Signals

by Tim Gautreaux

  Finally, at a little before five on the fifteenth, the Beauty Queen let him in, and he went about his business quickly, finishing as usual by spraying under the kitchen sink. He noticed that she had not made coffee. He looked for her in the hall and in the living room, retracing his route, giving embarrassed little shots into corners as though he were going over a poor job. He found her in the bedroom, with her back against the headboard, reading a book.

  “I left a check for you on the counter,” she said.

  “I saw it. How you doin’, Mrs. Malone?”

  “I’m fine.” But the stiffness of her mouth and the deep-set hurt in her eyes said otherwise. She rested the book on top of her dress, a dark print with lilies against a black background. “Is there something you forgot to spray?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Usually I mist under your bed. Every now and then you leave a snack plate and a glass under the edge.” He got down on his knees, adjusted the nozzle of his wand, and sprayed. “You decided what to do about the baby yet?” He wondered if she sensed the wide gulf of anticipation behind the question.

  “I’m having an abortion tomorrow,” she said at once, as though she were reading a sentence from the book in her lap.

  His thumb slipped off the lever and he froze on his knees at the foot of her bed. “It would be such a fine baby,” he said, straightening his back and staring at her across a quilted cover. “You, a beauty-contest winner, and him, a good-looking lawyer. What a baby that would make.” He began to say things that made his face burn, and he felt like a child who had set his heart on something, only to be told that he could never have what he wanted. “Clarisse would be so happy,” he said, trying to smile.

  Mrs. Malone drew up her legs and glared at him. “Mr. Robichaux, what would you do with such a baby? It wouldn’t be like you and Clarisse. It would look nothing like you.”

  He stayed on his knees and watched her, wondering if she had planned out everything she was saying. He reflected on the meanness of the world and how for the first time he was unable to deal with it. “It’d mean a lot to us” was all he could tell her.

  “It would be cruel to give this child to you. Why can’t you see that?” For a moment her face possessed the blank disdain of a marble statue in her backyard. “Would you please just get out,” she said, looking down at her book and balling a fist against her forehead.

  The Bug Man left the house, forgetting to close the door, feeling his good nature bleed away until he was as hollow as a termite-eaten beam. In twenty minutes, as he pulled into the littered drive of the Scalsons’, his feelings had not improved. He was late, and the Slugs were seated at their hacked table arguing bitterly over pieces of fried chicken. Felix stood in the door, pumping up his tank, looking into the yellowed room at the water-stained ceiling, the spattered walls, the torn and muddy linoleum, the unwashed and squalling Scalsons. The grandfather dug through the pile of chicken, cursing the children for eating the livers. The mother was pulling the skins off every piece and piling them on her plate while the children gave each other greasy slaps. They tore at their food like yard animals, spilling flakes of crust and splashes of slaw under the table. “Gimme a wing, you little son of a bitch,” Mr. Scalson growled to his son.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Felix said, and everyone turned, noticing him for the first time.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the Frenchman. You must have water in that tank of yours, because the bugs have been all over us the past month. What’d I pay you good money for anyway, shorty?”

  Ever since he had opened the door the Bug Man had been pumping his tank, five, ten, twenty strokes. He adjusted the nozzle to deliver a sharp stream, pressed the lever, and peeled back Mr. Scalson’s left eyelid. The heavy man let out a yell and Felix began drilling them all with streams of roach killer—in their faces, across their chests, the grandfather in the mouth. The family sat stupidly for several moments, sputtering and calling out when they were sprayed again in the eyes as though being washed clean of some foul blindness. One by one the Scalsons scampered to their feet. The father swung at the Bug Man, who ducked and then cracked him across the nose with his spray wand. When the grandfather came at him with an upraised chair, he snapped the brass wand across the top of his head, leaving a red split in the hairless meat on his skull.

