Signals Read online

  Obie nodded. “I know about what a man thinks he needs.” And with this he began unbuttoning his shirt. “You think you need to make a statement in life. But it don’t seem like nothin’ you do gets taken serious.”

  Julian felt a slight rush of panic as Obie opened his shirt wide to reveal a tattoo of a tailless dragon over his liver and one of a disarmed battleship across his hairless chest. Below the vessel was a dolphin jumping out of the sea, but its fin and eyes were blurred as though by an industrial accident. All the skin from his shoulders down to his waistband was fine-line tattoo work partially eaten away, the flesh abraded and inflamed. “It’s a sight, ain’t it.”

  “What in the world happened to you?”

  “My tattoo collection. I’m gettin’ it burnt off. I got my arms did already. I found a cut-rate Indian doctor to do it over in Poxley, but those treatments still cost like the devil, and I’m about tapped out. It’s why I got to go to work.”

  Julian stood up and looked away. “If you like them, why don’t you keep what you have?” The colors, he’d noticed, were garish and mismatched.

  “I got my reasons.” Obie looked down at himself. “But I realized there’s a difference between wantin’ and needin’.”

  Julian looked again at the spider on Obie’s neck. “That so?”

  Obie splayed five fingers over his wounded chest. “Maybe I don’t need ’em no more. Get a little older, you see what you can do without.”

  Julian pointed derisively at what was left of the dolphin. “Well, there’s enough work around here that you can afford to burn yourself white as toilet paper.”

  —

  The night was warm and Julian turned in his damp sheets, waking briefly at gray dawn and hearing someone walking, inside and out. When he got up at eight and made coffee, Obie came to the big house’s kitchen door and waited outside the screen, looking in, as if knocking were beside the point.

  “I got a startin’ list for you.”

  Julian looked up from his coffee. “A list of what?”

  “Of things to fix the house.”

  “Come in here.” He took the smudged sheet where he sat at the wobbly table. “Good God, this is for over a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. Where’d you get the prices?”

  “I borried the phone in the hall.”

  He shook his head. “That’s too much.”

  “Delivery is free above a thousand. It’ll save you seven percent, man said.”

  Julian saw that he was looking at the ceiling, already working in his mind. “Well, what’s on the schedule first?”

  “Electric wire. Then low-luster paint for a couple of these rooms.” He smiled, showing big, evenly spaced teeth. “Hide the cracks and raise the spirits.”

  —

  After the Poxley Lumber Company truck left, Obie began work. By Saturday, the difference in the place was palpable. In the kitchen he installed a new gray breaker box, and two walls in Julian’s room were patched, sanded, and painted an airy antique white. Julian paid him in cash on the next Saturday morning, then drove him to Dr. Setumahaven’s office in Poxley, dropping him off and then going shopping. When he picked him up after the treatments, the expression Obie wore was that of a martyr, his eyes misshapen and dark with pain.

  “You look like a boiled lobster,” Julian told him.

  Obie gently lowered himself into the passenger seat. “I got my money’s worth today, all right.”

  They rode along the dusty road without talking, and Julian imagined he could smell the laser burns.

  That day Obie mixed mortar and began patching the ground floor’s exterior wall. The next week, he worked on the downstairs bathroom, and the rest of the month he repaired the sewer line out to the septic tank and installed a cheap air conditioner in Julian’s room, for he’d complained mightily of the steamy nights. The men tolerated each other and ate supper together on a card table set on the creaking floors of the big dining room. One rainy day, they sat under the wavering glow of a shorting light fixture, and Obie feebly complained about how little Julian was paying him.

  “Yeah, but you’re getting cheap room and board.”

  Obie gave a worried glance to the dusty brass disk holding a circle of 25-watt bulbs. “I got to share it with the squirrels and the rats. You ought to charge them half the rent.”

  Julian motioned to Obie’s neck where Dr. Setumahaven’s laser had reduced the spider to a dim shadow. “You’re still making enough to get rid of your collection.”

