F. E. Mazur's "UNVISITED SPACES"

UNVISITED

SPACES

Watching one of the morning news shows, Ritchie Lee Whelan burst out laughing.

"Alison, you got to hear this!"

Alison Keene appeared from the bedroom, in a hurry.

"I'm running late for work, and there's a deposition first thing. I have to go."

"That Dr. Emily? She said if we find a tick on Churchill, we should take it to Dr. Bernice. You know, to check for that fruity disease?"

"Oh, those crazy New Yorkers," said Alison. "But that disease hasn't a thing to do with fruit, Ritchie."

"Don't I know that. It's not even spelled the same."

Last evening, while sitting on the front porch, the pair had picked off more than thirty ticks buried in the long coat of Ritchie Lee's red-haired mutt and deposited them in a jar half-filled with bleach. Some were already dead from the poison squeezed days before into the nape of the dog's neck, but there were others still alive who, in Ritchie's words, were "mapping out the territory of ol' Churchill's hide." Ritchie Lee wished he could run up the Bluegrass Parkway to the airport and hop a flight to some New York City medical clinic where he would drop the jar of the now whitened bloodsuckers onto the doctor's desk with a note that read, "Compliments of Dr. Emily and CBS."

"What are your plans for today?" asked Alison as she hunted the car key inside her purse. "Do you have any water deliveries scheduled? Or anything?"

"With last week's rain, just one. Jarboe's Mexican Hotel," said Ritchie Lee. "Then, when I get back, I thought I might start on those bookshelves you want."

"Oh, Ritchie, no. Don't do that. I've been thinking of something a little different from what I told you. I'm thinking bookshelves, yes, but now with maybe a cabinet or two underneath for the DVD and the rest."

"So?"

"You'll need a router more than ever."

"I could buy one."

"And you're planning to do this with those saws in your pickup?"

"I'll look around for a used table or miter saw. Dudes buy them all the time, thinking they'll build houses and do remodeling. Afterwards, the things sit around and rust."

"I really have to go," said Alison. "Yesterday they shut down a lane on the parkway and lowered the speed limit to forty-five to protect the workers. There were police watching, too." She pecked his lips with a perfunctory kiss.

Ritchie Lee went back to the television after she was gone, but Dr. Emily was off the air. Alison's own doctor would laugh when he told her the story about the ticks. Those folks living in New York couldn't resist their digs at the South. Mostly it showed up in commercials: "Pleeze pass the jelly!" But once in a while they made a mistake and showed themselves to be the bozo.

He stepped over to where she wanted the bookshelves and, taking his tape measure off the television, measured the dimensions for the tenth time, but he still didn't jot down the numbers. What's wrong with the bookshelves they had found at an absolute auction, he thought, and why not drive out to another Saturday auction and bid on a few more? No, she was insisting on shelves built right against the walls, floor to ceiling, with special platforms at the corner, where they would intersect, to display her grandmother's figurines. And now she wants cabinets! Ritchie Lee thought about this for a long time, unsure if wanting a cabinet and shelves was really what it was about. Or was she trying to make the project so complicated that he would give it up? He once told her that he would do anything for her. He had told this to a couple of other women, too, and he had meant it. With Alison, he wasn't so sure. Too often he felt she saw him as her parents did. Not that either ever said anything to his face, but it was written all over theirs. It was their daughter's house, she was paying the mortgage and the taxes, and they didn't like his living there scot-free, even though it was Alison's idea that he move in. ("Let's see if I can stand you all day everyday before discussing marriage," she'd said with a half-hearted laugh.) Anyway, it wasn't true, he wasn't a sponge, and that's what pissed him off. He worked when work was available, and he had already filled out applications at a dozen places, including GE in Louisville and Toyota in Georgetown; and the money he brought in, he spent freely on Alison and their needs. Hadn't he returned from Kroger's earlier this week with two hundred dollars worth of groceries? When he finished the water hauling this morning, he would hop in the pickup and head over to the Danville Lowe's and buy them a router and some bits. She probably thought having to use a router would prevent him from doing the project; this morning was the third time she'd mentioned the tool. She didn't want shelving with cleats for support, she'd said; she wanted the shelves to slide into the uprights. "What you want is a dado," he told her. He'd done a little reading on the subject, and that word dado had taken hold.

