Ramp by Mark Jacobs
Ivy had supernatural hearing. In bed with the window open she could hear the termites eating the foundation of the house. She swiped her hand at Rollie, on his back next to her in the bed but not yet asleep.
“You hear that?”
He listened and caught an earful of katydids. But no termites. Not that he doubted her.
“Pest control,” he said.
“Come again?”
“One of them companies sprays for bugs.”
Keep it practical, that was his idea. Ivy’s hobby was finding signs in the everyday of every day. Portents, she called them, a churchy word if ever there was one, although they did not attend with any kind of regularity. His wife’s signs and portents tended to be gloomy. Rollie agreed the world was going to hell in a handbasket but had a firm belief in hidey holes. Harm’s way was a thoroughfare. You had to keep an eye out for oncoming vehicles.
A few minutes later she was snoring, leaving him awake in the dark keeping company with his consternation. The house was old and needed work. A whole lot of work. Ivy grew up in it. So did Ivy’s daddy, who was the last man to grow tobacco on the property. Forty-eight acres, Daddy Snooks used to brag, adding woods to the tally although those woods took up a good two thirds of the acreage and were almost never subject to the touch of his hands at labor.
It shamed Rollie that the farmhouse was falling down around them. Holes in the sheetrock, rain-rotted sills, wiring like the sprawl of a sick man’s innards. Every year the creepers crept closer, along with the weeds, the grass, and the snakes that hid in it. The problem was his debilities. They were bigger than he was; yes sir, and getting bigger. He was heavy, getting heavier. Skin red and dry, getting redder and drier. All the air there was in the world, you’d think more would go down his throat into his lungs, allow him to breathe in comfort.
Then bam, no warning, Ivy bolted up out of her dream.
“Too much money we don’t got.”
Meaning they weren’t about to call anybody to come out and spray for bugs, which of course Rollie knew as well as she did. Still, she was right. Damn termites were eating the place out from under them.
“Eddie,” he said.
“He ain’t called.”
So be it. Eddie was their grandson. Rollie’s trip to the doctor in Briery would be a whole lot easier if the boy did the needful: help him into the car, drive, run into the Rite-Aid afterward for prescriptions.
Dawn brought noisy birds and half a cup of hope that Eddie would show, grinning and joshing, pretending he meant to come all the time, he had the memory of ten elephants. By the time the sun dried the dewfall, whatever was in the cup had evaporated, too. Boy wasn’t coming.
Ivy rolled her wheelchair out onto the porch to watch Rollie negotiate the steps and make his way to the van. Big trip, and slow. They said travel was good for you, it expanded your horizons. Rollie wrote postcards all the way across the yard. Having a shitty time, be glad you ain’t here.
Behind the steering wheel he caught his breath looking back at Ivy on the porch. From the distance it was obvious, she was as big as he was. The diabetes had done her no particular good. Something about her washed-out look accentuated a feeling of comradeship with which he was familiar. It was not a husband-and-wife thing, it was more like they were members of a secret club. Just the two of them, and nobody standing in line to join. When he waved goodbye, pain stabbed his upper arm.
So maybe it was no surprise, him parking in front of the house again four hours later, the van stuffed with medical necessities. Oxygen tank, breathing gizmo, wheelchair, pills and more pills. And there sat Ivy in the same spot on the porch as though she hadn’t moved all that time, Sadie lolling at her feet.
Now came the tough part. He managed to drag out the oxygen set‑up. It was portable and designed for the helpless. And the wheelchair clattered down from the back seat of the van when he yanked on it. After that, complications. He placed the oxygen tank on the wheelchair seat and pushed, but the chair had no intention of cooperating. The grass was too high, the ground uneven, the wheels kept going sideways. The yard might as well be a mile.
He worked at it for a few minutes, but the effort tuckered him. He needed a break. He put the oxygen tank on the ground and lowered his body into the chair. Up on the porch, Ivy was more spectator than participant.
“Eddie?” he said.
“He called. Said they’re hiring at Taco Bell. Told the lady he was half Mexican, half Chihuahua, makes him a natural. What happens, you get to them steps?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
Getting all the new gear up the porch steps was a conundrum plain and simple. He had no strength to drag it, and no grandson to carry it on his behalf. What he did have was whatever time it took to make his way across the yard to solve the puzzle. Belts and pulleys? Areo-damn-namics? And then here was an old green Ranger pick‑up turning into the drive, a black man in blue workpants stepping down and coming toward him with a smile on his face.
