The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  He said when he switched on the lights, he found things more or less as he remembered them, but the bookshelves were empty. “Apparently, they’d sold her collection off in an estate sale or something. All the furniture, though, was still right there.”

  He’d gone upstairs, he admitted, just to see what it looked like—having seen only the entryway, the living room and the library when Mrs. Hill was alive. There were four bedrooms on the second floor. The three smaller ones had identical full-sized beds, but there was an enormous canopied four-poster in the master bedroom. He didn’t know why he did it, he said, but he flipped off the light and sat down on it, then kicked off his shoes, drew up his feet and rolled onto his back.

  Lying there, he’d experienced the oddest sensation: his father’s presence. It was all the more unsettling because they’d never been particularly close. When he was growing up, he said, his dad worked a lot and was gone a lot, and rarely did with him the things that Frankie and his father did together. They’d never gone to Fenway, or the Garden, though he’d been to both venues with the Zizzas. He realized that night that his most vivid memories of his dad almost all centered on holidays—Christmas or the Fourth, Thanksgiving or Easter. Those were the only occasions you could expect him to remain home all day. He even went to work sometimes on Sundays, though he always waited until the family had returned from Mass and eaten lunch.

  Kristin expected him to continue the narrative, but it broke off there. For several moments he sat beside her with his arms crossed. Then he reached out and grasped the bottle and took another hit.

  He was only inches away from her, but in the dark she couldn’t make out his features. She laid her hand on his forearm. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  “Because I want you to know that I don’t take tonight lightly.”

  “You mean you’re not just out to get laid?”

  “That’s a rather reductive assessment.”

  She let go of his forearm. For a moment she was back in the boxy little prefab in the Chapel Hill cul-de-sac, offering herself to a man who’d decided to walk her home. She shook her head. She wasn’t aware of having made a sound, but she must have.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “Twice in my life,” she said, “I thought a man was about to treat me like a piece of meat. And both times they turned into vegans. If that’s not funny, what is?”

  Viewed in a certain light, the following information would be: in his pocket lay the key to the house that formerly belonged to Penelope Hill. In reality, the old woman had indeed been a drunk, and he had come to this house with his father, though she hadn’t offered him milk and cookies and he hadn’t left with a book after that first visit or any other visits, either, because there had been no subsequent visits. He’d wandered over and laid his hand on a leather-bound book on a side table, but she’d snapped, “Don’t touch that!” His dad, who hadn’t been offered a drink that day, had gone there to inform her that he no longer could insure her home. She’d filed three claims for water damage in the last two years alone, having left her bathwater running until the tub on the second floor overflowed, ruining the walls and ceiling in two ground-floor rooms—probably befuddled by drink or even passed out in the tub. After she’d rudely commanded him to keep his hands to himself, Matt noticed the black key next to the book and, when she turned her anger back on his father, stuck it in his pocket.

  When she died and the town took over the property, which she really had left to Montvale in perhaps the only generous act of her life, he and Frankie tried the key, and to their surprise it unlocked the back door. Periodically, as teenagers, they’d come to sprawl on the furniture and drink beer or smoke weed. They never worried too much about getting caught, because everybody knew the caretaker left around four. Matt had once suggested to Carla that they come inside on Friday night and avail themselves of the big four-poster, but she said he was out of his mind.

  He was out of it now too. He hadn’t intended to tell the lies he’d just told. About ten or fifteen minutes ago, gravitas seemed called for, so he’d summoned it from the thin, cold air, and his skill at doing this forced him to draw a pair of conclusions. First, maybe he did possess enough imagination to write a novel one day. Second, though no longer a thief, he was still an asshole.

  The only decent thing to do, he knew, was tell her right now that he’d invented a sentimental crock of shit to lure her upstairs. He was always stumbling into stupidity, he would say. His personality obviously wouldn’t stabilize. Sometimes he thought he lacked a core, that he was all flank and edge. “Listen,” he began, “that stuff about my dad and Mrs. Hill? It just came to me a few minutes ago, when you suggested maybe I’d brought you here because I’d done the same thing with Carla. It felt like I needed to say something to convince you otherwise. So I made all that stuff up. Well, not all of it … but most of it. I did actually come here with my dad. Only that one time, though. He drove over to cancel her insurance, and she wasn’t nice to him or me either, and in a fit of mischief I stole her key. If you want to slap my face, or pick up that brandy bottle and bash me over the head with it, or just walk off and leave me here by myself, it’s all right. I’m deserving of whatever. But the bottom line is, my dad never had an affair with Penelope Hill or anyone else. He didn’t do things like that. With him, what you saw was what you got.”

  Since he couldn’t bear to watch her process this information, he kept his gaze aimed straight ahead at the brick wall on the far side of the garden. Unable to look at him either, she did too, thinking that what you saw was never what you got, and that it was sad he’d reached forty without attaining this basic insight. Then she corrected herself. It wasn’t sad at all; it was simply outrageous, especially after he’d read so many goddamn novels. “Let me ask you something,” she said.

  His Adam’s apple made a clicking sound. “Sure.”

