by Ted Neill
“Oh, Martin, I’m not worried about you.”
He took a drag off his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of yellow smoke. It curled and swam about his shoulders as he turned one last time. Martin Finch stood there watching Satan walk down his driveway, the gold sequins on his boots throwing off sparks and beams into the cloud following him, as he croaked out a few bars of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. At that moment, he more resembled an old Vegas lounge singer than fallen angel or the Prince of Darkness, corrupter of hearts.
Then he was gone. Martin took a deep breath of the air. The sulfur had dissipated.
Well, if that was not interesting . . . .
He stepped over Agathe’s body. He would have to make sure his story was straight before he called the police. Maybe he should call his lawyer first. He needed another drink. He returned to the living room to find the priest and the bottle of Bushmills missing. He poured himself one more single malt. Before he drank it, he froze.
The box. The little blue-black box was waiting on the coffee table.
Martin set down his drink, crossed the room, and reached for it, his hands trembling—more from exhilaration than fear. He picked up the box. It was light and sturdy. He was still impressed with how the bamboo material gave off such an elegant sheen, even in the dim light of his living room. It had to be expensive, priceless perhaps, he thought. Where was Antiques Roadshow when you needed them? With one of his manicured nails, he worked the top loose. The inside lip and edge were covered with black velvet that hissed as he opened it. He gazed into its interior, his heart leaping with expectation, before it was replaced with a suffocating heaviness. It weighed down his chest, sinking into his innards like a coffin into a swamp. He tossed the lid to the table, turned over the box and shook it over his hand before slapping it on the bottom like a bottle of ketchup.
Nothing was produced. It was empty.
19.
Frontiersmen
It was the Fourth of July. It was hot. Definitely hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. We had actually fried several out behind the store. It was a slow day, and we had time for that. See, I’m a refrigerator repair man. In hot weather, we always have to be on standby; the heat puts a lot of strain on those old fridges. But since it was the Fourth of July, no one was actually coming into the store—it was a holiday; people were barbecuing, pool partying. I was waiting for calls at the store with Ray, a kid we hired that summer. Funny enough, no one had called that day, not a one. Either someone else was getting our business, like that new store at the strip mall down the street, or no one’s fridges were breaking.
It was close to dinner time. I got in the car and drove over to 7-11. I got a Slurpee—red, white, and blue of course, a pack of Marlboro lights, and four hot dogs for me and Ray. They had some red, white, and blue licorice on sale at the counter. I decided it might be fun to try, so I bought some. On the way back, I drove down the street to look at the new appliance store, to see how they were doing. It was a sleek new store, attached to a custom-made furniture store. Inside they had salesmen in white shirts and ties standing beside their newest models. I saw a salesman inside, but no customers. The person at the counter was on the phone. Maybe they were getting our repair calls.
When I drove back to the shop, Ray was outside. He walked up to the van.
“Got a call from a lady in Covenant Hills. Says her fridge has been broken for two days now.”
“Why didn’t she call before?”
He rolled his shoulders. “Beats me. You got the food?”
“Yeah.”
I handed him the hot dogs and his soda. I had finished my dogs on the drive over. He walked back to the store with his hands full. He left the address of the woman on the seat of the car. He also left the passenger-side door open.
“Ray, close the door.”
But he was already in the shop. I think he heard me as the shop door was closing behind him, but he pretended not to. I pulled out from the curb and slammed on the brakes. I hoped that would cause the door to shake and close. It wobbled but stayed open. I tried it again, a lot harder. Things fell down in the back, but the door didn’t close.
“Son of a bitch.”
So I tried it going backwards. My Slurpee fell over, but fortunately I had drunk most of it already. The sheet of paper with the address dangled close to the edge of the seat—if it flew out I would be really mad, because I’d have to get out and get it. I lurched the car forward then stopped again. The door almost closed. I tried going backwards and turning the car—even closer, but not quite. Then I realized there was a line of cars behind me, waiting to pass to get out of the parking lot. There were quite a few, but no one had thought to honk. I pulled aside, leaned over, and yanked the door close.
Covenant Hills was one of the older neighborhoods, houses built in the nineteen fifties; one levels, split levels, but not too many two-story jobs—those were mainly in the newer neighborhoods, which were farther out, where all the houses had been super-sized in the nineties. Most of my jobs were in older places like Covenant Hills. Old houses, old fridges. In the newer neighborhoods, people had the state-of-the-art fridges that never broke, and when they did, they just bought new ones. The customer I was going to, Mrs. Giles, lived at 165 Ridgemont Drive. While I was searching the neighborhood, I had the craving for something sweet. I looked around for the red, white, and blue licorice, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I stopped the van. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to stop, after all, the side was plastered with the name of the store: Daniel Boone’s Appliance Repair, with Daniel Boone there on the side with his coonskin cap and a wrench in place of a rifle. Parking was free advertising. The company was partly mine; my father and some of his friends had founded it. I don’t know why they picked the name they did. None of the guys were named Daniel or Boone. My father’s name wasn’t Dan, and neither was mine. I couldn’t find the licorice and realized I must have accidentally given it to Ray.
