philip F. deaver
 

projects

One particular dark day in the dark days before prison, remembered dark but really probably was sunny he supposed, Carol gone and the kids, Stephen and Becky, playing at friends’ up on the north side, Wally Brown set about to get going again and struggled himself out of the house he didn’t really own, out into the yard (the yard like a child he lived with but hadn’t adopted), and fired up the mower (his). It was a Lawnboy, the biggest of that brand’s push-mowers and fairly new, and though the rains in May had gotten the lawn robust and tall, the grass did not figure to be a match for this machine. Wally muscled up and gave the cord a stout jerk, and the mower fired. Almost enthusiastically then, he plunged in. He mowed first along the east fence in the back yard so close he wouldn’t have to weed-whack it later. He ran it around the tractor-tire sand pile Becky this year seemed to have outgrown, around the birdbath with its cracked bowl, around the clothesline poles – all of these being installations from Carol’s former marriage and the couple of years she’d lived alone after it ended – along the south fence by the alley, along the west fence bordering the driveway, around the PVC soccer goal he’d brought with him from his former life and put up for Stephen, along the sidewalk, then pushing in close beneath the hedges that bordered the back of the house. Then, after mowing the borders of the backyard and around the various barriers and obstacles, he plowed into the deep, fragrant, summer green of the middle of it. The lawnmower was cranked to full-throttle, creating white noise, and that and the systematic progress of this simple work did Wally good. He could think while he mowed. Reflect on the article he was writing, focus on other things he wanted to think about and not on things he didn’t. When he started to think about things he didn’t want to think about, he pushed faster and distracted himself with exertion, focused on the mowing and did it perfectly, the rows efficient and straight.

Pretty soon, he was pleased to see that he was half-done with the back, and for a moment had visions of completing the entire backyard in what for him was record time, when suddenly there was a bang like a gunshot, and just like that the mower stopped. He’d only been working fifteen minutes. There was at least an hour to go, the rest of the back, the front yard, parkway. Exhaust rose from beneath the machine. The entire town around him was quiet except for his ears ringing and the sound of one or maybe two other lawn mowers somewhere blocks away. He stood motionless, staring down at it. There was a shock in how fast the world went quiet. Apparently he’d hit something. He walked around the mower, bent down to look close. Everything seemed okay. He tipped it up to look underneath. Perhaps whatever he hit was still under there, maybe tangled up in the blade. Everything seemed okay at first. Whatever he hit, it was gone now. Maybe he could just fire it up again and finish this life-sucking task. On closer look, kneeling in the grass with sweat dripping from the tip of his nose, Wally saw that the blade itself was bent and not just a little. He was done.

This was what he hated most about work around the house, that a project for which he planned to take some confined length of time, that he could delude himself into thinking was mind-clearing and thus rather healthy for him if it didn’t take too long, would, because of the wrong tools or some unforeseen complication, suddenly drag him into the loss of a day or the annoyance of returning to his study with the job left, for all his efforts, ragged and unsatisfactory, with no way to finish it short of turning it into a major Cecil B. DeMille project and ordeal. And, of course, there was no way to concentrate on his real work, his reading, his writing, his thinking, while the interrupted chore teetered unstable in the back of his mind.

