by Unknown
CHAPTER 7
That afternoon, after taking his nap, Hoke knocked on the door of each occupied apartment and introduced himself as the new manager. The schoolteacher, a Ms. Dussalt, had already left the island to spend a month of her summer vacation with her parents in Seffner, Florida. One of the Alabama couples claimed that their toilet kept running after it was flushed. Hoke showed them--both of them-- how to jiggle the handle to make it stop.
"And if that doesn't stop it," Hoke said, "take off the lid, reach down in there, and make sure that the rubber stopper's covering the drain."
"That's inconvenient," the woman said. Her tiny lips were pursed, and her abundance of hair had recently been blued.
"That may be," Hoke said, "but if I called a plumber out here for thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents an hour, he'd tell you the same thing."
"At the rentals you all charge, we shouldn't have to spend five minutes or so jiggling the handle every time we use the bathroom."
"I can move you to another apartment if you like. But you've been living here for two weeks already, and if I move you you'll have to pay a thirty-five-dollar cleaning charge for moving before your two months' rent are up."
"That's all right, Mr. Moseley," the woman's husband said quickly. "I don't mind jiggling the handle."
Hoke used his passkey to check Ms. Dussault's apartment, and turned off her water heater. He made a note in his policeman's notebook to turn it on again a day before she would return. The salad man wasn't home, but the college professor was in. He wanted to talk, and Hoke had a difficult time in getting away from him. He was a tall, rather stooped Ohioan in his middle thirties, with long chestnut hair in a ponytail down his back, secured by some rubber bands. He wore a "Go 'Gators" T-shirt, blue-denim cutoffs, and Nike running shoes without socks. He said his name was Ralph Hurt, but everyone at the University of Florida called him Itai, because itai meant "hurt" in Japanese. He had once spent an entire year in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, and had talked so much about his experiences in Japan that his colleagues in his department had come up with the nickname. Itai had a year's sabbatical leave at three-quarters' pay, to write a novel.
"You teach English, then? My dad told me you were a biology teacher."
"I am. But I couldn't get a grant to do the research in my field, so I told the board I'd write a novel instead. Sabbaticals are given out on a seniority basis anyway, so the board didn't give a rat's ass what I did so long's I put something down on paper as a project. So I said I'd write a novel, and now I'll have to write one to have something to show my department chairman when I get back. It doesn't have to be a publishable novel, although that would be nice, but I'm going to have to come up with two or three hundred pages of fiction."
"What is your field?"
"Ethiopian horseflies. I'm probably the only American authority on Ethiopian horseflies. Most of the original work on Ethiopian Tabanidae was done by Bequaret and Austen, back in the late twenties, but these early studies were incomplete. Other hot-shots in the field are Bigot, Gerstaeker, and, of course, Enderlein, but there's still a lot to be done. And there hasn't been much recently. The problem, you see, is that these flies can be as troublesome after they die as they are in life. The fact that the fly is only caught in the act of aggression seems to lead to a lamentable display of force by collectors."
"You mean it's slapped down on when it bites?"
"Exactly. As a consequence, it's almost impossible to get an Ethiopian -Haematopta- intact, you see. What I really wanted to do was to go to northern Ethiopia and do my own collecting. There's only so much a man can learn from plates, and I only have a half-dozen preserved specimens up at Gainesville to study. A man could write a long and very important book on wing variations alone, if he had the specimens. But I've only got one wing specimen that's halfway intact. I didn't know you were so interested in horseflies, Mr. Moseley."
"I'm not. But I guess it must be an important field of study."
"It is, definitely. There's no such thing as a group of immaculately preserved specimens, and until there is, all we have is a somewhat spurious appearance of accuracy in the studies published so far. At any rate, in lieu of going to Africa, I have to write a fucking novel to get my year off. Please excuse me. Sometimes I don't watch my language, although I'm careful around students."
"I don't always watch mine either," Hoke admitted.
