IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO roll paint right, across concentric horizontal loops of siliconized acrylic caulk. After Elaine left I put the brush aside and rummaged around in the garage until I found an old roller with a nap used for rough surfaces. My wife wanted the house a hue the paint company paint-namers tabbed Saharan Winter Sand, which most sane individuals outside of the house-painting business would call “tan.” I took my roller and pan outside, my aluminum extension handle, and the long ladder. The beads of caulk were stuck so thick it felt like driving over a Walmart parking lot of speed bumps paved one after another. It didn’t take me one hard roll up and down to have a flashback of little league baseball, and that feeling of bees in the hands when you swing and hit a pitch in on the handle. The sound that emanated was not unlike a stick drug across an expensive, tightly cropped picket fence.
“That’s a nice mural of the Riverside dirt track stands after a muddy Saturday night,” some guy in a Camaro yelled out at me as I stood in the middle of the front yard not admiring my work. I turned around and waved. I laughed, and even thought deep down how this guy probably knew exactly what I did to get back at a wife. I watched him ease by slowly, and paid attention to his gravity-prone mouth sag, and thought to myself, Now there’s a man who’s had destiny knock on his forehead more than once before he thought about answering the door.
I thought how maybe the same could be said about me, too, for about three seconds. Then I looked up at the sky for rainclouds, and wondered if rain might wash down Saharan Winter Sand over caulk lips over and over until one smooth facade showed that might satisfy wife, real estate agent, and prospective buyer alike.
A thunderstorm wasn’t in the forecast, just as Elaine told me.
I yelled back, “Come here and tell me that,” like fighting words.
I knew this guy—I’d seen him over at Compton’s store—and he always meant business one way or the other. He was one of the Shirley boys who ran an auto body shop nearby, pushing and pulling dents out of car panels and hoods. Ray Shirley also ran dirt track at Riverside, of course, in the modified division. One time I took Elaine over there and everyone jumped out of the stands holding their faces. I said, “Someone farted.”
What happened in fact was that there was a drunk guy raising hell below us, and there was this old woman who had a canister of mace, she blew the thing in the drunk man’s direction, and then all hell broke loose. Much like that Canadian Arctic wind not showing up on the weather screen, this woman didn’t understand how the wind blowing toward her might send spray backwards.
That’s what happened. Elaine and I stood there while everyone ran from the bleachers. Elaine said, “What the hell?” like that.
We smoked cigarettes, too, and didn’t smell or feel a thing.
This old guy in a wheelchair up top with us shook his head and said, “Again. It’s happened again. When will people understand stock car racing?”
I thought about the double-amputee when I returned to the ladder, after the Shirley boy drove off. I thought to myself, There’s a way caulk might make his life bearable, if one of those companies came up with a more pliable prosthetic limb.
I got up on the ladder and got my face close, is what I’m saying. This is no lie: I caught myself wondering why a Supreme Being didn’t invent regeneration for human beings. And at that moment something picked me off the ladder and threw me to the ground.
I almost broke my first hip at age thirty-three.
“YOU DID IT all on purpose, Louis. Don’t lie to me,” Elaine said when she got home. “What’d you do, jump off the ladder? I bet you had to go up that thing ten times and dive off to get a swelling that bad.”
I was in a tub of Epsom salts with an ice pack on the side of my ass. It had been years since I’d bruised myself, and I couldn’t remember if heat or ice came first. One time ten months before, I crashed the oxygen delivery van into the front of some old guy’s house and tore up my knees. This was winter and I’d lost control going down his driveway. He came outside with his walker and handed me two Darvons. I sang in the ambulance, later.
“Is it raining outside yet?” I asked Elaine.
“What did you do to paint the house? Did you get out a little watercolor brush and draw lines?” she asked.
My ice melted. For a second I wondered if I could create a thunderstorm in the bathroom with enough ice and hot water. I said, “I used a roller instead. Then on top of the ladder I looked up and saw these buzzards circling. They thought they’d found a dead polar bear rolled over, I bet. I leaned back, and then fell off, I swear. Help me out of here.”
