The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [215]
There was a basketball game on the TV. Staticky reception made it appear to be snowing on the court. I noticed a cord running from the bottom of the neon tube twisted into the likeness of a key and down to an electrical outlet above the floor molding.
Leon threw out his arms in an invitation to embrace, and roared: “My dearest uncle!”
“Hm?” said the old man behind the counter.
“It’s me, your grand-nephew! It’s Leon!”
“Eh?”
“Leon Smoler!”
The man looked blankly at him from beneath his visor. His skin was translucent and he looked like he weighed little more than a child. The man rose from his stool and walked up to the counter so slowly it was as if the air were made of glue. He was humpbacked with age and not much taller than me.
“I’m Yvonne’s son,” Leon helped him.
“Ah,” said the man. The gears were turning in his head as quickly as the hour hand of a clock—but they were turning.
“Ah!” he finally said. His mouth had three teeth in it and his tongue was as black and dry as an old boot. “Leon!”
The old man opened the trapdoor of the counter and baby-stepped out to be hugged by Leon, who had a difficult job of hugging him with sufficient heartiness without crushing him like a baby bird in a fist.
“How’s your mother, kiddo?”
“Safely interred, thank you. She hasn’t budged in fourteen years.”
“Atta girl. It’s been too long, Leonard! You oughtta visit more often.”
After several agonizingly long moments of preliminary introductions, catching up, and other such social niceties, Leon revealed the ulterior motive for our call. The old man—whose name, despite it being the name of his business, was not “Mr. Locksmith,” but was actually Samuel B. Siegel—was the owner and had been the sole operator of this locksmith’s shop for more than forty years after inheriting it from his father (Leon’s great-grandfather). He was surprised that Leon knew about the vast space below his shop, which was accessible only by an elevator in the back of the store. I was also surprised. Mr. Locksmith—as he shall here on out be called, because I prefer the moniker to his real name—looked at his watch, then locked the storefront, unplugged the neon key in the window and took us into the back room in shaky, puttering steps. He made a series of smooching noises, and the fat soft black-and-white cat stretched herself, got up from her bed beneath the neon key, and followed us.
To the right of the work area and counter there was a short narrow hallway lit by a single bare low-wattage lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling. A door on the right opened into a small bathroom that doubled as a storage place for cleaning supplies. There was a shallow porcelain dish on the floor with a mop in it and a yellow plastic sign, folded up against the wall, saying, CAUTION, WET FLOOR, and below that, CUIDADO, PISO MOJADO: between the languages, a man was falling. The back rooms smelled like oil, smoke, and cleaning fluids. Then the hallway bent left, a bend sinister, and we bent sinister with it. A calendar was tacked to a corkboard on the wall, the bottom half a grid of dates with notes scrawled in the squares, the top half featuring a photograph of a sand-speckled naked woman lying on a tropical beach in mildly pornographic repose. The hallway ended in an old-fashioned elevator, the kind with a grate of brass latticework that accordions open and shut. Everything in it, the panel with the buttons, the walls, the ceiling, was fancy, decorated with loops and filigrees of bent metal and carved wood, because it was built in a time when elevators were still special, when there was still enough amazement in them for people to want to ornament them—only this one was old and in a state of creaky disrepair, covered in stains and rust and dust, the brass discolored and the wood chipped and scratched and worn down. Mr. Locksmith was using it as a storage closet. He rolled back the brass accordion grating of the elevator door with a clatter and shriek of old and poorly lubricated metal parts grinding together, and started