Joe's Black T-Shirt

by Joe Schwartz

  “How’s business?” Mark asked only making conversation. He sat in the one other chair the office supplied and lit a cigarette. The idea of poisoning by second-hand smoke was not taken seriously within these walls. Ashtrays lay everywhere. Mark placed a multi-faceted glass one on his lap to ash in. It specifically reminded him of one his mother had used until the day she died.

  Buzz sucked white smoke through an arm-length water bong. Courteously, he extended the pipe toward Kevin.

  “No thanks, bro. I got a long drive ahead of me,” Kevin said

  With a casual shrug of his shoulders, Buzz took his hit for him. Barely able to see the two visitors through the cloud of carcinogens, “Business is good. It’s always good. What can I do you for?”

  Mark set the ashtray down, but kept his cigarette between his lips. In a struggle with his body mass, he removed the thick folds of cash.

  Buzz let out a low whistle and fanned out the repetitive bills across his desk.

  Kevin licked his lips then wiped the saliva from his mouth. He was never sure how much his partner would be carrying, such details were irrelevant, but this much was a surprise. Even to him.

  Buzz carefully separated each bill. When he had finished, the shiny glass countertop of his desk was hidden underneath the green rectangles. A coy smile belied the skinhead’s satisfaction with the great amount.

  “You getting ready for a war or something?” Buzz asked.

  “Something like that,” Mark said.

  “None of my business. Sorry I asked.”

  Kevin and Mark followed Buzz downstairs.

  ***

  The subterranean coolness seemed even more so in the darkness. Buzz slid his hand over the unfinished drywall and flipped on the lights. The overhead fluorescent tubes tinked and popped from the low temperature inside the frosted glass. As the bulbs warmed the room grew brighter.

  Buzz walked ahead not needing the light. When the strobe effect ceased and the dull hum of the lights harmonized, Buzz stood cross-armed in the middle of the basement. Like a proud father, surrounded by the multitude that is his family, he was confident in what he had to offer.

  Guns of every fashion filled the room. Rows of shotguns stood in every size and in a variety of colors from camouflage to pink. Rifles were stacked like cords of wood, separated by caliber, their muzzles sticking out as if gasping for air. Handguns of every species, from six shooters to automatic sprayguns, covered and bowed the folding tables where they laid. The smell of gun oil and gunpowder was as intoxicating as a bouquet of fresh cut flowers.

  Mark opened his wallet and handed a carefully folded paper to Buzz.

  He read the handwritten note silently to himself then called for his helper. Like a ghost, the man seemed to suddenly appear. The helper stood straight as a nail as Buzz read aloud from the sheet.

  The servant moved efficiently among the guns with a makeshift shopping cart constructed from a furniture dolly and a oversized crate. He presented the full load for Buzz’s inspection.

  “Muy bueno, senor. El camion de carga, por favor.”

  An hour later Kevin and the helper secured a tarp over the truck’s bed. The guns and ammunition weighted it down until the axle almost touched the ground. Mark and Buzz placed magnetic signs on either side of the truck, tossed a few shovels and wooden handled rakes atop with several bags of cheap grass seed, and the disguise was complete. Why should the police have any suspicion of a couple of landscapers, slowly plodding along to their next job?

  Inside the cab, Kevin turned over the truck’s heavy-duty V8 motor. The roar was deafening inside the two-car garage.

  As they backed out to the street, Buzz wished them well. “Vaya con Dios, mis amigos.” Before they left the subdivision, Buzz counted the cash one more time and locked it in his office floor safe.

  ***

  They plodded along slowly, west to east, deliberately using the inter-connecting streets. The respectable forty-five minute trip to Buzz’s place would be a snail’s pace two-hour return drive. The main mitigating factors: stop signs and traffic.

  St. Louis, per capita, had the most stop signs of any city in America. Kevin dutifully, yet begrudgingly, stopped at every damned one. The last thing he needed was to aggravate some piggy’s snout, be pulled over, and find what lay beneath that tarp. If making full and complete stops, painfully resisting the urge to slow and go, could keep him from seeing the inside of a jail, he would do it.

