Signals

by Tim Gautreaux

  But when he came around the house again, a big sedan had pulled up behind his car and a woman about sixty-five years old was helping Selma McKeithen out into the sunshine. The old woman waved at him. “Hello, there,” she said. “I hope you don’t want your money back for the radio. I lost it all at the horse races.”

  “No ma’am. I’d just like to visit for a few minutes and ask you some questions about it. The radio works fine, just like you said.”

  When a rear door of the car popped open, Selma McKeithen put a spotted hand on Cliff’s arm. “See if you can help Mr. Bill there get out of that low seat. That’s my husband. Once he’s upright, he can locomote on his own.”

  Cliff stepped to the curb and pulled upright a bony old man wearing blue jeans and a heavy sweater. Before he could stop himself, he blurted over his shoulder, “Didn’t you tell me you two got a divorce?”

  The old man looked at his wife and shook his head. “You told him the one about the old people with the dead children?”

  “It was a joke, son,” Selma told him. “Don’t you know what a joke is? Molly there is my daughter, and I’ve got two other living children. Vernon’s the only one we lost. He had a weak heart all his life.”

  Once inside the house, Mr. Bill sat in a wing chair and seemed to fall asleep. Selma and Cliff settled on the sofa while Molly went into the kitchen. Later, he explained over his coffee what he’d found out about her routines and how they were broadcast. He figured she’d be surprised to know that her work was still being listened to. He told her how excited Mr. Matsumoto was by the prospect of interviewing her about her career.

  As Cliff talked, Selma’s blue eyes stayed focused on his own, but her expression didn’t change. She shook her head and said, “Son, we listened to those programs for about ten years on Vernon’s special radio. It took a year for that boy to modify the thing and then two more to find someone to put me on the air, longer than I was in the business. Listening to his radio was fun, but then it got old. When Vernon passed on, I didn’t need to hear any more. Me and Mr. Bill still know those routines by heart. But Vernon, he loved me so much he’d play those tapes late at night, and we could hear him laughing to himself from all the way upstairs. All his life he’d ask me things like why I quit the show, and he’d tell me I could have been rich and renowned and all that stuff. Finally, I told him the truth: that he came along, and I liked him so much, I decided to make Annie and Chuck and Molly.”

  Cliff sat back on the flowered sofa. “He wanted to make you famous.”

  “I guess so.” Then her voice softened. “He told me one time how radio signals bounce around in the sky, and that I was landing all over the world. He said it would keep happening for years. Oh, he got so serious one night, he leaned into me like when he was a baby.” Here she moved her head over toward Cliff and drew closer, her pale and wrinkled face at odds with her youthful eyes. “He told me some signals go straight out into space, toward the planets. How someday one of my jokes would scratch past Pluto and keep going to God knows. Way out to whatever’s past all we can see. Sometimes I think about that, how the sounds we make never really stop, and then I believe all of us are famous but just don’t know it yet.”

  “What do you want me to tell the radio station operator?” he asked.

  Selma turned to her husband, who opened his eyes and winked at her. “You can tell Mr. Matsumoto,” she said, “that he’s got enough already, though not the best of me.”

  Cliff’s face darkened and he studied the floor. “He said he’d mention my name in the interview. He’d tell about how I found you and made the connection.”

  Selma pulled back and patted him on the shoulder. “Mr. Cliff, if you want to be well known, go out in your backyard and say your name to the sky.”

  —

  When he got home, he was angry. There was a note from his wife on the table, telling him she was spending the night with a sick aunt in the next town over. He wandered through the house for a while feeling like he was catching the flu, so he went into the man cave to take a nap. But the space he’d given so much time to now seemed to accuse him, and he couldn’t bear to look at it. Suddenly he punched the moose head to the floor and shoved it out the back door and down the steps into the yard, where it landed with a puff of dander and loose hair. The table with its tribute to Lithuania was next, followed by the disgusting donkey, which he threw overhand into the dark, then the terrible manikins and everything else, until after an hour, the room was bare except for the radio. He retrieved a bottle of furniture wax from the kitchen and rubbed the cabinet all over, then he tuned in an accordion festival in France, standing there listening stone-still until his legs ached. After raising the volume, he turned and walked through the back door, past the hill of embarrassments, and all the way to the fence, where he stopped in pitch-dark shade at the edge of the woods, the radio, from here, just a dancing tingle. He looked straight up at stars massed like schoolfish, a current of silver signals.

