Marked (2 page)

He sighed, put down the newspaper and heaved himself off the creaky chair. The concrete floor of the garage seemed to tremble as if Godzilla was marching across it. When he reached the floor-to-ceiling metal shelves on the far side, he started pulling down spray bottles.

“You use this to get the graffiti off the poles,” he said, handing me a bottle and a bunch of rags. “Don't monkey around with this stuff,” he said. “You fool around and get this in your eyes, you'll need one of those seeing-eye dogs to get around.”

He handed me a second spray bottle. “After you get the graffiti off, wait a few minutes until the surface is dry and then
spray this on. This makes it easier to get the graffiti off the next time.”

“The next time?” I said.

“You don't think taggers are going to give up just because you clean up after them, do you?” he said.

I'd never really thought about it.

“If it's a utility pole or control box, it comes off,” Stike said. “I don't care if they're pieces or burners—if they're on electric or phone company property, they're gone. Anything on city or private property, that's someone else's problem. You got that? The utility companies are not paying you to take care of someone else's problem.”

“Pieces?” I said.

“The so-called fancy crap they put up,” Stike said. “Piece is supposed to be short for masterpiece—talk about hyping your own garbage. Burners are the same thing but bigger and with more detail. But you won't get many of those. The poles and boxes are too small. The crews that do pieces hit walls, garage doors, that kind of surface.”

He turned and pulled a clipboard from the wall.

“Here's your route,” he said, pulling off some sheets of paper that were stapled together. He handed them to me and waited while I flipped through them before he said, “You recognize those streets?”

“Kind of,” I said, although I didn't really.

Stike looked at me the way Dave Marsh used to. He trudged over to another shelf and pulled down a battered city map book.

“You can read maps, right?” he said.

I nodded.

He thrust the book at me.

“Don't lose it,” he said. “It's company property. You go to the locations on your work sheet. You clean up whatever you see on utility company property. You check off the location and record the time you were there. At the end of the day, you come back here and turn in your work sheet.”

There were a
lot
of locations on the sheets.

“There's graffiti at all these places?” I asked.

Stike gave me a look. “You think the boss is going to pay you by the hour to go out there and hope you find something useful to do?” he said. “Look what it says at the top of this page—work order. That means everywhere you go, you work.”

“How do you know there's graffiti at all of these places?”

Stike shook his head. “You haven't heard? The utility companies run a campaign every summer. They set up a hotline. Someone sees graffiti on utility company property, they phone it in. The company promises to get rid of it within forty-eight hours. The idea is that if they wipe it out as fast as it goes up, these knuckleheads will give up and move their act somewhere else.”

In other words, make it a problem for someone besides the utility companies and preferably in not-so-nice neighborhoods.

“Do I keep at it until I finish?” I said.

“You keep at it until the end of your shift. Whatever you don't finish goes to the top of tomorrow's work order. At the end of the day, I go out and see what you did. You do a lousy job, you're fired. You do a sloppy job, you're fired. You take too long at each site or do too little work, you're fired. Some locations will need more work than others—that's a given. All Ray asks is you do a good job as efficiently as possible. You got it?”

I had it. I turned to leave.

“Hey, kid,” Stike said. “Don't forget your ID.”

He handed me a photo ID. I had a stunned look on my face in the picture. The id was in a plastic holder and had a clip on it so that I could attach it to my belt.

“Just in case,” Stike said.

I packed my supplies into the milk crate I'd fastened to the back of my bike the night before and got ready to leave.

“One more thing,” Stike called as I mounted up. “Keep your eyes open.”

“Huh?” Keep them open for what? What did he mean?

“We had a kid last year who ran into some trouble. Some crew didn't appreciate his cleanup. They waited for him one morning and jumped him. Kid ended up in the hospital.” He grinned at me as if he were telling me about some fond memory. “Watch the watchers,” he said. “If you think you're attracting some of the wrong attention, you let me know. Crews don't scare Stike.”

I had the feeling that not much scared Stike. But the thought of getting jumped by a gang sure scared me. I began to wonder if Dave Marsh had done me a favor after all.

I leaned my bike against the boulder that marked the entrance to the neighborhood where I was supposed to work. I couldn't imagine living in a neighborhood like that. The houses were all big—not as big as in the richest part of the city, where the houses cost millions of dollars and all had tennis courts and indoor swimming pools. But they were a lot bigger than the houses in my neighborhood and had yards that were either fenced in or surrounded by hedges.
People who lived here didn't have much to worry about, except taggers who ruined how neat and pretty everything was. It must be nice to live in a neighborhood where that was the worst thing that ever happened.

I looked around to see if anyone was watching me. I kept thinking about the kid who had ended up in hospital. I didn't want that to happen to me. But I didn't see anyone at all. Then I thought about it. Nobody would come after me today, I decided. I hadn't done anything yet. They wouldn't be on the lookout until they saw that someone had erased their tags. It wasn't today I had to worry about—it was tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

The first job on my list was the utility control box that stood just behind the boulder. It was a big gray box with two flat surfaces that were like blank canvases—at least they must have looked like that once upon a time. Now they were covered with tags. Mostly the tags were boring. Each one was done in one color, either blue or black. There was nothing creative about them.
They were just big squishy initials. I don't know why they even bothered. I mean, what was the big deal? Besides the tags, there were letters and numbers in neon pink between the arms of a big cross.

I stared at the neon pink letters. They were wide and slanted, sort of like the lettering on the tags. But they were different too, not like the rest of the stuff that covered the utility box. I wondered if they were some kind of official markings put there by the utility company.

