A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  —

  I had to get Amber under the arm and march her out to my truck—I told her she could pick up her car later. She wouldn’t speak to me, but once we got clear of Martin’s Falls she made me pull over, got out, stumbled into the dead grass, went to her knees and vomited. I let her have her privacy while traffic whipped past, then found paper towels behind the seat and did my best to clean her face with some old snow. “You okay to stand up?” I said.

  “We have to go back.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “What happened to Johnny?”

  “Let’s just get you home. You think you can walk?”

  “I can walk. Why couldn’t I walk?” She shook her head. “I fucked up, didn’t I?”

  I helped her back toward the truck and she sat down in the dirt with her back against the front wheel. “I think I have to again,” she said.

  “Just let it go,” I said. If a cop pulled over to check us out, I might pass the Breathalyzer and I might not. She turned her head and coughed out some more. I took another paper towel and dabbed at her lips. “When did you start drinking?”

  “Over at Johnny’s,” she said. “Before he went to pick up Jesse.”

  “So pretty early is what you’re saying.”

  “Pretty early,” she said.

  “Is it going to work if we try to get going? You’re going to catch cold sitting here.”

  “Fuck, where’s my coat?”

  “We’ll find it. Best thing now is just get you home.” I reached down; she took my hands and let me pull her up and help her into the cab. I got in my side and buckled her up.

  After a couple of miles she said, “Where are we going?”

  “Like I said. Taking you home. You have anything to eat this morning? Might do you good. We could stop off at the Hob Nob.”

  “Gross, no way. I don’t know, maybe.”

  “See how you feel when we get there. You want music?”

  “I don’t care, if it isn’t something shitty.”

  “Check in there.” I pointed to the glove box.

  She looked through the CDs and shut it again. “That must be the kind of shit what’s-her-name likes. You know what we used to call her? Bitch on wheels.”

  “Yeah, you said.”

  She looked down at her long fake nails; I guess she’d painted them black for the occasion. “You’re like not into me at all, are you? Because I don’t think I’m really probably into you.”

  “I’d say you’re a little on the young side,” I said. “Like about thirty years?”

  “Thirty-seven. I looked up your Social one time. So how old is she?”

  “She’s appropriate.” We were coming into Crowsfield, so I set the cruise at thirty to be extra sure. There’s usually one of them parked beside the convenience store. “You’ve seen her.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I want to look like when I get old. Not.”

  “Look,” I said, “we better get some food into you. Then you can go home and sleep.”

  “You don’t even know I was at Johnny’s last night.”

  “That wouldn’t be my business.” The past week I’d thought Johnny was hanging out at her desk too much. I’d seen her touching his chest when she was making a point; she was always touching somebody. But no, I didn’t even know. “So where was his wife?”

  “I don’t know, Johnny said she went to Foxwoods.”

  “What about your boyfriend?”

  “Everybody gets to do what they want,” she said. “Anyways, you’re not going to tell, and Johnny’s not.”

  “Perfect. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “Shit,” she said. “That was real attractive, me puking and everything.”

  I’d never seen where Amber lived—someplace in Egdon, that’s all I knew. It was mostly A-frames, double-wides and unpainted farmhouses; when the old town hall burned down in the fifties they’d put up a Quonset hut. There was still a commune left over from the hippie days, and you could smell their goats half a mile away. Amber pointed me to the shortcut off the Bozrah road, which turned to dirt and then back to pavement and came out by the Egdon Tavern. “What do I do here?”

  “Left at the stop. Then just keep going till I tell you.”

  We passed a swamp with cattails, a falling-down barn with no house nearby—I’d have to find out who the owner was—next to a cornfield that nobody’d gotten around to harvesting last fall.

  “He left me his all money,” she said. “He didn’t want my dad or any of them getting it. I’m going to be a rich-bitch like her.”

  “I would doubt she’s rich. You know what she probably makes a year? It’s not like she’s teaching at Harvard.”

