The
Handyman
Bentley Little
Cemetery Dance Publications
Baltimore
2017
Copyright © 2017 by Bentley Little
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cemetery Dance Publications
132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7
Forest Hill, MD 21050
http://www.cemeterydance.com
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-641-3
Front Cover Artwork © 2017 by Elder Lemon Design
Digital Design by Dan Hocker
PART ONE
Daniel
ONE
Business had been slow for most of the summer. So as much as I resented it, I was working on a Sunday morning, nearly two hours from home, showing a one-bedroom cabin in Big Bear to a young couple looking for a weekend getaway. It was the only property in the area within their price range, which meant that it was, in realtor parlance, a “fixer upper.” No view, no lot to speak of, and not only had the previous owners been allergic to maintenance, but the structure itself had issues obvious to even the most unobservant layman: stains on the ceiling from leaks in the roof; a sagging wall where a window had been installed with no consideration given to the location of load-bearing beams; a series of crooked shelves in the half-kitchen; a ridge in the incorrectly laid tile where two sections of flooring did not meet properly.
None of these drawbacks seemed to deter the young couple, however, who were positively giddy over the prospect of owning a vacation home in the mountains—no matter what shape it was in.
Still, as I led them through the rooms, the problems with the place were so distinctly noticeable that, at a certain point, it became comical. Looking at the shoddy construction in the bathroom—an unpainted plywood counter inexpertly built around the small sink—the husband shook his head, chuckling. “It’s like a Frank house,” he told his wife.
My breath caught in my throat, the rationalizing excuse I’d been about to offer suddenly forgotten.
Frank house.
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, and I looked more carefully at the man and woman, whom I’d seen until then only as buyers. They were a good decade or two younger than I was—in their mid-twenties, I suspected—and appeared to be Southern California natives. The man, Brad, a computer programmer, had one of those weird little squarish goatee things and wore a Bing Crosby-looking hipster hat. Connie, his wife, was blond and tan, with the standard issue big boobs and jeans so tight that everything was outlined.
I spoke carefully, making a special effort to keep my voice calm and noncommittal. “What did you say?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Did you call this a ‘Frank house?’”
“It’s kind of a private joke.”
“What’s a ‘Frank house?’” I pressed.
“It’s nothing.”
“What is it?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes,” I assured him.
Brad laughed. “Okay. I grew up in this house in Tarzana. My mom still lives there. The neighborhood sort of grew up around us, but when we moved in about twenty years ago, the house was by itself on the edge of the city. The guy we bought it from was the guy who built it, a guy named Frank. I was really little, so I don’t remember much about him, but my dad always said he was one of those guys who tries to pass himself off as an expert on everything. According to Frank, he’d invented this energy-saving heater and air-conditioner for our house, and he’d installed some kind of plumbing system that recycled sink water to fill up the toilets. The place was supposed to be state of the art when it came to the environment. Only nothing worked. The toilets didn’t flush. The roof leaked. And things kept falling apart. Not right away, but over the years. And each time something happened, my dad would curse out Frank and say, ‘This damn Frank house.’”
“Tell Mr. Martin about your mom’s laundry room,” Connie said.
“Daniel,” I said reflexively. “Call me Daniel.”
“Okay, so last year, my mom was watching TV. At night. And she hears this huge crash from the kitchen area. She goes back to check it out, and the entire floor of the laundry room’s collapsed! The washer and dryer have both fallen into this hole in the middle of the room, and the sink’s been pulled on top of them and water’s spurting everywhere from the burst pipes. It turns out that Frank hadn’t put in enough support beams for the floor. After they looked at it, everyone was amazed that it lasted as long as it did. Pure luck, according to the contractor who fixed it.”
Connie shook her head. “And the weird thing was that, under the floor, they found all these rolls of wallpaper. Dozens of them!”
“Twenty six,” Brad confirmed.
“Frank had been storing them down there in the crawlspace.”
“That’s why I called this a Frank house,” Brad said. “It kind of reminds me of the home where I grew up.”
I returned to realtor mode. “So this should be nothing to an old hand like you. Now, we haven’t finished going over everything, but it seems like you’re favorably inclined. So if it turns out that you two do want to make an offer, I’d bid two to three thousand lower than asking price since the place has all these problems. We might even try to get the seller to have some of them corrected before sale, though I doubt we’ll get anywhere on that.”
Brad and Connie looked at each other. “We are interested,” Brad said.
“Good! Then why don’t we go back to my office, I’ll put in a bid, and we’ll see where things go.”
I was on automatic pilot. I sounded helpful, engaged, competent, professional, but inside, I was none of those things.
Frank house
I looked around the poorly built cabin, feeling cold.
At that moment there was only one thing on my mind.
There were more of them.
TWO
I was ten years old when my parents bought the lot in Arizona.
