Scout’s Honor: Chapter 23

White Christmas

With its new paint and freshly cleaned windows, the midblock apartment building stood apart from its dowager neighbors. Austen had been disappointed by his tenants’ reaction—more accurately, their lack of one—to the royal blue, white-trimmed paint job he had given the building’s careworn façade. A few at least had conceded his new carpeting was an improvement to the creaking four-story walk-up. 

Austen stood high atop a chancy ladder in the second-floor hallway, sawing away at a yellowed wet spot in the ceiling, plaster dust snowing on him. He pulled at the stained section. As it broke free, two fistfuls of plump maggots and a rat carcass tumbled onto him. “Oh, Jesus Christ, goddamn it.” He swatted at the grey maggots cork-screwing in his hair, swinging about as if hornet-swarmed, flinging the desiccated rat against the wall. “Goddamn it.” 

He raced up to his studio—his home, office, and workshop—on the fourth floor to scrub away his revulsion. The worst apartment in the building, its window offered little light and less air, opening onto a mildewed light well. A spent mattress lay in the corner beneath the window. A reading lamp perched atop a half-dozen books on investing. A scarred work bench, as long as the bed, stood against the opposite wall, two sheets of pegboard hung with tools above it. A large walk-in closet had a small high window that glimpsed the sky, and it was here Austen set his desk. He kept his few clothes in a wooden bureau abandoned by previous tenants, its many nicks revealing geologic layers of paint. The monkish studio suggested the whitewashed squad bay in South Carolina that he recalled with such pleasure, every object in its place, every angle squared.

He scoured his face, his hands, even his hair with granular soap. Grabbing rubber gloves, a plastic bag, and an asthmatic vacuum, he dashed downstairs, cleared the wriggling mess, then returned to the leaking cast-iron pipe. He sawed out its cracked section, cut its replacement, and spliced it in with rubber hips and clamps. A glance at the corroded pipe showed mineral deposits had narrowed its opening to a pencil-width diameter. 

The hall floor squeaked. A tenant was tiptoeing past with exaggerated stealth. Austen couldn’t recall her name but knew half of her rent was past due. She was stooped over her door, drunkenly fumbling through her handbag, when he called hello from his perch. She snapped up like a vaudeville burglar hearing an offstage noise.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Austen, I didn’t see you there. Merry Christmas.” Mrs. Harridan had left her bookkeeping job at noon for the holiday, stopping at her favorite pub on her way home. A small, roundish woman nearing sixty, she had found favor with her wit and gentle sensibility in better times, but hard years and loneliness had embittered her. Now she was feared.

“Christmas?” Austen glanced at his cracked Timex. “Oh, damn. Merry Christmas to you, ma’am.” He scrambled down the ladder to clean up. “Your rent?” 

“I paid my rent,” she mumbled to her warped door.

“You paid your old rent, ma’am. Remember it went up on November first.” 

“I paid what was fair. Does he think a lousy coat of paint lets him double my rent?”

“I only raised your rent ten percent. That’s more than fair, you hadn’t had an increase in eleven years.” Folding his drop cloth like a flag at a military funeral, he sighed. His real estate handbooks had said nothing about recalcitrant tenants, about the human cost of their cold calculations of returns on investment. 

“Does he think this paper-thin carpeting turns this dump into the Plaza?” She looked beyond Austen to an imagined jury of her peers. “Maybe if His Majesty hired real workers, union boys who knew what the hell they were doing, instead of doing a half-assed job himself, maybe this dump wouldn’t be falling apart. Maybe there’d be jobs around here for the men. Maybe husbands would still be here if there was work for them. He’s lucky I’m paying any rent. Goddamn slumlord.” 

Later, Austen stepped into his trickling shower and scrubbed himself anew, washing away Mrs. Harridan more than the maggots. He told himself a man was measured by his own labors, recalling with pleasure his grandfather, the dignified Polish plumber who had never stopped working. His smile faded when a fresher image—Jonnie lecturing him about working smart—chased away the smells of his grandfather’s pouch tobacco and solder. Jonnie. He still thought of her often, sanctifying her as his memories loosened over time, missing her, longing for her, wondering whether she missed him, whether she’d changed, whether seeing her again would ever be possible. 

