Talk of the Town (21 page)

"No. Ah, I'm just browsing. Thank you."

"That's fine. Help yourself," she said, moving away to help another customer, of which there were surprisingly many. "We have another room in the back with some pottery and glass you won't want to miss. And we have catalogs at the front desk if you'd like to look at them or take one home. They're free. And someone up there can put you on our mailing list if you like."

"Thank you," she said, stunned. "Oh. You know, there is something you could help me with . . ."

"Yes?"

"That, ah, sculpture in the front window? How . . . how much are you asking for it?"

The young woman smiled. "I'm sorry, but it isn't for sale. It belongs to the owner and he won't sell it. He's already had several people offer him money for it.

But what he
will
do is take your name and address if you're interested, and when the artist is ready to sell others similar to it, he'd be very willing to send you the information. If you'd like to sign—"

"No. No. That's all right. I was just curious."

"Lots of people are. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Rose nodded.

"Is there anything else you'd like to see?"

"No thanks. Yes, actually. I'd like to see the owner. Is he here today?"

She grinned. "No, he isn't. He's not a very hands-on owner. I'm the manager. He just sort of pops in once in a while to check on things. But if you're thinking of making him a bid on the sculpture, I can tell you there's no use trying. He's very attached to it."

"Oh, no. Not the sculpture, I ... I wanted to tell him how wonderful this store is. I never imagined . . ."

"It's pretty amazing, isn't it?" she said, glancing around the store. "People can be real inventive when they put their minds to it. And like I said, if we don't have it here, we can find it for you. My boss knows everything there is to know about recycling."

"Yes, he does. I mean, I can see that he does."

She could see many things she hadn't seen before. The extent to which he'd dedicated his life to cleaning up the earth and its atmosphere. The extent of his belief in the ingenuity of mankind. The extent of his faith in her talent. The extent of his love for her.

TWELVE

Centering in on Gary's general location might have been difficult for a common civilian outside the garbage loop.

Rose, however, knew from a couple of months of seeing him with a telephone stuck to his ear that his office
always
knew how to find him. And there was only one All Bright Garbage and Refuse Collection listed in the phone book. Unfortunately, it was an 800 number and they were disinclined to give out his exact whereabouts, even though they would gladly take a message.

Well.

Who did they think they were dealing with? Certainly not Rosemary Wickum, Junker Extraordinaire, Pooh-bah of the Royal Order of Rummagers, soon to be the next Queen of Trash – if she had her way. And she was praying she would, just this once. In all her life, just this once, she was going to have it her way.
She
had an ace in the hole.

 "Cletus? Hello?" she said, picking up a pay phone when it rang. She'd been waiting and glaring off potential users for the past twenty minutes.

"Hey, Rosie," he said, sounding a million miles away. "I did what you said. I called the main office and told them I had to talk to the boss in person, but they weren't much help."
Now
she was starting to worry. "They said he'd be out all day. I guess he's someplace in Vallejo ridin' the trucks."

"You mean he's collecting trash? On the trucks?"

"Yeah. He does that sometimes. Says it keeps him humble."

"Yes, I know." She frowned and chewed her lower lip as she contemplated her choices. "Where
is
Vallejo, Cletus? Do you know?"

"North of you. On the other side of the Bay, I think."

"Which bridge would I take?"

"Hang on," he said, leaving the phone with a clatter and a clunk.

Rose fidgeted nervously waiting for him. Even if she could find Vallejo, what would she do then? Drive up and down every street looking for garbage trucks? That could take a week. No, not if she drove only the streets that had trash set out for collection.

And those would be?

Cletus returned to the phone with a map from his truck and she got directions to Vallejo, which she could have gotten from her own map, had she thought of it. She used a quarter to dial information and applied the charges to her home phone to call Vallejo's Sanitation Department. A phone card would have come in handy.

And what part of Vallejo had the trash picked up on Mondays? she asked the clerk in the Sanitation office. The northeast side, of course. North of Bella Vista, east of San Jacinto.

