“Exposed Wires” by Matt Myers
Spring 2008, Volume 32, Number 1
When Dale walked in Sue was passed out with plaster dust powdering her face, her left arm hanging off the couch, and her index finger stuck in an empty liter of vodka. The house had the distinct scent of sawdust and new paint, as loose trim boards lay like long blond crosses on the dining room floor. Several shades of green paint had dried on the wall just beside the window. Nine new bottles of top shelf vodka stood on the kitchen island like soldiers in a row, with a receipt for three hundred thirty dollars curled around the neck of one of the bottles. Dale’s stomach turned at the thought of another shot. Sue’s father had been dry for twenty years, and so maybe she had the right genes, but he couldn’t figure how she was able to take it.
He opened the cabinets, searching for something to soak up the alcohol. In college he used to think that bread would soak it up, if he could just get it into his stomach. He figured pasta would do the same and warmed a black pot for spaghetti. He pulled the coiled yellow receipt from the bottle and straightened it by rubbing it on the edge of the black counter. He remembered buying twice this much in Texas for one of their dinner parties, and even buying a stainless steel rolling cart for all the liquor and ice, so it could be out by the pool. It was a part of the job that he loved, entertaining all the oilmen and their wives, high heels and penny loafers clicking on the concrete as people mingled from table to table, not a care in the world when the money was good. Twenty couples were at that party, and there was liquor to spare. This was way too much booze.
The roiling water and fogged window above the sink signaled Dale to drop the spaghetti. He leaned his head into the hall to see if Sue was still passed out. He couldn’t see the mantel from this position, which had all their family pictures. He popped the jar of sauce and looked around, hoping all of upstate New York didn’t hear that he was making spaghetti from a jar. The whole family had once marched ten blocks in the snow, holding each other’s hands, to watch Syracuse play basketball on Kids Night against Seton Hall last year. Seton Hall’s best player was a lanky forward named Cappelletti. The heckler a few rows behind them kept yelling, “Your mama makes sauce from a can,” a joke not lost on the crowd, save the transplanted Texans a few rows down. Since then he had been conscious of the counterfeit Italian food he made in his own house.
Sue had around ten forkfuls of Texas spaghetti sitting at the coffee table in the den. She didn’t turn the lights on after the sun sank. The blue wash of the television lit her pale forehead and brown hair. Green paint dotted a few of her knuckles. She cut the noodles with the edge of her fork instead of twirling them on a spoon like the movies, and all of their neighbors for that matter.
After dinner, Dale walked into what they were now calling the guest room because they couldn’t bear to call it anything else. He wanted to see if she had changed anything, not that he cared or had a position, but it was his only way to track her thoughts while he was at work. The room was as it had been: dark blue paint with sponged-on yellow stars of different sizes. A quiet Texas night on the walls. The stuffed animals were still herded on the bed, leaning on each other for lack of space—maybe support—on that small bed. The skates that never got to cut a line on Onondaga Lake this past winter. It was the first room Sue remodeled when they moved in.
Dale was brushing his teeth, one hand balancing on the sink so that the piston in and out of his mouth didn’t wobble him to the floor. Sue came in and sat on the toilet. Strands of hair leapt from her ponytail and arced just in front of her eyes. She leaned forward just slightly like a catcher and would have been staring at the towel rack two feet in front of her, had her eyes been open. Coils of sawdust were still trapped in the folds of her hair. She pulled the handle and meandered down the hall. Dale glanced in the toilet and noticed the bloody tint in the water as it eddied away.
He followed her into the bedroom. “You on your period?”
“Next week. I think,” she said, seconds before flopping face down on their burgundy sheets, instantly gone.
Toothpaste lather crept out of his mouth, his toothbrush dangling at the same angle as his jaw.
Dale had been working at a glass factory just to pay some of the monthly bills so they could protect the oil money they were living on. It was just thirty hours a week; him and the owner, Andrew, humping window panes out of the oven. Andrew was older and neither of them worked very hard, but they were steady. Dale’s feet hurt after a week of standing all day in boots on concrete. He had worked much harder than this when he was younger—hauling hay, mowing yards, laying sod—but eleven years of board meetings, oil summits, and takeovers had softened his body considerably. A few weeks of sweating by the oven and lifting glass had trimmed his body some and hardened his soft parts. But his feet still hurt. He couldn’t stand still for too long without needing to move around.
