by Sideswipe
Ellita nibbled her lower lip. “You really think Hoke’ll be all right?”
“He’ll be fine.” Bill looked at his wristwatch. “It’s one-fifteen. If anyone ever asks you, Hoke’s been on an official thirty-day leave of absence since eight A.M. this morning.”
Hoke hadn’t planned it that way, but that’s how he got back to Singer Island.
2
Stanley and Maya Sinkiewicz lived in Riviera Beach, Florida, in a subdivision called Ocean Pines Terraces. The subdivision was six miles west of the Atlantic Ocean and the Lake Worth waterway. There were no pines; they had all been bulldozed away during construction. There were no terraces, either. Not only was the land flat, it was barely three feet above sea level, and flood insurance was mandatory on every mortgaged home. Sometimes, during the rainy season, the canals overflowed and the area was inundated for days at a time.
Stanley was seventy-one years old but looked older. Maya was sixty-six, and she looked even older than Stanley. He had retired from the Ford Motor Company six years earlier, after working most of his life as a striper on the assembly line. During his last three years before retiring, he had worked in the paint supply room. Because of his specialized work on the line for so many years, Stanley’s right shoulder was three inches lower than his left (he was right-handed), and when he walked, his right step was about three inches longer than his left, which gave his walk a gliding effect. As a striper, Stanley had painted the single line, with a drooping striping brush, around the automobiles moving through the plant as they got to him. These encircling lines were painted by hand instead of by mechanical means because a ruled line is a “dead” line, and a perfect, ruled line lacked the insouciant raciness a hand-drawn line gives to a finished automobile. Stanley’s freehand lines were so straight they looked to the unpracticed eye as if they had been drawn with the help of a straightedge, but the difference was there. During Henry Ford’s lifetime, of course, there were no stripes on the black finished Fords. No one remembered when the practice began, but Stanley got his job as a striper on his first day of work and had kept it until his final three years. He had been transferred to the paint shop when it was decided by someone that a tape could be put around the cars; then, when the tape was ripped off, there was the stripe, like magic. Of course, it was now a dead stripe, but it saved a few seconds on the line.
Stanley and Maya had lived in Hamtramck, and they had paid off their mortgage on a small two-bedroom house in this largely Polish community. On a Florida vacation once they had spent two weeks in a motel in Singer Island. During this time they had enjoyed the sun so much they had decided to retire to Riviera Beach when the time came. The Ocean Pines Terraces development had been in the planning stages, and because pre-phase construction prices were so low, Stanley had made a down payment on a two-bedroom house and hadn’t had to close on it for almost two more years. After Stanley retired, he and Maya trucked their old furniture from Hamtramck down to the new house and moved in. The house Stanley had closed on for fifty thousand dollars, six years earlier, was now worth eighty-three thousand. With his U. A. W. pension and Social Security, Stanley had an income of more than twelve thousand a year, plus three ten-thousand-dollar certificates of deposit in savings. Their son, Stanley, Jr., now lived with his wife and two teenage children in the old house in Hamtramck, and Junior paid his father two hundred a month in rent. Maya, who had worked part-time, off and on, at a dry-cleaning shop a block away from their house in Hamtramck, also drew Social Security each month, and both of them were on Medicare.
Despite their attainment of the American Dream, Maya was not happy in Florida. She missed her son, her grandchildren, and her neighbors back in Michigan. She even missed the cold and snow of the slushy Detroit winters. Maya didn’t like having Stanley at home all of the time, either, and they had finally reached a compromise. He had to leave the house each morning by eight A.M., and he wasn’t allowed to return home until at least noon. His absence gave Maya time to clean the house in the morning, do the laundry, watch TV by herself, or do whatever else she wanted to, while Stanley had the morning use of their Ford Escort.
After eating lunch at home, which Maya made for him, Stanley usually took a nap. Maya then drove the Escort to the International Shopping Mall on U.S. 1, or to the supermarket, or both, and didn’t return home until after three. Sometimes, when there was a Disney film or a G-rated film at one of the six multitheaters in the International Mall, she took in the Early Bird matinee for a dollar-fifty and didn’t come home until five P.M.
