up another tree.
“Red squirrel,” I said. “Usually you see gray ones.”
“What’s the difference?” Paul said.
“Aside from color, gray ones are bigger,” I said.
Paul was silent. Somewhere on the lake a fish broke. A monarch butterfly bobbed toward us and settled on the barrel of the shotgun that leaned against the steps to the cabin.
Paul said, “I been thinking of that stuff you said that time, about being, ah, you know, about not depending on other people.”
“Autonomous,” I said.
“Well, what’s that got to do with building houses and lifting weights? I mean, I know what you said, but…” He shrugged.
“Well, in part,” I said, “it’s what I can teach you. I can’t teach you to write poetry or play the piano or paint or do differential equations.”
I finished the beer and opened another one. Paul still sipped his. We were drinking Heinekens in dark green cans. I couldn’t get Amstel, and Beck’s was only available in bottles. For a cabin in the woods, cans seemed more appropriate. Paul finished his beer and went and got another one. He looked at me out of the corner of one eye while he opened the new can.
“What are we going to do tomorrow?” he said.
“Anything you’d like to do?” I said. “It’s Saturday.”
He shrugged. If he did enough weight lifting maybe I could get him too muscle-bound to do that. “Like what?” he said.
“If you could do whatever you wanted to do, what would it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you are twenty-five, what do you imagine yourself doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anyplace you’ve always wanted to go? That no one would take you, or you were afraid to ask?”
He sipped at the beer. “I liked the movie The Red Shoes” he said.
“Want to go to the ballet?” I said.
He sipped at the beer again. “Okay,” he said.
CHAPTER 19
It was Saturday morning.
I put on a blue suit and a white shirt from Brooks Brothers, all cotton, with a button-down collar. I had a blue tie with red stripes on it, and I looked very stylish with my black shoes and my handsome Smith & Wesson in my right hip pocket. The blue steel of the barrel was nicely coordinated with my understated socks.
Paul broke out a tan corduroy jacket and brown pants and a powder blue polyester shirt with dark blue pocket flaps. He wore his decrepit Top-Siders and no tie. His socks were black.
“That is about the ugliest goddamned getup I’ve seen since I came home from Korea,” I said.
“I don’t look okay?”
“You look like the runner-up in a Mortimer Snerd look-alike contest”
“I don’t have any other stuff.”
“Okay, that’s what well do this afternoon,” I said. “We’ll get you some clothes.”
“What will I do with these?”
“Wear them,” I said. “When we get new ones you can throw those away.”
“Who’s Mortimer Snerd?”
“A famous ventriloquist’s dummy from my youth,” I said. “Edgar Bergen. He died.”
“I saw him in an old movie on TV.”
The ride to Boston took three and a half hours. Most of the way down Paul fiddled with the radio, switching from one contemporary music station to another as we went in and out of range of their signal. I let him. I figured I owed him for the near daily baseball games he’d listened to while we worked. We got to Boston around a quarter to twelve.
I parked Susan’s Bronco on Boylston Street in front of Louis‘.
“We’ll go here,” I said.
“Do you buy your clothes here?” he said.
“No. I don’t have the build for it,” I said. “They tend to the leaner pinched-waist types.”
“You’re not fat.”
“No, but I’m sort of misshapen. My upper body is too big. I’m like a knockwurst on a canape tray in there. The