  They drove parallel to the highway, through the ruins of old St. Louis. Large homes of all brick, once beautiful were now shells that crumbled from neglect. Enormous factories that had employed thousands were now idle without a solid window left. It was a wasteland that had abandoned all hope. The trade for cheap overseas labor ironically lost more than it had saved.

  Mark almost spit his cigarette out when his phone buzzed against his chest. He fumbled with the tiny device dropping and catching the phone in mid-air.

  “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” Mark asked.

  “Daddy, it’s me. Can you hear me, Daddy?” Rose asked.

  “Yes, pumpkin,” Mark said.

  Mark saw Kevin in his peripheral vision pretending not to eavesdrop. It delighted him that Rose would have nothing to do with him. She was seventeen, still a girl consumed with make-up and clothes. In two more months’ time, Kevin would become a thirty-year-old man ancient as the dinosaurs, pyramids, and record players to her modern world of MP3s, IMs, and BFFs.

  Mark spoke in intimate, hushed tones, deliberately not letting Kevin hear as much as one word of his conversation. He told his daughter he loved her before he closed the phone and replaced it in his shirt pocket.

  “Was that Rose?” Kevin asked.

  Curiosity killed the cat. The poor bastard’s got it bad, Mark thought.

  He remembered how he suffered his wife’s father. Every Saturday, he listened to the same stories, week after week, nursing his one beer to the old man’s dozens. Rosarita, as desperate as Mark was to escape to the darkness of his car, to the secret places youth keeps for virgin lovers, she brought her father beer after beer. Some nights, the old timer went down without a fight, anesthetized by the alcohol. Others, he would find no peace. He would punch walls, break pictures, and push Mark around and sometimes hit him. Out of respect, he never hit back. The man was drunk and should not be held accountable under his own roof.

  When Rosarita eventually became pregnant, he did the honorable thing, and asked her father’s blessing. After the old man hit him hard across the jaw, almost knocking him unconscious, he embraced him. They drank together all that night, Rosarita served Mark exclusively, sitting on his lap, waiting only for his next command.

  This Kevin, he thought, would have no such luck.

  “You like Rose, don’t you?” Mark asked.

  The guilt turned Kevin’s face red.

  “I thought as much.”

  Kevin had no words. He kept his eyes forward and concentrated on the road, keeping a look out for cops. Whether he denied or affirmed the accusation, there was no hope. Mark had him dead to rights. Inevitably, he would either let it go or change the subject. If he had learned anything about Mark in the past three years, it was that he had a crippling short attention span. It’s why he always drove. One minute, Mark would be lucid, driving with perfectionism a DMV instructor would envy. The next he was everywhere, like a drunk feeling the road to get home, obsessed with fine tuning the radio or lost in some intimate thought.

  The halfway point of Natural Bridge was a welcome sight. Rush hour traffic was beginning to form. Long yellow busses intertwined with tiny Japanese cars. People eager to go back home found no solace.

  Kevin’s truck entered into this busy world unnoticed. Theirs was just another slow-moving vehicle, another target drawing commuter anger. Sometimes, usually a man, would pull along side to stare hard at them. It meant nothing, yet it was always funny to Mark and Kevin. If it tipped the scales back to even, then so be it.

  “Mr. Badass ther
e,” Mark said as he refused to look over and engage in childish staring games, “if he knew our little secret, eh?”

  Kevin agreed, also refusing to look over. They were mules, not murderers or heroes. The light would change, this idiot would peel out proving nothing to them, and they would safely and steadfastly continue.

  The blue and white sign declaring ‘U-Store It’ hovered above them. A chain link fence on rollers slid away after Kevin entered a secret four-digit code. The roll-up, safety-orange colored doors grew larger as the numbers stenciled above them increased. Kevin ignored the addresses as familiar to him in this cubicle maze as in his own neighborhood.

