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It was late in the day when Mack pulled up to the mailbox. The oak and hickory were throwing long shadows by then and the air had cooled considerably. He made a mental note to check out the furnace while he was home. His mother and aunt would be running it full blast before long.
“What the hell am I thinking,” he mumbled. “They’ll be in a house with a new furnace before then and have a maintenance man to make sure it runs right.”
He laughed quietly then, thinking of what else that meant. No more worrying about prison breaks. No more watching the TV, wondering where the latest rash of tornados would be touching down. There would be warning signals in town, time to get to safety.
Opening the box, he removed the mailbag and placed it on the front seat, next to the packet of information from Roxie Komenski. In so doing, he remembered that he had not yet looked over the listing agreement she’d drawn up.
He figured the burr-headed realtor to be a steamroller when it came to persuading someone to her point of view. People with Cadillac appetites were turned that way. She had probably pitched his idea to the builder at the gated community that very day, which meant he needed to look at that agreement fast. But time was on his side as Mama and Sister planned to visit Pa after they left the Hometown Buffet, then stop at the filling station to gas up. He had a good hour, maybe more.
He carried the envelope and mailbag inside, letting Whitey in while he was about it. The house seemed unnaturally quiet, with only the hum of the Frigidaire and the poof of the gas flame on the water heater filling the void. Hearing a roof joist crack as the house began to cool, he paused to listen. Old houses did that, but he knew it didn’t mean the house wasn’t sound. He wondered if Roxie Komenski had heard those sounds when she had made her guerrilla run on the place. If that was the reason she had determined the house needed fixing up before she could flip it.
A Walmart Christmas ad and a church flyer were the only things in the mailbag, so Mack laid them on the kitchen table. He opened the refrigerator in hopes of finding a Bud or Coors. He settled for a 12-ounce bottle of Pepsi, telling himself he should’ve known better than to find alcohol in the house. He was knee-deep in the Bible Belt. Besides which, his mother and aunt were teetotalers, had been since he could hold a memory.
Abruptly, he felt a dryness in his throat, then a longing, and his mind wandered to taverns he frequented in Amarillo and Lubbock, Midland and Odessa. Drinking suds in wide-open country with other carpenters who took their work and their beer where they found it. But hell, he thought, hadn’t you earned the right to knock back a few when you’d spent ten hours swinging a twenty-ounce claw hammer under a blistering sun or in a freezing drizzle?
Breathing deep, Mack sat down at the table, popped the top on the Pepsi, and turned his attention to the listing agreement. He recalled Roxie Komenski saying the terms were standard, but right off, he noticed her fee was seven percent, the high end of the going scale.
“Thought we agreed to six,” he mumbled, making a mental note to question the realtor about the elevated fee when he telephoned her.
He also remembered that the realtor had told him she based the listing price on her evaluation of the property. He felt his blood pressure elevate as he recalled her methodology, but he turned through pages until he found the one with the listing price stated.
“Damn,” he mumbled, finding the figure much lower than he had hoped. Making another mental note to have the realtor justify the lower price, he inserted the listing agreement back inside the envelope, unsigned.
Wondering how much more he would get for the property if he replaced the roof and made other improvements, Mack made his way down the hall to the bedroom. He tossed the manila envelope on the bed and traded Dockers and a v-neck pullover for jeans and a sweatshirt, debating which chore to tackle first.
His mother had lengthened the list as they sat over lunch at the Hometown Buffet. He hadn’t objected as the work would make the place show better. But as he drove up the track to the house, he noticed new saplings had sprung up and some of the brush had suckered. For his own peace of mind, he wanted to thin the grounds to give a clear view of the surroundings. A man had to wrest the land from nature in this neck of the woods and battle to keep it from being reclaimed to his dying day. If he let up a minute, it turned into a jungle. That thought strengthened the pull to haul ass back to the big and wide. The Panhandle offered no such impairment to a man’s vision.
Mack sighed. “And after that, I need to get the house ready to flip,” he said to the old white dog that still followed him.
Flip. He didn’t like the terms Roxie Komenski chose to use when it came to people’s property. He rubbed Whitey behind the ears, then laced his worn rawhide work boots, talking to the dog as he did so.