"The novel's coming along, though. I'm writing about a college professor at Gainesville, a history professor, who's having an affair with one of his students--an orthodontist's daughter from Fort Lauderdale. She works part-time in a wicker furniture factory, and they meet there at night to make love."
"Does she have bad teeth?"
"Yes. How'd you know that?"
"I don't know, but it seems to me I've already read a novel like that in a paperback--or maybe it was a movie?"
"You must be mistaken, Mr. Moseley. This is a true story, based on my own experiences. But I've disguised it by making the hero a history professor instead of an entomologist. The girl actually worked in a seat-cover shop-- for cars--and her father was a peridontist, not an orthodontist."
"That's a fairly thin disguise."
"You're probably right, but entomologists aren't expected to be particularly inventive. The manuscript won't be publishable anyway, and the department chairman won't even read it, so it doesn't matter. He'll just count the pages, and if there're more than two hundred he'll be satisfied. Writing it, though, is a kind of therapy for me. I'm lonely down here, and I'd much rather be in Ethiopia, collecting. Maybe you can come down some evening and have a drink? I can tell you a lot more about horseflies, or we can talk a little about Zen--"
"I don't think so. My father owns the El Pelicano, and he told me he'd rather not have me socializing too much with the tenants."
"That's absurd. Well, take these along anyway." The professor got a three-volume set of H. Oldroyd's -The HorseFlies (Dip tera: Tabanidae) of the Ethiopian Region- from the pile of books beside his desk and handed them to Hoke. The three books were heavy; altogether, Hoke figured, they weighed ten or twelve pounds.
"I'll get these back to you as soon as I can, Dr. Hurt."
"Itai. Just call me Itai, and there's no hurry. If you have any questions, I'm home most of the time, at least when I'm not on the beach."
Hoke returned to his apartment and put the three volumes on his dining table, a small, round affair with a green Formica surface and aluminum legs. There were four straight chairs with foam rubber seats, covered with plastic sheeting, and they too had aluminum legs. The floor was covered with brown linoleum with a square tile design, with narrow beige lines that were supposed to look like grout. There were no rugs in any of the apartments, because sand would get into the carpeting as the tenants came in from the beach, and there was no daily maid service to vacuum up. There was a narrow galley (it wasn't big enough to be called a kitchen), with a Formica counter between it and the living-bedroom. Two sturdy oak stools stood at the counter. The bathroom had a shower but no tub, and this room was so narrow that when Hoke sat on the toilet his knees touched the wall. The two single Bahama beds were in one corner of the living room, with the top third of one bed pushed beneath a square coffee table that held a clear glass lamp, two feet high, filled with seashells. When the El Pelicano was a hotel, only one door was required, but now Florida law required two doors for apartments. When Frank converted the rooms into efficiency apartments, he had added the extra door right next to each entrance door, but this useless exit was blocked inside each apartment by the dining table. The two doors, the galley, and the windows took up most of the wall space on three sides. There was room enough on the remaining wall, however, for a picture. The framed print, a cheap reproduction of Winslow Homer's "The Gulf Stream," was the same in all eight apartments, and was bolted to the wall to prevent its theft. Also bolted to the wall and chained in the galley were a toaster oven and an electric can-opener. Like the picture, these were highly pilfer
able items. A window air conditioner occupied the bottom half of one window, but the view of the ocean from the other window by the Bahama bed was excellent. Hoke usually sat at the table instead of the counter, because when he looked up he liked to see the semi-naked black man lying in the damaged boat floating in the current. The black man seemed indifferent to his fate, whatever it was going to be, and appeared to be contented with his hopeless condition, drifting along with the Gulf Stream.
The stew in the big iron pot, simmering on the small stove, smelled wonderful to Hoke, but although he was hungry he planned to put off eating for as long as possible. If he ate too early, it would be a long time until breakfast, and he was limiting himself to only one bowlful.
