Forty Martyrs

by Philip F. Deaver

  Carol had an old mower in the garage, and it too was a Lawn-Boy, so Wally went onto the enclosed back porch and punched the garage door opener. The door didn’t respond. Punched it again. Nothing. Held it high, nothing. Low, sideways, nothing nothing nothing. Batteries maybe. He stared at the garage door. It could be opened from the inside if he could find the key to the garage’s sidedoor. And thus tasks piled up on tasks. The light in the garage was out, and wouldn’t have lit much even if it worked, so he wanted to pull Carol’s mower out and take a look at it in the light of day. Maybe he could cannibalize it for a blade. Maybe a couple of long bolts out and in, and he could get back to work. The garage was really a two-car attic, full of stored broken things and boxes of redundant items and defunct implements and upended rusted one-thing-or-anothers such that trying to get through it in the dark to manually open the big front door was impossible. So he looked for a working flashlight among the several that didn’t work––in the utility drawer by the broom closet, under the downstairs bathroom sink, under the bedside table in his and Carol’s room, on the top shelf of the hall closet, on Stephen’s desk, in the piano bench in the front room. There was one flashlight Wally was sure worked, and that was the exact one he couldn’t find. But it was okay, because he couldn’t find the key to the garage’s sidedoor anyway. One of these days he needed to get to the hardware store and get some keys made, and a nice orderly rack of some kind to always hang them on, and the tools to hang it with, and some batteries, triple and double As, Cs and Ds, and some air conditioning filters, too, and some gas for the grill, and spray paint for the patio chairs, and some sealant for the deck, and a pressure washer and a car vacuum and some inner-tube patching kits, a stretch of gutter, hedge clippers a hammer nails a saw an actual tool kit screwdrivers wrenches electric stapler some twelve gauge shotgun shells duct tape deaver rope a red wheelbarrow and some fucking white chickens and maybe while he was at it he could get an actual life.

  He thought for a moment he might yell the loudest he’d ever yelled in his life. His throat felt scratchy, as if he’d already yelled. Maybe he had. He stared out the front window. He wasn’t going to cry. The grass was tall, but at least all of it in front was tall. It wasn’t half mowed like in back. Lucky he didn’t start in front, and then that would be what was only partially cut for all the world to see—but then he remembered that whatever he hit, of course, he wouldn’t have hit if he mowed the front, because it, whatever it was, was in the back. Of course, maybe if he’d started in front, the bad thing hidden in the grass in the back would have been in the front, or he’d have hit something else that was in front, like the stump of the deceased Chinese elm invisibly lurking where he least expected, or it would have been something else, because if this, then that, et cetera, cause and effect hooked together with rubber bands.

  It was Saturday morning. He went upstairs and took a long, hot shower. Someday, he was thinking, he’d like to build an addition on this house—he couldn’t build it; he’d have someone else build it to his design—an addition that would feel like his. After his divorce, he came to like having nothing and leaving no trail on the earth. He liked living austere. He liked living withdrawn. He liked laying low. He liked owning nothing, including having no pot to piss in. Now he was over that. Now he was starting to long for something that could be home to him and feel like it. His grown son could come there and be his pal in a place where they both belonged. The addition would be two stories, a nice spacious master bedroom on the ground floor, where he and Carol could sleep together––not in the nest and rut where she slept with her first husband. He could have her in his space, or at least have the illusion of having her in the illusion of a space that was his. There would be a study on the second floor, with many bookshelves, the desk given to him by his father, maybe a small fireplace, space for an easy chair and a good reading light that Carol would allow nowhere in the current house, because it was all hers and not a bit his and she had an eye for creating her own continuity. A man’s retreat is what Wally was dreaming of, the toohot water pounding down on him, the steam filling the bathroom and fogging the mirror. The administration building over at the college had recently burned to the ground, and with it his faculty office and with that most of his scholarly life. In the long interim post-firstmarriage time, that office had been his retreat. He needed a new one. The house phone rang and Wally stood under the water and didn’t even consider getting it. He never answered this phone. It wasn’t for him, and the answering machine would catch it. The shower was fiery hot. He dressed and felt better.

  Out on the back porch, he tried the garage door opener again, and now the door lurched open. Grand. Perfect. There isn’t a rational explanation for absolutely everything, he thought to himself. He went out to the garage to wrestle Carol’s old mower out onto the driveway, but it wasn’t there. He crashed around through the boxed or rusting detritus of two formerly separate lives, but no mower. He did lay eyes on his ten-speed mountain bike, fairly new and still functional. He’d forgotten it since last summer. He wheeled it out for a moment to look at it. Did he really own this? Had he bought it, eleven hundred dollars worth, ridden it last summer on a regular basis, and then entirely forgotten it with all else that was going on? He felt the sun on his wet hair. A plane was flying over. There was a time when he fantasized about getting a flying license. He had always liked flying, and now he scanned the sky to try to spot the plane he was hearing but it was behind a tree and anyway too high. He wiped off the bike seat, wheeled it a little and flexed the brakes. All good. Great. He might start biking again.

