Zipped

by Laura McNeal

  None of the jeeps talked. Maurice had gone away in the truck without saying when he’d be back, and nobody wanted to be caught talking when he returned. So they all kept yanking and tugging. Sometimes the roots pulled easily from the wet soil and flung mud onto their faces and parkas. It stayed cold—the clouds had packed tighter and darkened since this morning and the mist kept floating down. Occasionally Mick would stand to straighten his back, and once when he did this he saw Lisa standing, too, straightening her back, turned his way. Then they both leaned over again and resumed work.

  When Maurice returned midmorning, the bank was nearly done. He walked from section to section scrutinizing the jeeps’ work in silence until he got to the area where Lizette Uribe was still working. Nearly a third of her section was still covered with blue-green leaves and red stems. Lisa, who’d finished her section, had moved over to Lizette’s. Maurice stood watching the girls bent over and tugging for a few long seconds before he spoke.

  “What’re you doing, Doyle?” he asked.

  Lisa stood and turned. She looked scared but spoke up clearly. “Lizette’s area was a lot worse than mine, so when I finished my area I just started helping her out.”

  “Gomez needed help?” Maurice said.

  Lisa said, “Not exactly. She—”

  Maurice held up his hand to cut her off. He let his smile move among the group that had gathered nearby. “Two lessons here. First, to Doyle’s credit, she did what all of you should do. You jump in to finish the job.” He kept his smile fixed on his lips. “And lesson two is that if one jeep slacks off, all the other jeeps pay the price. Just to refresh your memory, your future pay depends on my written evaluation of your work, and nothing on that evaluation is more important than efficiency.” He turned now to Lizette. “You know what efficiency is, Gomez?”

  Lizette looked confused. “Working hard, I guess.”

  Maurice smiled. “It’s the effect of working hard. It’s how much work gets done in how little time.” He popped a bubble and kept his eyes on Lizette. “In this case, everyone finished his section with one exception, and that exception is you.”

  Mick, without thinking, said, “But her area had a lot more dogbane.”

  Calmly Maurice moved his eyes from Lizette to Mick. “Thank you for your input, Nichols. In the future please be reminded that when him who is Maurice wants your opinion, he’ll ask for it.”

  The crew stood in frozen silence.

  Mick thought, Him who is Maurice? And then he thought, Actually, it should be He who is Maurice.

  The mist had increased to a drizzle. Drops beaded on the hood of Mick’s parka and dripped to his face. Maurice said, “Now I suggest you all get up into Gomez’s section and help her finish.”

  They clambered up the bank with their barrels and began tugging. Mick kept peering out his parka and worked his way closer to Lisa. When he was within a few feet of her she glanced up. Her hair was wet and so was her face. She looked miserable.

  Mick didn’t know what to say, but he knew he had to say something. He said, “I’m thinking maybe we assassinate him who is Maurice.”

  A quick laugh burst from Lisa, which she stifled at once, but it wasn’t soon enough.

  “Something strike you as funny, Doyle?”

  Lisa’s face froze. She looked down the bank at Maurice.

  He was smiling. “Perhaps you’d care to share with the rest of us.”

  Lisa stared at him bleakly. She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  Quickly Mick said, “Someone up here passed some pretty rich gas, is all. I asked for the air freshener.”

  Maurice eyed Mick, then Lisa. “And that struck you as comical, Doyle?”

  Lisa said, “I guess it did, kind of.”

  Maurice nodded and smoothed out his smile. “Well, it’s nice to know what kind of thing can tickle a redhead’s fancy,” he said, and looked into her as if he was saying one thing and thinking another.

  The drizzle was turning to rain. Maurice looked up at the sky and widened his smile. “You’re in luck, jeepsters. What we’ve got here is perfect weather for fertilizing.” He looked beamingly at the crew. “This is how we make green pastures greener.”

