When I describe my job, I put on a bit of an act. I’m not completely honest about it. But dishonesty works, I’ve discovered, especially at these get-togethers where everyone shows up with a six-pack. Guys throw out a “So what do you do?” feeler as they sit down with hands tight around a beer bottle. Bored, nervous, with accusatory glances toward the spouse who made them come, they nod lifelessly at the responses.
This is where I enter the scene. I start talking about my managerial position at the Metal Shredders. Within minutes, the white knuckles are gone; the hands start to relax. Pretty soon they’re leaning back enjoying it. The wife is off the hook.
“You’re kidding!” they say after I relate a few job anecdotes. They’re laughing. I’m apt to laugh myself. Somehow it doesn’t seem so bad from the safe distance of a Saturday night. But the fact is I hate my job. Every morning I bury my head under the pillow until my wife drags me out. I’d rather die than go to work. But I’d rather go to work than tell my father I quit. “I’m quitting John Bonner & Son Metal Shredders, Dad. I’m not working for you anymore. I’m leaving you. Yes, Dad, I’m betraying you.” I’d rather die than say it. In fact, I’d rather go to work. Every morning it’s the same vicious circle.
But at parties I weave a few tales, all of them true enough, though you tend to embellish after a few beers. If I find the details getting out of control, I look over at my wife, staring at me with that stoic disgust she saves for when I’m naked (gaining weight recently), and it reins me back in somewhat. Besides, with this job even the truth is serviceable. And it’s certainly true from my point of view that my employees form the crudest, most malformed group of men on earth—half Dirty Dozen and half Three Stooges. Yet these men I claim to despise are the very swine that string the pearls of my anecdotes. Even the dead employees liven things up. Listeners’ eyes grow wide with half-drunk amusement. First I get them with the story of the human shredding. Then I follow it up with the wild dogs. After that, anything I say is funny. But people who are drinking have no taste. Though they may appear to be sloppily attentive, their minds are actually a blank.
The truth is that my job is excruciatingly dull. During the course of the day I have the time and appetite to eat about four brown bags of lunch. On occasion the workers have thrown their lunch pails into the small refrigerator near my desk, and I have been driven to furtive acts of theft, greedily opening their treasure chests and wolfing down tidbits that wouldn’t be missed. I haven’t reached thirty, yet I’m growing fat. Being a redhead, that means pudgy thighs and a stomach that’s excessively white. At night I suffer pains after supper. My wife thinks it’s an ulcer from working so hard, but it’s just from eating everything in sight and washing it down with cups and cups of burnt coffee. Because if it’s one thing men can’t do when they’re left on their own, it’s make a decent cup of coffee or keep their toilets clean. When you face the kind of toilet I do every day, what’s a rancid cup of coffee to that?
Besides, I don’t work hard enough to warrant an ulcer. I sit at my desk. I sit at my desk. Am I repeating myself? I do, every day. Sometimes I stare out the window at the metal waste surrounding me. Other times I take both fists, slam them to the desk top, and exhort myself with a cleansing “Okay, let’s do it!” Then I throw myself into work. Once in a while my wife calls; having twisted herself into a knot, she’s unraveling fast. It’s not just my ulcer she’s frantic about. She’s convinced my ulcer is responsible for her lack of pregnancy. I don’t have an ulcer, yet I feel telling her this might not be entirely welcomed news.
At any rate I sit here at the Metal Shredders, wishing instead I was scurrying about to important meetings in some I. M. Pei office building, running down marbled hallways, silk tie flying, briefcase swinging, slapping the elevator door as it closes in my face. Not the wildest fantasy perhaps, but it’s better than the yellow and pink carbons that have stained my hands the color of a lifelong smoker’s.
Right now I’m going over Accounts Receivable. The books are a mess. I’m not keeping up my end. The debits don’t equal the credits, not that they ever have, and now I have to send out the bills again. Bonner Senior says I don’t need a secretary, but I do. Someone to address envelopes. Put stamps on them. Find a mailbox. Make a decent cup of coffee and throw a PowerBoy into the toilet. I can’t stand it. I’m planning to go nights for an MBA. An MBA should rocket me out of here. With offers storming in even my dad, Bonner Senior, won’t want to hold me back.
I look out the window. It’s depressing here. The office is a prefab aluminum box with a flat roof that frightens me during snowfalls. In the summer I worry about frying like an egg. Even with a fan turned on my face, my insides boil so bad I might pop. I could go outside, but that means having something specific to do. The office is built on stilts, and I would look pretty stupid walking down the steps and standing at the bottom doing nothing until I was so embarrassed I simply walked back up. I know this because I’ve done it. So I’m stuck up here. Thus, the four brown bags for lunch.
