“What the fuck?” Joe moaned, half-stumbling into the office.
Frank understood. “Sorry, Joe, the tugboat’s off the road. The tank’s got a pinhole leak and I’m taking her over to Suffolk Welding this morning. You’re on the International today.”
“I hate that truck. It’s a bitch gettin’ in and outta that thing.”
“What can I tell you, Joe? You’ll have the tugboat back tomorrow. Listen, in the meantime, there’s like forty, fifty gallons a diesel left in the International’s tank. You better pump it off before you go load, okay?”
“Whatever.” Joe turned to leave. “Hey.” He hesitated. “You hear anything about the kid?”
“Nah,” Frank said. “It’s too early. My guess is he’s probably back at the home. You know him, how crazy he gets. He probably got all pissed off at something and freaked and couldn’t handle it. In a way, it’s good he didn’t show on Saturday. I was thinking maybe of taking him off the trucks altogether and putting him back in the yard. Now I’m sure.”
“He won’t like that shit. And he’s the best hose monkey we ever had, Frank.”
“Yeah, well.”
By the time he got out to the truck, Joe had forgotten all about the kid. He had troubles enough of his own. He placed the nozzle into the hole atop an empty fifty-five gallon drum. He primed the pump and opened the nozzle trigger on the International, but instead of the expected gush of diesel, the thick, red hose barely stiffened. He heard a slow trickling echo inside the steel drum. Maybe Frank had been wrong about there being diesel left in the tank. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’s almost impossible to keep track of inventory when you pump a hundred thousand gallons of diesel and oil a month.
Joe closed the nozzle trigger, rechecked the meter, the primer handle and the tank valve, and tried it again. A thunderous clanging rose up from inside the three thousand gallon aluminum tank. Now the pump began straining so loudly he could barely hear the L.I.R.R. train pulling in at the Ronkonkoma Station. Joe had never heard anything like this. He thought he saw the big truck shudder and he immediately closed the pumping trigger. The truck quieted back down.
“What the fuck was that?” Frank screamed as he came racing out of the office. “Did you open the goddam valve?”
“C’mon, Frank, you know better than to ask me that.”
“Yeah, well, you’re lookin’ a little fuckin’ shaky this morning, buddy.”
Joe thought about denying it, but knew he wasn’t going to fool anybody, least of all Frank. “The valve’s open. Look for yourself.”
Frank did, put on a spare pair of rubberized orange gloves and opened the pumping trigger. Once again the clanging rose up, the pump straining fiercely.
“Fuck!”
“I’ll get up top,” Joe said, already climbing the ladder on the rear of the tank.
Once up, Joe thought he saw the problem. The top of the truck was still covered in snow and ice. The hatch vents were clogged. If those vents were sufficiently clogged, you could either create enough back pressure buildup to blow out the tank or a powerful vacuum capable of crushing the tank like a soda can. Joe Serpe got down on his hands and knees, brushed the snow away and chipped at the ice to clear the vents.
“Try it now,” he called down to Frank.
It was no good. If anything the clanging was worse. Joe could feel the pump shaking the truck. Frank shut it down. Joe opened the hatch and had a look. Even in full summer sunlight, it was dark inside a tank. On a bleak February Monday, it was like looking into a black hole.
“Throw me up a flashlight,” he yelled.
“Here she comes,” Frank warned, tossing up a Maglite.
Joe grabbed it in midair, clicked it on and nestled on his knees in the snow at the side of the hatch. He aimed the beam through a hole in the rear tank baffle.
“Well…” Frank called up
He heard Frank, but couldn’t answer. His lips moved, but there was no sound.
Frank was impatient. “What the fuck is it, Joe? Something caught in there?”
“Call 911,” Joe thought he heard himself say.
“What?”
“Call the cops, Frank. Call ‘em right now.”
(Two Days Earlier) Saturday Morning, Valentine’s Day February 14th, 2004
J oe Serpe hopped from foot to foot on the concrete slab porch, watching his breath form clouds on the glass storm door. Early Saturday deliveries were a bitch. Everybody wanted their oil early, but no one was ever up in time to receive it. His knuckles were already raw from knocking and this was only his second stop. There were three doorbells. None of them worked. They never did in this town. Why is it, he wondered, did poor people always have so many doorbells and none of them worked? It was the same when he was on the job. Nothing works the way it’s supposed to in poor neighborhoods. It sucked being poor. There was nothing profound in that thought, but there it was.
Sometimes, customers taped a money-fat envelope to the inside of the storm door, or under the front mat or in a bag attached to the oil fill pipe itself. Joe had already checked. There was no money. This one time, he’d been instructed that the money would be in the glove box of a car parked in the front yard. When he pulled up in the tugboat, there were eleven abandoned cars in the front yard. He went through five of them before finding the money. He laughed to himself thinking about that stop. He wasn’t laughing now.
This shit drove him nuts. He knew someone was home. There were two cars in the driveway. One of them had a warm hood. Joe had checked that, too. Old cop habits die hard. And he thought he could hear a TV coming from inside the house. Though he’d only driven an oil truck for three years, he knew what was going on. Three years, that’s what he’d been told. It takes three years as an oilman to see everything. There’s a learning curve in all professions. Compared to the cops, the learning curve for an oilman was a piece of cake. For a street cop, the learning curve extends past retirement and into the grave. In oil, there’s trucks and tanks and houses-one pretty much like the next. In police work… Well, it was just different.
Joe, the stubborn fuck that he was, banged hard on the door one last time, his fist print smudging the coating of fog his breath had left on the glass. He ran his fingers up and down the row of impotent bells and rapped his knuckles on the front window. His rapping was particularly urgent because now not only was he cold, but he had to pee something wicked. No answer. He knew the drill. These pricks had dialed every oil company in the Pennysaver and had already taken delivery from the first truck that showed. Scummers, that’s what Frank called them. They were on the other side of the door holding their breaths until Joe gave up and drove on. It killed him to do it, but he had twenty other stops to do and an impatient bladder to deal with. He wrote a familiar message on the ticket:
NO ONE HOME/NO MONEY/NO OIL
CALL TO RESCHEDULE
He split the three part ticket, impaling the hard cardboard copy on a broken aluminum prong of the storm door and shoving the top white copy in the mailbox. Joe saved the middle yellow copy to show Frank that he’d tried to do the stop. Not that Frank gave a shit. Frank just threw the yellows out without looking. Joe only got paid for deliveries, not attempted deliveries. As a sort of final fuck you to the people in the house, he threw the carbon paper on the front steps. Just as he let the carbons go, the front door opened.
A skinny Hispanic man in a dirty t-shirt stepped unsteadily onto the stoop. His hair was a mess and the whites surrounding his dull brown eyes were shot with blood.
“Lo siento, jefe,” the man slurred his apologies. “Sleeping.”
“You Mr. Diaz? You ordered fifty gallons, right?” Joe began the scripted dialogue, some version of which he repeated more than 120 times weekly.
“Si, feefty gallons.”
“That’ll be $102.45 cash when I’m done pumping. Okay?” “Mucho dinero, jefe.”