The Last Fair Deal Going Down. David Rhodes

I continued along in my fool’s paradise, not believing he was capable of more than the at best erratic moments of his life.

      Will saw a woman stepping off a bus downtown and followed her to a department store where she bought a half-dozen silver plastic buttons. He thought her to be about twenty-seven, her body unusually firm and voice contemplative and rich. At a shoe repair shop she picked up a pair of fixed shoes, and waited for the 4:15 Middletown bus. Passing quickly by her and capturing a seat two sections back, Will noticed that her hair, which was held around close to her head with a white band, was healthy, showing no signs of color manipulations or extensive shaping processes. He got off the bus and slipped quietly into a small grocery store where he watched her enter a stone house, number 413 High Street, across from the Mercy Hospital, nearly. Under the pretense of compiling a “residential information survey” he learned from the owner of the store that she was Cedar Stern, twenty-eight years old, divorced now for four years, few if any friends, and an inhabitant of the number 413 stone house for four years — presently a saleswoman in Bridewell Greenery. He learned that Cedar Stern occasionally took in boarders — mostly medical students — who rented a small room on the second floor to the back of the house . . . with a private entrance and bathroom . . . and that the room was presently unoccupied, though it had been so for some time and the store owner thought that she had perhaps decided against renting it out. Will’s happiness was difficult to contain and he quickly told the grocer that he was late for an important meeting, and buying a newspaper hurried out of the store.

      Cedar Stern had not advertised the upstairs room, and Will needed it. None of the houses beside her or across from her were even remotely satisfactory. Somehow he needed to get the room — which was not advertised, perhaps not available — and he couldn’t talk to Cedar Stern himself, or let her see him. It was too early for that. Will had no male friends and he couldn’t ask one of his female friends to get the room for him because of the complications that might arise out of someone knowing where he lived; furthermore, the only people he knew Cedar Stern rented to were medical students, presumably male. On one hand she might refuse to rent to a woman and after denying one person find it easier to deny another, even a male: on the other hand she might agree to rent to a woman but then feel more inclined to pay personal calls to her roomer, so breaking the sanctity of the private entrance and bath arrangement. Both of these possibilities were of course unfavorable to Will.

      “You want me to what?” I asked.

      “To rent a room for me,” Will said.

      “Rent it yourself.”

      “I can’t do that . . . I don’t want anyone to know I live there.”

      “Get someone else. Get one of those girls that used to come over here all the time.”

      “I can’t trust anyone but you. Besides you look sort of like you might be a medical student.”

      “What!” I said, feeling somehow insulted.

      “Well, maybe not,” he added, ingenuously, but still to my relief. “But more so than Walt or Paul — who wouldn’t do it anyway.”

      “Get Nellie.”

      “I don’t want a girl to do it. I told you that.” He hadn’t told me that, of course, but I felt that in a way he might have said it, or at least he thought he had, or maybe it had just slipped his mind.

      “Why do you want this room?”

      “I just want it. It’s going to save my youth and stand as a personal monument to my stature.”

      “Bullshit!” I was sixteen then and not yet properly educated into accepting “bullshit” for something else.

      “I want that room, Reuben. If you won’t do it I’ll get someone else.” He was serious.

      “Okay, where is it?”

      “On High Street, now listen: she hasn’t advertised this room . . .”

      “She?”

      “Never mind that. What you do . . .”

      So that evening I walked up to Cedar Stern’s house and knocked. I felt pretty ridiculous in the blue sport coat that Will had gotten somewhere because he thought medical students wore them when they weren’t in white coats. I told him I didn’t think they did but he was sure he knew more about medical students than I did and I didn’t know enough one way or another to disagree with him — so I wore it.

      “Yes,” she said. I was momentarily paralyzed about the throat.

      “. . . Hello . . . I’m . . . Sorry to bother you . . . But . . . My name is . . .” The sound of my own voice finally caught up to me and as I listened to it I was able to organize what I was supposed to say into sentences. “My name is John Barnes. I’m a medical student at Drake University. This is my first year here and I have been given a job as an orderly in the Mercy Hospital as part of my tuition expenses. I don’t have a car and I was told that you sometimes rent out a room. I really would appreciate it, Mrs. Stern.”

      “I thought that I wouldn’t rent anymore because the last boys I had here were so noisy.” I was staring at her, thinking about Will. “. . . parties and friends coming in at all hours.” I was sure I had it by then. The rest was rhetorical — we both knew that.

      “I’m not like that, Mrs. Stern. Not at all. You won’t even know that I’m here.”

      “I don’t know. The stove upstairs doesn’t work too well and I don’t have time to get anyone in to look at it . . .”

      “I know a lot about stoves and mechanical things. My father used to be a do-it-yourself man around our neighborhood.”

      “It’s not very warm in the winter. And there’s no storm windows for that room.”

      “That won’t bother me. I find most rooms too warm.” A large dog with a motley nose was barking at the lower area of my legs, until he saw an orange cat hurry across the hallway. Cedar Stern, in pursuit of the two, called back over her shoulder between shouts of “no . . . Bad dog . . . Duchess, NO . . .” that I could have the room. She separated the animals by picking up the cat (Felix) and came back to accept twenty-five dollars for the first month. I told her that I would leave each month’s rent in her mailbox and that I would be no bother at all — that in fact she wouldn’t see me at all. And she didn’t.

      Will was overjoyed. I gave him the key and he drove to a root beer stand and bought me a root beer and a pork tender-loin with onion rings. He made me promise not to tell anyone about that room and I didn’t tell anyone, except Nellie, and then not until two or three years later — when it didn’t make any difference.

      The following morning Will waited in the grocery store until Cedar Stern had locked her front door, walked down the sidewalk, and boarded a bus. He bought two large bags of food, three cartons of cigarettes, two cases of beer, and two boxes of various and curious items from the nearest hardware store.

      There was a small yard in back of the house and a hedge of mulberry running around three sides, open to the sidewalk except for three lowgrowing maples, a small porch in front, and a larger one in back with a stairway to his room. He called the telephone company and had a telephone installed. With a putty knife he removed the putty and caulking compound from a basement window in back of the house. He took the glass out and put it carefully on the grass; then slid down into the basement, from where he gained approach to the entire house. With some fresh meat he made friends with the Great Dane and installed intricately hidden microphones in every room of the house, running the wires down into the basement, up between the walls, through tiny holes in the bathroom wall and into his amplifier equipment . . . complete with an individual, sure-tone channel for each microphone, a set of headphones, and a tape recorder. He disconnected the telephone in his room and wired it into the cable of the downstairs phone so that it acted like an extension, only didn’t ring. Cedar Stern’s bedroom and bathroom were both upstairs and separated from him by a single wall, through which he drilled two thin holes, one into her bathroom and the other into her bedroom . . . into these holes