Lawrence Block - Hit and Run

He went back to the kitchen, where she was running a vacuum cleaner. She switched it off when she saw him and he told her he felt like Rip Van Winkle. “When I woke up,” he said, “I was ten years older. I looked like somebody’s lovable old uncle.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d like it. I have some ideas about the color, too, but what I’d like to do is wait a day or two so both of us can get used to it the way it is now, and then it’ll be easier to figure out what else to do.”

“That makes sense. But—”

“But it means staying here, is that what you were going to say? Last night you talked about how tired you were of running.”

“That’s true.”

“Don’t you think maybe it’s time to stop running, now that you’ve finally got a good chance? Your car’s parked off the street. No one can see it, but it’s there whenever you need it. You can have the room upstairs for as long as you want. No one else has any use for it and you’re not getting in anybody’s way up there. It’s no trouble at all cooking for one extra person, and if you start to feel guilty about imposing I’ll let you take me out for dinner every once in a while. I bet I know a restaurant or two you might like.”

“I could get new ID,” he said. “A driver’s license, even a passport. It’s trickier than it used to be, they’ve tightened up security in the past few years, but you can still do it. It takes time, though.”

“What exactly have y’all got,” she said, “besides time?”

She cleaned out the dresser and closet in his bedroom, filling two Hefty bags with clothes she swore no one had worn in twenty years. “All of this should have gone to the Goodwill ages ago,” she said. “You’ll have enough room for your things, won’t you?”

His things, everything he owned in the world, filled a small suitcase and a shopping bag. He had almost enough room to give every garment its own dresser drawer.

Later, she had to go out, and wondered if he could stay downstairs where he could hear her father if he called out. “He sleeps most of the time,” she said, “and when he’s awake he doesn’t do much but talk back to the television set. He can get to the bathroom by himself, and he doesn’t like to be helped, but if he should fall down—”

He sat in the kitchen and read the paper, and when he’d finished it he went upstairs for a book in the hall bookcase that had caught his eye earlier. It was a Loren Estleman western, about an itinerant hangman, and he sat in the kitchen reading it and drinking coffee until the old man called out.

He went in and found the man sitting up in bed, his pajama top unbuttoned, a cigarette smoldering between two fingers of his right hand. You could see the illness in his face. Keller wondered what kind of cancer the man had, and if it was smoking-related, and if he should be smoking now. Then he asked himself what difference it could possibly make at this stage.

“It’s liver cancer,” the man said, reading his mind. “Smoking’s got nothing to do with it. Well, next to nothing. You believe doctors, smoking’s to blame for every damn thing. Acid rain, global warming, you name it. My daughter around?”

“She stepped out.”

“Stepped out? You got a nice way of putting things. Not teaching her brats, is she? She usually gets this colored girl to look after me when she does.”

“I think she had some shopping to do.”

“Step over this way so I can get a better look at you. Man gets old and sick, he gets to order people around. I call that inadequate compensation, myself. You think much about dying?”

“Sometimes.”

“A man your age? I swear I never once gave it a moment’s thought, and now here I am doing it. I’ll say this, I don’t think much of it. You sleeping with her?”

“Sir?”

“Can’t be the hardest question anybody ever asked you. My daughter. Are you sleeping with her?”

“No.”

“You’re not? Y’all aren’t queer, are you?”

“No.”

“You don’t look it, but in my experience you can’t always tell. There’s people who swear they can, but I don’t believe them. You like it here?”

“It’s a beautiful city.”

“Well, it’s New Orleans, isn’t it? We get used to it, you see. I meant this house. You like it?”

“It’s very comfortable.”

“You be staying with us for a while?”

“I believe so,” he said. “Yes, I think I will.”

“I’m tired. I think I’ll get some sleep.”

“I’ll let you be.”

He was on his way out the door when the old man’s voice stopped him in midstep.

“You get the chance,” he said, “you sleep with her. Or one day you’ll be too old to do it anymore. And what you’ll do is hate yourself for every chance you let get away from you.”

The following day they were at an optometrist’s shop on Rampart Street. She’d vetoed his plan to get reading glasses, insisting they wouldn’t look right, and when he said he didn’t need regular glasses, she told him he’d be surprised. “And if your vision is almost perfect,” she said, “he’ll give you lenses with almost no correction.”

It turned out that he needed one prescription for distance and another for reading. “Two birds with one stone,” the optometrist said. “In other words, bifocals.”

Jesus, bifocals. He tried on frames, and the one he liked was of heavy black plastic. She looked at him, laughed, said something about Buddy Holly, and steered him to a less assertive metal frame, with rounded rectangular lens openings. He tried it on, and had to admit she was right.

There were shops where they made your glasses in an hour, but this wasn’t one of them. “About this time tomorrow,” the fellow said, and they stopped at Café du Monde for café au lait and beignets, and paused on their way through Jackson Square to watch a woman feeding the pigeons as if her life depended on it.

She said, “Did you see the paper? The DNA test came back. He was definitely the man who raped and killed that nurse in Audubon Park.”

“No surprise there.”

“No, but wait’ll you hear what they think happened. You know how the live oaks will have branches that come almost to the ground?”

“They’re the only tree I know that’s like that.”

“Well, see, it makes them real easy to climb. And that’s what they believe he did, climbed up into one of the trees to wait for a victim to pass by.”

“I think I can see where this is going.”

“And then, because he had a something-point-something blood alcohol level, he lost his balance and fell, and he landed on his head and broke his neck and died.”

“The world is a dangerous place.”

“But a little less so,” she said, “now that he’s not in it anymore.”

Her name was Julia Emilie Roussard. She’d written it on the fly-leaf of one of the books he picked up.

It took him two days to use it. For all the conversations they had, there was somehow never an occasion where he could fit her name into one of his sentences.

He took her out to lunch after they picked up his eyeglasses (with a complimentary leather case bearing the optometrist’s name and address, and an impregnated strip of cloth for cleaning the lenses). On the way home she reminded him that he’d talked about two losses, his best friend and his most prized possession. Who was the friend, she wondered, and what was the possession?

He answered the second part first. His stamp collection, gone when he got into his apartment.

“You’re a stamp collector? Seriously?”

“Well, it was a hobby, but I was pretty serious about it. I gave it a lot of my time, and put quite a bit of money into it.” He told her a little about his collection, and how the childhood hobby had drawn him back in as an adult.