Keep On (2)

The lighter went out on its own when the fuel in the neck ran low, and he let it.

He lay in the dark of the corner with the bulb behind him and thought about the hinge. A door wants a frame in a wall, and he knew this wall. He had painted it. The second summer, Bernie had stood at the foot of the stairs telling him he'd missed a spot behind the heater, and he had told her nobody was ever going to see behind the heater, and she had said that was not the point. He had painted around the pegboard. He had never taken it down.

He got the lighter going again and held it low.

The pegboard hung from two nails at the top. Under its bottom edge he could see the strip of wood that was a threshold and, now that he knew to look, a seam running up from it on the right, thin as a pencil line, where the paint had pulled away from a gap. At the bottom of that seam, three inches above the threshold, was a hook-and-eye. A small one, the kind you put on a screen door. Painted gray along with everything else.

It was latched on his side.

He stayed there looking at it. A hook three inches off the floor, set where a man on his feet would never think to look for it. He tried to picture someone kneeling to latch it. He found he could picture it easily, and he stopped.

---

The space between the water heater and the wall was a foot and a half, maybe less. The gas line ran along the left side of the tank to the valve. He went in on the right.

He went in on his good side with his arms ahead of him, and the ribs went first, and he learned there was a way to breathe that let him move and a way that didn't. He took the first way. The tank was cold against his back. The left leg came behind him, and when the bare heel caught the edge of the pad he stopped with his forehead on the concrete and waited until the floor stopped tilting.

He worked the hook with the bent neck of the lighter. The paint had sealed it into the eye. He picked at it until a flake came away, then another, and then the hook lifted and swung down and tapped once against the wood.

He pushed. Nothing. He pushed again with the flat of his hand on the bottom panel, and the door moved inward a half inch and stopped, and he heard the paint along the seam tear like tape.

Air came out through the gap. Colder than the basement, and dry. It smelled of dust and old paper, and of something underneath he took a moment to place. The smell of the back of an old television. Warm wire, a long time cold.

He set his shoulder against the bottom of the door and pushed with his good leg, and the door went in.

---

The pegboard swung out of the way on its nails and knocked against the tank. The door was short, under five feet, and narrow. He could see nothing past it. He put the lighter through ahead of him and the flame leaned toward him in the moving air and showed him a floor of the same concrete as his own, swept, and the bottom of a set of steel shelves, and a few feet inside the door, on the floor, a folded towel.

On the towel, a first aid kit lay open.

It was the big kind, a gray metal box with a hinged lid, and someone had taken things out of it and set them on the towel in a row. Two padded splints, aluminum, folded. Rolled elastic bandages in their clips. A roll of tape. A bottle of pills in a plastic bag. Scissors. A flashlight, the long kind that holds four batteries, lying parallel to the rest. Everything set an inch apart. Everything facing the door.

He lay at the threshold with the lighter going hot in his hand and looked at it.

It was laid out at the height of a man on the floor. That was the first thing. A man who came through that door standing would have to bend to reach any of it. A man who came through it the way Martin had come would find it at the end of his arm.

He reached for the flashlight.

It was heavy and the switch was stiff. He pushed it with his thumb and nothing happened. He unscrewed the end and the batteries slid out into his palm, and they were swollen and crusted white at the seams. In the bottom of the open kit, sealed in plastic, was a second set. He had to tear the plastic with his teeth. The new batteries went in and the switch went forward and the light came on, yellow and strong, and he turned it on the room.

---

The room was smaller than the basement and colder. He guessed it ran under the front porch. Steel shelves stood along two walls, and on the shelves were boxes, cardboard file boxes with lids, and some kind of tape on reels, and some on cassettes, and spiral notebooks stacked in piles, all of it labeled in the same square hand with dates and words he didn't read. He kept the light off them. He didn't know why. It seemed to him that if he read the labels he would have to think about them, and he had enough to think about.

Against the back wall stood a workbench with a wooden chair pushed under it.

On the bench was the radio.

He knew it was a radio the way anyone would. There were two cabinets, one stacked on the other, both black, with meters behind glass and a row of switches along the bottom. A microphone stood on the bench in front of them on a heavy round base, the old kind with a bar you press. Headphones hung from a hook. A cable ran from the back of the top cabinet into a small gray box, plain metal, the size of a lunch pail, and another cable ran out of the gray box and up the wall to where it went through the ceiling.

There was a toggle switch on the front of the gray box, and it was up. Above it, on a strip of masking tape, someone had printed two words in marker.

KEEP ON.

Beside the radio, squared to the edge of the bench, lay a ledger with a green cloth cover. He saw it and let the light go past it.

---

He turned the flashlight back on the towel and did what the towel was for.

He sat himself up against the doorframe one inch at a time and got the left leg straight in front of him, and he did not look at the place below the knee where the shape was wrong. He looked at the splints. He unfolded one and it held the curve it had been folded in. He laid it along the outside of the leg and the second along the inside, and he began to wrap.

He had to stop four times. The first time he dropped the roll of bandage and it went rolling away under the shelves, and he lay back against the frame and breathed the way that worked, and then he took the second roll. The second time he passed out, or nearly, and came back with the flashlight beam lying on the ceiling and no idea how long it had been lying there. The third and fourth times he only stopped. When it was done the leg was a straight thing wrapped in tan, and he could move it without it moving on its own inside.

The pill bottle was aspirin. The date on the label was nineteen years gone. He shook two into his hand and took them dry, and they stuck halfway, and he worked them down.

He thought of the water heater a few feet behind him through the wall and decided it could wait.

---

It took most of an hour to get into the chair.

He dragged himself across the floor of the little room on his elbows with the splinted leg behind him, the flashlight in his teeth when he needed both hands. At the bench he pulled the chair out by one leg. He got a forearm on the seat. Then a hand on the edge of the bench, and the other on the seat, and he lifted.

The ribs took his breath and kept it. He hung there with his weight on his arms and his face against the edge of the bench, and the bench smelled of dust and old varnish, and he thought very clearly that he could let go, that the floor was right there and nobody would ever know whether he had tried. Then he was in the chair. He didn't remember the part in between. He was sitting with the splinted leg out stiff under the bench and both hands flat in front of him, and the room was turning slowly, and he waited for it to stop.

When it stopped he looked at the radio.

He found the switch that turned it on because it was the biggest and it was on the left, where his hand would go first. It was stiff like everything else. He pushed it, and down behind the glass the meters lit up amber, one and then the other, and a wide soft hiss came out of the cabinets and filled the little room to the walls.

He sat and listened to it. It was the first sound in a day and a half that hadn't come from his house or his own mouth.

A piece of masking tape ran along the edge of the top cabinet under the main dial, and on it, in the same square hand, a number with a decimal point. The dial's needle sat exactly on it.

He pulled the microphone toward him by its base. It was heavier than it looked. He didn't know what he was doing, and there was nobody to tell him. He put his thumb on the bar.

The hiss stopped when he pressed it, as if the room were holding its breath.

"Hello," he said. His voice came out of him small and dry. He tried again. "Hello. I need some help. I fell. I'm in my basement and I can't get up the stairs, and my leg's broken. I need somebody to call somebody."

He let go of the bar. The hiss came back.

He waited. The meters sat where they sat. He pressed the bar again and said it all over, slower, and added that he wasn't hurt anywhere else that he knew of, which wasn't true, and let go.

The hiss filled the room. Under it, nothing. He watched the needles behind the glass. He waited long enough to count to a hundred, and then he counted again, and the needles never moved.

At the end of the bench, on the gray box, the switch stayed up.

 

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