by Ted Neill
“What did your daddy do?” she asked when she came back inside. Her hair was wet and dripping on the shoulders of her bathrobe, but she didn’t seem to mind. She looked as if she felt cool and refreshed.
“He was a refrigerator repair man too.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “It’s always interesting to me how sons follow in their daddies’ footsteps.”
“He had more work back then, of course. Refrigerators broke down more then. Now they hardly ever do.”
“Just my dumb luck then,” she said.
“Well, this is an older model,” I said. “My dad’s dad was a repair man too, plumbing mainly, and his father was an immigrant.”
“From where?”
“Eastern Europe. I don’t know which country— Prussia, Poland, Austria, one of those. Do all those countries even exist anymore? Seems like they’re always redrawing borders over there. I know they came through Ellis Island, though.”
“Must have been some Irish in your family. You look like a good Irish boy.”
“Possibly,” I said and wiped some rust away from a bolt. “They all came over here looking for something better.”
She moved the coffee cup to one side of the table and turned the TV so she could see John Wayne shoot a couple Indians, Mexicans, or both.
“A lot of people dying this weekend,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Famous people. They just said on the radio this morning. Last night, that the guy who used to read the news died last, and then right after that, they said how this big movie director had died and also this aging Broadway star.”
“Hmmm. They must not have liked the summer heat,” I said.
“Pretty unpatriotic to die on a day like today.”
“My friend’s granddad died two days ago.”
“They having the funeral next week cause of the holiday?”
“No, had it today.”
“You didn’t go?”
“No, I’m working,” I said.
“Your friend go?”
“He’s not really my friend, just a guy I work with, Ray.”
“Oh, but did he go?”
“No, had work to do,” I said, if getting paid time and half to eat hotdogs and my stolen licorice could be called “work.”
The compressor was in and humming away. The fridge would be cold soon.
“You know. You got some rubber hoses back here that are about to go. I’m going to replace them.”
“How much?”
“No charge.”
“That’s mighty nice of you.”
“No worries,” I said. No worries, I think that’s what Australians would say.
“I have some beers in the neighbor’s fridge next door. I’m going to get them,” she said, shuffling across the kitchen in her slippers.
“Sure.”
I heard the front screen door slam shut. I yanked the old hoses out, threw them in the trash, then went out to the van. The sun was down, but the air would be hot all night. So hot it made me weak. I sat down in the back of the van before walking back. I found a water bottle in the back. The water inside was so warm, it was undrinkable. I poured it into my hat and dumped it on my head instead. It felt nice. My suit was already so hot and heavy from the moisture, more water didn’t make a difference. I saw Mrs. Giles return with the beers, so I got up, wiped off my face, and went in with the hoses.
Mrs. Giles watched me from the table with her beer while I hooked up the hoses, the TV still playing behind her. I could see John Wayne just over her shoulder. He was poised there the way angels or devils are sometimes in the cartoons, whispering in the ears of the characters. I wondered if John Wayne would be an angel or a devil. Mrs. Giles had got real quiet, and I wondered if she was sad. When she saw that I was done, she offered me a beer.
“No, sorry, I’m on the job.”
“Come on, it’s a holiday.”
“Let me finish cleaning up first.”
I put away my tools, wiped my forehead, face, and neck again. I picked up my trash, wiped the floor, and took another drink of water. I calculated the bill, writing extra hard on the sheet to press though on the carbon paper. My hands left wet prints on the paper. Sweat, of course. I showed it to Mrs. Giles. She noted the amount, folded it up, and slipped in into the pocket of her robe.
“I’ll write you a check.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You want that beer?”
“Let me think about it.”
I went to the van and put away the tools. Went back for one last look. I saw she had left the check for me on the table. The fridge was a bit off center. I knew she wouldn’t mind if I left it that way, but I centered it anyway. Mrs. Giles was setting up the TV to watch the DC fireworks. I called Ray. It rang five times. Mrs. Giles settled on a station she liked and tilted her head back to drink another beer. Ray’s phone rang five more times. I tapped my foot on the floor. I guessed Ray was watching the fireworks too. I leaned on the counter. Mrs. Giles smiled.
