Posted by nigel1 on June 19, 2002 at 14:12:24:
When Mo got back, he headed straight for the refrigerator. He didn't want a beer, after that long hot walk. He wanted some iced water. It was a lot cooler in the house. Jody stood with her back to him when he entered the kitchen. He hoped the water jug was full.
"Mo!"
"Goddamn it, woman! What are you tryin' to do?" The knife in his wife's hand had come within inches of entering his stomach.
"You shouldn't have smuck up on me like that. I've been jumpy all day."
He pulled a towel off the rack and dryed his face in it. "I figured you heard me comin' in. But maybe that damn air-conditioner is too loud." It could have been, he thought. Got to fix that stupid evaporative son of a bitch one of these days. It hummed and vibrated a lot. He'd have to do it in the morning, when it would be cooler out.
"I didn't hear the truck," Jody said. "That's what it was."
After emptying the water jug, he told her what had happened. "I need to get some of these tires fixed. Can't handle any more of this walkin' business."
"Chrissie's got the car"
"That's no surprise," he said. "When's she gonna be back?"
Jody removed plates from the kitchen cabinets. "She drove into town this morning to look for a job. She was supposed to be back home before dinner. Could be back any time, I guess."
"Good," Mo said. All he wanted to do, the rest of the evening, was sit still and get a little breeze on his face, watch a little TV, and go to bed. Take a shower and shave sometime or other. Then he'd get up before sunrise and climb up on the roof and see if he couldn't get that vibration damped out in the air-conditioner. There was one good thing about the bone-dry air outside-- it made his cooler work better. If this was damp heat we'd really be sweating, he thought. On the other hand, damp heat would mean rain, and they could use a lot of that. You couldn't have one thing without the other. He picked up a Field and Stream from the coffee table and headed for the bathroom.
Wow! The vibrations were really bad in there! It wasn't that it was rattling the shelves or anything, but it was making a kind of pulse he could feel in his belly. The air vent in the ceiling rattled a little, but that was not so bad. What was bad were the pulses, going wumpety-wump-WUMP! He leaned over a little and opened the door into the hall just a crack. It was a little better. At least it wasn't worse. But he closed it again and locked it, so no one would walk in on him. He hated that. Chrissie did that once, and he had been very upset. "Damn it," he'd said, "if the door is closed, somebody's in there! Don't you know that?" Wumpety-wumpety-WUMP! Over and over, same cycle, over and over. He knew what caused that. An electric motor turned a big squirrel cage fan with a belt drive, and the motor was mounted on a sort of hinged platform, with rubber bushings on one side. The bushings lost resiliency in the heat and damp inside the cooler and rotted away. Then the motor wobbled around, bouncing against whatever was left of the bushings. It did the same thing last summer, but not nearly so bad. Even, then, it was starting to give them all headaches. Fortunately the hot weather season ended. But he ought to have fixed the thing. He remembered seeing a thing on TV once, about a russian spaceman who got turned into a jellyfish because his rocket made a vibration like that. He was still alive when he came back, but oozing all over the cockpit. They kept him in a fishtank and fed him through tubes. Then everbody started to go to church for some reason. It was a dumb show. But he wondered if something like that could ever really happen. It was a stupid way to build a cooler anyway-- cheap piece of crap from the local hardware store. Why didn't they bolt it all up solid, or better yet, weld it together? He decided to see what it was like in the bedroom.
It was dark and kind of "close", the way Jody always liked it. Once, he'd associated that closed-in feeling with sexual intimacy, but lately it only made him sleepy. And at that moment it seemed unbearably gloomy. After pulling off his heavy boots he stretched himself on the bedspread and stared at the ceiling. There was just no way he'd be able to sleep in there with all that thumping and bumping going on. It wasn't that bad the night before, or he would surely have noticed. He got up and crossed the hall, finding Chrissie's room locked, as usual. Jody found him with his ear pressed against Chrissie's bedroom door.
"What's the matter, hun?"
"There's the strangest kind of noise comin' outta there-- kinda like a heartbeat, and a whinning sound, too. It'd drive me up the wall, listening to something like that all night."
"Well," Jody said, " Chrissie's been having trouble sleeping, and that's the truth."
Mo sighed deeply. "I guess it can't wait. Damn it! Save a place for me. I'm going up on the roof and fix that thing once and for all. When Chrissie shows up, go ahead and eat without me. I'll be down directly."
"Good," Jody said. "It gives me headache."
"Makes you jumpy as a cat," Mo muttered. "You durn near cut my gut open."
Mo left the house, and a withering blast of late afternoon heat hit him immediately. It made him a little dizzy. FM 1661 wound not a stone's throw from his front door, and it was deathly still. Except for the cicadas and the buzzing grasshoppers, the only other sounds came from his air-conditioner, up on the roof, a down draft unit much used and frequently repaired. Wumpety-wump THUD! He got his extension ladder out of the storage shed, and propped it against the eaves. It looked like they needed painting, in fact. Then he returned to the shed for some tools. He took a pair of pliers, making sure to get the one's with insulated handles, a big heavy screwriver with a good foot of blade, a length of baling wire, and a wad of dense foam rubber, saved from the time Jody made cushions for the divan. He stuffed the tools in the back pockets of his jeans and tucked the foam rubber under his belt in front. That ought to do it, he decided. Then he remembered he'd probably need something to trim his stuffing, so he picked up a pair of tin snips and headed for the roof.
