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“Nope.”
“You come over for dinner?”
“Sure. Now?”
“I’d better go back to my room first, on account of I have to freshen up. You wait a few minutes, then you come over, knock on the door, and I’ll let you in. That way we can try out the door.”
“Okay.”
“Well, I guess this is goodbye. Goodbye.”
“Bye, Nancy. See you in a few minutes.”
4 (#ulink_c87f9f42-98dc-5c20-b97f-d871feb03cf9)
I waited about five minutes and then I went and knocked on her door.
“Who is it?” she said, as if she didn’t know it was me. I think she just wanted to be proper and formal about it, to keep everything on the up and up.
“It’s me; Willy.”
She unlocked the keyhole lock and the deadbolt, opened the door against the chain, and looked out to make sure it was me. Then she pulled the chain from the slide and let me in.
“Willy! I’m so glad that you could come.”
“Yeah; me too.”
“Is Stanley out there in the hall?” she whispered.
“Stanley? No. Why?”
“He was out there a while ago. Lately it seems like everywhere I go, there’s Stanley. Then when I look at him he turns quick and walks away.”
I opened the door and looked up and down the hall.
“Has he been bothering you?” I said.
“No, but I think he’s been following me. Poor Stanley. I think he just wants somebody to talk to.”
“I’ve got a feeling he wants more than to just talk. He never talks to anybody. I don’t like him following you around like that.”
“I was in Gladys’s room yesterday,” she said. “I’d left my door open, and when I came back, Stanley was standing in my doorway. He wanted to tell me something but he couldn’t get himself to say it. I said, ‘What is it, Stanley? Tell me,’ but his face turned all red and he just shook his head and left.”
“He had no business snooping around in your room,” I said. “Don’t worry; when I’m done with that guy, he won’t be bothering you.”
“Don’t do anything, Willy. He’s just a lonely man who’s deaf and dumb and shy. He’s overly gentle and sensitive.”
“That’s what he wants everyone to think. It’s all an act. He’s got some kind of an angle.” I stepped back into the room and closed the door.
“The door works so good, I mean, it works so well, now,” she said. She must have been taking grammar lessons from Gladys. “You’re a wonder, Willy. You’re so handy.”
She gave me a bottle of beer. She didn’t open one for herself, because Nancy would never drink beer or anything that had alcohol in it. She said for me to make myself comfortable while she got dinner ready. Mr Winkley was looking down at his cat food, trying to decide if he wanted to eat it or not. I walked around the room and looked at everything. She didn’t have a lot of stuff. A blue Bakelite alarm clock radio on her nightstand and the Virgin Mary statue on her bureau were the only colorful things.
“Statue” maybe isn’t the right word. It was more like what they call a figurine. Nancy’s mother gave it to her just before she died, when Nancy was nine, and I believe that Nancy used to kneel and pray to it every day when she was alone. The figurine was the one thing she cared about the most, and that is why I think of it as a statue, though it was only about the size of a ten-inch pipe wrench.
I don’t know that I saw the statue that night, because you wouldn’t always notice something like that. But like I told the cops, if it hadn’t been there, I’m pretty sure I would have not seen it.
There wasn’t much to see out the window, mostly just the side of another brick building across the alley, but if you got close and looked sideways you could see some trees and grass. Nancy was working at the stove and then she went over to Mr. Winkley who was drinking water from his bowl on the floor. She stooped down and looked at his face, and I couldn’t think why she did that. Then she went back to working at the stove.
We had hamburger mixed in with macaroni, onions, catsup, and potato chips. She said it was her mother’s recipe. Mr Winkley was standing on the table with his head right in my plate, so that it was hard for me to get any. I had to keep pushing him away. We were sitting there eating and she started to pick up her glass of milk, and flinched.
“Did you hurt your arm?” I said.
“My wrist,” she said. “It comes and goes. I don’t even remember when it started, so it can’t be anything. It’s from holding my trimmer knife. I told Mr. Horne and he said he was going to move me out of the cutting department, but he never did.
