Joe Serpe stood atop the tank of his old green Mack, guiding the six foot long fill manifold through the open hatch. When he heard the mouth of the manifold clank against the bottom of the aluminum tank, he eased the manifold handle forward and the pump squealed slowly to life. Joe knew the routine; the first fifty gallons of the three thousand to be loaded would fairly trickle out, the meter click, click, clicking like the second hand on a watch. Then the oil would gush out of the pipe against the bottom of the tank with such force that it would lift the top of the manifold six inches above the rim of the hatch. He had seen rookie drivers panic the first time they loaded their rigs by themselves, when, seemingly with a a will of its own, the manifold reared up that way.
Serpe didn’t need to look behind him to know the sun was coming up. He could feel it warming his back and see its rays reflected in the fine, red-dyed mist spraying out of the open hatch. As he kneeled to look into the abyss of the tank to make sure the manifold was still seated right, he caught a full on whiff of #2 home heating oil. Some people’s mornings smelled like fresh roasted coffee and frying bacon. His smelled like a high school chemistry experiment. His entire life smelled of it, though he rarely noticed. He spent even less time worrying about what these fumes and his truck’s diesel exhaust were doing to his lungs. It didn’t pay for a man to focus on those kinds of things.
Although he had loaded the tugboat—his nickname for the green Mack—this way six days a week for years now, the process was still a revelation to him. Just lately he’d become fixated with the fifty-first gallon, with the transition from trickle to gush. It was that transition, the moment when things went from control to chaos, the moment when things slipped away that fascinated Joe Serpe. If only he could learn the secret of that transition, he thought, he might comprehend how he had lost Marla. For as sure as the sun was coming up at his back, she had slipped slowly away from him. He knew the signs. He had heard the clicking of the meter, but still he had been unable to stop her from leaving. No one knew loss better than Joe Serpe. No one.
Over the past decade, he had lost everyone and everything of value in his life. Once a legendary NYPD narcotics detective, Serpe had gotten jammed up covering for his partner and best friend Ralphy Abruzzi. Not only was Joe forced to leave the job in disgrace, but he had to testify as a prosecution witness in open court. Ralphy, godfather to Joe’s son, ate buckshot for breakfast the weekend before his sentencing hearing. After the suicide, the few cop friends Joe had left, abandoned him. Although it was Ralph who had the coke habit, who stole and extorted money, who eventually sold information and protection to dealers, it was Joe Serpe who was to be punished.
The media frenzy surrounding the trial and the fallout from the suicide cost Serpe more than a few friends. The stress destroyed his already fractured marriage; his wife and son fleeing to Florida before the ink was dry on the divorce decree. Joe didn’t mind losing his wife so much, but the distance—emotional and geographical—between him and his boy was pure hell. While the distance in miles remained constant, the emotional distance grew so that they barely spoke.
None of it—the trial, the suicide, the divorce, the estrangement—hit Joe nearly as hard as the death of his fireman brother on September 11, 2001. Vinny was crushed by debris as the first tower collapsed. That was the final blow. On that day, Joe Serpe’s world grew so small that it would have fit inside a paper cup. God, Joe thought, had a funny way of showing his boundless love for humankind. That day he handed the Almighty Mindfucker his pink slip and began his slide into the bottle.
So no, no one had to school Joe Serpe on the subtleties of the signs of loss: the emptiness, the nagging questions, the long sleepless nights. Very few men had lost as much or fallen quite as far and lived to tell about it. Even fewer had picked themselves back up and rebuilt their lives. But to rebuild his life, Joe had been forced to come to an uneasy understanding with loss.
As he noticed the rising pink foam near the lip of the hatch, Joe gazed quickly at the meter to his left. With fifty gallons to go, he eased back gently on the loading handle to slow the pumping: … 2956 … 69 … 76 … 89 … 96 … 97 … 98 … 3000. Silence. Serpe hit the red cut-off button and lifted up the spring-loaded manifold so that its mouth rested only inches above the surface of the oil in the tugboat’s tank. This permitted whatever oil was left in the pipeline to drizzle out into the tank. When it was down to a spit, he lifted the manifold up to shoulder height, hooked a capture bucket onto the end of the pipe, and folded back the loading arm to clear room for the truck that would follow the tugboat into the loading rack.
Climbing down off the loading platform and disconnecting the grounding plug from the chassis of his truck, Serpe realized he had learned nothing, that there were no lessons to be learned from the fifty-first gallon. Marla was gone. Deep down he knew that even if he comprehended the mechanics of her leaving, he couldn’t have stopped it.
He removed the wheel chock, got into the tugboat and drove the fifty feet or so to the checkout booth. Out of the truck again and inside the booth, Joe waved his magnetic loading card at the scanner and the printer spit out his bill of lading. Still thinking about Marla, it took him a minute to see the notice posted on the wall above the printer. Even then it didn’t quite register.
WARNING:
ALL C.O.D. OIL DRIVERS BEWARE
FOURTH DRIVER ROBBED AND MURDERED
MEETING 7PM TONIGHT AT ST. PATRICK’S GYM
SUFFOLK P.D. REPS TO ATTEND
Only when Serpe saw the second notice, the one about the wake for Rusty Monaco, did it hit home. He mouthed the dead man’s name and hung his head. There was history between Monaco and Serpe, a debt that now could never be repaid.
The trucks were all out and the phones had slowed down, so Bob Healy finally had a chance to breathe. He sat down at his desk with a fresh cup of coffee, a buttered roll, and a copy of Newsday. He still hadn’t gotten quite used to the five o’clock alarm and life in a trailer in an oil yard. He’d been coming into the office for a few months now, quoting prices, answering phones, taking stops, laying out delivery routes, but he wasn’t liking it much. The yard was either dusty or muddy depending on the weather. It stank of diesel fumes in the morning when the trucks warmed up and of heating oil the rest of the time. And when they used certain runways at nearby MacArthur Airport, it smelled of spent jet fuel. The trailer itself was a dump; too hot in summer and an icebox in winter. Besides all that, it was paradise.
Like he had told Joe in the hospital after Serpe had been shot, retired cops were good at only two things: owning bars or working security. Joe didn’t disagree. The plan was that the two of them would open a bar together someday, but Joe Serpe knew the oil business. He had learned it the hard way; starting on the bottom rung as a hose monkey, then driving Sunday, holiday, and night shifts. He knew how to make money at it. So the two of them had compromised. They pooled their resources to buy back Mayday Fuel from the government who had seized it from a Russian mob’s front company. They put aside a set amount of money each week out of the profits toward the purchase of a bar. Two years, that was the plan. Two years and then Healy could get out from behind the dispatcher’s desk and get behind the bar.
Healy sipped the coffee and made a sour face. Christ, he thought, even the coffee was beginning to taste like fucking heating oil. He flipped the paper over from the sports section to the front page, saw the headlines, and nearly shit.