Birthday Dinner

by Jeffrey Anderson

Chapter 11

  Zach arrived early in the afternoon and carried his tools and wood and supplies onto the porch through a moderate rain. It was one of those saturated North Carolina days when you felt like a fish—breathing the humidity, swimming in it—even when you weren’t wading through the rain nearly as warm as your skin. Snake’d opened the door even before he’d knocked and pointed without a word or even a direct glance across the cluttered living room (if you could call the jumble of rag-tag furniture, boxes, and clothes strewn about a living room) to the bathroom with its door ajar, its hinges sprung and the bottom corner wedged against the splintery floor so it could neither open further nor close. Then, still without a word, he disappeared—maybe to some other room, maybe gone from the house. Zach didn’t know; he really didn’t care, as long as he didn’t expose him to injury or the direct witness of illegal activity—neither of which the self-interested Snake was likely to do, at least not till Zach completed these essential repairs.

  Zach pulled the rusty hinge pins out of the frozen hinges of the door using vise-grips and a rust-dissolving lubricant. He took the door out on the porch, removed the knobs and full-mortised latch (which was all brass and a beautiful example of early 20th-century hardware though you wouldn’t know it from the dings and tarnish), and planed the bottom and latch edge of the door till they were smooth and straight. He then replaced the stripped hinge screws on both the door and the jamb with longer and heavier modern hardened screws. Finally, he sanded the hinge pins till they were free of pits and rust and oiled them lightly before hanging the door back on its hinges, tapping the pins back into the reconditioned hinges, and checking the door swing and door edge margins to the jamb sides and top. The door swung easily and fully and closed neatly against the jamb stop. The edge gaps weren’t very even or symmetrical, but nothing in the house was.

  Zach oiled the door latch and tightened its interior machine screws. One of those screws broke and fell out. Zach cursed—there was no chance he had one to match in his screw box. Then he realized the latch still worked, still held together even without the broken screw. So he oiled all the moving parts and reinstalled the mortised latch in the door, then threaded the brass knobs onto the spindle until they were tight but not so tight they bound against the escutcheons. He swung the door shut and felt a visceral sense of satisfaction when it closed smoothly and firmly in the jamb, the latch engaging the strike with a solid click. He opened and shut the door a half-dozen times, about four times more than required to confirm that it was in reliable working order.

  Then he turned his attention to the hole in the bathroom floor that, when you removed the filthy bath mat that covered it, gave one a clear view of the red clay of the ground a foot or so below. The house was built on brick piers a few courses tall and no continuous foundation wall to isolate the crawlspace from insects or animals or even people (small people) that might want to enter the house from below. That no person, or self-respecting animal, would ever choose to enter Snake’s house via this hole in the bathroom floor was a point that didn’t register on the building inspector’s checklist—the hole was an “interior hazard and unsealed exterior communication” that had to be repaired.

  And to repair it, Zach first had to drain the toilet then remove it from its hub and set it aside. He accomplished this distasteful task using a two-part mindset he’d learned while performing similarly repugnant chores on the farm—don’t let any air in your nostrils or any thought of what you’re doing in your brain. In other words, he became a kind of scent-less, thoughtless robot. The toilet removal went quickly enough, though he had to break both mounting bolts because their nuts were rusted to the threads. Then he washed his hands thoroughly with abrasive soap he’d brought along using Snake’s chipped wall-hung sink that needed its drain cleared but at least offered enough water and drainage for him to clean up.

  Zach used his power saw to cut away the rot on all sides back to sagging joists that were still solid except for one that had been perforated by termites, though the pests were long gone, probably decades gone. He reinforced the weak joist with a scab of 2 x 6, then cut a sheet of plywood the size of the hole in the floor, located and cut a round hole in the plywood for the toilet flange, then installed the plywood patch using hardened wood screws to fasten it to the joists. He slid metal mending plates under the toilet flange to support it on the plywood then screwed the plates to the plywood.

  He turned to head out to his truck to get a johnny ring for reinstalling the toilet and ran into Snake standing in the narrow path through the clutter of the living room. Zach stepped back, trying hard not to show his surprise.

  “Quitting time for Fix It,” Snake muttered.

  “I’m almost done with the patch.”

  “You done for the day,” he said in a low monotone that was all the more menacing for its lack of volume or inflection.

  “You don’t have a toilet.”

  “So?”

  “Where you going to do your business?”

  “Do my business where I choose. No matter to you.”

  “Can’t get back till Wednesday.”

  “Lived most my life with no toilet.”

  Zach shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He turned to gather up his tools strewn around the bathroom.

  Snake disappeared quick and silent as he’d appeared.

  Zach swept the porch of his door shavings, set his sawhorses to one side, grabbed his coiled extension cord, then did a last check of the porch for any tools he’d forgot.

  “Latonya credit about tapped out,” Snake said from the shadows beyond the ajar front door.

  Zach faced the doorway, was tempted to push the door open but chose to stay on the porch. “That’s not my problem.”

  “Not yours. Blondie’s.”

  “How is Latonya’s credit Becca’s problem?”

  “Blondie don’t want Latonya straight. She spitting enough cranked.”

  “Can’t help that.”

  “Could.”

  “How?”

  “Extend Latonya credit. Buy Blondie a little time.”

  “We’re not funding her addiction.”

  “Already have.”

  “No more.”

  “You call. But not even old Snake want to be on the wrong side of that bitch when she get cross-eyed.” The door swung shut.

  Zach took his power cord and walked out to his truck. The earlier rain had stopped but the feeling of being submerged lingered in the sodden late afternoon.