Six Stories (5 page)

‘Spare a little?’ he asks the passersby as they stream toward the revolving doors. ‘Spare a little, sir? Spare a little, ma’am? Just trying to get lil spot of breffus. Than you, gobless you, merry Christmas. Spare a little, sir? Quarter, maybe? Than you. Spare a little, ma’am?’

As he passes, Bill drops a nickel and two dimes into the young black man’s cup.

‘Thank you, sir, gobless, merry Christmas.’

‘You, too,’ he says.

The woman next to him frowns. ‘You shouldn’t encourage them,’ she says.

He gives her a shrug and a small, shamefaced smile. ‘It’s hard for me to say no to anyone at Christmas,’ he tells her.

He enters the lobby with a stream of others, stares briefly after the opinionated bitch as she heads for the newsstand, then goes to the elevators with their old-fashioned floor dials and their art deco numbers. Here several people nod to him, and he exchanges a few words with a couple of them as they wait - it’s not like the train, after all, where you can change cars. Plus, the building is an old one, only fifteen stories high, and the elevators are cranky.

‘How’s the wife, Bill?’ a scrawny, constantly grinning man from the fifth floor asks.

‘Andi? She’s fine.’

‘Kids?’

‘Both good.’ He has no kids, of course - he wants kids about as much as he wants a hiatal hernia - and his wife’s name isn’t Andi, but those are things the scrawny, constantly grinning man will never know.

‘Bet they can’t wait for the big day,’ the scrawny man says, his grin widening and becoming unspeakable. Now he looks like an editorial cartoonist’s conception of Famine, all big eyes and huge teeth and shiny skin.

‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘but I think Sarah’s getting kind of suspicious about the guy in the red suit.’ Hurry up, elevator he thinks, Jesus, hurry up and save me from these stupidities.

‘Yeah, yeah, it happens,’ the scrawny man says. His grin fades for a moment, as if they are discussing cancer instead of Santa. ‘How old’s she now?’

‘Eight.’

‘Boy, the time sure flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it? Seems like she was just born a year or two ago.’

‘You can say that again,‘he says, fervently hoping the scrawny man won’t say it again. At that moment one of the four elevators finally gasps open its doors and they herd themselves inside.

Bill and the scrawny man walk a little way down the fifth floor hall together, and then the scrawny man stops in front of a set of old-fashioned double doors with the words CONSOLIDATED INSURANCE written on one frosted-glass panel and ADJUSTORS OF AMERICA on the other. From behind these doors comes the muted clickety-click of computer keyboards and the slightly louder sound of ringing phones.

‘Have a good day, Bill.’

‘You too.’

The scrawny man lets himself into his office, and for a moment Bill sees a big wreath hung on the far side of the room. Also, the windows have been decorated with the kind of snow that comes in a spray can. He shudders and thinks, God save us, every one.

9:05 A.M

His office - one of two he keeps in this building - is at the far end of the hall. The two offices up from it are dark and vacant, a situation that has held for the last six months and one he likes just fine. Printed on the frosted glass of his own office door are the words WESTERN STATES LAND ANALYSTS. There are three locks on the door: the one that was on it when he moved into the building nine years ago, plus two he has put on himself. He lets himself in, closes the door, turns the bolt, then engages the police lock.

A desk stands in the center of the room, and it is cluttered with papers, but none of them mean anything; they are simply window dressing for the cleaning service. Every so often he throws them all out and redistributes a fresh batch. In the center of the desk is a telephone on which he makes occasional random calls so that the phone company won’t register the line as totally inactive. Last year he purchased a fax, and it looks very businesslike over in its corner by the door to the office’s little second room, but it has never been used.

‘Do you hear what I hear, do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste,’ he murmurs, and crosses to the door leading to the second room. Inside are shelves stacked high with more meaningless paper, two large file cabinets (there is a Walkman on top of one, his excuse on the few occasions when someone knocks on the locked door and gets no answer), a chair, and a stepladder.

Bill takes the stepladder back to the main room and unfolds it to the left of the desk. He puts his briefcase on top of it. Then he mounts the first three steps of the ladder, reaches up (the bottom half of his coat bells out around his legs as he does), and carefully moves aside one of the suspended ceiling panels.

