Things We Nearly Knew

by Jim Powell

‘I told you no good would come of it.’

  ‘Come of what?’

  ‘Of Franky being back in town. Trouble’s his middle name. In fact, it’s all his names. He’s Trouble T. Trouble.’

  ‘He’s got a point, though,’ I said. ‘Now we know there’s no Mr Hammond, and no one living there, and no one who’s lived there for years. You should have seen the place, Marcie. Give it a little more time and it’ll start falling down. What good would that do anyone? If Franky does it up like he says, that’s good news for everyone. As long as he gets out if the owner comes back to claim it. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘It would be fine,’ said Marcie, ‘if it was anyone else. Not when it’s Franky Albertino. Something will go wrong.’

  ‘I think he needs your acceptance of it.’

  ‘If it pours down with rain, I accept it,’ said Marcie. ‘Doesn’t mean I like it. Franky should never have come back. Some people should never come back. Most people, in fact. It’s a bad idea.’

  ‘You must admit he hasn’t done anything wrong yet,’ I said.

  ‘Stealing electricity’s not wrong suddenly?’

  ‘Apart from that.’

  ‘If I pinned the Ten Commandments on the wall to remind him what they are, he’d break each of them given time.’

  Time was the one thing it seemed we would have. Franky pushed ahead with his scheme. He discovered that there were dormant utility accounts in the name of Hammond, so he hit on the idea of changing his name. He was now Franky Hammond, officially. I don’t know how he managed to swing that one. You’re meant to have a good legal reason to change your name. Franky said his lawyer fixed it. So he had a lawyer now.

  He gave the house a makeover, and he gave himself a makeover. He even announced that he’d got a job. What made me uncomfortable, and Marcie too, was that he appeared not to have told anyone except us what he was doing next door, or that he’d changed his name. When he was in the bar, he didn’t mention the house, except to us, and in a whisper. He had drawn us into a conspiracy without our having had a say in the matter. He didn’t tell us it was a secret, but we felt obligated to treat it as one.

  We don’t like secrets. Besides, if you’re running a bar and you’ve got several regulars you’ve known for years and discussed everything with, they’d feel put out if you withheld crucial information from them. Worse, it would make them think, when they found out, which they would, that we’d been cut in on a deal, that we’d been underhand. We didn’t see why we should be put in that position with friends who’d been good to us for years, least of all by Franky, who’d stitched the town up as a kid and had been gone for more than a quarter-century.

  One night, when it wasn’t too busy and we could leave Steve minding the bar, we took him to a quiet table and had it out with him.

  ‘This place you’re working, Franky,’ I said. ‘I imagine they asked for your address. What did you tell them?’

  ‘I’m not actually working,’ said Franky. ‘Not at present.’

  ‘You told me you’d got a job.’

  ‘I was a little ahead of myself. I’ve signed on with an employment agency. I’m sure they’ll find me a position soon.’ Marcie raised both eyebrows, one after the other, and put both hands on her hips. Triple somersault with pike.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what address did you give when the employment agency asked?’

  ‘Care of you,’ said Franky. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  Marcie exploded a breath at him and looked at me to continue the prosecution.

  ‘We can’t go on this way,’ I said.

  ‘What way?’

  ‘With you and Marcie and me being the only ones to know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we don’t like it. Besides, you won’t be able to keep it quiet. People will find out. It’s a stupid thing to be doing. Much better to be upfront.’

  ‘I don’t see why people should find out,’ said Franky. ‘No one here seems to remember seeing the previous Mr Hammond.’

  ‘That’s because he didn’t exist.’ I’d started believing it myself now.

  Franky looked at me. ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone,’ he said. ‘Not for the moment. Later, perhaps, when I’ve kitted the place out and settled in properly.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Marcie. ‘I’ve already told Arlene.’

  Franky looked shocked. So did I, for that matter.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I do that? You didn’t ask me not to.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone else.’ Franky decided this might sound a little abrupt. ‘Please,’ he added.

