Pandora by Holly Hollander

me ask for something if I wanted it, and when I didn’t he went away; he had been a big fat sour-faced man who wore moleskin work pants, construction boots, and no shirt.

When things are bad, I always figure that if only I could spend all day thinking about them I could get them straightened out in my mind. But when I really have the time—like then—either I find out it doesn’t take nearly that long, or I just can’t do anything with them and they chase their tails through my brain until they wear me out. This time it was the second one, and finally I knew I’d have to find something else to do or go nuts, so I got up on my crutches and started poking around.

Blue’s desk had a file drawer, and the folders were full of letters. The first one that I read was from somebody who’d been in the slammer with him (black by the sound of it, although you couldn’t be sure) who wanted help when he got outside. The next was from a woman who was answering some kind of ad he’d run and wanted to know if a criminologist could talk sense into her son. The third was from a woman he must not have been seeing anymore who wanted him back. I didn’t know any of the people, and after the last one I got ashamed of what I was doing and stopped.

The drawer above had a little good white bond paper and a lot of cheap yellow paper, a supply of business cards like the one he’d given me on the train, the Greater Chicago White Pages, and a pencil that somebody had chewed. When I saw the paper, I remembered the letter somebody had sent to the Trib; but it had been done on an electric typewriter, and an electric typewriter wouldn’t have fit in here. Anyway, there wasn’t any. The flat drawer in the middle had more pencils, a couple of Bics, rubber bands, and some other junk.

The next drawer was the upper right, and that was where my father had kept that little Gestapo gun in his desk. It had hit me already how much this was like his study at home—I couldn’t have missed it after what Blue had said in the car—and I was a little scared of what I’d find there. I’d already noticed Blue was a lefty (his watch was on his right wrist, which practically advertised it) but just the same …

I could have saved my sweat. A box half full of tapes for one of those little minirecorders, a booze bottle half full of milky stuff that was probably moonshine, and—I am not kidding—a magnifying glass. The lens was in a solid brass frame that looked old enough to qualify for the Barton Antique Fair and Art Festival easy, and I tried to think of something witty along the lines of the difference between rich people and poor people was that rich people had new glasses and old whisky, but magnifying was too long and kept screwing it up.

Just one drawer left, and it was full of big envelopes, a lot of them recycled junk mail; they had clippings inside, and they weren’t labeled, so I couldn’t understand for the life of me how Blue knew what went where. I still can’t. The top one had two pieces on diet (maybe for the fat man, Tick?), one on the social difficulties of obese women, one about the cigarette industry, and one about a guy who stuck radio telltales on sea turtles. Nuts.

There were bookcases made of boards and bricks, and others made out of crates, the crates under the windows and the board-and-brick jobs up against the walls that didn’t have any. Lots of criminology, lots of true crime, and a few mysteries. Great Literature with capital letters. Maugham, Mark Twain, and some other stuff I didn’t know at all and couldn’t place. I found myself a book about the Cincinnati Strangler, a guy I’d never heard of who pulled some cute capers like stealing a cab and answering the calls he heard from the cab company’s dispatcher.

Blue and Muddy got back almost at the same time. Muddy had three rabbits and looked happy, and Blue looked just the way he always did. He didn’t really have an expressionless face like Sandoz’s, and with those blue eyes and the thin, straw-colored hair there wasn’t anything Indian about him. Just the same, you could have lost a lot of money playing poker with him. I said, “How’d it go?” and he said, “All right,” and I said, “Want to tell me about it?” and he said, “Not yet.” And that was that.

Muddy went back to the kitchen and cut the rabbits up, and Tick came in and built a fire and then went out and cut green sticks for us to roast with. We had roast rabbit and bread and apple butter and coffee, and except for the coffee it was about the greatest meal I ever ate in my life; I can still remember it. Tick didn’t eat much (surprising me quite a bit) and Blue hardly ate anything; but Muddy and I put away almost a rabbit apiece. Finally I asked Blue if he was trying to get my father off.

“I’m trying to find out who killed your uncle and Larry Lief,” he said. “It’s much the same thing.”

“You don’t think he did?”

He shook his head; but he wouldn’t say anything else, and when we were through eating he took me out to his car and drove me home. Bill wasn’t around and neither was Mrs. Maas, but Blue helped me on the stairs as much as he could, and I didn’t really have much trouble, although it was slow. While I was undressing I could hear him going downstairs. When he got to the bottom he didn’t go out, though. He went into my father’s study, if I was guessing right from the sounds, and stayed there for maybe half an hour. Okay, I’d searched his desk, so I couldn’t complain.

How We Mulled

It felt funny for our house to be so empty and quiet. I hadn’t really expected Elaine to come running to see if her little girl was okay, but I’d expected, at least, to hear her and Mrs. Maas stirring around. After a while it got spooky. I played records, and that should have helped; but it didn’t because I could hear the silence behind them, if you know what I mean; and when each record was over there would be nothing except the click, click of the changer and the flop of the next one dropping into place. When my hi-fi had gone through the stack, I let it switch itself off; I read for a little and took the medicine that was supposed to stop my leg from hurting, and went to sleep.

A door shutting woke me up. Not the front door—the back. Then I heard Mrs. Maas walking around in the kitchen; I listened for two or three minutes, I guess, before I was sure it was her, and then, boy, did it ever sound good. I could have yelled or rung my bell for her to come up, but I didn’t even think about it.

I switched on my light instead, grabbed my crutches and got up. My little clock said it was after midnight, but I started downstairs, scared to death I’d fall because I couldn’t use both crutches and hang on to the banister at the same time, but bound and determined to find some human company. I decided right then that if I ever get rich and build a house of my own it’s going to have an elevator.

Mrs. Maas must have heard me, because she came and dithered and more or less helped me down the bottom half of the stairs. I don’t think I’ve said a lot about Mrs. Maas so far, but maybe I ought to here. She was blond, a little bigger than average but not really big, solid-looking and muscular. I never asked how old she was, but her hair was starting to get gray and I’d say about fifty. One time she told me she had grown up on a farm, and both her parents had been born in the Old Country. She was a widow.

Here I’m going to psychoanalyze. If you don’t like it (and in a lot of books I’ve read I don’t) you can skip this bit.