The End of FUN (21 page)

“Yay.”

I checked his closet. It was weird. The pale, short-sleeved cowboy-style shirts he used to wear—they smelled like him. The whole closet did: a mix of leather and smoke and old man. I made a quick search—no Mary—then returned to the living room and thought about my next move.

Maybe I'd take a shower.

A quick, hot shower to help me think.

But as the first icy blast hit me—and as I shrieked and jumped out onto the linoleum, and in the moment of clarity that accompanies a shock of cold water—a few things were suddenly very clear. First of all, you gotta have hot water. Second of all, water heaters need power to run. Third, there was one more place I hadn't checked.

The basement. I hadn't checked the basement. But then I remembered the basement was where he'd shot himself, and I wasn't about to check it without light, plus now I was freezing, so I called the power company to get the power turned back on, but the lady had no record of the address on file. I argued with her for a while that this couldn't be true because I had been to his place when there was electricity, and although this was decades ago I was pretty sure he'd lived out the rest of his life with power—and the house had the outlets and light switches to prove it.

“I'm sorry,” said the lady. “You're not on file.”

I called Evie, but she didn't know the answer. She told me to call Dad. I told her I didn't want to call Dad. She asked me why not, and I said because I was mad at him.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I don't want to go into it.”

“You two need to learn to get along.”

“Thanks for the advice. Hold on, I'm writing it down.”

“I'm serious,” she said.

“Me too. I
seriously
want some power and light, or I
seriously
want a ride back into town.”

“I told you. Call Dad.”

So I called Dad.

“The power's out. I called the power company and they said they don't have a record of this place. I called Evie and she said to call you.”

“You sound upset,” he said. “Is this about the Katie thing?”

“No. It's about power and light. I want the power back on. No one told me there wouldn't be any power. Do you or do you not know what the solution to this problem might be?”

“Sure,” he said. “It's easy.”

“What is it?”

“Your grandpa wasn't on the grid. He used a generator. My guess would be that's where your problem is.”

“Where's the generator?”

“In the basement.”

“The basement?”

“Yeah. Go down there and I'll walk you through the troubleshooting.”

But that was the whole problem. I couldn't go down to the basement until I had some
light
. That was the whole point.

“So get a flashlight,” he said.

“There isn't a flashlight. I just searched the entire house.”

“Nah, I know where you can find one.”

“Where?”

“The basement. There's one on the fuse box. I left it there after they took his body out.”

Ugh. I opened the storm door and headed down the concrete steps, feeling along the cold walls until I came to where the fuse box was supposed to be.

“It isn't here. There's no fuse box.”

“Yeah, there is. Don't you see it?”

“I don't see
shit
, Dad! Remember? It's dark down here.”

“It's right there on the eastern wall…maybe ten feet from the door? About chest level? It seems highly unlikely to me that an entire fuse box would just disappear.”

Finally I found it. And YAY! for the flashlight on top, its thin, milky beam nowhere near the piercing candlepower of a Maglite
®
XL 1000 LED flashlight with patented FocusBeam
™
technology (YAY!)—but anything was better than darkness.

I followed the hazy beam to the little room in the corner and ran it across the generator, the wires and hoses and pipes and other things I didn't have names for, the product of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge—and yet the whole thing was a mystery to me.

“Don't worry,” said Dad. “It's easy. Designed by geniuses to be run by monkeys. Look to your left. You should see a control panel. There are three settings: OFF, AUTO, and TEST. What's it on right now?”

“OFF.”

“Well, there's your problem right there. Flip it to AUTO.”

So I did. There was a clicking sound—
click, click, click
—and then a ragged cough like it was trying to start—and then nothing. I toggled between AUTO and OFF a couple times, but whatever was supposed to catch would not catch.

“It's broke.”

“Nah, diesel engines don't break like that. The odds that you're going to have some major mechanical malfunction are pretty slim. The design as a whole is way more simple than your common gasoline engine, and—”

“Dad! I don't need a lesson on generators! I'm not trying to
build
one—I just need it to
run
again.”

