She goes back over to the “2” box and opens it. Inside are neatly stacked envelopes, a notebook, several folders, and a couple cassette tapes and albums. It’s my grandfather’s stuff. I just know it.
Aisha rushes to the window as if she hears something. She peers as far right as she can.
“Shit shit shit,” she says.
“What?”
“That would be the pastor’s car,” she says, panic obvious in her voice.
We rush into action. I repack the box as neatly as I can, and Aisha dashes over to the stairs. She pulls them up with all her might. They barely budge.
“They’re stuck. Maybe they don’t close from up here,” she says, sounding desperate.
“Fuck,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. “Hang tight.”
Before I can even react, Aisha leaps down the stairs, and in one quick movement she pushes the stairs up and slams them shut. I stare at the closed attic hatch like an idiot, thinking, What the hell just happened? Then I run over to the window, and, to my right, I watch the pastor slowly ambling toward the house from his car. I quickly shut the box, turn off the attic light, and hide behind the chair. The back door creaks open downstairs, and I glance out the window to my left just in time to watch Aisha scamper from the back door to the front yard of our house. She’s safely out.
That’s a lot more than I can say for me.
I SIT MOTIONLESS behind a leather chair in a window alcove of my neighbor’s attic, thinking about betrayal.
If I ever get out of here, Aisha is gone. She couldn’t have taken one extra second to explain to me that we were going to leap down the stairs? She had to lock me in? I am so pissed with her that I don’t care where the hell she sleeps. Just not in my basement. I’ll go back to being the guy with not too much going on, stuck for the summer with his crazy, dying father and his weird, psychobabbling mother.
I take out my cell phone. I make sure it’s on vibrate, and then I text Aisha.
wtf???
She doesn’t respond. My blood boils.
seriously. wtf.
Nothing.
If I’m stuck here for a full day, or worse, overnight, I’m in trouble. There’s no bathroom up here, and I already have to pee, damn it. I could crawl across the floor to the box and go through it. But when I press down on the flooring below me, it creaks. I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck behind this chair.
Finally, after seventeen minutes, my phone buzzes.
Didn’t want to text you when I got out cause I figured your sound was on. Forgot to keep my eye on my phone. Trying to get you out.
I type back furiously.
Well try harder. You abandoned me!
Wtf choice did I have?
I need to pee
Well, pee. Mice probably do it.
Mice?!?
Sorry. Not good in a crisis.
Wait. Is this a crisis?
See what I mean?
I put my phone away. Clearly I’m gonna need to figure this one out myself. How do you get out of an attic without taking the stairs? The window doesn’t open, and even if did, it’s a small, round thing, and it’s pretty high up.
I hear a noise and I tense my muscles. It’s a sliding sound. And then the slide gets louder.
Shit.
He’s lowering the stairs.
He’s coming up to the attic.
Shit shit shit. How am I going to explain this? Oh hi, Pastor. I just enjoy crouching behind chairs in strangers’ attics. It’s my thing.
Slow footsteps enter the attic, and then the light comes on. I crouch down low, and from my angle I can see the pastor’s shoes and the bottom of his pants as he walks directly toward me.
I used to play this video game set in Nazi Germany where you hide from the SS guards. They march right at you, and you only see their boots and the bottom of their legs. Sometimes they stop before they get to you, and other times you hear them yell something in German and then gunfire, and you’re dead. This feels exactly like that.
Pastor Logan strides slowly to the chair, and then to the left, like he’s going around it. I close my eyes, as if that will make me invisible when he steps on me.
I brace for contact. But there is none. Then I hear some sounds coming from a speaker at ear level. He’s put on a record.
I take a silent, slow, deep breath. The song starts with a harmonica, then a steel guitar comes up, and the beat starts. Then there’s a huge rustling noise. The pastor has sat down in the chair, inches from me. There’s no way this ends well.
The pastor starts tapping his foot to the beat. It must be that album that my grandfather had put our last name on — Steve something. It’s old music. The lyrics are all about going down to Laurel to see a girl. I try to imagine the pastor being young enough to think about going somewhere to see a girl. Surely my granddad felt that way about my grandmother when they were young. It’s all so impossible to imagine, the past — when old people were young and had the pervy thoughts I have today.
A cell phone rings, and I automatically tense up. But it isn’t mine.
The pastor stands up and strolls over to the record player to stop the music. He answers the phone. I stay as still as I can and try not to breathe.
“Hello? … This is he…. How can I help you? … Well, I should be heading back that way in an hour or two…. Oh my word…. When you say emergency, what do you — … Okay…. Of course…. I’ll be happy to — okay. Good-bye.”
The pastor mutters, “Dadgummit,” and I watch as his lower legs carry him back toward the stairs. He takes a long, long time to climb down, and I find myself holding my breath longer than I need to. The stairs slowly rise up into the attic, and the trapdoor gently closes.
I exhale. Out the window, the pastor ambles to his car, the car lights flash, and he backs up and pulls onto Rimrock Road.
I text madly, Get here! Now! He’s gone!
No response. Damn it. C’mon, Aisha. C’mon.
I hurry over to the stairs and try to push the trapdoor open. It won’t budge. I check my phone again. Nothing. I call, figuring maybe she’ll hear the ring.
And then I hear a ringtone — something sort of jazzy — playing within the house, and the stairs are pulled down, and there’s Aisha at the bottom, smiling at me.
“Thank God,” I say. “He got a call and left.”
“Who do you think made the call? Give me a little credit,” she says. I’m about to climb down when she adds, “We oughtta take the stuff — the box. Clearly can’t stay here. He comes and goes too much.”
I figure, What the hell? I pass the box to her. I climb down, we close the hatch, and we run out the back door as quickly as we can.
BACK IN MY dad’s basement, Aisha explains what she had to do to get me out of there. She wanted to call Pastor Logan right away, but she didn’t have his number. My mom was on the phone with someone back in New York, so Aisha bugged my dad, who was not too happy that she actually wanted to speak to the pastor. He almost didn’t give her the number, but finally relented, telling her she was crazy for wanting to talk to some religious dude.