Collected Short Stories: Volume III

by Barry Rachin

  Ava kept to her room for the rest of the morning. Around one in the afternoon, Rufus tapped lightly on the open door. “I’m finished stripping the paper. Going to grab lunch.”

  Ava nodded. “Okay.”

  “When I get back, I’ll size the walls and spackle any cracks or holes. Get everything ready for tomorrow.” Ava gazed down the hallway. All the old wallpaper had been stripped away and neatly bundled in trash bags. “You live here with your father?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Grew up in this house. I work second shift over at the Gas Mart on County Street.”

  “The one with the blue and white sign?”

  “That’s right. I was planning to go to college last September, but then my mother died and I decided to take some time off.” The gangly man smiled and scratched his earlobe. He would have been modestly handsome ten years earlier, Ava mused. Rufus still wasn’t bad looking for a working stiff in his late twenties.

  “What were you planning to major in at college?”

  “Philosophy.... existentialism mostly.”

  “That’s out of my league.” Rufus yanked his car keys out of his pocket and headed for the door.

  After lunch, the paperhanger ran a bead of dark blue masking tape around the baseboard and with a fine-nap roller began coating the walls with sizing. An hour later, Ava came back into the living room dragging a Hoover carpet cleaner behind her. “I was trying to steam the runner in the entryway, but the machine doesn’t work right.”

  Rufus put the paint roller aside, dropped down on his haunches and inspected the undercarriage. “There’s your problem,” he said, indicating a flat piece of plastic which extended across the front of the vacuum. “Someone must have whacked the front carriage and loosened the screws holding the squeegee plate in place.”

  “Can it be fix?”

  The man ran a thumb and index finger over his droopy moustache. “Just tighten the screws or drill pilot holes on either side,” he tapped the plastic unit where the new holes needed to be positioned, “and that should do the trick.” He rose to his feet. “If you got an electric drill and small drill bit I can save you the bother and take care of it right now.”

  Ava got down on her hands and knees. Now she could see the problem along with the potential solution. Without the plate wedged firmly against the floor there was no suction to pull the sudsy grime out of the rug. Her brother, Gary, had borrowed the machine a month earlier to clean his rugs. Did Gary know the machine was broken yesterday when he returned it? Probably. He had a disconcerting habit of borrowing things without asking and returning them damaged, empty or otherwise nonfunctional. “No, I’d rather do it myself.”

  Rufus’ face melted in a broad smile. “Like I said earlier, I’m real good with machinery and dead things. It’s just people I can’t manage.”

  With a Phillips head screw driver Ava fixed the carpet cleaner.

  She didn’t need to drill pilot holes as Rufus suggested. Locating a container of stubby, sheet metal screws under her father’s work bench, she simply replaced the rusty old screws, firming them hand tight. The new fasteners pulled the faceplate into proper alignment and, when she brought the machine back upstairs from the basement, it worked like new, sucking the wet sludge into the waste tray. Ava washed the front hallway runner and entryway rugs before heading out to work.

  The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ...

  Ava didn’t know if fixing the carpet steamer qualified as a sublime truth that she could structure her life around, but it certainly made her feel a little more in control of things. Later that night around two in the morning, Mr. Frick got up to use the bathroom. Seeing the light on in his daughter’s room, he stuck his head in the doorway. “How was work?”

  Ava put the Kierkegaard reader aside. “A lot drier than yesterday.”

  “Your brother stopped by.”

  “Yeah, I know. He dropped off the rug steamer.”

  Mr. Frick shook his head. “Gary came back again earlier this afternoon.” He pawed at the oak floor with a leather slipper. Ava noticed that, since her mother’s death, her father looked frailer, withered and parched as an autumn leaf. “Apparently, your brother, the investment counselor, made some bad decisions in the bear market and needs to borrow money.”

  Ava cringed. “How much?”

  “Quite a bit,” Mr. Frick remarked opaquely. “Problem is, I love your brother dearly. I just don’t trust him. Never did. I told Gary no… he would have to look elsewhere.”

  “And what was his response?”

