I dropped Ames at the Texas and headed to my office. There were no cars in the DQ lot. When I opened my office door, I half expected the phone to be ringing, but it wasn’t. I didn’t look at the information I had copied. I just placed it on my desk in the dark and headed for the back room, where I stripped down to my boxers and lay down on the cot, two pillows under my head. I wasn’t sleepy. I watched the lights between the slats of my blinds from occasional cars passing on Washington.
It was, I guessed, a little after three-thirty.
Sleep came, but not quickly.
8
Someone was knocking at my door. I opened my eyes. The sun was casting bands of dusty light through the slats of my blinds. More knocking. Not hard. Not insistent, but not giving up either. I reached for my watch, almost got it before it fell off the chair next to my bed. Then I almost fell out of the bed reaching for the watch.
It was a few minutes after eight.
I got up and stood for a few seconds, swaying slightly, blinking, wanting the knocking to stop so I could fold myself back onto my cot.
The knocking didn’t stop. In need of a shave, clad in my blue boxer underwear with the little white circles and an extra-large gray Grinnell College T-shirt that I picked up at the Women’s Exchange for fifty cents, I was as ready as I wanted to be for visitors.
When I opened the door, the sun greeted me just over the acupuncture center across Washington Street. A cool breeze and the sight of a man wearing a Tampa Bay Bucs sweatshirt dappled with stains from coffee and liquids unknown also greeted me.
“Digger,” I said.
“Little Italian,” he said, with a smile showing white, inexpensive but serviceable false teeth.
Digger, until a few months ago, had been homeless. Well, not homeless if you were willing to consider the rest room five doors down a home. Digger, bush of pepper gray hair and nose tilted slightly to the right, was a thinker. Once, when I was shaving in the rest room, he had said, “Why do women complain when men leave the toilet seat up? Why shouldn’t men complain when women leave the toilet seat down?”
We stood looking at each other for a few seconds, Digger with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly, me with my hands at my sides, waiting.
“Job’s gone,” he said, looking over his left shoulder.
I knew what he was looking at, the second-floor dance studio across the street where he had been working as an instructor. Digger had dug deeply into his memory of different times to call up what he called “the Spirit of Terpsichore.” The studio had closed a few days ago. No notice. Just gone, cleaned out, empty.
“You want to come in?” I asked.
“I bear no gifts,” he said.
“I expect none,” I said, stepping back.
He came in and I closed the door.
“Lewis,” he said, facing me. “I am optimistic.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” I said.
“Wrong word,” he said. “You are not happy. I have never seen you happy. I have seen you relieved.”
“I’m relieved to hear that you are optimistic,” I said.
Digger looked at the chair in front of my desk. I motioned for him to sit. He did. I went into the back room, changed into my yellow boxers with the little gray sharks, put on my jeans and a clean short-sleeved white button-down shirt, white socks and white sneakers. Then I went back into the office, Cubs hat in hand, where Digger was examining the sheet of names and addresses from the Seaside I had scribbled.
He looked up as I sat behind the desk and said, “I’m optimistic. My room rent is paid for two weeks. I have prospects, ideas.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“I thought you should be the first one I told because you were the one who lifted me from the chill confines of the WC and the depths of ignominy to the dignity of steady work and eating regular.”
Digger was smiling. With people who look like Digger, the conclusion to jump to was that he had spent the night cuddling with a bottle of inexpensive but well-advertised wine or some drug not of choice but of last resort. Neither was true. Digger neither drank nor used drugs. His troubles were deeper than that, rooted, as he put it, in faulty genes, ill-fated life choices, a series of concussions and a god or gods who enjoyed experimenting on him. I knew those gods.
“Ideas,” he said, looking down at my list and then back up at me. “I’ve thought of starting a church, the First Presbyterian Church of the Tupperware. Sell religion and plastic containers that you put things in and pop the tops. On top of each lid will be an inscription: jesus saves; so should you.”
I nodded. Digger leaned forward.
“How about this? A line of candy. Simple chocolates maybe made in the shape of offensive things. I’d call it Good-Tasting Chocolate in Bad Taste. You know. Swastikas. Klansmen. That one would be white chocolate, which you know is not really chocolate at all.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I think you need a job and a loan,” I said.
Digger stopped smiling.
“I paid you back last time,” he said.
“That you did.”
“Well, I’ve started finding some dignity. Now I guess I’d better find another job to keep the search going.”
I shifted my weight, took out my wallet, removed three twenties and handed them to Digger. I noticed that his hands were clean and his face freshly shaved. He took the money and touched his cheeks.
“Spic and span and speaking Spanish,” he said. “Ready to take on the world again.”
“Good,” I said.
“Any ideas?”
“Can you cook?”
“Continental, Mexican, Italian, Thai, Chinese, French,” he said, counting each one off on his fingers.
“Short order,” I said. “Griddle cakes, eggs, bacon, sausages.”
“With the best of them, whoever they might be,” he said.
“Gwen’s looking for an early-morning short-order cook,” I said.
Gwen’s was just down the street, a clean, bright survivor of the 1950s, not a kitsch and cool fifties diner, but the real thing. There was even an autographed poster of Elvis on the wall near the cash register. Elvis had dropped in for breakfast in 1957 when Gwen was a little girl and her parents had owned the place. Now, Gwen and her daughters ran the diner, kept the prices down and the food simple.
“I’m the man for the job,” Digger said. “Though I have to confess, I can’t really handle all that ethnic cuisine.”
“Confession accepted,” I said. “You know Gwen?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Let me know how it goes,” I said, getting up. He did the same.
“Can I buy you breakfast?” he asked.
“Get the job and you can make me breakfast tomorrow.”
“How do I look?” he asked.
“Got another shirt?”
He looked down at himself.
“Yes.”
“Clean?”
“Spotless,” he said.
“Put it on and go see Gwen. Tell her I sent you.”
“Here’s hoping,” he said, moving to the door.
I had long ago given up hoping and I didn’t think Digger had much left in him, but he hung on. I hung on. I was never really sure why. That’s one of the reasons I saw Ann Horowitz.
I got a clean towel from my closet, took my ziplock bag containing a disposable Bic razor, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste and made my way to the rest room along the railed concrete walkway outside my door.
The rest room was always clean, thanks to Marvin Uliaks, slow of wit, doer of odd jobs on the stretch of Washington Street between Ringling and Bahia Vista. He swept floors, cleaned toilets, washed windows and smiled at whatever cash was handed to him. I regularly gave him a dollar a week. It was worth it.
It was going to be a busy day. I did not want a busy day. I had my list from the Seaside. I had a dead boy whose mother was waiting for something that people called “closure.” Closure, the end of grief and the answer to why a tragedy burst through their door. I didn’t have hope and I suspected that closure, if I ever found it, would close nothing, just open new doors.