Jim stood in the kitchen heating the spoon over the flame of the stove. He thought about the old man in his jacket in the July sun taking small steps from his house to the garage to check on the progress. He could not remember the color of the old man's eyes. They were not blue he was sure of that.

Jim tapped the rig. A bubble floated up and he tied off. The teenagers were at grandma's and his wife was out with the baby. Cool air blew from the wall registers, but to Jim it seemed hot. It had been hot all summer.

The old man's name was Mansil. Jim had been arrested by a sheriff named Mansil in Louisiana, but the old man wasn't a sheriff. He had asked Mr. Mansil if he was from Louisiana. Mr. Mansil had said, no, he was not from there.

“You can have those shears if you want, I won't be needing them,” Mr. Mansil had said.

Mr. Mansil hired him to clean out his garage. There were lots of things the old man didn't want; jars of screws, hinges, a couple of hoses, herbicide, fertilizer, boxes and boxes of fertilizer: pellets in green boxes and cones in white boxes. You placed the cones in a hollow steel tube and ran a hose through it to inject fertilizer on your yard. Jim had never seen one before.

A rope had hung from a rafter in Mr. Mansil's garage. Jim saw himself swinging on it, the noose tight around his neck, his body swaying freely back and forth and then he was at a dairy farm in a barn with rows of mooing cows attached to machines and the smell of milk and cow shit and he hovered over his own naked cadaver and Mr Mansil walked in, looked up and walked out.

An axe with a red handle had leaned in the corner. “You can have that too,” Mr. Mansil said. “My grandson doesn't want it.” Mr. Mansil looked away, out toward the bluffs.

Jim had asked Mr. Mansil about the weather in the valley.

“Lightening,” he had nodded toward the charred top of the mountain. Then he turned and walked back to his house.

The phone rang, but Jim did not move. He was sick. It happened every time.

In a perfect world he could shoot up and not feel that dizzy, helpless free fall. Vomit-on-the-wing he called it. In that world everybody would be on heroin.

The box of linoleum tile, green and black, that Mr. Mansil had given him, was still on the kitchen floor. His wife had nixed it. Jim had also kept the rope and the axe and at the last minute he kept the fertilizer too, putting it in the keep pile. He had put the jars of screws and hinges in the throw away pile.

Mr Mansil had come out again. Deer were chomping on corn pellets in the backyard.  “I've been feeding them for thirty years,” Mr. Mansil said. He didn't address Jim, he had just said it, like a general comment about the passage of time and the habits of deer.

Jim had picked up a box of rat poison and a package of D-Con Roach Killer with a faded picture of Mohammed Ali on the label. Mr. Mansil had looked at the poison and then said, “I need you to sweep over there.” He pointed toward the floor.

Mr. Mansil had been a principle at schools throughout Texas and then had taught in the education department at the university. “I taught all levels,” Mr. Mansil had said, and that's all he said about it, as if it were a big waste of time, leading people out of ignorance.

Jim rolle d off the couch and put his pants on. He left his shirt off and then he looked in the mirror. She'll never know he thought to himself. He looked at his chin, then his nose, then his eyes. Jim's washed out face hung on his neck like a cheap cotton baby doll. His clammy hands drooped along his side as he swayed outside and stashed his shit in the false bottom of the rocker panel on his truck.

He picked up the weekly newspaper, opened it and set it on the table like he was reading it. The tabby slinked by, meowed and rubbed against his leg.

At the end of the afternoon with the floor swept and the two piles of stuff stacked in the truck, Mr. Mansil had come out again and looked over the garage.

A blue flashlight lay on the counter. “You can have that too. I won't be needing it.”

Then Mr. Mansil asked, “How much?”

Jim had scribbled some numbers on a brown paper bag and held it out. “Ninety-six dollars.”

Mr. Mansil did not take the brown paper. He only repeated the number as if as if ninety-six was a significant amount, not in its value of labor but in the number itself as if ninety six was the number of the day or the week or the most significant number in his life. Ninety- six hung in the air and you could feel Mansil absorbed in it. He repeated the number. “Ninety six,” he said. It slid out of his mouth like it was the clearest thing ever stated. And then he looked down at the clean swept floor and said quietly, “Ninety-six dollars.”

 

Jim had used part of the money to buy a dime bag. Mexican H. Nobody will know, not even the P.O. There was that shit you could buy, take it right out of the system, he thought.

The car drove up and Jim heard the baby crying and then he looked down at the newspaper and saw the obituary of Russell Royce Mansil. He bit down on his tongue. He couldn't feel a thing.