Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  And on he went, spinning out scenarios of profit. The store lost money at first, and despite Hector’s optimism, for several months it seemed it wouldn’t work, that the enterprise would fail, but then, like wind slowly filling a sail, the whole operation began to move. People were charging the limit on their cards and the banks didn’t care. Even in the struggling lower-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn, money was moving around like nobody could remember. Some of the best-looking neighborhood girls were making one hundred bucks a night in the good Manhattan bars just putting beers down in front of white guys in ties. If you could type you could get a night job on Wall Street inputting data into a computer—a lot of the older women who didn’t have kids to worry about were getting twenty, twenty-five thousand a year doing that, money they never dreamed of. Hector made an early payment of a thousand dollars to the Chinese businessman. There were minor hassles of course, like late deliveries of inventory and the guys who worked for Spinelli’s Carting Service, the mob trash hauler. The guys on the huge green Spinelli truck now wanted eight dollars a load, cash. Something about what’s on the books and what’s off the books. It came out to twenty-four dollars a week. One thousand, two hundred, and forty-eight dollars a year. Off the top. You paid or you paid, the saying went. He hated them; they reminded him of the mob fucks who had driven their truck right into his father’s car. Bump, his father is dead and the fucking garbage truck isn’t damaged. They knew there was nothing you could do. The cops didn’t give a shit about it. Eight dollars a load. Hector looked into it and found that was the price everyone else was paying—the fish market up the street, the laundry, the hardware store. Everybody paid eight dollars a load and when you figured the thousands of loads a day, you could see how the mob guys had so much money. He decided to pay it, without saying anything. Then the Spinelli guys tried to jack it up to twelve dollars a load on account of the hard sixteen-foot cardboard tubes that the linoleum came rolled on. The cardboard in the tubes was three-quarters of an inch thick and didn’t compress easily in the truck, so the Spinelli guys said. That wasted space, made the truck fill up faster, cost them money. Hector responded that he’d see that the tubes were cut lengthwise. He could do it with a handheld power jigsaw with a reciprocating blade. The Spinelli guys said no, it was gonna have to be twelve dollars a load, cut tubes or not. Hector told them to forget it. Cancel his carting contract.

  The trash started to pile up and after two weeks the big trucks from the flooring manufacturers couldn’t make their deliveries easily in the back because of the trash, so Hector jammed the trunk and backseat of his car with sawed-up tubes and hauled the stuff out on the Interboro Parkway one night and dumped it in a rest area near the highway and turned around and came back and did it twice more. It was wrong but what choice did he have? The loading dock was clear now and he would figure out what to do later. But the carting company sent two guys back in a car who asked if Hector would reconsider his contract. Still twelve dollars a load? Yes, they said. He wouldn’t pay it, he said. The mobsters, two older men with recently cut hair, nodded their heads. Maybe they were tough guys, maybe they weren’t. You could never be sure who you were dealing with. One of the men put a toothpick in his mouth contemplatively, Hector remembered aloud to Dolores, and said well, we can’t lose your business, and asked Hector to put out his hand so they could shake on some kind of a deal. When he did, the bigger man grabbed it tight. The other one pulled out a power box stapler from his coat and there was a sudden dok, dok, dok, and Hector was left on the sidewalk, clutching the meat of his thumb.

  “Fuck you!” he screamed after them.

  Hector called other carting outfits. They asked his location and when he told them, they declined the contract, saying the store was out of their territory. Clearly the mob had carved up every street of Brooklyn and given each piece to specific carting companies. It was, as Hector told Dolores, the fucking principle of the thing. Eight dollars he could understand. It was a little grease to keep everything running smoothly. But a 50 percent hike was unfair, especially since he’d promised to cut the tubes lengthwise. He worked for that money. When he thought about the risks he had taken muling the coke, just to have the money taken by a bunch of mob fucks.

  A week later the men in the car came back and said they’d heard that Hector had complained to some of his neighboring businessmen, which was true. They didn’t like that, they said. Bad for their reputation. He offered them ten dollars a load. He’d Cut the tubes lengthwise, and then into short sections and tie up the bundles. A piece of cake for the guys on the truck to pick up. He’d even have his guys put the stuff on the truck. What more could they ask for? The men smiled coldly and said the price was twelve dollars a load. Hector said he wouldn’t pay it. They looked at each other and knew that the problem wasn’t about money. They left.

  That week was a good one at the store, with clear profit of two thousand dollars, and Hector came home to dinner late and announced to Dolores that he’d just bought a new Chrysler LeBaron, a businessman’s car. You get some respect, he told Dolores, and the monthly payments aren’t so bad. And now I think we can look for a new apartment, too, chica. They were thinking about having a child, Dolores told me, and wanted a place with more space. Hector was tired of saving every cent, tired of living in a three-story walk-up. “We got to live a little,” he told Dolores proudly. “I’m going to start buying some things, you know, some clothes and all. We only got one life and we got to live it.” They found a place with three bedrooms, right across from the actual park in Sunset Park, the first floor of a house. The landlord liked them immediately—they were a clean, good-looking couple and the husband had a job. It would be quieter than the apartment building, where you could always hear people arguing and fucking and using the bathroom above your head and where there was always a mountain of bags of garbage in the doorway at the street. And the baby, when he or she came, said Dolores, would have a nice large bedroom. They’d set up a new television, they’d paint the kitchen over, they’d have a little changing table in the baby’s room, they’d put money aside for the baby’s education from the very start—all kinds of financial vehicles were now available, Hector explained solemnly, maybe put a little money into the stock market, since everybody was getting rich now doing that. Maybe put wall-to-wall carpeting down in the bedroom.

