Good Buddy (2)
By SoulFire77
- 71 reads
He brought the bin in on the Friday morning.
He had come off shift at seven and gotten home at twenty past, and the light was coming in flat and yellow down the length of the street so that every mailbox threw a shadow eight feet long. He parked. He sat a second with the keys in his hand.
Then he walked back down the drive in his work clothes and took the handle of the bin and pulled it up the concrete, and it went over the lip at the top of the drive with that bang, and he stood it against the side of the garage where it went.
Across the road Ellis Furr was out getting his paper, and he lifted a hand, and Roger lifted one back.
Four doors along there was a light on in a front window and a truck in the drive that had not left yet.
Emmy lost a tooth. She wanted me to tell you it was the top one.
Lindsay had sent it Saturday morning with a photograph of a small girl grinning at the camera with her chin up and one hand pointing at the gap, and the photograph had come through while he was asleep.
He looked at it a long time, at the kitchen behind her, at a wall calendar he did not recognize, at the corner of somebody's arm in the doorway.
He typed ha and deleted it. He typed Tell her I said good work, and sent that, and put the phone face down on the counter and went and got the coffee going.
It was six minutes past one in the afternoon.
Wayne came over on the Saturday with a wrecking bar over his shoulder and the bag of Sakrete on the other one, and he had a five-gallon bucket hooked on two fingers with a trowel and a whisk broom in it, and he was talking before he got to the mailbox.
"Now I want to say up front I might get in there and find out it's worse than we think and then we're both in trouble."
"That's generally how it goes."
"That's how it always goes." He set the bag down on the walk in a small puff of dust. "How was your week?"
"It was a week."
"Roger that." He said it and then waited for it, and Roger, who had heard some version of that joke since about 1974, let it sit there and go cold.
It took them forty minutes to get the step off. It was two treads on a pair of short stringers, set on the concrete pad at the bottom of the porch, and the left stringer had gone punky where it met the pad and there was a black stain up the back of it about four inches. Wayne got the bar in and worked it and the nails came out of the ledger with that long complaining sound.
"There," he said. "See that. That's your water."
"That's fifteen years of it."
"That's the front of your house is what that is, and it's the one part everybody quits looking at." He was down on one knee with his hand flat on the pad, feeling it. "Pad's fine. Pad's good. It's just you got no break between the wood and the wet, so it wicks up in there, and you'd never know until it dropped somebody."
He worked like a man who has done the same thing four or five times in his own yard. He was not fast and he did not stop.
Roger held the treated four-by-four while Wayne cut the ends square with a handsaw because he had not brought a circular saw and did not seem to think he needed one, and he mixed the Sakrete in the bucket with water from the hose, and while he mixed he talked, and none of it required anything.
He talked about the boat. He had bought it in 2019 with a plan to have it on Belews four weekends a year and he had had it on Belews twice, and the way he told the part about the second time — the ramp, the man behind him in line, the winch strap — was funny, and Roger laughed out loud, once, and put his hand over his mouth afterward like a man surprised by a noise in his own house.
"That's right," Wayne said, pleased. "That's exactly what Deb did."
The sun was over the Furrs' roofline by four and the yard went into shade and it got noticeably cooler, and the smell of the wet concrete came up sharp and mineral out of the bucket.
At one point Wayne sat back on his heels and looked up at the front of the house.
"You put that door in?"
"Sheryl did. She had a man do it."
That was the whole of it. He had not planned to say it and it came out flat, the way you say a thing you have said in your head so many times it does not have any edges left, and it went past. Wayne nodded at the door.
"It's a good door," he said. "That's a good door. They don't put that much glass in one anymore." And he went back to the block.
They finished at ten of six.
The new bottom tread sat an eighth of an inch proud of where the old one had, and Wayne stood on it and rocked from his left foot to his right and back, twice, watching his own boots.
"That's not going anywhere."
"What do I owe you for the bag?"
"Nothing. It's been sitting in my garage since Easter, I told you." He was wrapping the hose around his arm from the elbow. "Deb's been trying to get it out of there since April. You did me a favor."
It had been seventy-nine at noon and it was fifty-six now, and the wind had come around out of the northwest, and Roger was standing there in a T-shirt with his arms crossed and the sweat on him gone cold.
"You want a beer," he said. "It's cold out here."
Wayne looked up from the hose.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'll take a beer."
The furnace came on for the first time that fall about fifteen minutes after they got inside, and it put that scorched dust smell through the whole house, the one that comes off a duct that has not run since March, and Wayne lifted his head at it like a man hearing his name.