Carol had an old mower in the garage, and it too was a Lawnboy, so Wally went onto the enclosed back porch and punched the garage door opener. The door didn’t respond. Punched it again. Nothing. Held it high, nothing; low, sideways, nothing nothing nothing. Batteries maybe. He stared at the big garage door. It could be opened from the inside if he could find the key to the garage’s side-door. The light in the garage was out, and wouldn’t have lit much even if it worked, so he wanted to pull Carol’s mower out and take a look at it in the light of day. Maybe he could cannibalize it for a blade. Maybe a couple of long bolts out and in, and he could get back to work. The garage was really a two-car attic, full of stored broken things and boxes of redundant items and defunct implements and upended rusted one-thing-or-anothers such that trying to get through it in the dark to manually open the big front door was impossible, so he looked for a working flashlight among the several that didn’t work, in the utility drawer by the broom closet, under the downstairs bathroom sink, under the bedside table in his and Carol’s room, on the top-shelf of the hall closet, on Stephen’s desk, in the piano bench in the front room. There was one flashlight Wally was sure worked, and that was the exact one that he couldn’t find. But it was okay, because he couldn’t find the key to the garage’s side-door anyway. One of these days he needed to get to the hardware store and get some keys made and a nice orderly rack of some kind to always hang them on and the tools to hang it with, and some batteries, A’s, C’s and D’s, and some air conditioning filters, too, and some gas for the grill, and spray paint for the patio chairs, and some sealant for the deck, and a pressure washer and a car vacuum and some inner-tube patching kits, a stretch of gutter, hedge clippers a hammer nails a saw an actual tool kit screw drivers wrenches electric stapler some twelve gauge shotgun shells duct-tape rope a red wheelbarrow and some fucking white chickens and maybe while he was at it he could get an actual life.

He stared out the front window of the quiet house. He wasn’t going to cry. The grass was tall, but at least all of it in front was tall – it wasn’t half mowed like in back. Lucky he didn’t start in front, and then that would be what was only partially cut, for all the world to see – but then he remembered that whatever he hit, of course, he wouldn’t have hit if he mowed the front, because it, whatever it was, was in the back. Of course, maybe if he’d started in front, the bad thing hidden in the grass would have been in the front, or he’d have hit something else that was in front, like the stump of the deceased Chinese elm invisibly lurking where he least expected, or it would have been something else, because if this, then that, etc. It was Saturday morning. He went upstairs and took a long, hot shower. Someday, he was thinking, he’d like to build an addition on this house – he couldn’t build it; have someone build it to his design – an addition that would feel like his. After his divorce, he came to like having nothing and leaving no tracks on the earth. He liked living austere. He liked living withdrawn. He liked laying low. He liked owning nothing including having no pot to piss in. Now he was over that. Now he was starting to long for something that could be home to him and feel like it. His grown son could come there and be his pal in a place where they both belonged. The addition would be two stories, a nice spacious master bedroom on the ground floor, where he and Carol could sleep together not in the nest and rut where she slept with Jim, her first husband. He could have her in his space, or at least have the illusion of having her in the illusion of a space that was his. There would be a study on the second floor, with many bookshelves, the desk given to him by his father, maybe a small fireplace, space for an easy chair and a good reading light that Carol would allow nowhere in the current house because it was all hers and not a bit his and she had an eye for decoration and continuity. A man’s retreat is what Wally was dreaming of, the hot water pounding down on him, the steam filling the bathroom and fogging the mirror. The administration building over at the college had recently burned to the ground, and with it his faculty office and with that most of his scholarly life. In the long interim post-first-marriage time, that office had been his retreat and laughing place. He needed a new one.

The house phone rang and Wally stood under the water and didn’t even consider getting it. He never answered this phone. It wasn’t for him, and the answering machine would catch it. The shower was fiery hot. He dressed and felt better. Out on the back porch, he tried the garage door opener again, and now the door lurched and opened. Grand. He went out to the garage to wrestle Carol’s old mower out onto the driveway. It wasn’t there. He crashed around through the boxed or rusting detritus of two formerly separate lives, his and Carol’s, but no mower. He did lay eyes on his ten-speed mountain bike, fairly new and still functional. He’d forgotten it since last summer. He lifted it forward to the front of the garage, set it where it could be reached in case he ever wanted to start biking again. He wheeled it out for a moment to look at it. Did he really own this? Had he bought it, ridden it last summer on a regular basis, and then entirely forgotten it with all else that was going on? He felt the sun on his wet hair. A plane was flying over. There was a time when he fantasized about getting a flying license. He had always liked flying, and now he scanned the sky to try to spot the plane he was hearing but it was behind a tree and anyway too high. He wiped off the bike seat, wheeled it a little and flexed the brakes. All good. Great. He might start biking again.