  “When your dad died, did you really find a file labeled PENNY HILL HOUSE?”

  “Yes, I did. That’s the truth.”

  “By then, how long had it been since he canceled her homeowner’s insurance?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe twelve, thirteen years.”

  “Did you find any other files on people whose coverage he’d dropped that long ago?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “So why do you think he kept a file on her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Some papers. A few pictures.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “The ones he always took when he insured a property. Photos of the house and grounds, interior, exterior, nothing special.”

  “Did Penny Hill appear in any of them?”

  His dad had been the best man he ever knew. He was the kind of man who won the respect of everyone he encountered and gave you something to live up to. Hundreds attended his funeral. “I have no idea,” he said. “I can’t remember. Maybe she did. But so what, what’s your point? What is it you’re trying to prove?”

  Since she understood she was discomforting him by casting dark doubts on a truth he held dear, she declared a unilateral truce. They could argue tomorrow or the next day or even later on tonight. Or else they could both decide to go home at the end of the evening and ignore each other for the rest of their natural lives. The possibilities were various, the consequences undefined.

  Rather than answer his question, she rose, her chair legs grating on the patio stones. In a practiced manner at odds with everything he thought he knew about her, she slowly began hugging herself, each hand caressing the opposite elbow and working up to her shoulder, then inching down over her breasts to her stomach, where it lingered for a moment with the other before moving again toward her breasts.

  in the days following the failed robbery, Cal stayed home. His photo had appeared in the Cedar Park and Montvale papers, though thankfully not in the Globe, and he’d had to provide personal information to the Cedar Park police.
They took his driver’s license number, then asked how long he’d been on Essex Street, where he’d lived before that, his birthplace and so on. One of the cops told him he had an uncle in Bakersfield—“Service supervisor at the Mercedes dealership”—and when Cal failed to respond, the guy looked miffed. But Cal’s dad used to buy a new Mercedes every year and at one time or another had probably abused the cop’s uncle, since that’s how he always treated those he considered beneath him, which included almost everyone alive.

  Cal’s reluctance to leave the house was due in part to his fear of being recognized by people who might want to praise his bravery, which he obviously wasn’t worthy of. He’d just reacted like a pissed-off redneck. If he hadn’t, Andrew Saucer might have made off with a couple hundred bucks, but in all likelihood nobody would’ve gotten hurt.

  He’d been wondering what sort of suffering Saucer had experienced that made him willing to kill for petty cash. A certain amount of background was available online: six-year-old articles from the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Keene Sentinel and even older pieces from papers in upstate New York and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Mostly, they detailed his criminal actions and reported his sentencing. Cal was able to glean a bit more than that, though, from the earliest articles.

  Unlike a lot of career criminals, Saucer had lived what appeared to be a normal life, up until a certain point. According to the Worcester paper, he’d served two years in the army after graduating from Montvale High, then worked for almost a decade as a maintenance man at Assumption College. Due to cutbacks, he’d lost that job in 1989, about six months before sticking up the country’s oldest hardware store, Angus James, on Main Street in Worcester. The piece said he wasn’t armed when he entered, though he’d fortified himself with enough alcohol to be legally drunk. He grabbed a spade with a diamond-point blade and held it over the cashier until he emptied the register of $344.17. About an hour later, he was arrested. There were two customers in the store when Saucer robbed it, and unfortunately for him one worked in the dining hall at Assumption.

  After he went to jail that first time, it was as if he’d ceased to exist until he committed another felony. Except, of course, that he hadn’t. Just as he’d had a life prior to burglarizing that hardware shop, he had clearly remained alive between his crimes, and it was those stretches of undocumented existence that interested Cal.

  Saucer was a small man, and based on his inability to defend himself the other day, it was unlikely he’d ever learned to fight. So what happened to him in jail? Had he been regularly preyed upon by bigger and stronger inmates? That he hadn’t seemed unlikely, if not impossible. And what about those brief periods when he wasn’t incarcerated or making yet another bad choice? Was he watching sports on television, cooking or drawing, tinkering with engines? Preferring Pepsi to Coke, Budweiser to Coors? None of these questions could be answered without sitting down and talking to the man, and while he knew this would be both illegal and insane, he couldn’t quite rid himself of the urge to do so.

  If they’d been able to converse, he might’ve asked Saucer whether there was a single moment he could identify when things began to go wrong. If he hadn’t lost his job back in ’89, would he still be repairing broken toilets and replacing damaged screens at the college? Or did he think that sooner or later he would’ve started using master keys to enter the rooms of rich kids, stealing their laptops and making off with their credit cards? Was he who he was because bad things happened to him, or did those things happen because he was bad? These were the interesting questions, at least to Cal, and he suspected they might well be to Saucer himself. If he had to put money on it, he would’ve bet the guy woke up every morning asking many of them and fell asleep each night doing the same thing.

  He decided to quit drinking anything stronger than beer, and while not going to bed in a stupor had its virtues, he again was having terrible dreams in which he was descending a steep slope into a gully, his skin as dry as paper, the manzanita scratching his shins and flaying him alive with each halting step.