  Mr. Frick’s features contorted in a melancholy grimace. “Not to be denied, he wanted me to take out a home equity loan... sort of a cash advance on his share of the inheritance.”

  Ava felt a tightening in her chest. Her breath was coming in shallow, choppy gasps, and the young girl had to pause while the rage subsided before she could respond. “The man has no shame.”

  “In my will,” Mr. Frick spoke with brutal authority, “you’re the trustee… power of attorney. “ Her father cleared his throat. “Your also the sole beneficiary, since I’m leaving you everything - the house, furnishings, whatever remains from investments and retirement savings.”

  Ava stared at him in disbelief. “Is that fair?” She wasn’t thinking so much of Gary, the scheming schmoe, but rather her sister-in-law and two nieces, the oldest of which was just entering middle school.

  Hoisting his flannel pajama bottoms up higher on his skinny waist, Mr. Frick gazed at his daughter somberly. “Du weiss nit fun kein hochmas.”

  The boiler clicked on in the basement and Ava could hear the water pump pushing the heat through the house. “Unlike your brother,” the older man translated, “you don’t know from any funny stuff”. “Gary, the high-roller, drives a Cadillac Seville, vacations in Acapulco twice a year and wears custom-tailored suits,” he added coldly. “Let him reevaluate his present circumstances and learn to live within his means.” The widower trudged back to bed. When he was gone, Ava breathed in deeply and let the air stream out of her lungs in a barely audible groan.

  The other day when her troublesome brother returned the rug cleaner, Ava was fixing herself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. He looked distraught, utterly exhausted. “When the hell are you going to get a real job and move out on your own?”

  “Nice way to open a conversation.” Ava smeared mayonnaise on the bread then arranged the cheddar cheese and tomato slices. Since the late fall, native-grown tomatoes were hard to come by and prices had skyrocketed ridiculously. Ava paid seventy-nine cents for the plump, vine-ripened beauty she was positioning on the sandwich. She only needed half. Her father could chop what remained in a salad with his supper.

  “Well it’s true,” he shot back petulantly. “You’re almost twenty years old and act like some shiftless eccentric.”

  “Lacking focuss doesn’t imply dishonesty,” Ava replied. “Shiftless people may be lazy freeloaders and hopelessly ineffectual. Being shiftless doesn’t automatically make them disreputable.”

  Gary squirmed uncomfortably and gazed out the window at the bare trees. A blue jay was picking through the empty seed husks on the metal feeding station in search of the last few bits of edible protein. Ava kept a stash of sunflower seeds and cracked corn in the basement, replenishing the feeder on a weekly basis from late November through March. “A person can be shiftless,” she continued, “and still maintain his personal dignity. Of course that presupposes the individual in question does nothing flagrantly dishonest.” Ava watched as a pad of butter melted on medium heat. She lowered the sandwich into the Teflon pan and pressed down with a spatula. “Exactly how much of Mrs. Sardelli’s retirement savings did you squander?”

  Earlier in the week, an article appeared in the Community Section of the Brandenberg Gazette: Local investment advisor indicted for misappropriation of client’s funds. Gary had covertly moved an elderly woman’s entire life savings from government-bac
ked securities to a high-risk hedge fund that relied aggressively on selling short, leverage, swaps, derivatives and arbitrage. Three weeks into the transfer, the fund tanked and investors lost everything. Now the district attorney was indicting Ava’s brother for fraudulent misappropriation of funds.

  “Does dad know?” He brushed her original question aside.

  “Not yet.” She flipped the sandwich over and pressed down with the spatula again. Gary sat down and massaged the back of his neck distractedly. “You could sell your house,” Ava suggested, “and try to negotiate with the authorities for a reduced sentence.”

  “And where the hell are my wife and kids gonna live?” He whined with unfocussed rage.