Greedy weasel.
I drove around again for fifteen minutes but couldn’t find the house. Ridgemont Drive wasn’t a problem to find; I had already found it. It was the house number I couldn’t find. The highest number so far was 96. My GPS was no help. According to it, I had already arrived at my destination. I decided to ask for directions. I picked 65 Ridgemont; I had a feeling about them, maybe because they had two of the three numbers I was looking for.
My coveralls were navy blue, so you can imagine they soaked up the sun’s rays like a solar panel. I couldn’t wait for the sun to go down. The residents at 65 Ridgemont obviously had children; their toys were scattered all over the yard. I stepped on a plastic shovel by accident and pretty well broke it. What do you expect? It was left on the sidewalk. They could afford a new one by the looks of it anyway. There was a broken robot by the door and a tank with the turret missing in the bushes. These kids were ungrateful for their toys. I knocked on the screen door. I could see into the house. Looked like they were having a cookout on the back deck. I wondered if anyone heard me. I knocked again.
“Coming.”
A short woman, thirty-ish, came to the door. She didn’t open it.
“I didn’t call a repairman.”
“No, you didn’t, ma’am.” I tipped the bill of my baseball cap. I could feel it moving smoothly over the sweat on my forehead. “But someone on 165 Ridgemont did, and I just can’t find that part of the street. I was wondering if you knew where to point me.”
“Hmmm.” She put her hands on her hips. She had long fingernails, painted red, white, and blue with silvery stars in the spirit of the holiday. “Let me ask my husband.”
“Much obliged.”
She disappeared from the door. I heard a sliding glass door open, then another set of footsteps. A man in white shorts appeared.
“You looking for 165 Ridgemont?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just go down to the end of that street where it terminates on Loyalty Heights. Turn left, then take the first right, and that will
turn into the rest of Ridgemont. It’s like a little hidden section of road where it extends. Don’t know why they made it that way.”
“Thank you, sir, you have a good fourth.”
“You too,” he said.
He never opened the screen door.
When I pulled up at Mrs. Giles’s house, I was so hot and tired I felt like I had already worked on a fridge. By the amount of sweat on the back of my suit and under my arms, you wouldn’t think otherwise. I knew I had the right house, so I went to the back of the van and grabbed the tool kit. It felt extra heavy, and the shiny metal blinded my eyes. I wiped my forehead with a rag, and stuck it in my pocket. The house was a split level, with forest green siding, pea green trim, and turquoise shutters. There was an ’83 duster in the driveway. The garage was open, and I could see it was too full of stuff—chairs, drawers, old lawnmowers—to accommodate the car. I walked to the door and knocked.
Mrs. Giles answered in a pink nightgown. There was what looked like a coffee stain on the part that bulged out right under her belt and above her crotch. She had a leathery brown face, probably from sun and smoking. Her hair was dyed black. There was a half inch of gray at the roots.
“Come in and have a look at the patient,” she said, unlatching the door.
“Happy fourth,” I said.
“Oh yeah, happy holiday. I’m glad you guys were still open.”
“Twenty-four-hour emergency service, ma’am, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
She grunted and walked into the kitchen. On the kitchen table a TV was playing, surrounded by empty coffee mugs with stained bottoms. There was a plate with eggs and ketchup hardening. The fork was in a coffee cup. There was a man on the TV describing a Fourth of July parade. I walked to the fridge.
“Hasn’t been cold for two days,” she said.
I took off the grate, pulled out a rag to wipe away dust, and peered under with the flashlight. Probably a busted compressor. It was an old model, about twenty years old. I was surprised it had lasted that long. It had to be the compressor. Compressors are the first to go on those old models.
“My husband used to fix all these things around the house.”
“Really?” I said.
“He was handy. I guess that made him good for one thing. He’s long gone now.”
“Is that a good thing?”
She laughed, “You’re telling me.”
I had to look at the back. I stood up and rocked the fridge forward. I heard things moving inside, but Mrs. Giles didn’t seem too worried about spills. I got my flashlight and looked in back. That’s when you get into people’s private lives, looking behind their fridge—seeing places where they don’t clean, where things get lost and hidden. It’s getting to the bottom of things. The linoleum was gray with dust in the back. I was right. The compressor was shot to hell.
“Compressor is broken.”
“Well, can you fix it?”
“Yeah. I’ve got some replacement parts in the truck; I’ll get them.”
I turned the fridge completely around and spread my tools all about the kitchen floor. People like to see that, lots of tools; they think work is being done. She leaned against the countertop in her bathrobe and watched me.
“Must be hot in that suit.”
“It is. Real hot.”
“I can’t imagine working on the Fourth of July.”
“Well, the holiday pay is good.”
“That’s consolation.”
“You doing anything special?”
She grunted while she lit a cigarette.
