Good Buddy (1)

He came up out of sleep at ten past twelve with the fan going and the room the color of a paper bag.

The blinds in the front bedroom were the ones Sheryl had picked out the year before she left, two-inch faux wood, and they closed better than anything else in the house. Through them the day was a set of thin lines laid across the dresser. He lay there a minute and listened to the street. A mower somewhere down toward the circle. A truck idling, then not idling. Somebody's dog putting in its two cents about the truck.

The plant ran him eleven to seven, four nights on, and Thursday was the first day of his weekend. He got up. The kitchen tile was still warm from the sun coming through the door glass, which it would not be in three weeks, and he stood on it in his socks and filled the pot.

His phone was face up on the counter where he had left it at seven-thirty.

Did you ever get that smoke detector sorted?

His daughter had sent it at 9:04, which was the middle of the night as far as he was concerned. The one in the hall had started chirping in August and he had taken the battery out and the chirping had stopped, and he had told Lindsay that on the phone, and she had not liked it, and she was right not to. He looked at the message with the pot filling behind him. Then he turned the phone over and set it face down on the counter and got a cup out of the cabinet.

He drank the first cup standing up. The second he took out onto the front step.

It was eighty-one degrees at half past twelve on the seventeenth of September and the air had that thick green smell it gets when everybody on a street mows within a day of each other. Two doors up, the Bunches had their windows open. He could hear a television going in there, some daytime thing with a studio audience, and under it the sound of a washing machine at the end of a cycle.

Down at the circle a kid was riding a bike in figure eights with no particular plan.

The mail had not come. The bin was still at the curb from Tuesday, standing where the truck had left it with the lid up. He looked at it for a while over the top of the cup.

He went in and got dressed and drove to the hardware on Bell Road for a nine-volt battery and a bag of the cheap birdseed, and when he came back at two the bin was still at the curb and the mail had come. He got the mail. He left the bin.

There was a flyer on the doormat.

It was under the edge of the mat by about an inch, the way you put something down so it will not blow, and the rest of it lay flat on the concrete with the corner turned up in the heat. Cheap paper. Half-sheet, run off on a copier by somebody who knew how to center a heading and had then given up on the rest of it.

 

WILLOW ROAD CHURCH

408 Willow Road

You are invited to a

SERVICE

Saturday October 31st

Doors open 6:30 pm

Service 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Everyone welcome

Parking in back - please use side door

 

No phone number. No name at the bottom. No little cross in the corner or a picture of a family in a field or any of that. The top edge was soft and gone gray, the way paper goes when it has been carried a while against a thumb.

In the white space at the bottom, in blue ballpoint, somebody had written:

Front step is a little loose on the left, careful.

He read it twice. Then he stood on the step and shifted his weight over onto his left foot, and the concrete did not move, because it was concrete, and then he understood that it was the wooden step below it that was meant, the one he had put in himself in 2011 when the old one rotted out, and he went down onto that one and put his weight on the left side and felt it give about a quarter inch and come back.

He did it twice more.

Across the street Ellis Furr came out and got into his car and raised a hand, and he raised one back, and Ellis backed down the drive and was gone, and the whole exchange took four seconds and had taken four seconds every time for nine years.

He took the flyer inside and put it on the counter next to the mail and the battery, and it stayed there.

---

At twenty to seven the light was still good.

He had the hall detector down off its bracket and the new battery in his shirt pocket and both hands over his head when the knock came, and he said a word he would not have said in front of his daughter and got the thing seated and came down the hall with the ladder still standing under it.

Through the storm door there was a man about his own age in a golf shirt, holding a half-sheet of paper rolled into a tube, already smiling.

"Hey — sorry. Bad time?"

"No."

"I saw the ladder through the glass. I'll come back."

"It's a smoke detector."

"Oh, those things." The man rolled his eyes in a friendly way, a whole performance about smoke detectors, and then put out his hand at the level of the door before the door was open, so that Roger had to push it and take the hand at the same time. "Wayne Craver. I'm the brick ranch, four down, the one with the boat that never goes anywhere."

