Oregon Hill (3 page)

Besides, it’s not that far, and I can get a coffee to go at the 821 Café on the way. Maybe I’ll be awake when I get there.

On the paper rack outside the 821, I see the big block headline: GIRL’S BODY FOUND.

“Third time this month,” Peggy says, both of us looking up.

“Maybe you should put a net around the house.”

She snorts, her pigtails wiggling as she shakes her head.

It wasn’t easy getting up there. He had to put the ladder on the back side of the house, where the roof is a little more accessible. It took an effort.

Each of the first two times, I had to climb up there with him. I don’t like heights. Even more, I don’t like the idea of falling from heights. Les is a big man still, big ears, big knuckles on hands that look like the catcher’s mitts he used to wear. Usually, he’s OK, but sometimes he doesn’t quite know who he’s talking to and where he is. You hope he doesn’t momentarily mistake you for a North Korean or think you’re trying to score from second on a single to right.

Les Hacker used to play baseball. He was a Wisconsin boy who ended such career as he had with the old Vees, Triple-A farm club for the Yankees, who had plenty of catchers on the big team already. Les was no Yogi Berra.

After he retired, or was retired, he went to work for a roofer. Minor league ball never did pay much, and even less back then. Eventually, he started his own company and made a few bucks before he was forced into retirement by a broken hip brought on by a fall from a second-storey roof. A dumbass kid working summers had knocked a bucket of hot asphalt over on Les. When he told me about it, years later, he said he jumped off the roof just to get some relief.

Les met Peggy after she’d left her third husband, Mickey, the one that liked to celebrate major and minor holidays by going outside and firing a Luger into the air. Les has been exemplary compared with his predecessors, and I am inclined to try to help whenever I can. Someday, God willing, I’ll be seventy-six, too, and I’ll probably be as crazy as Les.

Peggy’s standing there in her bedroom slippers, sipping on her own coffee.

“Some story. That girl.”

I’m distracted at first, with the Les situation and all, then remember that Peggy always reads the paper, bless her. “Ought to cut that bastard’s balls off when they catch him.”

I nod and then turn my full attention back to Les. He got up there with the rickety metal ladder, same as before. Peggy says she can’t see throwing away a perfectly good ladder, and that he’d find some other way anyhow.

There’s nothing to do but follow him up.

Les is sitting there straddling the point of their roof. With his hands on his bent knees, he looks like he might be able to signal for a change-up. From here, you can see across Oregon Hill, all the way down to the river, past where the prison used to be.

“Nice view,” I say when I finally urge my shaky legs up to where he is. It isn’t a steep pitch, but it seems like Mount Everest to me, looking down. I know from experience that it’ll be harder for Les to get off the roof than it was to get on it. Climbing up, he thinks he’s thirty-five again, scrambling around like a monkey, waiting for his crew to follow him up. At some point, though, up here in the clear air, sanity returns.

“I did it again, didn’t I?”

Yeah, I tell him, as we look over toward Belle Isle and the river. You did. It’s a beautiful fall morning.

“It’s like I’m sleepwalking,” he says, “except I’m awake.”

Some people might be embarrassed by the fact that they’re losing it, but Les, when he realizes he’s done something in public that would make most of us die of shame, only laughs as if he’s just been told the funniest joke in the world. He doesn’t care that he’s the butt of it. I think it’s part of what attracted Peggy to him, the complete lack of self-consciousness. He’s a big kid in a lot of ways. He was like that even before his mind started drifting. But he’s also about the closest thing to a real man that my mother’s shared her bed with, an honest-to-God adult capable of being generous without an ulterior motive. I told her one time that her fuck-up magnet seemed to have lost its bearing when she found Les.

“Same thing,” Les says. “I think I’m back on the job, and I’ve overslept or something, and the roof has got to be done right damn then. Geez, you’d think I’d know by now . . .” His voice drifts away.

I tell him it’s fine, no problem, that I had to get up anyhow and get some dumbass off a roof, and he thinks that’s funny. Humor is how he communicates. And, as was not the case with so many I grew up with around here, you don’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing, the magic word that leads to a typical Hill dustup. Hell, I’m a little bit of a red ass myself, but I like to think that, in middle age (assuming I’m going to live to be 100), I’ve learned something from good-natured Les.

We finally get both of us down. By now, we have a small crowd. The cops don’t really bother us. I know most of them and can say a word, but it really isn’t necessary. I am not surprised to see, when I look over at the one squad car parked half a block away, David Shiflett. He’s standing beside the open door, drinking coffee, too, and talking on the radio. I give kind of a half-wave, and he does the same, and then he gets back in the car.

Some of the neighbors, though, seem offended at being involuntarily entertained.

“He’s goin’ to hurt somebody,” whines old Jerry Cannady next door, as if he thinks maybe Les will fall off the roof and crush his skinny ass to death. I ignore him, but then the guy the next house down, an assistant professor of sociology or some such shit at VCU, comes up, all agitated, and demands that we “do something.”

“That man is a menace,” he says loudly, not ten feet from Les. “Last night, he urinated in the rose bushes.”

He’s kind of in my face. I motion for him to be a little quieter, and it only stirs him up more.

“Don’t tell me to be quiet!” he says, then repeats it, like I’m hard of hearing.

Despite my best efforts, I have not learned well enough from Les, it seems. I take the young prof in hand, perhaps gripping too hard, perhaps pinching his neck a little. I remind him that Les Hacker is a human being, and that he’s having some hard times that aren’t his fault, and that he deserves the respect any adult human being deserves.

