Post Office (10 page)

“Go ahead, please.”

“Well, I need my job.”

“That’s rational.”

“But I have to study and pass three more schemes in order to keep it.”

“Schemes? What are these ‘schemes’?”

“That’s when people don’t put down zone numbers. Somebody has to stick that letter. So we have to study these scheme sheets after working 12 hours a night.”

“And?”

“I can’t pick the sheet up. If Ido, it falls from my hand.”

“You can’t study these schemes?”

“No. And I have to throw 100 cards in a glass cage in eight minutes to at least an accuracy of 95 percent or I’m out. And I need the job.”

“Why can’t you study these schemes?”

“That’s why I’m here. To ask
you
. I must be crazy. But there are all these streets and they all break in different ways. Here look.”

And I would hand him the six-page scheme, stapled together at the top, small print on both sides.

He would flip through the pages.

“And you are supposed to memorize all this?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Well, my boy,” handing the sheets back, “you’re not crazy for not wanting to study this. I’d be more apt to say that you were crazy if you
wanted
to study this. That’ll be $25.”

So I analyzed myself and kept the money.

   But something had to be done. Then I had it. It was about 9:10 a.m. I phoned the Federal Building, Personnel Department.

“Miss Graves. I’d like to speak to Miss Graves, please.”

“Hello?”

There she was. The bitch. I fondled myself as I spoke to her.

“Miss Graves. This is Chinaski. I filed an answer to your charge that I had a bad record. I don’t know if you remember me?”

“We remember you, Mr. Chinaski.”

“Has any decision been rendered?”

“Not yet. We’ll let you know.”

“All right, then. But I have a problem.”

“Yes, Mr. Chinaski?”

“I am now studying the CP1.” I paused.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I find it very difficult, I find it almost impossible to study this scheme, to put in all that extra time when it might be of no avail. I mean, I may be removed from the postal service at any moment. It is not fair to ask me to study the scheme under these conditions.”

“All right, Mr. Chinaski. I’ll phone the scheme room and instruct them to take you off the scheme until we have reached a decision.”

“Thank you, Miss Graves.”

“Good day,” she said, and hung up.

It was a good day. And after fondling myself while on the phone I almost decided to go downstairs to 309. But I played it safe. I put on some bacon and eggs and celebrated with an extra quart of beer.

Then there were only six or seven of us. The CP1 was simply too much for the rest.

“How you doing on your scheme, Chinaski?” they asked me.

“No trouble at all,” I said. “O.K., break Woodburn Ave.”

“Woodburn?”

“Yes, Woodburn.”

“Listen, I don’t like to be bothered with that stuff while I’m working. It bores me. One job at a time.”

On Christmas I had Betty over. She baked a turkey and we drank. Betty always liked huge Christmas trees. It must have been seven feet tall, and half as wide, covered with lights, bulbs, tinsel, various crap. We drank from a couple of fifths of whiskey, made love, ate our turkey, drank some more. The nail in the stand was loose and the stand was not big enough to hold the tree. I kept straightening it. Betty stretched out on the bed, passed out. I was drinking on the floor with my shorts on. Then I stretched out. Closed my eyes. Something awakened me. I opened my eyes. Just in time to see the huge tree covered with hot lights, lean slowly toward me, the pointed star coming down like a dagger. I didn’t quite know what it was. It looked like the end of the world. I couldn’t move. The arms of the tree enfolded me. I was under it. The light bulbs were red hot.

“Oh, OH JESUS CHRIST, MERCY! LORD HELP ME! JESUS! JESUS! HELP!”

The bulbs were burning me. I rolled to the left, couldn’t get out, then I rolled to the right.

“YAWK!”

I finally rolled out from under. Betty was up, standing there.

“What happened? What is it?”

“CAN’T YOU SEE? THAT GOD DAMNED TREE TRIED TO MURDER ME!”

“What?”

“YES, LOOK AT ME!”

I had red spots all over my body.

“Oh,
poor
baby!”

I walked over and pulled the plug from the wall. The lights went out. The thing was dead. “Oh, my poor tree!”

“Your poor tree?”

“Yes, it was
so
pretty!”

“I’ll stand it up in the morning. I don’t trust it now. I’m giving it the rest of the night off.”