  “Hello,” he called out. “My name is Cliff.”

  The Furnace Man’s Lament

  The wind started out of the northwest, and the snow came sideways, running like a train past my windows. I stayed inside and played spades with the kids, and now and then I went to the front window and looked out at a sky wrestling with itself. I saw the snowplow sail by and knock down the mailbox again. That time of year.

  After lunch, the phone jittered back in the hall, and I was afraid it would be a service call. I’m the furnace man, and it could be the end of the world out there and still somebody would call and bug me about their thermostat. I live in Minnesota with my wife and two kids, and it comes with the territory, these calls.

  The voice on the phone was high-pitched, like a very old man’s. He said his name was Swenson and he lived in Sauerville, about six miles away. Our place is out in the country, and sometimes I wish we’d moved to town, especially when the drifts get up to the eaves. I told the Swenson guy he wasn’t a regular customer, so I wouldn’t come out in a storm. The phone got quiet, and then the voice said there was an old person in the house who might get real sick if the furnace stayed off. I thought about that. My wife, Linda, tells me I have a starched and ironed heart, whatever that means, and I was remembering that at the moment. Just then, she came into the hall, put an imaginary receiver up to her ear, and mouthed, “Who is it?”

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Some guy I never worked for before. Said his heater’s on the fritz.”

  She came close and gave me a jab in the ribs. “It’s gonna be way below zero tonight. Way below.” Two more jabs. “You go fix it, Mel.”

  “Are you crazy? You hear that wind out there?”

  Then she crossed her arms. That means I’m done for, starched heart and all. “What’s the address?” I droned to the voice on the line.

  So I pulled on my storm gear, and it took about ten minutes to get all the zippers and snaps done, all the layering, the special gloves, and then I bulled out into the wind. There was only about a foot of new snow in the drive, so I put the pickup in four-wheel and backed to the road. Then I had to climb out and unstick the iced-over wipers. While I was futzing with them, Mrs. Shannon came along the highway, saw me, and slammed on the brakes, her old white Dodge sliding fifty yards like a puck and giving my bumper a rap. There was no damage I could see, so I apologized for being in the road, and she rolled down her window and waved me off. “Go about your business, Mel, before you blow away,” she yelled. “Not a car around here escapes winter without a dent or three.”

  By the time I got into Sauerville the wind was going like a siren, and a basketball was rolling ahead of me down the street faster than I was driving. I could barely make out Mr. Swenson’s house number. I’d driven by the place many times. It was in the middle of a block of old two-stories, built maybe in the First World War when the metal-stamping plant was set up. I knocked on the door and the thing rattled in its frame. About as heat efficient as a piece of gauze. A boy, maybe six
teen years old, kind of small for his age, a kid with an old face, held the door open against the wind, squinting.

  “Come in, whoever you are,” he keened in the voice on the phone.

  “I’m the furnace man.”

  “Come in quick.” He grabbed my coat and pulled.

  The house was pretty chilly, I guess. About fifty. The boy, who introduced himself as Jack, wore baggy jeans and sweatshirts over sweaters.

  “Where’s your dad, son?”

  He looked surprised by the question. “They never told me.” I looked at him closely then, deciding that yep, this is an odd one, a kid who chooses to say things that mean a lot more than what you hear on the surface. I run into more and more of them each year. I gave him another look, up and down. His face was dirty, and no parent would dress him in those lumpy hand-me-downs. He reached up and scratched his straight dark hair. I decided not to ask about his mom.

  “So, you’re living here with your grandparents, eh?”

