Summer in the Land of Skin. Jody Gehrman
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that I don’t have to watch him teetering on the tiny bucket anymore.
“I don’t have guests very often these days,” he says. “Don’t have much to offer—you just let me know if you change your mind about the beer.” I nod. “So, what brings you to Bellingham?”
“Well…” I can feel my face going hot. I take a breath and say, “I’m interested in learning a trade.”
“What trade is that?”
I force myself to look him in the eye. “I want to be a luthier.”
“Is that right?” he says. “Your father teach you much?” I shake my head.
“Still doesn’t really explain what you’re doing up here.”
“I was hoping you could teach me.” He’s staring out over the water, that serious brow and the silver stubble making him look like an old-time sea captain. He brings the can to his lips again, fastens his mouth to the hole, and slurps loudly, then burps.
“You want to be a luthier….” He won’t look at me now. He gets up abruptly and fishes in his pocket, produces a book of matches. “You smoke, Medina?”
“What?”
“Do you smoke?” he says, exaggerating his enunciation as if I might be slow.
“No. Why?”
“I quit. Ten years ago. But times like this I could really use a smoke.”
He stuffs his hands in his pockets. I want to say something that will put him at ease, but I’ve got a feeling just my being here is the worst part. He shakes his head and stares out at the bay, shifting his weight from side to side, making the boat rock a little. I hold on to the aluminum armrests of the lawn chair.
“Do you still have a shop?” I ask.
“Oh yeah. This right here’s my shop,” he says. “They come from miles around for their Bender guitars!” He shakes his head again, drinks his beer.
“My aunt Rosie says you’re the best.”
A small grin takes over his mouth, seemingly against his will. “Rosie. I should’ve known. She put you up to this?”
“She told me about you.”
“Your aunt is one crazy woman,” he says. “Almost as crazy as your mother.” He sits back down on the ice chest. “I guess your dad didn’t tell you much about me, huh?”
“Not that I remember,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I guess he wouldn’t.” The grin is still there, but now it looks more like a grimace; his mouth curves up at the edges, but there’s no pleasure in his eyes. “Well, I’m sorry you came all this way, but I can’t teach you anything, Medina. I haven’t touched my tools in a long time.”
I swallow, try to make my voice sound polite. “So, what do you do now?”
He finishes his beer, leans forward so his elbows are resting on his knees and twists the empty can in his hands. “This is what I do,” he says, staring at the mangled can. “You’re looking at it.”
I wander the streets as the sun goes down. It’s moving in slow motion—a torturous slide into the water. The mill sits like a big rusty beast near the bay and belches white smoke into the air. Clouds huddle along the horizon, gradually starting to display a spread of garish pink. I pace the sidewalks, trying to concentrate on the windows. In the orange light, the neighborhood takes on a watercolor glow.
I keep walking.
The absurdity of this mission is all too clear to me. I am several states from anyone I know, homeless, jobless, sporting a haircut that only this morning was glamorous but now is a ridiculous anachronism—I’m a flapper lost in space. Bender is a hopeless drunk, and my plan to apprentice with him is a farce. Yesterday morning, Rosie was a radiant goddess in go-go boots, launching me into my destiny. Tonight, she is revealed as a bored divorcée, tinkering with my life to escape her own.
My pace increases. I can’t remember where I left the truck. I walk and walk, as if the feel of the concrete under my shoes will keep me from floating away, balloonlike, into the sky.
Rounding a corner, I hear a few strains of slide guitar. It’s a song I used to know. The sun is finally down, and I can feel a chill trying to seep through my T-shirt to my skin, but my legs keep moving, pumping heat into the rest of me. Oh, sweet mama, your daddy’s got those Deep Ellum blues. I move in the direction of that voice, that guitar. I figure it must be coming from a bar somewhere, but I’m lost in a neighborhood quite a few blocks from downtown. I’m surrounded by trees and rows of old houses, some elegant, some abused and graying. The flowers that line their stone paths and white fences are bathed in a fiery light. The street sign says Walnut.
Without warning, there he is, leaning back in a weather-rotted easy chair, his feet propped up on the porch railing. His hair is long and brown and falls below his shoulders. A cigarette dangles from his lips, the orange tip glowing, and he works that guitar with his head swaying easy, his fingers gliding. His voice is a low, mournful growl, and it is so much like my father’s that I stop walking and stare, the chill spreading through me. Oh, sweet mama, your daddy’s got—
“Hey, baby?” a woman’s voice cries from a window upstairs.
He stops playing, examines his fingers. “Yeah?”
“We need cigarettes!”
“Can you wait a minute?” He starts in on the chorus again.
A head pops out of the window—dark hair, naked shoulders. “The question is not, ‘Can I wait?’” she says. “The question is, ‘Can you get your lazy ass downtown and get me smokes, or do I have to do everything myself?’”
He chuckles, shakes his head. “I hear that,” he says, and flings his cigarette onto the lawn, where it smolders in the grass. The head disappears from the window.
The man stands, gripping his guitar by the neck; he looks out at the orange smear of clouds on the horizon. His cheekbones are high and sharp, his eyes dark. He takes the metal slide from his finger and shoves it into the pocket of his jeans. As he turns to go inside, he catches me staring at him from the sidewalk.
I drop my eyes and start walking again, past their yard, across the street, and I do not look up again until I hear the door slam.
The temptation to get mystical is ever-present. This is all I’m going to say: after I hear that door bang shut, I look up, and the first thing I see is a sign in the third-story window across the street: Room For Rent. Before I know what I’m doing, my legs are marching me up the steps, and I’m ringing the bell, reading the words painted on the glass in neutral white lettering: Dr. Andrew Gottlieb, D.D.S., Painless Dentistry Guaranteed.
I glance at my watch and see that it’s a little past eight. Too late for a dentist’s office to be open. Still, something keeps me on this olive-green porch, swept to perfection. This building stands in sharp contrast to the others on the corner. There’s a faded blue place across the street, once grand, no doubt, now dirty and somehow institutional; kitty-corner is an even more neglected house, with a yellow paint job that’s peeled down to a white undercoat in huge patches, giving it the mottled look of a fried egg. The depressing effect is heightened by several broken windows. A couple of kids in dreadlocks are tinkering under the hood of a rusted van in the driveway. On the east corner is the house the guitar man disappeared into; it is a pale pink, three stories high, with a turret at the top. Like the others, it must have been stately once, though now it looks weather-beaten, and the porch is strewn with several rotting chairs.
Dusk is starting to settle in, and I feel a pang of longing for a dark room and my binoculars.
“Looking for me?”
I spin around. A man is standing there in the doorway, bare-chested, wearing tight cutoffs.
“I saw a