“Look at you, you’re soaked with sweat. Go take that horrid suit off and soak your feet in the pool.”
Why not? I thought. Why not?
“All right.” I went out back, took off my boots, and stuffed my socks in them. I took off the suit and folded it up beside the boots. I was in my boxers and T-shirt now. My whole body was moist and smooth with perspiration. I glistened like I was covered in Vaseline. The backyard grass was yellow and drying. Its brittle blades crunched and occasionally hurt my feet as I walked over them. The pool was little, pink, and plastic. There were pale, sand-colored fish painted on the bottom. I imagined that they were bright yellow before the sun got to them. The hose was by the pool. I stood in the water and sprayed myself. There was a pop in the distance, then a bigger one. I heard the crackle of sparklers and voices over the fences.
“Whooowiiiieee,” I said, getting into the spirit of things.
I came back inside. Mrs. Giles had a cold beer for me. Fireworks were exploding on the TV.
“You want to stay and watch the fireworks? I ain’t got nothing to eat here, but I’ve got beer here, and liquor for later. What do you think? You’re such a nice boy.”
I stood staring at the beer. My boiler suit was in my hand, and I dried myself with it. Stars and Stripes Forever was playing on the television. There was an announcer describing the fireworks.
“Why not,” I said. “Why not.”
There was nowhere else left to go.
20.
Grocery Cart
My son found a grocery cart in the creek today. He plays in the woods and the creek behind our house a lot. The first time we came to see our house, as it was being built, he was only an infant. I carried him down the hill to the creek in the baby-pack on my back. I remember standing there and thinking, “Nick, you’ll have a lot of fun down here.”
His fingers were so small then. There are a lot of things to marvel at about a baby, but it was his fingers that amazed me the most. They were so small, not even bony then. Now that he’s nine, his fingers are much more like my own, longer and skinny. He even has dirty fingernails like I did at that age. I remember the first time he got a cut on his finger; he was two. His mother wasn’t home, and he made me feel strong and useful as I swept him up onto the counter, put a Band-Aid on the cut with a kiss, and gave him M&Ms.
I follow Nick and his friend Gi down to the creek where they had found the grocery cart. I like Gi. Nick met him in Tae Kwon Do class. The first time I saw Gi was at their test for their green belts. I watched as Gi put his fist right through a board with this bloodcurdling scream. It was like a Bruce Lee movie, if Bruce Lee was an eight-year-old. I could hardly believe it. Nick broke a board that day too, but I could tell he felt more confident after seeing Gi do it first. They were good friends like that.
The grocery cart is upside down and in one of the deeper parts of the creek—deep for this creek is three feet or so. The wheels stick up in the air and look a little ridiculous. The
seat and the handle of the cart are submerged, but I can recognize the name of the grocery store where we shop stamped on them. We go up there every weekend.
“Bad teenagers probably did this,” my son says.
In my son’s world, it’s teenagers who are always misbehaving. I find his moralizing a little amusing, but if it keeps him from getting into the trouble I did as a teenager, I don’t mind.
“Vandals,” Gi echoes.
I’m glad they have consciences. They are good kids, the best. Better than I was. I watch them move around the banks, assessing the situation. Nick, in his bright red windbreaker, looks a little out of place among the softer earth tones of the woods.
“What are you guys going to do?” I ask.
Nick looks at Gi, and then he says, “Let’s take it out!”
“Yeah!” Gi says.
“That might take some work. It’s really wedged in there, boys.”
“We can do it,” Nick continues. “We’ve got all day, and we know the creek. Maybe they’ll give us a reward if we give it back.”
“Maybe we can make it into a go-cart,” Gi said.
“No, Gi,” Nick says. “We should return it to its rightful owners. It’s the right thing to do.”
Who am I to argue with that?
“Good luck boys. Call me if you need any help.”
