Homebody: A Novel (15 page)

He turned on the skillsaw again and polished off all but the two end studs. With them there was the danger of biting too deep and damaging the structural timber behind them. When the studs were reduced to a row of stalactites dangling from the ceiling and a row of stalagmites rising up from the floor, Don set down the skillsaw and picked up the sledgehammer. Positioning himself like a golfer, standing between studs, he took aim and swung, striking a stud low, near the floor. The nails gave way and the stud flew, clattering against the kitchen wall. He struck again, again, again, ducking and dodging the dangling studs as he went. To get the last few, though, he had to face the other way. "You got to move now," he said, "or one of these suckers is going to hit you."

"I'm quick," she said. "I can dodge."

"Nobody's that quick and just humor me, OK?" He felt the anger building back up inside him.

Maybe she felt it too, because she ducked back into the doorway. That was enough for a margin of safety. He knocked out the last two stalagmites. Then he started in on the dangling studs, swinging high like a lousy Little Leaguer who hasn't learned not to try for obvious over-the-head balls. Each stud clattered across the floor until they were all gone. Now what remained were two long strips of wood screwed to the floor and spiked to the ceiling, with bent nails sticking out of them where the two-by-fours had been attached. Don pried them away from the house with his wrecking bar, then peeled the two end studs away from the walls, and the room was one big space again.

Don stood there, panting a little, sweating. He looked over at Sylvie. She smiled at him and said, "The superhero saves the room."

"Just call me Hammer Man," he said.

She walked into the room and turned around, arms wide as if reaching for the walls. "It's so big."

"This is the room that Bellamy built." Don looked around at the timbers, denuded of lath and plaster. "Of course he meant it to look a little more finished, but the size is right."

"So from now on," she said, "you'll be putting things back in this room instead of tearing it apart."

"A little more tearing," he said. "Here and there. Get the lath and plaster off the walls. Remove the moldings, get the drywall up. But yes, when I'm done it'll look as good as it did when Bellamy brought Mrs. B. upstairs for the first time."

"There," she said. "I thought so."

Yeah, she was still a loon.

He gathered up two-by-fours and carried them down in armfuls and heaped them on the junkpile. As for the ones with nails sticking out, he took the time to remove what nails he could and hammer the others flat. No point in getting sued by the parents of some kid who got a spike through his foot because he couldn't stay off the junkpile.

It was probably his next-to-last trip to the curb when he came back into the house to find Carville in the entryway, sitting on the bottom step. "I'm ready to haul that old water heater out," he said. "Actually, I was ready a while ago, but I been inspecting the rest of your plumbing and heating while you calmed down some."

"Calmed down?" asked Don.

"When I came to the door to get you a while back it looked like you was having a scene out there with some guy in a suit. Admit it, you was just showing off for the woman."

Don was embarrassed. Cindy hadn't been the only one watching. "You just saw what I do when I don't kill a guy."

"There was a minute there when I thought maybe he wished you would."

"I just don't know my own strength."

"Good thing, cause I was right about that water heater. So limed up we oughta have a winch to get it out."

"Instead you've got the Man of Steel." Hammer Man, he thought, and almost smiled.

"Batman and Lark."

"Funny."

Down in the basement, the old water heater lay like a corpse on the floor. Carville shone his flashlight around the pipes amid the joists overhead. "These are solid. You might as well keep using them, because taking them out wouldn't be worth the pain."

"They're strong then? Nothing corroded through?"

"If a nuclear bomb flattened this whole town, these pipes would still be hanging up there in the air."

"Yeah, they built this place solid."

"Any new pipes, now," said Carville. "Some of these bathrooms and kitchens was put in more recent than the others. Got cheaper pipes running along here and over here."

"Yeah, but I won't need those now, they'll come on out."

"You didn't need me to tell you this stuff."

"Wanted to make sure I was right," said Don. "And I'm not a furnace guy."

"Yeah, well, this gas furnace, don't ever hook it up, it'll kill you the first night."

"Bad, huh?"

"I sealed off the line till you can get a new one installed." Carville walked over and rapped his flashlight against the ancient coal furnace that must have been put in when the house was first built, because there was no way it could have been brought down the stairs. "This coal furnace," said Carville. "Man, it's big enough to heat one of those college buildings."

"Yeah, I figured I'd just leave it down here."

