“How long you been gone?” the building commissioner asked. His name was Elvis, and I remembered him from high school. He’d been the mayor’s nephew. He’d slathered lots of Vaseline on his hair back then, and I used to wonder if a fly landing on his head could free itself before it dissolved. Now, it appeared he enjoyed hair spray, scented sweet, like coconuts. His hairline was in full retreat, but what was left, halfway back on his head, was sprayed straight up, like a little wall meant to hide the patch of shiny skin behind.
“Since high school, Elvis. I lived in the city while I went to college, stayed there when I got a job.”
“Heard about your job.” He smirked with his mouth open so I could admire his bad teeth.
“I was cleared.”
“Put your ass out of business, I heard. Got you throwed out of Gateville, too.”
A month earlier, I would have gotten in his face. Now, though, I was showering at the Rivertown Health Center while standing in what I hoped was just water. I needed the occupancy permit.
“Damned right,” I smiled. “I prayed I could be returned to my own kind.”
The top of his head glowed crimson all the way back to the hair wall, quicker than he could think. Instinct must have told him there’d been an insult, but the words had come too fast to process. He bent over the counter, head still glowing, and began filling out a form. When he was done, he hit it with a rubber stamp and pushed the permit across the counter.
I looked down. He’d stamped “Historic” in red ink at the bottom. “What’s this?”
“Your property is a historical. No changes.” He laid a dirty fingernail on a tiny drawing in the upper right corner of the permit.
It was a rendering of the turret. The City of Rivertown was using my turret as its symbol.
“What do you mean, no changes?”
“Check with us before you do anything, so’s you don’t spoil the integrity of the structure and we make you rip out what you done.”
“I want to make it into a residence.”
He shook his head. “No can do, even if it wasn’t a historical. It’s zoned municipal.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Mean’s the property’s only approved for city buildings.”
“I know what municipal zoning is. I meant, how can private property be zoned only for public buildings?”
“Your aunt approved it after she took sick.” The corners of his mouth twitched; something funny had penetrated his consciousness.
“Why the hell would she do that?”
“Might have been because of us waiving sixty years’ worth of unpaid taxes and penalties. Municipal property don’t pay tax, so there’d be no liens against her estate.” He showed me his bad teeth again, in the kind of feral grin hyenas give to fresh meat. “You been away a long time.”
“Does this mean I can’t live there?” I was struggling to maintain an even tone.
“It’s a municipal. Still, I suppose I could give you a temporary exception, so’s you can repair the place and all.” He batted his eyelashes like a virgin bride, dropped his head, and started making a notation on the permit. He wrote slowly, giving me time to fish in my pocket for a fifty to express my gratitude.
I didn’t have the fifty. Nor the gratitude.
He finished writing. I scooped up the permit before he noticed I wasn’t flashing any green and started for the door.
“Hey!”
I stopped and turned.
Elvis had his index finger in the air. “Just you can live there, and only to fix up the place on the inside. No wives,” he snickered, “no girlfriends. I catch wind of anybody else living there, you’re gone.”
I went out quickly, before I got stupid. Like the movie cop said, a man’s got to know his limitations, and mine were screaming to be let loose, all over Elvis’s oily head.
The next afternoon, I saw a zoning lawyer who told me, for a billable hour, that I’d been away a long time. Rivertown was under new management, he said. Grandson and granddaughter lizards had taken over, and the new lizards were college educated, not to be satisfied with small-change pimp and pinball money. They wanted Mercedeses, not Cadillacs, and for that they needed condominium developers with big, greasy wads of building application and zoning variance cash. But to get those developers, they first had to shake off the old Rivertown tank-city image of wet-floor bars, gambling houses, and strip joints. So they hired consultantswho came up with a marketing campaign. Rivertown Renaissance, they called it. To kick it off, they chose the turret-my turret-as the symbol of the rebirth of the town. They put it on the town’s stationery, police cars, fire trucks, and municipal Dumpsters. They even put it on the portable toilets in the town’s one park.
I could fight, the attorney said, but that would take money I didn’t have. Since I’d already moved in, he recommended I rehab cautiously on the inside and, when I could afford his three hundred an hour, take the City of Rivertown to court to change the turret’s zoning into something I could sell. Until then, he suggested I keep a low profile. Don’t provoke.
My hour expired. I left the lawyer’s office mumbling to myself. The dominoes of my life were still tipping over.
In the beginning, it wasn’t difficult to follow the lawyer’s advice. As November changed into winter, I had more pressing things than a zoning conversion to worry about. Like heat. I got a small personal loan at the bank, bought pipes, electrical conduit, and wiring-and three space heaters-and spent the winter clearing out seventy years’ worth of pigeon droppings and squirrel carcasses and repairing the rudimentary plumbing and wiring my grandfather had installed. With a used microwave oven and plastic washtub sink, the turret, with its bad roof, had all the comforts of camping out in an abandoned house, but as I reminded myself on an almost hourly basis, at least I was not at the health center. The zoning lawyer would have been pleased; through that winter and spring and into the summer, my profile was lower than a garden snake’s.
Late one afternoon, I was on top of the turret, leaning against the stone wall that rose five feet above the roof, arguing with Elvis. A long week had passed since I’d messengered my report to the Bohemian, and I’d stayed busy by calling every roofer in the yellowpages and trying to convince myself that the Bohemian was right in not going to the cops.
Elvis had seen the roofers’ trucks coming by all week, and each time one pulled away, he came blustering over to make sure I wasn’t violating any of his rules.
“A membrane roof is a big rubber sheet,” I said for the fourth or fifth time. I kicked at the loose stone pebbles on my roof. “It won’t leak like this tar and gravel. Besides, this wall hides it. I could put a pink roof on, and you’d never know.”
“I’d know.” Elvis touched a large dark red pimple on the tip of his nose. “I’d know.”
“You saw the buckets downstairs. This place leaks.”
“I’d know.”
The loving way he was fondling the zit was mesmerizing.
“I’d know,” he said again.
“What?” Engrossed by the way he was caressing his apple red nose, I’d lost the thread of what he was saying.
“If you were putting a pink roof on this place,” he said.
I’d paused, searching for the right one-syllable words, when my cell phone rang. A crisp British voice introduced herself as the Bohemian’s secretary and said, “Mr. Chernek requests that you go to Crystal Waters immediately. Mr. Novak will be outside the front gate.”
My heart started banging like an old pump. “What’s this about?” I shouted into the phone.
“Please go there, Mr. Elstrom. Immediately.” She hung up.
Elvis’s lips were working under his inflamed nose, but I couldn’t hear his words. Guilt had shut down my sound as my mind raced. Thirty pieces of silver, three grand; I’d been Judas. I’d sold out, hadn’t forced the Bohemian and Stanley Novak to go to the cops. For money, for a roof. Jesus. Now there’d been another bomb, and maybe somebody had died.