Joe’s Attic
The first knock came about midway
through a Rangers game on a warm but tolerable June afternoon. Joe Garfield was asleep in his recliner, as
was typical, and did not hear it. His
dog, an English Springer Spaniel named Nolan, did hear the knock but was not
bothered. Nolan lifted his head a
moment and ever so slightly turned toward the front door. The competing voices of the Rangers broadcast
team lulled him back to sleep.
No, Joe did not hear the first knock
or the second and third. He’d spent most
of his military life around jet engines and his hearing was less than average,
even for a man of eighty-two years. The
knocks ceased without Joe ever having realized it. He twitched in his overstuffed recliner some,
dreaming about a road trip with Millie from some time in the early
sixties. It was a dream he had
often. Sometimes they did not even speak
but shared glances and knowing smiles.
He thought the dreams were Millie’s way of keeping in touch with him
since she’d passed a decade prior.
He startled awake, the memory of
Millie’s smell fading into the scent of his living room, a place where they’d
watched three children grow up. Her
essence changed with the seasons, cinnamon-flavored in cool weather and
something like a honeydew melon in warmer months. The last image in his mind
before regaining clarity was of Millie smiling as she received the cat’s eye
sunglasses he’d bought for her on some anonymous voyage. Such simple things made her happy, a single
rose on an unexpected day, a night out at the drive-in, and even a pair of
plastic sunglasses.
Joe stretched, various bones
popping, and yawned. The yawn sent
shivers down his spine which was briefly exhilarating. His blue-gray eyes, nestled within a web of
fine wrinkles, settled on the television.
As much as he loved Ranger baseball, it had been years since he’d
managed to stay awake for an entire game.
Even their recent trip to the World Series was not enough to stimulate
him into wakefulness. The Rangers were
up, which was good.
Nolan eyed him from his spot on the
couch and gave a slight whimper.
“Outside, buddy?”
Nolan wagged his tail but would not
leave the couch until his own stretching regimen had been completed. Joe had nearly seven decades on the dog but
both of their bodies had seen better days.
When Joe stood he felt the tyranny
of years on his shoulders. Those same
shoulders that had ferried three children around the yard (and Millie a time or
two) with such ease were slumped and cruelly angled. The muscle was soft atop the bones that felt
much lighter than they had in years past.
Nolan followed Joe to the front
door, a journey that required a few extra moments to stretch for both of them.
Joe opened the door to find a man
waiting there, smiling happily. His
first thought was salesman but that
was a relic of his youth. No salesman
would waste the gas to drive along the poorly maintained farm roads to Joe’s
house. He then thought car trouble?
“Howdy, what can I do you for?” Joe
said.
The man, still smiling,
hesitated. He was an older man but
younger than Joe, wearing clothing that indicated he probably worked on one of
the farms nearby. He opened his mouth to
speak but then stuttered and glanced over his shoulder. With a deep breath that seemed to steady the
man, he spoke finally.
“I was wondering if I could take a
look at your attic.”
The man’s voice was a little
strained, unidentifiable emotions leaking through in a few awkward fluctuations
in pitch.
Joe trusted most people until he was
given a reason not to. Still, the
question robbed him of his ability to think for a few moments. Nolan occupied the time by nuzzling the stranger’s
thigh, a gesture the man appeared to appreciate.
“My attic? Well, I suppose so. Are you from around here? Renovating and looking for ideas?”
His eyes fixed on the spaniel with a
fondness Joe understood well.
“Something like that,” the man said,
patting Nolan on the head.
Joe retreated inside his home and
held the screen door open for the man to enter.
The man took two steps and waited.
“I had a dog like this when I was a
boy,” he said.
Joe was unable to see the man’s face
as he spoke but it sounded as if he was crying or very near to it.
“The attic is up the stairs. Here, let me get you a lemonade and we can
take a look together,” Joe said and shuffled towards the kitchen.
From the kitchen, Joe called, “You a
Rangers fan?”
“The Rangers? Oh, yes, I am. Wish I could have seen them win a Series,”
the man answered.
Rummaging through the refrigerator
Joe replied, “Oh there’s still time. We
have some good hitters. Pitching is
going to be the problem as it always is.
If this rotation holds up, though, it could be our year.”
Joe did not hear the man’s footfalls
as he scaled the steps. He did not hear
the brief squeal of the attic’s hinges as the man opened the door. And, when he returned to the foot of the
stairs with two frosty glasses of lemonade, the man was gone.
“Hey, sir? I got your lemonade right here. Give me a sec and I’ll meet you up there.”
