Garbage (15 page)

“Maybe you marked them just now, because I'm telling you all the bags here come just from today.”

“Did you see me just mark them?”

“If I didn't see you yesterday, how could I today?”

“Yesterday you left me alone for a few moments. Anyway, the city will know it's yesterday's because I'm taking this one with me. You'll let me, of course.”

“What could I do to stop you?”

“You could not block my way for one thing.”

“Oh, I thought something else.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I'm confused and disturbed. Why shouldn't I be? You think I've another living going? A rich father? Sure I do, but what I thought you meant—Not bribery for sure. I hope that's not what you thought. But you know: a hot coffee or cocoa was what I was offering you because of the cold, that's all. Look, I apologize, forget everything I said, but you finally want the truth of the matter?”

“You mean what you just said hasn't been? No no, I'm kidding, go on.”

“The truth is I dumped and this is the honest truth, dumped all of yesterday's garbage from yesterday's bags into cardboard boxes and shopping bags and drove them to the Sanitation pier to dump. Call the guard at the gate shack there if the same one's working late tonight and he'll tell you he saw me around two: blue van and that he also gave me a ride in his electric cart when I thought I saw a dead human hand that was only a cadaver's in their barge and so didn't count. But the plastic bags from yesterday I reused today, because buying them even by the ton runs into more money than my poor business can afford. But I had a feeling before you wouldn't believe me, so I told you the hoax story of these bags being fresh, which the garbage still is, from today.”

“Then you have yesterday's bags here, which as far as the Health Department's concerned is yesterday's garbage, since the dirty bags should have been dumped too.”

“What I say you wouldn't believe me.”

“Who doesn't? And please fight it if you like. That's what our Administrative Tribunal's for. Most of us inspectors love it when the less reprehensible stores like yours win, as we don't see any gain for the city when you go out of business and possibly on welfare. At a hearing this week you can show why you failed to abide by the Health Code. If the tribunal judges against you, you'll be fined. If it also decides, which is usually the case, that you're entitled to a third inspection and at that inspection you've corrected your violations and can show proof of new arrangements where they won't be repeated, your health permit will be restored.”

“How can I show the inspector I've corrected and won't repeat my violations if I'm not being allowed to correct and not repeat by this company of hoods?”

“Coercion's a civil court matter, not Health's. Ours is simply to see that all the food stores and restaurants meet the Health Code.”

“But I won't be able to prove anything to any court that I'm being threatened or other people are. I've no evidence of it and nobody who knows about it will be brave or dumb enough to testify.”

“All I'm saying is if you can prove to a civil court judge that you have been intimidated, then the court will probably make this company pay your fines, give you loss-of-business restitution and also issue an injunction against them to stop molesting you. Then you'll be able to hire another carter for your garbage which will mean you'll have corrected your violations and made arrangements not to repeat them. As of this moment though I have to ask you to tell your customers upstairs to go and for you to lock up and not enter the bar again for customers till we restore your health permit. Do and the tribunal might rule that you lose your health permit for good. If you don't close voluntarily now I'll call a cop and city carpenter and have a hasp and padlock put on your door and remove yours. Touch our lock and you'll be arrested and probably prohibited from handling liquor or food anywhere in the state again in a commercial way.”

“Close me. Don't know from where but I'll come up with something to open again.”

“That's the only way to do it, Mr. Fleet—peacefully and optimistically.”

We go upstairs, he carrying my garbage bag. He's a weak little guy or looks it and I say “Can I help you with that, no evil influence intended,” and he says no. I tell the one customer to pay up and go. As he's leaving the bar I say “Wait, Walt—here's your three bucks back. If you're going to be my last customer then I want it to be like my father did, which was to buy everybody at the bar a last round before he turned the place over to me with this immediate huge deficit. Of course he had them three deep that night and his leaving was like a going-off-to-war celebration, when I just have you two here. You want one, sir?” I say to the inspector. “Even just that coffee or cocoa?”

“Can't. I'm not even permitted to purchase a matchbook in any establishment I'm examining.” He takes my health permit off the wall, has me sign a release that he took it and puts the permit and release in his briefcase.

“I'll be twenty minutes.”

I tear down the bar, wipe it clean, shut the lights, lock up and he asks for and I give him the keys. I sign another release for them and he tapes a sign on the door: “Premises Temporarily Closed by Order of Dept. of Health.”

“Everyone who reads that will think I've roaches and rats galore in there and never come back to eat.”

“Have them phone me and I'll guarantee you've one of the cleanest bars in town.”

“Want to know something? Maybe I ‘ m cutting my throat by this but I want to say it anyway as a sign of my sincerity. I've seen occasional rats and mice in my cellar and of course roaches and trapped or poisoned them or chased them out and sealed up their escape holes. And a couple of times in recent years here an animal or two I've never seen before. I don't even know where this thing comes from and never saw a picture of it in any encyclopedia or animal book when I went to look or heard or read of it talked about. They've long slithering flat tails and big round ears and little kids' baby teeth and faces like platypuses these nonrats, though they're no larger than our average-sized mice. Once or twice I swear I saw them and when I did they got scareder than I was and darted into the dark together and disappeared, not to be seen by me for another two years. They must come from the sewers through holes or pipes in my wall from yesteryear that are behind things that I think are for something else or never knew were there.”

“Several other bar places around town have told me about them. They're little and light brown, right? and—”

“‘Little' I said and that shade of color, yes.”