The silver railcar was festive, office workers juggling Christmas gifts, laughter ringing out. Austen offered a middle-aged woman his seat and then stood, clutching a splendid bouquet of Penn Station roses and a bottle of ’71 Chateau Haut-Brion. Unwilling—no, unable—to spend money on himself, he lavished gifts on his second family. Outside, the temperature fell with the fading afternoon while the crowded coach warmed. He slipped off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. Ignoring the bleak industrial trackside, he pondered what he had to do to ready Mrs. Harridan’s building for sale. 

The train emptied as it rolled south into the Jersey suburbs. He found a seat next to a stout woman who smelled of peppermint. Checking the Middletown stop on the railcar’s wall map, he closed his eyes and conjured Jonnie’s musky perfume, remembering his guilty longings for her. Then he drifted to Ann Koch, her smile, her throat’s lovely hollow. Maybe they could just be friends. No. What decent woman would accept a man so weighted down by secrets that three personal questions would sink him? But a bright woman would surely realize it was self-defense. That he was a victim. Perhaps. But that bright woman would also know that, if he were ever caught, even an innocent Austen would be imprisoned for life: he had killed two policemen and fled. At length, he shook away thoughts of women. 

The rambling, one-story brick house with the gabled entry was set on an acre of leafless winter trees, its front yard studded by dwarf pines and a weathered, fiberglass mailbox on which a wooden quail herded her chicks. Flicking a mantle of snowflakes from his shoulders, Austen entered the house through the back door like one of the family. He stepped inside the big kitchen, its windows steamed, its rich smells redolent of Christmas. 

Alba Shoer embraced her prodigal son. A broad-boned, strong woman in her mid-fifties, Mrs. Shoer held him tight, then examined him at arms’ length with a cocked eyebrow. “Honestly, Richard, I can’t decide which looks worse. Parson’s beard or your mustache.” She laughed and squeezed him again. “Merry Christmas, young man. Has it been six months already? Seems that 4th of July barbecue was last week. But what’s different about you? You can’t be taller? What is it? Come here.” She took his face in her hands, turning it side to side, staring intently. “Richard Austen, I declare. You had your poor nose fixed. You are so handsome.”

“I was having trouble breathing, my sinuses—”

“Trouble breathing, my ass,” Parson chimed in, laughing. “You’re working on your game.”

“It is a wonderful improvement, Richard. You are one fine-looking young man,” Mrs. Shoer proclaimed.

“Thank you, ma’am. I brought you these.” He offered his gifts with a shy, hopeful smile.

“Whoa, Scout, this is one kick-ass Bordeaux. I knew you were making too much money,” said Parson, admiring the bottle. 

“Thank you, dear boy. I would show you Parson’s Christmas present for me—two suitcases of dirty laundry—but it’s all been washed and put away.” As a young woman she had never turned heads, but Alba was now a handsome woman, at the height of her career as a school administrator and proud of her family’s success. She’d be remembered more for her kindness than the flashing humor she’d passed on to Parson. “I’ll put these gorgeous roses in a vase before they dry out. They must be nearly as thirsty as you are after that long train ride. Would you like a glass of this lovely wine? Parson, please open the bottle for my third son.”

Alba had adopted Austen the morning she read Parson’s letter from boot camp about the quirky silent boy who had become his only friend. She’d fretted about Austen, imagining a wretched childhood, abusive foster parents, and apathetic authorities. After she met him at the boys’ graduation from Parris Island, Alba had encouraged his correspondence, writing to him as often as she wrote Parson.

Austen followed Parson into the book-lined den where his father and brother were watching the evening news. A local celebrity was standing in a soup kitchen, preening behind an aluminum pot from which he ladled minestrone into plastic bowls, keeping his good side to the camera.

“Five bucks says he beats the TV crew out the back door,” said Parson. Stashing the wine for later, he handed Austen a Budweiser. “You should feel honored, Aus. Dad would still be out working on the boat if you weren’t here. Mind if I show him your progress since summer?” Parson knew little would please his father more. 

