Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  “All right,” he said, gathering up his cards. He patted the deck square and put it on the windowsill. “Let’s go look. Maybe if we’re real quiet, we’ll do better this time.” He stood up and took Nicky’s hand, and the two of them headed for the barn. Eleanor and I both watched them go. I was wishing I understood better, and maybe she was, too, but then, she was an old hand at this family shit, and I was a rank beginner, so what the hell did I know about what she thought.

  “They’re a little bit alike,” she said. “My husband and your son.” She stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me, making supper.

  “You think so? Why?”

  She glanced at me over her shoulder, then went back to what she was doing. “It takes a certain amount of cussedness to get through, sometimes. I’m not sure that either Louis or Nicky has enough of it.” She looked back at me again. “Does he miss his mother?”

  “I don’t know if he remembers her. He hasn’t had it easy, though. I guess we both had a couple of tough years after she died.”

  “I imagine,” she said. “But you’ve got enough cussedness, Manny, I can tell. You get knocked down, you come up swinging. Am I right?”

  “I haven’t had much choice in the matter.”

  “Sure you have,” she said. “There’s a million ways to give up. Somehow I don’t see you quitting.” She turned around, leaned her back against the counter. “The problem is, the older you get, the more difficult it becomes. Getting back up again. Louis and I, we’ve had it too easy out here for the last few years, living apart like this. And Louis has that same thing I see in Nicky. When life takes a poke at him, it hurts him more deeply than it would you or me. And it isn’t the punch that does the damage, it’s the intent behind it.”

  Something must have gone wrong, I thought. She and Louis must have hit some kind of bump in the road. She doesn’t want to tell me what it was, but she wants to talk about how she’s feeling. “Seems like a good life out here, still and all.”

  “Very peaceful,” she said. “I’ve never been to Noo Yok City. So many things I’d like to have seen. Isn’t that a funny way to put it? But that’s the way it is. I couldn’t go to see it now. Maybe I don’t have enough cussedness left, either. I guess it bothers me too much when life tramps with big feet through my nice little garden.” She turned around, went back to her work.

  “Why should you have to struggle anymore? You’ve found a nice quiet place here.” I was thinking of those log cabins back up in the woods, the ones I hadn’t managed to dream into existence. “A refuge, almost.”

  “Oh, well, that’s true enough,” she said. “Manny, can I ask you something? Would it be all right if we forgot about moving you and Nicky over to Gerald’s trailah?” She looked over her shoulder, in the direction Louis and Nicky had taken. “I think I’m falling in love with yoah little boy.”

  I don’t think I had ever loved anybody before, or any thing. All I knew was, the longer I stayed with this kid, the more my guts knotted up every time I thought of him. It had been bad enough back in the city, when I saw him only once or twice a month, but that had been mostly guilt, I think. I didn’t know what it was I was going through now. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might be love, because I thought that was supposed to make you feel good. Jesus. “We would be happy to stay with you, Mrs. Avery. I think Nicky’s having a great time here with you guys.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” she said, turning away from me. “I’m glad.”

  Over dinner, I told Louis and Eleanor about my encounter with Hop and his current love interest at the convenience store. I included the fact that Bookman wanted me to swear out a complaint against Hopkins. I had intended to ask them about Franklin, but it slipped my mind. After dinner, Louis told me he had a problem with his truck. “Manny, why don’t you come outside and look at my Jeep for one second. I busted a shackle on her, and I think I’m gonna have to get it welded. Come see what you think.”

  “Okay.” Nicky got up from the table and followed me to the door.

  “Nicholas,” Louis said, “do me a favor, stay here, all right? Keep Mrs. Avery company.”

  “I wanna go too, Poppy.” He hung on to my leg with determination. I was beginning to understand him a little bit, but it was clear that Louis wanted to talk to me out of Nicky’s earshot.

  “I’m not going anyplace,” I told him. He started to whine. “Look. Come right over here by the window. You can watch me the whole time.”

  “All right.” He stood there, but he wasn’t happy about it. “You’re coming back inside, right?”

  “Absolutely. We’re just gonna look at Louis’s truck, I promise.”

  Louis leaned against the tailgate and looked at the pile of red oak logs in front of the barn door. “Listen,” he said. “One piece of information you should know. Bookman ain’t one to observe the formalities. He’s old school, if you catch my drift.”

  “Yeah? He thinks I did something, he’ll string me up in a basement room and let the boys go to work on me with rubber hoses?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Louis said. “Mind your manners when you’re dealing with him. He takes the direct approach to problem solving.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “I’ll be careful. Tell me something, Louis. Is everything okay with you and Eleanor? You both seem very quiet this evening.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, and he waved his hand as if shooing away a mosquito, which he might have been doing, because they had located us. “Eleanor’s pain spells were getting worse, and I took her in to the doc a couple or three weeks ago. They done some tests and so on. She was pretty ugly about it, seeing how much she loves getting out of the house. Anyhow, this aftahnoon the doc called, said we gotta come in again some day next week. Evah since she found out, she’s been giving me the picked end of the stick.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

  Louis squatted down and peered under the back of the Jeep. “My eyesight ain’t what it used to be,” he said. “Take a look at this damned shackle before it gets too dahk to see it. Tell me if you think it’s busted.”