We were on a two-week vacation, visiting relatives in Colorado, obnoxious redneck cousins who pretended to like me and my brother when the adults were around, but tortured us once the parents were looking the other way. On the return trip to California, my dad had scheduled a three day stop-off in Arizona, deciding that if we were going to go to the Four Corners area, we should take the opportunity to see the Grand Canyon. It was nice to be with just our immediate family again, and as we travelled down from northern New Mexico on the unlikely named Highway 666, I was, for the first time on the trip, genuinely happy.
The book Blue Highways had been a bestseller a few years prior, and my dad had read it and been inspired. He wanted to travel the country using back roads, so rather than drive Interstate 40, we took smaller roads through the overlapping reservations of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona.
In the backseat, between me and my brother Billy, was a pile of books. On top was a Sunset publication titled Indian Country, and when we weren’t playing one of the travel games we’d gotten at McDonald’s, I used the book to check out where we’d been and where we were going. There were maps inside, and photographs, and descriptions of scenic sites. I looked up the Hubble Trading Post, which a sign on the side of the road had s
aid was 75 miles ahead. “Can we stop by the trading post?” I asked.
“Sure,” my dad said.
Scattered here and there across the flattened landscape were Hogans and houses and trailers. Up ahead was a gas station and a surprisingly large Basha’s supermarket. Billy had to go to the bathroom, so my dad pulled into the parking lot and we went inside, looking for a restroom.
Ours were the only white faces in the grocery store, and we were the only ones speaking English. Everyone else was talking in a Native American language—Navajo? Hopi?—and I understood for the first time what it must be like for immigrants coming to this country. Actually, we were immigrants, I realized. These were the original residents of this land, and to them we were foreign interlopers.
It was uncomfortable for all of us, and my dad went into the bathroom with Billy while my mom and I remained close together outside the door. As soon as Billy was done, we were back in the car and on the road again.
We spent the night at a hotel made out of red rocks adjacent to the Cameron Trading Post. Perched on the edge of a gorge carved by the Little Colorado River, the hotel’s claim to fame was the fact that Waylon Jennings had spent his honeymoon there. Other tourists besides ourselves were staying at the lodge, and even without a swimming pool, Billy and I had fun.
The Grand Canyon, when we reached it the next morning, was so massive as to be overwhelming. We drove from lookout point to lookout point, and the canyon was so enormous that, over the space of twenty miles, the views were nearly identical. It was only the differences at the top, where we were, that brought some variety to the landscape, and we spent most of the day exploring Grand Canyon Village, the touristy collection of hotels and shops and historic buildings that lined a populated stretch of the south rim.
Still wanting to stay on the side roads, the AAA map’s blue highways, my dad did not take the interstate to Phoenix the following day but instead followed a patchwork of smaller rural routes out of Flagstaff and over the Mogollon Rim, a massive plateau which my Sunset book said was home to the largest stand of Ponderosa pines in the world. Driving down the south side of the escarpment, we saw a small town nestled in a broad valley between heavily wooded hills. The two-lane highway wound in a switchback to the bottom, where tall pine trees cast dappled shadows on the blacktop. Ahead, a green sign at the side of the highway marked the town limit.
“‘Welcome to Randall,’” Billy read aloud. “‘Founded 1881, Elevation 4,260 feet, Population 4,260.’
“Hey!” he said. “The population’s the same as the elevation!”
“That’s weird,” I told him.
“Believe it or not!”
“Not that weird.”
It was another mile or two before we saw the first building in town, a church. One of those little white-steepled ones you see in movies. The small parking lot before it was dirt, and behind was a stand of dark green Ponderosas. It looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
So did the quaint downtown that followed. There was a brick hardware store with adjacent nursery, a video store, a bank, a fire station, a pharmacy next to a doctor’s office, a bakery, a jeweler’s, a barber shop, a feed and grain store, a couple of gas stations, a post office, a grocery, a laundromat, a library and several other businesses that lined both sides of the highway for three or four blocks.
My mom thought it was the cutest town she’d ever seen, and instead of just passing through, she had my dad drive down side streets, through neighborhoods of cottages and cabins and single-story homes. Behind the houses was a trailer park, and past the trailer park a dirt road that led to a series of large cattle ranches. The sky, far bluer than it ever appeared in California, was filled with white puffy clouds, and though this was Arizona in the summer, the temperature was pleasant, the area cooled by a gentle mountain breeze.
“I could see myself living here,” Mom said.
We ate a lunch of hamburgers and fries at a restaurant called The North Fork, a dark bar-like place with wood paneling and pictures of fishermen and their catches framed on the walls. Afterward, my dad filled up the car at a one-pump gas station that had a stuffed moose in front of the office.
We already had reservations at a motel in Phoenix, and we’d lose our deposit if we didn’t show. Otherwise, we would have spent the night in Randall at a cute rustic inn next to a running stream, where my mom had my dad take a picture of me and my brother before we headed out.
