by Mike Heppner
“I don’t know the person.”
“Cam Pee’s the CEO of Living Arrangements. They’re a regional chain of mid-to-low-end retail establishments. They’re looking to spread out, go zone-wide, hit the rest of the Great Lakes. They need a new print campaign, something snappy, something poppy, something hip and now. I figured maybe you could throw something together.”
“Well, now. I seem to recall a prior commitment—”
“Don’t answer yes or no!”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Just let me know within the next nine minutes and we’ll get going.”
“All right. I’ll wait, then.”
“It really would be a big help, Julian. Naturally, we’d pay you under the table.”
“Well, I don’t need much.”
“Oh, that’s great. You’re considering it. You’re neither saying yes or no. This is good news. ’Cause I’ll tell you, Jules, if not for you, I gotta go to Gray Hollows, and we both know what a pain in the ass he is.”
“I don’t recollect the name.”
“Sure you do. Gray Hollows. He was here when you were here. A real smart aleck. My frustration level is at an all-time high. We need you back.”
“Oh, well, now you’re trying to talk me up, sir.”
“Not at all. You were a coup for us. I need to hire more New Yorkers. This town’s a wasteland. Look—I’m looking out the window. Nothing! Okay: a car.”
“I like it, myself.”
“Two hours, max. This is free money, Julian.”
“Well . . .”
“No! You’re right! Just think about it. I’m going to hang up. This conversation needs to end at this point. To say another word would be to disrupt the delicate balance between forces much too subtle to describe.”
“Mmmnnnnallrightsir.”
“I’ll only say this. You should neither consider the words yes or no with respect to this issue until the proper length of time has passed. Which would be about eight minutes from now.”
“Mmmwell, you have a pleasant day then.”
Julian hung up just as the bell sounded in the entryway. Hurrying downstairs, he told himself to slow down. At his age, he’d earned the right to take his time. Still, he couldn’t help it; he didn’t like to keep anyone waiting. The unpacked boxes in the living room throbbed blue and red as his pulse pressed against the backs of his eyes. He slid from the bottom step and skated on slippered feet into the foyer. Two women were standing on the front porch. One was nearly as tall as Julian, and she wore round sunglasses that made her face look like a skull. The other was petite, pretty; she stood apart, drifting toward the edge of the porch. He opened the door and stepped aside.
“Brother sir, good day.” The tall woman spoke in a solemn voice, using inflections that seemed unnatural to her. “My name is Lydia Tree and this is my friend Donna Skye. That’s Skye with an e.”
“With an e,” he repeated tonelessly, staring at the woman’s hair. Her assertive coif—blond and stiff—recalled an elaborate headdress.
“I understand that in your culture,” she said, “names are determined by a spiritual leader who blesses the newborn with an iron brand.”
“That a fact?”
“Welcome to the community!” She seized his hand and pumped it twice. Her skin was cold and hard, like a wet rock. “Are you a first-time homeowner?”
“Well, I’ve been a renter most of my life.”
“Ah, yes.” She turned and looked at her friend, who was standing on the lawn, nudging an orange leaf with her shoe. “The impoverished tenement houses. Tattered laundry blowing in the breeze. Elevated trains running at all hours of the night.” Patting Julian’s arm, she peered into the house over the top of her glasses. “May we come in?”
He nodded and led them past stacks of unopened shipping crates, tables and chairs wrapped in clear furniture bags. He felt oddly out of place—a squatter in his own house. Apologizing for the mess, he made a few trips around the living room with a small plastic broom, then found a pair of cement pedestals for the ladies to sit on. Fleeing to the kitchen, he opened the freezer and pulled out an ice tray, twisting it, making the cubes pop. Returning to his guests, he handed the ladies two iced teas and a plate of cheese and crackers. Damn! Forgot the knife. Go back? No, later.
“This tea is positively charming,” Lydia said, smacking her lips. “Did you grind the leaves yourself? No, of course you didn’t. How absurd. I’m just making conversation.” Glaring, she tipped back in her seat; the rest of the room seemed to lean behind her. “The reason, sir, why we’ve come here today is because we need some information.”
