Add This to the List of Things That You Are

Home > Other > Add This to the List of Things That You Are > Page 21
Add This to the List of Things That You Are Page 21

by Chris Fink


  The little man in the stoplight turns from red to green, and Timothy and Reka cross over. He feels ashamed that his thoughts are off elsewhere instead of on this current emergency. He wonders briefly what Reka could be thinking. Then the wall of protesters with their ugly signs demand attention. The protesters shout murderer and sinner and coward and one of them uses the word profligate and another one says Mom and Dad. Reka has to drag him through. She’s wearing new boots he’s never seen before with heavy heels, like those skull crushers. The door is in sight when a man in a heavy flannel shirt grabs him by the arm. Timothy turns. The man doesn’t look malicious, but the pressure on his arm is such that Timothy knows there’s no resisting it.

  Hey, the man says. Listen here. His voice is pleading and friendly. There’s still time, he says. Just take another day to think it over. You know, that’s your little fishing buddy in there.

  Let’s go, Reka says, and pulls Timothy in the door.

  Later, in the waiting room, Timothy wonders how the big man knew exactly what to say. Like the riveter girl in the bar, this man seemed to be able to see right into him, into his weakness.

  V

  Kidney stones, Timothy tells the tenants at Rooms for Men. Reka would stay with him for a couple of days to recover.

  How’s the patient? Fred asks when he passes Timothy in the hallway. Fred roams the hallways at Rooms for Men like a gray ghost, always some project underway, unclogging a leak or puttying some tile.

  She’s doing fine, Timothy says. Recovering. Not moving around too much yet.

  Let me know if you need anything, he says.

  On the second day, Reka’s feeling good enough to get up and around. I could use some fresh air, she says. You know, there’s someplace I’ve always wanted to see.

  Name it, Timothy says. I’ll show it to you. Fresh air sounds great, anything to escape the humid shroud in the little apartment.

  I’ve always wanted to see that widow’s walk.

  I’ll get the key from Fred.

  Now that she’s had the abortion, Timothy wonders if maybe he does love Reka after all. She made that sacrifice for him. Like the sacrifice she had made for the other lover, her ex-husband. Not everyone would pay such a cost, and it seems to Timothy like a thing of value.

  Timothy leads her gingerly into the attic. A bare bulb burns from the ceiling cord, revealing Fred’s little chest of Western wear, and his stockpile of antiques. Several chandeliers and gold chalices are piled in disarray on one side of the room. The other is stacked in framed panes of stained glass. There are dozens of these panes. In between rests a jumble of old copper and tin street lamps, stacks of tin ceiling tiles and boxes of brass fixtures, door knobs and plates. Even without realizing the value of these items, Timothy knows it’s a treasure trove. Fred has been collecting for decades, since back when old junk was just old junk, not yet varnished with the stately term, antique. When they tore the buildings down for the Park East Freeway, for instance, Fred just wandered through and took what he liked.

  Fred’s attic was once part of the boardinghouse. It was amazing to think that whole families lived up here, before Fred bought the place, before it was Rooms for Men. Fred told Timothy the story of the German immigrant woman who raised five children in this attic. She lived her whole adult life in this house, moving to Timothy’s apartment only after all her children had left and her husband had died. Timothy sees a little sink, like the sink in his apartment, covered in dust.

  Timothy guides Reka carefully past the sharp edges of the antiques toward the trap door in the ceiling leading to the widow’s walk. Besides being valuable, everything in the room seems dangerous for a woman in Reka’s condition. All these corroded old objects, angular and sharp like elbows ready to jab. He keeps her close to him as they step around the minefield of antiques to the trapdoor. Timothy is aware of his own tender feelings as he pulls the string and a stack of wooden stairs is revealed, leading up into the darkness.

  Ladies first, Timothy says. He follows Reka up the dark ladder toward the padlocked roof cap, which he unlocks with the key and lifts away.

  Well, this is my first widow’s walk, Timothy says after they’ve emerged into the light.

  Mine too. She’s so reticent. Reka is clearly not yet herself.

  The flat patch of roof is bordered by an ornate wrought iron fence. The brick chimney rising another six feet above them could use some tuck-pointing, and Timothy makes a mental note to tell Fred. It’s a sunny day, but they’re bathed in the shade of the big maple tree and the chimney. There’s not much of a view, except to the ground. A widow on this walk couldn’t have seen very far. Timothy climbs over the decorative fence and looks down the steep pitch of roof. From here he can see the roof of the little wooden wren house outside his window. One of the wrens, who can tell which, climbs into the hole with something in its beak.

