Lisa shot him with a gun-shaped hand that meant “Good thinking.”
“I don’t shop at Mitchell’s store, either,” said Rodney. “He yelled at me once, and all I was doing was looking through the bins.”
“Yeah, but how many hours had you been looking?” Milo asked.
“I don’t keep track of things like that, Milo.”
Lisa wheeled her chair back to look at Rodney. He was really a very sweet man, she thought, far sweeter than most. But he’d shaved himself badly the day before, leaving a patch of brown-gray stubble under one nostril, and several more on his neck. No, Rodney was not the answer. She stood and kissed his cheek. “You’re not the answer, either,” she told Milo.
“What’s the question?”
“What is Lisa doing for the rest of her life?” she said, and gave herself to the fluorescent hallway, the shining linoleum path to the coffee machine.
“She’s doing the classic-rock show on WWHY!”
“Oh, no,” she said, not looking back. “No, no, no.” Though it was perverse and destructive, she allowed herself the thought that she was old enough to be Milo’s mother, simply to enjoy the consolation of the subsequent thought: But I would have had to get started awfully early. And then she recalled that she had gotten started awfully early.
She yelped once in the coffee room and poured herself a mug of the black acid bath from the Mr. Coffee carafe. One of Milo’s pre-dawn survival tricks was to put three foil bags of ground coffee in the filter instead of one, and then coax the results past his tongue with heavy measures of non-dairy creamer. He had left the morning arrivals to figure this out for themselves.
She had a sip of sludge. She hadn’t been on a date since leaving her husband, and now it was the weekend again and she just wanted to go out with somebody, and not somebody she already knew, either, which ruled out everyone. There was a very nice gay man, HIV negative, who donated sperm to lesbian couples in the area. She never thought she’d join the ranks of the turkey-baster moms, but it was starting to look like either that or become Lisa Harrington, Raccoon Lady of Hollyfield, Vermont.
It had been a dumb move to feed the raccoon in the first place, she’d be the first to admit it. But he was cute and she was lonely. Recipe for trouble.
Her rented house had a pantry window facing the redwood deck in back. Since the end of the bitter-cold weather, she’d been leaving it open so Sergeant Pepper, her cat, could come and go at will. One evening after dinner, cleaning up at the sink, she sensed Sarge in the corner of her eye. When she turned to look, it wasn’t him. It was a mammoth raccoon on the windowsill, looking at her with his broad masked face. He was moving his pointy nose all around, smelling the pantry smells. His long, black claws hung over the edge of the sill.
You couldn’t live in Vermont without seeing lots of raccoons, but she’d never seen one this close up, or this big. She’d certainly never seen one sitting in a pantry window, so trusting and calm. She felt, after all these unsatisfactory years of adulthood, that she might finally be in a fairy tale. “Who the hell are you?” she said. “Do you talk?” To her great disappointment, he did not.
Jesse was sleeping on the living-room rug. Lisa stepped into the pantry, and, far from running away, Sparky—she’d already named him Sparky in her mind—came a little farther in. Quietly, she took bowls of dry cat kibble and water out the back door to the deck. Sparky waited on the railing, rising up on his hind legs to sniff the air and flex his slender hands. When Lisa went back in, he hopped down and ate the food, while she watched through the door. She had to keep the window closed from then on; otherwise, Jesse would kill Sparky on her kitchen floor, or Sparky would kill Sergeant Pepper on the redwood deck. Somebody would kill somebody. When Sparky came the following night, he scratched adorably on the glass. Lisa bumped him up to Sarge’s canned provisions—Elegant Entrée, Liver in Creamed Gravy, Tuna in Sauce.
