Keep On (5)
By SoulFire77
- 47 reads
The first thing he did in the dark was find the switch.
He knew where it was. End of the bench, front of the gray box. He leaned for it the way he had leaned before, and the ribs closed and held, and he went on through them with his hand flat on the bench until his fingers found the cold metal and the toggle under the strip of tape. It was down, where he had put it.
He pushed it up.
It went with the same small hard click. He sat with his finger on it and listened. Nothing came on. The meters stayed dark. There was no hiss. He pushed it down and up again, quickly, the way you work a light switch in a room where the bulb has gone, knowing better and doing it anyway. Up. It stayed up. It didn't matter which way it pointed with nothing behind it.
He got the flashlight from the bench and turned it on. The beam came out yellow and short, a little circle on the wall that barely held its edge. He turned it off again.
The breaker box was on the wall at the foot of the stairs. He had thrown a breaker in it a dozen times in twenty years, standing on the bottom step with one hand on the rail. Gray metal door, a latch you had to thumb. Shoulder height on a man standing.
It took him a long time to get there. He went out past the heater and across the floor on his elbows, the same way he'd come, the splinted leg dragging a straighter line behind him than the broken one had. He stopped at the heater and drank from the drain, as much as the voice had told him, more than he wanted. It tasted the same. He went on.
At the foot of the stairs he rolled onto his back and switched on the flashlight and pointed it up.
There was the box, where it always was. From the floor it looked like something on a high shelf in a store, the kind of thing you have to ask somebody to reach for you.
The broom stood in the corner by the stairs where it had stood for years. He got it by the bristles and pulled it to him and lay with it across his chest. Then he raised the handle and found the door of the box with it and pushed at the latch.
It took a while. The handle slipped off the latch and rang against the metal, and slipped again, and his arms began to shake from holding the weight up. On the ninth or tenth try the latch gave and the gray door swung open on its hinge. He put the light on it. Two rows of black switches, and one of them, near the top on the left, sitting crooked in the middle of its slot, neither on nor off.
He knew what you did with a tripped breaker. You pushed it all the way off, hard, and then all the way back on. You needed a thumb for that. He put the end of the broom handle against it and pushed, and the handle skidded off and hit the switch below it, and that one went off with a snap, and somewhere upstairs the refrigerator quit.
He lay there holding the broom.
He tried twice more. The second time the handle came down across his face when his arms gave out, and he let it lie there, and after a while he moved it off himself and set it down on the concrete beside him, and didn't pick it up again.
Over his head the refrigerator stayed off. Now he had done that too.
He went back to the chair. He didn't think about why. The little room was the only place in the basement with somewhere to sit, and the radio was there, and if anybody ever came down those stairs and found the box and threw the switch, the meters would come up amber, and he wanted to be in front of them when they did.
It took most of an hour again. Less, maybe. He was getting better at it.
Tuesday. He worked it out from the light in the grille. Tuesday, and today Doris's nephew would be pulling into her drive in that loud truck of his, and Doris would be on the porch with her bag. Martin would be on Thursday's porch in two days, or not. The nephew would take her and bring her back. Neither of them would look up this road.
He had the flashlight on his knee. He didn't turn it on.
The shelves were there in the dark on two sides of him. He knew what was on them now as well as he knew his own kitchen. Boxes with lids, reels and cassettes. Notebooks in piles, every spine with a date on it in the square hand, and a word or two after the date. Twenty years of somebody's nights. He could have turned the light on them. Nobody would ever know. He sat with his hand on the flashlight and the shelves on both sides of him, and he didn't turn it on, and after a while it was easier.
The grille went from gray to gold, late in the day, and then to gray, and then to nothing.
He was asleep, or near it, when the light came through the grille.
It came from low down and to the left and swung across the little square and up the far wall of the room and went out. Headlights. In his drive. He heard the gravel then, under tires, slow, the way a car comes up a drive when the driver isn't sure of it. The engine ran a while. Then it stopped.
