Keep On (3)
By SoulFire77
- 49 reads
He said it a third time, word for word, and let go of the bar.
The hiss came back. He had begun to hear things in it. A rise and fall like breathing, very far off, and now and then a tick, as if something small had touched the line somewhere between here and wherever the line went. None of it was a voice. He knew that. He listened anyway, with his head turned a little toward the cabinets, the way he used to listen for Bernie's car in the drive.
The flashlight lay on the bench with its face to the wall so the light came back soft. He had no watch. He had a furnace, which he could hear through the wall when it came on, and he had the vent up near the ceiling in the back corner, a square of grille the size of a book that let in air from under the porch and, until a while ago, a little gray. Now it let in nothing. Night again.
He pulled the green ledger over and opened it, because it was there and the radio wasn't saying anything.
The first page said STATION LOG in the square hand, and under it, smaller, H.T.
He knew those letters. They were on the deed. Hollis Teague, Estate Of. The bank had sold it to him that way, an estate sale with the furniture already gone and the rooms swept, and for the first year Hollis Teague had kept getting mail. Seed catalogs, a magazine about boats, envelopes from a credit union in Georgia. Martin had written DECEASED on them and put them back in the box. After a while they stopped.
The only thing he had ever heard about the man had come from Doris, years ago, on one of the first Thursdays. They had been driving past the house on the way back and she'd looked at it out her window and said he was a nice enough man who never once in his life turned off his porch light. Then she'd started in on her nephew, and that was all.
The log was ruled in columns. DATE. TIME ON. TIME OFF. FREQ. Then a narrow column at the right edge with no word at the top, only a letter.
R.
Every row was a night. Every night had the same number under FREQ, the number on the masking tape under the dial. The times ran from ten or eleven to one or two in the morning, sometimes later. And down the R column, row after row, a small neat check.
He thought at first R was for record, that the man had been taping himself and checked it off when the tape was put away. That seemed like the kind of thing a man would do who drew his tools on a board before he hung them. He turned the pages. Years of nights. The same hand, the same checks, the ink changing from black to blue and back.
Then he found a row with no check. Next to the empty box, in pencil, the man had written two words.
No R.
And three nights on, another. No R. And under that one, pressed so hard the pencil had dug a groove: No R. Called twice.
He sat back in the chair and the ribs told him not to, and he sat forward again.
So R was the other end. The man had been talking into this microphone at night for years, and almost every night somebody had answered him. The check was for that. The nights nobody answered, he wrote it down.
The hiss went on. Martin looked at it as if it were a face.
He thought about whoever had been on the other end all those nights. If they had been Teague's age, they would be old now, older than Martin. They might have moved away, or quit listening the first night nobody called, or the fortieth. Or they might be in the ground. He had no way to know which, and the hiss gave him nothing to go on.
He pressed the bar.
"This is the man in the basement again," he said. "I don't know if anybody's getting this. I'm going to tell you where I am, in case."
He told it the way you tell it to somebody from around here. Out the county road past the Albaugh place, past the bend, the white house set back behind the hedge, gravel drive. He said the basement door was off the hall and it stuck at the top. He said the front door wasn't locked, which he didn't know for certain, and then he said he thought it wasn't, and then he let go of the bar because he had heard himself and it was enough.
He waited. The meters sat.
Around what he guessed was midnight he did a thing he had been putting off. He took hold of the big dial.
It turned heavier than he expected, like a valve with sand in it. The needle came off the number on the tape and the hiss changed pitch, the way wind changes going past the corner of a house. He turned it slowly. Hiss, and a whistle that climbed and fell away, and hiss again. Further along there was a place where something like music came and went, too thin to be a song. Further still, two men talking fast in a language he didn't know. One of them laughed at something, and the other laughed back.
He pressed the bar and said he needed help. He said it twice, louder the second time. The two men went on talking to each other about whatever it was, and laughed again, and then the place went to hiss. When he turned back for it he couldn't find it.
He sat with his hand on the dial.
Then he turned it the other way, a little at a time, until the needle lay over the number on the tape. He held the flashlight close and moved it a hair left and a hair back until it sat dead center. For years, near enough every night, somebody had answered on this number. He couldn't say that for anywhere else on the dial.
The furnace came on and went off. He drank nothing because there was nothing in the room to drink. His mouth went dry again and he moved his tongue in it. He thought about the drain valve out past the door, and the hour it would take to get there on his elbows, and the hour to get back into the chair, and he stayed where he was.
He turned the log to the back.
The checks ran on. Then the last page with writing on it, and on that page six rows, and in the last row a date, and the times, and the number, and a check. Ordinary. Nothing after it but lines.
He read the date. He read it again and counted backward from this year on his fingers, the way he had counted to Thursday, and it came out twenty. And the month was March.
He had signed the papers in April.
He counted it a second time, slower, in case he had dropped a year somewhere. He hadn't. The last night Hollis Teague talked into this microphone, and somebody answered him, was five or six weeks before Martin stood in the empty kitchen upstairs with a realtor who kept apologizing for the smell of paint.
The bank had said estate. Nobody had said when. He had never asked.
He closed the book and put his hand flat on the cover.
Some time after that he talked again.
"I've got water," he said. "There's a heater out there with a drain on it. So I'm all right a while. I set my leg. There was a kit." He stopped. The bar was still down under his thumb and the room was quiet the way it got when he held it. He didn't let go. "There's a woman down the road I drive Thursdays. Doris. If somebody hears this, she's going to be on her porch Thursday at a quarter after seven and I'm not going to come, and she'll think I forgot. I never forgot once. Somebody ought to tell her."
He let go. He pressed again.
"My name is Martin Shoup. I should have said."
The leg had started a slow pounding under the splint, in no time with anything. He had brought the aspirin bottle in his shirt pocket. He shook two more into his palm and got them down with what spit he had, and laid his head on his arms on the bench, just for a minute.
Later, he didn't know how much later, he woke with his cheek on the bench beside the microphone and the flashlight gone yellow and dim. He switched it off to save it. In the dark the meters glowed, two small amber faces, and the hiss was the whole room.
He found the bar without the light.
"I painted this wall," he said. He hadn't known he was going to say anything. "Out there. Behind the heater. I painted right around that board and never took it down. My wife told me I missed a spot. She said nobody'd see it but that wasn't the point." He breathed the careful way. "I never did get that spot. Twenty years. She was right about it."
He started to say her name. He took his thumb off the bar instead, and the hiss came back over it.
He sat in the dark with the amber faces. The furnace came on. Up through the grille in the corner, faintly, a bird. Then another one. The grille went from black to the darkest gray there is.
The hiss changed.
He felt it before he heard it, the way you feel a truck on the road before it comes around the bend. The rise and fall he'd been listening to all night flattened out, and under it there was a sound like a room, some other room, with its own air in it.
The needle on the left-hand meter lifted off its pin.
Somebody on the other end cleared his throat. It was a small, careful sound, the sound of a man who had not used his voice yet that day and was checking that it was there.
"Good morning, Martin," the voice said.
It was a man's voice, older than his own or close to it, unhurried. It put the stresses in the wrong places, a little, the way somebody reads aloud who doesn't often have to.
Martin's hand found the bar and couldn't press it.
"You can rest now," the voice said. "You don't have to say it again. I heard you the first time."
Next Part:
Keep On (4) | ABCtales
- Log in to post comments