Garbage Read online

  “Right.”

  “Last time I can be talking to you like this. No more polite social teas and cutesy-pie chats from me, so also don’t bother with taps and tapes. Now once more—make up our minds. We haul a hell of a great barrel of trash.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Oh well. Maybe you’ll be a good lesson for some other possible dope,” and he hangs up.

  I call the police and tell them I want a tap on my home and business phones. Next day I awake the same time I do every morning and get set for work. I’ll be in at nine-thirty and open by ten and work to the end. I do that seven days a week. Been doing it for eighteen years straight, not one day off for vacation or being sick even when I had a hundred and three fever. I got this bar from my father. He got it from his father-in-law, though it was a different bar then, same name, in another part of town. It never made enough to support more than one family and it could probably just barely do that now. My father when I worked for him often warned me “Never give in to extortion ever. Do it once, they’ll be on you always. They’ll next want you to buy your liquor from them, then the mixers, then the records to rent for your machine. Then everything, even the bar coasters and lightbulbs. Before you know it they’ll own a good piece of the place and you’ll be working for them. Say no sir from the start. They’ll threaten but the chances are they won’t come through. And keep in contact with the police on this, though do what you can on your own without hurting yourself, since less the police have to do with the bar the better. If the police want a little palming for extra protecting and investigating, don’t give them anything but food and booze or soon they’ll be robbing you blind too. They still insist and you need them, go higher up till you get results. That’ll all happen a few times in your barowning life and if you ride it out, you’ve won. You give in just once, you’re sunk. You might as well stand on the other side of your bar and drink your business away, since that’s what’ll happen to it: straight down the drain.”

  Next morning around eleven two detectives come in, dressed like truckers, and tell me the Stovin company denied ever even hearing of my bar. “They say they got all the garbage they can handle now and which the city will allow them to dump and they’ve nobody working for them named Turner or Pete. They let us look through their recent financial and employment records, which they didn’t have to, and they seem to be as honest a private carter as one could be without allowing us a look at their original books. If you don’t mind we’ll pretend to be your customers on and off for a week, though to make it look realer you’ll have to put out for our food and an occasional rye and beer.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “Department will reimburse you for everything we eat.”

  “Even better, as it’ll at least guarantee me a couple of steady customers all week.”

  Two teams of policemen hang around on eight-hour shifts apiece, mostly playing cards and studying for college exams or watching the back TV. I get no attempted anything or threatening phone call. At the end of the week one of the policemen says “We’ll only observe the bar from the outside now. Nothing much, as it doesn’t look like anything will happen: a passing car or cop on the beat. We’ll keep the tap in, not to listen but to record your calls.”

  “What should I do if they march in here again?”

  “Phone us if you can, though God knows what I’d do if I were you. Probably, for just the fifteen bucks more a month, I would’ve let them have my garbage, even if I only half believed they’d hit on me or my place. Now that you came to us, if what you say is on the level, they wouldn’t do your garbage for ten times the amount and maybe got scared away. We’ll see. Fortunately, you don’t have a wife and kids. You did, they’d have threatened them to you and I bet you would’ve given in the first day.”

  “My dad never did and I don’t think I would’ve also, but then how am I to know?”

  “Your father’s times, those were different. People mostly murdered each other in their sleep, not out on the street. Today everyone’s got his homemade bomb and seven types of rifles and handguns. Maybe you should get one yourself. You’d be entitled to, I’d think, what with all those threats.”

  Next morning I go to police headquarters. Person in charge of gun licensing says “You’ve got to produce a definite witness who saw or heard your life or business being threatened or you to prove at least twice this year where your bar got robbed. Because without someone taking the chance under oath of standing up for you and then going to jail himself if it turns out he lied, half the city would be carrying concealed revolvers and shooting off their testicles and toes.”

  I probably could find someone to lie for me for a dozen free drinks, but then I’d be into another person for something else. Besides, I’m an old club man—I know how to swing one and knock out a troublemaker with one quick blow without breaking his skull. If a man came in with a gun and I also had one, I’d probably reach for it and blow out the window instead of his brains and then he’d pop me away for sure. I also don’t think I could live with myself if I killed anyone—I just want to help whoever’s threatening me to forever get lost.

  Business is the same as usual the next week: not so good. Police check in with me every night personally and once a day by phone.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Nothing’s happened if that’s what you mean.”

  “Don’t complain.”

  “I’m not,” but by this time they’ve usually already hung up.

  Once when a policeman says “How’s it going?” I say “Suppose some punk had a gun to my neck right now and told me to say nothing’s happening, how would you know?”

  “Does one?”

  “If anyone did, you think he’d let me tell you?”

  “Honestly now—no games. If anyone does have a gun on you, he doesn’t have to know who you’re actually talking to or your joking style, so say very naturally to me ‘I’m only fooling, Luke—I’ll take five kegs of bock and three normal ale, but this time make it cheap.’”

  “Nobody does.”

  “Then why frighten me like that? Stay loose.”

