The Lime Pit (2 page)

"Hello!" he called out, waving his arm as
if it were as jointless as a stick. "You must he Stoner. Glad
You could come out."

There was something of the planter's manner in
Cratz's voice, a Southern geniality that I'd missed over the phone. I
figured he was putting it on for his big-bellied friend; and, oddly
enough, it made Hugo come alive for me. That swagger was human. It
fleshed him out, gave him the bulk he once must have had and a little
of the athlete's vanity, that condescension that sportscasters and
fans confuse with kindness. It put money in his loose khaki trousers,
a wad of it tied with a rubber band. Blackened his hair and eye. Gave
him a temper and a streak of mean parsimonious pride. Hugo Cratz, I
decided, was probably a tough and devious old man.

"Let's sit and talk," he said when I'd
walked to where he and his pal were standing. "Up on the porch."

There were two painted lawn chairs on the veranda and
a big porch swing. Cratz took one chair, I took the other. And his
friend sat on the top step of the stoop.

"George is O.K.," Cratz said, glancing down
at the fat man. George raised his head and nodded seriously.

I glanced at the pack of Lucky Strikes that George
had rolled in his shirt sleeve.

The poverty of some men's lives never fails to shake
me. And, sitting on the porch, with George hunched affably below me
and Hugo Cratz leaning intimately forward in his chair, I was
suddenly conscious of just how much I represented in the way of
excitement and novelty to those two old men. It made me feel like
backing off that porch on tiptoe, climbing in the car and driving
straight home to the Delores. Instead, I squirmed and made small nods
and tried to avoid looking into Hugo Cratz's juicy blue eyes as he
reminisced, walking slowly through a maze of memories, establishing
along the way his own credentials as a man, until he arrived again at
that center space where his manhood failed--his daughter's, Cindy
Ann's space--and he broke down in big tears. Even his friend George
turned away then, though he must have heard it a dozen times before.
And I . . . I stared out at the tired, sundrenched street and
thought what a fool I was to play detective with Hugo Cratz.

Cratz excused himself and walked into the apartment
house to wipe his nose. I could see him through the first-floor bay
window. There were plants in the bay--leafy asparagus ferns,
begonias, and purple-leafed Wandering Jew. Either Cindy Ann had a
pleasant domestic touch or Hugo Cratz was less the crusty played-out
old man than he appeared to be.

"You've got to excuse him," fat George said
suddenly in a low, unfriendly voice. "He just ain't been the
same since that little bitch left him."

"You want to tell me about her, George?" I
asked.

George looked quickly at the glass-frame door of the
apartment building and took a deep noisy breath in through his
nostrils.

"What do you want, mister?" he said
hoarsely. "He don't have any money left, if that's what you
want." George took another deep breath and his big chest heaved.
"He ain't got nothing left," he said, looking down at the
seams in the pavement. "Time was he wouldn't need me to say it
for him."

I sat back in the lawn chair and tried manfully to
look like a tough detective for slow, stubborn George. But the harder
I tried, the more I felt as if my mail-order diploma were
showing--the one with the machine guns on it. And after a moment or
so, I realized that it wasn't only George who was making me feel like
a boob. Something wasn't right. Whatever that something was, George
considered it criminal, a pathetic by-product of Cratz's old age. And
Cratz thought it was embarrassing and just too damn sad.

And then it came to me with a certainty that made me
shiver in the hot July air. I shivered and then I blushed for Hugo,
for George, and for myself. A chorus of cicadas started a shrill
round in the nearby rosebushes, and I remembered the wasps outside my
office window. That's what they were trying to tell you, Harry, I
thought and laughed to myself. The cicadas grew shriller. The
sunlight on the lawn glowed as whitely as a fluorescent bulb. I
squinted and searched the yard for some evidence--some sunlit toy or
sign of kinship. A yellowhammer drummed on a distant maple tree. Then
the cicadas died down. A cloud passed across the lawn. And, in the
hush, I asked myself what are you going to do now?

