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| What a handsome fellow. |
Chapter Sixteen
The house was dead quiet…
The house was dead quiet, and yet reeking of the one hundred years of history steeped into its walls. Tiny hands opened up Jean’s bedroom door, revealing the white dressing table, with gold trim on the ornate woodwork. There were the two closet doors, leading into walk-ins with sloping rear ceilings, and heavily tasseled, brocaded curtains on the windows.
There was the bed, with thick newels and a framework of turned posts like a picket fence at head and foot. There was the proverbial cedar chest at the foot of the bed for extra blankets and linens.
The intruder watched himself go by in the mirror. What a handsome fellow.
A long, almost prehensile nose sniffed and quivered, always in motion, never to rest or stop for long. Bright, beady black eyes glittered in inquisitiveness, his walnut-sized brain limiting its attention span, yet he was always fascinated by every little thing he saw. The unmistakable aura of Jean Gagnon permeated the room, from the smell of socks, and shoes, a shirt, the place on the pillow, where he laid his head. The curtains were open enough to provide a white, filtered light through the outer nylon sheers, lightly patterned in a chintzy-lacy floral display. The masked bandit clambered and waddled around.
It crept and scuttled hither and yon, under the bed and up on top of the tallboy dresser.
With a grunt, it managed to pull open the small top drawer of the dresser, about far enough to stick its nose in, making enough of a gap to peek inside as well. The creature sneezed, wrinkling its nose at the stench of moth balls. Everything in the room was over-laden with a basic, dry, musty, powdery, soapy smell. He was careful not to step where some Gold Bond had spilled. The clock on the dresser ticked and tocked, accentuating and emphasizing the silence. Once again the hands manipulated a doorknob, hanging way over from the window ledge to do it, and the contents of the closet were examined by the animal. It crawled up on the coat rod, and held on with its back feet while checking in the pockets of shirts and jackets, all of which seemed to smell very different from what he was seeking. He managed to get it to snap shut, and then he looked in the other one.
This closet had some of the man’s things in it, including the now-empty knapsack.
Nothing was left untouched, un-smelled, or un-tasted, nothing was not poked and prodded. Nothing was ignored. The sly eyes of the bandit checked the room out for signs of its visit from a position on top of the headboard. All seemed undisturbed. Quietly the creature or perhaps it might better be called a being, ambled into the hall, its grubby and worn-down claws ticking softly on the polished and varnished maple floor. The creature decided to look in a few other rooms, as long as nobody was home. He pulled, and pulled, and pulled, but he just couldn’t get the bedroom door to snick shut afterwards. He waddled back and forth. A sniff at the bottom of a door was often enough. No one in there recently. Only if he had extra time would he check them out. This was no time for indecision. Fortune favors the bold, but never for very long.
With an idiosyncratic grin on its snout, he headed for the bathroom. The bedroom door was slightly ajar, but other than that, he was leaving no trace of his passage. The trickster had a pretty good idea of everyday human nature, and it was no big thing.
The bathroom door unlatched pretty easily, but there wasn’t much in there of interest.
Two people, sharing the room, the smells all laid out like an open scrapbook for him.
These were fresh scents, and the raccoon again had trouble closing the door when he was done with his examination. He moved on, wondering where to go next. It might be a good idea to find out more about the other person in the house. Detecting a characteristic thud-thud through the floorboards, the raccoon scampered back down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the cellar. He caught the noise of a key searching out the tumblers in the massive front door, and twisting the deadbolt out of its slot.
It sounds like Miss Andrews is home, he figured. He listened to her proceed down the front hall to the kitchen, and then her bags landed on the kitchen counter. She was humming a tune he didn’t recognize.
The bandit had two options. He could leave now, with the little he had learned, or he could hide in the floor joists and have a nap. He snuffled around for a while. The key thing was to make a plan and stick to it, to know one’s avenue of retreat and not get taken by surprise.
A short time later the intruder concluded that the chimney went up inside the frame of the house, and there was just sufficient clearance to climb to the attic. If he could find a second avenue of escape up there, he would feel a lot better about things. It was so much better to sleep indoors when he could. It was nice and warm in the basement, compared to sleeping in a half-rotten, hollowed-out old tree.
