The Landlord (draft)

The Landlord (draft)

     I had a sense of what we were in for when I first saw the sagging roof, the unkempt dandelion lawn, the busted up fence all overrun with blackberry brambles, and that Jesus-fish decal on Ken’s shiny new gunmetal gray Prius in the driveway.

    When we pulled up, we must have looked like the exact kind of desperate saps he was after: me struggling with the baby's car seat like a doofus, while Sarah had to run halfway across the street to wrangle Jessie out of traffic. Tired, overworked, broke, and halfway desperate. I can now hear it inside that slick motherfucker’s skull, as plainly as if he’d shouted it out loud: Bingo!

     Shaking hands and making smalltalk about kids and work on the moss-covered patio, I of course gave him the benefit of the doubt that first day. Hell, we were still nearly a month from the prospective move-in date, and he had lumber and paint laying all over the porch. He was even wearing those classic painter's overalls—with the blue stripes and the flat carpenter's pencil in the front pocket—like a character from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

     “I’ve still got a lot of work to do around here; gonna replace the roof this summer, that’s my next big project—and the blinds! I’m putting in some real good blinds, not those cheap, flimsy ones.” His magnificent horse teeth were like two squares of butter over corn-on-the-cob. “How old’s the little one here?”

     Sarah and I both spoke in unison—“fourteen weeks.” We glanced at each other, smiling.

     Jessie, swinging her sock monkey by its tail, hopped in front of the car seat I was still holding, eclipsing the baby, “That’s my baby brother, River. I’m Jessie. Jay’s my new stepdad.” She took my free hand as she said this. It was as if she knew we needed this place, and was working her 5-year-old charm to its fullest.

    “Pleased to meet you, Jessie. You want to come in with your folks and look at a house with your new baby brother?”

     Jessie nodded her auburn curls, and Ken winked at us before turning to fumble with the front door, the jamb of which was severely chipped around the missing strikeplate. It had obviously been broken into, and never properly repaired. I noticed that the door itself also stuck considerably at the top, and that Ken had subtly lifted up on the doorknob to avoid its scraping. “This door needs some work, I’ll get to that one of these days.”

     He led us in to a wood-paneled foyer, with the dingy yellow linoleum peeling up in the corner, and the words Hello Spring carved into the wall above the dust-clogged heater vent. To the right, a stairway led down into blackness, and to the left, where Ken was leading us, was the kitchen.

     “That’s a new fridge there, and there’s an electrical activity over here I’m gonna get to.” Sarah and I exchanged a concerned glance as Ken tapped his clipboard on the edge of the railing, causing a redwing blackbird to call out its three-part trill as it flew away. The marsh in the breakfast nook had an oily film over its surface, through which the cattails protruded like palm trees growing from solid ground.

     “Look, a volcano!” Jessie was already far ahead down the wooden dock, pointing to an obvious leak in the plumbing. Black chunks of cooling crust were flowing along in the rapids of liquid fire that poured into the far corner of the window. The glass was clearly original, all wavy and distorted, and I noticed there were no storm windows mounted outside.

    “It’s going to cost a lot to heat this place in the winter. These windows aren't insulated at all.” I said to Sarah.

    “Well, I saw a chimney outside, we might be able to use the fireplace. We could ask. Your uncle Roger said he has endless firewood, if we ever need it.”

    “Yeah, that’s true. Let’s ask. Where’s Ken?”

     He entered the room again behind us, out of the foyer we’d just been through. He must have slipped back into the darkened room down there to adjust something (or hide something), before showing us that part of the house; him being the shifty-eyed, lying prick I now know him to be. He flashed us that winning Velveeta smile of his, and tried to direct our attention away from the oilslick and the lava by pointing north, along a ridge beyond the badly chipped green formica (which he was, I’m sure, hoping I wouldn’t notice). Beyond his finger, across the dull green pond, was another dock, with a solitary bench at the end of it. On the bench sat an old woman with her head covered in a red shawl, babushka-style. She was crying, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose in between long, mournful wails, and shouting unintelligable curses into the water.

     “That’s an original kitchen witch!” Ken said. “You don’t find those around much anymore. It adds some real charm to the place. My wife says we should get rid of it, but in all the years I’ve never heard a tenant complain. Some people say it’s good luck. Personally, my wife and I are devout Christians, and our faith is strong enough--we don’t really feel threatened by superstitions or anything. I just, well, my mom always had one, and it’s kind of a sentimental thing for me, I guess.”

     Sarah looked at me, trying not to giggle. “It doesn’t bother me. I like it. We’ll keep it there.”

     I shrugged and nodded. “I’m more concerned about the windows. Seems like it gets pretty cold in here. What’s the primary heat source?”

     At this, Ken’s caterpillar eyebrows jumped up, the parallel creases on his sweaty forehead resembling a family of pale worms in a Ziplock bag. “Well, now, Jay, I was gonna get to that, now… here it is. I don’t want you using the fireplace for the time being, and I’ll show you why.” He waved us after him as he walked further along the deck, across the marsh toward the living room.

     “C’mon, Jessie,” Sarah hollered, “I don’t want you playing near that volcano. Keep up.”