  ‘Franky, this isn’t going to work. Arlene will have told Davy, so he’ll know.’

  ‘No. He doesn’t,’ said Franky. ‘Davy doesn’t know.’

  ‘Well, even if he doesn’t, I’ll be sort of bound to tell him, seeing as it was the three of us that went over the place. Other people will know too. Steve’s probably wondering what the hell we’re talking about right now. It’s no longer a secret.’

  Franky went off to the restroom.

  ‘Did you really tell Arlene?’ I asked Marcie.

  ‘No,’ said Marcie. ‘But it upset him, didn’t it?’

  It did upset him, and I’m not sure if it was the fact of Marcie saying she’d told someone, or of her saying she’d told Arlene in particular.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Franky, when he returned. ‘You were right, Marcie. Stupid of me to get so uptight.’ Marcie and I glanced at each other. ‘All the same, would you do me the courtesy of not mentioning it to anyone else for the time being? And also, to make it above board, I think I should be paying some kind of rent for the place.’

  ‘Who are you proposing to pay it to?’ asked Marcie.

  ‘Why don’t I pay it to you? You could look after it in case the owner returns.’

  ‘We’ll have a think about it,’ I said.

  Think about it, hell. We were being offered a bribe. Strings would come with the cash Franky gave us, or more likely the cash that Franky decided he owed us and might give us sometime later if we were lucky. We had no idea what the strings were attached to. Not our problem, you might say: we would just say no. But we’d still got pulled into the project. We were accomplices whether we liked it or not.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ said Franky.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ll need to get building materials and furniture delivered. And I’ll need to leave my car somewhere while I’m at the house.’

  ‘I believe it has a front drive,’ said Marcie. ‘That should suit your purpose.’

  ‘I don’t want to use it. I’ll be seen. Questions will be asked. I told you. I don’t want questions right now. Please can I use the space at the back of your house? No one can see it from the road. It would be perfect.’

  Marcie gave me a threatening look. I knew what she meant, but saying no would be to declare war on Franky’s project. I was reluctant to do that.

  ‘There’s no way through to the house from here,’ I said.

  ‘There is now. You cut the fence the other week.’

  ‘What about the brambles and weeds?’

  ‘I’ll flatten them.’

  I got another look from Marcie. We were on alien territory here. Usually, Marcie and I agreed with each other and, when we didn’t, I usually gave way. Maybe I would have done now, if Marcie and I had been discussing it in private. I was loath to do it in front of Franky, who was also looking at me, waiting for a decision.

  ‘You can do it for three months,’ I said. ‘And that’s it.’

  Franky proceeded to widen the hole I’d cut in the fence. He scythed the worst of the brambles and the grass and the weeds. He had a clear path to Mr Hammond’s house. Unless someone came snooping round the back of our private quarters, his handiwork would be invisible to the outside world. We watched as building materials were delivered, and got used up. Franky wasn’t wasting time. It
was the beginning of August when he announced his plans. By mid-month his adopted house was a building site, as was the back of ours.

  Marcie had been livid with my decision, and I couldn’t fathom it myself. Why had I gone out on a limb for someone wielding a chainsaw?

  ‘How do you suppose he’s financing this?’ she asked one day. ‘He’s here all the time.’

  ‘We don’t know he hasn’t got money,’ I said. ‘We’ve assumed it. Maybe he’s made his fortune and has come back here to spend it.’

  ‘He doesn’t have money. He told you that himself.’

  ‘He may not have been telling the truth. He was trying to get my sympathy at the time.’

  ‘If Franky had made his fortune,’ said Marcie, ‘he’d have been waving dollar bills in our faces the moment he got here.’

  ‘At least he hasn’t asked us for a loan.’

  ‘Even Franky wouldn’t have the nerve to do that. It doesn’t mean he hasn’t asked other people. There’s a new generation of suckers in town. Who knows who’s got the job of Franky’s banker? And you can bet, whoever it is, they won’t know either.’

