12/2/1998 g.g.Ashbrook
Pat walked into the front office of CRC Inc. to see Mr. Cline about a deal Hammond and Betz were supposed to be closing on a two story house on 7th street. It was a nice place, one block from the beach, two stories, four bedrooms, two kitchens, just as The Good Pastor Michael Frelkin had requested. When she came in Mr. Cline was standing by the filing cabinet with his stiff white collar on talking with a teenage couple. His hands were folded palms-together in front of his chest, and his head was tilted to the side with a glazed pained vacant look they’d all been taught to sport to impersonate authority.
"But Rachel and I would never do that," said the boy.
Cline brought his hands apart and let them drift down onto the boy and girl a shoulder each. He was speaking so softly that Pat could not hear what he was saying.
"Thank you so much Reverend Samples," the girl said. And with that the youths turned and started for the door. They were holding hands and with their frees holding bibles to their bosoms. They were smiling but the smiles almost seemed like sneers. And so with gaping grins they marched out nearly knocking Pat over never once registering the minor collision.
Looking around as he took the collar off and rubbed his neck, Cline caught sight of Pat and waved hello and asked, "So what brings you here this fine spear slashed afternoon?" And he grinned showing poppy seeds and clumps of spinach stuck in his teeth.
"Did Frelkin decide to buy the Mooretoe’s place?" she asked, as she walked across the room to his desk.
"Did he have a choice?" Cline shot her a surprised look as he switched name-plaques and rummaged around the letters and blocks on his desk finally producing a key.
"Before he moves in," she said, "we’re going to have to go through and sanctify the house. Does he know we haven’t done that yet? When does he expect to be able to move in."
"What time is it?"
"Two thirty."
"Well they started the Grounds Sanctification at one thirty. You look tired. Last I heard Frelky isn’t even planning on moving in for more than a week, so there’s no hurry. I doubt the instillation will run into anything…unfortunate. So."
"What do you mean 'instillation'?"
He looked up at her again, and squinted slightly. He rattled the key in a loose fist and it jingled as it hit against his rings. At last he said "Inspection. I think I said ‘inspection.’ Or I meant to anyway. Sorry about any confusion. Go out will you. It’s Saturday, your not supposed to be working today. I’ll see you Monday morning." And he held out his hand.
She shook it and thanked him and turned and started for the door. As she was leaving she turned around, thinking maybe she had one more question, and saw Cline standing in front the large door which stood behind his desk. She watched him open the door. It was dark in the other room, and Cline reached for the light as he shut the door behind him. She only got a quick shot, a moments glance, at what looked like a half dozen large apes standing around with coffee mugs.
She walked out the door and rolled her head around in neck stretch as she made her way down the concrete stairs. She reached her arms out and waved them around stretching her shoulders and the tendons of her fingers as she walked the curving flagstone walk. Then she got into her car and pulled out of the lot and turned onto Ocean Drive, heading for the north end of the island. As she drove the straight-away she passed people jogging down the street or crossing the street on their way to the beach with kites and wheel barrows full of what she assumed to be potatoes wrapped in tinfoil. One man, Terry Flubelton, who was out on a bike ride with the family, was dropping pistachio shells as he went. The steering wheel of the bike was attached directly to his shoulders, leaving his hands free to shell nuts, hold a novel or a map, or sometimes, as she’d seen him do before, grasp jars of fire flies or caterpillars. Gregory Pelzenderol was walking to the end of the island with his family, each member pushing before them their own lawn mower. And of course there were the sounds of cap guns, the surprised screech of a cold water jet ambush, and brightly colored hose filled balloons caught paraboling in the periphery.
She pulled into 8th street and parked and walked down a few houses. Then she walked right up between a one story bungalow and an old blue three story parapeter with shake siding. She crept closer to the other side, and stopped and poked her head out to gaze down seventh street for bustle spot. There was a new looking truck stopped outside the house to be Frelkin Mannor, and its engine was running. In faint letters on the side it had a giant pickle pic and the logo "Pepper Best Last Garlic Pickles Roast Longer," with the words at different levels and in different colors so it was hard to know what order to read them in. Then the driver's side door of the truck opened and the engine turned off and a man in a suit hopped out and his shoes made a clap sound when they hit the black top as if the soles were wooden. He pulled out a map and looked around, but it wasn’t that kind of looking. He walked around to the back of the truck and someone else met him there, someone who she guessed was either already at the house waiting or riding shotgun. The two men began to work very quickly. They opened the back of the truck and unloaded from it about five long crates, big enough for a dozen pairs of skies each, and had brought them into the house; and they were all done and had driven away in under four minutes. With the truck gone she walked across the street and up onto the porch. The door was open and inside it looked like they were just finishing up with the sanctification, and the crates weren’t anywhere to be seen.
