The Third Step

by William Lobb

  He closed his eyes and fell asleep. Sleep was always elusive, even more so this night. As soon as he closed his eyes, he thought of Pam, not the events of the night, only of her betrayal. He tried to blame it on the heroin, but deep down, his sense of being betrayed was deep. It felt, again like he was bleeding from a deep wound.

  Frankie awoke to his grandmother swatting him with a broom. He stood up and was a little dizzy. He smiled and said, “Hi, Grandma,” and she swatted him with the broom again. He said he needed a cigarette. She called him “asshole” and told him to come around to the back door when he finished smoking. He knew you’d not dare light up in that house. He did that once, never again.

  Frankie walked to the back door of the house. Usually, he’d stand on the collapsing porch and wait for her to come to the door. The porch was originally painted blue and white, but that was many years ago. Now, there were only hints of the color it once was. It was nothing more than old rotting wood seemingly held together by the years. Nails popped out everywhere. You stood there, and the floor felt like it might just give way. Every time he came to this door, he felt he was taking his life in his hands.

  If you looked out back and across a field growing wild asparagus and weeds and wildflowers, to the far side, you could see the spot from that fire so many years ago. Frankie was not sure about the stories he’d been told all his life, about the crazy, evil old man. He seemed none of that to Frankie, only a very sad and lonely old guy.

  His grandmother opened the door and looked at him disapprovingly, “You stink like a drunk, and you look like hell.” He walked in and took a coffee cup from the cupboard, poured himself a cup, and sat down at the table. He said he wanted to see her, because he had to go away for a time. She asked what he’d done this time, and he said he’d fucked up some guy bad.

  She leaned way back and slapped him hard against the face. He winced. At 99, she could still slap him senseless. He swore again, “Fuck,” and she hit him again.

  “God damn it, Grandma,” he said, and she hit him again. “Jesus,” another slap.

  Finally, he stopped swearing and she stopped hitting him.

  Through it all, he didn’t spill a drop of coffee. She brought him a plate of sugar cookies she’d baked the day before. Burned on the bottom, just the way he liked them.

  She stood looking at him, “You could go to the police.” Then she kind of laughed, “but that’s not the way of this family, is it?”

  Frankie only said he would try to get to Canada and he’d figure it out from there.

  He looked down at the filthy, ancient linoleum floor. Dirt ground in so deep it would never be removed. Everywhere he looked, he saw dirt and poverty and collapse. The old woman could see a change in him. She finally spoke again, “When you were a boy, there was such hope and promise. You never saw the deck stacked against you. Your optimism was annoying at times. No matter what you were dealt, you always saw an opportunity. Now all you see is dirt and decay, violence, and ugliness. You’ve become ugly, boy, ugly and sad.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “In blackjack, you can hit seventeen only so many times, Grandma, before you realize you can’t win. I’m only a little more realistic now.”

  She looked at him through those amazing Irish eyes and said, “So much like your grandfather. I only hope you can escape his fate . . .”

  Frankie got up to leave, telling her he needed to borrow the car, an ancient, early-1960s Rambler. The car barely ran. Driving it was more a test of patience and mechanical skill than transportation.

  She asked if he was too drunk to drive, and he assured her he was massively hungover, not drunk. Okay, maybe a little drunk . . . but she didn’t need to know that. She hugged him, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Frankie, you’ve always been such a pain in the ass.”

  He stood there in the creaking, slanting kitchen looking around, trying to absorb everything, like it was his last time. He walked out on the porch, looked back into the house, at the old and out-of-tune piano, at the old red, white, and silver Formica table, at the crooked floor, at the dirty linoleum floor.

  He turned, then looked back at her. Maybe it was the first time he’d ever really seen her as she stood there. This was not the witch standing before him. Not the strong and confident matriarch of the family. Not the rock that everyone loved and hated; this was an old, very old woman.

