Summer rolled on. My arm healed with no complications, although true to John's prediction it left a long, crooked scar along the middle of my forearm. It didn't do much to make me look tough, but all the same I was sort of fond of it. It proved I'd lived through something.
Around the same time that I picked the last of my stitches out, I found a part-time job transcribing old handwritten files for a local realtor's office. The work wasn't particularly steady – once I worked my way through their backlog of files, I'd be out of a job again – but I could work on my own typewriter at home, and the money was enough to once again line the bank account and keep me in cigarette money.
By now the balcony was something like an extended living room; I spent most of my spare time there, watching the street and talking with John. We'd fallen into an easy, laid-back sort of friendship since his impromptu surgery on my arm; we'd talk about politics and the local news, and every once in a while he'd tell me a story about life on the set.
I was kind of curious what he'd done in Vietnam – if he'd been a medic or what – but I didn't ask. For all that we were friends, John was still a private guy – there was always a kind of guarded watchfulness about him, and there were times he'd abruptly stop in mid-sentence, as if there were something he knew better than to tell me. I couldn't really grudge him that. Everyone's got secrets. They're part of what keeps us alive.
Towards the end of August John vanished on another extended location shoot, although this time he mentioned the absence ahead of time. I kept myself amused with working on my novel and with people-watching. I'd made a careful, months-long study of the street below us; I knew all the people who worked there, all the regular customers and tenants and loafers of the neighborhood.
The Man In Sunglasses turned up the day after John left; he'd show up every day in the midmorning, and stay until dusk wandering up and down the street. At first I figured him for just another out-of-work guy like all the others who loitered in our part of town; but after about the third day I realized that he was keeping an eye on our building as he loitered.
I figured him for INS; there were a lot of immigrant families in the neighborhood, and at least two in our building. I spent a while wondering if there'd be a raid in the middle of the night; but after three weeks The Man In Sunglasses vanished as abruptly as he'd appeared. A week after that John came back, and by then it was October and I was out of work again.
With all of that, The Man In Sunglasses – and the raid that had never happened – completely slipped my mind.
TBC