Thieves I've Known (22 page)

“Hi,” said Shelby.

He hadn't remembered seeing her smile before. It both relieved and further frightened him.

“Okay,” said Grimsley.

“I got your money. Half of it, at least.”

“All right,” he said. “I'm supposed to not take it. I was told this morning.”

She appeared to think that over. “On the one hand, I wish you'd take it. On the other hand, you should probably listen to your wife.”

“Either way I'm screwed,” he said.

He took some measurements on the roof, set the tarp over the hole, made his way back down the ladder. Inside, he noticed the bedroom door open a crack. He could see the old woman in the bed, the bottles and the tubes on the nightstand. He closed the door shut.

“We'll make some noise today,” he said.

“She's beyond that now.”

He took a cup of coffee although he didn't really want one. He placed the stopper in the bathtub drain. He set the chair back in the tub and took out his hammer. Stepping up, he took his balance, caught the plaster with the hook and pulled down. It came out easily, soaked through. He dropped what he took down into the tub, and Shelby handed him a pick and a chisel when he needed them. In a half hour he was covered in
white dust, and the plaster from one wall to the other had been removed. He started in on the wood.

“You make your living doing this?” said Shelby.

“Pulling out plaster?”

“No. Doing handywork.”

“Used to. Long time ago. I used to work the fish lines in Alaska. That was in the Stone Age. I work nights at the lumberyard now. Make sure nobody messes with the place.”

“Do you like it?”

Grimsley hooked into a nail. “It's bad luck to complain about your job.”

“Is it good luck to say you like it?”

“I guess.”

“Well?”

Grimsley said nothing to that.

He pulled out bad wood for the next hour. Took a break and had another cup of coffee in the kitchen. Shelby disappeared into the bedroom, and again Grimsley smelled something he didn't like as she closed the door. His knee hurt, but it felt good compared with his shoulders. He wished he'd brought his cigarettes. While he waited, he looked at the girl's books—something about the wall in China and one about the Wright brothers. Another slim text was titled
Guadalcanal
. He opened her notebook, looked at her handwriting, and then closed it again. He'd pay for that one. That was super bad luck. He walked into the den and looked at some pictures. There were a lot of the grandmother with other people, although she didn't look much like the person he'd seen through the bedroom door.

There was one of Shelby, no frame, from what seemed to be a few years back. He picked it up and looked on the other side. It read, “sixth grade.” He turned it back over and looked at her. The photo was of the school yearbook variety. Her smile seemed forced, although he didn't know what he could conclude from that observation. His sister came back to him then. He really should give her a call. She was only a few
years younger than him and could be dead for all he knew. Beyond the pictures and the furniture, the trailer seemed sparse and empty.

He found that if he kept the girl busy, she didn't ask as many personal questions. They walked back to his and Mona's trailer in the snow, found the sawhorses under the steps, set them over their shoulders for the walk back. Grimsley measured out the scrap wood with the tape, set the boards across the horses. He showed Shelby how to cut with the electric saw, how to set her feet, how to cut in a straight line, not at an angle. Woodchips collected in the snow.

Inside, he set the beams in the tub, dropped a collection of nails in the soap rack. He measured and remeasured the ceiling, set the boards in the right order. Shelby stood next to him in the tub, holding the support beams across, although there wasn't much room for the both of them. It was all he could do to not whack one of their heads with the hammer, and their work slowed to a crawl.

It was Shelby's idea to climb up to the roof and stick her arm through the hole, keeping the beams in place and giving Grimsley more room. He set her fingers—she couldn't look in—and told her not to move them. As he hammered, he told her where to sit, where to move to, so the nails wouldn't stick her if they came out the roof. They worked from the left side across, and then from the right to the hole. As they neared the end, only Shelby's hand and wrist could be seen.

“Didn't think you'd come back.”

