by Sideswipe
Stanley’s mind froze.
They would know that already. They would also know by now that he had been arrested as a child molester. He was innocent, of course, but Sergeant Sneider had told him that there were two other old geezers involved with Pammi, and it was quite possible that one, or both, of them were Wise Old Men. Whoever it was would lay low now, but any man once accused—as he was, even though he was innocent—would always be suspect. He didn’t think any of the Wise Old Men would actually say anything to him about it, but they would think about it—and figure it was him—and he didn’t want to sit there while they looked at him sideways and speculated about his guilt. No, it would be a long time before he could go to the park again—if ever. On the other hand, the longer he stayed away from the park, the more they would consider him guilty.
He couldn’t win either way.
Stanley separated his clothes from Maya’s and put her dirty clothing into a brown paper grocery bag. He sure as hell wasn’t going to wash her things. When she got around to sending for her clothes, he would pack them up and send them to her dirty. He looked through the pockets of his bloodied shirt and came across the news clipping Troy Louden had handed him. He hadn’t forgotten about it; he had merely put it out of his mind, which wasn’t the same thing. This errand had priority over everything else he had to do, but he was reluctant to deliver a message like that. It wouldn’t do the young man any good. But he had said that he would do it, so he might as well. There was a Big 5 writing tablet on Maya’s desk. Stanley printed out the message in block letters:
IF YOU DON’T DROP THE CHARGES, I’LL KILL YOUR BABY AND YOUR WIFE AND THEN YOU.
The printed message looked sinister all right, but it also looked unreal. Stanley then printed ROBERT SMITH under the message and sealed it in one of Maya’s pastel pink envelopes, along with the clipping. Then he printed Collins’s address on the envelope. There was only one Henry Collins listed in the West Palm Beach section of the phone book.
Even if the message didn’t help Troy, it couldn’t hurt him any. If Mr. Collins brought it in to the police station, Troy could deny that he sent it. How could he? He was in jail. Stanley put the sealed envelope into his hip pocket, collected his checkbook, certificates of deposit, and passbook, but he paused at the door. It was eight A.M., and the sun was blazing. He put on his billed cap and his sunglasses, and got his walking stick from the umbrella stand beside the door, but still he hesitated. Mrs. Agnew was out in her yard, watering the oleanders that grew close to her house. She would turn her back on him the moment he stepped outside. He could count on that. But all the other neighbors on the two-block walk to the bus stop would peer through their windows and point him out as the dirty old man who had molested little Pammi Sneider. Except by sight, Stanley didn’t know his neighbors very well. But Maya knew them all because they often met at each other’s houses in the morning when the bakery truck stopped on their street. The housewives would come out in their wrappers and buy sweet rolls and doughnuts and take turns meeting in each other’s houses for coffee. Maya had picked up gossip this way about the various neighbors, and had often tried to tell him about how Mrs. Meeghan’s dyslexic son was failing in school, or about Mr. Featherstone’s alcoholism (he was a house painter), but Stanley had always cut her off. He didn’t care anything about these people, didn’t know them, didn’t want to know them, and didn’t want to know anything about them. If they had been men he worked with, or something like that, he might have been interested in their private doings, but he wasn’t interested in these housewives or their husbands or their noisy children.
But he realized now that these women would be gossiping about him and about Maya’s leaving him, because that’s what they did best—pry into other people’s lives. Stanley steeled himself and walked to the bus stop, without looking either to the right or the left.
Stanley got off at the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Center when the bus stopped in front of the Publix. The bank wasn’t open yet, so he drank a cup of coffee in Hardee’s and slipped a dozen packets of Sweet ‘n Low into his pants pocket. When the bank opened (it was really a Savings & Loan Association, but it also operated as a bank), Stanley had no trouble cashing in his CDs and collected a cashier’s check for the money in his savings and checking accounts. He had expected an argument. But why would they argue? They made a handsome profit off him when he cashed in his three one-year CDs early. As he left the bank officer’s desk, Mr. Wheeler said:
“We’re sorry to lose you as a client, Mr. Sinkiewicz, but I suppose you need your money for bail—”
“Bail? What’re you talking about?”
“It was on the radio this morning—your, ah, trouble, and all, you know. So I assumed you required funds for a lawyer, and to post bond.”
“No.” Stanley shook his head. “That matter was all a mistake. It’s all cleared up now.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Sinkiewicz,” Mr. Wheeler said, smiling. “It was a pleasure to serve you.”
Stanley walked over to U.S. 1 and waited for the bus to West Palm Beach. He realized now that all the time he had been talking to Mr. Wheeler, the banker had been staring at the bandage on his lip. He had probably wanted to ask about it, but didn’t have the nerve. And all the time, Wheeler figured he was dealing with a child molester out of jail temporarily, on bail. If there had been something about his arrest on the radio, maybe there had been something on the local TV newscast, too. Stanley felt his heart pound again, and he slumped on the bus-stop bench.
