by Nick Petrie
“I’ll sleep in my own house,” she said. “I’ve spent the night in worse places. Besides, if it were going to collapse, don’t you think it would have already?”
7
Gray clouds roiled across the sky, and the air was thick with humidity. Rain was coming.
Peter walked out to the young officer directing traffic past the accident. He was short and round, probably pushing the edge of the department’s height and weight requirements, but he stood in the road like he owned it. He pointed at an old blue SUV, then pinwheeled his forearm to point down the road. The SUV didn’t move. The cop forked his fingers at the SUV, then swung his arm around again, this time more emphatically. When the SUV rolled on, the cop turned to Peter. He looked like he was barely old enough to vote, but he already had those indifferent, matter-of-fact policeman’s eyes.
“You’re the guy in the green pickup,” he said. “What do you need?”
“My name’s Peter, and I’ll be doing repair work on the house. I wanted to say thanks for being here.”
“Just doing my job,” said the cop. His name tag said R. MCCARTER. He waved a brown Volkswagen past, then glanced over his shoulder at the back end of the dump truck. “Hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Me too,” said Peter. “Will there be someone on duty tonight?”
The cop shook his head. “I’m only here because this is a possible hate crime, and it’s a slow day,” he said. “We’re short on cars and cops and overtime money. So no, there will be no police presence after shift change. I might end up leaving early, if somebody somewhere else does something stupid, which they probably will.”
“Okay,” said Peter. “Good to know. Thanks.”
He went to his truck, pulled his Little Giant ladder from the cargo box, and unfolded it to walk up Wanda’s roof. He wanted to make sure the house would stay dry when the rain started.
Most of the structure was surprisingly solid for a house that old, and the shingles were new, probably replaced by the bank that had foreclosed on the property. There was just the minor detail of the dump truck occupying the living room, and the front of the building collapsing in on itself.
Back on the ground, he stepped back to examine Wanda’s house from the street. It was two stories, long and skinny with a steep roof and narrow overhangs. Some would call it farmhouse-style, which to Peter meant the kind of simplicity of form that could be drawn by any child with a crayon, and built by any capable carpenter. Houses like it dotted the countryside over most of America, although this one had slightly strange proportions. Built longer ago than most.
The outside was red brick, the masonry corners softened with age. A series of additions had been put onto the back, the house growing over the years.
It was definitely an old house. How old, Peter couldn’t say.
He left Wanda on the porch with her camera and followed his phone to a hardware store called Hubbard’s, on the other side of the freeway, where he bought a blue plastic tarp and a hundred feet of rope. By the time he made it back, the young cop was gone and Wanda was nowhere to be found.
Peter unfolded the big blue tarp and tacked one side under the eaves of the house to keep water from coming through the hole where the wall used to be. As he tied the tarp taut over the back of the dump body, he heard the low echoing rumble of distant thunder.
* * *
• • •
The house’s main entrance was on the side, protected by a wood-framed porch, but the door was stuck in its warped frame. A possible sign that the dump truck had shifted the structure, or else just a sign that the house was old. Peter walked down the steps and around a windowed bump-out toward the back, where another side porch sheltered a second entrance. This door opened easily enough.
He stepped into a big room last renovated sometime in the 1950s, judging by the wide pine paneling. The white static flared, but not enough to keep him outside. Not yet.
The ceiling was water-stained and flaking where the roof or bathroom had leaked upstairs, but it hadn’t stopped Wanda from moving in.
A long couch and two overstuffed chairs, none of them new, flanked a wide wooden coffee table cluttered with photo magazines and mugs and empty beer bottles. In the center stood a large ceramic bowl with a chipped rim, filled with plastic pill bottles. To his right was the kitchen, a simple L-shaped run of cabinets with what looked like a thrift-store dining table standing in for an island. Someone had screwed diagonal braces along the table legs to steady it.
“I’m not what you’d call domestic,” said Wanda, behind him.
Peter smiled. “Me neither. How you live is your business. I’m only looking at the structure.” He turned toward the front of the house, walking into a sunny dining room that was probably the original kitchen, before the additions. In the center of the room stood a big worktable made of a pair of unfinished slab doors set side by side on plastic sawhorses, covered with a neat grid of glossy 9-by-12 photo prints. Cheap clamp lights hung down from a board screwed to the ceiling, low-budget but effective lighting, at least when the power was on. There was no chair.
“Was the floor always sloped like this?”
“I think so,” said Wanda. “I only moved in a month ago. I’ve been working nonstop getting ready for a gallery show.”
Looking more closely, Peter saw that the window glass was thick and wavy, distorting the view outside, from a time before modern factory-made glass. There were no broken panes. The winding stairs to the second floor, an intricate puzzle of interlocking pieces, hadn’t shifted since their last coat of paint sometime in the Eisenhower era. Any settlement here had probably happened long ago.
The front room was another matter entirely.
For one thing, it was full of dump truck.
