by James, Terry
Her house was some underpaid architect’s idea of revenge on the firm: Tudor Revival-meets-Doublewide Trailer. Expanses of white stucco crisscrossed with fake, reddish brown half-timbering, false shutters and mock masonry veneers. As if that weren’t bad enough, the base of the house was trimmed with mottled pink and white brick which looked like slabs of raw hamburger. And she had paid a hundred grand.
I pulled up to the curb and cut the engine. There I sat, thinking about the peculiar exchange at Der Wienerschnitzel. It put me off my hot dog. I grabbed the menu and combed it futilely for flogos. I removed the lid of the coffee and blew across it. I took a sip and stared out the window at the withered patchwork of crab grass and mowed-down dandelions, the faded Neighborhood Watch sign all but welcoming would-be burglars. High above the slanted roof—the television aerial filled me with strange dread—towered the back neighbor’s date palm, the final touch in this smorgasbord of incongruity. It was hard to believe she had been here nearly twenty years. For me it would always be the new house.
I got out and made my way to the front door. The TV was on, its exuberance electrifying every molecule in the vicinity. I pressed the bell, the single meaty clunk of which sent Daisy into paroxysms of yipping. I heard her grunt as she labored out of her chair. Then came a bout of wheezy hacking. On cue the first wave of irritation surged through me.
She opened the door.
“I thought it might be you.”
We hugged, her stringy, loose-skinned arms clutching me hard. “Happy Easter, Mom.” Under her sleeveless muumuu she felt as frail as a baby bird. It was always a shock to see how much she had shrunk. My memory only seemed to retain full-length studio portraits of her. Her hair was uncombed, patches of dry white scalp showing between her natural gray and the store-bought black.
“Is that a new suit?” she asked.
“No.”
Daisy, in defiance of her frenetically wagging tail, strafed me with suspicious snarls and yips. At the sight of my shoe lifting from the porch she raced back into the living room and did a few mad laps.
Mom shuffled back to her chair and sank into it like a scuba diver dropping into the sea. I took off my hat and jacket and settled in at her end of the couch. On the lamp table between us rested an assortment of items, each of which tugged my emotions in different directions. Her olive-green plastic inhaler. A pack of More Menthols and a yellow disposable lighter beside a full glass ashtray. Wadded-up tissues. A well-scuffed emery board. A paperback mystery with a pizza coupon sticking out of it. A blue-green tumbler containing an inch of cola beside a can of Diet RC. The TV remote.
She didn’t turn it off. I didn’t ask her to, not sure myself if I could take her without a chaser. On the screen a smiling blonde woman was extolling the virtues of a remarkable stain remover.
“Did you see that mess on Pleasant Valley?” she asked.
“What mess?”
“Where they’ve dug it all up. It’s been that way for weeks. Rush hour, forget it. You’re better off going clear down to Woolsey.”
My eyes came to rest on my high school debating trophy, front and center on the mantle. For her it was a reminder of what might have been. With my voice and my good looks, she had had hopes. I could have been a lawyer, or an actor.
“Did you have something to eat?” Before I could answer she said, “You should’ve told me you were coming. I would’ve made you something.”
She picked up her pack of cigarettes and shook one out and put it to her lips and lit up.
“Mom,” I groaned.
“Don’t start,” she mumbled through the cigarette, which jerked up and down to the articulations of her lips.
“You can’t be sitting there puffing away on Pirbuteral in one breath and a menthol cigarette in the other.”
“What difference does it make?”
“It’s your funeral.”
“Damn right.”
“Well, I hope you’ve saved up for it, because I’m sure as hell not shelling out for it.”
The smiling blonde, whose name we soon learned was Leslie, was presently discoursing with a grinning imbecile with slicked-back hair and a mouth wide enough to park a frying pan in. Craig was his name.
