Interference

by Michelle Berry

  “I can smell it.” Becky shudders. She walks towards the back gate and looks at the scar-faced man. Squarely. She shivers. For some reason there seems to be no wind in the backyard. Tom can’t figure it out. The man has made quite a few large piles of leaves throughout the yard and they are contained, not a leaf moving. Out front Tom is holding desperately to his one pile, which is shrinking now and is considerably smaller. The scar-faced man raises his head and nods at Becky. She ducks behind the gate, her face suddenly red, her eyes as wide as her mother’s.

  “Becky —” Tom starts.

  “Oh my god,” Becky whispers. “Oh my god, what’s wrong with his face?” She shakes her arms about as if trying to get rid of what she has seen, as if what she has seen has clung to her body and she needs it gone. Now. Immediately. She shakes him off. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Maria comes back with the brown paper leaf bags, and Tom holds them open while the scar-faced man puts the leaves inside. It’s an uncomfortable feeling being this close to the man, this close to his scar, but Tom makes a conscious effort not to pull away. In fact, the scar-faced man actually leans back, away from Tom, giving him space. Tom notices that he smells pretty good, a combination of wood and oil, a touch of deodorant warmed in the sun. They work silently and quickly. Maria goes inside.

  “You know,” the man says as he reaches down for another handful of leaves, “you couldn’t ask for a better day.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Bit windy, though. But crisp. Clean.”

  “It’s good,” the man says, scooping the leaves and then using the rake as a shovel, filling the bags. “A good, still day. No wind.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Tom looks at what used to be his pile. His rake. His half-filled bag, his demolished pile. He can see more of his leaves on his neighbour’s yard than on his own. That’s okay. Let him deal with the mess for once. Tom deals with the neighbour’s dog crap. What goes around comes around, he supposes.

  “Would you like lunch?” Maria calls from the side door. “I could bring you both out some lunch?”

  The man nods. “That would be nice,” he says. Tom watches his face when he talks. There are two sides to this man. Two-faced. One side of his face says one-half the words. Tom looks up at the clouds and notices someone on a roof about four houses down the street. Saturday chores. He suddenly hears the hammering that goes along with the man. Another neighbour farther up is on a ladder cleaning eavestroughs. Scattered throughout the street there are people raking. His daughter has gone back to playing basketball with Rachel across the street. Tom wonders if this scar-faced man would have joined the circus in the old days — shown his face to scare people, to excite them. He wonders if his grandfather would have bought a postcard of this face and if the caption would have been “Cut in Half With an Axe” or “Sword Fight Gone Wrong.” Tom doesn’t know why his grandfather kept postcards of freaks in his basement in a photo album and, until today, until he remembered, Tom never really thought about it. But now he sees it was odd and there was no reason for it. It’s insulting, in fact. And slightly racist. Or, if not racist, then appearance-ist.

  “Becky,” Tom calls out. “Lunch.”

  “She’s in here with me,” Maria says. “We’re already making it.”

  Tom looks towards the basketball net and, yes, it’s the neighbour’s child, Rachel, shooting baskets, not Becky. Tom loses track of his daughter. Girls at this age are like shadows. They flit in and out of his mind. Like a blind spot on his eye. And this frightens him. What if he permanently loses his daughter? What if one day he can’t catch her reflection anymore? Every time he sees her she has somehow changed. She has grown taller or wider. Her hair changes colour with the sun. The style of clothes moves in and out of fashion. One day she is Becky, the next day she’ll be someone else. Or she’ll be somewhere else. She’ll be gone.

