The Powerline by John Hearn

I slept on the beach by accident and was walking down the Powerline to my room. It probably wasn’t even 8 a.m. but was hot. My head was boiling. Why do they even make roads like this, so wide with blocks too long and no sidewalks? A pedestrian could get himself killed without even trying. Never-ending strings of electricity overhead hanging from pole to pole. Every half-mile or so a scorching aluminum bench for the bus, but the bus cost cash. Never any shade. The road is designed to press down on a guy like me. To frustrate and humiliate until my head explodes. I’ve got to get out of the sun, rest, just for ten minutes.

A gas station a furniture store a liquor store a dollar store and then one small house after another until the next intersection when it starts all over again. Identical houses but rusted aluminum awnings here and a blue tarp on a roof there and everywhere signs saying beware of pit bulls motherfucker. Most have bars on the windows. Some are boarded-up. One has an open side door.

I need a place to sit until my head cools down.

Mold grows where sinks and a toilet and pipes were. A stained mattress sits on the tiled floor of the tiny living room. I kick the mattress for rats and a corner of an old picture peeks out. A father in swim trunks, fat and smoking a cigar, a smiling mother in a swim suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat; two boys, ready for the beach in trunks and goggles. They’re standing in front of the house I’m in. It’s pink. They’re standing behind a Sold sign. A two bedroom one bath paradise by the sea is what the ad probably said. You can walk to the beach. Get away from the snow. Behind the family, in the driveway, is a red and white car, its top down, its wings ready for flight.

I kick the mattress again. A hypodermic needle. And again. A blood stain. And again. There’s something hard in the mattress. I see a tear near where I kicked. I don’t want to touch it, so I kick again, hard. And again. I see half of a notebook. With my foot, I pull it away from the mattress. It’s a purple covered Mead Five Star. This is what it says on the first page: “Name: Dennis Halloran; Date of Birth: February 14th, 1958; Address: 3402 Powerline Rd.; Home: None; Closest kin: brother William; Date of Death: Today.” I sit on the floor, against the wall, near the open door, with the sunlight on the notebook pages as I turn them. My head makes concentrating tough. My fear of rats and pit bulls does too. And I’m worried about some guy coming in pissed at me for messing with his mattress.

I turn the page. “Part 1: Powerline. I still remember the day our father came home with the brochure. He was excited like I’d never seen him. He sat at the kitchen table with us gathered around, my mother Sheila, my brother Billy and me. It’ll be like living in a resort all year round he said, tapping his pudgy finger on the caption that read Resort Living Year Round. Here’s the Atlantic Ocean he said, tapping on the blue blot on the brochure, and here’s our place, right here on the Powerline. This is our chance to get out of this hell hole he said, which is what he called Hoboken, New Jersey. Billy said what do you mean we’re moving. My father, Jim was his name, said I mean we’re moving. I don’t want to move, Billy said. He slammed the door behind him and ran down the stairs to the street.

But it turns out Billy liked it down here. He could play baseball all year and was good at it. So good at it all the people at the high school liked him, including all the pretty girls. So good at it he was drafted by the Detroit Tigers straight out of high school. Turns out I didn’t like it here, but I didn’t like Hoboken either.  I guess I worried too much, no matter where I was. In high school the pretty girls didn’t like that kind of guy.”

The house was beginning to get hot and my head still throbbed but I couldn’t stop reading.

“Part 2: Paradise. Turns out Jim was right: our new life was much better. He started selling parts for boats. Ships. The big cruise ships. And this was when cruises were becoming a big thing. So he started his own ship-parts company and made a bunch of money. And after a while, Shiela started to sell houses, and this was when everyone wanted a new house down here. Including us. That’s when we moved from Powerline to the house out on Palmetto Drive, with all the bedrooms and bathrooms and the three car garage and the pool. My parents kept telling us how lucky they were. They came from nothing and always struggled but now they had it easy. And they said we were lucky, too, because we had it easy, almost from the beginning.

“We’d go to restaurants for family dinners or eat out by our pool; we’d take vacations to Colorado and Costa Rica and once to Europe; we’d attend Billy’s baseball games and sit by campfires at the beach. Even when Billy hurt his arm for the second time, everything was fine. He married his pregnant girlfriend and worked with Dad and bought a big house with a pool and had a son and then a daughter. I headed off to college, the first ever in my family. I became an engineer and came home to help build paradise.”

“I married a nice girl who didn’t mind nervous wrecks, and we had a son. With all the construction down here, I was able to open my own mechanical engineering firm within five years. We got a big house with a pool. I’d tell Ralphie, our son, how lucky he was, how his grandparents had nothing before having so much. I’d drive him by the tiny Powerline house, it looking less maintained with each trip, and I’d talk of its power to give us all so much. Don’t forget how lucky you are I would tell him. Life is beautiful. Is that how people put it? Life is beautiful.”

I wanted to sleep but continued reading. 

“Part 3: Something Happened. He almost made it big, but didn’t. He was always the center of attention and was now only his father’s assistant. He still wanted all the pretty girls and wanted them more when he drank. He drank all the time. His wife and daughter left and went to Nevada. Billy stayed here with his son and second wife and then his third while he grounded our father’s business on the rocks. We lost touch long, long ago.”

“Me? I guess I passed my nervousness onto Ralphie. The kid couldn’t relax from the beginning. In school or at home, at a birthday party or the beach, at the start of each day and at the end, he was worried. Worried that his mother would die or that I would or the house would burn down or he’d be shot by a passing motorist. By second grade his teachers let us know they couldn’t cope with his refusal to follow instructions. By fifth grade we couldn’t get him to school without a struggle. By the time he was 16, he had taken up living in the in-law apartment over our garages. He was smoking pot. 

“We kept waiting for him to grow out of it, to start realizing his potential, as we put it. Finally, at 20, there were signs he was on the verge of making a life. He got a GED, enrolled in the community college, took a part-time job working at Publix and found a girlfriend. And then disappeared.”

I continued reading.

“Part 4: Passing Unexpectedly. That’s what my wife put in Ralphie’s obituary, that he ‘passed unexpectedly.’ She said it’d let him go with respect and saying he died from a heroin overdose wouldn’t. I said to Renee, my wife, ‘unexpectedly’ to us, maybe, but not to his dealers who sold to him, or his boss who fired him or his teachers who failed him, or his girlfriend who left him. They all saw what was happening.

“So the police told us they found his body here, on Powerline, in the house that once turned his family’s fortunes around. This little concrete box that allowed Jim and Shiela to make something out of nothing, and that gave their sons the chance to be happy.

I don’t know what happened. Something did, but I don’t know what.”

I woke to a cop kicking my foot. A second one stood in the doorway blocking the sun. They told me I was breaking and entering and trespassing and holding drug paraphernalia. I told them I was hot and tired and not thinking straight. Damned bums, the female cop at the door said. Get up, the other one said, you’re going to jail. I found a journal I said and handed him the Mead Five Star. As he read I noticed his name badge: William Halloran, 845. It’s about a place called Paradise I said. The female cop walked through what had been the kitchen and pushed open a door with her foot. She turned around with her face in the crook of her arm and said, “Bill we have a body here.”

# # #

John Hearn grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts and now lives in Jamestown, New York.

prev
next

Leave a Comment

Name*
Email*
Website