The scientist laughs. He has a thin, hardly noticeable laugh, more like a polite cough than a laugh. “You know, you could probably help us,” he says. He is heading for the door now, I guess to ask at another shop where Oscar’s German Deli is, but he isn’t going to have any better luck, believe me. It’s hard to give directions around here. There are no major roads. “We could use someone who understands the talk of other species,” the scientist says, his hand on the door. “Anytime,” I say, though I’m not a hundred percent sure what he means by other species. Does he mean the alien? Scientists don’t think the way we do, they think technical, so the words they use may seem like normal words to us but mean things totally different. But I’m always ready to help people out, it’s in my nature. If you ask me to help you, I put down what I’m doing right away. I was always like that, too. Not that I get much chance these days to do any helping out in Wading River, except with animals, of course. The guy leaves, and that’s the end of our conversation.
Susan says, “Marty, use more wintergreen. I can still smell it.” I pour the rest of the bottle in the mop water. I use so much of the em-effin stuff, it burns my throat and makes me sneeze. I sneeze twelve times, my nose running like a faucet. I count the sneezes, out loud. Susan says, “Will you please stop that?” One thing about a good string of sneezes, it helps your headache. It must clear some of the garbage out.
When I get home, Mrs. Piscopo has something to say to me. She taps on her dining room window after I park and as I walk up the side path past the scrub pines, that’s how she lets me know. It’s always three sharp taps. She must use a key or a piece of metal. Someday the glass will break, she taps so hard. So I go see what it’s about instead of going upstairs to my room and making my supper. “Marty,” she says when I come in, “there’s a telegram for you.” “Yeah?” I say, like I get telegrams every other day. Actually, I don’t think I ever got a telegram once in my life. I’m trying to think who it could be, but I can’t think of a soul. I’m thinking: It’s not a death, because I don’t have any family. Maybe it’s some kind of good news. Maybe my luck will change. Mrs. Piscopo hands the telegram to me, and sure enough, I see through the little window in the orange envelope that it says Martin Bogaty. My heart does a funny beat. They even spelled my name right, which doesn’t happen a lot, I can tell you. People spell it all kinds of ways: Buggaty, Bogatti, Bogarti, once Big Gotti. I open the envelope since it’s mine to open. I never read one of these before, so it takes me a little time to figure out how it works. Mrs. Piscopo is impatient because she’s nosy. She stands so close, I can smell her bathroom powder.
There’s a lot of numbers and letters at the top of the telegram that don’t make any sense. Finally I get to the words of the main message and piece them out. “Holy,” I say when I read it. “Holy” is what I say when I’m really astounded. “What is it?” says Mrs. Piscopo. You can’t blame her for being interested, all she does all day is watch television, make soup, and knit sweaters for her grandchildren, who have yellow skin and live on the other side of the world. “It says here I just won two million dollars in a sweepstakes. See, there’s my name and there’s the two million. Can you believe that?” I count the zeros again to make sure. “Don’t believe it,” says Mrs. Piscopo. “The same thing happened to my brother-in-law. It’s just one of those advertisements to get you to buy real estate in a swamp.” “With two million dollars, I could buy all the swamp I wanted,”
I say. “Read the fine print,” says Mrs. Piscopo, annoyed with me. “You’ll see there’s a catch somewhere, there always is. People don’t give you money for no reason, Marty.” I’m afraid she’s right about that, because no one ever gave me money for no reason and I don’t expect them to, but the telegram doesn’t have any fine print that I can see, not even on the back, it just says I have to call an 800 number and go to some seminar thing at a Holiday Inn. I’m glad I didn’t show a lot of excitement, because if I had, Mrs. Piscopo would be laughing at me now, and it’s been a hard day. There’s something heartless about her laugh, and it makes her look like a turtle too. I had a dream once about her: she was a turtle in a bowl, laughing.
I put the telegram in my pocket and start to go, but she tells me I have to clean the leaves out of the gutter on the front of the house because when it rained two days ago, she saw the water pouring again from the middle of the roof. I know better than to say, “Come on, can’t I do it tomorrow, Mrs. Piscopo? I’m beat.” I go get the ladder even though I’m beat and my head hurts. If I don’t help every time she says, and first thing, she’ll up the rent on me again, she’s like that, and if she ups the rent again, that’ll start cutting into my beer money, which I don’t want to happen. I remember how rough it was at the Andersons’. I once went for three months there, I kid you not, without a beer because I had to budget. What a long winter that was. I marked off the days like I was in prison. I was so thirsty for a beer, a beer was all I could think about, an ice-cold Michelob. Michelob’s my favorite. Beer gives you a gut, I know, but I say, so what, I don’t have to worry about my waistline. It’s not like I’m going to get into a bathing suit and go to the beach. It’s not like I’m going to a ball.
So, even though it’s getting dark, I climb up with a bucket and spend twenty minutes clearing wet leaves out of the front gutter. Some of them are half rotten, black and slimy. If Mrs. Piscopo got one of those mesh shields installed that kept out the leaves—you can buy them in aluminum or plastic—I wouldn’t have to do this at all, but she won’t pay a cent for anything more than she absolutely has to, like a lot of old people.
After supper I go to the bar to tell Joe about the alien being more like peas than spinach. I’m looking forward to that. I also bring along my telegram, so he can explain to me what the catch is in the two million dollars. Wading River has other bars—there’s an Irish bar on North Country Road just before you get to the state park, there’s Jerry’s at the bottom of the hill between the music store and the laundry, and there’s that fancy new one on 25A for rich fags—but I only go to this one. When you go to the same bar, you get to know all the people and all their jokes. I guess bars are like churches in that way. If you stay where everybody knows you, nobody gives you a hard time. Or almost nobody—I groan when I walk in, because, speaking of giving hard times, Dave is there, but I guess I should have expected it: this hasn’t been a great day. Dave sees me and says, “Hey, everybody, it’s Dog Man.” “How you doing, Dave?” I say and take my usual seat at the end near the ice machine. Dave is my only real enemy. I’ve never done anything to him, but that’s the way some people are, they can’t stand the sight of you and there’s nothing you can do about it. But I’ve learned this: If you don’t show how much you mind, people like Dave get off your case after a while. They get bored with it.