Signals Read online

  ALSO BY TIM GAUTREAUX

  The Missing

  The Clearing

  Welding with Children

  The Next Step in the Dance

  Same Place, Same Things

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Tim Gautreaux

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Several stories were previously published in the following publications: The Atlantic: “Attitude Adjustment,” “Died and Gone to Vegas,” “The Safe,” “Welding with Children”; Fiction: “Sorry Blood”; The Guardian: “Gone to Water”; GQ: “The Bug Man,” “Easy Pickings”; Harper’s: “Deputy Sid’s Gift,” “Something for Nothing”; The New Yorker: “Idols”; Ploughshares: “Resistance”; and Story: “Good for the Soul”; and “The Furnace Man’s Lament,” originally published as a Vintage Short Original, an eBook program of Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gautreaux, Tim, author.

  Title: Signals / Tim Gautreaux.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016019485 (print) | LCCN 2016026460 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493040 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451493057 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.A954 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3557.A954 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016019485

  Ebook ISBN 9780451493057

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images: (top two) Stacy Kranitz; (bottom two) Alec Soth / Magnum Photos

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tim Gautreaux

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Idols

  Attitude Adjustment

  Sorry Blood

  Radio Magic

  The Furnace Man’s Lament

  Deputy Sid’s Gift

  Gone to Water

  The Bug Man

  Wings

  The Piano Tuner

  The Review

  Easy Pickings

  Signals

  Good for the Soul

  Something for Nothing

  Resistance

  The Adventures of Sue Pistola

  Died and Gone to Vegas

  The Safe

  Welding with Children

  What We Don’t See in the Light

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Haley and Melissa,

  who gave us grandchildren

  Wake me up early, be good to my dogs

  And teach my children to pray.

  —JOHN ANDERSON

  Idols

  Julian was living in a sooty apartment building next to an iron foundry in Memphis when he received a letter announcing that his great-grandfather’s estate had finally been cleared up. He stood in the doorway of his peeling duplex, his hands shaking as he read the terms. Most of the property had been sold off to satisfy liens and lawyers’ fees, but the large country house and six acres remained, along with $28,000. Julian was a thin man of sixty-three, balding, a typewriter repairman who worked out of his spare bedroom and kept to himself. The one time he’d seen the grand old home was when he was eight, riding past it on a gravel road with his mother, back when she could afford a car. The mansion was surrounded on three sides by rows of cracked Doric pillars, its second-floor gallery missing many balusters, its windows patched with cardboard. It had been occupied for many years by a glowering family of squatters who’d slouched on the porches and stared after his mother’s black Ford as it crawled past the fence. For all he knew, they were still there.

  He went inside, out of the late June heat, and sat in a duct-taped recliner to reread the terms of his good fortune. The only extra money he’d ever had was a hundred-dollar win on a scratch-off ticket. Before his mother died, he’d spent two years at a tiny local college and considered himself at least wealthy in knowledge, more so than the shopkeepers and records clerks he dealt with. Normally, he disparaged people who owned large houses, yet deep in his heart he’d stored the memory of the old mansion as the only grand thing in his family’s history. It had shamed him to long for the house, and now he owned it.

  —

  The thought of inflicting pain on unlucky people bothered Julian, so instead of personally telling the impoverished family who lived in the house that they would have to leave, he asked the county sheriff to evict them. He spent a month emptying his apartment of derelict Selectrics and Royal 440s, then got into his twenty-year-old Dodge and drove southeast into the scrub-pine flats of northern Mississippi. After an hour, he left the wide state highway for a snaky blacktop road, and deep into the woods he turned left down a gravel lane that ran as straight as a railroad for ten miles. At one point he came up on a five-strand run of barbed wire healed into the bodies of live oaks, and he slowed, took a breath, and stopped the car. The lawn was a weave of waist-high weeds and fallen limbs punctuated by the otherworldly pink domes of thistle blooms, and rising beyond was a mildewed temple. Patches of plaster had fallen away from the main walls, showing an orange, wind-wasted brick. Julian pulled past the end of the fence, got out, and sat on the car’s hood. His now-dead mother, whom he’d found hard to bear, pretentious for a poor woman and full of outdated airs, had talked about this house as though it proved something about her ancestors, the Godhighs. “They were noble and powerful people,” she’d told him the day they’d driven by the place. “And we have their blood.” He straightened his back so he could stare over the wiry brush at the soaring columns, the brooding eaves, and suddenly felt that he deserved this inheritance, had deserved it all his life.

