The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Vollie, nose in shirt, bent to the translucent aperture of the brass mailbox door. The interior of the box brimmed with sunlight and nothing else, and he quickly turned to leave. The service counter was shuttered. A single blueish fluorescent tube in the ceiling lighted the lobby. The smell for the fifteen seconds it took to walk through the lobby and peer into his box was of feces, piss, rot, and it added up to some extraordinary other sweet reek, a new life form or weaponized gas.

  Yet this figure on the floor had taught himself or herself to keep living inside the reek. And when Vollie put his hand to the lobby door, his disgust gave way to something else and he turned back around. He approached the figure and stopped a few feet away and did not move. The others in the lobby had hustled out. For a moment no one new came in. He did not speak or take his nose out of his shirt, but he did not look away either. The breath of the figure seeming to falter, stop, and start again in a silent burst. The tile tattooed with skids. His disgust did not subside but opened and disclosed within itself something that had nothing to do with disgust. It was not pity either.

  It was pride on behalf of the person within the pile of clothes.

  A young woman in a sequin-spangled denim suit opened the door, took a step inside, let out a whimper word, all vowels and lamentation, and ran away.

  Pride overcame him like a sudden wind: he was somehow proud of the figure’s endurance, as if he participated in the figure’s accomplishment merely because both of them were people. The burden of life a person could carry around. The history a person could hoist on his back without putting it down. The history not only of troubles but of the beautiful things that had happened, the dream of flight, the plunge; in his own case the blast of sun on his head after the tunnel, the taste of home water; and the trouble too, all of it, the sorrows of childhood, a slug in the back, measureless time, hunger like a knife in the stomach, his recognition at some moment within the dark after Wakefield had died that the lieutenant was dying too, but that he himself would have to continue being alive, the disremembered acts of greed and thirst that kept him living. All this life, too much, far too much of it, accumulated around a person. And it was only his own weakness to want to drop it, to cut it off, to wash it away, to be naked under the sun, to leave others behind and face the sun alone. He felt pride for this person on the floor who could do what he himself could not do, who had chosen not to strip it all away but to carry the life around on the body and in the clothes. To be a universe, even of bacteria, molds, still a living ecosystem respiring its reek among the coats and undergarments.

  A person was a world that walked through the world.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TALENTS of Vollie’s youth no longer came to him with thoughtless ease—truth telling, fraternity in small groups, spitting on the dirt road while the combines crept north toward Minnesota, and the ease also of solitude, the boy’s light step in the woods, hours spent scribbling the fingering onto a piece of music—all these talents he had never considered talents were buried now and lost. New life had overgrown them. Probably he had new talents he didn’t see. But he had not yet grown the talent for knowing when he was being played and when he was not being played.

  He had asked one of the associates in Monterey—themselves surely liars, though he didn’t want to believe it—whether there was anything he could be sure Lorch would tell him the truth about; and in a laugh of what he wanted to believe was candor, the associate said, “Lorch is going to lie about everything from the start to the what’s-it-called, the thing before the last thing. But the last thing he doesn’t lie about. That’s the money.”

  After six months in Queens, Vollie believed to a near certainty that Hausmann either was not here or had never existed. Neither possibility excited or bothered him. But he couldn’t abide any longer the way Lorch had forbidden him to do anything here but listen. Perhaps the play was to drive Vollie mad with boredom.

  He met Lorch in midtown at a luncheonette on Forty-second Street, their standard rendezvous and only place of communication. Van Aken didn’t join them. Lorch had shaved his hippie whiskers. He wore a blue tweed suit, keenly tailored. He evidently kept an office in the city. When Vollie asked where, Lorch said between Houston Street and the Yukon, west of the Euphrates and east of the Hoover Dam.

  Then Vollie said that from neighborhood scuttlebutt, he had identified the woman named Sandy Colt, and he wanted permission to do the obvious thing and approach her to ask if she knew whatever had come of her tenant Hausmann.

  Lorch said, “Hold on.”