  “Yeah, well she sure lets you know it. Okay, so fine, it’s this school for fuckin’ losers. She was always looking at my nails and shit—and even like the way she said my name. It’s a fucking porno name, okay? Well, my moms thought it was beautiful. You know what I’m going to do? Go somewhere.”

  “Where were you thinking?”

  “Where the fuck ever. Away from this shit place.”

  “So am I going to be losing you?”

  “Well, I don’t have it yet. It’s got to go through probation—no, what is it, probate. Shit, and I didn’t even get the fucking flag. Just up here on the right. You think they’ll still let me have it?”

  We turned into a dirt drive, with a two-legged wooden sign reading Nagirreb Estates. Right, I remembered: a developer from Holyoke named Tony Berrigan started putting up crappo town houses in the middle of a field and then got sent away for tax fraud. I don’t know why he wanted to make it sound like someplace on the West Bank, but maybe Egdon had enough Sunnyhursts and Bonnie Braes.

  “That one there.” She pointed to a two-family with aluminum siding and a three-foot-square overhang above the door. The path to it was just footprints, and somebody’d parked a rusted-out Buick Regal on the muddy lawn, next to a lamppost with the numbers 5-7 on it. “You better just go.”

  “You still be in Monday? Or you need some time off?”

  “I don’t not show up for work,” she said. “I sort of don’t want to see Johnny, though.”

  “You might not.”

  “He’s going to be pissed at you,” she said. “Just saying.”

  —

  T-Mobile doesn’t work at my house, so I still have a landline and an answering machine. I thought it would be blinking when I came in—who else would Johnny call? But I made coffee, ate some cereal and still no word. From Kristin either; she was doing whatever you do in Boston. I turned on the radio, forgetting that Saturday afternoon was the opera. I tried to stick with it for a few minutes, then turned it off. My parents used to listen when I was little, and this man with a cultured voice would give the plot beforehand, which I could never follow—actually, I remember his name, too. Milton Cross. He must be dead by now. I remember our house smelled like mothballs, and the women singers would be shrieking away and the men singers bellowing, and I always thought my parents were just pretending to themselves that it was beautiful. I mean, I can recognize it as beautiful now—I’ve studied enough theory since then—but it’s not a beauty I can make myself rise up to all that often. Kristin was going to take me. She went down to the Met when she could afford it; she said supertitles made all the difference. Watching on DVD was good, but not the same thing. And she wasn’t even an opera buff per se—just a regular educated person, and this was part of life to her. I wasn’t that anymore, and I wasn’t completely the other thing either—Amber spotted that the second she opened my glove box, not that she didn’t know already. Nights when I don’t go out, I’ll read books because I can’t stand how a television sounds, no matter what they have on, which means half the shit people talk about is lost on me. Hey, this is where I live. When Obama ran the second time, I looked up the local returns the morning after, and Bozrah went for Romney 178 to 51. Jesse refuses to vote, even though he sent Obama a hundred dollars, so the one would’ve been
me. The locals just know me as basically a good guy, kind of an oddball sometimes, and of course the new people wouldn’t think to have me over for cocktails. I’m their fucking contractor.

  Johnny didn’t call till five o’clock, from the lockup in Greenfield. They were charging him with assault and battery, disturbing the peace, drunk and disorderly, they’d probably towed his car, they hadn’t set bail and could I get somebody down there. I tried the lawyer who’d handled that bullshit in North Adams, but all I could do was leave a message, so I drove down myself and there was nobody to talk to but the cop at the desk, who wouldn’t let me in to see him. Johnny had to stay in till Monday when he could finally get in front of a judge and the lawyer got everything knocked down to disturbing the peace. I handed over my debit card to pay the fine, wrote a check to the lawyer and told Johnny I’d run him back up to Martin’s Falls—turned out they hadn’t towed him after all. He said he’d found out about the suits: one of them worked at the funeral home as an usher and did the heavy lifting, and the other was an off-duty cop picking up extra change. They’d both been in Afghanistan.

