If They Can’t See the Light, Make Them Feel the Heat
by L. L. Babb
John Taylor spent the first hours of Saturday morning the same way he spent every Saturday when it wasn’t raining. At eight he mowed and edged his perfect square of lawn. Between 8:30 and 9 he hunted for signs of the oxalis that threatened a shady corner of the yard. After eradicating any sign of weeds, he decapitated the marigolds in the pots on the porch. Finally, he swept the walkways and stepped back to admire his work. Taylor always liked the way the lawn appeared to have just received a basic training haircut, each blade of grass chewed and standing at attention. He imagined the ravaged marigolds thanking him for his tough love.
Now he heard the interior of the house begging for its weekly beating—the carpets, the toilets, the sheets and towels—all in a chorus. He would get to them in due time.
He went inside, sat down on the couch, tipped his head back on the cushions, and closed his eyes. To be clear, this was not a nap. John Taylor did not take naps. Naps were for children or the elderly and though nearly sixty, Taylor did not consider himself either. He was simply going to sit for one moment before he continued his chores. A breeze puffed through the living room window blowing in curtains as sheer as tissue paper. The next-door neighbor was trimming his hedge with electric clippers. Taylor listened to the sound of the metal teeth gnawing through the branches, the drone rising and falling.
He dreamed he was on his favorite forklift lifting an oddly shaped box and fitting it like a puzzle piece into an oddly shaped slot on a shelf high above his head. At the edge of his vision, he saw his ex-wife flitting down the warehouse aisle towards him. She was barefoot and bare-legged, the puddling white skin of her midsection draped in gauzy, multi-colored scarves. Taylor shut off his forklift. He felt a familiar bubble of exasperation rise in his throat. What did she think she was doing coming to his place of business dressed like this? He instinctively realized that this nonsense–her dancing and twirling, this loopy exhibitionism–was the result of their divorce. Without his steadying influence, she’d gone off the deep end as he always feared she would. He reached out to grab her arm but she skipped away from him, brushing his face with the trailing scarves, a filmy gauntlet thrown down, then she disappeared around the end of the aisle towards the shipping/receiving dock. Taylor sighed and trudged after her. He considered calling her name but he barely dared acknowledge that he knew her. At the same time, he felt a profound ache behind his sternum, an unwelcome joy at the sight of her.
The doorbell rang. Taylor fought off the curtains blowing in over his face and struggled awake. He had a fleeting thought as the dream dissolved around him that it might be Emily at the door. He massaged his chest for a second as if trying to manipulate his heart.
The doorbell sounded again. “Just a minute, just a minute,” Taylor said.
A young man stood on the front step. At first Taylor thought it might be one of those school kids selling overpriced candy but noticed that this guy had a serious five o’clock shadow. Taylor couldn’t tell the difference between teenagers and adults anymore. Heck, sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between men and women. This fellow wore baggy shorts and a tee shirt proclaiming “ORGASM DONOR.” His baseball cap was on backwards but Taylor could see the shaved head underneath. Taylor disapproved of shaved heads on young men.
“Hi,” the young man said. “I’m your neighbor in the house behind you.” He nodded his head, took a step back, and said, “Lance.”
“Taylor,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand to the guy. What kind of person wore a shirt like that in front of a stranger? In front of anyone?
“My wife and I bought the place a couple of months ago.” Lance shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You know that storm that knocked out the electricity for a couple of days? That’s the weekend we moved in. Lousy timing but it wasn’t like we had any choice. I mean, when you give your notice at one place and escrow closes on the other, you gotta go when you gotta go. You know what I mean?”
“No,” Taylor said, bristling at the phrase “you gotta.” The divorce lawyer Taylor had hired and who had threatened to pull representation (and keep the hefty retainer) each time Taylor refused to relinquish one more thing to his wife, said “you gotta” a lot.
“Okay,” the young man said. “Well, the back fence between our yards is falling down.”
Taylor hesitated. He hadn’t been in his backyard in over a year. It had been Emily’s special place the way the garage was his. She had loved gardening. She crammed in wrought iron benches, a birdbath, hummingbird feeders, gates and gnomes and trellised arches. She had one bed of flowers planted exclusively to attract butterflies, another for cut flowers. Center stage in the middle of all this chaos was four topiary bushes Emily had been training to look like a family of giant, knee-high squirrels. She wasted a lot of time with those squirrels, clipping them, talking to them like they were her children. Perhaps they were, in a way. Taylor and Emily had met and married in their mid-forties, too late to start a family. Which was fine with Taylor. He didn’t really care for kids. They were disruptive and destructive.