  One night, week after I went for the gun license, a customer I never saw before comes in, has a mug of beer and two hardboiled eggs, says goodnight and leaves. On the bar napkin is a message written on it under his half-dollar tip: “Shaney, dear. Your place is getting effaced tonight. Bet you couldn’t wait. Sorry, sweet. Love, Pete.”

  I call the police. They come with sirens on and in droves, order me to close for the night, shut all the lights and we sit in an unmarked van across the street waiting for anyone suspicious to stop in front of the bar with something that could have inside it a firebomb or can of gasoline. Nobody stops for anything except the bakery driver, who at daybreak leaves against my door his daily bag of breadloafs and rolls.

  Hour later one of the three policemen in the van says “Nothing’s getting effaced today and I’m starving, so what do you guys say?” and we go into the bar for coffee and eggs I’ll make and some of those rolls. A few minutes later the phone rings.

  “So there you are,” my landlady at home says. “I’ve been calling and calling and getting more worried every second and already was accepting the fate you were so charred you didn’t leave a single trace.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your apartment early this morning. The fire, where all your rooms except the toilet were almost altogether destroyed. Thank heavens we saved the rest of the building and our lives because your nextdoor neighbors had the foresight to put in smoke alarms. The fire marshal’s right beside me and he—”

  “Let me speak to him,” I hear a man say.

  “He wants to know if you left something cooking on your stove or can remember a cigarette in your ashtray or lit match.”

  “Mr. Fleet?” a man says on the phone.

  “Listen,” I say to him. “I left for work almost twenty-four hours ago. You think it would’ve taken that long or whatever hours it was
to start a fire if I ever had the dumbness to leave anything cooking there? Well I don’t have the dumbness for that and gave up smoking a dozen years ago and throwing away lit matches without watching where they dropped about twenty years before that and nobody but me and my landlady who has the keys and a plumber or two has been in my apartment for five years. That fire was deliberately done by some company that’s trying to steamroll me to doing something I don’t want to do and if you want to talk to anyone about it, come over here and speak to the police.”

  “You stay there—someone will watch your apartment—and I’ll be right over.”

  “Goddammit I’m mad,” I yell, slamming down the phone. I throw the eggs on, scoop out the shells from the yolks because I threw them on so fast and then slice the rolls so quick I sliver my hands twice and my blood sizzles on the grill. “I’m mad, those bastards,” and I throw the spatula against the wall and punch my palm till it hurts.

  “You want us to take over the stove?” one of the policemen says.

  The marshal comes in while we’re sitting around a table eating and I say “Want breakfast? I know I can’t touch mine,” and he says “No, I go home for dinner right after this—I got the moon shift, lucky me. But what’ve you guys got that’s so hot?” and a policeman shows him the note the man left last night.

  “This spit-stained napkin’s supposed to prove something to me?”

  “Well I didn’t write it,” I say. “Besides, you don’t believe me, the hell with you—I got to see my apartment.”

  “Whoa, whoa. Lookit, not that I’m saying what I’m going to say happened or even implying you were any way in the wrong. But knowledgeably speaking, anyone could have written this napkin for you so you could get your insurance company, we’ll say, to think your apartment fire wasn’t paid for or invited by you.”

  “I don’t have apartment insurance. If I burned anything down it would be this unprofitable bar, but without first calling the police there’ll be a fire, though maybe even there you think that’s another ruse. Besides which I never hurt anyone except some dumb—wait a minute. You see a parrot in the apartment?”

  “A statue of one?”

  “Real.”

  “No.”

  “No parrot, live or dead or anything looking like a bird?”

  “No, why, you had one?”

  “Would I be asking? Maybe she flew away. I always kept the window open a little so she could get fresh air, though when it really matters to them, animals can squeeze out of anywheres. But I had my windows wide open last summer and she never flew away yet. And plenty of times had the chance, having picked open the latch with her beak or I let her free to fly and crap all over the place and me because I suddenly couldn’t see her caged, though a fire’s another thing.”

  “It was a pretty serious one, so your bird’s body could have gotten hid under the debris.”

  “I’ll just have to hope she flew away and someone caught her before she froze. But I never hurt anyone I was saying except some bum who was hurting someone else in my bar and wouldn’t stop or with his big mouth causing all my customers to flee, and then I only hurt his feelings some if he still wouldn’t go. Showed him the club and even used it on him light at times when he tried to rush me with a knife. Another thing: think I’d be fool enough to knock out the place I’ve lived in for fifteen years? And which to duplicate somewhere else, or even the same one, because they can charge me what they want once I’m burnt out and they put it back in shape—forget the cost to my soul if even one smelly puppy goes up in smoke because of me—I’d have to shell out three times the rent I now pay? Don’t be stupid.”

  “And don’t shoot off your mouth like that to me.”

  “I don’t deserve to? Being accused by you, threatened by others, my apartment burnt out, parrot gone, a hotel to go to now—you’re going to put me up?”

  “Easy, fellas,” a policeman says.

  “Then tell him to lay off. I’ve enough troubles.”

  “Lookit,” the marshal says. “I know you’ve a good rep in your apartment building. Quiet and courteous and Mr. Joe Concerned Dogooder Citizen when you’ve the time to and so forth.”

  “Oh please. Stop chopping and packaging the bullcrap.”

