Yeah, everybody had problems they needed to work out. Jesus.
In the morning he checked out and saw a fifteen dollar charge for some X-rated flick. He vaguely remembered seeing skin on the tube. The bill said he'd ordered it at four a.m. He'd been on autopilot, feverish.
The 'Stang was full of bodies. He felt them in the back seat staring at the back of his head. Thanking him, wishing him further pain, wanting him to hit a bridge. The ghosts piled up, and they still wanted a lot from you.
He hit triple digits getting back to Hangtree, hoping the state patrol would fire up after him, but no cruiser did.
He pulled up in front of Reb's place about noon. He had no idea why he was still staying with her. He should've gotten another motel room, gotten away from her, but there was something so familiar about the house and his connection to it that it grounded him despite all the distractions.
The sad shape of the place, which had bothered him at first, was beginning to become appealing. The collapsed, swaying rain gutters beat out a slow rhythm in time with his pulse. The smell of oncoming rain was strong on the day. He could almost see himself creeping up to Reb's window again, slipping in and out of darkness. The tug of sorrow was still there, and he appreciated its depth.
He was using Reb and a lingering shame had settled in his chest although he'd never made any promises. Even a bent cop didn't have to be bent all the time, in all things.
He walked in and heard her cursing in the kitchen. The stink of ammonia burned his nostrils. She was mopping a floor that hadn't been cleaned in Christ knew how long. She'd kicked over the bucket. A black and yellow puddle of suds rippled against the tile and sluiced up to the baseboards. Dead insects and rat droppings floated along. She was playing house for him again, and doing about as good a job as she'd done with the steaks. He knew it was his own fault.
She said, "If you're going to ask why I'm doing this, let me tell you."
"I wasn't going to ask."
"It's not for you. I'm going to sell this place. I'm going to leave. Maybe you could help out around here a little. Get a hammer and saw and some two by fours out of the shed and fix that hole in the porch, reinforce the stairs."
"Sure."
"There's a chainsaw in the garage you could use on that dead maple. Fix that screen door."
Another broken screen door. Why were screen doors coming down all around him?
"Okay," he said.
"And don't get it in your head that I'm looking for a husband. I'm not. I already know your views on marriage anyway, right? If I did want a husband, it wouldn't be you, right?"
"Right."
She was mad he hadn't come back here last night. He could see it in her face. She'd put him up, fed him, and treated him well as an investment. His staying away all night was evidence that she wasn't going to earn out.
He went out to the garage and got Reb's father's toolbox. He wasn't a carpenter, Mimi had been right about that, but maybe he could get the screen door on. He spent an hour straightening the frame, replacing stripped screws, tightening the spring, and hanging the door back up in place. It had a slight tilt and still didn't completely close, but he figured he'd done a pretty good job of it.
There were three chainsaws under the workbench, but none had gas in them. He couldn't find a gas can anywhere. He drove into town, hit a station, bought a five-gallon jug, had it filled, and got to work filling all three chainsaws. It wasn't until he had them out side by side that he realized they were different sizes. Crease drew out the longest one, fired it up, and got to work on cutting up the maple. He didn't know what the hell he was doing. It took him twenty-five minutes to figure out how to cut v-wedges to keep the saw from getting stuck in the wood. There was sawdust everywhere.
One of the neighbors was burning leaves. The smell grew stronger as the wind burst against his damp neck. The thick aroma drew some good memories forward from when he was a kid, watching his father work in the yard. Wanting to be like the man, like all men of Hangtree, standing tall with their adult mysteries, powerful arms, and faces like flint.
A strange, cold feeling passed over him. His vision blurred for an instant and it took a second to refocus. If he'd married Reb, and moved in with her, and took over her old man's house after his death, and spent years battling the bottle and his own ineptness, he might have wound up here doing this very same thing anyway.
He stacked the cordwood on the back stoop and thought it might be nice to have a fire tonight. He'd have to check the flue and see if it was clean enough to burn logs without smoking them out of the house.
There was no way he could fix the hole in the porch, but he did manage to use some of the cut two by fours in the corner of the garage to reinforce the stairs. He stood there holding the hammer, nails in his teeth, wood chips and sawdust in his hair, and a small rush of pride went through him. Not because he'd managed to spend a few hours filling out Reb's father's shoes, but because he realized that this wasn't the life for him and he hadn't made a bad choice in the first place.
Reb was at the screen door, trying it out. She looked at him and said, "It doesn't close right. I can't lock it."
"Who are you trying to keep out?"
"Jesus freaks and kids selling magazine subscriptions."
"That's why I left the hole in the porch."
She didn't laugh. She wore a face that said she'd never laugh again. "Why'd you stack the wood in back?"
"It's getting cooler, feels like rain. I thought it might be nice to have a fire."
"There's squirrel nests in the chimney. Come inside for lunch, if you're hungry."
He put all the tools away and closed the garage and thought the home improvement chapter of his life had now been firmly shut. He walked inside and the cloying smell of detergent made him gag. He went around opening windows while she said behind him, "Is it bad? I didn't notice after the first half hour."
"It's pretty bad."
It took a while but eventually the smell thinned. The place was cleaned up and looked much better than before. Maybe she was serious about selling. Perhaps she could get a good price for the house. You never knew when something was really quaint and when it was tobacco road.
She'd made a tuna salad and had set the dining room table again, but the candles weren't lit. They ate in silence. When he was almost finished he said, "Thank you," and wondered why he hadn't said it earlier.
"What are you thinking about?" Reb asked.
He hadn't been thinking of anything, but for some reason the name was on his lips. "Ellie Groell."
"Ellie Groell? Her? Why?"
"Her shadow was the last thing I saw of this town when I left it."
"Jeez, that's creepy."
No, it wasn't. It was pleasant. He'd been lonely and frightened and looking up at the Groell house had given him a sense of support. He didn't know why. It was getting a little ridiculous, the amount of things that he didn't quite understand.
"She still lives with her grandmother," Reb said. "The two of them alone in that big house. At least I think the grandmother is still alive. I could be wrong, she might be dead."
Reb cleared the table and when she sat down again she had a glass and one of Jimmy Devlin's stolen bottles of Jack Daniels in front of her. She didn't offer him any. Sipping the whiskey got her quietly moaning with a deep pleasure, her eyes closed. When she opened them, she focused on him and said, "Tell me what you've found out so far. About this thing that you came back here for. You discover that your old man didn't shoot the girl?"
"That's never been an issue. I know he did it. He told me so himself with nearly his last breath."
"Then why's any of the rest of it matter, really? I mean, if this is about your father."