  Right then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the soccer goal was sagging. He parked the bike against shelving where there were numerous gallon paint cans stored, the splash marks on their sides revealing mysterious colors nowhere to be found inside or outside the house. He approached and started analyzing the broken soccer goal. The upright post on the left side was broken. Not just broken. It was missing about a foot of PVC, erased cleanly like it had been sawed away. The soccer goal was now useless. The way it was drooping to one side, why didn’t he notice it earlier? He didn’t notice anything anymore. He hated the goal being broken like this. It was an icon for him. It was his from a past life. Possibly it was in the backyard more for him than for Stephen, he realized now. Wally raised his son––his grown son, not Stephen––to compete head to head. Not like baseball, which was Wally’s sport. He remembered how his son, in high school––his real son, mostly grown now and gone somewhere, the son from the other life, the other life that Wally’d ruined––he remembered watching his son receive a pass in soccer, then turn with the ball and face his defender. Wally had practiced this with him, and then Wally remembered seeing him do it in a high school game. Later there would be real life, and there would be a need for this skill, Wally told him, twelve years ago, standing in the other backyard in the other life, under this same PVC goal, now destroyed.

  The cell phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the number. It was his wife calling from Ohio. “Hey.”

  “Everything fine?” She was trying to talk real loud.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Kids?”

  “Are you in the car or on Mount Everest?”

  “Car.”

  “Hi to your mom.”

  “Yes, I’ll tell her. I’m between venues at this time.” The rest of Carol’s family, apart from Carol, was all over Cincinnati, taking care of her mom.

  “Right.” He could hear the sound of her open window. “Where’s your old lawnmower?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s your old green lawnmower that used to be in the garage. I need it.”

  “Honey, it’s been gone two years. Garage sale.”

  “I thought I’d just seen it recently.”

  “Nope. That wouldn’t be my old lawnmower. Gone and good riddance. One time I was mowing with it and the back wheels both fell off simultaneously.” She was attempting to talk above her car radi
o and the wind from the open window. “So the kids are at Margie’s?” she said.

  “Right. When do you think you’ll get home?”

  “What?”

  “When do you think you’ll be home?”

  “You don’t need my lawnmower anyway. What’s wrong with yours?” she yelled.

  “Oh dang, I hadn’t thought of that. Using my own mower that actually works.”

  “You’re breaking up.”

  Wally felt a wave of something, maybe it was just adrenaline, rise up, and he choked it back. “When do you think you’ll be home?”

  “You’re breaking up and your mood doesn’t seem all that great. Is that right?”

  Wally scanned the yard, the phone up to his ear. He looked up at the sky, white fluffies on blue. Don’t shout on the cell phone when talking in the yard. People can hear you for a block. It’s one of the modern comedies.

  “Are you there?” Carol said vacantly.

  “Carol. How about you close the car windows and turn off the radio when you’re calling somebody on the cell phone.” He was talking through his teeth like he was getting mad, but he didn’t really care about this. His annoyance was about the broken piece of his past that he was staring at.

  “Sorry,” she said, apparently the car window closed now. “Can you hear me okay?”

  He looked toward the garage. He used to have an ax. A few years ago he chopped wood in the backyard, split logs for the fireplace, and deaver for this mighty task he bought a hefty, all-business, double-edged ax. It was red and would leave red paint in the notches where he struck the logs. Now for some reason a big angry charge of something inside him rose up, and he wanted to destroy a few things in the backyard and general area with an ax. That ax would be perfect. He stared through the garage doorway looking for it in the mess. Surely in a moment he’d see that very satisfying blond ax-handle peeking out of somewhere in there. No. It seemed like everything in the whole garage had fallen over or was upside down. One box, full of old clothes, was half turned over and coming open. Spilling out of it was the ten-yearold blue jersey from some soccer team his son had been on back when he was nine. Somewhere Wally had the team picture, his son—not Stephen but his real son—wearing that jersey when it was new.

  Carol barked into the phone, “Listen, come to think of it, I really think you shouldn’t mow until I get home. There’s stuff in the yard. The kids need to pick things up. Before you mow—okay?”

  “When are you getting home, Carol? In fact, why are you gone even?”

  “Listen, honey, I can tell you’re upset. Does it seem like I’m gone a lot? Want me to come home now? Look, please, don’t mow, and I’ll be home tomorrow, late afternoon. Maybe we can mow then, after we pick up the yard or get Stephen to.”

  “What’s in the yard?”

  “Horseshoes.”

  Now Wally realized there was also a hole in the red plastic netting that draped the goal. He bent down and looked through it, lined it up with the gap in the goal’s left upright, and there was his lawnmower where it had suddenly stopped.

  Carol continued, “You don’t wanna hit a darn horseshoe with the lawnmower, hon, trust me.”

  Wally turned about-face and looked further downrange, toward the seven-foot privacy fence between his backyard and the Fosters’ next door. In the mowed grass at the base of the fence was a horseshoe worthy of a Clydesdale.

  Carol said, “The kids were tossing horseshoes. A binge of it last week. I told them to clean it up. They pulled the posts, but I counted the horseshoes, and there’s about three missing. So don’t mow yet.”