Back at the house, I help my wife, Elaine, with her own Saturday morning project. She is putting lining onto the pantry shelves, so she’s pulled everything out of the pantry and set it on the kitchen table. Canned soups, beans, sweet potatoes, bags of corn chips, crackers, and peanut butter sit on the table before me. White potatoes, garlic, and onions are on the chair across from me, beside the roll of plastic lining and scissors Elaine is using. Breakfast cereals rise from the counter like a city skyline. The dog walks by, sniffs the detergents and toilet cleaners on the floor, then moves on. Nothing interesting there. His treats are out of his reach on the counter.
Elaine is placing the lining on the shelves and smoothing out the bumps with her hand. She is crouched, balanced on her tip toes with her knees bent. She looks like a dancer about to take a leap. The position opens a gap in her clothing at the small of her back. Her hair is in a ponytail. She isn’t wearing makeup and is in just shorts and an old T-shirt. She’d never go out in public like this, but strangely, I find her beautiful as is. Maybe it’s because she wouldn’t let anyone else see her like this. I guess there is some security and intimacy in these domestic chores.
We met at my first office job. I was selling equipment to restaurants. I grew up working in my parent’s café after Dad got sober, left his corporate job, and opened it up with my mother. I used that job to pay for college and had worked in the front and back of restaurants since. We met when I was just a young, funny-looking guy with an eye patch, trying to make the shift from a blue collar to a white collar job. I’m glad she met me then and not before. We actually attended the same university during overlapping years. But our lives then were not overlapping. She was living in dorms and doing work-study in the library. Me, I was in cramped off-campus housing, living among empty cases of beer and cigarettes, fighting with frat boys, and studying between deliveries in the back of my parents’ café.
Compared to this one, I was living in a horrid world at the time: binge drinking, promiscuous sex, drugs, drunken fights, all the things you try to protect your child from. How parents can send their kids to college is a mystery to me. I take comfort in the idea that it is years away for Nick.
I hear the kids rummaging around in the garage. I go outside and see that they are looking for ropes. They find some jump ropes that they decide will suit their purpose and then go back to the creek. I change my clothes, gas up the mower, and mow the lawn. It takes an hour. Afterwards, I use the trimmer to trim the edges of the yard along the sidewalk. I am afraid I’m not quite as good at it as some of my neighbors, whose yards look more like carpets than lawns, but I’m not sure I care enough to put the time and energy into it. I’d rather help Elaine.
Elaine sets up a card table, and we have lunch outside on the back porch, since the kitchen table is still covered with the debris of her pantry operation. We have turkey and cheese sandwiches, with apples and oranges. I call the boys, who return without the cart. I see their shoes and pant cuffs are muddy.
“How’s the salvage operation going, boys?”
“It’s a lot tougher than we thought. There’s a tree fallen across the creek that’s really in the way,” Nick reports.
“It’s really heavy too,” Gi says around a bite of his sandwich.
“You guys look like you’re getting pretty muddy,” Elaine says. The boys are not sure how to react. They can sense her disapproval, but as far as they see it, they are still doing the right thing in salvaging the grocery cart.
“We can’t help it,” Nick says. Gi becomes quiet, as most kids do when their friends parents are not happy with them.
“Hey, it’s not the end of the world. Just wrap some trash bags around your legs and feet, like waders. Then you can walk right into the water,” I say.
“Yeah, that’s a radical idea!” Nick says. I chuckle under my breath at the fact that the word ‘radical’ is making a comeback. But Elaine looks at me as if I’ve just suggested that they parachute from the roof with bed sheets.
“Sidney . . . .”
“It’s okay, I used to do it all the time when I was a kid. It works fine. If it doesn’t, I’ll do all their laundry,” I say.
Elaine shakes her head, but she’s smiling so I know she’s decided to trust me. She says to the boys, “Make sure you have some fruit too.”
They tear into their oranges and talk to each other about all the new parts of the creek they can reach, now that they have discovered a way to walk through the water using the trash bag trick.
