by Norman Green
“Why not.”
ROLAND WAS STANDING in the yard, his face set in stone. He was wearing a blue uniform, blue hat, and he had a gun belt around his waist. Frankie, wearing the same kind of uniform, was twenty feet away, climbing into a truck, his jaw clamped shut in anger. Sean O’Brian was standing near Roland, red-faced. He fished his keys out of his pants pocket and handed them to Roland.
“I’m sick of these nigger repair jobs. You tell that guy I’m not paying for nigger work. If I have to send that truck back to him for the same thing again, I’m not paying his bill. You tell him that.” He turned, saw Silvano standing there. “Go with him,” he said, and he turned his back and walked away. He got six feet away and stopped. “No, wait,” he said, turning around. “Come inside, I gotta get you the new insurance card for the truck, the old one expired.”
Roland leaned against the car. Silvano followed the kid into the building.
They walked through the front door. Just inside the door was a small entryway. A metal door was set into the wall opposite the front door, and there was a keypad on the wall next to it. Sean O’Brian ignored the keypad and pulled the door open. “Broken,” he said. “Another item on the list.”
He stopped just inside the door and took a breath. “Hi, Elia,” he said, obviously trying hard to be pleasant. “Did you see that latest envelope we got from the insurance company? I think it came yesterday.”
It was her, it was that girl Silvano met in the bakery yesterday. “No, Sean, I haven’t seen it. If it isn’t on your desk, your uncle probably has it. Good morning, Silvano.” She smiled at him, God, she was something, she was wearing some kind of T-shirt that showed a little cleavage. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. She was still smiling that smile, waiting for him to answer.
He remembered to inhale. “Hi,” he said. “You look outstanding this morning.”
She considered that. “Every morning,” she said, “but thank you, it’s nice of you to notice.”
“Oh, damn.” Sean was digging through the rubble on a desk over against the far wall. “Damn,” he said, “it isn’t here.” It was obvious he wanted to avoid Joseph O’Brian.
“Gotta go in and ask him.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sean muttered. “Come with me, Silvano,” he said sourly. “If he starts in on me, at least you can take the insurance card and go.”
The two of them walked down an interior corridor and stopped at a door near the far end. Sean hesitated, then he knocked. There was a low murmur from inside. Sean looked at Silvano, shrugged, opened the door, and stuck his head inside. “Ah, Joe,” he said, his tone conciliatory, “do you have that envelope—”
“Come in, Sean,” the voice said. “I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, boy,” Sean said, looking at the ceiling as he pushed the office door open wide.
“Don’t take that tone with me.” The voice belonged to an older man who looked a bit like his nephew, in his face, at least, but he was thinner, without muscle tone, and stooped over somewhat. He was the bicycle guy, Silvano was seeing him up close for the first time. His hair was gray at the temples and was cut in a conservative style. “Who is that with you?” he said.
“This is Silvano,” he said. “Silvano, my uncle, Joseph O’Brian.” He turned to the older man, who ignored Silvano. “He’s going to go with Roland to pick up that truck in the Bronx, and I need to give him that insurance card that just came in case they get stopped. I know how much you enjoy paying tickets.”
“Hmmph.” The elder O’Brian glanced at Silvano. He’d been in the act of lacing up a pair of sneakers. They looked odd on him, out of place, like Larry Bird playing basketball in a pair of wing tips. He straightened up in his chair. There were papers and envelopes stacked in neat piles on his desk. Silvano looked around the room while the two O’Brians searched for the right envelope.
There were pictures on the paneled walls, lots of them, most were snapshots of Joseph O’Brian standing next to priests or brothers, arm in arm in some shots, shaking hands in others. Most of the priests were smiling into the camera, but in every shot Joseph O’Brian wore the same blank expression, lips pinched together, mouth downturned. Some of the other pictures were of pipe organs, ornate altars, stained-glass windows, church exteriors.
They found the envelope. Sean extracted the insurance card from it and handed it to Silvano. “Here,” he said, and he turned back to his uncle. “You getting ready to go on your bike ride?”
