Impossible Bottle
Craig Rodgers
At one time it was called a mansion. It would be called such still if not for its advanced decrepitude. A ruin, the bones of a place. Boards warped and bent hang loose in places and stone has come unmoored to fall to the grass where it has now lain for decades. The old house as years have gone on has slumped little by little into the awful embrace of time.
This once was grassland long ago trespassed by Spaniards and Frenchmen and Spaniards again. It was the lake and it was the woods to the north and it was the old house to the south. It was one, it was a whole. Now it is a grid of empty streets to the east and west, segments divided into weedy plots awaiting some fated unknown, places conceived but unborn, an undeveloped mirage of a parish with lanes named and blocks named and at the center point of this illusory suburb sits Lake Oriel.
A county road drags its line of new asphalt east to west. This artery cuts the landscape south of the lake and between the road and the lake sits the old house and its meandering driveway of dirt and rock. A car waits there, green, long, old.
Oscar Caulder sits in the passenger seat. The driver’s door is open and a bell pings over and over. The radio is off, the engine is humming. Oscar stares at a layer of dust on the dash. In time he opens his door.
Pebbles crunch as foot comes down. His pallor has grayed and his clothes do not fit the way they did two years prior, his frame slimmed, nearing sunken. Oscar looks at a fender painted the green of lime. Rust blooms in places. He looks at a slab of black marble housing a slot for mail. In lettering carved wide and deep the name LARUE runs along the stone’s side and beneath engraved in a diminutive cursive more easily felt than seen is the word Oriolum. He does not look at the LaRue house looming ahead beyond the drive.
Paul Caulder turns to his brother now standing alongside the car with his face turned away. He looks on at Oscar’s not looking. He does this for some time. When he’s ready he speaks.
“We can go in if you want.”
Oscar’s head comes around slow. He stares. He does not speak. Paul closes the driver’s door. He begins his walk to the house.
_____
The realtor drinks tea from a jar. He watches as Paul reads a page and turns it and reads another. When Paul asks why the price is what it is the realtor says the house is a teardown. Paul says it is an icon and the realtor scoffs, he snorts. He says it again.
“It’s a teardown. The only value is in the land or else it would’ve gone when the county sold off the rest.”
He drinks his tea. He says the woman who went there to die owned it but she never lived there. He says no one has lived there in ages. Paul begins signing his name.
“You’ll love the place.”
Paul looks up. He says to the realtor that he is not buying the LaRue house. He says his brother is the buyer. The realtor waits for more but there is no more. He asks if the brother should be signing then and Paul says he should not. He says his brother is unwell. Then he turns a page and signs his name again.
_____
There comes a hollow thud as the bolt recedes and the door is then opened. A place unsealed like a tomb after its unknowable eons. The house breathes.
Each footfall throws echoing clatter through rooms unseen. A cavernous vastness exists ahead. Paul approaches and then passes through this foyer to find himself in a hallway leading onward to a room lit by day some distance ahead. Dust stirs and dances in the quiet light.
Oscar pauses just inside the front door. Paul turns to look. Oscar’s eyes are closed and he is taking in deep breaths of this air untouched for so long but he does not find her in those breaths. Paul looks away.
A door to Paul’s right opens on a hall stretched and narrowed by the dark. He takes his phone from a pocket and shines a light to show the way but there is only rot and old wood and doors closed to him. Somewhere at his back footsteps climb stairs. Paul moves forward.
He enters a room bare on three walls with shelves floor to ceiling on the last, each space vacant, accentuating the loss of what once was here. A study, an office. Air tastes of mildew and something earthy. Everywhere dust. Painted walls have faded at every point save one square patch at head height where a painting once hung. The stomp of feet echoes in this place, marching, raining down from above. Paul returns to the hall. The next door opens on a closet and another leads to a room taken up by a table of thick and ancient wood but no chairs. Beyond this is another door and beyond this door is a kitchen with its wood-burning stove still in place. Paul opens the cast iron door and he closes it again. He is shouting to the footsteps overhead, he is saying we’ll get you set up, we’ll get the place furnished and utilities worked out. He says it needs a lot of work but it can be just how Evelyn wanted. He says your things are on the way. He opens a closet but there is nothing inside.
