The Visitors

ALSO BY PATRICK O’KEEFFE

The Hill Road

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Patrick O’Keeffe

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

O’Keeffe, Patrick, 1963–

The visitors / Patrick O’Keeffe.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-698-15135-2

1. Irish—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6115.K44V57 2014

823'.92—dc23

2013036972

Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Tom and Kathy Zeller

Seven years ago, near the end of July 2000, was the first time he appeared at the screen door. Two weeks earlier I passed him on a sidewalk three streets over, and the week before, he was sitting beside the homeless on their bench outside the post office, and two nights before, I saw him on Main Street. A street festival was ending. I was out for a walk. He was staring into a brimming trash can, and his face was close to its mouth.

That one-room flat on West Washington Street was an overhauled garage that jutted out the back of an old brick house. There were three bigger apartments in front, but I had my own door. Outside it was a small yard, evergreens at the back, maples on both sides, and during the summer months I kept my door open and the screen door hooked until bedtime.

It was around ten. Wednesday night. The window above the futon bed was open, and I heard footsteps on the gravel. I was sitting in the armchair, the music was on, and I stood quickly, turned it down, and glanced about for anything unsightly. Then I stood at the screen door and switched the outside light on.

—An old lady lying in the middle of your street, he said.

He was lanky, about four inches taller than me, and somewhere in his fifties. A few top teeth were gone. His face was speckled and sunburned, and he wore a baseball cap. I knew enough about the game to know that the team with the feathers is the Cleveland Indians.

I stepped back from the screen door.

—In the middle of the street, he said.

He pressed his hands flat against the screen. The frame creaked. A moth spun around his cap.

—In front of your building, he said.

Then he turned and ran.

A few minutes later I was standing under the maple whose roots had cracked the sidewalk. He was a few feet away. No old woman was lying in the street.

—So, right there, man, I said, and nodded at the street.

—Seen her, man. Coming back from the park, he said.

Before me two new Hondas were parked, like every other night. Across the street shades and curtains were drawn and porches were dark.

—Wearing white sneakers and a bathrobe, he said. —Got down and asked if she was okay. Said she needed to get up or a car would smash her. Old lady’s eyes were closed. She said nothing.

I didn’t say a word, nor look at him, when I crossed the street to the other footpath and looked up and down, with my back to him and the street. An elderly woman lived in a white two-story near the corner. In the evenings she sat on her porch, on a white plastic chair with a red cushion. She rested her feet on an old wooden soda crate and watched the street traffic and the fit young couples strolling the sidewalk, pushing their baby or two in pricey strollers. I walked down the footpath and crossed over, but right before I reached her house I was stalled by a dark stream shining across the footpath and vanishing down a gully. I thought that stream was blood red, though seconds later I was standing in the clearest water and listening to the seductive hiss of a sprinkler.

Earlier I’d smoked weed. And I was drinking red wine. The weed I got from a young mother at the bakery where I worked five or six mornings a week. My shift ended around noon, and when classes were in session, I drove to my apartment, washed, changed clothes, and walked to campus. That car was a rusted-out blue two-door Toyota
Tercel hatchback. It had a
FREE TIBET
sticker on the back bumper. I’d purchased the car very cheaply from a thirty-four-year-old graduate student whose parents had bought him a new one as a lure to finish the dissertation he’d been working on for eight years. Before the Tercel, I had a 1972 Chevrolet Camaro. My friend Brendan and I drove it from Boston to this university town in Michigan.

The old woman’s house was in darkness. In her yard, like in others, were a few election posters. Her white plastic chair shone in the light from a streetlamp. The cushion was gone, but the crate was there. On the walk back, I knelt and looked underneath a few cars and petted one of the neighborhood cats. I was feeling good. Weed and wine, of course, a warm July night, maples in full leaf, the trill of the cicadas, and I dallied, hoping the stranger would have vanished, but there I was, standing in the street before him, staring up at the sunburned face lit by a streetlight. His shirt was buttoned to the neck. The sleeves covered his hands, and the unbuttoned cuffs flopped like Beethoven’s. A shabby-looking backpack rested upon his left foot.

—Old lady, she was right there, he said.

He pointed to the street. I half-turned from him.

—I don’t doubt that she was, I said.

—Looked in the front of your building, but no light, so walked down the driveway and saw your light back there.

I turned to him. He buttoned his cuffs and undid his neck button. I didn’t say that one of the couples in front was hiking through Thailand for the summer and the other was on vacation, in a monastery, in Japan.

—You don’t believe me, man, he said.

—Yes, I do, man, I said.

—She was lying there, he said.

—I know very well she was, I said.

—You don’t believe me, man—

—I don’t care if you believe me or not, man, I said. —I’ll make you some coffee.

—Coffee’s good, he immediately said.

I stepped onto the short graveled driveway. He picked up the backpack, hooked it over his left shoulder, and followed me.

—Not too late for you, he said.

—I don’t have to work in the morning, I said.

He asked the time. I told him. I asked his name.

—Walter, he said.

I turned and shook his hand.

—James, I said, and he shook my hand.

—Thanks, man, he said.

—It’s fine, man, I said.