Beyond the town limits, they didn’t send a garbage truck to your house; Lisa had to take her own trash to the dump once a week. Between trips she kept her bags in the basement against the cool stone wall. A week after Sparky arrived, she went to take another load down, and a stench came up the stairs. She crouched on the steps with the flashlight. Every garbage bag was ripped open. She sent Jesse first and then followed him down, tiptoeing in her flat shoes around the scattered trash. The dog wriggled through the basement like a large black muscle, vacuuming the floor with his snout. Periodically, he stopped to scratch himself, and it made Lisa feel itchy, too. Her ankles bristled. Didn’t I shave my legs this morning? she thought, glancing down at the stubble there. She could have sworn she had. The light in the basement was bad, but she seemed to have hair on her feet as well. Then she saw the stubble hopping.
She shrieked and ran upstairs, and washed her legs in the tub, spritzed her rubber boots with flea spray and went back downstairs. Jesse was still on a psychedelic nose trip at the far end of the room. In the yellow light of the bare bulb, Lisa saw the black particles of fleas rush away from her boots like iron filings repelled by magnetism. Thousands of them were flicking around the concrete floor amid piles of white dust and plaster scraps she’d never noticed before. She glanced up at the ceiling. It was all busted—holes punched through it in many places, irregular clumps of white solids dangling by threads.
It took her a second to understand what this was. Sparky, the fat hog, had been running in the space between the ceiling and the floor upstairs, breaking through the plaster wherever it wouldn’t hold his weight.
Milo’s musical parting shot was pure thrashing rudeness, but it gave Lisa four minutes in the record library. She arrived in the booth with a stack of CDs, put on her phones, and cued up a disc. She was supposed to do a station ID followed by spots for a water-bed store and a Chinese takeout place, but they’d wait. She pulled a slider on the console to kill Lizard Euphoria, pushed another slider open, hit the button, and—wham!—Jimi Hendrix cracked the gloom with “Still Raining, Still Dreaming,” the only song Lisa could possibly play to start a radio show today, because it was still raining and she was still dreaming, and because if raccoons did talk they’d sound like the amazing wah-wah guitar Hendrix played on this tune.
Lay back and dream on a rainy day. Jimi made her feel so much better that she went on to his version of “Red House,” a blues she dedicated to herself because her raccoon- and flea-infested house was red. By the time the great man shook his strings through the first chorus, she had figured out what to do: an all-day blues marathon. Her condition called for the heavy medicine. I’m a one-woman blues revival, she thought, and ran to the record library again.
“How about some B. B. King, everybody?” she said when she was back in her d.j. chair, and the Master riffed on Lucille, his famous guitar. “Now let’s hear from the other King,” she told radioland, “and I do mean Albert,” and Mr. Blues Power ripped into one, followed by Buddy and Freddie and Muddy and Memphis. She did a whole half hour of the Wolf, and calls came in on the listener line. They were liking this out there. She’d struck a nerve with these blues. It must have been the weather, not to mention the economy these days. Vermont was more depressed than Lisa was. Last month, the station had run a news piece on the numbers of people eating road kill to get through the winter.
Maybe she could get someone to eat Sparky, she thought, answering the flashing phone. No, she didn’t want Sparky on a spit. She just wanted him out of her house.
The man on the phone was all worked up and couldn’t speak English very well. “This is best radio I hear since I come to this country!” he exclaimed.
“Glad you like it,” said Lisa.
“I love blues!” he said.
“Great. What’s your name?”
“Tommy T.!”
“Tommy T. That’s your name?”
“Yes! I grow up with this blues!”
He sounded Eastern European—Czech or Polish or something like that. “And where was that, Tommy? Where you grew up. Gdansk?”
He was silent for a second inside her phones. “You have excellent ear,” he said. “My home is near Gdansk.”
Lisa laughed. “I was kidding, Tommy. It was a joke, you know? Lech Walesa? Solidarity? Gdansk shipyards?”
“Yes!” he said. “Why is Gdansk joke?”
“It’s not. I meant that Gdansk is the only thing people like me know about your country, so I mentioned it.”
“Oh.”
“Would you like to request a song, Tommy?”
“I know how your car is breaking!”
“‘I Know How Your Heart Is Breaking.’ Sounds familiar. Who did it?”
“No! You! Your car!”
“My heart is breaking. As a matter of fact, it is, Tommy. But just how did you happen to know that?”