Presumably I’m up here on stilts so I can see what’s going on. This means I have a panoramic view of stacks and stacks of wrecked cars. I feel like a demented air-traffic controller madly conducting crashes. And what is going on under my watchful eye? My workers hide out during the day and emerge at night when it’s time to go home. Working, sleeping, or drinking, I don’t know. When they want to hide, even binoculars can’t find them. During lunch I might see them playing Mad Max with Uzi water pistols. They’re very much into these kinds of games. Man against scrap metal. One feeds the other, it’s a symbiotic relationship between workplace and futuristic metal movies.
The Shredders, with its high rises of scrap as the buildings and the greasy apron as our future farmland, displays a nuclear winter already in progress—bizarre metal appendages, fossils of Skylarks and Chryslers from the twentieth century. Man-eating machines. It’s the new classic confrontation. It’s true that one time a machine really did eat someone; we had an accident and he slipped right through the tunnel of the shredder with barely time to scream. The shredder is fast and powerful. It hardly does to say it wasn’t a pretty sight. It was hardly a sight at all. But that’s another story. A story, I’m sad to say, I tell to friends whose usual reaction is to laugh their heads off.
And during the rest of the day when the workers aren’t playing Mad Max? If I see them at all, they’re under the hoods of their own cars, then under the hoods of their co-workers’ cars. To a man they drive horrible bombs, disgusting big hunks pieced together with junk from the even more disgusting cars we’ve shredded, and after barely making it to work only to break down at the entrance, they spend all day fixing them so they can barely make it home. The paycheck never makes a round trip either. Overseeing them is not what I envisioned as a career. That is, a Business Career. You think:
People who take taxis
People who know what checkbooks are
You don’t think:
Squished cars
Men who squish cars
Stealing their lunches
Being within a hundred miles of them
I go back to Accounts Receivable and try to bear down. But my eyes keep wandering to Accounts Payable and all these invoices that don’t sound familiar. There’s a bunch from Laskow’s U-Pullem. Who’s been pulling what? I’ll have to ask Bonner Senior about this. He often does things without telling me.
It’s quiet now at my desk. Outside, the noise is stopping. The machines are powering down. The shriek of metal slows to a high scratch; I shiver until it’s over. There’s no traffic beyond the fences. Suddenly it’s very quiet and it’s like one of those things, a hammer bashing you over the head. It feels so good when it stops. The silence is wonderful. I lean back and listen to it. It feels good. I put my feet up on the desk. I’m in charge of the place. Just great. And I close my eyes.
The door is kicked open. Tony, our arc welder, walks into the office and strides over to the time cards as if he owns the place. He picks up the cards and shuffles through them. I barely, just barely, open my eyes and glare at him. A thick fur runs up his forearms, onto his upper arms and into the sleeves where it burrows under his T-shirt in a buoyant layer. Even through the hair I can see the speckles of welding burns on his skin.
Tony stands by the time clock. “Hello Tony,” I say in a monotone. There’s no answer. I think longingly of my MBA.
From the deck of time sheets Tony selects a card. He looks at his watch and makes an obvious gesture of checking it against the clock. “Mr. Greenjeans is late again,” he says.
This time I don’t answer.
“More than his usual half hour.”
“Those seats have to be welded in,” I tell him.
“I got some nice cream-colored upholstery,” he says.
“Well slap it in. Do some welding for a change.”
“Jesus it stinks. You’ll never get that smell out. I can’t even go near it.”
We picked up a car declared unsalvageable by the county attorney because of the odor (some corpses stored in the trunk). My dad has a friend, Mike Charny, who works at the county attorney’s, and we get a lot of interesting junk coming our way from their office. This one is a good deal. An ‘86 LTD. Mechanically it’s perfect, but the interior has been ruined. We’re going to throw in some new seats and a bunch of air fresheners and put it in our auction.
“Well go near it anyway,” I tell him.
“Go near it anyway, he says.” Tony picks up the beaker from the Bunn machine and swirls the coffee. “You got a cup? And I tell you another thing,” he says, grabbing the mug from my hand and thrusting it in my face. “Them dawgs going to come around. That’s dead meat they’re smelling.”
“Well clean it up for Crissakes.”
“Listen to him. What’d I just tell you? I put a bandana around my mouth. I still can’t go near there. It looks like Greenjeans to the rescue.”
“Leave him alone, Tony. He’s just our night watchman. He’s an old man.”
“The smelling section of his brain is gone.”
“How do you know?” I ask. This kind of interests me.
“He had an operation knocked it out.”
“What operation when?”
“Brain surgery. I don’t know!”
My legs are still plopped up on the desk. Tony walks over to me and looks down at my crotch. “I need in,” he says. He drives his hand between my legs—I barely avoid clocking him on the jaw with my boot as I jerk down my legs—and fiddles inside the drawer of my desk.