“Mr. Carwiller, right? Mr. Roland Carwiller? My daddy and your daddy were knowing one another way back.”
“Odom,” said Rollie.
“Yes, sir. Wesley is my Christian name. I do some pastoring, part time. To put food on the table I do electric work. You know our church. That metal frame building on School Heights Road, sign out front saying Alabama?”
“How come you all call it Alabama if this is Virginia?”
“It’s a long story. Can I give you a hand?”
One minute and thirty seconds later the chair, the tank, the paraphernalia, the medicine, and Rollie himself were up on the porch while the pastor was saying, “Looks like what you need is a ramp.”
A couple of years ago, Sadie would have been all over the stranger, affectionate and curious, his newness driving her happily nuts. Now she stank like an old dog and couldn’t be bothered.
Ivy was suspicious on principle. It was not a good principle. “What do you mean, a ramp?”
“Something at the proper angle, you can get your chairs up and down easy.”
It was August and sweltering, but for some reason there was no sweat on Wesley Odom. He was what Rollie’s momma would have called too handsome for his own good, and fit to boot. Kind of guy, he tapped a woman on the shoulder there was no chance she turned down the invitation to dance.
“Funny you should say that,” Ivy said. “About the ramp, I mean.”
“Why is that, ma’am?”
“Because our grandson is fixing to build us one.”
She was cutting him off at the pass. They all knew it. This was Southside, and the three of them were old enough to understand everything that wasn’t going to get said between white and black. Odom nodded.
“I’m glad to hear that, I truly am.”
Rollie asked him if he wanted a glass of sweet tea. Odom declined and wished them a good day. As he was getting into his truck, Rollie said to Ivy, “Well, that explains one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“How come Eddie took my tools last year. All this while I been thinking he sold them, or left them somewhere and forgot. Turns out he means to build us a ramp.”
“That Odom,” Ivy said.
“What about him?”
“He knew. He knows.”
“He lives in this county, he’d have to be a blithering idiot not to know. He look like an idiot to you?”
“I don’t want those church people of his clambering over my porch building me no charity ramp.”
“Course not,” said Rollie.
He didn’t mean it. The old house was a boat. At some point it would pull loose from its mooring and float away down a big river. The river was green and hard to visualize but real as a box of raisins. When that happened, there’d be no way back to shore.
“What?” said Ivy, who heard him thinking as surely as she heard termites munching their undercarriage.
“Anchors a-weigh.”
* * *
What the Reverend Wesley Odom knew, what everybody in Broadhope County knew, was the crime and the crime’s particulars, the sin and the shame of it, that put Rollie and Ivy’s son Dexter away for thirty years in the state prison outside of Petersburg. There was nothing in his background that explained the evil of the thing, taking a young woman out to a trailer against her will and doing her unspeakable harm. Rollie and Ivy did not discuss the details, not once. There were limits to what a parent could bear. They would not speak the unspeakable.
A day later, Eddie came by to brag about his new job at Taco Bell and show off the company shirt with a logo on the chest, and the matching cap. They made him look like a circus monkey. The idea of a ramp had fixed itself in Rollie’s mind since Odom’s visit.
“You recollect them tools of mine you borrowed?” he said, wondering how many steps would be involved to go from locating the tools to guiding his wheelchair down a ramp off the front porch. It mattered more to him than to Ivy. He was the one ran the errands, did the shopping, was out and about.
“Store manager told me I was supervisor material, I just gotta put some time in on the counter. I told her Sí, Señora. She laughed her ass off.”
Eddie looked like his father. The same sandy hair running to red, which came from his mother’s side; the same argumentative jaw line; the thin chest. A curse, but not as much of a curse as knowing your very own daddy, the man from whose loins you sprang, was a felon, a beast that got caught and sent to Sussex State Prison below Petersburg. Unlike Ivy, Rollie never blamed the boy’s mother for making herself scarce. Liza couldn’t take the shame. Well, there was no law said she should, nor any reasonable reason. It was fitting the grandparents raise the boy when the father went down and the mother went away. They had some making up to do. Not that Eddie was going to be governor of the Commonwealth.
All the thousands of secret unholy thoughts that had traveled through Rollie’s brain, wondering how Dexter could do what he had done; what part he, the father, played in the making of a criminal. Really, he understood now for the first time, it was the same one and only thought. You imagined it was about how, but really it had to do with why.
