I raised up on one elbow, checking my state of affairs in the early morning light that had managed to claw its way inside through the cobwebbed windows. Although I didn’t know it then, the place hadn’t been painted since Sautin’s tenure; the intercom was also broken, a couple of wires hanging limply from a ragged hole in the wall. The windows may have been cleaned once, but there wasn’t much to look out on that would make anyone do it again. At least the floor was clean. Cold as hell, but clean.
I pulled my only pair of socks out from underneath the mattress and put them on. I hadn’t taken off the jeans and what was left of my shoes was underneath the cot. The Wake-Up Creep moved slowly to the breakfast line which started in the group ‘bedroom’ along the far wall and trailed off through the double doors of the kitchen/dining room. The place stunk of feet and urine and I’m not sure which was worse.
I laid back down, staring at the ceiling. My stomach still wasn’t right from those goddamn sandwiches, and the mere thought of food threatened more contractions. I breathed steadily in and out through my nose, trying to formulate a plan. Trying to figure out how in hell I’d get out of this one. I had no money, none! I didn’t dare go back to the parking garage because odds were the bike was gone, and if not, the cops might be staking it out. The only living people I knew had no telephones, and even if I could get in touch with Blinkie and the others, what fucking good would that do? They weren’t the kind to take desertion easy. Or well.
Sweat broke across my brow. First things first.
I had to get money. Priority one. If I had to knock off an old lady and her two crippled grandkids, so be it. At the end of the line options tend to drain away. And that’s the moment I heard another voice. The next link in my chain…
“You sick, kid?”
I snapped my head toward the sound. Another old guy, slovenly but cleaner than the last. No beard on this one and his eyes still looked as if alcohol hadn’t washed all the life out of them. He had a broom in his hands and looked like he was intimately familiar with hard manual labor; his skin was the color of a desert in the early morning. There was a small pile of dust at his feet which he patted at with his broom.
I shook my head, no.
“Don’t feel like eatin?”
“No.”
“Well, think a man oughta suit hisself,” he said. He turned around and squatted, reached underneath a nearby cot to flush something out into the open. A paper cup rolled out along with two cigarette butts. “Sonsabitches cain’t even use the gotdamn ashtrays!” he spat. I sat up and bent over to tie the laces of my shoes.
“Hey, old man,” I said. “Wouldn’t happened to know where I could make some money, would ya?”
He turned around and faced me, his eyes holding a mysterious, knowing smile. He held out the broom and said, “Ya know how ta work one a these somebitches?”
“Long as I don’t have to ride it,” I answered, and he laughed.
***
Fella’s name was Willy Williams. Told me everybody called him Chubbs. Said he knew a guy worked at a coffee warehouse several blocks down the riverfront. They’d been needing the place cleaned but weren’t gonna pay much. Said it was supposed to be a helluva mess.
When I said I was game Chubbs laughed again. “Why you ain’t even seen it!” he said. Doan matter, I told him. “I just need the address” and he readily gave it. “Talk ta Toran,” he called as I shouldered through the heavy glass door street side. I didn’t have to write anything down because I remembered passing the place the night before. Wouldn’t have if their billboard hadn’t been lit up: a leggy blond wearing ski pants and a bikini top, a big mug of something in her hand. I couldn’t remember what she was selling but I did remember those tits.
When I got there I noticed a few people milling around by the front door. I steered around back on the old man’s orders. He’d said to circle around to the loading dock through a hole in the fence which I found just like he said, find Torah, or Toran, and get to work. It all sounded pretty straight-forward to me. At the loading dock there was another group of black guys hanging out, obviously on their morning break; it was about nine o’clock. I didn’t feel comfortable approaching them out of the blue like that but no other choice presented itself. I squeezed through the fence and started over, trying to look nonchalant.
Five steps in they saw me; I heard very clearly ‘look at this muthafucka’ and the biggest one turned and yelled my way. I pretended not to hear, grinned stupidly and kept on walking. This seemed to piss off the one who’d yelled and he cut away from the knot of men, pointing back the way I came with a big, muscled forearm. It was pretty clear he didn’t like fucking trespassers but it was the only line I had.
