The Last Studebaker. Robin Hemley
homes in droves, making a circle around Henry, who remained calm, though he could barely breathe.
While they waited, Tod, the guy who sat on Henry, picked handfuls of grass and talked softly to him. Under different conditions, Henry might have enjoyed their talk. Tod chatted as though sitting on a porch swing rather than Henry, and discussed things that people around there spoke about on calm nights: the dry weather, Notre Dame's prospects for the fall, the race for the pennant in the National League East.
When the police arrived they handcuffed Henry and left him in their patrol car while they went inside to talk to Rhonda. The neighbors hung around and Tod and Jimmy continued to chat with Henry through the patrol car window. When the police returned, they gave him his first clue of what had happened. Someone had tried to force Rhonda into a car while she was out jogging. Henry didn't fit the description of the man and didn't have a car, but the police still refused to let him go. The two of them, a middle-aged man and a young woman, kept asking him variations on the same question. “Why did you chase her?” the man said.
“I didn't know what was wrong.”
“Why didn't you stop when she screamed at you?” the woman said.
“I didn't know she was screaming at me. I just thought she was screaming.”
“In general?” the man said. “You thought she was screaming just to scream?”
The interrogation lasted half an hour. They didn't arrest him, but they didn't congratulate him either. Henry felt terrible, and tried to apologize: to the police, to Rhonda, to Tod and Jimmy, even to the milling neighbors, but the police could only deal with concrete guilt, not guilt in the abstract. They wanted someone to claim responsibility, not guilt, which was all Henry could offer. Tod just said, “Don't sweat it,” and he and Jimmy left with the neighbors. Pam, another of Sid's tenants, looked down from her window. Rhonda stood beside her in the nearly dark room, the flash of the patrol car's blue light streaking across her face and Pam's. Henry wanted to tell Rhonda he was glad she was all right. He hadn't meant to harm her. Other people he hadn't meant to harm weren't so lucky.
Sid waved his hand in front of his face, breaking up a cloud of smoke. “What do you think?” he said. “Do you think I should give you the boot? No, don't answer that. You're the accused. You only have one right in this court, and that's to listen.”
Sid seemed to get a charge out of reprimanding Henry, giving him fatherly advice and warnings. Sometimes Henry almost thought Sid was his father, but his real father lived in Pasadena, California, not South Bend, Indiana. The only similarity between the two men was that Henry's real father would have made him pay rent for staying at his house, too.
“Wild World” played on Henry's stereo, one of the few possessions he still owned. He traveled light these days. He'd tossed almost all his personal belongings in the Dumpster. A lot of things he hadn't been sure he could part with: Carla's guitar, Matthew's toys, all the things that had defined their life together. For a while, he thought about them, wondered if he'd made a mistake. He missed Carla's guitar most of all. His room in Sid Junkins's boarding house was completely bare except for his bed, his stereo, and his ten-speed. Besides that, he had a hot plate, a mug, and an electric coil to heat water. He only ate food he could stab with his Swiss Army knife.
He owned a house, too, but that wouldn't fit in the Dumpster and he couldn't sell it. He was proud he hadn't sold any of his belongings. He'd left them in plain view for the taking. May be he'd do the same with his house.
“If I were you, you know what I'd do?” Sid said. “I'd get out, have some fun, listen to Jah music. I'd buy some clothes. That would set you on your feet again. Then you'd be happy and you wouldn't take things that don't belong to you. As they say, clothes make the man. Look at you, sitting there in your underwear. What do you own—two shirts and a pair of jeans?”
Sid, the sharpest dresser Henry knew, looked so confident and easygoing in his present costume, what an Argentine rancher might wear: huaraches, brown shorts, and a military-green knit shirt. Henry wished he could look like that, wished he could even dress himself. Out on a walk the other day, he'd noticed something wrong with his legs. One of them suddenly seemed shorter than the other. By about two inches. He worried until he looked down and saw he had on two different shoes.
Sid also wore a multicolored African belt he'd picked up at a Wailers concert the weekend before, a concert to which he'd tried to drag Henry. He always attempted friendly gestures like that, trying to get Henry interested in life. Henry just wasn't interested.
“I am happy,” Henry said. “Honestly,” and he smiled, but he had morning mouth. His chapped upper lip stuck on one of his eyeteeth and he snarled rather than smiled.
Sid shook his head and said, “Don't kid a kidder. What about your old job? Maybe you could get it back.”
Henry had quit only a year and a half before. He'd worked for his uncle Dan, his mother's brother, who owned an advertising agency in South Bend.
Sid took another hit and said, “You know, we had a meeting last night.”
“We?”
“Me and the rest of the house: Tony, Rhonda, Pam, Charlie, and Pete.”
“You met without me?” Henry said.
“The meeting was about you.”
Sid's other tenants were Notre Dame students. He took an interest in all their lives, keeping track of their grades, their romances, their personal problems. Sid, who was unmarried, even fixed them lavish holiday feasts when they couldn't make it home. Of course, the flip side was that Sid never left anyone alone. He constantly snooped and inquired.
“Do you think ‘Wild World’ is a true song?” Henry said.
“What do you mean, ‘true’?” Sid said.
“I mean, do you think Cat Stevens wrote it about anyone in particular, or about people in general?”
Sid looked blankly at Henry.
“I think you caught the A-train,” Sid said, wetting his index finger with his tongue and snubbing out the joint. He dropped the roach in the plastic bag, rolled it up, and stuck it in the pocket of his shorts.
“I bet it's true,” Henry said.
He stood and went over to the stereo.
“I'm not through talking to you, Henry, so don't try to divert my attention, you rapscallion.”
“The record's stuck,” Henry said. “Sorry Cat,” he said and took the record from the turntable, but didn't bother to put it back into its dustcover.
He sat down again and said, “You're going to kick me out, aren't you?”
“You've got to start paying attention more,” Sid said. “You need to get on with your life.”
“Okay,” said Henry. “How?”
That kind of advice was easy when you were Sid Junkins. When you had control of your life, out-of-control people frustrated you. Henry could even sympathize with his decent, well-meaning landlord, and he would have accommodated him if he could have. He could see Sid Junkins squeezing his eyes shut in well-meaning frustration, could even hear his well-meaning thoughts: You see, to get hold of yourself, you just grab yourself right here, then you pick yourself up, slap yourself a couple of times, hold steady and don't flinch.
Henry remembered a man at the advertising firm named Malcolm Mooney, who'd been a steady and trusted employee for fifteen years. One day he'd started baby-talking in the office for no apparent reason. Not only to this colleagues, but to clients as well. The clients began complaining. No one in the office could figure out why gray-haired and straight-backed Malcolm Mooney had all of a sudden started speaking with a lisp in a tiny doll-like register: “Whath the mather? You dough likee my propothal?” he'd ask in the middle of a strategy session. The man mortified everyone, including Henry. Henry's uncle finally took Malcolm aside and told him to quit talking that way or quit the company. Malcolm acted baffled.