See? Almost simple.

Midday traffic was awful, and it was still raining intermittently. It took her almost an hour to get to Vallejo.

The corner of Bella Vista and San Jacinto was a busy intersection. She chugged the gray-green bucket of bolts and rust east two blocks and north three more blocks to a residential area.

She was in luck. It was a neighborhood with children. And no one takes notice of garbage trucks the way children do.

But because of the drizzly day, there weren't many kids out. Feeling a bit crazed by now, and far beyond caring what people thought of her, Rose found a yard with lots of bikes and balls in it and walked up to the door. A little boy about six or seven years old came to the door with his mother. He knew that the garbage truck had already passed by and it was going that away— north.

Again she felt someone good was watching over her. Vallejo was one of those towns that divided its blocks with alleys, which meant she had only to search one alley for every two streets going north and south.

See? Almost simple.

She was really super-sleuthing when she discovered she could drive in and out of the alleys along one street going west to east to see if the trash cans were empty— that would mean that Gary had already been down that alley, of course. In fact, she was so busy and pleased with her sleuthing, she nearly forgot that with all the time she was subtracting from her search, she was also getting closer and closer to her moment of reckoning.

She understood that when she found her first full trash can, recycling bins beside it, heaped with cans, plastic milk jugs, and newspapers. Her palms grew moist with apprehension as she drove around the block to the last alley with empty cans and started north, across the next street and through the next alley.

What if he shouted at her? She hated it when people shouted at her. What if he refused to listen to her? Told her to go to hell? Wouldn't let her apologize? What then?

She was tired, frightened, and guilty, and the rain was depressing. There didn't seem to be any end to it. A big black cloud would roll in from the sea, dump its load, and float off toward the mountains. Followed by another and then another.

Taking any mental sidetrack she could, she wondered if anyone had ever identified the idiot who went around telling people that it never rained in California.

She wasn't sure if the sky was darkening with another storm front or if she was simply imagining the doom and gloom around her when she finally spied the sanitation truck in the next alley.

She slowed to a crawl—the old truck's favorite speed —and absently rubbed at the tight ache in her chest. Why hadn't she prepared anything? What was she going to say? Her mouth went dry and her throat closed up when a familiar form in blue overalls stepped off the back of the truck, walked with a long, lazy gait into the shadow of a small outbuilding, then reappeared with a trash can in each hand.

Gary wasn't sure if it was the incongruous and disturbing noises of a military all-terrain vehicle approaching or the eerie sense of being watched that caused him to look up. But seeing Rose's gray-green hunk-o-junk creeping toward him left him with the impression that it was probably both. It belched a rude cloud of black smoke as it stopped at the street. But it wasn't until it started to cross the street into the alley behind him that he chose to disregard the urge to meet it halfway and took up the impulse to ignore it.

Of course, it was an impetuous inclination that wreaked havoc on his nerves.

Two minutes after leaving Rose at the Essex Hotel, he'd stormed out onto the sidewalk and felt besieged by the sounds and sights of the city—the tall buildings, the rush of traffic, the hum of neon signs, the faces of countless strangers, rainwater gurgling in the gutters. The fog was so thin, it hardly impaired his vision, but instead distorted what he saw so that everything took on an unreal, unfriendly, unconnected, sort of a forsaken quality that made him want to cry out in loneliness.

He was smarting and he was angry, but with a sudden and horrendous jolt in the pit of his stomach, he felt something much worse. Lost and alone. He'd turned back to the hotel with every intention of returning to Rose and doing whatever it took to work things out with her. But his pride stood stony and uncompromising between him and the door.

He'd taken his share of grief for a job and a cause he believed in. He could even understand Rose's frustrations in dealing with standardized pigeonholes and stereotypes, but he'd expected more from her than shame and embarrassment. Maybe he'd expected too much.

He'd asked the doorman to call him a cab and spent the entire ride—the entire and very expensive ride— back to his house in Fairfield wondering if he'd overreacted.

