THE FURNACE MAN, 1990
Nate’s red hair was carefully tucked under his orange Furnace Man cap. Working five days a week, he was getting meaner with each furnace or boiler he installed. He didn’t like this meanness and told himself he needed to change.
In late October, Nate was in an old house with an unfinished basement. Most basements had block walls, but this one had cement shelf walls that were smaller than the actual house. A two-foot crawl space was all around it. Some places he enjoyed working in, but this wasn’t one of them. It was filthy.
Roxie, the woman of the house, was downright lazy. She reminded him of Babs, his wife, but Babs wasn’t that bad. Roxie sat on the couch and watched TV and smoked when she could have been picking up things. He wanted to tell her that if she picked up ten items a day, she could have the clutter removed in two weeks. A stickler for cleanliness, he and Babs had many fights about it. Babs didn’t mind leaving a basket of clean clothes in the front hall for a day or dishes in the sink from breakfast and lunch until after dinner when he would do all of them. No way. He said it would take less time to wash those dishes at 8:00 and noon because the food wouldn’t have dried, but she never listened to him. When he got home each day, he ended up cleaning for an hour or more just so he could relax in the evening.
*
Nate stood on a stepladder, his head up in the crawl space, installing a hot water pipe for the new boiler when he saw movement. The damp earth reeked of rot and decay. He waited a second to see if he’d spot it or hear it. And then he saw movement again, but he didn’t shine his flashlight back there.
“Ralph, come here,” he yelled to his buddy who was working on the Munchkin boiler.
Ralph, twenty years younger, walked in slowly.
“See if you see something.”
Ralph was the tough guy. He lifted weights on weekends. So when Ralph stepped up on the ladder that Nate had just stepped down from, he pulled his light from his belt and nonchalantly shined it in there.
“Goddamn!” He jerked his head away and jumped down. His face was white beneath his dark stubble.
“What is it?”
“Hell, it’s a snake and a damn big one,” said Ralph.
“What kind?” asked Nate.
“Damned if I know.”
Nate took off upstairs. In the kitchen, he stepped over shoes, newspapers, a banana peel, a bucket of overripe tomatoes, and a bowl with a few Cheerios and milk, like it had been left for a cat. He walked into the living room where Roxie was watching the shopping channel in her long-sleeved t-shirt. “Ma’am, did your kids ever have pets?”
She looked up and laughed. “Yup, gerbils, bunnies, kittens, salamanders, but they don’t last.”
“What do you mean?”
“They disappear. Run away, I guess.”
“Ever have a snake?”
She wrote down a number on the back of a Women’s Day magazine. He saw a desk phone under some other magazines. “Yup, a few years ago but it got away, too.”
“What kind was it?”
She looked up and said, “I don’t know. They got it from a friend.”
“I think we found it. There’s a snake in the crawl space.”
“What do you want me to do about it? That’s your job. You get it.”
He wanted to wring her neck, but he walked away and went to his truck to get the new mobile phone which Mick, his boss, had spent too much money on.
He sat in the driver’s seat and talked to Mick. “I’m not going back there until it’s gone.” He didn’t tell him that he was deathly afraid of them. When he was eighteen, working on a ranch by Laramie, he’d pulled a bale from the baler and when he was lifting it to the stack, a rattler in the bale sprang. He got bit on the right cheek and had to be taken to the hospital. He was deathly sick and his face was swollen for days with a closed right eye, and he wouldn’t bale again and couldn’t take a step in any field without getting the shakes. After that, he took a job working inside, at a creamery.
Nate and Ralph took an early lunch break. They stopped at the branch library and went to the encyclopedias. Nate turned to snakes. There were colored pictures of all kinds of them.
“It had yellow on it,” said Ralph, standing above Nate at the table.
“Let’s see. It could be a timber rattler or a Bull or a boa.” Nate ran his fingers down the page of pictures. “I didn’t hear any rattle; did you?” asked Nate.
“Nope, but it smelled,” said Ralph.
“And it was big. Look at this.” Nate pointed to the picture of the boa. “It says it can grow to 11 feet.”
“But how the hell can it live down there? What does it eat?” asked Ralph.