I pointed to one of the three chairs and asked him to sit. I turned the music back up, started the coffee then poured myself some wine, and when I sat in the armchair, I pushed books aside on the small table to make room for the glass. I inquired if cheap South American wine was to his liking. He said no. And so I offered him a cigarette.

—Grateful, he said.

I lit one, passed him one and the lighter, and asked if he’d like some toast.

—Grateful, he said.

I dropped the bread in the toaster and pulled a saucer from the pile in the sink, wiped it clean, handed it to him, and told him to use it as an ashtray. The smell of brewing coffee filled that small room. Smoke clouded the lampshades. At the ceiling layers of smoke shifted like lazy ocean waves.

I asked him where he was from. Florida. I asked if his parents were from there. Mom from Greenville. Dad from Rockford, Illinois. I told him I’d never been to Florida, but I think I’d passed signs for Rockford once. I was with a friend, I said, we were driving to Chicago, we’d lost our way, but then beyond the trees and the buildings the beautiful lake appeared.

—It rose up and flashed like a monster, I added.

He told me that when he was eight his mom moved to Chicago, but
he stayed on in Florida with his aunt. Then his mom moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. I told him that ever since I was a kid, I had dreamed of visiting the desert and the mountains, though when I did a few years ago, they looked so familiar, maybe because I’d seen them so much on television and in movies. And I asked where his parents were now.

—Passed on, he said.

I buttered his toast and took a plate from the sink and washed it. I laid the plate of toast and the coffee on the floor beside him. I was blinking into the fridge when I asked if he needed milk.

—Not necessary, man, he said.

Which was good to hear. The fridge was empty except for two sticks of butter and an empty water jug.

He held the plate underneath his chin and took tiny bites. We didn’t talk for fifteen or twenty minutes. I changed the music, sat down, picked up a book from the table, and read sentences, a few being all I could manage. And so I stood and added wine to the glass, crossed the room to the screen door and lit another cigarette, blew smoke into the dark, and hummed along to the music. I flicked the outside light on. The moths appeared. I flicked the light off. When he was done eating I sat back down.

He smelled like dry rotting wood. And the shirt he wore was faded blue, Western-style, Sears or Levi’s from the sixties or seventies, with that fine stitching around the collar and the chest pockets. I had two like them. Una Lyons got them in a hand-me-down shop, on Francis Street in Dublin. It was my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday. She and I said the shirts looked ugly, but we also said they were cool.

He sipped the coffee and gazed about that room: the two low bookcases the previous tenant had left, the futon bed that was my own, the desk I had bought from a fellow graduate student in English who’d enrolled in law school in another state, and on the small rug between us, a stack of used books with dog-eared pages.

He told me he read the newspaper every day in the library. I said I read the Sunday newspaper, but I listened to music more than I read,
which wasn’t good for my studies, which were moving at a snail’s pace, but I told him the university paid me something for teaching writing to first-year students, and I had a job at a bakery.

And he told me he didn’t have any way to listen to music outside of the library, though when he was alone in the park he’d recollect a song, block out the world, and fully hear the song in his head. He liked the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix. I said I liked them, too, but that blocking out the world was a bit of a task. He shrugged and asked what books I’d read when I was a kid. I said there were a few I took out of the school library more than once, but the one I borrowed the most was
Robinson Crusoe
.

—It ends in a slapdash way, Friday is a lie, but then there was nothing like it, I said.

He yawned and rested his head on the back of the chair. He folded his arms and slowly stretched his legs. Above him a cobweb dangled from the low ceiling. I asked if he’d like another cigarette. He didn’t reply, and it worried me that he might fall asleep, but then he startled me by jerking up his right hand and slowly massaging his jaw. He said he’d slept on concrete the night before. I asked why he didn’t sleep in the shelter out on Huron. He said the people there made him crazy, and he sat upright and stared at me.

—You’re not from here, man. How do you end up here, man?

I stood and switched the music off.

—Hear! Hear, man! I said, and laughed. —I ended up here the way you ended up at my screen door over an hour ago. Or I ended up here with the friend I drove to Chicago with. A good few years ago, we arrived from Boston, but my friend went back home. He got tired of it. Homesick, I suppose. But I wanted to stay. I like it here fine.

And so I told him I once lived on the next street over, that I lived there for a time with the woman who showed me the desert. I think I told him her name was Sarah, and I definitely told him she wrote her dissertation on urban gangs, and that she and I put the kibosh on things a while back.

—She wanted to move back west. The west, where she was from, I said.

I was staring down at the pile in the sink.

I drained the wine bottle and sat down.

—Wine and pot, man. Both should be illegal, I said. —But that woman hasn’t left my head all night.

—Woman out west, he said.

—She’s never in the head, I said. —The one you saw lying in the street. I should have called the police, but who wants to invite the cops—

—She just got up and went on home. Folks change their minds, he said.

—Indeed, they do, very wise, I said.

He took his cap off and ran his fingers through his graying, stubborn hair.

—Told the truth, man, he said.

He fixed the cap back on.

—I don’t doubt you, man, I said. —An old woman lives down the street, that’s all, but I’ve never really spoken to her and I don’t see her that much.