Trust (13 page)

“So we come back here, and I say to Waldo: ‘Hey, I hate to tell you this, but before Mikey starts with the paint sprayers there, I think he’d better straighten the frame.’ Not that I ever see one of those jobs that really did what it’s supposed to. They put the damned chains on and pull it and haul it, but it never turns out so it’s true. And Waldo just looks at me, and then he says, well I have got to be nuts. A frame job on that thing’s a four-dollar bill, and he’s not gonna part with the money.

“So, I don’t know,” Fritchie said. “I think Waldo might have to eat this one. Nobody smart enough to earn the kind of money he expects to get for it’s dumb enough to buy it. And the ones stupid enough to buy it, they’re too dumb to have the dough.”

It was nearly 4:30 when Earl called the apartment again. The line was busy. He called again at 4:45. There was no answer. He called at fifteen-minute intervals between then and six, when he took his dinner hour for pizza at the Pleasant Café on Washington Street and stopped to buy two six-packs of Budweiser and two jugs of Almaden wine—one California Mountain
Red, one California Mountain Rosé—at Barney’s in the Square. He got no answer to the eight calls he placed between 7:10 and 9:05, time that he spent alone in the showroom before turning off the lights and locking up for the holiday.

The apartment in Somerville was dark when he opened the door, struggling with his bags from Barney’s while he groped in the dim hallway light for the lock. He shut the door with his right heel and turned on the overhead light in the hallway with his left elbow. He went into the kitchen and put the bags down on the counter. There was a note taped to the refrigerator door:

Earl opened the refrigerator. Penny had removed the top shelf to accommodate the enormous turkey thawing on the second shelf. She had relocated all his beer to nooks and crannies among the pickle jars, cans of Pepsi, the bunches of carrots and celery, the English muffins and bread, and the cartons of cottage cheese jumbled on the lower shelves. She had put three cans on the shelves built into the door. He stared at the disorder for a while. Then he removed the turkey, cold and wet in its plastic shroud, oozing water and blood, and put it in the sink. He found the top shelf in the space between the side of the refrigerator and the cabinet that housed the sink. He replaced it in the refrigerator. He put his beer back in its regular place: two rows of six cans each stacked against the right inner wall of the refrigerator. He went to the Barney’s bags and took out the two fresh six-packs. He stacked them next to the old supply. Then he recovered the scattered Pepsi cans and arranged them next to the beer. He took two of the cold beers and shut the door. He went into the living-dining room without turning on the light and sat down in the chair at the end of the table nearest the door. He cracked the first beer and drank half of it,
sitting in the faint light from the streetlamp outside, and thinking.

It was just after 2:00
A.M.
on Thanksgiving when Earl went to bed. There were thirteen empty beer cans stacked in a five-four-three-one pyramid cluster on the lemon-scented polished table, with another, half full, balanced on the top. He did not undress, except for his shoes. He got up to urinate twice, once while it was still dark and once when it had begun to get light. He noticed that rain was driving against the frosted glass of the bathroom window, and that there seemed to be some crusted material on his shirtfront. He got up at 3:20
P.M.
, this time switching on the fluorescent light over the mirror in the bathroom. He was able to identify the crusted material as the semidigested remains of the pizza he had had for supper the night before. He removed the shirt and dropped it on the floor. He brushed his teeth and rinsed. In his stocking feet, pants, and undershirt, he went into the kitchen, noticing as he passed through the bedroom that the pillow-case, sheet, and blanket were also encrusted.

The turkey had thawed completely in the sink; he prodded it with his forefinger—the breast was soft and yielding. He opened the refrigerator and got two cans of beer. He returned to the living-dining room and turned on the football game. He sat down in his black vinyl armchair next to the window that looked out on Cedar Street. He put his feet up on the matching ottoman, opened the first beer, and drank. The game between the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers was over. He watched the San Francisco 49ers play the Los Angeles Rams in brilliant sunlight in the Coliseum. “That’s where I should be,” Earl said. “Some
place where it’s fuckin’ warm, and isn’t raining all the time.” As he drained each beer, he set the empty in the row he was arranging on the windowsill.

The news came on after the game was over. He learned that nine people had died in highway accidents in New England since the start of the four-day holiday, and that police, while pleading with motorists to drive carefully, had called out all available manpower to patrol the highways, looking especially for drunk drivers and speeders. A spokesman for Logan International Airport said that passenger traffic through the terminals had been light, and that the last departures and arrivals delivering passengers to family reunions at 1:40 that morning had justified Wednesday’s traditional reputation of being the busiest travel day in the year. The Red Cross had announced that it was critically short of blood supplies, particularly type O negative, and urged all potential donors to report immediately to any one of seven convenient locations that would be open all night in the Greater Boston area. The cardinal archbishop of Boston had joined volunteers serving Thanksgiving dinner “with all the fixin’s” to toothless, hairless, and confused residents of two Roman Catholic homes for the elderly; the diners gaped dazzled into the camera lights as the prelate held compartmented metal trays of food under their chins, and beamed into the lens. The weatherman predicted rain ending shortly after midnight, with the skies clearing and temperatures “in the balmy low sixties” for Friday and Saturday, but feared that another moisture-laden warm front moving up the coast from the Carolinas would bring more rain on Sunday, “just when most will be leaving for the long return trip home.” He reminded
motorists that roads would be slick, and that police would be out in force. The sports reporter hurried over the professional football scores and said that the Celtics would be leaving in the morning for their game with the Knicks Friday night at Madison Square Garden, after enjoying two days off at home with their families; John Havlicek, who had suffered a slight ankle sprain in Tuesday night’s game against the Pistons at Boston Garden, was expected to start. The announcer commented on film of the high school football games between Wellesley and Natick, and Brockton and Framingham, “played in a sea of mud,” before introducing a long list of other scores in white lettering that crawled down a blue screen against background music—the fight songs first of Georgia Tech and then of USC.

