Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 19

  Even though I had a lot on my mind, I took some care in preparing for the meeting of the knitting group. I suppose because I'm such a crappy knitter it's important to me that the other members at least have a good time when they come over, so they'll be in the mood to help me when they find out I don't know what it means to beg with p1, work 39 (44, 51) sts in Seed st, Inc 2, *beg with p1 (k1, p1), work 64 (73, 86) sts in Seed st and etc.

  The main thing you have to do is put some thought into the food. You don't want to just have chips and cheese and crackers and Diet Pepsi. You have to line up something slightly exotic, like maybe tabouli with tiny dice of heritage tomatoes, plus whole wheat pita wedges to scoop it up with, and some of those crunchy little onion pancakes and maybe some potstickers, and then almond lemon bars and a couple of truffles to nibble as the shadows lengthen into the low blood sugar period, knitting problems begin to multiply, and the gossip grows correspondingly more intense. And then you need a variety of drinks, from raspberry lemonade to coffee to pure mountain water. Usually no one will drink anything alcoholic, quick reflexes and steady hands and a ready wit being essential in the fiber arts. The other members will bring a few things, too, sometimes a lot of things, but the host is responsible for the nutritional substrate, plus providing a clean, well-lighted place to knit. In the sudden press of events I'd been neglecting the apartment a little bit, so I had to rush around vacuuming and dusting and replacing a lightbulb or two. I'm a little short on furniture, so I had to move a couple of chairs in from the kitchen to supplement the couch.

  Victor Carogna managed to increase my tension level, probably deliberately, by arriving late. I was bound to be a little jumpy anyway, because one of the first to arrive was April, looking demure in loose jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, no makeup. She seemed perfectly cool and normal, greeting everybody, including me, without a hint of embarrassment, chatting about work and her latest project just as if she'd never wound my Koigu at all. I tried to maintain a matching level of reserve, but my mind was of course tormented with a series of contrasting images, and it was difficult to talk to her as if nothing had happened between us. I was wondering if she'd told the rest of them anything, but decided I was safe: she'd probably rather keep her moonlighting quiet, especially in this group.

  Everybody was curious about where Victor was. “I think Margaret may have taken a turn for the worse,” said Ayn, who was still glowing from the morning's 20-mile ride to the top of Mt. Tamalpais and back, although she'd changed out of her spandex. “Victor said last time that she'd been having some attacks of mild paralysis.” Everyone knitted silently and sympathetically for a minute or two.

  “Well, you know if Margaret's having any problems at all, he won't be here,” Sharon finally said. “He's such a sweet man, under that gruff exterior. He does everything for her. You'd never expect it, from the way he talks, but there it is.” Their expressions all softened as they nodded, thinking tender thoughts about Victor Carogna and his problems. I wanted to scream. Sharon I could understand at least: her boyfriend had not only lost another job but was now threatening to leave her if she didn't get her thighs vacuumed. But what about the rest of them? How could they be taken in by this animal? Had they all had such horrible experiences with men that even Victor Carogna looked good to them? April was actually wiping a tear from her eye as she ripped out her last 15 minutes of work. Only Betty remained unmoved. “He's a nice boy,” she said, generically, but I suspected she was trying to remember who he was.

  “Did he tell you about his doilies?” I asked. I described the doilies in detail, dwelling maliciously on the history and properties of some of the murderous devices depicted on them, with which I happened to be familiar because of my two years in the army. They listened attentively, impressed as always by the scale of the projects Victor Carogna undertook and immune to the vicious implications of his obsession. I couldn't detect the tiniest critical note for his fascination with all that machinery designed to explode human flesh into a cloud of bloody bubbles.

  The conversation moved on. Ayn wanted all the gossip about the Castro Street Wells Fargo branch. She missed the homey, constricted politics of the small office, now that she'd moved down to the big Market Street temple of finance. Some young stud with a gleaming new MBA had apparently been transferred in at Castro and was trying to throw his weight around. “He's a man in a hurry,” said Janet. “You notice how his tie is always blown back over his shoulder, even though there's no wind in there?” They all laughed. “He's trying to get Milton to put in a new procedure for recording transactions, now that we've finally got the old one figured out, which took us about two years. I don't think it's going to go over too well, though. It's the same thing Milton did when he came in, so he's not about to let this dude change everything. You'll probably be getting him down on Market Street pretty soon, Ayn, thank God. Milton'll kick him down there and pretend it's a promotion.” I got this vision of the row of women sitting on their teller stools behind the counter, revolving complacently in short arcs and tapping their little keypads instead of knitting – all sweet, reasonable, and absolutely immutable warehouses of office tradition. Of course they knew they were the people who actually kept the place going. Now they were discussing how the different amounts and quality of conversations they had with male customers correlated with their choice of necklines on a given day. It should have been very entertaining, but I was getting too antsy about Victor Carogna's absence to pay much attention.