Right then, out of the corner of his eye he noticed the soccer goal was sagging. He parked the bike against shelving where there were numerous gallon paint cans stored, the splash marks on their sides revealing mysterious colors nowhere to be found inside or outside the house. He started analyzing the broken soccer goal. The upright post on the left side was broken. Not just broken. It was missing about a foot of PVC, erased cleanly like it had been sawed away. The soccer goal was now useless. The way it was drooping to one side, why didn’t he notice it earlier in the day? He didn’t notice anything anymore. He hated the goal being broken like this. It was an icon for him. Possibly it was in the backyard more for him than for Stephen, he realized now. Wally raised his son, his grown son, not Stephen, to compete head to head. Not like baseball, which was Wally’s sport. He remembered how his son, in high school, his real son, mostly grown now and gone somewhere, the son from the other life, the other life that Wally’d ruined, he remembered watching his son receive a pass in soccer, then turn with the ball and face his defender. Wally had practiced this with him, and then Wally remembered seeing him do it in a high school game. Later there would be real life, and there would be a need for this skill, Wally told him, twelve years ago, standing in the other back yard in the other life, under this same PVC goal, now destroyed.

The cell phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the number. It was his wife. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Carol called to him from Ohio, all the way over Indiana.

“Hi,” he said.

“Everything fine?” She was trying to talk real loud.

“Yes,” he said.

“Kids?”

“Are you in the car or on Mt. Everest?”

“Car.”

“Hi to your mom.”

“Yes, I’ll tell her. I’m between venues at this time.” The rest of Carol’s family, apart from Carol, was all over Cincinnati, taking care of her mom house to house.

“Right.” He could hear the sound of her open window. “Where’s your old lawnmower?”

“What?”

“Where’s your old green lawnmower that used to be in the garage. I need it.”

“Honey, it’s been gone two years. Garage sale.”

“I thought I’d just seen it recently.”

“Nope. That wouldn’t be my old lawnmower. Gone and good riddance. One time I was mowing with it and the back wheels both fell off simultaneously.” She was attempting to talk above her car radio and the wind of the open window. “So the kids are at Margie’s?” she said.

“Right. When do you think you’ll get home?”

“What?”

“When do you think you’ll be home?”

“You don’t need my lawnmower anyway. What’s wrong with yours?” she yelled.

“Oh dang, I hadn’t thought of that. Using my own mower that actually works.”

“You’re breaking up.”

Wally felt a wave of something, maybe it was just adrenalin, rise up, and he choked it back. “WHEN do you THINK you’ll be HOME?”

“You’re breaking up and your mood doesn’t seem all that great. Is that right?”

Wally scanned the yard, the phone up to his ear. He looked up at the sky, white fluffies on blue. Don’t shout on the cell phone when talking in the yard. People can hear you for a block. It’s one of the modern comedies.

“Are you there?” Carol said vacantly.

“Carol. How about you close the car windows and turn off the radio when you’re calling somebody on the cell phone.” He was talking through his teeth like he was getting mad, but he didn’t really care about this. His annoyance was about the broken piece of his past that he was staring at.

“Sorry,” she said, apparently the car window closed now. “Can you hear me okay?”

He looked toward the garage. He used to have an ax. A few years ago he chopped wood in the back yard, split a bunch of logs for the fireplace, and for this mighty task he bought a hefty, all-business, double-edged ax. It was red and would leave red paint in the notches where he struck the logs. Now for some reason a big angry charge of something inside him rose up, and he wanted to destroy a few things in the backyard and general area with an ax. That ax would be perfect. He stared through the garage doorway looking for it in the mess. Surely in a moment he’d see that very satisfying blond ax-handle leaning against something somewhere in there. No. It seemed like everything in the whole garage was fallen over or upside down. One box, full of old clothes, was half turned over and coming open. There was the ten-year-old blue jersey from some soccer team his son had been on back when he was nine. Somewhere Wally had the team picture, his son wearing that jersey when it was new.

Carol barked into the phone, “Listen, come to think of it – I really think you shouldn’t mow until I get home. There’s stuff in the yard. The kids need to pick things up. Before you mow – okay?”

“When are you getting home, Carol? In fact, why are you gone even?”