“Information?”
“Donna, perhaps you’d—?”
“Oh, Lydia.” The other woman fiddled with her glass, watching the liquid slosh and settle.
“Donna is writing a book.”
“She’s exaggerating.”
“How can you exaggerate you’re writing a book? Either you are or you aren’t.”
“Lydia thinks I’m writing a book. I never said—”
“Discussions were made vis-à-vis ‘Do we do this thing?’ and the answer you gave me was yes.”
Julian let the ladies argue for a while, then asked, “What sort of a book are you writing, madam?”
“Oh. Well. Hmm.” Donna blushed, stirring her drink. “It’s not really a book. If I write it. I don’t know.”
Lydia broke in. “It’s a collection of motivational lore. A sprawling compendium examining the belief systems of many cultures from many different lands.” Her hands flashed, pitching the words. “Their varied heritage. Their spiritual convictions. Their rough-hewn ways of life. I’m just stringing words together. This is a broad overview of the sort of thing you can expect.”
“I always wanted to write a book.”
Lydia slapped her partner’s leg. “There! That’s what we want!”
“Ma’am?” he asked, wanting to take it back—whatever it was.
“ ‘I always wanted to write a book.’ See, Donna, that’s your lead-off sentence. The black man in America. His noble courage. Sweating over a factory job fourteen hours a day. Picture his children.”
“One child, actually.”
“Naked. Swinging from a fire escape.”
“A girl. Emily. Course, she ain’t so little anymore.”
“This is perfect. This is exactly what we’re looking for.”
Julian reached out to pick up the cheese, but it had glommed onto the plate, so he set the whole thing back down, plate and cheese and crackers too, a nice fan of twenty, the top one broken but the rest okay.
“I don’t know that I’d be all that useful to you ladies.”
“Nonsense,” said Lydia, turning to her friend. “Now, Donna, you ask the questions.”
Donna stopped playing with her drink. “Oh, gee, uh . . .”
Lydia snapped her fingers, three regular beats. This is the tempo, darling. “Age, birthdate, middle name.”
Trying to be helpful, Julian offered, “I was born in 1936.”
“Ah.” Lydia brightened, hearing a hook. “Near the height of the Depression!”
“Not really,” Donna moped. “Depression was early thirties, wasn’t it?”
“Near the height, near the height.” Lydia huffed on her sunglasses and wiped the lenses with her sleeve. “It’s gotta be at the very top, otherwise it’s no good?”
Boots sounded in the hallway—slow, even strides. A young man appeared in the corridor, adjusting the clasp of a canvas tool belt. His faded denims looked rugged, and his flannel shirt hung open to show his bare chest. The ladies stared; their heads banged together as they both reached for a cracker.
“Hello? Mr. . . . Mason?” The man read Julian’s name from a yellow notepad and knocked on the wall. “I’m the electrician,” he said, scanning the floor. “Door was open so I came in. You want me to check the wires upstairs?”
“Oh. Oh, yes!” Julian’s slippers slapped against his heels as he crossed th
e room. “No, not upstairs. I mean yes—upstairs, but all the way upstairs.” He pointed at the ceiling, feeling silly. “My office is in the attic.”
The young man brought out a huge screwdriver and cocked the shank. “I’ll find it,” he said, then continued up the steps. The ladies watched him go. Tipping her drink, Lydia cupped her hand around her friend’s ear and whispered, “How’d you like to put that in your mouth?”
Julian returned to his guests, eager to speak after the lengthy preamble, and so he talked about his childhood, the wartime factories, his mother and the other women, the bomb builders, the celebrations after Nagasaki and the subsequent rush to buy property, but by the time he got to the fifties, he noticed that several minutes had gone by without an interruption, and so he stopped, waiting for a sign, a show of interest.
“Excuse me,” Donna said, coming out of a daze, “what was that?”
“When I was living in Boston.” He broke a cracker in half. Dust sprayed across his lap. “That was when I was working in the shipyards.”
“Before that.”
