The Art of Disposal (28 page)

“What's her girl like?” I said.

“Amazonian. And she's got pink hair. You ever seen a girl with pink hair?”

I told him I had. I could still see Dan the Man, healthy, strong, hunched over, combing his pen through that dead girl's hair.

“Remember that show, Wonder Woman?”

“Sure,” I said. “Linda Carter.”

Frank took out his cigarettes and fitted one into the holder. Sparrows chirped in the trees that grew up from the open squares in the sidewalk. “I used to fantasize about that show. I was a slave on this island full of beautiful broads, and they'd all use me and pass me around and treat me like an absolute dog.”

Some shrink would have a field day with that, too.

“Leila would fit right in on that island of mine,” Frank said, striking a match.

Mudcap turned a page of his newspaper, and it rustled as he smoothed it out.

“He can read?” I said to Frank.

“At a fifth grade level.”

Mudcap shook his head and licked his bottom lip.

Frank asked me about the Mark Mason job. I opened up my camera bag and took out the D4. I scrolled through the five images I'd snapped and picked my favorite one, and then I passed the camera over to him.

He squinted at the LCD screen.

“That's him,” I said.

“Dumb prick. You know the sweetest part of the deal? I bought up a half-dozen Masonfields from a New York gallery. Now they'll go up. His untimely death is the best thing he ever did for his career—and mine. I'm gonna double or triple my money.”

“You're into art? Eddie's wife has some real nice Thomas Kinkade plates.”

Frank looked like he'd just smelled a dead skunk. Then he laughed. He turned to Mudcap. “This guy's a riot. Thomas Kinkade.” He laughed again. “You serious?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Poor Eddie.”

“Thomas Kinkade?” Mudcap said.

“The Master of Light,” Frank said with disgust. “He's got a whole team of people he trained to paint his crappy paintings, and he signs them and collects the dough.”

“Smart guy,” Mudcap said.

“Not anymore,” Frank said. “He's dead.”

“I gotta hit the head,” I said.

I walked down the dark hallway inside of Calasso's and bumped into Leila, walking up from a creaky cellar stairwell. She was carrying a burlap sack full of coffee beans. She nearly dropped it.

“What's your name?”

“No thanks,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Listen, creep. If I had a dollar for every guy tries to pick me up, I could quit working here.”

She rolled her eyes and started to squeeze past me, but the hallway was small and I moved and blocked her.

“How'd you like a swift kick in the balls?” she said.

“Listen, you got me all wrong. I'm happily married, with three kids.”

“Four, three, two, one…”

I held my hands up, like someone was robbing me. Then I took out one of my business cards, and offered it to her. “I really need your help.”

“I bet you do,” she said, and reluctantly took the card.

“Call me. There's money in it for you. Lots of money.”

I hit the head, and then I walked back outside, nervous that she'd come storming out there and say something to Frank. But she dropped off the check without a word.

Mr. Nelson Scott's Illinois Bunn Special Railroad Grade pocket watch wouldn't run. I unscrewed the caseback and poked at the gleaming innards with a wooden skewer, and the balance wheel wobbled like an old drunk.

The balance wheel of a mechanical pocket watch makes eighteen thousand revolutions per minute. This weighted wheel is the fragile heart of the watch, able to regulate the immense energy of the tightly wound mainspring and convert it into the precise ticking of a second hand, a minute hand, an hour hand. A well-timed watch from the early 1900s can still be accurate to within a minute per week. Will one of our modern electronic gadgets have such worth, such longevity, such innate beauty a whole century after its birth?

I got some books on watch repair from the local library, and I tried a trick for getting a watch ticking again: you hold it firmly in your hand and give your wrist a quick snap. This is supposed to trigger the balance wheel (if the staff isn't broken). But nothing would convince Mr. Scott's watch to run again. It was frozen at 9:04, the time of the watchmaker's death.

I obsessed over that pocket watch. I longed to understand how it worked, to fix it, to bring it back to life. But my reading on the subject only discouraged me, as watchmaking and pocket watch repair is the kind of slow skill that one acquires only through years of labored study.

