Chapter 17

Jack, wearing a mask, gloves, goggles, and coverall, tore another bit of the wall down and stuffed the piece into a plastic bag. The interior of the damaged wall had been completely covered with the black mold. They were going through trash bags at an incredible rate. After he filled one, he handed it out the window to Dave who was wearing a similar outfit. Dave would throw the bag into the back of the pickup truck.

Although the worst area had been the central wall, Jack had ripped every piece of sheetrock out of the house where there had been any chance of water damage. There were a couple of smaller patches of mold in other areas. With the removal of the last bit of sheetrock, he stepped back and examined the interior of the house. It had taken half a week, but they had reduced most of the house to a shell.

Jack closed up the bag and handed it out the window to Dave. According to the articles that they had gotten out of the library, they now had to wash the interior of the house with a dilute solution of bleach. He looked up at the roof that was now visible through the ceiling and shook his head. There was a lot of water damage up there. It probably would have been cheaper to tear the house down and rebuild it.

Jack stepped outside and removed his mask. Dave walked over and removed his mask. After removing his goggles, Jack said, “That’s the last of the sheetrock.”

“Good,” Dave said looking at the back of the truck. He looked over at the house and asked, “How bad is the damage inside?”

“Pretty bad,” Jack answered.

“I can mix up a bucket of bleach,” Dave said coughing. The sooner they killed off the mold, the sooner they would be able to work without wearing all of the gear.

“Give me a minute to catch my breath. It is hot miserable work while wearing all of this gear,” Jack said.

“Do you want me to do it?” Dave asked. He covered his mouth and coughed. He was getting better, but that initial blast of mold spores had triggered an allergic reaction.

Shaking his head, Jack answered, “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll be scrubbing in there for hours,” Dave said feeling bad that Jack had to do all of the work inside the house.

Jack said, “We have to pull the carpet. All of that bleach will destroy it.”

“We probably ought to do that anyway. Who knows how many spores are in it now,” Dave said. This little job was getting bigger every time they turned around.

Jack was thoughtful for a second and then asked, “What if we were to use a sprayer like you use for spraying trees? Do you think we could fill that up with bleach and spray the interior?”

“You’d end up with a lot of water in the house,” Dave said pointing out the obvious flaw in Jack’s plan.

“How about if we used a wet-dry vacuum to suck up the water? That would also help get rid of any loose spores floating around,” Jack said.

Dave shrugged his shoulders and said, “We could try it. A toilet brush could be used to scrub the surfaces.”

“Let’s do it that way,” Jack said. He couldn’t imagine trying to wash every surface inside the house with a little bucket of bleach water and a scrub brush.

“Will we need to bag the carpet?” Dave asked thinking that would be a major job.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Jack answered confident that the carpet was safe.

Relieved to hear that, Dave said, “The truck bed is half full of plastic bags. We probably ought to make another run to the landfill to dump it off.”

“Let me get out of this coverall,” Jack said. It didn’t take long for the two men to get out of their work clothes. Jack said, “Put them over there on the porch. I’ll take them to the Laundromat to wash tonight.”

“You can wash them in our washer,” Dave said. He covered his mouth and coughed again.

“I don’t want to spread the spores through your house. Your cough is bad enough,” Jack replied.

“I’m getting better,” Dave said starting to cough again.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jack said after waiting for Dave to stop coughing.

The two men got into the truck and headed off to the landfill. Dave asked, “How are we doing on budget?”

“We’ve spent about three hundred dollars so far,” Jack answered. Most of it was for the clothes they were wearing and the plastic bags. He said, “Of course, the house is going to require a lot more work than we expected.”

“I’m afraid that we won’t be able to fix it in time for the cold weather,” Dave said with a sigh.

Jack said, “Once we get the mold out of there we can start using the house even without fixing the roof. I figure that we can really cut some corners in terms of fixing up the interior. We’ll replace the carpet with linoleum. Considering what we’ll be using it for, that would probably be best anyway.”

“Are you talking about those little tiles with the adhesive backs?” Dave asked. He hated linoleum tiles since they normally curled up along the edges and looked horrible after a couple of years.

“No. We’ll get the large rolls and just lay it over the whole floor,” Jack answered. He had a little experience with laying linoleum and knew where they could pick up some stuff that had gone out of style for a cheap price. He said, “I’ve done it before. I might be able to borrow some tools.”

“Is it hard to install?” Dave asked.

“On a scale of one to five, it is a five,” Jack answered.

