Above the Beam
Well, nobody ain't nobody, important or not.
Owen dries his hands on the dish towel, spreads it out to hang over the rail of the oven door. Supper dish is done. The rest of the baked beans he made the other night with a little bit of green tomato chow and some leftover tuna fish cakes that he fried up. It’s November, so it’s well past dark when he heads out to the garage. On his way past the dining room table, he closes the open Bible. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he mutters under his breath, and closes his eyes, and then continues out to the garage.
He turns on the fluorescent light. It buzzes to life in a flickering glory. In the centre of the room, towards the front rolling door hangs the chain hoist from the rafters above the garage he built fifteen years ago. The loft ceiling covers the right half of the garage, open rafters over the left, and the hoist hangs right at the seam. Nobody ever said he was a carpenter, but he tried and he took a painstaking amount of time to build this garage the way that he wanted it. And now that the ‘78 Malibu was restored, and he sold it to Ricky from work, well, where he used to work, the garage echoes in its emptiness.
He walks over to the workbench and grabs the length of one-inch rope that he picked up a month ago when he first began his contemplation. The noose knot is an interesting knot, and he’d been tying knots all his life, truck hitches, hoists, and any number of things that he managed to do in his job with CN. He’d been retired a couple years now, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. He traveled across the country and back so many times, fixing engines and cars and linkages along the way. And when he finally looked up, Janice was gone. After his daughter Melanie buried her little David, she’d moved to Hamilton.
And now it’s just him.
He hears a scraping sound in the loft above him, and he stops with his hands contorted in its workings on the rope, and there’s still nothing. So he finishes his knot.
Knotted rope in hand, he grabs the stool he made ten years ago. It’s just hammered together, but he loves this thing. The way that he built it is square and it has a step in the middle of it so that way when he flips the seat that is hinged halfway over, it turns into a short step stool.
He carefully positions the stool underneath the hoist, looking up at it to make sure that it is lined up and that there’s nothing around the stool so that when he kicks it away it will do so unimpeded.
He flips the lid over and climbs up top of it, puts the knotted rope around his neck, and hooks the opposing knotted loop on the hook of the hoist. He buckles his knees a little bit to test the strength of it. He knows from working on the Malibu that the beams above should hold his weight as they’d held the weight of several engines over the years, but the beams are now old and stressed. He’d noticed on the last project that they sagged under the weight of the load. Owen isn’t an engine, so he’s reasonably confident that the beam will take the jolt. He tests it again anyway by buckling his knees, and the beam cracks loudly. He wonders if this might be the beam’s last act in carrying him to the Great Beyond.
Owen closes his eyes, satisfied that things are ready: car sold, supper made, leftovers taken care of, house cleaned, bills paid. With his eyes still closed, he readies to kick the stool away.
He hears another scrape and what sounds like a gasp, and a small yelp.
“Who’s there?” he says to the room. To the gasp.
A rattly cough and a female voice, young sounding. “Nobody important.”
“Well, nobody ain’t nobody, important or not,” says Owen.
Owen forgets where he is for a moment, and nearly falls off the stool. “I’m in the middle of something here,” he says.
“Yeah, I fucking noticed,” says the voice above him.
Owen pulls the rope off his neck and stares at the gyprock ceiling above him. “Language,” he says.
“Okay, Pops,” says the voice.
He steps carefully off the stool, noose in hand. “How long have you been up there?”
“Depends upon who’s asking.”
“A man standing in his own damned garage. That’s who.”
“A few weeks,” says the voice.
“Weeks?” says Owen. “Weeks. How the–?” Owen sits down on the stool, absently pulling and fidgeting with the knot.
There’s movement and the voice is closer to the edge of the loft, but still out of sight. She definitely sounds young… and sick. After a coughing fit, she says, “It’s dry. Your camping stuff’s decent.”
“That’s the ex-wife’s.”
“She left you, old man. I figured she wasn’t coming back for it.”
“And the groceries?” Owen asks.
“What groceries?”
“Well, I figure the ones I’d written-off as just being distracted.”
She moves again. The voice is behind him now and he scoots around on the stool to face the voice. And the voice says, “Yeah, well, you’re a bit distracted.”
The voice laughs a weird little laugh, and it’s hard, like she’d told herself the funniest joke. And she’s laughing so hard that it degenerates into another coughing fit. “Jesus, fuck,” she says. “Won’t this stop?”
“Thief,” says Owen.
“Sure. Fine. Thief. Okay. You want to talk about thieves? You think I picked your fucking loft? You think I woke up and went, you know what I want? I want a dead man’s camping gear.”
“I’m not dead,” says Owen.
“Yeah, we’ll give it twenty minutes.”
Owen doesn’t respond to her, he just stares at the rope in his hand, shakes his head, and then he says, “That’s a bad cough.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“I have some cough syrup in the cabinet over the bathroom sink in the house.”
“I know. It’s not helping.”
“Then you’ve had some. I guess God helps those who help themselves.”
“Jesus fuck,” she says, and another wet coughing fit.
And then the voice above him says, “You’re old, pathetic and weak. Will you just get it over with already? You don’t seem to be able to even do this right.”
“Do what?” asks Owen.
“Don’t, don’t play effin’ dumb. You think I don’t know what’s going on, that I can’t tell? You cleaned the whole goddamn house. Nobody cleans a house for fun. Not old dudes like you, anyway.”
Owen picks up the stool, drags it closer to the edge of the loft and sits down again, hoping to catch a sight of the voice above him. “Keep your voice down,” he says.
“Or what? Why? Who the hell is gonna hear? Your daughter? She’s in Hamilton. And David…” She stops at that.
“Go ahead and say it. You seem to know everything about me anyway. Say it, goddammit,” he says.
“I’ve read all your mail, Owen. Jesus, man, it’s 2026. There’s this thing called paperless billing.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t trust computers or any of that AI crap.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Things are quiet for a bit. Owen sits stone-still on his stool thinking about Janice and Melanie and David and how he shouldn’t outlive his grandchildren.
He clears his throat. “You’re one angry sounding thing, aren’t you? I don’t think you’re as mad and pissed off as you’re making yourself out to be.”
“Fuck off,” she says.
“You’ve been hiding in my garage for weeks, and you chose now to make sure that this old goat heard you?”
Nothing from the voice above him. She blows her nose and then it’s quiet again.
Owen fidgets with the rope again, waiting for her to respond. Waiting for her to come down, waiting for something, anything to be different.
The voice from above says, “Look, I can’t listen to that, okay? I just can’t. I can’t listen to you. I heard you set the stool and your damn exit-plan rig. I knew what was going on. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t listen to it.”
“You scared up there?” Owen asks.
“Of you? No.”
“Of what then? Or is it a who?”
“Yeah, something like that. My name’s Chelsea.”
Owen stands up, stretches his arms above his head, and cricks his back and tosses the rope onto the workbench. Time for that later, he thinks, and then out loud to the voice above, “Good to meet you, Chelsea. When do you last eat?”
She doesn’t answer. Owen tucks the stool in underneath the workbench and heads to the man-door.
“Well, come to the house, you know the way. Hit the lights behind you. I’ll go fix some tea and toast, and we can talk about it.”