Stike told me to remove any markings I saw on utility company property. These were markings. They were on utility company property. It seemed simple.

But what if they were official markings, like you see painted on the street sometimes when the city is planning to do some work? And what if I got in trouble for removing them?

On the other hand, what if they were graffiti? And what if I left them there and Stike fired me? My mom was so proud of me for getting this job. I thought about how
disappointed she would be if I got fired on my first day.

Time was ticking by.

I had three pages of work to do. Stike was going to inspect not just how well I had done the work but also how much I had done. I had to get moving. But first I had to decide what to do about the neon pink markings.

I pulled my sketchbook out of my pocket and flipped it open to a clean page. I copied the cross and the letters and numbers in it—
2N 3W
—each number or letter in one of the four spaces made by the cross. If it turned out they were important, I could at least tell Stike what they were. I could even put them back if he wanted me to.

Then I got out my spray bottle and rags and I started to work. It took more applications of the spray and a whole lot more scrubbing than I had expected. I started to worry that I would run out of spray before I got through the first page of work. I waited for a few minutes until the surface dried, and then I sprayed it with the second spray bottle.

I was loading my supplies back into the milk crate when I spotted her.

She was holding three leashes in one hand and two in the other. The leashes were those kind with the big plastic handles that pay out the leash like a tape measure, so her hands were really full. She had light brown, shoulder-length hair with streaks of gold in it. She was wearing a backpack. Even with all those dog leashes in her hands, she had a way of walking, tall and straight, that made me think she was loaded with confidence. Well, why not, if she lived around here? I bet at least half the girls in this neighborhood went to private school. I bet almost all of them would end up in university. So why not stroll down the street like you owned it? Why not have five dogs? Three of them were big—a German shepherd, an Airedale and a chocolate Lab—and probably cost as much to feed as my mom spent on me.

She glanced at me, that's it. Just glanced and then turned her head away again, like she had better things to look at. I wasn't
surprised. I was wearing beat-up jeans and sneakers.

I swung my bike around, rode off the traffic island and into the street and headed in the opposite direction from the girl. I had a job to do. I couldn't fool around with a bunch of dogs before going to the tennis club or the yacht club or whatever she had planned for the day.

Stike was standing out in front of the garage when I got back.

“You're late,” he said. He didn't sound happy.

I stared at him. I had heard of people getting in trouble for being late getting to work. I had never heard of anyone getting in trouble for being late leaving work.

“What were you doing?” he said. He thrust out a mammoth hand. It took me a few moments before I realized that he wanted my work sheets.

I took the papers from my pocket, unfolded them and handed them over.

“
Hmph
,” he said after he had flipped
through all three sheets. “You did all this today?”

I nodded. I had finished the jobs on the first two sheets and a few of the jobs on the last sheet. But by then it was almost five o'clock. I started to worry that Stike would be gone by the time I got back to the garage. I worried that that could mean trouble.

Stike shook his head.

“You get paid for eight hours, no matter how much time you put in,” he said.

“That's okay.”

“It's not okay. Ray don't like it when you cost him money,” he said.

“But you just said that I don't get paid more—”

“I'm your supervisor. I have to go out and look at what you did. I've been waiting for you a couple of hours now. Ray's gonna have to pay me overtime for waiting around and then for going out to check on you. You better be worth it, kid. You better have done an A-one job.”

He folded up my work sheets and headed for a pickup truck.

“Do you want me to come back tomorrow?” I said.

“We'll see,” Stike said. He swung his heavy body in behind the steering wheel. He turned the key in the ignition and started to back up the truck. “I'll let you know.”

He was gone before I remembered the neon pink letters and numbers on the utility control box. I should have mentioned them. I should have told him what I'd done. I wondered if he would be mad.

My mom opened the apartment door when I was still halfway down the hall.

“I thought I heard the elevator,” she said. “I thought it might be you.” She looked relieved.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” I said. “I should have—”

“There's a man on the phone. He wants to talk to you,” she said.

I hurried into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

It was Stike.

“A couple of places, you can still see some of the tags,” he said. He sounded gruffer over the phone than he did in person. “One place you checked off looks like you did a sloppy job.”

“Is that the place with the skull and crossbones?” I said. “Because whoever threw that up there must have used a different kind of paint. The stuff you gave me didn't work so well and—”

“Relax, kid,” he said. “I figured that out.” There was a pause, and I started to worry that he was going to say something about the neon pink markings on the utility control box.

But he didn't.

Instead he said, “You gonna waste my time and Ray's money again tomorrow being some kind of brown-noser?”

“No, sir,” I said.

I heard a rumble on the other end of the phone, like the beginnings of a cave-in. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of Stike laughing.

“See you tomorrow, kid,” he said.

The line went dead.

“Who was that?” my mom said.

“My boss.”

“Is everything okay?”

I glanced at the phone. I had done a good job—that's what Stike had meant even if he hadn't come right out and said it. I'd done a good job. He wanted me back tomorrow.

“Everything's fine,” I said. “What are we having for supper?” Suddenly I was starving.

I stared at the work sheet Stike handed me the next day.

“Isn't that the same utility box I started with yesterday?” I said.

“It's the same utility box you're gonna start with every time someone calls in a complaint,” Stike said. “It's right out there in the open. Every doctor, lawyer and stockbroker who lives around there drives by it every day. The taggers know it. You start with that—it should go easier now that
you treated the surface—then you move on.”

Stike was right. I didn't have to use nearly as much spray or elbow grease to get the marks off the box this time. The whole time I worked on it, I kept an eye out for anyone watching me. I wanted to do a good job, but I didn't want to end up in the hospital on account of it.