“You can’t park here,” Bob told him.
“Can’t I?” Ethan looked around at the empty lot. “Why not?”
Bob pointed at the sign in front of the car: PARKING FOR LIBRARY STAFF ONLY. Ethan read the sign. He said, “I’ve parked in your special space.”
Bob couldn’t say for certain whether or not this person was making fun of him. “Just, move it along, all right?” he said, and Ethan began the ritual of starting his car: pumping the gas and jiggling the steering wheel back and forth. He reached to turn the key in the ignition, then froze. “I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“I can’t move the car. Or I could, but I can’t go home, and so I’d really rather not move it, because there’s nowhere else for me to be right now.” Ethan pointed. “What if I parked in one of these other, less special spots?”
“Why can’t you go home?”
“Well, there’s a whole long story there, but in a nutshell it’s that it could be bad for my health.”
“Why?”
“I’d have to tell you the whole long story to answer that question.”
Bob looked at the library and back. “Couldn’t you tell me a shortened version?”
“Yes, I could do that,” said Ethan, and he sat up straight to tell it.
He lived in an apartment above the pharmacy across the street from the library. The night before he’d returned home after seeing a movie, and in prowling up the block in search of a parking spot noticed that the light in his apartment was on, though he distinctly remembered turning it off. He sat idling awhile, and soon saw an individual he now described to Bob as “a man I know who wants to kill me” stepping around inside his bedroom. Thinking to wait it out, Ethan moved his car off the street and into the library lot, behind a shrubbery bisecting the library property from the sidewalk. From this vantage point, Ethan explained, he could see into his apartment but was himself hidden away. He had spent the night on stakeout, then, succumbing to sleep only as the sun was coming up.
Bob asked, “How do you know he’s still in there?”
“That white pickup truck’s his,” Ethan said.
“Why don’t you call the police?”
“That’s a fair question, but a complicated one, and the answer, unfortunately, is that the man who wants to kill me is himself a policeman.” Ethan lit a cigarette and sat there as if considering the experience of smoking. It was here that Bob had his first sense of liking Ethan. It came over him strongly and was confusing in that he didn’t understand what had happened to inspire it. At any rate, his initial annoyance at the distraction from his perfected morning was gone. “Okay,” said Bob. “Next question. Why does the man want to kill you?”
“Well, now, there’s a story there, also.”
“A long story?”
“No, it’s quite a brief story.” He ashed his cigarette out the window. “Can I ask your name?”
“Bob.”
“Nice to meet you, Bob. I’m Ethan.”
“Hi, Ethan.”
“Hi. Now, the truth of the matter in terms of this man’s wanting to kill me is that there is a wife involved.”
“The man’s wife.”
“The man’s wife and not mine, that’s right, Bob. It’s a dusty old tale and they’ve written a thousand lousy songs about it but what are you going to do? The wife and I achieved a familiarity. And my understanding had been that she and I would keep this off the books. So maybe it’s that I made a mistake in supporting the understanding, or she made one in betraying it. Either way, here I sit.”
They both had been gazing up at the window of the apartment as Ethan explained his position, and so they both saw the figure of a man passing by, a blur of ruddy flesh, a significant, heavily browed face looking quickly out and around, then disappearing. “Did you see?” asked Ethan excitedly.
“I saw. Big fellow, isn’t he?”
“He isn’t small,” Ethan said.
“Is he not wearing a shirt?”
“He took it off around four a.m.”
Bob shifted his weight. “Why would he take off his shirt?”
Ethan made the I-don’t-know gesture with his hands, and his expression read of world-weariness. Bob invited Ethan in for a cup of coffee. “I don’t want to get you into trouble,” Ethan answered, but he was grinning as he spoke, already moving to open the door of his car.
They entered the library and Bob made a pot of coffee while Ethan poked around. He didn’t appear to consider any of the events of the morning odd or worrisome. Bob went about his setting-up routine and Ethan followed behind. He instantly understood what Bob might enjoy about this process. “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” he said. “All quiet like this?”
Bob felt a little shy, as though a secret vice had been uncovered, but said, “I like it.”
“And I suppose you’re a fiend for books?”
“I suppose I am.”
“I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me.”
“See, for me it’s just the opposite,” Bob said. He thought it a good quip but its quality was not remarked on. “And what do you do?” he asked Ethan.
“Not very much. My father used to ask me, ‘How are you going to make your living answer, Ethan?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know, Dad.’ And I wasn’t lying, either — I didn’t know, and I still don’t know.”
“Do you have any job at all?”
“I have had any number of jobs, Bob, thank you for your concern. But none of them held my interest for very long. I’m at the sweet spot of my unemployment just now.”
“What’s the sweet spot?”
“It just started, and I don’t have to think of it ending for months.”
“And what do you do with your time?”
“Goof around, have fun adventures.” He shrugged. “I’m twenty-four, and I’m not very worried about it.”
“I’m twenty-four too,” said Bob.
“You don’t seem twenty-four.”
“I don’t feel twenty-four,” Bob said.
Ethan pointed out that he might be stuck there awhile, and he asked for a book recommendation to pass the time. Bob, sharing a joke with himself, gave him Crime and Punishment.
“What’s it about?” asked Ethan.
“Just those two things.”
Ethan shrugged and sighed and settled in at an empty table and opened to the first page. Bob unlocked the front doors at eight thirty. It was raining all through the morning hours, and foot traffic was sparse. Ethan sat with his Dostoyevsky, occasionally peering out the window to see if the white truck still was there, and it was. At lunch they split Bob’s sandwich. Bob asked Ethan what he thought of the book and Ethan said, “I wasn’t interested at the start, now I can’t stop reading. But why does everybody have two names?” After the sandwich, they sat smoking in the break room. Ethan said, “I’ve been thinking. What if you went over and knocked on my door?”
“Why would I do that?”
“To gather an impression of the scene.”
“Is your impression of the scene not as clear as mine?”
“Yes, all right, but you could speak with this guy, maybe get an idea of how long he’s planning on hanging around, you know?”
Bob was surprised to be giving the idea any consideration at all, but there was some aspect to the story of Ethan’s morning, in addition to the way he had approached the situation, that prompted in Bob a similarly casual attitude. He was having fun, and this was uncommon enough that he felt a compulsion to carry on. But now, with Bob pulling on his coat, Ethan was having second thoughts. “I wouldn’t want him to kill you,” he said.