He called Andrew to say he had to take Sue to the doctor. Andrew had no problem with it.
The doctor was a squat, Indian man with round, rimless glasses, and he wore a white coat that somehow commanded absolute faith in his intelligence. After the tests on Sue, they sat in his cramped office, surrounded by diplomas and books piled high.
In an Indian accent Dale knew he would imitate later when recounting the doctor’s words, Dr. Surindar said, “The individual factors are not that great, but the combination of heredity, recent habits, and stress have contributed to your liver damage. What is not certain is when it began. What is certain is that your liver is suffering.”
Dale and Sue sat next to each other in identical chairs, both so still they were almost frozen. Dale turned his head slightly to Sue. She was an adult. She knew this wasn’t healthy. She knew how far back her father’s eyes had sunk and how far out his bulbous nose pointed, that he vomited every morning since he stopped drinking.
“Mrs. Jacobsen, your body is already giving you signals that it is dying.” Dr. Surindar removed his glasses and cleaned them with the point of his tie. He held them up to the light and squinted his narrow, black eyes at the lenses before settling them back on his nose.
Sue didn’t stop looking at the doctor as she spoke, even though Dale felt like she was talking to him. “I don’t throw up or drive drunk, cheat on Dale or cat around all hours of the night. A little blood in the toilet a week from now and we wouldn’t be talking. I remodel our house all day. I do good work. I’m just drinking when I do. Nothing’s changed, except how I get to sleep.”
Dale hadn’t heard her say this much at one time in the last ten months.
“You will die if this continues,” Surindar said, the patience gone from his voice.
“You act as if cancer at eighty-two is better than liver failure at thirty-six.”
Dr. Surindar talked about living another forty years and how much good life was left, despite how she might feel about it presently. His voice seemed to fade off as Dale focused on what Sue had just said. It made perfect sense. She wasn’t belligerent; she didn’t forget things. She didn’t beat on him or hock their television for liquor money. They had enough money for her to drink forever. She didn’t blackout or vomit all over the rugs. She was a good alcoholic, if there was such a thing.
This was what she wanted me to see, Dale thought. She wanted me to see that she has her self-destruction under control. Sue’s father was sixty-one, had been a drinker from nineteen to fifty-three. She knew how to handle it. She knew how to succeed where her father had failed. This was her way. Dale couldn’t detect any emotion in her eyes, even from her profile. She had decided, and it might have seemed crazy to anyone else, but it made a strange kind of sense, like how you’re supposed to drive your car faster when it’s overheating. The airflow cools the engine. Dale figured he could make some adjustments to her diet and maybe water down some of the bottles and drinks. He wouldn’t be intervening; he would just interrupt a little.
“I would suggest you remove any sharp objects in your house: knives, razors, and such,” Surindar said.
Dale had almost forgotten that they were still in his office. If Surindar hadn’t spoken, he might’ve sat there all day, resting his aching feet. “How’s that?” Dale asked after no response from Sue.
“Alcoholics stop producing sundry vitamins, but specifically vitamin K, which is a clotting agent. If she cuts herself when you’re not there, even a small gash won’t stop.”
Dale bought a lockbox from the Army/Navy store right off 690 on their way in from the doctor’s office. They didn’t say a word on the way home, but that had been the way of things. At the house, they both walked past the floor molding and paint as if ignoring it would somehow make it feel like it was supposed to be there, like light switches or guest soap.
In the kitchen, Sue poured vodka into a ball jar with very little ice. She looked out the window while Dale pulled the knives from the drawer and laid them beside each other on the counter. He looked at Sue’s veins, the barely visible blue pipes beneath the small swell of her right forearm. Her skin was so fair that he could almost see through her on certain parts of her body. On one of their first few dates, Sue had worn a yellow tank top when they sat on the hood of his truck by the river, watching the sun dissolve into the Texas plains. When he could, Dale had eyed her breasts and the easy veins running calmly just below her skin. Those veins had become a thing of small arousal, nothing he could ever touch or have touch him, but something close to Sue, inside her that heated him up. He understood then by the river how a myth like Dracula could become.