The young men tramped out into the freezing air, their breath stirring the drifting snowflakes. Parson lit a Camel. They walked into the detached shed that had become the shrine to the Alba, the fiberglass boat Frank Shoer was building, the boat its namesake called his other woman, the boat in which he dreamed of fishing away his retirement.

“I’m clerking in the city again this summer,” said Parson.

“With Ascott Swanne again?” 

“I thought I’d try someplace new. You heard of Porter & Benedict?” 

Austen shook his head. With neither time nor interest in anything save his own real estate, what little he’d heard of the city’s storied upper crust had come through his high-living friend. 

“They thought they should hire someone descended from a real porter.” Parson laughed, stepped over the gunwale. “Watch your step.” 

“This teak looks great.” Austen knelt, rubbing the smooth deck. “I have to ask your dad what kind of varnish he used. How’s Eileen?”

“She’s fine. She wanted me to come to her parents’ place at Lake Tahoe for Christmas. Couldn’t do it.” Parson sighed over his formidable girlfriend. He had tried moving out once, but failed. He did like her, but damned himself for liking her comfortable apartment more: her soft bed, her cooking, and the way she vacuumed without asking for help. The two young men puttered about the boat until Parson finished his cigarette. “We better get back inside.”

Alba had softened her traditional colonial dining room with cut flowers, using Austen’s extravagant bouquet as her centerpiece, her marble-topped sideboard awash with poinsettias and garlands. Candles had the room glowing with golden warmth. 

Austen bowed his head while Frank Shoer meandered through a prayer-full maze of thanks for the family’s many blessings. Rather than counting his own—few as they seemed—Austen inhaled Christmas’s rich smells: the wreaths and the tree, the scented candles, sugar cookies, yams, turkey, and steaming potatoes. 

“How much did you make when you sold that Queens fourplex?” asked Parson’s older brother, Francis. 

Austen stalled, hiding behind a mouthful of potatoes. “I came out OK on that one.”

“OK? He made a fortune,” said Parson, announcing the profit he’d sworn to keep secret, laughing when Austen winced. His family had to be proud of his best friend. “Bro, you spent ten years going to school, I’m doing my seven and my boy here is kicking our butts.” 

“That’s it?” Francis asked. “You buy a building and sell it ten months later for more than I’ll make practicing medicine in five years? I’m in the wrong business.”

“No. You’re not,” countered Austen. Two unaccustomed beers and Mrs. Harridan’s tongue-lashing had his words tumbling out bitter hot. “I’m a janitor who happens to own the crappy building. I patch the plumbing, rewire the electrical, haul the garbage when there’s a strike. I repair wrecked apartments when the courts finally allow me to evict deadbeats. Yesterday, I carried a new toilet up four flights of stairs to replace one a tenant cherry-bombed as a going-away present. I—.” He shook his head, softened his tone. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have gone off like that.”

“Maybe I’ll stay in school,” Parson joked.

“You should be proud of yourself,” Alba said. “You’re wisely reinvesting your capital. A practice foreign to every member of this household. Mr. S. invests in leaky boats and my boys invest in… what do you invest in, dear ones?”

“Free love and night baseball.” 

Alba peered over her glasses at Parson, bundling her affection with a stern look. “Free love. We never should have let you attend Berkeley—you should have stayed east. They have too many earthquakes in California for us, don’t they, Richard?” she asked, repeating Austen’s standing excuse for avoiding the golden state. 

The conversation drifted to current events, and soon they were discussing the evening news soup kitchen story, Francis dismissing the celebrity’s generosity as cheap publicity.

“Motive is important when dealing with evil or crime,” Alba said. “Yes, my almost lawyer? But with good acts, with charity, we should be more tolerant of motives, more charitable toward charity—”

“Well put, Mom.”

“But seeing that line makes me feel so for those children. All that welfare money spent on drugs, and the poor babies at a soup kitchen.”

“As long as the courts mollycoddle drug dealers, you’ll have bread lines a mile long,” Mr. Shoer declared. “Throw the book at crime and you could close half those handout places.”

“No, Dad.” Parson seldom argued with his father, but he’d wrapped up a criminal justice class days earlier and was sure the old man was misguided. “Seventy percent of all crime is drug-related. Either people getting busted buying or selling it, or users selling their bodies or robbing people to get their next high. We need to decriminalize drugs—not legalize them, decriminalize them. Besides, it’s the practical thing to do: If drugs aren’t available, addicts will just be drunks instead. Right, Aus?”