Above is a dark area which cannot quite be called a utility space, although a few pipes and wires do run through it. There’s no dust up here, at least not in this immediate area, and no rodent droppings, either - he uses D-Con Mouseprufe once a month. He wants to keep his clothes nice as he goes back and forth, of course, but that’s not really the important part. the important part is to respect your work and your field. This he learned in the Marines, and he sometimes thinks it is the most important thing he did learn there. He stayed alive, of course, but he thinks now that was probably more luck than learning. Still, a person who respects his work and his field - the place where the work is done, the tools with which it is done - has a leg up in life. No doubt about that.

Above this narrow space (a ghostly, gentle wind hoots endlessly through it, bringing a smell of dust and the groan of the elevators) is the bottom of the sixth floor, and here is a square trap door about thirty inches on a side. Bill installed it himself; he’s handy with tools, which is one of the things Sharon most appreciates about him.

He flips the trap door up, letting in muted light from above, then grabs his briefcase by the handle. As he sticks his head into the space between the floors, water rushes gustily down the fat bathroom conduit twenty or thirty feet north of his present position. An hour from now, when the people in the building start their coffee breaks, that sound will be as constant and as rhythmic as waves breaking on a beach. Bill hardly notices this or any of the other interfloor sounds; he’s used to them.

He climbs carefully to the top of the stepladder, then boosts himself through into his sixth floor office, leaving Bill down on five. Up here he is Willie. This office has a workshop look, with coils and motors and vents stacked neatly on metal shelves and what looks like a filter of some kind squatting on one corner of the desk. It is an office, however; there’s a computer terminal, an IN/OUT basket full of papers (also window dressing, which he periodically rotates like a farmer rotating crops), and file cabinets. On one wall is a framed Norman Rockwell print showing a family praying over Thanksgiving dinner. Next to it is a blowup of his honorable discharge from the marines, also framed; the name on the sheet is William Teale, and his decorations, including the Bronze Star, are duly noted. On another wall is a poster from the sixties. It shows the peace sign. Below it, in red, white, and blue, is this punchline: TRACK OF THE GREAT AMERICAN CHICKEN.

Willie puts Bill’s briefcase on the desk, then lies down on his stomach. He pokes his head and arms into the windy, oil-smelling darkness between the floors and replaces the ceiling panel of the fifth-floor office. it’s locked up tight, he doesn’t expect anyone anyway (he never does; Western States Land Analysts has never had a single customer), but it’s better to be safe. Always safe, never sorry.

With his fifth floor office set to rights, Willie lowers the trapdoor in this one. Up here the trap is hidden by a small rug which is Superglued to the wood, so it can go up and down without too much flopping or sliding around.

He gets to his feet, dusts off his hands, then turns to the briefcase and opens it. He takes out the ball of tinsel and puts it on top of the laser printer which stand nest to the computer terminal.

‘Good one,’ he says, thinking again that Sharon can be a real peach when she sets her mind to it … and she often does. He relatches the briefcase and then begins to undress, doing it carefully and methodically, reversing the steps he took at six-thirty, running the film backward. He strips off everything, even his undershorts and his black, knee-high socks. Naked, he hangs his topcoat, suit jacket, and shirt carefully in the closet where only one other item hangs - a bulky red thing, a little too bulky to be termed a briefcase. Willie puts his mark Cross case next to it, then places his slacks in the pants press, taking pains with the crease. The tie goes on the rack screwed to the back of the closet door, where it hangs all by itself like a long blue tongue.

He pads barefoot-naked across to one of the file cabinets. On top of it is an ashtray embossed with a pissed-off-looking eagle and the Marine motto. In it are a pair of dogtags on a chain. Willie slips the chain over his head, then slides out the bottom drawer of the cabinet stack. Inside are underclothes. Neatly folded on top are a pair of khaki boxer shorts. He slips them on. Next come white athletic socks, followed by a white cotton T-shirt - roundneck, not strappy. The shapes of his dogtags stand out against it as do his biceps and quads. They aren’t as good as they were in ‘67, under the triple canopy, but they aren’t bad. As he slides the drawer back in and opens the next, he begins to hum under his breath - not ‘Do You Hear What I Hear’ but the Doors, the one about how the day destroys the night, the night divides the day.

