Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  “Maybe you should put a net around the house.”

  She snorts, her pigtails wiggling as she shakes her head.

  It wasn’t easy getting up there. He had to put the ladder on the back side of the house, where the roof is a little more accessible. It took an effort.

  Each of the first two times, I had to climb up there with him. I don’t like heights. Even more, I don’t like the idea of falling from heights. Les is a big man still, big ears, big knuckles on hands that look like the catcher’s mitts he used to wear. Usually, he’s OK, but sometimes he doesn’t quite know who he’s talking to and where he is. You hope he doesn’t momentarily mistake you for a North Korean or think you’re trying to score from second on a single to right.

  Les Hacker used to play baseball. He was a Wisconsin boy who ended such career as he had with the old Vees, Triple-A farm club for the Yankees, who had plenty of catchers on the big team already. Les was no Yogi Berra.

  After he retired, or was retired, he went to work for a roofer. Minor league ball never did pay much, and even less back then. Eventually, he started his own company and made a few bucks before he was forced into retirement by a broken hip brought on by a fall from a second-storey roof. A dumbass kid working summers had knocked a bucket of hot asphalt over on Les. When he told me about it, years later, he said he jumped off the roof just to get some relief.

  Les met Peggy after she’d left her third husband, Mickey, the one that liked to celebrate major and minor holidays by going outside and firing a Luger into the air. Les has been exemplary compared with his predecessors, and I am inclined to try to help whenever I can. Someday, God willing, I’ll be seventy-six, too, and I’ll probably be as crazy as Les.

  Peggy’s standing there in her bedroom slippers, sipping on her own coffee.

  “Some story. That girl.”

  I’m distracted at first, with the Les situation and all, then remember that Peggy always reads the paper, bless her. “Ought to cut that bastard’s balls off when they catch him.”

  I nod and then turn my full attention back to Les. He got up there with the rickety metal ladder, same as before. Peggy says she can’t see throwing away a perfectly good ladder, and that he’d find some other way anyhow.

  There’s nothing to do but follow him up.

  Les is sitting there straddling the point of their roof. With his hands on his bent knees, he looks like he might be able to signal for a change-up. From here, you can see across Oregon Hill, all the way down to the river, past where the prison used to be.

  “Nice view,” I say when I finally urge my shaky legs up to where he is. It isn’t a steep pitch, but it seems like Mount Everest to me, looking down. I know from experience that it’ll be harder for Les to get off the roof than it was to get on it. Climbing up, he thinks he’s thirty-five again, scrambling around like a monkey, waiting for his crew to follow him up. At some point, though, up here in the clear air, sanity returns.

  “I did it again, didn’t I?”

  Yeah, I tell him, as we look over toward Belle Isle and the river. You did. It’s a beautiful fall morning.

  “It’s like I’m sleepwalking,” he says, “except I’m awake.”

  Some people might be embarrassed by the fact that they’re losing it, but Les, when he realizes he’s done something in public that would make most of us die of shame, only laughs as if he’s just been told the funniest joke in the world. He doesn’t care that he’s the butt of it. I think it’s part of what attracted Peggy to him, the complete lack of self-consciousness. He’s a big kid in a lot of ways. He was like that even before his mind started drifting. But he’s also about the closest thing to a real man that my mother’s shared her bed with, an honest-to-God adult capable of being generous without an ulterior motive. I told her one time that her fuck-up magnet seemed to have lost its bearing when she found Les.

  “Same thing,” Les says. “I think I’m back on the job, and I’ve overslept or something, and the roof has got to be done right damn then. Geez, you’d think I’d know by now . . .” His voice drifts away.

  I tell him it’s fine, no problem, that I had to get up anyhow and get some dumbass off a roof, and he thinks that’s funny. Humor is how he communicates. And, as was not the case with so many I grew up with around here, you don’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing, the magic word that leads to a typical Hill dustup. Hell, I’m a little bit of a red ass myself, but I like to think that, in middle age (assuming I’m going to live to be 100), I’ve learned something from good-natured Les.