Paul does not sense the quiet and then he does. He doesn’t know how long it has been there. Back to the hall and up the stairs. Darkness thickens far from windows. He opens a door and there is nothing and he opens a door and there is a mattress. Paul stands staring. He closes the door. The quiet is unchanged.
Downstairs again and through dim halls and through the dining room with its table long and ancient and into the kitchen. Here there is a door and through this door is sun warm on skin and the clean air of day. Paul stands in the east yard.
Around the corner Paul comes to a veranda with floor made of stone cut from a quarry five thousand miles or more from this place. The wood of the ceiling has faded to gray. Oscar sits in a chair of bamboo woven and shaped, crude wicker. His ring finger is absent its earned ornamentation but the wristband from the institute still encircles one slender limb. He looks out past the veranda and past the north lawn at the lake beyond. A sign posted warns away those who would fish, those who would swim. Below these admonitions there is painted a bottle laid corked on its side. The sun glints on the glass of that bottle in such fine detail that it could be this sun on this day. Contained within the bottle there is a ship with three masts, the kind of ship built for voyages long and not always fruitful.
_____
The engine shuts off and the gurgling rumble of its living ends and in its place for a time is a minute ticking and nothing else. Then the movers are out of the cab, they are unlatching the cargo door in back which rolls up to reveal a darkened cave filled with boxes held shut by reams of tape. Three men haul boxes on dollies or by hand from the truck up the drive and through the LaRue house’s open front door. Each man wears jeans dog-eared from use and boots much the same and a shirt adorned with the logo of the company by which they are employed and no man of the three looks at Paul as they go about their work. A fourth man stands at the mouth of the cab door still open. He takes occasional sips from an overlarge cup with no writing, no label. He wears dress slacks and a white button-down with sleeves rolled to elbows. He takes a call and he looks at a watch. When the call has ended this foreman stands only watching, only sipping, his eyes turned to the monolithic facade of the old house with its crumbling spires and bleak stare. Paul steps near.
“Do I need to sign anything?”
The foreman does not turn and for a moment he says nothing. When he speaks he asks if Paul is the new owner.
“My brother is. His wife was a LaRue.”
The foreman is ignorant of the name and he does say so. Paul points to the black marble slab mailbox with its carved markings. He tells of a lake and of a ship found on that lake, a great three-mast seafaring vessel devoid of life and it three hundred miles from the sea with its Latin name written along its hull. He tells of a family raising a house from the remains of that great ship and claiming their holding the first of many of that time, their people arriving to claim those lands, to tame them. He tells of settlers fled or murdered in a conflict lost to memory and only the old house with its old family remaining when the Spaniards later came to make that land theirs. And so they did, all but the LaRue holding, which would pass heir to heir for three centuries until the last LaRue did go there to die.
The foreman considers all he’s just heard. He sips from his cup and he turns his eyes with some reluctance from the LaRue house. He says he’s heard this story told before, some details changed, some the same. He says it was a Spaniard who built the old house and a Frenchman who wrenched it from his custody but that Frenchman was not named LaRue. He says the house in the story is not this house at all but is a house far from this place and that the Frenchman’s family inhabits it still.
Paul listens as the foreman speaks and when the man falls quiet Paul says no, he shakes his head no. He says to the foreman that this story was told to him by his brother and by his brother’s wife before that. He says it is a story passed down heir to heir just as possession of the house is passed down through years and though some details may have faded or changed the underlying foundation has not, cannot. This is that house. This is their house.
The foreman regards Paul. He looks at the cup in his own hand and he looks to Paul again. He says it is possible for each story to be as true as the other. He says there are many Frenchmen and many houses. Then he climbs into the cab of the truck and shuts the door.
When the movers run out of boxes to carry they remove their heavy gloves and they load their dollies into the truck and they shut and latch the rear door and then they are in the truck and they are leaving.
The front door stands open and waiting. Paul does not shut it behind him as he enters the LaRue house and a band of sunlight follows him in. Boxes are stacked or piled against bare walls. Among their number one has been cut along the junction of its sides and its viscera spilled across the floor. Paul advances through foyer and along the entry hall past door and past stairs and under an archway that opens upon a sunroom lit with window after window on two sides, the north, the east. A cord trails in loops and unfurled lengths to connect to a phone ancient and blue and from the base set alone on the floor another cord spirals up to the handset Oscar has held to his ear. He turns in silence to look at Paul standing rigid in the entryway. A trembling of the empty hand. Quiet. He bends with agonizing slowness to set the handset back in its cradle.
