young he’d had his own insurance business in a town about fifty miles down the road. He’d been seeing some queer guy, and when he ran for mayor the guy told Howie to give him money or he’d tell everybody. It all came out. Howie’s wife took him to the cleaners and that’s when he started drinking. He had a son that was grown up but the son would never see him.
We worked on the door for a while and the Colonel came out and watched. He was tall and thin, and his white hair was cut flat on top. He was retired from the Air Force. I planed the edge of the door and Howie used a hammer and chisel to make a fit for the new hinges. He was making a lot of noise so that Elsie would hear us downstairs and know we were working. Gladys came barging out.
“Pipe down!” she said. “Can’t anybody have any peace and quiet around here?” She came down the hall to see what was going on, and by the time she got to us she wasn’t mad anymore.
“What are you bums doing, ripping up the joint?” she said. “Pardon me, Colonel; I don’t include you in that category. It’s those two bums I was referring to, I mean, to who I was referring, to whom I refer. Did I say that right, correctly?”
Gladys read a lot, and she was on a self-improvement kick, learning how to talk with the right grammar. She was always on some kick. I liked Gladys. She was a kick.
“These two workmen are repairing young Nancy’s door,” the Colonel said.
“You keep an eye on those two, Colonel,” she said.
Gladys was no spring chicken and she had gone to fat some. She wore a babydoll nightgown around the hotel and didn’t comb her hair, but she wasn’t too bad to look at, and she didn’t mind you looking. I asked her if she had seen Nancy.
She yawned and stretched with her hands held above her head, and if there’d been a light on in the hallway you could have seen through her nightgown. The Colonel and I were looking, but Howie didn’t pay attention; his hinges swung the other way.
“She went out,” Gladys said. “Cat’s in my room, ripping up the wallpaper. He just attacked one of my wigs. I need male companionship. Mr. Winkley is my male companion. No, I don’t know where she went. I’m not her mother.”
I was squatted down working on the lower hinge. Gladys started pounding on the top of my head with her fist. “When are you going to fix my door?” she said. “You bum.”
I swung my arm to push her arm away. “Cut it out, Gladys,” I said.
Something thumped in Gladys’s room.
“I’m going to kill that cat,” she said, and went back into her room, and after a while the Colonel left for his room.
“Roy’s been bothering Nancy,” I said to Howie. “She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“I assure you, Willy, it won’t last long. She’s not right for Roy.”
“He’s not right for Nancy,” I said.
We finished working on the door and I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette and thinking about a story the Colonel had told me, all about these soldiers that hid inside a wooden horse they’d made, and the enemy dragged the horse inside the walls of their own city. Maybe you already know the story, but I thought it was just the Colonel that knew about it and told me. I was thinking about that story when I heard Nancy’s footsteps coming up the stairs. I knew everybody’s footsteps.
I listened as she walked down the hall and knocked on Gladys’s door. I heard Gladys say, “He was a little angel, no trouble at all,” and then Nancy and Mr. Winkley went to her room. A few minutes later she came out and walked toward my room. She stood outside my door for a minute, walked halfway back to her room, then again to my room, and knocked on my door. I went to answer it.
“Hi Nancy.”
“Hi Willy.”
“I fixed your door. Howie helped.”
“I know.” The way she said it, you’d have thought that me and Howie fixing her door was the greatest thing that ever happened.
“We put on new hinges with longer screws, and planed the edge. It works real good now.”
“It does. It works real good. I feel so much safer now. You’re a wonder, Willy. I don’t know what any of us would do without you. You’re so handy.”
“I’m good with tools,” I said. “Everybody says so.”
“I know. They do. You’re really good with tools, Willy.”
“Nobody can ever break in now.”
“There’s something I wanted to ask you about, because you know so many things and I don’t know sometimes. It’s nothing too overly personal or anything like that.”
“What is it?” I said.
“Well, it’s something about Mr. Winkley. There’s some other things too, and I was just wondering if you’d had dinner yet.”
“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.”
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