Strange Weather: Four Short Novels
Joe Hill
SNAPSHOT
1
SHELLY BEUKES STOOD AT THE bottom of the driveway, squinting up at our pink-sandstone ranch as if she had never seen it before. She wore a trench coat fit for Humphrey Bogart and carried a big cloth handbag printed with pineapples and tropical flowers. She could’ve been on her way to the supermarket, if there were one in walking distance, which there wasn’t. I had to look twice before I registered what was wrong with the picture: She had forgotten to put on her shoes, and her feet were filthy, almost black with grime.
I was in the garage, doing science—my father’s term for what I was up to anytime I decided to ruin a perfectly good vacuum cleaner or TV remote. I wrecked more than I built, although I had successfully wired an Atari joystick into a radio, so I could jump from station to station by pressing the Fire button—a fundamentally stupid trick that nevertheless impressed the judges of the eighth-grade science fair, where it earned me the blue ribbon for creativity.
On the morning Shelly turned up at the base of the driveway, I was working on my party gun. It looked like a death ray from a pulp-era science-fiction novel, a big horn of dented brass with the butt and trigger of a Luger (I had in fact soldered together a trumpet and a toy gun to create the body). When you pulled the trigger, though, it sounded an air horn, popped flashbulbs, and blew a storm of confetti and paper ribbons. I had an idea that if I could get the gun right, my dad and I could bring it to toy manufacturers, maybe license the idea to Spencer Gifts. Like most budding engineers, I honed my craft on a series of basically juvenile pranks. There isn’t a single dude at Google who didn’t at least fantasize about designing X-ray goggles to see through girls’ skirts.
I was aiming the barrel of the party gun into the street when I first spotted Shelly, right there in my sights. I put down my bozo blunderbuss and narrowed my eyes, looking her over. I could see her, but she couldn’t see me. For her, looking into the garage would’ve been like staring into the impenetrable darkness of an open mine shaft.
I was going to call to her, but then I saw her feet and the air snagged in my throat. I didn’t make a sound, just watched her for a bit. Her lips moved. She was whispering to herself.
She darted a look back the way she’d come, as if afraid someone might be sneaking up on her. But she was alone in the road, the world humid and still under the lid of an overcast sky. I remember that all the neighbors had put their garbage out and the trucks were late and the avenue stank.
Almost from the first, I felt it was important not to do anything to alarm her. There was no obvious reason for caution—but a lot of our best thinking takes place well below the level of conscious cogitation and has nothing to do with rationality. The monkey brain absorbs a great deal of information from subtle cues that we aren’t even aware we’ve received.
So when I came down the slope of the driveway, I had my thumbs hooked in my pockets and wasn’t even looking directly at her. I squinted into the horizon as if watching the flight of a far-off airplane. I approached her the way you’d close in on a limping stray dog, one that might lick your hand with hopeful affection or might lunge, upper lip drawn back to show a mouthful of teeth. I didn’t speak until I was almost within arm’s reach of her.
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Beukes,” I said, pretending to notice her for the first time. “You okay?”
Her head swung toward me, and her plump face instantly settled into a look of pleasant benignity. “Well, I’ve got myself all turned around! I walked all the way down here, but I don’t know why! This isn’t my day to clean!”
I hadn’t seen that one coming.
Once upon a time, Shelly had mopped and vacuumed and tidied the house, four hours every Tuesday and Friday afternoon. She was already old by then, although she had the brisk, muscular vigor of an Olympic curler. On Fridays she left us with a plate of cake-soft, date-filled cookies protected by a film of Saran Wrap. Man, those were some cookies. You can’t get anything like them anywhere anymore, and no crème br?lée at the Four Seasons ever tasted so good with a cup of tea.
But by August 1988 I was just weeks away from beginning high school, and it had been almost half my life since Shelly had cleaned for us on a regular basis. She’d stopped working for us after her triple bypass in 1982, when the doctor told her she ought to take some time to rest herself. She’d been resting ever since. I’d never given it much thought, but if I had, I might’ve wondered why she ever took the job in the first place. It wasn’t like she needed the money.
“Mrs. Beukes? Did my dad maybe ask you to come in and help out with Marie?”
Marie was the woman who’d replaced her, a sturdy, not terribly bright girl in her early twenties, with a big laugh and a heart-shaped can, who provided imagery for my nightly sausage-pounding ceremonies. I couldn’t imagine why my father might think Marie would need a hand. We weren’t, as far as I knew, anticipating company. I’m not sure we ever even had company.
Her smile faltered briefly. She shot one of those anxious looks back over her shoulder, down the road. When she returned her gaze to me, there was only the faintest trace of good humor on her face, and her eyes were frightened.
“I dunno, bucko—you tell me! Was I supposed to clean out the tub? I know I didn’t get to it last week, and it’s pretty dingy.” Shelly Beukes pawed through her cloth tote, muttering to herself. When she looked up, her lips were squeezed together in an expression of frustration. “Piss on it. I walked out of the house and forgot the fucking Ajax.”
I twitched, could not have been more startled if she’d pulled open that trench coat and revealed she was naked. Shelly Beukes wasn’t anyone’s idea of an uptight old lady—I had a memory of her cleaning our house in a John Belushi T-shirt—but I had never heard her use the word “fuck.” Even “piss on it” was quite a bit saltier than her usual conversational fare.
Shelly didn’t notice my surprise, just went on to say, “Tell your dad I’ll take care of the tub tomorrow. I don’t need more than ten minutes to make it shine like no one ever put their ass in it.”
Her cloth shoulder bag drooped open. I looked into it and saw a battered, grimy lawn gnome, several empty soda cans, and a single raggedy old sneaker.