Eddie promised to bring back the tools. He promised to buy the lumber to build the ramp, and then build it. I been knowin’ my way around a hammer forever, Granddad. That was how Rollie knew the promises were hollow. It was all the boy could do to cover his rent on an apartment in Briery. That wasn’t going to change any time soon
When he left, Rollie said to Ivy, “What if that Reverend Odom comes by again?”
“Those people, everybody and their brother calls themselves a reverend. They can’t even afford a real church. It’s an overgrown shed is what it is.”
Rollie held his breath and jumped into deep water. “If he offers to build us a ramp, I say we let him.”
“Eddie said he was going to build the thing, let him keep his word.”
August had a sneaky way of running into September. Rollie felt the flow, he practically smelled the green river getting closer, his under-ear heard the lap of deadly water. They needed rain. The leaves were dry and falling early this year. They hit the ground with a thump the like of which he did not remember. He was seventy, a nice round number but not quite accurate. Seventy-one, which had its own sneaky way of running into seventy-two.
Halfway through September came one long day of leisurely rain. They sat on the porch in their wheelchairs watching it fall straight down. Better than television, which they no longer had because the satellite bill was steep and the company cut them off. So be it.
“I got a funny feeling,” Ivy said around lunch time.
It was foreknowledge, arrived at however she attained such information. Late that afternoon Eddie finally showed up to admit he’d been fired from Taco Bell. He was the victim of a misunderstanding, the way he told it, plus ill will on the part of the manager, who had quit laughing at his jokes. The jokes, Eddie swore, were as funny as they had ever been.
Later, Rollie felt bad for the way he responded. “Remember that ramp you was going to build us?”
The kid was sensitive. Tears came to his eyes, and Ivy looked numerous daggers at Rollie.
“Never mind any ramp,” she told Eddie, “what you got to figure out is what your next job is going to be.”
Which was true and unavoidable. Just as true, just as unavoidable, was Wesley Odom’s coming by again. A day after the rain it was like no drop ever fell, every living and dead thing was dry, and the wheels of Odom’s truck raised dust in the drive. As he came up the steps Sadie got to her feet and muttered but then changed her mind, lay back down on the floorboards alongside Ivy’s wheelchair, tongue hanging out the way a dog’s tongue was obliged to do, it was part of the design.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Carwiller, Mr. Carwiller.”
Ivy begrudged him a good afternoon, and Odom asked how old the dog was.
“Thirteen,” she told him.
Sadie was fifteen. Rollie had no idea why she lied. Odom bent over and patted the dog’s head, and the ease with which he moved stabbed Rollie with envy. The man worked all day, came up the steps like a teenager, had all the bounce in the world in him.
Ivy coldly asked him, “Can we help you, Mr. Odom?”
He had made up his mind not to be put off by them. Never would he flinch. He said, “Your place is on my way home. Thought I’d see how that ramp project was coming along.”
“They laid Eddie off at work.”
“That’s too bad. I got a boy in the same situation. Can’t say Carlos is pounding the pavement around Briery with any real fervor, but I have faith he’ll turn something up.”
“The offer still stands,” Odom said, addressing himself to Rollie. “With a friend or two, I can have that ramp up and running in no time.”
Rollie had made up his mind. Yes, he tried to get out, and We thank you kindly. But once again Ivy jumped in mouth first.
“Eddie’s been promised a job at the new cement plant out on Four Sixty. He’s starting in on that ramp this weekend. Rollie is driving to Lowe’s in the morning to pick up the lumber.”
Odom nodded slowly. He knew she was lying. He knew why she was lying. Still wasn’t going to flinch. He patted Sadie on the head again, and Rollie wondered what was in the man, made him want to help so bad.
* * *
You wouldn’t think spaghetti was enough to set off a champion argument. Must be the meatballs. They came frozen but were better than nothing. Dexter’s favorite meal, back when Ivy made the real thing.
There was a fan in the ceiling over the kitchen table, but it wouldn’t turn. There was a washed-out, curl-edged picture of Eddie in his baseball uniform back in high school, magneted to the fridge. There was a pyramid of pill bottles on the counter that had a sacred look, like a cunning thing set up to appease God. A fly on the kibble in Sadie’s dish. A blotch of tomato sauce on Ivy’s blouse. How any of that led to what Rollie said was a question he could not answer.
