I looked up from my boots. “Where’s he live?”
“Germany. He moved over there a long time ago, Gramps said.”
“Germany?” I looked at him hard, but he seemed to be drifting away from me in the dim light. “You must have some cousins, eh?”
He closed one eye, as if that might help him remember. “Well, yeah. A lady in a nursing home over toward Fargo.”
“She’s that old?”
“Granma said she had something wrong with her brain. I don’t know.”
“Did you ever meet these people?”
“No. I think the lady in the home sent Gramps Christmas cards, but he stopped writing back. He told me one time it made him sad to write her.”
I stood up and settled in my boots. “You go to school?”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course. Fourth Precinct. I’m a junior.”
“You get along all right with your grandpa?”
Here his face fell a bit. “He was a real good joke teller. Worked in the tin plant and knew how to make anything out of metal. Until a couple years ago when his talking slowed down. Most of the time now he just sleeps. He says he doesn’t understand the TV anymore.”
I zipped up my coat. “Well, bud, I patched up the old furnace as best I could. You’re going to have to get a new one, though. She won’t last long.” The kid braced his foot against the door and let me slip out.
When I stepped through the opening, I was sucked into a black wind. The porch had iced up, and I slid across and down the steps into a drift, my tool kit banging open. I had to dig for wrenches and sockets on my knees for five minutes. The howl was racketing and complex, tearing through the trees for miles around. Snow was flying so thick I couldn’t see my white truck from twenty feet away, and even in first gear it could barely push away from the curb. Out on the county road, though the plow had made another pass, the truck fishtailed this way and that, and I started to feel drunk. Coming down Needham Hill I stood on the brakes, and the truck rattled on like a block of ice and took out the Pulaskis’ old wooden mailbox.
—
Before supper I was in the den resting up when Ted, my youngest, came through.
“Hey, kid.”
“Dad.” He kept on toward the kitchen, but I grabbed his arm.
“I met a boy today about your age. Goes to Fourth Precinct. Jack Swenson. You know him?”
Ted sniggered, shaking his blond hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, he’s in the other homeroom. We call him Stinky.”
“Stinky?”
“It’s just a joke. He doesn’t mind. Sometimes he smells like oil is all. Or a little sour. He told me one time his bathroom was on the fritz.”
“Is he an okay fellow?”
“He’s cool. Not too dumb and real good at PE. A guard on the basketball team.”
“He in your Boy Scouts or anything?”
Ted put his thumbs in his jeans pockets and bit his lip, which meant he was pretending to think. “He hasn’t shown up in a long time. A real old lady used to drop him off at the VFW for the meetings last year.” He glanced into the kitchen. “Mom’s about ready.”
“All right.”
“Where’d you meet Jack?”
“I fixed his furnace today.”
“Jeez. In the nick of time.” And he lurched into the kitchen in that rubber-jointed way sixteen-year-olds walk.
—
After supper and a shower, I got in bed and turned on the laptop. I tried a few different search engines and turned up Doris Swensons who were presidents of corporations in Alaska or were ninety years old, but nobody around the Twin Cities. My wife came in and went to bed. I told her what I was looking for, and she said to try newspaper police reports and obituaries. I wished she hadn’t said this, because after I turned off the computer, I lay there thinking about it. And why did I care? I mean, I fixed the kid’s furnace, took his risky check, and went out in a storm to do it. What else was I supposed to do? Linda sensed I wasn’t asleep in two seconds like I usually am, so she said in this tiny little wife voice, kind of whispery, “If you use the computer, it won’t keep me awake.”
So I sat up and surfed, and pretty soon I found out that four years ago, in a dried-up little factory town outside of Minneapolis, a thirty-seven-year-old Doris Evelyn Swenson had died of burns incurred in a meth-lab explosion. She was a native of Sauerville and was survived by her parents.
