Sinister Shorts

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “I'm here to clean the furnace,” he said. “You made an appointment with me for tonight.” She couldn't see him too well on the porch, but what she could see matched the voice: a pockmarked face, a short body, a certain twist to the trunk that suggested something not quite right with his posture.

  Had she made an arrangement with this man? She had drunk a few glasses of wine that evening, waiting for Geraldo, who had said he was delayed, quite a few glasses, and those phone calls just weren't all that important. She couldn't remember exactly what she had said. She got a lot of calls from solicitors, and at the moment, she had a headache and a certain amount of blurriness.

  “This is a bad time,” she said.

  “I'll have to charge you seventy-five dollars for a house call whether I clean the furnace or not, at this point, Mrs. Rodriguez. It'll only take fifteen minutes. Might as well let me do my job.”

  Seventy-five dollars! For fifteen minutes of work! Geraldo would kill her! Lost in her thoughts, trying to figure out a way to make this whole thing palatable to her husband, who should be home any moment, she let the little man in.

  He brought some tools in a canvas plumber's bag. While she scrambled for a robe, he picked up dirt and lots of clinky bits of debris from the vents in each room, snaking a long vacuum hose a long way down, except for in the children's bedrooms, even though, as he said, those might be the dirtiest. Kids stuck all kinds of things down there. But she didn't want him to wake them up.

  Then he needed to get into the basement. Geraldo insisted that she unlock the basement for workers, and never give out the key to anyone. To get there, they had to go out the back door, and down a steep hill alongside the house to a half-size door that led underneath. She put some shoes on, and turned on the outside lights while he waited, watching her. She pulled a jacket on over the wispy robe she had found, tucking her wallet into its pocket, and led him outside. She wasn't letting him back in the house.

  He followed her down the steep hill, slipping and sliding in the mud. She had trouble with the key; it took forever to get the door open. The cold night air worked on her, and suddenly clearheaded, she remembered the phone call. She hadn't told the furnace man to come at all.

  He followed her through the door.

  She flipped the light on by the door, exposing the dirt floor of a hillside basement and showed him where the furnace was, in the farthest corner, while she tried to think about what she should do now he was here and had already done some of the work. He fiddled with the furnace for a couple of minutes, maybe five total, and announced that he was done.

  “You said you would replace the filter,” she said. “I didn't see any filter.”

  “I don't have the right size. Anyway, yours is in good shape. You don't need a new one.”

  She hadn't needed to have the furnace cleaned, either. And she could as easily have vacuumed the vents.

  “I'm not going to pay you,” she said. “You didn't do anything. And I didn't ask you to come here tonight.”

  “Oh, but you did, Mrs. Rodriguez,” he said, coming close enough so that she could smell the alcohol on his breath. Maybe he could smell hers, too. “You wanted me to come. And now you owe me.”

  “I'm not going to pay,” she said. She took a step back. Her foot caught on a box, and she started to fall. The furnace man caught her in his arms, one hand still clinging to a heavy wrench that she hadn't seen him use.

  She pulled away, shaking him off like dirt.

  “Where's your husband tonight, Mrs. Rodriguez? Working late, huh?” He blinked brown eyes as solid and impassive-looking as thumbtacks. “He'll pay if you don't. I'll just wait with you for him to come home and we'll tell him all about it.”

  She was walking toward the basement door, with him following a few steps behind. She whirled to face him. “We're not going to pay! I never asked you to do anything!”

  “Look at it from my point of view,” he said, taking that wheedling tack that she just hated. “You have this nice house in a nice neighborhood. I come and do some work for you: I expect to get paid. Is that so hard to understand? Don't tell me you can't afford it. Not too many women can stay home these days, but you do. You're home all day, aren't you? Plenty of time to take a little nap, get out some frozen food for dinner real quick before everyone comes home. It's a nice setup.”

  “What do you know about me? You don't know me at all.”

