Joe Schreiber - No Doors, No Windows

ALSO BY JOE SCHREIBER

Eat the Dark

Chasing the Dead

Star Wars: Death Troopers

To my father-in-law, Lester E. Arndt, 19332008

IT WAS A LONG NEW HAMPSHIRE FALL, the kind that stayed mild well into October, and the man and the boy had spent the afternoon in the backyard, throwing a ball back and forth between two worn leather gloves the man had found in the garage. The boy was young, five that summer, but the man spoke to him in the easy, playful way he mightve addressed a teenager, with an obvious affection that the boy repaid with rapt delight. They had come outside wearing jackets, but after a half hour of shagging runaway balls past the old toolshed to the cornfield that bordered the property, the man took off his denim jacket and draped it over a low branch of the maple that towered across the yard. Upon seeing this, the boy immediately shed his jacket too and tossed it on the ground. Anyone watching the two of them wouldve assumed they were father and son.

When he saw the boy winding up to throw the ball underhand, the man turned and began to run back toward the cornfield, where experience had taught him hed soon be diving to retrieve it. But some eccentricity of wind or gravity interceded, and the ball sailed over his head, momentarily blocking out the midafternoon sun before the man realized its final destination. In a perfect, stretching, never-to-be-repeated arc, the ball closed in on the darkened window of the toolshed, and a moment later, he heard the pop and tinkle of breaking glass.

The boy stood frozen, oval-eyed, the glove dangling from his hand. Uncle Scott?

Its okay. The man, still catching his breath, slowed to a walk, approaching the shed with his shadow stretched out in front of him. Peering between the two or three snaggletoothed rectangles of glass remaining in the frame, he smelled musty canvas and ancient motor oil, dead grass and rotten leaves. Vague piles of equipment and tools loitered in the shadows, crouched low to the concrete floor.

What happened? The boy sounded astounded by the enormity of his crime.

Dont worry about it, the man said, and looked with a rueful smile at the smudges on his sleeves, where hed been leaning against the sill. Piece of advice for you, kiddo. Never let a salesgirl talk you into paying eighty bucks for a shirt.

Okay.

Walking around the wooden double doors, the man stopped again to examine the padlock that dangled from them like a slab of stone. Ah. The plot thickens.

What are we gonna do? the boy asked.

For every lock, theres a key. He turned from the shed and walked across the yard toward the place where hed grown up. It was a large, rambling old farmhouse that hadnt changed substantially since his father had built it here fifty years ago. Here was the same enclosed back porch with the same rooty subterranean smell that he remembered disliking as a child and disliked now. More tools. An old railway lantern. A Coca-Cola sign. In one corner, a smiling wooden policeman, cut out with a jigsaw and hand-painted, raised one hand toward the wall. His father had made that, forever ago.

Inside, the house smelled like a dozen different casseroles and hot dishes mingling into one generic aroma pool of gravy and starch. Entering the living room with the boy at his heels, the man, a nondescript New England exile named Scott Mast, walked past the lump on the sofa, mired in front of the television behind a platoon of empty brown bottles. On TV a pretty blonde in a tight T-shirt and tool belt was talking about rehabbing a hundred-year-old Federal house from the ground up. As she dipped her paintbrush and laid down the initial strokes, the creature on the couch made a noise that couldve been a belch or a snore and rearranged its extremities among the flattened cushions. Scott and the boy went into the kitchen.

If his mother had been alive, he knew she wouldve been mortified by the influx of perishables that had arrived after his fathers funeral. But Eleanor Mast was fifteen years in her grave, killed in the same fire that had taken Great-Uncle Butch and a dozen others. And now they had buried their father. At the memorial yesterday, Owen had already started making noises about moving out of the rented mobile home where he and Henry lived and coming back to live in the old house. Scott visualized the two of them here in the kitchen, feasting for months off defrosted meat loaf, venison sausage, and turkey and cranberry wreath.

He reached over and retrieved the Mason jar from the shelf above the sink. The jar rattled with spare coins, loose nails and screws, paper clips, bits of scrap wire, and empty wooden spools, a trove of ageless, useless junk. When he and Owen were kids, their mother had always kept a few dollars rolled up inside it for school lunches or ice cream in the summer. The paper money had long since vanished, leaving only the most clamorous and least valuable contents gleaming dully in the rays of afternoon light. Scott dumped it upside down on top of the stove, sorting through sticky pennies and two-cent stamps.

What the hells going on in there? the voice from the living room called.

Nothing. Scott raised his voice but didnt look up. Just looking for a key.

Within seconds, Owen had lumbered into the kitchen doorway, head cocked and eyes squinting at Scott beneath a hood of thatched black hair. At thirty-one, he was three years younger than Scott but seemed both older and slower. He wore a black Jack Daniels T-shirt that wasnt quite long enough to cover the droop of his belly above the low-hanging waist of his Levis. With him came the aroma of beer and stale synthetic fabric mingled with chewing tobaccoold, familiar smells that came together in Scotts nostrils in a weird combination of nostalgia and almost unbearable sadness. Owen took another step, brushing the boy aside, his flushed and faintly perspiring face still turned up to maintain eye contact with Scott. What key?

To the shed.

Yeah? Owens eyes narrowed. Whats out there?

Nothing, Scott said. We just lost our ball. Went through the shed window and

You kidding me? Owen finally seemed to notice the boy standing between them. Henry, what did you do? Did you break that window out there? He grabbed the boys arm hard enough that Scott saw his head jerk forward, upper and lower teeth clicking together, a reaction that only seemed to disgust his father. Dont pull that act on me. That didnt hurt.

Owen, Scott said, it was my fault. I threw the ball.

Yeah? Owens head twisted slightly sideways toward him, sly fascination spreading over his face. How come?

I lost control of it.

Typical. Owen reached around and scratched the back of his thigh. I guess you figure you can just break Pops shit all you want now that hes gone, just fly on home and not worry about it, huh?