Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  “Maybe a little dessert,” he said and flipped his cup. “A little later.” She nodded and tilted the pot. Two steelworkers sat at the counter. One was a grinder and one was an electrician, and although Fred knew their names, he wasn’t sure which went with whom. The electrician ate corned beef hash and stared straight ahead, chewing without blinking. A radio played in the kitchen.

  “Brenda sick or she hit the lotto?” Fred asked.

  “Oh she’s sick,” the grinder said.

  The electrician swallowed. “Sick of having guns pointed in her face.”

  “There was a holdup?”

  “Don’t you read the paper?”

  Fred opened his hands. “I’m asking.”

  “Guy come in yesterday with pantyhose on his head,” the waitress said. “Made everyone lay down on the floor. Cleaned the place out—register, wallets.” Her voice went up a note: “He took Brenda’s wedding ring.”

  “Way to tell it,” the grinder said. “You left out the gun. Sawed-off.”

  “You were here?” Fred asked.

  “It was in the paper,” the grinder said. “I was here it might’ve been different.”

  “Yeh, you wear your pantyhose where no one can see it,” the electrician said.

  “But I hear the guy looked a little like you,” the grinder said to Fred.

  “Yeah,” the electrician said. “I heard he poked holes for his glasses.”

  Fred thought. “I wouldn’t use a shotgun,” he said. You would want one hand free. And he would have worn a mask.

  “You mean that’s your face?”

  The waitress had gone to the window. She came back with steak and eggs for the grinder, well done and over easy. Then she went heavily to the other end of the counter and took a puff off a cigarette she had parked next to the warmer. She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, looking at some sort of booklet. She made marks with her pencil. She was very neat and scrubbed-looking.

  “Tell me my horoscope?” the electrician said. “Sagittarius.”

  “It’s not that kind of book.” She showed it to them. “This tells you how to pick numbers in your dreams.”

  “Yeah, in your dreams,” the grinder said.

  “You dream of a rabbit, that’s 249,” the new waitress said.

  “Freddy doesn’t believe in playing numbers,” the grinder said.

  “Oh no?” the new waitress said. “Are you religious?”

  “Tell her why, Fred.”

  Fred lit another cigarette. “I don’t want my life drastically altered by an act of dumb luck,” he said. “For better or for worse.”

  “You’re deep,” she said. “But it has numbers for your job, your name, the weather, days of the week…” She spoke flipping through it.

  “That’s for niggers,” the electrician said, and the door opened. Everyone turned thinking shotgun and pantyhose but it was a young couple wearing motorcycle jackets. Mohawks. One of the steelworkers grinned and the other shook his head. After she told them the special was the tuna noodle with bun the new waitress got a bottle of Tabasco for the grinder and wiped down the counter. She lifted the coffee pot off the warmer and wiped off the bottom, and the warmer hissed slightly when she ran the damp rag over it. She rinsed the rag and wrang it and put it back in her apron with the dream book and brought the coffee pot back to Fred. She was slow but she got there.

  “Pulling a double?” Fred said.

  “Today was my day off,” she said.

  “Nervous?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?” the grinder said. “Even the roaches are hiding.”

  She shrugged. “The owner’s in the back.”

  “Watering down the ketchup.”

  “He’s making it worth my while,” she said.

  The cook came out from the kitchen and swept the floor. Said the NFL had gone on strike at midnight. Heard it on the radio. Then he went back to the kitchen, flipped the broom and stirred the chili with the handle.

  “Amen,” Fred said.

  “Is that good?” the new waitress said.

  “Puts us out of our misery,” the grinder said.

  “What do they want anyway?” the electrician said. “Fifty-five percent.”

  “Fifty-five percent of what?”

  “I don’t know but that’s how much they want of it.”

  “Hell with em, maybe they’ll show Canadian,” the electrician said.

  “It was good enough for Theismann,” the grinder said. “What are they talking about?” the new waitress said.