I continued toward him, painting my face a moon of imbecility. He turned back to his boys, yelled something else I couldn’t quite make out, and hot-footed it across the back lot to meet me. I was relieved to see he didn’t look completely pissed off when he got up close, but he also didn’t look like the kind of guy people saw twice if he was.
“Wha’da fuck, kid?” he said, eyeing me up and down. “Ya doan look reta’ded an ya gotdamn show ain’t blind.”
I tried to smile but he didn’t. I swallowed hard and said, “I need to talk to Toran.”
He didn’t move. “Doan know no Toe-ran,” he said. “My name be Torand wit a ‘d’, but who da hell’s axin?”
“My name’s Jesse,” I said holding out my hand. “Chubbs said you might have some work.”
His face didn’t change but something did in his eyes.
And he didn’t run me off.
Chapter 13:A Few Dollars
Torand went and talked to the boss (a young white guy I only saw through a plate glass window while sitting quietly in the workers’ lounge), and I heard a bit of loud laughter, and I got the job. Oh yeah, I got it all right. Chubbs had been right; I soon found the place was indeed a hurricane-sized fuckin mess. But I had to go through with it. Because now I knew, invisible or not, I’d lost my edge. Just thinking about pulling a job got my hands to shaking and my heart pounding, suicide for a guy in my line. The mess with the lunatic had fucked with my head. So I was stuck with this, but (I told myself, sitting in the lounge waiting for Torand to come back) the only thing I had to do was clean the warehouse. Simple job. Right?
Wrong.
To my knowledge and experience the place had never been cleaned before. Ever. And it was about a thousand years old. Chubbs had said a coffee warehouse but that was like saying the World Trade Center had been two, tall buildings. And it wasn’t just a warehouse either; there was also the loading platform and staging area, and a huge walk-in freezer where a deep-sea fishing rig could have been hidden if necessary. It made me think of those damn ice chests again, and man, did my fuckin hands shake then.
It was Tuesday and Torand said I had till Saturday, no reason offered. Not much time. He gave me a broom with an extension handle and pointed me toward a ladder leaning by one of the bay doors. It was a heavy ten-footer but that wasn’t tall enough to get everywhere. Just the warehouse itself was several thousand square feet.
The assignment was easy enough: clean the cobwebs from the corners and ceiling. Fine and dandy, but the ceiling had plenty of recessed skylights that looked to have been the homes for countless generations of spiders and other insects. He pointed out a wash basin where several semi-clean towels dripped from a rack. Said I’d need those for the dust. He told me to start in the back, away from the rest of the men. Then he walked off.
For the next seven hours I wrestled the ladder, fought vertigo, and choked through a Saharan storm of cobweb dust and spider shit. The only good thing was I had no supervision since nobody else was willing to inhabit that swirling hell of dust. Another lucky thing turned out to be the shelving; it reached up to about six feet from the ceiling (five-and-a-half if you counted the level of dust up there), so it gave me something to stand on instead of having to drag around that damn ladder.
I also found o
ut what Torand meant about the rags: I had to soak em down and wrap em around my nose and mouth just so I could breathe. Every twenty minutes or so I’d ditch one (two black circles the size of dimes, and one the size of a coffee can) and tie on another I kept in a Ziplock bag in my back pocket. By noon I looked like Al Jolson from the bridge of the nose up; from the bridge down to my neck I was a white, sweating ghost.
I took breaks when I wanted, after all the guy was getting his warehouse cleaned for an astonishingly low price. I thought of the five hundred bucks I’d fucking lost and it almost made me as sick as that goddamn double cheeseburger had.
The only interesting thing at all were the boxes.