"Good choice. You know, I bet it would still work great. If you could stand shoveling the coal."

"Or find anybody to deliver it," said Don.

"Oh, they still do, you know. There's still a few coal trucks in the world." Carville walked around behind the furnace. "What I can't figure out is what this was for."

"What?" asked Don. He followed Carville and saw at once what he was indicating. There was a gap in the foundation behind the furnace. It was filled with rubble, but not haphazardly—somebody had plugged a hole. No, a doorway.

"I never actually looked back there. I mean, who'd break the foundation behind the furnace?"

"It was probably a root cellar or something," said Carville.

But Don knew that nobody would put a root cellar where you had to walk behind a blazing furnace to get to it. "Couldn't be a coal bin either, could it."

"No, the chute's over there. Oh, well, you never can figure out some of the weird things people do with their houses."

"It doesn't weaken the foundation, does it?"

"Not with that beam over the gap. Looks to me like this was here when the house was originally built. It wasn't added in later."

"Well, someday when I'm feeling more ambitious I'll dig it out and see what's behind there," said Don.

"Tell you what, don't call me in on that job."

"I wouldn't dream of it. All that's back there is Al Capone's vault anyway."

"Nice working with you, Geraldo," said Carville. "Now pick up your end of this chunk of limestone and let's get it out of here."

They were both strong men but they had to rest twice, getting the old water heater out. And getting it onto the junkpile had them both dripping with sweat and panting like fat old men jogging for the first time.

"I've been younger," said Carville.

"Yeah, but you were stupid then."

"But I didn't know I was stupid," said Carville. "I knew you were stupid, though."

"Go home, man, you've given me half the day, I can't afford any more."

"Hot water'll be ready in an hour or two."

"You did the electrical too?"

"I'm a full-service heating and plumbing and air-conditioning guy."

"That's why you're such a babe magnet."

"Naw. It's my pipe wrench."

"Take your tiny little pipe wrench and go," said Don.

A few more dumb jokes and Carville was on his way. It was a friendship that began in high school, and that was the level it was still at. Which was OK. That was all he needed from the guy.

The shower was all he'd hoped it would be. The new shower head didn't pulsate or anything like that, but it delivered a stream of water so intense it tingled and that was fine with Don. It was nice to shower in a tub he'd cleaned himself, instead of those truck-stop showers, which always felt kind of clammy and slimy and fungusy.

And then to pull back the shower curtain and dry off on his own clean new towel and put on a new bathrobe and slippers—it was downright domestic. From now on living here wouldn't feel like camping anymore.

Down in the parlor, he was just finishing buttoning his shirt when he heard Sylvie's voice from the hall. "Knock knock?" she asked.

"I'm decent," he said.

She came in. He sat down on the cot and started putting on socks. "Clean clothes," he said. "You ought to try it sometime."

"The dress isn't as dirty as it looks," she said. "After a while, the old grime builds up so thick the new grime just brushes right off. Sort of Teflon clothes."

"Bet we can market
that
and make a killing."

She smiled wanly.

"I left the soap and shampoo in the shower. Be careful cause it gets really hot now."

"I can hardly wait," she said. "You clean up nice."

He didn't know what to say. "Thanks." And then he had to change the subject. "Now that I'm cleaned up, I'm going over to call on those old ladies next door."

"I thought you said they were crazy."

"Yeah, but they really cook. Want to come, see if we can wangle two snacks for the price of none?"

She shook her head. "I'll stay here."

"They told me I could ask them if I had any questions about the house. They used to live here. Before you"

"What question are you going to ask them?" asked Sylvie.

"There's a gap in the foundation behind the old coal furnace. Might have been a root cellar or something."

"It's nothing."

"People don't leave a gap in their foundation for nothing, Sylvie." His shoes now tied, he got up and headed for the door. "I'm locking up behind me," he said. "You've got your key?"

She took it out of the wilted little pocket in her sad blue dress and held it up for him to see. "Thanks," she said.

He stepped out and closed and locked the door.

Sylvie listened to the dead-bolt close. She didn't need the key. She knew the house would open for her whenever she asked. But it still mattered to her. The key meant that he was admitting she belonged there.

But just because she felt better about things didn't mean the house did. She had tried and tried to calm it all afternoon, but the removal of that wall had been traumatic. "It's cosmetic surgery," she explained. "That wall was a goiter. It hurts to have it removed, but you're glad it's gone. The room is beautifully proportioned now, and the windows are in just the right places on the wall."