“Don’t get nervous,” he says.
“What are you doing, Tony?”
“I need the key to the tow truck.”
I fling his hand aside and dip my fingers into the well that holds the tow truck keys. They’re gone. “What do you need them for?”
“Your old man has a job for me.”
I lift the tray and search the rest of my desk drawer. “Where the hell are they, Tony?”
“Anybody sign out?”
We start scattering papers for the clipboard that’s not hanging on the nail where it should be. Tony finds it by the coffee machine. The last entry is not only coffee-stained, it’s over six months old. Tony shrugs, brushes and straightens the top page like it’s a wrinkled shirt, and hangs it back on the nail. Coffee-yellowed, it seems as ancient and discarded as the concept of organization behind it. Tony reads the page. “Supposedly Thompson was the last person to use it.”
“That helps,” I say. I lean back and laugh. Thompson is dead.
Tony grabs a chair, swivels it around, and hikes a leg over it. “You’ve got a great sense of humor,” he mumbles. Then he plops his chin on the backrest while he stares into space with the rubbery-faced intensity of a bulldog. Thompson was a friend of his—not a great friend, but a friend. He and Tony succeeded in transforming the Metal Shredders into a brewery and personal car repair shop. Too much of the first and not enough of the second led to his demise.
For years there’s been talk of a pack of wild dogs in the area, and Thompson proved it wasn’t just myth. He broke down not too far from here after going with Tony to one of those desolate bars that always manage to spring up in desolate places. Thompson knew about the dogs of course. They were legend, often talked about but never quite seen directly except by the friend of a friend. A lot of people didn’t buy their existence at all, but Thompson must have believed it enough not to start walking but not enough to stay locked in his car. He stood out on the hardtop and worked under the hood, and I suppose being drunk destroyed his reflexes or his hearing. It scared us all when we found out, but there was a certain thrill to it too. Frankly, it was the first time I was glad the office was built on stilts. If Tony knew the story I told about it, prefaced by a hilarious description of his friend (extremely short with arms as long as an oragutan’s), I don’t know what he would do to me. Well, now I can add a punch line to the story: at least Thompson did one thing right before he died. He signed out the tow truck.
“Tony,” I say, “it suddenly occurs to me that you used the tow truck the day before yesterday.”
“I put the keys back,” Tony mumbles. Now he’s staring at the floor and his mouth is open and sucking the back of his hand.
I hold up the invoice from Laskow’s U-Pullem. “So is this you?”
Tony raises his head long enough to give me this look, this look that says, How stupid can you be? Then his face, smooth from stretching toward me, plops back on his hand and is instantly mushed into oatmeal.
I reach down to my bottom drawer, try to open it, kick it, remember to crack the top drawer to unhinge it, and reach down for the rest of my food. I’m reluctant to bring it out because I’ll have to offer some to Tony and I want it all for myself. But I have to have something. I’ve got to eat.
I bring out half of a turkey and cheese submarine from Lawson’s and pick off the cellophane. (My lunch is augmented in pit stops at several stores during my morning commute—I’m even embarrassed to tell my wife how much I’m eating and too embarrassed to buy it all in one place.) The guts of the sub have gotten nice and soggy, the way I like it, and I grab a bite before reluctantly holding it out to Tony, who shakes his head no. Just as I’m inwardly celebrating his refusal he asks, “What else you got in there?” I make an elaborate show of looking down in my drawer to find him something good. My hand brushes aside a Drake’s apple pie and I resurface with a rock-hard, skinny cigar of jerky. “Slim Jim?” I ask.
“Un-uh,” Tony says. “I’m in the mood for something sweet. You got anything sweet?”
At first I’m convinced that Tony, having heard the telltale crinkle of cellophane when my hand hit the Drake’s pie, is just being a sadist. When I toss him the pastry, he rips off the wrapping without even bothering to check what fruit flavor he’s received (unless he has package colors memorized, green for apple), breaks the crescent pie in half, and devours it in a continuous gulp with three spasms of his throat that pass as bites. To my complete surprise he hands the other half back to me, having some notion of fairness after all, and appears to give the pie no further thought. I don’t think he even noticed what he was eating, and just as briefly as he savored the taste, he now seems to have forgotten completely about it. This is like sex, I think. This is how a man is supposed to be. This is how I’m not. Ask my wife, no don’t.
My wife. Thinking about her does me no good. I squirm in my seat and my face grows hot. Tony’s face is still mashed into the back of his chair. It’s about time to go home. But I have a few minutes. I reach into my drawer and pull out my Slim Jim. When I hear rattling on the metal stairway, I chomp quickly and throw it back into its hiding place.