  After sandwiches and a beer the man stands up from the bottom of the porch step where he has been sitting and wipes his hands on his paint-splattered coveralls. Tom has been curiously watching him eat, but pretending to look across the street at the squirrels shooting up and down the huge oak tree in front of Trish’s house. He admires the squirrels and then watches Rachel shoot baskets on her own. When the man drank his beer he held the bottle against one side of his lips, took a swig sideways. When he took a bite of the sandwich he took it full on, directly in the middle. But he chewed on one side or the other. One cheek would masticate while the other would remain frozen. Another bite — the opposite cheek. It took everything Tom had not to say anything, not to ask. And the man didn’t offer any explanation for his disfigurement. He simply chewed, drank, swallowed, joined Tom in watching Rachel. Now he is standing with his hands on his hips and looking at the last pile of leaves on the front lawn. They have worked hard, Tom and the man, and have accomplished more than Tom thought he would for the day. When Maria went inside to make lunch, she didn’t come back. Tom assumes she has used the extra hand as an excuse to get on with other things: maybe brushing the dog, doing laundry, starting a soup for dinner. Tom can smell something cooking every time she opens the door to hand him beer, napkins, sandwiches and finally cookies and fruit.

  The man is grateful for the food. Tom can tell. The way the man stands there, relaxed and satisfied, with his hands on his hips, and admires all the work they’ve done. Tom counts fifteen bags of leaves at the front sidewalk. Except for the scar dividing his face into two, the man would be just fine. A nice working companion. Very helpful and quiet. In fact, Maria, when Tom works with her putting leaves into bags, ends up talking so much that he finds he has to pause in order to react. And, of course, when she talks he thinks. And when Tom thinks too much things don’t get done quickly enough. Tom wishes he had $40 to give the man. He wishes he had something. He wishes he had asked Maria to go to the bank machine when she went to get more leaf bags. Why didn’t he think of that? For all the time he spends thinking Tom knows he can be very thoughtless. After all, Maria tells him as much.

  Becky comes out of the front door with a cookie and her basketball. Tom watches as she glances at the man standing there with his hands on his hips. He is turned from her, offering only half his face, and Becky quickly looks elsewhere. Tom sees wet wipes in her back pocket. For after the cookie, he assumes.

  “Going back to Rachel’s,” she says and skips off the porch, heads across the street — looking before she crosses — and into Rachel’s driveway. Tom and the man admire them. The girls shoot hoops for a bit and giggle and look across the street at Tom and the scar-faced man. The girls whisper. Then they shout. They argue. There is a small pile of used wipes beside the base of the basketball net. Tom didn’t notice them before. But now that he’s seen them he’s having a hard time noticing anything else.

  The weird thing is that the scar-faced man doesn’t acknowledge the girls at all. He doesn’t blush or look nervous. He is aware that they are looking at him — and, Tom reasons, he must know why they are looking at him — but it doesn’t seem to faze him one bit. In fact, it’s as if he isn’t even aware of his disfigurement, as if his split face is nothing out of the ordinary. Tom is beginning to feel comfortable around him, almost as comfortable as the man himself feels around Tom. Who’s to say Tom’s face is perfect? Who’s to say Tom himself is easy to look at? We can’t account for other people’s tastes. In fact, being with this man makes Tom feel better about his past, about sitting on the floor of his grandfather’s basement, sneakily gawking at those postcards. Tom was never sure if what he was looking at was good or bad, allowed or discouraged. Was this some sort of pornography? Why would his grandfather place the album in the basement? Up high on the shelf? Why did no one in the family ever mention them?

  If everything else that happened later hadn’t distracted him from this lesson, Tom would have looked back on the day and remembered that he learned something about beauty and ugliness and about judging others. He would think that he learned somet
hing about what was right and what was wrong and about how to react and interact with people who are different from him, and finally, perhaps, that he learned something about his grandfather. If things had gone better, that is.

  “Only three more bags, I’d say,” the scar-faced man says, beginning to work again. Becky is hollering across the street and Rachel is doing cartwheels carelessly near the road. Tom stands up from his position on the porch and walks down to stand next to the man. The difference between Rachel and Becky is absurd — one wiping her hands, the other rolling on the grass between the sidewalk and the road.

  “You never told me your name,” Tom says.

  “And you never told me yours,” the man says. Tom and the scar-faced man laugh. The man’s laugh sounds wheezy, as if it’s caught somewhere between the cut through his lips.

  “Tom Shutter,” Tom says.