She didn’t like that. I could see an argument coming, so I stood the thing up behind a chair and turned the lights back on. If the thing had burned her tits or ass, she would have thrown it out the window. I thought I was being very kind.

   Several days after Christmas I stopped in to see Betty. She was sitting in her room, drunk, at 8:45 in the morning. She didn’t look well but then neither did I. It seemed that almost every roomer had given her a fifth. There was wine, vodka, whiskey, scotch. The cheapest brands. The bottles filled her room.

“Those damn fools! Don’t they
know
any better? If you drink all this stuff it will kill you!”

Betty just looked at me. I saw it all in that look.

She had two children who never came to see her, never wrote her. She was a scrubwoman in a cheap hotel. When I had first met her her clothes had been expensive, trim ankles fitting into expensive shoes. She had been firm-fleshed, almost beautiful. Wild-eyed. Laughing. Coming from a rich husband, divorced from him, and he was to die in a car wreck, drunk, burning to death in Connecticut. “You’ll never tame her,” they told me.

There she was. But I’d had some help.

“Listen,” I said, “I ought to take that stuff. I mean, I’ll just give you back a bottle now and then. I won’t drink it.”

“Leave the bottles,” Betty said. She didn’t look at me. Her room was on the top floor and she sat in a chair by the window watching the morning traffic.

I walked over. “Look, I’m beat. I’ve got to leave. But for Christ’s sake, take it easy on that stuff!”

“Sure,” she said.

I leaned over and kissed her goodbye.

About a week and a half later I came by again. There wasn’t any answer to my knock.

“Betty! Betty! Are you all right?”

I turned the knob. The door was open. The bed was turned back. There was a large bloodspot on the sheet.

“Oh shit!” I said. I looked around. All the bottles were gone.

Then I looked around. There was a middle-aged Frenchwoman who owned the place. She stood in the doorway.

“She’s at County General Hospital. She was very sick. I called the ambulance last night.”

“Did she drink all that stuff?”

“She had some help.”

I ran down the stairway and got into my car. Then I was there. I knew the place well. They told me the room number.

There were three or four beds in a tiny room. A woman was sitting up in hers across the way, chewing an apple and laughing with two female visitors. I pulled the drop sheet around Betty’s bed, sat down on the stool and leaned over her.

“Betty! Betty!”

I touched her arm.

“Betty!”

Her eyes opened. They were beautiful again. Bright calm blue.

“I knew it would be you,” she said.

Then she closed her eyes. Her lips were parched. Yellow spittle had caked at the left corner of her mouth. I took a cloth and washed it away. I cleaned her face, hands and throat. I took another cloth and squeezed a bit of water on her tongue. Then a little more. I wet her lips. I straightened her hair. I heard the women laughing through the sheets that separated us.

“Betty, Betty, Betty. Please, I want you to drink some water, just a sip of water, not too much, just a sip.”

She didn’t respond. I tried for 10 minutes. Nothing.

More spittle formed at her mouth. I wiped it away.

Then I got up and pulled the drop sheet back. I stared at the three women.

I walked out and spoke to the nurse at the desk.

“Listen, why isn’t anything being done for that woman in 45-C? Betty Williams.”

“We’re doing all we can, sir.”

“But there’s nobody there.”

“We make our regular rounds.”

“But where are the doctors? I don’t see any doctors.”

“The doctor has seen her, sir.”

“Why do you just let her lay there?”

“We’ve done all we can, sir.”

“SIR! SIR! SIR! FORGET THAT ‘SIR’ STUFF, WILL YOU? I’ll bet if that were the president or governor or mayor or some rich son of a bitch, there would be doctors all over that room doing
something!
Why do you just let them die? What’s the sin in being poor?”

“I’ve told you, sir, that we’ve done ALL we can.”

“I’ll be back in two hours.”

“Are you her husband?”

“I used to be her common-law husband.”

“May we have your name and phone number?”

I gave her that, then hurried out.