At first, Grimsley thought Shelby had said it, but then he realized the voice had come from behind him. He turned on the chair, trying to keep his feet. The old woman stood in the doorway. Her nightgown had slipped off one of her shoulders, and her yellow teeth, a few of them missing, were clenched tight. She held a plastic hanger above her head like a club.

“Where's my sewing machine?” she said.

“I don't think it's in the bathroom,” said Grimsley. He felt exposed, up on the chair. On the rooftop, he could hear Shelby begin to scramble down.

“Ronald will settle this between us,” the woman said. “He'll be here in a minute.”

Grimsley watched the hanger in the woman's hand. She looked frail and weak, but not above using it. He wished he were off the chair. He had a vision of broken hips.

“I don't know any Ronald,” he said.

“You'll know him soon enough,” said the woman.

“I don't doubt that.”

“As soon as he gets here, you're going to be sorry.”

He started to get down off the chair. “I'm already sorry,” he said.

She held the hanger out in front of her. “You stay where you are, or I'll blow a hole clean through you.”

Grimsley stopped moving. He stayed on the chair. “You got the wrong man.”

“And you've got the wrong luck,” she said.

He didn't like that at all.

Shelby appeared in the hallway, placed her arm across her grandmother's shoulders, but the woman took little notice. Grimsley didn't move. The girl whispered to the woman, words Grimsley could not make out. He looked down at the hammer in his hand, realized he had it gripped tight.

He stood there for another minute or two as Shelby talked to the woman. She didn't take her eyes off him, though. She didn't look at all like the woman in the pictures, not like the woman in the bed, either. If she'd had a gun, Grimsley bet she'd already have used it. Eventually, she handed the hanger back to Shelby.

As she turned back toward the bedroom, she looked at him once more. “You and I aren't through yet,” she said.

The bedroom door closed behind them, and Grimsley stepped down off the chair. He collected his tools and left the wood in the tub. There was that smell in the hallway, stronger this time. Outside, he climbed up the ladder, tried to be as quiet as he could. Through the hole, he could see that only three planks remained, but he pulled the tarp over the gap, set the wood over the top.

When he climbed down the ladder, he took one of the sawhorses back to his trailer, stored it under the steps. He thought about not going back. He snapped his fingers a few times, and that made him feel better. When he returned, he waited for Shelby a few minutes, watched the ice out on the pond—dark in the center, thick and white near the edges. He wondered if there were penguins under there. A pile of leaves whirled with the wind. Grimsley pulled his collar up to his neck, checked his watch. He picked up the other sawhorse and headed home.

Shelby sat with her grandmother for most of that night. She watched the moon through the window, watched it disappear past the frame. She rubbed the woman's palms, the tips of her fingers. The woman didn't move much, although every hour or so her eyes opened—she was drugged up again—and she seemed to watch the end of her own nose. The woman's arms were now blue. In the morning, Shelby would call the doctor. The girl tried to eat a sandwich in the kitchen, had trouble keeping it down. She drank some apple juice and then some coffee.

Taking the chair from the tub, she set it next to her grandmother's bed, in the glow of the lamplight. She tried to read her Wright brothers book, scanned the same pages for an hour. Eventually, she turned to the middle, studied the dimensions of the brothers' glider: the warped wings, the elevated rudder. When she took her grandmother's hand, it felt cold, and Shelby found her wool cap and set it over the woman's head. The eyes were closed.

Shelby found if she whispered the words, she could make progress with the chapter about the first flight. She'd read for ten minutes, flip back to the pictures in the middle of the book. She studied a corner of the glider, then the other corner, thought of the machine as a series of lines. The faces of the fishermen, of the two brothers, of their sister seemed pale, ashen in the dim lamplight. Shelby dog-eared a picture of a derby hat, abandoned at the top of a dune. She read some more, took out her flashlight, set it at the top of the book, shined the light down.

Shelby found a passage she'd always liked. Her grandmother's eyes were closed, but she read to her.