“Maybe if I spruce the old place up a little it’ll bring a lot more. How ‘bout it, boy? Want to live out your golden years in a patio home?”
As the dog panted his enjoyment with the attention, Mack remembered the lunchtime debate about mules and dogs and souls and Heaven. Then his thoughts went to Sister’s revelation about Bill and Jack being buried together, and he wondered again why two mules would die on the same day.
As he made his way to the bedroom door, Mack paused, thinking he needed to hide the envelope containing the realtor’s listing. He planned to broach the subject with his mother when the time was right, but he needed to wait a day or two to give her a chance to cool off.
Ruby’s health was more a concern for Mack than anything else he’d found out on this trip. She’d always been one to self-manufacture complexities, over-chew matters, and the last year had taken its toll on her. A patio home was the perfect place for her and Sister. They’d both earned the right to their golden years, especially with his father gone and his grandfather in a nursing home. Yes sir, he thought. It’s the right choice.
As he walked to the closet to place the packet on the top shelf, he noticed his mother’s old photo album. He pulled it down and leafed through it, suddenly remembering a picture that might help in the search for his grandfather’s mules. He slowed turning of the pages as his grandfather’s life passed before his eyes and stopped to study one photo in particular.
“She was a Georgia peach,” he mumbled, studying the petite woman dressed in a two-piece suit and holding a bouquet in one hand.
Mack knew little about his grandmother, known by her children as Grace. As he recalled, the reason behind the first-name basis was dictated by the woman herself, who wanted to retain her youthful image and saw a passel of kids calling her Mama as unfitting.
He studied the picture again. The woman was leaning against the arm of a tall proud-looking man whose eyes belied they belonged to Mack’s grandfather. The look of a man who made a good catch, Mack thought. He became more curious about the woman’s disappearance as he continued to turn pages but he did not find her semblance again. Save for the wedding picture, the woman was non-existent.
“What the hell happened, Pa?” Mack whispered. “None of this is making any sense. How can a woman bear you two children and leave one picture behind?” Remembering the postcard in the living room, a reunion notice, he was struck with another thought.
What if she’s not dead after all?
A few pages later, Mack finally found the picture he was looking for. A smiling younger version of his grandfather, sitting on the seat of a buckboard wagon looking between the ears of two long-eared and very serious-eyed mules.
“Bill and Jack,” Mack murmured, frowning. He figured each of the mules stood sixteen-hands, maybe taller. “Take one helluva-big hole to bury those two.” The mules’ simultaneous deaths continued to rub like a burr under a saddle blanket.
Seated next to the man was a small girl in a bonnet. Sister? Mack studied the background in the picture but was unable to identify its location. Slipping the photograph out of the album, he laid it aside and went back to the album.
The next page showed another black-and-white photograph displaying five smiling men in Army uniforms, arms draped around each other’s shoulders as a gang of schoolboys would do. Too damned young to be shipped off to Normandy, Mack thought, running his finger down the row until he found his grandfather. He studied the clear-eyed boy with a lop-sided grin and saw a trace of himself in the set of the shoulders and square jaw.
The next picture showed his grandfather with two children. The larger of the two reached his knee and he held an infant in his arms.
“Mama?” Mack said, looking at the baby. He could see nothing more than two eyes and a small puckered mouth inside what looked to be a hand-crocheted baby cap. He looked then at his grandfather’s face, studying it hard, and noticed an emptiness in the eyes he had not seen in the previous pictures.
“The Army hung you out to dry, didn’t it, Pa.” He let out a bitter laugh and mumbled, “Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.”
Feeling a tightness in his neck, Mack turned another page and came face to face with a yellowed newspaper clipping detailing a prison break at the state pen at McAlester. He recognized his own countenance in the face of the man featured in a photograph and closed the book fast.
“C’mon Whitey.” Mack replaced the photo album on the top shelf and laid the manila envelope on top of it. “Let’s get to those tree limbs.”
He walked out the back door to the shed where he found a pruning saw and ladder. “Might as well take a look at the shingles while I’m up there . . .” He flexed his neck muscles to loosen the tightness. “See if I was sold a boatload of marketing hype when I had that forty-year roof put on.”