Turning off the laptop, I listened for a long time to the wind tearing through the eaves. I was glad I had a metal roof over my head and two feet of insulation in the attic, but I wondered how Jack and his grandfather were doing, alone as they were in the world. I had my kids, my wife, my brother two houses over, both of my cranky old parents, aunts and uncles, and a drawerful of cousins spread over the near counties. How would I feel if I had only one blood relative to help me in the whole freakin’ world?
A gust slammed the house like a locomotive trying to couple up. I pulled the covers up to my chin, and my wife gave me a little pat.
—
The next morning the phone rang me out of bed at seven, and it was Mrs. Puderer, a couple miles east.
“Mel, can you get out?”
“What’s wrong?”
“The heat pump’s making a noise when it cycles. It’s still heating. Just making that noise.”
“It’s probably just loading up. Let me look out the window.” I went into the front room, and the damned plow hadn’t come at all. I’d never seen that not happen before. In the middle of the highway there was something like a large flat boulder. “Honey,” I called. “What the hell’s that in the road?”
From the kitchen she said, “It’s Old Lady Canaby’s Buick. It gave up right there.”
“Where is she?”
“In the back bedroom with Ted. She knocked on the door about four-thirty, and I put her up.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“You were snoring.”
I went back to the phone and told Mrs. Puderer that with three or four feet of snow in the road I couldn’t get out until the plow came, if it ever did. She was satisfied with that, having lived here every day of her life.
—
So we played Scrabble all day, and the weather girl on TV told us the blizzard wasn’t going to stop, was a double-barreled freak with more wind and snow coming. Mrs. Canaby got spunky and launched the family into a cribbage marathon, playing for money until about eleven when we all turned in. I was asleep, dreaming of a handful of sevens and eights, when the phone rang at three a.m. It was Jack Swenson, and he sounded upset.
“Mr. Todd, the furnace stopped working about noon. I tried all day to restart it myself, but it just won’t go.”
“Aw, we’re covered up out here, boy.” There was no way I was going out. It was a killer storm.
“Gramps won’t wake up. I can’t get him to move at all.” He started yelling and begging me to come start his furnace. “I tried to make him some tea, but the water stopped running.”
I looked at the floor, scared to go out, maybe. But my wife would never settle for me not helping a kid in trouble. Let’s see, he’s six miles away, the roads are closed, the wind’s blowing like a jet engine. Maybe I could try to get to town on my lawn tractor. Nope. Then there’s my brother’s snowmobile. “Look,” I said, “I’ll give it a shot, but I can’t promise I’ll get there. Meanwhile, call the fire department and 911.”
“I did that,” and here he began to cry, holding back as much as he could. “Nobody can come because of the blizzard. The emergency people say they’re evacuating a nursing home ten miles from here.”
“Hang on. All I can do is try.”
I called up Butchie, and without a pause my brother said he’d take me on his snowmobile. As if I’d asked him to take me to the hardware store on a sunny day. Last year I made fun of him for buying that rig, told him it was a waste of money. But he enjoys wearing white camo and deer hunting with a bow in winter. He likes to ice-fish at night. I think he has antifr
eeze in his brain. At any rate, after suiting up, I heard this racket at the back door, so I opened the kitchen window and stepped up onto the snow, dragging my toolbox after me. He had to yell, the wind was so bad. He said we had to go cross-country.
“Why?” I hollered.
“If we cave in a car roof out on the road, we’re liable for the damage. Besides, it’s shorter.”
So off we went, zipping up a drift and shooting over the back fence.
He’s got halogen headlights, but they lit up the ice in the air so much it was like driving in a snow globe. We cut across the rear of his property and along the barbed wire bordering the Pudlewskis’ dairy farm. We got in their back field, which was clear of boulders and machinery, and buzzed west at a good clip through the dark. I didn’t know about Butchie, but everything on me began to hurt with the cold. At the Trask farm we banged up over a big lump of something that spilled me off into the snow. He righted the machine and came back to me on his snowshoes.
“What the hell did we hit?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I know,” he said, scraping snow until he hit a layer of furry ice. Then we saw it was a big milk cow that got caught out.