He hated the fussy, high-maintenance plants that Emily had chosen for her garden. It was just like her to find the messiest trees and flowers. Camellias fell off the bush and covered the ground like a bunch of soggy debutants the morning after a ball. A droopy Japanese tree dropped millions of curled, green leaves the size of fingernail clippings. The topiary squirrels grew together into a conspiratorial huddle that Taylor felt uncomfortable turning his back on.
When the divorce was final, after he had to give Emily money for half of his own house, Taylor rented a tractor. He tore everything out of the backyard, smoothed down the dirt, and filled the yard from fence line to fence line with concrete. While he was doing it—hacking down the delicate Japanese maple, tipping over the birdbath, attacking those damn squirrels with a chainsaw—he felt a surge of righteous vengeance. But shortly after the concrete had set, all the anger just rushed out of him. He was overcome with a combination of shame and fear, as if something deep inside of him had been yanked out and exposed, unfurling and flapping like a banner that proclaimed his true, small self.
Now as Taylor led the neighbor down the front steps and along the narrow side yard, it was as if a strong current was pushing him from behind. He felt his face getting hot. There was nothing to be ashamed of, he told himself. He could do whatever he wanted with his damn yard. He didn’t need to justify anything to anyone.
Lance didn’t appear to notice the flat grey moonscape. The fence was indeed falling down. Two eight-foot sections leaned over into Taylor’s yard, the dog-eared planks gaping. Taylor reached down and grabbed the top of the fence and tried to push it back upright, as if the problem were merely a matter of balance. The top of the board broke off in a splintery chunk in Taylor’s hand.
Lance let out a low whistle of astonishment. “Man, that fence is toast.”
“Now, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Taylor said, annoyed. He had lived with this fence for twenty years. What right did this guy have to judge? Taylor could see over the leaning fence into Lance’s yard. There was a new deck, a table with chairs and an umbrella, and a complicated-looking stainless-steel barbeque. Terra cotta pots overflowing with impatiens were arranged across the yard in orchestrated casualness. He turned to look at his own yard. His house rose like a stucco battleship looming over a sea of concrete.
“I called a guy I know.” Lance pulled a folded slip of paper from his shorts pocket. “New redwood planks, posts, labor, everything comes to $2,500.00. That’s $1,250.00 apiece.”
Taylor studied the fence, hackles rising. It wasn’t the money that bothered him so much as the principle. Emily used to ambush him like this when she wanted something. She’d start out sweet, let’s just have a look-see, merely window shopping, not really in the market today and then the next thing he knew she’d be raising her voice, waving Consumer Reports, enlisting some slime-ball salesman to bolster her case. “What principle?” Emily would say. “What possible principle could you hold relating to—” and here Taylor could fill in the blank. A better dishwasher. A set of dinner dishes that matched. Refinishing the hardwood floors.
The sliding glass door to Lance’s house slid open and an attractive woman picked her way along the new deck and across a zig-zagging line of stepping stones. A pink sweater hung from her shoulders, the sleeves tied around her neck. When she got to the fence, she smiled at Taylor. “Hi,” she said, with a quick wave of her hand. “I’m Avril,” a name that Taylor judged as simultaneously odd yet familiar, like the kind of name they gave to new cars.
“John Taylor,” Taylor said, nodding his head.
“How’s it going out here?” she asked. “Have we got everything all worked out? Honey, did you show him your research? The estimate we received? If you write out a check today, Lance can call someone this afternoon. I really need to have this fence repaired by next weekend.”
Apparently, Taylor had been dealing with a subordinate. Now that his wife was there, Lance stared at his feet. Lance was obviously the kind of guy who had to be prodded into doing the simplest of tasks. It was sad what young women were settling for these days. Taylor had been a great husband. He always took care of the important issues—Emily hadn’t had to worry about a thing. Taylor imagined she was kicking herself for divorcing him. She had squandered him away like an unearned inheritance.
