Keep On (4)

For a while he only held the microphone.

Under the hiss, on the other end, he could hear the room the man was in. A chair took weight and gave it back. Something heavy was set down on wood, a cup or a mug, and a moment later there was a sound he knew from his own kitchen. A kettle, somewhere behind the man, beginning to tick as it heated.

A kitchen. A man in a kitchen in the morning with the radio on.

Martin pressed the bar.

"Who is this?"

"Somebody who heard you," the voice said. "How is the leg?"

"Broken."

"I know it's broken. You said. I'm asking how it is."

Martin looked down at the tan wrapping and the stiff shape inside it. "It's splinted. There were splints."

"Good. That's good." The voice stopped and started again, as if it had been about to say more and decided against it. "You said you had water. From the heater."

"From the drain on it."

"He always said that water would keep a man a week. I never knew whether he'd tried it." A pause. "Is it bad? The water."

"It tastes like the tank."

"I'd imagine it does." The kettle was louder now. The man let it go on. "Drink more than you think you need. You'll want to save it. Don't. There's forty gallons in that tank, and you don't have forty gallons of time."

Martin let go of the bar and sat with that.

---

"Can you call somebody," he said. "An ambulance. The sheriff. Anybody."

"I could."

"Then call them."

The kettle on the other end began to whistle, low and climbing, and the chair took weight and gave it back, and the whistle stopped. Water poured. A spoon went around the inside of a cup three times and tapped twice on the rim. Martin listened to every bit of it.

"How long have you lived in that house, Martin?"

He told him. Twenty years in April.

"And in twenty years you never found that door."

"It was behind the heater."

"It was," the voice agreed. "And what made you look behind the heater, this time."

So he told it. The pilot. The slipper. The bulb with the moth on it. The phone face down on the counter and the alarm going off at ten after six with nobody to hear it. He hadn't meant to tell so much. Once he started it came out the way water comes out of a valve that hasn't been turned in a long time, rust first, then clear, and he didn't stop it. He told how he'd found the hinge with the lighter. How the kit had been on the towel. He said that part twice.

The voice let him finish. Then it said, kindly, "And you painted that wall."

Martin's thumb came off the bar.

"Twenty years ago," the voice went on. "Around his board, you said. Your wife told you you'd missed a spot. She was right about it. You told me she was right about it." A sip of something hot. "You were talking to me most of the night, Martin. I'm sorry I didn't say so sooner. I wanted to hear how you talked when you thought nobody was there."

---

The amber faces of the meters looked back at him.

He didn't know how long he sat. Long enough that the voice said his name once, gently, to see if he was there.

He pressed the bar. "You let me sit here all night."

"I did."

"I could have died down here."

"You weren't going to die last night. You had water and you had a chair. I listened to you get into it." The voice was patient, the way a man is patient explaining something he has explained before. "It took you most of an hour. I heard all of it."

The ribs did what they did when he breathed too deep, and he breathed shallower.

"Who are you," he said.

No answer for a while. The cup set down.

"There's a book on the bench," the voice said. "Green. Have you read it?"

"Some."

"Then you've seen the letter he kept at the end of every line."

"R," Martin said.

There was a sound on the other end that was nearly a laugh and was mostly breath. "Is that what he put." Then, quieter, almost to itself: "R. All those years." And then nothing, and Martin waited, and when the voice came back it had a different set to it, flatter, as if it had stood up from the table.

"I'll ask you to understand something. That frequency has been listened to by a number of people, over the years. Some of us because we wanted to, and some of us because we were paid. I don't expect you to sort out which is which. I couldn't always."

"Which are you?"

"I'm the one who answered."

---

He tried again later. He couldn't leave it alone.

"Did you know him? Teague."

"Hollis," the voice said. "Yes."

"Where is he?"

"Georgia." The answer came easily, the way a man gives the name of the town he grew up in. "He went home to Georgia. I go see him when I can. It's a long drive, but it's quiet when you get there." The cup lifted and set down. "He used to come on at eleven. Eleven o'clock, every night, near enough. You don't know what that was like, Martin, a voice like that in the dark. He'd talk about anything. The weather where he was. Things he'd seen, or thought he'd seen. I'd sit right here and listen and when he finished I'd say goodnight to him, and he'd put his check in his book. And then one night he didn't come on."

"In March."

"In March." A pause. "You did the arithmetic."

"Twice."

"So did I. For a long time. Every night at eleven I'd turn this radio on and sit here, and there'd be nothing on his number. Nothing but that box of his, doing what he built it to do." Something in the voice tightened and let go. "Twenty years. And then a man comes on at four o'clock on a Monday afternoon, from his room, on his set, saying he's fallen down the stairs."

"I did fall down the stairs."

"I know you did. I listened to you breathe."

---

He started to tell him the road.

He got as far as the county road and the voice cut across him, not loud, and he stopped.

"Don't. Please. Anyone can say an address, Martin. Anyone can sit in a room and tell me a road and a white house behind a hedge. You'd be surprised what people will say on that number, and where they'll ask a man to drive to." The chair creaked. "I'm not a young man. I drive a long way for nothing, or I drive a long way and somebody's waiting at the end of it who isn't a man with a broken leg. You understand. You'd do the same."

"Then what do you want."

"I want to believe you. I'd like to. You sound like what you say you are." The patience again. "There's a gray box at the end of that bench. Hollis built it. There's a switch on the front."

Martin turned his head. The flashlight was off, and he could just see the shape of it in the amber light, and the pale strip of tape above the switch.

"The one that says keep on," the voice said.

Martin didn't answer.

"For twenty years that box has done exactly what he asked of it. I'm asking you to turn it off."

"What does it do?"

"It keeps the room private." A breath. "He doesn't need it anymore. You do understand that. Nobody's going to come down those stairs looking for Hollis Teague."

Martin looked at the switch. He thought about the man who drew his tools on a board before he ever hung them, and printed two words on tape where nobody could miss them. Somebody who did that meant it.

"If I turn it off," he said, "you'll call somebody."

"If you turn it off, I'll know you're where you say you are. Then I'll know what to do."

---

He leaned over in the chair. The ribs closed down on him and held, and he waited them out with his hand halfway there, and then he reached the rest of the way.

The switch was stiff. Twenty years up. He put his thumb under it and pushed, and it went down with a small hard click, louder than it had any right to be.

Nothing happened that he could see. The meters didn't move. The hiss went on. Then it changed, the way the water from the drain valve had changed, from one thing to a clearer thing. It sounded nearer. As if a wall had been taken out from between him and wherever the hiss came from.

"Thank you," the voice said.

"Now call somebody."

"In a minute. Say something for me first. Anything you like. I want to hear it come in."

Martin pressed the bar. His mouth was dry and he worked it.

"I'm right here," he said.

The needle on the right-hand meter swung hard across its glass and stuck. A smell came up off the back of the cabinets, hot dust, the smell of the back of an old television. Out past the door, on the other side of the wall, something in the breaker box went with a sound like a knuckle cracking.

The meters went out. The hiss went with them. In the main basement, the bulb on its cord at the foot of the stairs went out, and the line of light it had laid across the threshold of the little room went out with it.

He sat in the chair in the dark with his thumb still on the bar.

He held it there for a long time. Then he took it off, and listened, and there was nothing in the room but his own breathing and, far off through the wall, the furnace starting up the way it always did.

 

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