Page 64 - WTPO Vol. VII #5

The Blue House (continued from preceding page)
of nature’s inimitable talent; all the stunning red and gold, the varying shades of brown and orange, the undersides of the leaves hidden from sunlight, pale as the bellies of sharks, the black and brown tree trunks, and the partially clad branches, hooking out into the cool morning air like the limbs of charred skeletons. Even the grass ran the gamut from emer- ald to flaxen. Fall was her favorite season and Octo- ber her favorite month (though she cared little for the commercial enterprise of Halloween). She stood at the Henry fence for a while, breathing in the cool air, taking in all the color laid out before her. In time she nodded and smiled and turned for home, Albert pulling ahead as always.
Things were really underway when she got back. She could hear the nerve-jarring wrench of metal and wood being twisted and destroyed. She could hear the workers’ deep voices, a barrage and bark of instruc- tions being given and unenthusiastically received;
and laughter, she could hear laughter too, the deep, raucous kind of laughter she’d long associated with blue collar men, men her father worked and drank with, men just like her father. And below this, blending at the base of all this muscular noise, came the steady thump of rock music.
Again she waved at one of the workers (not the one from before, this one older and fatter, walking out from the church with what looked like an entire pew resting on his wide shoulder), and he waved back, and she felt good. She unleashed Albert and let him run wild around the front yard (the fence was well suited to the house it surrounded, for it was crooked and split at every turn and hadn’t seen a lick of paint in a donkey’s age. It was the kind of fence Hollywood paid skilled men good money to build for a movie stunt, Helen believed. Making it so a man could fall right through without getting so much as a damn scratch).
That damn crazy dog, she thought, as Albert ran up and down like a thing demented, barking his guts out at all the commotion taking place at the recently con- demned Mt. Olive Baptist Church. Some of the workers stopped lifting and destroying things for a moment and looked over, pointing and laughing at this old dog gone wild. Helen laughed right along with them, which just made Albert work himself all the harder, shooting his small body up and down beside the fence like a furry piston.
The morning air warmed up nicely as the sun climbed to its apex. Helen went back inside, discarded her wooly hat and got her things together. She took the blanket from the couch and folded it into a tight square. She snatched up the pack of Lucky Strikes and
lighter from the kitchen and put them in her back pocket. She took a plastic bottle of water from the fridge and put this on the couch. She then took her school bag out from the closet under the stairs and emptied all the contents next to the bottle. She put the water bottle in the outside pocket of the bag and took the bag out to the yard and placed it against
the baby-blue colored siding of the house. Albert ran straight to her and she bent and scooped him up in her arms, his long tongue slobbering her face, the muscles in his tense body twitching and throbbing, his stiff tail drumming against her midsection. She knelt and opened up the backpack, and in a swift and practiced maneuver, manipulated Albert into the maw of the opened bag, turning him around and zip- ping it up loosely just below his throat (he wriggled for a moment like a freshly hooked fish before memory overtook fear and he settled somewhat
into this incongruous position, his pride and instinct briefly resigned).
Helen stood and slung the pack across her back. She tightened the straps at her shoulders and across her stomach. Albert looked ridiculous, blinking gorm- lessly, tongue waving like a warning; an animated canine head latched behind the head of another animal altogether. Helen went along the side of the house and looked for the ladder her father used last summer to climb atop the house to give the sagging roof its annual layman’s inspection. She found it buried in a mass of weeds and loam, long strands
of green and brown snagged and twisted about the rotten wooden frame, the wood itself still damp from the recent rains. She pulled it up with some effort and slapped it hard against the side of the house, which sent a few tiles skittering to the ground. She then slowly climbed the ladder, inspecting the tenac- ity of each rung gently with her foot before giving it her full weight, giving Albert a slew of “atta boys,” as she went, so happy to be here alone, out of school, with the autumnal sun warming her head and limbs, her father’s cigarettes and her adored dog behind her, the vibrancy of today’s simple life covering her like a cherished coat.
At the roof’s edge she stepped from the ladder and scuttled across the deformed surface of loose and broken tiles and offbeat undulations, bent low at the waist, Albert snorting and tongue-lolling at her ear, her fingers lightly brushing the unstable landscape that now carried her, the sounds of commonplace destruction and classic rock from the workers nearby swelling in the crisp morning air, closing in on her like a white-capped wave.
57