Taylor watched the wife’s eyes flicker over his own bare yard. He wanted to tell her that he was better than his backyard, she should come around to the front porch, have a glass of ice tea. Instead, he heard himself say, “Actually, I think I’ve got everything we need to…fix the… ” He lost the will to continue halfway through then forced himself to push forward, “…the fence…in my garage.” What Taylor had in his garage was a pegboard of gleaming power tools that he didn’t like to get dirty, each one outlined with a black sharpie so that Taylor could tell at a glance if something was missing, a half bag of quick setting cement, and a jar of recycled nails that he had pulled from some old pallets he was going to use for firewood.
“Really?” the wife said. “Why, that would be fantastic, wouldn’t it, Lance?” She gazed at Taylor with such grateful admiration that he was afraid he might blush.
“Well, sure,” Taylor said. What was he doing? It was as if he had been bewitched by this woman whose name he had already forgotten. Sally? Abby? Aspirin? Aspirin couldn’t be right. He ho-hoed, continuing helplessly. “With Lance’s assistance, we can bang this out tomorrow.”
“What? I was going to watch football,” Lance whined. “I’m not good at this stuff. We need to hire someone.”
“You’re not good at it because you never try,” Mrs. Lance said. “I think this is just wonderful. I’m always in favor of saving money.” She turned towards Taylor and cocked her head conspiratorially. “Lance might learn a few things.”
Taylor felt buoyant with benevolence. He had once felt this way with his ex-wife. How Emily had looked up to him when they first started dating! Emily had been, in Taylor’s opinion, a mess—expired tags on her car, no health insurance, a lukewarm credit score. She took his coat the first time she invited him over to her apartment and threw it over a pyramid of clothes on the living room couch. Plastic garbage bags full of recycling leaned three-deep against the cabinet doors in the kitchen. She was 46 and had a brand-new tattoo of Marvin the Martin peeking over the top of her tank top, right over her left breast. She wasn’t his type at all but after that night in her apartment, when Taylor offered to take the black bags of cans and bottles to the recycling center downtown, Emily had gazed at him with such gratitude it made his heart full. He had believed he could make her happy with so little effort. Looking back, he thought he must have lost his mind.
Sunday morning, Taylor filled a wheelbarrow—two hammers, a trowel, a saw, the bag of cement, and a plastic bucket to mix the cement in. He had slipped off to the hardware store when it opened at seven and bought two lengths of pressure treated wood. The neighbors didn’t need to know that he did not, in fact, have everything in his garage to fix the fence. He tucked the receipt in his shirt pocket.
He was pulling nails and taking down the old planks when Lance showed up on his side of the fence at 10 am. “What’s the plan, man?” Lance asked. He held a paper cup from one of the new coffee shops on the main street of town, the one jam-packed with people gazing at their cell phones. He probably had paid more than $5.00 for a cup of coffee. Taylor wondered if Lance’s wife approved of that kind of nonsense.
“Most of the boards are fine.” Earlier, Taylor had determined that the rot was confined primarily to the edges of each board. The centers were good, solid redwood. A little green in places, a bit unsightly, but still strong. “We’ll trim the rotten parts and reuse these.”
Lance looked at him with the blank face of a straight man waiting for the punch line. He took a sip of his coffee. “Then the fence would only be about four feet high. We will see right over the top of it.”
“Well, I wasn’t finished,” Taylor said. “We’re going to nail these two-by-twelves along the bottom and use the existing boards for the top. Not a problem.”
“I dunno, that sounds kind of janky to me,” Lance said. “Half of the fence will be horizontal and the rest of the planks vertical? Dude, I can’t even picture what you are talking about.” He pursed his lips and sucked at the lid of his coffee. Taylor wanted to smack him.
“You got a better idea?”
“Oh, I had a much better idea but you shot it down yesterday.”
“Right,” Taylor said. He grabbed the bucket and the bag of cement. “When you’re done moaning, you can pull off the rest of the boards.”
The job took all day. The quick setting cement was not as quick as Taylor remembered and the salvaged boards were more damaged than he first thought. By the end of the afternoon, when Taylor stepped back to judge the finished project, the result looked more like someone’s patchwork quilt hanging on a clothesline than it did a fence. Boards went horizontally and vertically, and up towards the top corners, there were spots where Taylor had hammered on small pieces of wood that overlapped crazily like some kind of collage.