The place sold a little of everything, I soon discovered: holiday gift baskets, imported and domestic teas and coffees, cheeses, wraps, preserves, dried meats, European candies, and on and on. It was like some sort of archeological dig in reverse. The newer shit was closest to the floor, usually the first three shelves or so, while the higher you got, the older shit was. And up on top near the ceiling, under layer upon layer of grime and dust (many of the boxes too sun-bleached to even read) was stuff I seriously doubted management even knew existed. Inside one such box I found a nest of rats and what was left of about a thousand airline packets of peanuts. I shut the box and left them right where they were.
I even found an old box of Penthouse magazines dating back to the ‘70’s. After about twenty minutes of thumbing them through I considered jerking off but after one look at my grimy hands, decided against it. I’d sneak one or two out in my pants whenever everybody except the lock-up man had gone.
Around three or three-thirty the warehouse crew cut out. The place got a lot quieter then, taking on a more ominous pall. Most of the skylights were too grimy on the outside for the work I was doing inside to be of any effect, and the building next door blocked out most of the rest of what little light could get through. There were about ten or twelve halogen bulbs burning (about half the lights the day-crew worked under) and they struggled to hold off the demons of that choking, expansive hell hole.
I was more careful in moving the boxes by then; the box of rats had unnerved me and God only knew what else could be living up here. At a skylight near the darkest corner I found the remnants of the biggest web yet. It looked newer than a lot of the others that swung free in the fetid air near the ceiling, the strands almost as thick as horsehair and as sticky as gum on a hot, city street. While I fought to get it down my flesh crawled, my mind conjuring the monster that probably eyed me from some hidden, nearby nook, just waiting for a chance to slide down and sink its teeth into my spine or something equally deadly. It didn’t help finding the bones either. They fell from a massed corner, wrapped thickly in the dirty horsehair strands. Some kind of sparrow, all gone now save for a few feathers and a sprinkling of bones. I decided to save the rest of that area for the next day.
At five-thirty the lone, remaining black guy called me down. He had my hours written down and said I should return the next morning at seven. By then I was almost too tired to care, and I still had the walk back to the Salvation Army. The moment I stood outside on the loading platform I realized I’d not eaten the entire day. And there wouldn’t be any going back inside for a candy bar from the machine. When I’d stepped onto the platform the black guy had grabbed the garage door behind me and slammed it down to the concrete. I heard a loud click of a lock engaging and knew that was it.
Seems they didn’t want me going out through the front door.
I limped over to the hole in the fence. My back was stiff and aching from standing and reaching over my head all day. I was hawking up big, nasty, black chunks of phlegm and dreading the next morning. Just the thought of another day of that shit made me want to walk straight off one of the piers. But the thought of those bones in the web resurfaced, and I pictured my own rotting body pulled apart by catfish the size of Volkswagens near the ragged mouth of the Mississippi.
I opted for a few more days on the street. Maybe the dust and other shit would be enough to finish me off without actually having to fucking kill myself.
***
The Army was quieter that night. It had about half the men from the night before and not many newcomers. Chubbs was gone but I was willing to bet he’d be back. Probably begging for a little of the money he’d sent me to drum up. Well fuck him, I thought, scrubbing the black mess from my face in the cracked mirror over the hard-water stained sink. I figured I could make it till Saturday, and then I’d take the money and get the hell out of New Orleans. If I really busted it I could make about two hundred dollars. Not much, but enough to get the fuck out.
And where then?
I was afraid of the answer.
After my shower I hobbled into the dining room lucky to find one of the kitchen help ladling out a pot. She was a kind black lady whose tenderness reminded me of my grandmother and after taking one look at me she didn’t even have to pose the question. She told me to sit down and she’d throw something together. That ‘something’ turned out to be soup and bread, the best goddamn thing I think I’ve ever had before or since. I thanked her from the bottom of my heart when I finished and stumbled off to my cot, seeing no one, hearing nothing.
I don’t think I even took my shoes off before I went to sleep.
