Some people call me the good brother, which tells you something about the other one, Randall. I’m not so good. I’ve done time—always in county lockups, though, never state. I’ve had a few dustups, most of them that left the other guy drawing the short straw, never killed anybody, though, never got killed, ha ha. I’m trying to be a better man because of Cass, this real religious gal I met in church. Yeah, church, but I won’t go into the details on that because it’s kind of embarrassing and doesn’t make me look as good as you’d think. Or should that be “as well” as you’d think? Cass gave me this grammar book, and I’ll read a page or two every day because I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to that stuff back in my school days. She’d like to introduce me to her mother, but she wants to wait until I speak a little better, her old lady being an English teacher. Can you believe that, me, Paul Minette, tattoos and scars and jail time, getting all lovey-dovey with a Pentecostal daughter of a school marm! Cass’s not batting a thousand percent keeping me on the straight and narrow, though. I backslide. Like, me up on that roof with Randall.
It was cold as a witch’s tit up there. The short prybar felt like a slab of ice in my hand. Randall had put the long prybar down and was pressing the roof here and there with his bare palms.
“Hey, this son bitch ain’t copper,” Randall, who hadn’t taken up the study of grammar, said. “Hell, I saw that the second I stepped out of the pickup,” I said.
“Why the hell didn’t you say something before we climbed up here?”
“I thought there was a slim chance I was wrong. It happens about once a year.”
He felt around the roof again.
“Hell, this son bitch ain’t even metal.”
I felt around, too, but my hands were so numb from the cold that I couldn’t tell if it was metal or vinyl or composition or who knows what kind of crap they use nowadays. Nothing we’d be likely to sell if we ripped off some sheets of it, though. Copper, now, you can make good money on copper. I backslide worse if there’s money involved.
“Well, no use sitting up here freezing our asses off,” I said, but Randall was too busy cussing Joe Sandifer to take the hint. Joe was the one who told him about the copper roof. He did yard work for the rich folks that owned the big house and knew when they were going to be out of town.
“Joe must have been fooled by those gutters. Those gutters are grade-A sons of bitches,” I said, hoping that would make Randall feel a little better about Joe, whose future health I was getting a little worried about. Randall went right on cussing, though. Pretty entertaining for a while, but I was too cold to appreciate it.
“Well, bro, you can sit up here all night feeling sorry for yourself if you want to,” I said, “but I’m getting off this mountain before my pecker freezes off.”
“Go on ahead. Age before beauty.”
Getting down from the roof was harder than getting up, and getting up hadn’t been no picnic. Randall had called me earlier that night and described this sweet copper job, told me where and when to meet him with my pickup and ladder. Which I did.
“What the hell’s that?” he said as I was hauling the ladder out of the bed of the pickup.
“Obviously it’s not a Christmas tree. You told me to bring my ladder.”
“For a roof job. You brought a goddamn six-foot folding ladder. Now that’s just hunky-dory for all the six-foot-high roofs around, but this one . . .”
“Would it a killed you to specify the extension ladder? I was half asleep when you called.”
“Half asleep, half-wit, whatever.”
The folding ladder wound up coming in handy even if it didn’t reach the roof. We propped it up against this wooden trellis that ran up one side of the house almost to the eaves. I climbed the ladder as high as I could, then went right on up the trellis, which was covered in some dead vine that kept breaking apart in explosions of dust that sent me into such a sneezing fit that I almost lost my grip. But I held on, and the trellis held on to my two-hundred-plus pounds and so did the gutter that I used to swing myself up from the trellis to the roof. The folks that owned that house didn’t go in for cheap guttering.
After I was up on the roof, Randall tossed the prybars up to me and then he started up. Although he hadn’t said anything, I knew he’d let me go first because I outweighed him by quite a bit, so if the trellis and gutter would hold me, it’d be safe traveling for him. Made sense. Besides, Randall had been afraid of heights ever since we were kids jumping out of Uncle Karl’s barn loft, and for a joke our cousin Dale moved the hay wagon we’d been landing in. Randall went out of the loft with a Tarzan yell and spent three months in the hospital. Maybe that accounts for the fact that I’m four inches taller and forty pounds heavier than him. Maybe not. We get kidded a lot about not having the same fathers, and it does make you wonder. Wouldn’t put anything against Ma. Pa always kept a close eye on her. With some women you have to.