So I found a local guy, a clockmaker, and I met him at a coffee shop and brought the watch along with me. When he asked about its history, I told him that the watch belonged to my grandfather, and he called him a man of good taste.

This clockmaker was a slight man, perhaps seventy years old, with wisps of white hair along a shiny bald head. He wore an argyle sweater.

“What I do is a total restoration and cleaning,” he said. “I disassemble every part, clean each one, peg the pivots, clean the jewels, reassemble everything—then time and adjust it in three positions.”

The clockmaker spoke in the joyful tone of a man who loves his work.

“It's our job,” he said, “as stewards of these pieces, to keep them running; to care for them and pass them on to the next generation.”

He pawed the watch, rolled it over in his hands, held it up into the light of the coffee shop window. He unscrewed the caseback, took out a jeweler's loupe and studied the insides with a squinty grin.

“This cost a pretty penny back in 1913.”

“1913?” I said.

He scooted over closer to me—the legs of his chair squeaked in rebellion, and some patrons turned their heads. The clockmaker twitched and pointed into the watch movement, showing me the serial number. “1913. Railroad grade. Twenty-three jewels. Highly accurate.”

He pulled the loupe out of his eye socket, and blinked repeatedly to clear the tired eye.

“The balance staff is broken. That's a delicate job.”

“How much?” I said.

He hesitated, rubbed his thumbs gently along his forefingers. “Three-fifty. But that's for everything. Cleaned, timed.”

“Done,” I said.

He was quite pleased. “Now here's a young man who knows a thing or two. Appreciates real craftsmanship. This modern world continually confounds me. Nowadays, no one just enjoys their piece of cake. First they gotta take a picture of it with their mobile phone. And for what? Who knows.”

I signed some paperwork, shook the old man's hand, left the pocket watch with him, and walked out of the coffee shop. I drove for a while, past rows of dreary apartments where kids sat on bikes, and sad skinny men hobbled down the sides of the road carrying plastic bags full of groceries. I got onto the highway and let the yellow lines pull me along, and they pulled me toward Dan the Man's house. Dotty had called me last night and made me promise to stop by as soon as I was done with my morning appointment. I thought about the balance wheel of a pocket watch, spinning back and forth eighteen thousand times a minute.

I parked, ran across the street and up the few steps to the front porch, and knocked on the door. Dotty answered. She was easy on the eyes for an older lady, but she wore too much make-up. She kind of chuckled and wiped a hand across her face, and she gave me a big hug. Her eyeliner was running.

“Ask him in for Christ's sake!” Dan the Man said from inside of the house. His voice sounded like it was being broadcast through an old radio speaker.

Dotty loved ferns and there were plenty of them. The house almost felt like an afterthought, like the ferns were there first and some architect had carefully built a house around them. Dan the Man was sitting on the couch, a blanket over his knees, gripping a steel bar with his left hand. There was the whirring of a motor. There was a clear mask over his mouth and nose. He pulled it to one side and said, “this is some real Darth Vader shit, huh?”

He put the mask back on, seized a few breaths, and took it off again.

“Damn, Ronnie. I thought you crawled into a hole and pulled the hole in with you.”

“What do you mean?” I said, not looking right at him.

“Hell, you never stop by. Eddie stops by.”

“Daniel,” Dotty said like a schoolteacher.

“Sorry, Ronnie,” Dan said.

“For what?”

“I look terrible. Smell terrible, too.”

“You always smelled terrible,” I said, and sat down in a rocking chair near the couch. There was a cut-crystal jar with a lid on it sitting on the marble-topped coffee table. Inside were some of those colorful jelly candies, so coated with coarse sugar you could use one to sand a rough board. Dotty caught me looking at them, and she rushed over and opened the lid for me. I was put on the spot, so I ate a yellow one. It was awful. But I looked at Dotty and nodded and smiled.

The whole room seemed to spin around, like it was sitting on a giant Lazy Susan. Then it stopped spinning. The vertical lines where the walls turned into corners went diagonal. I took a deep breath. Dan the Man looked worse than Mister Z. His skin was gray and blotchy. I tried to pretend that it didn't bother me, but he could see right through that.

“Poor Dotty,” he said. “She's gotta look at me every day.”