  Ava wasn’t about to suggest that he move back home. The disgrace would kill her father. And anyway, adding Gary, the flimflam artist, and his nuclear family to the mix would turn their idyllic existence upside down. Try as she might, Ava couldn’t muster a grain of sympathy for her brother. “I’m the job Gypsy,” she muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  She removed the sandwich from the pan and sliced it at a diagonal. Placing a dill pickle on the side of the plate, she brought the meal to the kitchen table. “When I finished high school last year and couldn’t find steady work, you used to ridicule me. ‘Ava’s a brain-dead, job gypsy… can’t settle down, score a husband, make a normal life.’” “I’d rather be a shiftless job gypsy living at home with my widowed father,” she observed, raising the pickle to her mouth, “than a two-bit crook.”

  In the morning, Rufus arrived early and began cutting the wallpaper into seven-foot strips. With an aluminum square, he marked the pattern repeats, trimming the paper at a right angle. Using a plum bob, he determined the placement for the first sheet. “How did you make out with the carpet steamer?”

  “Great!” Ava was sitting on the third riser of the stairs leading to the upper level, nursing her morning coffee. “Once I got that vacuum plate screwed down, it worked like new.”

  Rufus rolled a sheet of prepasted wallpaper inside out and submerged it in a plastic tray of lukewarm water. Beginning in a corner near the picture window, he positioned the sheet against the wall. Mr. Frick had chosen a sedate fruit pattern in pastel green and gold hues. The cream-colored background caught the early morning light brightening the room while creating the illusion of more space.

  “Nice choice,” he said with genuine enthusiasm. Rufus brushed the wet sheet out with the bristle brush, smoothing in both directions from the middle toward the outer edges. When the first piece lay flat against the wall, he ran a small tool with a serrated, metal wheel over the bottom edge trimming away the excess and pressed the paper snug against the baseboard molding. “These older houses,” Rufus noted, “got character. The high ceilings and ornate cornices – you don’t see that anymore.”

  “Yes, the place has special warmth.” The girl was still in shock over recent, domestic developments. Ava and her father had their own, separate agendas. Mr. Frick never questioned what Ava was doing with her botched-up life. For sure, her father was going through his own dark night of the soul since losing his wife. Days could pass without seeing one another, and yet their mutually exclusive lives intersected in random, unforeseeable ways. Which is to say, they loved each other at a safe and manageable distance.

  Du weiss nit fun kein hochmas. The pithy, Yiddish adage left nothing unsaid. Ava would get everything, while Gary received a lengthy prison sentence and the Bronx cheer. “Are you familiar with the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard?” Ava asked.

  Rufus chuckled in a gruff, throaty manner. “I quit high school in the eleventh grade. Outside of an occasional Playboy or Hustler, I haven’t read a goddamn thing since then.” He grabbed up a second sheet and soaked it in the tub. “Why do you ask?”

  “Since high school, I have been trying to structure my life around Kierkegaard’s guiding principles.”

  “And how’s that going?” Rufus eased the dripping sheet in place, butting it firmly up against the first.

  “Hard to say. It’s not the sort of thing where you go to sleep in a metaphysical quandary and wake up the next morning thoroughly enlightened.” The wallpaper, as it inched across the room, left to right, was coming nicely. “Hopefully, before I’m carted off to a nursing home in geriatric diapers, things will fall into place.”

  Ava went to the market. When she returned Rufus had already finished two walls and was trimming the paper over the fireplace. “My father left a check for you. I’ll place it on the dining room table, if I leave before you’re finished. Rufus, who was balancing on a ladder, grunted something unintelligible. “You’re doing a swell job!” Ava waited a discrete interval, but there was no reply.

  In December the weather turned sharply colder with temperatures dipping well below freezing in the early morning hours. Ava began dressing in layers. At the Emerald Square Mall just over the town line in North Attleboro, she bought a pair of fleece-lined snow boots, thermal underwear and a week’s worth of heavy-duty, woolen socks.

  Snow descended the first week in January. From the relative warmth of the gas station office, Ava watched the fluffy whiteness envelope the blacktop. An hour later with the snow already several inches deep, a metallic blue dodge Caravan pulled up at the last row of pumps. Ava traipsed out to car. The driver didn’t even bother to roll down the window. Rather, he cracked it open, an infinitesimal sliver, and barked, “Fill it with regular… check the oil.”

