The Taste of Penny (7 page)

“The miracle is we still have enough pennies to Xerox our own flyers,” Jeremy says when they check the Community Bulletin Board at the PriceChopper, “with you going around eating them all.” Jeremy scribbles on the Two Men flyers. On one he draws a little caricature of two stick-figure men buttfucking in parentheses. On others he writes:
I take umbrage AT your two frigging faces. I take umbrage AT your hauling. I take umbrage TO the Two Fags And A Buckity-Buck.

“You're not getting what I'm saying,” Sam says. “It worked. I should have blown that breath reader off the charts. All the tequila I put back. It could have been fifty percent I'm telling you.”

“With your drunk driving ability then, it had to have been the signs. Just take off the signs.” Jeremy knows what a terrible drunk driver Sam is, but, knowing what pride Sam takes in his supposed prowess, he keeps it quiet and never goes out for the serious drinking with him after work. The truth is Jeremy has been talking to some guys at the dump who haul things around the landfill about bringing him on. There is no shortage of things people don't want at the dump like there seems to be in the rest of the world.

“I'm not talking about why I got pulled over. That seems pretty obvious. I'm saying the penny fucked up the test.”

Jeremy staples the new Brotherman's flyers over the defaced Two Men flyers.

“I don't know anything about a breathalyzer, brotherman. Or for that matter what a penny will do about
it. What I know is if you'd blown one one-thousandth more, there'd be no business right about now. Then what would we do?” Jeremy would step up the pressure on the guys at the dump is what. Jeremy can't drive, but can the bitch haul. The guy is built like a small forklift. When not carrying anything he moves about as if he's falling backwards. He slants at forty-five degrees from knees to waist. He's five foot four with arms that bear hug a Barcalounger. When he picks something up he sinks into himself; it's the only time his feet and head are in line. Sam interprets these qualities to mean that Jeremy can fight.

Jeremy can haul. Jeremy likely intimidates. Jeremy cannot fight.

“If one single person on one single night sees these signs, and we get a job out of it, that's one job more we'd have than now. I'm not taking off the signs. I'd just like to pass this penny.”

“It will pass,” Jeremy says. “Have faith in that much.”

Sam doesn't know.

Once they replace their fliers they do what they usually do: They buy a six-pack of Hollandia tall boys and go drink them at the park with their feet propped on the rearview mirrors. The end of Brotherman's may be near anyway. Jeremy hands Sam his hot sauce from the glove compartment, and he upturns it into his beer. He drinks the beer in hopes it will make him feel normal.

They wait for the mobile to ring. Jeremy searches phrase books and novels and newspapers from the library for passages quoting
umbrage at
something. Periodically he steps out and does pull-ups on the jungle gym. Sam worries about the penny and tries not to chew his nails. He rubs under his rib cage to see if he can feel anything and stains his T-shirt orange.

“You're worth more now,” Jeremy says. “Think of it like that. Sam plus one cent.” Then Jeremy says, “Tomorrow, let's go in early and ambush the Two Men at PriceChopper.” Sam understands this to mean they will be kicking some Two Men ass in retribution for having one of their cop buddies pull him over, but Jeremy intends only to clarify a grammatical point.

“What time?” Sam says.

“Early, make sure we don't miss them,” he says.

“Sixish then?”

“Sixish.”

 

Sam purchases sample packs of Metamucil and Ex-Lax and a single packet of apple and cinnamon oatmeal from the Dollar Store on the way home. That night he panics the panic of a man who may have something seriously wrong with him medically but does not have insurance. His jowls quiver. He's sweaty and pale in the bathroom mirror, white as the gauze eye patch. He washes his hands and he wants to bite them so bad they tremble. He rushes into the kitchen and soaks them again in the two bowls of hot sauce, beating his head on the table to the
Jeopardy
tune. He mixes fiber, oatmeal, and laxative in a bowl of boiling water. He breathes the steam, and when it's cool enough he eats.