  “You paid me more, I could get ’em burnt off faster.”

  “I don’t understand why you bother at all. I mean, who cares? The doctor’s gotten rid of all the ones people can see.”

  Obie rubbed his narrow face, his whiskers crackling like coarse steel wool. “I used your phone to call my wife. She said she might could take me back if I got rid of all my idols. She calls ’em idols.”

  “Take you back?” Julian gave him a startled look. “Didn’t you tell me that woman beat you with a broom?”

  Obie looked down at his plate wearing a faraway smile. “Aw, she’s just a woman. Can’t hurt no man unless she buys a gun.”

  Julian stood up and began to clear the table. “Next time you go see Setumahaven, tell him to stick that laser in your left ear and light up your brains.”

  Obie watched him leave the room and called after him. “Ain’t you never lonesome for some company?”

  Julian came back in and stood behind his chair. “I’ve got to the point where I can live alone. I’ve built up my business, and now I’ve got this big house to keep me busy and give me a place in the world.”

  The light fixture made a futzing sound and Obie blinked. “So this here place makes you feel important?”

  Julian threw his arms wide. “I am important. What do you say to that?”

  Obie looked toward the window where the antique glass distorted everything beyond. “I say I need another box of roofin’ nails so I can fix the tin on top of your importance.”

  —

  The work went on through September, and Obie slaved over the corroded wiring and slow-running plumbing. He ran his hands over every board in the building, finding where thousands of square nails had pulled free from the shrunken lumber.

  After Julian had gone to bed one night, he heard the back door to the main hall scuff open. Figuring Obie had come in for a drink of ice water, which was all he allowed him to have from the refrigerator, he dropped off to sleep. Soon, he was awakened by talking, just parts of words bouncing up the stairs to his single bed. He crept to the head of the stairway and heard Obie use a soft and rhythmic voice he’d never heard before. Listening hard, he heard him say, “Save me, O God, for the waters threaten my life; I am sunk in the abysmal swamp where there is no foothold.” Julian walked down until he could see Obie seated at the old phone table, a flashlight shining down on an open Bible. He wondered if the call was long distance, if he should yell out to stop reading Scripture into the phone at twelve cents a minute.

  Someone on the other end of the line must have asked a question, for Obie’s voice stopped, and then said, “I’m workin’, but I ain’t able to save much. He cusses me and charges me for ever thing. Sent me to town in his car to get tar and took the gas out my pay. What? Read Psalm 64? It’ll cover him, will it?”

  Julian listened for a few minutes and understood that he was speaking to a woman, of all things. He coughed, and Obie shone the flashlight up to the dark landing. “I got to go now. I’ll call you fore long.” He hung up and raised his face.

  Julian’s voice sliced down on him. “Was that the Georgia woman?”

  “It was.”

  “You planning on reading the whole Bible to her?”

  “No.”

  “When I get the phone bill, I’ll let you know the charges.”

  Obie turned his head toward the back door and looked as if he might speak, but the only sound that drifted up to Julian was the click of the flashlight and then the invisible creaking of the ha
llway’s boards.

  —

  On Wednesday, he drove to Chance Poxley’s store to buy a night table. Mr. Poxley was leaning on the end of the counter and watched him walk in the door. The old man screwed up his face as though he smelled carrion.

  “Do for you?”

  “I need a small, inexpensive table to put beside my bed.”

  “Uh-huh. That Parker boy still workin’ for you?”

  “He is, slowly.”

  “How much you payin’ him, anyhow?”

  Julian turned his head toward the store’s cheap furniture, then looked back. “Has he been complaining to you?”

  Mr. Poxley focused on Julian’s eyes. “That boy’s a good worker. I believe he can fix a broke horse.”

  “He’s all right.”

  “What you payin’ him?”

  “That’s between me and him. He ought to pay me just to put up with his spooky ways.”

  “You bring him into town today?”

  “He’s over at Setumahaven’s.”

  “I heard he had ’em on the bottoms of his feet. Must hurt like fire to have one took off there.”

