by T E. D Klein
She felt his free hand close tightly on her shoulder. The ground was spinning beneath her feet, the shadows rising to claim her.
"And now," he said, "it is time to meet Mr. Hagendorn."
Neither of the Hartleys had been of any help, beyond locating, in one of their local guidebooks, a map of the hiking trails that crisscrossed the mountain; but the old lady, lips quivering with concentration, had been able to make an educated guess where the villa had stood, just above a jagged grey line identified on the map as Romney Gorge. Judging by the map, it seemed, despite Laszlo's claim, the climb of at least an hour; but Philip made it in half that — in time to see a burly figure in hospital whites struggling with a young woman at the top of the trail, by the edge of a cleft cut deep into the rock and opening onto the sky.
He raced toward them with what little strength remained, knowing that, days later and far away, he'd be able to tell his son the story of how one of the pair was snatched back from the abyss, while the other went to meet his master alone.
Growing Things
“Hey, honey, listen to this one. It’s downright scary.”
The magazine, drawn from near the middle of the pile, was yellowed, musty-smelling. Herb licked his lips with a fat tongue and squinted at the page with the corner turned down. “ ‘Dear Mr. Fixit: Early this spring a peculiar roundish bulge appeared under the linoleum in my bathroom, and now with the warm weather it’s beginning to get larger, as if something is sprouting under there. My husband, who is not well, almost tripped over it yesterday. What is it, some sort of fungus? How can I get rid of it without having to rip up the linoleum? As we cannot afford expensive new flooring, we are relying on you.’ Signed, ‘Anxious.’ ”
“I shouldn’t wonder she was anxious,” said Iris from her cloud of lemon oil and beeswax. She’d been giving the old end table a vigorous polishing and was slightly out of breath. “Who wants to share their bathroom with a bunch of toadstools?”
“Don’t worry, Fixit’s got it under control. ‘Dear Anxious: Sounds as if you have a pocket of moisture trapped between the floorboards and the linoleum. Often a damp basement is the culprit. Simply drill a hole up from the basement to release the moisture buildup, then seal the area with flash patch or creosote.’ “ Herb rubbed his chin. “Sounds simple enough to me.”
“Not in this house.”
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t have a basement, remember? You’d have to get down on your belly and slither beneath the house, with all that muck down there.”
“Hah, you’re right! Certainly wouldn’t want to do that!” Herb’s stomach shook as he laughed. “Thank God the damned bathroom’s new.”
In fact, the bathroom, clean and professionally tiled, was one of the things that had sold them on the house. Herb liked long showers, and Iris—who, unlike Herb’s first wife, had never had to make time for children—was given to leisurely soaks in the tub.
The rest of the place was in, at best, an indifferent state of repair. The rain gutters sagged, the windows needed caulking, and, if the house were to serve as anything more than a summer retreat from the city, the ancient coal-burning furnace in an alcove behind the kitchen would have to be replaced. Eventually, too, they’d have to add more rooms; at present the house was just a bungalow, a single floor of living space crowned by a not-too-well-insulated attic littered with rolls of cotton wadding, damaged furniture, and other bric-a-brac abandoned by the former owners. Who these owners were was uncertain; clearly the place hadn’t been lived in for years, and—though the real estate lady had denied it—it had probably been on the market for most of that time.
The two of them, of course, had hoped for something better; they were, in their way, a pair of midlife romantics. But Herb’s alimony payments and an unexpected drubbing from the IRS this April had forced them to be practical. Besides, they had three acres’ worth of woods, and stars they could never have seen from the city, and bullfrogs chanting feverishly in the marsh behind the house. They had an old woodshed, a swaybacked garage that had once been a barn, and a sunken area near the forest’s edge, overgrown with mushrooms and moss, that the real estate lady assured them had been a garden. They had each other. Did the house itself need work? As Herb had said airily when a skeptical friend asked if he knew anything about home repair, “Well, I know how to write a check.”
Secretly he nourished the ambition of doing the work himself. Though he had barely picked up a hammer since he’d knocked together bookends for his parents in a high school shop class, he felt certain that a few carefully selected repair manuals and a short course of This Old House would see him through. If fate had steered him and Iris toward that creature of jest, the “handyman special,” well, so be it. He would simply learn to be a handyman.
