Tell the nigger to come on in when he’s ready.”
“Shall I tell Leonard you called him a nigger?”
“Slipped on that. Force of habit.”
“Bad habit.”
“You won’t tell him I said it, all right? You know how he is.”
“How is he?”
“You know. Like that time in the field, when him and that other nig—colored fella with the knife got into it.”
“That guy ever get out of the hospital?”
“Think he’s in some kind of home now. I’m surprised Leonard didn’t do some time for that. You won’t tell him about the ‘nigger’ business, will you?”
“I did tell him, there’s one good thing about it.”
“Yeah?”
“You already got the roses for your funeral.”
He rang off and I had the fifty-cent raise for me and Leonard both, just like I thought Leonard might actually go back to it.
Frankly, I had a hard time seeing me going back to it, but a look at the contents of my refrigerator and a peek at the dough in the cookie jar made me realize I had to.
My mood moved from blue to black, and I was concentrating on the failures of my life, finding there were quite a few, wondering what would happen ten years from now when I was in my midfifties.
What did I do then?
Rose-field work still?
What else did I know?
What was I qualified for?
I wasn’t able to tally up a lot of options, though I spent considerable time with the effort.
I was considering a career in maybe aluminum siding or, the devil help me, insurance, when the phone rang.
It was Leonard.
“Goddamn, man,” I said. “I been wondering about you. I called your place and no answer. I was beginning to think you’d had an accident. Refrigerator was lying on top of you or something.”
“I didn’t go back home,” Leonard said. “Not to stay anyway. I packed some of my stuff and came back here to Uncle Chester’s.”
“You calling from there?”
“His phone got pulled from lack of payment. Months ago. I’m calling from a pay phone. You want to know what I’m wearing?”
“Not unless you think it’ll really get me excited.”
“I’m afraid clothes have to have women in them for you to get excited.”
“Maybe you could talk in a high voice.”
“Cut through the shit, Hap. I’m gonna live at Uncle Chester’s awhile. I been going through his stuff. I feel like I want to do that, get in touch with who he was. And more importantly, find out what this fucking key goes to.”
“His main coupon collection.”
“Could be. I’ve looked everywhere. I got other reasons too. I want to fix the house up some. Maybe sell it for more than I can get now.”
“Sounds smart, Leonard. Things are swinging here too. I got my old job in the rose fields back.”
“Lose it again.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Hey, you toted me some, move over here a bit, least till I do what I got to do, and I’ll keep you fed and in toilet paper.”
“I don’t know. That’s more charity than I like. I don’t even have a bum leg.”
“Me neither. Hardly. I’ve been moving around some without the cane. Mostly without it. I don’t plan to pick it up again, I can do without it. Look, Hap. It ain’t charity. You can help me fix the place up.”
“What I can’t fix, which is nothing, I shit on. You know that.”
“You can tote a hammer, hand me nails. And there’s something else. These fucks next door. I got no problems with them yet, but I feel one brewing, way they watch me. They’re biding their time. I’d like to have you at my back, and there’s always the chance they’ll get you first, instead of me. I like the idea of a buffer.”
“Well, I can see that.”
“Good. Can I count on you?”
I considered working for Lacy again. I thought of the rose fields, the heat, the sticks, the dynamic pay.
“What the hell do you think?” I said.
8.
The real repairs and cleaning began in earnest.
I went to live with him in Uncle Chester’s house the next day, and he got the bed from then on and I got the couch. During the days we did repairs, or rather Leonard did. I walked around with a hammer and nails and fetched things, hummed and sang to myself. I do some pretty good spirituals. Leonard said that’s the way it ought be, a black man with a honkie servant could sing a little gospel.
We spent a lot of time on the roof, taking off the old tin and putting down some real roofing. I trimmed the big oak that was scratching the roof all by my ownself, managed to saw off the offending limbs without sawing through a finger or busting my ass on the ground.
It was hot as hell up there and the glare was bad enough you had to wear sunglasses while you worked. I began to tan and lose weight, and I liked the feeling so much I gave up beer and excessive numbers of tacos.
When I wasn’t holding down roofing for Leonard to hammer, wasn’t fetching something, I’d look off at the crack house and wonder who was inside. People came and went there pretty brisk come late afternoon, and right on through until morning. Come full day, things got quiet. Selling crack wore you out, you had to get some rest before the next tide came in.
Whole thing depressed me, seeing kids and adults, and even babies on the hips of female druggies a couple years into having their period, lining up over there like it was a cafeteria.
I saw a couple of cop cars during that time, and there was even a bust and some folks were hauled in. In fact, it was Leonard made the call, but the next day, same guys that left the house were back. One of them was Mohawk, the other was Parade Float. Great strides in my understanding of our judicial system were made without leaving the house and yard.
