Nine Inches (10 page)

Well, Lonny was dead now, and the grandkids were coming for another visit. And that compressor was still just gathering dust in the garage, not doing a damn bit of good for anyone.

•••

BALANCING THE
pool box on his hip, Gus li
ft
ed the latch on the gate and slipped into his neighbors’ yard. A misty drizzle dri
ft
ed across his face as he circled around the gas grill, onto the carpet of AstroTurf Lonny had laid on top of what used to be the swimming pool.

Th
e Simmonses’ garage was detached from the house, set way back at the rear of the property.
Th
e original structure had barely been big enough to accommodate a car and a lawn mower, but Lonny had expanded it in the mid-eighties, turning the squat little box into an attractive and comfortable cottage, complete with a wood-burning stove, a stereo system, and a half bathroom.

He had conceived of the refurbished garage as a sort of clubhouse for his teenaged sons, and for a couple of years they’d actually used it that way, hanging out with their buddies, blasting heavy metal on the stereo, and turning themselves into expert Ping-Pong players. But it didn’t last; the boys got driver’s licenses, and their attention shi
ft
ed to the world beyond their backyard. A
ft
er his sons le
ft
, Lonny began spending more and more time in the garage himself, drinking beer and watching ball games, playing epic eight-ball tournaments against himself on the pool table he’d bought for a song when the Limelighter Café went belly-up. In recent years, Gus had o
ft
en noticed the light on late at night and wondered what Lonny was up to. A couple of times this spring, he’d seen his former friend emerging from the garage at daybreak, looking rumpled and bewildered as he shu
ffl
ed across the turf to his house.

Gus heard the branches of the oak groaning ominously in the breeze and couldn’t help looking up into the dark canopy of leaves that hovered over the garage like an enormous
fi
st. Lonny had been deeply alarmed by the symphony of creaks and squeals produced by the massive limbs; he’d insisted to Gus that the whole tree was ready to come toppling over in the next big storm, trunk and all, as if it were no longer rooted to the ground.

But the tree’s still here,
Gus thought. It was Lonny who had fallen, brought down by a massive heart attack during an a
ft
ernoon nap in the garage. Gus would have considered it an ideal way to go — no su
ff
ering, no medical bills, no burdens placed on your loved ones — except that he’d been within listening range of Peggy’s hysterical shrieks upon
fi
nding the body and had witnessed the frozen look of devastation on her usually proud face as she followed the stretcher out to the ambulance.

Th
e garage door was locked, but that wasn’t a problem — Lonny kept a spare key in a secret compartment at the bottom of a thermometer he’d mounted on the wall above his woodpile. Gus knew this because he and Martha had given Lonny the trick thermometer as a
fift
ieth-birthday gi
ft
, back in the days when everyone got along and the passage of time still seemed like cause for celebration.

THE FIRST
thing that struck Gus as he stepped inside the garage was the smell of cigar smoke. Not a faint stale whi
ff
of it but a concentrated gust, so strong that he expected to turn on the light and
fi
nd Lonny leaning on the pool table, squinting at the cue ball through a cloud of grayish fumes from the El Producto clamped between his teeth.

But all he saw, when his groping hand
fi
nally found the switch, was a large open room, the geography of which was instantly, and deeply, familiar.
Th
e workshop along the le
ft
wall — the wrenches, screwdrivers, and hammers all neatly suspended from the pegboard. Some metal storage shelves full of paint cans, power tools, and miscellaneous crap. Beyond that, the old refrigerator where Lonny kept the beer he bought by the case at the Liquor Warehouse.
Th
e bathroom in the corner, just past the snowblower, which was covered for the season with a brown plastic tarp.