The slow-climbing footsteps have a crisp hollowness that reminds me of autumn. Tony is about to say something smart about the footspeed of our night watchman when the window reveals the bold gray hair of my father. Tony jumps up as soon as he notices him. His lower body is an empty pyramid where he’s standing over his chair, his upper body a masquerade of attentiveness.
My father opens the door and does a stomping routine as though it’s winter out (it’s late spring). “Been welded to that chair since yesterday,” he says.
I watch as Tony goes from at-ease to attention. He swings his leg over the backrest and brings his thighs together. He fusses with the chair, rolling it on its casters until he has it arranged under a table. But he makes no response. After all, Bonner Senior could have been addressing me.
My father takes off his jacket with excruciating precision. We wait silently. Then he turns and fixes a neutral gaze on Tony. All I feel is relief.
“What?” Tony finally says, shrugging. He quickly twists up his palms. Bonner Senior doesn’t answer and Tony gets nervous. Having nowhere to go, he walks in a circle. With all his hair he looks like a caged animal.
Bonner Senior doesn’t bother with any niceties. He just says, “Why were you sitting down?”
“Well, Mr. Bonner…”
“Do I pay you to sit down?”
“I was trying to discuss the time card situation with Mr. Bonner. I mean… not you, I mean your son.”
It takes a lot to make Tony call me Mr. Bonner. Watching him squirm isn’t pleasant. I know how he feels. My stomach starts to burn. I feel a flush creep up my chest.
Bonner Senior straddles the corner of my desk and aims his crotch directly at Tony. “I guess this means the car’s all done?”
“I have located the problem,” Tony says. This is his answer to a yes-or-no question.
“And?” Bonner Senior throws out his hand like a friendly politician fielding questions.
Tony responds by looking at me. His glance is followed by my father’s.
“The car’s outside,” I say.
“And?”
“And? And nothing. The car from Mike. It’s outside. Tony’s in the middle of putting in new seats.” I try to sound casually dismissive, but by now the traitorous flush has attacked my neck and face.
“Your son is right,” Tony says.
“Well, this should have been completed by now.”
Quick, clumping footsteps sound a brief reprieve. In a second the door opens and men move quickly to the time clock. Bonner Senior takes advantage of the noisy flow. “Why didn’t you get on this earlier?” he enunciates, facing me in an exaggerated way so that Tony can’t read his lips. “We have an auction on Monday, remember?” His eyes attempt to pull a comprehending nod out of me.
My own eyes want to oblige, but they’re suddenly riveted to a spot on the desk. Looking at it from my father’s point of view, I can imagine how he feels. My blank sockets must resemble a stalled slot machine; no doubt the butt of his hand is twitching with the urge to unjam me.
But he regards me impassively. Control is his only expression. “You didn’t forget that, did you?” It’s a question, but it’s asked in the imperative voice.
I look up at him, completely lost. It’s like one of those school amnesia dreams. My skin is a mess. I imagine by now there’s a violet tinge to the redness. “Is this ringing a bell?” my father finally asks.
Yeah, it’s ringing a bell. A school bell. And I’m getting one of those school sweats. MBA classes don’t look so good right now. I pretend to watch the men clocking out, check to see they’re doing it right. As they pass my desk, they nod respectfully but wordlessly to my father and sneak a quick eyeful of me.
Bonner Senior’s eyes and mouth clamp shut, vents closing down to prevent steam from escaping. He’s aware of the presence of these men, so he begins a soft explanation about the auction on Monday.
Men are still beating a path by our desk. Bonner Senior keeps his back to them as he talks to me. But he can feel their glances lingering longer than necessary, and once in a while he turns around to face them. This is enough to shoosh them away. Tony stays in the corner, rocking stiffly on his bowlegs.
“Okay,” I say after the explanation. “I’m up to speed now.”
Bonner Senior sits down slowly and gives me a sorrowful look. I can’t stand to meet his gaze. I turn to Accounts Payable and flop through the bills. “It’s here somewhere,” I say, though I haven’t a clue what I’m referring to. I scatter some invoices around, I check my bottom drawer, which contains nothing but food. I do anything to avoid looking up into his face. Bowlegged Tony is standing like a wishbone, taking it all in. “Okay, so…” I mumble. I stand up. “I guess we’d better get started.”
Bonner Senior pushes back his chair in obvious relief.
“There’s a problem of odor,” Tony says.
“You heard the man, Tony.” Bonner Senior’s already at the door.
Outside, I see that our night watchman has arrived. Mr. Joe Greenslade is talking with Marcus, the only other worker who hasn’t scattered homeward.
“Joe,” my dad acknowledges.
Mr. Greenslade bows. He’s old, and he has slow, elaborate manners.
