That night, I had to do no such categorizing. Crawling between the frigid sheets and worn woolen blankets, I felt warmed by my indulgent, childish typings. I had the sense, too, that Carolina would have approved of my pettiness, and I fell asleep almost instantly after my head touched the cold pillow.
Ten
Leo called at eleven in the morning, waking me from the first deep sleep I’d had in weeks. “Apparently banging on your door doesn’t intrude into your consciousness.”
I mumbled something profane into my phone.
“Let me in,” he said. “It’s snowing.”
I pulled on pants and a sweatshirt from the chair, slipped on Nikes and into my pea coat, which is what one uses for a robe when there’s no heat, and hustled down the metal stairs to open the timbered door.
“Entrez,” I said, in what might have been flawless French. It’s one of three words Amanda has told me I’ll need to know if I ever become a doorman in Paris. The other two are “Merci,’” said with palm up, and “La patisserie?” voiced with raised eyebrow, for directions to the nearest bake shop. She assures me they’re all I’ll need.
“Jeez, it’s colder in here than outside.” Leo shivered as he stepped in out of the snow.
“Perhaps.” I closed the door. “But there’s less wind.”
Leo wore his usual winter ensemble-the orange traffic parka, the chartreuse knit hat with the purple pom. Today, though, he’d added a lemon-colored wool scarf. “For color,” he said, whipping it back with a flourish, like the Red Baron stepping down from his biplane after yet another successful aerial sortie. “Endora bought it for me.”
“She alone understands your style,” I said.
“Is the heat on in your office?” he asked, already ringing the stairs on his way up.
“Not yet.” I clanged up after him and turned left, toward the sink, to make a pot of coffee.
“No time for that now,” he said, coming out of my office and shutting the door.
“Where are we going?”
“Do you not own a calendar?”
“It’s March first… ah,” I said, realizing. Then I shook my head. “It’s snowing. He might not be open.”
“March first is Opening Day. Always. Finish getting dressed, if you own more clothes. I’ll wait for you in my car, where there’s heat.”
He started down, then stopped to launch his eyebrows into a little dance. “Especially this year,” he added enigmatically, before going down the rest of the way.
“I don’t understand,” I said to his back.
“You’ll see.”
“See what?” I said, but he was already out the door.
I was out to his Porsche in ten minutes. Astrud Gilberto sang softly above a Brazilian guitar as Leo drove us down Thompson Avenue. He turned at the river road and headed down the familiar heaved asphalt toward the concrete piers beneath the overpass. It was snowing harder.
“It’s too early-” I started to say.
Leo quieted Astrud and the guitarist a bit as he coasted to a stop. For a minute, neither of us spoke. Then he said, “Behold.”
I stared at the horror through the falling snow.
Kutz’s Wienie Wagon sat in its usual spot under the railroad overpass, on the same flat tires that had supported it since the Second World War. But its narrow clapboard siding was no longer covered with curling flecks of white paint, as colorless as birch bark.
He’d painted it purple. Not lilac, not lavender, but a ripping, jelly-damned-bean purple.
“What the hell has he done?” I shouted. There were few things in my world that I’d ever trusted to stay constant, but Kutz’s flaking hot dog trailer headed that short list. The world might continue to change, and Rivertown might continue to crumble within it, as the lizards went about corrupting it, brick by brick. Never, though, had I doubted that Kutz-eighty-some years old, mean as a snake stuck under a rock-would always, always, be boiling hot dogs under the overpass, and that he’d be doing it, always, always, from that peeling trailer that flicked off bits of leaded paint the way Kutz’s always upraised middle finger flicked off the world.
Now he’d gone and painted the thing. Purple.
“Shit, Leo. Double shit.”
He switched off the CD, silencing the murmurings of the Brazilian goddess. “Yesterday, at the Discount Den, they told me he’d just bought ten gallons of rubberized paint on closeout, that thick glop you’re supposed to trowel on rough walls. I knew what the nutcake was going to do. I swung down here, tried to tell him it would drive away customers. He told me to go screw myself and kept slopping it on, crazy as a jaybird.”
“Yesterday?”
Leo turned and grinned. “Yesterday.”
“It snowed yesterday.”
“Nuts like a jaybird,” Leo said again, “out there painting in the falling snow.”
“Why?”
“Check out the sign on the roof.”
I looked higher. Kutz had amended his old sign to read KUTZ’S WIENIE WAGON AND LATES.
“What are lates?”
“Lattes. Kutz is going in for snoot coffee, lattes and espressos and that stuff.” Leo cut the engine, and we got out.
He headed for the order window. I split away and went around to the back of the trailer. Of course, it was purple, too. Worse, it had been smoothed and filled in by the thick, rubberized paint.
Generations of Rivertown’s young bucks had carved their initials into the slats on the back of that trailer, guys who were now old men, guys who’d moved away, guys who were dead and never coming back. Since World War II, they’d carved their names, or their initials, or the initials of girls they’d known, or wanted to know, or would never know, with a quick knife cut into the soft, flaking wood. My initials were back there, too, with a girl’s, inside a heart carved two months after I graduated high school. Now they were gone like the rest, covered up with rubberized purple paint. Not even the indentations remained.
I walked around to the front. “What the hell, Kutz?” I yelled through the closed Plexiglas.
He bent down and slid open the order window. “Got to change with the times, attract a better crowd than you jerks just buying wienies.”
Leo’s hand found my shoulder as we waited for our order. He knew what I’d gone looking for on the back of the trailer.
Kutz bagged the six hot dogs, cheese fries, and the two drinks-a Big Swallow for Leo, a small diet for me-and handed them through the window. “Sure you don’t want a couple of lates?” he asked Leo.
“Not in this lifetime,” I said.
We carried the bags to Leo’s Porsche.
“Shit,” I said again.
“Trust the weather.” Leo started the Porsche up the potholed road.
“What do you mean?”
“Ever see Kutz cleaning anything inside that trailer?”
I shook my head. “Word is, he doesn’t even change the hot dog water, lets it sit over the winter because it’s too greasy to freeze.”
“Exactly.” He nosed the Porsche up onto Thompson Avenue and accelerated west toward the turret. “Kutz laid on that glop while it was snowing. No way he scraped or washed that old, flaking wood before he hit it with the paint. Give it a few freeze-and-thaw cycles, throw in some summer rains, and that ground’s going to be littered with sheets of rubberized purple, big as the shredded tires you see on the interstate.”
“What if the weather doesn’t come through?”
Leo flashed me a big-lipped smile that connected his ears with a mouth full of white teeth. “You’re crazy. You’ll think of something.”
At the turret, he went up to the heat in my office, and I went to the kitchen to put on coffee.
“It looks like it’s been snowing popcorn balls in here,” he called from across the hall. He’d noticed the wadded-up sheets of white paper from my typing frenzy. Then, “Jeez, what the-?” His voice stopped suddenly.