truck, gone to the front door and confirmed the delivery. He was too tired, too pissed-off to do his normal routine. He popped the air brake, put the truck in neutral, flipped on the PTO and shifted into third gear. He set the meter, primed the pump, yanked the hose over his shoulder and walked up a stranger’s driveway for the twenty-sixth time that day. It was days like this Joe most regretted complaining to Frank about the kid. Cain wasn’t a kid, not really, but his being retarded made him seem like one. Christ, he was a good two inches taller than Joe and strong as an ox for someone so reedy thin. Country strong, Frank called him. Retard strong; Dixie, one of the other drivers, was less kind.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Cain. He did. Joe was the one who gave him the nickname King Kong. It fit-Cain Cohen, King Kong. The perfect moniker for a hose monkey. Even now as Joe shlepped the hose, he smiled thinking about the kick the kid got out of the nickname. He was so proud of it. The thing was, Cain drove Joe a little nuts. When they stuck to subjects like sports, they were okay. In fact, it kind of reminded Joe of riding the streets with his first partner, but you could only talk so much sports and Saturdays could be very long days.
The kid was a little too preoccupied with that Japanese anime crap. And the kid could fool you. He sometimes seemed almost bright, but Joe had learned there was a limit to the kid’s range. There was just some stuff that Cain couldn’t get no matter how many times you explained it to him. That wouldn’t have been bad if the kid wasn’t so freaking curious. He asked a million questions and it was one of these questions that had finally gotten to Joe.
“Why is Frank’s company called Mayday, Joe?”
“Cause Frank thought it was a good name that people would remember.”
“Why? It sounds like a stupid name to me. What does May have to do with oil? It’s hot in May and we don’t deliver a lot of oil in May.”
“Mayday’s got nothing to do with the month of May, Kong.”
“Then what’s it mean?”
“It means ‘help me.’ Even though we spell it m-a-y-d-a-y, it comes from the French m’aidez, m-a-i-d-e-z, which means ‘help me.’”
“But we don’t speak French in America, Joe, so that’s stupid.”
After about a half-hour of going round and round, Joe had cut off the discussion. That night he went to Frank and asked for the kid to be taken off the tugboat. Two months had passed since then. Cain had gotten over his initial hurt, but Joe still felt shitty about it. He had come to the realization that the kid’s questions were painful echoes from his own life. His son, Joey, now fourteen and living with his mother and stepfather in Daytona Beach, had always been a curious kid. Worse even were the echoes of Vinny in the kid’s questions.
Joe hooked up the nozzle to the fill pipe. He was about to start for the front door, when he heard a storm door slam shut and footsteps coming his way.
“Fill up?” Joe shouted.
“Whatever she’ll take,” a man answered back, his footsteps growing louder as they grew nearer. “I shoulda checked the tank a week ago, but… There’s alotta things I shoulda done.”
Joe said nothing. He heard this lament or versions thereof several times a day. He slid the trigger open and got a strong vent whistle. The homeowner was standing right behind him now. Joe didn’t bother looking up. He wasn’t interested in making friends and influencing people. He just wanted to get done.
“I really appreciate your coming so late.”
“No sweat,” Joe lied through clenched teeth.
“This weather sucks, doesn’t it?” the customer asked. “My wife used to love the snow. Me, I got no use for it.”
“Oh God,” Joe muttered to himself, “a fuckin’ talker.”
“Did you say something?”
“No, nothing. Yeah, this weather sure does suck.”
“It must be rough for you, working in this shit. No?”
Suddenly, a chill rode the length of Joe Serpe’s spine. There was something about this guy’s voice, the way he phrased things that was eerily familiar. Frantically, he searched his memory, trying to recall the customer’s name. The whistle weakened, the tank almost full. Joe did not take notice as he tried remembering Ma spelling the name out for him. What was the name? Now, the whistle died completely. Joe did not slap the trigger shut. There was a loud gurgling in the vent pipe, oil rising up fast. Healy! Christ almighty! Joe snapped back into the present, smacking the trigger closed. Only a few drops of oil sputtered out the vent pipe turning the virgin snow beneath the color of cherry ices. The customer seemed not to take notice.
