Painting the Shutters

Cindy thought the house I live in, in Southeast Washington D.C., would look better with shutters. The owner, her boss, agreed. I didn’t have a vote. I don’t pay rent because I’m the building superintendent. The net result of all that was that one of the first things I did after moving into my new six-flat home was to spend a Saturday hanging shutters at the windows. The good thing about row houses is that you only have the front to beautify.

But time passes and, like anything else covered with paint and exposed to the outdoors, the shutters need maintenance or they cease to beautify. That’s why I spent so much of last weekend on a ladder with Monte holding it steady and Cindy standing beside it, supervising. Monte lives across the street with his grandmother, the lady we all call Mother Washington. She’s kind of the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood. Monte is kind of the official pre-teen wise-ass. But I’ve tried to take him under my wing, in a way, sort of mentor him.

So he was being a good troop, holding the ladder good and steady while I scraped a year’s worth of smog and pigeon droppings off the shutters. When I reached the ground at last, Cindy was still looking up.

“You nicked the paint on that one top left,” she said. “You can see it from here.”

“What’s the difference?” Monte asked. “Aren’t we done?”

“So we paint it,” I said, ignoring Monte as best I could.

“You know, I loved the red shutters when you originally hung them,” Cindy said, still staring up at the front of the building.

“You chose the color, as I recall.”

“Yes, I know, Hannibal,” she said. “It was my idea. But now I really think black would be better. Give the building a nice touch of elegance.”

“But then you’d have to paint them all,” Monte said.

I shrugged. “A little more paint. A little more time.”

Yes, Cindy is my woman and she always gets her way. But aside from that, the building deserved it. She’s a grand old lady who had been allowed to fall into disrepair and decay, and had been turned into a crack house for a while. That was the way I found her, a bit earlier in my Troubleshooter career, when the owner, Dan Balor, hired me to clear the bad element out. Balor’s a partner at the law firm where Cindy works. Anyway, once we chased the druggies out, some friends and I decided to move in. Balor fixed the building up, and the new tenants keep her up because she has been through enough and deserves to be treated with respect.

Monte took off for lunch while Cindy and I went to the paint store. But he was typical of boys his age in that money was a reliable lure so he was back for round two. Back, yes, but his heart wasn’t in it. As I was about to mount the ladder he muttered under his breath.

“Why don’t you just hire a painter?”

I just shook my head and started climbing. How could a kid who’s so smart have missed the point like that? It’s as if he just wasn’t paying attention. But as I climbed I wondered if maybe it was me. Maybe I just believe in doing things the hard way.

Conversation died as I started painting the first shutter. One coat was going to do it, but it was slow going because I was using a fairly small brush. You see, each shutter had a little tree-shaped cutout in the middle. I had to be able to get the brush inside the hole, to paint the inside edge.

“Hannibal, is that as hard as it looks?”

Maybe it was because his father ran off before he could walk that Monte had missed some important lessons. “Ever see A League of Their Own?” I called down, not losing focus on the movement of the brush.

“The old movie with girls playing baseball?”

“Yeah. There’s a scene where Tom Hanks, talking about baseball, tells the team that the hard is what makes it great. That’s not just in sports, buddy.”

“I know,” Monte yelled back up. “I work on my jump shot for hours. But this is different. Nobody can see that inside edge from down here. Why waste the time to paint in there?”

“Because when you got a job you do it right.”

“But you won’t get any credit for that, not even from Cindy or the landlord. I mean, you’re doing extra work but who’s going to know?”

I stopped painting. I’m embarrassed to say that I had to think a minute.

“I will.” Then I nodded, looking down at my young friend and said, more to myself, “You will.”

The bottom line, as I later explained to Monte, is that to be a success a man needs to resist the lure of three things: drugs, alcohol and shortcuts.