“They wouldn’t touch you.”
“Stupo: they will.”
“But you know people.”
“They know bigger people. Bigger than bigger people. People bigger than biggest and more. Make mine look like scopic insects under glass to squash on thousand a time. Besides, I got fair deal you can say with Stovin’s. Yes, but you have no tapedeck or fancy small recorder things under there or somewhere like in your shirt, do you, to catch my voice? Because you do and then don’t tell me and erase all that went on before and now shut it off, you and me friends no more.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Say, I worry. I don’t then I’m one who insane.”
“I’ve nothing to take down what you say except my head.”
“Then clean erase that after we through too. No tell cops or anyone what I say about any things between me and them that I say now to you. Promise.”
“Okay.”
“Say ‘I promise.’”
“Okay, I promise.”
He puts out his hand and we shake.
“So this is the deal. It goes that I get all the storeowners who fight Stovin’s about their garbage and win without my helping a finger to them, and they get to collect the rest.”
“You’ll end up with no one but me, if they even leave me a bar here for you to collect from.”
“So I lose with one fight, but at least here I have slight chance of staying in business a lot more days. For you see, they could just have said ‘Take a walk, baby, we run your garbage show now,’ and me, no madman with my life, would have to have had obey. But my second cousin. I skip his name but he not someone that big in Stovin’s or with their backers — of which group he belong he very sly about even to me. But he arrange as favor that they give me that other verbal deal out: to let me stay collecting garbage till they take away all my business in this neighborhood or almost, instead of just my closing my doors and going away when they say.”
“So you’ll be out entirely, because you once said you only collected around here.”
“True. I do. It’s a pact. Keep your trap shut, but we private carters carve the city into pieces. One gets West Side, other another side, and me I get here downtown. But Stovin’s, they want my piece, they succeed without puffing and maybe later even get half this whole city, when before about twenty of us cut it up. But it’s not so bad. I got savings stacked away and ideas for new businesses for me not concerned with any of them, or so far. And this is what happens a lot in garbage elsewhere. It happens too in lots other businesses here and there — chocolate bars, for one. You laugh, but check with candystores if not true. And news magazines distributing is another and some newspapers too, the weekly ones. And funeral parlors. That one and soon private carting my cousin say is the most. You think you want to open funeral parlor in city when and where you like just because you great undertaker and got degree from school to undertake? Laugh. All controlled. A few people, maybe same ones in garbage, say what you do or don’t with funeral parlors and who even gets city licenses for them, and also orange juice. Everything liquid in citrus fruit.”
“Who is this Stovin?”
“The man?”
“So I know who I’m up against.”
“Exactly, not for sure, but hear big man with body too, plus tough son. So you’re up against strong tall wall, two walls, no doors through them also, but don’t you believe all that I hear: maybe they’re both small and only their noise is like walls.”
“And the backers? I’m not naive, but what’s it: an organized crime group of sorts?”
“Everything I hear is they’re powerful people though maybe Stovin himself most powerful backer of them all and also this time in same business he back powerfully: garbage. He’s not always in it: before he sold cigarettes to grocery stores. But I think I’m lucky they not kick or try to me out sooner, that’s also the truth. They see this as upcoming neighborhood, more stores than before when For Rent signs were, so more garbage to pick up and what have you. So they move in, of course. Later I sell them my trucks, though not at the fairest price. But truth is, Shaney pal, you have to let them pick up your garbage sometime soon, for I be out by then and they won’t let any new carter come around nor would any carter will.”
“One of the reasons I didn’t—”
“Say, because of our old business together, years on years, I know,” and he grabs and holds my hands. “But told you — I be fine. Savings, wife who understands, and I tell you the truth now too, I’m sick of garbage after so long. She sick of it too, telling people what I do, even with all the money I once make, so stop concerning yourself for me and see them and agree to the first offer they say to take your garbage from now on.”
“All they want is two thousand and now probably more.”
“Pay it. Then they come around nice-like for your garbage, and that’s the price you pay for not calling me before besides being so nice and for first saying to them no.”
“I don’t have two thousand to spare.”
“Have it, find it, spare it, please.”
“That much? No way. They either have to collect my garbage for the fifteen to twenty-five extra dollars a month or run me out. I can’t get a loan, not that I’d try, so I have no choice.”
“Then start running, I think, but I pray maybe you’re right and you win after all.”
“Shaney,” a customer says coming in, “you won’t believe it, I just got laid off, so you’ll have to start me a new IOU tab with a double shot of rye.”
“Now I got to go,” George says, “and say goodbye last time in our lives for a while perhaps, for I don’t want Stovin’s people see me here and think I advising you to oppose. Thanks for the bad brandy,” and he drinks up, kisses my hands, pats my customer’s back and goes.
I phone Stovin’s and say “Jenny, don’t hang up, this is Shaney Fleet again. I’m sorry for the unease I might’ve caused you the other day with my being rude, but could you please tell your boss or Turner or Pete if they’re there—”
“I already told you.”
“Then just Mr. Stovin or son or the accountant who might know of me or any salesman that I’m ready to give in, this isn’t a trick, and I’d like your company to start carting for me.”
“For whatever it’s worth, Mr. Fleet, I’ll pass it on.”
“You’re a doll.”
Next day while I’m tapping a keg in the basement cooler right under the bar a customer shouts out “Shaney, a paper just flew through the mail chute — want me to pick it up?”
I run for the stairs, then down the two steps I got up, as the rod in the keg could explode the way I left it halfway in and the beer ready to spout, and finish tapping it and run upstairs and around the bar to the outside. Policeman on the beat, police car cruising the street, a group of kids tossing around iceballs and making noise as they walk home from the nearby parochial school, overhead pretty close a seaplane, faraway the barking at the same time of fierce dogs, around me snowflakes. I pick up the envelope and read the note inside. “Our answer,” it says in letters painstakingly penciled and filled in from an alphabet stencil, “is same place last chance $2500 now go to bank dont for a moment phone or delay.”
I take one of my pickled eggs, mix lots of garlic cloves from the jar with it, chop them up and under the counter stick them in the note envelope and spit a goodsized wad into it and tell the two customers “I’ll be right back, get another beer free if you want but don’t let a soul in even if they knock.” I stick a little billy in my back pocket just in case and go outside, lock the door and go to the bank and write on the back of a withdrawal slip “2500 death germs I hope you get from my spit, you bastards, and may the garlic not be enough to ward them off, don’t ask me what good or symbol to you is my putrid egg,” and put that in the envelope on top of about twenty blank withdrawal slips and seal it up, get on line and when it’s my turn I go to the teller and put the envelope on the counter between us and just as he grabs and brings it down to him I say “Excuse me, I forgot something, just a second,” and rifle through my coat pockets. “Damn, I must’ve left it in the bar — can I have that back?” He gives me the envelope and I leave the bank and go to the phonebooth on Second and Prescott another block away and wait for a young woman in the booth to finish arguing with her father about how it’s none of his damn business where she was last night and earlier today—“Do I ever ask you where you are or what you do? No, so shut up or I won’t come home,” and slams down the receiver and scoops up her change. I look at her, maybe coldly because I’m suddenly sorry for her dad, and she stares at me as she leaves the booth and says “What do you want?” and I shake my head and step out of her way and go inside, turn around, see that she’s gone and nobody else seems to be looking at me, feel under the shelf, find the tape which is so sticky that my fingers have difficulty getting off it, and fasten the envelope to it and leave the booth and go around the corner and head back to the bar. But I stop, a block away, say “Hell, came this far, let me see who they are,” and hail a cab and have him drive me to the opposite side of the busy oneway avenue about thirty feet up from the booth, and doublepark.