  He laughed, and the sound sent a chill up her bare legs. “I know enough. You had a dirty furnace and I cleaned it. Now you owe me money.” All in that nasty voice of his…

  “You can't stay.”

  “I'm not leaving until I'm paid.”

  She wanted this settled without him making a racket and waking the kids and her neighbors. They were standing at the basement door. She took her wallet from her jacket pocket. “Look,” she said. “Just take a look. I only have twenty dollars. How about if you take that and go away?”

  “That's not enough,” he said.

  “You hardly did anything.”

  “The job is seventy-five bucks. It's a deal. A sale.” He set his bag down, with the wrench on top of it, as if he were resigning himself to a long wait.

  “What's the name of your company?”

  “Goodwill Heating and Plumbing,” he said.

  Huh? For the first time she realized he had never given her the same name twice. He was making things up as he went along. Why, she'd bet he didn't even have a shop! Coming to her house like this, in the night, uninvited… probably just set off in his truck with no idea who would be foolish enough to let him in, no business address, no records of any kind… She should never have let him into the house. “Send me a bill. I'll get the money and send it to you.”

  “Cash on completion,” he said.

  “You have got to leave. My husband is about to come home. If he finds you here…”

  “What?” he asked innocently. “Didn't you tell him about the furnace?”

  She wanted to scream at him. My God, the man was unreasonable. He was making her crazy! He had no idea! Geraldo might be home any minute! Her husband would be wild, finding her dressed like some floozy, and a man hanging around. He could ruin everything worth anything in her life with his impossible demands! “Get out!”

  He folded his arms, and stood there with a little smile on his face. He had her. The men always did get their way…

  She grabbed the heavy wrench off his bag, raised it in both hands, and brought it down on his head, while he stood there, goggle-eyed with surprise. He had never expected such a thing from her, that was for sure. He knew nothing about her, nothing. She had to hit him several times before he stopped moving and thrashing around on the ground.

  She went back up to the house to get a couple of big trash bags out of the kitchen drawer, put some yellow plastic dishwashing gloves on, and bagged him up, using tape to seal the bags. She made a quick trip to the garage for the shovel, and went to work, digging a fairly deep hole, one that would cover him nicely, in the soft loamy soil at the middle of the basement. She buried him with his tools.

  With a bucket of cold water, she went to work on the blood that had spattered the basement wall. Cold water on blood. She wondered if men knew that.

  She had a good marriage. She would do anything to save it.

  She wondered if Geraldo knew that.

  Trio

  “Don't ask me that.”

  “Why not? You love me. I'm waiting for you to say you don't love me.”

  “Please.”

  “I didn't come all this way to let you off easy. You have to decide.”

  In the kitchen, the teapot whistled. Victoria slid in her socks across the green linoleum floor toward the stove, gripping the telephone in her left hand. She touched the sizzling handle of the pot and pulled her other hand away quickly. On the wall beside the sink a hotpad hung, oily and besmirched by a thousand meals. She couldn't put her hand inside it.

  “Ouch,” she cried, moving the pot to a wooden cu
tting board as fast as she could.

  “What's the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is he there?”

  She marveled at how the voice on the phone of a man she had loved so dearly a few months before had devolved so insidiously into a whine.

  “No.”

  “Vic, I want to marry you.”

  It was not an invitation, a plea, a question. It was an edict. She found a chipped mug in the cupboard, reasonably clean, and set it on the drain board. In the cabinet, she located a tea bag and placed it delicately into the cup. She used a dish towel found near the plumbing under the sink to protect her hand from the steaming kettle while she poured the hot water.

  The water wet the leaves inside the translucent bag, making them soggy and a darker color, sending up a smoky drift of Lapsang souchong. Why did he have to want her now? She had run away, found someone new, and now all of the sudden, Jason couldn't live without her. It struck her as all wrong. His words were as murky as the contents of her cup.

  “Why?”

  “I can't live without you.”