  Mark unlocked the door to the storage unit and lifted it high above his head. Kevin parked the truck, then helped Mark close the door, re-locking it from the inside.

  The two men worked in silence. They unloaded the guns, sorting and organizing as they went, careful not to accidentally pull a trigger. In their trade, carelessness was how men got killed. Finished, they took the signs off the side of the truck, threw them in back with the other impostures of working men and headed for Mark’s house.

  ***

  The truck rested at the curb once again. Neighbors who had been at work earlier were now home mowing grass and washing cars. Children played lively outdoor games or rode bicycles untroubled by their parent’s woes.

  Rose sat on the porch. On a table, two freshly opened beers waited.

  “This was a good day,” Mark said.

  “Beats the hell out of working for a living,” Kevin said.

  Rose stood and hugged her father before he sat with his beer. Assured he was comfortable for the moment, she went inside.

  Kevin stood and stared at the door holding his beer without drinking. “I love her.”

  Mark waved his cigaretted hand as if annoyed by a mosquito. It was a foolish thing, this talk of love, he thought. A word used with such carelessness that Mark still wondered at the breadth of its meaning.

  “I do,” Kevin said.

  “You don’t know anything,” Mark said.

  “I know I want to marry her, make her my wife.”

  “Shut-up.”

  “No.”

  “Shut it or I will shut it for you.”

  “I love her and want to do right by her.”

  Rose came out, tears in her eyes, slow moving past her father, careful into Kevin’s embrace. Her black doe-like eyes pleading for her father’s mercy.

  “I don’t under---”

  Kevin placed a loving hand over Rose’s stomach, below her navel. Rose placed hers on top of his, trying to smile and not cry, but failed.

  Mark sat dumbstruck. He supposed Rosarita already knew.

  ###

  Road to Hell

  Steve rolled off Jeannie, reached across to the nightstand and set a glass ashtray between them. He lit a cigarette for her, then one for himself. The cool menthol burn always tasted good after vigorous sex. In bed, he watched the smoke entrails intertwine, float above, and cling spirit-like to the ceiling.

  Sundays, from eight until eleven was their time, while his wife and children attended services. In three weeks, he realized it would be his and Jeannie’s second anniversary.

  He liked the fact he had a mistress. He loved Brenda and hadn’t any plans of abandoning their marriage. Brenda was a good woman. She helped him build his small business from a magnetic sign on the side of his worn out Chevy S-10 into a middle-class income.

  In a sense, it was how he met Jeannie. He had searched the steep grade for her blue and white trailer. All these single-wide shanties looked the same to him. Finally, the angular, stick-on number eleven appeared, and he pulled his oversized van into her pea-gravel driveway.

  She called him because her kitchen and bathrooms sinks refused to drain. The water was black and stagnant. A seasoned pro at such mundane things, he had a fairly good idea the problem lay somewhere between trailer’s discharge pipe and the sewer.

  He unloaded a hammer drill and the used tire where he kept the drain snake coiled, then went to work. Under the trailer, he found the clean out. With a large pipe wrench he opened the sealed cap. He hadn’t anticipated it being so easy to turn and was immediately drenched in wastewater. The smell was overpowering, but something familiar that no longer made him gag.

  Steve attached the steel quarter-inch cable to his drill. He was running forty feet out when the auger bit and twisted viscously in his grip. Automatically he let off the trigger, flipping the slide marked forward to reverse. Steve slid the snake tenaciously warring against the blockage. When he was certain the obstruction had been cleared, he replaced the drain cap and carried the heavy equipment back to his truck.

  In the bill, he charged for everything he could think. Residential trip charge, plus inspection fee, plus equipment usage fee, plus hazardous removal fee then added in for time and labor.

  Covered in black-speckled filth, Steve knocked on Jeannie’s door. She had changed from her initial sweats to Daisy Duke shorts that exposed her ass cheeks and a t-shirt, knotted to reveal her firm belly and accent her small breasts. They both stared at one another, gawking. Wordless, Steve passed the bill to her.