The front of the big Kenworth cab had dropped through the floor into a shallow crawl space, wearing the broken rectangular frames of the front windows across its grille like a horse with a wreath of flowers after winning a race. The truck’s windshield was cracked but still in place. The top of the heavy-duty dump body had taken out the ceiling joists overhead for a good eight feet.
At the edges of the room, the floor tipped steeply toward the truck. Wanda’s worktables and lamps and other office debris had fallen inward around it. Under the truck, the floor structure had collapsed entirely. Broken bricks had collected at the low spots around the front wheels and nose. He noticed that the wall plaster was troweled directly over the brick. This house was old.
“Is there a way to get into the crawl space?”
Wanda didn’t answer. He turned to see her standing in the doorway, one hand holding the camera to her eye, the other controlling the focus of the lens.
“Wanda?”
“What? Oh, sorry.” She edged sideways into the room, her shoes finding purchase on the popped edges of the pine planks, camera still up, her finger still twitching on the shutter. “Is it okay if I shoot you?”
For a fraction of a second, Peter didn’t understand the question. He was used to a different context for “shoot.”
He didn’t want her to take his picture. He hadn’t liked it in Iraq, either, strangers documenting him and his men doing a difficult job in impossible conditions, trying to catch them in moments of weakness or failure.
But he figured that the camera was what she could control, her way to make order out of this chaos.
“Fire at will.” He stepped past her to look for the entrance to the crawl space.
He found it at the back of the house, a metal hatch with uneven brick steps down into what was once probably considered a storage cellar for home-canned fruit and vegetables.
As he went down the stairs, the white static crackled up his brainstem. Hello, old friend. He reminded himself to breathe deeply, in and out.
The bare bulb didn’t light up when he pulled the chain. He remembered that the fire department ha
d turned her power off. He took a small flashlight from his pocket and hit the switch.
The cellar was small, barely ten feet square. The walls were the same old brick as the house, with warped wooden shelves standing empty along the sides. The floor was hard-packed dirt. The ceiling was low enough that Peter had to bend in order not to hit his head. Cobweb sheets opaque with dust hung down like ghostly shrouds.
Nobody had been down here for a long time.
Where the cellar ended, the crawl space began, dirt-floored and dark, smelling of mold and rot. He wouldn’t be crawling inside, there wasn’t enough space, not even for a combat crawl. No, this would be more like a squirm, flat on his belly, with just his forearms and toes to propel himself forward. He felt the static turn to sparks in the back of his head. He thought of the time he’d gone under a broken-down front porch to remove a large, unfriendly dog.
That little adventure had turned out well enough, he reminded himself. The worst he would find down here was a possum or raccoon, maybe a snake or two. Unless the dump truck decided to fall into the hole while he was inside.
But it didn’t matter, not really.
If he was going to put Wanda’s house back together, he had to know what he was dealing with.
What, you want to live forever?
He went back to his truck to get the blue mechanic’s coveralls he kept for dirty jobs.
* * *
• • •
Working his way back into that crawl space was like moving back in time. The wood framing overhead changed from 2-by-8 floor joists to rough-sawn lumber to barely squared logs. The center beam went from a rectangular timber to an unpeeled tree trunk, its midsection resting not on a brick pier but on a massive stump with gnarled roots still deep in the dirt. His light showed him the ax marks left long ago.
At the near side of the stump, he found a lumpy section of bricks laid down as a kind of rough floor. Dirt-colored uneven shapes, bricks that had come badly from the molds and were probably just thrown down to keep the mud from swallowing boots during rainy-season construction. Peter smiled at the old-school frugality of it, finding a new use for something otherwise without purpose.
On the far side of the stump, daylight shone through and everything was shattered. The log beam was snapped like a toothpick, the framing overhead turned to splinters. The front bumper of the dump truck had plowed up the dirt, but it hadn’t budged that ancient stump from the Tennessee soil.
He saw a flash of light behind him and he knew Wanda was taking pictures of his boot soles.
He turned himself around and made his way out again.
“I ordered a pizza,” she said. “I thought you might be hungry.”
“Sounds great.” Peter was definitely hungry, but he was also thirsty. Her fridge had been without power since early that morning. If she had anything to drink, it would probably be warm.
As if she could read his mind, Wanda said, “I got cold beer, too. On ice.”
Peter smiled. “June told me we’d get along.”
* * *
• • •
After he changed out of his dirty coveralls and washed himself with the neighbor’s hose, they sat on the porch steps, ate pizza from the box, and drank Ghost River Gold while Wanda shot the cars driving by.
“I knew an Army major once,” Peter said. “After a car bomb or suicide attack, he’d take pictures of the people standing around the blast area. He said some bomb makers like to see the aftermath. Sometimes for pure pleasure, sometimes as a kind of quality control, to inspect the damage and make a better bomb next time. Maybe this guy has the same impulse.”
“Maybe I knew the same major,” she said. “I was on-site after a market bombing, and he asked me to send him the crowd photos. Since then, it’s become a habit. I caught a lot of license plates and faces today.”