  Good answer. “You know,” she said, then blew on her tea while she paused to think, “I didn't do any of this to hurt you.”

  Silence on the phone. While her words sunk in, she wiped the drops of water from the scummy counter. Sharing a kitchen with male roommates, it turned out, was no picnic. When the lights went out, the roaches scurried around the room, proud owners of the night. She reached under the sink, past Luther's gallon of half-drunk gin, and found some cleanser which she sprinkled liberally around the countertop.

  “Is he better-looking?” Jason asked.

  Tom was taller. His hair was darker. He looked good. The regularity of his looks, the cragginess, the nasal sound of his voice, these flaws reduced him to human, while his aspirations and intelligence elevated him.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then, why?”

  She took a tentative sip of her tea, which was still too hot. Hardening herself against the pain, she let her tongue scald as the second, longer sip traveled toward her throat.

  Because, she thought, I let go. I finally did. After years of holding on, dreaming, accepting lies as truth, she had let go. And now, too late, here Jason was, exactly where she had wanted him a long time ago. It was a pyrrhic victory. Now, she felt cold and distant from him. How to tell him? He had been her skin. He had held her soul together for years. She puzzled over the words she should speak. Should she tell him it was over? How could he understand that? Clearly, he clung to the idea that she was still accessible to him. Where was the grace in this situation? How did you tell someone that the passion between you, once so palpable, had burned to dust? Another man's smell, his sex, his squarer jaw, was now as established as her skeleton.

  “I'm coming over,” Jason said, as if tired of waiting for her to say something.

  “No!” she said into the dead phone.

  By the time Tom came home, she had sizzled frozen corn to perfection, chicken-fried two steaks, and poured an entire bag of prepared salad into a bowl and drizzled it with dressing from a bottle. One of Tom's virtues was an undemanding palate. He ate to live, unlike Jason, who lived to eat very well.

  Jason had not shown up.

  They dined by candlelight, a stick dribbling over an old wine bottle at the table in the worn kitchen, any romance derived from the shush of wind and rattle of old glass in the windows. They turned on an old movie, but within minutes, were making love in the attic room he had painted in shades of blue.

  She was on top because he liked it that way, and she was exploring some unfamiliar realms of feminine pleasures up there, when suddenly, the door flew open.

  In stepped Jason.

  But she didn't notice immediately. She was licking Tom's shoulder, relishing the salt and sweat of it. She only noticed when Tom stopped moaning and then stopped moving entirely.

  “Get out,” he said distinctly.

  She turned and saw Jason.

  He stood frozen in a corner by the door, glows from a canister candle on the dresser bleeding red light down his cheeks. How long had he been there watching them?

  “Jason?” she said, lifting herself off Tom and turning to look at him. “Who let you in?”

  Immediately, she knew the answer. Luther had let him in, too drunk and oblivious to consider anyone else's problems, and too lazy to announce a guest.

  Jason said nothing and everything. His eyes had assumed a largeness beyond normal, and the clenching and unclenching of his jaw scared her.

  “You have to go,” she said before Tom could do anything. How must he be feeling, nude, wrapped in her body, totally vulnerable.

  Jason swayed in the doorway. She saw for the first time a glinting in his hand. A gun? But… how could this be possible? She had loved him. She had given him everything, her entire heart and soul, and he had repeatedly trampled on them. He had stomped them until they didn't have a breath of life left.

  All this thought was reduced to a moment of breathless suspense while she waited to see what he would do, feeling Tom's innocent blood pumping in the heart that was still close enough to her own to feel.

  ***

  She had met Jason when she was in college in Los Angeles. He was her best friend Carol's buddy. She heard about him for months before they met, and that was exactly the source of all the trouble. What she heard from Carol, about his wit, his warmth, his loving family, she incorporated into a mythology. She invented a perfect man in her mind, smart, sensitive, funny. Creative. Against that, she didn't have a chance. At their first meeting, she fell, and she fell hard.

