Free Country Hardball by Steve Weddle

the antenna on Miss Imogene Crawford’s place.
    Aunt Vee screamed from the front of the house. I could picture her leaning up on the arms of the chair, taking a deep breath. “How’s about you fix that woman’s antenna right and that’ll be your rent check for the month? Think you can manage that?”
    So I took a couple of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a ball-peen hammer, and half a roll of duct tape, dropped them in a green pillowcase, and headed down to Miss Imogene’s house.
    By the time I got down to her place, I had sweat and grit on the back of my neck. I knocked at her door, and she let me in. She offered me a glass of water, and I sat down in the living room. Thick red and brown shag carpeting matched most of the furniture and made the couch look like a little hill in the floor. I sat down and she brought me a glass of warm tap water and I downed it in a couple of swallows.)s that.
    I started to tell her why I was there when she walked over to the television set and turned it off. I hadn’t even noticed the thing had been on. You get that way sometimes. You get something in your head that you have to do and you get focused on it so strong that you forget what you set out to do. You can get that way laying floors. You get so caught up in going one direction, then you look up and you’re caught in a corner and everything’s gone off kilter by a quarter inch.
    “Doyle, you know you don’t need an excuse to stop by, but I see you got a pillowcase full of something there.”
    I looked down at the tools and felt like I’d just dragged a mess of wet squirrels into her house. “Aunt Vee said maybe you could use some help down here on your antenna,” I said because those were the words I’d practiced on the way down and I hadn’t had time to think of anything else.
    She looked puzzled, turned her head like my Aunt Vee did whenever something really weird would happen. Like if someone would say, “Today, the part of Alan-Michael Spaulding will be played by seventeen flaming armadillos.”
    But then her niece started hollering from the back of the house somewhere. “I’m still hungry. I’m still hungry. I’m still hungry.” A chant almost, and she took that last “hungry” and let it linger out there like “hoooongreee” in some weird monster kind of rumbling. Then she was asking why can’t they ever have anything to eat and she knows it costs money and why can’t they ever get any money. She was walking and talking and by then she’d come to the end of the hall and could see that I was sitting there with a pillowcase between my feet.
    I started looking anywhere else. Over to the photographs on the fireplace mantle. Over to the shelves where Miss Imogene had all her collectible dolls. Shelves that were empty now except for the doll stands and the ghosting dust around the edges.
    So Miss Imogene sat there for a second until I thought of something to say. “She said your TV was acting up. Maybe you weren’t getting all the channels and could I help, she said.”
    Her niece’s name was Constance, but she went by Connie. And Connie said how much she liked my aunt’s cooking and how sweet she was to have them both over.
    I asked if they were having electrical problems after the storm.
    Miss Imogene raised an eyebrow. “Why would you ask that?”
    “Just noticed all the lights are off in the back is all,” I said.
    “Oh,” she said.
    “That’s environmental,” Connie said. “On account of the environment. We all have to pitch in and do our part.”
    I nodded. “Yeah. We all have to do our part.”
    We talked for a while longer about the weather. How hot it was going to get and how the weatherman said another big storm was coming that weekend.
    “How’s your aunt doing?” Miss Imogene asked.
    “Fine, I guess. What do you mean?”
    “I just mean, you know, what with your uncle’s passing on like that.”
    “Oh. Yeah. Fine, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, it’s been a couple of years,