Charles Willeford - Sideswipe

by Unknown

  "Yes, sir. We been expecting you, Mr. Sinkiewicz. Troy and Miss Forrest have gone over to her motel to get her suitcase. She's moving in with us, too." James forced a smile. "They should be back just now."

  "Miss Forrest? I haven't met her--"

  "I only met her last night myself, Mr. Sinkiewicz. She's Troy's friend, not mine. If you're parked out front, you better pull into the yard back here and park over there." James pointed to the utility shed.

  Stanley nodded. "The grass out front needs cutting. It didn't look like nobody lived here, and I was afraid for a minute there I had the wrong house."

  "I'm supposed to cut the grass every two weeks, but I was away on a trip and missed a few weeks."

  Stanley got his car and parked it by the shed. He brought his box of clean clothes and toilet articles into the spacious four-car garage, and James tried to take the box away from him.

  "I'll take that upstairs for you, Mr. Sinkiewicz."

  "I'm not in any all-fired hurry, son." Stanley surrendered the box and looked at the huge paintings stacked against and hanging from the garage walls. "Troy told me you were an artist. I'd like to look at your work, if you don't mind?"

  "I don't mind at all." James put the box on the steps that led upstairs to the apartment, and crossed to the easel. "I finished this one just now, but I haven't got a title yet. Sometimes when I can't think of a title I give it a number. But I haven't thought of a number, either."

  Stanley studied the painting, frowning with concentration. He put on his reading glasses and moved in a little closer. "I wouldn't know, myself--although it looks a little scary."

  "It's a nonobjective painting," James explained, "and some kind of emotion is all you're expected to get out of it. Two years ago there was a German painter staying over on the Saint James coast--that's in Barbados--and I showed him some of my work. He told me I was probably the only primitive nonobjective painter working today. He's the same man who advised me to go to New York and study at the Art Students League. And when we finish our job, that's where I'm going."

  Stanley nodded. "You could use a little more study, I guess. I used to do some painting myself. One thing you need's a steady hand." Stanley pointed to a canvas on the wall, a crosspatch of thin vertical red lines and thinner horizontal black lines on a lemon background. "Now that picture over there. You put all them lines on with a straightedge, didn't you?"

  "Yes, sir. That was just an experiment, Mr. Sinkiewicz. But even Mondrian used a ruler to get certain effects."

  Stanley shook his head. "If you've got a steady hand, you don't need no straightedge. You got any clean canvases and a striping brush? I'll learn you how to do it."

  "Yes, sir." James didn't want to have the old con spoil one of his unused canvases, but he didn't want to offend him either.

  James removed the newly finished painting from the easel and replaced it with a recently sized blank canvas. "There's a can of brushes on the workbench, Mr. Sinkiewicz. Take any one you like."

  Stanley moved to the cluttered workbench. He opened a can of turpentine and held the spout to his nose. He sniffed experimentally, inhaled deeply, and screwed the lid back.

  "Do you like the smell of turpentine, son?"

  "I don't mind it. But I don't particularly like it."

  "One good thing about turpentine. It always smells the same."

  "Yes, sir," James said uneasily. "It always smells the same."

  Stanley rummaged around in a coffee can full of brushes and selected a short-handled camel's hair brush about a half-inch in width. "This ain't no regular striping brush, but it'll do. A real striping brush is wider, and slants back aways, and the bristles are longer on one side than on the other. I'll just stir up some of this cadmium orange and turpentine, and then I'll show you how to make a straight line without looking at the canvas."

  As Stanley mixed the new tube of cadmium orange with turpentine, James scowled and bit his lower lip. The paint had cost him $4.95 in U.S. dollars, and the old man had squeezed out half the tube.

  "All right, young fella," Stanley said, his cheeks flushing, "just watch me now."

  Stanley held the paint-loaded brush at his side, resting his forearm on his hip, and stared up at the cobwebby ceiling. He took two swift steps in front of the canvas, turned, and winked at James. James's jaw dropped. The bright orange line on the canvas was exactly one-eighth of an inch wide, and straight as a die. The line was as vibrant as a tightly stretched guitar string. It looked to James as if it would hum to the touch, and the old man had drawn this perfect rule in less than a second!