But after the doctor’s office, that same fair skin, weakly protecting bloodlines, worried Dale. They seemed so easy to get to now. She was so vulnerable with all that blood that wouldn’t stop if tapped by one of the knives lying haplessly on the kitchen counter.
“How will we cut our food?”
“We’ll figure something out,” Dale said, searching the drawers for more cutlery.
“Are we not supposed to shave either?”
Dale could feel her putting an argument together, crossing her arms as armor in this battle. “Maybe you should just shave when I’m around.”
“I cut my ankles every time. It’s always stopped.”
Dale set each one of their steak knives in the bottom of the lockbox. Then the paring knives, the bread knife, the ice pick. He would have felt like a child, too, having his parents lock the gun case to keep him from hurting himself.
“I think he was talking in general. Watch out for sharp objects. But this is irrational.”
Dale looked up from the lockbox at Sue. He morphed his face to say Are you serious? so he wouldn’t have to say it out loud. Sue looked back at him, leaving no doubt that she was ready to defend and protect her defined methods. After all, Dale had accepted her rational views in the doctor’s office. He couldn’t change his mind now.
The chef’s knife wouldn’t fit in the box. Ten inches long, cold black handle, not quite as sharp as it used to be considering all its use, but it wasn’t going in the dull green box at any angle. Sue was watching him when he realized the knife wasn’t going. What was her issue with the knives? Did she want to be around them now that they were even more dangerous to her than before?
“That one’s not even going to go,” she said. As petty as it was, Dale knew she wasn’t going to let it drop.
“I give. Why do you want knives around? Is the doctor wrong? Is he crazy? Should we buy more?”
“I just don’t think we should change our lives because of his thoughts on chance.” She always seemed to calm down once Dale got angry.
“If all I get is eliminating sharp objects to keep you from bleeding to death, then that’s what I get. You’ve got that,” he said, pointing to her ball jar—one swig away from empty—with the chef’s knife. “I’ve got this.”
He slammed the box and hauled it up to the attic. He set it in the corner on top of the empty boxes that held all of their clothes, towels, and books on the move up from Texas. He slid the key into a hole between the rafter slats. Sue had become defensive about her behavior when the typical response would have been to be quiet and unobtrusive. Dale leveled his temper, then walked down to Sue.
“What if I start going to the liquor store for you?”
“Trying to water me down?”
“The liquor bill has been pretty high. Let me buy the cheaper stuff in the bigger bottles.”
“She’d be starting school tomorrow,” Sue said, staring at the pictures on the mantel.
He stopped, stunned by her ability to dictate the tempo of any argument. He walked over to the coffee table and sat down with his back to Sue. He rubbed his hands together, squeezing them to feel the blood prick his skin. The mantel was just in his periphery, but he looked at the wall in front of him.
“How does this work? We both drank a lot in college and we drank to get drunk. But I don’t know how to be around what you’re doing.”
She sat silent on the couch behind him.
“Can I cook stuff that will help soak up the liquor? Or make mixed drinks instead of basically shooting it straight?” he said, seemingly to an empty house. “Will you eat cereal in the morning so the milk will coat your stomach?”
She sighed behind him. He turned his face to the side but only far enough to confirm she was still there. He could hear her teeth clinking off the ball jar, the inhaling of the liquid, her swallow so loud from her rough throat. He couldn’t discern if he had said something wrong, if she felt cornered, or if she was just thinking of something else.
She never did answer, and so finally Dale stood and looked at her. She was slumped back on the couch, her chin nearly on her chest, her eyes arrowing up at his. He smiled to show he wasn’t angry, if that was a concern, softened his eyes to show understanding, though he had none but wanted to convey some solidarity. He dug his hands in his back pockets and slowly moved away, hoping she would stop him with a word, wave, fist, or foot.