She heard a sliding sound and turned to see Don's wrecking bar creeping toward the hall. "Stop it," she said. "He'll just find it anyway, and he'll think I moved it."

The wrecking bar stopped.

"I've got to look into this shower thing," she said. "I vaguely remember that cleanliness was next to godliness. But will it ruin the bounce in my hair?" She walked out of the room, up the stairs.

As soon as she left, the wrecking bar slid on out of the room and down the hall. And the workbench moved even closer to the cot, butting right up against it, sliding it an inch or so out of position. Then all was still in the parlor once again.

Garlic

The Weird sisters acted as if Don's coming over that afternoon were a visit from royalty. Well, to a point—presumably they wouldn't have had Prince Charles sit down in the kitchen with a cup of tea while he watched them prepare bread and a bean-and-bacon soup for that night's supper. But apart from the setting, they couldn't have fussed more over him or spoken more solicitously if he had been the prince himself. Don couldn't decipher their game, other than his certainty that they still hadn't given up hope of him abandoning his renovation of the Bellamy house.

"The secret," Miz Evelyn was saying, "is to use only a
dash
of seasoning, just the faintest hint of it. That way you don't smother the natural flavors of the stock and the vegetables."

"Miss Evvie," said Miz Judea, up to her elbows in bread dough, "will you be a dear and put away the flour and sugar bins for me so I have room to lay out the loaves?"

Miz Evelyn stepped away from the stove and picked up the two bins from the table. As she headed for the pantry, she went on with her commentary. "If I let Miss Judy here make the soup, she'd drown everything in garlic and peppers."

While Miz Evelyn was out of sight, Miz Judea rushed to the spice rack, grabbed a jar of garlic powder, popped off the shaker top and poured about a third of it into the soup. Then she replaced the top, set it back in its place on the rack, and returned to her bread before Miz Evelyn came back in from the pantry.

"Miss Judy's a wonderful cook," said Miz Evelyn, "but she has no subtlety."

Miz Evelyn stirred the soup pot, then lifted the wooden spoon to take a taste. "There," said Miz Evelyn. "Just the right amount of garlic. You can only just barely taste it."

"That's why Gladys likes Miss Evvie to make the soup," said Miz Judea. "Garlic makes her fart, the poor dear." She looked at Don with a steady gaze—did not so much as wink.

There is no untangling the complicated webs they weave in this house, he thought. Maybe it was time to get down to business. "You ladies told me that if I have any questions about that house..."

"Oh, we'll know the answer," said Miz Judea. "Or Gladys will, anyway."

"Well I was down in the cellar with the heating and plumbing contractor, and we noticed there was a break in the foundation behind the old coal furnace. It's all plugged up with rubble, but I wondered if maybe it was a root cellar or—"

"He found it!" crowed Miz Evelyn with delight.

"Took you long enough," said Miz Judea.

"Well I wasn't looking for it," said Don. "What is it?"

Miz Evelyn's voice got low and conspiratorial. "A rum runner's tunnel."

"That house was a speakeasy during Prohibition," said Miz Judea. "They'd sneak the booze up the tunnel from that gully out back."

"And whenever the cops raided the place," said Miz Evelyn, "they'd sneak the city council out through the tunnel."

The two of them broke up laughing at the memory.

"Oh, those were the days, those were the days," said Miz Judea.

"You were here then?"

Miz Evelyn answered him. "Both of us came here in '28. Shared a room upstairs."

"The one you been tearing apart," said Miz Judea. "Feels so good."

"You lived in a speakeasy?" asked Don.

"We weren't in the speakeasy part," said Miz Judea.

"We were in the bordello part," said Miz Evelyn.

Don couldn't think of a thing to say about that. But his silence was an answer all the same. Miz Judea laughed and hooted, while Miz Evelyn clucked her tongue and shook her head.

"What's so shocking?" said Miz Judea. "We were ladies of the night. It got me out of a sharecropper's cabin and it got Miz Evvie down from the mountain."

"Sorry," said Don. "I... you just don't look like..."

"He can't imagine us being young and pretty enough," said Miz Evelyn.

Judea slapped another loaf into shape and dropped it into a well-oiled pan. And another—slap slap slap slap slop and she slid the breadpan aside and pulled over the next.