“I want to talk to you first.” He wore the same expression he’d had on in each of the pictures. The kid sighed.
“Okay.” He turned to Silvano. “Go with Roland,” he said.
Silvano closed the door behind him. The voices got louder as he walked back down the corridor. The O’Brians are taking up an old argument, he thought, one that they’ve had a lot, because they’re both trying to talk over the other guy, not listening. They’ve both heard it all before.
Elia was grinning when he got to the outer office.
“What’s up with those two,” he asked.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “They do that all the time.”
“Why?”
She looked in the direction of Joseph O’Brian’s office. “Well,” she said, “Mr. O’Brian, Sr., is very spiritual. He’s very involved with church and all that, and he objects to Sean’s hair, his music, his friends, and so on. And Sean wants to be left alone. He wants to do his own thing. It’s the same old story, right?”
“I suppose. Are you and Sean . . .”
“No,” she said. “You seem very worried about my love life.”
You can’t have a casual conversation with this one, he thought. She bores right in on you, she actually listens to what you say. When was the last time anyone did that? “Well,” he said, “you know how guys are, we get around a woman like you, we get all primitive and shit. It’s not our fault. God made us this way.”
She was shaking her head. “How about if the two of you just butted heads, like mountain goats?”
“Too painful. Could we just dance around and make hooting noises, the way sandhill cranes do?”
She leaned back in her chair and laughed. “Go for it,” she said, “although I don’t know what it would get you.”
He sat down in the chair next to her desk. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. Men have gone to war over a smile like yours, did you know that?”
She leaned her elbow on the desk and stared at him. “I’ll have to be more careful with it in the future.”
Over his shoulder Silvano could hear the O’Brians heating up. “Are they gonna get violent? Should we call the cops?”
“Nah. Sean’s not a bad kid, he would never hurt anyone, he just never had anybody to teach him how to act. And his uncle has that disease old men get when they start believing so hard they think they know the answer to everything.” She cocked her head, listening. “They’ll be all right. They’ve just been reacting to each other lately. Joseph thinks Sean should be more spiritual, and Sean thinks Joseph is a religious fruitcake. I don’t know which one is right. I don’t think being a little bit spiritual would be a bad thing, do you?”
He shrugged. “They might both be right. The problem with spirituality is that it never looks the way you think it’s going to.”
“What do you mean?”
He stood up, folded the insurance card, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “I would tell you a story about that,” he said, “told to me by a wizzled up little Japanese guy. Tough old buzzard. I don’t think I got time for it, though, I got to go. Next time I see you.”
“All right,” she said. “Catch you later.” She smiled at him again, a lower-voltage version this time, but it still got to him. He went through the outer door into the sunshine and breathed the air in. It seemed to taste better than it had, just twenty minutes ago. Be careful, he told himself, just be careful. Don’t go believing some strange female is going to put you right.
SILVANO GOT INTO the Cadilla
c on the passenger side. Roland started the engine and looked over at Silvano, his face expressionless. “Told you he was ignorant,” he said.
“Yeah, you did. You ever want to take that pistol out and make him dance, like in an old Western?”
Roland sighed, dropped the gearshift down into drive. “It is a thought. Might do him some good. But you know, it ain’t none of my business. The Man upstairs got His own way of teaching you. You don’t pay attention, you suffer the consequences. I’m betting someone will come along, teach the boy a lesson or two,” he said. He stepped on the gas and the big car started rolling. “It’s His business, and I got to leave it to Him, because this is a good job, and right now I can’t afford to lose it. Pays pretty nice, it’s year-round, you know, no layoffs since I been here. My mother’s been sick, and we got a lot of medical bills. Plus I got a niece in college, and I’m trying to help my sister keep her there.” He looked at Silvano. “I ain’t a free man, and neither is Frankie. Frankie’s in deeper than me, he’s got a wife and four kids. Works all the overtime he can get. You know, a man has to count up the cost before he opens his mouth.”
“Not so easy, being a grown-up.”
“No it is not.”
“How long you been working here?”
“Two years.”
“No kidding.”
“Pretty long time for me. Before I got this job, I was a gypsy, pretty much.”