  The day seemed dark to Wally, but when he looked up, it was skyblue with white clouds and plenty of sunlight.

  “You could hit one of those big heavy old things and it wouldn’t be good at all.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Of course, it would be easier to find them if you mowed more often, because the grass would be shorter.”

  “But what’s…”

  “But what’s done is done,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  That afternoon, Wally roamed around the house. It settled in on him how lucky he was he didn’t lose a foot. Or kill one of the kids. Random, thy name is a fast-ripping mower blade slinging a horseshoe. He ate a grilled cheese sandwich and had a Coke. He went in his study and stood. He had forgotten his meds that morning. Bathroom. He popped his pill, toasted himself in the mirror with his special St. Louis Cardinals bathroom water glass. “Prozac Nation,” he said to the feckless weirdo who smiled at him and toasted him back.

  If Wally could have drawn a picture of himself that day, he’d have used chalk and would have depicted a man in blue weather, suspended in a net that was hanging from above, from somewhere out of the frame, the sky. It would have been a lost little fellow who was not trying to escape the net but was resigned to it in some way. Was sort of lying in it, like in a hammock, a prisoner without knowing it. But whose net was it?

  God’s. It was God’s net.

  It occurred to him that there was extra PVC under the house. He wondered how big a project it would be to make the soccer goal right again, like it was before. He recalled long tubes of PVC, left over from a plumber’s visit a few years ago. Maybe there was a section deaver of it that was the right size. Hardware store: glue, PVC joints. He was outside and another plane was going over. He’d left the garage door open, and when he tried to close it using the remote, nothing. He whacked the remote against the doorjamb, not too hard, tried again. Nothing. He wandered out to the garage looking for the ax. Today he’d be one wild-ass medieval Paul Bunyan if he found that ax. He was rummaging and digging in the disaster they called the garage and didn’t notice Lowell Wagner had come up the driveway.

  “Hey, Wally. You in there?”

  Wally looked up and laughed. “Hey, Lowell.” Lowell was out for a run apparently. He was in his running clothes—a pair of black shorts and the usual sweated-up Lincoln State PE department t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Lowell lifted the bike out of the garage, looked at it with the eye of an expert. “You gonna start biking again? Not a bad idea.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” Wally said, rummaging.

  “Not a bad idea.”

  Wally skidded a pile of boxes a few inches, head down among boxes full of magazines, toward the back of the garage. There was a bookcase that had fallen over, and he was thinking the ax might be under it. “Look at this. A rat ate my ball glove. You believe that happy horseshit?” Wally tossed the glove out of the dim garage and onto the driveway.

  “You need to keep your baseball glove in the house, man. It’s a good one. Was.”

  Wally moved a few things so it was possible to walk without falling. He was wearing old Dockers; he felt lazy and fat when Mr. Exercise Man was hanging around.

  Lowell said, “Don’t forget, there’s a 5k run next week down in Arcola. Broomcorn Festival.”

  “I know, Lowell.”

  “Want me to sign you up?” Lowell was sitting on Wally’s bike. “I’m driving down there anyway.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sort of slipping out of condition. I’ve got a few projects going.”

  “You’re slipping all right.” Lowell was astride the bike, wheeling it forward and back. “Back tire’s low,” he said.

  “Ha,” Wally said. He straightened up and looked at Lowell. He kept looking at him. He looked at him a long time, longer than either of them was comfortable with.

  “Come on! Answer me. It’s about three miles. It’s nothing.”

  Lowell was sometimes so forthright about running. It was the foundation of mental health in his mind. Wally hated buckling under the pressure of his friend’s purity and rigor. But he did. “Okay, sign me up. I’ll reimburse. How much?” He could back out at the last minute, by phone or by simple omission.

  “It’s fifteen bucks counting the t-shirt.”

  Wally stared at the mess around him. “I’ve got a few projects going.”

&n
bsp; “I see that. You’re frustrated.”

  Wally stood straight up and looked at him. “Stop being an active listener and getting on my nerves, okay?” Wally shoved some stuff with his foot, then pushed something else with his shoulder. Then he kicked something. “I’ve started about ten things today and don’t seem to be able to finish any of them.”

  “Right.” Lowell seemed to be staring at him waiting for the next thing to respond to responsively. He was applying his special kind of shrink’s pressure. Didn’t he have something to do on a Saturday? Gotta come over to Wally’s when Wally’s in a bad mood and looking for an ax?

  “Carol’s in Ohio at her mom’s,” Wally said, butt up, head down among the boxes. Arching over him was one end of a long defunct swingset. “Her mom’s been slipping a little, you might say. You might say. So Carol’s keeping an eye on her.”

  “And the kids are…”

  “Margie’s. Swimming.”

  “So…”

  “So, you’re annoying the fuck out of me right now, by the way. So, it’s a good time to get some stuff done.”

  Lowell put the bike back by the paint cans, gently leaned it.

  “So, you’re doing okay otherwise?”

  “Otherwise?”

  “Bust your butt doing that, man.”

  Wally stood on a tricycle and got the burned-out light bulb unscrewed. Without event, he stepped down, light bulb in hand. He held it up to show victory over the odds. “Otherwise than what?”