*
At 1:00, Mick arrived to check on their progress. When he climbed the stepladder and turned his high-powered flashlight on it, he gasped and scurried down the ladder. His face was beaded with sweat.
Roxie came down the steps. “What’s with you chickenshits?” she asked. “I want this furnace done today. It’s supposed to freeze tonight.”
“Ma’am, it won’t be done today,” said Nate.
“Do I have to call your boss and report you guys?” she asked.
Mick spoke up. “I’m the boss and I don’t want my men in danger. We don’t know if it’s poisonous.”
“Dammitt, it’s just a snake.”
“Why don’t you come here and look for it yourself,” Nate said. He motioned for her to use the stepladder.
But she walked backward up the steps and said, “I have to pick up the boys at school and take them to soccer practice. But I’ll be back in two hours and I want this done and this mess cleaned up.” She slammed the basement door on her way out.
Mick looked at them and said, “We have too many other jobs waiting for us so we can’t delay with this one. Do whatever you need to to get it out of there.”
When Ralph and Nate heard her car start up and back out, they headed upstairs and out to the truck. Nate grabbed a drill and saber saw from his toolbox and returned to the bedroom where so many clothes littered the floor that he couldn’t see the pattern on the linoleum. And it smelled of sweat and dirty underwear and old sex.
He went into the closet and pushed shoes and clothes out of the way and cleared a spot. He drilled four holes in a square, and he took the thin-bladed saw and cut out a six-inch-by-six-inch square. Then he drove to the Humane Society and picked out a mid-sized white rabbit. It was soft, and he thought it a shame to do this to it, but he had to. He put the rabbit near the hole and closed the closet door. He waited outside the door, listening, but nothing happened. It was nearly 5:00. When he heard her car drive in, he made sure the closet door was shut, packed up his tools, and went out the back door.
The next morning, she was waiting for him on the porch when he and Ralph drove up. “What’s with the damn hole?” she asked. “You’re wrecking my house and I’m going to sue your ass.”
He nodded toward her in her stained flannel bathrobe.
“Is the rabbit still there?” he asked. Ralph followed him.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
As soon as he walked into the bedroom and saw the open closet door and no rabbit, he felt shaky.
“Damnation,” Ralph hissed.
Both began looking above them and around them and when they didn’t see anything, they moved toward the basement.
“You go first,” said Ralph to Nate.
Nate didn’t know why but he zipped up his hooded sweatshirt and pulled his hood up over his cap. He started down the steps and stopped to make sure Ralph was behind him.
They both kept looking around.
“Do you want to check?” Nate asked Ralph.
“No way,” said Ralph. “You’re my boss so you have to do it.”
“You stay right here,” said Nate. He climbed the stepladder and flicked on his light.
There was nothing but a large hollowed-out cave. And when he shined the light along the rest of the crawlspace on that side of the house, he saw nothing but dirt.
“Well?” asked Ralph.
“It’s not here,” said Nate.
Ralph snorted and pointed above them. “I bet it’s up there still.”
“Could be,” said Nate, but he wasn’t sure this was better. At least he knew where the snake was when it was in that crawl space. Now he would be looking above him and over his shoulder all day.
“Let’s get this done so we can get out of here,” said Ralph. He walked to the Munchkin on the other side of the stairs and opened his toolbox.
An hour later when Nate heard screams from upstairs, he felt better. She’d spotted it. He ran up the stairs, closed the basement door, and hooked it shut. He shoved his sweatshirt underneath it. He ran downstairs and pushed the stepladder over to the hole in the ceiling. He covered it with a small piece of plywood and began pounding the nails in it.
When it was covered, he heard another scream and then pounding on the basement door. “Get up here and help me.”
He went to the bottom of the stairs and listened to her crying. He felt bad. He wanted to get that blasted boiler installed but he couldn’t do it.
“You’re not going up there, are you?” Ralph whispered.
“Don’t want to but have to.”
“Why?”
“Cause it’s the right thing to do.”
She was pounding again. “It’s moving.”
Nate stomped up the stairs.
“Come on, Ralph,” he said. “We got to do this. We’re never going to get anything done until it’s dealt with.”