  He got in the truck, shot the finger at the courthouse and said, “How’s my face?” I turned the mirror toward him. “Fuck,” he said. “Good job.”

  “They knew some tricks,” I said. “I felt bad I didn’t get your back.”

  “Hey, they had a few years on you. No offense. Tell you the truth, I think I might be getting a little old for this shit. Fuck, man, ten years ago? Five years ago. I owe you money.”

  “Forget it. I can probably write off the lawyer as legal fees. Buy us lunch if you want.”

  “You mean drinkies too, right? That was a long couple days, man.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t say no.”

  “I ought to,” he said.

  We drove over to Buster’s, where they’ve got wooden booths and old metal signs on the walls and they keep it dark in the middle of the day and the waitresses will flirt back with you up to a point. We got a young one whose white apron was tight across her breasts and we both ordered Jack on the rocks. Johnny looked at her chest and said, “I want mine double.” She said, “I could’ve guessed.”

  “Hey, I might not be that old after all,” he said when she went off to the bar. “We don’t have anything this afternoon, do we?”

  “Miller Brook. Jesse and Myron are over there.”

  “Well hell then.”

  “I’m going to need you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, man. My favorite day. Thank you, sweetheart.” The waitress set our drinks down. “And how about a couple of menus?”

  “No problem,” she said.

  “You don’t have to hurry,” he said. “Not that we don’t like your company.”

  We raised glasses, and he downed about half of his and said, “Hal-a-fuckin’-looyah.” I guess I downed half of mine too. “So Amber get home okay?” As he said it, he looked up at an old Kelly Tires sign.

  “Well,” I said, “she got home.”

  “How about Jesse?”

  “He probably caught a ride with Myron.”

  “See that?” he said. “I fuckin’ love Jesse. Because he knows how to fuckin’ carry himself. I don’t give a shit if he’s black or what he is. Now me, couple of drinks and I’m liable to get right into it with you.”

  The waitress put menus in front of us. “Can I tell you about our specials?”

  “Sweetheart,” Johnny said, “you make everything special. Why don’t you come sit down with us?”

  “You could bring us another round,” I said. On her way to the bar, she whispered something to an older waitress.

  “Goddamn right,” Johnny said. “Let’s be assholes. So okay, you took her home and then what? She say anything to you?”

  “She was pretty hammered,” I said. “I kind of let it all go in one ear.”

  “Shit,” he said. “Yeah, I don’t know, fuck it. Arlene hates my ass anyway.” He downed the rest of his drink. “Hey, she’s got all that bullshit with her boyfriend, plus Billy and dealing with all that, so we’re having some drinks, sitting on the couch—I’m not gonna fuckin’ send her home. She is hot. You know this.”

  “So did Arlene find out?”

  “I been off the grid for three days, man. They probably had it on the fuckin’ View. That’s what she watches.”

  “Amber said she was off somewhere.”

  “Well yeah. Else it wouldn’t of fuckin’ happened.”

  “So maybe you dodged the bullet.”

  He counted on his fingers. “You, me, Amber, the motherfuckers next door—they had to see her car there in the morning. I mean you’re not going to be telling Arlene, right? Because you already fucked me once. I had your back that time.”

  “Johnny. Different situation. You moved on the guy.”

  “Nah, come on, I’m just fuckin’ with you. Maybe I’m fuckin’ with you.”

  The other waitress put our drinks down. “You gentlemen make up your minds?”

  “What happened to your friend?” Johnny said.

  “She went on break. What can I get you?”

  “Cheeseburger well,” I said. “With fries? And a cup of clam chowder.”

  “You?” she said to Johnny.

  “I am such a fuckin’ fuckup,” Johnny said. “Just one more of these bad boys and bring me the check.”

  “I’ll have those right out for you.” She headed for the kitchen.

  “Listen,” he said, “they don’t stop you in the middle of the day, right?”

  “Probably not if you color between the lines.”

  “Fuck, man, and Arlene’s probably home by now. She doesn’t go in till tonight. I’m thinking just get in the car and go. Fuck all these crazy bitches.”