  He finally showed up close to an hour late, and I took him right out to the kitchen to get the gun from him.

  “What's the hurry, Ducelis?” he said, unloading the barbecued ribs he'd brought. “Afraid those targets are going to run off somewhere?” I thought he seemed a little preoccupied, though, despite his usual contemptuous air.

  “I just want to get it while the ladies are involved with their gossip. I'm sure they'll give me some shit about having a gun.”

  “Aw, it's just a little one,” he said. “Got ammo?” He handed me a little cardboard box, like a package of lozenges. As usual, I was inexplicably pleased by the weight of the lead in my hand. “I even brought you a holster. You better try it on.” Despite my protests, he fastened the strap of the holster over my shoulder and shoved the little revolver into it. “There you go,” he said. “Now you look like the real thing.”

  Naturally, while I was standing there like an asshole, Janet came in to refill the onion cake platter. “Oh for God's sake,” she said. “What are you boys doing out here? Always playing with your weapons. I'm surprised at you, Randall,” she went on. “After all you've been telling us about Victor's nasty doilies, and here you are waving your own thing around. You better come out and show the girls. They'll be interested.”

  So I had to go out and model the whole setup for the knitters.

  “I don't like those things. They give me the willies.” Sharon tossed her red hair and continued knitting. It gave her the willies on me, I thought; on Victor Carogna I'm sure it would have been quite pheromonal.

  “Isn't it kind of small?” said Janet, nibbling suggestively on a stuffed grape leaf. “Cute though,” she added kindly. “You planning to use it on anyone in particular?”

  “Just target practice,” I said, trying to maintain some shreds of dignity. I took the thing off and sat back down on the couch between Ayn and Betty. Victor Carogna took his usual spot in the chair next to the door and got one of his doilies out of his tote bag, with some nice cotton yarn and a crochet hook.

  “Sorry I'm late,” he said. “Margaret's a little under the weather today. I wanted to make sure she was comfortable before I left.” Of course, he had to play the Margaret card the minute he got there. By now my thinking on the topic of Victor Carogna was not very charitable or even reasonable. Mainly I was thinking about how I was going to get him to stick around for a few minutes after everyone else had left, so I could
menace him with his own little pistol. I still didn't believe it, but I was trying to will the event into existence, to convince myself that my time had finally come to take arms against a sea of troubles.

  “Have you heard from Leilah at all?” Ayn asked me.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “She saw a Black-throated Sparrow.” I didn't bother to explain that this meant she must be in Nevada or southern California – let 'em worry about it. I gave them a quick rundown on her visit, without mentioning the fight about all her stuff that I'd thrown out. They wanted to know what kind of yarn she'd taken with her, and chuckled over the idea of her knitting the winter away by a glowing wood stove in Bridgeport, CA.

  “I wonder what the museums are like in Bridgeport,” April mused.

  “Who cares,” said Victor Carogna. “She'll have a fine time. The point is, you got a different kind of people up there in the mountains. She'll meet some actual human beings, instead of a bunch of friggin bleeding-heart vegetarians. They might change her whole outlook on life.”

  “Right,” I said. “The simple life. Just cows and the people who eat them.” It grated on me even to hear him talk about her. And I eat just as much meat as he does, by the way, although I mostly stick to chicken.

  As the afternoon wore on, there was gradually less knitting and more talking and eating. The tabouli and even the barbecued ribs disappeared, consuming most of my paper napkins in the process. Betty breached the almond lemon bars, which led to a general run on the desserts. I made coffee and brought it in on a tray with sugar and cream. I was just settling back onto the couch with my cup when there came a tentative knocking at the door.