“Listen, honey, I can tell you’re upset. Does it seem like I’m gone a lot? Want me to come home now? Look, please, don’t mow, and I’ll be home tomorrow, late afternoon. Maybe we can mow then, after we pick up the yard or get Stephen to.”

“What’s in the yard?”

“Horseshoes.”

Now Wally realized there was also a hole in the red plastic netting that draped the goal. He bent down and looked through the hole, lined up with the gap in the goal’s left upright, and there was his lawnmower where it had suddenly stopped.

Carol continued, “You don’t wanna hit a darn horseshoe with the lawnmower, hon, trust me.”

Wally turned about-face and looked further downrange, toward the wood fence between his yard and the Fosters’ next door. In the mowed grass at the base of the fence was a horseshoe worthy of a Clydesdale.

Carol said, “The kids were tossing horseshoes. A binge of it last week. I told them to clean it up. They pulled the posts, but I counted the horseshoes, and there’s about three missing. So don’t mow yet.”

The day seemed dark to Wally, but when he looked up, it was sky-blue and white clouds and plenty of sunlight.

“You could hit one of those rusty old things and it wouldn’t be good at all.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Of course, it would be easier to find them if you mowed more often, because the grass would be shorter.”

“But what’s ….”

“But what’s done is done.”

“Yeah,” he said.

Wally roamed around the house in the afternoon. It settled in on him how lucky he was that he didn’t lose a foot that day. Or kill one of the kids. Random, thy name is a fast-ripping mower blade slinging a lucky horseshoe. He ate a grilled cheese sandwich and had a coke. He went in his study and stood. He had forgotten his meds that morning. Bathroom. He popped his pill, toasted himself in the mirror with his special St. Louis Cardinal bathroom water glass, as usual when he was alone: “Prozac Nation,” he said to the feckless weirdo who smiled at him and toasted him back.

If Wally could have drawn a picture of himself that day, he’d have used chalk and would have depicted a man in blue weather, suspended in a net that was hanging from above, from somewhere out of the frame, the sky. It would have been a lost little fellow who was not trying to escape the net but was resigned to it in some way. Was sort of lying in it, like in a hammock, a prisoner without knowing it. But whose net was it?

God’s. It was God’s net.

It occurred to him that there was extra PVC under the house. He wondered how big a project it would be to make the soccer goal right again, like it was before he started mowing. He recalled long tubes of PVC, left over from a plumber’s visit a few years ago – maybe there was a section of it that was the right size. Hardware store: glue, PVC joints. He was outside and another plane was going over. He’d left the garage door open, and when he tried to close it using the remote, nothing. He whacked the remote against the door jam, not too hard, tried again. Nothing. He wandered out to the garage looking for the ax. Today he’d be one wild-ass medieval Paul Bunyan if he found the ax. He was rummaging and digging in the disaster that they called the garage and didn’t notice Lowell Wagner had come up the driveway.

“Hey, Wally – you in there?” Lowell could see him. He was just kidding, acting like he couldn’t see Wally because of the hectic mess.

Wally looked up and laughed. “Hey, Lowell.” Lowell was out for a run apparently. He was in his running clothes – a black pair of shorts and the usual sweated-up Lincoln State PE department t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Lowell was Carol’s psychologist. Wally didn’t have a shrink of any kind at the present – go figure. But Lowell was Wally’s friend, and sometimes they would exercise together. Lowell lifted the bike out of the garage, looked at it with the eye of an expert. “You gonna start biking again? Not a bad idea.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Wally, rummaging.

“Not a bad idea.”

Wally skidded a pile of boxes a few inches, head down among boxes full of magazines, toward the back of the garage. There was a bookcase that had fallen over, and he was thinking the ax might be under it. “Look at this. A rat ate my ball glove out here -- you believe that happy horseshit?” The ball glove sailed out of the dim of the garage and landed on the driveway. Lowell eyed the ruined glove, didn’t pick it up.

“You need to keep your baseball glove in the house, man. It’s a good one. Was.”