“Who was that?”
“Did they go?”
“Oscar, who was on the phone?”
A moment passes as Oscar goes on staring and then he is turning and he is looking out the nearest window at the lawn and the lake and the day. The lake rests in a stillness that is absolute and the spread of sun along its surface does not shimmer or ripple but only sits reflected as if the lake were itself a window.
_____
They come to eat, they come to drink. Townies, tourists. Plates are festooned with rice or steak or smoked pork, a hodgepodge of regional flavors and simulacrums thereof. Walls are hung with photos from years gone by and maps brittle and faded, license plates nailed in place, the head of a cow. A letter of praise from a celebrity long dead is framed. Everywhere wood. A sign reads Caulder’s Rustic.
Paul moves between patrons eating or talking. He reaches a door unmarked by signage and this door he opens and here there are stairs that he climbs. Diner noise is diminished. The deep resonance of each step is the only sound. Upstairs he walks on carpet through a foyer and past an office to stand in an open doorway. Inside stands a woman addressing a table of men. Each of the seated is clothed in the casual dress of summer but one in full suit tailored to fit. She wears a sweater. When she sees Paul standing there she holds up a finger. He nods.
Down stairs and through lounge and Paul is stopping, he is speaking to the hostess.
“When Shelly comes down tell her I went over to the Cauldron.”
The hostess nods, she says okay.
Sidewalk traffic moves on its way. Paul passes windows looking in on shops; a coffee house filled with youth, a junk store offering keepsakes. Items decorated with ships-in-bottles line shelves, hang from racks. Shirts, mugs. A third window is set into a door and this Paul opens and the room he enters is a bar hall peopled by no one. He takes a seat at the bar. When the bartender comes in from a door in back Paul asks her for a beer. She brings a bottle frosted and smoking in the heat of the day. He opens the bottle and drinks and he does not pay. The bottle is emptied and another arrives and that bottle follows the first and as a third is being opened Shelly enters and she orders the same. A jukebox is lit but silent and the only sound is the hum of an air conditioner that is heard but not felt. They drink in the quiet for some time and then Paul is speaking, he is making his apologies for interrupting her meeting. She waves a hand.
“I was almost done anyway.”
“Well.”
They talk of business, of the restaurant and all that goes with it and they each call for another bottle. When the talk lulls and his courage has come on he reaches into a pocket and comes up with an envelope. From the envelope he takes a page and this he unfolds and stares at as if he is unsure of what he holds. Then he is flattening the page on the bar and pointing out numbers, some among many. Dates, amounts. A bank statement. He asks her if she is drawing on Oscar’s account. The look she turns to Paul is one of pity.
“I can put money in, not take it out. I take care of the business, you take care of him. That was the deal.”
She drinks down her beer and she sits a moment and then she speaks again.
“Maybe he’s being blackmailed.”
Paul looks at Shelly. He looks back at the page on the bar. He says to her blackmailed for what. She shrugs.
More beers are brought but she is glancing at the door, she’s watching the clock above the bar. Her mind is miles from this place when Paul tells her someone came to visit Oscar at the institute. She has little interest in the answer when she asks who. Paul tells her he does not know. He says it again.
“I don’t know.”
He says to her you should come see him. He says he’s your brother too.
“Paul, that’s not our brother.”
Paul stares. She says to him that man is a ghost and that house is a ghost and the two belong together.
_____
He strains in the stillness but the words have no shape, are a formless hum in the sunroom ahead. Paul stands and he listens but he cannot make out what is being said. When the sound has ended and the soft brush of the phone being laid in its cradle has gone by Paul steps into the room. He says to Oscar he wants to know who he was talking to and Oscar says nothing and he tells Oscar the lumber will be here any minute. He says the tiling will be here, and the stone for the walk. He waits. Oscar nods or Paul thinks he does.
“You haven’t asked about the restaurant.”