  The man nods, and begins to work again. “Hold this bag for me, Tom.” He bends to pick up more leaves from the last few piles, and when he does Tom sees the back of the man’s neck when his collar rides down with the stretch from his coveralls. There is a tattoo on the man’s neck, and Tom strains to make it out but the man turns and catches him staring. The man stands quickly and adjusts his collar, as if ashamed. It looked like a cross to Tom, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Stop it, Rachel,” Becky shouts. “Dad, Rachel won’t clean her hands and they are all dirty.”

  “Becky’s a neat freak.” Rachel laughs.

  “Work it out, guys,” Tom shouts back, looking nervously from the man to his daughter. As if he has to impress the scar-faced man. His daughter’s cleanliness, her strangeness, compared to his scar-face. Tom starts to walk across the road to mediate the argument. When he turns back he sees the man standing near the bottom of his porch, holding a rake in one hand, a pile of leaves pressed against his chest in the other. The man is staring up at Tom’s house, up at the second-floor balcony, up to where Becky’s room is. He is tense, stiff, still — like the leaves, like the died-down wind, like the autumn air around him. Tom shivers. It’s a warm Saturday afternoon in early November but Tom senses winter is near.

  Becky and Rachel make up. Rachel wipes her hands on her shirt and this, for some reason, is good enough for Becky. They sit on the curb on their sweaters and watch the scar-faced man work. He works on the bags, filling them. Becky’s hair shines bright in the diminishing sun. Nothing like the new neighbour’s gold California hair, Tom thinks, but still, it’s pretty. Tom watches her as he helps the man bag the last leaves. His daughter is so pretty. Twelve years old and already a heartbreaker. Tom’s heart breaks every time he looks at her, every time he can see her, his vision of childhood being what it is.

  Maria opens the front door. She signals to Tom, crooks her pointing finger. The dog barks from inside the kitchen. Tom can see him down the hall. He doesn’t rush at the front door anymore, like he used to, but he still likes to bark. He likes to let himself be known. He likes to prove to everyone that he is still useful even though they’ve been yelling at him for years not to bark.

  “What are you going to pay him with? Do you think he’ll take a cheque?”

  “Not sure,” Tom says. “I could go to the store and get cash. It would only take me a minute.”

  Maria studies the man on the front lawn. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable with you going,” she says. Her hands are crossed across her chest. “What about if I go and get money? I should have done that before, when I got the bags. You should have told me to get money. I just never carry money around anymore.”

  Tom nods. Maria pulls on her coat and heads out to her car again. “I’m just going to the store,” she tells the scar-faced man. “I’ll just go get something at the store.”

  The man nods. Maria makes her nervousness obvious. She doesn’t need to justify everything she is doing to this man. Just go to the store, Tom thinks. And then come back. Pay the man.

  “I’m just going to get you some money. You’ve been such a help today.”

  “No,” the man says. “I can come back tomorrow or another time. You don’t have to go now to get money.”

  “It’s no problem, really,” Maria says. “Just to the store. The cash machine. No problem at all.” She climbs in her car.

  “Mom,” Becky calls out from across the street. “Where are you going?”

  “Just to the store,” Maria says, her window open to the warm air. “I’ll be back soon.”

  The man has finished the leaves and he sits on the bottom step of the porch, watching Maria drive away for the second time that day. Tom drags the last bag to the sidewalk and wipes his hands on his jeans. With Maria gone the day seems awfully sad suddenly. As if she has driven out of their lives. Tom looks at Becky, who is standing at the base of the basketball net, across the street, clutching the ball to her chest as if it’s her child. Rachel is running in circles around Becky, poking her with a stick.

  “The rain held off,” Tom says.

  “Was it supposed to rain?”

  “That’s what they said.” Tom studies his lawn. It’s almost perfect. Not a leaf anywhere. His neighbour’s lawn, however, is a mess. Tom knows that with a stiff west wind all those leaves next door will be on his lawn again and he’ll have to start all over. The man never cleans up leaves, never shovels snow, never picks up his dog shit. He’s really not a great neighbour. Although he’s quiet. Stays inside. Tom never has to talk to him. That’s a huge bonus. Trish, Rachel’s mom, is over all the time, worrying Maria with every little detail of her life. “I really appreciate your help,” Tom says. “Even though I didn’t think I needed it, I sure did. My wife, well, she ends up talking so much I never get anything done.” Tom laughs. A throaty laugh. It comes out funny because Tom feels guilty the minute he laughs. He feels as if Maria can hear him. The man nods, smiles with half his face.

