“Si,” Joe agreed. “Muy mucho. You got it?”
“I got,” Diaz answered, staring at his bare cold feet on the concrete porch.
“That the fill pipe there?” Joe pointed at a black pipe extending about a foot out of the front of the house just left of the stoop.
“The pipe, si.” Diaz turned and went back inside.
Joe went into action. He reached into the cab of his old Mack, took out a fresh ticket, wrote it up and slid it into the meter at the back of the truck. With a quick forward twist of the dial at the side of the meter, he locked the ticket in place and cleared the mechanism. He set the meter at fifty, opened the tank valve, slipped on his once-orange gloves and primed the pump. He lifted the nozzle from its holster, threw the hose over his left shoulder and marched it to the fill pipe. At the fill, he unscrewed its cover, screwed the nozzle in place and slid the pumping trigger open. Joe had repeated this routine so often, he found himself acting it out in his sleep. More than once he’d startled awake dreaming he’d dropped the hose.
Almost immediately upon sliding open the trigger, Joe heard music to an oilman’s ears-a whistle. When oil goes into a tank, air is displaced and that air comes howling up through a vent pipe. Only two things ever come out of a vent pipe: air, if you do the delivery right, or, if you fuck up, oil. When the whistling stops, the tank is full. Keep pumping after the whistle stops and you’ve got oil gushing through the vent pipe. Air was good. Oil was bad. It was that straightforward. That was one of the things he liked about the oil business. It was all black or white, good or bad, air or oil. Early on as a cop, Joe had learned that a cop’s universe was shades of gray.
There was little chance of a spill when they ordered fifty gallons. Standard tanks held between 250 and 275 gallons. Joe knew that only poor people or fools ordered only fifty gallons. In this weather, fifty gallons would last five, maybe six days. Then he’d be back. At fifty gallons, oil was almost two bucks a pop. Smart people or people with money ordered two-hundred gallons. It was forty cents cheaper per gallon that way.
“They’re idiots,” he had said to Frank during training. “Why order so little? You get hammered that way.”
“They’re not stupid, Joe, just poor,” Frank explained. “Poor people gotta make choices most of us don’t ever gotta make. Some weeks, it’s oil or food.”
Joe felt silly for opening his mouth. Frank was right. He remembered how it was on the cops, in the bad neighborhoods. There, it was drugs or food. It was Joe’s experience that drugs were more powerful than food or oil or God.
The whistle stopped almost before it got in full swing. Joe’s old Mack might be a rickety piece of shit with no radio, but it pumped like a motherfucker. New equipment was an anathema to Frank. Sometimes Joe thought his boss would buy used oil filters if he could. But he respected Frank. He owed Frank a lot. Frank had saved him. Frank gave him a job when no one would touch him with someone else’s ten-foot pole. Joe Serpe had his faults. Disloyalty wasn’t one of them. He knew plenty of cops who might disagree.
Now Joe went through the routine in reverse: unscrewing the nozzle, replacing the cap, pulling the nozzle back toward the tugboat, reeling in the hose, taking off his gloves, closing the tank valve, unlocking the ticket from the meter with a reverse twist of the dial. He wrote up the price, added the tax, totaled the ticket and marched up the front steps. He opened the storm door and knocked. The front door pushed back.
Joe saw the TV was on, tuned to a Spanish language channel. There was a baby standing on his tippy-toes in a playpen a foot or two in front of the TV. The baby stared at Joe with happy eyes. A woman dressed only in a nicotine-stained nightshirt lay unconscious on a blue vinyl couch, her arms and legs splayed carelessly at unnatural angles. Seated perpendicular to the couch in a ripped up recliner behind the playpen was the man who had been on the porch. He held a thin glass pipe in his hand. One end of the pipe was pressed to his mouth; he held a disposable lighter to the other. Diaz sucked hard on the pipe, white smoke shooting into his lungs.
Disgusted, Joe ripped the yellow receipt copy and screamed in his pidgin Spanish: “Donde esta the money?”
The man, smoke leaking out of the corners of his mouth, pointed the cheap lighter at an envelope at the foot of the door. Joe counted the money. Exact change. He slammed the door shut. He could hear the baby begin crying behind him. He did not look back.
Almost from the first day he’d taken the job with Frank, Joe had noticed his gift of invisibility. Even now, three years later, he had trouble believing the things people let him stand witness to. His stop at Casa Diaz wasn’t the first time he’d been treated to a box seat at crackhead Nirvana. In Wyandanch, he’d had to wait for a guy to finish shooting up before getting paid, and Joe had had more pot smoke blown in his face than he cared to remember. He’d watched parents smack their kids around, men beat their dogs and a woman slaughtering chickens. Invisibility had its perks. Semi-clad women of all shapes, colors and sizes often came to the door to pay him, some so scantily dressed that he was convinced he must indeed be invisible.
It was to laugh, he thought, turning onto Sunrise Highway from Fifth Avenue. When he was working Narcotics, what he wouldn’t have given for the gift he now enjoyed. He had always known God was a bit of a mindfucker. God seemed to make a point of proving that to Joe at every opportunity. What Joe couldn’t figure out was why God got such a kick out of beating the same dead horse over and over again. Joe looked up. “I get it,” he said. “I get it.”
Fuck! His bladder was screaming at him. He had forgotten to piss. He pulled to the service road curb, got out, and walked around to the passenger side. He positioned himself so that passing traffic could not see him. Joe knew the Almighty too well to rely on his intermittent invisibility. As the burn ebbed slowly away, he tried not to think about the baby’s happy eyes.
Cain could barely contain himself, watching the clock blink the red seconds away until he went down to breakfast. It wasn’t breakfast that so excited him. Breakfast was all right here; better than in some of the homes he’d been in, worse than others. Sometimes they helped him pick out his clothes for the day, but not today, not on Saturdays. On Saturdays he wore the rugged Carhartt uniform Frank had bought for him.
He thought his dusty black Wolverine work boots were really cool even though the staff hated the way they smelled of oil. When he first got the boots, Cain tried polishing them up after each shift and washing off the soles to get the stink out. Now he just let them be. He had come to love that smell. And like Frank said, “You’re a workin’ man. There’s no shame in smelling like one.”
Frank was right. Frank was right about a lot of things. Frank was smart. Sometimes Cain thought that if he were normal, he’d want to be just like Frank. Frank treated him with respect. His parents never treated him with respect. They still talked at him like he was a baby. He was retarded, not stupid. He was a man now, not a baby.
Cain found himself getting agitated, thinking about his folks. That wasn’t good. When he got like this, he got in trouble. But nothing could ruin his day. It was Saturday. He got to work on the truck with Frank. He had only a few more minutes before heading downstairs.
He slipped on his thick woolen socks. Then he slid his skinny chicken legs-that’s what Frank called them-into his thermal long johns. Next came his favorite piece of clothing on earth, his kelly green Mayday Fuel Oil, Inc. t-shirt. Though Cain liked the logo of a white tanker truck encircled by a life preserver on the front of the shirt, it was the back of the cotton tee that he loved best. He held it up before him:
KING KONG
HOSE MONKEY
He was smarter than a lot of people he had met in the homes. He could read. Sometimes he didn’t understand all the words, but he could say them. Once he’d shown the shirt to his parents. It made his father sad and his mom had gotten all angry about the hose monkey. He tried to explain that they weren’t making fun of him, that ‘hose monkey’ was what oilmen called a guy who rode shotgun on the truck and pulled hoses. They called you that whether you were retarded or not. He never showed them the shirt again. Cain pulled on the shirt and admired himself in the mirror.