Afterward he powers on the computer and finds a yellow plastic glove for dishwashing under the sink. He coats it in Vaseline, goes to one of the free movie sites and cranks up. He talks to the screen, imitating the voice of the guy upstairs, and when it's over he collapses into the lawn chair he uses as an office chair, then spends an hour on the toilet pushing, concentrating, pushing, before admitting failure, swallowing half a Xanax and falling deeply to sleep.

The Red-haired Girl hears Sam as she prepares for bed and watches the Weather Channel, slightly concerned by the
TV's constant beeping because of severe incoming weather. She believes that it is the guy two floors up jerking off while talking to the screen, even though the sound seems to be coming from directly over her head. The walls and ceilings are thin enough, she believes, which is why the severe incoming weather concerns her.

Sam wakes to weather sirens and the taste of vinegary fingers. In his sleep, the fingers of his left hand—his favorite to chew for reasons having to do with angle and bent—have migrated to his mouth. Outside it sounds like a bombing raid. He opens his window and the wind and rain whip through the room. Sirens are interspersed with a garbled message. He sticks his head out into the dark to hear better. Weather-warning megaphone speakers in the distance blare something that sounds like:
Lorena Bobbitt in area. Seek lover.

He can barely hear knocking at the door. It's the Red-haired Girl, standing there holding a vanilla-scented candle.

“This is your wake-up call,” she says. “The severe incoming weather is income. The whole building's in the basement.”

Sam disappears to find his shoes. He slips his bare feet into his work boots. When he comes back she is standing in his living room. In the lightning flashes, he sees the hot sauce bowls on the kitchen table, the open tub of Vaseline and the glove on the computer desk.

“We have the exact same space,” she says. “And there is where the magic happens.” She points to the ceiling.

He makes to get her out of the room fast, taking her by the waist. She interprets this as a forward move. She likes forward. They take the steps carefully in the dark, stopping only to let the guy upstairs brush by with a flashlight, his feet smacking the stairs like soft tomatoes.

The Red-haired Girl enters the basement first. Her
candle illuminates their neighbors and a goldmine of junk. Sam simply marvels for a moment. The remnants of who knows how many years of tenants' leftovers, rotten and mildewed from the moisture, well beyond any desirable condition. The mess is arranged in aisles. Their neighbors are situated among the aisles in little cliques. The women with dogs smile nervously and wave. Every person secretly chastises himself for saving the however-much per month to live in the flimsy-walled apartment building they all live in. An AM radio reports multiple tornadoes spotted in the area.

Sam takes the candle and the lead now. He wanders through lanes of wooden crates, old doors, paintings, battered suitcases, porch swings, mattresses, and box springs. There's ancient dressers and stacks of mismatched drawers, a foreign-looking shrunk, and couch beds—big, heavy, steel couch beds.

The Red-haired Girl takes Sam's arm. Her nails dig into his bicep. He registers their crispy quality. He looks down and is excited to find that he can see them reflecting the candle, finely shaped, perfectly manicured, the kind with a whitewall across the top and a lavender body. The Xanax emphasizes everything.

The Red-haired Girl stops him in front of a basement window. She points to a blanket underneath two sawhorses, where her bulldog Lusya is sitting. “Kind of a cool spot right?” she says.

“A room with a view,” Sam says. Through the window they see the little shrubs lining the apartment building sideways in the wind.

The siren and the unintelligible announcement broken-records.

“What the hell are they trying to tell us?” Sam asks.

“The sky is plummeting,” she says.

“I don't know your name,” Sam says.

“You see me all the time,” she says.

“I call you the Red-haired Girl,” Sam says.

“You're the Creepy Cute Guy!” she says. “Let's just stick with those.” Then she says, “Look.” The little sideways shrubs are gone.

When he wakes up, he is horrified to discover his hand clawing up the Red-haired Girl's stockinged leg, catching and running as it goes. A purple light seeps in through the window, and the basement is quiet.

She interprets his gesture in a particular way and pulls herself out of the shredded stockings.

“Touch me,” she says. Sam retracts his hands out of habit.