  “I don’t think about it.”

  Poxley blinked. “What do you think about, Mr. Typewriter Man?”

  Julian looked at the old man with a sneer. “What do you think I ought to think about?”

  “How about payin’ somebody does good work a livin’ wage.”

  “Look, he doesn’t have the expenses I have. Again, has he been complaining?”

  Chance Poxley swung his head away. “That one won’t complain.”

  “Well, by damn, show me a table, then.”

  —

  He finished at Poxley’s long before he was supposed to pick up Obie at the doctor’s office. He parked his Dodge, angrily mulling over Mr. Poxley’s criticisms, and then went into the little red-brick city library, where he found a small Bible and walked into the stacks with it lest someone see him. He turned to Psalm 64 and read:

  Hide me from the conspiracy of the wicked,

  From the noisy crowd of evildoers,

  Who sharpen their tongues like swords

  And aim their words like deadly arrows.

  He slammed the book shut, holding the cover down as though it might spring open accusingly. Between two musty stacks of dog-eared history books, he waited to see if the words might have some effect, but he felt no change at all, although he couldn’t resist touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

  —

  When Obie climbed into the Dodge that afternoon, he was bent forward with pain. Julian looked at him sullenly. “I wouldn’t give anyone money to hurt me. If I were you, I’d have saved up for an automobile instead.”

  Obie closed his eyes and leaned his head against the cracked window. “What need do I have of a automobile, with no place to go?”

  “Which one did they finish up today?”

  “The battleship. Feels like he dug it out of me with a pocketknife.”

  Julian checked his rearview mirror before backing up. “That’ll make a big scab. Will you be able to work on the upstairs porch?”

  “Gimme a couple hours. I’ll see.”

  —

  He drove into Memphis the next day, delivering refurbished typewriters and picking up dirty, nonfunctional machines from three behind-the-times businesses and two antique shops. He collected a few accounts and added up his money. The weather had been unseasonably warm, and he considered buying Obie a small electric fan, but then decided it would just make him unhappy if he ever had to live without one again. It was cruel, he thought, to make things too comfortable for someone who was going down in life.

  Two weeks later, Obie walked up to where Julian was sweating over an old gray Royal on the front porch and told him that he had an appointment with the doctor on Wednesday.

  “I’m not going into town that day.”

  “It’s important. I got to get the big one on my back burnt off.”

  He put down a slim screwdriver. “You have one on your back? What for?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Julian straightened up in his tin chair. “Let me see it.”

  Obie unbuttoned his denim shirt, slipped it off, and turned.

  Julian put a hand to his chin. “Good Lord, it’s Jesus.”

  “He cost me a lot.”

  He adjusted his glasses. “It’s a good job for such a large image. Too bad I can’t skin it off you and frame it or something.”

  Obie jerked his shirt on and began buttoning it. “Can you take me in on Wednesday or not?”

  “I guess. If you pay my gas.” Obie stared at him, and Julian wondered how he could expect him to ride him around like a free taxi. “Now, what do you think about that railing up there?”

  “I reckon it ought to be changed,” he said, tucking in his shirt. “You might lean on it and fall and break your neck.”

  —

  Julian waited outside the doctor’s office, dozing behind the wheel, dreaming of tall gleaming pillars and him standing between them in an immaculate white suit. When the passenger door opened, he woke up feeling sore and sour. He looked at his watch and frowned. “What did your red-dot doctor think about erasing God off you?”

  Obie sat with his back away from the seat. “He only took him off the outside,” he whispered.

  Julian gave him a mean smile. “You sure he didn’t replace him with Buddha?”

  “Can we go on to the house?”

  “Aw, can’t you take a joke?”

  Obie rolled his burning eyes over toward him. “Do you have any aspirin?”

  “There’s a tin in the glove compartment. But don’t ask me to buy you a Coke.”