“That right?”
“Oh, yeah. I been all over. Before this I worked a year in a slaughterhouse in Davenport, Iowa, and before that I was at a chicken plant in Maryland, down the eastern shore. And so on. Yeah, I been all over. I mean, hell, why not? Might as well see a little bit, before you die. But this job is nice, no blood or nothing.” He settled into the driver’s seat, getting comfortable, warming to his story. “You ever been in a slaughterhouse?”
Silvano sucked in a big breath and held it. “No,” he finally said, exhaling. “No.”
Roland laughed. “No place for a white man. You see a white guy in there, either he’s a supervisor or he’s on work release.” He looked over at Silvano. “Just the way it is. Not bad money, but it’s a hard, hard place to make a living. Cows or hogs, they come in at the end of the building that smells like shit. They can smell it, you know, they can smell death, and they know what’s gonna happen, they be oinking or mooing, shitting everywhere, trying to get away, but these places, they’re death factories. They’re very good at what they do, catch the animals and string them up, no cow nor no pig gonna get free. Before they know it, they be hanging by their back legs, on the conveyor. Next, there’s a guy with the hammer, always a big motherfucker, arms like trees.” He looked over at Silvano again. “Ain’t a regular hammer, like you guys use. It’s a pneumatic thing, suspended from the ceiling, looks like a jackhammer, a little bit. Dude just holds it up next to the cow’s head, pulls the trigger, bang, the cow’s unconscious. Not dead, mind you, but out of it. Two seconds later another guy with a pneumatic saw rips the thing from asshole to Adam’s apple, guts and blood go flying everyplace, heart still beating.
“And so on.
“Pigs go the same way as the cows. Chickens, now, they’re a little different. They hang from their back feet, too, well, that’s the only feet they got, but they be upside down on this chain, right, they go through this pair of rails, look a little like parallel bars, traps their heads and slides them through this machine that zaps them, kills most of them, except for some of the roosters, the males. Males can be tough, but you’re a rooster, all being tough buys you is you get to hold your head up, watch the next machine coming, the one that grabs you and cuts your throat. Then the next pair of parallel bars traps the head and pulls it off, drops it into this sleuceway that carries it off to get made into cat food or fertilizer, or mattress padding, for all I know. Very efficient.”
“You worked there a year?”
“Little bit longer, at the chicken place. Funny thing about the chickens, a chicken is dumber than a fencepost, but it’s the chickens that get away most often. I don’t know if it’s because they’re small, or if they trust us less, or if they just want it more, but some of them do get away, at least for a little bit. But they’re stupid, you know, they don’t know to run and keep running, they don’t know what’s food and what ain’t, they ain’t ever been outside in their lives, so they just wander around the parking lot. Plant will have some guy looking for them, you’ll see him walking around, stick looks like a golf club but with a hook on one end, he’s got that in one hand, he’s got a bunch of chickens in the other hand, you know, carrying them by one leg each, he be covered with shit. Taking them back inside to die.
“And I often wondered, you know, if there ain’t a big cloud of bad karma hanging over these places like a bad smell. Oh, and you can believe it, brother, the smell of them places is for real, it’s like nothing else you’ve ever smelled, and when you been in there all day long it seems like forever before you get clean of it.”
“You go to the supermarket,” Silvano said, “I bet the stuff looks a little different to you.”
Roland laughed. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “all nice and clean and wrapped up in plastic. I couldn’t eat chicken for a long time after I left that place. Ain’t no problem now, though, I like them precooked wings, come frozen, got spicy red sauce to dip them in. It’s red but it ain’t blood. You lick it off your fingers.
“I was a little boy in Atlanta, my grandmother had chickens in her backyard, run around in this little fenced-in enclosure. Yellow and fuzzy, cute when they’re little. She catch one, she hold it in her hands and cut its head off with a pair of tin snips. Pull the feathers off, clean it, and cook it. It was more honest that way. Make you understand what this animal gave you, so you could eat your dinner.
“But anyway, now you know all about me, what about you? How come you’re in Brooklyn? I got family obligations, right, but you look like a free man. What you doing here? Couldn’t find no place better than this?”
