1503951243

by Laurel Saville

  To Darius, this wasn’t much money. Typical of his frugal grandfather. Enough to assist, but not enough for financial independence. However, Darius was beginning to think his material needs were far fewer and less ambitious than he had once thought. In fact, he was beginning to think that the expensive materialism he had seen all around him growing up—$16 cocktails, $50,000 cars, $250 shoes—wasn’t for him at all. He liked his $3 premade submarine sandwiches and the coffee he could buy for pocket change.

  In two months at the camp, he plowed through every paperback. Some he read twice. He began to seek out books at the little library in town. Then he drove to a bookstore in Plattsburgh. He read about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. He read apocalyptic, speculative, and science fiction titles. He read back-to-nature treatises. For the first time in his life, he considered the degradations of mankind and the abuse humans had heaped on the planet. As the summer slipped away and the days became crisp, when the day approached that he was supposed to be sitting in a college seminar, he cut up the credit cards his parents had supplied him with as a buffer against the bruising uncertainties of the world and mailed them the pieces in an envelope with no return address.

  The weathered FOR SALE sign was tipped over, sticking from the ground as if it had been struck by a plow the winter before. Or maybe several winters before. A vine had wrapped itself around the post, and a tendril hanging over the board waved at him in a vaguely lascivious way, like a woman at a window. He turned off the dirt road he’d been following onto a pocked and pitted drive. Muddy water splashed out from under his car tires as he rocked and pitched his way down the well-worn, weed-infested gravel. After about one-quarter of a twisting mile, the drive ended abruptly in front of a farmhouse. A dark, dejected, and morose thing sitting slump-shouldered in the midst of overgrown scrub. The porch drooped off to one side, the screen door was canted halfway open, and a couple of once bright-white planters that were now gray with mold hung from the crosspieces. Tattered lace curtains hung in the spider-webbed windows. There was a barn set back from the house. It was more erect—more resilient, apparently, to the abuses of weather and neglect.

  Darius got out of the car. When he slammed the door, something skittered under the house. He heard it hiss but saw only two eyes, dark and reflective, before they turned and disappeared. He took a few steps forward and stood in the yard of knee-high grass. He watched another creature covered in fur and stealth slide through a crack in the barn door. A bird called, distant and plaintive. Then silence settled into the overcast air.

  Darius made mental notes. The turnoff to the house had to be almost five miles down a poorly maintained and lightly traveled dirt road. The trees, scrub, and twisted driveway made the farmhouse and barn impossible to see from the road. The land around the buildings sloped upward, leaving them in a kind of bowl that kept the site extremely secluded. Darius did not realize this meant that the cold of the coming season would collect here and stay far into the following spring. Those sorts of concerns were beyond his experience. He went to the barn and pushed the door against its rusted rollers, shoving it aside just enough to peer in. Dim light from a few broken windows worked its way past dust motes. He made out a couple of stalls and a separate area with a workbench and wall hooks. He’d never had so much as a pet turtle growing up, but he quickly filled the barn with an imaginary cow, a goat, and a few chickens. He stepped back into the yard and sneezed. He saw, off to the side of the barn, the decayed rib cage of a structure, with tattered strips of weather-beaten plastic flapping in the breeze. It took him several minutes of staring and the sudden memory of a drawing in one of his back-to-subsistence-farming books to realize this had once been a hoop house. Then he quickly imagined the metal structure straightened, re-covered with fresh plastic, and filled with tidy flats of vegetables getting a head start on spring, safe from cold blasts of air, reaching their green fronds toward the wan winter sun.

  He walked over to the farmhouse. The steps to the front porch were tilted and springy with rot, but they held as he climbed them. The door was locked, so he stepped back into the yard and looked upward. Two rooflines moved away from each other at hard right angles. He’d never been in an old farmhouse, but he filled in what he could not see with mental pictures of a compact kitchen with a tin-top table; a lumpy, overstuffed chair in a parlor; a few bedrooms at the top of a short, steep staircase. He wasn’t sure where these images came from, but there they were, quaint and romantic.