The bus came at last, and he rode into West Palm Beach, getting off at the downtown Clematis Street stop. He deposited his cashier’s check of $38,314.14 in a money-market checking account and withdrew fifty dollars with his new temporary checkbook before leaving the new S&L. Interest rates on CDs had dropped, and he could earn almost as much interest in the new money-market account as he could from buying new CDs. Besides, he wanted to have his money readily available in case he wanted to buy a car. He also filled out forms to have his UAW pension and Social Security checks transferred to his new account.
Before leaving the S&L, he asked the young woman who had opened his new account how to get to Spring Street, in West Palm Beach. She gave him complicated directions that would entail two bus transfers, and he couldn’t understand what she was talking about. Being without a car gave a man an entire new way of looking at the world. He thought he knew West Palm fairly well, just from driving around and going to the library, but he didn’t know it at all when it came to public transportation. He walked to the Greyhound bus station and got a Veteran’s cab. The driver, a black man wearing a woman’s nylon stocking cap with a little topknot in it, didn’t know where Spring Street was, either. He had to call the dispatcher on his radio for directions. It was a three-fifty ride to Mr. Collins’s house, where Stanley got out and told the driver to wait for him.
Collins’s house was a two-bedroom, lemon-colored concrete-block-and-stucco building on a short dead-end street with eleven other houses constructed from the same plans. A pudgy young woman was listlessly spreading sand on a dying front lawn. There was a baby, eighteen months or perhaps two years old, in a plain pine playpen on the front porch. The barefooted woman wore faded blue shorts and a lime-colored elastic tube top. The pile of yellow sand was about six feet high, and she was taking a small shovelful at a time from the pile and sprinkling it awkwardly on the lawn. She was perspiring freely. Stanley checked the house number against the address on the envelope.
“Excuse me. You Mrs. Collins?”
She nodded, a little out of breath, and looked incuriously from Stanley to the cab, then back at Stanley. The driver had his door open and was reading a comic book that had Bugs Bunny on the cover.
“Is Mr. Collins home?”
She shook her head. “No, he ain’t. He’s out gettin’ estimates on the car. He had a accident yesterday, and he has to get three estimates before he can go to the insurance company for the money. At least that’s what they told him on the p
hone. Tomorrow he has to go back up to Jax, so he has to get the car fixed today. I don’t know when he’ll get home.”
Stanley felt a great sense of relief. It was much easier this way, dealing with a young woman instead of a truck driver. “I don’t have to see your husband, Mrs. Collins. I found this envelope downtown on Clematis Street. I figured it might be important, and since there wasn’t any stamp on it, I got a cab and brought it on out.” He tried to hand the woman the envelope, but she wouldn’t take it.
“I’m pretty busy right now, and I can’t spend no time listening to you tryin’ to sell me something. I’m tryin’ to spread some of this sand around this mornin’ before it gets too hot, and it’s almost too hot to be out here now.”
“You better take it. I don’t want nothing for my trouble, but as you can see, the meter’s ticking on my cab, so I can’t stay and talk with you.”
She dropped the shovel on the ground, wiped the palms of her hands on her shorts, and took the envelope. As Stanley started to back away, she tore it open and frowned as she read the short message. She looked up, puzzled, and started to unfold the news clipping.
“I don’t understand this at all. Who are you?”
“I’m a retired foreman,” Stanley said, pausing beside the taxi, “and I was shopping downtown when I found that envelope, that’s all. All I am, I guess, is a good Samaritan. But I’ll tell you something else I’ve learned living down here in Florida. If it was chinch bugs and army worms that killed your lawn, sand won’t get rid of them. You’ll have to get an exterminator out here to spray your lawn, and it’ll run you about thirty-five dollars.”
Stanley tapped the driver’s comic book with the end of his stick, got into the back seat of the cab, and closed the door. Mrs. Collins rushed over. “Just a minute! What’s all this mean? I don’t understand what this is all about!”
“I don’t know either,” Stanley said, pushing down the door lock. “It’s addressed to your husband, so maybe he knows. Let’s go, driver.”
The driver closed his door, put down his comic book, and made a U-turn back toward Pierce Avenue. The woman stayed at the curb, staring at the retreating cab for a moment, and then unfolded the clipping again.
Stanley caught the bus back to Riviera Beach and got off at the International Shopping Mall. He watched a demonstration class of middle-aged aerobic dancers perform in the plaza section for about a half-hour, then had a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke at Cozzoli’s while he waited for the movies to open at one o’clock. He got an Early Bird ticket and sat through two showings of The Terminator before coming out into the mall again. Because of daylight savings time, it still wasn’t dark enough to go home, so he wandered around the mall until the nine P.M. bus left for Ocean Pines Terraces.
It had been awful to walk those two blocks that morning, with all the neighbors looking at him, so he wanted to make certain it was dark before he went home. He was exhausted from the long day, and he had missed his afternoon nap. There was so much shooting going on in the movie, he hadn’t been able to sleep in the theater, either. Stanley went to bed and fell asleep immediately. He forgot to put the damp wash in the dryer, and the next morning the laundry was covered with mildew and he had to wash it all over again.
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. Dussault, 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 w
icker 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 periodontist, 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 Horse-Flies (Díptera: 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 pilferable 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.