“Hoo boy,” Lance called over from his yard. “This is some piece of shit.” Mid-afternoon, Lance had switched from coffee to beer. When Taylor peered over the top of the fence, Lance waggled a can at him. “I don’t want to be around when Avril gets home and gets a load of this.”
Taylor hefted his hammer in his hand, trying to store AVRIL in a readily accessible corner of his brain. She appeared to be the kind of person who appreciated frugality and functionality. So what if it wasn’t a work of art? It was a fence. She would be pleased with the work and the money saved. She could plant a tree or a bush in front of the parts she didn’t like.
“I’ll drop a note by with your share of the expenses,” Taylor said, filling his wheelbarrow with his tools.
The following evening after work, Taylor sat down at the kitchen table and itemized the cost of the repairs. He wrote down the amount he had paid for the wood then estimated the cost of the cement and the nails in his jelly jar. Bent or not, they had used every last one of them and they would need to be replaced. He adjusted the half bag of cement for inflation since it was several years old and the price had surely increased since he bought it. He estimated the hours he’d spent pulling and straightening the used nails from the old pallet plus the time he had actually spent repairing the fence, and multiplied that by his hourly rate at work. He thought about adding a rental fee for the wheelbarrow and the bucket but dismissed that idea.
He got up and filled a glass of water from the tap. Should he really charge for pulling the nails? He would have done that whether the fence needed fixing or not. He sat back down and crossed it off the list. He thought about …Advil…looking at the list. He took out the inflation for the bag of cement. It still looked so petty, $12 for this, $48 for that. He removed his hourly pay. He crumpled up the paper and wrote down a flat amount. Then he halved it. Advil would shake her head in wonder. She would be amazed that someone could do such a fine job for such a small amount of money. She was the kind of neighbor he thought he might be friends with. He might even get used to Lance. Teach him stuff. He halved the number once more. $17.50. It was a ridiculously low figure and Taylor was tempted to adjust it up a little, just to make it more believable, then stopped himself. Advil would understand that this was a gift.
And honestly, he didn’t want anything but her appreciation. And the $17.50.
Taylor wrote the amount on a new piece of paper with “Fence Repair” and a smiley face next to it. He had never used a smiley face before but he felt this was a situation that warranted it. They were neighbors. Friendly. Taylor put the paper in an envelope and took a stroll around the block to leave the note in the Lance’s mailbox.
He half expected the money to be in his own mailbox when he got home on Tuesday evening but it wasn’t. What had he been thinking? They couldn’t very well leave cash in his mailbox. Perhaps they planned to walk over later. He watched television that night well past his regular bedtime, leaving the porchlight on so they could see he was awake and available.
Wednesday night, Taylor wrote the figure on another piece of paper, minus the smiley face, and signed his name at the bottom. “Your neighbor, John Taylor.” Now they had a choice of dropping by the cash or a check. This time he took the note to the front door in case it had gotten lost in the mailbox the first time. He thought he could hear voices when he knocked but no one answered. He slipped the note under the door.
By Friday evening, he still hadn’t heard from the Lances. Taylor went out into the backyard to check on the fence. Perhaps it had fallen down again. Maybe something else was wrong. Maybe one of them had gotten sick or been in a car accident. In the grey light of the moon the fence looked as formidable as the face of a cliff, complete with outcroppings and toe holds.
Taylor heard the back door to the Lance’s house slide open with a groan. Now he could hear people in their yard, voices and laughter and something else, ice rattling inside a plastic cooler. A champagne cork, a pop, more laughter. He reached up and grabbed the top of the fence to peek over. It felt sturdy, thicker than he remembered. Was there something propped up against it on their side? He couldn’t tell in the dark. He went back and got his stepladder from the garage, unfolded it against the fence, and stood on the first rung. Yes, there was something there, a solid piece of redwood against the fence that he had built. He climbed the second rung and peered down. Another piece of wood next to that—a whole row of dog-eared planks, screwed in and freshly stained, supported by the fence he had sweated over and paid for.
It took Taylor’s breath away. The disrespect. The audacity of it.
There was Lance holding court at his sissy barbeque, swinging a beer in the air, flanked by a couple of guys just like him. A trio of t-shirt wearing, baseball-hatted imbeciles. There were strands of white Christmas lights hung from the house, crisscrossing back and forth over the deck. Lance waggled his spatula in the air—king of his backyard. That little shit. Advil floated out of the house as if on wings, carrying a plate in one hand, shoulder high, stopping by one seated woman, dipping her head to listen, to nod, laugh.
