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Stumble On (Continued)

By: Paul Handley

Three days later, Josh went back to finish the screens. He resolved to leave the minute a dusting of paint shavings rained on his head, or even a slow drip at the rate of rain drops escaping web strands. He knew he should care that Mrs. Brendt ate cat food, but the revolting image it conjured up made him resent her even more. Ever so briefly a sensory perception of the cat food texture and stark fishy taste pierced his water-leached brain that, due to the Stroh’s, had tugged all night on the surrounding membranes.

While carrying out two of the screens that he had hurriedly dropped in a stack against a support beam inside the garage, he immediately realized his mistake. He recognized that he should have sprayed the screens with a hose to clean them before placing them in the windows. Josh blamed Mrs. Brendt for not saying anything. They were her screens. He decided to get the hose anyway and only wash the screens that were are still out. She wouldn’t even notice that he had made the effort, Josh thought resentfully.

Josh circled the house in a haze from the remnant of the alcohol in his system and the humidity causing that same alcohol to be dragged out through his pores, creating a sticky weather system in the areas sealed between his clothes and skin. An interdisciplinary dermatologist/meteorologist that would be able to recreate the identical conditions in a lab would be fascinated. Josh located a spigot sans a water hose. “Of course,” he murmured to himself.

He walked into the open garage and immediately saw a shiny, coiled hose in the corner. Then he heard a conversational voice. Josh walked out of the garage and around the side that was away from the house. There was Mrs. Berendt talking to a cat. “Good girl, Frisky,” she said, while coaxing the cat toward bowls of food and water.

She wasn’t eating cat food, Josh thought bitterly. The electric motor should have tipped me off. She should have had a manual push mower or at best an old gas powered one. Josh walked back into the garage and saw himself reflected in a dirty mirror with a peeling pinkish wooden frame. He looked like a crazy old man.

After he was finished, Mrs. Berendt came out to talk. “Are you done?”

“Yes.”

“You cleaned all the screens?”

Josh hadn‘t seen her this invigorated during the entire process. “Yes,” he said with a bit more hesitance.

“You sure?”

“I had a few screens already in. Why didn’t you tell me to wash them before I put them up?”

“I’m not paying you country clubbers for work you didn’t do.”

Josh looked around for a moment to see if he had an accomplice. “What’s a country clubber?”

“Rich people who never had to work. I worked banquets at Glen Oak Country Club. I’d be cleaning cooking pans with scalding water to clean off the bottom layers of cakes and lasagna baked into them. Look at these forearms.” She turned them over and showed what look like connected age spots to Josh. “These are burn marks. The window over the sink I cleaned in looked out to the pool. While I scrubbed, I could watch the country clubbers. Hardly anybody except the young kids. They would just be laying there, the middle of the afternoon, just laying there while my skin burned. That’s how I spotted my husband. He was lazier than the rest. I don’t think I ever saw his hair wet. He had the best tan I have ever seen. Never even got up to get something to eat. He had this way about him as if it bothered him to have to make the effort to place an order. I wanted to do that. Be like that. Just hold out a bill folder and not look at the person who was taking your order. It was regal.”

Josh paid as much attention to the sudden fountain of words as a Shakespeare soliloquy he was forced to watch at school. “That’s interesting. I thought you were practically a mute, but I want my money.”

“You stink like alcohol. Don’t deny it. I recognize it. My husband was a drunk. He was a country clubber that got me pregnant. Thought I’d grabbed the brass ring. He was just plain lazy. You could be his son.”

Josh removed all the screens and cleaned all the ones he hadn’t done before. He was shellacking all the screen frames in the garage while wearing a mask to protect himself from the fumes. He had threatened Mrs. Berendt with leaving, but in the end decided he was so far into the job that he wanted to come out of it with something. In addition, she had promised extra pay to apply a coat of polyurethane varnish, though again, no specific figures had yet been mentioned.

Sweating under the mask, Josh noticed the cat trying to rub against his ankle. Josh pulled out his lighter embossed with a black marijuana leaf and let it burn a hole in a screen. He picked up the can of varnish. He shook it hard and sprayed the rest of the screen, the cement floor behind it becoming wet from the filtered mist. Josh lit various sections of the screen with his lighter, making it look like bees defending a honeycomb. Then the entire screen flared and Josh just walked away.

He sat with Mrs. Berendt watching baseball in her kitchen. The Cubs had a doubleheader today and they were catching the second game. “As the great Ernie Banks used to say, ‘Let’s play two,’” said Mrs. Berendt after she invited Josh inside.

Earlier, he put out the flames on the screen and disposed of it in an alley dumpster behind her house. Josh told her, “You must be missing one.”

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