She walked in just as Marty JoKone was coming down the stairs. "Hello, Pat," he said in his booming low choir voice. "Stopping by to make sure we’ve done the place justice are you?"
"Pretty routine this time ‘round?" she asked.
"For the most part. Betz and Hurger are making the last round with holy water atomizers, coating the walls, and they have brushes for the doorways, but you know the procedures I’m sure. There was one room upstairs which we had trouble neutralizing any readings in."
"Violence?"
"John thought it might just be the architecture, something not quite Kosher there, but a Violence in the history was my thought. We got it though. This place is as smooth as a green peach now."
"Say, Marty, when I was coming up just now, there was, it looked like a moving truck I think, it was pulling out at the other end of the street when I was pulling in. It just made me wonder, is Pastor Frelkin moving any of his furniture already?"
"I think they were dropping off a few lamps for the windows; to keep the place from looking too empty at night."
"Mind if I take a look around? It looks like a nice place he’s getting."
"Go ahead," he said with hands spread. And with that he went into the kitchen where some woman Pat didn’t know was christening a new faucet with rose water and Old-Spice.
She walked up the stairs passing by crews of Latin mumblers armed with spritzers. The crews were apparently working their way down, apparently done with that part of the house. She walked down the halls checking the rooms. None seemed to have any furniture. But the rooms were not all exactly the same, they had been painted different colors. She thought it was strange how such an old house could have no memories in the walls, or the floors, or anywhere; that water and smoke and an arbitrary old language could do such a thing. But the house was clean, for better or worse. As if it were built last Tuesday and ready for its first family, still smelling of new paint and plastic and carpet vapors. She wandered if it were just some kind of coating they put on, that if she could find some way of scraping through, that all the things that had happened there over the years would come gushing out. Or if they were really gone, like dirt scrubbed from under fingernails. She checked each room, it seemed more like twenty bedrooms than four but; looking out for one’s own, she supposed. She even checked the attic which was a great non-partitioned area which she imagined would be perfect for a boxing ring for young men set up in the middle, or an art studio.
There was nothing anywhere but sunlight on a hardwood floor, and so she went down and through and down until she reached the first floor, but then she went down to the basement not paying any mind to the people walking about. When she got to the bottom she looked around, and found herself in the middle of a hallway which ran to either side of her. The rooms were all well lit on one side, and she checked through all of them, but nothing novel. On the other side where it was dark she fished around for a light switch. Finding the little nub she clicked it up and found a long hallway before her, with Marty JoKone at the end of the hall shutting a door he was coming out of. And as the door shut she saw people inside. People in rags, with long brown teeth, inch long, and grimy faces, with wild tangled hair on their heads and their arms and mid-digitally on the fingers, and they seemed to be moving around frantically. But there seemed something abnormally costume-like about their appearance, something laughable. There were three loud thuds from the other side of the door after he shut it.
"Ah, Pat." He boomed jovially, "I take it you found everything done satisfactorily. No stray recollection in the upper floors?"
"Who’s back there."
"There’s something in the Kitchen I’d like to ask you about, if you have a minute."
"Who. Is back there?"
He didn’t seem to hear her question at first. "There’s something about this company, Pat, which you probably don’t know. I guess it was only a matter of time before you found out. You're a smart girl, things don’t get by you like they do other people."
Marty unlocked the door, and the knob twisted; the door creaked back. A tall haggard man with a rotting fishing cap on stepped out. Musty dark pants and shirt, irregular nostrils, fingers long and not quite straight, one jutting cheek bone. He held up a green and white card in his hand, showing long thick nails more like animal claws. "Say Martin, do you know what the capital of Botswana is? Peggy was bleeding and some of the cards got smutched. Or…" he leaned back into the room and whispered something and came back with another card, "the year of the first artificial heart implant?"
"That was in nineteen eighty two, Jerry." declared Mr. JoKone.
"And what about Botswana?" he asked.
"Gaborone. No, Zanzibar. No, no it is Gaborone, I think."
