Bring Into Focus

I slide down the embankment, looking for cover from the eyes that watch, the voices that accuse. I seek shelter in a wayside restroom, cowering there on the tiles and the septic stench, imagining a softer world. By dawn I’m walking again along the shoulder of the interstate, until a nice old lady picks me up. She’s my surrogate grandmother for the day; a soft smiling caricature of kindness with pudgy arms opened wide to pull you into an all consuming hug. She smokes like a grease fire, but that doesn’t bother me. We drive to Reno and there she drops me off with a ziplock bag of her oatmeal cookies. An hour later at the side of the road I cry while I eat the first cookie, then save the rest, one per day, I figure, should grant me a few moments of peace for nine days.

By mid-week I walk into Jefferson and stop at the first phone booth, leaf through the white pages until I find him, buried there innocuously in the hundreds of other names like an undiagnosed cancer. Wayne Sturges. I tear out the page, fold it neatly into my pocket, then walk to the hardware store for supplies. Rope, electrical tape, pliers, utility knife…Any of the tools I think could be useful.

Sturges’ house looks about as run down and uncared for as I’d expected. If the color hadn’t started out as gray, then the peeling paint and the sun and dirt had turned it that way. Rotting shutters, two of them missing like gaps in a derelict’s smile. A gravel yard overgrown with tall weeds and refuse. Rusted chain link fence. The roof sagged, a broken spine. The front steps crumbled and cracked. A desolate home for a desolate man. I opened the gate, climbed up the steps turning to sand and rock and knocked on the door. Torn screen, torn from the inside out, somebody trying to get out?

When he came to the door in his stained robe, I could tell by the expression on his unshaven face that he thought he knew me from somewhere. Guess he couldn’t place me here, a thousand miles away from where he’d first run into me.

“Sturges,” I said. Not a question, but a statement.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve come to finish the job I started six months ago.”

He recognized me now. Those bloodshot eyes opened a little wider.

“She’s just about dead now. Can hardly get anything out of her.”

“Well I come to take care of that.”

He opened the door. That threw me off a little. I’d already examined the door to judge if I’d be able to kick it in. I would have been able. He knew that too, I guess.

The room stank. Pizza boxes, opened tuna fish cans, beer bottles scattered on the floor. The television was propped on overturned milk crates, the picture flickering . Oprah. Fuzzy picture with a coathanger antenna.

I dropped my bag of supplies next to the television, grabbed the pliers and set to work on the antenna. “You know I don’t like to leave a job undone…”

“Sorry man, but I was moving out here and had to get her out of the shop. Didn’t think you could do nothing for her anyway.”

“We’ll see.” I pinched and crimped the antenna, taped on a tinfoil pie plate I’d seen on the floor, trying to work it like a shaman bringing into tune the transmissions of spirits traveling invisibly through the air, getting into the groove of my life’s work: to focus the pictures that come in blurry.