The Hour of Bad Decisions (3 page)

The juncos, small grey birds with white bibs, flew away in short, alarmed arcs out in front of him, and a dragonfly hung, almost motionless, watching. In a nearby spruce, there was the liquid burble of a robin singing. Grass met sky in an even line high above the fenceposts, and the smell of summer was full in the air. Far away, someone hammered, metal on metal, and gently, like breathing, came the roll of the swells in on the rocky beach.

Tony watched his brother start the truck and pull off down the road. And with a sudden exhaling breath sweeping up from the sea, the air abruptly felt as cold as if fall had already come.

“S
HE'S BEEN IN MY HOUSE
. I'
LL BURN THE
bitch, Charley,” Brendan Connor said. Now, there's something to be frightened about, fires and rowhouses. I'd be lying if I said that most people downtown didn't think about fires at least once a week. You can't always get insurance in downtown St. John's, companies don't want to take the risk, and when there are fires, they often take houses two and three at a time. Shared walls and shared roofs, old, dry wood and no firebreaks between the floors. Like rows of flammable dominoes, windows instead of dots, just waiting to fall.

And it wasn't just Brendan who knew Mrs. Murphy.

“She's blind in one eye,” the woman who sold me the house said, laughing, when I had asked about noise. “Blind in one eye and quiet as a mouse.”

That, when I was trying to figure out if I really wanted to buy a house in a long row of shared walls and narrow back yards, when I was asking who the neighbours were, and whether it looked like I'd have any trouble.

It was a narrow house, one in a line of narrow rowhouses. Red. Ochre red, really – red but in that flat-toned, matte-flat old paint that so dignifies clapboard. Long, uneven ranges of clapboard along the front, and rectangular, blind windows, heavily shaded so that you can only imagine the rooms inside, rooms dark enough to hide the dust on the lampshades and what you would imagine might be fussy end-tables. Except for the fact that I have no real furniture, only an office chair and a small table, a bed and bookshelves.

Blind in one eye she was, and eye-patched, too, with a black fabric triangle like something out of a pirate movie. I wouldn't know that until several weeks after I moved in, although I would occasionally hear her on the other side of the wall, shuffling like a small mouse caught there in the air pocket behind the plaster and lathe.

Worse, still, in the bathtub. Yes, the bathtub, that porcelain parabolic ear – I'd lie there, once the water was turned off and the ripples were lapping my belly, when the house was quiet and empty, and I'd hear disconnected, scattered words, as if fistfuls of letters were making their way through the pipe chases.

“If I … Don't.”

“Telling you that it isn't…”

“Not right, not at all …”

It was never a complete sentence, rarely in fact a complete clause. But I'd hear it nonetheless and strain to make out just a few words more. It was as if she was talking intensely to someone who wasn't there. Only one voice, clearly a woman, but soft, a muttering, really, with rounded consonants so it had an eerie sibilance. Perhaps it was the walls themselves, or more precisely, the travel through the walls, that rounded the words. I don't know.

I found out her name from a bill that had been put into my mailbox accidentally: Anne Meadus Murphy. A Mrs., but with no sign of the Mr.

And then I caught her one day, watching. I was out behind the house, wandering through that most dislocating of worlds, someone else's garden left behind – peonies, big and hanging low by then, rows and rows of stubborn, unweeded perennials, tumbledown, fragrant shrub roses scattering white petals like fat confetti – watching me from what would have been the kitchen, if the geography of her house was the same as mine. Her small face in the window, the kind of face that suggests suspicion just in its construction. She had a short, sharp nose, thin mouth with lips pressed tight and pulled down in the corners, all of her features set into a face as round as a bowl. Pick one word out of the air for her, and it would be disapproving. I waved, and she pulled back out of sight quickly. If you hadn't seen it happen, you might imagine it was an illusion. The glass so clear and empty, flat enough to walk mere inches this side of a mirror.