  “Why? If we deliver, we’re paid. Sir, did I misunderstand?”

  “I ask myself, Why this haste? Why this tone of mistrust? He’s trying to elicit and prod. Is it because he doesn’t believe we’ll carry out our commitments? Have we ever let him down as to an agreement?”

  “My understanding was the sooner the delivery, the sooner the contract is complete,” Vollie said.

  “You’re looking pallid. I don’t like warehouse work on you. It isn’t enough to take a constitutional after supper. Get outside at lunchtime. You want the sun direct, not aslant. Arise, and let us go up at noon. For the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out.”

  “Tell me straight why not.”

  “This woman isn’t the kind of entity who you can knock on her door and she’ll tell you things. This is the kind who, if you knock, you are the secret police or the headless horseman. SSA and the Health Department already spooked her good. Don’t you undermine my operational security, Sergeant.”

  Vollie said, “I do the job, and afterward I’m paid.”

  “It puts me off my waffles you’d already be speaking in terms of some hypothetical ‘afterward,’ Sergeant Tilly. Put some cream in your coffee. You eat like the slender ladies in the Metrecal commercials. Let me at least get you a biscuit.” He waved at the passing waiter. “It’s enough for now that you should watch and report. There are protocols vis-à-vis you, me, the customer. Both the proximate and the ultimate customer. What you propose is not just the cultivation of actionable intelligence but something close to acting on it. At that level there are other protocols.”

  “You give me the job. You tell me I’m working independently. But to complete it I have to rely on superiors who don’t seem as eager for me to finish as you say they are.”

  Lorch, in a low and silky television voice-over, said, “Here they come—the slim ones, the trim ones. Who are they? They’re the Metrecal for Lunch Bunch.”

  “I want to work, sir.”

  “God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts,” Lorch said. The biscuit came. He seemed to forget whom he had ordered it for and buttered it quickly and stuffed it in one side of his mouth. With the other, he spluttered what sounded like, “You haven’t even touched your plate.”

  “Yes, I have,” Vollie insisted with annoyance, showing the clumped remains of his omelet.

  Lorch swallowed heavily and repeated, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  * * *

  • • •

  FRIDAY NIGHT. The unfamiliar block lay closed in a husk. Winter on the air and gravel dust.

  In search of parking after a double shift, Vollie drove in ever wider rectangles before he found a spot between a trash heap and a Bel Air with a crushed roof and four flat tires. No street lamps or people, except a girl he half recognized, sitting without a coat under the unlit marquee of a dance club that was also evidently a bowling alley called the Bowl-nanza. A halter top, a half-there skirt; barefoot, makeup disarranged. A lurid unseasonable flower perched in the back of her hair. She was crying with great self-possession and shivered. She had done nothing to interrupt her tears and projected an air of resilience in the face of suffering, character earned through long years, although the twiggy girl was barely fifteen. Her cheeks were still the roundest part of her.

&nbs
p; Vollie might have let her cry in peace, but she said, “Oh, hello, Iceman.”

  “What happened to you, there?”

  “Nothing happened to me. I did it myself.” She wasn’t the girl who watched the basketball with Sandy Colt; she was the girl who sometimes tagged along with those two, inspecting the other people on the old el or reading a magazine, the one who hid among sidewalk klatches, turning as the men passed. “I don’t regret a thing,” she said. “What do I have to regret?” She studied her polished toenails through her nylons.

  The leagues had all emptied and left the lanes to the late-night crowd. Teenage screams escaped the building, though the heavy doors were closed. Traffic on the avenue periodically convulsed in drag races. The old did not drive at night for fear of the young.

  “Where are your shoes?” he asked.

  “What if I never put them on? Did you consider that?”

  “Were you wearing them when you went inside?”

  She looked at him askance, the wry mouth coming up at a corner.

  “I need to go home,” Vollie said. “Are your friends coming to get you?”