When they first moved to Florida, Maya had telephoned Junior two or three times a week, collect, to see how he and his wife and the grandchildren were getting along, but after a few weeks, when no one ever answered the phone, she had called only once a week, direct dial, on Sunday nights. She then discovered that Junior would be there to talk—for three minutes, or sometimes for five. Her daughter-in-law was never at home on Sunday nights, but sometimes Maya would be able to talk to her grandchildren, Geoffrey and Terri, a sixteen-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl.
Stanley was a clean old man, and very neat in his appearance. He usually wore gray or khaki poplin trousers, gray suede Hush Puppies with white socks, and a white short-sleeved shirt with a black leather pre-tied necktie that had a white plastic hook to hold it in place behind the buttoned collar. The necktie, worn with the white shirt, made Stanley look like a retired foreman (not a striper) from the Ford Motor Company, and he always said that he was a retired foreman if someone asked him his occupation. He hadn’t been able to make any new friends in Florida, although, at first, he had tried. For a few weeks, Stanley had been friendly with Mr. Agnew, his next-door neighbor, a butcher who worked for Publix, but when Mr. Agnew bought a Datsun, after Stanley had told him that the Escort was a much better car, and an American car to boot, he no longer spoke to Mr. Agnew, even if Maya was still friendly with Agnew’s wife.
When Stanley left the house in the mornings, he wore a long-billed khaki fishing cap with a green visor. He always carried a cane, even though he didn’t need one. He wore the cap because he was bald and didn’t want to get the top of his head sunburned, but he carried the cane to fend off dogs. The gnarled wooden cane had a rubber tip and a brass dog’s head handle. The handle could be unscrewed, and Stanley had a dozen cyanide tablets concealed in a glass tube inside the hollowed-out shaft of the wooden cane. Stanley had appropriated these cyanide tablets from the paint shop at Ford because he found them useful for poisoning vicious dogs in Hamtramck, and later in Florida. Stanley was afraid of dogs. As a boy, he had been badly mauled by a red Chow Chow in Detroit, and he didn’t intend to be bitten again. During the last three years, he had used three pills to poison neighborhood dogs in Ocean Pines Terraces, and he was ready to poison another one when the opportunity arrived. Stanley had a foolproof method. He would make a hamburger ball approximately an inch and a half in diameter, with the cyanide pill in the center. Then he rolled the ball in salt and put the ball in a Baggie. When he took a walk and passed the house where the targeted dog lived, he would toss the ball underhand onto the lawn, or drop it beside a hedge or a tree as he continued down the sidewalk. When the dog was let loose in its yard, it would invariably find the hamburger by smell, lick the salt once or twice, and then gulp down the fatal meatball. Thanks to Stanley’s skill, the neighborhood was shy one boxer, one Doberman, and one Pekinese.
Stanley’s cane had also helped to make him a fringe member of the “Wise Old Men,” a small group of retirees that congregated each weekday morning in Julia Tuttle Park. This small two-acre park had been constructed by the developer as a part of his deal to get the zoning variance that he needed for Ocean Pines Terraces. There was a thatched shed in the park, where a half-dozen retirees played pinochle in the mornings, and there was a group of rusting metal chairs under a shady strangler-fig tree, where another, smaller group of elderly men sat and talked. The group that met under the tree was called the “Wise Old Men” by the pinochle player
s, but they meant this sarcastically. The two groups didn’t mingle, and if a man went to the park every day he would eventually have to decide which one to join. Stanley didn’t play pinochle, and he didn’t talk much either, having little to say and a limited education, but for the first few weeks, after silently watching the boring pinochle games, he had joined the group under the tree, to listen to the philosophers. The dean of this group was a retired judge, who always wore a starched seersucker suit with a bow tie. The other Wise Old Men wore wash pants and sport shirts, or sometimes T-shirts, and comfortable running shoes. Except for the judge, Stanley was the only one who wore a necktie. The group had changed personnel a few times since Stanley’s retirement—some of the older men had died—but the judge was still there, looking about the same as he had in the beginning. Stanley, when he looked in the mirror to shave each morning, didn’t think that he had changed much either. He realized deep down that he must have aged somewhat, because the others had, but he felt better in Florida than he had ever felt back in Michigan when he had had to go to work every day.