In the middle of the garage, Lonny had created a makeshi
ft
den, a few pieces of cast-o
ff
furniture — foldout sofa, easy chair, end table with a little portable TV on it — arranged in a semicircle around the Franklin stove.
Th
e game area
fi
lled the remaining space: Ping-Pong table, pool table, foosball.
Th
e whole place gave the impression of a
fi
nished basement that had doggedly burrowed its way above ground.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, it gradually occurred to Gus that the garage must have remained untouched since the day of Lonny’s death. He told himself to stop gawking, to just in
fl
ate the pool and get the hell out, but he couldn’t seem to make himself move. He felt a small hard ball of grief rise up from his throat, growing as it moved, then burst out of his mouth in a series of sobs that shook his whole body.

“Oh, Lonny,” he heard himself cry. “Oh, Jesus.”

•••

FEELING A
bit shaky, Gus sat down on the easy chair and tried to get hold of himself. He wasn’t sure what it was about being here that upset him so much. He wasn’t a superstitious man, didn’t believe in ghosts. Nor did he have any kind of sentimental attachment to the garage itself. Except for one long-gone summer, he had rarely set foot in here for more than a few minutes at a time.

It must have been 1989, he thought.
Th
at was the year Martha got laid o
ff
from Honeywell, and things got tense between them. Lonny wasn’t working, either. He was recovering from knee surgery and was bored out of his skull, puttering around the house all day.

For a short time — a month, maybe just a couple of weeks — Gus had fallen into the habit of joining Lonny in the garage a
ft
er supper and staying for several hours, not heading home until he was pretty sure that Martha was asleep, or at least too tired to pick a
fi
ght.

What had he and Lonny done on those lazy summer nights? Watched the Yankees, drunk beer, knocked the balls around on the pool table. Listened to country music, which Lonny loved (he had driven an eighteen-wheeler as a young man and considered himself an honorary Southerner) and Gus usually hated. But for some reason, he didn’t mind it so much in Lonny’s garage, all those songs about hard luck and heartbreak, how everybody got their share.

A couple of times, though, late at night, they got to talking, man-to-man, about more serious subjects — the deaths of their parents, their worries about their kids, the everyday indignities of walking around in an aging body, what their lives added up to more than halfway down the road.

And they talked about their marriages, too, something they had never done before. Lonny complained bitterly about Peggy — how she’d let herself go and lost her sense of fun, how critical she’d become of everyone they knew, as if she’d somehow been promoted to a higher station of life. On top of everything else, their sex life had gone down the tubes. She practically made him beg for it; he was lucky if they had relations once a week.

“I don’t know what happened,” he confessed. “She used to love it, used to put these little notes in my lunch box.”

Th
e notes weren’t dirty, Lonny explained.
I can’t wait for bedtime,
she’d write, or
You are entitled to a free gi
ft
. Details at eleven.
Just cute little things like that. But man, they sure got him going.

“Now I’m lucky if I get a sandwich,” he said, grimly scrutinizing his cigar. Gus must have been thrown o
ff
by Lonny’s candor; he must have felt obligated to con
fi
de a secret of his own. Or maybe he just needed to unburden himself. Whatever the reason, once he got started on the subject of Martha, it all came tumbling out. Her frustration with him, with the fact that, intelligent as he was, he was never going to amount to anything more than shipping supervisor at Precision Bearings. For years she’d been bugging him about going to night school, taking some courses in computers or accounting, but he always had some excuse. And now — it was as if both of them had woken up on the same gray morning and realized the same thing — it was too late.
Th
ey’d turned a corner.
Th
eir lives were their lives. Nothing was going to change.

“It wasn’t so bad when she was working,” Gus explained. “But now that she’s home all day, she broods about it.”

A
ft
er years of stoical silence, Martha had turned into a fountain of complaints. She wanted to travel, drive a nice car, to own a vacation house on the water, to look forward to a fun and prosperous retirement, but it wasn’t gonna happen. Because of him — his passivity, his cowardice, his willingness to settle for second best. He could see the disappointment in her face every time she looked at him, and it had done something to his head. Well, not just his head.