"Roger Mabe."

"I know it. Well — I know the truck." He let go. "You work nights."

"Third."

"See, that's what I figured. Your truck's gone when I get up and it's back when I'm having my coffee." He laughed at nothing in particular. He was a man laughing on a step at twenty to seven.

Somewhere behind him a grill lid came down with that hollow sound.

"Anyway." He held up the rolled paper. "You get one of these?"

"On the mat."

"Okay, good." He unrolled it, glanced at it, rolled it back up. "They don't really do online, that church. They print like fifty of them and walk them around. I said I'd take our road."

"That right."

"It's four streets. I've been three evenings on it." He looked past Roger's shoulder into the hall. "You get the little candy people down here on Halloween? We used to get thirty, forty. Last couple years it's been more."

"Some."

"We do the whole thing. My wife does. She's got a fog machine now, God help me." He said it with a kind of pride. "You're welcome to come stand in the yard and eat our candy if you want. That's what I do."

Roger turned the doorknob under his hand and did not say anything, and the pause went about a second and a half, and Wayne filled it without appearing to notice there had been one.

"Listen, I'll let you get back to your ladder. I just wanted to put a face to it. Nine years and I've waved at you about four thousand times." He was already backing down the step, and he stopped on the wooden one and pointed at it with the rolled flyer. "There you go. Feel that?"

"I felt it."

"It's the stringer, probably. Underneath. You get water down in there where it meets the concrete and it goes soft on you and you don't know it until somebody heavy comes up." He grinned. "I'm somebody heavy."

"I'll get under there and look."

"I've got a bar and a bag of Sakrete been sitting in my garage since Easter." He said it lightly, throwing it away, already turning. "Anyway. Good to meet you finally, good buddy."

He went off down the walk. At the road he stopped and turned around and walked backwards three or four steps.

"Hey — did I write on yours? I've been writing on some of them. My wife says it's weird."

"You wrote on mine."

"Yeah, I do that." He shrugged with both hands out, one still holding the flyer. "Feels less like junk mail."

Then he turned around and went on up the road, and two houses along he said something to a woman dragging a hose across her yard and she laughed, and he kept going.

Roger stood in the doorway a while.

Down at the circle there were four or five of them out now on scooters and one of those plastic cars, and the light had gone long and orange across the fronts of the houses on the east side, and one of the kids had shoes with the velcro that ripped open loud enough to hear from here. Eight minutes to seven and still hot. A dryer was running somewhere close and putting out that clean cooked smell across two yards.

He went in and got the ladder put away.

---

He ate a sandwich standing at the counter at half past eight and watched the street go blue.

The bin was still at the curb. He could see it from the kitchen window at an angle through the front room, the black shape of it against the Furrs' hedge, and he thought about it the way you think about a thing you have already decided you are going to do tomorrow.

His phone was where he had left it that morning, face down. He turned it over.

Did you ever get that smoke detector sorted?

He typed Got it fixed, and looked at it, and added finally, and sent it, and it went out with the little sound at eleven hours and twenty-six minutes after she had asked. She would be putting her girls down about now. She would see it in the morning.

He put the phone in his shirt pocket.

The flyer was still on the counter under the mail. He moved the mail off it and looked at it again, at the two different ways it gave the time, the 6:30 pm and the 7:00PM, at please use side door with the lowercase letters, at the good half inch of white space at the bottom, and the six words in it in blue ballpoint.

He put it up on the refrigerator under the magnet from the tire place, which was where things went that he had not decided about.

At twenty of eleven he came out with his keys and his lunch, and it had finally started to cool, and the porch lights were on up and down and there were still two kids out somewhere hollering at each other behind a house. Somewhere back in the trees behind the Bunches' a cicada was going, one of them, late in the year for it, running its long dry note up and letting it fall.

He stopped at the truck.

Then he went back up the walk and stood on the bottom step and put his weight on the left side of it, and it gave, and came back, and he stood there in the dark doing it again with the truck door open behind him and the dome light burning.

 

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