Elaine walked away. I struggled around, then finally slid out over the edge. When my wife returned she said, “Good. I found six Fine Red Sable brushes from when I took that painting class in college. Fill in the gaps, Louis.”
I think she might’ve meant that in a double-entendre kind of way, now.
SHE DID. ELAINE didn’t come back that night, or even the next morning to pick up clothes for work. I waited until noon the next day to call her at work, and then only got an answering-machine message about what number to call to order the new chinois with beech-wood dowel and stand. Of course I went outside with my tiny brushes and started filling the white indentions by hand. I knew later that the job wouldn’t be so difficult if I’d’ve only used the eight-inch brush and painted from horizon to horizon.
Ray Shirley came by and said, “I seen you fall off the ladder. I seen you in the rearview mirror and felt it was part my fault for breaking your concentration.”
I said, “My foot slipped.” I felt like an idiot holding the artist brush.
Ray Shirley said, “You aim to fill in every spot you missed with that little thing? Goddamn, boy, I didn’t think you’d be good on detail work, what with the way you caulked the whole place.”
My hip hurt. I’d put Icy Hot on it earlier, which burned my fingertips, which made it hard to hold the brush, which felt like a thin branding iron in my hand. I said, “Originally I only planned on teaching my wife a lesson. I think she left me, though.”
Ray Shirley stood on the ground, looking across the street. His Camaro idled chugging in my driveway. He said, “I’m on my third. The first two didn’t understand racing. Third one’s half blind. She don’t get scared watching me, ever.”
I started to say how I could’ve used a blind wife—and even got my mouth open to say so—when some hand reached down again and pushed me. I almost broke my second hip, then. Ray Shirley stepped out of the way without looking up. He got me to my feet and held my arms over my head so I’d get my breath back. “You seem to be the kind of fellow what needs a job on the ground, son. Hell, you need a job below the ground, like a miner, or a grave digger.”
I tried to say, “Or a cave guide,” but couldn’t get it out.
OUT OF MEANNESS I finished painting the fouled front of the house, then the rest of it with the regular paint brush sideways. The place looked pretty good when I finished. From afar the ripples weren’t even noticeable—like maybe two miles away—and up close it only looked like I’d bought wood from a lumberyard with dull and wiggly band saws.
This process took me less than a week; I forget meteorological lingo, but it may have been Indian summer. What I’m saying is, it was the end of October and early November, and still warm enough to paint at night. There was no need for spotlights. I’m no geologist or chemist, but I bet siliconized acrylic caulk has some kind of phosphorescent properties that make it glow in the dark. I almost needed a welder’s mask to see what I did and where I’d been.
In my mind I saw Elaine driving by the house at dawn, checking to see if I covered the caulk adequately. When cars passed by I never turned around for two reasons—I didn’t want to make eye contact with my wife, and both my hips seemed fused to the point of petrification. I think there’s some kind of toy where this guy goes up and down a ladder, stiff, and I could’ve modeled for it.
I didn’t turn around, but I did yell out, “Dead man caul
king,” more than once I swear.
Understand, I didn’t call Elaine up at work, and made a point not to look in her closet to see if somehow she’d returned while I went out for booze or cigarettes so she could scavenge up all of her low-cut blouses and slit skirts. I didn’t pace back and forth, seeing as how I couldn’t. Not once did I get on the telephone and call Elaine’s parents, her boss at home, various clients I knew she kept an ongoing customer relationship with, the police, or that guy who has a show on TV about missing persons. Somehow I knew maybe Elaine underwent a seven-year itch thing known usually to people like me, and that she’d return in time all apologetic, spiritual, calm, and ready to patch up anything wrong in our relationship. I felt certain she’d saved vacation and sick days up in order to meditate in New Mexico, or Nag’s Head, or some real ashram over in real India.
She didn’t.
I never called Elaine’s old roommate Amy, on purpose. Already I knew my wife had given up and left her job—that she’d learned from me. I thought about that poor kid Jason with his mottoes, and wondered if he knew Elaine.
