There were also little black ruins of dog flop where the animal had sneaked a crap when Eve Fletcher wasn’t paying attention.
Eve had smoked Pall Malls at the rate of two cartons a week for most of her adult life. As a consequence her teeth looked like kernels of corn. Her world, the interior rooms of the small house, had yellowed as well over the years. A beanbag with a green aluminum bowl of ashtray was perched like a sleeping pigeon on the arm of her BarcaLounger. When each cigarette was no more than one-half its original length, she would crush and fold the butt unmercifully and, once certain it was dead, pour the contents into the ash can beside the chair, wiping the ashtray out with a facial tissue. It’s the last half of a cigarette has almost all the tar in it, she always told herself. Then she would replace the cleaned ashtray on the chair’s arm, where it would wait to receive the next offering. There was seldom much of a wait. She held her cigarettes between the wrong side of her middle finger and the next to last, so that if she fell asleep with one active, it would burn her awake and not fall to the bed or chair to smolder and ignite.
The walls in the den were papered in a nicotine-dulled floral and spotted with her favorite art. There was a textured reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a painted-by-numbers Last Supper, and hanging over the television set, a large photograph of a thin-necked, bleak-eyed boy in his graduation cap. The color photograph had faded to a light-blue whisper, and noncritical sections of it had bubbled and adhered to the glass. A framed photograph of the same boy, though beefier, in Marine Corps dress blues, was perched on top of the television set beside a pot of orange plastic flowers held aloft by impossibly green stems.
Eve had seen herself as a beauty before she’d been married and forever lost her snappy figure to her sole pregnancy. During the Second World War she had worked in a factory making eyeglasses for soldiers and sailors. That was where she had met Martin’s father, a quiet man sidelined from the army due to flat feet. Milton Fletcher had passed away in 1954.
Eve shifted her legs, the stubble catching against the pink sheeny polyfibered nightgown, and studied the TV Guide carefully. She stared at the Big Ben clock on the tray.
“Nine thirty-three! They promised me the cable would be back on before my stories start. Can’t trust anybody.”
She closed the housecoat over her knees and rubbed the dog’s neck somewhat vigorously. After she’d located the remote control on the dinner tray and switched on the television, she watched the static for a few seconds, a deep frown embedded in her face.
“God-dangit, where the hell’s those TV people?” she wondered aloud. “I bet I’ll just deduct these hours from the bill if they don’t get a move on!” she told the dog. She did the applicable math in her head but had a pencil in her hand just in case she needed to figure on paper. It was a talent she had. “Cable’s thirty-two a month. Kill the extra dollar and, say, a dollar a day, and at twenty-four hours a dollar that’s four cents an hour. Now. From seven- thirty to…”
She heard a car door close, then another, and the dog began growling. She scratched under her wig, which sat on her head like a gray turban, with the eraser end of the pencil. Then she stood and carried the barking dog toward the door. The buzzer sounded just as she got there. She had the pencil in her hand in case she needed a weapon. You never know, she thought. Martin says anything can be a weapon.
“Yes?” she said loudly so the people on the porch might hear her through the storm door.
“Cable trouble, Miss Fletcher?”
She opened the door a crack and looked at the people in matching coveralls standing on the porch and at the white pickup truck with CABLE VISION painted on the door. Mr. Puzzle, who could hear the voices, began having a conniption fit. Eve tried to quiet him by gripping his muzzle, and he bit her so hard it broke the skin above the ragged pink nail on her thick trigger finger. The closest one was a woman with her thumbs hooked into her tool belt. Behind her was a thin younger man with round-lensed, gold-frame glasses. There was a cigarette dangling from the girl’s lips. Eve managed to get a grip on the dog’s mouth and clamp it, whereupon the dog’s cheeks inflated. He sounded like a motorboat.
“Pocket hound,” the girl said cheerily. “My mama has one of them handheld attack dogs. Gotta get in close to use ’em.” She laughed. Eve stared at her, her drawn face announcing that she was not a woman easily amused.
“Miss Fletcher?” the man said.
“Mizzus Fletcher,” she corrected. “I’m a widow.”
“You reported your cable out?”
“I most certainly did. Last night at eight twenty-one on that answering machine, and this morning first thing they opened, to the lady that answered. I didn’t think you would get to it before my stories. I have to keep up every day. It’s Monday, and they leave you in the lurch on Fridays. If you miss Monday, you’re just swimmy-headed about what’s happening the rest of the week. I hope my bill will show an adjustment for the inconvenience. The money I pay for this is criminal!”
“That so?” the cable woman said, taking over from the man. “Never watch it. We’ll need to come in. The trouble is most likely inside. Must be an old hookup.”
“Well, I’ve had cable since seventy-seven. Don’t ever watch the first story or you’ll be hooked. I like that HBO sometimes, too.” Mrs. Fletcher opened the door wide so they could enter. “Go about your business. TV’s in the den.”
“We’ll need to get in the attic,” the man said.
“They didn’t need to get in the attic when they installed it,” she said suspiciously.
“They probably snaked it in from the eaves, but we’ll have to look at running new cable. The early cable was coaxial three, and it gets brittle with age. I’ll probably have to replace it with this new finer gauge.” He held up a piece of fiber-optic line for her inspection. “This stuff lasts forever and doubles your reception quality.”
“I can’t see the picture too good. But there’s nothing wrong with my ears. Door to the attic is in the hallway. Just pull the chain and the stairs come down. Do you adjust color?”
Eve watched as the two checked the cable box on her set, and then the man went out in the hallway and climbed up into the attic with the roll of cable and a silver toolbox. The woman looked at the picture on the wall.
“He’s a looker,” she said.
“That’s my boy, Martin,” she said.
“Nice looking,” the woman said. “Married?”
“Goodness no!” Eve said. “Hasn’t found the right girl.”
“What does he do?”
Eve shifted closer and confided, “He was in law enforcement. He’s a police consultant to governments and such. He knows lots of very important individuals like you see on the news.”
“Where is he these days?”
“How long is this going to take?” Eve asked nervously. She didn’t want to discuss her son, what with the communists always trying to get revenge on him and doing things like framing him up and all that.
“Not long. What’s the dog’s name?”
“Puzzle. I call him Mr. Puzzle.”
“Cute.”
“Martin named him. He said it was a puzzle how come the breed even survived.” She laughed out loud, and her foul breath staggered Sierra. “Why the rattlesnakes and Mexicans didn’t eat them all up, he says, is man’s greatest puzzle. Martin has a well-developed sense of humor. Gets his personality from my side. We moved in here in fifty-four, and first thing you know Milton’s gone across the river. Well, I-”
The man yelled down. “Sierra, I’m gonna have to rewire.”
“How long?” Eve asked, feeling the stories were in the pipe somewhere on their way to the TV set from the station, like water heading toward a shower nozzle from a reservoir.
“Half hour to an hour,” Sierra said. “I better help him. He’s a bit slow unless you work him. You know how men are.”
“I should say I do! I had to stay on my Milton day and night.”
Sierra slipped into Eve’s bedroom and, being as quiet as possible, fired the small nail gun, placing a transmitter in each heel of the four pairs of orthopedic shoes in Eve’s closet. Then she sneaked back to the ladder and climbed up so she could look in on her partner’s progress.