“The man on radio tell about it. Before.”
A man on the radio told him my heart was breaking, thought Lisa. One way you knew you’d plunged to the deep, hidden crux of reality was that the strange people started calling you up. It happened to Lisa periodically—clusters of crazies ringing her phone.
“Tommy, have you ever noticed how other people’s license plates contain secret messages meant for you alone?” He fell silent. Lisa recalled that she was strange now herself, and shouldn’t be casting stones. She had a James Cotton song going with twenty seconds left to run and there was nothing else cued up. “I have to put you on hold,” she said, and hit the button for Rodney’s booth. “Rod, talk to this guy for me, will you? I can’t figure him out.”
She flipped through some discs. The station had a brand-new CD copy of “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos—an immortal creation that contained, as she remembered it, an astounding version of “Have You Ever Loved a Woman.” It was a song about a man in love with his best friend’s wife, which Eric Clapton actually had been at the time. That was why it was astounding. If you didn’t know, you knew the instant you heard his guitar.
She let it roll and punched Rodney again. “So what’s the story?”
“He’s from Poland.”
“I got that.”
“His whole life is the blues.”
“I sort of got that, too.”
“He came to America to play blues guitar. He wants to fix your car.”
She unraveled this for a second. “Oh, my car.”
“Yeah, what did you think?”
“Never mind.” He was a guitar bum who also worked on cars. Why did those things always go together? And here was evidence that it went well beyond America—to Poland, of all places. Didn’t that prove it was something in the structure of the male brain? She got back on the phone.
“You play Eric Clapton!” Tommy exclaimed.
“I do that sometimes. But this one’s for you, Tommy.”
“Thank you!”
“I understand you play the blues.”
“Yes! I am blues-guitar player!”
“A guitar player who fixes cars? I’ve never heard of that.”
“I am fixing car for living. You stall in puddle, yes?”
“Yes. Right. But now it won’t even start in the rain anymore.”
“I know! Vapors! Wires getting wet! Not hard to fix. Great honor to fix blues lady’s car. Please come to shop today. I fix for you!”
She did need to do something about the car, and her usual mechanic was Mitchell’s best friend. “What’s your real name, Tommy?”
He didn’t answer right away. “Tomasz,” he finally said. “Tomasz Tomaczewski. But is no good for blues.”
“I can see that. And where are you fixing cars, exactly?”
She knew the garage he was working at, and said she’d drop by after her show. She had a soft spot for Tommy T., because he reminded her of a feeble old joke she’d loved as a girl at summer camp—the one about a Polish window washer who frightens a woman on the phone. I am viper. I am coming to you.
“I am coming to you,” she told Tommy T.
“I fix car for blues disc-jockey lady!” he declared.
The garage where Tommy T. worked was a place Lisa had seen for years but never visited—a former gas station known now as Al’s Car Repair. She sputtered over there in the unending rain. Rodney had gleaned on the phone that Tommy knew someone who knew someone who knew Al, and that was how he’d got this job. He must have been an ace mechanic, but, even so, he was dumb lucky to be working at all; he’d been in the States only three months.
As if her car knew where they were, it hit a puddle in Al’s potholed lot and died right there. She opened her door to the stinging weather. WWHY was playing loud in the shop. She got halfway across the lot when the world wobbled like a bad TV tube. In the dark mouth of the building, beside the stout chrome shaft of a lift, her father was working under a car. Not her father as she knew him last, but a man younger than she was now—the father who threw her bottle in the sea. He was wearing bluejeans and a red plaid shirt, and his straight brown hair fell to his shoulders like the prince in disguise in a story he used to read to her. She stopped in the lot and closed her eyes. In the red darkness, her father-prince emerged from the building with her bottle in his hand. When she opened her eyes, the real guy had come out holding a wrench. It wasn’t her father in his late twenties, just a man who looked miraculously like him. “Blues?” he cried out.