  Yes, he thought. Yes, this will do. This will more than do.

  When he left, he had to get out of his car and step over to the FOR SALE sign, then rub away some moss and mold to make out the phone number. When he called, the agent asked him to describe the house and where it was. Darius tried, but he didn’t know what landmarks to conjure; some of the roads near there did not have street signs. He’d only found it because he’d been intentionally turning down smaller and smaller roads and had gotten lost on his way back, finding himself finally spit out onto the main two-lane road three towns above the one where he was living. The agent said he’d have to get back to him. When he called Darius a few days later, he told him the listing had actually expired a couple of years back.

  “Do you have any more information?” Darius asked. “Is the house still for sale? Is there someone else I could call?”

  The agent said he was new in the office and had no idea who had originally listed it. He suggested Darius look up the deed at City Hall. Darius found three listings with the same last name as the property owner’s. He called one number, which rang endlessly. The other was picked up by a person who thought Darius was a salesman of some sort and hung up on him. When he dialed the third, a woman answered. He thought he heard her drag on a cigarette as he told his story of discovering an abandoned farmhouse that he hoped to buy. Darius found it strange to say so many words. He had not had much conversation with anyone for months. Once he started talking, it seemed hard to stop.

  “How the hell did you find the place?” the woman on the other end of the phone finally interjected into his steady flow of words.

  Darius sputtered to a stop and laughed, relieved to be interrupted.

  “There was a sign,” he said.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. “I haven’t been out there in ages.”

  “Your house?” he asked.

  “No, my grandmother’s. She died, oh, five, six years ago. We put it on the market, but no one was interested. Figured the place would just rot back into the ground.”

  “Well, I’m interested,” Darius said firmly.

  “Seriously?” Her voice was full of amusement and incredulity. “I mean, why?”

  “I’m looking for something I can work on. Get my hands dirty. Make it my own,” Darius said with a newfound and totally manufactured confidence.

  The voice on the other end of the phone guffawed. “Well, you’ll get all that and more with that place,” she said.

  They made plans to meet out there in a few days. She said her name was Sally. Darius went to the library and checked out some how-to books on carpentry, gardening, and homesteading. He went to the hardware store and stood in the tool aisles, staring at the implements there, daydreaming about their uses, imagining how they might feel in his hands. He was not ready for tools, he knew this, but he bought an ax and a hammer—heavy, useful things that he’d never owned before. He set them by the door in the cabin and picked them up from time to time, ran his hands up and down their shafts, picturing the potential for useful work each tool seemed to hold in quiet abeyance. He went back to the store and bought a tool belt. He put it on in the bathroom of the cabin and looked at himself in the mirror, turning this way and that as if he were a high school girl trying on a prom dress. He admired the way the leather strap sat on his narrow hips.

  On the day he was to meet Sally, Darius gave himself extra time to get to the farmhouse, remembering how lost he’d become when he’d left it and trying to retrace his steps home. He had no trouble this time and got
there fifteen minutes early. There was already another vehicle there. A truck. Small, dark green, with rust eating away at several places on the panels. Darius was suddenly, sharply, jealous. He wanted a beat-up truck instead of his low-slung Saab. A woman was there, too, standing in the front doorway. A compact, sturdy presence, her hands stuffed into the back pockets of her jeans, work boots laced up on the outside of her pants, her hair tossed into a tumult around her face by the gusty winds of an increasingly brisk September. She raked her hair out of her eyes with her fingertips and stuffed it through the opening at the back of a ball cap. She didn’t smile as he got out of the car and moved toward her. He was surprised to find that he couldn’t read her expression. Her lips parted in a way that could as easily be mocking as welcoming. Her teeth were a little crooked and overlapping. He wondered why she’d not had braces. It never dawned on him that dental work, for some people, was a luxury rather than a necessity. She was not conventionally pretty, but there was a rough-hewn handsomeness to her face. She stuck out her hand and gave his a couple of firm pumps.