“Ma’am?”
“What did you say before that?”
“Before I moved to Boston?”
“I wasn’t listening to any of it.”
He coughed. “Oh. All right. Boston came right after Detroit— would’ve been about ’52 . . .” He pointed at different spots on the wall. The places, mapped out. “Before that you’d have to go all the way back to Pittsburgh, which was where I grew up.”
“Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” Donna spoke the words slowly, making the place sound exotic, Polynesian.
“That’s the one. We lived there for several years, back when my father was out fighting in the Pacific.”
“And he was . . . ?” She frowned, needing more. “Killed in the service?”
“No, he came back after the war and worked in the auto industry for another twenty years before he passed on.”
“Damn.” She sucked in her cheeks. “This isn’t really . . . dismal enough, is it Lydia?”
“It’s coming, Donna. I can feel it.” Lydia clapped her hands, resetting the scene. “So: Boston, 1952.”
Julian straightened in his seat. “Yes, so I went to Boston and got a job working on the docks. I lived in a one-room place down by the water. Just me and a little coil to make sandwiches on.”
“Describe the coil,” Lydia said, closing her eyes.
“Uh . . .” He made a shape with his hands. “Little thing . . .”
“Okay, okay.” She swished her drink, spilling some of it. “Just give us the nuts and bolts, and we’ll take it from there.”
He thought about that, the nuts and bolts, wondered what to say next—the essentials, okay, just the bare statistics, leave out the details, the old heating coil, the way the melted cheese dripped onto the hot part, then sizzled and turned black, and the taste of the sandwiches, always a little charred, the same thing each day, getting up at five a.m. for a quick breakfast, the harbor visible through his broken and barred window, the sounds outside, the bells, the bang-bang of the boats in the shipyard where he worked along with a thousand or so dockhands— mean guys, liked to fight, no harm intended but you might get a busted nose, and he recalled how they passed the time, painting dirty pictures over the hulls before covering them up with gray primer, and the funny accents of the beat cops, a constant menace, old Boston rednecks striding the boardwalk, Hey, nig-gah, why doan you go hoam ahn take ah nahp?, streets overrun with drunks and pissed sailors, and the bar on the first floor of his building where they’d patched a blown window with a red-and-black dartboard—window was round too, you see, so the dart-board filled the hole perfectly, and motorists would drive by and try to hit the target, thump thump, darts dropping to the pavement at all hours of the day and night, particularly between two and four in the morning when he worked on his drawings, his letters, designs of his own invention, and once a month he would send them home to his mother in lieu of money—ha ha, Julian very funny, but he told her that one day he was going to join a foundry where great men still developed new alphabets—not new alphabets but new ways of drawing the old ones—and his mother said that if he wanted to do that with his life then he must be someone special, which he believed at the time, but then she died and the decades passed, and little happened after that: some money made, but nothing permanent or particularly important.
Heavy footsteps crossed the ceiling. The ladies watched as a bare light fixture shook overhead. A steel measuring tape dropped from the landing to the foot of the stairs. The electrician followed, retracting the tape as he went. “Sorry. Just checking how far I’ve got to drop a line.” He rubbed his face, sweaty from the attic. “Those outlets are grounded already.” He stepped out of his work belt and set it on the floor. “You’ve got a free jack up there. If you get around to hooking up a modem, let me know.”
“Oh.” Julian cleared his throat. “No, I don’t believe I’ll be needing any of that.”
“Don’t need it?” The man shook his head. “Take my advice. It gets pretty effing lonely out here. Commute’s a bitch, too.”
“I don’t plan on—”
“Sure you do!” He pointed over his shoulder. “What about those print layouts on the second floor? Your FedEx bill must cost a fortune.” Digging into his pocket, he pulled out three business cards and passed them around. “I’ll hook you up. I also do custom Web-page design. You won’t ever have to leave the house.”
Julian read the card and folded it in half. “Well, Mr. Field, I sure do appreciate it, but I’m pretty old-fashioned.”
Lydia drained her drink, then said, “It’s a strange name for a computer guy.”