She smiled and nodded her head. He came running over. He wanted to shake hands, but his were coated with engine grease, so he just waved the wrench around and babbled. He was a good five years younger than Lisa was, and he acted younger than that—the enthusiasm overdose combined with the language barrier, she supposed. But he wasn’t the dark, self-involved guitar jock she’d expected. He was a big, cute puppy of a guy.
“I know, Tommy!” she finally got in. “You love the blues. You told me.”
Two other guys came out, men in grubby overalls who wanted to see the lady d.j. “We always listen to your show!” one said.
“We didn’t think Tommy was really gonna call you,” said the other.
“Tommy,” Lisa said, “I hope you didn’t call me on a dare.”
Tommy didn’t understand this.
“We didn’t dare him to do nothin’,” said the second guy. “It was his idea.”
“If I close my eyes it’s just like the radio!” the first guy said.
People always said this. The guys pushed her car into a bay, where Tommy examined it for a while. It turned out she had bad corrosion of delicate parts, and the supplier was closed for the day. Tommy would get replacement parts tomorrow, but her car had to stay the night.
“I give you ride home,” Tommy said, but first he had to wash his hands and show her his guitar and amp, which he had right there with him at Al’s Car Repair. They were precious vintage Fenders, just like the ones the famous bluesmen used. He opened the guitar case and lifted a Stratocaster from the orange plush. It was blue. He held it up like a baby for Lisa to see.
“You bring this stuff to work with you, Tommy?”
“I worry if someone will steal! Also, maybe after working I jam. I must jam, Lisa!”
He had an old beat-up Dodge wagon, not the most confidence-inspiring vehicle for your new mechanic to be driving, but the heat and the wipers worked, and they were the essential things right then. The weather was revolting. Lisa thought, When I get back in my house, I’m not coming out till I see the sun, like a groundhog. Which reminded her. “You know anything about raccoons?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Animal?”
“Yeah, the animal.” Tommy T. made her feel afresh the vast possibilities of America, where raccoons might be a brand name of something, or a rock band you’d never heard about. She spread her fingers across her face to mimic the masks of the woodsy creatures who seemed so cute till you discovered they were vermin, vicious and diseased. She had stopped feeding Sparky, but he came to her closed window every night anyway. When she banged on the glass to make him go away, he hissed at her—a frightening, feral hiss. “I think I have one in my basement.”
&nbs
p; “Not good when animal in house,” Tommy said.
“Any animal? I have a dog and a cat.”
“Dog is good! Why not dog get raccoon?”
“Because he’ll kill it, Tommy.”
“Good!”
“I don’t want my dog killing things. Besides, raccoons have rabies. That raccoon could bite my dog and my dog could die.”
This was hilarious to Tommy. “Raccoon not kill dog! Dog kill raccoon!”
At Lisa’s house, he guided his big spongy boat into the horseshoe drive. Lisa was unlocking her front door when she saw him getting his equipment out. “Tommy, it’s perfectly safe here,” she said, and gestured to the woods around them. “Nobody’s gonna steal your stuff.”
“Too cold for guitar in car,” he said, hauling out the battered luggage of his sacred things.
Her heart sank at the adolescence of it, his obsessiveness about his stuff, but artists were like that, weren’t they? It wasn’t like being an Elvis fanatic. If you could find a man to love you the way Tommy T. loved his Fender guitar, you’d be all right.
She heard Jesse plop down from the bed when she opened the door. She’d been letting him sleep with her since she’d moved out here—starting him at the foot of the bed, but giving in until now he stretched out full-length, with his head on the pillow. He came down the hall like a cannonball, saw the man in the drive, and flew past Lisa out the door. Tommy had his guitar in one hand and his amp in the other, and no time to set them down. When the dog leaped, Tommy hoisted his knee, and Jesse landed on his back with a squeal Lisa had never heard him make. He got up and tried it again, and got the same thing from Tommy.
“No jump!” Tommy commanded. To Lisa’s amazement, Jesse obeyed. “Heel!” Tommy said, and Jesse escorted him up the steps, all eye contact and lolling tongue. He’d met the alpha male Lisa was always hearing about from the obedience-school people.
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