  For the next hour the jeeps were fertilizing front lawns on both sides of five different streets. Mick’s job was to keep the spreaders filled with fertilizer so that the other jeeps would have a full one waiting when they returned with an empty. The chemical fertilizer came in sixty-pound bags. He cut them open and poured the white crystals into the next spreader. The rain had soaked through his parka and his pants, and what wasn’t muddy was now dotted with white fertilizer stains.

  Mick was wet and he was cold, and he knew everyone else was, too. The only good thing was that Maurice had left and he could say something to Lisa every time she came back with her spreader empty. Once he made her laugh by whistling “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” He’d decided the next time she came for a refilled spreader he would say, “Hey, how about if we go to Bing’s for some fries or something after work?”

  But this time as Lisa was approaching, a voice rang out behind him.

  “Schoolgirl!”

  Mick glanced around. It was Janice Bledsoe, sitting warm and dry alongside Maurice in a covered golf cart. She said, “Our guy’s a whole lot nicer than your mean old Maurice. Our guy told us to clock out, get our checks, and go home.”

  Lisa smiled gamely. Water streamed down her face and neck.

  Janice looked down the street at the other jeeps and said, “Hey, you guys look like a fertilizer-spreader drill team.”

  Maurice laughed. He seemed slightly different than he had all morning. Happier. More alert to sudden possibilities. He said, “Maybe we’ll enter our little fertilizer-spreader drill team in the next Fourth of July parade.”

  Janice laughed as if there were some wit hidden within the remark that only she recognized. Then she turned again to Lisa. “Anyhow, my mom’s here. Want us to wait for you?”

  Lisa shook her head. “That’s okay. I’ll just call home when we’re done.”

  “You sure?”

  Lisa nodded. “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” Janice said and then, turning a playful smile at Maurice, she said, “Home, Jeeves.” As they were U-turning, she looked back over her shoulder and yelled one last thing to Lisa: “Good luck tomorrow with tall, dark, and Mormon. Save me all the juicy details!”

  After they were gone, Mick said nothing to Lisa as he rolled a refilled spreader toward her. Before he’d felt happy, but now he just felt wary, and Lisa must’ve sensed it because she began to explain.

  “It’s just some guy who’s coming to dinner tomorrow,” she said. Then she said, “He’s a missionary, so it’s not a date. He brings his own date, really. Another missionary guy.”

  Mick nodded stiffly.

  “Missionaries go two by two, like on Noah’s ark.”

  He nodded again. He didn’t know why she was doing all the explaining, but he did know that the idea of asking her to Bing’s for fries had been a mirage that disappeared upon approach. “Hey,” he said, trying to grin, “tall, dark, and Mormon seems good.”

  She looked at him. He hoped she would say something that would make him feel different, better, the way he’d felt just a minute or so earlier, but when she said, “My mom invites them every month,” he didn’t feel better.

  Still, even here on this gray day, with her hair wet and stringy, and with a smear of dirt across her cheek, her eyes were a brown so deep and dark they seemed to pull him into them. “Well,” she said, “let’s make the green pastures greener,” and then she turned away and pushed her spreader up the street toward the next lawn.

  At 12:30, when every member of the northeast crew of jeeps was uniformly cold, wet, and hungry, Maurice Gritz said, “There’s other work we ought to do, but let’s save some of the fun for next time. So let’s just clean up the truck, store the tools, and call it a day.”

  He passed out their paychecks—he’d
clocked them out at one, “an extra half hour for working wet,” he said—then began to walk away. “Oh,” he said, stopping and turning back, “and when you’re done, I need Traylor and Doyle to stop by my place for a minute.” He pointed to the tin-roofed cottage beyond a small gully and next to the maintenance shed. “Just give a knock on the green door.”

  The crew put away their tools and swept out the truck. Nobody spoke, and when the other jeeps began to move toward the locker rooms, Mick began moving, too. Lisa said something to Traylor and went off to the girls’ side to change.

  At his locker, Mick put on a dry shirt and his dry leather jacket, but his Levi’s were still wet and his boots were spongy. He was the first one out of the locker room, and when he saw no one around, he climbed on his bicycle.

