Hose Monkey (2 page)

(Two Days Earlier)
Saturday Morning
Valentine’s Day
February 14th, 2004

 

INVISIBILITY

 

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.”

“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.

There was a knock on the door. The imposing figure of the home aide everyone called Mr. French filled the doorway. Cain didn’t much like Mr. French. The feeling was more than mutual. Their disdain for one another was immediate, but had deepened recently after Cain made a joke at Mr. French’s expense in front of a cute occupational therapist.

“Do all people from Haiti hate other people like you do?” Cain had asked.

It hadn’t helped that the therapist had laughed at Cain’s pun on hate and Haiti.

French had a reputation for getting rough with the residents. He hadn’t hit Cain, not yet, anyway, but he was riding him pretty hard lately, pushing him, trying to get him in trouble. Cain had told Joe Serpe about Mr. French. Joe, one of Frank’s drivers, had once been a cop, though he didn’t like other people to know that. Joe had promised to come down and have a talk with the health aide if he got tough with Cain, and Cain had told Mr. French as much.

“Man, it stink in ‘ere.” Mr. French held his nose. “You ‘ave two minutes to get to breakfast, ‘ose monkey,” he snickered. “‘ose monkey, indeed. The monkey is much smarter, no?”

Cain could feel himself getting worked up. He didn’t need the mirror to see his face was burning red.

French stuck out his chin at Cain. “Come on, boy, you would like to ‘it me? Your cop friend won’t be able to ‘elp you, monkey boy.”

The back of Cain’s left hand slashed across the rich black skin of Mr. French’s cheek.

Bob Healy rolled over in bed. Eyes still closed, he reached instinctively across the bed for Mary. He’d dreamed about her. They were at Plumb Beach, alone at the shoreline in the semi-darkness, lazy planes gliding overhead toward JFK. He cradled her freckled face in his sandpapery palms, her green eyes sparkling as they had when Bob saw her that first time at the CYO dance at St. Marks.