  "That's what I mean by a steady hand," Stanley said, with a short laugh.

  James clucked and shook his head. "I don't know how you did that, Mr. Sinkiewicz. I couldn't draw a line that straight, even with a yardstick."

  "There's a knack to it, son. Here. Take the brush and I'll show you how to hold it. You've got to put the right amount of paint on the brush, too. With a little practice, you can learn how to do it."

  For the next forty-five minutes James and Stanley were engaged in painting straight lines. The once-white canvas was an almost solidly colored orange rectangle when Troy Louden pulled into the driveway outside the garage and honked the horn of the Morris Minor. They both went outside to meet him. Troy embraced the old man, hugging him to his chest, and kissed him wetly on the cheek.

  "By God, I'm glad to see you, Pop! To tell you the truth, I wasn't sure you were going to pry yourself loose from up there. If you hadn't come today, I was going to call you tonight. You've met James, I see."

  "He sure has, Troy," James said. "Mr. Sinkiewicz has been teaching me how to paint a straight line."

  "That's nice of you, Pop." Troy frowned at James. "I hope you thanked him."

  "Yes, I did."

  "It'll take him a while to get the hang of it," Stanley said. "A man can't learn nothing overnight."

  Troy punched the old man lightly on the arm, and then snapped his fingers. "Jesus. I was so glad to see you I forgot to introduce you to Dale Forrest. Hop out of the car, honey, and meet Mr. Sinkiewicz."

  Stanley had seen the woman in the car the moment he had stepped out of the shady garage, but he had hurriedly looked away again. As Dale Forrest advanced toward him timidly, holding out her limp right hand, Stanley forced himself to look at her face again. The young woman had a voluptuous figure, with long straight legs. She wore greendenim clamdiggers and a short-sleeved white silk blouse with the top three buttons undone to reveal her cleavage. Her heavy breasts, without a brassiere, strained against the thin silk. Her skin was a golden bronze, and her hair was almost the same shade, although bright highlights shimmered at the crown. Her long thick hair softly framed her face, and there Dale's beauty stopped.

  There were four knobby irregular bumps on her forehead, as if someone had been beating on her with a hammer. Instead of eyebrows, Dale had two hairless dents above her eyes, both of them crisscrossed with red scars where stitches had recently been removed. She had filled in these crescent-shaped depressions with black makeup, which made them more obvious. Her nose was crushed almost flat, and the left nostril was partly missing, as if cut away with a razor blade. Both of her sunken cheeks contained rough and jagged scars, and some of these holes looked large enough to contain marbles. Her jaw had been broken, and reset off-center, and her tiny recessed chin jutted to the right at a puzzling angle. Although Dale still had her lower front teeth, her six upper front teeth were missing, and her gummy smile was like a grimace of intense pain. Stanley recognized that the grimace was a smile, but when he looked at it he felt like crying. Her scarred and puffy lips reminded him of the sewn end of a sack of potatoes.

  "I'm happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Sinkiewicz," Dale said. She shook Stanley's hand, then dropped behind Troy as if she were trying to hide.

  "Likewise," Stanley said, clearing his throat.

  "James, boy!" Troy said. "Where'd you put Stanley?"

  "We haven't been upstairs yet, Troy. But I
thought I'd give him the bed out on the porch, if that's all right with you?"

  "That'll be fine. Get Dale's bag out of the car."

  The six-bedroom, two-story house faced Biscayne Bay, and the Shapiros, the elderly couple who owned it, spent three winter months there every year. They had, at one time, kept the garage apartment as servants' quarters, but they no longer employed live-in servants, even when they were in residence, so the garage apartment hadn't been redecorated for more than ten years. Even so, the garage, like the bayside house, was constructed of the coquina stone that was once quarried in the Keys, and its exterior showed almost no deterioration. All of these residences along the bay, put up in the late 1920s, when there had been a good view of Miami Beach, were built to last, and they had. In return for staying on the premises, and for looking after the grounds, James Frietas-Smith had the rent-free use of the apartment and garage, with his utilities paid for by the Shapiros.

