Please Don't Go (4 page)

Poking out from the back of the house, just beyond the trellis, was the edge of a shiny glass greenhouse. Thick rolls of insulation were draping some of the inside of the structure, which Zephyr assumed was part of the winter preparation process that was so common for Mainers. It looked as though he had started to remove the protection, but not all the way; for every drop of sweat you shed in the fall was a dollar saved in heating through the stretchy dead winter.

Zephyr approached the door.

He pulled back on the brass knocker, releasing it with a thud against its rusty base. When he heard no sounds from inside the house, he knocked again, this time with his bare fist on the stark white door, its paint beginning to chip away in beefy slices around the quadrants of paned glass.

It was on the second knock that the door inched open, just enough so that Zephyr could see a glaring eyeball that studied him from foot to mane. “Who’s that?” the eyeball asked. Zephyr was surprised that the eyeball could speak with such clarity, given that it had no discernible mouth.

“
I’m from Richter’s, sir,” Zephyr replied to the shifty retina, lifting the bag of groceries in his hand to better meet the line of sight of Mr. Rattup... he could only assume that Rattup was the man behind the eye.

“
Well, that’s splendid. But you haven’t answered my question, boy. I asked
who
is at my door, not intentions or motives of said person, but
who
. I asked for nothing more than identification. Since I cannot recall ever making your acquaintance before, I deem it reasonable enough to start with the basics, do you not agree?” he shot back, a tone of agitation buttering his scratchy aged voice. “So let’s try this a second time. Who are you? And when I ask that question, I mean for you to
identify yourself
, in case you have never been asked such a thing in previous instances of your seemingly undignified life. This is how human beings greet one another.”

“
My name is Zephyr, Mr. Rattup. Pleased to meet you,” Zephyr replied, lying about the pleasure part. He was accustomed to such treatment in his daily work at the market, but he never felt anything better than garbage when spoken to in such a way. If it wasn’t a co-worker, it was a brash customer, seeming to have an air of entitlement about their very attendance in the store. Being addressed as
boy
was a lot more common than he would have liked to admit. This was most common in older folks that seemed to have not forgotten slavery, though now they applied the hateful term to all races, creeds, and ages.

The man at the door (Rattup?) snickered to himself, blinking his sliver of visible eyeball once, and then a second time, still the only feature of the man that Zephyr could detect through the slim fissure between the frame and door. It reminded him of the mechanical eyeball that greeted the droids outside of Jabba’s Palace in
Return of The Jedi
. Zephyr told himself that if Rattup swung open the door and revealed himself to be nothing more than a Cyclops, that he would run for his car and drop the groceries along the way. “What are you, some kind of hippie? What kind of name is that?
Zipper
? Was your silly mother a goddamned seamstress or something? Of all the names...” he trailed off, the eyeball disappearing and reappearing as the man shook his head from side to side.

Zephyr hung his head for a moment. It was a typical response from men and women of The Eyeball’s age, upon finding out that he was not only more than a
boy,
but that he had a name that did not fit their standard list of proper Christian names. They did not understand the world’s array of “goofy hippie names,” and explaining it to them was as difficult as speaking to a deaf mute. They would often stare at him with blank confusion, as though their cat had just died and they were not quite sure what to do next, always asking him to repeat the name...
louder, sonny
. “Well, I guess my parents were a bit free-spirited. In a way, they were hippies, but not like you would imagine. It’s not Zipper, it’s
Zephyr
. Zephyr was a Greek god, and it refers to a western wind,” he said to the man in the door, already preparing for the eventual confusion and conversational banter that would follow.

Wind? WIND? Did I break wind? And what did you say about God? God’s not Greek! He’s American.

“
You don’t think I know what a
zephyr
is? I know we just met, but do I look like a buffoon? I knew the word zephyr before you were even born, little hippie boy. You best watch your mouth around me,” The Eyeball warned in a huff, then changed the subject over to his requested grocery store booty, “Did you get everything I asked for, hippie? You get the toilet paper?”

“
Yes, sir,” Zephyr replied, resentful that the condescending curmudgeon had now settled upon calling him
little hippie boy
instead of his actual name, which was far easier to say than
little hippie boy
. He might have even preferred plain old
boy
to
little hippie boy
. “I picked up everything, just like your list said, to the letter.”

“
Good. Good. Three cans of black pearl olives? Sliced?”

“
Yes.”

The Man Who Must Be Rattup cleared his throat, squelching out a bumpy cough through the crack of the door. A bit of mucus landed on Zephyr’s left sneaker, but he chose not to address it just yet. He would be happy enough with completing his delivery and going home, of removing himself from the door of the frigid old bag of wind. Rattup asked, “Cough drops? You’ve got my lemon honey cough drops, right? I’ve got a nasty cough most of the year, and if I don’t have eight cough drops a day, I’ll drop dead, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?” In his brief description of his daily cough drop regiment, Zephyr found that his dislike for The Eyeball was growing, much like the little foam wrestlers he would buy as a
boy
, which grew to one hundred times the size when left in a watery fish bowl for three days.

“
Yep.” He hesitated, stumbling over his words, “I mean yes, I have your cough drops. And no, I don’t want you to drop dead.”
But that wouldn’t be so bad
, he thought to himself with a hidden grin.

The door swung open, almost popping the bags of groceries from Zephyr’s grasp. “Well, then get your hippie butt inside, my friend!” the man announced, throwing his hands out in a welcoming gesture, grinning wild and big like a madman who had just escaped a shackled padded cell. “Welcome to the Rattup home,” Mr. Rattup greeted, bowing with a polite moment of honor that Zephyr would not have expected from the cantankerous coot who had initially peeked his judgmental reddish eyeball through the door’s crack only minutes earlier. “Good sir,” he stated, pulling off to the side to allow Zephyr’s entry. “Please, enter.”

