A Stranger's House (12 page)

We sat in the no-smoking section, but in a restaurant this small, the Friendly's Grady told us he worked at, that distinction didn't really matter: there were only three banks of booths running lengthwise, the room only some fifty feet deep. Smoke from other tables would find us.

Tom leaned toward me, said, “He told me when we were out there that he didn't know why. But all I'm doing is asking. That's all. And I'm just trying to find out if he really wants to work out there with us.” He paused. “I just don't know if I trust him or not.”

I said nothing. We'd had this conversation too many times, Tom wondering out loud exactly
why
the owner, Mr. Clark, was getting rid of the place. We could get no straight answer. Clark, just as Grady had said, was living in Maplewood Home, a rest home just outside of town on Route 9. It was a big old place, ugly yellow with turrets and spires and dormers and screened porches, a place that had at one time, we were told, been the home of the onion baron of the Pioneer Valley back in the 1890s. But now it housed only old folks, and was a private place, as private as you could get and still be minutes from town. Though the house was set only a few yards back from the street, it was surrounded with black wrought-iron fences and had a security guardhouse at the base of the driveway. The guardhouse, merely a shack painted the same color as the house, was manned day and night. So far, we hadn't been able to speak with Clark; all communications had been through Rita and the owner's lawyer, a Mr. Blaisdell. The lawyer had virtually guaranteed there was no structural damage. We were buying the house as is.

I looked around, wondering if Grady were even working tonight. We'd come right over from work, Tom still in his tie, me still smelling of rabbit. But then I always did.

“Who are we going to trust?” I said. “We can't get a word out of Clark. Or Blaisdell. Grady's the only one who knows anything about the place. I trust him.”

He leaned even closer. Still I wasn't looking at him, but at the cook station, at the metal door back into the dishwashing room, at the cash register. He said, “You don't even know him. You don't.”

The metal door swung open, and there stood Martin, his hair still slicked back, his eyebrows straining high above his eyes. He had on the blue-checked polyester shirt the men here wore, the little name plate with the red Dymo sticker on it pinned to his chest. He was carrying a plastic bin filled with plates, his lips parted, teeth clenched. Quickly he walked from the doorway to behind the wood panels that hid the cook station and ice cream freezers, his head above the panels. All I could see was his profile, his high forehead, the sweat that glistened there. He made it to the end of the freezers, disappeared below the panels, and I heard the bin of plates slide into a cupboard of some sort back there, heard the bin hit the back wall with a metallic thud. His head popped up above the panels, and he weaved his way back between waiters and waitresses, pushed the metal door open, and disappeared back into the steam and bright lights and kitchen sounds.

I turned to Tom. His eyes were still on the door. I said, “Did you—”

“Yes,” he said without letting me finish. He turned to me. “I guess I shouldn't be surprised, really.” He put one hand on the tabletop, drew an imaginary circle, tapped the center of it.

I looked back to the door, and remembered once more him staring at my hand. Without looking I touched the spot where the dressing had been a month before, felt the little raised slits of flesh, felt, I imagined, the red color of that scar. Touching the skin made it almost tickle, and I stopped, flexed the fingers. Though they were still tight, the flesh between thumb and forefinger a little tender, they were limber enough to begin surgery the next day, and I thought of putting Chesterfield, soft, white Chesterfield, into the Gormezano box, placing him on the surgery table, lining up the
stereotaxic frame, and the work that would begin. I swallowed, caught a breath, because it was just as it had always been: a mistake to have named the first rabbit.

Rabbit running had been canceled until I came back the Tuesday after I'd been bitten. I'd needed the extra day, that Monday, just to sit in the empty apartment, Tom at work. I needed to sit and watch television and read magazines and sleep.

Tuesday morning, though, I had gotten right back to business. I wanted to go in there and do what I had to do, not let any fear settle in me. But Will and Sandra and Paige and Wendy insisted on asking me again and again how I was. I only smiled as best I could, afraid to tell them I just wanted to be left alone, to do my work. To get these rabbits run.

Finally I went down to the basement, closed my eyes a moment, and pushed open the heavy door into the Green Room.

There sat Chesterfield at his cage door, his nose going again, ears straight up.

My eyes next went to Large #2's former cage, where a new rabbit sat. Mr. Gadsen had already been in to cover himself.

I crossed the room, and saw atop the cages a brand new pair of canvas gloves. I picked them up, the material stiff and white and coarse. Pinned to the left glove was a scrap of old notebook paper torn from a three-ring binder. On the piece of paper was written:

I crumpled up the note in my good hand, threw it in the trash bin next to the cages.

I habituated them that day, the same work I'd intended to have
done the week before, and by Thursday I had them used to the dark and to the tone, ready to be hooked up to the potentiometer. All the rabbits had come through fine: a little irritation in a couple of the rabbits' eyes, but no major problems. Only yesterday, Wednesday, had Jack finally given the go-ahead for surgery, the rabbits' conditioned inhibitions at high enough of a percentage to warrant our going into their brains.

I still hadn't called Mr. Gadsen, hadn't seen him, and didn't intend to.

Someone placed two glasses of water before us on the table, and 1 looked up.

It was Grady.

He was smiling, the order pad in one hand, the other holding his pen, ready to write. “You ready to—” he said, and stopped. He got a puzzled look on his face, his smile faltering a moment. I glanced at Tom. He was looking at Grady, too.

“Wait a minute,” Grady said, all smiles again. He put the pen behind his ear, plugged back into that shiny black hair. “Now wait a minute. I know you,” he said. “I know you two.” He put his hands on his hips.

“Chesterfield,” Tom said. “Your grandfather's place?”

