A Place He Could Handle

“If you buy that place, I’m leaving you.”
Irene’s shoulders were maybe a little squarer than usual, but her voice was low and level. She had even blue eyes, a nice smile except for one chipped tooth you didn’t usually see. She rubbed her tongue on it now, felt it tug.
“I mean it, I’m not going to live in some old place in the Flats with college kids in the basement drinking and playing loud music. That’s not for me, not now.”
Davey leaned back, balanced the heavy glass of scotch on his leg.
“It won’t be some old place, I’ll get the guys in to fix it up, like you want. And we’ll take our time, get good tenants downstairs. It’s a great deal.”
“Have you found anybody else who thinks this is a deal? You’re almost broke, and you’re buying a house?”
“I can’t afford to rent anywhere decent. I buy, I get tenants, we live for almost free. I’ve been over that with you. It makes good sense, long-term.”
She took a long drink from her scotch, looked out over the woods at the side of the house they were renting. She liked the view, liked the way the land fell away so the living room windows looked out on lots of space and air.
“I’m not going. I didn’t walk out on a marriage and move in with you to end up in a place like that, a place you can’t handle.”
Instead he found the brown mobile home, with orange trim, on an acreage about 12 miles west of the city. The farmer sold them the trailer and a half-acre of low land, all the county would let him subdivide, and he took back the mortgage.

“Are you happy?” he asked her one June night, as soon as she came in from their garden, vegetables already over-run with Scotch thistle growing thigh high, two weeds rising for every one she pulled. He’d told her that organic stuff wouldn’t work, but she had books and plans. He’d ploughed it all under twice now with a bucking rototiller, so she could start again, but she still wouldn’t let him clear it out with weedkiller. She had on rubber boots, leggings, a sweatshirt he’d bought her that had pictures of Princes Diana, Mother Teresa and Elvis, and said Together At Last. She’d never worn it, except to pull thistles.
She brought her hand up to her mouth, bit at thistles stuck in the fleshy part just below her thumb, ripped off a little bit of skin.
“I think I’ll go to bed,” she said.

Davey got fired on a Friday, which surprised him. He’d just read an article saying that was a bad day, left the loser too much time to brood on the weekend. The manager had called him in just before lunch, his dark jacket on. He kept glancing over Davey’s head at the clock above the couch all the time he was talking. Davey wanted to ask if he’d read the article, knew what a mistake this was.

He’d gone to the lounge in the strip mall on the way home, asked for four shots of vodka in a glass, sat at the bar rather than take a table during the lunch rush. He could see himself in the mirror, then looked away and focused on the glass, threads of clear liquid dancing as the ice melted and the glass shook just a little in his hands. He touched the cigarette burns and dents on the dark bar, closed his eyes and smelled his drink, the fields and the fires and the wind. He pressed it against his forehead, felt the cold. He drove home very carefully, watching for small animals that might run into his path.

“What are you going to do?” Irene still had on her work clothes, a blue suit with a some sort of black check you could only see in the right light, the kind of $700 costume they sold where she worked.
“Take some time, decide what to do next. They’ll pay me for three months.”
“Did you know this was coming? Didn’t they give you a reason?”
He looked at her, then changed the channels on the TV. It was new, 42 inches, and he wondered about buying it now. He’d been wondering anyway, since it filled the living room in the trailer, left him feeling like he was shut in a closet, and they had to sit so close they could see all the little dots that blurred together into the image.
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Now she watched the TV. She thought about his answer, like she always did.
“I don’t know.” She leaned her head back in the chair, felt the cheap fabric rub against her neck. “I really don’t know.” They watched TV together, then Irene went to bed.

“How come you’re so different out?”
They were sitting in the yard, watching the sun turn the valley slope golden, drinking wine. They had been at a lunch barbecue at Elena’s, the woman who owned the clothing store.
“I’m not different.” He stretched out in the lawnchair, reached his bare feet into the grass and closed his eyes, felt the sun on the side of his face. He couldn’t see her, facing into the sun.
“You are. You laugh, and you talk and it’s like a long time ago.”
He just waited, trying to remember when he’d laughed.
“Is that just play for you, when we were with those people? Which is real?”
He opened his eyes, could just see her hair, looking black not red against the sun, before he had to close his eyes again.
“It’s all pretty real to me.”

He hadn’t thought about Irene having another man. Then one day he just knew she was, and he knew who. Afterwards, he thought back and wondered how he knew. Maybe he’d noticed her buying new clothes, new underwear. Maybe when she started leaving early for work. Or maybe when she stopped talking about Gordon.
Davey didn’t do anything for three days, then on a Monday when she left early for work he waited 10 minutes and followed, saw Irene’s car parked near Gordon’s townhouse, tucked around a corner but there. He kept driving, bought coffee and a muffin and went home and checked the paper for jobs.

