“Pistachio nuts,” I said.
He jabbed a hand into the nuts and withdrew a few as if he were cradling tiny torpedoes of gold. “Look closer; behold the miracle.”
I took one from his palm. “A most ordinary pistachio,” I said, having keen observational skills.
“How would you open it?”
It had not burst open. There was no seam.“Nonsplits,” I said, at last understanding his earlier use of the term-and not.
A Home Depot plastic bag lay on the case of All-Bran. He smiled, reached inside, and pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers. “Comprende?” Sometimes he switches to Spanish, though never for very long, because he does not know the language.
“Oui,” I answered in flawless high school French. “Ma and her lady friends will have to use pliers to open the pistachios, thereby strengthening their motor and mental skills. Thus the world will be saved, bronze Brumskys will be erected, and pigeons everywhere will have something appropriate to aim at.”
“Genius, huh?”
“Drive me home.” I had no time to dawdle. Yups were coming.
Five minutes later, he pulled up to the turret. “Come over tomorrow, and behold the beginnings of the new age.”
As I climbed out of his rental van, I told him I would bet every one of my newfound twenty-eight hundred and fifty-three dollars that nothing but good was on the horizon for us both.
I will remember that moment for as long as I live.
Two
I awoke the next morning early and optimistic. I shrugged into my three sweatshirts, XL, XXL, and XXXL, and fairly raced down to the second-floor kitchen to make coffee. I was anxious to embrace the day and all the yups it brought forth, exactly as Lester Lance advised.
Burbling along with Mr. Coffee, I looked around with new satisfaction. I’d learned finish carpentry and cabinetmaking in that kitchen and thought the new oak cabinets, moldings, and trims looked fine indeed. True, the badly dented microwave offered a discordant note, presenting as it did the tiny potential of glow-in-the-dark aftereffects, and the rusty avocado-colored refrigerator I’d found in an alley worked well enough in the winter but was not at all reliable in the summer. No matter; they’d be gone soon. Only high-end stainless steel appliances would impress yups, and those were on the horizon. I had a new client, talking retainer.
Mr. Coffee gasped at last, and I took my coffee across the hall. As on each of the five floors, a huge fireplace was set into the southwest curve. It had been used only once, to share a fire with a woman reporter whom I’d never quite gotten to know.
I pulled the plastic garbage bag down over my desktop computer, covered my card table desk with a bedsheet, and began cutting thin strips of oak molding to surround the slit windows.
Architecturally, the narrow windows were historically accurate, ideal for archers to repel attacking marauders. Because they were set into rough stone, trimming them was fussy, slow work. By one o’clock, I’d only finished two and was ready for a break.
I went into the kitchen, drank the last burned dregs of the coffee, and ate half a cup of Cheerios, dry. Drinking burned coffee was a longtime habit. Dry Cheerios, though, were new. I’d had the happy yellow box since my divorce, but I’d used it simply as a cabinet divider to separate the small mounds of Twinkies and Ho Hos that were my ordinary staples. I’d been inspired to a wider view when, simultaneously, Lester Lance Leamington moved up into the daylight and I acquired a generous client. Change was in the wind for sure, and I reasoned I should improve my nutritional life as well. I began supplementing the Twinkies and Ho Hos with small test doses of Cheerios, administered one half-cup at a time. It had been almost a week, and I’d experienced no ill effects from the little sawdust-colored circles. In fact, that day I thought I noticed more spring in my step as I bounded up to the third-floor bedroom, where I keep my clothes piled on a chair next to my bed. I changed into unstained khakis and my least wrinkled blue button-down shirt, slipped on my blue blazer and peacoat, and walked my new health and optimism down the street to city hall.
The Building and Zoning Department was in the basement, the darkest floor of all. Unlike the mayor’s first-floor office, where the big bundles from pimps, bookies, and tavern operators were counted out behind thick mahogany and closed drapes, the windowless basement offices were for collecting ordinary, day-to-day gratuities for permits that in any other suburb wouldn’t require a bribe at all. I hadn’t been down there since before Elvis Derbil had been perp-walked out by federal agents.
His door had been changed only slightly. The opaque glass now read J. J. DERBIL, BUILDING AND ZONING COMMISSIONER. Only the first name had changed. Official positions were passed along through families in Rivertown like genetic disorders.
The secretary in the outer office hurried out another door when she saw me. That had been her habit since the first time I’d come to scream at Elvis.
“Ahem,” I said, clearing my throat behind the counter in the now empty outer office.
“Do you have an appointment?” a woman’s voice called from inside Elvis’s old private office.
“Purely an introductory call,” I called through the door.
“You are?”
“Dek Elstrom.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“We’ve met?”
“You’re the pain in the ass that lives in that limestone toilet-paper tube. Go away.”
“I’m a taxpayer. You work for me.” I laughed. Even I saw that as ludicrous.
“Make an appointment, Elstrom.”
“Who are you?”
“The building and zoning commissioner, you idiot.”
“I meant your name.”
“Derbil.”
“I meant your first name.”
“Make an appointment,” she said for the second time. She certainly had Elvis’s communication skills, though my nose told me she didn’t use his coconut-scented hair spray.
“I want you to rezone my property from municipal to residential.”
She laughed. I left, thinking that to stay longer might jeopardize our budding relationship.
Since I was all dressed up, I drove to Leo’s. I needed humor, and good coffee to wash away the dregs I’d just had at home, and heat, in which to enjoy them both.
I parked in front. As always, his walk and steps were immaculate, despite the snow that seemed to have fallen every day since November. Oddly, Leo’s old aluminum baseball bat lay on the snow next to the walk.
The sound of a vacuum cleaner came through the front door. As did a sort of pinging, as though gravel were ricocheting inside, against the walls and windows. I had to knock loudly for almost a minute before the vacuuming stopped and Leo opened the door. Though he was dressed with his usual absurd cheeriness, in a too-large aqua-colored Hawaiian shirt festooned with monkeys riding balloons, and red cargo pants, he was not smiling. His normally pale face was flushed dark, perhaps from exertion.
“Vacuuming, Leo?” I asked, affably enough.
“With a normal vacuum cleaner, not a Shop-Vac like others must use,” he said, trying for a smirk. On a head so pale and thin, a smirk was always an interesting contortion, because it made his thick black eyebrows look like they were trying to mate.
“I’m here for coffee,” I said.
“First we clean.” Leo never gets sidetracked. He thinks and lives sequentially. He is not like me.
I stepped inside. The living room had been shelled, literally. Splintered beige pistachio shells and crumbly bits of yellowish green nut meat lay on the carpet, the tops of the picture frames, the windowsills, and the yellowed plastic slipcovers that had protected every piece of upholstered furniture since Leo was an infant.
Two vacuum cleaners sat in the middle of the floor. One was an upright, the other a canister on wheels. A broom and a dustpan were set against the big-screen television. Shells crunched beneath my shoes as I took another step into the room.