On his drive into work the next morning, he thought about the chef’s knife still in the wood block, the kind used in slasher movies. The black handle stuck out of the blond wood at an angle that made it easy to grab, easy to wield. He couldn’t figure why Sue had found the knife removal a point of contention. They had small arguments about everything lately. It seemed to be a bleeder valve for their stress. Neither looked to be mad at the other, but anything—knives, paint, what to eat—became a place where each could stick in the needle and tattoo the other with blame.
At the glass shop, Andrew seemed happy to have Dale back, even though he had only been gone a couple days. Andrew was a little over sixty, skinny but wiry from handling big sheets of glass his whole life. He had a gap in his front teeth that Dale focused on as he talked. Andrew produced replacement panes for the old houses in the Syracuse area, and Dale was hired to help with the panes. His feet started hurting as soon as he stepped foot onto the concrete floor.
Work moved fast, and the heavy New York accent spewing out through the gap in Andrew’s teeth helped move the days along. The job had become a good source of therapy or at least some solid time away from Sue.
A few weeks later when Dale walked in from work, Sue was on the phone with her mother. She was holding her ball jar at the end of an extended arm toward Dale. The phone cord wouldn’t reach into the kitchen, and its curls were nearly flat from Sue stretching to get there.
He scratched his ear right in front of her stiff arm, making her wait a few extra seconds before he acquiesced. He couldn’t look in her eyes because he didn’t want to see the need. He grabbed the glass and walked to the kitchen, his work boots pounding the hardwood floor as he did, the pain in his arches streaming through his lower legs at every footfall.
He dropped some ice in the ball jar and poured three fingers of vodka, followed by some orange juice and a bit of Sprite. Sue’s agitation rose from her mother doing what mothers do, and once her mother had Sue’s blood up, she usually went for the kill. Dale didn’t want to be in the middle of handing her a drink when she did.
He thought he might slide the ball jar from the kitchen doorway to Sue who was sitting in the chair on the opposite side of the dining room, the phone cord stretched out and slack by her toes. It was only about twenty feet. It would be like a scene in a movie, barkeep sliding a mug of suds down the bar to a cool patron who catches it without spilling a bubble. Maybe a little would run over, but only enough to look cool. But this was twenty feet of worn-down hardwood, ridged and hilly, bald spots and waxy slats. It would never work.
“Don’t do this,” Sue said into the phone.
This was usually the way of it.
“How can we? Mom, I know that. Don’t think we haven’t thought of it. What would we bury? I can’t believe you call me to do this. That won’t make anyone feel better. Except you, then. It’s not disrespectful. It’s not anything. Maybe it’s not real to you unless there’s something in the ground, but just to you.”
Dale zoned out looking at the neighbor’s house through the kitchen window. He couldn’t hear the rest of it, but he’d heard it all before. Once a month for almost a year. His mother-in-law was the only reason he was glad to be out of Texas. The ice popped and shifted in Sue’s drink, and he heard Sue trying not to raise her voice to her mother. He walked into the dining room and handed her the cocktail, then pivoted and walked into the study to see what needed to be done.
Their original plan was to fix up one room just how they liked it, then move their bedroom in there. They were going to remodel one room at a time so that the whole house wouldn’t be a wreck, but just one room that they could close off or ignore. The study came second, after the room now called the guest room, and it had seen little progress. None, in fact, while small projects had begun all over the house. Sue had torn out molding in some rooms, taken wallpaper down in others, sanded spindles on the stairs, but she never completed anything.
The study was no worse or better than any other room. The lath and plaster walls were cracked. The hardwood floor was abused and could stand to be replaced or refinished. The wiring, which was a problem with the whole house, was old, a fire hazard, but at least it was behind the walls. As long as they didn’t hang sheetrock, they would never have to deal with it. The home inspector did say it was against fire code, and if the insurance adjuster could prove it was the old porcelain knob circuitry, there would be no way to get insurance, thus no way to carry a mortgage. The house was built in 1891, and the switches were push buttons, but all parties seemed comfortable ignoring the potential fire hiding in the walls.