Wally moved a few things so it was possible to walk without falling. He was wearing old Dockers; he felt lazy and fat when Mr. Exercise Man was hanging around.

Lowell said, “Don’t forget, there’s a 5k run next week down in Arcola – Broomcorn Festival.”

“I know, Lowell.”

“Want me to sign you up?” Lowell was sitting on the bike. “I’m driving down there anyway.”

“I don’t know. I’m sort of slipping out of condition. I’ve got a few projects going ….”

“You’re slipping all right.”

“Ha,” Wally said. He straightened up and looked at Lowell. He kept looking at him. He looked at him a long time, longer than either of them was comfortable with.

“Come ON! Answer me. It’s about three miles. It’s nothing.”

Lowell was sometimes so forthright about running. It was the foundation of mental health in his mind. Wally hated buckling under the pressure of his friend’s purity and rigor. But he did. “Okay, sign me up. I’ll reimburse. How much?” He could back out at the last minute later, by phone or simple omission.

“I’ll sign us up and you can reimburse later. It’s fifteen bucks counting the t-shirt.”

Wally stared at the mess around him. “I’ve got a few projects going.”

“I see that. You’re frustrated.”

“Stop being an active listener and getting on my nerves, okay?” Wally shoved some stuff with his foot, then pushed something else using his shoulder. Then he kicked something. “I’ve started about ten things today and don’t seem to be able to finish any of them.”

“Right.”

Lowell seemed to be staring at him waiting for the next thing to respond to responsively. He was applying his special kind of shrink’s pressure. Didn’t he have something to do on a Saturday? Gotta come over to Wally’s when Wally’s in a bad mood and looking for an ax? “Carol’s in Ohio at her mom’s,” Wally said, butt up, head down among the boxes. Arching over him was one end of a long defunct swingset. “Her mom’s been slipping a little, you might say. You might say. So Carol’s keeping an eye on her.”

“And the kids are ….”

“Margie. Swimming.”

“So….”

“So – you’re annoying the hell out of me right now, by the way – so, it’s a good time to get some stuff done.”

Lowell put the bike back by the paint cans, gently leaned it.

“So, you’re doing okay otherwise?”

“Otherwise?”

“Bust your butt doing that, man.”

Wally stood on a tricycle and got the burned-out light bulb unscrewed. Without event, he stepped down, light bulb in hand. He held it up to show victory over the odds. “Otherwise than what?”

“Everything going all right besides your ball glove?”

“Yes.” Wally picked up the steel tricycle and lofted it with a loud supremely satisfying crash into a pile of whatever was at the back of the garage, and turned toward his visitor. “How does that soccer goal look to you?” Wally stared at him from knee high in the middle of his upside-down life. He looked around for something else noisy to heave. A rake. Holding it at the end of its handle, he wheeled around once, three sixty and very fast, and slung it against the back wall, plenty of bam and rattle. He could feel his face go red, but he laughed anyway, too loud, and Lowell hesitantly laughed, too, but he didn’t flinch. “Did Carol tell you to look in on me?”

Now Lowell was inspecting the goal’s bad post. “This one we can’t blame on the rats,” he said.

“Did she?”

Lowell stood looking at Wally, like he was considering whether to answer the question or not, which meant the answer was “yes” as far as Wally was concerned.

“Veronica’s got pizza for lunch today,” Lowell said finally. “Smelled real good. Why don’t you get out of your garage malaise and come on over.”

Wally went back to stirring around, didn’t answer. Lowell wasn’t there just as a friend dropping by.

“Little food wouldn’t hurt,” Lowell said to him.

The invitation hung there and died. Good enough for it, Wally was thinking.

“Okay, well – anything I can do?”

“How about you make like a tree and leave,” Wally offered, and though he regretted the wording immediately, it did make them both laugh.

“It’s probably a good time for somebody to be here, actually. But okay.” Lowell headed down the driveway, calling back, “Give me a call if you want some pizza this evening. Veronica and I are just hanging out. You’d be welcome to come over. Let’s talk this week, and we can coordinate the Arcola thing.”