Ralph was behind him when Nate unhooked the lock. In that moment she had swung open the door and he could see her tears and wild eyes.
She was squeezing herself past them and going down the steps.
“Where is it?” Nate asked.
“In there,” she pointed to the living room. “I saw it moving under the clothes. It went behind the couch.”
“Ma’am, if you go down that basement and hide, then we’re never going to get it or the furnace done.”
Ralph said, “How the hell we going to find it in this dump?”
“Don’t call it a dump,” she said.
“What is it then? I don’t know how your hubby can stand it when he comes home at night.”
“He doesn’t come home anymore. He left a month ago. Moved out.” Then she started crying again.
“We’re sorry about that. But we have to deal with this snake.”
Nate felt around his back pocket and pulled out a card from the Humane Society. He’d worn the same pair of pants from yesterday. “I’m calling them to get the number of animal control. They’ll get it.”
The three of them stood by the basement door while Nate dialed on his new-fangled phone, the size of a small brick. He’d only used it a few times. He pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket and put the card on Ralph’s back. “Don’t move,” he said. Then he dialed that number.
After he had given them the address, he added, “Get out here fast. It’s a big snake. Inside a house. There are little kids here.” He hung up.
“There aren’t any little kids,” said Ralph.
“Okay. I lied. We need them to get here fast.”
“Well, my boys are sort of little,” Roxie said. “Eight and ten.”
Nate led the way to the door of the living room. The floor was covered in clothes and food wrappers. “Wait. I’m going downstairs to grab three garbage bags from my toolbox.” He always carried bags for cleanup. They had a reputation for cleaning up their messes after installing a furnace or boiler.
He came up the stairs with a large black bag. Ralph and Roxie had inched closer to the basement door.
“Okay. We’re going in there together to clean up. Animal Control needs to see where it is.”
The three of them moved together. They were so close that Nate could smell Roxie’s sweat. Nate leaned over and grabbed a Pop-Tart box and Pringles container. Ralph grabbed a newspaper. Roxie reached for a Big Gulp plastic cup.
“Come on. We have to move faster.”
Nate moved ahead to the coffee table and reached for the dirty cups, cereal bowls and plates crusted with dried mac and cheese. He tossed them into the sack.
“What are you doing? Those are good dishes,” said Roxie.
“You can dig them out later,” he said. “I want to see the top of this table.” He put the bag at the end of the table and scraped everything into it.
Ralph had moved ahead and was grabbing dirty t-shirts and towels and socks. Roxie reached for a paperback and tucked it under her arm.
“Get a broom,” said Nate.
“It’s in the kitchen,” said Roxie.
He lifted the empty coffee table onto the couch with a balled-up orange Afghan. He and Ralph began grabbing what was underneath the table. Roxie picked up a purple bra from the floor and tossed it into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. Nate swept up a pile of junk and Roxie used a magazine as a dustpan to pick it up.
They were moving toward the recliner when the snake slipped out from behind the couch. Roxie screamed. “There,” she said, jumping onto the recliner. Nate and Ralph backed up to the front door as they watched it crawl toward the kitchen.
“Is that stove a gas one?” Ralph asked.
Roxie nodded.
“I bet it’s going toward the pilot light. Snakes like heat.”
“Don’t stop cleaning,” said Nate. And he reached for the half-full basket and began stuffing other clothes into it.
“Those were clean,” she said.
“Not anymore.”
Ralph lifted an orange Big Wheels, opened the front door, and tossed it. He grabbed the Fisher Price castle and pirate ship and a broken racket and tossed that out.
“Hey,” she called, still on the recliner. “My kids still play with those.”
“I don’t know how the hell they can play in this goddamn mess,” Ralph snipped.
Nate looked up at her still on the recliner. She was tearing up again. He thought she wouldn’t look too bad if she’d brush her hair out of her eyes.
“It just got this way since he left us.”
“Well, I can see why he left,” snapped Ralph.
“That’s enough,” Nate said to Ralph. Nate swept up another pile of junk. He had put on his work gloves. He shoved more newspapers into the almost full bag. The beat-up wood floor was almost bare.
