Abercrombie’s Haunted TV and Small Appliance Repair

These days Joe doesn’t sleep much, so he’s downstairs in the shop when footsteps on the porch startle him. Usually he hears them coming long before they make it that far. They’re kids, after all; they have no perception of how far their excited voices travel in the dark.

Sometimes they don’t make it as far as the porch. For some of them, it seems to be enough just to stand in the yard with the unmown grass grazing their bare knees. They dare each other to touch the hand-painted sign at the bottom of the driveway and leave it at that.

But the ones tonight are a brave group. Bold enough to come right up to the door, try to peer through the darkened windows. Joe can’t help feeling proud. Made of stronger stuff than their parents, that’s for sure. The adults make excuses to save face, but Joe knows they’re scared. That’s what keeps them away from Abercrombie’s TV and Small Appliance Repair. Joe knows what gets whispered about his shop.

Just last week he overheard two women in the pharmacy, talking about “that old abandoned-looking shop” out by the highway entrance ramp. “They fix TVs?” came an incredulous voice from the next aisle. “I bet it’s a front. Drugs or something.” And then another woman, her voice low and urgent: “Oh, it’s not a front. Nothing like that. The place is haunted.” Joe left before he could hear what she said next.

These kids tonight deserve a little something for their trouble, so Joe heaves himself out of the recliner and pads over to the door in Lizzie’s old slippers. First, he toggles the switch for the neon OPEN sign that hangs in the front window on the other side of the blinds—not enough to turn it on, mind you, just enough to make it buzz menacingly. He is rewarded with a squeal and a clatter of retreating footsteps. Furious whispers from the yard are followed by the groan of a floorboard. One of them is still on the porch.

Well, well. Joe smiles with affection as he shuffles over to the wall by the basement door. He feels along the row of switches till he finds the one he wants. He lifts it slowly, feeling the plates inside the switchbox slide past one another, electricity poised and ready to cross over as soon as the circuit is completed. Anticipation buzzes through his fingers. He feels it, when the switch catches, even though there’s nothing to hear yet. A happy energy bubbles beneath his hand. Electricity wants to travel.

Joe holds his breath, and soon, from the basement, he can hear the speakers whirring to life, and Lizzie’s voice, already half-choked with age, spitting “Trespassers!” from beneath the floorboards of the porch. Before she can say anything more, Joe hears the pounding of sneakers leaping from the porch and down the driveway. Gone, for now. He flips the switch back off and Lizzie is silenced once more.

It was Lizzie’s idea, rigging the speakers up in the basement windows, recording her voice onto one of those blank cassettes that used to litter the shop back when they did a brisk business in tape deck repairs. She had such fun doing it, really hamming it up, breathing spooky noises and venomous warnings into the tape recorder. “Haunted, eh? We’ll give ‘em haunted,” she said cheerfully, uncoiling speaker wire from a spool.

He’d never thought to record her just being her ordinary self, so all he had now was this caricature of a creepy old lady. All the same, he liked hearing her voice. Even playing the part of the crone, she was still his Lizzie. If he listened hard, he could hear the smile of mischief burbling underneath the feigned malice.

She was already sick by then. Joe’s universe had folded in on itself, retracting until his world was composed of only Lizzie and him. She no longer told him when the hedges needed trimming or the paint on the porch railing was beginning to chip. What did it matter anyway? Let the place fall apart, for all he cared.

When Matthew came for a visit, he had sneered at the overgrown yard, the sagging porch. “You need to fix this place up, Dad,” he said. “Or hire someone. It looks trashy.” Of course he didn’t offer to help with any of it himself. Wouldn’t want to dull the crease of his pressed khakis. How had he and Lizzie raised such a son, Joe wondered. He was soft in the places a person should be strong, and hard in all the wrong ways. He didn’t even kiss his mother goodbye.

Once he’s scattered the kids from the porch, silence presses in on Joe. That’s the game, to scare them away. But he finds himself staying awake, ears straining for their return. He sleeps in the recliner again.

