A while back, though, their family doctor had told him something unsettling. He’d said, “Know what I hate? When a patient comes in and says, ‘Doc, I’m here for a checkup. Next month I hit retirement age and I’ve planned all these great adventures.’ Then sure as shooting, I’ll find he’s got something terminal. It never fails.”
Well, Doug had avoided that eventuality. He just hadn’t gone for a checkup.
And anyhow, planned no great adventures.
The trouble was, he was short on friends. Why had he never noticed before? It seemed he’d had so many back in high school and college.
If Danny had lived, maybe he would have been a friend.
Although Ian was nice company too, of course.
It was just that Ian seemed less … oh, less related to him, somehow. Maybe on account of that born-again business. He was so serious and he never just goofed off the way Danny used to do or sat around shooting the breeze with his dad. Didn’t even have a girlfriend anymore; that pretty little Cicely had faded Clear out of the picture. She had found someone else, Doug supposed. Not that Ian had ever said so. That was the thing: they didn’t talk.
Danny used to talk.
Walking Beastie past the foreigners’ house one unseasonably mild day in February, Doug noticed someone lying face down on the roof. Good Lord, what now? They lived the strangest lives over there. This fellow was sprawled parallel to the eaves, poking some wire or electrical cord through an upstairs window. Doug paused to watch. Beastie groaned and thudded to the ground. “Need help?” Doug called.
The foreigner raised his head. In that peremptory way that foreigners sometimes have, he said, “Yes, please to enter the house and accept this wire.”
“Oh. Okay,” Doug said.
He let Beastie’s leash drop. She wasn’t going anywhere.
He had been in the foreigners’ house several times, because they gave a neighborhood party every Fourth of July. (“Happy your Independence Day,” one of them had once said. “Happy yours,” he’d answered before he thought.) He knew that the window in question belonged to the second-floor bathroom, and so he crossed the hall, which was totally bare of furniture, and climbed the stairs and entered the bathroom. The foreigner’s face hung upside down outside the window, his thick black hair standing straight off his head so that he looked astonished. “Here!” he called.
Darned if he hadn’t broken a corner out of a pane. Not a neatly drilled hole in the wood but a jagged triangle in the glass itself. A wire poked through — antenna wire, it looked like. Doug pulled on it carefully so as not to abrade it. He reeled it in foot by foot. “Okay,” the foreigner said, and his face disappeared.
Doug hadn’t thought to wonder how the man had got up on the roof in the first place. All at once he was down again, brushing off his clothes in the bathroom doorway — a good-looking, stocky young fellow in a white shirt and blue jeans. You could always tell foreigners by the way they wore their jeans, so neat and proper with the waist at the actual waistline, and in this man’s case even a crease ironed in. Jim, was that his name? No, Jim was from an earlier batch. (The foreigners came and went in rotation, with their M.D.’s or their Ph.D.’s or their engineering degrees.) “Frank?” Doug tried.
“Fred.”
They were always so considerate about dropping whatever unpronounceable names they’d been christened with. Or not christened, maybe, but—
“Please to tie the wire about the radiator’s paw,” Fred told him.
“What is it, anyhow?”
“It is aerial for my shortwave radio.”
“Ah.”
“I attached it to TV antenna on chimney.”
“Is that safe?” Doug asked him.
“Maybe; maybe not,” Fred said cheerfully.
Doug wouldn’t have worried, except these people seemed prone to disasters. Last summer, while hooking up an intercom, they had set their attic on fire. Doug wasn’t sure how an intercom could start a fire exactly. All he knew was, smoke had begun billowing from the little eyebrow window on the roof and then six or seven foreigners had sauntered out of the house and stood in the yard gazing upward, looking interested. Finally Mrs. Jordan had called the fire department. What on earth use would they have for an intercom anyway? she had asked Bee later. But that was how they were, the foreigners: they just loved gadgets.
Fred was walking backward now, playing out the wire as he headed across the hall. From the looks of things, he planned to let it lie in the middle of the floor where it would ambush every passerby. “You got any staples?” Doug asked, following.
“Excuse me?”
“Staples? U-shaped nails? Electrical staples, insulated,” Doug went on, without a hope in this world. “You tack the wire to the baseboard so it doesn’t trip folks up.”
“Maybe later,” Fred said vaguely.
Meanwhile leading the wire directly across the hall and allowing not one inch of slack.
In Fred’s bedroom, gold brocade draped an army cot. A bookcase displayed folded T-shirts, boxer shorts, and rolled socks stacked in a pyramid like cannonballs. Doug managed to take all this in because there was nothing else to look at — not a desk or chair or bureau, not a mirror or family photo. A brown plastic radio sat on the windowsill, and Fred inserted the wire into a hole in its side.
“Looks to me like you might’ve brought the wire in this window,” Doug told him.
But Fred shrugged and said, “More far to fall.”
“Oh,” Doug said.
Presumably, Fred was not one of the engineering students.
Fred turned on the radio and music started playing, some Middle Eastern tune without an end or a beginning. He half closed his eyes and nodded his head to the beat.
“Well, I’d better be going,” Doug said.
“You know what means these words?” Fred asked. “A young man is telling farewell to his sweetheart, he is saying to her now—”
“Gosh, Beastie must be wondering where I’ve got to,” Doug said. “I’ll just see myself out, never mind.”
He had thought it would be a relief to escape the music, but after he left — after he returned home, even, and unsnapped Beastie’s leash — the tune continued to wind through his head, blurred and wandery and mysteriously exciting.
A couple of days later, the foreigners tried wiring the radio to speakers set strategically around the house. The reason Doug found out about it was, Fred came over to ask what those U-shaped nails were called again. “Staples,” Doug told him, standing at the door in his slippers.
“No, no. Staples are for paper,” Fred said firmly.
“But the nails are called staples too. See, what you want is …” Doug said, and then he said, “Wait here. I think I may have some down in the basement.”
So one thing led to another. He found the staples, he went over to help, he stayed for a beer afterward, and before long he was more or less hanging out there. They always had some harebrained project going, something he could assist with or (more often) advise them not to attempt; and because they were students, keeping students’ irregular hours, he could generally count on finding at least a couple of them at home. Five were currently living there: Fred, Ray, John, John Two, and Ollie. On weekends more arrived — fellow countrymen studying elsewhere — and some of the original five disappeared. Doug left them alone on weekends. He preferred late weekday afternoons, when the smells of spice and burnt onions had already started rising from Ollie’s blackened saucepans in the kitchen and the others lolled in the living room with their beers. The living room was furnished with two webbed aluminum beach lounges, a wrought-iron lawn chair, and a box spring propped on four stacks of faded textbooks. Over the fireplace hung a wrinkled paper poster of a belly dancer drinking a Pepsi. A collapsible metal TV tray held the telephone, and the wall above it was scribbled all over with names and numbers and Middle Eastern curlicues. Doug liked that idea — that a wall could serve as a phone directory. It struck him as very practical. He would squint at the writing until it turned lacy and decorative, and then he’d take another sip of beer.