It was well over a hundred degrees when we reached Phoenix, too hot even to swim, but it was getting late anyway, so we got a pizza, brought it back to our room, watched TV, went to bed, and the next morning headed for home.
Back in Anaheim, sitting in our sweltering, un-air-conditioned house, we thought about that little town in the pines, and one night when we were sitting on the back porch, looking over our neighbors’ roofs at the Disneyland fireworks exploding in the sky to the east, my mom said, “It would be nice to have a little vacation home someplace like that, where we could go hiking and enjoy the fresh air and spend our summer vacations away from it all.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?” my dad agreed.
“It would.”
“All right, then. Let’s do it!”
Dad was an impulsive guy, and while that sometimes drove my mom crazy, it made life a lot more fun for us kids. On the way back from the dentist, for example, immediately after we’d had cavities filled, he might decide to stop off and get ice cream. Or, instead of going to the hardware store as he’d originally planned, he would take me and my brother to the miniature golf course. Like I said, it often irritated my mom, but this time she had no problem with it. She was giggly and excited as my dad talked about the logistics of buying a second home, and that night Billy and I went to sleep knowing that, even though we weren’t rich, we might soon have our very own vacation house.
One of my dad’s friends had told him about a new development in the home trade, pre-fabricated houses, and the next weekend our entire family went out to investigate. There was a company that made and sold pre-fab houses in Corona, and we drove down the Riverside Freeway to where a grouping of model homes were on display in a field adjacent to a gigantic lumberyard. There was a traditional cabin, a small A-frame, a medium-sized A-frame and a large A-frame, as well as a hexagonal house topped by a bubble-like skylight that looked like a landed UFO. The houses were surprisingly affordable and came with everything except carpets and furnishings. Shingled roof, tiled floors, wall paneling, overhead lights and switches, kitchen counters and sink, stove, bathroom sink, toilet and bathtub; all were included, along with the basic construction materials, interior plumbing and wiring. All a person had to do was put it all together. Or, in our case, hire someone to put it all together.
It was the mid-sized A-frame that appealed most to my parents, and we walked through the model twice. The first floor consisted of a living room, an open kitchen with dining counter, and, down a short hallway, a bathroom and bedroom. But it was the upstairs that captivated Billy and me. If we bought the house, the high-ceilinged loft would be shared by both of us, and we were already planning how we would divide it and where we would put our beds.
Downstairs, the salesman was trying to pressure my dad into buying a house today. The kit was only $15,000—the price of a car!—and it could be delivered within a week.
“Well, actually, if we were to buy one, it would be for a place in Arizona. I’m pretty sure it would be too expensive to ship it—”
“Oh, we have a branch in Phoenix,” the salesman said. “In fact, you could even purchase a kit today, and we could have our Phoenix branch ship it to your property.”
“That would be great,” my dad told him. “If we had property. We’re still in the looking stage right now.”
“Take my card, then. And when you’re ready, give me a call. I’m sure we can arrange something satisfactory.”
We were
all excited as we drove back to Orange County, and to the cheers of me and my brother, my dad announced that next week we would be returning to Randall, Arizona.
Our family didn’t have a lot of money. My dad was a junior high science teacher and my mom was a substitute English teacher. But my parents did have summers off, which we usually spent going to the beach or doing fun free things around Southern California. We were exactly the kind of family who could really make use of a vacation home because we would be able to spend a lot of time there.
I heard my parents talking low in their bedroom that night when they thought I was asleep. “Do you really think we can afford it?” my mom asked.
“It’s not that much,” my dad assured her. “We can refinance the house and use the extra money to buy a lot and that A-frame.”
“But we’ll need to pay someone to build it.”
“I think we can swing it. Don’t worry. Things will work out. They always do.”
Their voices got lower after that, so I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the tone sounded positive, and I fell asleep dreaming of all the cool posters I would put up on the roof/wall of my new loft bedroom.
We did indeed return to Arizona the following week, after my dad had had the car checked out by a mechanic buddy of his to make sure it was still in good enough shape to travel. We’d driven it far already this summer and didn’t want to tempt fate, but everything seemed to be in working order, and I helped my dad change the oil, we washed the car together, and early Monday morning, well before sunrise, we were on the road.
This time, my parents had made reservations at the Knotty Pine Lodge in Randall, and we arrived in town mid-afternoon, checking in and dropping off our suitcases before heading downtown to a setback log cabin that housed one of the local real estate offices. The agent was a pretty blond woman with a thick Southern accent who my mom later said reminded her of a beauty pageant contestant. My dad told the woman what we were looking for, but seeing that we were from California and assuming that we were wealthier than we were, she tried to steer us to large houses on large lots, a crude and tactless maneuver I’m proud to say I’ve never used in my own career as a realtor. We were interested in none of the properties she showed us, but while being driven around in her oversized silver Buick, we passed several empty lots with signs that read “For Sale By Owner.”
The Handyman Page 1