Piney said, "What's the difference what I wear? Besides, don't call me a dirt-bag. I got a job."
His job, which he went to fairly often, was holding a sign downtown, on the corner of Whitehead and Rebecca.
There was an ordinance against billboards for parking lots, but there was no law saying a person couldn't sit on the curb, holding a sign on a stick. The sign said parking, painted inside an arrow. The only hard part of the job was making sure the arrow pointed in the right direction. Piney sat in the shifting shade and looked around. Sometimes, if people gave him paperbacks, he read. Mostly he watched the town go by and framed questions to consider.
Fred said, "Plenty a dirt-bags got jobs. And if you're talking White House, it does matter what you wear. Fancy place, it matters."
"Okay, okay," said Piney. "But what I wear, that comes after. First question is, I'm invited, do I go?"
"And the answer is," said Fred, "of course you go." He crunched his beer can, tossed it into a sagging paper bag propped up in the corner, popped another. "Everybody invited goes. Astronauts, football teams."
Pineapple raked his scraggly beard, said with satisfaction, "Me, I wouldn't go."
"The president would be all broke up," said Fred.
"Ya go, it's like sayin' y'approve."
"Piney," said Fred, "have a beer." He knew that Piney hadn't had a drink in years. Have a beer—this was just something he said when his friend was launched on a flight of screwball tangents and strong opinions, some inquiring ramble that, in other men, would probably be powered by alcohol. But then he added, "Approve a what?"
"You're on TV," said Piney, "the whole world looks at you, says, there's one more smiling idiot that approves... But not me, nuh-uh, no way. Me, I don't approve."
Fred said, "Approve a what, is what I'm asking?"
Pineapple didn't answer right away. A plane came storming up the runway, which ended about 150 yards from where the hot dog sat in the mangroves. The noise got louder every second as the engines revved and the propellers whined, until the craft became airborne and the clatter changed over to a screaming whoosh. When the plane passed overhead—so close that, in daylight, you could count the rivets in its belly—the clamor seemed less a sound than a pressure, a downward crush of air that flattened the candle flames and seemed to squash the fiberglass wiener deeper into its roll.
As the racket was subsiding, Pineapple said, "Just, ya know, approve. In general. Like everything is hunky-dory."
Fred thought it over. Something had shifted when the plane went by, his sodden bag of beer cans and stew cans and soup cans tipped over in the corner and spilled some nameless residue on the floor. "Ya mean," he said, "it isn't?"
"I know what you're thinking," Aaron said, as, with a suitcase in each hand, he led the tourists across the lighted courtyard to their room. A light breeze rattled the palm fronds, a hint of chlorine wafted from the pool. "You're thinking, the man's delusional, he shouldn't work front desk."
In fact the couple from Michigan weren't thinking that at all. They were thinking, mostly, about how tired they were. They watched their feet as they took cautious steps along the unfinished brick path, and they wondered vaguely about the piles of dirt and stacks of lumber scattered here and there, the bound-up shrubs whose roots were balled in burlap, waiting to be planted.
"He's perfectly with-it a lot of the time," Aaron went on. "Comes and goes. You know. Besides, he wasn't supposed to be working the desk, just sitting. So he could call me. With the power tools, I guess I didn't hear."
The tourists nodded. The husband, a weekend putterer himself, said, "Must be a lot of work, this place."
Aaron blew air past dusty lips. "If I'd only known how much."
The wife said, "The older gentleman. He's your father?"
"Brilliant man," said Aaron. "Inventor, engineer. Self-taught. Still holds a couple patents. But let's face facts, seventy-six, he's slipping pretty bad."
The wife said, "How nice you've kept him with you."
"We've always been close," said Aaron. "Usually he worked at home. Had lots of time for me. Made lunch together. Omelets. Taught me baseball in the driveway. Grounders on hot asphalt. Other kids were jealous, fathers working in the city all the time."
The husband said, "Plumbing. Electric. Landscaping. Lot of aspects to a place like this."
"Tell me about it," Aaron said.
"It's nice when families stay together," said the wife.
"Most days," Aaron said.
"Contractors down here, workers," said the husband. "Can you get good help?"