“That one time.”
Ivy knew something was coming. “What time?”
“Dexter stole the lady’s purse. You thought it was a mistake. A prank, you said. He didn’t mean any harm.”
“You thought beating the life half out of him was going to cure him.”
Up to that point they were civil with one another, but the conversation quickly went bloodthirsty. Every bad thought they had ever stifled came up and was flung at the other person like a turd from the toilet. It ended with Ivy telling him he was a rotten father. She laid the blame for Dexter’s crime at his feet. If Rollie had known how to behave, what to say and what to do, what not to do, maybe their only son would not be locked up in Sussex State Prison. The dog, as was its wont, took Ivy’s side.
Rollie slept on the couch that night, no mean feat given his bulk. It was three minutes after three – he looked at the clock – when she rolled out from the bedroom and shook him awake.
“Maybe,” she started.
All these years, he had learned how to wait. When she was ready she said, “Maybe we should go see him.”
It shocked him. Not once had they visited Dexter at Sussex. Their reason, such as it was, had to do with what they saw at the trial, which was no remorse. Their son was a stone. When the judge read out the verdict and a cop led him away he did not turn to look at his parents.
He said, “It’s a long drive. All that way, south of Petersburg.”
It was not the right thing to say, it was only what came to him. But Ivy went easy on him. In the dark he listened to her jumpy breathing. He smelled Sadie’s old dog smell.
“Something to think about,” she said before turning her chair around and heading back to the bedroom.
In the morning it was obvious that Wesley Odom had their number. He knew they didn’t want people from his church around so arrived with his son Carlos and a truckload of lumber, which the son began unloading without being told to.
“I got a job going, over to Pamplin,” he explained to Rollie. “Carlos can handle this.”
“How much you give for the lumber?” Rollie asked him.
“Let him get the work done, we’ll worry about the rest later.”
Rollie said yes because they needed the ramp, damn it, and because Ivy stayed in the house, which he took as a signal she was relenting.
Carlos was as good looking as his father but lacked the older man’s warmth and ease of self. That was normal in a kid in his early twenties, and Rollie did not hold his coolness against him. There was a sullen, downcast-eye way about him that also was normal, especially if you tacked on the fact that his daddy was tasking him with a job that paid nothing, a favor for a fat old couple in wheelchairs he had never met or cared to meet. His Nationals jersey was three sizes too big for him. Eddie wore his shirts like that, too.
As the sun rose and the insects ticked, Rollie sat on the porch in the shade and watched him work. He was deliberate in the way he went about moving and measuring. It was obvious he knew what he was doing even if he didn’t like doing it. Ivy never showed herself, which was rude. Once, Rollie went in for a pitcher of tea. She was sitting in her chair with her hands crossed staring at the television screen, as if wishing could power the dish. Carlos did not thank him for the tea but drained two glasses.
“That church of your father’s,” Rollie said once.
Carlos stopped working, laid his saw on the porch boards, said nothing. He glared a little at Rollie, but it didn’t amount to much.
“Your daddy told me it’s a story in the name, why they call it Alabama.”
“Our people come from there,” Carlos said.
“Way back, you mean.”
The boy nodded, and for some unknowable reason Rollie saw a picture in his imagination of black men bent over cotton plants, burlap sacks strapped to their waist, their hands plucking white bolls. The picture moved him. He felt, not exactly guilty, but involved. It was like being married, that familiar sensation of intimate connection. He had to open and shut his eyes a couple of times to make the picture go away.
At noon, Rollie rolled to the kitchen. Ivy had taken out a package of hamburger. It was thawed. He fried a good half pound of the meat into a burger for Carlos, put it between two slices of bread, put ketchup on the sandwich, took it out to him on a plate.
“You want more tea with that?”
Carlos nodded, and Rollie poured. He could see the urge to thank him fighting the urge to keep his mouth shut. The boy had been raised with manners, and the contest was a draw. He mumbled a couple of words that were subject to interpretation.
The frame of the ramp was in place. It looked sturdy. A little later Rollie made the mistake of going inside to take a leak, which gave Ivy the three minutes she required to make her move. She was out on the porch in a flash saying something that offended Carlos. By the time Rollie came back outside, the boy had thrown down his hammer and was stalking down the drive.
“What’d you say to him?”
“Nothing. He’s got a cell phone. He’ll call somebody, they’ll come pick him up.”