Earl finished his last beer shortly after 9:30. He put it at the end of the row he had arranged on the windowsill beside him. After urinating for the fourth time since he had gotten out of bed, he returned to the kitchen and took the jug of rosé wine from the Barney’s bag. He got the cork stopper out and took a tumbler from the cabinet over the sink. He put four ice cubes in the tumbler and filled it with wine. He replaced the stopper in the jug and put it in the refrigerator on the top shelf, on its side. He punched the turkey lightly and returned to the living room, momentarily and vaguely surprised to see that he had begun watching
The Sound of Music.
“Well, why the fuck not?” he said to the screen. “I’m a fuckin’ human being. This is my day off. I got some fuckin’ rights.” He sat down in the chair again.

When he awoke there was a constant blizzard of gray snow on the screen, and an insistent, hissing buzz
from the speaker. It was dark outside the window. He was surprised again when he saw the jug of rosé, nearly empty, on the floor beside him. He lurched his way into the bedroom and groped on the bureau until he found Penny’s alarm clock behind the upraised cover of her jewelry box. “Twenty past nine,” he said. “Fuck it, so I’m late. ‘You gonna do about it, Waldo, huh? You gonna fuckin’
fire
me? Well, fuckin’ fire me, then get it fuckin’ over with.’ ” He collapsed onto Penny’s side of the bed and resumed sleeping almost at once.

Earl awoke shortly before 7:00 on Friday morning, sprawled on top of the quilt on Penny’s side of the bed. He had a desperate urge to urinate, but held back until he had looked around the bedroom and identified enough objects to satisfy himself of where he was. His neck and shoulder muscles on the left were slighly stiff, and he felt somewhat groggy, but he knew what to do. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head lowered, and pressed the heels of his hands down against the mattress until his mind began to clear. Then he stood up and went into the bathroom. He relieved himself, and brushed his teeth twice, repeatedly rinsing with cold water and a gargle of mint-flavored mouthwash.

He shut the bathroom door. He took off his clothes and turned on the shower, three parts hot to one cold, and stuck the plastic curtain wetly to the pink tile tub enclosure in order to trap as much steam as possible. When the steam began to billow above the curtain rod, he stepped into the tub, shivering and flinching as the hot water sprayed over him, and gritting his teeth. “Poison goes out through the pores,” he remembered,
“poison goes out through the pores.” He recalled his father’s daily ritual of showering in cold water: “People ask me,” he would say, at every opportunity, “how I stop my teeth from chattering. ‘Why, it’s easy. I leave ’em in the glass on the commode till I get out and dry.’ ” The old man was all right. Had been, at least, or would’ve been if Donsie hadn’t set his mind against Earl.

The heat reddened Earl’s skin and made him sweat. He put his hands on his pelvis and arched his back, bending and stretching his torso down-up, right-left, twenty times. Then he turned around and put first his right foot and then his left on the faucet that let water into the tub, tensing and relaxing the muscles in his calves and thighs; he did that twenty times with each leg. When he felt limber, he soaped himself all over and then shampooed, rinsing all the lather off at once. He shut off the water and stepped out of the tub, his skin very red, and grabbed the big, rough, white bath towel that Penny saved for her weekly sessions of bubble bath with oil. “Close those pores, close those pores,” he muttered, rubbing himself vigorously and soaking the towel through. He wrapped it around his waist and opened the door to let the steam out. He returned to the sink and used Penny’s facecloth to wipe the condensation off the mirror. He shaved and rinsed his face, splashing on heavily spiced Jade East shaving lotion. He dropped the towel on top of his dirty clothes and returned to the bedroom, naked. He felt wonderful, and hungry, and he dressed rapidly in khaki pants, a clean pink shirt, a maroon tie with narrow gold and silver stripes, and his maroon blazer, thinking of the $1.89 Special Breakfast served at Dean’s Red Spot at
the intersection of Massachusetts and Western avenues in Central Square in Cambridge. He checked his wallet after he had slipped on his brown loafers. He had twelve dollars. He looked at his watch; he had plenty of time. He would have two Special Breakfasts. He gave the wet, soft turkey a friendly pat on his way out.

He was the first to arrive at Centre Street Motors. He carried his large cardboard container of coffee and his two morning papers in to his desk; he was studying the sports sections and drinking the coffee when Fritchie came in at 8:30. Fritchie had a bag of doughnuts and a container of coffee. “Jesus,” Fritchie said, looking at the wall clock above Earl’s head, “either I’m dreaming or the traffic this morning was worse’n I thought it was. What’re you doing here first?”

Earl grinned. “Ahh,” he said, “we had the big dinner yesterday afternoon, and then Penny gets it in her fool head, she’s got to take the bus up to Portland, spend couple nights with her parents. Wanted me to drive her, but I said I hadda work. I tell you, Roy, I never been so glad I hadda work in my whole life. I never met her family, and from what she tells me, I got no ambition in that line. So anyway, the big dinner, and then I sit down in the chair, and I have the glass of beer, and I watch the football games, and then the movie comes on and I make a turkey sandwich, and I have a little wine, and then I have a glass of beer. The result of which is that I fall asleep in the chair, don’t wake up until about two this morning, get in the sack and sleep till about seven. So I had, I dunno, maybe ten, eleven hours sleep. Wake up rarin’ to go.”

“See?” Fritchie said. He put the bag of doughnuts
and the coffee on his desk. “Gettin’ old, just like the rest of us. Your younger days, feed like that, get up from the
table
rarin’ to go. Go out, spend the night chasin’ broads. Start getting a little older, best thing you can think of’s a nap, and then get ready for bed. Doughnut?”