Dale gripped a loose end of wallpaper and pulled it off. The piece got smaller and smaller until there was nothing left. He pulled a few more pieces and flung the green, faded flowers to the floor behind him.
“Mom says ‘hi,’” Sue said from behind him. “There’s a solvent that lifts it off.”
“They coming to visit anytime soon?”
“She’s too disappointed with us…with me, to come out here.” Sue picked up the strips Dale had pulled from the wall and tossed them in the far corner. “You don’t have to torture me by holding my drink for so long while I’m on the phone. I get that you disapprove. You don’t have to reinforce it every chance you get.”
“You didn’t have to be such a pain in the ass about the knives.”
“I wasn’t a pain about that,” she said, leaning against a wall.
“You weren’t easy to get along with.”
“So you punish me by holding my drink like my older brother?”
Dale struck another strip from the wall, folded it over a few times and tore it to pieces. “I didn’t think you’d notice one drink.”
She shouldered herself off the wall. “You know, remodeling the house is my project. I don’t want you messing with it unless I ask for your help. I don’t even want the wallpaper taken down.”
She walked over to Dale and grabbed the strip from his hand and stood between him and the wall he was stripping.
“So you want this wallpaper left up here?” he said, then picked up a big piece from the floor, showing Sue its holes and bare threads, the glue that had become amber dust on the backside.
“I just don’t need your help. I wanted a house to remodel. You said ‘fine’.”
“Don’t take your mother out on me,” Dale said.
“Don’t you blame me for what happened.”
“Nobody’s to blame for that. She’s just gone.”
“But you think that’s why I drink, right? Guilt’s working on me.”
Dale shook his head. “I don’t think that,” he said, softer.
“But you don’t drink or anything, so you’re suspicious why I do.”
“I can’t talk to you.”
Dale walked over to the window. Sue followed him over. He fumbled with the window lock. “This is my house, too.”
Sue turned away and leaned back against the wall. “Maybe Mom’s right.”
“She’s due to be.”
Sue rolled her eyes and rubbed her face with both hands. She repulled her hair into a ponytail.
“Do you think this is the same for you as it is for me? She was part of my body.”
“Are you looking for permission? ‘Cause it ain’t happening. And I’m not asking permission to stop you, ’cause I just will. Justify it however you want. It’s insane.”
Dale stomped out of the room, out of his boots, and into the shower. He took long showers, always had, twenty minutes or more. In college, he figured what he was paying in electricity and water bills, he was saving by not having to see a psychiatrist. Long showers washed away his stress—the comparatively little amount he had back then—but there wasn’t enough water in Lake Ontario to abate it now.
Later that fall, nearly a year and a half for Sue without a sober moment, Dale came home and called an ambulance. Sue was bleeding on the floor of the guest room. A window out of its tracks lay broken on the hardwood floor, a quiet gash on Sue’s calf.
Dale applied pressure below her knee. “Why didn’t you call?” Blood oozed into the spaces between his fingers, dying the white around his nails pink.
“I couldn’t reach the phone,” she said, lying there without any pain on her face.
It looked like a soup can full of blood had spilled on the over-trafficked floor. Two pints wouldn’t kill her and the vodka slowed its flow, but it wasn’t stopping.
Dale rode in the back of the ambulance, holding Sue’s hand like he was trying to pull her out of deep water or up from a cliff. Her brown hair relaxed on the flat pillow of the gurney. Blood was nearly solid in Dale’s nose, more than just a smell but something blunt and thick. He noticed the ambulance moving cautiously. The lights and the sirens were rolling, but the driver wasn’t hurrying. He looked at the paramedic, trying to detect if the speed meant she was in no danger or that she was close to gone. The beefy man with close-cropped hair forced a smile. Sue had passed out already. Dale squeezed her hand, but it was unresponsive.
“She needs at least ten days to recover, rehydrate, and purge her liver,” Dr. Surindar said.
“Right now we need to observe how she handles the new blood.” He stood nearly a foot shorter than Dale. He was in jeans and a yellow, collared shirt. They had pulled him away from home. His dark skin seemed to glow in the bright white of the hospital hall.