  The empty garage below the apartment was huge, and with all four doors swung up against the ceiling there was ample light for his painting. The apartment above, however, was shabby, filled with discarded furniture and other items from the large house in front. In addition to the screened porch on the east side, furnished with a sagging three-quarter-sized bed and several odd pieces of antique furniture, there was a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom with a tub but no shower, and a kitchen large enough to include an old-fashioned breakfast nook, as they were called in the 1950s. The view from the porch and from the breakfast nook provided a good prospect of the bay. All of the rooms were large, with high, paneled ceilings. The pink wallpaper, with tiny rosebuds of darker pink in the design, had pulled away in various places and hung down in scattered tatters. A musty, nose-tingling odor of dust, mildew, and stale bacon grease pervaded the rooms, and there was no air conditioning. There was a large overhead ceiling fan in the living room, but it didn't work any longer.

  "You can have the bedroom, Pop," Troy said, "if you don't want the porch, but Dale and I don't mind it in there, and you'll have a better breeze on the porch at night."

  "Whatever you think, Troy."

  "Good. The bathroom's at the end of the hall next to the kitchen, and I'll have James put some clean towels in there for you. You don't mind sleeping here in the living room, do you, James? You can sleep on the Empress couch."

  James shrugged. "I don't care where I sleep." He took Dale's overnighter into the bedroom, and she followed him in. When James came out again, she closed the door and stayed in the bedroom.

  "Take your jacket off, Pop," Troy said. "We've got some errands to run this afternoon, so you might as well be comfortable."

  Stanley had put on his suit jacket after getting out of his car, but he shucked out of it now and removed his tie. Troy took them and handed everything to James.

  "Hang these up for Pop, James. Okay, old-timer, let's get going."

  "Where to?"

  "James." Troy snapped his fingers. "Have you got any more money?"

  "The five I gave you was my last cent."

  "Well, it doesn't make any difference, I guess, now that Pop's here." He put a hand on the old man's thin shoulder. "Pop, you'd better give James twenty bucks or so, to go to the store. Talk to Dale, James, before you go, and find out what she needs. She can cook dinner for us. We should be back around six or six-thirty."

  "I don't know where you're going, Troy, but I'd like to go along," James said as he accepted two ten-dollar bills from Stanley.

  "And I'd like to take you, too, James, but Pop and me've got some business to discuss. Ask Dale if she knows how to cook pork chops."

  Troy crossed to the bedroom door and rapped on it. "Dale, honey." The door opened, and Troy planted a long kiss on the woman's ruined mouth. "Pop and me are going out for a while. James'll get you what you need, and you can fix dinner for us. All right, sweetheart?"

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Louden."

  "There's a good girl." He patted her exquisite buttocks.

  Stanley followed Troy down the stairs. Troy wanted to drive, so Stanley handed over the keys to his Honda.

  CHAPTER 11

  At seven-thirty that Sunday evening, Hoke and Aileen ate one roast beef sandwich apiece and decided to save the other two for Monday's lunch. Hoke wasn't hungry, and neither was Aileen, but they chewed methodically through the sandwiches, washing them down with tall glasses of iced tea. Aileen wanted something sweet afterwards, and Hoke told her to eat one of the mangoes, suggesting that she either eat it over the kitchen sink or take it into the shower--preferably the latter--because it was so ripe.

  Aileen took the mango into the bathroom, closed the door, and moments later the shower was running full force. Hoke cleared the table, rinsed the plates and glasses, and put them on the sideboard. Because the water was running at the sink and in the bathroom, he didn't hear the first knock, but when he turned off the faucet, he heard a very loud pounding at the front door. Hoke opened the door, trying to hold back his rage. There was no need for anyone to bang so hard. Louis Farnsworth, the salad man at the Sheraton Hotel, was at the door. Hoke would have said something sharp to him, but there was a woman standing there too.

