In a Cat’s Eye

Nancy swept her floor and Howie stood there watching me work on the door. I knew what he was up to.

“That looks like a job for two men,” he said. I liked Howie, but I didn’t want him butting in on my job.

“I don’t think so, Howie,” I said.

“Many hands make light work.”

“Nope.”

“If we work on this together, then I can talk to Elsie and she’ll give us both a little something, in exchange for our effort. I know how to talk to her. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty, right down the middle.”

“No, Howie. I’m sorry.”

“You might need me to go to Peavey’s to buy new hardware. Those old hinges look worn out to me.” That Howie would get the money from Elsie, and then instead of buying the hinges, he’d spend it all on beer. I didn’t like him butting in on my job.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll split fifty-fifty, on the hinges and anything you can get out of Elsie. We’ll have to plane the edge of the door. There’s a plane up on the third floor, in one of the empty rooms, somewhere. See if you can find it. While you’re doing that, I’ll check and see what we have in the supply closet.”

“Willy, you’re a true friend,” he said, and hurried upstairs to the third floor.

I went to the supply closet where I had the set of hinges and receipts I told you about. I cleaned the hinges with Brasso so they’d look like new, keeping an eye on the stairway where Howie had gone up. I put them in the Peavey’s bag along with a receipt for two dollars and ninety-nine cents, and dropped the bag out a window. Then I went down and told Elsie that I needed three dollars to go out and buy new hinges.

She gave me three dollars and I was gone for maybe an hour or so, and then I came in with the bag that I threw out the window.

“Have you been drinking?” she said.

“No,” I said. I showed her the hinges and gave her the receipt and a penny; but I felt guilty, cheating Howie like that.

When I went up to Nancy’s room Howie was sitting on the floor in the hall, pretending to be working on the door. He’d probably come out when he heard me coming up the stairs. He had a bottle of beer, and that made me feel better, because I’d meant to save him some of the Thunderbird I’d bought, but I’d ended up drinking the whole bottle sitting on the railroad tracks in the sun. I figured the Colonel must have given him the beer, because it was the Colonel’s brand. I asked Howie where Nancy was and he said that he’d been talking to the Colonel in the Colonel’s room, and when he came out, she was gone. Then he saw the paper bag from Peavey’s in my hand.

“You have hurt me deeply, Willy,” he said. “I trusted you, and you have betrayed that trust.”

“If you had gotten the money from Elsie you would have gone out and spent it all just like I did. Anyway, you’re the one who showed me how to save the old receipts for pretending to buy things we already have.”

“Just because I do it, that doesn’t make it right, does it? I regret that I have sometimes set a poor example. You have not only betrayed my trust; you have betrayed Elsie’s trust as well.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way.

“Come on, let’s get to work,” he said. Howie was a pretty good guy. When he was 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.”