  “What do you see in him?” Carol asked her, strangely upset.

  “What a question. He's your friend. You like him, don't you?”

  “Well, he has his problems.”

  “Of course he does. He's human.”

  But she didn't really believe it. Suddenly Carol, formerly Jason's biggest fan, became his biggest detractor. “He's too short for you,” she would say. “He's sleazy,” she said once. “Can't you see it?”

  She couldn't. She liked his compact size, which made him less threatening. He was muscular to make up for a lack in height, and had a lovely narrow waist and dark, masculine whiskers that he had to shave daily. What did Carol mean calling him sleazy, she puzzled. Was it possible Carol was jealous?

  She tested the theory and found it untenable. Jason had made a play for Carol ages ago which she had rebuffed. He flirted shamelessly with her on every occasion, and she discouraged him with playful insults, as sexually interested as a sister would be in a charming but disgusting younger brother.

  Then she considered the idea that Carol was jealous of their growing closeness, because Jason had sniffed out Victoria 's excitement about him immediately, and began to circle in an ever narrowing spiral.

  “Just because I like Jason and he seems to like me doesn't mean we won't still be friends,” she had told Carol.

  Carol broke into a big belly laugh. “What a relief!” she had responded. “Gee, then I can be honest with you? You won't turn on me if I say something negative about him? I just hate friends that pull that kind of shit, loyal to the boy, even when it means sacrificing a sense of humor or perspective.”

  “Just what is it you don't like about him?” she had asked one night after sharing a joint in Carol's living room.

  Carol thought for a long time. “Jason's okay, running around with lightweights. But Vic, you're not like that. You're going to get in there and scratch his insides. It's you two together that feels dangerous to me. Somebody could get hurt.”

  She dismissed Carol's worries right then and there. “Deep is good and right. Who wants a shallow life? People are emotional creatures. We've got to give that full scope, don't we?”

  “See what I mean?” Carol complained. “Everything is so heavy with you. You go too far. Most people aren't cut out for high drama.”

  She had shaken her head. “Hurt is human. How else do we kn
ow we live?”

  “Vic, you drive me crazy, and I bet I'm not the only one.” Carol had left it at that.

  When Jason and Vic finally went to bed together, a month after their first meeting, Vic was deeply, hopelessly smitten. In love, in the worst possible way. Awash in sexual chemistry, she felt satisfied beyond reason with his lovemaking, which later she might have called calculated. The tiniest touch of his fingertip sent gushers of hot blood flooding through her body. Sex synthesized her into an unthinking organism, which exploded fertility, big as a season, bursting with buds and pollinating the universe. She wanted to own him, possess his soul and every thought.

  And Jason was an eager colluder. He wrote poetry and songs for her, oblique metaphors which were really all about him and not about her at all. But that was fair, in fact, because all her thoughts of him were really all about an idealized version of herself. She was in love with her own creation, a consummate specimen of humanity, and not with Jason at all.

  This went on for quite a while, lots of letters, feverish phone calls in the dead of night, passionate meetings on a cold, sandy beach, on a roof still radiating heat after the sun went down, against the dirty wall of a garage. She didn't want to contain their lovemaking. She desperately wanted to be out of control emotionally, and so she was.

  Jason, perhaps, came along for the adventure.

  They wore out. Six months of mindless doggy happiness and two years of self-imposed blindness passed before reality began its inexorable drip, smearing her fresh, perfect painting of relationship bliss.

  A weekend came and went without a letter. That Sunday night, her frantic worry had given way to a dark resignation. She called his house, even though he preferred to call her.

  “He's not in,” said his mother. “Who shall I say is calling?”

  As if she had no idea who Vic was. As if nearly three years hadn't registered with her.

  When he did call, he was full of newsy gossip about his weekend. He had studied hard on Saturday, and taken on his brother's paper route for fun on Sunday. They did the route in his battered Karmann Ghia, high.