  We finally get both of us down. By now, we have a small crowd. The cops don’t really bother us. I know most of them and can say a word, but it really isn’t necessary. I am not surprised to see, when I look over at the one squad car parked half a block away, David Shiflett. He’s standing beside the open door, drinking coffee, too, and talking on the radio. I give kind of a half-wave, and he does the same, and then he gets back in the car.

  Some of the neighbors, though, seem offended at being involuntarily entertained.

  “He’s goin’ to hurt somebody,” whines old Jerry Cannady next door, as if he thinks maybe Les will fall off the roof and crush his skinny ass to death. I ignore him, but then the guy the next house down, an assistant professor of sociology or some such shit at VCU, comes up, all agitated, and demands that we “do something.”

  “That man is a menace,” he says loudly, not ten feet from Les. “Last night, he urinated in the rose bushes.”

  He’s kind of in my face. I motion for him to be a little quieter, and it only stirs him up more.

  “Don’t tell me to be quiet!” he says, then repeats it, like I’m hard of hearing.

  Despite my best efforts, I have not learned well enough from Les, it seems. I take the young prof in hand, perhaps gripping too hard, perhaps pinching his neck a little. I remind him that Les Hacker is a human being, and that he’s having some hard times that aren’t his fault, and that he deserves the respect any adult human being deserves.

  I also intimate that I might have to beat the shit out of him if he doesn’t stop making Les feel bad, which is probably a mistake. If I’d done that to one of the old Hill boys, we’d have had to clear a space and go at it, and I’d probably get my ass kicked; but this one is a come-here who doesn’t go by the code and is willing to accept such treatment with nothing more than a shouted threat over his shoulder as he retreats into his house. Some of the neighbors seem disappointed to be deprived of a good, old-fashioned street brawl. They don’t see many of those anymore.

  “You’re crazy!” the prof adds as he slams the door, and I think he’s talking about me instead of Les.

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “Probably.”

  We have a cup of coffee and talk about Isabel Ducharme’s murder, and then I take my leave.

  “I’ll try to do better,” Les says, and the way he says it kind of breaks my heart.

  Since I’m already up, I figure I might as well do now what I was going to do later. I walk over to the VCU campus, a hodgepodge of Victorians turned into offices and newer classroom buildings and dorms that were built on the cheap. Nothing much seems to match, although I have to admit it is getting better. They used to have a poster that read, “If you want ivy, bring your own.” It still applies.

  I know Andi’s address, in one of the buildings too near the campus for gentrification. She shares a four-bedroom place with five other girls, and it never seems to me that there is any kind of order to it. Guys and girls seem to come and go all the time (OK; sometimes I walk by), and the only time I’ve actually been inside, and had to use one of the two bathrooms, I was struck with how women can be as slack at basic housekeeping as men. Maybe it’s part of being equal or something.

  I’m about to go up and knock when, like magic, she comes out, fumbling with her keys, trying to lock the door one-handed and not put down her books. It’s shortly before eleven, and I guess she’s going to class.

  She has her mother’s features, thank Go
d, although she’s still thin as a rail, while Jeanette, the last time I saw her, had put on a few pounds. Haven’t we all?

  But she has her mom’s beautiful porcelain blue eyes, that same wide, expressive mouth, although Andi’s isn’t as prone to break into a smile. I don’t think anyone had a prettier smile or a sunnier disposition than my first wife. It took an asshole like me to make her frown and cry.

  Andi is talking to two other girls when I first see her, and she definitely is smiling, for a change. When she sees me, the smile goes away, but she doesn’t. She tells them something, and I think I see her roll her eyes. She walks over.

  “Hi,” I say. “Thought I’d drop by. I was in the neighborhood. Actually, I live in the neighborhood.”

  “I know.” She’s looking away.

  “I tried to call.”

  “Oh,” she looks at me for a second, then away again. “I was going to call you back. But . . .”

  She lets it hang. She knows I’m not going to scold her.

  “Sorry,” she says. End of discussion.