  He walked up the flag steps, through the unlocked door, and into a broad hall. The house was an echoing series of frighteningly tall rooms that smelled of emptiness and mouse droppings. The place hadn’t been painted in many decades, though the last occupants had left it relatively clean. The lightless kitchen, something added a hundred years after the main structure was built, contained a gassy-smelling stove and a badly chipped sink. Upstairs, four vast rooms opened off a wide hall, and a door led up to an attic crossed with naked cypress beams. Above that perched a glassed-in belvedere, unbearably hot, where he could look out over long, flat plots of woods that once were cotton fields. He imagined pickers dragging their bags slowly across the steaming landscape and understood whose labor had paid for the house. The roof was iron and looked to be sound, though storm dented and running with rust. After inspecting the outbuildings, he drove six dusty miles to the town of Poxley, where he bought, on time, a bed, some chairs, a couple tables, and a dinette set. Mr. Chance Poxley, a soft, liver-spotted gentleman in a white shirt and skinny tie, also showed him a small used refrigerator.

  “You can’t live without no icebox,” Mr. Poxley told him. “You’ll leave a can of potted meat out too long on the windowsill and think you can eat it the next day. Then you’ll get to throwing up all over the place. You’ll get the sick
headache.” Mr. Poxley raised a blue-veined hand to his forehead. “You’ll be throwing up things you never seen before.”

  “All right,” Julian snapped. “I’ll take the damned thing. When can you deliver it all?”

  “Where you live?”

  He told him and watched for his reaction.

  “Law, is that old place still standing?”

  Julian sniffed and raised his chin. “Not only is it standing, I’m going to restore it the way it was.”

  Mr. Poxley scratched the back of his head and squinted. “What way was it? Ain’t nobody alive ever seen a drop of paint on that place.”

  “That’ll change soon,” Julian said, plucking his receipt from the old man’s fingers.

  “You ought to get you a nice little brick house on a half acre, somethin’ you can keep up. I don’t think you understand how much that place’ll cost to fix. How cold it’ll be come winter.”

  “The house is a part of my family’s history.”

  Mr. Poxley seemed to think about this a moment. “Well, I hope history can keep you out of a draft.”

  —

  The next day, the old man and two high school boys delivered Julian’s purchases. Upstairs, Mr. Poxley stared at the sagging bedroom ceiling. “Say, what you do for a livin’?”

  “I sell and service typewriters on a business route in Memphis.”

  “Typewriters,” Mr. Poxley repeated, as if Julian had said buggy whips or steam engines. “We threw our last one out ten years ago.”

  “Some places need reliable old models to fill out forms and such.” Julian spread open a sheet over his new mattress. “Antique shops want rare old models restored.”

  The old man gave the house the once-over, looked down the long, flaking hall, over the warped pine flooring, gazed up at the cloth-covered wires snaking across the ceiling. “For your sake, I hope typin’ comes back in style.”

  —

  For the next three weeks, Julian swept down the rooms and galleries and thinned out the fallen limbs in the yard, the end of each day finding him tired unto sickness. He bought an electric saw and some lumber to patch the second-floor gallery, but every time he was halfway through a board a fuse would blow in the spider-haunted circuit box in the kitchen. The first time he fired up his double hotplate, the fuse box door was open and he witnessed a cerulean flash and rat-tail of smoke—the first of four fuses it took to fry one egg. He had no idea how to upgrade the wiring, and in the following days he began to eat his food cold.

  Every day, he walked through his rooms, calculating how long it would take to patch the fractured plaster, paint the blotched walls, and glaze the windows.

  Julian understood that he would have to hire cheap help, a broken-down old carpenter desperate for work or some rehabilitating wino or mental case, and the idea elevated his spirits, as if such servitude would echo the history of the place. He thought of the ancient kitchen house in the backyard, left over from the days when kitchens were built separate from the main houses to prevent fires, and he figured the hired fellow could stay there, as part of his salary. The rural living and hard work would bring the poor man back to health, so giving him the job would be like granting him a favor.

  —

  He drove in to see Mr. Poxley, who as usual was standing at the end of his counter, his left elbow holding him up. “What can I do for you, Mr. Typewriter Man?”

  Julian frowned at the greeting. “I need to find somebody to do electrical work, simple carpentry, and painting.”

  Mr. Poxley’s eyebrows flew up. “So do I.”

  Julian crossed his skinny arms. “But I can offer a place to live.”

  “You say you want this worker to live out there with you? What on earth for? He’ll eat you out of house and home and bum money ever’ chance he gets. After a few months on the place he’ll be the same as a brother-in-law.”

  “I want an employee, not a relative.”

  Mr. Poxley flapped his limp hand at him. “You want a sharecropper, son. Them days is over, gone to history.”

  Julian suspected that Chance Poxley had little grasp of history and was just a desiccated old man who specialized in opinions. Still, he probably knew everyone in the county. So Julian leaned in and lowered his voice. “I thought maybe I could find somebody with a weakness. You know how people go out of circulation because they gamble too much or drink.”