“Nothing good on TV anymore,” Mom complained. “All that reality shit. I hardly ever watch it anyway. The only thing good is Bob Kingsley. He had that Chinese chef on the other day, I forget his name—Ho something. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that guy has lived through. Fourteen kids. He showed pictures of them. So sweet. His wife is an accountant, you know. CPA. Bob asked him why he moved around so much, and the Chinese guy said it was the school districts. Fourteen kids. Can you imagine? No sooner are they in a good school than the neighborhood goes to pot and they have to move on. The Chinese are big on education. That science fair they had, the top ten students, every one of them was Chinese. A couple of Indians, I think. Oh, I do like that Indian guy on Life as Usual.”
She rambled on, but Craig had captured my attention with his demonstrations. We were treated to several clips from the “amazing” instructional video that came with the package when you ordered all three Atlas 9 products.
Mom shook the inhaler and squeezed two puffs into her mouth and sat concentrating on her held breath. She exhaled and set the inhaler back on the table.
She resumed smoking her cigarette. With every passing second the fibers of my nerves seemed to be unraveling from their neuronal twine. After a few puffs, she set the cigarette in a lip of the ashtray. From the imperceptibly advancing ember, a fluid stream of smoke rose in a vertical line. Two feet up it rippled into a run of fanned crimps before dispersing in the gusts of air-conditioning.
“I tried calling you the other day,” she said.
“What for?”
“You got something in the mail.”
“What was it?”
“A credit card offer or something.”
“I’ve told you a million times, just throw that crap away. I don’t know how they even got this address.”
“The banks sell them.”
“I never gave this address to any bank.”
“Once it’s out there, forget it. It goes viral.”
Now it was time to apply the Atlas 9 Strong, the world’s strongest oxygen-based stain remover.
“This country’s gone to hell.” She was off again. “All anyone cares about is getting rich. The government. They’re all corrupt, the whole lot of them. They should all be taken out and shot. All the money they’re taking from us. It’s robbing the poor to feed the rich. Sooner or later they’re going to say enough is enough, and that’ll be the end of the whole damn thing. I’ll be dead by then, thank God. I’d hate to see what’s coming down the pike. I’ll tell you what’s coming. The Chinese. They’re just waiting for their moment. You think when we start going down they’re just going to sit there and watch? Hell no. Your father may be a bastard, but he’s right about that. Biggest army in the world. When they decide to take over there won’t be any stopping them. They’ll swarm in and take over everything, round us up and put us to work in their factories. They won’t touch the Mexicans. Too lazy. Oh, it’s a disgrace the way these Mexicans treat their dogs, Eddie. You drive around town and it’s nothing but stray dogs everywhere you look. They just let them run wild, let them starve. They don’t give a damn. It makes me sick the way they treat their animals. This used to be a nice place to live. All down the block it’s Mexicans now. Where the Parkers used to live, that’s a Mexican family. Alice Schumacher’s house, that’s Mexican. Rich and Barbara moved to Castillo to get away from them. Mexicans moved in. I don’t have anything against them, they just need to stay in their own part of town. They’re driving down the property values. Mary Jo told me hers dropped sixteen thousand since the Mexicans started moving in. I’m afraid to get mine reappraised. I don’t want to know. Forget it. They drive down the property so their cousins can move in next door.”
It was time to spray on the Magic, with its pleasan
t citrus odor. Craig did so, and while he waited we were treated to another real life story, this one about dog urine on the upholstery of a guy named Ted’s Corvette.
“You won’t catch me giving my credit card number out to anyone anymore. I was watching You Could Be Next the other night, on that outfit the Quakers. Have you heard of them? They’re these scam artists. They get your credit card number and address, and instead of stealing from you they order a bunch of crap in your name, have it sent to you, as if you ordered it yourself. They call it quaking. You got quaked. So all this shit you didn’t even order starts landing on your doorstep. You’re stuck having to deal with it, calling the companies, paying for the return shipping, calling the bank. On and on. One lady had stuff coming to her every day for a month: appliances, flowers, books, CDs, clothes. They even sent her an antique canopy bed. You name it. It about drove her batty trying to get to the bottom of it. Another lady they hit stopped trying to fight it and just ended up keeping it all. She said the time and money it would have cost her sorting it all out was worth more to her than the cost of the stuff. No way in hell you’ll get me giving my credit card out on the internet.”