  9

  I had a puzzle book as a kid. One puzzle had two drawings, apparently the same, and the task was to list twenty things that were different between them. I used to stare at the drawings, and at first I couldn’t see a darned thing that was different. Then I spotted one thing, then another, till I had fourteen or fifteen of the twenty. As I noticed each one, the difference – previously unapparent to me – became glaring. How could I not have noticed that the four bars on the gate had become five, that the little girl’s shoelace had come undone?

  That’s what it was like last summer, the first and last summer of Arlene, with its gradual revelations. Mostly, I feel that I’ve run like quicksilver through my years, but for those few months it was different. For a time, life was subtle, willing to share its innuendos with me. The longer I live, the more it seems that I’ve forgotten how to be subtle. We’re not living in a subtle age, I suppose. We deal in bright sunlight or abject darkness. There’s no shade, no shadow, no ambiguity. Everything is what it appears to be. It isn’t, as we know.

  It was past the midpoint of August. Next door, Franky was building his dream, or rebuilding someone else’s. I watched from the sitting-room window as Marcie picked the flowers. The weather was grey and still, as it always seems to be on this day, even when it isn’t. We don’t have much of a garden and too little time to tend what we do have. Some flowers blossom, and other flowers, wild flowers, grow in the patch of land that separates us from Mr Hammond’s property. That day, I could see flax there, and black-eyed Susans. There were more than enough flowers for two small bouquets.

  Marcie selected them with care. Each bloom would have a considered place in its vase. What had been so carelessly lost would be carefully recalled. The harvest took twenty minutes, and they were small bouquets. No flower was discarded, once picked. Each flower was precious. Sometimes it took a minute or two for Marcie to select the next one. Once or twice she looked toward the window where I was watching behind lace curtains. She couldn’t see me, but she knew I was there, because I was always there on this day.

  When the flowers had been assembled, Marcie returned to the house, to the kitchen. She trimmed them with a paring knife and arranged them in two vases that had been a wedding present from my Great-uncle Alvin, and which had now acquired this purpose and no other. I watched this process too. When it was complete, when each stalk occupied its proper place, Marcie placed the vases on the sideboard. Then she went to the cupboard and took out the photograph, the one that was present on this day and on no other, and placed that on the sideboard also. She stood in contemplation and I stood beside her, my arm around her.

  We did not speak. There was nothing to say. There never had been anything to say. All words were inadequate. We who talked freely, without premeditation, at other times, did not talk at this time. Once, perhaps, one or other of us might have inclined our head, the trace element of an ill-remembered ritual. We no longer did that. The ritual was hollow and what it symbolized no longer existed for us. Many things did not exist.

  Sometime in the next few weeks, I would say that I felt like a break and I’d go fishing for a while. Before that, Marcie would go to Colorado for a few days. That would be announced in a few days’ time. The departures were assumed and would not be discussed. She would go, and I would go, separately and at separate times, and then it would be the fall, the leaves would turn to gold, and life would resume.

  It was in Colorado that it happened. At summer camp in Colorado, fifteen years ago. They weren’t meant to go to there; we had other plans for that vacation. Those plans fell through, and Roseanne and Bobby had friends who were going to the camp, and they begged to go too, and there were a couple of vacancies, so we said yes. What parent wouldn’t say yes? It was an accident. No one was to blame. No one was ever to blame in those days. Now, fingers would be pointing everywhere. Yes, the staff could have been more vigilant. Yes, the driver was going too fast. We all drove too fast. We decided then that we weren’t going to steep our souls in vinegar. We accepted then that it was one of those things.

  Still, I don’t like August. It isn’t the sun so much, or the warmth. Those are things I like, on their own, shorn of their trappings. Nor is it the dappled sunlight in the garden, or the gold in the grain, or the dark green velvet of the leaves on the trees. These also are things I like, on their own, shorn of their trappings.

  I do not like any part of summer: the season that recreates our innocence before destroying it. The season that is the repository of each false promise made to mankind, the worm within the apple, the darkness at the heart of the candle’s flame. I do not like summer anywhere, even in places that are made for summer. I do not like beaches and parasols and cotton candy. I do not like summer camps.