Joe took the stairs one step at a
time. Nolan hobbled at a faster pace and
sat in front of the attic door with his tail swishing the hardwood floors
impatiently.
“You sure are fast! Takes me a full minute to get up these stairs
nowadays,” Joe said.
There was no reply as the man was
already gone.
Joe stood at the top of the stairs
with two glasses of lemonade in his wrinkled hands. His white hair looked like pulled cotton atop
his head, swaying with the breeze created whipping his head around in search of
his guest.
“Sir?”
There was no reply. Joe placed the glasses on the banister and
made brief eye contact with Nolan, saying without speaking that the dog was not
to disturb the lemonade or risk his dinner if he did. Joe pulled the attic door open and took a
step in, slightly hunched over to allow for the low ceiling. The light was not on but some sunlight
filtered in through the windows. The old
man flipped the light switch and it hardly made a difference. It was bright enough with the sunlight for
Joe to see that he was alone. The kids
had retrieved most of their belongings over the years and so the population of
boxes was minimal. All that was left in
the attic were things Joe found too painful to look at on a day to day basis,
Millie’s clothes and cookware.
“Am I going crazy? Sir?” he whispered and then called out.
Nolan entered the room with his head
low and his tail carving a lazy curve in the dust on the floor. He nudged Joe’s hand with his head and
offered a single, half-hearted whimper.
Joe sat in front of the television
ten minutes later, having exchanged his lemonade (which Nolan drank happily)
for a beer. His eyes were fixated on the
television but he did not follow the action of the game. He did not hear the announcers or commercials
despite the fact the TV trumpeted at maximum volume. There were many things about growing old he
did not like. Growing old alone was the
worst among them, but he also wondered if dementia might take root all at
once. Were there signs he’d missed?
He drifted into a light slumber and
when he woke it was dark. Joe joined
Nolan on the couch for the night.
Without allowing his mind to dwell on the matter for long, he decided he’d
rather not sleep next to the attic, if just for that night.
*
Joe woke to the sound of
knocking. Initially, he could only stare
at the ceiling. Nolan spooned Joe from
the side and was still snoring. Joe
wondered, at once, if he was merely dreaming. Even as he considered this the image of Millie
in the garden and wearing her Rangers baseball cap, the last fragment of the
dream he’d been having, faded away from his mind’s eye.
He lifted Nolan’s paw from his chest
and swiveled so that his feet contacted the floor. He waited for another knock for a few seconds
before deciding to investigate regardless.
The voyage to his front door was more urgent than the previous day. He hummed as he walked in an effort to
prevent his mind from thinking too hard about what might be waiting on the
other side of the door.
Joe grasped the brass just as he
heard the sound of Nolan’s nails clicking across the wooden floor of the living
room. He waited for the dog to join him
at his side before turning the knob.
There were two people standing on
his porch, both Mexican in appearance.
The fact that they were Mexican was not unusual for that part of
Texas. Some of Joe’s old friends said the town is turning brown in a way that
indicated they were not happy with this fact.
Joe never minded the Mexicans or any other race. They were hard workers who wanted to provide
for their families. Also, without Mexicans
in town there would be no Mexican restaurants, a fact Joe often cited when
arguing with his friends.
The man offered his hand to shake
and the woman’s back was facing Joe.
“What can I do you for?” Joe asked.
He recognized the instant terror on
the man’s face, a sign that he did not understand English. Joe had seen it before and, unlike some of
his friends (a dwindling number), he was not bothered by it.
“Ayuda?” Joe offered, inquiring if
help was needed.
The man smiled, still nervous and
unable to assemble the few English words he knew into a sentence that could
describe his plight. Instead he pointed
a finger at something behind Joe’s back and nodded his head three times,
gesturing as if to say up?
“You want to go up the stairs?”
The man only smiled and nodded his
head in the same motion as before. Joe
turned his fingers into legs and mimicked walking upstairs to which the man
nodded enthusiastically. Joe was glad he
was able to bridge the communication gap but disturbed at the man’s
wishes. Nolan pushed past his master and
prodded the woman, whose back was still turned, with his wet nose. The woman turned and revealed that, within
her arms, she carried a small bundle, a baby.
The baby was still.
“Perrito…” she whispered, and freed
a hand to pet Nolan’s snout.
“Baby okay?” Joe asked, pointing
toward the bundle and offering a questioning thumbs up.
The man did not replay but his
sullen, downward gaze spoke for him.
“Can we…” the woman spoke with a
heavy accent.
She nodded toward the staircase
behind Joe.
“You want to see the attic?” Joe
asked.
They both nodded without much
confidence.