  —

  The next evening the weather was mild, and at dusk Felix and Clarisse were sitting in the yellow spring-iron chairs, whose backs were flattened metal flowers. He had told her everything, and together they were staring at a few late fireflies winking on the lawn like the intermittent hopes of defeated people. Across the road a mother called her child for the second time, and they watched him bob up out of a field.

  In the house the telephone rang, and Felix got up slowly. It was Mrs. Malone, and she sounded upset.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. He twisted the phone cord around his fist and closed his eyes.

  “I was in the clinic’s waiting room this afternoon,” she began, her voice stiff and anesthetized, “and I read the local paper’s account of the attack.”

  He winced when she said “attack” and stared down at the dustless hardwood of his living room. “I’m real sorry about that.” He thought of the expression on his wife’s face when she had brought the money for his bail.

  “And you did it right after you left my house,” she said, her voice rising. “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He listened to her breaths coming raggedly over the phone for at least a half minute, but he didn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t sure why he had hurt the Scalsons. At the time, he had wanted only to keep them from damaging the world further.

  “I don’t want you to work for me anymore. I just can’t have you in the house.”

  “I wouldn’t bother you again, Mrs. Malone.”

  “No.” The word came back quick as a shot. “You’ll stay away.”

  And that was it.

  —

  The Bug Man went back to his work at dawn, and for that day and every workday for the next ten years he walked through houses and lives. His business expanded until he had to hire three easygoing local men to spray bugs with him. He erected a small building with a storage area and office, hiring a young woman to manage appointments and payments. Clarisse attended the local college, became a first-grade teacher, and labored in her garden of children. In his spare time he began attending a local exercise club and soon lost his bulky middle, though much of his hair left with it.

  Felix had been thirty-seven when the other independent exterminator in town decided to sell the business to him. These new routes were profitable, and Joe Brasseaux, Felix’s best sprayer, tended them religiously, never missing an appointment for two years, except for one day when he called in sick. Felix looked over Joe’s route for the afternoon, and when he saw the addresses, he decided to treat the houses himself.

  About four o’clock, he pulled into the long drive that led to the Beauty Queen’s house. Getting out of the truck, he looked up at the oaks, which had changed little, and at the pool in back, which swirled with bright water. The plantings were mature and lush, rolling green shoulders of liriope bordering everything.

  The driveway was empty, but in the door was a key with a pair of small plastic dice hanging from it. He rang the bell and bent down to pump up his tank. When the door opened, he looked up, and standing there was a young boy with sandy hair, blue eyes, a dimpled chin, an open, intelligent face and, Felix noticed, big feet.

  “Yes, sir?” the child said, adjusting the waistband on what appeared to be a soccer uniform.

  For a moment Felix couldn’t speak. He wanted to reach out and feel the top of the boy’s head, but he pointed to his tank instead. “I’ve come to spray for bugs.”

  “Where’s Joe? Joe’s the one takes care of that for us.”

  The Bug Man looked inside hopefully. “Is your mother Mrs. Malone?”

  “She’s not here. And I’m sorry, b
ut she told me not to let in anyone I don’t know.” The boy must have noticed how Felix was staring, and stepped back.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me.” Felix gave him his widest smile, all the while studying the child. “I’m the Bug Man.”

  The boy narrowed his bright eyes. “No sir. Not to me you aren’t. You’d better go away.”

  At once he felt shriveled and sick, like a sprayed insect, and wondered whether he should tell the boy that he knew his mother, that he knew who he was, but the Bug Man was by now a veteran of missed connections and could tell when a train had left the station without him. He scanned the child once more and turned away.

  Pulling out of the drive, he saw in the rearview a small fair-skinned figure standing on the steps, looking after him, but not really seeing him, he guessed. He allowed himself this one glance. One glance, he decided, was what he could have.