He slips on a plain blue chambray shirt, then a pair of fatigue pants. He rolls this middle drawer back in and opens the top one. Here there is a pair of black boots, polished to a high sheen and looking as if they might last until the trump of judgement. Maybe even longer. They aren’t standard Marine issue, not these - these are jumpboots, 101st Airborne stuff. But that’s all right. He isn’t actually trying to dress like a soldier. If he wanted to dress like a soldier, he would.

Still, there is no more reason to look sloppy than there is to allow dust to collect in the pass-through, and he’s careful about the way he dresses. He does not tuck his pants into his boots, of course - he’s headed for Fifth Avenue in December, not the Mekong in August - but he intends to look squared away. Looking god is as important to him as it is to Bill, maybe even more important. Respecting one’s work an one’s filed begins, after all, with respecting one’s self.

The last two items are in the back of the top drawer: a tube of makeup and a jar of hair gel. He squeezes some of the makeup into the palm of his left hand, then begins applying it, working from forehead to the base of his neck. He moves with the unconcerned speed of long experience, giving himself a moderate tan. With that done, he works some of the gel into his hair and then recombs it, getting rid of the part and sweeping it straight back from his forehead. It is the last touch, the smallest touch, and perhaps the most telling touch. There is no trace of the commuter who walked out of Penn Station an hour ago; the man in the mirror mounted on the back of the door to the small storage annex looks like a washed-up mercenary. There is a kind of silent, half-humbled pride in the tanned face, something people won’t look at too long. It hurts them if they do. Willie knows this is so; he has seen it. He doesn’t ask why it should be so. He has made himself a life pretty much without questions, and that’s the way he likes it.

‘All right,’ he says, closing the door to the storage room. ‘Lookin good, trooper.’

He goes back to the closet for the red jacket, which is the reversible type, and the boxy case. He slips the jacket over his desk chair for the time being and puts the case on the desk. He unlatches it and swings the top up on sturdy hinges; now it looks a little like the cases the street salesmen use to display their cheap watches and costume jewelry. There are only a few items in Willie’s, one of them broken down into two pieces so it will fit. He takes out a pair of gloves (he will want them today, no doubt about that), and then a sign on a length of stout cord. The cord has been knotted through holes in the cardboard at either side, so Willie can hang the sign over his neck. He closes the case again, not bothering to latch it, and puts the sign on top of it - the desk is so cluttery, it’s the only good surface he has to work on.

Humming (we chased our pleasure here, dug our treasures there), he opens the wide drawer above the kneehole, paws past the pencils and Chapsticks and paper clips and memo pads, and finally finds his stapler. He then unrolls the ball of tinsel, places it carefully around the rectangle of his sign, snips off the extra, and staples the shiny stuff firmly into place. He holds it up for a moment, first assessing the effect, then admiring it.

‘Perfect!’ he says. ‘Wonderful! Sharon, you’re a geni - ‘

The telephone rings and he stiffens, turning to look at it with eyes which are suddenly very small and hard and totally alert. One ring. Two. Three. On the fourth, the machine kicks in, answering in his voice - the version of it that goes with this office, anyway.

‘Hi, you’ve reached Midtown Heating and Cooling,’ Willie Teale says. ‘No one can take your call right now, so leave a message at the beep.’

Bee-eep

He listens tensely, standing over his just-decorated sign with is hands balled into fists.

‘Hi, this is Ed, from the Nynex Yellow Pages,’ the voice from the machine says, and Willie lets out breath he hasn’t known he was holding His hands begin to loosen. ‘Please have your company rep call me at 555-1000 for information on how you can increase your ad space in both versions of the Yellow Pages, and at the same time save big money on your yearly bill. Thanks.’

Click

Willie looks at the answering machine a moment longer, almost as if he expects it to speak again - to threaten him, perhaps, or to accuse him of some crime - but nothing happens.

‘Squared away,’ he murmurs, putting the decorated sign back into the case. This time when he closes it, he latches it. Across the front is a bumper sticker, its message flanked by small American flags. I WAS PROUD TO SERVE, it reads. And below that: SEMPER FI.