“He used to be so nice. Then one day I was late coming in to work and by mistake I hung my coat on the wrong rack where the office girls hang theirs and they told him and he gave me a warning. It’s a permanent warning too, so I’ll always be on probation, forever. I’m just a trimmer, that’s all I am.”
“Somebody ought to put that guy’s lights out,” I said.
She put her glass down on the table, and Mr. Winkley stuck his head in it and was lapping his tongue trying to get at the milk. She tilted the glass so he could have some milk.
“Even the girls I work with on the trimmer line were like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ I guess I thought I was some hot … stuff.” Nancy never used swear words. “So now I just try to stay out of everybody’s way.”
She held Mr. Winkley’s face in her hands, and squinted at it. There was something about his face that she kept looking at.
“You should make them get out of your way,” I said. “That’s what I do.”
“My mother always told me,” she said, “that if you were good to people and played your cards right, you could get anything you wanted, but I don’t know anymore.”
“Watch this,” I said. I stood up and grabbed two legs of the table, one in each hand, and lifted the table up over my head. Then I set it back down.
“You’re so strong, Willy.”
She picked up the dishes and took them to the sink. I stayed sitting at the table with Mr. Winkley, and watched her back as she did the dishes. She was a small girl, but she was wearing shorts that were even shorter than she was. She dropped a spoon and bent over to pick it up, and I was trying to think if she looked better from the back or the front, but I couldn’t decide.
She was washing the dishes with her back to me and she said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Her saying that out of the blue struck me, because nobody had said anything about anybody going anywhere. Now when I think about it, she might have meant that her life wasn’t going anywhere; but I don’t know.
“You’re not going away, are you?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t told anybody, but I can tell you because you’re my friend: I’ve been thinking I might get a bus ticket and ride until I see a nice quiet place, like a farm with a red barn and a big field and trees, and a pond with ducks in it; where nobody knows me and I won’t be in anybody’s way. I’ll get off the bus and go up and knock on the door and get a job as a cook.”
I figured she was just dreaming, and she wasn’t really going away.
“You’re a good cook,” I said; “but what about Mr. Winkley? They might not let him on the bus.”
She stopped working on the dishes and spoke with her back to me.
“I was wondering,” she said, “if maybe you would take care of him; I mean, just until I got settled in.”
I saw the corner of a suitcase sticking out from under her bed.
“Don’t go,” I said. “He’d miss you too much. Besides, you’d have to quit your job. You’d lose all your seniority. You’re the best trimmer they have. You’d have to give Mr. Horne two weeks’ notice. It’s a law. If you don’t, then the police will get you and bring you back.” I knew that wasn’t true, but I didn’t want her to go away.
“They’ll never find me,” she said.
“What’s the story with you and Roy?” I said. I had to find out for Elsie, but I wanted to know for myself too, and I thought maybe she was going because she wanted to get away from Roy.
She went back to the dishes.
“No story,” she said. “He’s just a friend.”
Some friend, I thought; she’d just got done saying that I was her friend. I didn’t want to push it, so I just said, “If he’s been bothering you …”
“Stay away from him, Willy.” She turned around and dried her hands with a towel. “He’s a lot bigger than you are. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
I didn’t like her saying I was small.
“Roy isn’t as big as everybody thinks,” I said. “I could take that guy, easy, but I don’t like to pick on guys that have only one arm.”
“You’re just the right size,” she said. “Anyway, there’s a lot of things going on in my life and I don’t know. Never mind me. Roy isn’t bothering me.”
She came over and sat across the table from me. Mr. Winkley was on the table turning around in circles and rubbing against her hand. Nobody said anything and Nancy looked sad about something. When she finally talked, it was like she was talking to herself.
“It’s green now,” she said.
“What’s green?”
“His eye.”
“Him?” I said. “Mr. Winkley?”