  “It was no problem at all,” the man says. “I like raking.”

  “And painting?” Tom says.

  “Painting?”

  “Your coveralls. All that paint. You must be a painter.”

  “No, that’s not paint,” the man says. He wraps his arms around himself, huddles in as if trying to protect himself. “That’s just rust and such.”

  “Cars then?”

  The man shakes his head, shrugs.

  “You work on cars?” Tom asks.

  “No,” the man says. “Not on cars. Not really.”

  “Well, I’m going in to wash my hands. Can I get you something? A lemonade? Coke?”

  “That would be nice of you,” the man says. “I’d like a Coke, if you have one.”

  Tom walks around the man, still huddled on the bottom step, and enters his house. He leaves the door open and the screen door bangs shut behind him as he meanders down the hall. The dog is overjoyed to see him. Wiggles his hips until his body is bent in half. The tail whaps on the floor like it’s beating a drum. Tom bends to pat him. He then pours himself a glass of water and washes his hands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing hard under his nails and up his wrists where the dirt from the leaves has travelled. Even though he was wearing gloves most of the time he still managed to get dirty. Becky would be horrified if she could see her father’s hands. This is something he doesn’t get in an office, dirt under his fingernails. This is the feeling of hard, simple work, not frustrating computer-controlled work. Afterwards, Tom pulls a Coke from the fridge and pours it into a glass for the man. He adds ice and thinks for a bit about adding a lemon slice but then realizes that the man might think he’s weird. A nice face; a nice house; a nice family; a nice, clean, leaf-free lawn and then a lemon slice. It might just be too much.

  As he steps over his dog and carries the glass of Coke to the front door, down his long narrow hallway, he hears Maria’s car pull up to the curb. She comes into the house just as Tom reaches the front door.

  “Here you go.” Maria hands him som
e $20 bills. “I figure we should give him about $40, or even $60? What do you think?”

  “I think $40 is fine. He was here only two hours and we didn’t ask him to help out. Plus we gave him lunch.”

  Maria stands in Tom’s way. “You want lemon in that Coke?”

  “No, it’s not for me, it’s for him.”

  “What do you think happened?” she whispers. “His face?”

  Tom shrugs. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. He’s a hard worker.”

  “Must be difficult, though, to be judged all your life for that face.”

  “Maybe it just happened. Maybe he hasn’t had long to deal with it.” Tom knows, when he says this, that it isn’t true. The man has lived most of his life with that face — it’s in the way he moves, the way his eyes take you in when you talk to him, the way he approaches the world. And, if this is the case, it means that whatever happened to him, happened when he was just a boy. Maybe Becky’s age.

  “Still,” Maria says. “I can’t imagine.” She touches her face thoughtfully. She stands there in front of the door, blocking it.

  “I have to get past you,” Tom says. “Give him his drink and the money.”

  “He isn’t outside,” Maria says. “He’s not out there. I thought he might be in here with you. Maybe he’s using the washroom?”

  “What do you mean?” Tom pushes around Maria, almost spilling the Coke, and looks out the screen door. The scar-faced man isn’t on the bottom step anymore. Tom goes outside and looks up and down the street. He walks around the house and looks in the backyard. There is no one in sight. It’s strange for anyone to leave before getting paid. The man worked hard. He knew Maria was getting money for him. He didn’t slack off once today. Why would anyone work like that for nothing? And why would he leave without saying goodbye? Maybe he will come back tomorrow. Maybe he’ll come back tomorrow and get money from Tom and Maria and they can ask him what happened to his face and wish him well. Tom wants to know about his face. Tom wants to say something to him. He doesn’t know what, but this kind of leaving isn’t right.