"It was fun at first," said Miz Judea. "An adventure. All those men with money, clean-smelling. You got to remember where we were from. But when we got tired of it, lo and behold, the house wouldn't let us go. Prohibition ended and it became just an old whorehouse and the men got worse and worse and we were
stuck
. Then my young cousin Gladys came looking for me."

"It was Gladys who got us out," said Miz Evelyn.

"The house still holds onto us, though," said Miz Judea. "We could never get farther than this carriagehouse."

"Not for long," added Miz Evelyn.

"Once a strong house like that gets hold of you, it takes real power to get free. Gladys, now, she—"

Don set down his teacup. "Ladies, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but have you really been living next door to that house all these years because you believe it has some kind of magical hold over you?"

"Oh, he's an
educated
man," said Miz Evelyn, as if this were a well-known joke.

"I know, I know," said Miz Judea. "Young and skeptical."

So they were back to the mumbo-jumbo. Well, Don knew what he had come to find out—that gap in the cellar wall was a secret back door with a tunnel leading down to the gully. Someday it might be worth digging out the rubble and exploring it, but in all likelihood it had long since collapsed inside and what he really ought to do was seal it over so it didn't make a prospective buyer nervous. He pushed back his chair. "Thanks for answering my question, ladies. And for the tea."

Miz Evelyn was crestfallen. "Are you sure you won't stay for some of this soup?"

"No, sorry," said Don. "Too much garlic. Makes me fart."

Miz Evelyn looked shocked and offended. Out of the corner of his eye, Don caught Miz Judea's glare—she could no doubt cook a goose in flight with a look like that, and baste it, too. So Don grinned at Miz Evelyn and rose from the table. "I was joking, Miz Evelyn. I have no doubt your soup would be so good I'd eat it all and leave nothing for the two of you."

"Three," said Miz Judea, a bit of acid in her tone.

"Oh, Mr. Lark, you joker!" said Miz Evelyn. "What a caution!"

Don tipped his nonexistent hat to Miz Judea, then to Miz Evelyn. "Ladies, you are a constant marvel and I'm glad to have you as neighbors, even if only for a year."

Miz Evelyn giggled, and as he left Don heard her saying, "He makes a pretty speech, don't he, Miss Judy." He didn't hear Miz Judea's reply.

Don was hungry and he figured Sylvie must be, too. Whatever she'd been scrounging for food over the years, it was about time she stopped and got something decent. As long as she was his tenant, after a manner of speaking, he couldn't very well let her starve or risk food poisoning. So he drove down to the new standalone Chick-Fil-A on Wendover south of I-40 to buy a few dozen nuggets. Which wouldn't be as good as the Weird sisters' soup, maybe, but also wouldn't leave him beholden to anybody, which was just as important.

He couldn't get over the old ladies being prostitutes. What kind of perversity was it regarded as, in those days of deep Jim Crow, to have a black whore and a white whore sharing a room? He couldn't help wondering if men paid to get them both at once, or if the room was partitioned off somehow. But then the very thought of those old ladies naked or, worse still, prancing around in merry widows or negligees made him faintly ill, and he drove the image from his mind.

Or tried to. Why did they always have to tell him things he didn't really want to know? However things went in the Bellamy house during its bordello days, it was still a fact that they had come out of the whole affair as friends, and if there was a little underhanded conflict between them, like that garlic business, it didn't make them any less close. And Gladys got them free somehow. That's the part he couldn't understand. These ladies were sensible. In fact, they were smart. Yet they still believed in magic and houses having a hold over people and...

And he remembered the missing screwholes on the front door. And how Sylvie, who didn't seem crazy at all, had somehow decided she had to stay in that house rather than go out and face the world. Maybe they were the sensible ones indeed, and he was the one so superstitiously bound to the folklore of science that he couldn't admit the obvious. Those old ladies had been stuck and were still tied to the house, and Sylvie was stuck right now and couldn't get free. The way she ran into the upstairs room when he was butterknifing through the two-by-fours—did the house send her to find out what he was doing, cutting into it that way?

Could the same thing happen to him? Could he also get stuck in that house?

I'm surrounded by crazy people and now crazy is beginning to seem normal. Houses don't hold people, and I covered those screwholes with the deadbolt and just remembered it wrong.