  A handshake like a man’s, he thought. She appeared to him not unlike the farmhouse itself—good bones, but a fixer-upper.

  Sally showed him in and they wandered the half-dozen dusty rooms. Even Darius could see that the house had little to recommend it. There was chipped linoleum where he’d thought he’d find scuffed wood floors, and garish wallpaper where he’d pictured wainscoting with layers upon layers of paint. There was no fireplace, just black spots where sparks had jumped from a long-gone woodstove onto the matted orange carpet. It smelled like cat pee and an old campfire.

  Still, he liked it. He’d been alone too much recently. He was ready to like anything.

  “What do you do?” he asked Sally as they stood in the dank living room, swiveling their heads around in the thick air of the long-closed-off space.

  “Do?” she said. “Do about what?”

  “You know, for work.” He was irritated by what he felt was her unnecessary stonewalling of his obvious query.

  She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes. No one Darius knew smoked cigarettes. Certainly not indoors. Sally shook one out of the pack and lighted it before answering him.

  “I’m a social worker,” she said.

  Darius wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “What sort of social worker?” he asked, trying to cover his ignorance.

  “I work for the state,” Sally said. “I work with kids. Foster kids. JDs. Fucked-up kids and their fucked-up families.”

  Darius wondered what a “JD” was but didn’t ask. He was a bit startled by her use of profanity. He didn’t know any women who swore so freely.

  “Sounds like hard work,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Sometimes. At least the job is secure. Never a shortage of delinquents around here.”

  Ah, he thought. Delinquents. Juvenile Delinquents. JDs.

  He wasn’t sure what to do next. Sally stared at him and took a long drag on her cigarette. The directness of her gaze made him uncomfortable in a way he’d never been before. He was used to people coming at each other in a certain way. There was a standard set of questions one normally asked, about fathers’ last names, firms worked for, schools attended. These queries were always pitched in a tone designed to sound casual and friendly, but the answers were used to place people in a pecking order, to help decide if you were someone to compete with, dismiss, or try to cozy up to. This Sally person was doing none of these things. Darius wondered how old she was. She looked like she’d lived a lot more than he had. That didn’t necessarily mean she was much older. He wanted to ask her age, but that was a question he knew was considered impolite. At least among the people he was used to. Maybe it didn’t matter to someone like her.

  “How old are you?” he asked quickly, before his courage gave out.

  She gave him an annoyed look. He didn’t care. He wanted to know.

  “That’s a rude fucking question,” Sally said. “Not that I care. But still. Twenty-nine.”

  He nodded instead of apologizing. Looked around the room to avoid looking at her.

  “Not from around here, are you?” she asked, squinting against an exhalation of smoke.

  He shook his head.

  “What do you think of the place?” she asked, then sucked on her cigarette again.

  “It’s perfect,” he said.

  “Yup,” she said, crushing the cigarette under her boot and into the orange carpet. “Definitely not from around here.”

  Darius tried and failed to get bank financing. His small trust fund and lack of a job or credit history did not impress the bank officers. He came to Sally with the news, expecting that would be the end of things, but Sally said she’d take his $10,000 down payment and hold the mortgage herself.

  “What do I have to lose?” she said with a shrug. “Even if you bail on me, I’m still ahead ten thousand bucks.”

  They met a few weeks later and signed a simple purchase-and-sale agreement she’d downloaded from the Internet.

  “David?” she asked as she looked things over. “Thought you said your name was Darius?”

  “My legal name is David. But I’ve been called Darius for most of my life.”

  “Two kings,” Sally said.

  Darius looked at her quizzically.

  “A Jewish king and a Persian king?”

  Darius was silent.

  “Never mind,” she said as she handed him a set of keys.