The truck for water hauling was an old Jimmy painted red, no shine. The cylindrical tank was black with matching no-shine, and was severely rusting on one end along the weld. A pair of thick chains and binders secured it to the truck frame. The tank's capacity was 2,400 gallons and the weight of the load tested the truck's engine and brakes, not to mention the driver's mettle, on every hill and holler. Ritchie Lee had purchased it off old Dick Robb, whose son told his father he wasn't interested in driving across people's lawns and filling their cisterns. But Ritchie Lee now thought he might have been bested, which was the reason he was searching for work elsewhere. The day following the exchange of Robb's title to the truck and Ritchie Lee's personal check, the weekly Sun appeared with the headline, "WATERLINE TO EXTEND TO ENTIRE COUNTY BEFORE YEAR'S END." And no time was being wasted. Along several roads he was already seeing the evidence, mile-long mounds of upturned clay and rock ribboning up and down the rolling terrain, as if some cartoony woodchuck, rather than a backhoe, were behind the digging, which meant it would all be finished in a mere few minutes, not several months, and folks would convert their cisterns into patios, while others, like Jarboe maybe, would turn their farmland into a trailer park.

He downshifted and rolled the truck to the rear of the Corner Store where the large overhead hose was hanging. He hoped the automatic mechanism was fixed; he didn't want to drive another twelve miles into Springfield for water. There was no money to be made if you were forced to do that.

He jumped down out of the truck and went inside to ask for quarters. That the young girl behind the counter accepted his two dollars told him the dispensing mechanism was repaired and he wouldn't have to go elsewhere.

From a booth in the rear Len Robb saw him, and the tall farm boy rose up out of it, a styrofoam coffee in hand. Ritchie Lee expected him to ask how things were going with the truck and the water hauling. Instead, Robb asked, "Have you heard about Carly?"

There was only one woman from the area named Carly, and Ritchie Lee had loved her very much.

"Carly? No. What about her?"

"She's missing."

"What do you mean?"

"It was on the news this morning. She went out jogging yesterday evening and never came back."

Jogging. That was a big part of the reason she had stopped seeing him. She would run almost every day for an hour or two, and she wanted him to run with her. But it wasn't in him. Running, jogging, or whatever people called it, it wasn't something he could make himself do.

"She never came back?"

"Do you know her husband?"

Ritchie Lee nodded. "Just to see him. Seems like a nice fellow."

"Well, according to him, she always ran up 53 a ways and then turned onto Biddle Ridge where there's no traffic and it's safer."

"Huh."

"Yeah, right," said Robb, frowning.

"That's all that's known?"

"That's all I've heard."

The girl behind the counter said, "There's more. It was just on the radio. They found tire tracks and some signs of where there may have been a struggle. Police think she might have been abducted."

Ritchie Lee watched Robb shake his head at the floor.

Outside, behind the store, he slipped the quarters into the slot and commenced to flood the black tank with chlorinated city water. As the level rose inside, the hollow sound of deep, dark metal lessened. Once the tank was full, he climbed back behind the wheel and headed up 53 toward the Jarboe farm and the Mexicans. When he reached Carly's house, he looked over, but it appeared silent, despite several SUVs and pickups filling the driveway. He moved his eyes from the road to the sloping sides beyond her property. But what was he hoping to find, he asked himself. He could think only the worst. Beautiful women never came out of these things alive. He wondered if at that very moment she was already dead. And why hadn't her husband been jogging with her? Didn't she tell him that a prerequisite a man intending to marry her must fulfill is that he exercise too?

At Biddle Ridge, he gazed down its narrow pavement, but made no move to turn off. She wouldn't be discovered along 53 and no one would find her on the side of Biddle Ridge either. If she were found at all, it would be somewhere else, where no one would expect. He drove on toward his delivery point, all the while thinking of her. She was a year and two months older than him. He remembered how soft her skin was. All this time--what, three years already?--and he could still feel her flesh as if the recollection wasn't one at all, but was real. It was one of the many things about her he had found fascinating. So much hard exercise, and yet so soft.

Going uphill, the truck strained, and the engine and transmission noise inside the cab was deafening. He turned onto a gravel road a mile before snaky route 53 met the parkway and followed it to the Jarboe farm. It was a warm spring morning, sunny, and a few redbuds still had a flower or two. He swung a wide turn alongside the trailer, then backed up to the cistern. Several Mexican men were outside and another opened the door upon his arrival. Inside he could see a woman and a young child. It was impossible to know how many lived in the trailer, which his buddies had nicknamed the Mexican Hotel, but it was understandable how Jarboe scheduled him to come out with a load every three or four days, more during dry spells.

