An Ordinary Decent Criminal (11 page)

“Um, I dunno. There’s a 7-11 on the corner. Does that help?”

The copies of the resume went into my case along with a box of paper clips from a rack near the door, which I remembered in time to pay for.

“Actually, is there somewhere I could sit down for a cup of coffee? A restaurant, or bar, or hotel, something like that. Not a Starbucks, though.”

Her brows unclenched and she aimed me towards a commercial bakery a block away with five round tables under an awning around the side. There were four other patrons, two old men sitting by themselves and drinking small cups of coffee, and a pair of middle-aged women in pantsuits eating pastries and drinking designer bottled water. I sat down and a minute later a young man with dark, curly hair, blue eyes, and a gold earring came out, holding a menu. He was wearing a set of white overalls and an apron, and crushed into his pocket was a chef’s hat.

“Good morning, can I get you something?” His voice rolled over the consonants.

“Sure. Could I see the menu?”

He handed it over grudgingly and I noticed the flour on his hands and shoulders. I also noticed a great deal of black body hair that stuck out of the ends of his sleeves and out the top of his shirt.

“Do you work in the bakery as well?”

“Yes. With my brothers and father. We take turns taking care of the customers out here.”

“That’s fine. Could I get a large coffee with cream and sugar and whatever pastry you recommend?”

He started to smile and then recovered his game face. As he headed back to fill the order, I realized that maybe he was smiling because not many people asked his opinion. Smiley, a bad guy I’d known, had the idea that people like it when you defer to their opinion and they like it when you’re polite and ask questions. That had led him to one of his mottos: “Be nice. Nice is good. Nice sets a standard. Then, when
you get mean, the shock is strongest.” So here I was, trying to be nice (without the mean at the end), and it seemed to be working.

The baker came out with my coffee and a Danish with a dirty yellow filling. Before he could go away, I gestured to get his attention.

“Is this a cheese Danish?”

He nodded.

“A real cheese Danish? Never frozen, no preservatives, no, God help me, additives? A real, honest to God, fresh cheese Danish? I haven’t had one since Chicago years and years ago.”

“Yes, it’s real and it’s very bad for you. Enjoy.”

I did. When I was finished, I sat back and licked the tips of my fingers and then I drank some coffee. That was good but not in the same category as the Danish. When the baker came back, I accepted a refill for the coffee and motioned him close. “Do you guys do bagels too?”

He showed bad teeth in a broad smile and nodded.

“Then I’ll be back.”

Over the second coffee I clipped the copies of my resume together and then put them back into the case. Then I tipped half of the total bill and went on. I figured I could cover five or six blocks today and the same tomorrow, stopping for more resumes as needed.

When I reached home after three, I found Claire in the kitchen on her hands and knees with her head in the oven. I admired her butt and listened to Fred sleeping on a pillow under the table in the dining room.

“My favourite end.”

She didn’t turn around but a hand snaked between her legs and gave me the finger. “How’d it go?”

There was a small table under the only window in the kitchen and I sat at it and picked up an apple from the wicker bowl. “They were polite. No one refused to take a resume but no one promised me the stars and the moon. Family businesses and mom-and-pop shops.”

She pulled her head out and breathed deeply. There were spots of grease on her forearms and chin and the smell of oven cleaner was strong. “What the hell did you expect?”

She dropped the rag she was holding and came over and jumped into my lap. I shrugged and rested a hand above the comforting swell of her hip.

“I don’t know, baby. I’ve never had a job before.”

She pushed herself back a bit and looked into my face. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. Really. I’ve either stolen or been in jail. I’ve never had a job-job.”

She laughed softly and then took my hand and put it down the top of her shirt. “Well, you know what will make you feel better?”

I didn’t but she did. We would have done it a second time there on the kitchen table if Fred hadn’t woken up and started to cry.

The next day I was up at 7:00 and headed down Main and hit thirty more businesses before taking a break around noon to go back to the bakery for a bagel. It was almost, but not quite, as good as the Danish, and the cream cheese was a little too bland to be really top notch. The baker lent me a copy of the local Yellow Pages so I wasted time in the cool spring sun with a second cup of coffee and made notes on the back of one of the resumes.

“More coffee?”

“Please.”

The baker stood there for a few seconds and read over my shoulder. “Looking for a job?”

“Yes.”

He waited, I guess for me to add more but I didn’t, and he sniffed loudly. “It’s a good time of year.”

He glanced at the clouds but when I still didn’t say anything, he sniffed again and walked back into the building.

In a few seconds the anger faded. It was odd, in prison you wouldn’t think of prying into someone else’s personal space, they might kick
the shit out of you, shiv you, or fuck you. In the real world the interference seemed like a fairly common occurrence, and no one seemed to care or give it much thought. I also suspected that kicking the shit out of someone for reading over your damned shoulder would be frowned upon. The wind shifted a little and brought a dirty smell off the river and I realized that going straight was going to be hard. There were no referents, no signposts, no maps to how to behave.

There were lots of businesses listed nearby in the Yellow Pages: garages, groceries, convenience stores, five-and-dimes transformed into dollar bargain stores, bars, restaurants, and so on. All those needed untrained workers and I certainly qualified for that category but they also paid very little, about $7.25 an hour for minimum wage, according to the call I’d made to the labor board. I did the math on the corner of the resume and came to a total before taxes that would leave us with four hundred a month to live on (after rent). That’s if I could get forty hours a week.

“That’s not right.”