We started again, headed up a hill, the engine whining, the wind about to tear my nose off, and then we got hung in a chain-link fence. All the way to Sauerville, we wandered over the outlines of things, hunting gaps in the fences, squeezing through windbreaks, at one point scraping over a snow-swamped hay baler. Finally we hit the railroad where a big wedge plow had just shoved through, and we rode the snow ridge it made all the way into town. We buzzed up the kid’s street, steered around a fallen cottonwood, and stopped on his lawn.
It was cold as hell in the house, let me tell you. Jack began pulling me upstairs, and I told Butchie to go whack on the furnace. When I got up to the old man’s bed, I couldn’t feel anything by touch because my own hands were dead. I lifted the covers and moved his arms. Or at least I tried to.
I didn’t want to turn around and face the boy. How do you tell someone that the last person in the world who could care for him was dead? It struck me, as I covered up his grandfather, how alone Jack was now, coming from someplace he didn’t understand the history of—and going where? I put an arm around his shoulders and told him what had to be said. Jack walked to the old man, pulled the covers down, and gave him a long hug. Then he went to the door and laid his head against the narrow edge of it with his eyes held shut.
“Come on,” I told him, and made him walk downstairs, where he called the sheriff himself, and put his disaster at the tail end of all the bad stuff happening that night.
Butchie was already taking the heater apart in the cellar, and the boy sat down on a wooden box and watched us work. At one point he began sobbing. I guess the reality hit him then.
I kept working because I didn’t want to fool around in his pain. But he cried on and on, and though I was pretty sooty, I decided to go over, squat in front of him, and chuck him on the shoulder. “Hey, it’s gonna be all right.”
“He was a great old guy,” the boy said. “Granma was great too. I used to talk to the mailman about them, and he said they don’t make people like them anymore.”
“I know.”
“She was forty-one when she had my mom,” Jack said. “She used to tell me how happy she was to have her. They’d tried for a lot of years. But she said my mom was never happy, and nobody ever knew why.” Here the boy looked me right in the eyes. “What could make her so unhappy?”
Man, oh man, what was I supposed to say? A psychiatrist or mind reader I’m not. I started to give him some cliché bull, like, life’s a mystery, or who knows, but at this time, in this situation, I figured I’d give a real explanation a shot. So I said, “You know, one time I bought a load of transformers for furnaces. The first one only lasted a week and the customer gave me hell on the phone about that. The next one I installed caught fire in my hands as I was wiring it in. The company I got them from overseas said they couldn’t help me. I was stuck with twenty-four of these things, so I took one apart on the workbench. It was wired wrong. One of the fields was wound with mostly uncoated wire, making the whole thing a big short circuit. It would never work right.”
Jack had stopped crying and was staring at me, breathing through his mouth. “You’re saying my mom was wired wrong?”
I thought he was quick, but now I knew it for sure. I gave him a look. Lowered my voice. “Maybe it wasn’t her fault. Each baby comes from the factory different from the next. Different circuits, different wires.”
“But why wasn’t she like Granma?” he sobbed.
“I don’t know, bud. Genes don’t control everything. We just don’t know why people do or don’t do things.”
He seemed to think about that. Nodded and straightened up. He wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve. “Now what’s gonna happen?”
I had to tell him something. “There’s social workers and judges that’ll take care of you. Unless there’s a relative or a family you’re close to that can help.”
He looked over to the furnace. “It’ll be a judge, then,” he said.
Eventually we fired up, sending heat rising through the pipes and registers, kind of bringing the house back alive at least. Then we heard the crunch of the deputies’ boots above us on the porch.
—
The coroner made it out later that morning. Butchie was good about hanging around, tinkering with the dampers. Everyone was talking to me like I was in charge, and I kept telling them, “I’m just the furnace man.” The more I said it, though, the more I felt that I’d somehow become part of the kid’s family by default. Finally, Butchie came up and gave me the “So?” look. Then I packed my tools and left, leaving the deputies and firemen and one old neighbor man to sort things out. Butchie and I got on the snowmobile and buzzed off toward home. The wind had died down, and the snow had slacked off. The temperature had come up to about zero, and the ride home wasn’t exactly a pleasure, but it felt like an escape from an awful scary place.