“You don’t even have a computer,” I pointed out.
“And I don’t want one either. It’s nothing but porn on there anyway. I’ve seen it. They had a class at the center, trying to convince us how great the internet is. I asked them to look up Vitamin-B for me and up pops some naked woman with tits out to here …”
The ash of her cigarette, still burning on the edge of the ashtray, was nearing the end of its battle with gravity, which in my experience, at sea-level, with cigarettes thicker than hers, is about two and half inches in length when unmolested by air drafts, earthquakes, or sudden fluctuations in barometric pressure.
There’s a newsreel of the demolition of the bell tower of a church that had the misfortune of ending up stranded in the dead zone between East and West Berlin when the wall was built. As sad West Berliners look on from rooftops, the GDR’s pyrotechnicians detonate the charges, and the noble old steeple timbers over under the weight of history and collapses in a cloud of dust. Something of the poignancy of that silent demolition touched me as at last Mom’s cigarette fractured at the fulcrum, and that long, slender column of ash collapsed into the wreckage of butts littering her ashtray.
“I need something to eat,” I said. “I’m going faint.”
“What do you want?”
“Anything.” I got up. She got up with me. Daisy got up with her.
“I’ve got a nice canned ham. Do you want a ham sandwich?”
“Sure.”
“What do you want on it?”
“Everything.”
“Do you want mayonnaise and mustard?”
“Everything.”
“Pickles?”
“Everything.”
“Sweet or sour?”
“Just make it the way you like it,” I said, making my way to the back door.
“It’s your sandwich, not mine.”
It was just as depressing outside. The right half of the yard was covered with fake red lava rocks, the black plastic underliner all chewed up at the edges, tough green weeds poking through here and there, others all shriveled up and brown. Briquettes of sunbaked dogshit everywhere. The rest of the yard bore witness to her failed vegetable garden. A few furrowed rows of dry dirt, in one of which lay a tennis ball bleached of all color, and some wild pink hollyhocks. Hundreds of dried and cracked seed cones littered the ground where the neighbor’s juniper tree branched across the north wall.
I stood in the shade of the porch with all her artsy-crafty windchimes, half of them missing the chimes or hopelessly tangled in their own lines. A bee was flying in and out of the end of a tube of bamboo. Through the kitchen window came the sounds of her hacking as she worked on my sandwich. Daisy emerged from the rubber flap in the door. She went out and sniffed around her domain, raised her leg and peed against the dead rose bush near the south wall. From somewhere on the breezeless air came the scent of barbecued lamb. The date palm rustled softly.
“Your sandwich is ready, Eddie! Do you want it out there?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want something to drink?”
“No.”
“I’ve got iced tea, ginger ale, cranberry juice … water.”
I found a rigid dishcloth and wiped as much of the dust and rust as I could from one of the old blue metal chairs, the only furniture she had retained from the old house. She came out with the sandwich and hovered around disturbing my peace. She had made it with a thick slab of processed cheese, dill pickles, a piece of wilted iceberg lettuce, and some kind of sweet sandwich spread. I was too hungry to dwell on the death of civilization that it bore testament to.
She shuffled out and picked the dead leaves from the rosebush and tossed them to the ground. Daisy sniffed them and moved on to better things. Mom came back and pulled up a chair and sat down in it next to me.
“How are your feet?” she asked, perhaps realizing in the process of making my sandwich that she had done nothing but rant since I had walked through the door.
“Fine,” I said and took a bite. It was surprisingly good. “Someone wrote some novels about me,” I casually mentioned.
“What?”