  “Granma died last year. Gramps is taking care of me.” He nodded toward the stairs.

  “Why don’t you go get him?”

  “He’s asleep right now.”

  I looked up the steps and noted the sooty wallpaper. “Where’s the door to the basement?”

  “Under the stairs. I’ll show you.”

  The minute I’d stepped in the front door I could smell partially burned fuel oil. It was in the air, and I guess in the furniture, walls, and carpets. Sometimes people get used to the smell and live with an unregulated furnace for years, the odor getting stronger and stronger—petroleum in their bones, practically. Down in the cellar, the smell was tough, and I wasn’t surprised to see the furnace, an old coal-eating tin man that had been converted to burn oil.

  The boy flicked on the lights, then folded his arms and looked at me hopefully. “I hope you can fix it quick.”

  I did the usual, pressed the reset switch, which did nothing, checked the transformer, the blower motor, the fuses. Old furnace men called this one an octopus, I guess because of all the ducts rising like silver arms from the heat exchanger. The wiring was a mess, and the whole thing looked like it had been worked over by a dozen different amateurs in the past seventy years. I got down on my knees and opened the inspection door and flicked on my flashlight. Right away I saw the burner was the wrong one and caked with wet crusts of oil. The heat exchanger was perforated, which explained the fumes.

  “Aren’t you going to light it?” the boy asked.

  “Let’s go see your grandpa.”

  He made a face. An old face that was figuring all the angles. “We’ll have to wake him up. You can talk to me about it.”

  I stood up and stared at him for a bit. I imagined that if I got close enough, I could smell oil fumes on his breath. “No, I can’t. Let’s go find Gramps.”

  “I can handle it. I can handle everything.”

  “Look, you’re a kid. You can’t take an estimate and pay my bill.” I started up the steps, and back in the upstairs hall he slid past me and up another flight.

  “Okay. Come on, then.”

  I followed him up the shoe-dished steps, and behind a paneled door on the second floor was Gramps, a white-haired fellow asleep in a wing chair next to an unmade bed. The boy stood beside me and didn’t make a sound. “Mr. Swenson?” I said loudly.

  “His name is Harry.” The boy went to him and shook his shoulder.

  “What?” the old man said, and judging by his lost eyes and the way he said it, I knew it was the big what. Like “What are you?” or “What decade is it?”

  “The heat man’s here, and he wants to talk to you about the furnace.”

  “Why?”

  The boy raised his voice a notch. “The furnace repairman. I called him. He wants to talk to you.” Jack pointed, and the old man looked my way.

  “Hello. My, it’s cold in here.”

  It was true. The storm was rumbling down from Canada, and I could hear gusts bowling metal trash cans down the street. “Yes sir,” I said. “I checked out your furnace, and you really need a new one. It’s been hanging in there a long time and’s finally wore out.”

  “You better talk to my wife. She takes care of things, you know.”

  The boy gave me a look.

  “I can’t legally work on it because it’s leaking fumes up through the registers.”

  Old Harry Swenson nodded. “You know, she pays the bills. These heavy curtains, she bought those.”

  From the looks of them, that had been during the Eisenhower administration. I guess it was forty-eight degrees upstairs. “You folks will have to go somewhere tonight. The temp’s dropping like a stone.”

  The old man nodded slowly. “Is that so?”

  I waited a minute for him to say something more. The room was painted green, and the bed frame was an old coming-apart thing made back in the Depression. I watched the window curtains move from the wall like ghosts, then settle back. When I glanced at the old man, he was asleep. I motioned to Jack and we went downstairs into the hall again.

  I looked the kid in the eye. “Who else lives here?”

  “It’s just me and Gramps.”

  “How do you pay for things?”

  “He has a credit card, and a pension or something puts some money in his checking account so’s we can pay the bills.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t take a credit card.” I began to think about all the hard luck locals who’d stiffed me on a bill.

  “I know how to write a check.” He seemed to study my expression, which to be honest was probably pretty doubtful. “I can carry it upstairs for him to sign.”