As long as Miss Andrews was plunking stuff around in the kitchen, it was a good time to go. The raccoon began to climb into the dark vertical shaft, with his feet on the bricks and its back against the wooden laths of the interior wall. It was easy going for one of his gifts and experience. Up ahead the dark turned to a dimness, a slot full of pale shadings and the suggestion of tongue-in groove boards. He was almost there now. Hopefully he could find a loose roof vent or something.
***
Polly began cleaning, preparing and putting away the vegetables from earlier that day. First she had to soak and spray them in the sink, cut off the leaves and roots, and then wash them again. She heard Jean come up the back porch, and thump the snow off his boots before entering.
Ten centimetres of the bottoms of his trousers was heavily encrusted with white crystalline powder. He stood there, brushing the stuff off of his pant-legs.
“Where’s the key to the garage?”
She stopped what she was doing and found one in a kitchen drawer, and she watched Jean put it on his key ring. He eyed up all the food lying on the counter, potatoes, green beans, apples and pears, tomatoes, and carrots, but made no comment.
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| All them brightly-colored vegetables. |
Sooner or later, they would have to talk about the future. Jean went down into the basement to check on the furnace filter. The systems of the house were pretty basic, but this was only his second time down there.
He mucked and prowled around, had a look at the power panel, the hot water tank, the plumbing of which was exposed and clearly visible. The washer and dryer seemed to be two or three years old by the stickers inside. Everything looked to be in pretty good shape. There was plenty of liquid soap, some bleach, and anti-static sheets to throw in the dryer.
It had all the usual smells. On a shelf behind the workbench, were a few cans of paint, one-litre and four-litre sized. All of them had a little bit in them. Shaking one, it was obviously all dried up by the lack of sound and weight transfer. It was as hard as a rock in there.
There weren’t a lot of tools and stuff. The old lady had probably employed a handyman or maintenance service. He grinned—she would have insisted on keeping the leftover paint. It was quite empty and surprisingly clean. The floor was thickly-painted in a kind of battleship-grey coating in the utility room. The second room had white tiles with narrow beige streaks, old fashioned. They might have been from the 1980s. Everything else was bare concrete. There were four rooms, all big and mostly all empty, including the root cellar under the front porch.
The place had a musty, moist smell, but he found no obvious signs of seepage or leaking foundations. No, this was all block walls, old wood, old cement, and no real air in there in years.
In the front of the house, on the side facing the main street, the left one of two windows was broken. A shallow window-well could be seen through the streaky, milky glass, with a round hole there, like maybe a baseball or hockey puck might have punched it out. What was once covered by a thick hunk of brown cardboard, held in place by duct tape had loosened up and become bent back by the wind. There was even a tiny snowdrift on the window frame below the hole. He tried to push it back into place, but the dried up old tape wouldn’t stick. This particular room was empty except for some boxes, also empty, stacked up in a corner. In another corner, half a dozen folded lawn chairs leaned up against the wall. He snapped off the light and went out the door again.
He wondered if Miss Andrews had any duct tape up in her kitchen drawer.
She and Jean had been feeling each other out cautiously, neither seemingly anxious to initiate the conversation. But certain questions had to be asked. Just then she was at the top of the stairs.
“Mister Gagnon?”
“Yes?”
“Do you like fried chicken?”
“Yes. Yes I do.” He was at the bottom of the stairs.
Her footsteps clomped back to the other side of the room above.
The big conversation, he couldn’t put it off much longer. The trouble was that he didn’t really have any plans of his own. Not after seeing this house. Fried chicken. Holy crap, he thought. Maybe he could get her to stay on at reduced wages? All it took was money.
Going outside, he opened up the garage and had a look. He was shocked at what he found inside. Yes, they were going to have a little talk soon.
Jean had the sinking sensation that he was kicking the old lady out of her home and that was a hard thing to deal with, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t afford to pay her five hundred a month, let alone five hundred a week.
You could only block off so many rooms, and turn down the thermostat so far. You could try to live with only one or two lights burning at any given time. But sooner or later the roof needs replacing, or the furnace blows up. Then what would he do?
Even if it only took a thousand a month, he didn’t have it. If he could get a job for fifteen or twenty bucks an hour, he doubted if he could keep the place. The worst part of it was, in the dead of winter, with the whole town shut down, it was looking like a hard sell. It had high taxes to boot, all coming out of his own small pockets.