  Looking down from the roof, Timothy wonders if the fall would kill him. The height, maybe forty feet, along with the hard gravel, seems sufficient to do the job. As long as you went head first, you wouldn’t have to suffer much. He feels the telltale weakening behind his knees and in his groin.

  Why don’t you stand away from the edge, Reka says. You’re making me queasy.

  OK, Timothy says, but he doesn’t step over the railing just yet.

  Aren’t you scared of falling to your death? she says in an exaggerated tone.

  It would be a quick death, Timothy says in the same mood. I’m not afraid of a quick death. Just a slow one.

  Aren’t you maudlin, Reka says. Life is a slow death.

  Wow, Timothy says. I mean, that’s the most depressing thing I’ve heard in my whole life.

  Timothy peers over the side edge of the widow’s walk and catches sight of Fred, setting up his ladder. Fred struggles with the ladder, and it occurs to Timothy for the first time that he’s getting too old for this work. It’s dangerous for a man his age to be climbing ladders. Then a commotion from next door pulls his gaze the other way. He steps back to safety, next to Reka.

  They watch a man leaning over a moving box. He’s just dropped it on the porch, and the crashing of the box is what they heard. They watch as the man picks up the box up. That’s Jerry, Reka says. Good old Jerry.

  Jerry has a station wagon out on the street. He fits the box in the back end and heads back into the house. An overweight man sits on the porch with his shirt off, smoking a cigarette. They’re arguing. The big man is giving Jerry some moving advice, and Jerry is telling him where to put his advice.

  Listen to this, Timothy says to Reka. Jerry, he calls. Oh Jerry. We’re watching you. He pulls Reka behind the chimney.

  They watch from behind the chimney as the men strain their eyes into the leafy tops of the maple.

  Who’s there? a voice calls.

  Reka calls out too, her voice a high chirrup. Old Fat Baby, she calls.

  The fuck is that? Jerry says to the trees. He sways a bit, and Timothy can tell then that the man is drunk. The old bottom hunter still looking for his way.

  As if in answer, one of the wrens pipes up. It must be the paranoid male, singing danger, danger, danger.

  Timothy and Reka laugh at that. They crouch behind the chimney holding one another. Huddled together with Reka in this good hiding spot, Timothy feels a giddiness he knows Reka must share. It’s a lightness that comes from knowing you’re safe here. That no one will find you until you give yourself away.

  Acknowledgments

  Dear reader: If you’ve read anything of these pages, I owe you a debt of gratitude. Raphael Kadushin at UW Press, for your faith in this project, I thank you. And to the talented staff at UW Press for helping to pull this book off (and even helping to name it!): Thanks! Cheers to all my writer pals; you never (well, almost never) let me down—Christi Clancy, Chad Faries, Christopher Grimes, Jayson Iwen, Kristen Iversen, Phil LaMarche, Cris Mazza, Scott Sublett, Kyoko Yoshida. Scott, you love the forest, and this project needed someone to see past the trees. Dan Libm
an and Molly McNett, you were essential readers, and I owe you. Thank you to the astonishing number of journal editors who somehow said yes; the slow trickle of story publications has sustained me. Thanks to my good colleagues and friends at Beloit College. Beloit students too; I’m daily more thankful for good students than almost anything. Except my family—who puts up with this strangely inaccurate parrot’s flapping—thank goodness for you, and thank goodness you don’t watch what you say. (I know you remember it all differently.) And of course, Breja, best wife, awesome person, thank you for believing in me always. And Iris, you little spandoozler, you are a blessing.

  These stories appeared in somewhat different forms in the following publications: “High Hope for Fatalists Everywhere” in The Pinch; “The Bush Robin Sings” in Rosebud; “Three Ps” in Phoebe; “First One Out” in Elixir; “Lazy B” in North Dakota Quarterly; “Strings” in Witness; “Birds of Paradise” in Clackamas Literary Review; “Trollway” in Fifth Wednesday; and “Add This to the List of Things That You Are” in New Orleans Review.

  Chris Fink is a professor of English and environmental studies at Beloit College, where he edits the Beloit Fiction Journal. His previous book of fiction, Farmer’s Almanac, was published in 2013. His short stories have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Fifth Wednesday, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Rosebud, The Pinch, Witness, and many others. A regular contributor to Northern Public Radio, Fink lives near Beloit, Wisconsin, with his wife and daughter. In the summers, he teaches Writing Wilderness in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

 

 

 


‹ Prev