I did the figures again and then looked around. There were two old men sitting solo at the counter and one turned slowly and looked at me so I stared back. He was small, just over five feet tall, with long arms and a shock of white hair that swept down and blended into gray eyebrows. He was wearing khaki pants and a white button-down shirt about three sizes too big for him. His skin was deeply tanned and his eyes were small and brown with very fine lashes, like those of a young girl.

“Can I help you?”

“Depends. You looking for work?”

I folded the resume up and took a sip of the coffee. The old man didn’t look like he had a job of his own, much less that he could hire anybody, but I could be wrong.

“Sure.”

“I don’t need a lot of help but I need some. Maybe an hour’s work once a week and I’ll pay you ten under the table.”

He carried his coffee over to my table and sat down before going on. “I own an archery shop down the street and I’m getting a delivery in. I have to watch the door while someone else brings in the boxes. I’m also too old. The fucking driver won’t touch anything once the truck stops. What do you say?”

Ten bucks would cover yesterday’s coffee and today’s, so I agreed.

The old man’s shop was called The Buttes and I tried to make a joke of it.

“It’s an old English term for where you shoot a bow.”

“Oh.”

“Bet ya feel pretty stupid.”

I ignored him and he showed me where the truck was going to come up behind his place and where I should stack the boxes. Then he led me around to the front of the place and let us both in with a big ring of keys. Once inside, he took down a laminated sign hanging in the door and put it on a post with several others. As he went to turn on the lights, I read the signs. One said “Deer Season!,” another said “Gone Fishing,” and the last two said “Coffee at the Greek’s, be back soon” and “Lunch, be back later,” respectively.

“Ya gotta tell your customers straight what’s going on.”

I hung my coat and vest on a circular rack of odd-looking bows in the middle of the room and looked around at an incredible mess. Along one wall were racks of bows for rent, along another were more for sale, and several large machines full of rollers and counterweights sat near the cash register. Shelves in the middle of the room held racks of camouflage clothing, bags, accessories, quivers, and a bewildering variety of arrows and other equipment. The back end of the room was given over to two ranges about twenty yards long that ended in a wall lined with several hundred sheets of pressboard stacked on top of each other and held down by industrial-sized clamps attached to the ceiling and floor braces.

“Nice place, huh?”

“I do not have the words. Is there really this much need for archery supplies?”

The old man was checking the answering machine and making notes on a clipboard attached to the wall. “Yep. I get hunters, Olympic wannabes, target freaks, schools, and clubs. Hell, these days I even get couples coming out on dates. I do fine.”

He scratched his nose and then continued. “Now, don’t get me wrong. Business could be better. It could always be better, betcha even Izzy Asper said that. Before he died. Here, I’ll open the back door for you.”

He walked down the lane to where an old, pocked target was still pinned to the wall. Inset near one corner was a steel door with a complicated latch, which he opened and then propped into place with a stop carved from a piece of two-by-four.

“The truck should be here any time. My name’s Frank, by the by, yours is . . . ?”

“Oh. Sam Parker. Glad to meet you.”

We shook hands and then he scratched his nose again. “Well, when he comes, unload the stuff into the middle of this range here and then we’re square and I’ll pay you. Okay?”

The bell that announced customers rang in the front of the store so Frank headed off while I waited for the delivery. In twenty minutes the driver showed up, pulling a five-ton diesel truck into the back lane and scraping the buildings on both sides. The driver hopped out, bringing with him a cloud of smells, dried urine and testosterone, flatus and halitosis, and coming towards me with a rolling gait like a sailor. He was a short man with a big belly and a wart right at the corner of his left eye.

“Where’s the old man?”

I could hear archers talking inside along with the regular thud of the arrows into the target. I pointed over my shoulder. “He’s in the front. Does he have to sign for something?”

The driver pushed a battered clipboard into my hands and belched. “Yeah.”

As I took the delivery sheets back to Frank, I idly flipped the forms back to reveal that the driver had taped a centerfold to the clipboard itself. The picture was of a fat, ugly woman with bad teeth who had both hands locked into her vagina and was pulling it apart with what looked to be satisfaction at a job well done. I shuddered and flipped the pages back into place and let Frank sign.

“You look spooked.”

“Never mind.”

“You looked at the picture, didn’t ya?”

“I said never mind. I meant never mind.”

Frank scratched his nose with the tip of a broad-headed arrow. “Actually, I think it might be his wife.”

I started to walk back and he shouted at my back. “Or his sister.”

When the driver had his papers back, he opened up the side doors and stood back.

“There you fucking go. First two fucking pallets and don’t leave any fucking wrap behind. Fuck.”

The pallets were maybe two yards square at the base and three yards high, and consisted of brightly colored boxes of archery and outdoors equipment, tents, bags, and camouflage clothing. They were all wrapped in thick plastic that looked like Saran Wrap on steroids. I jumped up and looked at the pile.

“C’mon, I ain’t got all fucking day.”

There was no way around this. I grabbed hold of the edge of the plastic and started to tear it.

When I had the top layer exposed, I took the first box and looked for a place to put it. Finally I had to climb down and put it by the door. While I was doing this, the driver had retrieved a small cooler from the cab and was drinking a can of beer and eating a foot-long submarine sandwich loaded with meatballs and dripping a semi-translucent
red sludge onto the ground in front of him. He saw me looking and waved the bottle around.

“Don’t worry, it’s only fucking American beer. It’s like piss.”

It took me almost an hour to unload both pallets onto the ground. When I was done, the driver slammed the door shut and nearly took my fingers off.

“Took you fucking long enough.”

He was a small man, shorter than I by maybe a foot and a whole lot heavier, but he dwindled when I got in close. I smiled into his face and he reached for his belt, where a multi-purpose tool or folding knife was holstered in a leatherette case.