Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 21

  My brief, scary experiment with arming myself against my troubles seemed to be over, and all I was able to do was retreat into the familiar paralysis. I hung out for the next couple of days, knitting fretfully on The Scarf and idly writing physics problems about the muzzle velocities of guns, just waiting for something to happen. I tried not to draw any attention to myself, tiptoeing from room to room, turning the pages of my books with great care, and taking showers and flushing the toilet very late at night after everyone else in the building had presumably gone to bed. I went out only to buy yogurt and granola with dried raspberries at the fruit stand around the corner, and a newspaper, of course, so I could read about myself. I was disappointed to find that this whole hurricane in my life only rated one short paragraph on the police blotter. Just a garden variety shooting, it seemed, although the writer had some fun with the knitting group connection – “Friendly Needling Turns Ugly,” that kind of thing.

  The mysterious motions and strange moaning of the building continued. I had discovered during my first foray to the fruit stand after the shooting that Mr. Clabber had jacked the entire building up on some enormous rusty steel girders and had brought in a backhoe to excavate underneath it. That explained the lurching, at least; but the stench of diesel exhaust was now added to the already annoying hammerings, sawings, whinings, and Indonesian expostulations. “We make garage,” Mr. Clabber said, gazing expectantly at me. Well, OK, but I don't have a car. In fact, I don't even have a bike at this point. And after he built the garage, he could probably raise the rent. He was also reinforcing the walls for earthquake protection, but it felt like he might destroy the building in the process. I really wished he hadn't picked this particular moment to make the place over.

  Meanwhile, upstairs there was a lot of stomping around and loud talking, although as usual I couldn't quite make out any of it, plus sliding and thumping of heavy weights, doors opening and closing, incessant traffic on the stairs. I didn't dare look out to see what was happening. Soon enough, the dreaded knock came on my door.

  But it was only April. I was actually kind of glad to see her. Looking back on the whole thing, I felt as if she was the only one – maybe even including Leilah – who had briefly seen me as an actual human being, instead of just some skinny pawn to be shoved around the board to wherever she needed me. True, she'd deceived me; but within that context, possibly because of our intimate moments, I felt as though there had been at least minimal human contact.

  She looked a little hot and bothered, I thought, with damp tendrils of blond hair escaping from a businesslike ponytail to hang around her face. She sat down on the couch with a sigh and gazed at the TV's empty skull. “Well, we're leaving,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked, hardly daring to hope. “It's kind of sudden, isn't it?”

  “We've actually been planning it for a while, but this seemed like the right time. I just wanted to come down and make sure you were all right, and say goodbye. That was quite a scene the other day. You must be kind of shook up.”

  I managed a shrug and asked about their new living arrangements.

  “Just between you and me,” she said, “we're leaving town.” My heart leapt up.

  “Arthur's quitting his job?”

  “Actually he's working on a transfer. But we've both kind of had it with San Francisco, so he's going to take his vacation. We just want to get out of here.”

  This all seemed to be good news for me, but there were still some nagging questions. “What about your other business?” I didn't want to refer directly to the 4,000 dollars, but I was hoping for a hint as to where things stood with that. “Isn't that going to be disrupted?”

  “Internet. Available worldwide,” she said with a little smile. “It's not going all that well, anyway. I haven't really built up the right kind of clientele yet, so it won't hurt to start over somewhere else.” I appreciated the delicate reference to the way her clients had disappointed her. She stood up and stretched, groaning. “I'm so tired from all that packing,” she said.

  At the door she paused and smiled, and stuck out her chest just a little. “I was wondering if you could lend us a couple of hundred bucks. Mitochondrion tore up all the rugs, so we had to forfeit our deposit. We're basically broke.” She smiled into my eyes. I walked her over to the teller machine then and there.

  The quiet from upstairs after they left was a little depressing, even though their departure had lifted all kinds of weight off my shoulders. Inexplicably, I missed them: their voices, their footsteps, the indecipherable conversations and faint music. I tried to imagine their life in Salt Lake City, or wherever the hell they were going to end up, but it was hard to picture. How would it all end? Arthur, I supposed, would stick with the bank unless one of his shady schemes came through, which seemed very unlikely. Or unless somebody shot him, which seemed less unlikely, given his evident unfitness for life in the underworld. After all, I thought, he'd been reduced to recruiting me to solve his problems for him.

  Although I'd never seen any signs of it in her behavior, I thought drugs must somehow have been involved in April's career change, given Arthur's entrepreneurial activities and his unsavory relationship with the uxorious ex-cop Victor Carogna. Could you go back to Wells Fargo after being an internationally available escort and coke addict? She obviously had chosen her manager poorly, and I couldn't see her making enough money at it to retire comfortably. So then I had to try to imagine April at, say, 45. What would she be doing? Maybe she could latch onto some relatively decent guy she met in the course of her profession, marry him, and live happily ever after in a little white house in South Platte with sunflowers in the garden. I wished for something like that for her, but I didn't really hope for it. Still, what does happen to people who move out of our lives, in any case? If we never see them again, aren't we free to imagine whatever we want for them, the best or the worst?

  Meanwhile, Nurse Julia had reappeared with Raton to give me a tour of her apartment, which was a godawful mess. “I've been so busy with work and packing, I haven't had time to tidy the place up,” she apologized, but having lived with Leilah for 25 years I recognized the signs. “The bed's made up clean, though,” she said.

  She made me a cup of tea and we sat around chatting for a bit. Because of her odd schedule, I suppose, she didn't have much contact with the other tenants and really knew almost nothing about recent events in our strange building, although she'd somehow learned of Leilah's departure (maybe our big farewell fight had awakened her from her afternoon slumbers?) and had seen what she casually identified as obvious drug types going up or coming down the stairs. I was relieved to discover that she seemed to know nothing about April's moonlighting. It certainly wouldn't be me who told her about it.

  “I'm glad we finally met,” she said, as Raton and I walked her down to board the blue SuperShuttle van. “It's reassuring to have a contact in the building.” She looked different, less clinical, in her civvies. “My mother taught me to knit, but I haven't done it since I was 8 years old,” she told me. “I've been thinking of taking it up again.”

  “Do you like birds?” I asked shrewdly.

  “Birds?” she said.

  Raton stared, trembling slightly, as the van pulled away.