Zephyr stepped through the doorway, thankful that the man had two working eyeballs, after all. Those eyeballs stayed focused on Zephyr as he made laborious round trips back and forth to his vehicle. Rattup’s observant eyes looked as though they were tired (red and veiny), but they also had a deeper fabric of thought to them, like Zephyr imagined an old hound dog would have.

After retrieving from his car each of the five bags of food that had been requested, the gray-haired (balding in spots, but a fair amount of hair remained, sweeping back over his head in no particular pattern) Rattup thumbed through each bag, taking careful stock of his goods. “Excellent,” he whispered to himself after each item was inventoried from his shopping list. “You’ve done it,” he whispered, gazing at Zephyr and offering a thumbs up. “Success!” he belted, reaching across his Formica kitchen counter with a folded twenty dollar bill in his hand. “For you, good sir.” Zephyr took the gratuity with a pause, still unsure if the man had been putting on a ruse with his newly unearthed niceties. When he had the money in his grasp, Rattup did not pull it away, and so that eased Zephyr’s initial concerns to some degree. He pocketed the bill. It had already been earmarked for a past due rent payment, but he appreciated it all the same. It was a step towards financial freedom, though that stairway’s total height was immeasurable.

“
That’s too much,” Zephyr replied to the gratuity, but was grateful all the same.

“
A deserved tip for unfettered success. A bit more than I would tip for deliveries, more so than than the last grocer who made transport for me, but consider it a precursor to my asking that you stay for a spell. I don’t get that many visitors these days. Would you sit and have lunch with an old timer like me? I make a delicious hummus dip. Do you like pastrami, young man?” His snowy white eyebrow raised in anticipation.

Zephyr felt rushed into this proposition, a moment of frenzy without underlying purpose. “Well, I’ve got, ahhhh...” he stammered, searching his brain for a good excuse or believable ruse. He looked down at his cell phone, palmed in his hand, noting the time. Jackie would be waiting for him, but it would not hurt to give the man a moment or two of his time, given that he did not seem as harmful as he had perceived him from the onset. If he committed, there would be another healthy tip after his next delivery. A gift horse’s mouth was slapping open before him. “I guess, but I have to be really quick. And thanks, but I don’t eat pastrami. I don’t eat meat at all,” he replied, readying himself for another barrage of crotchety angst. Zephyr noticed that older people only hated one thing more than his unique “hippie” name, and that was his aversion to eating once-living animals. It roused a ferocity in some meat eaters that terrified him, as though his avoidance of meat was spitting in the eye of fervent carnivores. When
they
became wild-eyed about his nontraditional life choice, he often wondered to himself if he would eat
them
if they were a dinner option. They didn’t seem as harmless as a deer or a moose. “But the hummus sounds great,” he added a dab of honey to the top of his anti-meat statement.

“
Don’t eat meat?” Rattup queried, furrowing his brow. “Well, that is quite the interesting development. Don’t hear that very often. I’d like to hear all about it!” he shouted with great bravado, as though he was standing on a ledge in a Shakespeare tale, patting Zephyr’s shoulder with resounding approval. “Please find your way to my living room. I take all of my meals there. I have a delightful magazine collection that you are welcome to peruse. I will be along in a few minutes with our lunch. One pastrami on wheat with Dijon mustard for me, and extra hummus for the young vegetarian. Lemonades for both. I assume that vegetarians drink lemonade. There were no lemons killed in the making of this lemonade, I assure you,” he stated, chuckling at his own barb.

Zephyr could not help but feel comforted by the man’s warmth. The Eyeball had, in an instant, transformed himself into a three-dimensional being with a beating heart, as though through an act of magic. Though this baffling transition had confused Zephyr, it was welcome all the same, at the end of an otherwise pointless day.

4.

He scanned the aforementioned magazine collection, a majority of which were literary journals and culinary-focused periodicals. Instead of dabbling in the magazines, Zephyr opted to observe and analyze Rattup’s expansive library. Along each of the four walls of his den was an endless supply of books, a cornucopia that made Zephyr’s heart skip several beats in his chest. For as long as he could remember, nothing brought more joy to his soul than to be surrounded by books; at libraries, bookstores, or just sitting on the sofa with one propped on his lap. Rattup had a stash that went back to the early nineteen thirties. Some were torn and beaten, ragged and falling apart. Others were brand new, still holding that dreamy scent that a freshly printed novel could often deliver alongside its rosy or bitter prose. Some of the books in his collection even possessed Richter’s price tags, though Richter carried only the trashiest bits of what some would consider literature.

He ran his finger along the oak shelves, consisting of seven rows from floor to ceiling, the stretching storage only discontinued on occasion by one of the few dirty white-trimmed windows, splashing ugly blossoms of light on to the soiled orange carpet. Many of the books were familiar to him:
Moby Dick
by Herman Melville,
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare, a scanned recreation of Ireland’s epic
Book of Kells
,
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
by Betty Smith,
To Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee,
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley,
The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin,
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens,
The Shining
by Stephen King, a thin paperback translation of
The
Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka,
Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler, and the entire
Harry Potter
series. Scattered within the common titles were ones that Zephyr had never heard of in all his life:
A Spoonful of Sand
by Henry Teffers,
The Friends of Pancho Villa
by James Carlos Blake,
Tangled Up In Green
by Rodney Littlefield,
John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary
by John Ransom,
A Beast In Spring
by Jonah Gant,
Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and
Flatland
by Edwin A. Abbott.