Oscar stares and he waits. Paul wipes hands on pants. He says Shelly has been looking after things since Oscar’s been away. He says she’s got franchises in three states now. It’s good, he says. It’s going good. He says she wants Oscar to run the flagship when he’s ready. He says she calls the restaurant the flagship now.
Oscar watches Paul. When he speaks he says she can have it. He says that’s how Mom wanted it anyway.
“Oscar, she has it. She can have it? She does.”
Oscar sits without response. Paul wipes hands again. He takes in hand a box and moves it across the room to join others of its like. He says to Oscar your share is still yours. He says we’ll have our own line of sauces soon.
A knock comes and Paul turns and he’s moving, he’s leaving the light of the sunroom to traverse the darkened hall and arrive at the door closed to the day. Light pours in as Paul pulls the front door open and there stands a man with a tablet and the need for a signature. Paul signs and he directs the man to the east yard to the spot where the lumber is to be laid. Men exit a truck parked in the drive and they spread a tarp across the ground indicated and then they are fetching stacks of planks that begin to accumulate as Paul looks on. The man with the tablet scrolls through lines of words on his screen.
“You’re gonna need a lot more wood if you’re doing the whole thing.”
“It’s just a start. “
“What about the old?”
“What about it?”
“You can’t dump it.”
“Are you wanting it?”
“This place is a landmark. You can’t get rid of it.”
Paul asks the man what he would do with it but the man shakes his head.
A field as yet unmarred runs to the lake’s eastern lip where the streets of an unbuilt world begin to appear. Among that paved grid a man is walking. He is a line in the distance, an indistinct collection of movement. Paul looks on. Men stack wood in slow accumulation and the man with his tablet studies something found there and when Paul heads off into the unkempt grasses no one much seems to mind.
He steps from the field onto a road leading nowhere. The man standing some distance ahead has resolved features that he turns Paul’s way only long enough to nod before returning his attention to a sign held by a rusting pole driven into undeveloped ground. Paul moves near.
The man’s suit hangs loose. Gray cloth cut some time ago. He stands with hands in pockets and he turns again to Paul.
“You an investor?”
Paul says he is not. He says an investor in what. The man retrieves a hand from a pocket to point at the sign. Age shows where print has faded, corners fray. Ogden Development Group. Paul again says he is not an investor.
“You lucked out.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
Paul gestures at the sign. The man says he did indeed invest and what he lost on his investment is so much more than money. He says he lost time and he says he lost face. He lost potential and that is everything. He says to Paul his name is Ogden Mallory and this is his great work. A naked bitterness colors his every word but if Paul notices it does not show. Paul is pointing across the way where men have gone and a truck has gone and in a field sits a pile of wood atop a tarp and beneath a second tarp pulled across to cover the stack and where Oscar stands in lawn staring out at a lake whose stillness is absolute.
“There’s mine.”
“The house?”
“My brother.”
Paul talks of Oscar and of Evelyn and of the life they were supposed to have. He talks of her coming to this place for months under the guise of renovations she never began. He says to this stranger things he should not say.
Ogden nods along to this progressing opera, and when it comes to Evelyn’s death the story falters and halts though there is still much unsaid. Into the quiet Ogden speaks.
“My uncle walked into the lake.”
“What?”
“Really he ran off to God knows where. When I was a kid. But that was the story we told, my brothers and me. He walked into the lake and that was that.”
_____
He’s making a list; paint, nails, more. Paul reads back his words and he adds items and he reads it back again. When the footsteps begin he lays the list in his lap and looks to the ceiling. He closes his eyes and pictures each room through which they move. He imagines the renovations needed in each. In time his eyes open and return to the list. He considers. He adds to the list. Lacquer.
The ring of the phone is a bark in the room. The pounding of feet above has stopped. There is a chill, a shudder underneath the skin. Paul stares as the phone rings again. He touches the handset and he feels the vibration of that ring. That hand lingers there. The ringing stops. He picks up the phone and he listens to a dial tone. There is a beat and there is nothing. He goes on holding the handset to his ear a moment longer. Somewhere above the footsteps start again.
_____
It is sawdust and it is turpentine. These smells Paul breathes in. He pushes a cart of yellow plastic along aisles, shoes tapping on tile ancient and cracking. He follows his list and he fills his cart and he ignores the looks, he ignores the talk. The gossip. They say he killed her, that he snapped and he had to be locked up. They say he shouldn’t be out there in that house, her house. They say it’s obscene. They say he should be locked up still.