When he got back with the bag of nuggets, having snitched only a few, he went through the house calling Sylvie's name, but she didn't answer. Not even in the attic. It was the first time he'd been in the house that she hadn't also been there. So he sat down and ate the nuggets himself. He was hungry enough to polish them off without trouble, and the fries, and both lemonades. Then, because he hadn't really done his day's quota of work yet, he went room to room tearing up carpets and hauling them out to the curb. No reason not to bare the floors everywhere in the house, get the carpets all hauled away with the first load. When he tore up the carpet in the room that had Sylvie's bed in it, he couldn't help noticing that the bed was all she had. No other furniture. Not so much as a book to read or a nightstand.

It was dark when he finished. He was sweaty and dusty and worn out. So much for his shower. But he didn't have the energy for another one tonight. Besides, his towel wouldn't be dry yet.

When he came into the house from the junkpile out front, he heard water running in the house. So she had come back while he was outside. Must be using the back door. Or... the tunnel? Was there room enough to squeeze through over the top of the rubble, if somebody really wanted to?

Tired as he was, curiosity got the better of him and he went down the stairs into the cellar. He had left a worklamp hanging in the cellar, but even after he found the power strip and turned on the overhead, he still needed his flashlight to see behind the coal furnace. The rubble didn't quite reach to the top of the gap in the foundation. Depending on how skinny Sylvie really was, maybe she could do it. But there was no sign of anybody climbing there—not that he knew what such a sign would be. A footprint? Not likely. Fallen rocks? It was a pile of rubble, for heaven's sake. How could he tell which rocks were fallen because of somebody climbing over? So what did he know now? Maybe she used the tunnel, maybe she didn't. And what did it matter?

He was tired. It was dark outside. Time for sleep, so he could be up at dawn. He stopped in the bathroom at the top of the cellar stairs in order to use the toilet and to wash his hands and face, then ducked his head down to splash water onto his hair to rinse out the worst of the dust, then toweled his head so he wouldn't soak his pillow. He still felt filthy but at least his face didn't feel cemented over with carpet dust. The water was still running upstairs. He wondered if he might have caused Sylvie's shower to turn cold when he washed up or hot when he flushed the toilet. It had been thoughtless of him not to wait till she was done. But then, it was kind of a long shower she was taking and he needed to get to bed. He'd ask her in the morning whether the downstairs bathroom affected the upstairs shower.

He went into the parlor without switching on the light—he could see well enough by the streetlight to take off his shoes and socks and lie down on his cot. So he followed his ritual and pried each shoe off with the toe of the other foot, then sat down to take off his socks.

But when he leaned back, he cracked his head hard against something. It was so painful, so sharp a blow that he almost blacked out. He had to lie down until he could see again, and when he felt the back of his head it was wet. Which meant he had just got blood all over his pillow. Of course he knew at once what he had hit. Lying there on the cot, the workbench fairly loomed over him.

He tried to stand up but again almost fainted. So he crawled to the power strip and turned on the light. The workbench was almost malevolent in its placement, right up against the cot, at exactly the middle, where he sat every night to take off his shoes. Why did she move it? And why to that exact spot? It was impossible to imagine that she actually meant him to hurt himself, and yet it couldn't have been more perfectly placed to achieve that end.

His head was clearing. When he looked at the pillow he could see that there really wasn't much blood, just a dot of it. His fingers had felt the liquid, but of course his hair was still wet from the washing up he did. That's what he had felt. Mostly. But there was a goose egg growing on the back of his head.

He pulled and then pushed the workbench away from his cot. The strain of moving it made his head throb. Damn her anyway for touching his stuff. Didn't they have a deal? He wasn't going to let this pass. He wasn't going to be calm and reasonable about it, either. She had drawn blood, for pete's sake.

He strode to the stairs and started to take them three at a time. The pain in his head immediately let him know that this was not a good idea. One step at a time he finished the ascent, then walked to the bathroom door.

It stood ajar by a couple of inches, and inside he could see fog swirling. He raised his hand to knock—or to push the door open? What was he thinking? She was taking a shower, which meant she was naked in there. Just because he had bumped his head didn't give him the right to violate her modesty. Time enough for this discussion in the morning.

He made his way downstairs gingerly, because each jolting footstep rang through his head. This was going to slow him down tomorrow, he knew it. He rummaged through his suitcase and found some extra-strength Tylenol, then went to the bathroom and took four of them with a few handfuls of water. Had to get some paper cups.