“After she’s released, you should let her dry out at Ravenwood upstate.”
Let her, he said. The doctor’s disappointment was palpable. His choice of words, let her, said that it was Dale’s choice to allow her to drink, to let her do this to herself. Dale had respected her method of coping, self-destructive as it was, but he was an enabler. Dr. Surindar couldn’t understand what they were going through or how they were going through it, but his blame was on Dale nonetheless. Dale didn’t agree but was content to have some direction.
“How long will that take? I mean she’ll be here ten days.”
“Sixty days would suffice. More would be best.”
“That’s a long time,” Dale said, almost accusing Surindar of something, though Dale didn’t know exactly what.
The doctor checked a few boxes on the clipboard and glanced up at Dale before signing an illegible permission beside an X. “Yes, Mr. Jacobsen,” he said. He had never called Dale Mr. Jacobsen before. It was like a reprimand from his mother, except he didn’t know Dale’s middle name. “It will be a long time to be alone.”
Dr. Surindar forced a tight-lipped smile to the nurse on the other side of the white counter as he handed her the clipboard. Dale inspected the side of the doctor’s head, the gray hairs alternating with black, diving backward from his temple. A long time to be alone.
Dale didn’t sleep much on the small hospital chair in Sue’s room. Once her body had accepted the new blood, she sent Dale home. She said he didn’t need to be there every minute, and Dale didn’t make a fuss.
But Dale couldn’t sleep at home either. Whether or not he missed Sue, she was missing. His insomnia or anxiety did afford him time to work on the house and try to finish what Sue had started. He hadn’t helped out much or really at all, and definitely not since Sue issued the charge that it was her job. He was fairly knowledgeable, had done a lot of work to their old house, but it was more repair than cosmetics.
He had been fairly annoyed by the idea of fixing things. Repainting walls that were crumbling because it looked quaint, finding hardware and switchplates to match the worn-down hardwood flooring. He had thought from the beginning that they should gut it, then remodel it exactly how they wanted, rather than stick patches and Band-aids on a century old home. Plus he thought he’d enjoy the demolition. At the very least he would know when he was finished.
He started in the den and ripped down all the lath and plaster. Most of it crumbled once he hooked a hammer in the wall. Plaster dust coated the trodden hardwood floors and looked like a funnel cake. He tossed the white chunks in the basement. Then he demoed the dining room and found it odd to see into the den once the wall was torn down. He moved around the house, ripping out casing and crown molding, not caring if he ruined it or not. He was looking for an excuse to go to the lumberyard anyway.
He found some artifacts behind the walls, a few rubber balls, some carpenter’s punches, a square, chunks of wood. It was a strange pleasure discovering hidden nothings behind the walls that had been back there since nobody knew when. He didn’t touch the guest room. He hadn’t even been in there to clean up the blood or the broken window. He demoed the walls on the other side, but didn’t touch or even open the door to the inside.
By the second night, the entire house was gutted, save one room. He could see from the den through the kitchen, through the bathroom and into the study. He could look at the dining room table from the den and could see his own bedroom from the study. Exposed wires and hundred-year-old studs the only things blocking his clear vision. All of the casing and plaster chunks were piled in the basement by the octopus heater, now working overtime since he had tossed out the pink insulation.
The house was just a shell. The wiring was old porcelain knobs, the fire violation they had been warned about, but it still had juice. The roof kept out rain and snow and the walls blocked the wind. Dale could get to the attic and basement by the stairs, walk around on the floor, see outside through the windows, wash himself in the tub, flush his piss down the toilet, sleep on his bed. But there were no pictures, no paint to dictate the mood and openness of a room, no trim to highlight the color or color to highlight the wood. Each footfall on the battered hardwood floor echoed to the back of the house. It was hollow in there.
Despite the liberal application of guilt from Dr. Surindar, Dale wasn’t going to drop off Sue at any place upstate. She had shaken her way through withdrawal in the hospital, a nice long scar on her leg as a reminder, stitches like pubic hair poking from her calf. Dale would do better this time than just watering down drinks and heavy carbohydrates.
