Глен Хиршберг: Transitway

On the first day of his retirement, Ferdinand Fernandez awoke to banging on his front door. For a few, fuzzy moments, the sound bewildered him. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually heard it. Rolling over, he dropped his hand onto the empty pillow beside him, momentarily wondered at the ghost of heat he imagined he felt there, then forgot it as whoever was outside banged again.

"Coming," Ferdinand mumbled, digging into the pile of clean but unfolded Hawaiian shirts he never bothered to return to his single chest of drawers. The one he pulled up was mostly blue, with swordfish leaping across it. Struggling into that and a pair of shorts, he stood up barefoot on his futon, feeling his gut drop onto his hipbones like some exhausted geriatric leaning over a seawall, and caught sight of the clock.

10:30.

The panic that seized him wasn't entirely surprising. He'd felt it buzzing around in his dreams all night. And it had probably been thirty years since he'd slept this long. This time, the banging on the door rattled his living room clock off the wall.

"Goddamnit," Ferdninand barked, though half-heartedly. As he stepped across the warped hardwood floor of his bungalow in his bare feet, he decided it wouldn't be the worst thing to see another human being's face this morning. Any human being's. After all, today— and pretty much every day, from now on — there would be no one, anywhere, waiting for him.

Throwing open the door, he blinked against the blinding LA. sunlight, and Q shoved him backward and strolled in, brandishing a black satchel. His shined two-toned shoes clopped, as though they had taps attached. Knowing Q, Ferdinand thought, they just might.

"Out the way, freed slave coming through," Q said, bounding straight across the living room, through the kitchen toward the unused back hallway and the bungalow's other room.

For the second time that morning, panic flared in Ferdinand's chest. "Where the hell are you going?"

At the sound of his voice, Q stopped dead, one foot still in the kitchen, the other poised above the scraggly tan carpeting of the hall. When he turned around, he was wearing the surprised smile that had, all by itself, made him a better teacher than Ferdinand, and an exceptionally long-lived department chair. There was something endearing about someone so completely in charge being that willing, and that often, to be caught off guard.

"No idea," he said. "Seems like last time I was here, we…"

"Last time?" Ferdinand blinked, rubbed at the sleep in his eyes and wound up smearing sweat there instead. "When was that, exactly?"

By now, Q had recovered, become Q again. "Right 'round the last time you invited me, F-Squared."

Ferdinand winced, although he knew Q hadn't meant any insult. The nickname had been pasted to him by a recent class of students and was a term of affectionate mockery since, other than P.E., his courses had become probably the hardest in all of Florence Normandie High School to fail. He hadn't meant to go soft. He'd just lost the point, somewhere, of telling these particular kids, facing their particular choices, that they sucked at communicating.

For a long breath, the two men stared at each other. Outside, the air Q had disturbed filled again with its more familiar sound: the gush and snarl of traffic pouring over the 110 freeway just down the block like the morning tide. Ferdinand eyed his boss — ex-boss — and felt a surge of startling and powerful gratitude. For thirty-four years, going to work had been better than it might have been because he got to spend at least twenty or so minutes of his time with this man.

Except that looking at Q now, it seemed Ferdinand hadn't really seen him for years. When, exactly, had Q gotten old? Well into his fifties, Q had kept his 'fro flying— "Springy as a trampoline, soft as your butt" — but sometime recently he'd shaved it down, and now all he had atop his knobby black skull were outcroppings of charcoal fuzz, like dead moss on a boulder. What had been Q's barrel chest was now a barrel all the way to his hips, and it swung when he walked.

"What?" Q snapped.

Ferdinand gestured at the black satchel. "That's your idea for our first day of retirement? Bowling?"

Q unzipped the satchel with a flourish, then drew out the strobe ball that had hung over his desk for three decades. He laid that on Ferdinand's white, round, plastic kitchen table, then pulled out eight bottles of Corona and set those ceremoniously next to the ball before flinging the bag away.

"Not your real uncle, praise the Lord," Ferdinand murmured, then blinked as Q straightened up, mouth flat.

"What?"

"I don't know." Ferdinand's breath felt furry and uncomfortable in his mouth. From too much sleep, perhaps. "Didn't I used to say that to you? Or some student?"

Q shrugged, settled back into his habitual, hip-cocked, preening posture. "Well, I ain't your uncle. I'm your daddy." And he waved at the beer and the strobe. "You imagine how boring this year's end-of-term wine-and-whine faculty meeting's going to be without me and my stuff?"

"I'm still trying to get over how boring they were with your stuff."

Q grinned. "What's for breakfast, fellow free man?"

While Ferdinand got bowls down from his cabinet for cereal, Q wandered again toward the hallway that led to the back room. It made Ferdinand nervous. God, when was the last time even he'd been back there? Guest room, that's what he'd called it. Hadn't he? Stupid conceit. By the time he'd finally managed to save enough scraps from twenty-six years of teaching paychecks to put a down-payment on this place, his parents had been long dead, and his sisters had moved to Fullerton with their families, which was just far enough away for them to visit less often, but not far enough for them to sleep over. Except for Q, his school colleagues had stayed colleagues, not friends, and if Q ever did sleep over, it would be face down wherever the last Corona had left him, not in a bed. Right this second, Ferdinand couldn't even remember if there was a bed in that room. Whatever furniture there was in there, the termites and dust must have long since claimed it.

Pouring oat bran and milk into the bowls, Ferdinand let his eyes close for just a moment. People had warned him about the first hours of retirement. He'd told them they were crazy, it wouldn't be like that for him. From outside, sluicing through walls honeycombed with termite nests he couldn't afford to eradicate, came the gush of freeway noise. There should have been other sounds out there, too. Had been, once. The blatt and thud from some suped-up ride stereo, say, or the sound of neighborhood kids woofing at each other's sisters. But his neighborhood had gone silent of late. Or else the freeway had overflowed its banks and drowned out everything else.

He turned, and Q scowled.

"What is that? Bran? I bring you my strobe, you offer me fiber?" Sweeping both bowls out of Ferdinand's hands, Q flipped them upside down into the sink. "Where the eggs?"

He didn't wait for Ferdinand to point to the refrigerator before popping it open. "Good. Where the peppers? You people always have peppers." He found those, too, piled in the vegetable drawer. "Okey-dokey. Now. Dance."

And all at once, Ferdinand realized it was all true. There would be no more Back-to-School night. No more "Wait, you teach English?" No more beautiful, still-hopeful faces disappearing mid-semester into their South Central lives and never coming back. No more F-Squared. No more no-flip-flops days. Dropping into a pose he could only hope was as gleeful as he felt, he launched himself into the Macarena.