“I’ve got something I want you to do,” Tony tells him. Greenslade bows deeply. Tony motions for him to follow but Greenslade heads for the stairs, oblivious. Tony is forced to pull him off the bottom step to make his point. Greenslade hangs onto the railing and stands for a few seconds to get his bearings. He’s an old man. Balance is a problem with him. But he’s not annoyed. There’s a big smile on his face.
Meanwhile, Bonner Senior is pointing Tony toward the car. “Come here,” Tony says to all of us. Marcus, at least, is willing to edge closer. I throw my support to Marcus and leave Bonner Senior standing alone. “I want to show you something,” Tony says. “Just come here.”
We get closer to the car. An odd smell creeps into the edges.
“That can be taken care of,” Bonner Senior informs us when he sees our faces cringing.
Tony hides his nose inside the collar of his shirt. He stands as far from the trunk as possible. With his left foot poised to run, he uses his right arm to flip open the trunk.
“Jesus! God!” The smell is overpowering. We immediately run in the opposite direction, stumbling over Greenslade, who’s still shuffling toward the car. At a safe distance we turn around.
“Guess I’ll head home now, Mr. Bonner,” Marcus says.
Mr. Greenslade is the only one who doesn’t want to escape. He steers himself back on course after being run into, and slowly makes his way through the dizzy landmines of middle and inner ear disturbances until he’s next to the car.
“See I told you!” Tony shouts with excitement. “His smeller’s gone.”
“I got vertigo is all,” Greenslade says, leaning on the car.
“Look at him! It doesn’t bother him. He’s perfect for the job.”
Once his balance is restored, Greenslade looks into the trunk and smiles. His old body is built like a stepladder, straight but on a slant. At one time he must have been a strong man. His pelvis is wide for a male, though with no flesh on his buttocks, and his back, shrunken from arthritis, is now planted in his hip bed at a size too small. Though he’s officially our night watchman, his main job is to dial 911 if something goes wrong enough to wake him. I’m not sure he can even handle that. He talks with a stutter, whether from excitement, old age, or a speech impediment I haven’t a clue. Yes we tried getting younger ones, but they have a problem called not showing up. We were thinking of just bagging it and getting a guard dog instead, a Doberman or a German Shepherd, but the wild dogs put an end to that notion. The theory of the wild dogs is that they used to be respectable pets that somehow “turned.” Apparently they’re now like a gang of hoodlums on a rampage, corrupting other innocent canines in their path, their numbers ever growing. Nobody wants a guard dog that might become one of their new recruits.
Greenslade removes his head from the trunk of the car. “S-s-s-ome… went on here,” he remarks. He turns to Bonner Senior with a dry laugh.
“There were a couple of bodies in there for a while,” the Senior says. Mr. Greenslade lifts his head. “I say there was a corpse in there.”
Greenslade nods knowingly. “Thought so,” he says. He starts his shuffle over toward my dad. Marcus’s ears perk up at the mention of corpses, and he shuts the door to his pickup and slides over.
Greenslade’s got his thumb jerking over his shoulder, and his head bouncing away to the rhythm of his stutter. But he can’t get the words out.
“What bodies?” Marcus asks.
Tony’s flipping his hands at everyone. “I know this story already.” He puts his face down to Mr. Greenslade’s. “A man body and a girl body.” He intertwines his fingers and thrusts them up to the old man’s eyes.
Greenslade rubs his kidneys while he considers this. “W-w-w they engaged to be married?”
“They were either engaged, Joe, or they were married already.” Bonner Senior shrugs soberly, the best answer he can give to a good question. I watch him as he tells the story to the group. He’s a man in charge with a studied version of the common touch. Physically he looks like the type who always plays the sheriff on TV westerns like The Big Valley or Bonanza—thick whitish hair, stately, retirement handsome, authoritative but deferential to the right people, the Barkeleys, the Cartwrights, and Mike Charny at the county attorney’s.
The story, as the sheriff relates it, is that a man and a woman from North Carolina were going to buy some marijuana. They were dealers. “Do you believe it?” Tony interrupts. “Small time.” But for having heard it all before, Tony remains pressed to my father’s side for the rest of the story. In no time his tough face inherits the look of a child.
“Anyway, the woman was driving,” the Senior continues. “The man was in the passenger seat with a briefcase of money. The supplier told him to come back into the garage. When he did, somebody with an Uzi was waiting for him.”
“Was he a, a…” Greenslade starts to ask but spots Marcus, who is black, and stops.
“A Mexican,” my dad says.
“Yeah,” Greenslade agrees happily. He grins reassuringly at Marcus.
“He opened fire and killed the guy. The woman of course had no chance to escape. She knew she was done for.”
“Yeah,” Tony chuckles. They’re coming to his favorite part.
“What happened?”
“Shot her up right in the car. About sixteen bullets.”