  “Are we expecting anyone else?” I said. “I'll get it,” said Victor Carogna, standing up. He opened the door, then abruptly backed into the room, propelled by a hand against his chest. The hand was attached to a long, skinny arm; the other arm of the pair was holding an aluminum baseball bat. Between the two arms was a scrawny chest loosely draped with a tanktop. Above the tanktop was a rather narrow face with an irrelevant mustache and goatee, myopic eyes shrunk to the size of peas by frameless lenses, and a mouse-brown comb-over. The tanktop read “I'll Be Back”. The hand gave Victor Carogna one final shove into the center of the room, then reached back to close the door.

  “Good afternoon,” said a nasal, caressing voice. The visitor looked around the room at the open-mouthed crowd, then back at Victor Carogna. “Who the fuck are all these people?” Victor Carogna pulled the cigarette pack out of his pocket and tapped out a Camel, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, took a leisurely puff or two. “What can we do for you?” he said.

  “I think you know. You owe me money. Quite a lot of money. I need it. Now.”

  I had to admire Victor Carogna; he was pretty cool in the face of this invasion, but he smoked the Camel about halfway down in 30 seconds, and I noticed his hands were trembling a little bit. So were mine, but I could control them by keeping them planted at my sides on the couch, where I was also comforted by the chilly morsel of Victor Carogna's little pistol.

  “Would you like an almond lemon bar?” Betty piped up.

  “Shut up, bitch,” snapped the intruder. The other women stirred disapprovingly but made no complaint. They were intimidated, even though this guy was physically an unlikely candidate for hooliganism, with those 10-inch pipestem arms and the sunken chest, not to mention the baggy shorts and a bad case of varicose veins, the kind that stick out in knots all over your calves. But the look on his face – determined, unself-conscious, half crazy – made up for any physical deficiencies. One look into those hazel eyes had made me a believer. I was sure he knew how to swing a bat.

  Victor Carogna glanced at the rest of us as though looking for guidance on how to handle the maniac. “What money are you referring to,” he said, tapping Camel ashes absent-mindedly on the rug.

  I'll Be Back swung the bat sharply, backhanded. The sound was spectacular, more than just loud – what you might think a black hole would sound like as it wolfed down a red giant. It was almost enough to make me forget that the son of a bitch had just imploded my widescreen Sony TV. Flakes of glass dispersed around the room, tinkling down on the tops of the bookshelves, and the air filled with a luminous, acrid powder. I didn't want to think what it was doing to our lungs. The women all screamed, and I probably did too. Victor Carogna glanced at me and then took another long drag on the Camel.

  “I don't think that kind of thing is going to resolve our problem here,” he said. “Whatever it is.”

  The bat swung again, this time making a sharp crack as it contacted Victor Carogna's arm, sending the Camel flying. “Shit,” he said, with real pain on his face and holding his arm, which hung limply like a broken branch. The skinny thug was drawing a bead on the other arm. Victor Carogna collected himself and looked over at me again – his usual sarcastic expression, but with something else mixed in, impatience maybe, a certain meaningful tilt of the gray eyebrows. So I shot him.

  The guy with the bat, I mean. I didn't actually shoot him, I shot near him. And I don't even know why I did that, since I wasn't particularly unhappy to see Victor Carogna being humiliated and even hurt. Knitting group loyalty, I guess.

  I shot near him because I was still having trouble – probably always will have – with the idea of rending someone's flesh by projectile or any other means. I shot near his head, because I thought that would make the biggest impression on him. Mind you, I didn't actually know whether the gun was even loaded, since I hadn't bothered to check when Victor Carogna gave it to me. Possibly I had registered the extra weight of the ammunition. Or maybe my subconscious had recognized some facts that my forebrain was unaware of. I was reassured by a loud pop and a modest recoil.

  The bat guy seemed surprised but not at all daunted by the shot across his bow. “Woaaaiiii,” he said – the kind of expostulation you might make watching careening cars nearly collide in a wild six-way intersection – and started for me with the bat raised. So then I really did shoot him. There were ladies in the room, after all; somebody might have gotten hurt. I aimed for his stomach, that being the biggest target, but off to the side, so as not to hit the spinal cord. He froze immediately, with the bat still raised above his head. Then he lowered himself carefully to the rug, stretched out with the bat beside him, put a hand over the little red hole in his shirt, and started groaning. Everyone else was silent. The suspended TV powder gave the whole scene a dreamy look.