Joe employed his fingers again,
miming walking upstairs and then opening a door. To this they nodded with more
enthusiasm. He stepped aside to allow
the family into his home. They waited at
the foot of the stairs as the man had the previous afternoon.
“Limonada?” Joe asked.
The couple nodded in unison.
Joe’s mind was a network of random
ideas, half-formed thoughts and questions.
He looked over his shoulder with about every third step as he shuffled
to the kitchen. The family stayed in the
same spot at the bottom of the stairs until Joe opened the refrigerator. The lemonade sat at the front and so it did
not take as long to retrieve it. He
pulled out a beer for himself and left it on the counter.
Joe tried to collect the Spanish
words he knew into a coherent sentence, something to do with Rangers baseball,
as he carried the drinks out of the kitchen.
As the day before, there was no one waiting for him. It was an eventuality he’d suspected but of
which he’d hoped to be wrong.
He placed the glasses at the foot of
the stairs and began his ascent, half stepping and half pulling himself up the
flight. Nolan waited for him, tail
wagging, at the top of the stairs, facing the attic door.
Joe entered the attic only after
several minutes of contemplation. If it
was a fantasy how far did he want to pursue it?
The attic was unoccupied as it had been the day before, but Joe did not
leave at once. He strolled around the
room with his hands on his hips, admiring his collection of Millie’s
things.
Amid her various clothes, sun
dresses and multitudes of t-shirts, Joe happened across a particular item that
made him smile, although his lower lip trembled. He liberated the Dallas Cowboys jersey from
the mobile clothes rack. It was an
Emmitt Smith jersey, one she’d worn during their last Super Bowl win in
1995. There was still a nacho cheese
stain on the sleeve from where she’d inadvertently wiped her lips after a
touchdown.
Joe lingered in the attic for an
hour, then two. A dress would bring back
the memory of a night out dancing. The
arthritis was so debilitating she spent most of her final years in a
wheelchair. Still, every few months
Millie would take a few Tylenol and summon the energy to take Joe for a night
of dancing. She could only last a few songs
and paid for that the next morning with pain and stiffness that would not abate
until the afternoon. But, for twenty
minutes at the Senior Center, they were celebrities.
Joe laughed in the attic, for hours,
often with tears in his eyes. Nolan
accompanied him, sniffing clothes and other items Joe presented him. Sometimes he wagged his tail as an old memory
of Millie flashed in his mind.
Millie had found Nolan on the side
of the road on a morning walk. He was in
a box with seven other puppies, all dead.
She carried the entire box home and buried Nolan’s litter mates. That December, on a morning walk with a
young, spry Nolan, Millie slipped on ice and fractured an ankle. The arthritis took over from there and Millie
never went on another morning walk after that day.
Thirteen years later, Nolan was no
longer young and spry. But, he still
remembered Millie and how the house filled with wonderful smells each time she
cooked a meal.
Joe sat on the floor with a photo
album in his lap, reliving memories he’d not visited in years. Nolan slept beside him, dreaming of chasing
rabbits in the fields surrounding the house.
Joe barely heard the knock when it did come.
*
It is amazing how quickly people
adapt to unusual circumstances. Once
your life falls into a pattern, regardless of how out of the ordinary that
pattern may be, you cope.
Most of the time Joe did not hear
the knock. Instead he went about his day
watching baseball, drinking beer, and listening to old country music on his
stereo. He drove to town twice a week to
get groceries and trade war stories at the VFW.
Almost every time he opened his front door or returned home from town
there were people on his porch. After
the third occurrence he no longer wondered why they were there. He’d open the door, smiling, and leave the
room long enough for them to walk upstairs and into his attic.
Nolan greeted each guest and
relished the new sets of hands rubbing his head and patting his rump. On lazy days Joe propped the door open with a
rock and left a sign posted at the entryway which stated “The attic is upstairs
to the right! There’s lemonade in the
fridge!”
Joe spent more time in the attic
looking at Millie’s things. He dreamed
of her more each night and during his daily baseball game naps. Sometimes, when he thought about her enough,
it was as if she was in the house with him, perhaps just in the other
room. Thinking about her brought her to
life in a way, and made the time they had together seem more real. With the renewed celebration of the life
they’d had came a potent longing and his bed felt emptier each night. Nolan dutifully occupied the space where
Millie had slept and Joe woke most mornings to find his arm draped across his
dog’s midsection, inspired by a dream in which Millie was still alive and
laying beside him.