  For the first time, he saw frailty, for the first time he saw fragility, for the first time her years were not a number, but a fast-approaching marker that the end of this road was very near.

  She spoke, uncharacteristically softly, but with purpose, confirming his impression. “I’m very old, boy. Old and very tired. I used to fear the end; now I embrace it. I don’t know where you are going: to Canada, to jail, to Hell; if they even want you there, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be here when you get back. Come to me, visit my grave, talk to me just like we do in this kitchen, bring me flowers and tell me your secrets. Bring coffee and talk to me. I’ll be there and waiting.

  I fear for you. I’ve always feared for you. You always loved the thunder, the approaching storm, but you hated the soaking rain. You loved waiting for the fight, but hated the blows and broken bones; you loved everyone from a distance, even me. You don’t have a wall built around you—that would be too easy—you are completely empty inside. It’s as if you started out full of life, but shed it at an alarming pace, until even as young as you are, you are completely empty. I fear that you’ll walk this earth for a long, long time before you find rest. Come to me, talk to me, someday, and somehow I’ll lead you home.”

  With that said, she watched Frankie turn and walk down the deadly stairs. Every time his shoes hit the dirt driveway he wanted to kneel down and kiss the ground. He muttered to himself “crazy old bat,” but a small part of him wondered, could she be right?

  He had a funny feeling leaving this time. One he’d never had before. He turned and looked back at the house, at the old woman smiling and staring out the window. He’d survived another trip to Grandma’s house.

  Out in the old block garage he stood and looked at his ride. He swore it was colder inside the garage than out. The roof was missing in a huge chunk. He often thought the prized Rambler would be safer and more protected under a tree.

  Frankie hacked and coughed as he sat in the driver’s seat and inhaled the odor of mold and mildew and mouse crap. He pulled the door shut. It creaked so loudly he heard some mice or rats scurry away in fear. He saw a few empty beer cans on the floor, evidence of his last trip in the mighty Rambler. He turned the key. The engine groaned, stopped. Silence. He got out, the door creaked again and he noticed two of the tires looked half flat. Frankie popped open the hood, swore repeatedly, wiggled some wires, found the hot battery wire severely corroded. He found a wrench, cleaned the battery terminal, reattached the battery, went back behind the wheel, turned the key, and the engine groaned, making a sound like it was battling something deep inside itself.

  Suddenly, the whole car shook. Frankie worked the choke and the gas pedal and the Rambler roared back to life. As it idled, the radio came on, classic New York AM morning radio. The car shook like a cement mixer, but as he worked the choke, the shaking subsided. Frankie sat there behind the wheel, holding on with both hands.

  Getting this car started was about as close to praying as Frankie ever got. Everything in the world that morning was gray: the floor in the garage was gray; the walls were gray; the roof was gray; the Rambler was gray; inside the Rambler, the dust was gray; the dirt was gray; the interior was gray. Hell, even the sky was gray.

  He drove the Rambler down the road four miles to the gas station and filled it up with fresh gas, put air in the tires, and found the courage to drive this death trap to Eddie’s house.

  That was the pervasive feeling of this day: when he thought about Pam, he felt gray; when he thought about Billy, he felt gray; about
leaving, he felt gray, like he couldn’t possibly be bothered to give a fuck if he had to.

  He went inside and paid for the gas, bought a couple of 16-ounce Budweisers and some Marlboros, and then drove down the road to Eddie’s house.

  The old woman’s words echoed in his head as he drove, while sipping beers and smoking his cigarette. He thought about her, the story of her life, how she and his grandfather met. He was never sure if it was an epic love story or maybe two kindred spirits sharing a darkening journey. He knew she was old, very old, but he couldn’t even think about her dying. This had to be another one of her maddening, twisted games. One more thing for him to think about, this day; this week he had more than enough on his mind. On some days he wondered whether he would one day die with too much still on his mind.