Rollie knew her. She would not be persuaded to confess. In a way, he didn’t need to know. It had something to do with being black, that was for certain. And it made for a long afternoon.
And a longer evening. To Rollie’s surprise, Wesley Odom did not return, if for no other reason than to pick up the tools his son had left behind. Ivy was not talkative. She paged through old magazines looking at the pictures, humming Hank Senior tunes under her breath. Rollie occupied himself calculating how he could entice Eddie to come back and finish the job that Carlos had begun. The main thing was getting him to show. The other main thing was forcing him to focus and get down to work once he did show. Rollie promised himself he would pay Odom for the building supplies the minute a dollar came into his pocket.
The house had a tin roof, under which cell reception was terrible. They had let their land line go; no sense paying for a phone they hardly used. Rollie went outside and dialed Eddie’s number. The boy was in a happy mood.
“Got some really good news, Granddad.”
“You land yourself a job?”
“These guys I know invited me to go to the Outer Banks for a few days. One of them’s got this awesome house, sits right on the beach. Well, it don’t belong to him, but he gets to use it.”
“And the job?”
“You worry too much. I got something lined up for when I get back. Later, ‘gator. I’ll call you from the ocean.” A pause, and then, making up for all the things that could and could not be made up, “I love you, Granddad.”
No ramp.
A little later, Sadie whined to go out. And then could not manage the steps back up onto the porch so started in whining again from the grass below. When she saw what was happening Ivy burst into tears, which prompted Rollie to move slowly down the stairs on his butt, step by step, until he reached the dog and half dragged, half coaxed it onto the first step. Once the creature saw that it was possible, it did its best to go the rest of the way on its own steam although Rollie had to provide the occasional push. When Rollie himself made it back up he was breathing hard, and Ivy wheeled the oxygen tank over to him just like a trained nurse.
His breathing difficulty continued in the morning. He was outside on the porch early with his tank and his mask hearing the green river whisper when Wesley Odom’s pickup stopped at the head of the drive. Odom parked there a minute or two until Carlos got down and made his way up the drive, swinging his arms. He had on a different basketball jersey – Cleveland, LeBron James, number 23 – and a pair of those baggy short pants that Eddie also favored.
“Morning,” said Rollie as Carlos went back at the job he’d walked off the day before. Well, he had to say something.
Carlos nodded, though not to him.
Rollie should have left well enough alone. The kid was there, was he not? He was going to finish the ramp. But Rollie couldn’t let it be.
“What was it your daddy told you, just now, when he dropped you off?”
Carlos shrugged.
“Must have said something. I could see from here he was talking at you.”
Another shrug. What did it matter what Wesley Odom said to his son? But Rollie’s curiosity overmastered his self-control. He had to know. He asked again.
This time the boy told him, his voice level, neither friendly nor unfriendly, “Said don’t walk away from a job half done.”
It sounded, in Rollie’s ears, like Solomon. Must have sounded like something to Ivy, too. She was at the screen door, listening, and heard the whole short conversation. She stepped out onto the porch.
“I’m making pancakes,” she told Carlos.
“I ate.”
“Got butter, got syrup. I make more, will you eat again?”
The kid had to know he was in control of the situation. That was okay. He let it hang for a moment. It was still early, strips of fog languishing over the grass like they weren’t quite ready for what came next. For some reason a hot day in September could feel hotter than one in July. Funny how that was.
When his self-chosen moment was right, Carlos nodded to Ivy. “I’ll eat a pancake.”
“Good,” she said, and turned toward the kitchen.
“Me and Ivy, we got to eat hearty this morning,” Rollie told Carlos, who was already laying a plank in the frame he had constructed the day before.
“Yeah, why is that?”
“Taking a trip.”
“Where to?”
“Over south of Petersburg.”
“Long way,” said Carlos.
“That bucket of bolts I drive, it’s seen better days. Still runs pretty good, though. Should make it.”
“What’s over there?”
Rollie thought for a moment. “Family,” he said. “We got family over that way.”
He fit the oxygen mask over his mouth and took a delicious pull. As Carlos raised his hammer to nail down the plank, Rollie heard Ivy moving around in the kitchen. Another couple of minutes, and the pancakes would be ready.
Mark Jacobs is the author of five books including A Handful of Kings (Simon & Schuster) and Stone Cowboy (Soho Press). His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and The Idaho Review.