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A Garden Full of Snow

by T. M. Adams

Bentavagnia was an instrument of the law...

That Saturday, Carmine Bentavagnia had three things he had to do. Each was routine, each would require a certain amount of time; his whole day was planned for him.

The first task was simple. It took him to a welfare hotel in the cankered belly of the city, a rickety gallery of apartments in back overlooking the parking lot. Every air conditioner in the row wheezed and dripped asthmatically in the sweltering heat, except one. Apartment 46 had had its electricity cut off. Bentavagnia began to stagger a little, working up his act. Noting the name “Sheila Jameson” on the door of the apartment two doors down from 46, he knocked on 46 s door. “Sheila?” he said loudly, with a practiced slur. “Come on, Sheila, I know you’re in there!”

After two minutes of this, the door suddenly burst open. A stringy, red-face man in a T-shirt and jeans said, “Willya get outa here, she’s in 44!”

“Wanna talk to Sheila,” Bentavagnia blustered thickly. “Where is she?”

“Not here, jerk. Now get lost!”

“Isn’t this Sheila’s—” He mouthed the name on the half-open door. “Are you — what? — Frank Stanley?”

“Damn right.”

Bentavagnia swayed forward. Stanley put out a hand to fend him off, and Bentavagnia deftly slipped the legal paper into it. “Then, Mr. Stanley, it’s my duty to serve you with this notice of eviction.”

The red-faced man stared down at the notice and began to swear. As Bentavagnia turned to leave, Stanley grabbed him by the lapel and began to shake him, shouting almost unintelligibly. He was several inches taller than Bentavagnia. and in much better shape, but instead of twisting free and running for it Bentavagnia began to shout back, even louder and more furiously than Stanley himself.

Bentavagnia seemed able, like some sort of lizard, to blow himself up to twice his normal size and spit poison distilled from bile. His unenvied eminence among process servers was due to just this ability to take and dish out raw hate. It didn’t matter to him whether he served papers on a cheating wife or a starving squatter, on a crooked politician or an insurance-swindler’s mark. He didn’t care how underhandedly he approached them — whether he played delivery boy or accident victim or fireman, whether he crashed their parties or scaled their fire-escapes or blockaded their driveways. He made no allowances. His essential gift was a self-righteousness that encompassed all possible cases. He was an instrument of the law, wasn’t he? And these evaders of the law, who had offered him violence time and again, were the scum of the earth. And he told them so to their faces, at the top of his lungs, just as now, bringing all of Stanley’s neighbors out to listen and reducing Stanley to white-faced impotence. Bentavagnia loved to see the satisfaction on the neighbors’ faces whenever he evicted anyone; it reaffirmed his faith in human nature. He strolled off, whistling.

This first routine task of the day left him in a relatively good mood to approach the second, a visit with his kids. As he walked back to his car, he felt almost mellow. He had vented only a small portion of his vast reservoir of anger, but the experience, which would have raised another man’s blood pressure, and seemed to lower his. The old hypertension was still there, however, like an extra shirt in the summer heat. He was going to sweat right through to his jacket soon. This bothered him; he spent a great deal of money on his cheap-looking suits. They were in that style, originated by Las Vegas nightclub performers and metastasizing throughout the country via singles bars and discos, which bids fair to become the national costume, and the barrel-shaped Bentavagnia, with his sallow snapping-turtle face, brought out their every flaw. Only his tiny black custom-made shoes had class, and he had to pay twice what they were worth for that, the fitters had come to hate him so.

He had money, though, despite alimony and child support to pay. True, even a large city requires only a small number of full-time process servers, since junior law clerks can handle most of the court-issued citations, summonses, and subpoenas. But lawyers will take good care of the man who can tackle the determined evaders, even to the extent of filling in his slack time with their own routine evictions, foreclosures, and garnishments. Bentavagnia was making out all right — or so he told himself, glaring at total strangers on the street.

He visited his sons every Saturday at the same time. Myra, his ex, would leave the room while he showed them what he’d brought them. His presents were always expensive since he could find fault with anything not hidden behind a big price tag. Today he gave Tony, aged seven, and Jerry, six, each a book of rhymes and stories. The books were “personalized.” Throughout the text the name of a recurring character, the brave mouse, had been left blank and these spaces had been filled in with Tony’s and Jerry’s names in the same typeface, only spelled backward, to give them a fantasy look and make the gimmick more interesting.

Tony and Jerry received the presents without enthusiasm. Ordinarily active, vicious, cheerful kids, in their father s presence they were sullen, obedient, and fretful. He had them open their books, got them to turn to the same page with a minimum of shouting, and knelt down to show them where they could find their names.

“See here, where the mouse is in the garden, next to this snowbank? No, Jerry, look at your own book, it’s the same — see, right under the picture, the mouse’s name?”

“Ynot,” Tony said.

“That right, that’s ‘Tony,’ see, spelled backwards. And Jerry’s says ‘Yrrej.’ ”

“Stupid idiots put it in backwards,” Tony said.

“No, no, it’s supposed to be like that!” Bentavagnia said. “It’s cute.”

“Yeah, but too bad those stupid idiots hadda put my name in wrong,” Tony said.

“It’s supposed—”

“You gonna send them back, Daddy?” Jerry asked.

When Myra came in a moment later, the kids were in tears and Bentavagnia was in one of his rages. She called for her new boy friend, a truck driver, who grabbed the process server by his belt and collar and drop-kicked him into the street. Bentavagnia soon returned, a tower of righteous indignation. After giving everyone on the block a lecture on a father’s rights he went back to his car and drove off. From beginning to end the interview had been familiar and routine, the natural result of attempting good will in bad faith, a Bentavagnia specialty. It was now noon.

The third task of the day Bentavagnia had also done a thousand times before. He was to serve a man named Freddy Angel with a summons to testify in a suit arising from a traffic accident. It was a nuisance summons, but probably one that Angel wouldn’t strain to avoid. The only snags were that Angel was hard to get hold of and, worse, he was reputed to be a bagman for the Machine — and Bentavagnia wanted nothing to do with that outfit. He had even thought to ask Dominic about it the night before.

Dominic was his mentor and his only friend. A tall, white-haired man with a face from an old Roman coin, he was the proprietor of the Venetian Gondolier Cocktail Lounge. In exchange for Bentavagnia’s constant fawning, Dominic supplied him with liquor on credit, a sympathetic ear for his teary midnight maunderings, and occasional advice. Dominic’s influence over the process server even impelled Bentavagnia to attend Mass with Dom’s family occasionally; Bentavagnia had otherwise stopped pretending to have faith years before, when his mother had died. Dominic’s opinion about the Angel commission had been reassuring.

“This is a small thing, you tell me,” he had said, “and not related to his business. This is all right, if it is done properly. Introduce yourself straightforwardly. Give him the paper with an apology. If he takes it badly, offer to forget about it. Keep it quiet, and with respect.” It sounded reasonable.