Silvano sighed. “I grew up in Brooklyn. Joined the Army, stayed away for a long time. But Brooklyn is like an ugly girlfriend with big tits. You know you should stay away, right, but you can’t get her out of your head.”
Roland was laughing. “Well, I been there before, brother. I been there.”
ROLAND HAD TO STAY with the car, there was no safe place to park it. “Guy’s inside that garage,” he told Silvano. Black guy, and I mean black. Jamaican, little bit fat, got a mustache. Tell him Sean was pissed off. That’s all you gotta say.”
Silvano walked through the open truck bay door into a dimly lit garage. A greasy-looking dog got to his feet and showed his teeth at Silvano, growling.
“Sit.”
It was a command voice, and the dog dropped his butt to the floor abruptly, looking around behind him. A man came out of the shadows. He had the darkest skin Silvano had ever seen on a human being.
“From Black and White,” Silvano told him. “Here to pick up a truck.”
“Van,” the guy said. “Armored van.”
“Whatever. Kid was pretty pissed off,” Silvano told him. “Made noises about not paying the bill.”
The guy grinned broadly. “He don’t got the stones for that,” he said, fishing a set of keys out of his pocket and handing them to Silvano. “Him don’t want I come down there to visit.”
“What was wrong with it, anyway?”
“Air-condition. The gas leak out. Him use the van to cash payroll checks. Park the ting in the hospital parking lot on payday, right, everyone inside come out to cash the check. Him hire maybe four, five off-duty cops to work inside the van, hand out the money. Hot day, right, they leave the ting run all day, with the air-condition on full blast. See, you got the black van, park in the sun all day long, four, five cops inside with sweat running down the crack of the ass, well, mon, it’s just too beautiful to contemplate. You know what I’m saying?”
Silvano was laughing. “All those guys driving for him off-duty cops?
Anyway, I told you, right? Guy was not happy. You might lose a customer.”
“Fuck him.” The guy patted his stomach. “I look like I’m starving? Besides, summer’s over. Don’t need the air-condition no more.”
THE VAN WAS loaded down with the extra weight of inch-thick bulletproof glass and steel armor plating, and it drove like a pig. It was sluggish and it wallowed through the corners. Silvano followed Roland in the Cadillac. He was happy when they got back, glad to get out of the van. He tossed the keys to Roland and went back to work.
Shortly before the afternoon coffee break Silvano noticed a guy he hadn’t seen before. The guy was wandering around the construction site, young white guy with straw-colored hair chopped into random lengths, sticking straight out from his skull. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a blue flannel shirt. At first Silvano assumed he was working there, but there was something about the guy that caught his attention. The guy went over to where the sprinkler-fitters were installing their piping. After a short conversation he walked away with a two-foot piece of inch-and-a-half galvanized pipe. He held it in his right hand like a club, smacking it into his left. Alarm bells started ringing in Silvano’s mind, and he stopped working and watched the guy.
The guy walked up to some carpenters then, and after another brief conversation one of them grabbed a piece of two-by-four and a power saw and cut a foot-long stake, broad at one end, pointed at the other. Silvano listened to the zing the saw made, reminding himself not to jump to conclusions.
“Thanks a lot,” Silvano heard the guy say. “I really appreciate it.”
There’s a thousand things he might need that for, he thought, but the alarm bell in the back of Silvano’s head kept ringing.
A few minutes later the coffee truck drove up, honking its horn, and hard hats started pouring out of the half-finished building. Silvano sat down on the steps out in front, near a group of about ten men when the guy in the blue flannel shirt, still carrying the pipe and the wooden stake, approached the driver of the coffee truck, who was busy making change, and asked him something. The man looked up in surprise, shook his head no. Silvano took note of the look of surprise on the driver’s face, and he watched the guy make a slow circuit around the job site, stopping here and there, asking people his question, getting the same startled looks and negative responses in each place. He strained to hear the guy but could not. It didn’t matter, eventually the guy got around to them. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and leaned in, addressing no one in particular. He kept his voice low and conspiratorial.