“I can’t figure it.” Ernie gravely pulled on the end of his nose. “I’d swear I remember checking the door before I left.”
“You couldn’t of checked that door. That door was open. How else did he get in there and get that toilet paper? Did he have a passkey?”
“I don’t know, he might of had one. I sure don’t remember leaving that door open.”
“Forget it, forget I ever said anything about it. Don’t go on any more. It’s settled.” Florestano paced off under dangling fan belts, turned abruptly and came back. “If you don’t want to admit it, forget it. He got in there and he got the toilet paper and arguing won’t bring it back. Now I’m not trying to accuse you if you don’t want to admit it. I just want you to realize your mistake so it won’t happen again.”
“I’d admit it if I thought I did it.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“If you want to put the blame on me it’s up to you.”
“No, no, it’s not a matter of blaming anyone. These things happen. It was just something I wanted to call your attention to. Nobody wants to sit on a toilet seat a wino’s been on. It’s like shaking your dick where a nigger shook his. You got to think of the public. It’s public relations. Personally I couldn’t care less. One man’s as good as another as long as they pay their way. Only there’s people around that don’t feel that way. So if an undesirable asks you for the key, the shitter’s out of order. It’s just a matter of consideration. If there’s no undesirable piss on the toilet seat you’ll get repeat customers. So that door stays locked.”
“I keep it locked.”
Mario Florestano gave him a long look. “So how’s married life treating you?”
Left in charge, Ernie scattered sawdust on the floor of the lube room, pushed it around with a long-handled broom, scooped it up blackened, and dumped it in a drum of empty oil cans. He wiped off the grease rack, wiped and hung up the tools and ambled out to cars, thumbs hooked in his pants pockets. When the streetlights came on he went to the switchbox and the night air quivered in the tall white beams of the floodlights.
13
Along El Dorado and Center Streets between Mormon Slough and the deep-water channel hundreds of farm workers and unemployed loitered in the warm summer evenings. They talked, watched, drifted in and out of crowded bars and cardrooms, cafés, poolhalls, liquor stores and movies, their paths crossed by lines of urine from darkened doorways. Around the area cruised squad cars and patrol wagons with their pairs of peering faces. The fallen, the reeling and violent were conveyed away. Ambulances came driven by policemen. Fire trucks arrived and sodden, smoking mattresses were dragged out to the pavement. Evangelists came with small brass bands. Sometimes a corpse was taken down from a hotel. Occasionally in The Stockton Record there was an editorial deploring blight.
On the morning the orange city maintenance trucks came to Washington Square, Billy Tully was sitting on the grass. The park was a block of lawn and shade trees within a periphery of tall date palms with high sparse fronds, faced on one side by the ornate eaves of Confucius Hall and on the opposite side by the slate steeple and red brick of Saint Mary’s Church.
“Now what they going to do, mow the grass?” he said after the three vehicles had parked and the workmen were climbing down from the cabs.
“Pick up trash, I guess,” said a tanned, wrinkled man sitting near him in the shade.
Chains rattled, tailgates dropped, tools were dragged over truckbeds. The workmen entered the park with axes and chain saws.
“Must be a diseased tree,” said Tully, and a man with a scab down the bridge of his nose announced: “Tree surgeons. Probably a diseased tree.”
The last day haul had departed for the fields hours before. There were perhaps forty men reclining on the grass — gaunt night sleepers in coats, and farm workers in shirt sleeves, unhired at the morning shape-up. Two men and a woman in overalls rose from under the tree where the workmen stopped.
“Tree surgeons,” shouted the man with the scab after the rope starter had been pulled on the first chain saw. Roaring and sputtering like an outboard motor, the saw dug into the tree. In a moment another saw was roaring on the other side of the park. Ropes were thrown up into the foliage, sawdust flew, the trees swayed, tilted over, cracking, and fell with a rush of green leaves and a crash of branches. Men were rising, shambling away, and one after another the trees they had rested under came crashing down. Billy Tully remained propped up on his elbows, his legs flat on the lawn, until the crew reached his tree. He got up with the others, everyone surly and argumentative, walking away while a workman called after them.
“Hey, move your buddy.”
An inert man remained behind unresponsive to prodding feet.
“He’s no buddy of mine,” said Tully.
“He won’t be anybody’s buddy if he don’t move.”
“That’s your problem.”
“He’s breathing,” said the other workman.
The man was lifted up at the knees and shoulders, head hanging sideways, mouth open, sockless ankles and thin white shins dangling. He was pulled in opposite directions, his legs were dropped, he was dragged on his rear as the man holding him at the armpits stumbled backward. Again he lay on his back. Exchanging accusations, the two workmen once again grasped the slack limbs and carried him out of the shade.
Tully went back to the heat of his room. Barefoot and shirtless on the bed, he read a Male magazine and dozed to the sound of the saws a block away. They roared all day. By mid-afternoon, when returning laborers were arriving from the farms and Tully strolled back to the park, all the shade trees were down. Many of the trunks had been cut into sections and much of the foliage was gone. Across the park, as on the days that followed — when the trunks and limbs and stumps had all been cleared away and the patches of bare earth seeded — men lay lined in the elongated shadows of the palms and out in the glare of the sun.
14
Ernie and Faye Munger moved into three rooms on the ground floor of an old, three-story, white shingle apartment house. The kitchen faced onto garbage cans and lawn chairs in a back yard enclosed by a hedge, and dishes occasionally vibrated in the cabinet from a motor idling in a garage beyond the wall. Faye’s mother, perpetually smiling and exclaiming, her green eyes wide open and fearful, came and hung curtains. She treated Ernie with an awkward deference, her disappointment evident in sidelong looks, and he spoke to her in a polite son-in-law cant intended to convince her of his exceptional qualities.
In the curtained shadows he slept late, waking to find Faye, often nauseous, already up and dressed, his mornings not the times of sensual indolence he had imagined. At night he phoned the apartment from the station, and if Faye did not answer he called her parents’ house, where he invariably reached her, the ensuing conversations interrupted by customers, the receiver left on the desk while he slopped a wet rag over windshields, decided if a deficiency of oil was worth mentioning, peered into radiators but left the filling of them for another time and place. By the time he had locked up and driven home, Faye was usually asleep. They made love in the heat of the day.
Often they were visited by Faye’s friend, Norma Panelli, who discussed with Faye in the kitchen the fortunes of various couples, the girls’ voices at times sinking to whispers. To Norma Ernie spoke little, in order to discourage too soon a return.