Animal Control drove up and two men in navy blue jumpsuits came to the front door.
The heavier one carried a long pole with a hook in his hands. “Where is it?” he asked.
Nate pointed toward the kitchen.
“Behind the stove,” said Nate.
“Well, you’d better clear us a path,” said the skinnier one.
Ralph moaned. “Goddamn, I’m not a house cleaner.”
Nate took the broom and began sweeping a path with the two jump-suited men following. The snake’s tail poked out from behind the stove.
The two guys headed to the other side of the stove and motioned for Nate and Ralph to pull the stove away from the wall. On a nod from the guy with the pole, they pulled the stove out, sending an empty fry pan to the floor.
“Come here, boy,” said the skinnier one.
Nate watched the other one maneuver his pole. Soon he had the snake’s head on the hook. When he dragged it out, it was six or seven feet and there was a huge lump where the undigested rabbit was probably lodged.
The other guy lifted the end of the snake, and they carried it through the living room and out to the truck.
Roxie broke down and sat on a kitchen chair. “Oh my, it’s huge,” she mumbled. She turned to Nate and touched his arm. “Thanks.”
Nate did something he shouldn’t have but he wanted to do. He pulled another bag from his back pocket and swiped everything on the table into it. It was bare except for dried milk and pieces of Fruit Loops. “Okay. I feel better. Now let’s get this damn furnace done. It’s cold in here.”
While they worked downstairs, Nate heard sweeping upstairs. Two hours later he smelled something cooking. She walked downstairs with a paper plate with ten cookies on it. She had changed into a clean t-shirt and her hair was brushed back into a ponytail. He thought he smelled perfume.
Nate nodded. He wanted to say, I’m not eating anything made in your kitchen, but he didn’t. He kept working, trying to ignore her.
“They’re refrigerated ones. Pillsbury. I just slice them and put them on a cookie sheet. And I washed it and the knife.” She set the plate on the Munchkin boiler and stood back while he nervously looked at them, but did not take one.
She huffed and ran upstairs and returned with a greasy sheet and the plastic Pillsbury wrapping. “See.”
He touched the pan and said, “Okay. It looks sort of clean.”
The heat would probably kill the germs anyway. He took the thinnest one and ate it. It wasn’t bad so he took another one.
She stood and watched him.
“Thanks. I’m sorry about worrying about things being clean. I’m a neat freak and my wife isn’t. We fight all the time.”
She looked at him. “Maybe if you’d be sweeter to her then she’d do more. A woman wants to know she’s loved. That’s all.”
“So your hubby didn’t love you?”
“He had a girlfriend. He spent all his time at her place but came home and wanted me to put out for him, too.”
“Well, he’s a jerk. I don’t have affairs and Babs knows it.”
“But you might not make her feel she’s appreciated, you know.”
“I clean the house. That shows it.”
“No, it’s not enough. You need to buy her some chocolates,” she said.
He ate his fifth cookie. They were good. “Hell, she’s always on a diet.”
“Well, rub her feet. I make my boys rub mine. It feels so good.”
“I’ll think about it.”
When they left at 5:30, the kitchen floor was bare. She had washed up the dishes that she’d rescued. They were drying in the yellow plastic drainer. He wanted to dry them and put them away, but he held off.
The boiler was working. The house was warming up. Her boys were on the couch. The orange afghan on the back of the sofa was folded. The floor and the end table were clean.
*
That night, after he’d washed and dried the dishes, Nate went into the living room. Babs was watching TV. He sat down at the end of the couch and lifted her feet. He rubbed one foot. She looked at him strangely. “What are you doing?”
“Massaging your feet.”
“Why?”
“So you feel appreciated.”
She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t pull away. She lay back on her pillow and seemed to enjoy his fingers rubbing her instep.
TRICIA CURRANS-SHEEHAN is the author of The Egg Lady, The River Road, and co-author of a trilogy, Deep Skin. She was the editor of The Briar Cliff Review until 2023. Currans-Sheehan has published stories in VQR, Connecticut Review, South Dakota Review, Puerto del Sol, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Fiction, and other journals.
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