~

Later, with the daylight slipping through the slats of the blinds, Joe settles into the quiet of an ordinary workday. At nine he flips the OPEN sign on and moves his coffee from the shelf beside the recliner to the workbench. Hardly anyone brings him TVs or toasters to be repaired anymore, though. The world has changed. Machines are considered disposable. Discarded like so much litter as soon as they need a little maintenance, a little care. Folks can’t be bothered. They reckon the things that serve them have no right to demand any service in return.

These days, Joe fills his days repairing things the young man from Goodwill drops off for him every few weeks. Today he pulls a clock radio from the box. Joe’s fingers feel clumsy, stumbling in the dark in search of the source of the trouble. He doesn’t have the same way with machines Lizzie had. She would simply have held this little clock radio in her hands, eyes closed, listening to something beyond his hearing. And then she would have gotten out her set of tiny screwdrivers, humming to herself, and honed right in on the frayed wire or the loose connection that was keeping the thing from fulfilling its purpose. Customers used to chuckle uneasily, watching her diagnose a shorted-out space heater or a vacuum cleaner with a frayed belt, joking that Lizzie was some kind of witch. They’d glance over at Joe for reassurance, but he liked to see them squirm and would just smile impassively. They were happy enough to collect their good-as-new things, though, sorcery or no.

Joe turns the clock radio over in his hands, but it has nothing to say that he can hear. He adjusts his glasses to try to make out the miniature screws, when he’s startled by the unmistakable sound of footsteps climbing the steps to the porch. His back straightens. The doorknob jiggles, then goes silent. A knock on the door—uncertain, shy. Joe turns toward the door and realizes it’s still locked, customers being so rare.

“Just a minute,” Joe calls, and his voice sounds gnarled from lack of use. He shuffles to the door, slips the chain, and opens the door.

“I wasn’t sure you were open. I saw the sign, but the door . . .” It’s a kid, sixteen or so, standing there on the porch, cradling something in his arms. He’s wrapped it in what looks like a flannel shirt, a cord trailing from the bundle, its plug dangling and forlorn.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Joe says, turning his back on the kid and lumbering back to the workbench. He moves the clock radio aside and pats the empty space on the workbench. “How can I help ya?” He coughs to get the gravel out of his voice. It occurs to him that it’s been a good while since he spoke aloud. Days maybe.

The kid steps tentatively into the shop, eyes wide. He’s hugging the bundle to his chest, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. His eyes roam, taking in the shelves groaning under TVs and stereo receivers, the yellowing advertisements from defunct electronics companies, the sideboard with its jumble of mugs, toaster, electric kettle. The recliner draped with a quilt where Joe spends most of his nights, the dark stairway leading to the second-floor apartment where he and Lizzie made their home. Joe can’t imagine what a boy this age would see in this place. A dusty room cluttered with junk, most likely. That’s all most folks seem able to see these days.

“You fix things?” the kid says.

“Depends on the thing, and depends on the trouble. Want me to take a look?”

The kid steps to the workbench and gingerly puts the bundle down, unwrapping it to reveal one of those old dual-deck cassette players with an AM/FM radio and multiple speakers for high and low frequencies. A portable stereo system, a boombox. It was top of the line, once; would’ve cost someone a pretty penny. Now its chrome is worn off in places, its controls grimy, and one of the doors is stuck partway open. It’s a sorry sight, but Joe has a feeling there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. Plain old neglect can make a thing look broken.

“I found it in the basement,” the kid says. “It belonged to my dad.” Past tense. Joe wonders which part is past, the belonging or the dad. “I don’t know, it’s probably garbage.” There’s something in the kid’s eyes when he says this, something exposed and raw that he’s trying to cover over with hardness.

Joe wishes he had Lizzie’s gift now. To close his eyes and know without a doubt that he could take this forsaken thing and restore it to something useful. He wants to tell this boy, yes, of course I can fix it. He wants to be able to promise. But all he can say is, “I’ll do my best.” The kid nods, already resigned to disappointment. His shoulders sag and he turns to go.

“If you’ve got a minute, I can take a look right now. Give you an idea.” Joe’s never been a fan of while-you-wait repairs. It’s too nerve-wracking to have the customer watch while he bumbles through a diagnosis. But he doesn’t want the kid to leave, not without a little hope, anyhow.