***
The Creeping Weirdo didn’t have to wake me the next morning. Matter of fact, I don’t even know for sure if he was there; I never saw him again. Fate took me elsewhere. I started awake suddenly, a tiny cry escaping as my eyes flew open to the semi-darkness of the dormitory. The smell is what killed the horror of the nightmare; I had been chased through row after row of coffee-slicked aisles, dogged at my heels by a spider the size of a cocker spaniel. I’d run out of room when I started awake. I’d also run out of sleep.
None of the other men were yet stirring and when I took a quick look around I didn’t see Chubbs either. I shook my head to clear it and five minutes later hurried down the street to the warehouse. The sooner I got it done the sooner I could high-tail it to…? It didn’t matter. I just wanted to be done. And I also didn’t want to be late; Torand wasn’t the kind of guy to be late on.
I raced down the dimly-lit streets, past the billboard, and hunkered into a vacant doorway right across the street from the warehouse. It was a good fifteen more minutes before first a blue Chrysler, and then a beige Crown Victoria wheeled into the parking lot. A woman got out of the Chrysler, two men from the Crown Vic. Two of the three finished smoking their cigarettes, and then they all went inside. Several minutes later the windows in the parking lot-fronted upstairs window came on. No sign of a work crew yet. I half-wished I’d hung around for breakfast but there was a snack machine in the workers’ lounge. I had enough change to make that work, at least.
I left the early morning shadows of the warehouse and circled around back, still keeping to the shadows. They’d cast me out like a stray the day before and I wanted to make sure I didn’t piss anybody off for being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. But the whole time I slunk around hunting for that torn spot in the fence, I wondered why? Why the hell was I doing this? After all, I was a thief by benefit of talent. I could have made more money stealing one purse than I did choking on spider-shit and dust all day long the day before. And now I was gonna do it again. What the fuck was I thinking?
But by the time I got to the opening in the fence I knew. I was chickenshit; I’d lost my nerve. My hands were already starting to shake just thinking about it. When had it happened? The night I found the woman in the chest? The night John bled out near the pond? When I burnt the lunatic’s house down? I didn’t know and couldn’t say, and even now I have to admit there was more to it. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind I was answering another purpose. The first piece in the purpose I fulfilled yesterday, and the last piece I will fit today before noon today.
There was no one at the loading platform as I ambled up. I thought about knocking on the back door (just the thought of th
at candy machine had my mouth watering like a trained dog) but decided to sit and wait. Surely the crew wouldn’t be much longer.
I heard the rusty grating of the garage-door rollers and stepped away from the wall. Torand walked out onto the loading platform, pretended not to see me, and yawned hugely. Flexing his arms as he did so, I experienced the image of him squeezing money from a safe. He didn’t even look my direction when he spoke.
“Les go, boy,” he called, turning back inside. I heard a lot of other voices in there. I crossed the fifteen yards separating me from the loading dock where I’d been hunkered down, placed both hands on the rubber bumper for incoming trucks, and jumped up squarely on the platform. Some of the other guys I recognized from yesterday piled through the bay door, jostling each other and talking shit. Nobody said dick to me.
Torand was waiting just inside the door, standing next to the ladder and broom. The compliment was quick but surprising. “Done awlright, yestidee. Gotta hump ta get finished, though,” and he walked away. I slipped into the workers’ lounge and got that damn candy bar, practically ate it through the wrapper. Then I went to doing the same shit I hated from the day before.
Later on that afternoon I was headed to the can. I hadn’t pissed all day and it was a little quieter than usual. I figured most everyone else was eating lunch but the candy bar had taken all the spare change I had.
The workers’ can wasn’t located by the workers’ lounge. Maybe because the lounge had been added later; from the looks of it the can had been there since the Stone Age. Probably got cleaned every fifty years or so whether it needed it or not. It was stuffed back by a utility closet and the only way to get there was to pass by the gigantic freezer all by itself in a weirdly humid room just inside the last set of bay doors. The closer I got I could hear voices coming from there. Two of em and not any of the crew’s. I recognized the first voice as Mike’s, the owner or boss or whatever, but the second was unfamiliar.