Such was life for Joe that
summer. As time passed he ceased to
question the obvious and resigned himself to the belief that people entered his
house and disappeared inside his attic leaving behind not a trace. It didn’t make sense to him but he also
didn’t see any harm in it. One morning
at the end of August a guest appeared at his door that Joe recognized. Randall had played tight end on the high
school football team while Joe was a running back. They had been acquaintances, friendly but not
friends.
“Randall?” Joe asked to the man who
stood amid a crowd of six other people on the porch.
Randall was the tallest among them
and even carried a bit of his high school bulk on his body. He looked younger somehow, not as stooped as
he’d been when Joe last saw him. He met
eyes with Joe and in the first instant there was a flash of acknowledgement.
“Randall is that…” Joe began.
Joe remembered, then, reading the
name Randall White in the obituary of
the local newspaper and not making the connection to his classmate. From that moment on things began to make
sense to Joe, but in a way that left him torn between sympathy and
apprehension. He answered every knock he
heard, without regard to the hour, and welcomed every visitor into his house.
In September he loaded Nolan and a
duffle bag up into the truck and drove to San Marcos, where the kids were
getting together for his oldest, Teddy’s, birthday. Teddy was turning sixty, a number that made
Joe feel infinitely older. Joe was able
to immerse himself in the experience, his mind straying to the reality of what
waited at home only occasionally.
On the drive back a flare of pain erupted
in his chest that drained the strength from his left arm. He pulled to the side of the road and the
pain subsided somewhat, though he found it impossible to clench his left hand
into a fist. Had Millie been around the
pair would have driven straight to the hospital. Since she was not Joe decided to wash down a
few aspirin with a beer and hope for the best.
There was quite the herd waiting for
him outside of his house, one hundred or more people congregated on or near his
porch. Nolan was unable to receive
affection from each person as they filed into the house and walked up the
stairs.
The Rangers were doing well at the
end of September and it seemed like another deep playoff run was
inevitable. On the last day of the
season Joe fell asleep with Nolan beside him.
He woke to the sound of scratching, not the knocking to which he’d
become accustomed. Joe gently lifted his
canine companion off of his lap and positioned him lengthwise on the couch.
He opened the door to find Nolan on
the porch, wagging his tail with renewed vigor.
The dog spun around and bolted into the yard, running in looping circles
as he had as a puppy. Joe smiled wide at
that, for a moment.
Realization washed over him and
tears brimmed in his eyes, spilling over onto his cheeks.
“Nolan? No. No. No…” he whispered.
He walked back to the living room
and found Nolan on the couch, as still as Millie had been ten years previous.
Nolan waited on the porch and seemed
upset by the emotions of his master.
Nolan felt wonderful, like a young dog again. He could run, a streak of black and white,
and chase the rabbits that had grown too fast for him in the past several
years. His hips no longer hurt and his
vision was no longer cloudy.
“I can’t. I can’t lose you, Nolan. I can’t lose you.”
*
Joe buried Nolan’s body right next
to the house. He couldn’t stand to have
him any further away.
*
In Joe’s dreams he danced with
Millie and played fetch with Nolan. He
dreamed more often as the Rangers dominated their way to the World Series. He usually lasted only until the third inning
and woke up after the game had already ended.
The parade of visitors did not end
but Joe found it hard to be a considerate host.
He generally left the front door open and only interacted with the
people he met as he came and went. At night
the house was quiet in a way he didn’t like.
Sleeping so much during the day he found rest elusive after dark. And when he didn’t sleep he would simply
listen, mostly to the sound of crickets in the grass. In the silence between their songs he could
sometimes hear a shuffle of feet or the abrupt squeak of his attic door opening
and closing.
*
Autumn came swiftly to Texas. The grass dried up and the leaves turned the
colors of fire. The smell of burning
wood greeted Joe on an afternoon he awoke on his porch with no recollection of
how he’d come to be there. He took a
step inside of his house. He heard the
sound of the television; the Rangers were tied in the seventh inning of the
last game of the World Series.
“Joe? Come upstairs. You can watch the game with me and Nolan,”
Millie’s voice called.
Joe took a step up the stairs and
hesitated. It was a dream. He leaned over the railing and recognized the
white tufts of pulled-cotton hair poking over the top of the recliner. A familiar hand rested on the arm of the
chair with a slightly tilted beer bottle clutched in its fingers.
“The game’s almost over, Joe!” Millie
called.
Nolan punctuated the statement with
a youthful bark.
Joe did not realize how nimbly he
scaled the stairs, how normal his joints felt by this former challenge. He opened the door to the attic and stepped
inside.
As he closed the door Millie said,
“Look! I don’t need that stupid old
wheelchair anymore! We can go dancing
again!”
The door clicked shut.
