It’s mid-afternoon, the air is stale, and there are blooms of mold streaking the drywall, scraps of blistered wallpaper, water-damaged boards and windowsills, cracked paint, tan and brown stains on the ceiling layered like a contour map. Adam cannot adjust to the silence, which seems to be encroaching in through the dirt-caked windows.
This is the first time Kurt has stood inside this house in over thirty years, though it had regularly affirmed itself during that time in the monthly invoices he received from a real estate attorney whom he now knew only in the abstract—Kurt had hovered his pen over a Christmas card last year for a full minute, groping for the man’s name and failing. No matter. The less Kurt had to deal with the fact of the house’s steady depreciation, just the very idea of its existence, the better. But Kurt did not sell the house, either. Now he stands in its ruined den, and under the stench of the decaying wood, he inhales the weak and familiar bouquet: rug mold and pot ash, rat urine and stale Pledge. The sour, wall-bound scent of vegetable oil—
—from supper every evening as Earl Schrader would batter-fry cabbages, potatoes, wild mushrooms, kidney beans, anything except the flesh of animals—I’ve married the only hippie in Montana, Delilah would tease her husband, but when the local free papers began running features about the heroin craze of California, whose cultist adherents in the name of Satan ate human flesh, performed lewd and perverted acts in public (“Unpictured Here for our Readership’s Decency”), Earl didn’t have to say anything, and Delilah relented; it was understood that he took his eating as seriously as his religion, exulted in temperance, so words that were spoken about him in his presence had to be small and reverential, and from his only son Kurt he would brook no jokes, no complaints, and Kurt learned not to speak in a way that might betray adulthood, learned to behave as if he was just glad to be there, to be nourished by what he ate, to grow, because the first child—born five pounds, also named Kurt, had only grown thinner, and Earl had blamed it on the doctor, on bad luck, on the Devil’s moon, and Delilah blamed it on the drafty house, this God-damned cheap old clapboard death-trap: if they had just lived with her parents, like she wanted, if Earl hadn’t insisted on handling all his finances, on making everything his own, his own—
There is a loud creak, and the bedroom door, which was closed, pops and swings open, rasping on its old hinges, and the doorknob strikes the wall so hard it makes the door wobble.
“What the hell was that?” Adam calls out from the kitchen, where he’s leaning on the counter.
“It was the door,” Kurt says. “It opened by itself.”
“What?”
“Settling, drafts. Old houses do that.”
“Haunted houses do that.”
Kurt says nothing. He rummages through a duffel bag containing the prepared checklists, the cardboard shipping tube stuffed with blueprints, and the laminated DIY guidebook xeroxes, setting it all down on a dry patch of the hardwood floor, begins smoothing them, sorting them, and loses track of time in the male euphoria of planning and stratagem. Adam roams the five rooms by himself; kitchen, bedroom, washroom, toilet, den. He complains about the damp and the cold, the water running from the ceiling but not the faucets, he slides his hands down the bloated walls and takes his palms away dripping, hears a tinny buzz in his ears.
“Adam? Walls or floors?”
“What?”
“Walls or floors, which do you want to do first? Or do you want to work on them together?”
Adam says nothing, just paces around the empty bedroom, stretching his bones, rubbing his hands on the front of his heavy jacket, heads to the window, which is smoggy with pale green dirt on both sides. He peers outside, jerks the frame up to open it but finds it stuck, gives up, sits down on the floor under the window, yawns repeatedly, lets the tears of drowsiness overflow his eyes and run down to his chin, and as he settles onto the floor he is struck by a haze of bafflement—doesn’t remember why he entered the room, a sheen of absentia over his eyes, and he pats his vest, pants, ass, cargo pocket, retrieves a pack of cigarettes and a nicked-up plastic lighter, lights up, draws in, breathes out. The smoke rises in a column and mingles with the dust motes suspended in the window light, and after a minute, Kurt calls from the other room, “Jesus, you smoke now, too?”
“Only now and then,” Adam says. “Don’t worry, it’s not a habit.”
[End of excerpt. If you'd like to read the rest, let me know. -Tony]
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