  “Mick!”

  Lisa’s voice.

  She smiled when he turned. She must have brought a complete change of clothes because she was totally dry from the neck down. Only her hair was still wet. She looked pretty great. “I’m waiting for Traylor,” she said, and nodded toward the locker room. “He still in there?”

  Mick had seen Traylor leaning close to the mirror fussing with his hair. “Yeah, he’s in there. He’s doing some remedial work with the hair gel.”

  Lisa laughed. A silence followed, and then she said, “When Maurice is done firing me, I’m going to catch a ride home with my mom. There’s room in the trunk for your bike if you want a ride, too.”

  Mick wanted to say yes, he wanted to a lot, but he had the feeling she was just being polite. And why should she be anything more than just polite? If what she wanted was tall, dark, and Mormon, he was none of the above.

  “Naw,” he said, “it’s okay. It’s not that far.”

  She shrugged and smiled. “All right. Just thought I’d ask.”

  Which made Mick think he’d been right. She was just being polite.

  Traylor emerged from the locker room, blinking. His gelled hair went way beyond the normal weirdness.

  “Over here, Traylor,” Lisa called.

  “See ya,” Mick said, and stood in the pedals, but as he set off he circled back and, slowing slightly, said, “Just so you know, I think Maurice’d be crazy to fire you.”

  Lisa grinned and as Mick pulled away, she said, “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  These Minutes with Maurice

  “So whattaya think this is all about, anyhow?” Sean Traylor said to Lisa as they walked across a wet mulch of leaves and pine needles toward Maurice Gritz’s cottage.

  Lisa didn’t like toadies, so she didn’t like Traylor. “I’d guess you’re going to get some of the brownie points you’ve been after, and I’m not,” she said.

  Tall, skinny Traylor threw up his hands in a gesture of mock horror. “ Whoa! That’s kinda harsh.”

  If this had been someone else, Lisa might’ve been disarmed, but this was Traylor, who’d laughed at Maurice’s Gomez line. “Yeah, I guess it was,” she said matter-of-factly, and that ended their conversation.

  Rain dripped from the corrugated roof of Maurice’s cottage. Gray smoke steamed from its metal chimney. A wooden footbridge spanned the small gully, and the front door was enameled forest green. Traylor stepped forward to knock.

  A few seconds passed and Traylor was about to knock again when the door suddenly swung open and there was Maurice, grinning and toweling his head dry. He was wearing only cutoff sweatpants—no shirt, no shoes—and Lisa thought he looked like one of those weird, too-buff, too-smooth guys you saw in muscle magazines. He draped the towel around his neck and motioned them inside.

  “C’mon in where it’s warm and dry.”

  Traylor stepped in first. Lisa followed but hovered near the door. Everything was neat—the bed was made, the floor was clean—and almost cozy. Rain tapped on the tin roof. At one end of the room the embers inside a wood-burning stove glowed a brilliant orange.

  So, Lisa thought, our manly crew chief has been tending his cozy little fire while his campesinos work in the rain.

  Behind Maurice, from the kitchen alcove, a kettle began to whistle. Maurice said, “You guys want some hot chocolate or instant coffee?”

  Lisa and Traylor both shook their heads.

  Maurice nodded. The whistle continued, but he ignored it. He said, “Look, Traylor, I just wanted you to know you did good work today. When jeeps do bad, I tell ’em. But when they do good, I tell ’em that, too, and you did good work today.”

  Traylor simultaneously nodded, blushed, and grinned.

  From the kitchen the whistling grew shriller and more insistent. Maurice kept his smile fixed on Traylor. “You need a ride home, Traylor?”

  Traylor said no, he had somebody waiting for him.

  Maurice’s tone turned politely dismissive. “Okay, Traylor, good work, and we’ll see you next week.”

  Traylor nodded and set the door closed behind him when he left.

  Maurice glanced for just a moment at Lisa, then turned and disappeared into the kitchen alcove. The whistling quieted and a minute later he came back out holding two cups of hot chocolate. When he presented one to Lisa, she didn’t know what to do except take it. She was still standing just inside the door, the doorknob within easy reach.

