It’s been a over a week since I went on a ride-along with what proved to be Boyce’s next-to-last locksmith call. The one I went on was memorable to me, and necessitated another break from the blog (if Charlotte thought about her reputation more, she would say again to me, “It’s getting worse.” But since she’s awesome, she says instead, “Would I be the only one to eat biscuits if I made them?”). Boyce’s last call, however, proved memorable to him and stunning to the rest of us, so maybe I should start there.
It was something of a routine call. New homeowners needed to change the locks, so Boyce got the call. And like Boyce says every time he gets that type of call, he told this happy couple, “It would be cheaper to buy and install new locks.” The couple didn’t care, though, and told him to go ahead with the job. While Boyce was changing the locks, he watched the couple talk to each other. The way the wife sometimes used her hands reminded him of something, and Boyce started looking around the house. It was his last day, so he thought what the hell, and asked the couple if he could see upstairs. They didn’t care at all to show him. Boyce was sure he could have asked them for three pairs of soiled underwear, their passports, and a shovel, and they would have asked, “May we bring the lime?” When he looked into each of the rooms he said he started to smile really big, and told the couple if they answered the right way he’d finish their locks and walk away without charging them a dime. He didn’t even bother saying how it was going to sound weird. He just said, “Tell me something that has come out of one of these closets.” They told him a story about how a homeless man walked out of one of the closets, put a knife on the window sill, and told them, “My sister is deaf.” Boyce didn’t ask them to explain anything more. He told them he’d finish those locks in just a few minutes and then be on his way.
When Boyce told us that story, Sammy asked him what he would have done if that couple had said nothing has ever come out of those closets other than dust and cobwebs. Would he have assumed he had the wrong couple, or even more hysterically pleasant to Sammy, would he lie to us about what they said?
That call was Boyce’s last, but the one before that was mine. Boyce was sure that we were going to end up at Sammy’s parents’ farmhouse or Dr. Keegman’s office. When he picked me up, however, he said he didn’t recognize the address at all. Even when we pulled up to the house it didn’t seem familiar. We had to walk through a bit of mud because of all the rain we had, and when Boyce got up to the front door and saw the busted lock, he looked back at me and asked me whose place this was. I told him I didn’t know. That’s when the door opened, though. All three of us involved had different expressions on our faces. Boyce looked angry, because he was sure he was going to jail for this. He said, “Cyrus…?” But I didn’t answer because I was busy getting burned up by the smirk on the face of Rachel’s priest.
He came out to meet us on the porch and shook Boyce’s hand. He told me it sure was pleasant that I should be on his doorstep, but I told him the only thing pleasant about any of this was that the mild flooding of his front yard due to rain would soon bring many songbirds to feed on the insects and worms. Rachel’s priest told Boyce that this must be an odd case for him. He pointed out that his lock had been completely disabled with minimal damage to the door. “But would you look at this,” he said. “Whoever it was didn’t come inside.” He showed us there wasn’t a single muddy print in his house. “They just wanted to take apart the lock.” I pointed out that perhaps the thief took his shoes off before entering. When Rachel’s priest asked me what kind of thief would do that, I told him a polite one. “Nothing was taken,” he said. But I replied that maybe the thief saw that everything inside sucked and figured he was better off robbing a homeless shelter.
I thought Boyce was going to abandon me right there on the porch. I know he suspected me of this, but I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, and gritted my teeth as best as I could to wordlessly convince him I had never been to this house. Rachel’s priest invited us inside, and Boyce declined. But then Rachel’s priest sort of hinted that maybe this was a police matter instead of a simple locksmith matter, and Boyce agreed that we would come in. I didn’t know what to expect in a priest’s house. I thought there would be a lot of furniture made out of crosses and apostles, but it looked pretty normal. I would have been weirded out by the fact that there were kids toys strewn about, but Rachel told me a long time ago that she wasn’t Catholic, and that priests could marry in her Christian conference. Not just marry, Rachel, destroy lives, too.
I think Boyce wanted to avoid it, but he couldn’t help noticing the record collection on the shelves. He and Rachel’s priest talked for a few minutes about music, and after a few tries, Boyce finally got him to understand that he wanted a list of his favorite album covers, not albums. Once they swapped lists, and Boyce described Led Zeppelin by ramming his fist into his open palm, Rachel’s priest invited us to sit down. He told me he was happy to have us over, and that he still remembered Rachel talking about not just me, but Boyce and Sammy, too. Probably while he was listening to his secret recordings of Rachel’s confessions, and she told him she was struggling with me having two best men.
Once we sat, Rachel’s priest smiled at me for a moment, like the way my high school pyschology teacher would when he thought he was intepreting us based on our handwriting or the way we held our hand up in class. (Nice try, Mr. Randall, official school weirdo. You made the mistake of telling our class one of your dreams: you were wearing a football jersey made out of pineapple wedges and threw lava rocks at kids who were on your lawn. Everyone else might have laughed at the absurdity of that, but at least one of us wasn’t shocked when you wound up six years later prohibited from being five hundred feet from schools and churches.) Rachel’s priest asked me very slowly how long since Rachel’s been gone. I told him, and he asked me if I blamed him for that. “I do,” I said. He said, “You probably blame God even more. I wonder if you even find a way to blame yourself.” I told him he had no idea. Just no idea.
I didn’t want to be there anymore and stood up to leave. Boyce explained he still had to fix the lock. I told him I would walk back by myself and he could pick me up on the way. Rachel’s priest asked if there wasn’t anything I wanted to say. He stared for a while. Boyce nearly had his entire face in his hands. So I said, “I miss her.” I could have added that he would bring in a lot of Evening Grosbeaks with a couple feeders, but I decided to stick with the dramatic.
My exit destroyed that momentum, however, since I had to put my shoes on, which we had taken them off because of the mud. I got a knot in one of the laces so I tried to just shove my foot into the shoe, but all I could do was push the back of the shoe down on the sole. Boyce started telling me to just take his shoes instead, but I told him he couldn’t fit in my mine. Man, I really got my ankle rolling back and forth trying to get into that shoe with the knot, but I couldn’t, so I just walked out with my heel on the back of it, limping like some peg leg sailor who lost his leg from cutting bread.
I tried to listen to the birds as I walked but it was hard. Sometimes when I went with my father on one of his walks he would tell me to be quiet so he could hear the birds, even though they were extremely loud. Since I had often just come from having spent a weekend with my mother, I just assumed he wanted me to shut up. But maybe it was because he couldn’t hear the birds for all the noise in his head.
Eventually Boyce caught up to me in the van, and he wasn’t very happy. I tried to get him to understand that I didn’t do anything to that guy’s house, and that it could have been a coincidence. Or if he was determined to see a conspiracy, maybe Rachel's priest did it himself, undoubtedly right after he closed down his poisoned milk stand next to the elementary school. Boyce just kept saying I owed him big. I told him that’s fine, knowing he meant at the casino. When he dropped me off at my house he asked me if he could back the van into the camaro. I told him it was the least I could do and he put the van in reverse and rammed it with the van’s fender, right where it was roped on due to Janice’s mailbox. He got out and we both stared at the damage, which was actually minimal. It is a shame that the emotional abyss which comes to a man when his family’s welfare is in jeopardy cannot be soothed by slamming a van into an abandoned car. I told Boyce that I would need a week, and he said that’s fine, that he could use one, too.