I pulled Murder at the Crossroads out of my pocket and held it towards her face so she could get a good look at the “Eddie King” on the cover. She looked confused.
“They’re detective novels,” I said. “I’m the main character. They’re based on my real cases.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.”
I sat there eating my sandwich. She scratched her dry knees.
A few minutes later I said: “You remember that Mexican maid we had for a while?”
“Mexican maid?”
“Yes, a kind of short, plump woman with curly hair.”
“We never had any Mexican maid.”
“I’m sure we did. I have a distinct memory of her vacuuming with that old green box-vacuum, the one with my NFL stickers on it. I have another memory of me and her kid working on a jigsaw puzzle together.”
“You must be remembering someone else’s house. Do you think your father would have ever let me hire a maid, let alone a Mexican one?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re probably thinking of the Raffertys or something. They had a Mexican woman.”
“No, that was Nieves. She was nothing like this woman. Maybe she only came a few times. Maybe she was a babysitter who did some cleaning while she was there.”
The doorbell clunked.
“Do you want me to get it?” I asked.
“If you want. It’s probably Mary Jo. She’s supposed to be bringing me some pecans.”
I got up and went to the door. It was a woman in her sixties with a brown-tinted perm.
“Oh, hi there.” She clearly wasn’t expecting a man. “Is Stella in?”
“Yeah. Around back. Come in.”
“That’s all right. I was just bringing around these pecans for her.” She smiled at me. “You must be Eddie.”
“Yes.
She handed me the bag.
“Happy Easter,” she said.
“Happy Easter,” I replied.
She told me to tell Mom that they had missed her at church. I assured her I would. I set the bag on the counter in the kitchen and stood at the window looking at Mom sitting there, perhaps regretting our inability to communicate, most likely thinking of nothing at all.
I stuck it out until five then told her I had to get going. She wanted me to stay for dinner. That would have killed me. I told her I had some unfinished business to attend to.
“On Easter Sunday?”
I kissed her forehead at the door and walked out to the car. I got in and pressed the ignition button and nothing happened. A glance at the dash confirmed my suspicion.
I walked down to the first house with a pickup parked in front of it and knocked on the door.
A hirsute man answered, probably thinking that I was either a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon. His belly was testing the tensile strength of a Miami Dolphins T-shirt. I thought I heard a football game on the TV, but it wasn’t football season. I explained that I had left my headlights on coming through the tunnel. That seemed to gratify him. He came out and drove his pickup down to Mom’s and pulled up to about a foot from the front bumper and popped his hood, leaving the engine running. I followed him back on foot. He got out and walked over to my car, jumper cables in hand.
“Hell of a car,” he said. “What year is it?”
“’42.”
“I’ll be damned. You don’t see many of these old tanks around anymore.” He gazed admiringly at the grille, the fenders, the zinc trim. He walked over to the driver’s window and bent down to have a look inside.
“They sure as hell don’t make ‘em like they used to,” he said after a good long look.
I opened the hood and propped the rod in place. He came back around to the front and took a look at the engine.
“Flathead V-8?” he asked.
“L-head straight-6.”
He nodded.
“What kind of mileage you get?”
“If it was any lower I’d need a tow truck to drive it.”
“I’d hate to see your gas bill.”
“You’re helping to pay it.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“It’s deductible,” I said. “Business expenses.”
“Oh? What’s your business?”
“Insurance,” I said, the quickest way to end that line of questioning. He nodded.
He hooked up the cables, first to my battery then to his. “I wouldn’t think it’d be easy finding anywhere to fill ’er up.”
“A couple of stations in the barrios still sell leaded. I keep a few spare cans in the trunk for emergencies.”
He nodded. “Go ahead and give her a shot.”
I got in and pressed the ignition. It turned over sluggishly a few times then caught. I revved it for a while then let it idle. He unhooked the cables. I could tell he wanted to go for a spin in it. I thanked him and said I would see him around.