Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [72]
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