Wanda was looking a little ragged around the edges. Even her dreadlocks seemed to droop. She’d had five beers, not much pizza, and she’d been awake since the middle of the night.
“How are you holding up?”
“Aside from the fact that we’re out of beer?” She raised the heavy camera and waggled it at the end of her wrist. “Long as I have this, I’m fine.” She stood, a little unsteady on her feet. “Yeah, I should get to bed,” she said. “You’re welcome to crash on the couch, but you better pull your pickup around back first.” She laughed. “Even before the dump truck, this wasn’t a great neighborhood.”
Peter got up, too. “I think I’ll stay out here. You know, just in case.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re standing watch?”
He was reminded again that she’d been embedded in war zones. Standing watch wasn’t a particularly civilian concept. He shrugged. “I don’t sleep very well inside.”
“Suit yourself.” She looked him full in the face for a moment. Then her long arm reached out unexpectedly and roped him into a hug. Just as abruptly, she released him. She smelled of plaster dust, overripe sweat, and stale beer.
“June was right,” she said. “I told her I didn’t want a big dumb guy here, some bubba I don’t even know getting in my way, telling me what to do. She said you weren’t like that.”
“Give me time.” Peter smiled. “I’m dumber than I look.”
“Mm,” said Wanda. “I don’t think so.” She wobbled down the path to the door that still opened, and went inside.
Peter backed his truck to the far end of the gravel drive beside her boxy blue Toyota Land Cruiser. She had a small garage, but the green kudzu vines had overgrown it and started pulling it over. No shortage of projects here, he thought.
He dug his phone out of his glove box. June answered on the second ring.
“Hey there, handsome.”
“I’m pretty sure you lied to me, a few days ago.”
“Who, me?” He could hear the smile in her voice.
“Wanda Wyatt didn’t really ask for help, did she?”
“No,” June said. “She never would. She’s a lot like you that way. But she needs it, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” said Peter. “More ways than one. Did you talk to her today?”
“No. Why?”
“Someone drove a dump truck into the front of her house this morning.”
“Shit.” He heard her fingers flying across the keyboard and knew she was online, searching. June was never far from her laptop. “Is Wanda okay? Did they get the guy? What about her house?”
“Wanda didn’t get hurt. The driver vanished. Wanda says the cops don’t know anything yet. I got a tarp on the house to keep the rain out, and an engineer’s coming to take a look tomorrow. But she’s wound pretty tight.”
“That’s Wanda,” said June. “Boy, it’s a good thing you left when you did, isn’t it?”
He grinned at the night. “Nobody likes a know-it-all.”
“Someone does,” she said. “I was totally right, by the way. You do need a goddamn hobby.”
* * *
• • •
When they were done talking, Peter found his ground cloth and sleeping bag and rolled under the back end of the dump truck. The rear axle was two feet above his nose, but he could see out on three sides.
It reminded him of the night he’d slept under a burned-out Iraqi tank during a long patrol along the Tigris.
The same soft humidity, the same lush green landscape. The same knowledge that someone out there wanted to do harm to a person under his care.
He slept with part of his mind half awake and tuned in to his environment.
The rest of him slept better than he had in months.
8
Peter woke early to find Wanda lying full-length on the wet grass, the camera blocking her face as she took Peter’s picture under the dump truck.
“I don’t think I’m ready for my close-up,” he said. “At least no
t first thing,”
“It’s not about you. It’s that long morning light.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“Sleep is for the weak.” She pushed herself up on long arms and stood. Now all he could see were her runner’s calves and unlaced red Chuck Taylor high-tops. “I turned the utilities back on. There’s coffee if you want some.”
“Wait,” he said. “Do you smell gas? Are there any pipes leaking? Did any circuit breakers pop?”
“It’s fine.” Her shoes walked away. “Don’t be such a worrywart.”
Inside the house, in the bright light of morning, the mess had a different quality. The chemical smell of the wrecked truck had faded, and now he could smell something else, the faint stink of rot. Maybe it was the garbage can left unemptied for too long, or the dirty pans on the stove turning interesting colors. He felt the static rise. Something else was wrong here.
Wanda was in the workroom, her back to the mess. She waved a hand at the kitchen. “Mugs,” she called out. “Coffee. Help yourself. Food in the fridge.”
The coffee poured like black paint. He opened the fridge and found moldy bread, milk gone chunky, packaged hamburger turned gray. Nothing had been edible in there for a week at least.
He walked into the workroom, carrying the horrible coffee. “You must be pretty stressed out about all this,” he said. “Is there anyone I can call for you? Any family or friends? Or maybe we could just go to breakfast, get out of the house.”
She stood staring down at the crisp grid of 9-by-12 photographs on the worktable made of doors and sawhorses, her own mug of coffee held tight against her chest. He realized that she wore the same clothes she’d had on the day before. He wondered if she’d slept in them.
“I’m trying to narrow down the images for my show,” she said. “These are just placeholders. The real prints will be much larger. But I’m having trouble choosing.” She handed him a fat stack of photographs. “See if there’s anything in there you like.”