A stout, blond-haired woman entered the store wearing a loud, brightly colored print dress. Immediately, the old man sprung to attention. She was one of his best customers, and the wife of the congressman, who, unfortunately, was forced to live in his district.
“Martin,” he barked. “The steaks for Mrs. Anderson, please.”
Martin moved toward the rear of the store slowly, like a sleepwalker. He entered the large walk-in freezer with its great slabs of red meat, marbled with fat. The huge meat hooks gouged enormous holes out of the fresh meat, not yet frozen by the coldness and still dripping with blood. The sides of beef hung at attention as if soldiers, in neat long lines. Martin pushed one great side out of his way, and it swung back and forth, causing a chain reaction with the others.
“The work is very easy,” Martin thought as he walked through the freezer to the shelf where the already prepared steaks waited. “I have lots of time to read. The people look at me strangely sometimes, but I don’t think Tati Cuda has said anything to any of ’em. That would be against the family rules. I try to be friendly. I smile even when I don’t want to. I just don’t like to talk.”
He returned to the front of the shop, and placed the steaks silently before Mrs. Anderson. “Maybe that’s why people think I’m strange.”
“Thank you, young man,” Mrs. Anderson told him. She turned to the old man. “Cuda, you’re going to start delivering, again,” she demanded rather than asked.
“When Martin gets a little more familiar, I think we will make deliveries, yes,” he replied. “If you behave, Martin. Can you behave?” he asked pointedly.
A flush of embarrassment crossed Martin’s face, and he smiled awkwardly at the woman.
Noticing his discomfort, she commented, “He seems perfectly well-behaved to me.”
“Yes,” Cuda said, “he’s just a little slow. I’m sure you’ve heard about the problem we have with Martin.”
“Yes,” she insisted, “but he seems perfectly well-behaved to me.”
Martin gave her a generous smile and returned to his chair in the corner and to his paperback.
• • •
“It’s really nice to be out of the store,” Martin thought a few days later on his way to make deliveries. The bills stapled to the top of the two shopping bags he was carrying waved like flags in the breeze. Martin squinted behind his dark glasses at the passing street signs. He wanted to make the deliveries promptly and correctly so that Tati Cuda would let him out of the store more often. He felt like a prisoner on leave, thankful to be out from under the reproachful glare of the warden.
“I like the way the store smells,” Martin continued to think as he walked along. “And I like that I can read a lot, but too many people come in and try to talk to me. Making deliveries, I can see the town and learn where everything is. That’s good stuff to know.”
Martin liked to walk along the railroad tracks and catch glimpses of the big locomotives pulling their cargo and return the friendly wave of the engineer with his bright red bandanna. No matter where the delivery was, he would make sure to take the route that would bring him alongside the tracks. The town didn’t seem to be so depressed and deserted that way. At least there was life when the smoke poured out of the stacks and into the cloudless summer sky, and the wheels clacked their rhythmic tune on the railroad ties. At least the trains and their passengers were more colorfully dressed than the elderly inhabitants of Braddock, who all looked like rejects from a black-and-white TV set. Martin tired of their lined, weary faces and their vacant, empty eyes, which had seen everything and now only wanted to close.
He also loved to walk along the tracks because it would take him by the only plant that was still in operation in Braddock. From many yards away he could hear the loud crunching roar that accompanied the great machine which swallowed the tangled and jagged junked cars and spat them out in neat metal cubes.
As Martin watched the automobile compactor, he thought, “I could do it to people in town if I want to. There’s lots of ways. And lots of people that nobody would ever miss.”
He thought back to his first day of deliveries when he had visited a haggard middle-aged woman in a sweaty housedress, her hands poised on the vacuum cleaner. She had opened the door right away when she recognized him from the store.
“Oh, hello, Martin,” she had said without hesitation. “Thank you.”
Then she had taken the bag from his hand and disappeared into the house to get her purse. Martin waited and observed an old Italian man across the street mowing his lawn. The sound was very loud and hurt Martin’s ears. But as soon as the man disappeared around the corner of the house, the noise got dimmer and dimmer and Martin realized how very alone he was and how easy it would be to enter the woman’s house and . . .
“There,” the woman had interrupted his thoughts. “That’s for the order,” she had said, placing a few dollars in his outstretched hand, “and . . . this is for you.” Martin closed his sweaty hand over a few coins, not bothering to look at them or count them.
“Can I get you a lemonade or something?” the woman asked, thinking he wanted something else when he did not move from the front door.
Martin only smiled and glanced over her shoulder into the dark, cool inviting hallway of her house.
He shook his head, but his broadening smile gave the woman slight cause for alarm.
Martin passed the automobile compacting plant and continued his deliveries. He dropped the next one off at a small brick house with a neatly kept flower garden presided over by two pink plastic flamingos. An old man with a wizened face and a toothless smile took the bag from him, grumbled over the rising prices, and failed to give him a tip.
“I like to see new people,” Martin reflected as he started in the direction of the last delivery for the day. It was a few blocks away from the brick house and almost across town from Cuda’s shop. “I see people who never come into the store because they use their telephone to tell Cuda what they want.”
