Small Town

The great wonder in the Carpenter’s mind was that it had taken him this long to think of it. What better place to pass unnoticed than in a derelict boat on the Hudson? His own apartment was ten minutes away, and he knew the Boat Basin well enough. Once, when his children were young, he’d had fantasies of keeping a boat there. It would have been pleasant to take them all boating on a summer afternoon, then walk on home through the twilight...

He’d been coming to the park now for several nights, keeping out of the way of the occasional cop on patrol, always choosing a bench out of the reach of the streetlights. Now and then, in the hours between midnight and dawn, he’d go for a closer look at the dark and silent vessels.

The Basin dwellers, he knew, were a close-knit group, in the manner of a gathering of outcasts. They respected one another’s privacy but stood united against a common enemy — i.e., the real estate interests and municipal authorities who periodically conspired to get rid of them. It wouldn’t do, he knew, to take over the home of some gregarious houseboater, some pillar of the floating community.

Better to supplant a part-time resident, to slip like a hermit crab into the empty shell of a pleasure boater with an apartment somewhere else. And that way he’d be assured of a seaworthy vessel, one he could take out onto the water if he wished.

So he waited, looking for an opportunity. And he was watching patiently that evening when a boat pulled in and docked. It was a nice-looking one; he’d seen it the night before, noticed earlier this evening that it was not at its slip. He’d seen fishing poles on hooks above the cabin, and supposed the fellow had gone out for a night’s fishing, or just to get out on the water and look up at the stars.

The lights went out, the engines ceased to throb. A man, wearing a brass-buttoned blazer and a Greek fisherman’s cap, walked from the pier and headed east through the park.

The Carpenter followed him.

Over the next three days the Carpenter learned that the man’s name was Peter Shevlin and that he lived in one of the fine prewar apartment buildings on West Eighty-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. The lobby was attended around the clock, and the Carpenter never even considered entering it.

Shevlin worked in a high-rise office building on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties, and rode to and from his office on the subway. He seemed to live alone, and to spend much of his time alone. One evening he stopped on his walk from the subway to pick up dinner for one at a taco stand on Broadway, and that reinforced the Carpenter’s conviction that he did not share his apartment with a wife or lover.

Years ago he’d been inside Shevlin’s building, and knew the apartments there were all quite sizable. He guessed that Shevlin was widowed; if he’d been divorced, his wife would very likely have wound up with the apartment, and Shevlin would be sleeping on his boat, if indeed the courts didn’t take that away from him as well. And he was of an age to be a widower. He was, the Carpenter realized, about his own age, and it struck him — for the first time, oddly — that the two of them were not that far apart in appearance. If you stood them side by side they’d look entirely different, but they were about the same height, and similarly built, they both had gray hair, and to describe one was to describe the other.

It was, he thought, as if the man had been sent to him. Another widower, a man who lived just two blocks from the Carpenter’s old apartment. A man who’d lived the Carpenter’s dream, owning a boat and mooring it at Seventy-ninth Street. A man ready for sacrifice.

The Carpenter slept during the day, turning up at one of the multiplex movie houses in time for the first show of the day. He took the senior discount, bought popcorn, and went into one of the theaters. The clerks were all young people working for minimum wage, and they hardly even looked at their patrons. The Carpenter, his head lowered, his shoulders drooping with age, never got a second glance.

He’d go to a theater, breakfast on popcorn, and doze off, sleeping lightly, and always waking up when the feature presentation ended. When he was a boy you could go to the movies and sit there all day, you could watch a double feature three times over if you were so inclined, but now they had lengthy intermissions between showings and you had to leave when the picture was over.

But there were eight or ten or a dozen or more screens under a single roof, and what was to prevent you from going from one to another? It was illegal, your ticket only entitled you to a single performance of a single film, but on weekday afternoons none of the films played to as much as a quarter of capacity, and often he was one of a half dozen patrons making up the showing’s total audience. Why waste an attendant’s time to keep a lonely retiree from double-dipping?

The Carpenter got plenty of sleep. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep anymore, he watched the movie.