  It isn’t easy to engage Andi in conversation, or at least it isn’t for me. Grades, her mom, boyfriends or lack of, music.

  I only get something like interest when I mention Isabel Ducharme.

  “That was spooky,” she says, then looks at me, maybe straight at me for the first time in this encounter. “You probably saw her.” Apparently, Andi still reads the paper.

  “I saw her body. Yeah.”

  “And she was, like, decapitated?”

  “Yeah. Decapitated.”

  Andi gives a little shiver. I don’t think it’s just for effect.

  “Did you know her?”

  Andi explains to me, as if to a small, slow child, that there are “like, almost 30,000 kids here.”

  But, she adds, Isabel did live in the same suite as a girl from Andi’s high school, a couple of years younger.

  “One degree of separation,” I say, and get no response.

  “Do you think she’d talk to me, you know, about what kind of girl she was and all?”

  Andi says she doubts it, but when I ask her, she does give me a name.

  Andi’s twenty, and she should be in her third year at VCU. What she’s really in, I couldn’t tell you. Not having been a daily part of her life since she learned to talk, my part in her education is to write checks and shut the fuck up. She’s not lazy. She works part-time at Edo’s Squid and another restaurant, a Thai place just off campus, but she seems to put more into waitressing than she does into study. No one, and certainly not me, can impress her with how much easier it is to get a college degree in four (or five) years than it is to get into that one-course-a-semester routine that leads to perpetual student-hood. Sometimes, I think that’s what she wants.

  She was a good student in high school, and Jeanette and I both thought she should have aimed higher than a mid-level state school, but she had friends going to VCU and she said she wanted to be an artist. She seemed to know what she wanted. Now, I’m not sure. I mentioned to her once that she seemed to be drifting. She rolled her eyes and told me everyone was drifting.

  I ask her if I can buy her breakfast or lunch or brunch or something, but she says she has a class. Far be it from me to discourage that.

  “Well,” I say, “call me. Let’s have dinner sometime.”

  But we never seem to.

  I resist the urge to tell her to be careful. She’s twenty, for God’s sake. She only looks like a little girl as she walks away from me, tugging on a bra strap that shouldn’t be showing.

  I walk back to the Prestwould with the morning slipping away. In Monroe Park, the students are enjoying a fine fall day. The squirrels who haven’t yet been eaten by the hawks are frolicking around the inert bodies of guys from the shelter enjoying a last bit of freedom before cold weather drives them indoors. “The squirrels and the nuts,” according to McGrumpy, which is what we call my upstairs neighbor, Feldman.

  The building itself isn’t that old. It was built in 1929. But to say they don’t make them like that anymore is an understatement. It stands there, glowering down at the park like Norma Desmond waiting for her closeup, a great lady who’s seen better times and doesn’t know it.

  The interior walls are terra cotta. You could slaughter a sheep in the next room and no one would hear. It has maid’s rooms that most have turned into space for washer-dryers. High ceilings and lots of single-pane windows. My unit (the one I rent from Kate since she left) overlooks the park and downtown. I can’t quite see the newspaper building, ten blocks away, but I can see the corporate headquarters, Suitville, across the street from it. One time when Sally Velez was up here, she asked me if I thought a sniper could pick somebody off that far away.

  When Kate and I moved in here nine years ago, it took us a while to figure out where the distant buzzing came from that we heard sometimes when we ate in the dining room. One of the older residents had to tell us about the button for summoning the maid, hidden underneath the rug.

  It’s a nineteenth-century kind of building constructed in the twentieth and trying to get by in the twenty-first. The roof leaks, the windows leak. Hell, the walls leak if you get a big enough storm. If the plumbing goes south, you get a guy with a sledgehammer to knock a hole in one of those brick walls, then the plumber comes in and tries to fix it, and then a crew comes in to fix the hole the sledgehammer made. The radiators play the Anvil Chorus, and the place smells like hot metal when they’re on full blast.