The funeral was to be at 10:30 a.m. but it was already hot. I had on a cheap black suit, bought and fitted in a rush. It was my first new suit in years. I had located the son. We drove along in his new Mercedes-Benz. I had traced him down with the help of a slip of paper with the address of his father-in-law on it. Two long distance calls and I had him. By the time he had driven in, his mother was dead. She died while I was making the phone calls. The kid, Larry, had never fit into the society thing. He had a habit of stealing cars from friends, but between the friends and the judge he managed to get off. Then the army got him, and somehow he got into a training program and when he got out he walked into a good-paying job. That’s when he stopped seeing his mother, when he got that good job.

“Where’s your sister?” I asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“This is a fine car. I can’t even hear the engine.” Larry smiled. He liked that.

There were just three of us going to the funeral: son, lover and the subnormal sister of the owner of the hotel. Her name was Marcia. Marcia never said anything. She just sat around with this inane smile on her lips. Her skin was white as enamel. She had a mop of dead yellow hair and a hat that would not fit. Marcia had been sent by the owner in her place. The owner had to watch the hotel.

Of course, I had a very bad hangover. We stopped for coffee.

Already there had been trouble with the funeral. Larry had had an argument with the Catholic priest. There was some doubt that Betty was a true Catholic. The priest didn’t want to do the service. Finally it was decided that he would do half a service. Well, half a service was better than none.

We even had trouble with the flowers. I had bought a wreath of roses, mixed roses, and they had been worked into a wreath. The flower shop spent an afternoon making it. The lady in the flower shop had known Betty. They had drank together a few years earlier when Betty and I had the house and dog. Delsie, her name was. I had always wanted to get into Delsie’s pants but I never made it.

Delsie had phoned me. “Hank, what’s the
matter
with those bastards?”

“Which bastards?”

“Those guys at the mortuary.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I sent the boy in the truck to deliver your wreath and they didn’t want to let him in. They said they were closed. You know, that’s a long drive up there.”

“Yeah, Delsie?”

“So finally they let the boy put the flowers inside the door but they wouldn’t let him put them in the refrigerator. So the boy had to leave them inside the door. What the hell’s wrong with those people?”

“I don’t know. What the hell’s wrong with people everywhere?”

“I won’t be able to be at the funeral. Are you all right, Hank?”

“Why don’t you come by and console me?”

“I’d have to bring Paul.” Paul was her husband. “Forget it.”

So there we were on our way to half a funeral. Larry looked up from his coffee. “I’D write you about a headstone later. I don’t have any more money now.”

“All right,” I said.

Larry paid for the coffees, then we went out and climbed into the Mercedes-Benz. “Wait a minute,” I said. “What is it?” asked Larry. “I think we forgot something.” I walked back into the cafe. “Marcia.”

She was still sitting at the table. “We’re leaving now, Marcia.” She got up and followed me out.

   The priest read his thing. I didn’t listen. There was the coffin. What had been Betty was in there. It was very hot. The sun came down in one yellow sheet. A fly circled around. Halfway through the halfway funeral two guys in working clothes came carrying my wreath. The roses were dead, dead and dying in the heat, and they leaned the thing up against a nearby tree. Near the end of the service my wreath leaned forward and fell flat on its face. Nobody picked it up. Then it was over. I walked up to the priest and shook his hand, “Thank you.” He smiled. That made two smiling: the priest and Marcia.

On the way in, Larry said again:

“I’ll write you about the headstone.”

I’m still waiting for that letter.

I went upstairs to 409, had a stiff scotch and water, took some money out of the top drawer, went down the steps, got in my car and drove to the racetrack. I got there in time for the first race but didn’t play it because I hadn’t had time to read the form.

I went to the bar for a drink and I saw this high yellow walk by in an old raincoat. She was really dressed
down
but since I felt that way, I called her name just loud enough for her to hear as she walked by:

“Vi, baby.”

She stopped, then came on over. “Hi, Hank. How are you?”

I knew her from the central post office. She worked another station, the one near the water fountain, but she seemed more friendly than most.

“I’ve got the low blues. Third funeral in two years. First my mother, then my father. Today, an old girl friend.”

She ordered something. I opened the Form.

“Let’s catch this second race.”

She came over and leaned a lot of leg and breast against me. There was something under that raincoat. I always look for the non-public horse who could beat the favorite. If I found nobody could beat the favorite, I bet the favorite.