  “What friends? I did it all, I don’t deny it. Just because she liked him first doesn’t mean she owns him. I’m a girl outside with no coat. And nighttime. And people might get the wrong idea. What do I care what they think?”

  “You’ve been drinking,” he concluded.

  “Actually, I’ve taken a barbiturate, or something, to relax, and yes, I’ve had a little drink, and it all feels wonderful.” She picked pith balls off her meager skirt. The knees awkwardly crossed and recrossed. With unsteady pride, she looked across the avenue at nothing. It was clear she was about to be sick.

  The door to the bowling alley opened. A steel door painted black and freshly graffitied.

  Marlon came out. “There you are,” he said.

  “Get. The fuck away from me. Go have a good time with your fan.”

  Marlon looked at Vollie. Then he looked at the girl. Then he looked at Vollie. He said, “I don’t understand what you’re doing here, Mr. Tilly.”

  “Your date is trying to get kidnapped for ransom. I’ll leave you both to it. Good night.”

  “Hold on right there,” Marlon said. “How did this all start about some date? Lizzy, you never said we were on a date officially.”

  The girl pushed on the sidewalk as on the gunnels of a tottering rowboat. “The fuck away. I’m waiting for my bus.”

  “Bus doesn’t come out here at this particular time,” Marlon said.

  “Ask her what happened to her shoes,” Vollie said. “See what she tells you.”

  “There was an altercation,” Marlon explained.

  “You need two for an altercation,” Lizzy said. “Trisha attacked me.”

  “I’m marking a spare on the scorecard,” Marlon said, pleading his case to the nearest adult. “Trisha comes in, swoops—I don’t know from where, she’s flying from the eaves like a bat.” To the girl he said, “She didn’t actually hit you.”

  “I look like an asshole,” Lizzy said miserably.

  “Mr. Tilly, can you give her a ride home?” Marlon asked.

  The girl’s tears started again. “I can’t go home stoned!” she said. “Daddy will strangle me.”

  The door slammed open, and Trisha marched out of the bowling alley toward Lizzy and stood over her. “Get up, tramp,” she said. “I’ll take off your head. The whole head. Do you understand?”

  Lizzy made a listing effort to sit upright.

  Trisha said, “Do you want your shoes back? Go take a dive in the grease Dumpster behind the building. Maybe you’ll find them. If I come one step closer, hussy, you’ll really be sorry. Hey, Marlon?”

  “Don’t. Please,” Lizzy said weakly.

  “Marlon, do you know why Lizzy keeps that flower in her hair?”

  “Stop it,” Lizzy said. “Don’t.”

  “Because,” in singsong nasal taunt, “her daddy gave her a flower once on vacation.”

  “Get a coat on that girl,” Vollie told Marlon, trying to walk away.

  “Don’t leave me here with her!” Lizzy cried.

  “Do you know what else she does when he takes her on a trip, Marlon?” Trisha said. “She writes me letters.”

  “I’m sorry!” Lizzy cried. “Don’t!”

  “You aren’t sorry, you only decided to like him because I liked him—want to hear what the letters are about, Marlon?”

  “Don’t!”

  Trisha’s breath was white. She wore a plaid sweater with long lapels folded over the collar. “‘Dear Patricia, The beach is awful. I cannot find the words to relate how friendless I feel being away from you. Daddy dumped me for the whole day. I love you.’”

  “Don’t!”

  “‘I love you, Patricia. You are my only true friend,’” Trisha shouted. “‘You are the friend of my heart. We should go away together and start over in the mountains.’”

  Lizzy let out a sob and snatched the flower from her hair and smashed her eyes in it.

  Trisha took a step toward Lizzy and raised her thin arm high behind her, winding to swing. The hand hovered. Lizzy crouched. “One of you guys has to do something,” Lizzy said.

  “Mr. Tilly,” Marlon said, “you better stop her.”

  An AMC two-seater roared past them the length of the block. A dirt bike chased it, popping a wheelie at equal speed.