“You shouldn't have told me,” he said, and shook his head as if he were going to scold him. He even pointed a finger at Tom, then at me. “I would have guessed. I would have.”

Tom and I smiled, looked at each other. “I don't doubt it,” I said, and Grady's smile grew until I could see most of his teeth: clean, white. Not what I would have thought, for some reason.

He said, “So, what brings you out here?”

“Would you believe a Fribble?” Tom said, and gave a small laugh. I smiled.

“I know better than that,” he said. “You told me you two live in town. You could get that at the Friendly's on King instead of coming all the way out here.” He was still grinning. “You two are up to something else.”

I said, “The jig is up.”

He lost the smile for a moment, and I saw the kid in him again,
the puzzled boy. He was practiced at the adult, but not proficient. He said, “Excuse me?”

“The jig is up,” I said again. “That means the game is over. That you figured us out. You figured out we were lying to you.” I folded my hands together in front of me on the table. I was looking up at him. Cigarette smoke from somewhere drifted into my lungs.

“Oh, oh,” he said, and laughed. “It's Claire, right? That's your name.”

“Right,” I said. “Good memory.”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “It's Martin, actually. He's the one with the memory. He's the one who remembers everyone we've ever met. Seriously. He does.” He turned to Tom. “And you're Tom, right?”

“Right again.”

“We wanted to know if we could talk to you,” I said. “About the house.”

“You guys really buying it?” he said. He had quit smiling.

I looked at Tom. He said, “We put in the bid, your grandfather took it. Or at least his lawyer took it. We're just waiting for escrow to clear now.” He paused and smiled at me. “I guess we are.”

“So,” he said, “sure we can talk, but—” With one hand he pulled the pen out of his hair, and half turned from us to point to the rear of the room. He turned back to us. “If you'll look back here to my right and behind me, ladies and gentlemen,” he went on, “you'll see my manager. She's back there, as always, with Leo, one of Northampton's finest. If she sees us talking too much over here, she'll ride my butt the rest of the night and on into tomorrow, too.”

I looked past him to the last booth. There sat the manager, a plump girl with a perfect tan, her golden hair up and in curls atop her head. She wore the white blouse female managers wore, hers too tight, straining against her breasts so that the seams in her bra were visible beneath the material of the blouse. Leo was sitting next to her in his dark blue uniform and black nylon jacket. He, too, was overweight, his neck thick, face puffy. He had a sundae in front of him, and was looking at it, laughing. The manager said something to him and took a drag off her cigarette.

“Real executive material,” I said.

“Can't argue with that,” Grady laughed. “Tell you what,” he said. “We get off in twenty minutes. You want to, we can talk after that. We can shoot the breeze then.”

I looked at Tom.

He said, “I don't mind, if you don't.”

We ordered, and when Grady was gone to get us our coffees I looked back at the manager to see if she'd even noticed Grady at our table. She was still whispering things to Leo, her cigarette sucked down almost to the filter, the stub in her pouty mouth, and I knew she hadn't even seen him over here. He just wanted to get away from us, and I wondered what he would be able to tell us.

Then for some reason I glanced back at the metal door, and saw Martin there in the small, square window.

All I could see was his face, nothing else, filling the glass, looking at me. He turned and was gone, and I realized then that that was the reason I had looked to the window, what I had expected to see: a man who remembered names, remembered people. I wondered, too, if while he looked at me he were again touching his own hand, imagining on his own flesh a scar like mine. The same scar I was touching now, the adhesions mountains at my fingertips.

I took my hand away. I took a sip of water, let an ice chip slip into my mouth, and felt it melt, my tongue cold against the roof of my mouth once it was gone.

“What we wanted to know,” Tom said, and I could see his breath out there in the parking lot, the small clouds illuminated by the little lamps on the side of Friendly's, “is why the heck now. I mean, why are they selling it now? After so many years. Sure, we're buying the thing, but this lawyer just won't tell us anything. We just want to know.”

We were leaning against the trunk of our car, the metal cold on my bottom. Tom and I stood as close to each other as we could.

Grady stood a few feet off, his back to the restaurant and the lamps. I could barely make out his face, his shoulders up in the cold, one hand jammed deep into his pants pocket, the other holding a cigarette. He held it with his thumb and first three fingers, as if it were some little peashooter. I knew he imagined that was how
adults did it. He looked away from us, took a deep drag off the cigarette, and held it. He didn't say anything.

I took in a breath, the air sharp and clear in my lungs. I said, “Is it something structural? Because we've had some people out to look at it, some experts, and—”

“What experts?” he said. He turned his head to me. “What did experts have to say about the place? What do they know about the place?” I couldn't see his face, but on his voice was an edge, not an assumed toughness, but real emotion: hate, I thought, or maybe fear.

He looked at his feet, shot out a breath. The cigarette hand was down at his side.

“I'm sorry,” Grady said to the ground. Tom looked at me, and back to Grady, cleared his throat. I could feel my hands in my coat pockets begin to sweat.

“It's just that,” Grady said, and looked straight up into the night. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, just barely lifting one foot off the ground, placing it gently back on the pavement, lifting the other. “Just that, Jesus. That that's the house where my daddy grew up. The house where he was born. In that old house Martin and I go out to three times a year. And my grandfather, my grandfather never asked me about selling the house. He never even asked. That's what's wrong.”

I could see now that his eyes were closed, and I lost him. I had no idea who he was, I saw, no idea of his age, where he lived, anything. Maybe Tom was right; maybe he was not to be trusted. For a moment I was frightened, felt the cold burn into my eyes, then remembered this boy, remembered he was only a person, that he had a father and a mother, must have had someplace to live.