None of the men spoke much English and he couldn't speak but a couple words of Spanish. When he listened to them talk among themselves, their language seemed like it was traveling at light speed. He wondered if they had their own brand of you know, or ah, or well. As a few moseyed over to watch him unload the water into the cistern, he thought of the joke he'd told Alison, how one day, when the world announced that people from all over the globe now spoke English, America would respond with "Sorry, we switched to Spanish." He thought that idea funny, but Alison wouldn't crack a smile.

He couldn't blame them for coming here. None of the politicians on their side of the border seemed to be doing much to make life better for them in their own country, and too many here didn't want to do the hard work anymore, like kill chickens and cut tobacco.

One of the younger men came closer and bent over to look into the bottom of the cistern as it was filling and the motley debris and decaying bugs were roiling the water. He carried a long ugly scar under his chin, and Ritchie Lee again thought of Carly and what might have happened to her. He knew what Alison would say to what he was thinking, but the fellow in Lexington who killed the boyfriend of a university co-ed a year ago was a migrant, and Jarboe certainly had not traveled down to the border to interview these people. He looked at each of the faces, and those that were friendly may have keyed into his thoughts, for their smiles disappeared. He ignored them after this, drained and recoiled the dispensing hose, replaced the cap on the concrete cistern, then drove off, the old truck grinding its way back toward 53.

As he returned to the house, Churchill raced out from behind the purple lilac that needed pruning, and attacked the truck's tires. They stepped together toward the front door of the house where the dog wanted to follow him inside.

Ritchie Lee said, "Not this time of year." Leaning over, he walked his fingers through the animal's coat, parting the hair at the follicles. A new army of the tiny bloodsuckers had assembled in and around the dog's ears and eyes, with others heading for the same destination. "How come they always party on your head, Churchill? How come they never show up on your ass?"

Inside, he saw by the DVD's digital clock that it was noon, which surprised him, and he clicked on the television to a Lexington station. This thing about Carly wasn't really setting in, and the story, as reported, offered nothing new to push him in any direction. He wished he could do something, but what? Others were already searching for her, the reason so many vehicles were present at her house, and the same reason he hadn't seen any faces. But it would be fruitless, he again told himself, and they all would soon give up, if they hadn't already, after learning of the tire tracks and the signs that Carly had fought with her attacker. He turned off the television and stared at the space where the bookshelves were to go.

Carly, in spite of drifting from her church, had remained spiritual the same as he, but it was otherwise with her family and friends; and Ritchie Lee was sure some of them were busy forming a prayer chain while he stood around thinking about an electric tool. It didn't seem right to go out on this day and purchase a router. But neither did he want to be available to receive their call. He wanted nothing to do with a prayer chain and holding hands with people he might not like. If he prayed, it would be silently and alone.

And realizing that praying was something he could do, he raised his head and offered up a brief one, but with little belief it would work. So then he offered another that he thought might possibly be successful, although it was really a kind of postscript to the first. Afterwards, he left the house to run the pickup over to Lowe's in the next county, throwing Churchill in the cab for company. But to avoid answering the phone he might better have stayed at the house and worked outside. At the huge home improvement store, the routers, each with its own special features, price, and rebate, were too much for him as he thought about an old girlfriend, and he was unable to reach a decision. To make the matter worse, another customer approached and informed him, almost in secret, that one of the store's competitors in Lexington would match the price, plus return the purchaser another ten percent. "You'd be foolish to buy it here," the man whispered to Ritchie Lee.

On the return trip he pulled the pickup into a McDonald's and shared a quarter-pounder with the dog. It was late afternoon when he was once again at Alison's, who returned from work not long after.

"You've heard about Carly?" she said after coming through the door.

He just nodded.

Aware that Ritchie Lee once dated the missing woman before her marriage to another man, Alison didn't know what else to say, so she disappeared into the bedroom to change into other clothes.

"I didn't buy the router," she listened to him report. "Churchill and I drove over to Danville and I looked at them, but I couldn't make up my mind."

She didn't offer an immediate response. Instead, she finished ridding herself of her work outfit and slid into jeans and a yellow boatneck.

When she again joined him in the front room, she said, "I'm glad you didn't buy the router. I have someone coming out in just a few minutes."

"Coming out? To do what? You've hired someone to build your bookshelves, haven't you? You don't think I can. That's what it is, isn't it?"

"Ritchie, I know you can build them. But it will take you much longer than it will Miguel."

"Miguel?"

"Miguel Lugo."

"You've hired a migrant? Well, I imagine cutting tobacco is a lot like cutting a dado," he said with deliberate sarcasm.

"Miguel is an American. He's lived in Kentucky nearly all his life and he speaks better English than most of us. What's more, Ritchie, he's a cabinetmaker. That's what he does for a living."

