Free Winter Tides by James P. Blaylock Page B

television from inside the house—Sesame Street characters singing about the neighborhood. Jenny was a Sesame Street regular, still young enough at five years old to think she was living in some remote corner of it. With any luck she’d have a couple more years of thinking so before the world changed her mind for her.
    Jenny’s parents had died three years ago in a car wreck. She had been two at the time that Collier had gotten custody of her, and he was the only father she remembered. His son had owned a condominium in Anaheim, which had gone to Jenny, except that it turned out to be worth less than her parents had paid for it. Stuck in the middle of a decaying neighborhood, half the condos in the complex were empty, the owners disappeared. Collier had paid the mortgage with his son’s bank account, thinking at first to hold onto the condo as Jenny’s legacy, but with each month that passed, the account shrank and so did the value of the condo, and after five thousand dollars had evaporated that way, Collier had done the same thing that all the other tenants were doing—he gave it back to the bank by simply walking away.
    There was some money left in Jenny’s account—money that Collier wouldn’t touch. It wouldn’t change his life in any way he cared about, but some day, he had told Dave, it might change hers.
    Collier had pulled his chair over to the edge of the porch,and he sprinkled water onto his garden over the top of the porch railing. He had onions and sugar cane going, along with a half dozen tomato vines in cages. He nodded at Dave and gestured with the hose, nearly squirting him down.
    “You should have hollered,” he said. “I’d have bought you a cup of coffee.”
    “I’ve had enough,” Dave told him.
    “Well, sit down. You work too much. I see that light come on at dawn and go out at nine or ten at night. A person would think you owned the place. Either that or you’re trying to avoid something.”
    “I like work.”
    “That doesn’t make it healthy. Work can be a disease just like anything else. You find more workaholics than any other kind of holic.”
    Dave sat down on a painted metal chair and looked out into the foggy morning. Across the little patch of grass that was the bungalow’s lawn, the back of the Ocean Theater rose three tall stories, its rear windows hung with heavy black drapery to keep out the sun during matinees. It was built of the same redwood clapboard as the Earl’s, but it was considerably older, with arched, Gothic-style windows and lot of interior woodwork that gave it atmosphere. It had fairly recently been painted white on the outside, and from a distance it looked good, but the window putty was falling out, and the old rear porch and most of the sills had been worked over hard by termites and weather. Casey, the Earl’s younger son, had applied to put it on the Historic Register, which might save it from the wrecking ball, in the event that Casey’s older brother Edmund gained control of the business and the property.
    “How’s the Duke’s palace?” Collier asked.
    “Coming along. We get a new artist today. She’s supposed to be pretty good. How’s old Parsons doing with Lear?”
    “Good enough, when he’s sober. He’s about got it down.”
    “How is he when he’s not sober?”
    “He’s a ball of fire out on the heath, but he can’t keepthe monologues straight. If Lear was a drunk, nobody could touch Parsons in the role.”
    “Touch up the script,” Dave said.
“Make
Lear a drunk. Shakespeare’s dead. He couldn’t care less.”
    Collier looked at him but didn’t say anything, as if he was thinking the idea over. “That’s a hell of a concept,” he said finally.
    “I was kidding.”
    “No, I like it. If Shakespeare would have thought of it, he’d have used it. Damn, this is a
good
idea. We modernize the whole shebang, or else we just mix things the hell up. Eclectic costuming. Anachronistic props. We make Lear a drunk, like you said.