     The living room was spacious, with large corner windows, and the walls and ceiling were all textured with a heavy spackle. It felt very post-war to me. I could envision a noble fir Christmas tree, bedecked with hanging silver tinsel, next to a wooden television set on feet: Beaver Cleaver stuck in the billboard soup-bowl. The fireplace, which was off to the right as you entered, sharing a wall with the kitchen, was separated by about a quarter-inch from the wall. You could feel cold air pouring out of the gap as you walked by. The mantle was a deep red wood—mahogany, perhaps. The hearth was of chipped slabs of gray slate, and the firebox was so dark it felt like a black hole. I set river down next to it in his carseat. He’d fallen asleep.

     “Like I said, I don’t want you guys using it for now. It needs some work. The wall heaters work just fine.” Ken walked over to the corner windows, “I did want to point out the blinds to you guys, though. These really are good blinds, not those flimsy kind.”

     My attention, though, remained on the fireplace. I could hear an intermittent, muffled sound coming from inside—a voice, as if someone were counting slowly. I crouched down and leaned in closer, realizing it was my mother’s voice, and somehow I could tell that she was laying on the couch in my Grandmother’s living room, and trying to say something. Her speech was badly impaired.

     “You doing okay, sweetie?” Sarah put her hand on my back, her voice indicating that she already knew who the voice belonged to, although she never knew my mom.

     “Yeah, I’ll be okay, this is just hard.” I nodded my head toward the voice in the firebox. “This was after the stroke. The aphasia was still really bad. I think she’s asking for my help, but I know we’re past all that. It’s just hard. I haven’t heard her voice in a long time.”

     Sarah petted the back of my head affectionately. “I know. Let me know if you need anything from me, babe. I love you.”

     “I love you, too.”

     Jessie bolted in from through the doorway on the far side of the room, holding her sock monkey on her shoulders as her father would sometimes carry her at the Olympia farmer’s market. “There’s a tree to climb in the bathroom. Ken said I could!”

     We could see its branches from across the hall as we followed her out of the living room, leaving Ken with his shitty blinds.

     “This is a Pacific Madrone.” Sarah was elated, “an Arbutus menziesii. It’s an evergreen, but it’s a deciduous evergreen. We had one of these in my backyard in Leschi, when I was a kid. You know you’re not too far from salt water when you see one of these.” This one had a wide, gnarled base that bubbled out of the floor tiles, with a main trunk that snaked its way out and back again, somewhat like a bonsai tree. Half of its branches were blackened with the all-too-common madrone canker. Jessie was already sitting high up in one of the healthier ones, peeling away a brittle sheet of its papery orange bark and mock-feeding it to her sock monkey. I could almost feel Sarah bristling. “Make sure you keep at least one hand on the tree, honey, it’s a long way to fall.”

     One of the tree branches was scraping against the bathroom window, which I noticed had a crack at the top of it. On the sill were two plump, dead bumblebees, laying feet up, right at eye-level if you were sitting on the adjacent toilet. I imagined relieving myself in the morning, taking a break from the Facebook newsfeed to closely examine these two crispy carcasses.

     “I still have some cleaning to do,” Ken had made his way in. “There’s just so little time in a day, you know how it is, I’m sure.”

     “We sure do. As long as the plumbing’s good, we’re pretty easy to get along with.”

     “Good. That’s good to hear.” He stepped back into the hall. “Now, there is something I’d like to point out about the bedrooms, if you’ll follow me through here.”

     He led us back out to the room at the end of a hall. As we passed through the threshold, I felt the warmth drain from my abdomen, and bees filled my stomach. I knew Sarah felt it, too. There was nothing remarkable about the room—same dingy beige carpet, same textured walls—except for a large, dusty chalkboard on the wall opposite the door. Saying nothing, we took each other by the hand, feeling the hope drain out of us. Clearing his throat as he tugged on the string to the blinds, Ken muttered, “Still working on the trust issues in here, but it’s a good one—it’s a good room. I lived here, once, in 1985.”

     Sarah turned toward me, her eyes down and her lower lip trembling. I started to reach up, to caress her hair the way I used to, but she stopped me. “Please don’t.”

     “But babe, wait.” She looked up at me, her eyes waiting, filled with the last hope that I might utter some magic incantation to erase everything that had happened between us over the last year. I kept her eyes in mine, trying to find the right words, knowing I didn’t have them. They didn’t exist. Lost and desperate, I could only come up with, “we can work this out.”

      “This is our foundation, Jay. How is this supposed to work? I can’t do this.” She was starting to cry now. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

      “I’m sorry too.” Her face blurred through the tears in my eyes as I swallowed hard. “I’m gonna go get River ready to go. I hope we can talk later. I love you.”

       Still wiping tears away, I made my way back out to the fireplace, finding River awake and alert, quietly looking up at the white ceiling fan, kicking his legs in his milk-stained onesie. I scooped up the carseat and went back into the kitchen, catching up with Sarah and Ken as they were going over the particulars of the rental agreement. Jessie was pulling on a cattail, still attached to its stalk, trying to get it closer to her nose to smell it. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” I said.

      “Well, Jay, if you want to go over your copy, make sure everything looks good. Sarah’s looking at hers. There’s a couple of things on there I’m still gonna work on before move-in time, so I might need to tweak the language a bit.”

     It was pretty straightforward: 12 months, first and last upon move-in; don’t use the fireplace; tenant pays all utilities; tenant maintains lawn; and Fuckface gets to automatically keep $250 of the deposit for carpet cleaning upon move-out. Carpet cleaning. Jesus, you should see this carpet. This guy is un-fucking-believable.