  It was just light enough to see. “Yeah, Louis, it split up at the top, and it spread out so the spring assembly is all loose. And your shock absorber is bent all to hell.”

  “Son of a hoah.” He said it calmly.

  “Might be time for a new truck, Louis.”

  He shook his head. “Ain’t in the budget.”

  “Wouldn’t take a lot. Even that piece of shit I rented from Hobart would be a serious upgrade. I bet he’d sell it to you for two or three hundred bucks.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Louis said. “Give it to me, though, if I wanted it.”

  “So?”

  He shook his head again. “Had this truck a long time,” he said. “She might be about used up, but she ain’t dead yet. I don’t like to go letting myself want moah than what I got. I’ll wind up just like old man Calder, mean and ugly, thinking bad about everyone I know. If you’ll give me a hand tomorrow mohning, we’ll push her downstreet to Gevier’s house, see if he’ll bring his weldah home from the garage and patch her up again.”

  “Be glad to help, Louis. If you got a piece of chain, we’ll tow her over first thing in the morning, before I go up to see Bookman.”

  “Don’t forget what I told you about him,” Louis said. He looked away from me, out into the growing darkness. “Sometimes I do wish,” he said, “that I could just write a check and solve all my problems. Course, you know what they say: Wish in one hand, piss in the other, guess which one fills up the quicker.” He slapped at his arm. “Christless mosquitoes,” he said.

  I waved away the one that was trying to bite my ear. “Ain’t these things supposed to be gone by this time of year?”

  “Worse in the spring,” he said. “These ones are just the survivors. First hard frost’ll kill ’em. Let’s go inside.”

  Later that night, I sat in the chair with my feet up on the bed. I could he
ar either Louis or Eleanor snoring in the other bedroom, and I could just make out the shape of my son underneath the covers. Most nights were like this for me. I have never needed as much sleep as everyone else. Sitting up alone in the dark, night after night, had always reinforced what I thought was the solitary nature of my life, the essential aloneness of anybody’s life. I might have had that lesson beaten into me at an early age, but these other people had to learn that eventually, didn’t they? Every man for himself, isn’t that what they say? Dog eat dog. Devil take the hindmost. But now I could feel the connections between me and these people around me in the dark, and I was worried about Eleanor and whatever her physical ailment was, about Louis and his financial problems, and my son—Jesus Christ, what’s going to happen to my son? What kind of life would he have, how could he be normal, growing up with someone like me for a father, who didn’t even know what that word really meant?

  There’s no one to tell you what the right thing is, there’s nowhere you can go to look it up, you have to feel for it on your own, in the dark.

  4

  We used the Subaru and a twenty-foot piece of chain to tow Louis’s Jeep over to Gevier’s house. Nicky rode in the Jeep with Louis. He was getting attached to both Louis and Eleanor, and followed one or the other of them everywhere. Eleanor had started teaching him the alphabet and some rudimentary arithmetic. I appreciated her efforts, but now the kid’s head was filled with a million questions. “What’s that word, what’s this mean, what’s that sign say?” Jesus. I was glad to see it, in principle, and I kept reading and spelling and so on for him, but he could get on the nerves of a plaster saint. Once he realized that all those numbers and letters meant something, he went insane with curiosity. Let him ride back there with Louis, drive him nuts for a while.

  Gevier lived with his daughter in what had once been a trailer, but you couldn’t see the trailer part of it anymore. Louis told me about the place the night before, trying to prepare me ahead of time for what was coming. Gevier, during the years he’d been living in the place, had added onto it, following the dictates of his own inner voices until the thing had morphed beyond recognition. I found out that morning that if you asked him about the design, he’d explain the logic to you, but you had to have a lot of patience and a good vocabulary to follow him. A lot of it supposedly had to do with heat loads, overhangs calculated to let the sun in during the winter and keep it out during the summer, due south being the primal attitude, round being from nature, Satan hiding in corners, and shit like that. If you closed your eyes and listened you might be persuaded that he was a genius and everyone else was building his house to outmoded ideas, but open your eyes and look at the guy one time and the illusion was destroyed, because when you looked at him, you had to know the guy had to be fucking whacked. I guarantee no professor in the history of MIT ever had hair like that. Some of what he said was probably right and some of it was probably bullshit, but I was never sure which part was which.

  Building, trailer, whatever it was, it sat about thirty yards back from the road. You wouldn’t call the space between the road and it a front yard, necessarily, there was no grass and no trees, just dirt, flattened and beaten down hard, oil-soaked in a few spots. You couldn’t tell what was out behind the house, either, because there was a chain link fence on either side of the building that ran parallel to the road. It had green plastic strips woven into the open spaces, so all you could really see was a few trees poking up here and there.

