Damned If I Do (3 page)

It began when Sherman offered and then repaired a small radio-controlled automobile owned by a fat boy.

The fat boy, who wore his hair in braids, came into the shop with two of his skinny friends. They sat at the counter and ordered a large soda to split.

“This thing is a piece of crap,” the fat boy said. His name was Loomis Rump.

“I told you not to spend your money on that thing,” one of the skinny kids said.

“Shut up,” said Loomis.

“Timmy’s right, Loomis,” the third boy said. He sucked the last of the soda through the straw. “That’s a cheap one. The good remote controls aren’t made of that thin plastic.”

“What do you know?” Loomis said. Loomis pushed his toy another few inches away from him across the counter, toward Sherman. Sherman looked at it, then picked it up.

Douglas was watching from the register. He observed as Sherman held the car up to the light and seemed to smile.

“Just stopped working, eh?” Sherman said to the boys.

“It’s a piece of crap,” Loomis said.

“Would you like me to fix it?” Sherman asked.

Douglas stepped closer, thinking this time he might see how the repair was done. Loomis handed the remote to Sherman. Douglas stared intently at the man’s hands. Sherman took out his pocketknife and used the small blade to undo the Phillips-head screws in order to remove the back panel from the remote control. Then it was all a blur. Douglas saw nothing and then Sherman was replacing the panel.

“There you go,” Sherman said and gave the car and controller back to Loomis.

Loomis Rump laughed. “You didn’t even do nothing,” he said.

“Anything,” Sherman corrected him.

Loomis put the car on the floor and switched on the remote. The car rolled away, nearly tripping a postal worker, and crashed to a stop at the door. It capsized, but its wheels kept spinning.

“Hey, hey,” the skinny boys shouted.

“Thanks, mister,” Loomis said.

The boys left.

Fat Loomis Rump and his skinny pals told their friends and they brought in their broken toys. Sherman fixed them. The fat boy’s friends told their parents and Douglas found his shop increasingly crowded with customers and their small appliances.

“The Rump boy told me that you fixed his toy car and the Johnson woman told me that you repaired her radio,” the short man who wore the waterworks uniform said.

Sherman was wiping down the counter.

“Is that true?”

Sherman nodded.

“Well, you see these cuts on my face?”

Douglas could see the cuts under the man’s three-day growth of stubble from the door to the kitchen. Sherman leaned forward and studied the wounds.

“They seem to be healing nicely,” Sherman said.

“It’s this damn razor,” the man said and he pulled the small unit from his trousers pocket. “It cuts me bad every time I try to shave.”

“You’d like me to fix your razor?”

“If you wouldn’t mind. But I don’t have any money.”

“That’s okay.” Sherman took the razor and began taking it apart. Douglas, as always, moved closer and tried to see. He smiled at the waterworks man who smiled back. Other people gathered around and watched Sherman’s hands. Then they watched him hand the reassembled little machine back to the waterworks man. The man turned on the shaver and put it to his face.

“Hey,” he said. “This is wonderful. It works just like it did when it was new. This is wonderful. Thank you. Can I bring you some money tomorrow?”

“Not necessary,” Sherman said.

“This is wonderful.”

Everyone in the restaurant oohed and aahed.

“Look,” the waterworks man said. “I’m not bleeding.”

Sherman sat quietly at the end of the counter and fixed whatever was put in front of him. He repaired hair dryers and calculators and watches and cellular phones and carburetors. And while people waited for the repairs, they ate sandwiches and this appealed to Sherman, though he didn’t like his handyman’s time so consumed. But the fact of the matter was that there was little more to fix in the shop.

One day a woman who believed her husband was having an affair came in and complained over a turkey and provolone on wheat. Sherman sat next to her at the counter and listened as she finished, “… and then he comes home hours after he’s gotten off from work, smelling of beer and perfume and he doesn’t want to talk or anything and says he has a sinus headache and I’m wondering if I ought to follow him or check the mileage on his car before he leaves in the morning. What should I do?”

“Tell him it’s his turn to cook and that you’ll be late and don’t tell him where you’re going,” Sherman said.

Everyone in the shop nodded, more in shared confusion than in agreement.

“Where should I go?” the woman asked.

“Go to the library and read about the praying mantis,” Sherman said.

Douglas came up to Sherman after the woman had left and asked, “Do you think that was a good idea?”

Sherman shrugged.

The woman came in the next week, her face full with a smile and announced that her home life was now perfect.

“Everything at home is perfect now,” she said. “Thanks to Sherman.”

Customers slapped Sherman on the back.

So began a new dimension of fixing in the shop as people came in, along with their electric pencil sharpeners, pacemakers, and microwaves, their relationship woes, and their tax problems. Sherman saved the man who owned the automotive-supply business across the street twelve thousand dollars and got him some fifty-seven dollars in refund.

One night after the shop was closed, Douglas and Sherman sat at the counter and ate the stale leftover doughnuts and drank coffee. Douglas looked at his handyman and shook his head. “That was really something the way you straightened the Rhinehart boy’s teeth.”

“Physics,” Sherman said.

Douglas washed down a dry bite and set his cup on the counter. “I know I’ve asked you before, but we’ve known each other longer now. How did you learn to fix things?”

“Fixing things is easy. You just have to know how things work.”

“That’s it,” Douglas said more than asked.

Sherman nodded.

“Doesn’t it make you happy to do it?”

Sherman looked at Douglas, questioning.

“I ask because you never smile.”

“Oh,” Sherman said and took another bite of doughnut.

The next day Sherman fixed a chain saw and a laptop computer and thirty-two parking tickets. Sherman, who had always been quiet, became increasingly more so. He would listen, nod, and fix the problem. That evening, a few minutes before closing, just after Sherman had solved the Morado woman’s sexual-identity problem, two paramedics came in with a patient on a stretcher.