  “He still can sign his name, eh?”

  The kid looked away. “After I give him his bath he’s awake enough to do a few things.”

  “Well, you better bundle him up and get him to the Motel 6 on the edge of town.”

  The boy put his chin up at me, kind of pushy all of a sudden. Surprised me. When he grew up he wouldn’t take any crap from anybody, I could see that. “Hey, the furnace kind of worked until day before yesterday.”

  I noticed my breath floating in the room. Back home, my wife would ask me what I’d done on the call. “Ah, let me go check something out in the truck.”

  As soon as I opened the door the wind tore my toboggan off, and I had to go chasing the damn thing through the side yard. I saw the rusty oil tank on stilts by a window and gave her a knock. Not too much in there. In the truck I called the sheriff and found out the nearest homeless shelter was twenty miles away in Elbo. I asked if there was an emergency fund to pay me for the repair if Gramps couldn’t, and he said nope, though maybe I could get a local church to pony up something.

  I looked at the old place, the scaling paint, the warped little porch. It wasn’t too big of a house, kind of plain. By two a.m. all the pipes in it would start to split. By dawn, the toilets would break open and all the P-traps would bust under the sinks. The boy and his grandfather could stay under blankets and quilts, but they couldn’t come out to eat without getting sick. Maybe the old guy’d get frostbite. The high forecast for tomorrow was six. I looked at the house again. I knew I wouldn’t want to die in it. I started the truck, cursing the fact that the kid’s check might be no good, that I might wind up busting my ass and not making a dime. I shouldn’t be so negative, but that’s how I’m wired. Me negative, wife positive.

  Across town in an old asbestos-siding building was Abe’s Plumbing and Heating. Abe was about eighty, tough as a two-dollar steak, one of those die-hards who, if they found out somebody froze to death because he didn’t maintain his furnace right, would only nod and say, “Yah, there’s no cure for stupid!” I convinced him to root through his old parts in a shed out back of his business, and he found the right burner. Charged me like hell, he did.

  I got back to the house, and the kid followed me down to fight the octopus. He watched everything I did, like he was really interested. My own fifteen-year-old wants to be a lawyer. That’ll cost like flam
ing hell, so I used to bring him out with me on service calls, to see if he’d fall into my line of work. But he was unimpressed with what I did every day to feed his face. I could tell he’ll never be a furnace man, that’s for sure.

  The old burner was corroded in place, and it took forever to get it off. About seven or eight other problems had to be fixed. The only thing that worked at first was one fuse, and that because somebody had put a penny under it. But right at dark I got a fire, and the ducts above me began to tick and ping with the rising heat.

  Young Jack watched everything I did and asked a million questions. By the time I left, he knew as much about that furnace as I did. He paid me with a ragged check he had in his pocket, and I was on my way. At the door, though I was anxious to get home to dinner, I took time to sit on the stairs and re-lace my boots.

  “Jack,” I said, “do you have any relatives other than your grandfather?”

  “Nope.”

  “A mom somewhere?”

  He picked up his head and looked at me for a second. “I’m kind of alone.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Since I was born.” He said it quick.

  I thought about what he’d just said. “You never saw your mother?”

  “Nope. Granma told me she went over to Minneapolis and never came back. I don’t remember her.”

  The wind was screaming across the porch, but the shiver running along the top of my shoulders wasn’t because of the cold. “What was her name, son?”

  “Doris. Doris Evelyn Swenson.” He recited his mother’s name as if it was a brand of cereal. No pang of longing there, and who could blame him? He never saw his mother. Not once. But I had, years ago, right out front of this house. The woman was my age. I’d seen her around when I was in high school, but I didn’t tell the kid that.

  “Doris Evelyn Swenson, eh? You ever try to find her?”

  He shrugged. “How do you find somebody like that?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I nodded. “Your Gramps, he have any brothers or sisters?”

  “He used to talk about that, how he and Granma were the youngest in their families, how almost everybody had died. There’s one brother.”