Anyway, getting down off the roof.
I’m not afraid of heights particularly, and I’ve had quite a bit of experience climbing all sorts of things over the years—chasing folks, being chased by folks, stealing stuff from up on top of things—but even I didn’t have a lot of fun getting from the roof to the trellis with those eaves jutting a good eighteen inches out from the house. It didn’t bother Randall that much because he wouldn’t even try it.
“Randall! Come on, goddamit. Just grab ahold of the gutter with one hand and swing down and grab the trellis with the other.”
“Nope.”
“Come on! Don’t be such a pussy. You can’t stay up there all night. It’s a miracle the cops haven’t shown up by now.”
“Let ‘em show. Maybe they’ll bring an extension ladder.”
I cussed him a while. I doubt it was as entertaining as his cussing Joe Sandifer had been since it didn’t quite have that heat behind it. I mean, I wasn’t really going to kill Randall, but the jury was still out on Joe. Think I’m joking?
The cussing didn’t do any good. He wasn’t coming down. In fact, he climbed back up the roof valley away from the edge, sat down, and put the collar of his coat up like he was in for the long haul.
I asked him what he intended to do. He told me he intended to sit right there until I came back with my sixteen-foot extension ladder. That’s when I remembered I’d traded it to a guy for a Roto-Rooter. My goddamn neighbor’s got this tree growing up next to our fence, and the roots go right into my sewer line. I poured twenty-dollars-worth of Roundup on that tree’s roots trying to kill it, but no luck. So I figured I’d get a lot of use out of that Roto-Rooter.
I told Randall.
“Go get a rope,” he said. I thought he meant it was to hang myself with, but then I realized it was to help him get down from the roof.
So I went to get a rope.
I don’t have any rope at my place, so I drove over to Randall’s.
I normally wouldn’t knock on the door at that time of night, but there was a light on inside, and even before I got to the porch, I could hear the Home Shopping Network going full blast. I knocked loud enough to be heard over it.
Randall’s wife, Lilith, came to the door.
She was wearing a silky-like robe over something, I guess there was something under it.
“I need a rope,” I said. She stared at me. “It’s for Randall,” I said. She kept on staring. “He’s stuck up on a roof,” I said. “Of course he is, of course he is,” she said, sagging over against the doorjamb. Her eyes began to close.
Lilith doesn’t do drugs unless you call alcohol a drug. She does a lot of that. You have to do something if you live with Randall, I expect.
They have a history. They’ve been married five years but only the last two legally because before that Randall was still married to this other old gal. When Lilith found out about it, she put the screws to him, told him she was going to turn him into the law for bigamy if he didn’t start treating her exactly like she wanted to be treated. Randall didn’t like the sound of that because he wasn’t clear on how bigamy would fit in to the whole three strikes and you’re out thing, his first two stretches in Cummins being for assault and battery, so he took to making her cups of herbal tea, cleaning the bathroom, all sorts of things a man shouldn’t have to do. Humiliating. But then the other old gal up and died, so Randall said, “Now I’ll treat Lilith any way I damn well please.” I think he generally treats her OK, though. He can really do some damage to a man that pisses him off, but he’s never hit a woman that I know of. If a woman pisses him off too much, he’ll just say sayonara and go find a new one. Lilith is still in the picture, though, so obviously they’ve worked things out.
She was standing there in the doorway barefoot. She paints her toenails a variety of colors.
I looked her up and down, up and down. Then I saw that she had gone to sleep leaning up against that doorjamb.
“Lilith!”
Her eyes came open just as slowly as they’d closed.
“That rope,” I reminded her.
“Rope? What the hell do I know about rope? Think I keep rope in the freezer or something?”
Woman has a mouth on her.
“Probably in the garage,” I said. “Is it unlocked?”
“Sort of,” she said. “Genius lost the key and smashed the lock with a sledgehammer. Help yourself.”