  White trash, that’s what you’d think. I admit that’s what came into my mind when we pulled up in front. Gevier came out—I swear he had on the same shirt he’d been wearing the day I met him—and stood blinking in the sun. Nicky popped out of the Jeep and walked on up to him. “Hi,” he said. “Remember me?”

  “Of course I do,” Gevier said, watching Louis and me. “Hello, Nicky. Hello, Louis, and . . .” He looked at me, uncertain.

  “Manny.”

  “Yeah, Manny. Fohd sent the right part, but for the wrong side of the van. I did a little screaming and yelling, they’re gonna rush the other one out. They say. Supposed to be heah Monday. If it is, you should have yo-ah van Monday night. You fellas want to come inside?”

  No, I thought, hell no, but Louis walked right up to the door. “Sure,” he said. I’ve probably been inside the homes of at least a hundred people, mostly as what you might call an uninvited guest, and there are few things that fascinate me more, but I was a little worried, going through Gevier’s front door, anticipating what I was going to find.

  Man, was I off.

  I don’t always enter through the door the residents of the place habitually use most often, but when you do that, you almost always see a set piece. This is what they’d like you to think about them. They may be accountants or dentists but they love art, or they have a million pictures of their family (see, I do love them), or they’re big Yankee fans, or whatever. I broke into a loft in Chelsea once, guy actually had a kayak hanging from the ceiling just inside his front door. I had been inside only two houses in Maine so far, so my sample was limited, but in both cases you walk through that door and you’re in the kitchen. I guess that’s because the kitchen was central to the lives of the people who lived there. In the domiciles I was used to invading, the kitchen was peripheral, off to one side.

  Gevier’s kitchen didn’t have your normal kitchen layout, there’s a shock. No cabinets, for one thing, the place was floor to ceiling shelves. One wall was devoted to food—canisters, jars, cartons, and all that. The wall next to that one was bare, the space taken up by the woodstove and the shiny copper-jacketed water heater. I wasn’t sure how the water heater worked. All I know is that it had pipes running through the woodstove, two more that ran up to the solar panels on the roof. I didn’t see a gas line, and there were no wires going to it. And the pipe that carried smoke out of the woodstove didn’t go straight into a chimney like the Averys’ did, either, it made a circle around the top of the kitchen and then ran off down the hallway. Gevier watched me looking at it the way a scientist might watch a rat that had displayed some unexpected trait, unusual intelligence or a gift for abstract reasoning, maybe. Not up to his level, of course, but beyond what he’d expected.

  The other two walls were lined with books, a lot of thick, fat ones, too, a set of encyclopedia, engineering manuals, books of all kinds, some in what I took to be Latin and Greek. Louis told Gevier his tale of woe while Nicky and I admired the library. Nicky was too busy taking it all in to ask a lot of questions, which was a relief.

  There was a certain order to the place. I started to pick it up after a while, even though I could not make out the logic behind it. The thing is, just because a guy is smarter than you does not mean he isn’t crazy. You had to keep your eyes open when you talked to Gevier, you had to hold on tight to the context, or you wouldn’t be able to use anything he told you. Rosario, my partner from Brooklyn, was just the opposite. With him you had to close your eyes. Sometimes I would picture his words typewritten in the air in front of me, all context removed, because Rosey had a serious Brooklyn accent, and he tended to chew up his words before he let go of them, plus he had this thing in his eyes, you wouldn’t be surprised to see guys sneaking up behind him with a net. He was actually a pretty smart guy, but unless I could separate what he was saying from the way he looked and sounded I would always tend to discount it because he came across like such a maniac.

  A girl came out of a back room. She looked like she was right on the edge of adulthood—it’s that look that baby birds get when they don’t know yet if they’re going to be able to fly, so they stand there on the edge and look out with an intensity that the rest of us old crows have forgotten. She bore a certain resemblance to Gevier, but not too much, lucky for her. She was tall and thin and she had the kind of muscle tone you have to work for. She wasn’t what you’d call beautiful. Handsome, maybe, if your taste ran that way. She had circles under her eyes. I’d never seen them on a person so young before.

>   “Edwina,” Gevier said, “I want you to meet Manny and his son, Nicky.”

  She considered him icily. “My name is Edna.” She turned in my direction. “If you ever call me Edwina, I will clean your clock.”

  Nicky couldn’t say “Edna.” “Hi, Ed . . . umm, Ed . . .” He shrugged. “Hi, Eddie. Do you live here? Did you read all of these books?”

  She looked at me and shook her head. “I can’t win,” she said. She walked over and shook Nicky’s hand. “I’ve read most of them,” she said, “except the ones on rebuilding motorcycle engines.” She glanced at her father in disgust. “We’ve got more in the other room,” she said, turning back to Nicky, “better ones than in here. Would you like to go look at them?”

  He looked over at me. “Can I go?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Don’t break anything.” I couldn’t get used to him asking me permission for things, and I felt strange giving it. Funny how a five-year-old kid can feel the shape of a relationship before an alleged adult can. I watched the two of them go. She had a fine, taut rear end, but I didn’t know if she was past the age of consent yet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there anyway, you might come away bleeding. Better to admire from a safe distance.