One morning the topic under discussion was the “dirtiest thing in the world.” Theories and suggestions had been tendered, but they had all been shot down by the judge. Finally, toward noon, Stanley had looked at his cane, cleared his throat, and said: “The tip of a cane is the dirtiest thing in the world.”
“That’s it,” the judge said, nodding sagely. “There’s nothing dirtier than the tip of a cane. It taps the ground indiscriminately, touching spittle, dog droppings, any and everything in its blind groping. By the end of a short walk, the septic tip of a cane probably collects enough germs to destroy a small city. I believe you’ve hit upon it, Mr. Sinkiewicz, and we can safely say that this is now a closed topic.”
The others nodded, and they all looked at Stanley’s cane, marveling at the filthy things the rubber tip had touched as Stanley had carried it through the years. After that triumph, Stanley had contributed nothing more to the morning discussions, but he was definitely considered a fringe member and was greeted by name when he sat down to listen.
But Stanley didn’t go to Julia Tuttle Park every single day like the others. He was too restless. He sometimes drove to Palm Beach instead, parked, and walked along Worth Avenue, window shopping, marveling at the high prices of things. Like Maya, he visited the International Mall on U.S. 1, or parked in the visitors’ lot of the West Palm Beach Public Library. He would browse through the obituaries in the Detroit Free Press, looking for the names of old acquaintances. The fact was, Stanley didn’t quite know what to do with his long free mornings, yet although he was frequently bored, searching for something to do to pass the morning hours, he was unaware of his boredom. He was retired, and he knew that a man who was retired didn’t have to do anything. So this was what he did: Nothing much, except for wandering around.
Once a week he cut the lawn, whether it needed it or not. In the rainy season, lawns had to have a weekly cutting; in the winter, when the weather was dry, the lawn could have gone for three weeks or more. But by mowing one day every seven, on Tuesday afternoons, he broke up the week. Maya did all the shopping and paid all the monthly bills from their joint checking account. Stanley cashed a check for thirty-five dollars every Monday at the Riviera Beach bank, allowing himself five dollars a day for spending money, but almost always had something left over at the end of the week.
In the evenings, Stanley and Maya watched television. They were hooked up to the cable, with Showtime and thirty-five other channels, but they rarely changed the channel once they were sitting down. Sometimes they watched the same movie on Showtime four or five times in a single month. Maya went to bed at ten, but Stanley always stayed up and watched the eleven o’clock news. Because of his afternoon nap, he could rarely fall asleep before midnight. He rose at six A.M., though, got the Post-Times from the lawn, drank some coffee, and read the paper until Maya got up to fix his breakfast.
On a Wednesday afternoon in June, Stanley was asleep on the screened porch behind the house at three-thirty when Pammi Sneider, the nine-year-old daughter of a retired U.S. Army master sergeant who leased a Union gas station out on Military Trail, came through the unlocked screen door. Pammi was a frequent visitor when Maya was home, because Maya would give the girl cookies and a glass of red Kool-Aid, or sometimes, when she had been baking, a slice of pie or cake. The Sneiders lived four doors down from the Sinkiewiczes, and once Mrs. Sneider had told Maya that if Pammi ever pestered her to just send her home. Maya had said she liked to have the little girl drop by, and that Pammi reminded her of her granddaughter back in Michigan, whose name was Terri, a name ending with an i, just like Pammi’s. Despite that conversation, the two women were not friends. There was too much difference in their ages, and in just about everything else. Mrs. Sneider was only thirty-six, and she belonged to Greenpeace, the La Leche League, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, and the West Palm Beach chapter of N.O.W. Mrs. Sneider was away from home a good deal, but this was a safe neighborhood, and Pammi was allowed to play with other children and was also authorized to go to Julia Tuttle Park in the afternoons, by herself. In the afternoons, very few of the older men went to the park. It was too hot to sit there, for one thing, and when school was out, the older men did not like to hear the small children squealing on the playground equipment and chasing each other around. There were almost always a few mothers there with smaller children, so the park was considered a safe place to send children to get them out of the house.
