“Have a brandy and beer while you’re here — that ought to fix you up.”
“Just the second half of that — the draft,” and I pour and give him it, he says “How much?” I say “First’s on me if you don’t mind, especially when you didn’t take the brandy,” and he says “No way, leastwise today,” and gives me a dollar, I give him change and he puts a quarter tip on the bar.
“I wasn’t trying to manipulate you or anything,” I say going downstairs with him. “Not for a few cents — that isn’t what I was trying to do. Anybody, my feeling goes, even the mayor, is also a potential customer if he lives or works around here or nearby, so the first or second one free is my standard policy.”
“It’s okay. Don’t get alarmed if you are. But I live upstate and go by the rule to get for nothing you got to give for nothing, and so on on my job, so now we’re all straight.”
I show him the trash bags and tell him why they’re there.
“Hiring a carter’s your problem, ours is your clientele’s health.” He writes a violation. “I’m sorry, you think I like doing this? But get all these bags out by this time tomorrow or we’ll have to temporarily revoke your health permit which will mean you’ll have to close down till the violation’s corrected and permit’s returned.”
“At least let me keep open the bar part.”
“Beer’s food and you’ve got olives on the bar and stuff. No, Department regulations are the entire place I’m afraid, so nothing more for me to say.”
I don’t offer him anything else — not money, which I’m almost tempted to just to relieve from me some of the strain. Or whatever he might like: though I never did it before or my father if he was telling the truth. I know from other bartenders where some inspectors have taken women as payment or TV’s or sports tickets or washers for their wives or in the old days suits for themselves and radios. But I can see by his face and personality where it would only get me in much worse.
That evening while drinking with a customer at the bar I tell him my dilemma from almost the beginning and say “I’m at a loss now to know what to do. You used to have a store, Red. What way in the same spot would you get rid of your trash without having the same bags pile up on you with twice as many others the next day?”
“Take them to the garbage pier.”
“What garbage pier where?”
“Uptown along the river on the West Side where they unload all the city’s garbage into barges and tug them out to the ocean to dump. You want a van, say the word. A friend for a small fee for him and me. You have to do the driving, I’ll only help you pile them in, as I don’t want to get too involved in this if those shits who are screwing you are as serious as you say.”
I call Sanitation and learn it’s okay to unload my trash at the pier after two a.m. when there’ll be no city garbage trucks to interfere with. I give Red the money. He comes by around one with the van and we fill it up with bags. He says “I wish I could help you with the second load but have to get some sleep.”
“Next round I can probably do myself though it’ll probably kill me.”
“Make sure you get the van back to my friend before you croak or he’ll kill me. While it’s still out you, me and the bar are on loan.”
I drive to the Sanitation dock, enter the pier through a gate onto this old covered wooden structure like an old-fashioned covered bridge upstate but much longer and which has at the end of it floating in the river a huge barge. I back up and drop my bags in it one by one. All kinds of things are already in the barge and as trash some I’ve never seen before. A hammock that looks brand new. If I had any use for one or knew anybody who did and felt it’d be safe to climb in to get it, I would. A set of golf clubs, half a big tree, what seems like a good restaurant freezer, shrubs that have green flowers on them so they must’ve been growing indoors, a bunch of small men’s hats the same size it seems and in what look like perfect blocked condition and shape and some still fitted bottomside up in lidless hat boxes. Rats are in the barge also and mice or maybe they’re baby rats, these mice, a special river barge kind, not like what I’ve seen in my bar cellar from time to time. And various animal carcasses. I almost think a dead human hand sticking up, its fingers outstretched, with the rest of the body underneath covered by garbage. Next time I drop a bag in I think it’s definitely a human hand with blood on it even and on the forearm puncture marks and around the wrist a patient’s identification bracelet. I drive to the man at the gate who seems to be in charge here. He says “It’s probably your imagination or part of a store manikin or something,” and I say “No, it really looks real, come and see.”
“It’s happened before, I won’t say it hasn’t. One time I found five whole baby bodies in it and not fetuses, all tied together and gagged and smothered, worse thing anyone’s ever seen here. It made the papers.”
“I think I remember hearing of it.”
“You’d have had to. None were traceable, case went unsolved, all sorts of speculation, no crime could have been viler unless there were more bodies of them. Let’s take a look if you insist.”
We get in a two-seater electric cart and when we’re halfway there he stops and says “Oh yeah, now I recall, sorry for wasting your time, because I was to expect them. A small truckload of cadavers from a medical school, or parts of what’s left of them, arms and legs and things, no heads, that’s not allowed to be scrapped the law says. I think next time they should consign them to a common pauper’s grave, but I suppose they think what use would a nameless tomb be to anyone and also the expense and who’d keep it up over the years?”
“In the special field they have, the city.”
“Then it’s you and me, Jack, you and me and every taxpayer, which comes from our billfolds. Better here.”
“I don’t mind paying for it when it’s just a few cents per taxpayer, especially when I now know they’re ending up here and then the ocean.”
“They don’t float, they sink, nothing to bother your beach house about unless they have an unusual bloated condition. And it’s good for the water and earth and so eventually us. Helps replenish the minerals in them exactly like everything we excrete.”
“I still think it’s worth a check to see if that hand’s not connected to somebody murdered.”
“No, I know what it is, was forewarned,” and he drives to his wooden shack by the gate, I get out and drive to the barge and drop some more bags in it, trying to cover the hand which I can’t stand seeing anymore. One of my bags finally knocks it over and the next one sinks it.
A truck pulls up. Private carter, not from one of the companies I know of. Man jumps out of the cab, dump part of the truck rises to about forty-five degrees up and the back flap flips open, something like a coal chute drops out and the garbage starts sliding down it into the barge.
“What are you doing here? “the man says. With a long iron hook he’s dislodging some garbage stuck at the sides of the raised rear.
“My bags. I’m all done but this one.”
“You private or public?”
“I own a bar if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s where your bags come from?”
“No, from home.”
“What ‘ s in it then?” and he slashes the bag I ‘ m holding with his hook.
“All right,” when the bottles drop out, “they’re from my bar, what of it?”
“What of it is what are you trying to do, put us out of work? Get off the dock with your garbage and don’t come back.”
“Hey look, don’t talk to me like that. I’ve had more than enough crap from you private garbage guys.”
He puts the hook up to my face. “Smell this. Smell good? Smell like dogwood? Your face and van’s going to smell like this when I push both you and it into the barge after splitting your nose and tires. Because store people start depositing their garbage here to save on the private costs and not one of us truckers will have a job. Foy?”