  Fearing the nightmares, he fought off sleep as much as he could, though since he was trying to behave like a normal husband in an average marriage, he stayed in bed beside Kristin rather than prowling the house and attempting to wear himself out. Due to his size, he couldn’t shift position very often without waking her up, so he lay on his back, still and stiff, his right hand gripping the railing.

  During the day he often felt disoriented and lethargic, and he’d stopped working on the house. When he wasn’t parked on the couch thinking about Saucer, he spent time with his friends on the third floor. At the hospital they’d told him not to play for several days, since that might cause his stitches to work loose, but he’d never been able to keep his hands off a stringed instrument if one was nearby. Figuring he was most likely to hurt himself on the guitars, he generally played one of his mandolins for a little bit, mostly open chords that didn’t require any big stretches. Even if you weren’t trying to improve your technique or learn something new, you could simply appreciate tone. He had a vintage Gibson F-5 that cost him a staggering eleven grand and a four-year-old Bitterroot, made in Montana, that he’d bought new for twenty-nine hundred. The F-5 sounded pretty good, but the Bitterroot sounded great, delivering such a piercing treble that you didn’t have to attack it hard on single-note leads. He sat with it on the daybed for an hour or two at a time, strumming D’s and A’s and listening to the strings sing.

  The Bitterroot was very basic, something very few professional musicians would ever play. Most, if they saw one hanging on the wall of some high-end shop, would walk right on by and reach for the oldest F-5 in sight or, if they couldn’t swing that, would settle for a Gilchrist or a Monteleone. Andrew Saucer was the kind of man you walked right on by, unless he was waving a gun in your face. Practically a definition of basicness. But the Bitterroot had a great tone, whereas Saucer’s was off. He didn’t sound good, didn’t look good, couldn’t think well, and as soon as Mass General released him from intensive care he’d be right back in jail.

  When Cal finally laid the Bitterroot in its case, he was drawn to the window, where he stood looking at the neighbors’ maple. After searching online, he’d decided the tree was of the Autumn Blaze variety, and even though he could see others in the distance that looked almost identical, this one fascinated him. He wished there were some means of determining how long it had stood there, how many times it had burst into color or its leaves had turned brown and fallen off and whether it had suffered any significant storm damage. Surely, the snow must weigh it down. Even on a tree this big and sturdy, a branch would have to break eventually.

  Over the next couple of weeks, Kristin began to return late—sometimes after nine—but he’d grown used to that in California. The further she got into her school year, the more meetings she’d have to attend. And those meetings meant it was more likely that things would go wrong. Though he lacked evidence, he suspected the main activity university administrators engaged in was coming up with stuff to administer. Like contractors, they got paid twice: first for building something, then for repairing it after it began to fall apart.

  Each day, when she left, she’d tell him if she’d be coming home late. If so, around six thirty or seven that evening he’d put on a warm jacket, then go out and light a fire in the Smokey Joe. While waiting for the coals, he sat by the grill and enjoyed the crisp air. There were leaves everywhere now, brittle and crunchy, and each evening he promised himself that the next day he’d drive down to the hardware and buy some of the tall brown lawn bags he’d seen standing on the sidewalk throughout the neighborhood, awaiting curbside pickup. But when the next day came, he again stayed home.

  One night toward the end of the month he was out there with Suzy, sipping Sam Adams and debating whether he wanted to throw a steak or a couple of chicken breasts on the grate. He’d just about decided on red meat when he heard someone call his name, and stood up.

  In the light from the k
itchen window he could see his neighbor standing at the fence, holding a comically large wineglass. You could have poured half a bottle into that thing, and it looked like the older man had.

  “How you doing?” Vico asked.

  “So-so,” Cal said. “Just trying to figure out what to eat.”

  “Haven’t had a chance to talk to you lately.”

  “I’ve kind of been keeping a low profile.”

  “That business at the store shake you up?”

  “I guess maybe it did. A little bit.”

  “Scared the living shit out of me.” With his free hand, Vico gestured at his own house. “I mean, I’ve always assumed I’d die right there, in some mundane way. Know what I’m saying? Have a heart attack and fall down the stairs. There’s a rug right at the bottom that’s about six inches thick, so I’m hoping that’ll minimize disfiguration. I got some relatives that went into their boxes in poor condition—bullet wounds, water damage, you name it—and since it’s my buddies who’ll most likely find me, I don’t want to cause them any loss of appetite.”

  “That’s considerate of you.”

  “Well, these guys appreciate a good meal.”

  The level of disengagement Cal felt began to frighten him. For an instant, he forgot almost everything he knew about this guy—his former profession, what kind of car he drove, who the hell he was. He remembered only that the man had watched him beat another person half to death. His neighbor would never forget it, and in his eyes that was who Cal would always be, just as Cal would always see him as someone who’d witnessed it.

  The fence between them suddenly seemed to say it all. He himself had ended up on the far side of the continent from everything and everybody he could plausibly call familiar. The individual he knew best wasn’t even a person—she was only a dog, and she was old. She couldn’t be expected to stick around much longer.