“I’m not a computer guy.” Olden took the old man’s seat as Julian left to find his checkbook. “I work with computers. There’s a difference.”
“Do tell.” She tilted her glass, mixing the ice with her tongue. A tiny trickle pooled in the back of her throat.
Olden helped himself to some snacks from the tray. “Okay, then. For example. Your product. Which is . . . ?”
She brought the glass back down. “You’re asking?”
“Or you can make one up. It doesn’t matter.”
“Well . . .” She looked away, trying to think. Outside, a deflated basketball drooped from a dead branch. Too bad Simon never liked to play. A few sports, third, fourth grade. The expensive uniforms. Chichi fabric. The other kids. Meatheads of the world. Drinking in the stands. Everyone’s an alcoholic. Simon in his goalie uniform. Drowning in equipment. Hates the helmet, keeps it up whenever the ball’s not in play.
She turned away from the window. “Does it have to be a thing?”
“It can be anything.” Olden’s eyes flashed. “A thing, a person, a—”
“A person!” she said, grabbing the edge of her pedestal. Donna gave her a curious look. “A person. My son!” Olden squinted, not getting it. “He’s an actor. I’m working on building his career.”
“TV? Movies?”
“Anything! He’s a very talented . . . very sweet . . . uh . . . he’s just a . . .”
“Oh, that’s perfect. We need to get you on the Net. Three thousand hits a day. There’s a lot of competition out there, but I know a few tricks.” He pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his shirt pocket and cut off a square of cheese, placing it between two crackers, making a sandwich. Lydia hid behind the man’s business card, rereading the words, the clever design, the neat, modern type. OLDEN FIELD—NETWORK CONSULTANT. Breathing quickly, she imagined a steady process—three thousand hits a day. Total saturation. Simon-in-the-air.
“So,” she said, pocketing the card. “You do this for a living, hunh? You could put it all together for me?”
Olden finished his cracker, then shrugged. “Maybe.” He dusted his hands and hoisted the tool belt over his shoulder. “We might have to work out an arrangement.”
Julian returned and handed a check to the electrician. Looking down, he saw the cracker crumbs, the missing piece of c
heese. He blinked. Crazy day.
Lydia stood up and tugged on her friend’s sleeve. “Donna, I hope you don’t mind if I take you home now.”
“But Lydia, our interview—”
“That’s for another time.” She steered the other woman into the hallway, pushing from behind. Their high heels wobbled on the hardwood floor. “I’ve got to get back to my son . . .”
Confused, Julian teetered after his guests. “I was just starting to enjoy myself,” he said, catching up to them near the front door. Olden stayed behind, inspecting the check.
“We’ll take it from here.” Lydia straightened her sunglasses and stepped outside. “Nineteen fifty-two: Boston, a bar, a bunch of junk . . .” She snapped her fingers, clicking off the main points.
Donna turned and waved through the screen. “Thanks a lot, for the . . .” She stammered, then gave up, feeling like an idiot. Her friend was already waiting inside the car. The horn sounded and she hurried across the driveway. Julian waved from the porch; when the car drove off, it seemed to take something with it—something from him.
Back inside, the men toured the place. Olden took the lead, pointing out things that needed fixing. Upstairs, he used a wrench to knock the glass out of a broken storm window. The pieces fell two stories and shattered against a concrete drain. “I’ll stop by next week,” he said, pulling down the screen. “The weather should hold until then.”
“When does winter start?” Julian leaned against the window seat and casually took his pulse.
“Soon. October’s usually pretty cold. Snow, sometimes. Several feet by January.” Olden dusted the glass chips from the sill. His palm glistened with fragments. “I hope you have something to read.”
“Read?”
“Yeah, and snow tires. We don’t mess around up here.”
Julian smelled the cool air breezing through the window. “Nice change, anyway.”
“From the city? Sure.” Olden curled his fingers and looked at his fist. “I like it out here. Interesting people. Takes a certain mentality.”
Julian stared at the young man’s hand and tried to smile. “Well, I hope I got what it takes.”