by Barry Rachin
“How much do I get paid?”
My mother flashed a dirty look. “Room and board plus the usual amenities.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the 'usual amenities' entailed but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my life, which seemed to be in a perpetual holding pattern over a destination not of my own choosing.
My father was a lanky, outdoorsy type with an unruly mop of dirty brown hair that fell down over his ears. My mom suspected him of trimming the shabby mess with a pointy scissors squirreled away with the razors and dental floss on his side of the medicine cabinet, but my father always pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to incriminate himself regarding the butchery and self-mutilation that passed for personal grooming. When it came to shaving, the man was equally lax, running a Schick twin-blade disposable over his stubbly chin no more than twice a week at best so that he never grew a full beard or appeared clean shaven for more than a few, random days per month. However, my dad’s personal grooming habits had no appreciable impact on business. The man, who was honest to a fault, never charged a penny more than the job demanded and guaranteed all his work.
The first house call was in an upscale neighborhood on the historic East Side of Providence. The oil burner shut down in the middle of the night and there was no hot water. My father slid the metal face plate on the front of the burner to one side and stuck his nose up against the belly of the furnace, sniffing the acrid air.
“How many times did you try the reset button?” he asked.
The owner, a thin, rather effeminate looking man with a sallow complexion and horn-rimmed glasses, scratched his earlobe. “I don’t remember. I kept hitting it but nothing happened.”
I didn’t like the sissified guy right off. He sounded snooty – like he had a bad case of book brains. Book brains was a term my father coined to describe a person with a PhD in nuclear physics, who could design an nuclear bomb but had trouble tying his shoe laces or balancing a checkbook. It was people with book brains who were running the country into the ground. President Obama, according to my dad, had a terminal case of book brains. So did all the fat-cat politicians in Washington D.C.. They talked a good line and, at face value, seemed harmless enough but were a menace to society. And they never worked with their hands.
“You don’t recall how many times you pressed the red button?” My father repeated the question.
“I forget exactly. What difference does it make?” Acting as though his fragile feelings had been injured by the ‘indelicate’ question, the gaunt man hurried from the basement without waiting for an answer.
“The walls of the furnace are flooded,” My father spoke in a sober drawl. “If the motor fired up with that much fuel in the system, it could have caused an explosion and burnt the house down.” He grinned sheepishly and punched me lightly on the upper arm. “But we won’t share that minor detail with the owner.”
He knelt down on the cold cement and waved a half-inch wrench at the furnace. “Draft regulator, stack control, master switch, blower, oil pump.” The man proceeded from top to bottom identifying each mechanical part. “Transformer, motor, oil shutoff button, burner assembly and, on the inside, is the combustion chamber.”
Pulling the metal cap off the transformer, he placed the blade of a flat head screwdriver vertically on the further pole of the electrical unit and then lowered the blade until it rested a fraction of an inch away from the opposite pole. A dim flash of electricity arced, jumped from the transformer to the screwdriver but just as quickly died away to nothing. He repeated the process a second and third time. “Transformer’s burnt out.” He reached into the toolbox and located an adjustable wrench. “Go out to the truck and get a replacement. There’s a pile of spare parts over to the right alongside the wheel well.”
“Did you notice how it killed him to write out the stupid check?” My father chuckled. We were a good three miles away from the home.
“Yeah, he did seem rather aggravated.” The homeowner, who mentioned that he taught comparative literature at Brown University, made a half-hearted attempt to smile when the burner fired up and my father began packing his tools. The supercilious grim quickly petered away when he was handed the bill. You could tell that the chump was in the habit of bossing other people around, having his own way ninety-nine per cent of the time.
“You weren’t here even an hour.” The emaciated man waved the bill fitfully in the air. “Isn’t this a bit steep?”
“Parts and labor – that’s all I charged you.”
“Well, I dunno …” It was a nasty, vindictive jab as though to suggest that my father was somehow taking unfair advantage. I hated the guy. I wanted to kick him in the shins or tell him outright what a pompous ass he was. But my father didn’t seem the least bit ruffled by the customer’s snide superiority. He waited patiently while the fellow wrote out the check with a gold-nibbed fountain pen that looked like it might have cost more than the new transformer.
“What a jerk!” We were back on the highway, a light drizzle misting the windshield. I still couldn’t get the image of the spiteful professor out of my mind.
“I’m paid,” my father replied, “to fix the burner, not refashion his personality.”
“What if he refused to pay?”
“The guy might be a money-grubbing skinflint, but he’s too shrewd for that.”
“But what if he went ballistic and tore up the bill,” I insisted.
“Simple enough.” My father flipped the knob for the intermittent setting on the windshield wipers. “I’d remove the new transformer and put back the broken one and that would be the end of it.”
The second call was a little old lady with a dowager’s hump and crippling arthritis. She hobbled to the front door with a three-prong cane and a well-fed, Siamese cat following at her heels. From the way my father stopped to pet the cat and commiserate with the old lady before going downstairs into the basement, I could tell that he felt sorry for the craggy-faced woman all crippled up like that and hardly even able to move from the living room to the kitchen without the cat skittering under her wobbly legs.