I knew about Brendan Connor, the man on the other side, already – who didn't, given everything that had been said about him in the news? His house had been empty, at least until some relative could be identified to come in and strip it out, to clean it up enough that it could be put on the market. Social Services had seen to that. It looked like a smart buy, in that mercenary way, the way the '80s real estate speculators used to talk about it: you know, buy a distressed property or one on a rundown street, then move on when the neighbourhood gets fancied up.

He was, the stories said, unfit to care for himself, surrounded by rubbish and old newspapers. They took him away when they found he hadn't washed in weeks. Turner, one of the reporters from the newspaper where I worked, said there was a circle of fine dirt around every pore on his hands, so that the backs of his hands looked patterned, almost camouflaged. That his hands looked speckled, like fish skins. Connor didn't agree, and it was news for a while – that the authorities would come in and take a seventy-year-old man from his home. But when you found out more about how he was living – when Turner talked about the scores of cats and the piled, filthy dishes and the garbage simply thrown out the back into the yard, you were less sympathetic. When the neighbours talked about rats strolling the tops of their fences like tight rope walkers, well, some of the magic of renegade individualism faded.

But then, for no reason, they let Brendan come back. They let him come back, or they ran out of
reasons to hold him. Or else he simply left and they didn't come looking. It's hard to know – sometimes people just manage to walk away, and it's more than the system can do to find them again. Too much paper passed through too many hands, no one directly responsible for anything, too many people with full caseloads and more important problems to solve.

I saw him at the front door with a great big handful of keys, muttering and looking for the right one. Right after I moved in, while the books were all still in boxes. And by then, Turner had told me even more about what the house was like: half-empty cans of ravioli perched on chairs, on the stairs, pretty much anywhere he had left them when he'd stopped eating and set them down. That he had piles of newspaper three and four feet high, scattered through the house, years of newsprint, yellowing and crumbling wherever it lay. An upstairs room filled with coils of green garden hose and milk crates of either rusty or greasy bicycle parts. And, by the end of the last spring, no electricity, maybe because he didn't want to pay the bills, maybe because the envelopes were just never opened. Crusted pots and pans all around a white-gas camp stove on the kitchen table.

Turner said he made his way around at night with candles, except in the summer, when he mostly slept with the dark and got up as soon as it was light, four o'clock or earlier.

When I met him, shuffling around his yard in stained, dark-grey suit pants and suspenders, his fly
half-down, he called me “Charley,” for no reason I could understand. My name is Stephen.

Sorry – that's right – I should have told you. My name is Stephen, Stephen Morris, and I sell classified ads for a newspaper. Pretty much all day on the telephone or at the front counter, and then home. You can't really put much romance into it, except if you tell someone in a bar that you're a newspaperman. It's a lie, sure, but a harmless one. I'm forty and single, now, and I'll try and avoid the shorthand that this would all be if I were writing my own “personals” ad in the paper. You know the kind, “swm, tidy, quiet, seeks… etc.” I'm more “articles for sale” material: “For sale – dryer in working condition, two sets wooden shelves, bicycle, wedding dress size ten, never worn.”

I'm old enough to have hair sprouting out of the backs of my upper arms, old enough to feel truly second-hand already – and old enough to know that the word “catch” won't ever apply to me.

I'm the kind of flotsam that's statistically supposed to exist everywhere; you know, the “two out of every three marriages” kind, the starting again, picking up the pieces kind. The kind of guy who's lugging around more baggage than he has hands to carry it with. The kind who provokes tight-lipped head shaking at parties he's not even invited to any more.

So, to put life into the same sort of shorthand: new phone number, new address, new house – smaller than the one I left, a new universe with quiet, empty, hardwood-floored rooms. But at the same time, rooms where I was comfortably alone – in every single one.

One Sunday afternoon in July, about two weeks after I moved in, I found Mrs. Murphy in my basement, standing in front of my washer. The washer lid was open, and she was staring in at the wet clothes.

“Nice day,” I said.

“Is it?” she answered, staring back hard.