Taylor ducked down, crouching on the step ladder. They were having a party! They had used his fence to make a better fence and now they were having a party. They owed him money and instead of paying him for his time and his materials and his knowledge and the use of his tools, they had given money to someone else to make his fence look better and they were having a party that he had not been invited to. Did they think he wouldn’t notice? Were they deliberately having a party to mock him? A man laughed and Lance tittered and Taylor knew that Lance was probably telling everyone about the fence and the money and how they had used him, taken him for a fool. Because he was a fool. An old fool.
Wasn’t this always what happened when you tried to help someone? Wasn’t this the story of his life? What did Emily do as soon as Taylor had gotten her affairs all straightened out? After he’d given her his good name, shared his outstanding credit score, put her on his car insurance with his good driving discount, rendered unto her his knowledge and expertise and guidance? She’d left him, of course, left him flat. And what had he gotten out of that marriage? Nothing. No, hell, less than nothing. He’d lost money, lost time, almost lost his home.
Taylor folded up his stepping stool and brought it back to the garage, placing it carefully in its usual spot. Later, he would acknowledge, if only to himself, that this was the moment when the trajectory of the evening might have gone a different way. It was hard to see those particular moments when standing in the middle of a lifetime. The thought of being able to forget it, to just let it go, nudged at a corner of his mind, but quickly disappeared. He reached for the six neatly bundled stacks of newspapers sitting on the recycle bin. He loaded the newspapers into the wheelbarrow and added the pieces of broken-down pallets he had carefully pulled the nails from. As he propped the pallet pieces on top of the newspapers to make teepees against the fence, he heard the party pitching up. Lance was singing.
This was his fence. He could do anything he wanted with his own fence. They hadn’t paid one dime for it.
He went into the kitchen, retrieved a pack of matches from the junk drawer, and grabbed the full gas can as he passed through the garage again. He doused the newspapers with the gasoline, emptying the can. He lit a match, and touched the flame to the paper. It caught then fizzled and Taylor was in the process of striking another match when there was a whoosh that pulled the air out of his lungs. The newspapers, drenched with gasoline, the rotten wood, and the stain-soaked redwood planks, ignited into a wall of orange and blue flames ten feet high. A woman screamed. Someone shouted. Taylor was driven back to the wall of his house.
Taylor could only cower and shield his eyes from the bright light. The singeing heat, the acrid smell of chemicals, and a deafening roar consumed the night sky. Shadows danced over the concrete making Taylor’s backyard look alive. In the spot where the Japanese maple had been, a tiny eddy of black smoke rose up and reached wispy tendrils towards him like a ghost beckoning. He remembered planting that tree, its new branches and leaves wrapped in a burlap turban, Emily watching as he dug the hole. That had been a fine day in early spring. Emily feared that the sun might burn the new growth so Taylor brought out a beach umbrella to protect the tree after it was in the ground. He and Emily gazed down at the pathetic thing, its thin trunk quivering. Without him, the tree would have died that first year. Now it was gone forever. Wasn’t that the way of everything you cared about?
It was raining. Or no, someone on the other side of the fence was spraying water. Lance must be using the garden hose. It would never occur to Lance that the fresh redwood stain on their side of the fence was oil based. “You’re making it worse, you idiot,” Taylor called. In the distance, he could hear sirens and he thought he might go back inside and let someone else take over. Why did he always have to be the one to fix everything?
He felt a massive weight pressing down on him, so heavy and unrelenting that it was hard to get to his feet. This was his burden—all this great knowledge, his common sense, the resolve to do things the right way versus the wrong way, his sense of duty. Wearily, he headed back to the garage to get the fire extinguisher from its place on the pegboard. He didn’t want to use it. He’d have to pay to replace it once it was activated. He was always the one to pay, he thought. Always.
BIO
L. L. Babb has been a teacher for the Writers Studio San Francisco and on-line since 2008. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at the Peatsmoke Journal, Cleaver, the San Francisco Chronicle, the MacGuffin, Good Life Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart anthology for her short story, “Where Have You Been All Your Life.” Lorraine lives deep among the trees of Forestville, CA, with her husband Cornbaby Johnson, dog Smudge, and cat Cosmo.