“Thanks for dropping by,” Wally muttered in his direction, too quiet to be heard. “What a pal,” he said, though Lowell was completely gone. “Have a good day, Lowell,” Wally said to himself.

On the side of the house, he kicked in the window-sized plywood piece that covered the opening to the crawlspace. Down on his hands and knees he looked in. It took a moment for the eyes to adjust. What was the first thing he saw? The flashlight! The one that worked! It still did! It was under the house! What a weird day! He imagined writing to his sister about it, how this day unfolded in a spiral. He wondered if he could remember the details. The phone was ringing in the house. With the flashlight, he could see the extra lengths of PVC pipe. There were plenty of pieces but the size was wrong and, besides, if he had to go to the store for the glue, why not get the exact length and size of pipe, the connector joints, and do this right. Of course. Wally was feeling better. There was not a chance in hell he’d find something to measure the goal with, but it was okay. Finding the missing flashlight was his reward for patience and for not losing his temper very much.

He replaced the crawlspace cover and went inside. He checked messages; there was one. Margie called to say she was going to keep the kids overnight if Wally didn’t mind – she’d be in touch tomorrow. Carol was working the system from a remote location. He sat in the leather chair in his study. The iron horseshoe was on his desk but he didn’t remember putting it there. Probably had, though. Before long it was evening, and he realized he’d been reading. He looked at his watch. It was almost dark outside. He felt okay but sometime in the past hour he’d sweated down his shirt. Where were the kids? He went in the kitchen. A burner on the stove glowed bright red. No harm, no foul. He turned it off. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. He’d lost some hours, he knew that. He looked in the back yard. Had someone smashed everything back there with an ax so that it looked like there’d been a Viking raid? No, everything looked fine except the soccer goal, and that was an act of God. The garage door was still gaping. From the enclosed back porch, right at dusk, he watched the garage door and pushed the little button on the remote. Just like nothing ever didn’t happen, the door obediently dropped down on its rails and closed. This was a torment and a mystery, one of the many. Another was that when Wally went back to the front of the house, he noticed through the front window there was a police car parked at the curb. Out of sight at the side of the window, he looked out for a while. Later he backed away from the window along the wall and slipped unseen into his study. He kept the lights off. A policeman was staring in. From his desk chair in the dark, Wally stared back.

Only the Lord knew what time it was when the next phone call came. Pitch black was in him and over him. Wally had leaned back in his chair in the dark of the study. The sudden noise of the house phone didn’t faze him, nor did he move. It rang many times; he wasn’t going to pick it up. What he might do, he was thinking, was stroll down the front sidewalk and have a chat with the constable. Do you know what was on his desk? His ax. Do you know when he found it? Neither did he. Do you know what was in the front yard? A stump. He should go out there and deal with it. The porch light would reach that far into the yard. He could chop out that stump, and maybe while he was at it, he could go down and talk to the police officer at the curb. He could settle everything so that when the sun came up he could mow the lawn in front and the stump wouldn’t hurt the lawnmower if he ever got the lawnmower fixed one of these days because of the horseshoe. Sleep was helping him see things clearly and in a more positive way.

The phone stopped ringing, and almost immediately his cell phone started squawking in his pocket. He writhed about in the leather chair trying to get at it. As he peered at the screen on his cell, he realized again that he was feeling better. Amazing how sometimes the weight could just be lifted.

The register said “unknown caller.”

“Hello.” He tried to sound authoritative and business-like, even though most people who knew his cell phone number knew better about him.

“Hi, is this Wally? This is Rachel McCabe.” How nice. Rachel, the beautiful neighbor across the street.

“Hi.”

“You didn’t sound like you, sorry.”

“Well, I’m the one who’s sorry.”

“Is this Wally, really?”

“Well, is this really Rachel McCabe from across the street?”

“Haha. Let’s go back and forth on that one for a while, want to?”

“Nah,” Wally said, trying to sound as friendly as he could.

“Hey, is Carol home? I wanted to talk to her for a second if I could catch her.”

“Me, too.” Wally looked at Rachel’s house out his window. “Rachel, I was just thinking about you. I’m dazzled that you called right when I was mulling you over.”