  Wings

  Marissa was a member of a small accounting firm, a short woman with straight black hair falling only to her chin, and dark, terrier eyes. It was now a week since her husband had been buried, a Saturday, and she examined the contents of his workbench for only a moment before raking all of it into a trash can. There were a few tools she had no use for and some rusty gizmo he’d been tinkering with the day he had a heart attack. He owned so much stuff, and not much of it fit onto her balance sheet.

  Later, she walked into the backyard and glanced around at the too-tall carpet grass and shaggy boxwoods waiting to be trimmed, their gardener lying across town working a lawn from the underside. She bent down and pulled a single weed, unable to think of what to do with it.

  Her cell phone rang and it was Alice, the retired and disabled flight attendant who lived across the street. She said how sorry she was to hear about Brad’s death and then seemed to run out of things to say. She ended the brief conversation by reminding Marissa that she’d left her garage door open. Alice wasn’t really disabled, but Marissa liked to think of her that way. She had a barely noticeable limp.

  “Garage?”

  “I hate to be a nag, but your whole house looks so much nicer with that broad door closed. It’s why the subdivision made the rule, Marissa.”

  “I guess I left it open when I put the car up.” She was generally polite to the woman across the street, a once willowy beauty with whom she had nothing in common, especially once willowy beauty.

  Alice had lived over there at least twenty years, a widow, still single and good-looking, though going gray and soft around the edges. When asked, she would say she’d been a stewardess, using the old term as if to freeze herself in a younger time. She sported through the neighborhood in her little red Mercedes, driving more carefully each year. The summer Marissa and her husband had moved to Green Oak subdivision, Alice seemed to flirt with him at a newcomers’ party, and Marissa felt like throwing her Bloody Mary into her lap.

  “Oh, and I wanted to tell you I was so sorry I couldn’t come to the funeral.”

  Marissa’s little mouth grew smaller. “But mainly you wanted me to hide the plastic junk in my garage, right? That’s more important than a dead husband.”

  There was a little gasp on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You know—”

  Marissa hung up, angry with herself for being angry. Alice, after all, was like most of her neighbors in the subdivision, people who would mail a personal note about a peeling board on the side of a house, but not about a wedding or funeral. She didn’t know much about her, having chosen to avoid the wide lake of her beautiful presence whenever she’d come over to ask Brad a question.

  She dropped the weed she was holding on the lawn. What would be the point of losing patience with everyone? Someday she might need help, since she was alone now; her daughter, who was in graduate school, had left an hour before, desperate to get back to her library carrel.

  She went in and rang the office to say she would show up Monday morning to deal with the tax accounts, but it was May, and taxes were no longer a burning issue. In the kitchen she sat and stared across the breakfast table at her husband’s chair. The one next to it was missing a screw. She saw a phantom Brad bent over it with a screwdriver, so she got up, grabbed her purse, and walked through the house quickly, past his engineering degree hanging on the wall, past her daughter’s graduation photo, heading for the garage.

  She found Alice waiting for her, standing under the big open door, and just for an instant Marissa wished she had the remote control in her hand.

  Alice folded her arms and said, “Look, I know I seem a bitch about this door thing. I know it.”

  Marissa stepped back. The other woman had seldom come across the street to talk to her directly. Her husband had been another matter, and Alice was always plying him with questions about lawn plants and air conditioner maintenance. “I was just going to bring the door down.”

  “And I know I should’ve come to the funeral, but I just can’t take them. I went to my father’s last year, and it almost killed me.”

  She knew that Alice had been to one other burial, her husband’s. He’d been an airlines pilot. Marissa had never known the man who went down in a wind-shear accident somewhere over Iowa with forty-seven passengers, but she thought she would have liked him if for nothing else than his last words, picked up by the cockpit’s voice recorder: “Oh, well…”

  She stepped around Alice to make sure her Lexus was clear and then noticed that her husband’s shiny pickup wasn’t all the way in. Fishing keys out of her purse, she walked over and sat in the truck’s leather seats, pausing now, for what, she wasn’t sure, maybe a whiff of him, some residual touch from his fingers. She ran a palm slowly over the arc of the steering wheel. Alice walked up to stand at the open window. “You should go for a long drive.” The statement sounded as though there was some experience behind it.