“It’s green now. That’s because you’re here.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought they were on drugs, but I didn’t think that Nancy would ever take drugs.
“Cats’ eyes are green,” I said. “Sometimes they’re blue. Some cats have blue eyes.”
“That’s not what I mean. Lately, sometimes his eye gets black, and real big, like a saucer. It scares me.”
“You must have had a bad dream or something,” I said. I didn’t like her talking crazy like that.
“It seems silly now,” she said. “It’s when I’m alone; I’m not afraid when you’re here.”
You could just barely hear piano music coming through the wall from Gladys’s room. It sounded like classical music and I thought Gladys was improving herself. Mr. Winkley went to sleep on the table. It was getting dark and we listened to the music. When the music ended Mr. Winkley woke up and stood up on his hind legs and grabbed onto my wrist, and started arm wrestling with me.
“It’s getting dark earlier now than it used to,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Why does it do that, Willy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It does that every year. In the winter it will be dark most of the time.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m glad it’s not the other way around. I mean, it’s better to have the sun in the summertime, when it’s nice outside, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I said.
She went back to the sink to finish washing the dishes. Mr. Winkley was still grabbing my wrist trying to pull it down. He bit down on the back of my hand and stared at me like he was saying he was going to beat me one way or another. That’s when I saw that his eye, which had been green just a few minutes before, was big and black, and I realized that was what Nancy had been talking about. I could see why it scared her. It did look like a saucer, like he was a machine that could kill you and didn’t care. It was like he was two different cats.
“Help me, Willy.”
Her saying that when it was so quiet in the room scared me. I didn’t know what she meant.
“I can’t reach the cabinet over the sink,” she said. “I need a big tall man to help me put these dishes away.”
I was taller than Nancy and I could reach the cabinet to put the dishes away for her.
“Mr. Winkley won’t hurt you,” I said. “I’ll show you.” I picked him up and handed him to her and we looked at his big black eye. He must have been wondering why we were looking at him like that.
“Keep looking at his eye,” I said. I went and turned on the light.
“It turned green,” she said.
I turned the light off and on a few times so she’d get the idea, and then I explained the whole thing to her, how cats can see in the dark, and how humans’ eyes do the same thing only not as much. I knew all about it.
I was about ready to leave and she started telling me about this movie that was supposed to be very good. I wanted a cigarette and Nancy wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t smoke in her room because Nancy wasn’t the kind of girl who would ever smoke.
I was getting ready to leave again and she said, “I have to show you my bird book.” She went and got the book. She sat down at the table, and I pulled up my chair beside her so she could show me the bird pictures. She’d circled in pencil the ones she’d seen. I didn’t even know she was interested in birds.
She pointed to a picture of a bluebird and said, “My mother used to say that when you see a bluebird, it brings you happiness. I always used to look for them.”
There was no circle around the bluebird. She turned the page.
“This one, the purple finch, is our official state bird,” she said.
“It’s pretty,” I said. I wasn’t looking at the picture, though; I was looking at her. That’s when I realized, like a light bulb going on over my head, that she had been telling me about the movie because she wanted me to ask if I could take her to see it. She must have gotten the idea from Elsie.
She told me she’d bought the book some weeks or months before, along with a bird feeder and some seeds. She got the feeder out of the closet to show me.
“I was going to put it outside my window,” she said, “and I was pretty hepped up about it at first, but then it seemed kind of stupid. It’s too dark in the alley. The birds won’t go there. Anyway, I don’t know how to put it together.”
“The birds will come,” I said. “It’s not always so dark in the alley. I can drill holes in the brick for the screws and make a hanger for it, and we’ll put it outside your window. You put some seeds in it, and pretty soon a bird will come to it, and then the other birds will come too.”
“Do you think I might get a bluebird? Oh Willy, I’ve never seen a bluebird!”
“Sure,” I said. “There’ll be lots of bluebirds; all kinds of birds; blue, red, yellow, all different colors. When do you want me to put it up?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. How about tomorrow morning?”