He turned into a pathway which led up to a rather old Victorian house, its turreted roof in need of repair. The lawn was a patchy brown and green and crab grass grew untended along the pathway. Martin double-checked the address on the bag. Tati Cuda’s handwriting matched the name on the mailbox: Santini.
“I like to look at the addresses and try to imagine what the people will be like. The addresses and the names.
“Sometimes they look just like their names, and other times . . . they’re really different . . .” He rang the doorbell of the Santini home and waited patiently. He imagined that a heavy-set dark-haired woman cradling an infant in one arm, a toddler clutching at her skirt, would open the door. He hoped there were children—he hadn’t heard a child’s laugh since he had arrived in town.
He waited for a few more minutes and then rang the bell once again, afraid that the woman would not be home and then later phone Tati Cuda, screaming that the delivery had never been made. The old man would believe her before Martin.
The door opened and a fairly young, slender woman was framed in the doorway. Her face looked as if she had just been disturbed from a very deep sleep, and her light brown hair was mussed up, yet stylishly set. She wore a short white pleated skirt and a sleeveless powder blue cotton shirt. Her light pink polished toes were shod in white sandals. A pale hand flew to her hair when she saw Martin standing there, and she automatically organized the few stray strands. She smiled at him with red lips, her heavily painted eyes crinkling in the sunlight. There was a certain brittleness about her.
“Well,” she said in a surprisingly gentle voice. “That was quick. I thought you wouldn’t come until late this afternoon.”
She extended her hand to take the shopping bag from Martin and gave him a warm, friendly smile. But Martin could detect a great sadness struggling to free itself behind her eyes. A few small lines marred the smoothness of her forehead.
“It was good you caught me,” she continued, trying to sound cheerful. “I was just gonn
a run down to the K-Mart.”
She turned and started to take the bag of meat down the long, dimly lit hallway to her kitchen. Suddenly, she faced Martin.
“I can ride you back downtown if you like,” she offered.
Martin looked like a frightened rabbit and backed down the step, shaking his head.
“Why not? It’s such a hot day.”
Martin drank in her fresh prettiness. It reminded him of the woman on the train—her soft hair, her gentle voice, her graceful gestures. For a second the vision of Christina, her face flushed, her thin wrist brushing the bangs off her forehead, flashed before Martin’s eyes. His body visibly relaxed and Mrs. Santini noticed.
“Come on, don’t be silly,” she pursued. “We’ll go.” She disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen, leaving Martin open-mouthed on the stoop.
She returned promptly, a worn red leather bag slung over her shoulder, and she was holding a set of car keys. Martin followed her to the rear of the house where a car about six years old but in good condition was parked on the cement driveway before a small garage. She indicated that Martin should get in on the passenger side, and she slid behind the wheel. She started the engine smoothly and backed out, commenting to Martin as she maneuvered skillfully out of the driveway, “This is something. You come all the way up to deliver the stuff, and I deliver you all the way back downtown.” She laughed, and Martin observed the short hairs that stuck to her sweaty neck and the crucifix on the dashboard, which wobbled despite its suction-cup base.
“I could have picked it up myself,” she said as they merged with the traffic on the street.
Martin looked sheepish at her last comment, and he tried to dispel his discomfort.
“Hey, I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m going right past. It’s just too bad that you had to walk all the way up, that’s all.”
They drove in silence until she turned onto Commercial Street.
“Listen, do you have a minute?” she asked. “I need gas.”
She pulled into the corner gas station, without waiting for Martin’s reply. Then she let the car coast up to a pump and stopped, waiting for the attendant, who rushed out to her window quickly, wiping his hands on grease-stained overalls. “Dollar’s worth of regular,” she said pleasantly. The attendant gave her a disgruntled look.
Mrs. Santini looked toward Martin in response, as if it were necessary to explain.
“My husband puts in all the mileage when he’s out gallivanting, so I’m not going to use my money to fill the tank for him. I get little enough as it is.”
Martin swallowed hard, and looked out the passenger side window. She was making him very nervous with her confidential chatter, and he squirmed under her close scrutiny. She acted as if they had known each other for years.
Mrs. Santini thought he was worried about getting back to the store.
“I know. You have to get back. It’ll just be a minute. Could you reach in the glove there and hand me the little notebook that’s in there?”
Martin looked at the glove compartment and then back at the woman as if he hadn’t understood.
“In the glove,” she repeated, “there’s a little notebook.”
Martin reached over and pushed the button to the compartment door. He searched through it as if it were holy, afraid to touch anything for fear it would break. Leaving the compartment door open, he handed the woman the notebook. Mrs. Santini took the notebook from him and pulled out a pencil which was lodged in the spine of the book.
“My husband’s a fanatic about this,” she told a curious Martin as she scribbled a few notes. “How much gas. When. What’s the mileage,” she mumbled as she wrote.