  —

  In late October, the money finally ran out. Julian told him he couldn’t pay him anymore, but that he’d let him live on the place for free if he painted the outside. Obie walked out onto the front lawn under the two-hundred-year-old oak and stared back at the house. Julian stood between a pair of cracked pillars, watching him. After two minutes he called out, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m figuring it would take me sixty gallons of primer and paint and a full year to do it myself, what with sandin’, washin’, and scrapin’. I’d have to live here three years past the end of the job to take the value out in rent.”

  Julian stepped into the yard himself and looked up at the complex eaves, the paint-sucking galleries. “We can work something out.”

  “No we can’t. I’m finished with my treatments. Setumahaven give me some fadin’ chemical, and Monday I’ll go to that tannin’ parlor by the cornmeal plant.”

  Julian took a step backward. “What are you talking about? You can’t leave.”

  Obie spread his arms like a gaunt bird ready to take flight. “The old me’s gone. The new me’s got to move on down the road.”

  —

  During the next week, Obie’s skin changed from an angry mix of blood and ink to a mildly unhealthy skim-milk hue, and after sessions at the Red Bug Tanning Salon, he turned a rosy manila color. One night Julian decided that Obie might stay and work for him if he went into his meager retirement savings and paid him a real salary.

  The next morning he got out of bed and fried a ham steak for breakfast, Obie’s favorite. After setting the table, he went out into the yard, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw the door to the old kitchen was wide open. Inside, the cot was empty, and Obie’s duffel bag, always in the same spot under it, was gone. He began to panic and felt his sickly house looming over him, leprous and crippled. He raced into Poxley, but no one at the bus station had seen Obie, and Dr. Setumahaven’s office was closed. After driving around the town’s narrow streets for half an hour, he parked and went into Chance Poxley’s store.

  The old man came out of his office and squinted at him. “What?”

  “I can’t find my hired man.”

  “Well.”

  “He just left without a word.”

  Mr. Poxley leaned ove
r and pressed the clear button on his adding machine. “That so?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  The old man shook his head. “It’s been a while. He did tell me he’d finished up with the skin doc. I don’t think he had much need of your job anymore.”

  “He told me he used to stay with a cousin. Where’s he live?”

  “He ain’t there. That boy pitched him out to begin with.”

  Julian stared out the store’s broad plate windows emblazoned with shoe-polish lettering—CASH TALKS. “I’ve got to find him.”

  “Unless I miss my guess, you can’t afford him no more.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Mr. Poxley looked down and his voice softened a bit. “What you need him for, anyway?”

  Julian’s mouth fell open a bit and he stared at a new gas range to the right of the counter. He could fix a typewriter but nothing else in the world, and he didn’t know if he could live in the old mansion, unable as he was to keep it nailed together. But the real problem came upon him as suddenly as thunder. He’d be alone. The house and its canyon rooms would swallow him up, the only sound his own footsteps thrown back in his face, and when he stopped moving, a silence vast as night.

  —

  In the middle of November, a freakish weather pattern set in—a howling wind with ice in its teeth. Julian was adjusting a Royal 440 and around sundown his hands began to shake. The single-pane windows and shrunken doors shivered in their frames. There was no insulation anywhere, and what little residual heat there was soon leaked through the ceiling lath. He put on sweaters and two jackets and remembered that the house had no heating system at all. The squatters had used tin trash burners, running the stovepipes out the windows, but all that had been thrown into the yard. Obie had told him that the fireplace flues were no longer safe, that the chimneys were cracking apart in the attic. He climbed in bed under every sheet and spread he owned, deciding that the next night would be warmer.

  But instead it brought a whip-cracking gale, and a weatherman on his car’s radio announced that a solid week of unusually cold temperatures was on the way. He drove into town and bought an electric heater, but under the fifteen-foot ceilings the device was like a spark at the North Pole. The third night, he slept in his car with the motor running, but he checked the gas gauge on waking and knew he couldn’t afford to do that again. He got out of the backseat cursing the oil industry and the whole Middle East and loaded up five repaired typewriters for delivery in Memphis.