  The cops showed up about 15 minutes after April flipped open her cell phone and dialed 911. I had removed the aluminum bat from the reach of the thug as a precaution. He hadn't seemed to notice, and continued to groan, although he was having some trouble breathing. Along with instilling the spirit of the bayonet, the army had trained me to stop the bleeding, clear the airway, protect the wound, and prevent or treat for shock. Only the last of these seemed applicable here, so I had covered the guy with the blanket that the cat used to sleep on before the coyotes got her.

  There were two cops: one giant, muscular guy who was just starting a pot belly, and a petite woman with her blond pageboy haircut sticking out from under the police hat. They took it all in – the smashed TV, Victor Carogna, who was smoking on the couch and trying not to move his smashed arm, the gun on the coffee table among the rubble of tabouli and ribs, and the guy still groaning on the floor – with that complete absence of expression that must be a major part of the training at the Police Academy.

  “Who belongs to the gun?” said the big guy, in a voice so calm and low-pitched as to be almost inaudible. I looked at Victor Carogna. He didn't seem anxious to claim his gun, so I raised my hand.

  “So what's going on?” asked his partner.

  Betty looked up from the afghan she was puzzling over. “This is our knitting group,” she said.

  “OK,” said the blond cop. “But what about him?” gesturing to the guy groaning on the rug.

  “Well, he's not a member,�
�� replied Betty. The cops glanced at each other.

  I thought Betty's explanation was about as good as anything I could have dreamed up at that point. The cops, however, seemed to be reserving judgment on the knitting group hypothesis. The woman called an ambulance to remove the wounded, while the big cop gradually got the rest of the story out of us. He frowned a little when I explained that it was Victor Carogna's gun but that I had done the shooting.

  “Why did you bring the gun to your knitting group?” he wondered. “Were you expecting trouble, or is it a normal precaution in these kind of groups?”

  “I'm Victor Carogna, SFPD retired,” said Victor Carogna. “My friend here wanted to do some target shooting. I loaned him one of my handguns.”

  “You're Carogna?” said the big cop. His lack of expression made it impossible to tell what he thought about that information, but it clearly had meaning for him. I was thinking something too; or rather, beginning to feel a vague uneasiness about my role in the afternoon's events, now that the Wild Bill Hickock adrenaline cocktail had dissipated. I was rather pleased that it had turned out I was able to shoot someone after all, even though it hadn't been Victor Carogna. On the other hand, I was interested and a little puzzled by the convenient presence of a gun – a loaded gun – lying on the couch next to me when the guy showed up with his bat. I didn't really know what to think. Where was the front end of this chain of fools? I wondered who was behind the guy I had plugged – who was trying to get money out of him?

  The rest of us had to stick around for questioning after Victor Carogna and his attacker had left for San Francisco General. The cops asked me a lot of questions about the gun of course, and the blond woman even went out to the squad car to plug my name into Crooknet, or whatever they use to check up on people, but of course I was clean as a whistle. One thing about going through life without doing much one way or the other is that you can compile an impressively blank police record. That blankness seemed very convenient, too. I was wondering what they would have found if they'd run Victor Carogna's name through their database.

  The knit women thoughtfully helped me tidy the place up after the cops had left, admonishing us not to leave town until further notice. Even with the vacuum cleaner it was almost impossible to get all the little flakes of glass from the TV out of the carpet, and the scent of that toxic stuff from the screen was still hanging in the air, mixed with a faint bouquet of gunpowder. “Poor Victor!” said Sharon, as she washed the platter he'd brought the ribs on. “After all he's been through, and now this.”

  “I wonder what kind of business he was doing with that guy,” I ventured, trying to inject an element of reality under the skin of their sentimental mood.

  “Oh! There are just so many untrustworthy people in this world! Or just plain crazy. And everyone seems to be so ready to use violence to resolve things,” said Ayn, glaring at me.

  “Are you all right?” April asked me, as she trailed the rest of them out the door. I almost burst into tears, but managed not to throw myself on her attractive bosom, thanked her for asking, and kept my distance. There was still the 4,000 dollar debt and, upstairs, Arthur's brooding, gravid presence. I was no longer sure how April fitted into the whole picture, but I didn't want to take any more chances.