  “You think?” She stared straight over the hood.

  “Yeah.” She crinkled her nose. “Sadness is kind of like cigarette smoke that sticks in your clothes. Air it out. Lose it.”

  Marissa studied the tall woman in the smart peach sundress. What right did she have to look so good at midday in this Louisiana humidity? “There’s a lot to lose.”

  “I know it.”

  “He didn’t pay much attention to me. Just his tools and his toys.”

  Alice bit her lip for a moment. “He had a lot of them, all right.”

  “Yes. Well, here I go.”

  Alice didn’t step back from the window. She seemed to be waiting for something. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just down the road for ten minutes and back.” She put a hand on the shift lever.

  “Oh. Can I come along?”

  It would have been rude but understandable to say no, and Marissa opened her mouth to do just that, but instead the word okay came out of her mouth, startling the both of them. She had no idea where the word came from and was reminded of the time her English teacher gave her the assignment to write a poem, something she’d never done before or since. She remembered sitting in front of her old Apple word processor and staring as letters formed on the screen like ants in a line. It was a poem about shades of light in her empty campus mailbox. When she finished, she had absolutely no clue where the words had come from.

  Alice’s eyes widened and she gave her long hair a toss. “Pull over to my drive while I get my purse.”

  Marissa backed into the street, considered pulling the remote out of the glove box to close the garage, but didn’t, finally moving across the way to pick up Alice. She glanced at her ice-blue eyes and wondered what her neighbor was thinking, but she was unreadable, just like a stewardess walking a plane’s aisle during a thunderstorm.

  Marissa turned right toward the subdivision’s wisteria-haunted guardhouse and rolled through onto the bright, open highway beyond. She would drive west for a bit, that’s all, and think about what to do with Brad’s things. He was a collector, and in the attic display room were arrays
of metal toys as old as a hundred years, antique guns, porcelain store signs, not to mention walls of tools—a lifetime of bought history. Brad had trained in the knowledge of objects, dragging her along on forays into antique shops and flea markets all their married life. She never understood what he’d seen in any of it, though he’d tried to explain why he’d chosen this truck or that sign, and why it was important to preserve them. Even the toys were forms of art, he’d told her. Now, who could tell her how to get rid of it all? She gave Alice a sudden look of appraisal. “Did my husband ever talk to you about his collecting?”

  Alice stared ahead down the sun-crazed road and waited a moment before answering. “He was in the garage working on a little toy gas tanker once and said he had a lot more. He took me upstairs and showed me about twenty Texaco trucks from different eras.”

  Marissa pictured the little wheeled city of painted steel vehicles in the attic, the miniature running boards and radiator cowlings limed with dust. “I don’t know how I’m going to get rid of it. If it was up to me, I’d throw it all out. But my daughter called an appraiser to come over and look at it.”

  “I’m not surprised she’s not interested in that stuff either. It’s a man’s thing, gathering piles of iron or brass. Hard stuff, mostly. Coins, antique barbed wire. Stuff with an edge. They compete with one another for it.”

  Marissa sped around a pickup with two expensive motorcycles tethered in its bed. She looked over at the man and woman in the cab, who both waved at her. “Your better half, what did he collect?”

  Alice seemed a bit startled at the question. “Nothing.” She turned her face away. “He never made it to that stage. It took me maybe ninety minutes to clean out everything he owned.”

  —

  The new crew-cab truck rode like an old lady’s sedan, its cushioned motion carrying Marissa’s spirit along and up, promising some vague escape or roadside vision that might hint at why her husband had to die in his early fifties. She drove to the first little town and was over its bridge and into the woods beyond so quickly she couldn’t remember if she’d driven through at all. “How much time do you have to spare?” she asked. “This feels better than I thought it would.”