“Whatting me over?” she laughed.

“Mulling. Thinking, you know.” He sat up straight in the dark. “It’s a very surprising thing that you called right now. No, Carol’s in Ohio at her mom’s.”

“Ah. Is her mom doing okay?”

Wally found he couldn’t speak for a moment. Words were wedged and stuck.

“Hello?”

“She’s slipping, Carol’s mom is – but holding forth.”

“Holding forth, or holding her own?”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“Listen,” she said, “I can ask you this just as easy as I can ask your wife. I wanted to know if everything is okay, because there’s a policeman out front and he’s been parked there for quite some time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Maybe something’s up at the Fosters’.”

“Lemme look,” Wally said. And he went through the motion of looking.

He could tell somehow that she was looking, too – movement, maybe the sound of a blind at the window being moved. Finally, she said, “Maybe he’s just parked there to slow people down. They go down Van Allen like bats from Hades.”

“Did you just call on the other phone?”

“Yeah, but I know you don’t pick it up. I got your cell from the campus directory.”

“Why didn’t you call Carol’s?”

“Who says I didn’t, smart boy. She didn’t answer.”

“Ah.” Wally stood up. “Rachel, tell you what. I’ll put on a shirt and go out and see what Sherlock Holmes is up to, and I’ll call you back.”

“Well, you don’t need to do that. I can do it as easy as you can. I was just wondering if you knew anything I didn’t.”

“No, no, I’m going. I was going out there anyway. Some yard work.”

“Very funny. It’s two AM.”

“The better the day, the better the deed.”

“What?”

“I’ll call back after I find something out.”

“Deal,” she said. “Okay, I’m off then. Hope Carol’s mom is okay.”

“Thanks. Bye.”

He went upstairs without turning on a single light in the house and got his blue denim shirt and put it on. He loved this shirt. It was the best shirt he ever had. He went in the bathroom and, using the nightlight above the sink, wiped his face with a cool wet cloth. Combed his hair a little with his fingers, washed out his mouth. Rachel was very pretty, everybody thought so. Sometimes it did one good to be in touch with the outer world. It was a fresh perspective on things. He wondered why his ex-wife intentionally got fat and wouldn’t make love anymore. Even if she started hating him, still, that seemed like an extreme and self-destructive tactic. Life could be real convoluted, first thing you know it. Back in the bedroom, he slipped into his top-siders. In the dark, he walked out the front door of the house, ax on his shoulder like a rifle and he was a soldier, down the front sidewalk to the mailbox which was about fifteen feet from the front end of the parked cruiser. He hoped the mere presence of the large double-edged ax would send the message that he was out there to work on the stump. He looked up, as if to notice the police car for the first time, with the intention of walking over to the driver’s side window and saying hi. But no one was in the car. From the foot of his driveway, Wally looked up and down the neighborhood, house by house, both sides of the street. Nothing, nobody. There had been some mail, though. Hands full of envelopes and papers, he turned toward Rachel’s house and gave the “beats me” shoulder shrug in her general direction, figuring she was watching. On the front porch, he leaned the ax against the door jam, and then he walked back in the house.

In the dark he put the mail on the piano without giving it so much as a once-over, and went back into the study where his cell phone was. He sat down, and as he was redialing Rachel, he happened to glance out the front window in her direction. The police car was gone.

“Did you see that?” he said to her when she answered.

“See what,” she said in a pleasant tone.

“Did you see Sherlock pull away?”

“No,” she said. “I’m watching a tape with Hattie.” Hattie was her daughter. “Why, d’you chase him off?” Rachel and Hattie were a couple of night-owls, that’s for sure.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She laughed. “Well, good work. He needed to haunt somebody else’s curb, not ours. Glad everything seems okay in the ‘hood.’”

After he hung up, he went upstairs and thought he might get in bed. Surely it was time. Instead he found himself taking another shower. He got all cleaned up. He was feeling okay. He was glad the policeman had shoved off. It was Saturday night, for God’s sake. Didn’t he have anything better to do than watch an empty house?