“Okay,” Joe said. “I’ll write you up and meet you at the front door.”
“Good. I’ll get the cash.”
Joe did not turn to look as Mr. Healy retreated. Instead, he looked at the fresh footprints as he carried the hose back to the tugboat. When he removed the ticket from the meter, Joe noticed his hands were shaking. No, he thought, it had to be a different Healy. There must be hundreds of Healys on Long Island. Joe filled in the totals, laughing at himself for being such an idiot. He felt like some brokenhearted teenager who runs into an old girlfriend. He walked up to the door, bill in hand, an embarrassed smile on his face. He knocked at the storm door.
“One second. Gimme a second,” a bodyless voice answered the knock.
Shit! There was that chill again. It was the voice. His voice. Just as he could not calculate the millions he had confiscated over the years, Joe could not count the hours he’d listened to that voice accuse and cajole, prompt and prod, jab and parry. He was tempted to leave the receipt in the mailbox and run, scream for Healy to send in a check.
But Joe Serpe hadn’t run from anything in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. Instead he cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face up close to the storm door. He looked at the framed collage of family photos on the staircase wall.
“Motherfucker!” he hissed. “It’s him.”
It seemed to take about a week for Healy to get downstairs with the money. At first, there was no sign of recognition in Healy’s faded gray eyes. The lack of recognition wasn’t lost on Joe. Maybe his invisibility was shielding him. But in his heart, Joe knew God would never pass up such a rich opportunity to fuck with his life. Sure enough, just as Healy began forking over the cash, a light went on in his eyes. Bob Healy’s pupils got small as pinheads. His mouth formed that wry, mischievous smile Joe had learned to despise.
“Fuck if it isn’t Joe ‘the Snake’ Serpe.”
Frank was finishing his entries into the computer when he noticed just how dark it was outside the office. He considered giving Joe a buzz to see how that last delivery was coming, but he decided against it. He didn’t want to insult the man. Anyone who could do buy and bust operations in the worst of the worst neighborhoods in New York City could handle a little snow and darkness. Frank had already decided to throw Joe an extra twenty for doing the stop. That would bring Joe’s pay for the day up to a nice round three hundred bucks. All in all it had been a nice payday for everyone. Besides, Frank had big troubles of his own, things he didn’t even want to think about.
Frank checked the window again. The snow seemed to be slowing its pace. Yet Frank felt unusually ill at ease. It was certainly true that he didn’t like having trucks out in the dark and that early in his tenure Joe had been a bit of a hot-rodder, but that wasn’t it. Frank loved reclamation projects, Joe best among them. Everybody who’d ever worked for him had been a reclamation project of one sort or another. There was Fat Stan the Psycho Man who had managed to get off welfare and get his life back in order while earning his keep for Mayday. What a character, Frank laughed, remembering the day he found Stan thumbing a ride outside the grounds of Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital.
Then there was King Kong. The jury was still out on him. He hadn’t shown up for work today. While it wasn’t the first time, it wasn’t exactly a chronic problem either. Even though the kid claimed to like working with Frank, he wondered if Cain wasn’t still feeling the sting of being tossed off the tugboat by Joe. He liked the kid a whole lot, but Frank had always been a little shaky about his decision to move Kong from working around the yard to hose monkey.
The group home was just a little ways down Union Avenue. If something went wrong in the yard, Frank could have someone from the home there in five minutes. The truck was something else altogether. It wasn’t the work itself. Christ, you could train a monkey to pull a hose to a fill and back. Hence the job title. No, it was the ‘what ifs’ that gave Frank pause. What if the driver got injured? What if the truck were robbed? What if there was a spill? An accident?
From the first, Frank understood there was potential for disaster written all over taking the kid on. The