“This is my wife,” the more distressed of the ambulance men said of the supine woman. “She’s been hit by a car and she died in our rig on the way to the hospital,” he cried.

Sherman looked at the woman, pulling back the blanket.

“She had massive internal—”

Sherman stopped the man with a raised hand, pulled the blanket off and then threw it over himself and the dead woman. Douglas stepped over to stand with the paramedics.

Sherman worked under the blanket, moving this way and that way, and then he and the woman emerged, alive and well. The paramedic hugged her.

“You’re alive,” the man said to his wife.

The other paramedic shook Sherman’s hand. Douglas just stared at his handyman.

“Thank you, thank you,” the husband said, crying.

The woman was confused, but she, too, offered Sherman thanks.

Sherman nodded and walked quietly away, disappearing into the kitchen.

The paramedics and the restored woman left. Douglas locked the shop and walked into the kitchen where he found Sherman sitting on the floor with his back against the refrigerator.

“I don’t know what to say,” Douglas said. His head was swimming. “You just brought that woman back to life.”

Sherman’s face looked lifeless. He seemed drained of all energy. He lifted his sad face up to look at Douglas.

“How did you do that?” Douglas asked.

Sherman shrugged.

“You just brought a woman back to life and you give me a shrug?” Douglas could hear the fear in his voice. “Who are you? What are you? Are you from outer space or something?”

“No,” Sherman said.

“Then what’s going on?”

“I can fix things.”

“That wasn’t a thing,” Douglas pointed out. “That was a human being.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Douglas ran a hand over his face and just stared down at Sherman. “I wonder what Sheila will say.”

“Please don’t tell anyone about this,” Sherman said.

Douglas snorted out a laugh. “Don’t tell anyone. I don’t have to tell anyone. Everyone probably knows by now. What do you think those paramedics are out doing right now? They’re telling anybody and everybody that there’s some freak in Langley’s Sandwich Shop who can revive the dead.”

Sherman held his face in his hands.

“Who are you?”

News spread. Television-news trucks and teams camped outside the front door of the sandwich shop. They were waiting with cameras ready when Douglas showed up to open for business the day following the resurrection.

“Yes, this is my shop,” he said. “No, I don’t know how it was done,” he said. “No, you can’t come in just yet,” he said.

Sherman was sitting at the counter waiting, his face long, his eyes red as if from crying.

“This is crazy,” Douglas said.

Sherman nodded.

“They want to talk to you.” Douglas looked closely at Sherman. “Are you all right?”

But Sherman was looking past Douglas and through the front window where the crowd was growing ever larger.

“Are you going to talk to them?” Douglas asked.

Sherman shook his sad face. “I have to run away,” he said. “Everyone knows where I am now.”

Douglas at first thought Sherman was making cryptic reference to the men who had been beating him that night long ago, but then realized that Sherman meant simply
everyone.

Sherman stood and walked into the back of the shop. Douglas followed him, not knowing why, unable to stop himself. He followed the man out of the store and down the alley, away from the shop and the horde of people.

Sherman watched the change come over Douglas and said, “Of course not.”

“But you—” The rest of Douglas’s sentence didn’t have a chance to find air as he was once again repeating Sherman’s steps.

They ran up this street and across that avenue, crossed bridges and scurried through tunnels and no matter how far away from the shop they seemed to get, the chanting remained, however faint. Douglas finally asked where there were going and confessed that he was afraid. They were sitting on a bench in the park and it was by now just after sundown.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Sherman said. “I only need to get away from all of them.” He shook his head and said, more to himself, “I knew this would happen.”

“If you knew this would happen, why did you fix all of those things?”

“Because I can. Because I was asked.”

Douglas gave nervous glances this way and that across the park. “This has something to do with why the men were beating you that night, doesn’t it?”

“They were from the government or some businesses, I’m not completely sure,” Sherman said. “They wanted me to fix a bunch of things and I said no.”

“But they asked you,” Douglas said. “You just told me—”

“You have to be careful about what you fix. If you fix the valves in an engine, but the bearings are shot, you’ll get more compression, but the engine will still burn up.” Sherman looked at Douglas’s puzzled face. “If you irrigate a desert, you might empty a sea. It’s a complicated business, fixing things.”

Douglas said, “So, what do we do now?”

Sherman was now weeping, tears streaming down his face and curving just under his chin before falling to the open collar of his light blue shirt. Douglas watched him, not believing that he was seeing the same man who had fixed so many machines and so many relationships and so many businesses and concerns and even fixed a dead woman.

Sherman raised his tear-filled eyes to Douglas. “I am the empty sea,” he said.

The chanting became louder and Douglas turned to see the night dotted with yellow-orange torches. The quality of the chanting had become strained and there was an urgency in the intonation that did not sound affable.

The two men ran, Douglas pushing Sherman, as he was now so engaged in sobbing that he had trouble keeping on his feet. They made it to the big bridge that crossed the bay and stopped in the middle, discovering that at either end thousands of people waited. They sang their dirge into the dark sky, their flames winking.

“Fix us!” they shouted. “Fix us! Fix us!”

Sherman looked down at the peaceful water below. It was a long drop that no one could hope to survive. He looked at Douglas.

Douglas nodded.

The masses of people pressed in from either side.

Sherman stepped over the railing and stood on the brink, the toes of his shoes pushed well over the edge.

“Don’t!” they all screamed. “Fix us! Fix us!”

House

The doctor leaned back, the brown leather upholstery of his chair visible above his head, smiled, and said, “And what are you thinking as you look at me now?”