Greenslade has to bend over, his delight is so great. He gets dizzy again and Marcus helps him straighten up.
“They caught the men, by the way,” my father adds. “And listen to this explanation. The guy claims he didn’t mean to shoot them. His finger kept slipping.”
“Yeah right…,” Tony agrees.
Marcus stretches out his chin to ask something.
“They hid them in the trunk, Marcus,” my dad preempts. “A couple of weeks at least.”
Marcus, satisfied, retracts his neck.
“Oh,” my dad remarks, “here’s something interesting. When they did the autopsy on the woman, guess what they found? An old bullet in her from a previous run-in. An old bullet, Joe. She’d been shot before.”
With this, Greenslade—barely recovered from his last jag of laughter—is forced to sputter anew.
“He likes hearing about dead girls,” Tony says. He stares at Greenslade’s shaking body. Then he pokes him.
“Don’t poke,” my dad says.
Greenslade waves him off, still laughing. “It’s all right. W-w-w-where was that bullet located?”
“Turns you on, don’t it?” Tony’s saying.
“I don’t know, Joe,” my dad answers. “Near the heart, I imagine. Too dangerous to remove.”
“In the chest,” Mr. Greenslade observes.
I decide to put an end to this. “Well, this is an interesting story, it’s all well and good, but the fact remains that you’ll never get the stink out.”
“It smells?” Greenslade asks.
Tony rolls his thumb toward the old man. “I told you!”
“I don’t mind driving it,” the old man offers.
“I’ll keep that in mind, Joe.” My dad accords him a weighty nod.
“We don’t need anyone to drive it, dingbat!” Tony yells.
Greenslade shakes his head, thoroughly amused. “Dingbat…” he mutters.
I leave the group to their merriment and head for the stairs. Once inside the office I call Sharon and tell her I’ll be a little late. I’ll just meet her and the others at the fern bar she’s got picked out. She says okay. Is she withdrawn or simply unannoyed? It’s not like her to be calm. “Are you alone?” I ask. She hangs up on me. She’s probably alone wishing she weren’t. It’s my fault. She wants a baby that looks like Bonner Senior. Strong planed features, unethnic but nicely tanned, no freckles. Dark brown hair. But I tell her, Look at my mother and that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a redhead, it’s like a tungsten gene, it’s strong, it’ll burst through anything.
Bonner Senior opens the door and goes through his midwinter stomping routine again. “I’ve got them fixed up with some industrial-strength cleaner. That should keep them busy.” He takes a seat across from me. “It’s true. Old Joe Greenslade doesn’t smell a thing. It’s mighty peculiar.” This sounds kind of like Bonanza talk. He crosses his legs; then his arms. “Marcus has gone home,” he adds. “You’ll have to get some lime to deodorize it.”
I poke my chin toward the phone. “Had to call Sharon.”
He leans quickly over my desk. “Can you do that?” His eyes flicker at me, accusatory, searching, long-suffering. “The lime?” He fastens me with another look, the kind of look aching to be topped off with a cowboy hat. “Don’t put Tony in charge of it. Do it yourself. Tony’s a welder. End of story.” He falls back in his chair.
“You don’t have him on a welding job right now,” I say, a real edge of anger in my voice. “But you don’t seem to mind that.” I try to control the heat in my face by flipping through a gift catalog. A Master Desk Appointment Log bespeaks my position in the world with its aura of authority. It promises a quantum leap forward.
I can feel my dad’s eyes burning through me as I try to appear engrossed in the World Holiday Labels, an easy way to remember important holidays in different countries. Of course, the red blotches have started and it’s clear I’m not engrossed in anything.
“Look,” my dad begins. “If you’re not happy in your job…”
“If you’re not happy with the job I’m doing,” I retort.
His back and arms push the chair to its maximum give. “I’m happy with the job you’re doing.” He holds up his hands to stop me from butting in. “For the most part. I just think you need”—the chair squeaks up and down—“a little more management skill.”
Have Chris set up NY appointment. Study ad campaign of Sloane. Set up executive vacation schedule. I read from the list of sample entries on the Master Desk Appointment Log. They’ve even got them handwritten. This is management skill. I close the catalog and toss it aside.
“Enough of that kind of talk,” Bonner Senior announces. “We’ll get you straightened out. Any news on the home front?” His chin indicates the phone.
“No,” I say. “Sharon’s fine.”
“But no new news to report?”
“No new news.”
“Okaaay.” He stretches and stands up. “Any plans on the docket tonight?”
“Going out with some friends. Nothing major.”
“Well, according to your mother, she has something planned for me. Dinner, I guess. Or a movie. We’ll see. Got to keep them happy, right? I’m willing to go along with it.”
This is what I hate most, I want to tell him. Because you have good things to tell me about metal shredding doesn’t mean you have good things to tell me about life.