  The old lady was tough. She always gave him a hard time. Poor, dirt poor, she had spent time in breadlines during The Depression. She never lived that down. Never forgot. For the rest of her life, she never asked anyone for anything, and she never gave anyone anything. Everything you got from the old lady you earned.

  Sometimes, he would listen to her stories of going without, stories of having nothing but the clothes on her back, filthy clothes that smelled of dried sweat and dust. She would talk about a summer spent picking berries, living in a community of berry pickers on the side of a mountain near Ellenville, New York. Even now, long after she tried to convey and paint this picture of hardship to Frankie, it actually sounded like an ideal life to him. Another life, another world, a world completely separate from the one he lived in.

  I went with Frankie one time up onto that mountain to find the old berry-picker shacks. Some of them were still there: falling-down, tarpaper shacks with garbage strewn all around. Really old newspapers could be found in some of the houses, papers dating back to the 30s. The shacks were all overgrown, with trees rising up through the roofs of the remains of sheds; old buildings full of broken refrigerators and tarpaper walls that were designed to look like bricks, as if no one would know they weren’t really bricks by looking at them.

  The old woman told him stories of his grandfather, and it appeared the apple did not fall far from that tree. The key difference between Frankie and his grandfather was that his grandfather was a good man, a man of conscience and duty and love. He did not know his grandfather well. They kept an uncomfortable distance. One night, right before the old man died, he told Frankie the story of how he and she met and how he won her love. It was a story he often thought of, one completely foreign to him, like pretty words that ran together . . . words that made no sense.

  Chapter Five:

  The Old Man’s Story

  The old man had told Frankie he remembered the first time he saw her: she was so young. His first reaction was to feel guilt and a sadness he could not explain. She walked along the dirt road between Chester and Washingtonville. It was a hot, dry summer day in 1913, the kind of day a guy can taste the salt of his sweat on his skin and all he can breathe is dust from the road. A blue sky hovered overhead with hardly a cloud, just a relentless sun.

  The grandfather, Artie, sat on the front porch of the house of a friend and watched her, without blinking, as she got closer. He continued to stare as she walked away. He watched the dust kick up from her shoes. “She is so young and beautiful” was all he could think. For the first time in his 29 years, he felt himself an old man, and was ashamed. How could he lust after someone so young, so much younger than he was? He knew he had nothing to offer her, his was a drunken life of misery. How could he want to spoil one so young and beautiful and not yet ruined by this world?

  She was never far from his thoughts. He went about his life. He went to war. In the fall of 1919, on a crisp, late September day, he was at the farm of a friend, up the road from his house in Craigville. A crew of local laborers was harvesting the last of the early Macintosh apples. A girl drove by him in a new Model-T Ford. He laughed at the way the truck jerked, the vehicle almost gasping as she tried to work the clutch.

  He thought to himself that the money made from the harvest would surely have to go into fixing the truck when that girl got done with it. She backed the truck around in a long, sweeping arc, being careful not to have to shift again, then came to a stop, ground some gears before finally finding reverse and backing up to where the baskets of harvest apples were crated and waiting.

  The door opened. It was as if someone had punched him in the chest. It was her, the girl from the road.

  How long had it been? Four, five, or six years? She was the young girl with the dusty shoes who had haunted his thoughts and his dreams. She was no longer a child, now a woman, a beautiful woman, with her dark, long hair pulled back.

  He watched the muscles of her thin arms as she lifted the baskets of apples onto the flatbed. He watched every movement of her body, watched her breasts as she took in deep breaths, and watched the sweat form on her brow.

  Their eyes met, finally, and he could not speak. He felt himself drown in the deepest, darkest, most perfect and soulful Irish eyes he had ever seen. They were black and haunting and warm and kind and, for a reason he could not explain, they scared him to death.

  Too shy to speak, he rushed to her side and helped her load the last of the baskets onto the truck. She smiled at him and climbed back into the cab. She started the truck and drove it jerkily away.

  He slept fitfully that night, awakening what seemed like every five or ten minutes. He knew that day he had met his future.