The roof wasn't very steeply inclined, but the corrugated tin dazzled him with reflected sunlight. When he steadied himself with his hand, he yelped and pulled it away. The roof was hot! He wished he'd thought to use his gloves. The air-conditioner bulked up just to the side the roof's apex, just off the center line. Pieces of straw matting protruded through the side vents, stained red by rust, and looking almost like a small animal's innards. Thin streams of water drooled out of the cooler's bottom. Birds liked to pick the straw out and build it into their nests. Straddling the roof peak, trying not to touch it with his hands, he pulled one of the side panels loose. The water running over his hands and up his arms as he lifted the panel felt good. He laid it on the unit's metal top and squatted so as to be able to peer inside. His calves and thighs ached already. The problem was obvious. The motor kicked and bucked, rattled and bounced, against the vee belt driving the fan. The rubber shock mounts fitted over the long ends of the motor mounting bolts were in bad shape. Not only was the rubber dead, the protruding bolt ends were worn through. What should have been a pair of rubber "biscuits" were now a couple of rubber "doughnuts", doing no good at all. What a damn stupid way to build something, he thought. There! He wedged the big screwdriver into the works, under the motor, and pried up on the loose end. With the belt taut, it was a hundred percent better. He pulled the screw driver back out, and it was worse than ever. While he worked, Chrissie turned off the county road and bounced into the driveway. Seening the way she gunned the car over the bumps and ruts made his blood boil. When she stopped, the brake squeal ended with a final, loud, crunching grind of metal against metal. He knew what caused that, it meant more expenses. That girl, he said to himself, is going to get a royal talking to, just as soon as I finish up here. Hastily, he yanked a handful of foam cushion out of his belt, and stuffed it under the motor mount with his fingers. Then he used his screwdriver to pack it tight. Sweat trickled into his eyes, and was becoming a target for a swarm of gnats. He scalp itched where his hair was thin. Somehow, the foam stuff didn't seem to be working as well as he thought it would. If he had a wood block, a piece of 2 x 4, he could wedge it tighter.
"Daddy," Chrissie shouted, "when you comin' in?"
"In a minute," he yelled, wiping the sweat out of his eyes. "And by God, I've got something to say to you! You go back inside!"
Then, because he was angry, he began to poke furiously at his foam wadding, using the tip of his heavy screwdriver. There was a fat, blue, spark, and, startled, he sent the screwdriver looping gracefully through the air, rising in a high arc before vanishing below the edge of the roof, making a "chunking" sound when it hit something.
"O my God! Oh, Daddy, no!" Chrissie screamed. Still blinking, he saw Jody staggering in the back yard, in a peculiar knock-kneed way, holding the top of her head, where his screwdriver protruded. Chrissie skipped and danced around her, going no, no, no, seemingly unable to steel herself to touch her mother. As he watched, before he could summon the will to move or speak, the screwdriver toppled backward and fell, bouncing once against his wife's backside, before striking the ground point first and penetrating. The damned thing seemed to have a homing instinct, Mo thought. He felt sick. At the same moment a fountain of blood sprayed between Jody's fingers, and she fell face forward, sprawling, streaming blood from the crown of her head as though someone had pulled a plug.
Chrissie disappeared. She must have run inside to call for help, surely, Mo thought. The air-conditioner went wumpety-CRASH-thump-thump-BUMP like something demented, and he had a feeling he had better be very careful getting down from the roof, as much as he wanted to hurry. His legs felt wobbly and for an instant, he forgot where to find the ladder. Don't tell me I'm gonna get heatstroke, now, he thought-- that would be too fucking much. And while he edged toward the ladder, beginning to feel slightly less faint, a voice in his head told him there was no way Jody could be seriously hurt. There was just no way, that screwdriver could have punched into the brain. God forbid. All those cracks about her thick skull-- they were really coming back to him now. It wasn't even that sharp, and it didn't fall that far. And if it had gone in to any depth, God forbid it, it would not have fallen out the way it did. It must be that she just got a bad knock and a scalp wound. It stunned her. She needed a few stitches and an icepack. But she was stretched face down in the dirt like a dead person, and there was an awful lot of blood-- and flies! Flies, already! Looking down from the edge of the roof, he felt the blood drain from his face, and he went cold, then hot. Chrissie stood in the yard, looking down at her mother. She had his M-1 carbine, that he kept, loaded, with a special twenty round clip, in his bedroom closet. Holding it in her hand, letting the weapon dangle at the end of her arm, she held the muzzle over her mother's head. "Chrissie," he began, but she fired five shots, slowly, at desultory intervals, into Jody's tangled hair, which seemed to collapse and settle onto itself as the bullets entered. Each shot cracked sharply in the burning heat, falling dead almost immediately, with no reverberation. Everything shimmered. Every shot made him flinch. He could do nothing but squat there, on the edge of the roof, swallowing hard. It would have been easy to close his eyes and pitch slowly forward, to lie in a ragheap at the foot of the ladder. "Chrissie," he said again. She looked up, directly at him. "You killed her," she said. She was so calm, then, in her light summer dress and sandles. "You dropped that thing on her HEAD, and you hurt her in the BRAIN, and made her suffer like an ANIMAL." The girl shuddered and closed her eyes. "God! It was horrible!" Again, she stared at him. "She died slow, but I put her out of her misery. I had to do it, Daddy." Then she became suddenly like a maniac, screwing up her face until it became hard to recognize. "You must be crazy," she said. "You're crazy as hell!"