He didn’t say anything to her. He took to driving that way often, whenever she left the house early or worked late at the store. He marked the changes. She went in early every day, not just some. Her car moved from the side streets to a space just down from Gordon’s house.
Sometimes he thought of leaving a note on the window. Once he took a piece of paper and a pen, parked behind her car in his truck. But he couldn’t think of what to write, so he just put the paper under the windshield wiper, blank.
Each time he turned the corner on to Gordon’s street, he was hoping the car was there. When it wasn’t he felt cheated. When it was he felt sick. He started checking through the day, three or four trips. He didn’t have a job, so he had time to drive.

“I think you’re seeing someone.”
He didn’t look at her, stared into his drink, held it up between thumb and finger and watched the TV flicker through the Scotch, felt the little sharp edges of the carved crystal. Wedding gifts, four years before. Three had broken, but one had made it this far. He felt the wind push against the side of the trailer. It had pulled the door out of her hand and slammed it against the side when she came in. He often thought about the wind, how it came from up in the mountains somewhere and travelled down the river valley. It always made him think about how small the mobile home was.
Irene sat down, stared over his head at the spot where the water leaked in, marked the panelling whenever it rained hard and left the room smelling like must, like rotting leaves, for days.
“I’ve been so lonely.” She looked down, still not at him, but closer. “I’ve just been so lonely.”
“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose that’s too bad.”
They cried. She said she would stop.

Their bed was too small. It was big as they could get into the tiny bedroom, barely fit through the door, and you had to turn sideways and edge along the wall to get into either side. But even laying face down, with their legs crossed at the ankles and their arms folded under them, they still touched sometimes.

He hadn’t checked in a week. But there was nothing on television, and he was tired of reading and it was 5:30 on Friday and she wasn’t home. He decided to get a video.
He drove past Gordon’s house, listening to the six o’clock radio news, summer weekend safety warnings and highway reports. Her car wasn’t out front. But when he went down the next block, there it was, the big dent in the front fender like a scar.
He went to get a video. He’d watched too many videos, because he needed to give himself a reason to drive past Gordon’s house. The video store clerk in Gordon’s neighborhood knew his name. They talked about the movies he rented, ones he should rent.
The clerk liked him, admired his taste.

He took the video inside, set it by the television, but decided not to watch it. He went into their bedroom, looked through her dresser drawers, held a sweater against his cheek to feel the rough wool, smell her.
In the kitchen he poured a tall glass of Scotch, then went to the grey metal shed where they kept tools and bikes and golf clubs and hauled out his chainsaw, a red Poulan he used to cut the wood for the stove he’d put in the living room. It always made the little room too hot.
He carried the drink in one hand, the chainsaw in the other, put the chainsaw down and went back for their stepladder, sipping the drink. The sun was low, the way it gets in September, and he made a 30-foot shadow across the lawn, the ladder and his angular body looking like a cross against the yellow grass.
It took two or three tries to get it started, a roar, little backfires and puffs of oil-smelling blue smoke, the vibrations running through his palm to his wrist and up his arm. His drink spilled so he carried the saw into the house, filling the living room and kitchen with smoke and noise, and brought out the bottle.
He climbed the ladder, set the bottle on the roof, went back down for the saw, then kicked the chain in gear, teeth a black blur.
Cutting through the roof was harder than he expected. The noise was like cars crashing, the aluminium siding ripping and tearing, tiny jagged arrows sticking in his hands and forearms, a larger piece hitting his forehead, drawing blood that he wiped off with one hand, the saw bouncing and twisting. Once the metal skin was ripped, the saw cut easily through the wood frame, light two-by-twos and particle board sheathing stitched together with staples. He stopped once, turned off the saw and sat on the roof with his feet hanging over the edge. He’d cut halfway across and the roof was already sagging a little. Davey always liked the silence in the country when you stopped a car or chainsaw, the way he could hear the birds start up, hear the wind in the poplars that separated the fields. He sat, and drank, and watched the sun light the underside of the clouds.
He could see in through the long narrow hole in the roof - the sofa, the TV, his desk, the lamp they’d bought in Seattle, bits of the frame he’d cut. He had another drink, then started the saw and worked across the rest of the roof, down both walls, cutting through the centre of the trailer, finishing by cutting right through the middle of the front door. When he stopped, and opened the door, the two halves fell to the ground.

When Irene came home around 9 he was already asleep in the kitchen and most of the furniture was moved around, shifted into the two halves of the trailer.
He’d divided things up pretty fairly, she thought.