The perfect customer would be an eccentric, reclusive, rich old psychopath who wanted to live in a crummy little town in the middle of nowhere. He could sit up there in the turret room, and play the piano or the organ like Captain Nemo in that book by Jules Verne. While Jean was sure there were people rich enough to buy the place, people who might like snowmobiling, fishing and hunting, white water canoeing and the like, the difficulty was in finding the right guy at the right time.
The perfect customer would be someone who liked snow-shoeing and ice fishing, and drinking, or virtually anyone with bags of money. Maybe that was Jean’s problem. He was so used to being behind the eight ball, caught between a rock and a hard place, that he was looking at it all the wrong way. He had the strange thought that almost anyone else would look at it as an opportunity, rather than a millstone, a God-damned freaking albatross hung around his neck. Truth was, he had fourteen grand coming at the end of the month—was he really all that desperate?
***
All it took in the modern world was money, she thought, money to pay the bills. If you had money, what you actually did for a living came second. But that was just cynical.
Right now, the problems that she had could only be solved by money, and that was that.
Janet sat on the edge of her bed and wrapped presents, having gotten a four-pack of wrapping paper at a dollar store. She had very little Scotch tape left, so she was being careful. Jason’s presents were done. It was a lot of little small things, so she made up a lot of small, bright packages, which would hopefully be more cheerful than everything in one big box. She guessed she was trying to make as much fun for them as possible on a tiny budget. She told herself that a lot of moms have had to get creative from time to time.
That morning, an elderly gentleman pulled up into her driveway in a silvery Chevrolet minivan and knocked on her door. After checking that he had the right name and address, he left five big boxes of food.
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| Overwhelmed by the food boxes. |
After thanking him profusely, and in some mild shock, she dragged them into the kitchen to examine the contents, which turned out to include a twenty-pound frozen turkey, a bag of potatoes, two cabbages, and numerous cans of soup. A few other items were included as well.
There were even three presents for each child, which she unwrapped just to check and make sure they weren’t completely oddball, or inappropriate age-wise. These were inexpensive, like a new toque, or some gloves, plus a toy. Jason had gotten a crazy-looking model car, and there was a stuffed teddy bear for Ashley. It was such a simple thing, yet it also reminded her of her own little-girlish attachment to a certain stuffed dog.
The turkey sat in a pan on top of the stove. It was too big to thaw in the fridge, and she hoped it would be all right. Her house was definitely cool at night…She could close the hall door and crack a window.
She hoped it would be thawed out by about five in the morning. She planned to get up early and put it in the oven. While they might be eating leftover turkey for a week, it was a real blessing. Which reminded her, she still had to call someone and get the recipe for stuffing. Mom had done it for years, and Janet hadn’t done a turkey in a long time. It might be wise to get a quick review. Ashley’s presents were wrapped. Janet was using two of the patterns of paper for Jason, and the other two for Ashley, this to avoid confusion on Christmas morning.
Jason’s presents were in metallic gold, and in a red paper with candy canes on it.
Ashley’s had the patterns of reindeer and snowmen; and the one with Santa Claus’s homely visage beaming out of it.
She wrote their names on slips of colored paper and put them on too.
Now that she had enough food around the house for a few days at least, Janet regretted not having asked Jean to dinner. Now that she had something to actually put in front of the man. She was full of second thoughts and second-guesses tonight. Janet wouldn’t have been comfortable being too obvious, or throwing herself at a man, but on the other hand, it was foolish to let such an opportunity pass. In the crunch, the moment she was waiting for, she had waffled, and blown any chance she had. Any kind of sexual aggression was beyond her. It was quite out of character. She couldn’t escape being herself, and it was never enough.
She hadn’t exactly forgotten about the Yule Glow, in fact she was a little curious about what to expect, but the sheer size and weight of all those boxes of food had been a little bit overwhelming. All that emotion, maybe. She carried the gifts out to the living room, where they had a small artificial tree sitting on an end table, pushed into place beside the TV set. The height of the table made up for lack of height on the tree. She carefully placed the presents around the base of it, hoping a little feng shui would go some ways to concealing the paltriness of the offering. Half a dozen envelopes with cards within completed the display. The colors of the lights on the tree shifted randomly.