People liked to think they were evolving, becoming more tolerant, more sensitive to the needs of others. But it was a slow and difficult process. There were still slanted suppositions toward alcoholism and judgments made on unwed mothers and prejudices against fatherless children. Maybe the struggle against all three was enough for one person's life. Maybe it hadn't been fair to ask her to put up with one more contorted opinion about her life.

He'd spent Sunday alone, rattling around in his semi-empty house, seeing Rose everywhere. He picked up the phone a dozen times to call her, eager to forgive, then settled it back in its cradle, calling himself every kind of fool. She hadn't yet asked for forgiveness. She might not want any.

In the afternoon he tried to get some paperwork done and found himself making a list of alternative careers. Teacher. TV weatherman. Stand-up comedian. Truth was, he didn't want to be anything but a garbageman. That's when he got mad again.

It wasn't in him to pretend to be something he wasn't. Isn't that what he'd told her? And wasn't it true? He was never going to be anything but an ordinary man who dealt with public waste on a day-to-day basis. It was a good, honest, and for him lucrative profession. It didn't matter how much he loved her. If she couldn't accept who and what he was, she didn't really love him.

Yet,
she was there. She'd come looking for him. He took it as a good sign, and his heart swelled with hope. But he cautioned himself to slow down. His whole world was at stake, and he needed to be sure. Sure that Rose could love him as he was. Even more sure that what he was wouldn't impair or betray Rose's faith in him.

He climbed back to his perch between the rear loader and the trailer of recycling bins and faced forward as they rolled to the next stop. He was traveling with the driver and the two regular loaders, who were keenly aware of the beat-up pickup truck following them – assuming it wanted to pass. He was the only man not surprised when a red-haired woman jumped out and left the poor old thing sputtering to death.

"Gary?" she said, walking around to the right side of the truck where he was tossing a heavy trash can up in the air to empty it into the truck as if it were a glass of water. She watched him pick up a second can and repeat the action, assuming he would turn to her when he was finished. He turned in the opposite direction as if he hadn't heard her speak and couldn't see her standing there. "Gary. Could we talk for a minute? Please?"

"What about?" He found he couldn't ignore her. Had he forgotten how beautiful she was? The humidity had frizzed her great mane of copper and gold curls, making them look soft and out of control.

"About Saturday night. At the ball. About what I did."

"What did you do?" He'd picked up two recycling containers and was sorting them into the appropriate bins on the trailer. Naturally, the two regulars, who were loading from the other side, were finished and terribly interested in the garbage groupie they'd picked up.

Rose glanced over the top of the trailer at the two loaders and then back to Gary, who was clearly disinclined to step away to have a private discussion with her.

"Well, I . . ." It wasn't ever going to be easy, she decided, jumping in with both feet. "I was thoughtless and rude and mean and nasty and—"

"When?"

She looked again at the men climbing onto the truck from the other side. When she looked back, Gary was again stationed on the right rear bumper. With a hiss and a squeal from the brakes, and the clank of loose glass and the tink of aluminum cans, the truck rumbled on to the next stop.

She raced back to her gray-patched monster. Twice she tried to get it to roll over. The third time it didn't mutter a sound. It was exhausted and sound asleep.

Meanwhile Gary's garbage truck had made two more stops. She had to jog-walk to catch up. When she did, she couldn't remember the question.

"I asked when it was that you were thoughtless and mean and rude and nasty. My memory is a bit selective today."

About as selective as a hog in slop, she suspected. Still, it was his apology. He could take it any way he wanted to, so long as he took it.

"When I asked you not to tell people you were a garbageman." She waited for a response while he dumped two more cans. Nothing. He went back for the recycling."It was a stupid thing to do. I knew it the second I did it. I know it hurt you, and I know you're angry."

"Excuse me," he said, indicating she was standing in his way. She stepped aside.

"I don't blame you," she said, leaning forward, trying to see his face. "I mean, I don't blame you for being hurt and angry. I would be too. There is no excuse for what I did, but I do have an explanation. If you want to hear it."