And fate, for once, had seemed to agree; for, among the artifacts left by the previous owners was a bookshelf stacked high with old magazines.
Actually, not all that old—from the late 1970s, in fact—but the humidity had aged them, so that they had taken on the fragile, jaundiced look of magazines from decades earlier. Iris had wanted to throw them away—“Those moldy old things,” she’d said, curling her hp, “they smell of mildew. We’ll fill up the shelves with books from local yard sales"—but Herb refused to hear of it. “They’re perfect for a country house,” he had said. “I mean, just look at this. Home Handyman. Practical Gardener. Growing Things Organically. Modem Health. Perfect rainy day reading.”
Luckily for Herb, there were lots of rainy days in this part of the world, because after three months of homeowning it had become clear that reading do-it-yourself columns such as “Mr. Fixit"—a regular feature in Home Handyman magazine—was a good deal more fun than actually fixing anything. He’d enjoyed shopping for tools and had turned a corner of the garage into a rudimentary workshop; but now that the tools gleamed from their hooks on the wall and the necessary work space had been cleared, his enthusiasm had waned.
In fact, a certain lassitude had settled upon them both. Maybe it was the dampness. This was, by all accounts, one of the wettest summers on record; each week the local pennysaver sagged in their hands as they pulled it from the mailbox, and a book of stamps that Iris bought had long since stuck together. Dollars had grown limp in Herb’s wallet. Today, with the summer sky once more threatening storms, he lay aside the Handyman and spent the afternoon with his nose buried in a back issue of Country Kitchen, while Iris, unable to transform an end table from the attic into something that passed for an antique, put away her beeswax and retreated to the bedroom for a nap.
It was growing dark by the time she awoke. Clouds covered the sky, but the rain had not come. Despite the afternoon’s inactivity, they were both too tired to cook; instead they had dinner by candlelight at a roadside inn, along a desolate stretch of highway several miles beyond the town. They toasted one another’s health and wished that they were just a few years younger.
The house felt chilly when they returned; the air seemed thick with moisture. They’d already had to buy themselves wool mattress pads to keep their sheets from growing clammy. Tonight, to take the dampness off, Herb built a fire, carefully examining the logs he carried inside for spiders and insects that could drop off and infest the house. He remembered a line he’d seen in Practical Gardener, something about being constantly on watch for “the blight on the peach and the worm in the rosebud.”
This evening, though, it was Home Handyman that drew him back. He’d started weeks before with the older issues at the bottom of the pile and had steadily been working his way up. While on the couch Iris yawned over a contemporary romance, he engrossed himself in articles on wood-stove safety, building a patio, and—something he was glad he’d never have to worry about—pumping out a flooded basement.
The issue he’d just pulled out, from the top half of the pile, was less yellowed than the ones before. “Here’s a letter,” he announced, “from a man who’s had trouble removing a tree stump next to his house. Mr. Fixi
t says he’d better get rid of it fast, or it’ll attract termites.” Herb shook his head. “Christ, you can’t let down your guard for a second out here. And here’s one from a man who built a chimney but didn’t seal it properly.” He chuckled. “The damn fool! Filled his attic with smoke.” He eyed their fireplace speculatively, but it looked solid and substantial, the flames merry. He turned back to the magazine. The next page had the corner folded down. “Some guy asks about oil stains on a concrete floor. Mr. Fixit recommends a mixture of cream of tartar and something called ‘oxalic acid.’ How the hell are you supposed to find … Hey, listen to this, here’s another one from that same woman who wrote in before. ‘Dear Mr. Fixit: The advice you gave me previously, on getting rid of bulges under the linoleum in my bathroom by drilling up from the basement, was of little use, as we have no basement, and due to an incapacity my husband and I are unable to make our way beneath the house. The bulges—’ ”
Iris looked up from her book. “Before it was just one bulge.”
“Well, hon,” he said, thinking of her in the tub, “you know how it is with bulges.” He made sure he saw her smile before turning back to the column. “ The bulges have grown larger, and there’s a definite odor coming from them. What should we do?’ Signed, ‘Still Anxious.’ ”
“That poor woman!” said Iris. She stretched and settled back into the cushions. “You don’t suppose it could be radon, do you?”