Nothing was wrong with her furnace. A fifteen-amp fuse had blown. My father reset the circuit breaker and the burner fired up of its own accord. The woman sat at the kitchen table with a checkbook and ballpoint pen. “How much do I owe you?”
My father waved a hand dismissively. “There’s no charge unless we find something wrong.”
That wasn’t true. The company charged a flat-rate service charge just for showing up regardless of what was done to remedy the problem. The woman with the dowager’s hump placed the checkbook on an end table. “Perhaps you’d like some sugar cookies to take with?”
A Tim Horton’s coffee shop loomed up ahead. My old man has always been partial to their coffee, swearing up and down that it’s ten times better than the dishwater they served up at Dunkin’ Donuts. He pulled into the parking lot.
“That old lady back there looked to be in her eighties,” my father observed.
We were sitting in a booth nursing our hot drinks. I was nibbling a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich on a croissant. “Except for the kamikaze cat that’s always running under her rickety legs, she must live alone,” I noted.
“Someday, it’s just a matter of time, we’re all gonna be like her - a little absent-minded, forgetful … getting our pills paid for by Medicare and living on social security.”
“Don’t seem like a barrel of fun,” I noted.
“Well, at least she got the whacked-out cat for company.”
A boy that I recognized from zoo camp came into the coffee shop with his parents and a younger sister. He nodded affably and went off to sit in the far corner. I was thinking about Cheryl Oliphant – my favorite pastime lately – and how her fractured, disjointed commentary got under my skin. “Call of the Wild - did you ever read the book?”
My father, who had been lost in his own, private thoughts, looked up distractedly.
“Yeah, we studied that in high school - the adventure story about the sled dog up in the Canadian wilderness during the gold rush.” He scratched his grizzled chin and took a tentative sip of coffee. “Buck was the dog’s name, if I remember correctly.”
“London wrote a short story about a man struggling to light a fire to keep warm after falling through the ice and getting his feet wet. Years later the author went back and rewrote the story but with a completely different ending.” I finished off the croissant sandwich, washing the flaky crust down with what was left of my milk. “Everyone wants things to turn out a certain way.”
“Like the Brown Professor, who was hoping I’d give him a break on his repair bill.”
“You charged him the going rate.”
“I didn’t charge him a cent more than what the job required, but he would never see it that way. Stingy bastards like him will always nickel and dime you to death.” He spoke in a perfunctory tone devoid of animosity. “How come the guy in the story was traveling alone?”
“I don’t know.”
My father shrugged. “Thing is, you gotta try and do the right thing by people – never take an unfair advantage but, at the same time, don’t let the troublesome types walk all over you. We live in a community and everybody’s got too …” His voice broke off as his thoughts hit a cerebral cul-de-sac. “Aw, cripes! I don’t know what I’m babbling about anymore.” Mercifully, my father home-grown philosophy was cut short when his cell phone began twittering feverishly. He spoke briefly to the party on the other end of the line then flipped the phone shut and stowed it in the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. “Looks like it’s going to be a busy morning.”
The third repair call was gas not oil. A middle-aged woman with great legs and sandy blond hair that cascaded down over her ears in curly ringlets met us at the door. “There’s no heat, no hot water.”
My father placed the metal toolbox on a wooden bench and removed a thin metal plate covering the bottom of the gas heater. Dropping down on his haunches he peered into the guts on the burner. “Pilot light’s dead.” He pressed down on a button and held the flame from a butane lighter up against the nozzle. Half a minute later he released his grip on the pilot button and the light went out. He relit the gas and repeated the process a second time. “Thermocouple’s burnt out. Totally fried.”
“Is that bad?” the blond asked. She was quite a looker with pale blue eyes and massive breasts - soft and inviting like something out of a Playboy centerfold. Not that the woman’s clothing was terribly revealing, but I could see by the curvy contour of her cotton pullover that the woman had a wickedly fine torso. And there was no ring on the third finger of her left hand. I might be just a goofy, dumb-ass kid, but I’m savvy enough to check for these things.
I’m sure my father, who doesn’t miss a beat, picked up on that too, but, after an appraising peek at the prodigious family assets, he immediately settled in with the heating element and was all business. “Replacement part costs a whopping eight dollars and ninety-five cents and takes less than five minutes to replace but, I’m not suppose to tell you all that.” With a small wrench he loosened a brass fitting and pulled a copper wire away from the burner. “There’s your culprit.” He placed the coiled tubing on the cement floor.
The woman knelt down and retrieved the damaged device. “How does it work?”
My father had already ripped the cardboard packaging from the replacement part and was positioning the silver nozzle under the burner. “What you’re holding is a thirty millivolt thermocouple.”
“Which means nothing to me.”
“It’s really quite basic stuff. A thermocouple is made from two dissimilar metals. If the gas flow is interrupted or the flame accidentally goes out, the sensor immediately closes, shutting the fuel supply.”
