The gun was loaded.
Dugan the boss called Joel into the office when the truck had returned to the shed. Joel always felt inferior around Dugan, who was a tall, barrel-chested Irishman whose family had always worked for the city. Dugan had come to the sanitation department with certain advantages.
Twelve years ago, he’d started on one of the collection trucks, in a job much like Joel’s present one, but he hadn’t remained there long. From day one, Dugan had pull. Joel knew that was what it took to get ahead in a city job, pull. And that was what it took to get the assholes off you, once they settled on you as a target for their sick, cruel jokes.
Not only didn’t Joel have pull, but Dugan and Sal had turned many of their fellow employees against Joel, spreading lies, making sure Joel was passed over for any promotion. Joel considered himself a realist and saw the situation as something he had to endure. In some matters there was no choice.
Just as he always did, big Frank Dugan glanced up at Joel over the frames of his glasses and made the smaller man wait while he finished what he was writing. He sat behind a wide, cluttered desk. On the wall behind him was a large cork bulletin board with schedules and notices pinned to it. Alongside the corkboard was a bank of battered filing cabinets that were the same gray metal as the desk. A space heater was glowing over in a corner. There was a pair of wet leather boots on the floor in front of it, smelling up the place.
Starting to sweat in his heavy coat, even though it was unbuttoned, Joel waited.
“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, Joel,” Dugan said, when he finally put down his pen and looked up. His blue eyes were rheumy and his face flushed. He looked as if he’d been drinking before Joel arrived, not doing paperwork.
Then it suddenly struck Joel that when he had the revolver out, Sal might have caught a glimpse of it in the truck’s outside mirror. A gun in New York, concealed on the person of a city employee, was a serious matter. It was especially serious now, because the gun was in Joel’s black metal lunch pail, which was in Joel’s right hand.
Joel began to perspire even more. He could feel beads of sweat running down his right side beneath his waffled winter underwear. This was just the kind of thing Dugan and Sal must pray for every night, a chance to rid themselves of Joel and at the same time humiliate him and make it impossible for him to find any kind of city job.
But it wasn’t about the gun.
Dugan shrugged his bulky shoulders and said, “I got some bad news. We’re going to have to lay you off, Joel. I’m sorry.”
“Lay me off?” Joel was astounded. “With my seniority? You’d have to lay off a dozen men to get to me!”
Dugan nodded somberly. “The department’s laying off twenty.”
Joel could only stare at him. He’d been working for the Department of Sanitation for nine years. Getting flat- out fired for some lie cooked up against him was one thing, but the thought of a layoff had never occurred to him. His heart turned cold and dropped.
“It isn’t the best of times for the city,” Dugan said.
“I heard we were doing okay, with the new municipal bonds.”
“Yeah, it sounds like a lotta money, but it’s not.” Dugan stood up, looming even larger in the small, warm office. “Not enough, anyway.”
Joel nodded, swallowing loudly.
Dugan extended his hand. “I wish you luck, Joel.”
Joel shook his boss’s hand, feeling the powerful grip.
Dugan must have known what he was thinking. “You have union benefits, Joel. And there’s always unemployment. I’d like to tell you it looks like you’ll be called back soon, but in all honesty I can’t.”
Joel couldn’t get the words out-not the ones he wanted to say, that this was a crock of shit, that Dugan was a phony, that he and Sal probably got together to shaft him, that this was goddamn unfair! Joel should get the gun out of his lunch pail and tell Dugan what he really thought. Tell Dugan he was gonna fuckin’ die. Not that Joel would actually squeeze the trigger. But Dugan wouldn’t know that.
What Joel said was, “Yeah. . Yes. I understand.”
Dugan nodded, then sat back down at his desk and picked up his pen. He began to write. Joel was no longer a city employee. Joel wasn’t there.
Joel left the office. He felt empty inside. His life felt empty. Sal and Dugan had fucked him over, just as he’d been getting fucked over all his life. He should have expected it. In a way, he
As he trudged toward the lot where his ten-year-old Ford was parked, the gun in his lunch pail was heavy. He recalled the gun’s cold heft in his hand when he’d plucked it from the trash, how heavy it felt for its size. How deadly efficient it looked. How serious. How. . important.
It was the only substantial thing in his world. It was his only source of comfort, though why it comforted him escaped him.
As he drove home he thought about the gun, what he might have done with it in Dugan’s office, what he
Not that he really would have used the gun.
But it was something to think about as he negotiated the bumper-to-bumper New York traffic that he’d come to hate.
When his father walked into the apartment, twelve-year-old Dante Vanya saw the look on his face and knew something was wrong. Something
“School was okay today,” Dante said.
His father nodded, as if he’d barely heard. “Where’s your mother?”
“Walked down to the store. She needed something for whatever she’s cooking on the stove.”
For the first time, Joel noticed the pungent scents wafting from the kitchen. His nostrils actually twitched as he sniffed at the air.
“She’s making some kinda stew,” Dante said.
His father didn’t answer. He simply trudged toward the bedroom he shared with Dante’s mother. His shoulders were hunched and his head gave the impression of being bowed though really it wasn’t. What he looked like, Dante thought, was somebody with about a thousand pounds of lead stacked on his shoulders.
After his father had disappeared down the hall to the apartment’s small bedrooms, Dante stood up and pretended he was going to his room. It was the last door at the end of the hall, and it had one of the apartment’s few windows that didn’t look out on the brick air shaft.
He actually did go to his room, but first he paused in the hall and peered into his mother and father’s bedroom.
The closet door was open and his father was standing on his toes with one arm raised. His back was to Dante. Dante saw that his father was placing his black metal lunch pail, which he usually set on the kitchen table when he returned home from work, on the top closet shelf. He was pushing the lunch pail back as if trying to make it as unnoticeable as possible, toward the rear of the shelf where shadows were dark and light didn’t play.
An odd thing for him to do, Dante thought.
An odd way for his father to act.
He didn’t know his father’s unusual behavior had only begun.
16