“I was hoping for a one,” Dave said. “You must really know just about every construction job there is.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders and said, “My dad used to say that if you knew how to work with your hands that you’d never starve. I’ve made sure that I can do just about any job on a construction site that is necessary.”

“Smart,” Dave said. He looked out the window and said, “Once I got my plumbing license, I never really had to worry about work. There’s always a toilet somewhere that needs repair. People won’t live with a serious plumbing problem.”

“That’s true,” Jack said.

Dave said, “I made a pretty good living. With the economic problems I thought about returning to work. I could probably work a few hours a week without killing my retirement benefits.”

“Why didn’t you?” Jack asked looking over at Dave.

“I came pretty close, but the commune came up and I decided that this was a better option than going back to work,” Dave answered.

“In what way?” Jack asked.

Dave said, “I’ve come to appreciate the community that we’ve built. I knew that something was missing in my life and I didn’t know what it was. When we were younger, all of us used to meet and talk at school events. Sometimes we would get together for New Years Eve or a backyard barbecue. When the kids grew up and the school activities stopped, we all kind of drifted apart.

“Sometimes I would run into one of the neighbors at a store or something. We’d talk a bit, but that was about it. Nothing would come of it and we’d go our separate ways. I never stopped to think about what we had lost.”

“I guess that is part of growing old,” Jack said.

Dave shook his head and said, “No. It was the change in times. Television became more important than people. Jobs seemed to take more time out of the day. We were all rushing to save money for retirement without thinking what it would mean to retire without friends.”

“I didn’t think of it like that,” Jack said.

“When Gail’s husband died, I remember thinking that it was a tragedy that a woman was a widow so young. After the funeral, I went home and never gave it another thought. She was left over at that house all alone and trying to deal with her grief. None of us even thought of going over to visit,” Dave said shaking his head.

“That’s a shame,” Jack said thinking it was so easy to get isolated.

Dave said, “The other women lost their husbands one at a time. I went to all of the funerals, but that was about it. I feel pretty bad about that.”

“I can imagine,” Jack said. He realized that he hadn’t really thought that much about what the women had gone through in becoming widowed. He said, “It must have been rough for them.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Laura,” Dave said. Just the idea of it made him sick to his stomach.

“I’m sure it would be rough,” Jack said pulling up to the entry of the landfill. He pulled out the ten dollar bill that would let them drop off their load and rolled down his window.

The guy at the entrance of the landfill looked in the back and said, “You paid ten dollars for the last load. With a little effort you could have included this one with that one. Go ahead and drop this one off.”

“Thanks,” Jack said pleased to have saved ten dollars.

“Next one will be ten dollars,” the man said with a smile.

“We’ll be dropping off carpet tomorrow,” Jack said.

“You must be gutting a whole house,” the man said shaking his head.

“That’s about right,” Jack replied.

The man said, “I guess it is cheaper to remodel a house than to sell one and buy a new one.”

“You can say that again,” Jack said with a laugh.

“Take it easy,” the man said moving to press the button that opened the gate.

Jack drove over to the edge of the landfill and parked the truck. Winking at him, Dave asked, “Why don’t you lower the tailgate, drive backwards for a bit and then slam on the brakes?”

Jack laughed. Every time they came here, Dave had asked the same question. He said, “We’ll do that one of these times.”

Jack climbed into the back of the truck and tossed out the bags. He hadn’t realized how many of them there were until after he had tossed ten of them out. Pausing to wipe the sweat from his eyes, he said, “It would have been a whole lot easier to get a waste bin, but a lot more expensive.”

Dave sat in the front seat watching Jack work. He felt guilty that Jack was doing all of the hard work while he was mostly watching. He coughed and thought about that blast of black mold he had gotten when he had pulled open the wall. He muttered, “At least my cough is getting better.”

Jack emptied the truck bed of contaminated sheetrock and climbed out. He paused to think about what the man had said at the gate. He went inside the cab and said, “You know, we could remodel the interior of the house. Not all of the walls are load bearing.”

“What are you saying?” Dave asked.

“Well, no one is going to be living in it. We could open up the kitchen so that it is adjacent to the living room. We could open the wall between two of the bedrooms to make a very large living room. That would leave us with one bedroom to use as an office,” Jack said.

Although the idea sounded good, there was a problem with it. Dave said, “She’d never be able to sell the house if we did that.”

“That’s true,” Jack said. He realized that while doing the work on repairing the house he had started to think of it as a community center rather than as a home. It was a pretty easy trap to fall into and he was going to have to watch himself in the future.

“Of course, we could ask her,” Dave said. It never hurt to ask.