Читать книгу Ten Dollar$ A Week - Stephen Wasylyk - Страница 4

Morley remarked, “There is much to be said for a life of crime.”

Bakov grunted. Sooner or later Morley would explain what he meant, and Bakov could afford to wait.

They occupied a pair of the folding beach chairs that were lined up against the wall of the red-brick building, like those on an ocean liner. The landscaped grounds, a smooth green sea, stretched before them to the wrought iron fence and the street beyond that was the edge of the world fancifully called the Golden Age Retirement Center.

The Center was a pleasant and friendly place and most of the presidents had little reason ever to leave its confines even if they were capable of doing so, their mobility hampered by the infirmities of old age, the lack of spending money, or both.

It was morning, the grass still wet with dew, and the heat hadn’t yet penetrated the canopy of trees that surrounded the broad patio. The two men were alone, the others still at breakfast in the dining room.

Morley raised the powerful field glasses from his lap and studied the facade of the balconied apartment house that rose like a wall across the street. He was thin, his shoulders bony against the flowered sport shirt, his face creased and lined below the full thatch of unruly white hair that defied both comb and brush. His eyes were Wedgwood blue and surprisingly young for a man who had celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday only a few days before. Age hadn’t slowed or dulled him as much as the economic system that no longer allowed him to earn a living.

“The woman on the fifth floor, he said, “is there again on the balcony. Every morning at the same time in the sun in her bikini.”

“Bikinis I can see at the beach,” Bakov said.

Morley handed him the glasses. “Not like this.”

Bakov raised the glasses and studied the apartment house. “I do not think I like her all browned. A woman with a body like that should be nice and soft and white, maybe pink, but not burned by the sun.” He let the glasses fall to his lap and leaned back in his chair. Small and heavy, his face sagged in basset-hound folds below a shining scalp that glistened slightly with perspiration. Heat bothered Bakov, even this early in the shade, but he preferred the company of Morley to the sterility of his room. He brushed his fringe of iron-gray hair carefully as if it were something precious. As old as Morley, one of Bakov’s pet annoyances with old age was that it had deprived him of his once magnificent head of curly black hair. He felt that he could, at least, have been allowed to retain that, even if his once square hard body had sagged to resemble the lower half of an hourglass.

“So,” he said, “what to do?”

“Crime,” said Morley. “I should have led a life of crime. I would not be here now. What do I have? A few dollars of pension, a few dollars of Social Security that all goes to this place. I do not even have enough pocket money to take a bus trip into town and if I did, what would I do when I got there with no money?”

“I have money,” Bakov said. “My son sent my five-dollar allowance.”

“It’s not good,” Morley complained. “We have both worked hard all our lives and what do we have? Nothing. We were honest citizens who obeyed the law and it got us nowhere. What little money we managed to put away is gone became of inflation. I will tell you something, Bakov. The director called me into his office yesterday. He wants me to pay him ten dollars more a week or I will have to leave. Where will I get it? Where can I go if I don’t stay here?”

“He is raising the price ten dollars a week? He has said nothing to me.”

“He will.”

Bakov sighed. “Then we will have to leave together. I do not have ten dollars more a week either.”

“You have a son to help. I have no one.”

“No. He has a family of his own. He cannot afford the ten dollars any more than I can.”

“Give me the glasses,” Morley requested.

He studied the apartment house again. “Every morning,” he said. “As soon as her husband leaves, the young man arrives and the shades go down. Think of that. Every morning. You would think that they would get tired and miss a day once in a while.”

“You were young once,” Bakov said. “You know how it is.”