My wife called once and I said, “Hello,” and she hung up, not knowing we’d gotten that star 69 device. Elaine had left everything we’d accumulated in order to live with Amy, the woman worried about what uncircumcised people might mean to her future. My wife had moved to Delaware, of all places.
I sat in the living room alone like a man alone in his living room. I thought about how this house now stood caulked beyond what full-time caulkers might agree upon.
Ray Shirley finally showed up again and I waddled to the front door and let him inside. He said, “I got people working the pits who don’t care as much about life as you do.”
I sat inside my house steamed for two reasons. I said, “What?”
“I want to ask you if you’re working any more in a real job,” Ray said. “I know you’re not working a real job getting paid and all.”
I’d been thinking about oxygen. I’d been thinking about how someone out there needs to start up a business as an oxygen-tent caulker, just in case. I said, “I’m working. I don’t get paid, but I’m working. It’s hard to explain, man.”
Ray Shirley looked out the front window where my eight-foot stepladder still stood. He said, “I have one word for you.” I said, “Uh-huh.”
“Pitman,” he said.
My whole life flashed before my eyes, with the exception of the time Baudelaire came to me in college. I said, “Right, pal.”
Ray Shirley said, “My boy I had working for me down at the garage just quit. He worked Saturday nights when I raced, too. I think you’re the man I need for the spot he left.”
I nodded. There was no way I could afford my tan igloo another year without a job. I’d called my oxygen boss, drunk and begging, but he’d found someone stupid and reliable to fill my place. I said, “I don’t know anything about cars.”
Ray Shirley shook his head sideways. He mentioned how I needed to get over Elaine, and nothing could do it better than learning the intricacies of carburetors, pistons, valves, and timing chains. He said there weren’t enough people out there who could fill holes left wide and inviting by people who ran fourway stop signs, or followed too closely. I limped each step outside toward his car, on my way to find my new job, the one he said God called upon me to do.
These days I sit on an upside-down dry-wall bucket, waiting for customers to offer their dinged and dented vehicles. Let me say that I’m not the first person to notice how modern science should’ve invented a Bondo of sorts by now, to smooth over damage we’ve done to what still flutters on beneath the rib cage.
WHEN CHILDREN COUNT
THE ONLY THING MADAME TAMMY SAID THAT MAY HAVE been overheard went something like, “Oh, hell, it doesn’t matter—I’ll take paper.” She stood in line at a regular check-out aisle in a Winn-Dixie halfway between Charlotte and Atlanta. Fifty customers stood in the 10 Items or Less line. Tammy only bought a roll of paper towels, some fingernail polish remover, Jewish rye, and pimento cheese, even though she stood between two women with full carts. She held a twenty-dollar bill. It was noon, and Tammy had just read a hundred palms at the Monday-Thursday Chesnee flea market near the North Carolina border, in peach and apple country.
“You sound exactly like my dead sister,” this woman said, pushing her full cart into Tammy’s backside. “I ain’t never heard nothing like that. Say this: ‘I will never, ever order a club sandwich here with bacon again, what with the ptomaine.’ Say it. Say.”
Tammy turned around and smiled. She still wore the black turban, the black smock, the golden spangles and half-moons. She stood six feet tall, and raised one eyebrow for emphasis. The woman behind her kept putting groceries on the belt: white bread, frozen dinner rolls, a slew of Vienna sausages, potted meat, Spam, diapers for both kids and adults. “Club sandwich ptomaine,” Tammy said.
“Well I’ll be damned,” the woman said. “It’s as if my sister spoke from the grave.” The cashier gave Tammy her change. “It’s the last thing I ever heard her say. She ate a bad sandwich over at this little place best known for its barbecue, she made herself known how she felt about the food, and then she died later on that afternoon.”
The cashier said, “Do you want one of the game pieces in order to see if you can win a million dollars instantly, or save them up for weekly bargains?”
Madame Tammy said, “I don’t believe in playing games at the store. I don’t like getting my hopes up.” She stepped forward and took her one sack.