Tiny red, white, yellow and green LEDs flickered on and off. As she closed the front curtains, the tree was reflected in reverse. It made for an interesting slant on reality. It actually looked better when one step removed. A kind of separation in the first degree. Janet wondered why she didn’t feel even more lonely than she did. But with kids, there was always so much to be done. It was more of an intellectual exercise. Just the fact that she actually had a man to think about, a man she actually considered attractive for the first time in a long time, somehow made it better, even if nothing ever came to pass. It was reassuring to discover that she could still be interested, even capable of being interested, in a man again. There was a kind of excitement in this discovery. The fact that she could even want another man.
The fantasy brought a little romance into her life. It could happen, she reassured herself. Theoretically, it could happen. She just couldn’t really visualize it ever happening to her. If it did, she hoped she would be all right, and not turn out to be a big disappointment.
***
Harry and Slick sat in the doughnut shop. They were both very quiet, both glad there were enough other people in there to keep the other guy from bringing up the subject. It was preying on both their minds, for sure.
Finally Harry nodded.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Admitted Slick. “The whole thing just seems a little too crazy.”
“Teddy seems to have everything figured out.” Harry was keeping his voice down.
There was plenty of noise in the room, and that helped. The crowd was all intent on their own interests, their own coffees, sandwiches and bagels, their egg-fucking-mick-muffins. Slick was awful quiet.
“That’s the part that worries me.” Harry noted this rather sagely, ascertaining that his coffee cup was empty.
Slick seemed to realize that it was a joke, and some of the tension went out of him. Slick, he just sat there in thought.
“Hey Slick—if you could go anywhere or do anything that you wanted, where would you go?”
Wilson just stared at him.
“Huh? How the hell would I know?” Slick was nonplussed, struck by the possibility.
He had never seriously thought about leaving town before, of going somewhere else.
It was too early in the morning for this. Now Harry was sure, and all of his own doubts were flooding back with a rush in the broad light of day. It was one thing to think of it while half-drunk.
“Where would I go.” It was a rhetorical question, at least it always had been up until now. “Where in the hell would I go?”
“We could open up a fishing camp. A lodge. It doesn’t have to be too far up north, or anything.”
Harry had a birthday next week. Lately it was kind of preying on his mind.
“Fuck that. I want to go south.”
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| Yeah, a fishing camp down south somewhere... |
Harry grinned. Slick was about to make a decision, to commit himself to a sensible answer.
“Well, we could open up a fishing camp down south then.”
“Yeah. I suppose we could.” A slightly-nervous Slick thought about it. “Have you really thought this out? I mean, like, seriously?”
He looked both ways, but everyone else was intent on their mugs.
“What’s there to think about? The odds are it won’t happen anyway.” Harry grinned. “It don’t hurt to dream, does it? But let’s have some kind of a plan, just in case. Surely you can see the sense of that?”
Harry was using all his persuasive skills on his old buddy.
“All for one and one for all.”
He was amused to see his friend’s careful and cautious movements, like he was afraid to drop his cup or something. Slick was just being paranoid. He moseyed along behind Slick as the two of them made their way out into the parking lot.
“Let’s cruise a few side roads for a while, and do some thinking.” Having finally convinced himself, he didn’t want to lose Slick.
Slick opened up the vehicle and nodded his head in acknowledgement. He had nothing better to do. Harry was the oldest, Slick himself was thirty-six. McCabe was about thirty, and Ted Hiltz was twenty-even, a bit of a late bloomer as it turns out. When Ted got a high-paying job in the fabrication shop, instead of moving out, he decided to stay at home and sock a pile of money into the bank. He wasn’t talking about it much lately.
Maybe the balance was shrinking instead of growing.
Ted was the kid who didn’t want to grow up, and predictably enough Harry was the most seasoned. He asked the most reasonable, and hard to answer, questions of the group.
Where would he go? You can’t change who you really are, at least that’s the way Slick had it figured.
END
Images. Raccoon.
Louis. Other images.
Louis has books and stories on Amazon, including ebooks, paperbacks and the audiobook Speak Softly My Love.
See his works on Fine Art America.
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