  Thump! The hood of the minivan lurched upward as the driver pulled back on the latch release. Ava loosened the gas cap. She topped off the tank, raised the hood vertical and pounded on the driver’s side window with a gloved fist. “We need to be clear about something.”

  Reluctantly, he lowered the window. The man’s pleated tuxedo shirt was outfitted with shiny black studs, a cummerbund encircling his waist. “Is there a problem?” The tone was shrill, petulant. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Problem is, you’re always in a hurry.” Ava leaned her elbows into the van depositing a clump of dry, powdery snow in the man’s lap, “As I recall, every time I fill your gas tank you ask me to check the oil but never purchase anything else. If I didn’t know any better …” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

  The man shoved a credit card through the window. “Forget about the stupid oil.”

  Ava processed the card and brought it back to the car. The fellow mumbled something angrily under his breath. “Excuse me?”

  “Just close the hood so I can get back on the highway.”

  Ava gazed out across the whiteness. The dry cold didn’t bother her. The new woolen socks and fleece-lined work boots kept her feet toasty warm. If anything, the crisp, early-season snow was invigorating. She bent down and stuck her nose up against the frosty glass. “Not this time.” She strolled back to the office, turning around in time to see the Caravan fishtailing crazily out of the gas station.

  A steady flow of customers passed through the Texaco Gas Mart up until dusk, when the streets became completely deserted except for an occasional snow plow. In the cramped office, Ava flipped the space heater on high to take the chill out of the air. Around eight-thirty a foot of snow was already blanketing the ground. A lone pickup truck skidded around the corner and pulled into the station. Rufus, wearing a stocking cap and green plaid jacket, slogged through the packed snow toward the front of the building. “Any of that wallpaper fall down yet?” the tall man inquired with a sly smile. He had a face like a lopsided, weather-beaten pair of shoes, the heels worn away at a perverse angle.

  “It’s still where you left it,” Ava grinned back at him.

  “Hell of a night to be pumping gas.” Rufus arranged himself in a chair and extended his damp boots toward the heater.

  “I might not be long for this job.” She told him about the musician floundering around in the snow.

  Rufus made several vulgar references regarding the piano player’s parentage then cracked his knuckles.
“That Danish philosopher you mentioned the last time I saw you...”

  “That would be Soren Kierkegaard.”

  “What would Mr. K say about the bonehead in the blue Caravan?”

  Ava thought a moment. “‘Think of a hospital where the patients are dying like flies. Every method is tried to make things better but it’s no use. Where does the sickness come from? It comes from the building; the whole building is full of poison.”

  “Society is morbidly sick, and the piano player is Typhoid Mary.”

  “In a matter of speaking, yes.”

  Rufus let loose a throaty chuckle, the steamy air floating toward the ceiling. “At least you turned the tables on the creep by refusing to do his bidding.”

  “If he complains to the boss, I could lose my job.”

  “Do you care?”

  Ava grinned brazenly. “No, not at all.” A car pulled into the station and the girl went out to pump the gas. “Why did you come here in this awful weather?” she asked when the customer was gone.

  “I liked talking to you.”

  “But you hate people. You’re a self-proclaimed misanthrope.”

  “True enough,” Rufus returned, “but you’re the exception that makes the rule.”

  “I’ll take that as a backhanded compliment.” Ava slid open the ‘Lost and Found’ drawer and pulled out the velvety, pea green pouch. “What do you make of this?” She emptied the contents on the table.

  Rufus stared at a ratty-looking book, the cover of which had been completely torn away, and three brass coins. The three coins were about the size of quarters but thicker with square holes in the center. The surface of each was inscribed with an exotic script. “Are these subway tokens from another planet?”

  “This,” Ava picked up the frayed manuscript, “is a copy of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Change, and the coins are used to predict the future.” She told him about the fellow with a penchant for lottery tickets and chewing tobacco who ran off in the rainstorm. “A week ago Tuesday, was the two-month anniversary so I decided to open the bag and take a peek.”