The woman behind Tammy held out her hand for the little perforated cardboard square. “Listen, I’ll pay you to let my little niece call you up and say something. If you’ll just talk to her a little bit. She keeps wanting to call up her momma in heaven and all, and me and my husband—we got custody now—we don’t know how to handle it. We don’t know how to handle it. We just don’t know. We don’t. It’s hard explaining some things.” Tammy turned around and nodded, although she just wanted out of there.
The cashier looked back and forth between them. She slid items across the scanner. Between blips she said, “My mother died when I was twelve. I’d just about forgotten what she sounded like until one day the TV was on and this lady was doing a commercial for getting your credit fixed. It sounded just like my momma. I hope to hell that woman doing commercials don’t make it in Hollywood, seeing as I couldn’t take hearing that voice oncet a week or nothing. It was just a local commercial, though.”
A two-for-a-dollar frozen pizza didn’t connect. The cashier kept running a flat box of sausage-topping over the eye. “Well,” Tammy said. “I’m not around much. And my brother’s coming to stay with me awhile. What would I say?”
The woman said to the cashier, “They’re two for a dollar. Just ring the goddamn thing in! It’s written on a big orange thing there. Just ring it in.”
“Store policy,” said the cashier. She had braces, and some boy’s high school ring on her index finger. Tammy thought she didn’t look more than twelve at the time, and remembered how she felt when her own father left some three decades earlier.
The pizza clicked finally. Tammy said, “Sure. Tell your niece to call me up.” She reached in her pocketbook and pulled out a business card. It had an eyeball on an open palm. “Since I’m not there most of the time you might tell your niece that the pay phone’s pretty busy up in Heaven, in case she can’t get through.”
The woman said, “Her name’s Edwina, but we call her Eddie. She’s a special child. We call her Special Eddie. Listen. You ain’t got an answering machine, do you? That might confuse her—why her momma won’t pick up and all. Hey, do this if you don’t mind: change your message. I’ll pay you and all.”
Tammy nodded. She didn’t ask the woman how they would get together for payments, and so on. “I’ll do what I can do. And I can do, I promise.” She didn’t go into details about how she searched every day for her own father at flea markets across America.
MADAME TAMMY DIDN’T want a roo
mmate, wayward brother or not. She had enough problems, and a list of needs longer than a desert turtle’s lifeline. She had to buy rubber-soled boots, seeing as a man selling stolen rebar at the table next to her got hit by lightning last Wednesday down at the Pickens County Flea Market. She needed to hire a new gofer—the school year had started and she no longer had a fifteen-year-old to depend on—to scour the various markets she worked, in search of old men selling used golf balls. Madame Tammy needed to take the only snapshot she owned of her father, Shorty, and get it touched up by one of those photographers who filled in cracks, tears, and fades. Over the years she had felt certain that her father didn’t do stunt work in Hollywood like he wrote in those couple letters thirty years earlier; although she wasn’t a true psychic she felt certain he still dove into dark, still, nighttime water hazards, retrieved duffers’ errant approach shots, and cleaned them up for resale more than likely.
Madame Tammy needed complete silence at night so she could sit in a chair and replenish herself with hope. Her father could’ve died from cancer, stroke, or heart attack by now.
“I don’t have room for anyone, Lamar,” she told her brother. “I live in a little place. I’m hardly here, too. Hell, I live in the back of my van more often than not.” Right away Tammy thought about how most people might’ve said, “If you’re hardly there, then you’ll hardly notice me.” It wasn’t that she felt embarrassed about her living conditions between flea markets—she owned a vertical, three-story, fifteen-hundred-square-foot house on top of Tryon Peak, near the South Carolina/North Carolina border. Some days she referred to the house as the Tower. After particularly fruitful flea-market days she called it the Steeple, and on bad days the Finger.
Lamar used a phone card to call her. He was already in Opelika, trying to stay off Interstate 85, on his way. He said, “This thing only lasts ten minutes. Look, I just need a few days—a week at most.”
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