“I don't do touch,” Sam says. She interprets this in a particular way also. Sam is really shy and awkward about these things. She interprets him as forceful and direct.

She says something else then, which Sam cannot decipher: “Moose me,” maybe.

Sam does what he believes is expected of him. He is intrigued to discover she tastes like lemon. Leaned against the foreign shrunk in the back corner the guy upstairs begins masturbating, for the first time in his life, quietly, without even a whisper as he watches them through the sawhorses.

Soon Sam desires different textures. He bites, which seems to be the thing. Her body flops around. He keeps on biting, all the way down her leg, her ankle for a while, back up, knee, hip bone, nipple one, nipple two, lip, ear, lymph node, neck fold. She goes for it. When he moves down her arm—shoulder, elbow, wrist—something tells him just to get what it is he's after. He starts small, the hard, tender nail on the end of her pinky. He nips that off in two clean bites, no tearing, practiced. Then goes the thumb. He decimates her lovely nails, during which she orgasms thrice.

The Red-haired Girl, while genuinely liking this, does not however expect that it will constitute the main activity of a sexual relationship with Sam. The guy upstairs finishes all over himself, without making a sound.

 

Sam would say that he notices the penny less today. But no one is asking. Jeremy is writing on a piece of paper as Sam maneuvers the F-150 through the twilight, around fallen power lines and trees, to the PriceChopper. He parks at the other end of the parking lot, away from the automatic doors, where they have a clear view of the Community Bulletin Board.

Six-thirty rolls around and then seven. Sam calls the landlord on the mobile. He explains to him that he just happened to seek shelter in the basement last night and couldn't help noticing all the junk. He also just happens to run a hauling company if he's interested in getting rid of it. The landlord seems receptive, asks for the name of his business. There is a negotiating period. Sam wants two months' rent. The landlord says he'll meet him there to discuss it further this week, but right now, he could actually use Brotherman's to haul away the detritus tornados dropped onto a number of his properties. Sam says he thinks they could find time in their schedules to do that today.

“We got work,” he says, turning to Jeremy. Jeremy is too nervous to answer.

A truck parks in the fire lane.

Sam and Jeremy look at each other. They get out. The Two Men—caught taping over their flyers—notice them from across the parking lot. They recognize the duo from having themselves once staked out the competition for the same purpose they are now being staked out. When they'd seen Jeremy, they'd called that plan off. Now they come toward them, full stride.

And this is when Jeremy stops. Sam stops too, figuring that Jeremy is bearing the brunt of this thing.

Jeremy holds up the piece of paper he's been working on and clears his throat. The Two Men eye them from across the parking lot like in an old Western. Jeremy begins to read:

“Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I believed; and with an air of languid patronage, at which I secretly took great umbrage…A wife…who properly conducted her economy, should take no umbrage at such little fancies of her husband, but be always certain that he would return…”

Sam ignores what he thinks he mistakenly perceives as a tremble in Jeremy's voice. He is not mistaken.

“How fathers should not draw too ready rein/Nor sons take umbrage in a trice/At father's counsels…”

Sam recognizes fully the miscalculation made here when the Two Men recommence their approach and the sound of footsteps in hasty retreat appears first from beside him, where Jeremy was just a moment ago standing, reciting his speech, then from further and further behind him. On his stocky legs, Jeremy trucks through the parking lot. He moves well through the morning. Sam wonders where exactly he plans to go. Jeremy figures he was on his way out anyhow.

The Two Men stand in front of Sam.

“There's so many things you can do with a truck,” he offers.

Just one of the Two Men, the one who
looks
like he used to be a cop, takes his shot, which Sam manages to block, but then the other hand of the one Two Men comes out of nowhere because the eye patch makes for this huge blind spot. Sam stays where he falls on the wet asphalt. His teeth feel pushed. His mouth, drowned in blood, tastes of penny.

The Two Men look down on him as the grocery store cop waltzes over.

“This poor guy's keeling here,” says one of the Two Men.

“Must of just fell,” one of them said.

“Must of,” says the other.