Way it worked was simple. I’d had it all wrong. You broke the law you didn’t have to really suffer. See, a guy sold drugs to kids or anyone else, they could come get you, they could lock you up, but come morning, you knew somebody, had some money, a good lawyer, a relationship with the bail bondsman, you could go home, get a free ride back to your house. Have some rest, a Dr. Pepper and a couple of Twinkies to lift your spirit, and you were in business again, if come nightfall you had the supplies.
It was depressing, and the folks next door must have known we felt that way, ’cause they liked to
hang out on their front porch come dark and stare at us. We could see them over there beneath their little yellow porch light, congregating like the bugs that swarmed the bulb above them.
And their light and our porch light, when we used it, was about all the light there was for Comanche Street, because the street lights had long been shot out and no one had come to replace them. If they had, the crack house people would have shot them out again. The only beacon they wanted on the street was their beacon, one that called people to their place to buy something to make them spin and float, help them coast through another few hours.
There were a couple houses across from us, but they kept their porch lights off, and what lights they burned were filmy behind curtains, looked like lights seen from a distance and underwater. Decent folks on Comanche Street didn’t come out of their houses at night, lest they encounter the dealers or the druggies themselves, the latter looking for a quick few dollars to purchase a hunk of rock.
For that matter, during the day you didn’t see folks much. The working people came and went, but didn’t linger. The kid we had seen on Leonard’s front porch that day, we began to see more often. He wore a beeper on his hip. Acquired a cool walk. Had some nice clothes. He looked as if his soul was melting.
The bars and locks on Uncle Chester’s door began to make sense. You didn’t nail something down in this neighborhood, it’d show up at the pawnshop, and the money received for it would finance some druggie to do some business.
Got so we left the house, we had the impression we might come back to the front door off the hinges, rammed in, and all the little goods that Uncle Chester had left would be gone, except the coupons. Or maybe the shits next door would start to think they ought to get even with me and Leonard, and we’d come back to worse: smoke and charred wood.
Considering all that, way we did, was something had to be bought, one of us nearly always stayed while the other went to get it.
Got so Leonard stayed pissed all the time. Kept his brow furrowed and his uncle’s shotgun oiled and loaded, and not with rat shot. He made jokes about how many niggers next door it would take to roof the house, he sliced them real thin.
We cleaned inside the house, too. Uncle Chester and his odors finally departed. The flies went in search of deader pastures.
Nights, after a hard day’s work, was when we did our cleaning and searching for what the key went to. No safe or locked box or locked floor or wall panels were found. Some of the coupons from the deposit box were good, though. We used them for eat-outs, one of us running into town to pick up pizza or burgers.
At night, we worked to the sounds of Leonard’s country music; hillbilly voices fighting it out with the rap and rock sounds next door, stuff I sometimes preferred to lost loves and drinking in the barroom, but Leonard, he used the decibel knob to drown them out. ’Least they were drowned out in Uncle Chester’s house. I don’t know they noticed next door. Nobody called the law on either of us. In that neighborhood, somebody wasn’t getting hurt or robbed, a little loud music didn’t mean much. For all the good the law did down there, they might as well have just drove near the neighborhood and honked, tossed out a few Don’t Do Drug leaflets.
Last room we tackled was the one with the newspapers. It was hot in there, and the little fan managed to stir the dust and make you choke. The roof had leaked, gotten on the papers and mildewed them, and in some places the water had soaked through and joined the wood beneath them and rotted out sections of the floor. We could hear it squeak, feel it sag when we walked.
We decided best thing to do was remove the papers, glance through them quickly as possible, see if there was anything there really meant anything.
After a couple pickup loads to the recycling center, we quit looking through the rest, quit thinking they meant anything. Only thing we noticed were gaps in pages, where Uncle Chester had liberated coupons with scissors.
All doubts were cast aside. It was pretty clear by then. Uncle Chester had been off his nut. The key had probably gone to something no longer owned, long lost to time, but significant somehow in the watery cells that made up Uncle Chester’s brain.
Leonard put the key away and forgot about it and read Dracula. He said he liked it pretty good and thought it would have scared him more had it not been for the crack house next door. Look out there and see that happening, it’s hard for some guy with fangs to scare you much. Guys next door were bigger vampires: clutch of assholes made you want drugs way a vampire wanted blood. Made it so you’d do anything to have it. Rob and lie, murder your lovers, take up astrology and reading cozy mysteries.
After we’d been there about a week, Leonard quit using his cane and replaced the broken bottles on the bottle tree. I think he was taunting the folks next door to shoot them out, looking for some excuse to exchange their heads, mix up their internal organs.