Pammi was barefooted, and she wore a blue-and-white striped T-shirt and a pair of red cotton shorts with an elastic waistband. She carried a leather sack in her left hand, a sack that had once contained marbles. She tiptoed over to the webbed lounger, where Stanley was sleeping on his back, and gave him a French kiss.
Stanley spluttered and sat up suddenly. Pammi giggled and held out her grubby right hand.
“Now,” she said, giggling again, “you gotta give me a penny.”
Stanley wiped his mouth, blinking slightly. “What did you do?”
“I gave you a kiss. Now you gotta give me a penny.”
“My wife’s at the store,” Stanley said. “But she should be back soon. I don’t know if she’s got any cookies for you or not, Pammi. I haven’t been in the kitchen—”
“I don’t want a cookie. I want a penny for my collection.” The girl held up her leather bag and shook it. The coins inside rattled.
“I didn’t ask you for a kiss, and you shouldn’t kiss a man like that anyway. Not at your age. Who taught you to stick out your tongue when you kissed?”
Pammi shrugged. “I don’t know his name. But he comes to the park every day when it begins to get dark, and he gives me a penny for a wet kiss, and five pennies for a look. You owe me a penny now, and if you want a look you’ll have to give me five more.” Pammi put her sack on the terrazzo floor and stripped off her red shorts. Stanley looked, and shook his head. Pammi’s hairless pudenda, which resembled a slightly dented balloon, did nothing to excite the old man.
“Put your shorts back on. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
As Stanley got off the lounger, Pammi laughed and danced away. He picked up her shorts from the floor and stalked the little girl, trying to drive her into a corner so he could put her shorts on again. Maya drove into the carport in the black Escort and parked, then came into the kitchen with a bag of groceries and looked through the sliding glass doors to the porch. By this time, Stanley had Pammi by one leg and was trying to insert it into the shorts, while Pammi giggled and tried to get away from him.
“You owe me six cents first!” Pammi said. “You looked, you looked!” Then, when Pammi saw Maya’s face through the glass doors, she stopped giggling and began to cry. Maya hurried through the living room and went out the front door, slamming it behind her. When Pammi began to cry and ceased struggling, and the front door slammed, Stanley let go of the little girl’s leg. He was still holding her shorts in his right hand when Pammi ran out the ba
ck screen door and into the yard. She cut through the unfenced back yards and, bare-butted, raced home, four doors away.
Still holding Pammi’s shorts, Stanley went into the kitchen. He looked into the bag of groceries on the sideboard by the sink. There was a quart of milk and a dozen eggs in the bag, as well as some canned things. He put the eggs and the milk into the refrigerator. He wondered where Maya had gone; she had, apparently, taken her handbag when she’d gone back out the front door. Maya’s car keys were still on the counter beside the bag of groceries.
It did not occur to Stanley that he was in an awkward position. Instead, he was irritated because Maya had left the house without telling him where she was going. He was also a little concerned about Pammi. A girl that young shouldn’t be French-kissing a man old enough to be her grandfather—or great-grandfather, for that matter—and showing off her dimpled private parts for pennies. He wondered who had taught her those games, but he couldn’t think of any of the old men in the park who would do any such thing. Later on that evening, he decided, he would go down to Mr. Sneider’s house and talk to him about it.
Stanley picked up the leather bag of coins and looked inside. He dumped the pennies on the kitchen table and counted them. There were ninety-four. He guessed that Pammi had needed six more pennies to make a hundred, so that was why she had kissed him and showed him her private parts. If she had a hundred pennies, she could change them for a dollar bill.
Stanley put the rest of the groceries away and sat in the living room waiting for Maya to come back. Twenty minutes later, Maya came briskly up the walk, accompanied by Mr. Sneider. Stanley, still holding Pammi’s red shorts in his lap, got out of his chair as Maya unlatched the front door. When it swung open and he saw the expression on Mr. Sneider’s face, Stanley started to run out toward the back porch. Sneider, rushing past Maya, moved uncommonly fast for a man his size and he hit Stanley in the mouth before Stanley could say anything to either of them.