"Thanks." Jerry smiled showing gaps and his eyes twinkled with a rich vivacity, "I eest. I." He blinked hard again and again. His arms began to flail and the cards fell from his hands. He began a long moan which turning to a high screech and Pat had to cover her ears. Marty stepped back. Jerry fell to the floor and grabbed his face as ripples of spasm moved through his body, his one arm hitting the frame of the door again and again in a spunky rhythm. Then, as it seemed to be over, he slowly stood up, and put his hat back on. He seemed very out of breath and barely able to stand. Wiping with his sleeve the bile which had spilled out over his lower lip and down his whiskery chin, he hung his head. "I’m… I’m sorry you had to see that, Ms. Delner."
"That’s ok," Pat said.
"I’m glad I finally got a chance to meet you. We all know ‘Pat,’ but… you know."
"The feeling is mutual," she said with a smile. He looked at her for a moment, and after a penetrating inspection she saw something in his eyes like thanks. And she walked foreword and gave him a big hug.
"Do you live with Pastor Frelkin?" she asked.
"He’s a funny man, the Pastor. Part of him doesn’t know we exist, even if we’re in the same room he seems to see right through us. Part of him blames us for everything that makes him unhappy. Sometimes he tells us he’s going to eradicate us. And sometimes he enjoys pretending that we do things like kill people and cause hopelessness, it makes him feel important or something. I think he’s hung up on purity."
"So you live with church officials?"
"Oh we’ve always lived in churches and in the houses of people who act holy. But now we live in all the houses that are ‘prepared’ by the CRC. We get ordinary families now."
Pat could see somewhat into the room through the doorway behind Jerry as he talked. There were about eleven of ‘them’ she guessed, or roughly thereabouts. One seemed to be stuck on a bed post and others were trying to pull ‘it’ off. The floor was wet and reflective, but it was dark so she could not tell because of what. There were pieces from board-games strewn about, a lot of what looked like bend up coat hangers. Someone inside was coughing hard wet coughs.
"Well, we’d better be going now," Marty said.
Pat couldn’t think of what to say. Should she ask something? Marty was walking back and tugged at her hand. She found herself walking backwards, and she waved to Jerry and he waved back and tipped his hat and the part he grabbed broke off in his hand. Marty pulled her around the corner and she walked up the stairs on her own. "Let me get you some water," he said, and patted her on the back.
When they got up to the kitchen Marty lifted his briefcase up onto the counter top and took from it a crystal tumbler and put it in her hands. Then he took one for himself and pulled out a thermos and poured her some, and then some for himself. The glass felt cold as soon as the water came in. She sipped it and it was quite cold, and fresh to the taste. Martin leaned forward toward her rather quickly and Pat dropped her glass in a panic and ran over to the other side of the kitchen away from him. He knelt down slowly and began putting pieces from the broken tumbler in his own glass. Someone knocked at the door, a stiff man with a soft white collar appeared. "Hello?" he said, "I’m sorry, I’m Joey Pearler, and I’m from the Central office in Gelsaroll, just on the mainland a few miles in [this last part he stated as a question]. I just need to know if you can sign a Jesus-409 script to authorize a postage write-off, my supervisor didn’t show up this morning. I was told that-"
Pat stormed out right past him and ran down the stairs and to the sidewalk and down the street toward the sea, kicking off her shoes as she ran. As she crossed the main street she saw all the houses and wandered how many must have been ‘inspected,’ ‘cleaned’ and how many would be in years to come. And she saw the church on the corner, and she ran and didn’t stop until she got to the boardwalk. There, right at the top of the wooden steps, two kids were playing with water guns and one shot her in the face by accident with a thin stream. The water was warm and tasted like pennies. The one boy looked up and said, "Sorry, Miss," and ran after the other, who fled and toward the arcade, the two firing away in the hot sun. She heard one of the kids ask the other when they’d run far enough to forget why they were running if the other had any quarters left.
Pat walked slowly onto the beach and when she was in a ways closed her eyes for a few steps. The sand, the indecisive waves, the gulls -but of course, the wind. She sat down in the sand and pulled off her dark jacket and shirt, and slipped her dress off. What was left looked more like a bathing suit than some of the things which had been fashionable for years, she was still young after all, and she listened for the people thinking, for the sounds of feet in the water, for the people talking and calling, and the life guard whistles, and the drifting eyes, and the countless futures that spilled off the coastline without source or destination, and she opened her eyes.