_____
Wood gives with a satisfying snap. The hammer drops and Paul uses only gloved hands to pry the board from the house’s flank. When that one is free he takes up the hammer and does another and then another. The wound opens and spreads and the work goes on. In time he steps back. He examines the maw he’s created. He steps close again and he eyes beams and he sniffs for rot. When he is satisfied he drags fresh planks over and he takes one up and nails it into place.
_____
He hears a pounding. A steady thump of impact and then a break and silence and then it comes again. Paul blinks in the dark. He throws back sheets of his makeshift bed and rolls onto a floor cold with night. The pounding stops again. Paul stands, he stretches. Joints pop in the quiet. He crosses the bedroom, the flooring done in new tile. He looks out and down and Oscar is there, he is shaping old wood to a purpose all his own. Light spilling from a downstairs window shows his way. His pounding resumes. Paul makes his way back to bed.
Paul thinks he is still awake when the phone begins to ring. His eyes do not open and the world remains untethered, intangible in its impossible black but he does not believe this is a dream. He listens as the ringing stops. He listens to the voice, its edges rounded by walls. He cannot touch the words but he goes on listening for some time.
_____
Days and nights and days. Swaths of old are repaired or rebuilt, replaced with the new. The pile of rotted past grows and from among this Oscar draws the pieces he employs for his chosen toil. Paul continues his work.
The phone rings. Oscar goes into the house and the ringing stops.
There is no plan. The renovations are a chaos, a patchwork of progress inside and out that in its own time begins to show its positive results. The dead layers are shed and in their place something new comes to be.
The phone calls to Oscar and he goes to it.
His own work begins to take shape and the shape it takes is a raft, a canoe. He slathers epoxy and bends wood and the craft in time becomes whole. He studies its details up close and from distance and he adds layers of glue. Its stink is caustic and sweet. He sits in the sun as it dries.
Paul stands among the refuse of his doings. He wipes a brow beaded with sweat and he looks at the world around him. He looks at his brother and at the wristband he wears.
“You still have that on.”
Oscar turns his face from the lake where his eyes have been pulled, as they so often are. He looks to his brother and he looks at his own wrist and he looks at his brother again as if he is unsure what he’s found there.
“Yeah.”
He nods and he looks at it again and he goes on.
“I got used to it. You know. You get so used to the idea of a thing telling you how things are that after a while you forget to wonder if it’s right.”
His eyes search the day so bright, a hard and endless blue above and the house undergoing its metamorphosis and Paul haggard but vital and the lake and the world. He turns to the boat before him. He is silent and then he is not.
“I miss her.”
“I know you do.”
“She wasn’t in her right mind at the end. The things she was doing, coming out here, that wasn’t her. She’d been sick so long.”
His words fall off. He turns from the boat to the lake and when he turns back it is as if he’s said nothing at all.
There comes a rumbling some distance off. When over the rise there appears a truck it is followed by another and another and as they are making their way to the empty streets of a world unborn and as they are unloading men in thick boots with the tools of a builder trade there follows trailers hauling oversized equipment for use on the work of something new to become.
_____
It is any hour between when the sun has gone and will come again. The silence is complete, there is no sound in this world. Paul enters the sunroom on bare feet. He sighs or he yawns. He watches as beyond that wall of windows Oscar gets his feet under him. Oscar dusts his knees and he is not wearing the institute wristband. On his ring finger he wears his wedding band. The phone begins to ring. Oscar does not turn. Paul looks at the phone and he looks at Oscar. Oscar takes boards cut to the shape of oars and these he throws into the mouth of his creation which he grabs onto and drags to make his slow way to the place where lake meets land. He gets in, he rows. At the lake’s middle he stops and he sits. Nothing moves. There is no sound. He leans to look over the side, to look down into the lake. In all directions stars surround as if the sky itself has been shattered and its shards now strewn across the lake face are the only light left in the world. Paul picks up the phone.
Craig Rodgers is the author of Doing Time, One More Number, Francis Top’s Grand Design, and The Ghost of Mile 43.