Cindy Ann . Whatever it was, it wasn't Cratz. She
wasn't his daughter, his granddaughter, his wife. She wasn't any
relation at all. She was just a girl, probably poor-white from lower
Vine, who had seen old Hugo as a stepping stone on the way out of
tarboard shacks, poverty, and the old age that comes on almost
overnight. She'd probably bilked the old man out of a few dollars or
a few Social Security checks. And then went on her merry way. And
Hugo, Hugo Cratz, the man I was working for, who had loved the little
gold-digger with that shameless, impotent infatuation that age has
for youth ... Hugo Cratz was just a very sentimental, very lonely,
and very dirty old man.

"It's not a bad place," Hugo said as he
reseated himself on the lawn chair. Frail as he was and wet-eyed, he
looked like a fuzzy-haired, wizened child. "My son's got a nicer
one up in Dayton. Nice boy, Ralph. He'll send me the money. I mean if
it ends up costing me a few dollars to find her." Cratz surveyed
the lawn and said again, "It's not a bad place. Schwartz bought
it for his kids seven, eight years ago, when old man Carroll died. He
divided it up good. Split the downstairs into eight measly
apartments. Then jacked up the rent so's I had to take the job of
handyman just to stay on. It was a helluva lot of work for me alone.
'Course with Cindy Ann around there wasn't much to it. She'd take
care of the lawn and I'd look after the garbage and repairs."
Hugo's eyes began to tear and his thin collapsed mouth trembled. "It
was real nice," he said.

"She's no kin of yours, is she, Mr. Cratz?"
I said softly. "No blood relative?"

Cratz ducked his head, and I caught sight of George
fidgeting uncomfortably on the stoop.

"What if she isn't?" Cratz said defiantly.
"Does a person have to be kin for you to care about 'em, to want
to make sure they're all right?"

"What if she doesn't want to be taken care of?"

"What're you saying?" Cratz said slowly.
Anger dried his blue eyes and gave his thin face a sharp, predatory
vigor.

"All I'm saying is what the police have probably
already told you. If Cindy Ann left you of her own free will, there's
absolutely nothing you can do about it. You can't hire someone to
make her come back to you, Mr. Cratz, as much as you might want to."

Cratz made a shrill little noise in the back of his
throat--a stifled scream. Then he grabbed me savagely by the arm.
"C'mon," he said, pulling me out of the chair toward the
apartment door. "C'mon in here. And you--" he pointed at
George, "get on home. Goddamn loudmouth," he said under his
breath.

George started to say something in his own defense,
but Hugo cut him off with a chop of his left hand. "Can it,
George. I blame myself. I shoulda known better than to leave you out
here with this one." He plucked me by the sleeve. "And
don't you say nothing neither. This is my time we're on now. And I
already used up two and one-half dollars of it lollygagging."

He shoved me through the door into a dark, musty
antechamber. On the right a stairwell coiled up to the second
floor; on the left a narrow hallway meandered toward the rear of the
house. Cratz walked down the hallway to the first door on the right
and fumbled in his pants pocket for a key.

"I always keep it locked," he said. "Two
years ago we had some niggers move in on the second floor. 'Bout then
apartments started getting broke into." Cratz cackled dryly.
"I'd like to see 'em break in here. Yes, I would. After you,"
he said, pushing the door open.

The door frame was low and I had to stoop to make it
through.

"You're pretty good size, ain't you?" Cratz
said with a touch of expertise. "What d'you go? 'Bout six-three?
'Bout two-twenty?"

"Two-fifteen," I said, surveying the dim
little room. Cratz's apartment looked to be no bigger than a small
storeroom and it was stuffed like a storeroom with sprung and faded
furnishings.

"You ever play ball?" Cratz asked me.

"Some. In college."

"What? End, maybe?"

"You got it."

Cratz chuckled. "Don't mind the mess. Just sit
yourself down."