  “You tell me,” Fred said.

  “I hate sports.”

  “Amen.”

  “You know what game I like? I like Trivial Pursuits. You know that one?”

  “I’m familiar,” Fred said.

  “He’s familiar,” the grinder said. “Freddy’s got a foot in the door.”

  “Just his foot?” the electrician said. “I hear he’s good with his hands too.”

  “What are you guys on about?” The waitress looked at Fred. “Are these friends of yours?”

  “They know my name,” Fred said.

  “Just ships that pass in the night,” the electrician said, and the grinder said, “All you pass is gas.”

  Fred lit another one. “Brenda coming back, do you know?” he asked.

  “What am I, chopped liver?”

  “Tuna casserole,” the grinder said.

  “Gentlemen,” Fred said.

  “Uh oh,” the grinder said. “I’m worried.”

  “Just talking about the special, Freddy.”

  “All you can eat,” the grinder said.

  “All right,” the waitress said, “okay,” but they were done anyway and when they left they tipped her well, as if to pay for the privilege. Fred stayed. The punk rockers left. A bus driver came to lay over in the parking lot. He took a cup of chili out to his bus and Fred stayed, his back to the night. Traffic dwindled. The booths were empty, the owner somewhere in the back, the pager never made a sound; the world had made a place for them.

  They smoked. She put the old pot on the other warmer and made a fresh one. Refilled the ketchup bottles, wiped down. Stacked menus.

  “But what was I saying?”

  The ceiling fan spinning in his coffee.

  “You’re going to give yourself an ulcer,” she said.

  “Already have one,” he said. “Comes with the territory.”

  “And what might that be?” she asked.

  “Actually,” Fred said, “I’m thinking of going into business for myself,” and he looked at the lemon meringue.

  From the Report:

  A blue stain can be found on the surface of the wall. (Prussian blue is a complex compound of ferric-ferrocyanide, a stable inert transition metal complex. The occurrence of color is an electronic transition from a low-spin Fe2+ ion in a carbon-coordination center to a high-spin Fe3+ ion in a nitrogen-coordination center. Artists who have used this pigment include Gainsborough, Constable, Manet, Van Gogh, and Picasso in his Blue Period.) According to the official literature, this was a delousing room, or a storage room for disinfected materials. The color occurs nowhere else on site.

  Things were slow at first. At first it was just the two of them in square footage on the near west side. To the left was a dry cleaner, to the right a guy who smoked cigars and did your taxes at a flat rate. There was a welfare office across the street and thrift stores and strip bars up and down and aimless men and women who blew by like tumbleweeds in slow motion. Hardly anyone ever came in—it was not that kind of business—but rent was cheap and there was room to grow, though things were slow until Indiana.

  A National Engineering helmet cost fourteen hundred dollars.

  After Indiana they hired a machinist and a draftsman. Later they took on a part-time secretary, a heavily made-up acquaintance of Jim Dolly’s who spent the majority of her brief day on the phone, under a monumental wig, engaged in what seemed to be installments of the same conversation. She was soon replaced by someo
ne with actual experience, a competent, handsome woman in her early forties who worked up front in the carpeting and imitation wood with the draftsman and a dart board bearing the likeness of the president of Libya. Besides answering the phone and typing letters, she received the mail, kept the books, disbursed the payroll, would have administered the benefits had there been any, and sometimes attracted winos and other vagrants who would stop at the storefront to leer at her. One of them once put his tongue out and pressed his lips against the glass right under. then Jim Dolly (who’d also wrestled in college, Division II) was standing over him, applying some hold, some kind of nelson, wrenching his arm up behind his back and pushing his face against the glass till his nose bled, then dragging him out of sight, offstage, reappearing a couple of minutes later even more red-faced than usual, straightening his clothes and brushing himself off. Letting himself in and leaning on the edge of her desk the way he sometimes did.