  “You’ll get through it,” I said.

  “Easy for you, right? I been working for you how long? Well one of these days you ain’t gonna see me.”

  —

  The house on Miller Brook Road belonged to the Web designer, Steven Holtzman. He took his wife to Aruba for three weeks, didn’t drain his pipes, the power went out, everything froze, then we had a thaw and you can imagine what they came back to. Great old house too. When the insurance adjuster came out with me to look over the damage, he said a good clean fire would’ve been better. We gutted the whole house back in February, right down to the studs, wearing coveralls and masks; we kept heaters going, but they didn’t do much. We filled two dumpsters, the mold-remediation guys came in and did their thing and now the wife wanted everything back just like it was; she still had pictures on the computer. It was going to end up at least a three-hundred-thousand-dollar job. Holtzman was sick about it, and ashamed of himself—it really had been a dumb-ass move—so I had to do some hand-holding. I told him probably July; I knew in order to make that I’d have to hire on extra people. There’s never a shortage of guys out of work; the trick is finding anybody that knows what they’re doing. I had my big three, because Myron had done his cutting over the fall and winter, and I’d be pitching in myself, but we had some smaller jobs coming up, plus the lawns and landscaping right around the corner.

  When I got to the site Tuesday morning, Jesse and Myron were already out in the yard sanding the twelve-inch hemlock floorboards we’d managed to dry out, the legs of the sawhorses in the mud and old snow. A pair of Asscrack Harrys were humping sheets of drywall into the front room, where Jesse’d gotten plywood down, and the radio was going. Billy’s old radio, which Amber had passed on to Jesse.

  Johnny still hadn’t showed by ten o’clock, so I called his cell and his house, then tried Amber at the office; she hadn’t seen or heard from him. “Anything else shaking?” I said.

  “Some guy called about the ad. And somebody else, but they hung up.”

  Jesse and I started hanging drywall in the upstairs while Myron stayed with the floorboards. That was a waste of him but I didn’t trust the Asscracks not to leave marks with the sanders; they both looked about sixteen, though the one with the tattoos ru
nning up his neck had finished high school. I put him to work stapling rolled insulation between the studs in the dining room and sent the bodybuilder one over to Security Supply in North Adams, where I had an account, to pick up toilets for the half baths, rolls of PEX and a list of other stuff; the toilet in the master bath, with the wooden tank up top, had been ruined too, but that I’d had to special order. This afternoon I’d get him started cleaning up everything we’d taken out and stored in the shed—the claw-foot bathtub, the antique sinks with the brass fixtures, the wood-burning Glenwood kitchen stove that Holtzman’s wife actually cooked on once in a while. She claimed you could taste the difference.

  When the noon whistle blew down at the town hall, the guys brought out their lunches—Myron’s wife always packed something hot for him in a zippered bag—and I got in my truck to go by Johnny’s house. It was getting colder and starting to cloud over. His Pathfinder wasn’t there, so I sent him a text—Where U?—then drove to the office and found Amber on the Internet as usual.

  “What stinks in here?” I said.

  “Coffee was tasting like shit, so I ran some white vinegar through the coffeemaker to get all that scunge out. I was just about to vacuum. This place is going to be a disaster area after I’m gone. You better get somebody good in.”

  “So no word? I stopped by his place.”

  “I told you he’d be pissed.”

  “He’ll probably turn up.” I looked in the mini-fridge and found a single peach yogurt. “This yours?”

  “You can have it. So how come you’re mad at me?”

  “Who said?”

  “I call bullshit.”

  “I’m not too happy with Johnny.”

  “You just wished it would’ve been you,” she said.

  I peeled back the foil and found a plastic spoon in my drawer. “I’m good with who I’m with.”

  “Well, if you want to know, it wasn’t exactly epic.”

  “I don’t need details.” I ate a spoonful of the yogurt, then pushed it away. “Here, you want the rest of this? I better get back.”

  “So is everybody thinking bad about me?” she said.