"There it is. First one."
"I need to change that filter."
"Everybody needs to change that filter."
They sat at the kitchen table. Roger had two chairs at it and there had been four once and he did not say anything about that, and Wayne took the one with its back to the window and turned it a little so he could see out.
He looked around the room. The counter, the range with one burner cleaner than the other three, the refrigerator with the tire-place magnet and the flyer under it and a photograph of two girls in a plastic frame stuck up next to it.
"Those yours?"
"Grandkids. Lindsay's."
"How old?"
"Six and three." He turned the can around on the table. "Six lost a tooth."
"That's the age." Wayne drank some of his beer. "We didn't have any. It wasn't for lack of going at it, we just didn't." He said it plainly, with no weight on it at all, and moved straight on. "You get out to see them?"
"It's ninety minutes."
"That's not far."
"It's not far when you're not asleep at noon."
"No," Wayne said. "No, that's true. That's true." He turned his can around on the table now too, and for four or five seconds neither of them said anything, and outside somebody's kid went by on the sidewalk at a dead run.
"I'll tell you," Wayne said. "Couple years back I was in a real bad way for a while there. Some stuff at work and then my mother went, all in about a year." He shrugged. "You come out of it. You just — you don't come out of it by yourself, is the thing. Somebody comes and gets you."
He drank.
"Anyhow," he said. "Deb'll be wondering."
He rinsed the can at the sink without being asked and stood it upside down on the drainboard, and at the door he stopped and looked back down the hall.
"You know what you ought to do is take that hall light out and put a brighter one in. You've got a forty in there. You're coming in at seven in the morning half asleep."
"The ladder's put away."
"I know it. I'm just saying." He grinned. "I'm not your daddy."
Then he went out and the storm door banged twice and he went off up the road in the cold with the empty bucket swinging.
Roger stood at the sink a minute with the two cans in it and the light off in the front room, and the house had that quality a house has for about ten minutes after somebody leaves it, and then it did not.
The gutter thing came the following Tuesday.
He had said he would come up and look at a bad corner on Wayne's back gutter on the Monday afternoon and had slept through it, straight through, four hours past when he meant to be up, and he woke at half past five with the light already going and got the phone off the counter.
Sorry. Slept through it.
The reply came back inside a minute.
no worries!! sleep is sleep. Wed?
He looked at that. Then he typed Wed's good and it went out with the little sound, forty seconds after Wayne had sent his.
Lindsay's tooth photograph was still up there, three messages back.
The first week of October came in cool.
Bags started going out at the curb on the Monday because the county only takes yard waste the first two weeks of the month, and by Wednesday there were bags in front of every third house, slumped and dark green, and men in the yards at five-thirty with blowers going in the last of the light. The Bunches' windows stayed shut now. He could not hear their television anymore when he came out with his coffee at one, which meant the street had gone quiet in the afternoons, and the only way to know a house was occupied was the cars.
The pears on the sidewalk down at the circle had come down and gone over, and where the kids ran their bikes through them there was a smell like cider gone wrong, sweet and turned, and wasps still working at them at four in the afternoon.
He got up at noon on the Thursday and put a jacket on to go out for the mail, first time that year.
Wayne came by twice that week. Once for the gutter, which took eleven minutes and turned out to be a piece of ridge cap, not the gutter at all, and once on the Friday at half past four with two cups of gas station coffee in a cardboard tray, and he stood on the new step drinking his and looking out at the street and stayed about twenty minutes.
At six-forty he said he had to go and then stood there another ten.
On the Saturday Roger went out to the big place on Sixty-Two for a furnace filter.
He came back with two filters, a pack of weather stripping he had no immediate plan for, and a flashlight.
Coming through he went down the seasonal aisle because it was where they had put the extension cords, and it was all out already, the whole thing, the inflatables in their boxes and the orange strings of lights and the plastic pumpkins with the handles.
On the way to the register he went past the lawn furniture, which they had marked down to clear.
He stood there a minute.
There was one folding chair on his porch and there had been one folding chair on his porch since the spring, green webbing, aluminum, and it was the one he sat in.
He put a second one in the cart.
He set it up that evening on the left side of the door where the porch is wider, angled a little toward the road the way you would if two people were going to sit out there, and then he went in and made himself something to eat, and when he came back out at eight it was down to fifty-one and the empty chair had a maple leaf in it.
He had not asked Wayne to come by that night. Wayne had not said he would.
Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/good-buddy-3
- Log in to post comments