I also intimate that I might have to beat the shit out of him if he doesn’t stop making Les feel bad, which is probably a mistake. If I’d done that to one of the old Hill boys, we’d have had to clear a space and go at it, and I’d probably get my ass kicked; but this one is a come-here who doesn’t go by the code and is willing to accept such treatment with nothing more than a shouted threat over his shoulder as he retreats into his house. Some of the neighbors seem disappointed to be deprived of a good, old-fashioned street brawl. They don’t see many of those anymore.

“You’re crazy!” the prof adds as he slams the door, and I think he’s talking about me instead of Les.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Probably.”

We have a cup of coffee and talk about Isabel Ducharme’s murder, and then I take my leave.

“I’ll try to do better,” Les says, and the way he says it kind of breaks my heart.

Since I’m already up, I figure I might as well do now what I was going to do later. I walk over to the VCU campus, a hodgepodge of Victorians turned into offices and newer classroom buildings and dorms that were built on the cheap. Nothing much seems to match, although I have to admit it is getting better. They used to have a poster that read, “If you want ivy, bring your own.” It still applies.

I know Andi’s address, in one of the buildings too near the campus for gentrification. She shares a four-bedroom place with five other girls, and it never seems to me that there is any kind of order to it. Guys and girls seem to come and go all the time (OK; sometimes I walk by), and the only time I’ve actually been inside, and had to use one of the two bathrooms, I was struck with how women can be as slack at basic housekeeping as men. Maybe it’s part of being equal or something.

I’m about to go up and knock when, like magic, she comes out, fumbling with her keys, trying to lock the door one-handed and not put down her books. It’s shortly before eleven, and I guess she’s going to class.

She has her mother’s features, thank God, although she’s still thin as a rail, while Jeanette, the last time I saw her, had put on a few pounds. Haven’t we all?

But she has her mom’s beautiful porcelain blue eyes, that same wide, expressive mouth, although Andi’s isn’t as prone to break into a smile. I don’t think anyone had a prettier smile or a sunnier disposition than my first wife. It took an asshole like me to make her frown and cry.

Andi is talking to two other girls when I first see her, and she definitely is smiling, for a change. When she sees me, the smile goes away, but she doesn’t. She tells them something, and I think I see her roll her eyes. She walks over.

“Hi,” I say. “Thought I’d drop by. I was in the neighborhood. Actually, I live in the neighborhood.”

“I know.” She’s looking away.

“I tried to call.”

“Oh,” she looks at me for a second, then away again. “I was going to call you back. But . . .”

She lets it hang. She knows I’m not going to scold her.

“Sorry,” she says. End of discussion.

It isn’t easy to engage Andi in conversation, or at least it isn’t for me. Grades, her mom, boyfriends or lack of, music.

I only get something like interest when I mention Isabel Ducharme.

“That was spooky,” she says, then looks at me, maybe straight at me for the first time in this encounter. “You probably saw her.” Apparently, Andi still reads the paper.

“I saw her body. Yeah.”

“And she was, like, decapitated?”

“Yeah. Decapitated.”

Andi gives a little shiver. I don’t think it’s just for effect.

“Did you know her?”

Andi explains to me, as if to a small, slow child, that there are “like, almost 30,000 kids here.”

But, she adds, Isabel did live in the same suite as a girl from Andi’s high school, a couple of years younger.

“One degree of separation,” I say, and get no response.

“Do you think she’d talk to me, you know, about what kind of girl she was and all?”

Andi says she doubts it, but when I ask her, she does give me a name.

Andi’s twenty, and she should be in her third year at VCU. What she’s really in, I couldn’t tell you. Not having been a daily part of her life since she learned to talk, my part in her education is to write checks and shut the fuck up. She’s not lazy. She works part-time at Edo’s Squid and another restaurant, a Thai place just off campus, but she seems to put more into waitressing than she does into study. No one, and certainly not me, can impress her with how much easier it is to get a college degree in four (or five) years than it is to get into that one-course-a-semester routine that leads to perpetual student-hood. Sometimes, I think that’s what she wants.

She was a good student in high school, and Jeanette and I both thought she should have aimed higher than a mid-level state school, but she had friends going to VCU and she said she wanted to be an artist. She seemed to know what she wanted. Now, I’m not sure. I mentioned to her once that she seemed to be drifting. She rolled her eyes and told me everyone was drifting.

I ask her if I can buy her breakfast or lunch or brunch or something, but she says she has a class. Far be it from me to discourage that.

“Well,” I say, “call me. Let’s have dinner sometime.”

But we never seem to.

I resist the urge to tell her to be careful. She’s twenty, for God’s sake. She only looks like a little girl as she walks away from me, tugging on a bra strap that shouldn’t be showing.

I walk back to the Prestwould with the morning slipping away. In Monroe Park, the students are enjoying a fine fall day. The squirrels who haven’t yet been eaten by the hawks are frolicking around the inert bodies of guys from the shelter enjoying a last bit of freedom before cold weather drives them indoors. “The squirrels and the nuts,” according to McGrumpy, which is what we call my upstairs neighbor, Feldman.

The building itself isn’t that old. It was built in 1929. But to say they don’t make them like that anymore is an understatement. It stands there, glowering down at the park like Norma Desmond waiting for her closeup, a great lady who’s seen better times and doesn’t know it.