  “I look out for my own,” he said, though had it been a woman loitering at the window he might have ushered her away more diplomatically, might have reappeared after a longer absence and in quite another state, having had a frank but sympathetic conversation (perhaps even driving her to a rehab facility or shelter), and would not be leaning on the edge of the secretary’s desk as he was now.

  “Tell me you didn’t hurt him.”

  “Just had a few words.”

  “What’s that on the window?”

  “He was French kissing plate glass. Would you believe I gave him my handkerchief?”

  “No. Why don’t we just move my desk?”

  “My office is a little small.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Door’s locked. We need to look like a serious business.”

  “But look what happens. What if he comes back?”

  The dartboard hung above and just beside the corner where the draftsman worked at his high table, smoking his pipe. Jim Dolly pulled a fistful of darts from the colonel’s face and said, “Let’s talk about it at lunch.”

  “I’m part-time, I don’t get lunch—not to mention medical.”

  “You knew that going in.”

  “Should I talk to Fred about it?”

  “Go ahead, it’s his candy store,” and Jim Dolly threw hard and fast, steel points piercing the board like nails from a nail gun. The draftsman in his high chair, with his ruling pens and protractor, straight edges and French curves, smoked his pipe. He didn’t look up.

  “At least put up blinds,” the secretary said, and there was a piercing whine from the back of the business. A sort of grating.

  4.16 milliseconds in a National Engineering chair. Cost of electricity: thirty-one cents.

  The machinist worked in a shop in the back. He was a short, thick-armed man who couldn’t sit for long periods of time because of a medical condition. Grim-faced and stoical, with a fringe of red hair around the shiny dome of his scalp, apparently more familiar with the use of power tools than the application of deodorant, he dealt almost exclusively with Fred because Fred was where the ideas came from, and because he’d known Fred’s father, and grandfather, a machinist like himself, and because, like the draftsman, he did not share secret understandings.

  The noise stopped, started again.

  “Tax guy’s been complaining,” the secretary said.

  “About the smell?”

  “He’s a working man, he breaks a sweat. About what do you think?”

  “I don’t hear a sound,” Jim Dolly said, and looked at the draftsman again.

  “Are we zoned for a machine shop?” the secretary asked, because she knew something about these things, and Jim Dolly said, “Hell if I know,” because he didn’t, and then he asked her if she felt like taking a walk to the liquor store, though he wasn’t really asking.

  “Which one?” she said; there were two within walking distance.

  “Take your pick,” he said. “Ron Rico 151. Bacardi if they don’t have that.”

  “You’re going to bribe him with a bottle?”

  “That or hit him upside the head with it,” Jim Dolly said, because if Jim Dolly didn’t know a thing he knew a way around it; if lending institutions proved reluctant to qualify them for a small business loan, he knew of what might be called alternative sources of investment capital, and he knew what kind of sticks the tax guy smoked, knew that Cubans went with rum, even if they were from China, and that was why he and Fred were partners, forty-nine/fifty-one.

  “Let me wash my hands,” he said, and put the last dart in his pocket.

  The secretary called them the Skipper and Gilligan, but only to herself. When a call came in she would route it to one or the other, but because Fred spent so much time with the machinist and the draftsman, and still worked part-time for Xerox, and because Jim Dolly was a salesman and not a silent partner, it was often he who picked up and then you might hear him pulling his weight, being upfront about the markup—he sometimes found a use for the truth—twenty percent, but that included consumables, hands-on training, certification and support; that included dignity and decorum, and lately propriety and correctitude as well because Jim Dolly had added a thesaurus to his repertory of the tools of persuasion.

  He sold a Collapse Kit to the State of Delaware, a metal frame with handles on each side, to be worn by the inmate in the event of a breakdown on the way to the scaffold. Lowered his voice and dropped hints about the Trailer, a mobile facility still in the works.