  “You look like you’re still freezing,” Maurice said in a voice that seemed almost friendly. “Stand over by the stove.” He gave an encouraging smile. “It’ll warm you up.”

  Lisa didn’t want to leave her place by the door, but she knew it would seem rude if she didn’t. She moved over to the stove.

  “There,” he said, and Lisa had to admit the fierce heat from the stove did feel good, but the hot chocolate was stuff from a packet.

  Maurice was regarding her. “You want something to eat? I make a pretty stellar omelette.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Maurice nodded. He sat down on a weight bench positioned between the bed and the wood-burning stove. He looked at her for a second and said, “Can we talk off the record for a minute here?”

  Lisa said, “What does that mean?”

  Maurice drank all of his hot chocolate in two or three gulps, then reached for the plastic tub of Bazookas on the bed stand. While unwrapping one, he said, “It means talking honestly and”—he grinned—“not for attribution.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “Well, for starters,” Maurice said, “I think I owe you an apology.”

  Lisa waited.

  “I get the feeling you think the way I’ve treated Uribe”—he pronounced it you-rib-bee again—“isn’t quite kosher.”

  The woodstove made a steady ticking sound.

  Lisa said, “You get that from Janice or figure it out for yourself?”

  Maurice smiled and shrugged. “Little of both.”

  Lisa thought about it for a second or two, then took a deep breath. “Okay, first of all, it’s oo-ree-bay, not you-rib-bee, and, yeah, I think you hold her to a much tougher standard than the rest of us, and, finally, it’s not me you should be apologizing to, it’s her.”

  To her surprise, Maurice’s expression was serious, and he was nodding slightly. “Yeah, I was thinking maybe I ought to do that, too.” He looked down at his bare feet for a few seconds, then he raised his eyes to her again. “So how do you like this job, Doyle?”

  “Off the record, this isn’t the best day to ask.”

  Again Maurice nodded thoughtfully. Then—and to Lisa this seemed like weirdness on top of weirdness—he lay back on the weight bench, grabbed the massively weighted chrome bar resting on its cradle above him, bowed his back, and began gruntingly working through a set of bench presses.

  So that’s how Ken-doll does it, Lisa thought. Only Ken-doll didn’t appear to be wearing anything beneath his cutoff sweat-pants. Lisa looked away.

  As soon as Maurice sat up from his bench presses, Lisa set down her empty cup and said, “I’ve got to go now.”

  To her relief, Maurice simply nodded, went to the door, and held it ope
n for her. “I’m glad we had this little talk,” he said.

  “Me, too,” Lisa said, though she wasn’t sure she was. She stepped into the rain.

  “Doyle.”

  Lisa turned.

  Maurice let his eyes settle on Lisa. “Off the record, Doyle, you have the most beautiful goddamn hair.”

  Lisa had always been taught to thank people for compliments, but if this was a compliment at all, it came covered with slime, so it was to her own surprise and dismay that she heard herself say, “Thank you.”

  As she turned and walked away, Lisa felt his eyes on her, and she had to fight the impulse to run, actually run for the footbridge.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Soldier on a Roll

  The house was dark when Mick got home that Saturday afternoon. He hung his jacket over a chair and pushed the chair next to the radiator, then he went upstairs and took a long hot shower. After that, he checked messages—one from his father saying it was snowing hard at Tug Hill and he and Nora had decided to stay the night, and he’d call later to make sure Mick was okay, and one from Reece saying the weekend with his cousins in Connecticut was something that shouldn’t happen to any species above crustacean. Mick smirked at this and went back to thinking about his father. He was glad they were staying over at Tug Hill. As long as his father was with Nora, Alexander Selkirk couldn’t be.

  In the kitchen, Mick fried onion rings and sliced sausages that he washed down with orange juice he drank straight from the carton. He tried to let Foolish out into the backyard, but the dog took one look at the rain and skulked back inside.