“Okay,” the kid says.

Joe keeps one eye on the kid while he removes the deep-set screws that will let him see inside the machine. The kid wanders through the shop, his fingers grazing over TVs, lamps, toaster ovens. “You weren’t scared,” Joe says after a minute.

“What?”

“To come here.”

“Why would I be scared?” There’s a defiant edge to the kid’s voice. Like he knows why some people would be, but not him. He’s different.

“I know what folks say about my shop,” says Joe, lifting the back off the boom box. It’s dusty inside, but dry.

“That it’s haunted?”

“Sure,” says Joe.

The kid shrugs. He doesn’t ask if the rumors are true. Maybe this kid is the one from the porch last night. The one who didn’t scare so easy.

Joe undoes a few more screws, lining them up on the bench in cozy groups so he can find them when it’s time to reassemble. He uses a can of pressurized air connected to a tiny straw to gently clean the circuitry. Then he dips cotton swabs into Lizzie’s special cleaning solution and removes layers of sticky gunk from the gears and tape heads. It looks like decades-old dried-out Coca Cola. As he cleans, he nudges each piece of the mechanism, finding them reassuringly solid.

The kid is standing behind him, looking over Joe’s shoulder. Joe glances back and is surprised to see intense concentration on the kid’s face. “Pretty neat, seeing what’s inside, huh?”

The kid nods, stepping closer. “Is it . . . okay?”

“Think so. Just needed a good cleaning. Most problems come down to maintenance. Old isn’t the same as busted.”

The kid nods sagely. As if he’s lived long enough to see a loved thing deteriorate, or to know how an old body feels on a cold morning, the rasp of thinned cartilage scraping against bone, the rattle of air squeezed through wilted lungs. The more worn down Joe gets, the more he longs for Lizzie. If only she could lay hands on him, close her eyes, and use her tiny screwdrivers to tighten up his loose places.

But this kid knows things. Joe thinks of the tender way he held the boom box in his arms. What would make a kid his age come to a place like this to get an old tape player fixed? The kid looks young and whole, but who knows what might be broken inside. He’s brave in that way that’s fueled by need.

“Let’s test it out,” Joe says when he’s done. “You got a tape?”

The kid shakes his head.

Joe pushes his stool back from the workbench, trudges over to an enormous steel cabinet and starts rifling through drawers. He finds an old tape Lizzie liked to listen to while she worked, a compilation of classical music called Baroque Favorites. He blows off the dust and slides it into the tape deck. He plugs in the cord and gestures to the Play button. “Want to do the honors?”

The kid smiles, like he’s been invited to cut a ribbon with an oversize pair of scissors. He reaches out a long, delicate finger and presses Play. There’s a satisfying clunk as the gears slide into place and the reels begin to turn. Joe adjusts the volume knob, and soon the lilting harpsichord and booming cellos of the third Brandenburg concerto fill the shop, spilling into the empty spaces, reverberating off the shelves of toasters and handheld mixers and oscillating fans. The music pours out like held breath, soaked into the dry shop like water into a sponge. Joe grabs the edge of the workbench for balance.

The air is filled with Lizzie, as if her essence had been magnetically encoded onto the plastic tape alongside the Bach she’d loved. Joe hears, amidst the rise and fall of the music, her teasing voice, her bowlegged stride, her arched brow. Here it is, what Lizzie knew: that these machines we’ve touched aren’t lifeless. They hold things for us. Sewing machines and typewriters and electric can openers, all coated in scraps of feeling, shards of memory, layer upon layer of what we’ve absently discarded.

The kid is resting his hands on the boom box—both hands, like a blessing—and his eyes are closed.

Joe sinks onto his stool and listens. He lets his eyelids fall. In the darkness, he hears something familiar. Over the music, he can’t be sure, but his mind strains to fit the sound into the shape of his longing. Perhaps it’s just the rumble of timpani, or the lighter appliances on the shelves trembling from the friction of the low-end sound waves. But for a moment, Joe is certain he hears the creak of a floorboard overhead.