  How could I not love it? When Kate left, I asked her to let me stay and pay rent and half the condo fee. She said fine, that the place had nothing but bad memories for her, but if I wanted to live there, to knock myself out. I can just about make the rent, usually, as long as Mel Wheelwright and his corporate masters let me hang on by my scratching, clawing fingernails to what I’m sure is the best-paying job I’ll have for the rest of my sorry-ass life.

  The residents here skew toward old. There are still a couple from before the building converted to condos. They hate change, mainly because change, in the last tenth of your life, is seldom for the better. They balk at fixing things, for the same reason that they opt for only the one-year subscription to The New Yorker. If the roof doesn’t leak, but I’m dead, so what?

  However, they are the smartest, most interesting people I’ve ever lived among. And they need me to change their light bulbs and fix their cable TVs and computers when one of them hits a wrong button and is sure they’ve broken the contraption forever. In exchange, they bake me brownies and cookies and brighten my life.

  Kate was the one who wanted to move here. We were renting a place on Laurel Street, on the Hill, because R. P. McGonnigal’s Uncle Ookie owned it and gave us a bargain. It was kind of nice, to me, living on the Hill again, but Kate had just gotten her law degree and thought we could “do better.” She said she’d always wanted to live in the Prestwould, ever since she was a little girl. When a unit halfway up came open in 2000, at a price that sounds like a steal now, even with real estate tanking, we took it. We were married there four years later. We had some good times, often with each other.

  She insists that I don’t smoke inside for fear of bringing down the future resale value, but she wished that when we lived together, too. I try to be good, but you can’t have everything.

  As I walk in the front door and then fob myself into the lobby, I see Clara Westbrook, one of our older and more astute residents, sitting there in one of the chairs where she waits when someone’s coming to take her someplace. She has her oxygen tank with her. She rolls it behind her like a kid pulling a toy duck.

  “Oh, that poor girl,” Clara says. She looks like she’s been crying. “She couldn’t have been much younger than your Andi.”

  How does she do that? I can’t remember the names of everyone in the building, and there aren’t that many of us, but she knows my daughter’s last name and age. I don’t believe she’s ever seen Andi, except in pictures.

  “There are such bad p
eople out there,” she says. “Sometimes, I don’t think I’ll mind leaving this place very much.”

  I know she means Earth and not the Prestwould.

  Then she looks up at me and smiles.

  “But I get over it.”

  She asks me if I know anything else about it.

  I tell her that I emptied my brain into the computer at work last night, that everything I know she’ll know if she reads the paper.

  “Well, I hope they catch the bastard.”

  I tell her I do, too, and that I’m sure they will.

  I ask her if she’s seen Custalow.

  “Oh, I think Abe and Susan are down in the basement, trying to fix the heat. It’s freezing in here.”

  Actually, it feels as if it’s about seventy-five in the lobby, and this likely is Antarctica compared to Clara’s unit. It’s a bone of contention here among the newer, younger, more affluent members of our little insane asylum. We pay a common heating bill as part of the condo fee, and there are those among us who would like to take very old people far below their comfort zone in order to save a few dollars. What passes for sweater weather for Clara Westbrook and her friends is a pleasant temperature for the newbies. Such people deserve to spend all eternity in hell, with Clara controlling the thermostat.

  I take the stairs down to our basement and finally find Abe Custalow and the lovely Susan looking mildly confused as they stare at the Rube Goldberg expanse that is our boiler.

  “Don’t know,” Custalow says. “We might ought to get somebody in here that knows what they’re doing.”

  “Shit,” says Susan. “These old farts will never pay for that. They want us to fix it.”

  Susan Sheets is about half Abe’s (and my) age, but she already looks ridden hard and hung up wet. She’s got two kids out in Powhatan somewhere and a boyfriend who “visits” her occasionally here. I know because I caught them one night visiting on a table in one of the utility rooms when I came down to look for something in my storage cage. Because I didn’t tell, Susan gives me wry, conspiratorial smiles now and then, and I think she would show her appreciation in a more corporeal way if I only asked. I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, but Mr. Johnson, my auxiliary brain, has disappointed me and others before.