He walked with his arm around her waist, holding onto the rail of the wide steps up to their home. “I did a little work on the house,” Dale said as he slid his key into the deadbolt. Sue’s blue hospital bracelet, riddled with patterned holes, stuck out from under her coat sleeve as she languidly reached to check the mailbox. She didn’t acknowledge Dale’s bit of news.
Sue pulled her head back as she walked in just ahead of Dale, then scratched behind her ear in her habitual attempt at understanding something that didn’t meet her approval. Dale noticed she nodded resolutely after a few seconds. Whether she thought it was a good idea, the right thing, or was just tolerating something that couldn’t be undone was not revealed in the bobbing of her head.
Sue slumped onto the couch right inside the door. She pulled the quilt into her lap from the back of the couch. Dale sat with her.
“Want some water or something?” Dale asked.
“I’d rather have anything than more water.”
“There’s soda and juice in the fridge,” he said, knowing she wasn’t looking for those alternatives. “Doc said after sixty days it won’t be so hard.”
She scratched her forehead. She had chewed her nails down to nothing in the hospital. “Remains to be seen.”
“They gave me a list of people who know what it feels like to go without it.”
“A child?” Sue said, staring straight ahead at the television that wasn’t on.
Dale was watching the same channel.
He brought her some cranberry juice, then carried all the kitchen knives down from the locked case in the attic. He touched them back to the magnetic strip over the sink and could see Sue looking at him from the couch. He made a silly wave, acknowledging the absurdity of being able to see each other from those rooms. Sue barely waved in return. It was a wave that didn’t want to encourage the cuteness of this situation she had come home to, but still a wave so as not to be rude. Dale had missed her surgical social skills.
His framing hammer was on the kitchen island. He took hold of it, flipped it into the air, and caught it by the handle. He tossed it a few more times, hiding on the other side of the refrigerator so Sue couldn’t see him. He walked into the guest room.
When he opened the door he pivoted his head to look through the studs of the west wall. It was still intact and he couldn’t see Sue staring at him from the den, just the Texas night full of stars on the painted wall above the bed. He dragged the bed and mattress into the study, carefully walked the books, dresser, and stuffed animals in there as well. Then he tore into the west wall, seeing the light from the big window poking through first, then the door, the mantel, and Sue. She just watched, impassively sipping her cranberry juice, not moving to help or stop him. He pulled off the whole wall and flung the chunks into the basement.
When he came back up, he looked down at the floor; the dark stain from Sue’s blood had penetrated the hardwood. He twirled the hammer in his hand, wondering what was below, forgetting the walls. He pounded one end of a board, busted the tongue off of it, and the other end sprung up. He hooked the claw under the slat, pulled it up, and as he did the tension from the other boards, the puzzle pieces of the tongue-and-groove jigsaw floor, loosened. He kept tearing at the boards, not fired by rage, just digging furiously to finish the job. Board after board he hooked and pulled. By the end, the flooring was ripped out and piled in the basement with the casing and plaster. He had to balance on his toes to traverse the joists. He walked down each one with his arms out to his side, checking for buried items, buried anything. Standing on the joists soothed his arches that seemed to hurt without end. There was sheathing below the joists. Other than that, nothing. No insulation, no hidden artifacts or hammers or punches, not even a stray nail.
Sue stood up from the couch with the blanket wrapped over her shoulders. She cautiously walked a few steps forward, still somewhat wobbly from the languor of her last hospital week. She poked her head between two studs, a stretch of wiring perpendicular to her throat, her shoulders balancing what her legs couldn’t handle. She craned her neck to better see Dale. He was teetering on the joists one room away, trying not to lose his footing.
Matthew Edward Myers’ recent work can be found in Cimarron Review, Florida Review, The MacGuffin, and The North Atlantic Review. Currently, he is finishing up a documentary about the nation’s worst superfund site, located near his hometown in Oklahoma. He lives with Tanya and Jack, wife and dog, respectively, in Denver, and during the day works as a writer for The Man. Shame on him.
Tags: Spring 2008