He opens the door and waves without turning around. I get up, watch him go down the steps and into his car. He backs the car up to Tony and Mr. Greenslade, hangs out the window with his instructions, then gives them the same kind of blind wave as he drives off.
I stand at the top of the stairs. Greenslade’s got the hose out and is spraying into the trunk. “Are you guys almost finished?” I yell. They don’t hear me so I clamber down the steps. A piece of paper floats in the air and I clamp it down with my foot. When I stoop to pick it up, I retrieve a hundred-dollar bill. The first thing I do is stuff it in my pocket, stand up straight, check to see if anyone saw me, and run back up the stairs. I lean against the office wall and huff from nerves and exertion. I am seriously out of shape. I take out the hundred-dollar bill and examine it. It’s Benjamin Franklin and he’s staring right at me. Is this Uncle Sam’s way of keeping you honest—aren’t the lower denominations kind of profiles? I put the bill back in my pocket, but then I can’t help myself. I slip it out again and bring it up to my nose. It smells. It smells bad.
A clod of gravel sprays against the office window. Tony’s outside hollering. I open the door. “Come here! Come here!” he’s screaming. “Jesus, come here!”
Money is flying in all directions from the trunk. “Get it out, man!” Tony is yelling to Greenslade, who’s frantically unearthing the trunk’s bowels. Even all that money can’t bring Tony closer to the trunk. He runs up to the office and flies back down with a trash bag. “Get it all!” he orders Greenslade, whose inept clawing is annoyingly ineffective. Yet neither of us can help. The smell has drawn a hostile border around the car. “Thank God for no brains,” Tony says. He jogs up and down with nerves as he watches Greenslade from a safe distance.
By the time we get all the money collected, it’s twilight. We rush up to the office, Greenslade a few minutes behind, and Tony looks in the bag like a kid looking at his Halloween candy. “How’re we going to count all this? Man, it stinks. Greenjeans is going to have to do it. In the meantime…” Greenslade opens the door, out of breath. “You’re going to have to count this, old man, it’s too stinky for us. Okay? In the meantime, we’ll divide it up.” Tony disappears into the toilet. He comes out with two more plastic bags. “Anybody have any objections?” He cocks his head in a question mark.
Greenslade and I keep quiet.
“Fine,” Tony shrugs. He hands the two empty garbage bags to Mr. Greenslade, dumps the third bag upside down. We watch as tens, twenties, and hundreds come streaming out. Tony looks down at it and up at Greenslade. “You’re not busy this evening, are you, Greenjeans?” The old man chokes on his laughter. “Here. You’re the only one can stand to touch the stuff.”
“Count,” Tony says.
“Oh yeah,” Mr. Greenslade mutters. He bends laboriously and struggles after a hundred-dollar bill.
“Not now. Never mind, go ahead.”
A bubble of snot starts to fall from Greenslade’s nose. He wipes it off with the bill. “God,” I mutter and roll my eyes at Tony.
“Yeah, just mix it up with the dead meat, old man.”
“What?” Greenslade asks.
“I said, Think you’ll finish by morning at that pace?”
Greenslade bounces his head in amusement. He slaps Tony the jokester on the shoulder. Tony backs off. “Please,” he says. “I got to get home and take a shower. Hey, I should pull out a couple of these hundreds for my date tonight. Man, I liked the part about the extra bullet in that girl’s tit. Do you think it’s true?”
“I imagine,” I say.
“It kind of turns me on. Doesn’t it turn you on, your old lady with a bullet in her tit? Hey! Greenjeans! Does Mrs. Greenjeans have an old bullet in her tit?”
“I w-w-wish.” He chuckles and again goes for Tony’s shoulder, but Tony’s too quick for him. He heads for the door and I follow. Greenslade’s bent body chases us like a slave. “Hey hey, Tony. M-m-my w-wife hasn’t got an old bullet, she’s just g-g-g an old tit.”
“Ha ha that’s great, Mr. Greenjeans, tell it to Captain Kangaroo. Don’t forget to count the money.”
Greenslade stands at the top of the stairs and watches us go down. All of a sudden he rears back and laughs as loud as his old dry throat will allow him.
“Are we leaving?” I ask Tony at the bottom of the stairs.
“Yeah.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“Get back here early in the morning. It’s Saturday, nobody’ll be here.”
“Then what?”
“Then. Then nothing. Then it’s our money.”
“But,” I say. But, I want to scream, how do we do it? What if we get caught? How do we get rid of hundred-dollar bills? Where do we go? How much at a time?
So instead I say, “What about the old man? Can we trust him?” I recognize the line from a TV show the night before.
Tony waves me off. “Hey, Greenjeans, no cheating up there. Don’t let that money start talking to you.”
