Steve Hamilton - The Lock Artist

“You goddamned son of a bitch.”

He came at me then. I turned and pointed the shovel blade at his neck. That’s all I had to do.

“I will get you, you stupid bastard. I promise you.”

Then he left.

I went back to work. Every few minutes I looked up at the back windows, hoping to see Amelia. I didn’t. When I went to the faucet to fill the water jug, I heard Mr. Marsh yelling into the phone.

Just before four o’clock, I saw the back door open. My heart went into my throat for a second until I realized it was Mr. Marsh. He had a drink in one hand. With his other hand he grabbed one of the patio chairs and carried it out to the hole. He set it down a little too close to the edge, tried to take a seat, and almost dumped himself right into the dirt. He adjusted the chair, sat down again, and this time kept his bearings.

He watched me dig for a while. He took long sips out of his glass until it was almost empty.

“Why are you doing this?” he finally said.

I looked up at him.

“I got all sorts of guys working for me these days. Building things. Trying to make deals happen. You know what I’m saying? All sorts of guys all over the place. And you know what?”

He rattled the ice cubes in his glass and then drained it.

“I’ll tell you what. If every one of those guys worked like you do, I’d have absolutely no problems at all. I’d be fucking rich and I’d have no problems.”

He took out one of the ice cubes and threw it at me. It went two feet over my head.

“Look at you! You show up here every day. You do your job. Every minute you’re supposed to be working, you’re working. Every single minute. And the whole time you keep your fucking mouth shut. No complaining. No back-talk. No calling me up and telling me you can’t do one simple goddamned thing because this thing happened and that thing happened and this person said goddamned whatever. None of that bullshit at all. Not one little bit. Do you have any idea what I’m saying to you?”

I stayed still. I wasn’t sure what the right response would be, or if he’d even notice it.

“Who’da thunk it,” he said. “All these guys supposedly working for me and getting paid pretty goddamned well, and the one guy doing the best job is the juvenile delinquent who has to do it for free. Can you imagine?”

No. I cannot imagine.

“You want a drink?” he said. “A real drink? Come on, I’ll fix you something.”

I put my hands up. No thanks. It’s almost four o’clock, and I’m dying to get to my car, to see what might have been left there.

“You sure? I make a mean vodka martini.”

I put my hands up again.

He got out of the chair and stepped down into the hole. He came close enough for me to smell the alcohol on his breath.

“I didn’t want you to actually dig me a pool. You realize that. I mean, what the hell do I need a pool for?”

Once again, staying absolutely still seemed to be the only way to go.

“You win, okay? No more digging. Put the shovel away. Put the wheelbarrow away. You’re done. You win. End of story.”

End of story. Yet he was still standing there.

“I’m sorry I did this to you. Will you accept my apology?”

He seemed to really mean it. What else could I do? I nodded my head.

“Can we be friends now?”

Okay… not sure what to think now.

“Tell me we can be friends.”

What the hell. I nodded my head.

“Shake on it?” He switched his glass to his left hand and put out his right.

I shook it. It was cold and wet from the drink.

“When you come back tomorrow, we’ll think up something else for you to do, okay? Something a lot more fun? More rewarding?”

He’s really, really drunk, I thought. Or really, really crazy. By tomorrow, he may have forgotten all about this. Or else it’s going to be an interesting day all around.

“It’s a little early,” he said, “but you go on home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Without another word, he stepped back, grabbed his chair, and dragged it back to the house. I stood there for a while, watching him. Waiting for the big zag after the zig. It never came. So I just threw the shovel in the wheelbarrow and went around the house to my car.

It was empty. No envelope.

I was running the scenarios through my head. Amelia coming to her senses. Or Zeke getting to her somehow. Or hell… maybe even Zeke figuring out our little game and taking the envelope out of the car himself.

Before my stomach could turn completely over on that one, I heard something behind me. A door shutting? No, a window. I looked up and saw the brown envelope sailing through the air. The window already shut and the person behind it already gone.

I retrieved the envelope from the front lawn, got in my car, and drove a hundred yards. The craziness with Mr. Marsh already forgotten, because this was something much, much bigger. I pulled over and opened the envelope. First page from me, second from her, third from me again…

Page four.

I knew she had had to deal with Zeke for the first hour, so she hadn’t had much time to work on it. But here it was. I was expecting that maybe she’d pick up from where I had left off, her standing there at the edge of the hole after I had finally uttered my first words, but the scene was different. The first panel showed the foursome sitting outside under the umbrella. Today? Is that what she was drawing? In the middle distance, there I was, hard at work, while Zeke and the other two artists watched me and laughed. You could only see the back of their heads, Amelia’s profile in the foreground. Her thought bubble… “You clowns can’t even see it. He’s got so much more talent than any of you. And he’s kind of beautiful, too.”

Holy fuck, I thought to myself. Holy motherfucking fuck.

Second panel. Amelia standing up. Zeke looking up at her with dumb surprise. The way she drew him in that panel alone, like he was the most pathetic and ridiculous human being who ever lived. It brought even more pure joy to my heart.

Third panel. Inside the house. Amelia with her back to Zeke, saying, “Get out. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Fourth panel. “Later…” in the upper left-hand corner. Amelia in her room, sitting on her bed. The thought bubble… “He was here. Right here in my bedroom. Two nights in a row.”

I swallowed hard, kept reading.

Fifth panel. Silhouette of Amelia on the bed, leaving lots of room underneath for a longer thought… “Definitely an uncool thing to do, sneaking into my room in the middle of the night. Absolutely way over the line un-fucking-cool, right. So last night, when he didn’t come here at all…”

Sixth panel. Viewpoint from outside the window. Amelia on the inside looking out, saying it out loud… “Now that was just fucking cruel.”

One page of paper. Wood pulp bleached and then pressed into a thin layer. Marked with the rubbed-off graphite from a single drawing pencil. That’s all it was. You understand this.

I held that page of paper in my hands for five minutes maybe, while sitting in my uncle’s beat-up old car on the side of a road just outside of Milford, Michigan. On a hot afternoon turning into a hot evening. When I could finally breathe again, I put all of the pages back into the envelope. I reminded myself of the correct procedure for operating an automobile, put it in gear, and pressed the gas pedal. Steered it all the way home.

I went inside and opened the envelope again, took the pages out, and put them on my desk. This lonely cigar-smoke-smelling room at the back of this old house. The miracle that these sheets of paper could even exist within that lonely room’s four walls.

I sat down with a clean page in front of me. If I had been capable of laughing out loud, I would have done it. What in goddamned hell could I possibly draw in response to this? Six panels of what exactly?