  “That’s what she said—your landlady and other tenants. And your record for arson or suspected with my department and your whole family line of bar licenses is bloodbank clean. I checked. But I have to think of every possibility what started the fire—that’s my job.”

  “Go to Stovin’s then—you with these men. Show them the note. Don’t be afraid. Show them it and say point blank they wrote it and watch their faces lie in their protests.”

  “All we can do is go there, if these officers are willing, and question them about your charges and see what’s what. I’m sure though that if anyone was intimidating you for the reasons you said, then with that fire he’s stopped.”

  The policemen and marshal go. I’m exhausted and because I never could get anyone to work for me steady, being every mopman and bartender I had the past few years turned out to be the worst sort of loafer, drunk or thief or all three, I close up for the first time in my barowning life when there’s still daylight out, other than for my mother’s funeral. A policeman’s to stay in front of my place guarding it but I don’t see one. Hell, let Stovin’s burn down the bar. At least I’ll get insurance on it, though I make sure to take all the cash I keep under the counter for the next day’s change and things.

  I go home. Home’s a burnt-out two rooms but a john which still works. I take a last pee in it, retrieve what I can which isn’t much but shaving and tooth-cleaning things and a pure pewter beer mug of my grandfather’s for a sausage-eating contest he won a hundred years ago and which is almost still too hot to touch, and give a last look around for the parrot before I choke to death. I find her half dug in by her beak and claws to my one floor plant. Sara wasn’t originally mine but a gift, though her owner said “on loan,” in lieu of six months of unpaid bar bills. But I grew fond of her and she of me and I liked to talk to her when I got home from work or Sundays when I couldn’t by law open the bar till noon. “Got a match?” she’d say from the previous owner every time I walked in the door and I’d say, hanging up my coat, “Sara, how you doing? Don’t you know by now I don’t smoke?”

  “No match?”

  “No ma’am, I told you, I no smoke.”

  “No ma’am I no got a match.”

  “So now you no smoke.”

  “No smoke?”

  “You and I no smoke.”

  “I so now you no smoke got a match?” back to me or something and so on till we somehow wound up at the beginning and then I’d stop.

  I pull out the plant, put Sara in the hole and cover her with earth, feel sad about it, stick a pen up in the pot as a headstone, finally let a few tears go for the loss of my place and mate, wash the singed feathers and fronds and blood and smell off my hands and leave.

  A fireman’s outside my door drinking coffee when he wasn’t there before and says “Nobody’s supposed to be in there and what do you have in that bag?” and I say “It’s all right, I’m family.”

  I say goodbye to the landlady, check into a hotel nearby and sleep a few hours and reopen the bar, since I’ve nothing else to do and it’s not only my livelihood but where I see just about every social contact I know. Same woman in regular clothes is still in a private car in front of my bar and drives away talking into a two-way the moment I unlock the door, so I guess she was my police guard.

  The marshal calls next day and says “We’ve no proof whatsoever that Stovin’s had anything to do with your fire. Maybe it was someone in your apartment building who wanted you moved out or just a bar customer with a grudge.”

  “And the police, what do they think?”

  “Agree a hundred percent. But they did tell me to tell you, as they’re very busy today and knew I’d call, that they’ve removed the taps on your phones.”

  “The one o
n my home phone wasn’t too tough to remove, was it?”

  “I’m fire, they’re police, so I wouldn’t know.”

  “Listen. You’re ever around the bar for a drink, drop in.”

  “I’ve wives to slide home to, pal, but thanks.”

  “Free, on me, all you can guzzle and eat, because you’ve been all right.”

  “Different story then. I might drop by tonight.”

  “I once wanted to be a fireman,” I tell him that evening. “But after whiffing for the first time what an apartment fire was like and seeing my poor bird turned into a crow, I’m glad I followed the family tradition of owning a losing bar.”

  “My father and only older brother died in the same fire once,” he says. “Yeah, after that happened they made a law saying no two family of the same members, of the same immediate, brother-in-laws and cousins excluded—you know what I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can serve in the same fire station or even district. We’re famous as a name in fires. It’s called the Dibbeny Law which is our name and is now almost coastwide.”

  “Must’ve been some blow to you, losing both.”

  “It killed me. It was arson.” He’s now crying. “Maybe the only good thing it did was get me out of the navy as a hardship case at the start of my hitch to support my mother and brother’s kids. I’m still trying to find the guy who did it twenty years later, but of course know that’s crazy, which is only between you and me.”

  “Which leads me—mind if we talk some more about it?”

  “Go on. I told you, I’m really dead.”

  “What are the chances of finding the ones who burnt me?”

  “If they’re pros, zero. If they’re not, give it ten percent. Even me, who’s a crackerjack investigator for eight years now and took no bribes yet to digress me, my success story is no better than sixteen point five percent and most of those were jealous rage ones, so easy.”

  He gets sloshed and breaks down at the bar again but this time doesn’t recover and starts coughing like I never heard anyone and muttering “Brudder, fudder—ah rats, oh crap, tap me again, Shaney, zap zap,” and I have to pry the glass out of his hand and put him in back to rest and call his sons to pick him up.