—
The funeral was late the next week. Me and my wife went. There was a good crowd of neighbors and creaky folks the grandfather had worked with at the tin-stamping plant. The boy was seated up by the coffin, his eyes red, acting brave and saying what he could to people who paid their respects. Normally a wife or daughter does that, not a teenage boy. The minister gave a nice devotional, and we walked across the street to the Lutheran graveyard and stood among the gray, weather-leaned stones. The ground was hard, and it must have taken a hell of a big backhoe to dig the grave. We settled at the edge of things, and I asked Deputy Toller if Jack was in child services or what.
“Yep,” he said. “The Maxy family on the west edge of town has him and a couple others.”
“That’s kind of sad,” my wife said. “I mean, to be uprooted like that.”
Toller leaned in close. “Minnesota law says sometimes a kid can live by himself if he’s able and a judge okays it. But the boy didn’t want to stay in the house.”
“I don’t know what to think about that,” I said.
The deputy shrugged. “Child services says he’s been taking care of himself for two years already, him and the old man. But he wanted out. Looks to me like he wants to move on, that one.”
I shivered at what I would have done. No family of any sort, alone in a rambling place that needed all kinds of repairs. “Was there an estate?”
“Well, there was a will, Sheriff said to me this morning. The boy’ll get a decent bank account, the house, and some life insurance. Probably some other stuff as well, like a town lot or some antiques in the attic. All the accounting hasn’t been done. The old man was working back in the fifties when making money was easy as falling off a log.”
Linda stood on her tiptoes to see them lower the coffin. She watched the boy during the rest of the prayers and then gave me one of her hard-to-figure-out looks. What in the world was she thinking? I glanced over at Jack as the minister handed him a little sc
oop of dirt to throw down in the crypt. He tossed it and then stared into the hole as if he was hoping the old man would climb back out.
When the funeral party had pretty much dispersed, he came up to me. “Hey, Mr. Todd.”
I wanted to squeeze him on the shoulder, but I held back. “We’re sorry for you, Jack,” I told him. “It’s always tough to lose a grandpa.”
“If there’s anything we can do to help, let us know,” Linda said.
He looked back at the grave and fastened the top button on his coat. “Thanks. The minister brought me. He’ll take me back out to the Maxys’, I guess.”
“Oh, we’ll give you a ride,” my wife said. She’s the kind who always goes out of her way to help. Sometimes I think she does it just to make me feel selfish. “Go tell the minister you’re going out there with us.”
So I have to drive down the old farm road west of where the mill used to be, and it’s rutted and half rock salt. Then we turn off toward the north a couple miles, and right after the one-lane bridge with no guard rails is the Maxy place. I give it the eye as I slide into the drive. Needs paint. Boxy place built in the late forties and sided with asbestos. Big lot, fenced with hedges that hadn’t been trimmed I bet in twenty years. I turned to the boy, who was in the back. “You been here, what, since last week? How’s it going?”
“It’s all right. Mrs. Maxy’s okay. Kind of old, like Granma.”
“And the other kids?”
“Two guys. They kind of mind their own business.”
The front door opened and a starved-looking old gent, Mr. Maxy, I guess, stood out on the front steps and looked at us. “Thanks for the ride,” Jack said, popping open the door and kicking snow up through the drive.
“We could do that,” my wife said, kind of dreamy sounding.
“Do what?”
“Be foster parents.”
“Hey, I can hardly handle the ones I got now.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, and it was, actually, because my kids never gave me any trouble to speak of, and I made good money. She didn’t say any more about it on the ride back home. I kind of expected her to, but she didn’t. Maybe she figured if she didn’t say anything, I’d think about it. And she was right. Foster parents in these parts were poor folks who needed the money from the state. I didn’t exactly fit into that category. I was the furnace man. I didn’t have to take in strays. Orphans, I guess. Though poor Jack was a stray if ever there was one. Aw, hell.
Signals Page 10