There was a television whispering on my left on a
flecked metal trolley and a big scarred darkwood table in the shallow
bay. A chair covered with a torn and dusty yellow throw sat next to
the table, and a sprung, pea-green convertible couch next to the
chair. The bed was pulled open; and the sheets were rumpled and
dirty. Behind the couch was a stone mantle crowded with photos of a
young man in uniform. Beyond the couch the narrow room emptied
abruptly into an alcove the size of a small walk-in closet. In it
were a long trough-shaped sink and a tiny Kelvinator refrigerator
that made a mournful, ubiquitous hum. The apartment was so narrow
that the front of the convertible bed actually touched the credenza
stacked against the far wall. The walls themselves were papered in a
faded, water-stained stripe that was peeling off near the ceiling.
The whole place stank of grease, old clothing, and unwashed flesh.

"It ain't much, is it?" Cratz confessed as
he sank down on the open bed. "I just said that stuff about it
being a nice place to comfort that old woman George." He looked
about the room with a mournful, watery eye. "No, it ain't much
to show after seventy-some years."

"About George," I said, sitting gingerly on
the dusty edge of the yellow chair. "He didn't say a word about
Cindy Ann."

"Then how'd you know?"

"I guessed. It wasn't too hard to guess from the
way you were acting."

Cratz stared out the big window at the bright expanse
of lawn. "It's dark in here, ain't it?" he said softly. "I
gotta replace that overhead bulb. 'Course it's hard for me to get up
on a ladder since I had the stroke. It done something to my sense of
balance. Man, I used to be as light-footed as a cat."

Hugo toed the faded rug and looked over at me. "I
know it's shameful. To be so old and so damn helpless. I know it. I
know that's what you're thinking, too. You get to a certain age and
people, younger folks, figure you're through with life. You ain't
even supposed to have an appetite any more just pick at your food and
smile. 'Bout now it's all supposed to wind down. And you're supposed
to get yourself all prepared for the big one. Like starving yourself
a little at a time out of all the pleasures of life was the way of
easing into it. Don't you believe it! I ain't prepared to die. I wake
up in a cold sweat every night thinking of it. Stuff the damn sheet
in my mouth to keep from crying out." Cratz pressed a hand over
the crumpled sheets. "But, then, she'd be there," he said,
patting the mattress. "And I'd feel better."

"You know where Mt. Storm Park is?" I
nodded.

"It ain't so far from here. And up to the time
of my stroke I could walk it easy. Just cut down Mount Olive and over
to the Park Road. Me and George used to go over there every damn
afternoon. Just to be doing something. That's where I met her, Cindy
Ann. Stretched out on a beach blanket alongside the shelter house.
Man," Cratz said wistfully, "she was a sight. And pleasant
to me. Not thinking right off what maybe she should have been
thinking. That I was just another old man looking down her sun dress.
Which I was, too. No, she was too sweet for that. We started to chat
and she invites me to sit down. And I told George I wouldn't be
needing him any further. And that's how I spent that afternoon until
way on toward sunset, sitting on that big yellow beach towel of hers
and telling her about my life.

"It ain't often that you can find a young person
that you can sit and talk to. They just don't care about the past.
But Cindy Ann was different. And it wasn't like she was putting on.
Boy, you get old enough and you can spot that sort of thing a mile
away. She cared about me. Maybe having come from a broken home and
being miles away from it and her folks and her friends she needed
somebody to care for. So I'd walk on out to that park every day. And
she'd be there waiting. And it got so that was the only thing I'd
look forward to in the day. Sitting with Cindy Ann in the park and
telling her about my days in the Corps or about football or my son.
Whatever.

"And then one day 'bout a year ago, I come to
the park and she wasn't there. Man, I'd liked to die. I didn't know
what happened to her. Whether she was hurt or sick or something
worse. I got George to lend me his car and I spent the whole damn
afternoon driving through Clifton, just looking to see if I could
catch sight of her. I come home, feeling like an old man, and, damn,
if she wasn't setting out there on that very stoop waiting for me! I
ain't ever seen anything looked as good as that little girl sitting
on the stoop, with her little bag of clothes and things in her hand.

"To this day I don't know why she come to me. I
just figured she needed a place to stay and I offered her the couch
and she said, 'Yes, O.K., for a while'."