After lunch, I show the boys how to secure the tops of the bags underneath their knees with rubber bands from the newspaper. I offer to help them with the cart, but Nick says,
“It’s alright, Dad. I think we’ve got it now.”
I help Elaine finish the shelves and then go back outside to haul some dead branches out of the woods that will make good firewood in the winter. By the time I have a sizable pile, it’s late afternoon, and I go out onto the deck to start a fire for the grill. Afternoons are my favorite time of day on the weekend. There’s a feeling of fullness after a hard day of work and the promise of an evening, perhaps lovemaking, and soon another day.
I work on the grill and find myself thinking of a man with a blind son I once saw on the subway. I’m not sure why they popped into my head then, but they just did. I remember that it had been interesting to watch them. The son seemed happy and comfortable, despite his white eyes rolling this way and that in his sockets. The father, he seemed stern. Maybe it was out of self-consciousness, or even shame—which would be sort of sad, I reflect. When the son stepped too close to the edge of the subway platform, the father scolded him. He guided his son’s hand, which was holding a white cane, so that the end of the cane moved over the bumps at the edge of the platform. I had never realized until then that those bumps were signals to blind people that they were nearing the ledge.
Would I be able to reprimand a blind child, I wonder? That father didn’t seem too sympathetic to his son at the time, but maybe familiarity eliminates sympathy. Maybe it was just tough love. Someday the father would be gone, and his son would have to navigate the subways alone. The reprimand came from a place of love, even a fear of loss. I feel a pit in my stomach at the thought, just then, and suddenly feel like I have some insight into the dad. The blind boy never stopped smiling though. That was important. The father was doing something right. I watch the charcoal catch fire and turn red.
Shortly before dinner, I hear the unmistakable rattle of a grocery cart rolling along the sidewalk. I go out front to take in the boys and their victory march. They wave at me, triumphant, from behind the cart, their heads just as high as the handle. O
ne of the wheels can’t turn because of mud caked on it. Algae hangs in green strands all over the cage, yet the steel glints in the afternoon sun like a prize trophy. The boys allow me to hose it down for them. Gi goes home for dinner. Elaine and I listen to Nick’s account of the rescue operation all through dinner.
“When I get home from work Monday, we’ll take it up to the grocery store in the car.”
“With Gi, right?” Nick asks.
“Of course, you all are a team.”
Nick asks to be excused, so he can go try to get one of the wheels unjammed from the mud. That night, after a bath, he sleeps like a log wrapped in blankets, dreaming of creeks, jump ropes, trash bag waders, and grocery carts.
Monday, I get home at a quarter to six. I drive up to the house, listening to my books on tape, to find Nick sitting by the cart in the driveway. He must be excited to return it and collect a reward. I take off my suit jacket, roll up my sleeves, and lift the cart into the trunk. I use some bungee cords to close the trunk lid down on it and secure it. We pick up Gi at his house and drive to the grocery store. In the backseat, the boys speculate about what kind of reward they might get. I pull up in the loading lane and lift out the cart. The boys take over from there and push the cart inside. They say they want to do it themselves; I tell them that is great and to just ask for the manager when the find an employee.
No one else is pulling up to the loading lane, so I lean up against the car, cross my arms, and watch the boys through the windows. I see the boys walk up to a woman behind a cash register and ask her for the manager. She picks up a phone next to her station and pages her boss on the overhead speakers.
The boys wait beside the cart. Gi has his hands in his pockets. Nick has his on the cart. A tall, balding man in about his fifties in blue pants and striped shirt wearing a keycard on his belt comes up to them. His face is lined, and he does not get that smile that some adults wear when talking to kids. I feel a knot in my stomach for the boys. The manager gives off a grumpy vibe. I can tell Nick picks up on it. But Nick perseveres. I can’t hear what he is saying, but he gestures to Gi and the cart, recounting how they had found it. The man listens without saying anything. He looks serious, like he is mediating a disagreement between feuding employees or something. I wonder if he doesn’t believe the boys or something. He asks them where their parents are. I can lip read that much. Nick points to me, and the man glances my way.