Martin stared into the glove compartment as if he were peering into Mrs. Santini’s bedroom as she was getting dressed or making love to her husband. There was a little pill bottle, a plastic tube of suntan lotion, a pantyhose egg. Suddenly she flipped the notebook closed, and leaned over Martin to return it to the compartment. The unexpected contact made Martin flinch. He could smell her sweet perfume mingled with perspiration, and feel her warm breath on his arm as she leaned over him. Her hand seemed to brush his knee as she brought it back to the steering wheel. He looked at her, and she moved back in her seat, smiling at him in return.
“I’m sorry. I’m the complaining old housewife. If you don’t like it, get out of it, right?” she asked her silent companion.
But Martin, unaccustomed to such personal revelation, felt the criticism was meant for him and moved toward the door to leave.
“Oh . . . I don’t mean you,” she said quickly. “I mean me. If I’m so dissatisfied I should just get out of it and shut up about it. Anyway,” she sighed, then brightening, “in the meantime, it’s nice to have somebody around to complain to.”
The attendant came around to the driver’s side of the car and Mrs. Santini rummaged through her disorganized bag for her wallet and pulled a rumpled dollar bill from it. Then she resettled the articles in her bag, straightened her skirt, and restarted the car.
“You remind me of a dog I used to have,” she told Martin, as though to herself, before pulling out. Then she realized the effect of her words and explained, “Oh, I don’t mean that to sound funny. I had this old dog, Mutt. He used to sit on the floor and give me those eyes.” She looked deeply at Martin. “I used to really be able to talk to that old dog. And he’d just listen and listen. Until I got it all out of my system. Never said anything. Never talked back. Ha, ha.” She got a faraway look in her eye and Martin thought she might cry.
“What would I do if she cried?” Martin thought solemnly. “Tati Cuda would surely think it was my fault.”
His squirming caught her attention. She looked at him and smiled. This time he smiled back.
“Anyway,” Mrs. Santini said to the embarrassed silence that followed.
She pulled the car over to the curb. Surprised, Martin looked around and saw the familiar sign of Tati Cuda’s shop. For a moment, he wished that the ride weren’t over, that he and Mrs. Santini were going for a long trip that would take hours. He liked to listen to her soft voice and see the corners of her sad eyes crinkle when she smiled at him. He even liked the way her loose hairs kept falling into her eyes as she spoke.
“See you next week, OK?” she said to Martin’s back as he quickly got out of the car and closed the door. From her point of view, Mrs. Santini could see his gangly arms dangling at his waist, which was encircled by a cheap leather belt. His pants were gathered in pleats around his waist, and she felt sorry for the thin, awkward boy who now stooped to look at her through the passenger window. He put one badly chewed cuticle to his mouth. Through the window, she saw him glance furtively at her legs, with her skirt hiked up to her thighs in the heat. She felt self-consciously at her knees and then started to pull the car away.
Over the purr of the engine, she thought she heard Martin call “Thank you.”
She checked in the rearview mirror and saw him leaning toward her, his arm raised in mid-wave. Suddenly, she stepped on the brake and pushed in the emergency brake. Then she opened the door and stood, half in, half out of the car.
“Listen . . . do you do . . . other kinds of jobs . . . handiwork . . . yard work . . . stuff like that?”
Martin immediately dropped his arm, and it hung by his side as if it were made of stone.
Confused by his reaction, Mrs. Santini started to return to her car. Over her shoulder she said, as casually as she could, “Well . . . let me know, maybe we can work something out. See you next week.”
Martin stood in the street for a few minutes, until he could no longer see the dust-caked back of her car and a cloud of exhaust was the only evidence of their encounter. A few townspeople walked by, and they remarked to each other about the pale, thin figure that stood transfixed at the curb.
“I could do anything I wanted,” Martin thought as he entered his private dream world, the noises of the street a dim throb in his ears. “Some people like me. It would b
e easy. I just have to be careful. I’m sure I could do it. I’m sure I could do it so no one would find out it was me.” He turned toward the shop slowly, his mind still millions of miles away. “I just have to be careful . . .”
As Martin returned to the reality of the garbage-strewn street, he caught Tati Cuda looking at him suspiciously through the butcher shop window. Martin could see that the old man was worried. “He’s probably thinking, ‘What happened with Mrs. Santini?’ ” Martin thought as he returned the old man’s distressed look with a smile. “He’s probably wishing Mrs. Santini had given him a ride home, but he’s too old.” Martin knew that even though his chronological age was much greater than Tati Cuda’s, the old man thought of him as a child and was at times jealous of his youth. In fact, Martin’s mother, Elena Bulyaresse, was actually Tati Cuda’s aunt. “How funny I call him ‘Uncle’ when he is really my first cousin,” Martin thought as he walked past Cuda and into the shop where the last few customers of the day were gathering up their purchases.
• • •
Each day it became increasingly difficult for Tati Cuda to get out of bed. Gone was his sprightly step on the way to the shop in the morning; gone was the pleasure he had in eating Christina’s supper after a long day’s work. All that replaced it was the vision of Martin’s harrowing eyes and his chalk white face staring at Cuda across the breakfast table as if he were being scrutinized by the devil himself.
One morning, he could no longer stand it.
“Martin,” he addressed the young man, much to the surprise of Martin and Christina. They both looked up from their breakfast plates.
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