Free The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin

Then
a week. And, before I knew it, old Hugo would have manipulated me
into letting him stay on--to bully and cheer me as I jousted with
Lance and Laurie for the honor of Cindy Ann.
    That wasn't going to happen. If I had to put him on
the bus myself and watch it leave and call like a worried mother when
he arrived, that wasn't going to happen. The truth was I liked the
old codger too much to see him hurt. And, if Coral was right, that's
what could happen.
    He answered the phone on the twentieth ring, in that
high-pitched, hurky-jerky voice and, when I reminded him that he was
leaving that day, he said: "Yes. All right, Harry. Whatever you
think is best."
    I half expected to find him gone when I pulled into
his driveway at half-past one that afternoon. But there he was,
sitting on the porch chair, shading his eyes with one hand and
gripping a straw valise in the other. I honked and Hugo walked down
the front steps, cracked open the car door, and slid onto the seat.
    "What kept you?" he said cheerfully.
    I gave him a sidelong look. His chin was bristling
again with salt-and-pepper stubble; and his nose took little swipes
at it when he worked his jaws, which he did with mechanical
regularity, as if he were chewing a wad of tobacco or talking to
himself. And those wet blue eyes, like eyes in a clear aspic, were
nervous and merry.
    "Just what are you so cheerful about?" I
asked him, throwing the Pinto into reverse and backing out onto
Cornell. "Did you call your son?"
    "Yep." He nodded. "Called him this
morning. He's been trying to get me to come up there for years. Said
he'd build a room addition for me if I promised to stay for good."
    "Uh-huh," I said, guiding us onto Ludlow
and west to the expressway. "You call the bus station like I
told you to?"
    "Sure did," Hugo said. "She leaves at
two-fifteen and arrives in Dayton at four-thirty. Ralph'll be at the
depot to pick me up."
    "Uh-huh," I said. "Did you remember to
bring the key to your place and the shoebox?"
    "Got 'em in my bag, Harry. Just like you told
me."
    I bit my lip.
    "You sure are nervous, Harry," Hugo said
placidly.
    "I just don't want to forget anything, Hugo,"
I said, turning onto I-75 and heading south out of the Clifton
hillside along the sunny industrial flats on the outskirts of town.
"I don't want to give you any reason to show up on my doorstep
tomorrow."
    "Aw, Harry," he said.
    At two sharp we pulled up beneath the prancing neon
greyhound above the bus terminal entrance. I slipped a quarter
into the meter and Hugo moseyed toward the depot.
    "Wait up!" I barked at him.
    He stopped dead at the door and pretended to read the
schedules and travel posters in the display cases.
    "You sure are nervous," Hugo said again, as
we walked out of the keen white sunlight and into the shade of the
terminal.
    No matter how noisy a bus terminal gets--and on a
July Saturday they get pretty damn loud--you can always hear your own
footsteps echoing above the crackle of the loudspeakers, the hiss of
air brakes, the soft sigh of bus doors opening, and the amplified
roar of the diesels as they pull out of their loading docks. I don't
know how they do it, how they calculate the eigentones and reflecting
angles to bring the click of heels and shoe leather into such crisp
prominence. Nor do I understand why bus stations are always made to
look so dreary. Or why the people sitting on the hard blue-and-red
plastic benches are invariably as cheerless and sullen-looking as the
gaunt men and women in Walker Evans's studies of the rural poor. Even
the attendants and guards are seedy and impassive; and everyone looks
too damn bored to talk about it. If there's an urban hell, the bus
station must come pretty close to being it.
    I shadowed Hugo as he picked up his ticket and,
together, we walked down to the basement lockers. Hugo got the
shoebox out of his valise; and, after taking three of the photographs
out and slipping them into my pocket, I shoved the box into a
fifty-cent cubicle and