by Sideswipe
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?”
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 forgotten 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.
As he had gotten older, Stanley recalled, especially after he had been assigned full-time to the paint shop, he had lost most of the friends he once had on the line. He had lost interest in drinking beer in a noisy tavern. It was more comfortable to sit at home in his underwear, and a lot cheaper to drink a six-pack at home after work. The number of men he had known well dwindled as many of them were replaced by robots; and the new employees were all so much younger than Stanley that he hadn’t had anything in common with them. The new men had called him Pop, or sometimes Grandpop, but they hadn’t asked him to go bowling with them after work. At one time, Stanley had been keen on bowling, but he hadn’t bowled a line now in—hell, it must be fifteen years, at least. In fact, he had given his bowling ball to Junior when he left Hamtramck for Florida.
In other ways, it was kind of pleasant to have the house to himself in the morning. He certainly didn’t miss Maya. He didn’t have to leave the house and wander around for hours. He could watch “Donahue” himself if he wanted to, instead of getting Maya’s secondhand opinion about what the people had said that morning about sexual deviance. He had never been satisfied with her summaries; she always seemed to leave out something important or get it wrong somehow.
He decided he would do all his shopping at night. The market was open until eleven, and the bus ran until ten. In the late evening, he would be much less likely to run into any of his neighbors at the supermarket.
Stanley got his deck of Jumbo index playing cards and laid them out for a game of Klondike on the kitchen table. With the big numbers, he didn’t need to wear his reading glasses. He played for almost an hour before he tired of the game, but he didn’t beat the cards a single time. There were ways to cheat and win, but Stanley never cheated because he would only be cheating himself.
At ten-thirty the mail came. Stanley waited until the postman got to the next house before opening the door. There was another offer for supplementary insurance for people on Medicare (he got one or two of these solicitations a week) and a circular from Sneider’s Union Station offering a free car wash with an $11.95 oil-and-lube job. If he still had the Escort, he would have taken Sneider up on that one, but Maya had the car. No catalogs today. Sometimes Maya received a short letter from one of the grandchildren, usually asking for something or other, which she immediately bought and mailed to them. But Stanley never got any personal mail. He no longer read the children’s begging letters either, because they made him so angry. Louise, Junior’s wife, encouraged her kids to write Maya and ask for things, Stanley suspected, because brand names were never misspelled, unlike the longer, and even shorter, words in their letters.
Stanley tossed the mail in the trash can. He folded the dry laundry and put it away. The blood on his shirt hadn’t washed out altogether, so he put it back into the hamper. He would rewash it a third time the next time he did the laundry, and if it didn’t come out then he’d just throw it away. He had plenty of shirts.
Finally it was noon, so he could fix lunch. He heated a bowl of tomato soup, but he wasn’t hungry. When Maya fixed it, she put whipped cream in it, but there wasn’t any Cool Whip in the refrigerator. He didn’t finish the soup. By the time he washed the saucepan and his bowl and spoon, it was only twelve-thirty. Stanley changed the sheets on his twin bed and put the dirty sheets into the hamper. He took a long shower, put on clean underwear, and stretched out on his sweet-smelling bed for a nap. With the Venetian blinds closed and the window air conditioner turned to High-Cool, he fell asleep almost immediately.
He was awakened at five by the telephone. When he heard the phone he didn’t know how long it had been ringing. It was on the kitchen wall, and Stanley, who was wearing his socks but not his shoes, slipped on the terrazzo floor and almost fell when he rushed to answer it. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
There was no answer.
“Hello. Who is this?”
The person at the other end hung up. Stanley hung up, too. He hated it when people did that. If they had a wrong number he expected them to say so, not just hang up without a word. But what if it was intentional? Someone trying to harass him. He could expect that—if someone thought he was a child molester. Well, he wouldn’t let that bother him … but it did bother him. He poured a six-ounce can of prune juice into a glass, added ice cubes, turned on the television, and watched a rerun of “Kojak.” He had missed the first few minutes, and it was one he hadn’t seen before.
A little after six, just after the news came on, a taxi pulled up outside and stopped at the curb. Stanley went to the window, then hurried to open the front door as Troy Louden came up the walk.
“Evening, Pop. Let me have a five, will you? I’ve got to pay the cabbie.”
Stanley took out his wallet and gave Troy a five-dollar bill.
“Better give me one more, Pop—for a tip.”
Troy paid the driver and then came back to the house.
“Sit down, sit down, Troy,” Stanley said, indicating the recliner and switching off the TV. “It’s good to see you, son! I delivered your message, the way you said, even though I didn’t want to. Mr. Collins wasn’t to home though, so I gave it to his wife.”
“I know, Pop, that’s why I’m here. To thank you. The message was just an empty threat, but it worked out just like I told you it would. Collins came down to the lock-up and told them that he’d been mistaken. The knock on his head had confused him, and being dazed that way, he only thought I had a gun. The sergeant wasn’t too happy about it, but Collins had this bandage on his head so he couldn’t say that Collins had intentionally filed a false arrest charge, either. When they let me out, I told the sergeant I wanted to see Collins and tell him there was no hard feelings, but he’d already left. Did you tell Mrs. Collins your name? When you talked to her, I mean?”
“No, I just told her I was a messenger.”
“Did you get my clipping back?”
“She kept it. I guess she showed it to Mr. Collins when he got home. He was out getting insuranc
e estimates for his car.”
