Brian started to help me with the next pitcher, but he spotted the girl I’d seen earlier. The music overpowered any chance that she would hear even the loudest “Scuse me!” that he could holler, so he wadded up wet napkins and threw them at her until she looked at him. As soon as he caught her eyes he pulled his shirt open and started pointing at his chest while mouthing the words, “You and me, baby. It can happen.” This was a new low in pick-up technique for him, but I wasn’t surprised when she got up, walked over and asked him to dance. I could tell by the way they were talking as they moved to the floor that he would have company going home again.
All the tables were empty. Everybody was dancing, a fast song. I couldn’t tell who was dancing with who. That close together, and from my angle above the floor, they looked like a solid mass, bouncing and waving to the music.
I finished the pitcher by myself while noticing some things: the surface of the bar is slick, and it’s a pretty good jump to that access ladder. A guy would have to have secure traction if he was thinking about climbing the ladder, walking across the catwalk and lowering himself into the cockpit of the Nieuport 17.
I reached under the table and started the difficult process of pulling off my boots.
FATHER’S DRAGON
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I shot a dragon in the garden with the video camera!”
Thomas winced at the word “dragon,” and then, when he shifted his shoulders to get a better angle with the wrench, he clunked his cheekbone against the kitchen sink’s U-joint. He thought, not the dragon again. The cabinet edge dug into his back while the cold, rough underside of the sink pinched his elbow against a copper tube. He couldn’t see his seven-year-old. “The camera’s not a toy, Dolby.” Trapped by the plumbing, Thomas’ voice sounded stupidly hollow to him.
“Mom said I could use it.”
“Tell Mom I said it’s not a toy.”
“I’m filming your feet, Daddy.”
Thomas tried to pull himself out of the cabinet, but when he turned, his elbow forced the copper tube to bend, starting a fine mist from where it joined the faucet deep in the dark gap behind the sink. “Oh, damn.”
“Louder, Daddy. I don’t think I got that.”
Holding his temper, Thomas said, “Hand me the pliers, son.” With his free hand, Thomas bent the tube back, but the mist kept falling. Since he was lying flat, looking up into the workings of the sink, the water sprayed straight into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, as if clearing tears, then leaned his head to the side. His ear filled and the wet pressure on his eardrum throbbed with his pulse. “The pliers in the tool box. Get me the pliers.” He stretched, felt the nut that held the tube flush to the underside of the faucet and put his finger over the leak. A trickle ran down his arm and into his shirt. His other arm ached from holding the wrench in place; its handle felt huge and unwieldy, and he couldn’t help thinking it was his father’s wrench, that he shouldn’t have it. Thomas’ most vivid memory of his father was of a huge man bending over him, hand raised, screaming, “Don’t mess with the tools,” and then the slap. Thomas’s dad disappeared when Thomas was six. Now that he was a dad himself, he thought about his own father a lot. Even though the tools belonged to Thomas, he seldom took them out.
Thomas waited. Water pooled between his shoulder blades and crept along his backbone. “Dolby?” The back screen door slapped shut.
“Ah, hell.” Pulling his hand out of the gap increased the spray and shifted the wrench on the sink trap. An ooze of black slime slipped out of the joint, hung from the bottom of the pipe and dropped into his mouth. He spit hard as he extricated himself from the cabinet.
The shut-off valve spun freely when he twisted it. Flicked with his finger, it whirred like a propeller. Water dripped onto the green tile his wife loved, but only reminded him of his kitchen when he was a child, the place of many arguments between his father and mom. Thomas had warned his wife that old country homes like this were maintenance nightmares, but she hadn’t cared. Leaky pipes the first month we live here, he thought. Heaven help us in the winter. He pushed a towel against the cabinet base to soak up the water.
Thomas picked up the tool box and headed for the cellar. In the living room, his wife lay under a fuzzy, blue and yellow afghan, a washcloth folded over her eyes. Thomas said, “I’m going to have to find the main water cut-off.”
She nodded slowly.
He said, “Another headache?”
“Little one.”
“What about our dinner?”
“I called the sitter.”
Thomas slumped. “I was looking forward to getting out together. The two of us.”
She lifted her hand, waved it languidly like a handkerchief towards him. “My head.”
The tool box’s handle was cutting off the circulation to his fingers; their tips tingled. He shifted it to the other hand. “Maybe we ought to see somebody. You got one of these the last time we were going out.”
She sat up; the washcloth dropped off her eyes leaving a red stripe across her face like a broad swath of Indian war paint. “If you really want to, we’ll go.”
“No, no. I’m just saying you get a lot of headaches.”
She pressed the washcloth to her eyes and sank back to the pillow. Thomas started to speak but didn’t. She was motionless, absolutely rigid, frozen.
He asked, “Did you tell Dolby he could play with the camera?”
“He said he wanted to film a dragon. I can’t talk to him.”
Thomas said, “That’s a thousand dollar piece of equipment,” and it sounded to him like his father speaking.
She sighed from under the washcloth.
Thomas shined the flashlight up into the floor joists. He had only been into the cellar twice, first when the realtor showed them the water heater was new and second when he carried the love seat they didn’t have room for down the rickety wooden steps. He thought the cellar was a creepy and ugly place. In the cobwebs dozens of pipes and wires went every direction. Some pipes were obviously old plumbing that hadn’t been removed when new ones were installed, and it looked like new plumbing had replaced old several times. He thought some of the pipes must be for gas, but there was no way to tell immediately what did what, what went to what, and what was functional. He tracked an insulated pipe from the water heater to a junction where one pipe veered towards the bathroom and another disappeared under the kitchen with several other pipes into a hole that was dripping steadily. He couldn’t tell which pipe carried unheated water.
Dolby’s behavior preyed on Thomas’s thoughts, but more than that, his reaction to his son bothered him. Nothing he said ever seemed to penetrate, like the boy purposefully ignored him when he spoke. And what worried Thomas was he believed he behaved that way when he was a child. He remembered Dad talking to him, but remembered little he said. Like Dolby, he had lived by his own agenda. After Dad had left, Thomas had a dragon of his own. He had to have one. No one ever listened to him, he had thought. Now Dolby was fascinated with them.
He played his light around. Except for the love seat, this end of the long, narrow cellar was almost empty. The old water heater, a huge, rusting tank with a grate for coals under it stood next to the new heater, a gleaming white eighty-gallon Sears model that seemed out of place.