Hoke opened Volume I of -Horse-Flies of the Ethiopian Region- and read the introduction. He didn't understand most of the technical terms, but the plates in the book were beautifully delineated, with an attention to detail that seemed painstakingly precise. By studying the plates closely, Hoke could see what Dr. Hurt--Itai--meant by damaged specimens. Some of the segments on the antennae were missing, and so were parts of the legs. The delineator had not guessed, or filled in the missing parts, but that, Hoke supposed, was what real science was all about.
In science, if it wasn't there, you couldn't just guess at something and fill it in, whereas detective work was just the opposite. You took what you had, the facts you could find, and then tried your best to fill in those missing parts until you came up with a complete picture. Well, he wouldn't have to worry about detection any longer. No more guesswork. These books, which he had been so reluctant to accept, were just the right sort of reading. He could read them when he didn't feel like working out a chess problem (after he got settled in, he planned to buy a board and chessmen and a book of problems), and he wouldn't get emotionally involved with the horseflies. He might have to buy a biology dictionary, however, to learn the definitions of some of the special words entomologists used. Maybe Itai had one; if so, he could borrow the professor's, a little later on--
There was a knock on the door, a rat-tat-tat of one knuckle.
Hoke opened the door, and there was his daughter Aileen. She exposed her crooked, overlapping white teeth in a wide grin. She was wearing jeans, a pink T-shirt, and tennis shoes. As she encircled Hoke's naked waist to hug him, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, Hoke pulled back and looked over her shoulder.
"Did Ellita drive you up, or what?"
"I drove up myself. I didn't have any trouble at all."
"But you don't have a license!"
"Sure I do!" Aileen giggled and put her leather drawstring purse on the table. She opened the drawstring, found her wallet, took out a Florida driver's license, and handed it to her father.
"This is Sue Ellen's license," Hoke said. "If a trooper'd stopped you, you couldn't have passed as your sister. You girls don't look anything alike."
"But I wasn't stopped, Daddy. Now that I've proved I can drive, you ought to help me get a learner's permit so I can at least drive around in the daytime."
"I don't want you driving yet, honey, you aren't aggressive enough to drive in Florida. Where'd you park my car?"
"Over there--in the mall lot."
"Give me the keys. I'll move it to the manager's slot next to the entrance."
After they got the car, and Hoke reparked it by the entrance, he asked her what were in all of the cardboard boxes in the back seat.
"I brought my things, too, Daddy, along with stuff for you. I'm going to stay with you for the rest of your leave."
"Who told you that?"
"We had a family conference, me, Ellita, and Sue Ellen. Sue Ellen's got her job at the car wash, and Ellita'll be having her baby soon, so I had to be the one--and I wanted to be the one--to come up and look after you. Besides, Ellita's mother's going to move in before the baby comes."
"I can take care of myself. You girls are going out to California to live with your mother."
"No." Aileen shook her head. "We voted against that. Sue Ellen decided she isn't going back to school in September. She's sixteen and she's got a good job, so she can drop out legally. We don't want to live with Mom and Curly Peterson. And you know that Curly doesn't want us around."
"Just take what you need upstairs, and we'll leave the rest of the stuff in the car for now."
"Won't someone break in and steal them?"
"This is Singer Island, not Miami. Besides, there's no room for all of that stuff upstairs. When your grandfather converted the hotel to apartments, he had to use the closets for kitchens. So except for a few hooks by the galley doorway, and that little alcove in the bathroom, there isn't much room to store anything."
Aileen paused in the small lobby, holding her train case in her right hand. "What about the room behind the counter, Daddy?"
"That was the old office, when this place was a hotel. It's full of odds and ends now, a couple of rollaway beds and some other crap."
"If I cleaned it out I could make it into a bedroom, or we could store some of our stuff there."
"Never mind the 'we.' You can stay tonight, but I'm sending you back on the bus tomorrow."
"I'm not going back. You need someone to look after you; we decided." She walked into the apartment ahead of him. "I know you aren't sick, or anything like that, but you're still acting funny, and Ellita doesn't want you living all by yourself."
"What I do is none of Ellita's business."
"She's your partner, Daddy, and she's concerned about you."