A car door, closed the way you close a door at night so as not to wake anybody.
He sat up in the chair and the ribs let him know.
Footsteps on the porch.
They were right over his head. He had forgotten that, or never thought about it. The room was under the porch, and the boards were thin, and he could hear every step a man took across them. Slow and even. A man who knew there was no hurry. The steps went to the front door and stopped.
He heard the storm door open. Then the front door itself, the one he'd said he thought was unlocked. It was.
The steps came inside and went on above him into the house. Across the front room. Into the hall. They stopped in the hall a while, long enough that he thought about the little table there and the photograph that leaned whenever the furnace came on, and whether it was leaning. Then they went on to the basement door.
He heard it stick. The man stood there and tried it once, the way anyone would, and then Martin heard him set his shoulder to it, the way Martin had for twenty years. The way Martin had told him, in the dark, on the air, that you had to.
The door gave.
A beam of light came down the stairs. White and strong, a good flashlight, nothing like the yellow one on his knee. It came down one step at a time with the man behind it. The stairs took his weight the way they took Martin's, the fourth one from the bottom saying something as he stepped on it.
The light crossed the basement floor. It found the broom lying there and stayed on it a moment. It found the slipper in the middle of the floor where Martin had left it on Monday. Then it went to the heater, and around the heater, and found the pegboard swung aside and the little door standing open behind it, and came through.
It lit him up in the chair. He shut his eyes against it and opened them.
The man behind it didn't say anything for a while. He held the light on Martin and then moved it, slowly, onto the bench, the radio and its dark meters. Onto the gray box at the end of the bench, and the switch, standing up.
"You put it back," the man said.
It was the voice. Here, in the room, it sounded smaller and older and had breath in it.
He came the rest of the way in, bent under the low door. Martin saw a dark coat buttoned to the neck, and gloved hands. The face above them was one he wouldn't have looked at twice in the feed store, gray at the temples, shaved close that morning. The man stepped past him to the end of the bench, reached out with one gloved finger, and pushed the switch on the gray box down. It made its small click. It didn't matter. He did it anyway, and then he stood for a moment with his hand resting flat on top of the box.
Then he turned and looked at Martin, and crouched down in front of the chair, and put the light on the leg.
"Somebody taught you that," he said.
"It was in the kit."
"I know where it was." He touched the splint with two gloved fingers, just at the edge of the wrap, the way a man touches a fence to see if it's hot. "It's good work. You'll keep the leg."
He looked past Martin then, at the doorway, where the towel still lay on the floor with the open kit beside it and the empty places in the row where the splints had been.
"He never got to it," he said.
He stood. He looked around the room once, all the way around, the light passing over the shelves and the boxes and the spines of the notebooks with their dates. He didn't stop on any of it. He looked the way a man looks at a room he is about to leave.
"Let's get you upstairs, Martin."
He didn't carry him. He couldn't have. He got behind Martin on the floor of the basement and put his arms under Martin's arms and locked his gloved hands across Martin's chest, below the ribs, and went up the stairs backward, sitting, one step at a time, pulling Martin up after him with the splinted leg bumping each tread. He breathed hard and didn't hurry. On each step he stopped and said "Good," and then they went up another.
At the top Martin saw his own hall. The front room beyond it with a lamp on that he hadn't left on. The little table, and the photograph on it, leaning.
The man got him to the kitchen and into the chair at the table, the one Martin always sat in, facing the window. He turned on the light over the sink. He ran the tap, and it ran cold, and he filled a glass from the cupboard where the glasses were, the first cupboard he opened, and set it in front of Martin with his gloves still on.
Martin drank all of it. The man filled it again.
Then he pulled out the other chair, the one nobody had sat in for nine years, and sat down across from Martin, and unbuttoned the top button of his coat. He looked at his watch.
"There," he said. "The fire department will be here soon."
Martin held the glass in both hands and let his shoulders down for the first time since Sunday.
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Keep On (6) | ABCtales
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