“Any idea why it broke?” the woman asked.
My father shrugged. “Just normal wear and tear, that’s all.” He depressed the red button a second time and relit the pilot. Fifteen seconds later he released the pressure, lifting his finger away altogether, and the pilot burned continuously. “That’s it! You’re back in business.”
“I got a question.” I said.
“Fire away.” We were a mile and a half from home and, courtesy of the hump-backed lady with the three-pronged cane, nibbling on sugar cookies dusted with multi-colored sprinkles.
“From when you first met Mom, how long did it take to figure out that she was the one?”
“Strange question.” Up ahead a lady with a baby carriage was standing at a crosswalk. He braked to a halt and waited while the woman reached to the opposite curb.
“That’s not an answer.”
We passed the Brandenberg Fire Station and the post office. “A guy I knew from high school, Victor Palumbo, had this girl, Lois, who he wanted to go out with. Lois was best friends with your mother but didn’t really know Victor all that well and thought he might be a big gavone.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a disparaging Italian term describing a jerk, phony, embarrassment, whatever.”
So what happened?”
“Lois arranged a double date. As I remember, Victor and Lois had absolutely nothing in common so the budding romance proved a big flop.”
“The double date – that was the first time you ever laid eyes on Mom.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“From when you met her, how long - ”
“Five minutes,” My father cut me short. “That’s all. I knew inside five minutes.” We pulled into the driveway. My old man had to reorganize his truck for a commercial installation. I went into the house where my mother was folding laundry in the den. There were three separate piles – bath towels, hand towels and washcloths. A mound of unmatched socks were resting in a straw clothesbasket.
Five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes. The words reverberated through my brain like a Buddhist mantra.
Later that night as I was lying in bed waiting to drop off to sleep, I got to thinking about Cheryl Oliphant. The inscrutable enigma-of-a-girl had been shadowing me day and night. I would be taking out the stinky garbage and a fleeting image of her with Nicolena, the South American python, would mysteriously flit through my brain - a randomly bizarre misfiring of the neural synapses. Or I would be nursing a glass of milk before taking my shower and sense her presence like some invisible sprite.
I tried to imagine what it might be like to be married and come home to her, a dozen years older, of course. Cheryl would have supper waiting every night when I returned from work. A bucolic existence, we would jibber-jabber about nothing in particular just like my own, thoroughly dopey folks. Mrs. Oliphant, who I had seen dropping her daughter off most mornings during the first week of zoo camp, would be a regular guest, but the philandering father would be persona non grata, barred from ever setting foot in the inviolate sanctuary of our home. Of course, my mother would teach Cheryl how to bake breads, not just the exotic dessert loafs with fruit, eggs, cream and honey but the hearty traditional recipes with fresh herbs, whole wheat, molasses and sour dough starter. At fourteen, I possessed a wide-ranging and engrossing imagination. Funny though, how things always worked out so much better in my fourteen year-old fantasy than mundane reality.
“Got any more sour cream apricot bread?”
My mother was packing my lunchbox Monday morning. “Your brother and father went a little overboard with the loaf last night, but I think there may still be a little left.” She raised the lid on the breadbox. One last slab of the orange-flecked loaf remained. My mother placed the bread in a separate sandwich bag, nestling it between an overripe banana and bottle of Gatorade.
“When were you planning to make more?”
“Not for a while yet.”
I fumbled with a knot in the shoelace of my left sneaker. “Could you bake another loaf so I could have it for the middle of the week?”
“I don’t see why not.”
&nbs
p; Teasing the tangled string apart, I eased my foot into the shoe. “Would you and dad ever get divorced?”
“Such a crazy question!”
“No, it isn’t. There’s this girl at the zoo – her parents fight and everybody’s miserable.”
“Well, that’s not good.” Her eyes wandered from my face to the bulky slice of sour cream apricot loaf perched in the lunch box. “Your father and I get along just fine so I don’t think divorce is a viable option.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the word ‘viable’ meant, but the woman’s intent was perfectly clear. Suddenly, my mother reached out and pulled me against her plump body. “Now you have an utterly stupendous day at zoo camp and don’t worry about such nonsense.” Her voice assumed a no-nonsense authoritative edge. “And be kind to that poor girl whose parents don’t know how to behave.”
My folks, like the river otters, were creatures of habit. My father got up every day and went to service heating and air conditioning units. He came home promptly at six. He gave his wife a box of candy each Valentine’s Day and a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card the first Sunday in May. We went on vacation every summer to Booth Bay Harbor where the family didn’t really do much of anything spectacular but always managed to have a great time. I dragged along behind my parents and younger sister as they flitted about the touristy shopping area, buying T-shirts that said stupid things like ‘I’m a Bona Fide Mainiac!’, purchasing coffee mugs that were ridiculously overpriced and homemade blueberry jellies for relatives and friends. My folks had a walloping donnybrook-of-a-fight once or twice a year. My mother usually won, and my father sulked for a day or two but never held a grudge. And that was about it.
What did Cheryl Oliphant say about river otters?