She's a small woman, thin, somewhere in her sixties, only five feet tall or so, but she stands like a taut wire, leaning towards you on the balls of her feet, poised. Then, that incongruous pudding-bowl face, a face that looked as if it was meant to be suited to warmth and caring and a plate of fresh muffins, but instead came across as strict and almost bulldog-tough. Pugnacious. We stood like that for a minute or two, and then she went out the back door into the yard, a door I have never unlocked, have never opened, a door I'm pretty sure I don't even have a key to. There were keys for the Yale lock and the deadbolt for the front door on the keychain the lawyer handed me after the sale closed, and another gold-coloured key that opened the back door onto the deck. Three keys and a worn leather tab, worn so smooth that you could see there used to be words pressed into the leather, now little more than shallow ridges.

And once she'd closed the door, not slamming it but pulling it closed behind her with a sudden huff of wind, it was almost as if there were no door, as if its simple white rectangle sealed tight into the white-painted back wall of the basement – and as if she had never been there at all. The kind of thing that makes
you shake your head sharply, trying to clear your mind of the cobwebs of imagination.

It was not, in the end, the magic it seemed: Mrs. Murphy had lived in the neighbourhood for as long as anyone, and she had a history of feeding the cats of vacationing neighbours, bringing in the mail – and collecting door keys – but that was something I wouldn't find out from a chatty mailman until almost a year had passed.

I put the wash into the dryer, thinking about Mrs. Murphy springing over the fence between our yards like a misshapen little angry sparrow. And I decided to buy a new lock for the basement door.

Brendan was digging in his yard then, a long, narrow trench from the back right corner of his foundation. There was lumber piled next to the hole, twoby-fours and flat boards, like you'd use for concrete framing. I didn't want to ask what he was doing. He was working with a pick and shovel, wiping sweat from his forehead with an astonishingly dirty handkerchief and leaving brown streaks behind. With a morning's digging, the trench was already ten feet long, and close to three feet deep.

“You should stay off another person's ground, Charley,” he said, breathing hard. “Stay off their ground, 'nless you ask 'em. That's politeness.”

The soil is hard clay pan back there, full of rocks, mostly dark grey shales that threw sparks from the tip of the pick. I was leaning on the fence, looking into the thicket of timothy grass, goatweed and thistles that sprouted up between cans and rusting chunks of
metal. He had a six of India beer there, three empty, three to go, and it was hot for St. John's, with a miasma coming off him that was far more than hard work and sweat. The
SPCA
had taken all the cats at the same time Social Services had taken Brendan, but already there were three more, watching us from his back window. His back door was open, and the back hall looked as wrecked as if the house had been abandoned: wallpaper hanging in long, mildew-speckled strips, tangles of dirty clothes on the floor. There was no reason to believe that anyone, even Mrs. Murphy, would want to go in there. While I watched, one of the cats came out into the hallway, tail flicking, and pounced on something out of sight from where I was standing.

“Watch out for her,” Brendan said, sweaty circles blossoming on his collared shirt, in under his arms and in the middle of his back. “She's bad trouble.” He was wearing dirty sneakers with the laces pulled loose, the tongues reaching up in the air as if his feet were too swollen to be packed into the sneaker tops. He swung the pick as if he were accustomed to it, hands sliding just far enough along the handle as the pick swept through its descending arc. Then he'd raise it again, loose-elbowed, relaxed, an ease of motion in his movements. Enough to see that it was a motion he was more than familiar with.

“Strange 'uns around here,” he grunted. “You should be careful. Old woman over there” – he waved one hand loosely toward a green house with yellow trim, then grabbed the pick handle again – “she just screams all the time. No reason fer it a'tall.”

I wanted to ask what he was doing with the wood, with the trench, but it just didn't seem polite. Then, the next morning, around four a.m., the hammering started, and one by one the other neighbours started to wake up and realize that Brendan was home.

I
WOKE UP THE NEXT NIGHT
, convinced that serious, small, half-blind Mrs. Murphy was standing at the foot of the bed, her mouth a thin line, but by the time I could find the light switch and turn the light on, the room was empty. There wasn't a single sound of her in the house, not a footstep or the distinctive whisper of fabric, only the occasional creak of the house cooling, the flat-top black roof surrendering the day's heat back to the chill of the night.