"Where did you find him?"

"He's a client. He's been working for someone else for years. Our office is doing the paperwork so he can incorporate and become his own employer."

They heard the vehicle on the gravel driveway and Alison went to the door to wait. A middle-aged man, who would have struck anyone immediately as a hard worker, stepped out of his truck and strode up the sidewalk while glancing at the property.

"This is a beautiful place you have," Miguel Lugo said to Alison when he was inside the house. She quickly made the introductions and Ritchie Lee extended a hand.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," said Lugo. "Now, where are these shelves to go, as I'm sure you both would like to relax after working all day?"

The question was addressed to Alison, but it was Ritchie Lee who answered.

"Right over there," he said. "They'll stretch from the window to the corner, and from there along the wall to the other window."

"But in the corner I want a few shelves to display some things other than books," explained Alison. "Things like crystal. And I want glass doors over them for protection while allowing them still to be viewed."

"You had mentioned cabinets this morning," said Lugo.

"Underneath," said Alison. "For the components. Maybe include the TV too."

Lugo ignored them as he studied the walls and the windows without taking a measurement. After a time, he moved his gaze to the other walls and also to locations nearer the center of the room.

"What's the matter?" inquired Ritchie Lee. "Are you thinking the shelves should be built elsewhere? Maybe leave that space where Alison wants them for something else?"

Lugo shook his head. "Along any wall is fine," he said. "It's all unvisited space. What I am looking for is a spot on the opposite side of the room for a smaller cabinet that will balance and pull everything together."

"Oh," said Alison, liking the idea of a second cabinet off by itself.

"'Unvisited space,' what's that mean?" Ritchie Lee asked, curious.

Lugo produced a measuring tape and returned to the location for the shelves.

"Come over here," he ordered them both. "Now look where you stopped," he said, pointing to their feet with the extended yellow tape. "You're each about a foot from the wall."

"So what?" said Ritchie Lee.

"There are places on the earth where no one has ever set foot," said Lugo. "The same is true of the insides of a house. No one ever walks closer than a foot or so from any wall without good reason." He reached out, grabbed Ritchie Lee by the upper arm, and pulled him next to the wallboard. "Ever find yourself standing here? I think not. Even when a person straightens a picture, they do it from a foot away."

Alison moved herself close to the wall, brushing it with a shoulder, to understand what Lugo was saying, and raised her eyebrows approvingly at Ritchie Lee who smiled back, even as he was thinking.

Ritchie Lee awoke before dawn and stepped about quietly. When Alison opened her eyes and realized he was not to be found anywhere inside the house, she concluded that he must have a very early delivery of water, until she looked out a window and saw the pickup was gone. Then she figured she must have misread his reaction to Miguel Lugo and that he was up at first light to find himself a router and a table saw so that he might begin work on her shelves before the cabinetmaker could even present her with a quote. Well so be it, she thought. If he wants to build them, I should stop interfering. She washed, dressed, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and left for the law offices in Lexington. About five miles up the parkway and beyond the lane closing, she flew her car over a rise and whizzed past the pickup on the side of the road. She slowed as fast as she could and pulled onto the shoulder about five hundred feet ahead. When traffic behind her was momentarily nowhere in sight, she gunned the car in reverse and backed along the shoulder to the truck. She thought maybe he was having engine trouble, or that the truck had run out of gas. Or maybe he'd had just too much coffee.

Ritchie Lee saw Alison get out of her car and walk to the pickup. He stood bent over in the middle of dozens of small cedars in a narrow gully below grade and five feet from the wire fence that marked the boundary of the parkway. The puzzlement on her face as she looked down at him was obvious. He waved her away, several times. Waved her to ignore him. To get herself to Lexington and the office. To just leave him be.

Reluctantly, Alison obeyed, although not immediately, and without ever saying a word she left, thinking she would find out after work what this was about. Then, as she sped off up the parkway and disappeared over the horizon, Ritchie Lee bent himself over further and spread apart the many small cedars here and there so that he might better see the ground beneath.

Except for the jogging, he knew that he would have done anything for her, if she had only given him the chance. This, now, was the least he could do, to visit this long narrow strip of land that went unnoticed and unvisited by everyday people, especially where heavy brush and foliage and out-of-sight ravines might hide a thing of interest. And while it crossed his mind that his actions would likely appear foolish to those same people, he couldn't help but wonder if Miguel Lugo's visit had been an answer to his prayer; and so ignoring the doubt, he promised he would look for Carly's body up and down the parkway all day if necessary, and tomorrow too.

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