Frank Shoer waved a hand to spare their guest and said, “Son, a society that openly tolerates vice has its moral fiber fray like a halyard rubbing against the mast.” He pulled out his empty meerschaum pipe, his signal the topic was closed. 

“You a millionaire yet, Scout?” Past midnight, the two young men were sprawled in the den, draining the Haut-Brion Parson had squirreled away. In his father’s red leather chair, stocking feet crossed on the ottoman, he looked to the manner born. 

“I told you what I am—I’m a building super. I fix sinks, I’ve yanked enough hair out of shower drains to go into the wig business,” said Austen, distracted, his friend’s comments about decriminalizing drugs nipping at him, taking him back to Mexico.

“You got to be a millionaire. Putting that in my book. Scout goes bucks up.”

“I’m not a millionaire,” insisted Austen. He hadn’t had a drink since he’d last seen Parson over Labor Day, but now he was drunk, his habitual reticence faltering. “OK, OK, maybe half. Maybe a little more than half.”

“Did you say a little more? Of course, old boy. Delighted.” Parson splashed a couple inches into Austen’s wine glass, poured himself another. “No BS, you’re rich—”

“Screw rich.” 

“You net more out of those buildings while you sleep than I’ll make in a year. That’s a fact. Baby, I’m quitting school, buying a plunger, kicking your skinny white ass, and getting rich.”

“I read something about rich,” said Austen. “Only three ways of getting there: You can be born with it, marry it, or borrow it.”

“So maybe with that pretty new nose, you can marry it. Get your teeth fixed, hell, get contact lenses too, and you’d be spanking tail. That is, if you just tried—tried being pleasant, talking. You’ve heard of talking? Only woman I’ve ever seen you talk to is my mother. Besides, why you got to be rich anyway?”

Uncorked by the wine, Austen’s ambition bubbled over, words he’d never spoken aloud spilling out. “I want… I want the respect that I had in Nam.”

“You were the man,” enthused Shoer. “The Scout.”

 “I need to be somebody. Really succeed. What have I got? Nothing. A couple buildings that’d fall down if they weren’t midblock. Somebody told me once never to work with my hands,” Austen said, rueful. “Hell, that’s all I do, fix toilets, trap rats. Without fancy degrees like yours, all I can do is shit work. Eventually, maybe I can develop something good, be a for real developer, but now what I’ve got? Nothing.” 

“You’re on your way, you’ll get there.”

“No. I’m going nowhere. Right back.” Austen staggered to his feet, tiptoed to the bathroom, trying not to wake the sleeping household. He splashed his face with cold water, nodded at the nose Mrs. Shoer so admired and sat on the toilet, lost in the unfamiliar alcohol. He hung his head. Was his financial roadblock truly insuperable? Maybe if he had a dozen third-rate tenements the banks would listen to him.

“Hey, did you mean that stuff about legalizing drugs?” he asked, rejoining Parson a minute later. 

“Decriminalizing them? Why not? Everyone’s getting high anyway. May as well be cheaper. Speaking of which, maybe we do New Year’s together, kick off next year in style. I’ll score a little blow—”

“Blow?”

“C’mon, Aus, it’s the best party drug in the world. Perfectly harmless if you don’t count the two-day hangovers. We’ll do the night with a couple ladies. Get you a date. You in?”

Austen had little enthusiasm for a blind date, less for getting high, but warmed to the prospect of a long evening with his one friend. “OK, I’m in.” He emptied his glass slowly, but his mind raced. “You really think it’s harmless?” 

“What?”

“Cocaine.”

Parson laughed so loudly Austen shushed him with a finger to his lips. “In moderation, Scout, it’s a boon to mankind: conversations sparkle, dullards shine, and the sex? The sex is amazing,” Parson rhapsodized. “But… sure, too much will kill you same as too much of anything. Hell, drinking too much water will kill you quicker.” 

“You ever, you know, sold a little pot or anything?”

“Who hasn’t?”

Austen nodded, sobered by memories he’d tried to bury in a Lemon Grove bomb shelter.

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