“Between the sheets,” he told Lonny. “You know. It’s not working like it’s supposed to.”

“Ouch.” Lonny gave a sympathetic wince. “
Th
at’s a tough break.”

And of course Martha held
that
against him, too. He didn’t get it. She claimed to have lost respect for him as a man, but somehow still expected him to perform like one.

“At least she’s still interested,” Lonny pointed out.

“Lotta good it does me,” muttered Gus.

All these years later, Gus wasn’t quite clear why he and Lonny had stopped spending their nights together in the garage. All he remembered for sure was that Martha had gone back to work the following September — she found a secretarial position at Merck, a job she’d keep until retirement — and their marriage slowly returned to an even keel. She stopped complaining, lost interest in making him accept responsibility for her unhappiness. His “problem” had continued, but a
ft
er they moved to separate bedrooms, it no longer seemed to upset her so much.

GUS HAD
the compressor warming up and the de
fl
ated pool spread out on the cement
fl
oor when he suddenly became aware of a hitch in his plan, such an obvious one that he was embarrassed not to have considered it until now: if he in
fl
ated the pool in here, he’d never be able to get it out. Lonny’s garage was equipped with a roll-up door wide and high enough to admit a car, but Gus hadn’t seen it in its raised position for years, not since the day the pool table had been delivered. Lonny had apparently decided to treat the big door as if it were a wall, blocking it up from the inside with an impressive collection of junk. It would have taken a half hour of hard labor just to clear a path to the handle, and Gus would have to put everything back when he was
fi
nished.

No, the only practical way in and out of the garage was the regular door, maybe seven feet high by three feet across; the kiddie pool had a nine-foot diameter. A
ft
er a moment’s thought, he arrived at what seemed like a reasonable solution. All he needed to do was drag the pool liner directly outside the door, with the air valve facing in; that way he’d be able to in
fl
ate it from the doorway without exposing himself to the rain — it had gotten quite a bit heavier in the past few minutes — and without removing the compressor from the garage.

Th
e plan would have worked perfectly except that the electrical cord on the compressor turned out to be too short. Gus checked all the obvious places — the drawers on the worktable, the tool chest, the storage shelves — before his gaze
fi
nally landed on a fat orange extension cord, neatly coiled, resting on the card table where Lonny kept his record player, a clunky wood-veneer Kenwood that had to be at least thirty years old.
At Folsom Prison
was on the turntable, and Gus couldn’t help smiling.
Th
at was Lonny’s favorite record, and it seemed like a blessing that it should have been the last music he had ever heard.

A handful of familiar, timeworn albums were stacked on the table, a rogues’ gallery of men in cowboy hats. Gus
fl
ipped through the collection — Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tom T. Hall — the essential sameness of the portraits making it that much more jarring when he reached the bottom of the pile and found himself looking at a hazy, romantic photo of a woman with an elaborate
fift
ies hairdo sni
ffi
ng a spray of
fl
owers.

Bouquet,
the cover said.
Th
e Percy Faith Strings in Stereo.

A startled laugh escaped from Gus’s mouth, followed by an odd feeling of relief, the sense of a small mystery being solved long a
ft
er he’d stopped wondering about it.

SHORTLY AFTER
he’d retired from Precision, Gus returned from his annual physical with a free sample of Viagra that had been urged on him by his doctor. When he sheepishly mentioned this to Martha, she surprised him with a willingness to give it a try.

“I’ve missed all that,” she told him.

“Me, too,” he said.

Th
ey tried not to make too big a deal about it, taking the plunge on Saturday night a
ft
er a pleasant dinner at Applebee’s and a game of Scrabble.
Th
ey went upstairs and undressed in the dark, shy as newlyweds, before slipping under the covers. For a few seconds, as they pressed against each other in a tentative, slightly anxious embrace, Gus imagined that things would be better between them from now on, that they’d found a cure for what ailed them, the
real
problem lurking at the bottom of everything else.