One night he woke me up calling out “You sonsabitches” in his sleep. He was making me nervous. He kept the shotgun a little too close. I felt things were coming down on Leonard that were bigger than he was. Somewhere in all this, he had determined the assholes next door were the cause for Uncle Chester’s death. And maybe they were. Old Uncle Chester had been everything Leonard knew about manhood.
Leonard had been raised by his grandmother, but it was his uncle he came to see summers, and it was his uncle who taught him what it was to be masculine. Taught him about the woods and guns and carpentry and the appreciation of books. Encouraged him to make something of his life, gave him backbone. Then, when Leonard was a young man and realized he was gay and told his uncle, it had all fallen apart.
But be that as it may, his uncle had formed him, had taken him like dough and shaped him and baked him and made him who he was, and no matter how I felt about Uncle Chester’s disowning Leonard, I had to admit, he had done a good job. Or a job that had held up till now—up until Uncle Chester came back into Leonard’s life, came back after he was dead like some kind of ghost. And not a happy one.
* * *
One Saturday afternoon, hot as the blazes, I was up on the roof with my shirt off, cooking up a skin cancer, considering breaking my ban on ice-cold beer, and Florida Grange showed up. She was driving a little gray Toyota, and when she got out of the car I saw she was outfitted in a simple sky-blue dress that showed lots of leg and happily threatened to show a little more.
She stood in the drive and put a hand over her eyes like an Indian scout and called up to me. “Leonard here?”
“He’s in town. Went to get some supplies.”
“Oh. Well, I came to visit my mama, thought I’d drop by and see how things are coming along. And I got another paper for Leonard to sign. I missed it at the office.”
“One minute.”
I got my shirt off a sawed oak limb and pulled it on. It was a cotton jean shirt with the sleeves bobbed short and it felt good and soft against my warm, sweaty skin. I sucked in my gut while I buttoned it, just in case Florida was watching. I climbed down by method of the oak.
I dropped out of the tree, wiped my hands on my pants, smiled, and went over to see her. I stuck out a hand and we shook. She had the same soft hand and the same rattling bracelets. Her hair was dark and wild, like a storm cloud. The wind picked up the smell of her perfume and gave it to me. I needed that like a punch in the teeth.
I caught my reflection in her car windshield. I looked like shit, but my teeth were clean. I’d brushed with my own toothbrush not long ago, and I’d even used mouthwash. Progress was being made.
“Would you like something to drink, Miss Grange?”
“Florida?”
“Yeah. That’s right. Florida.”
“Yes. I would like something to drink.”
“I’ll get it. It’d be best to sit out here on the porch. We don’t have air-conditioning.”
“That’ll be fine.”
“We’ve got Coke. Diet Coke. Ice tea. Beer. We’ve got some nonalcoholic beer too. Sharp’s. It’s pretty good.”
“I’ll
have ice tea. No sugar.”
I went in the house and poured her tea and got myself a Sharp’s. I had discovered I actually preferred the nonalcoholic beer to the real thing. It was the taste I liked, not the results.
I carried the tea and Sharp’s onto the porch. Florida was seated in the glider Leonard and I had installed. I had fastened the bolts to the porch roof. I hoped I had done a good job. I’d have hated for Florida Grange to bust her shapely ass.
I gave her the tea and sat down on the other side of the glider and mentally groped for small talk. I almost said something about the weather but restrained myself. I tried not to look at her legs, which were bare and smooth looking. I wondered if they were as soft as her hand.
“You living here?” she asked.
“For now. I’m helping Leonard get the place in shape to sell.”
“I see.”
We sat in silence and sipped our drinks. An old black Chevy chugged along the street and an elderly black face looked out of it at us, looked away, and looked back. The driver was trying to determine if any miscegenation was going on.
It wasn’t, though I was hopeful, in a fantasy sort of way. Actually, seemed to me, from here on out, I’d have to be content to look at Florida Grange’s legs and sneak a look at her panties when she got in or out of her car, way I used to do with girls when I was in high school.
Thought of that made me feel sort of ill. Guys, they’re some piece of work. Next thing I knew I’d be putting quarters in filling station restroom rubber machines, trying to get those special gift items you bought when you really didn’t need a rubber. The Instant Pussy, a French Tickler that looked like a plastic squid, and the little book of sex jokes.
Here was an intelligent professional woman, and all I could think about was how much I’d like to dork her. I had to think about something else. Thing to do was to talk to her the way you’d talk to any interesting professional in the law business, male or female.
“You get many whiplash cases?”
“What?”
“You know—”
“Oh. Now and then. I mean, a couple. I mainly do wills, stuff like that.”