I have asked dozens of bicycle riders how they turn to the left. I have yet to find a single person who stated the facts correctly when first asked. They almost invariably said that to turn to the left, they turned the handlebar to the left and as a result made a turn to the left. But on further questioning them, some would agree that they first turned the handlebar a little to the right, and then as the machine inclined to the left, they turned the handlebar to the left and as a result made the circle, inclining inwardly
.

Shelby took her grandmother's hand. It felt colder still.

“He's a smart bear,” said the woman.

In the morning, Grimsley slept late. It was his first of two days off. He hadn't told Mona about the woman. “We're almost there,” he'd said. “Be done today.” She made some breakfast: egg whites (she did that once a week) and grits (which he didn't like). He cleaned his plate. Afterward, they watched cartoons on the
TV
, and Mona wrote cards to her family and rubbed lotion into her arm during commercials. There were more penguins in the cartoons, and it annoyed Grimsley again. At noon, he looked for his toolbox in the closet where it wasn't, and found it under the bed where it was. He changed into work clothes. Outside, he couldn't find any sand, so he dropped some snow into his shoe, which soaked through his sock and made his steps squeak as he walked through the maze of homes.

In the distance, Grimsley could see an ambulance parked along the road, lights off, and the door to the woman's trailer was open. There was movement through the window. He thought for a few moments about turning around, but he made it to the steps and set his toolbox in the snow. The ladder had fallen during the night. It lay sideways, pointing out toward the pond. He could see a man dressed in white through the doorway. The man held the end of a stretcher. A pair of feet were wrapped in a blanket. Grimsley walked around in the yard, kicking at the snow, digging a short trench near the side of the house.

When they brought her out, the blanket was over the woman's face. Shelby stood in the doorway. The men took the stretcher into the ambulance,
and one of them came back and talked with Shelby for a minute. He handed her a clipboard, and she signed a few papers.

After that she went and stood near Grimsley. He put his hands in his pockets and didn't say anything. They watched the ambulance as it pulled out of the yard and passed through the mud and the snow. A few heads—eyes and chins—watched from windows. The land was flat there, and they could see the ambulance for a few miles as it headed north toward the highway. It disappeared in a stretch of trees and then reappeared in the clearing beyond. Eventually, the ambulance went below a hill and didn't come back up.

“I'm sorry,” Grimsley said.

“It was coming.”

Grimsley looked at his toolbox. “How're you doing?”

“I'm all right.”

“That's good.” He thought about going to get Mona.

“Can you finish the job today?”

Grimsley shrugged. He wanted to say something else. “Just an hour or two.”

“I'm going to be packing up,” she said. “So if you could do it on your own, that'd be best.”

“All right.”

Shelby went inside, and Grimsley picked up his toolbox and followed her. In the bathroom he set the planks back in the tub and took out his measuring line. When he went to get the chair, Shelby was setting the pictures in stacks on the couch. Some dishes and glasses were already in boxes on the floor.

“I could get you some more boxes at the yard,” he said.

“I've had them for a while,” she said. “Been keeping them in the closet.”

“Oh,” he said.

He took the chair into the bathroom and set it in the tub, placed the hammer and nails in the sink. Then he came back out.

“Where are you going to stay?”

The girl looked up from the boxes. “I'm headed out to Bremerton. It's near Seattle. One of my sisters lives there. Bus leaves on Tuesday.”

“That's good.”

“Yep.”

Grimsley went back to the bathroom and picked up the hammer. He climbed up on the chair and set one of the planks against the ceiling. He stuck in a nail and hammered it through. He hammered a few more, and the taps echoed in the bathroom, out to the hallway. When the plank was in place, he climbed down and went back to the den.

“You need a ride on Tuesday?”

“You offering one?”

“Yep.”

“I've got to be there at eight,” she said.

“I'm up early.”

“All right,” she said.

Grimsley went back and finished putting up the rest of the planks. The hole in the roof disappeared as he slipped the smallest board into the last gap. He took it back out, filed the edges to make it fit. He heard something small fall in the den.