“I’m calling about Carolina-”
“Carolina!” he said, sucking in enough air to fill a balloon. “You tell her I will not be treated in such a fashion! You tell her that she isn’t the only columnist in the world! You tell her-”
I cut him off so he could suck in more air. “You don’t understand-”
“No!” he shouted. “She doesn’t understand. I need columns; I need them now, and I will not listen to anything that premenopausal-”
I held the phone away from my ear, let the words float away. I’d heard enough to make up my mind. When the noise died down, I brought the phone back to my head. “She hasn’t been well. She wanted me to call and tell you that. Also, she didn’t receive your last payment.”
“Hold on,” he said, much more calmly. Papers rustled in the background. “She’s wrong. Her last quarterly check was sent out in mid-December. I’m looking at it right now. It got cashed, in Florida, same as always.”
“On Windward Island?”
“Of course. As usual, cashed by her service.”
“Smith’s Secretarial?”
“Of course.”
The same outfit that forwarded her mail to Michigan was also cashing her checks. “Could you check the spelling of her last name on the check?”
“Why would you ask that?” Suspicion had crept into his voice.
“Double-checking the details, is all. You know Carolina.”
“D-A-R-E, care of Smith’s Secretarial. The check was cashed, but maybe they didn’t deposit the money into her account, or whatever.”
“Probably Carolina just forgot.”
“Well, you tell her I haven’t forgotten, not about our contract. I’ve been covering her ass for weeks now, saying she’s been sick. I don’t care how ill she is, you tell her to send in some columns-”
“When did you last speak with her?”
Too long a silence came from the other end.
“Come on, Charles. How long?”
“You know damned well I’ve never spoken with her,” he said in a small voice.
“Never?”
“Who are you?”
“A friend, helping her. And trying to help you.”
“This is what comes from her being a real recluse.”
“Not to worry, Chuck,” I said. The simpering twit hadn’t once asked how sick Carolina was. “She said to tell you she just mailed in a new batch of columns.”
“It’s Charles,” he corrected, “and it’s about-”
“Chuck, she specifically wanted me to tell you to pay particular attention to the last letter in the bunch. It’s kind of about you and her.”
“It’s Charles,” he screamed.
I hung up.
I keep a gym bag in the Jeep for those odd moments when the need to drop the extra pounds I’m carrying overwhelms me. That need doesn’t arise often. The gym bag’s also there for those moments when I’m angry. That does occur frequently, and since the turret’s walls are limestone, tough on the knuckles when punched, I try to hustle my anger over to the Rivertown Health Center, where I can run and talk to myself. The other people there, especially the winos who live upstairs, don’t mind; they talk to themselves, some of them, all day long.
I went out, jiggled the lock on the turret door to make sure it had latched tight, and started toward the Jeep and calmer moments. But the day wasn’t done with me yet. Across the lawn, Elvis Derbil, in a snap-brim cap worn backward, metal studs glinting off his black leather motorcycle jacket, was scuttling across the lawn toward city hall.
Elvis Derbil, author of the hundred-dollar use-no-plywood citation.
“Elvis!” I yelled across the lawn. Lizards can hear, even if only as vibrations through their membranes. Elvis, though, didn’t turn his head. He just hurried through the parking lot door.
I hustled across the frozen snow, over what had once been my grandfather’s land, to the city hall built with my grandfather’s limestone. Down the stairs, along the dark corridor, through the door marked BUILDING DEPARTMENT, I chased the trail of coconut-scented hair spray. The look on my face sent the department clerk-a dimwitted niece-pattering away; she’d witnessed our confrontations before. Stopped at the counter, I yelled Elvis’s name through the doorway to his office. I couldn’t see much of him except for one scuffed sole of a pointy-toed red and black cowboy boot, dripping snow slush onto the surface of his desk.
“Get the hell out here, Elvis,” I yelled.
“Come to pay your fine?” his voice asked from behind the wall. The dripping boot didn’t move.
“Come to protest, Elvis,” I said, still yelling.
“I told you: That structure’s a historical; no materials not in keeping with the period.”
“That plywood is only a temporary cover for a broken window.”
His chair creaked, and the boot slid off his desk. A second later, he appeared in his doorway. His forehead, bald halfway back, glistened beneath the overhead fluorescents like Crisco under a stove light. He leaned against his doorjamb and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his striped cardigan sweater. “You telling me they used plywood in the Middle Ages?”
“You telling me they used window glass in the Middle Ages?”
The tight-lipped smirk on his face opened around yellow teeth. “A ‘course they used window glass,” he said. “Otherwise, why did they put in windows?”
“High archers,” I said, lowering my voice.
The smirk disappeared as if someone had turned off a switch, and worry lines appeared. He was thinking. “What the hell do foot problems have to do with windows?” he ventured, after mulling it over for a minute.
“Not high arches; archers: bow and arrow guys, high up.”
He nodded vaguely, the most motion he could summon while his brain was frying. “I told you you’d get ticketed for not using authentic material.”
“It’s temporary, until I can get glass cut.”
“Tell you what: I’ll cut the fine in half if you get glass in it by two weeks.”
“That’s still fifty bucks.”
“Better than a hunnert.”
From habit, I opened my mouth to yell back, but then I shut it. My war with city hall was not winnable through individual battles. I had to wear them down, inch by grinding inch irritate them enough to make them anxious to change my zoning to residential and be rid of me.
And I had reduced the fine by fifty bucks.
I left.
The attendant, a wily fellow who lived upstairs, was pushing shallow eddies of cloudy water toward the floor drain in the basement locker room of the Rivertown Health Center. Normally, the only thing he ever hefted was bolt cutters, and then only when some fool new to the place and thinking a padlock would safeguard a watch and a wallet had just gone up to work out.
“What prompted this?” I asked.
“Toilets,” he grunted past the sagging stub of the cigar that had drowned on his lips.
Toilets spit back often enough at the health center. In the past, though, the attendant had left things to air dry rather than lift a mop himself. I could only guess that his new energy was prompted by city hall. The lizards were becoming increasingly desperate to revive the decaying old tank town, to make it worthy of demolition and new construction by upscale developers, for the kickbacks that would bring.
It was slow going. Rivertown was a hard town to make a show of cleaning up. The hookers strutting Thompson Avenue, and their older sisters behind the bowling alley, could outrun police strobes quicker than cockroaches fleeing sudden light. The tonks, too, were untouchable. Most of them were owned by the lizards themselves. As were the vacant factories with their shattered windows, and the boarded-up retail stores dotted along Thompson Avenue like missing teeth.
That left visible eyesores like the Rivertown Health Center. A stained yellow-brick pile, tiger-striped by rust running off its metal roof, it had been defrocked years earlier from being a Y.M.C.A. Its upstairs population of winos and semiretired sex offenders-slowed by age, rather than by any loss of inclination-was a ripe target for a very public cleanup campaign, but even that had limited prospects for success. The grizzled folks who slept, stupored, on the upper floors were rarely seen, staggering down into the daylight only on the first day of the month, and then only to snatch their disability checks from the mail slots at the front desk. The rest of the time, their prowlings were as nocturnal and as furtive as raccoons: fast forays to the liquor store across the street for fresh half-pints, and occasional stumblings down to the Willahock, to admire the stars while urinating in the river. Toppling the health center would send the residents, very publicly and very permanently, into the streets.