I went around the house to the garage. Found the rope. Drove back to the big house.
Randall was where I’d left him, hunkered down in that roof valley hugging himself.
“Took your damn sweet time. What did you do, stop off at the church and say a novena for me?”
I think novena must be a Catholic thing. Randall was married to a Catholic once, his first wife, not the old gal that died.
I threw the rope up to him. He looked around.
“What the hell will I tie it to?”
I walked around the house, looking.
“The only thing I can see is the chimney. Tie it around that.”
He tied it around the chimney, then flung the other end down over the edge of the roof. It hung down maybe a foot over the gutter.
“Son of a bitch,” we said.
“You brought the short goddamn rope. Why the hell didn’t you bring the long goddamn rope?”
“You didn’t tell me there were two ropes. How was I supposed to know?”
I thought that was a pretty good point, but he cussed me for a while anyway. I didn’t take offense. I knew he was cold and scared. We’re brothers. I felt for him.
Finally, he stopped cussing and told me to go back and get the long rope, so I went to get the long rope.
The light was still on in Randall’s house. I went to the front door. Lilith opened it before I had a chance to knock.
“I came for the robe—I mean the rope. I got the short one when I shoulda got the long one.”
Lilith leaned against the doorjamb looking at me with those sleepy cat eyes.
“Well, I guess if the short rope was in the garage, the long one must be there, too. If the rope’s what you came for. If it was the robe, that’s in here.”
We went inside, and she handed me the robe.
I drove back to the big house with the long rope on the seat beside me. Randall was right where I’d left him. I threw the rope up.
“Think we’ll need to tie the two together, or will that one be long enough by itself?”
He didn’t answer, just began tying the rope around the chimney. He didn’t seem to be in a very good mood.
After he finished tying it, he threw the rope off the roof, and it hung down all the way to the ground.
“Bingo!” I said.
He worked his way down the valley of the roof holding on to the rope. When he got to the edge, he stopped and peered down like a little kid on the edge of a swimming pool trying to work up the courage to dive in.
Poor bastard.
It was a mean trick I’d played on him with Lilith, I guess. But, hell, if it was that easy with me, you can bet she’d been doing it with everybody except the undertaker. I’d be doing Randall a favor to tell him that—not about me and Lilith, hell, I’m not that crazy, but that Lilith was a trashy little slut that’d only bring him pain. Sure, the news would hurt, but he’d be better off in the long run. Besides, it’s never taken Randall long to find a new woman. They go for that bad guy vibe. For that matter, he can have mine if he wants. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with Cass, all that Jesus business. I’m ashamed to say it, but I haven’t even gotten into her pants yet, not all the way. And I’ve had enough of trying to figure out that damn grammar book.
Hey now. While I was thinking about having that conversation with Randall, he’d managed to twist himself around a little this way, a little that way, until he was lying face down with his trunk on the roof and his legs dangling down. He came down a little more until his body was off the roof and he was holding on to the rope with one hand and the gutter with the other. He didn’t seem to want to let go of that gutter.
That’s when I had this vision of him losing hold of the gutter and rope, too, and falling and hollering, “Paul! Paul!” and I’d catch him and say, “Little brother.”
That didn’t happen, though. No, he let go of the gutter and grabbed the rope and came right on down, no problem. So everything was OK.
We got in my pickup, and I turned the heater up all the way and drove him to his car, which he’d had the good sense to park down the street and around the corner unlike dumbass me, parking in the big house driveway. Of course, I’m not so worried about that third strike, all my time being in county lockups, which don’t count as a strike in this state.
He didn’t get out right away but held his hands up to the heater vent like a cowboy at a campfire.
I didn’t say anything to him about Lilith being a slut. He seemed down enough as it was.
“Hey, cheer up. You’re off of that roof. Everything’s gravy after that, bro’.”
“Gravy, hell. Didn’t score no copper and lost two ropes on top of it.”
I decided right then and there I was going to Home Depot and buy him a new rope, a good long one. Being considerate and stuff like that is why folks call me the good brother.
© Dennis Vannatta
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including Literary Yard, River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories The Only World You Get was published by Et Alia Press.
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