Greenjeans lifts his head and emits a dry sound. His hands are on his hips. He looks happy.
“And don’t tell anyone!”
Very deliberately Greenslade draws a line across his lips. “M-m-my 1-lip…”
“Yeah we get it. Look, what can I tell you? He doesn’t have a brain. Who knows if he can even count.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I say.
“When the stink dies down, you count yours and I’ll count mine. It can’t be that much. It’s just dope money for Christ’s sake. That’s been out for years. Figures somebody from North Carolina would be into marijuana in 1987. Wearing bell-bottoms, right… I hated hippies, man, but now I’m one myself. Still running against the wind.” Tony begins to sing.
“Has this happened to you before?” I ask. “I mean, it’s not really the counting I’m worried about. I mean…”
Don’t make me do it, Tony, I think. Don’t make me whimper.
“Everything will be all right,” Tony answers. “Tomorrow we’ll get here real early, we’ll go about it very logic-minded. We won’t do anything in a hurry. We’ll send Greenjeans on his way, and then you and me will pour some after-shave on our money and figure out what to do. You can’t count on Greenjeans anyway, he’ll walk into a store and stink it up to high heaven, we just got to hope they think he’s been stuffing it under his mattress.”
“But don’t you think we should do it tonight?”
“We can’t do anything until we get rid of some of that smell. Are you willing to touch it?”
I shake my head.
“Besides… it’s late.”
A dog howls in the distance.
Tony jerks around. “Did you hear that?”
The dog howls again, followed by a chorus. The sound razors the back of my neck.
Tony rubs himself nervously. “They smell it. Shit, man, this is like a werewolf movie. They’re after my meat, man. Hey, Greenjeans! Them dogs is out. Stay inside. We’ll close the gate.”
Greenslade stays locked in his stance, that of a happy witless housewife admiring her laundry line.
“Get back inside! I said. Them dogs is out. We’ll shut the gate.”
Finally Greenslade throws back his head in a rasp of comprehension. His chuckle saws the quiet night air. Another dog howls.
Tony’s bouncing up and down. “I’m waiting for you, Bonner. I got the smell all over my jeans. Oh Jesus, let’s go.”
Tony jumps in his car. He pulls out of the gate and parks across the street. I pull in front of him. We both hop out and run across the street to the main gate, swinging it out onto the road before shutting it. “I can feel those dogs,” Tony’s saying. His hands are shaking as he fiddles with the gate chain. “They’re after me,” he says.
“Calm down, Tony.”
A rustle in the bushes propels us into the air. We twirl and come down frozen, backs pressed into the fence. When nothing happens, my hand unglues itself from the wire mesh and clamps the lock. I keep my eyes ahead. “Do you really think the dogs are coming?”
“Yes, man! They’re smelling the meat. They got Thompson, didn’t they? They got a taste for humans.”
Even Tony pauses at this last remark. Then we take off running for our cars, laughing hysterically. When I get inside and lock the door, the hysteria turns to hyperventilation. Without thinking, I take out my hundred-dollar bill and bring it up to my nose like smelling salts. The fumes clear my head. They really clear my head. My mind is working now, it’s watching Tony strut into the bank and give himself away with his hairy welding-speckled arms. A guy like that wouldn’t have money, they’ll know it, the bank’ll know it, the bank’s been trained, they know the way money smells when it’s been festering with a corpse. A chimera suddenly flits through the night; it sends me to the floor. It couldn’t get any worse. Now I’m dog meat. The car is rocking. I tell myself: The car may be rocking but the door is locked, calm down. When I resurface, Tony’s face is pressed against the windshield. For a moment we stare at each other’s distorted features.
“Can’t you start your car?” he’s yelling.
I roll down the window. “How are we going to cash it?” I ask.
“It’s cash. Cash. It’s already cashed.”
“But you can’t…”
“After the scent dies down. Don’t worry. We’ll talk tomorrow.” Tony looks around fearfully. “What’s wrong with your car? Please, man, don’t make me stand here any longer.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’ll start it up. Let’s go.”
“I’ll follow you home. I’m right behind.” He jogs toward his car. “Do you have after-shave?” I call to him. I got after-shave I hear echoed back to me. “Would you pick up some lime too for the car?” I yell. In the dark I see his body pumping.
No stories tonight, I tell myself. Sit quietly at the fern bar and don’t turn red. No spinning yarns about the Shredders. Let your friends do the talking. Don’t start on the dogs. It’ll lead to other things, a taste for humans—don’t even start. Stay sober. Talk about adoption.
I turn on the engine and pull out. Now and then I look up to see if Tony’s still behind me. His headlights bounce off the rear-view mirror and catch me in the eyes. He’s got his brights on but I don’t mind. It keeps me running smoothly, steady on the road.