Cheapskate in Love by Skittle Booth Page A

trick
answers out of him with leading questions, Bill would change the subject or
respond vaguely about weather and terrain conditions that day. Soon he completely
ignored sneaky queries from Matt, because Bill saw if he
became hooked by one , like a fish caught nibbling a worm, he would never
escape. Just like a fish, he’d be cut into a hundred little pieces and fried.
His coworkers, like cats, would clean his bones.
    With his friend Stan, Bill had no need to conceal what had
happened, because they talked infrequently. By the time they met again, Bill
had recovered enough that he could simply gloss over the incident. However,
over the following months, Bill told Stan much more about that day in his
usual, indirect, unexpected, piecemeal way. Eventually, Stan was able to put
the pieces together. Through his long familiarity with Bill and a little
detective skill, Stan could interpret what Bill told him with a good deal of
precision.
    Especially when the subject was dating, Stan was accustomed
to doubting what Bill said, because he had learned that Bill rarely described
events accurately, in which he had played a part. In Stan’s view, Bill left out
more than he explained in order to brighten the impression he gave of himself.
The hike, which at first in Bill’s bits of retelling, seemed to have been some
kind of surreal event, like a landscape by Dali, with bizarre parts that didn’t
belong together and a mad monster running everywhere, later shaped itself, in
Stan’s mind, into an ordinary tale of human weakness. Although Bill made it
seem like he was dragged against his will into an alien landscape and set upon
by terror after terror, Stan eventually concluded that he was an equal
participant. In fact, Bill was the necessary participant for what had
transpired. Without him, there would have been no hike. In the unfolding of
that day, he pictured Bill as a sort of apple-cheeked shepherd, in the manner
of Boucher, chasing his cherubic shepherdess and taking a tumble through his
own excessive cupidity.
    On Bill’s first day back at work, the pain he suffered from
performing his normal commuter travel to Manhattan was so great that he was
forced to go home, after spending only the morning in the office. He had
allotted extra time for his trip into the city and had walked slowly—that
was the only way he could move. But
since he had rarely moved from his bed, while he had been at home recuperating,
and his back was still not fully healed, his usual commuting routine was
unusually demanding and exceeded his endurance. Claire told him he should take
a taxi home to prevent straining his back even more. “You could seriously
disable yourself,” she warned, but the idea of paying for a taxi to his
apartment building on Long Island had an instant salutary effect on his well-being . He walked out of the office with more vigor than
he had shown even before the accident on some days.
    When he left the office, Claire, Debbie, and Matt openly
ridiculed what none of them had mentioned to Bill when he was there, although
when they had first seen him, they had stared at it in amused amazement. Even
Katie, who normally did not join in their discussions, had something to add.
The irresistible subject of their ridicule was his hair. At one point, Debbie
went so far as to call it something out of a horror movie.
    The following day, a Friday, Bill worked until his usual
finishing time. The energy and drive he had summoned the day before when
leaving the office had deserted him and would not come back, as much as he
wanted it to. He could only walk slowly, very slowly, to Penn Station to catch
the train home. Commuters streamed past him on the sidewalk and in the
underground passages to the Long Island Railroad track, where he needed to go.
He had never walked so slowly in his life and felt like a seventy-year-old man,
until a man, who looked like he was close to eighty years old, hurried by him
with everyone else. Then he felt he had