“Well, that's just the problem, isn't it? Nobody wants to know how anything works anymore. They just want everything to magically run when they flip a switch.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

I just wanted it to
work
—and clearly the switch was not working. Clearly, the whole thing was beyond my abilities, and if we were ever going to get it fixed, Dad needed to make a trip over to Grandpa's place. But no, he wasn't having it. He was enjoying this, his foray into tech support. He walked me through a series of steps to troubleshoot the problem, and at the end of it I flipped the switch again. The generator coughed and sputtered. And then—nothing.

“It's broken.”

“It's not
broken
. There's something we're missing here. Hold on. Let me think. You checked the fuel drums?”

“Yes! They're full!”

“And the fuel filter?”

“I took it off and shook it out like you said.”

“And put it back?”

“I screwed it on tight.”

“But not
too
tight—you don't wanna bust that seal. Hmm. There's gotta be something I'm not thinking about here.”

I didn't like being down there, what with the flashlight casting strange shadows every which way, and I was on my way back up the stairs when Dad spoke again.

“Ha! Wait! I bet I know what it is! You see the fuel line? Where it connects with the engine? There's a butterfly valve there, right? Check to see if the valve is closed. Turn it so it's parallel to the line. You get what I'm saying?”

I followed his instructions, and this time, when I flipped the switch to AUTO, the whole thing came roaring to life. Incredible. And noisy. I closed the door, but even so I could barely make out my dad's words at the other end of the line.

“Great,” he was saying. “Problem solved.”

I felt along the wall back to the fuse box and I flipped on the light switch. A flicker and then, lo and behold, the whole place was illuminated. Power! Hot water! I took a couple steps and stopped.

There was something there. Something dark. A stain on the earth at my feet.

Holy shit.

Here it was, ground zero. The place where he'd taken his last breath before pulling the trigger, the spot where he'd fallen, where he lay on the ground with the blood pooling out of his head.

I scrammed right out of the basement.

So that was day one. The sun came out the next day and melted the snow while I continued my search for the portrait of Mary, doubling back on everything I'd already checked over. The bedrooms. The dressers. The closets. The living room. The washed-out brown painting of deer in a field, the smaller painting of a steamship on a stormy ocean, the Northern Nevada Auto Parts calendar turned to December.

Where was the portrait?

Back in the kitchen, under the kitchen sink, I found something else.

A bucket.

A white plastic paint bucket, half-full of water.

And swimming in the water? A live, real-life mouse.

Yech!

You'd think that after seeing my grandpa's brains all dried up on the floor I'd toughen up, but—I don't know. Mice are just so—how can I even explain it?
Shiver
. That's all I can say.
Double shiver
. And there it was, doing laps in the water in the bucket. I'm serious. It was swimming
laps
. Around and around and around it went. How long had it been in there?

I couldn't just set it free—everyone knows the first thing a mouse is going do when it escapes a bucket is head straight for the nearest human, climb up that human's leg, and, if that human is male like me, take a big ol' bite out of his sack of Planters
®
special mixed nuts (YAY!). That's the nature of mice. It's just what they do. So instead of dumping the bucket, I took it outside, set it a ways from the house, and draped a towel over the edge like a big, fuzzy escape ladder, then leapt back out of the way so the mouse couldn't get me. I squatted behind the porch and waited.

I was squatting there, my whole being on highest mouse alert, MouseCon 10, when Homie
™
popped up.

“Send it to voice mail!”

“Hi,” said Katie. “It's me. I got your number from your dad. You left your bag in my truck.”

“No, you drove away with it.”

“We need to talk.”

I told her sure, that was fine, and she asked what I was doing at the moment, and I said at the moment I was at my grandfather's, hiding behind the porch, waiting for a mouse to crawl out of a bucket and hopefully not chomp off any of my bits.

Katie was quiet a moment. “OK,” she said. “Well, maybe I'll just head out there….Is that OK?”