mistake of looking back at the darkened snow where he’d sat. His reaction to what he saw was reflexive, born out of years spent as a floundering French major.
The city impound lot is located under the I-394 overpass at the western edge of downtown Minneapolis, shadowed by tons of concrete. A couple dozen columns, each maybe six feet in diameter, support the nonstop vibration of cars crossing the overpass. It’s a forbidding sight. But what was really depressing was the line of people snaking toward a concrete block building at one end of the lot. There must have been two hundred of them. Miserable-looking people. Cold. Unkempt. Mad. Every one of them looked mad.
Tom had not been able to feel his feet for more than an hour by the time he made it through the line to a bleak, unheated hallway leading to the service windows. Behind the windows, two guys processed tickets. And behind them were handmade signs that made clear this was the kind of place where the customer was never right.
It was Tom’s first sight of Earl Dethaug, one of the two guys behind the windows. The first thing you noticed about Earl was that he was fat. The way you get fat if you only eat white, yellow, and brown food. What Tom could see of Earl’s clothing was a dirty T-shirt and a down vest with wisps of white feathers sticking out of the seams. His arms were heavily tattooed. The tattoos suggested Earl had once been thin; they had faded as his skin spread over expanding girth.
The next thing Tom noticed about Earl was how unconcerned he was by the nonstop abuse he took from each and every person who presented themselves, rumpled tow tickets in hand.
The guy directly in front of Tom drove his fist into the window after finishing his business with Earl. It was a mistake. The window was bullet proof, and from the sound of the impact, Tom guessed the guy broke some bones.
From the window speaker, Earl said, “Next.”
At which point the guy turned fast, bumping into Tom. He spat in Tom’s direction and said, “Move your dumb ass!”
Tom didn’t even have to think about it.
Earl was staring at him as Tom stepped up to the window. “I personally impose a surcharge on anybody who don’t speak English, buddy.”
“I speak English,” Tom said. “But I curse in French.”
Earl continued to stare. “You speak anything else?”
“Spanish. Some German.”
“Hot damn,” Earl said. “You want a job? One of my guys is out sick. Georgie. The one that speaks spick. We’re getting killed. How about it, Frenchy. I’ll give you seventy-five bucks to work from now until 10 o’clock tonight.”
Tom thought about it. How hard could it be? And besides, after he paid the tow ticket and fine, he wouldn’t have any cash left for the rest of the month.
Tom said, “Is it heated in there?”
“We got infrared heaters above and floor heaters besides.”
Tom said, “You cover my tow bill and fine, and I’ll do it.”
Earl grimaced. Then he said, “I’ll cover if you stay until 7 tomorrow morning.”
That had been four years ago. Since then, whenever there was a snow emergency, Tom’s phone would ring and it would be Earl.
“Dirty drawers, Frenchy.”
Dirty drawers was Earl’s code for his personal snow emergency drill. Earl wore the same unwashed underwear he’d worn every snow emergency since he’d taken over the city impound lot. Tom made it a point not to ask how long that had been.
“It’s like this, Frenchy,” Earl said. “Snow emergencies—I don’t shave, I don’t shower. Hell, I don’t brush my teeth. And then I’ve got my specially aged underwear going for me. Gives a guy an edge. Know what I’m saying?”
It had never entered Tom’s mind that he’d be working at the impound lot for four years. When he thought about it, he considered the possibility he’d miss being the guy in control on the other side of the bullet-proof window when the pathetic hordes of towees showed up. He considered the possibility that he’d miss the drama of the twenty-four-hour snow emergency shifts.
There was always lots of drama.
Earl said, “I’ve had to duck twice working impound lots. The third time I have to duck, I’m out of here. Not gonna push my luck.”
The first time Earl ducked had been back when he’d run a private impound lot. He’d handled cars parked illegally on private property. Earl operated out of a ten-by-twelve-foot ice-fishing shack he’d bought off his brother- in-law for fifty bucks. He’d had a hole cut in the shack and installed a piece of glass with a pass window in it.
Three months after Earl started business in the shack, he’d dropped a handful of quarters on the floor. An eye blink after he’d bent over to pick them up, a brick came through the glass window, right where Earl’s head would have been if he’d been standing up.
The second time Earl ducked was after he’d left the shack to take a leak behind one of the impounded cars. He was maybe two car lengths away from the shack when he heard something behind him. Like a rock had hit the shack. It was another eye blink before the whole shack exploded.
The police bomb squad said somebody had lobbed a Vietnam-era grenade at the shack.
After that, Earl had a twelve-by-twelve cement-block structure put up. A bullet-proof window in front. A john at the back.
“Sweet,” Earl said, “but volume at the city was better. And I got benefits. So I sold the private lot. Came out ahead. Besides, once I read the city’s snow emergency rules—
Jorge Mendez—Georgie to Earl—said, “What I hear is people are gonna be able to sign up for an e-mail notification on snow emergencies. That could hurt our business some…”
Earl rolled his eyes.
“Georgie, Georgie, Georgie. You worked here how long? A year more than Frenchy, right? And you still haven’t figured out that our customers couldn’t get it together to move their cars if you and me went out and personally whacked each one of them over the head with a two-by-four.”
As usual, Earl was right. Nine times out of ten, people who got towed were people whose lives were already seriously out of control. These were people for whom bounced checks, parking tickets, and overdue rent were a way of life. They were running on a short fuse before they got towed, and getting towed was just one of a lot of things that lit their match.
Tom liked Jorge almost as much as he liked Earl, hard pressed as he was to explain what any one of them had in common with the other. Maybe the one thing that Tom and Jorge had in common was that neither could explain why they’d worked for Earl as long as they had.
“Does it bother you that he calls you
Jorge shrugged. “I corrected him a couple times when I first started working here. Then he put my name up on the schedule spelled,
It was Tom’s turn to shrug. “I guess.”
Jorge said, “Does it bother you he calls you
Tom said, “I never really thought about it. Just like I never really think about why I’m still here.”