  “Oh, you want a drunk sharecropper,” the old man said.

  “No, no. Maybe somebody just down on his luck. I could help turn him around.”

  “Oh, he gets drunk enough he’ll turn around plenty.” Mr. Poxley slapped his leg and bent over laughing.

  Julian had little patience with uneducated people, and started to walk out, but he caught sight of a large corkboard tacked over with hand-printed messages, a community bulletin board. “Can I at least put up a little notice there?”

  “Hep yourself.” The old man limped off toward the restroom, and Julian searched along the counter until he found a pen and paper.

  “Wanted: handyman to live on site and repair house. Ask Mr. Poxley for directions.”

  Succinct, that was the way to be, Julian thought. He looked back toward the restroom, and added, “No drunks.” Choosing a black thumbtack out of the pile in the ashtray, he stuck the note in the middle of the board, next to one offering a free rattlesnake to a good home.

  The following Monday, Julian was outside on the lower gallery cleaning up a geriatric Underwood on a plank table he’d dragged from an outbuilding. In each room of the house only a single bulb hung from the ceiling, and the big spaces drank up all the light, so he’d begun to work outside in the morning sun, weather permitting. Around ten o’clock, he sensed movement at the periphery of his bifocals and raised his head to see a man standing in the heat-struck privet lining the road, watching him. Julian called out, and the fellow struggled through the weeds and came up to the house. He seemed about fifty, a lean, fairly tall fellow wearing triple-stitch blue jeans and a matching heavy denim shirt with the sleeves cut to the armpits. His baseball cap was the same material, a plain-billed dome with no inscription. Julian had never seen a cap with nothing written on the front of it. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

  “Town. I seen your notice.”

  “What? Oh, yes.” He stood up and began to look him over.

  The man’s yellowed eyes darted up the side of the building. “I can carpenter good. My name’s Obadiah, but people call me Obie. It used to rile me when they called me that, but nowadays I just go along.”

  Julian studied him, looking for signals. “Can you paint?”

  “Your name.”

  “What?”

  “You ain’t told me your name.”

  “Julian Godhigh. Right now it’s Smith, but I’m going to change it to my ancestral name when I get a chance.”

  “Some men can change like a porch lizard switches colors,” Obie said, focusing on Julian. “And some cain’t.” The man listed to the side, and his skin was a cloudy blue gray, as though he were ill in some exotic, interesting way. “I can paint a wall like a artist.”

  Julian gave him a nasty smirk. “Really? Like Michelangelo?”

  Obie looked away. “I reckon. Only I use a roller.”

  “What about electrical repairs?”

  “It ain’t nothing I can’t pick up. I can do one thing as good as another.” He spat off into the grass.

  When the man turned, Julian glimpsed part of a tattoo, half a spider crawling out of the collar of his shirt. Again he saw that the skin on his arms was a smudged cyanic color, mottled in incoherent patterns as if the flesh had been cooked all over. “Are you from around here?”

  “Over in Georgia.”

  “Can’t find work there?”

  “My wife and me been havin’ trouble, so I was staying in my cousin’s travel trailer. Except now he wants to sell it.”

  The men walked around to the wasp-haunted kitchen house and forced open the cocked door. Julian said
he would buy a cot and the man could sleep there. They would try a working relationship for a few days. The one-room building contained a porcelain-top table and hide-bottom chair, both sitting under an unfrosted lightbulb hanging from the ceiling on a long cord, and Obie went in and scraped dust and fallen dirt-dauber nests off the table with the side of his hand. Julian returned to the big house and brought back a loaf of bread, block cheese, and lunchmeat, and they came to terms.

  Obie stepped over to a window. He rubbed a hand against the cloudy glass and cleared a view out toward a collapsing shop. “You ever been married?”

  Julian suddenly wanted a drink, and he sat down on the single chair. “One time. It lasted about four years, and then she got unhappy. I could never figure out why.”

  “They ain’t no figurin’ out the why of women,” Obie said, reaching over his shoulder to scratch his back. “I married a religious woman and did all I could to please her. I even got saved and tithed out of what little pay I made. She run me off even though I done things for her no other man ever would of.” He looked down at the floor as though contemplating a scene of great sorrow. “It was a mystery why I did it.”

  Julian bobbed his head. “Mine asked me to make more money, but I wanted to keep doing what I was doing. Manual typewriters and I were made for each other. I can make the big old Smith Coronas tap-dance like Fred Astaire.”

  Obie looked up. “You left her or she left you?”

  “I think the motions were mutual.”

  Obie leaned against the beaded board wall. “You traded a woman for typewriters.”

  At first Julian felt insulted, but the way Obie made the statement suggested that he understood, and that he had made some unusual trades of his own.

  “I needed to follow my talent.”