SUPPORT MY COKE HABIT THIS CHRISTMAS? Nevertheless, he drops a couple of dollar bills into the pot as he walks past. He has a good feeling about today. He's glad Sharon reminded him of the tinsel — he would have forgotten to bring it, probably; in the end he always forgets stuff like that, the grace notes.
A walk of ten minutes takes him to his building. Standing outside the door is a black youth, maybe seventeen, wearing black jeans and a dirty red hooded sweatshirt. He jives from foot to foot, blowing puffs of steam out of his mouth, smiling frequently, showing a gold tooth. In one hand he holds a partly crushed styrofoam coffee cup. There's some change in it, which he rattles constantly.
'Spare a lil?' he asks the passersby as they stream toward the revolving doors. 'Spare me a lil, sir? Spare just a lil, ma'am? Just trying to get a spot of breffus. Thank you, gobless you, merry Christmas. Spare a lil, my man? Quarter, maybe? Thank you. Spare a lil, 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; the elevators are slow and cranky.
'How's the wife, Bill?' a scrawny, constantly grinning man from the fifth floor asks.
'Carol's fine.'
'Kids?'
'Both good.' He has no kids and his wife's name isn't Carol. His wife is the former Sharon Anne Donahue, St Gabriel the Steadfast Secondary Parochial School, Class of 1964, but that's something 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 something unspeakable. To Bill Shearman he looks like an editorial cartoonist's conception of Death, all big eyes and huge teeth and stretched shiny skin. That grin makes him think of Tam Boi, in the A Shau Valley. Those guys from 2nd Battalion went in looking like the kings of the world and came out looking like singed escapees from hell's half acre. They came out with those big eyes and huge teeth. They still looked like that in Dong Ha, where they all got kind of mixed together a few days later. A lot of mixing-together went on in the bush. A lot of shake-and-bake, too.
'Absolutely can't wait,' he agrees, 'but I think Sarah's getting kind of suspicious about the guy in the red suit.' Hurry up, elevator, he thinks, Jesus, save me from these stupidities.
'Yeah, yeah, it happens,' the scrawny man says. His grin fades for a moment, as if they were discussing cancer instead of Santa. 'How old's Sarah now?'
'Eight.'
'Seems like she was just born a year or two ago. Boy, the time sure flies when you're havin fun, doesn't it?'
'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 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 closest to 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 ANALYSIS. There are three locks on the door: the one that was on it when he moved into the building, 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 color copier, 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 and 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 Mouse-Prufe 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 Army, during his time in the green, and he sometimes thinks it is the second most important thing he's ever learned in his life. The most important is that only penance replaces confession, and only penance defines identity. This is a lesson he began learning in 1960, when he was fourteen. That was the last year he could go into the booth and say 'Bless me father for I have sinned'
and then tell everything.
Penance is important to him.
Gobless, he thinks there in the stale-smelling darkness of the utility space. Gobless you, gobless me, gobless us every one.
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 trapdoor about thirty inches on a side. Bill installed it himself; he's handy with tools, which is one of the things Sharon appreciates about him.
He flips the trapdoor up, letting in muted light from above, then grabs his briefcase by the handle. As he sticks his head into the space between 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.