The Roofers
by Paul Lisicky
a fiction excerpt from Unbuilt Projects published by Four Way Books | October 9, 2012
Outside, by the front deck, the roofers are laughing again. They pretend that they don’t see me through the window. I pretend that I don’t hear them at my desk. I like the roofers. I’m happy to give them water when they ask for it; I like watching the guard go down in their eyes when they take their cups. I don’t even mind when they play their boombox too loud, and the sounds of “American Woman” pull my attention out to the patio, where the sawhorses are set up. Even their jokes interest me. Do you like it when I hold my crotch when I talk to you? one says. Not as much as when I have my lips on your butt, says another. And I’m practically laughing along. And though they’ll drive home to their wives and girlfriends once the four o’clock ferry pulls into the dock on the mainland, they’re not afraid in the least of what’s in front of them. The roofers: just look at the way they start goofing when “Dancing Queen” comes on.
Sun on skin, hot gold light frying the hydrangea. Is this how it happens? I mean, change, here, in a yard. Laughter taken into one ear, then returned, and passed on to another and another. And as for the old excuse of setting one man out to make the other men in? Well, we’re over that.
I think I might be seeing what I want to see. I think I still want to believe in the God of my childhood, who was reminded, in song, that he’d champion the peacemaker. I think I don’t want to hear the military plane on its daily route just over the beach. I don’t even want to know about the deer who stepped up to the stranger for a bite of his apple today. First he fed him half his apple, the roofer mutters, and then he shot him in the head. Sun on the floor. Tang of smoke in the nose and the eye. I freeze, as if the ghost of that animal’s slipped in and out of the house, before I catch myself edging forward on the seat. A part of me wants more: death, death, the low, delicious word, whispered to me through night.
And then I roll my chair to the corner of the room.
The gun going off, the body magnificent slumping to the forest floor. Who wants to hear it? Haven’t we had enough? And what of the guy’s girlfriend who might cover her ears when he lets her in on his secret, later tonight, after a bout of good sex?
I don’t know about that, I don’t know about that.
I want a smile to do all the work for me. I want to smile and smile and smile my bright American smile.
Outrage? Oh, I have it—and plenty. Don’t you? But it lasts as long as the next e-mail comes in.
Virginia Woolf says, “But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too…buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks….”
But we all know what she did once the enemy planes started flying too low over the downs. Halfway to her waist in the mud. That’s right, behind the house she loved.
Help us. The wheels on this chair, the roofers overhead, my shoes, the spent fuel that keeps us running--I can’t think too long on the cost of what it took to get them here without the whole operation shutting down. The deer licks the salt from my hand. I don’t even know what to ask for any more; it’s that mixed up. Teach me what to ask, if I may still call you by your name. Water in the mouth: Teach me, sir.
Sun on skin, hot gold light frying the hydrangea. Is this how it happens? I mean, change, here, in a yard. Laughter taken into one ear, then returned, and passed on to another and another. And as for the old excuse of setting one man out to make the other men in? Well, we’re over that.
I think I might be seeing what I want to see. I think I still want to believe in the God of my childhood, who was reminded, in song, that he’d champion the peacemaker. I think I don’t want to hear the military plane on its daily route just over the beach. I don’t even want to know about the deer who stepped up to the stranger for a bite of his apple today. First he fed him half his apple, the roofer mutters, and then he shot him in the head. Sun on the floor. Tang of smoke in the nose and the eye. I freeze, as if the ghost of that animal’s slipped in and out of the house, before I catch myself edging forward on the seat. A part of me wants more: death, death, the low, delicious word, whispered to me through night.
And then I roll my chair to the corner of the room.
The gun going off, the body magnificent slumping to the forest floor. Who wants to hear it? Haven’t we had enough? And what of the guy’s girlfriend who might cover her ears when he lets her in on his secret, later tonight, after a bout of good sex?
I don’t know about that, I don’t know about that.
I want a smile to do all the work for me. I want to smile and smile and smile my bright American smile.
Outrage? Oh, I have it—and plenty. Don’t you? But it lasts as long as the next e-mail comes in.
Virginia Woolf says, “But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too…buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks….”
But we all know what she did once the enemy planes started flying too low over the downs. Halfway to her waist in the mud. That’s right, behind the house she loved.
Help us. The wheels on this chair, the roofers overhead, my shoes, the spent fuel that keeps us running--I can’t think too long on the cost of what it took to get them here without the whole operation shutting down. The deer licks the salt from my hand. I don’t even know what to ask for any more; it’s that mixed up. Teach me what to ask, if I may still call you by your name. Water in the mouth: Teach me, sir.