Dotty walked over and kissed his cheek, told him that he was being ridiculous, and then she turned her face from me and walked off down the hall. I heard her sobbing. Then I heard her banging some pots and pans around out in the kitchen.

“I look like one of them aliens from that Roswell Predicament in nineteen-forty-seven.”

“Roswell
Incident
,” I said.

He took a drag on the oxygen mask. “Predicament, too.”

“What about the chemo?”

“All it done was made me barf. This shit kept spreading. Guess I taste pretty good to a cancer cell.” He laughed, and choked and coughed, and he slid the mask back on and gulped the air like he'd finally swum up from the bottom of a lake and broken the surface.

“I got a nurse here half a day, every day. And she ain't here to make me better. She's one of them hospice ladies that help you die. Built like a linebacker. Just my luck. But she's good to me.”

We sat for a while, no one saying anything. Dan the Man took hits of oxygen from his machine, and I stared at the ferns and the bright-colored candies in the crystal jar.

“I always knew it,” Dan said. His eyes got bright and he looked over his right shoulder to make sure Dotty couldn't hear, and he whispered, “all them guys I killed are getting even.”

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

“How was the sunshine state?” Dan the Man said. Then he coughed, long and painful, with a hand held tight against his chest.

“I was in Arizona,” I said.

“Ain't that the sunshine state?”

“Nope. Florida.”

“But Arizona's got the sun.”

“Florida too,” I said.

“You use the Low-E?”

“Slip and fall.”

“That how Frank wanted it?”

“Yep.”

“Well, he must got his reasons.”

Dan the Man took off his mask completely and got a cigarette out of a pack from a straw basket that sat on the floor near the couch. He positioned a green glass ashtray on the coffee table, and he asked me to go and open the windows that faced out toward the street. I did it, and sat back down. He thanked me, and lit the cigarette. Then he wheezed and hit himself on the chest.

“Can't believe you're still smoking.”

“Might as well. I'm dead either way,” he said.

I passed Dan an envelope with ten grand in it. He set the cigarette into the ashtray and opened the envelope. Thumbed through the bills.

“What's this?” he said.

“Looks like money.”

“What for?”

“Got twenty for the job. Giving you half.”

He tried to pass it back to me, and he coughed and wheezed again and dropped the envelope on the floor. I picked it up and set it next to him on the couch.

“Consider it tuition,” I said, “for all the stuff you taught me. Take it.”

He nodded, gently. “Might help Dotty, I guess.”

“She can use it to take a trip to Hawaii. With her new boyfriend.”

“Asshole,” Dan said, smiling. “I read it. That book you brung over. I never liked poems. I never got why some things should rhyme and some things shouldn't. What's to stop Sam Coleslaw from just writing out the whole story in one big chunk, the way your s'posed to?”

“I don't know,” I said.

He gulped a few breaths. “Well, I thought about it for a while, just sitting here all day and night, and I think I got to the bottom of it.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe some things is just too important to be written out willy-nilly. They got a shape to 'em. Like God spoke 'em right into the ear of the guy who was jotting it down. Sam here, God showed him a bit of everything. Angels and monsters. Ships lost at sea. Water, water, everywhere, but there ain't a drop to drink. Playing dice against Death.”

Dan's eyes teared up. It looked like molten glass had erupted and was eager to spill, but the tears didn't break.

“Get outta here,” he said. “You got better things to think about.”

A tear broke and ran down the creases of his baggy face. He picked the cigarette up and took frantic puffs on it as he wiped his face with his shoulder.

“You guys'll remember me, right? Tell good stories about me?”

“Of course I'll remember you. Every time I'm sitting on the crapper and there's no good magazine around.”

He laughed. He gulped a few breaths.

“Bet you a hundred bucks Eddie tells the grasshopper story at my funeral. That guy'll do anything for a laugh.”

“Grasshopper story?” I said.

Dan the Man went back into a raspy whisper, and checked again to see if Dotty was listening. He leaned forward. “She wants to bury me. Don't let her. Cremation—you guys promised.”

“I'll talk to her,” I said.

He put his upper teeth down far over his lower lip, and his head jerked, and he stared into the carpet like there was a hidden world underneath of it that he might be visiting soon.