  “Damn,” she said, “that’s a hell of a lot more than I expected.”

  Steve was used to it. He was almost immune to the shocked reactions his bills affected. It was more a disappointment to him if a customer was happy to pay than not. He was more than ready to recite by rote as to how the bill was calculated according to the duties that were necessary to be performed, the variables that constituted labor, and his closing argument that a professional plumber would have charged triple. Before he could say a word, Jeannie caught him off guard.

  “You stink.”

  “No shit, lady,” Steve said “I’ve been laying in dirt, cobwebs, and feces for the last hour, working on your goddam drain.”

  “Is it fixed?”

  “Yeah, it’s fixed.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah. Was it a rat? We got rats bigger than fucking housecats out here.”

  “It was your tampons,” Steve said. The more she talked the more he was getting pissed. He was usually more gentile with such news, but he could tell she was stalling. To hell with the miss and ma’m shit, he thought, for Christ’s sake. Write a fucking check already.

  “Oh shit,” she said. A smile lit up her face and she couldn’t stop from giggling.

  Certain she was completely off her nut, Steve pushed the bill. “Lady,” he said, “I’m tired. After I get back home and clean up, I still got to take my kid to his t-ball this game. So, if you wouldn’t mind…”

  “Seeing as you fixed the plumbing, you might as well use it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why don’t you come inside and take a shower. I got soap and about a dozen different shampoos.”

  “I don’t know---”

  “I could even wash your clothes while you wait.”

  Steve thought about it. He had a change of work clothes he kept in the van. This wasn’t the first time he had been baptized in excremental waters. The image of him changing clothes in his van, shoving the dirties into shopping bags, and the forty minute ride back home reeking of sewer filth wasn’t appealing. What the hell, he thought.

  He went to the van and grabbed the bag of extra clothes. Before coming inside, he sat on the second-to-last stair tread to remove his boots. In his stocking feet, he walked inside, while Jeannie held the screen door open for him.

  “I appreciate this,” he said, “but it ain’t gonna change that bill none. I’ve got a family to feed, you know.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Use the shower in my bedroom. You’ll pass the washer on the way. Leave your clothes there and I’ll put ‘em in.”

  “Don’t bother. Anything you wash is gonna smell for a week later if you do,” Steve said. “Put ‘em in a garbage sack and throw it out the door. I’ll get it when I leave.”
r />   “Whatever. Don’t make a bit of difference to me.”

  The shower was small. Jeannie hadn’t been kidding about all the shampoo she collected. After sniffing a majority of them, he decided on one that smelled the least like flowers. He wished he had brought some, but how the hell could he have known? The shampoo he normally used looked like tar and smelt worse than vapor rub. It was guaranteed to kill lice, mites, and the whatnot. With all the bacteria he got slimed in regularly, he relied on the medicinal detergent to help keep him healthy. At twenty-two bucks a damn bottle, it better work.

  After the shower he felt better. In his line of work, cleanliness was a rare and beautiful thing. Using her brush, he combed his shoulder-length hair. Still black without a hint of gray and thick as bears hide in winter. Observing his physique in the mirror, he wasn’t a pound heavier than the day he graduated high school. His body did, however, show the results of his strenuous labors in the form of raised veins and rock hard muscles. It was pleasing to him. While most of his drinking buddies were fat slobs who looked years older than they were, he was often mistaken for thirty when he would soon be eight years older than that in April.

  A towel tied about his waist, he opened the bathroom door. Naked and spread eagle on the king-sized bed, Jeannie was unabashedly masturbating herself with a purple vibrator. Steve instantly became erect. With no more hesitation than a dog in heat, he mounted her.

  After coming twice, he was spent. He got dressed and stood before her again in his socks. Steve couldn’t believe his good luck. Without a care in the world, he tossed his empty gymbag over his shoulder and told her good-bye.