  She had brought a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to celebrate the deal. They emptied the cans down their throats while wandering the rooms, then crushed and left them on the floor. As they went, Darius made mental notes about the projects he would take on to fix the place up, an endeavor he unrealistically and optimistically imagined would take only until spring. He listened with half his attention as Sally reminisced about her grandmother.

  “She lived here alone for as long as I can remember,” Sally said. “Mowed her own yard. Well, more like bushwhacked it, I guess, as there was never anything you’d call a lawn.”

  The day was damp and the rooms were chilled. The trees were shedding their leaves, and bits of snow spit and swirled in the air.

  “She even shoveled snow,” Sally said, popping the tab on another beer. “Just enough to get to the barn. Mostly stayed holed up here when the snow got too deep. Ate stuff she’d canned. A deer she killed. Pig she’d raised. Chickens too old to lay eggs. Died in her eighties with an ax in her hand, just about to split a log. Still ran a fucking chainsaw. Don’t make them like that old broad anymore.”

  Darius smiled and nodded as Sally talked. He took no interest in what she said and was unaware that these kinds of stories, told to another sort of person, might make them feel a deeper connection to the house and land. He simply wanted to get started. On something. Get himself set up and ready. For what, he wasn’t exactly sure, but having a place of his own seemed a vital first step. He reflexively drank the beers she handed to him, thinking that after the cans were emptied she’d leave and he could walk the rooms that now belonged to him alone, thinking, planning. Instead, when the last can was tossed aside, she folded her legs beneath her, sank to the living room floor, and fingered a joint out of the corner of her cigarette pack.

  “Mind?” she asked.

  Darius shook his head. Sally inhaled and then pointed the joint toward him. He shrugged, sat next to her on the floor, and took a toke or two. He was not much of a fan of weed but figured helping her finish the joint, as he had the beers, would send her on her way sooner. This, too, did not work out as he planned. Instead, after the slender joint was finished, she gave him another one of her disconcertingly direct looks, then shocked him by shouldering out of her jacket, pulling her shirt over her head, and pushing him backward onto the carpet. Her mouth hit his, her tongue searched for his, and he was stunned into submission. She ground her jeaned hips into his groin, and he was taken aback by how quickly and completely
he swelled. He let himself return her rough kiss. Her mouth tasted smoky and sweet, like burned marshmallows. She pushed her pants and underwear down, freed one leg, pulled him from his pants, rode him until she came, then kept going until the moment just before he came, when she expertly pulled back, leaving him with a quickly cooling puddle of semen on his stomach.

  It took Darius a moment to bring her face back into focus. She already had her pants pulled back up, her shirt on, and was lighting another cigarette by the time he came out of his orgasmic haze.

  “A celebratory fuck,” she said. “To seal the deal.”

  He stared at her.

  “Can’t say as I’ve ever been with a rich, preppy boy like you,” she said.

  “I’m not rich,” Darius said.

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Right. You bought this place with money you saved in a jelly jar by mowing lawns all through high school.”

  Darius sort of despised her in that moment. He had thought so little of her, with her coarse manners and cheap beer. When she said that, it occurred to him it was possible she thought even less of him than he did of her. When she left that day, he was glad to see her go. He thought it was all over now. The place was his. She’d leave him alone as long as he sent the mortgage payment in on time.

  Yet, the next weekend, her beater truck came up the driveway again. She walked onto the porch with a toolbox.

  “Figured you might need some of this stuff,” she said. “You’re welcome to borrow it. Don’t care if you break anything, as it all belonged to my ex, anyway.”

  She didn’t stay this time, just dropped her burdens inside the front door, turned, waved over her shoulder, and left. Darius picked through the items in the toolbox. He was unsure how many of them might be used, what they would be called upon to do, as if they were relics from another culture. Silence descended over the empty farmhouse. In Sally’s absence, what had been solitude quickly turned into loneliness.