"I'm quitting the department. I already told her that. I just haven't put my papers in yet because I've had a lot of other things to do. So Ellita won't be my partner much longer."
Aileen began to leaf through the books on the table. "These books are all about Ethiopian horseflies."
"I know. I've been studying them."
"Horseflies? I don't know, Daddy. You say you're all right and all that, and I believe you because you look fine--rested and all. But if I called Ellita and told her you were studying a three-volume set of books on Ethiopian horseflies, I think she'd be up here like a shot--"
"Don't get smart. There's a college professor who lives here, and he lent them to me for a few days. He's writing a novel."
"Really? What about?"
"It's about--I haven't read any of it. But don't bother him about it, either. A man writing a novel doesn't want to be bothered by some nosy kid asking a lot of dumb questions."
"Okay, Daddy, I won't say anything to him. That stew smells awful good."
"I guess you want some stew, too." Hoke said it in a way that would let her think he didn't care whether she ate any of it or not--but he did care. Aileen never seemed to gain any weight, but she was a voracious eater, so he knew she would want at least two helpings of stew. There went his plan. The stew wouldn't last two people for any five meals, and Aileen always ate a substantial lunch, too. And she liked to eat sweet things between meals. He didn't know what to do with the girl. He hated the idea of calling his ex-wife and asking her to take Aileen back--especially if Sue Ellen refused to go, too. Sue Ellen was bullheaded, and if he insisted that she return to her mother, Sue Ellen might just move out of the house and find a room somewhere in Miami. She was already making more than $150 a week at the Green Lakes Car Wash, and if she started to work overtime on Saturdays she would be more than able to support herself. But at sixteen, Sue Ellen shouldn't be living all by herself in Miami. Christ, how in the hell could a man simplify his life?
Aileen came up behind him, put her long arms around his waist, and rubbed her cheek on his hairy back. "I missed you, Daddy. I--we were all so worried about you. But you're going to be fine. I'll take good care of you, you'll see."
"I'm fine now. Just look in the cupboard above the sink, and set the table. You'll find plastic plates, two plastic bowls, and some wooden-handled silverware in the drawer beside the sink. So set the table, and I'll dish up the stew."
After they finished eating, Aileen excused herself and left the
apartment, saying that there was something she needed in the car. She was gone for more than fifteen minutes. While she was gone, Hoke put the leftover stew in the refrigerator and washed the dishes and silverware. When she came back empty-handed, Hoke asked what it was she had forgotten in the car.
"Chewing gum." She opened her mouth to show him the gum. "But while I was downstairs I took the old broom that was behind the counter and swept the lobby. It really needed it, and so do the hallways, upstairs and down."
"Jesus." Hoke shook his head. He remembered then that on top of acting as a rental agent, he was also responsible for keeping the apartment house clean; for keeping the small lawn mowed; and for checking that all of the garbage was put into the dumpster outside, if and when the tenants left stuff lying around. Maybe it might not be a bad idea to keep Aileen around for two or three days until he could get things policed up, and then he could send her back to Miami.
Aileen took her Monopoly game out of one of the cardboard boxes she had brought upstairs earlier and began to set it up on the dining table. "Let's play some Monopoly, Daddy. What do you want to play? The slow game or the fast game?"
"The slow, regular game, I guess. What's the hurry?"
CHAPTER 8
After Stanley rewashed the laundry and put it into the dryer, he sat in his recliner and wondered what to do with himself. He had forgottth to stop at the supermarket to buy the TV dinners, but there were all kinds of canned goods in the storage cabinet. There were also eggs, milk, hamburger, and a few tomatoes in the refrigerator, so he could get by without going to the market for a few days.
He didn't want to leave the house and have people stare at him and whisper. Perhaps one of the Wise Old Men would come by and offer him some moral support? He dismissed this thought at once. He had never invited any of the old men to his house, and none of them had invited him to visit them either. Most of these retirees were a lot like him, he supposed. Their wives ran them out so they could clean up, and the park had just been a place to go-- either there, or one of the malls. Stanley didn't have a close relationship with any one of them.