  Trisha turned to the Iceman, daring him to intervene. Her nose leaked, but it did not embarrass her. She did not doubt her rightness one bit.

  And yet in the Iceman’s eyes, spooky and black, she saw reflected what seemed her own plea that he might show her a way out of all this.

  * * *

  • • •

  MR. TILLY SAID OKAY, he would take Lizzy home to her parents; but Lizzy, who seemed about to pass out on the pavement, refused to go. They were at an impasse. Someone was going to have to get the harlot out of the weather.

  No one was going to figure this out but Trisha herself. That Lizzy had betrayed her only lent vigor to her cause. They couldn’t go to Trisha’s own house because her mother would rat Lizzy out to Lizzy’s mother on the phone. So Trisha told Mr. Tilly they would have to go instead to the house of her employer, Miss Colt, who, whatever else might be said of her, could keep a secret.

  Mr. Tilly seemed to think a minute. Then he said all right, and Marlon said okay, fine, he was going to go back inside and finish bowling, and thereby revealed himself to be just another boy doing what boys do, turning their backs—one more illusion shot down. Trisha’s lust for him evaporated in an instant. She felt cured.

  They drove past numberless pizza parlors, pierogi joints, Royal Swedish Warm Bath, Trisha in front, directing. The three of them picked their way through the crates in the lawn, the household appliances. Mr. Tilly held Lizzy by the arm, steadying her. A light came on. With pink foam curlers pinned in her dark hair, Miss Colt opened the door.

  “Come back here, poor idiots,” she said, clearing a spot on a sofa amid the prodigious trash arranged and stacked as though it were more than trash.

  Mr. Tilly lit a cigarette and tried to explain what had happened, but it was all too much for Trisha, who started threatening Lizzy anew and graphically cursing her.

  “Alice! Stop it at once,” Miss Colt said. “You do not have the first idea what those words mean.”

  Trisha asked if Lizzy could borrow a spare coat.

  “Absolutely not,” Miss Colt said.

  “Doesn’t Mr. Hausmann have one?” Trisha asked.

  Miss Colt said, “Elizabeth, go wash your face.”

  “Yes, Miss Colt,” Lizzy said.

  “You look terrible.”

  “I know I do.”

  “Alice, you go get our guests some tea, Alice.”

  Trisha asked, “Don’t
you have a blanket she could use?”

  “Will it be ever returned to me?” Miss Colt responded acidly.

  “I promise,” Trisha said.

  “You promise. But does she promise who leaves her house on a winter night dressed like a men’s entertainer and loses her shoes in a bowling alley?”

  Mr. Tilly’s cigarette had grown a long and listing ash.

  Trisha went away and brought tea in jars on a tray.

  “Alice, bring blanket with teepee on it from second room, Alice.”

  “Do you want me to check on Mr. Hausmann while I’m back there?”

  “Why?” the woman snapped.

  Trisha looked at her bright shoes. “I just think I should.” Then Lizzy came in the other entrance looking refreshed, and Trisha’s anguish choked her all over again.

  “You found cold cream in there?” Miss Colt asked Lizzy.

  “Yes,” Lizzy said.

  “And you feel better with your face cleaned?”

  Lizzy nodded and took a glass of tea from the coffee table and drank, shaking.

  Trisha went away and checked on Mr. Hausmann. When she came back with the blanket that Miss Colt prized for its Navaho theme, Lizzy was sitting comfortably next to Miss Colt on the sofa with her bare feet folded under herself, and Trisha felt her neck go red, her face go red. Miss Colt and Lizzy did not look at her but at each other. They did not speak with her but with each other. For a moment she couldn’t comprehend what they were saying though they spoke in her own mother tongue. She was on the other side of the void. The other people were together. And she was alone.

  But then Mr. Tilly came through the veil, gaunt and black about the eyes like the one who ferries you over the river into the world of shades. “Don’t cry,” he said. “What did he have to say?”

  “Sorry?” Trisha said.

  “You were going to check on your Mr. Hausmann,” Tilly said in careful tones.