“No, he says they may have something called ‘wood bloat.’ “ Herb shuddered, savoring the phrase. “ ‘Forget about preserving the linoleum,’ he says. ‘Drill two holes deep into the center of the bulges and carefully pour in a solution of equal parts baking soda, mineral spirits, and vanilla extract. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’d advise you to seek professional help.’ ”
“She should have done that in the first place,” said Iris. “I’d love to know how she made out.”
“Me, too,” said Herb. “Let’s see if the story’s continued.”
He flipped through the next few months of Home Handyman. There were leaky stovepipes, backed-up drains, and decaying roofs, but no mention of the bulges. From the couch came a soft bump as Iris lay back and let the book drop to the rug. Her eyes closed; her mouth went slack. Watching her stomach rise and fall in the firelight, he felt suddenly and peculiarly alone.
From outside came the whisper of rain—normally a peaceful sound, but tonight a troubling one; he could picture the land around the house, and beneath it, becoming a place of marsh and stagnant water, where God knows what might grow. The important thing, he knew, was to keep the bottom of the house raised above the ground, or else dampness would rot the timbers. Surely the crawl space under his feet was ample protection from the wetness; still, he wished that the house had a basement.
Softly, so as not to wake his wife, he tiptoed into the bathroom—still smelling pleasantly of paint and varnish—and stared pensively at the floor. For a moment, alarmed, he thought he noticed a hairline crack between two of the new tiles, where the floor was slightly uneven between the toilet and the shower stall; but the light was bad in here, and the crack had probably been there all along.
By the time he returned to the front room, the fire was beginning to go out. He’d have liked to add more wood, but he didn’t want to risk waking Iris. Seating himself back on the rug with a pile of magazines beside him, he continued his search through the remaining issues of Home Handyman, right up till the point, more than three years in the past, when the issues stopped. He found no further updates from “Anxious;” he wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed or relieved. The latter, he supposed; things must have come out okay.
The issues of Handyman were replaced by a pile, only slightly less yellowed and slightly less substantial, of Modem Health, with, predictably, its own advice column, this one conducted by a “Dr. Carewell.” Shingles on roots were succeeded by shingles on faces and legs; the cracked plaster and rotting baseboards gave way to hay fever and thinning hair.
“I have an enormous bunion on my right foot,” one letter began, with a trace of pride. “I have a hernia that was left untreated,” said another. Readers complained of plantar warts, aching backs, and coughs that wouldn’t quit. It was like owning a home, Herb thought; you had to be constantly vigilant. Sooner or later, something always gave way and the rot seeped in. “Dear Dr. Carewell,” one letter began, where the page corner had been turned down, “My husband and I are both increasingly incapacitated by a rash that has left large rose-red blotches all over our bodies. Could it be some sort of fungus? There is no pain or itching, but odd little bumps have begun to appear in the center.” It was signed “Bedridden.”
All this talk of breakdown and disease was depressing, and the mention of bed had made him tired. The fire had almost gone out. Glancing at the doctor’s reply—it was cheerily reassuring, something about plenty of exercise and good organic vegetables—he got slowly to his feet. From another room came the creak of wood as the old house settled in for the night.
Iris snored softly on the couch. She looked so peaceful that he hated to wake her, but he knew she’d fall asleep again soon; the two of them always slept well, out here in the country. “Come on, hon,” he whispered. “Bedtime.” The sound of the rain no longer troubled him as he bent toward her, brushed back her hair, and tenderly planted a kiss on her cheek, rosy in the dying light.
Complete Short Stories
The Events at Poroth Farm (1972)
Renaissance Man (1974)
S.F. (1975)
Magic Carpet (1976)
Petey (1979)
Children of the Kingdom (1980)
Black Man with a Horn (1980)
Nadelman's God (1985)
Well-Connected (1987)
Camera Shy (1988)
They Don't Write 'em Like This Anymore: A TV Treatment in Two Versions (1989)
Ladder (1990)
One Size Eats All (1993)
Curtains for Nat Crumley (1996)
Growing Things (1999)
Imagining Things (2007)