  I do not like the roads in summer, or the fast cars that bestride them. I do not like the conspiracy between the car and the road. I do not like the promise they make: to take you somewhere, to lead you somewhere. The promise of a perfection that hauls you forward, mile by mile, tempting you toward a beacon that does not exist, a mirage in a miasma, tempting you toward non-existence. May the gods preserve us from the idea of perfection.

  I am a placid man. Everybody says that. And Marcie is a placid woman, as far as a woman can ever be placid. We wallow in our placidity. We are admired for it. But beneath the flat metal of our road, there is a rage. A rage that simmers and bubbles and boils in the crust of our world. A rage that rails against the deceits of summer and its trail of broken dreams. Our road is strewn with dreams discarded. Sometimes one of us suggests making a change to our lives. The other always finds a reason not to make the change, and the one who made the suggestion is always relieved. We go through the motions of life.

  So give me the winter instead. Give me the still days of November, settled in mists and remembrances. Give me the chill days of February. Give me branches bare of leaves, and birds emptied of song. Give me roads without their siren calls of immortality. Give me life as it is, not life as it is sold as being. Life is November, and it is February, and it is the times between. Life is the unassuming months.

  There’s a time to be born and a time to die, the good book says. I can’t remember when the last time was for borning, a while ago now, but August last year seemed, once again, to be the time for dying, although it was the height of summer and the leaves were a goodly green on the trees.

  Mr Maflin down at the hardware store dropped dead one Saturday night after putting bolts on the door, like he’d done many thousand times before, and did now for the last time. Mrs George, who’d been my teacher in kindergarten, slipped away soon after. I’d thought she was eighty when she taught me. Turned out she was eighty-one when she died. She lived a long time in that year.

  Then there was Great-uncle Alvin, and he was a hundred. My mom and dad were dead. My grandma, Alvin’s oldest sister, was long dead. Alvin
went on and on. He had lived in a home, a little way out of town, for fifteen years or more. He was a small man, wiry and strong. As he’d got older, he’d gotten smaller and wirier still, so that by the end he was like a double-concentrate version of himself. A stock cube of Alvin.

  I would visit him once a month or so. His body was a sack of bones by the end; he couldn’t see and he couldn’t hear, but his mind was clear. At least it was clear on most things. One or two sectors had gone awry, such as believing that Marcie was called Roseanne. He’d started calling her by that name a few years earlier. To begin with, we’d correct him, then we stopped. The corrections caused us more heartache than an acceptance of the error. We’d known just the one Roseanne. He started calling me by the wrong name too, but it wasn’t Bobby. He called me Dexter. We didn’t know anyone called Dexter, and nor did he, so far as we knew. Roseanne and Dexter. That’s what we became.

  As it happened, I’d seen Alvin the evening before he died. He was his same old self, wanting to know the baseball scores. Because of his hearing, he had a special alarm clock to wake him in the mornings. Last thing before I left, I asked him what time he wanted it set for, like I always did.

  ‘Don’t bother, Dexter,’ he said. ‘Won’t be needing it tomorrow.’ He died that night.

  We’re here for three score years and ten and rising. You’d think that would be enough to work out what most of it’s about. I’ve got some years to go yet, I hope. I don’t know what any of it’s about. I don’t know if Alvin decided to die that night, or if an instinct told him he was going to die, or if he felt like having a lie-in the next morning. Can’t ask him now. Neither can I ask him why he chose to die in August, and whether he delayed it a few days out of consideration for us, or whether these things were coincidences.

  Marcie wasn’t around when Alvin died. She was in Colorado. She rang me from there on the day it happened. I withheld the news from her. The time belonged to Bobby and Roseanne, and Alvin would have been a gatecrasher. If that sounds mean, I don’t deny that he deserved a time of his own, but he’d need to wait for it. He could have a different time of his own choosing.