  Farnsworth was a thin man with a pot belly. He wore his white pants above the pot, and it looked as if he had a bowling ball below his belt. His hair was gray and thinning, and he had a sour expression on his lined face. The young woman behind Farnsworth was shorter than he was, but she outweighed him by sixty or seventy pounds. Her face was round, and her cheeks were so fleshy they sagged almost to her lips. Her puckered mouth was a small round 0, and she stood there blinking pale blue eyes. She--or someone--had plucked away most of her eyebrows. She had given herself--or someone had--a home permanent that didn't take, and her brownish hair had frizzed up all over her head. A port-wine-colored birthmark covered most of the left side of her face, including the left eyelid. Her heavy breasts inside her white T-shirt sagged nearly to her waist, and she wore a waitress's brown mini-skirt with a skimpy red apron.

  "You didn't have to break the door down," Hoke said.

  "I'm sorry," Farnsworth said. "I guess you didn't hear me knock the first time. I knew you was in there because I could hear the water running."

  "Okay--what can I do for you, Mr. Farnsworth?"

  "I need me another key. This here's Dolly Turner. She's just come down from Yeehaw Junction, and she's got herself a dishwashing job at the hotel. Until she gets a couple of paychecks and can rent her own place, she's gonna bunk in with me. So I need us another key."

  "Why can't you both use the same key?"

  "We're on different shifts, that's why. What's the big problem about a second key?"

  "No problem." Hoke went into the kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept his books and the extra keys. "You're 204, right?"

  When Farnsworth didn't reply, Hoke brought him the extra key with the apartment number written on an attached cardboard tag. "That'll be a buck-fifty deposit," Hoke said. "When you return the key, you get the buckfifty back."

  "I didn't pay no deposit on my key," Farnsworth protested.

  "That's because you paid a one-month security deposit rent, along with your first month's rent. If you lose your key, I can take it out of that. But each extra key's a buckfifty deposit."

  Dolly Turner looked sideways at Farnsworth. He took out a blue-green package of Bugler and some white papers, and rolled an economical cigarette. Dolly had a black wool Peruvian handbag with a white embroidered llama on one side. She rummaged in the interior, which was filled with odds and ends, including a flannel nightgown, and managed to find $1.38 in change.

  "That's twelve cents short," Hoke said, after counting the pennies.

  She glanced over at Farnsworth again, who took a long drag on his thin cigarette, and then watched black ashes flutter to the floor.

  "That's all I got on me," Dolly said, in a tiny voice, "but I'm supposed to get paid next Saturday, if I work out all right."

  "Okay. I'll trust you for the rest. But we
don't make any profit on lost keys. It costs a buck-fifty to have one made."

  Aileen, wrapped in a bath towel, came out of the bathroom, noticed the couple in the doorway, and quickly dodged back inside. Farnsworth and Dolly Turner left, and a few minutes later, Aileen, in jeans and a T-shirt, came out of the bathroom.

  "Who was that with Mr. Farnsworth, Daddy?"

  "Dolly Turner. She's going to be living with him until she's saved up enough money to rent her own place. She just got a job at the Sheraton, and he was good enough to take her in."

  "But they aren't married. Isn't it against the law to rent to an unmarried couple?"

  "They aren't exactly a couple. He's renting the place, not her, so she's merely his guest."

  "But isn't it against the law for two people to sleep together if they aren't married?"

  "No. They can sleep together. There's no law against that. But fornication between them is against the law. In fact, the missionary position is the only position allowed by law in Florida, and even then you have to be married. But it's a law that's rarely enforced."

  "What's the missionary position?"

  "That's when the woman lies on her back, and the man gets on top."

  Aileen giggled. "That ain't the only way they do it up in Vero Beach."

  "-Isn't-, you mean, or anywhere else. But that's the Florida law. It just isn't enforced, that's all."

  "If they did, it would sure spoil things in the parking lot at Beach High." Aileen laced up her running shoes and went to the door. "I'm gonna go out for a while and walk off that sandwich and mango."

  "Aren't you going to ride your bike?" Aileen's new bicycle was wedged between her Bahama bed and the wall.

  "I'm just gonna walk around the mall. But tomorrow I'm gonna clean out that old office downstairs and keep it down there. The apartment's too crowded, and if I leave it outside somebody'll steal it, chain and all."