  He had just seen the most unintentionally, uncannily beautiful thing he had ever laid eyes on.

  She was so young, and he so old; she was so perfect, and he a busted-up mess. At that moment, he knew he loved her, yet he had no idea in the world how to proceed.

  His house was not really much of a house at all. It was more of a shack built in a field off Hulsetown Road, just before it gets really hilly, down in the swampy flat where the creek runs through. He never understood why he stayed there. He worked in the village at the Borden Creamery as a carpenter, a good carpenter and a good hand on most days. He called his place his “home in the middle of nowhere.”

  Between the tiny villages of Chester and Washingtonville, it was a lot like nowhere, only more desolate, so quiet even he had to admit it suddenly seemed lonely. Why had he never noticed how goddamned lonely it was out there?

  Why had he never noticed the dirt floor or the broken side boards or how cold it got in there at night? On a cold fall night, he could lie on his bed and look out between the cracks in the sideboards. He would lay there and close one eye and try to name the stars that he saw peeking through. He would fall asleep listening to the crackling fire dying in the woodstove in the corner. Trying to name stars and thinking of nothing but her, he would close his eyes, but all he could see was that beautiful thin girl with the muscular arms and the black eyes and the long dark hair.

  He loved the fall, but soon it would be cold and winter and would stay cold for too long. He missed the sounds of the summer, the heat of the summer, the way that daylight in June seems to fade, at the end of the day, but never really goes away.

  He missed the way the days were before he first saw her, some five or six years ago, when his thoughts were his own. At times, he would pray in the darkness for God to pull these thoughts of her from his mind. He would pray to be free of her. When that didn’t work, he’d try to bargain with the Devil, offering one day to sell Him his soul. The Devil was apparently not interested, and when all that failed, he would simply weep. Suddenly he hated the dark and became almost afraid of it. He hated his dirt-floored, tar-papered shack with its cracked walls and leaky roof.

  Mostly, at night, he hated how it felt in there.

  There was a time when this desolate shack was a good place for a man to be alone, a good place to get drunk and be drunk and not have to worry about anyone bothering him in the middle of a good drunk. That time and those days had som
ehow and suddenly vanished. Now the loneliness screamed at him and tortured him and begged for the girl, the girl with the black, black hair and the Irish eyes.

  The September days rolled on into October. The summer that he loved so dearly had ended. The autumn cold had come upon Orange County and upon him, and he took that impersonal assault as an insult, a personal attack. He thought of summer’s end as an old and dear friend who boarded a train and left him behind.

  He spent his days at the creamery building things and fixing things. He spent his nights in the bar. He didn’t have many friends. His best, and at times his only, friend was Ben. Since that day in September at the farm, Ben had driven him home from the bar on more and more occasions, taking off his muddy boots, stinking of cow shit and rotten milk, and pushing his drunken ass back onto the bed, shutting the door behind him and somehow navigating himself home.

  Ben, as good a drinking buddy as he was a friend, never asked why. Neither one of them ever needed a very long list of reasons to get drunk. Almost any reason would do. Ben also had a car, not all that common in 1919, and Artie was in need of a friend with a car. They got along like brothers, when drunk on Saturday night or when sober in church on Sunday morning. Their friendship was perfect.

  He would awaken alone, dirty, sweating, still in his clothes, stinking from the day and the night and the whiskey and the beer. He felt alone and afraid in a way he never knew before. Solitude used to be a friend, a place to go, a quiet place away from Ben and the bar and the boss at the creamery. Solitude was a place to be, just be, to sit and breathe and be. A place to watch the sun rise or set, to watch the wind blow across the long blades of grass of the fields around his shack, moving like the invisible hand of God wiped across them, creating swirling patterns he only pretended to comprehend; a place to go down by the swamp, in back of the shack, and look for will-o’-the-wisp and recall the ancient Gaelic tales he learned from his grandmother so long ago.