Joe's Black T-Shirt (21 page)

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 there,” 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.”

“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.

It wasn’t until he was outside re-lacing his boots that he thought about it. He forgot to get the check. How the hell could he possibly go back in and ask for money now? The sneaky bitch, he thought.

He picked up a white trash bag he presumed by the smell and weight to be his soiled clothes. Pissed off he had been so gullible, he stopped dead in his tracks. Underneath his driver side wiper blade was a check. In the note field Jeannie had written
For Services Rendered
.

Jeannie still lay in bed as Steve got out. She had lit another cigarette and had turned on the television. It was one of those remodeling shows where in half an hour they turned a shithole into the Garden of Eden. Steve liked that they didn’t show the crew of thirty people doing the actual labor. Steve had repaired many a broken pipe by an under-informed do-it-yourselfer. An amusing thought crossed his mind that he should send in a suggestion to the station to do more shows regarding plumbing. It would be good for his business.

The bathroom door closed, Steve turned the shower ‘HOT’ valve wide open. When the steam had begun to fog the mirror, he tested the water with the tips of his fingers. Slowly, he opened the ‘COLD’, trying to perfect the water’s temperature. When it seemed he was close he stepped inside cubicle closing the white glass door. The water was still too hot and scalded his feet. He added more cold water and the sting subsided. With the removable showerhead he had installed in hand, Steve liberally sprayed his entire body. In ritualistic fashion he moved the water from his groin to his head, as he always had, with no more thought than as to how he ate or sat.

The water was barely tolerable. One degree hotter and he might risk a third degree burn. Steve’s theory was whatever micro-bacteria might have attached to him could not survive the elevated heat in conjunction with his energetic scrubbing. It was based in theory to a story his grandfather had told him as a teen-ager.

***

The old man had been in the Navy in WWII. As soon as they docked and were issued liberty, him and his buddies would hit the ‘shore-whores.’ After four months out at sea, surrounded by swinging dicks night and day, unless you were a sissy, you couldn’t wait to dip the ol’ wick as soon as possible. A lot of his buddies would stay overnight in the cathouses, too drunk and exhausted to make it back to the ship. His grandfather said he always came back and immediately took the hottest shower he could possibly stand. He claimed, due to this ritual, he was able to avoid the myriad of venereal diseases his buddies suffered.

***

Steve shut off the shower. His skin pink and warm to the touch, he gently patted his skin dry. Jeannie’s terri-cloth towels were rough and itchy. Maybe he would buy her some of those good ones he had seen shopping with Brenda. If they were still on sale he would go back and get her a set. If not, then he would buy only one for his exclusive Sunday usage.