“And seem to thrive on underground dampness and coolness and garbage and the seepage from kegs of ale and beer. They apparently only travel in twos and are probably of opposite sexes our resident pest specialist says, since one's always a lot furrier than the other and less the aggressor, but which sex that one is she doesn't know. Nobody's been bitten or even touched one yet though they say they have been sissed and spit at. You'd think, knowing the personality and armory you bartenders got, that in the fifteen years since they were first sighted, one of these cellar creatures would have been caught or shot or with a beer bottle or bat clubbed to unconsciousness or found one time down there after they had died a natural death. Since they've so far remained relatively timid and for all we know might be the same two going from bar to bar through their own subterranean paths, we kept it on the q.t. to the news so as not to alarm and frighten off the entire bar population and your clientele. But we would appreciate and are even offering a small reward and citation to the first bar worker who captures one alive and a small reward without the citation for one dead in almost any recognizable form, not that we're encouraging anyone to endanger his life doing it.”

“So I learned I wasn't crazy all along about these animals, which always till now kept me from telling anyone.”

We shake hands in front of the bar and he wishes me well and I walk in the falling snow to my hotel. Dayclerk's on duty behind the desk and he says “Never seen you here this early. What's wrong, you sick?”

“Just very upset. If my luck gets any worse—well, I don't know, I haven't all day stepped in dogshit yet. Any messages?”

Letter from the cemetery my family's at, forwarded from my old address and requesting a teller's check for the gravesite's annual maintenance. “This is our final reminder. Snow covers a multitude of untidinesses but does melt. If you cannot settle this debt by next week we will distressingly be compelled to let the ground of your deceased loved ones overgrow.”

Other another bill from my previous landlord demanding I pay all of last month's rent, even though I was burned out three days into it. Since, to get her off my back, I already sent her half a month's rent and figure because she's such a shrewdie she'll collect fire insurance on my apartment fire worth five times what it'll cost her to rebuild and then get twice the monthly rent I paid, I tear the bill up and drop it in the cigarette butt can by the elevator.

“Please for godsakes don't throw your trash in there,” the dayclerk says. “That's for tobacco objects only, which could ignite your letters and end up burning down the hotel.”

I pick the paper scraps out, shake the sand off and put them in my pocket. Helena comes out of the elevator as I'm about to go in it and I tip my hat at her. She acts like she doesn't know me and I hold the elevator button at L and say “Shaney, tenant in the hotel here, friend of the nightclerk Eric, how you doing?”

“Oh yeah or at least I think so. This morning, am I wrong? I was so freaking sleepy and didn't have in my lens. Fine thanks,” and stands there staring at me and I say “Well, isn't fair keeping other people upstairs from using the elevator, so I'll be seeing you,” and she pinches my sleeve and says “Want company? I could take an hour's detour and you were terrific last time, despite what I might have said in my sleepiness—you really got me going,” and I say “Not today thanks though thanks for asking, I mean that, and you know I didn't do anything of the kind to you,” and go in the elevator and press my button.

“Don't depreciate yourself,” she says as the door closes, “or you'll never get anywheres good.”

There's a lilac smell she left that I like and I almost feel like riding up and down another time to keep sniffing it. Reminds me of me on her, just faint traces of her body especially around the armpits and breasts, though mixed with my liquor and after awhile her sweat. And also of my grandmother when I was a boy, not only the toilet water she always wore but the bunches of lilacs she vased in one vase on their bar's free food counter every spring and made me trolley from home at least once a year then to smell them. “Stick your big nose in there, kiddy,” she'd say. She and my grandfather are also at that gravesite.

In my room for almost nothing better to do I take the bandage off even if I've a week to and stick it in the wastepail. Maybe the wound will heal faster in just plain air but what the hell do I know? In the mirror I've a long raw ditch in my head and the stitches have almost disappeared. Metal plate inside my skull I'm afraid to touch I can't even look where. Otherwise I'm quite a mess. Bags under my eyes, lost weight in the neck and face, skin paler, hair greyer, right side of my head again hurts, eyeballs bloodshot when I never noticed them anything but all white before, even my teeth ache. So my bar's locked up. All right, forget it for now. If anything, till you get yourself more in control, just try and joke about it, and ten seconds later: piss, shit! How'll I make my way when I haven't got hardly a pot saved to lick from and have to soon pay the bar rent and other bills and this hotel in a few days? and I slam the medicine chest door till the water glass falls off the toothbrush holder underneath and bounces around in the sink while I try to catch it before it breaks.

I drink a stiff drink and another and slap the mattress with my fists and shout “Christ, sons of bitches,” and then think easy there, getting nowhere by this, they could knock down the door and lock you up for being a sicko for all you know and I lie on the bed and think what to do to get my permit back and stop from losing my bar for good and right away drop off for an hour when I was trying my hardest not to.

I dream about being naked in bed with Helena though here she has specks for breasts and a much larger rear but is her same age and I'm only a year older than her and she comments on my “delicious sunbit skin.” She's supposed to be my sister, a telegram she hands me says, who in truth died of a doctor's mishap at home when she was eleven and me twelve and is also at that gravesite. And just when I'm about to shoot in her with more body thrills and force and noise than I had in real life this morning and maybe ever and Helena screaming my ears out too, I awake from the sound of a Sanitation snowplow grating against the pavement.

I pace around the room and can't think of a thing to do about how to reopen the bar and get my trash picked up on a regular basis. Tribunal? What do I have for it and another inspector that's new? Lawyer? Just for a talk with one what's to lose? I fish out the business card that lawyer slipped into my wallet at the hospital ward, call her and say “Janie Pershcolt? Shaney Fleet here, remember me?” and she says “Sure, how are you, what's up?” and I tell her what's happened till now to me since I last saw her, and when she asks, refresh her memory a little about what went on before.

“You know, for a moment I couldn't place you apart from the rest of my prison charges but now I do. How's your gash? You really got stabbed bad.”

“Hit with a pipe. Bandage came off today.”

“Knife or pipe, it's cause for celebration, right? because it means the doctors think you're getting well, so I'm glad.”