“Haven’t had plans on the fourth for years. That’s the way I like it, though. Too old for all that crazy whistling and screaming explosive shit. Once you’ve seen a few, you’ve seen them all. I remember one year a house down the street caught on fire from some fireworks. The fire department had to come and everything. That was something.”
“Some of those rockets do get noisy.”
“That they do. I can just sit here and watch the show at DC on the television. It’s always so pretty there, alongside all those monuments. I don’t know which ones are which though.”
“Well, the tall one’s the Washington Monument,” I said.
“I knew that,” she said.
“The others, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Is the one real near the Washington Monument, the one that’s supposed to look like a Greek temple, is that the Lincoln?”
“I think so. But they all sort of look like Greek temples to me,” I said.
“There is one for Benjamin Franklin that looks like a temple, I think. They took up all that space for those big ones and only had enough room left for one wall for the Vietnam memorial. But I guess that is what they do for wars we didn’t win—because they sure made a big memorial there for World War II. I think maybe they should reassign which ones are which. You know? Lincoln’s been dead a long time; they should use that spot for another memorial.”
“Mind if I get a glass of water?”
“Sure. You should take that suit off. You’re going to die in it.”
“I just might.” I drank the water. “You must be hot in that robe.”
“Nah, I got nothing on underneath. That’s no come on, you hear? See, when I get too hot, I just go lie down in the little pool I have out back.”
“You’ve got a pool?”
“Just a little plastic one. It’s left over from when my daughter’s kids were little.”
“Ah, okay. So, you just skinny dip for all the neighbors to see?” I said with a chuckle.
“Are you crazy? I’ve got a fence. I keep all those people out of my business. Live and let live, I say. It’s the American way.”
“Oh, right.”
I went back to the fridge: wrenching, screwing, socketing. Mrs. Giles flipped through the channels, not staying longer than a second or two on any one channel, except for when she landed on an old John Wayne western. She stayed on that a while, finally saying, “John Wayne, now that is when men were men.”
“So how many grandkids do you have?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
“Three. Three that I know of. Just my daughter has children; my son’s too young yet. Well, not too young. He just can’t seem to get his act together.”
“He’ll straighten out.”
“He’s not a bad kid, just doesn’t use his head. For instance, he studied art when he was at junior college. He’s got talent but no common sense. He and a girl friend of his from art school—I don’t know if she is a girlfriend or a just a friend, but if they are screwing, I sure hope he is using protection. He is not ready to be a dad. I’d probably end up taking care of the little brat—but they were walking by that bowling alley on Guinea Road . . . you know which one I’m talking about?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the side by the railroad tracks, you can’t see it from the road, but it’s all spray-painted. Now he and his friend thought that since the wall was already covered, they could go and paint it too. So they took some paint brushes and paint and went down there. Thought of it as a community beautification project.” She rolled her eyes and crushed out a cigarette. “The thing is, they did this at three in the afternoon. The owner came out—he was this Korean man— and just went crazy and called the police. My son and the girl were arrested. This wasn’t good for my son, because he was already on probation.”
I started to loosen the bolts around the old compressor.
“Probation for what?”
“Oh, this is a good one too. He got stopped for speeding. The officer asked if he could search his backpack. He said ‘sure,’ and the cop found his switchblade.”
“What’s he got a switchblade for?”
“His father gave it to him. I don’t know how long he’s had it—years, just carries it around like a keepsake or something. I don’t know. So he got busted for carrying a concealed illegal weapon. We talked to a lawyer about it, but he said there was nothing we could do since he g
ave the cop permission. We might have a case if he had said no, but then the cop could have said he had probable cause and searched him anyway. They get you if they want to. You know how cops are.”
“Yep, they really sock it to you.”
“Thing is, he had weed in the backpack too, but the officer just ignored that.” She lit another cigarette and blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling.
I had the old compressor detached now. It was caked with dust. Its parts were long past salvageable. I pulled the new one out of its box and put the old one in the empty box.
“It’s so nice that you speak English,” she said to me. “So many of the repairmen now, the delivery boys, the plumbers, don’t speak the language any more. You got to be fluent in Spanish, or Korean, or something nowadays.”
“Well . . . .”
“It’s fine that they come over here; it’s just that they should learn the language. I don’t mean this to be racist at all, but let’s be frank, it’s really people like us that understand each other better.”
She said it as if there was no arguing, and I guess there really wasn’t.
I put together the new compressor and had another drink of water. Mrs. Giles didn’t have air conditioning. I wished she did. My clothes were so wet now—like I had worn them in the shower. They were sticking to my body. The washers would have to be replaced before I installed the new compressor. I went to the van to get some. On the way back inside, I saw Mrs. Giles go out into the backyard. I guess she was going to cool off. I wiped my hands clean and pulled out my phone to call Ray. He said no one else had called, so I took my time with the rest of the repairs. I heard a high-pitched sound from the wall. It was the outside spigot. Mrs. Giles was pouring fresh water into her pool. The TV was still on, so I stood in front of it while I polished some bolts. I hummed along with a commercial jingle I liked.