No Good Deed...

The room smells of mildew. The tangy smell of old water saturating the carpet. Instantly Joe thought of old bread and bad fruit. Though the carpet glowed with cleanness, the smell revealed an unseen contamination festering underneath his bare feet. The damp carpet had ruined his socks, but as long as he didn’t stand in one place for too long, his feet would not get soaked.

Only after opening every window and turning the fan on did the air begin to thin and breathing returned to a secondary thought. The cold air filled the house and found it’s way into every room clogging the halls with the smell of rain.

The rain had not stopped in two months. Sometimes it would slow down to only a dull mist, something you might not even notice. Other times, like now, it would fill the air with such density you could swim up to the clouds themselves.

There would be times when he would be watching TV as the lights dimmed and flickered and a car would drive by in front of the house. The car’s tires across the soaked blacktop sounded just like what Joe imagined a tidal wave would sound like as it destroyed the houses a block over. He could imagine the shattering of homes as the water ripped fences and cars and trees up off the ground and began throwing them back down on top of the houses.

The silence of the empty house unnerved Joe. Ever since he came to this place, he always felt like he was being watched. Joe wondered if the old man from the other night was out there, watching him in this rain. Was he standing on the back porch looking through the glass? He could imagine the man’s face, twisted and distorted through the thick moisture of condensation on the glass. The old man always seemed to be around at just the wrong times. Joe knew what the man wanted. He knew the man wanted to be with his wife. He knew it from the first moment he looked into the old man’s eyes. But for some reason, he didn’t kill Joe. Lord knows he had plenty of chances. Come to think of it, he didn’t even have to kill Joe. He could have just turned him into the police, or worse reveal Joe’s secrets buried in the backyard – at least the ones that were his. That would have been enough.

Somehow, as Joe sat on his damp carpet, he had remained alive. He knew of no good reason why he was allowed to remain with her or why the old man hadn’t dragged him out to the dead rose garden to make another mound. But here he was just the same and he wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of it.

When Joe’s wife had come home from a horrible night of work, Joe made her dinner. It wasn’t much, but it was more than normal and she thanked him for it. As she complained about her job and the people she had to work with, Joe hoped that he was buying his right to life one good deed at a time.