  Jim Dolly used a different voice if the one on the phone belonged to a woman not his ex-wife, or to an associate in one of his collateral ventures—promotions, hunting knives, sapphic pornography—and, though it was not that kind of business, once he even had visitors, two serious-looking men who were polite though not excessively so, one wearing a suit, the other jeans and a silver satin jacket. Jim Dolly accompanied them off the premises to what he called lunch, and though he returned after only a brief absence, he seemed no longer to have an appetite, appearing instead to have a great deal on his mind, and he instructed the secretary that the next time anyone came calling she was to tell them he was in Kentucky on business. There is always a bigger fish.

  He went down the narrow hall that let off the front room to wash his hands. Fred’s office was next to the lavatory and later he would knock on Fred’s door and say, “Let’s go grab a tax deduction,” and sometimes Jim Dolly went alone and came back hours later, reeking and jovial or reeking and belligerent, or didn’t come back at all till the next day. Fred took lunch at the diner named after someone’s mother as often as possible. Brenda had returned and the waitress who had subbed for her was back on days. He still thought of her as the night gal.

  But things were slow before Indiana.

  There’d been a riot. The inmates had barricaded themselves in the death house and held six guards hostage. No one was killed but they’d knocked over the chair, shattered one of the arms and torn off the electrodes. The warden sent pictures. It could have been worse, he said, but most of them were superstitious and wouldn’t touch it.

  Fred’s only stipulation was that the chair be shipped to his business address; when it was ready he would deliver it personally. A deadline was negotiated, a handshake over the phone. The warden called OSP for a reference and a contract was sent through the mail.

  It would be needed again within the month. There was a surcharge for rush jobs.

  The repair was not especially difficult but they had to use fresh wood to replace the arm. The chair was old, they all were, and the oak had darkened over time; the color of the new wood didn’t match. Fred covered the whole piece in three coats of epoxy and dumped his ashtray. Shook his head. It would last forever but he would have preferred a natural finish.

  NASA had painted the space shuttle with it.

  They rented a U-Haul van, secured the chair to the inside frame with ratchet straps and covered it with a furniture mover’s blanket. Fred insisted Jim Dolly accompany him to Indiana—it would serve him well, he insisted, to see where
their products were put to use, and Jim Dolly suggested that in that case they should consider expanding their line of merchandise. He offered examples, and Fred tried to smile.

  They drove six hours through mostly rural flatness; roadside stands, a succession of small towns, each a name passing from memory before the next was in sight. Trailer parks. Jim Dolly couldn’t drive because his license was under suspension. He brought a pint, wore sunglasses, told Amish jokes. Was oblivious to scenery that didn’t include a golf course. Fred wasn’t bad company but he had trouble talking and driving at the same time. He would take his eyes off the road and look steadily at his passenger as he spoke, and after a while Jim Dolly faked sleep in order to discourage conversation. Then he wasn’t faking.

  They stopped once for gas and once for dinner at Denny’s. Fred had coffee and asked the waiter if the beef tips were marinated; he could not have marinated beef tips because of his ulcer. Jim Dolly, groggy and half drunk, asked for the free Grand Slam breakfast (Jim Dolly could eat breakfast all day!), insisting it was his birthday. When he couldn’t furnish legal proof he enlisted Fred as a witness, who could not on principle corroborate this claim, then demanded to speak to the manager, who apologized but said it was a matter of strict policy. He showed them where it was printed on the menu.

  “We’ll get it back,” Fred said—he would not lie on demand, but charging travel expenses to a government contract was another matter.

  Jim Dolly, glaring at diners whose heads had turned at the dispute, said nothing, and though his appetite seemed unaffected, he remained sullen and indignant and barely spoke again till he was almost done eating.

  “They do anything different?” he asked, and the line cook hit a bell in the window.

  “Who?” Fred said.

  “With a woman, I mean,” Jim Dolly said.

  “Two jolts, same drop.” Fred thought. “Not sure about the amps—I understand she’s a small gal.”

  “Right.” Jim Dolly nodded. “I just thought they’d do something different.”