  That night, sleeping in their old apartment, they were awakened by a phone call at about 4:00 A.M. Somebody had pulled a tractor-trailer up to the back of the store. Did Hector usually take deliveries so late? asked the caller, the man who ran the laundry two doors up. The unmarked truck was idling in the cold weather, rear doors open, the trailer flush up against the back wall of the store, so tight you couldn’t slip a Sunday newspaper through the crack between the truck and the store. There was a guy sitting in the cab of the truck drinking coffee, looking relaxed.

  By the time Hector had run the ten blocks from their apartment, the truck was gone. They had burned open the store’s loading bay doors with acetylene torches. The light was on and every piece of inventory was gone. In fact the salesroom looked rather neat, swept out. They had taken the cash register. They had gone into the basement through the steel gauge lock, taken the inventory there as well as taken the three cartons of toilet paper he stored down there. All they left were the baited rattraps. He figured it must have taken five or six guys only an hour working hard, especially if they had a mini forklift inside the truck. He’d offered ten dollars a load, instead of twelve, and so at three loads a week he was just six dollars off per week. Times fifty-two weeks. A lousy three hundred and twelve dollars a year—that was what his pride was worth. Insurance covered some of the inventory but it would take weeks for the police and insurance inspectors’ reports to be processed. In the meantime he had no inventory. Nothing could be sold. There was no way for him to make any money. He’d lost his own savings and he still owed Mr. Chu fifteen or twenty thousand after the insurance refund, depending on whether he could get some of the rent deposit
back. By the time Dolores got to the store Hector was weeping with anger and frustration and had broken his right hand on one of the walls. “That was my one fucking shot, Dolores,” he told her. “That was it.” They couldn’t move into the new apartment, they couldn’t do any-thing now.

  “And after that,” Dolores said, gazing upward toward the stars, “we were like, not the same. Hector had to give the old Chinese guy the new car and he took over the rent on the store and kept it going. Same name, everything. It’s still there. I mean we kept trying and everything and Hector paid back the money, but it was like, it was like when you hit a dog, you know, you hit him really hard and that dog is never going to be the same, it’s always going to be afraid. And it kind of made Hector mean, too. Life was going to start being harder now. We needed money bad. He got a job cleaning apartments in Manhattan. They made him wear a uniform with his name on the pocket. Sewn on the pocket. He hated that. They see that and they know you’re nobody. He used to say that. I’m nobody, Dolores. He used to tell me about the apartments, how much money the people had. One lady had thirty-seven rooms. He said he counted. It took them a week to clean the place. They had to put little pieces of tape on the rug so they put the furniture back in the right place. Antiques and stuff. The lady locked her bathrooms on purpose so they had to go down to the basement. He hated that job and he quit and he did some other little jobs and then he got that cable job. At least he got to work in Brooklyn and be around regular people. We still loved each other. I used to hold him at night and tell him it was okay, that I loved him and it was okay, it wasn’t his fault, how was he going to know they were going to do that, right? I used to tell him that every morning so he wouldn’t be depressed. ‘I love you Hector, it wasn’t your fault.’ I told him that every day.”

  Dolores turned her dark eyes toward me in silent recognition of her husband’s pain. Only later would I understand that although all that she had described to me that night was heartfelt and true, she had also been very selective in what she had said, cleverly excising certain facts that begged for explanation and which, had I known of them, might have caused me to alter my behavior. But for the moment I was consumed with the vision of Hector and his torments; I could not help but admire him, and thus feel a great shiver of guilt. Although Dolores certainly might suppose that Hector was looking for her, she didn’t know of her husband’s brief letters of appeal to me. Dolores did not know what I was doing. And neither, really, did I.

  ELEVEN

  ANXIETY, LIKE SOUND, CAN SUDDENLY GET A LOT LOUDER. Early the next morning I got a call while still in bed.

  “This Mr. Whitman, Mr. John Whitman?”

  I told him yes.

  “This is Jimmie Fitzpatrick, assistant building services supervisor down here at work? I got your number from security, here, sir. Hope you don’t mind me calling this early. I’m calling—it’s a pretty strange thing, sir—somebody spray-painted your name in front of the building last night, Mr. Whitman. I got my crew working on it already—”

  “My name?” I said sleepily, eyeing the clock radio. It was two minutes past six.

  “With a message, actually.”

  “What was it?”

  Dolores stirred next to me.

  “I got that written down so I could read it to you.”

  “Yes?” I could tell that he was stalling; there was a problem.

  “It read like this, see,” the man continued, “big capital letters: TELL ME WHERE MY WIFE AND BABY-GIRL IS, JACK WHITMAN. Tall letters, with a big spray-painted arrow going right up to the south doors.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I thought I’d let you know, in case somebody asked, see.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I got the mess covered up with brown paper and saw-horses out there so that everybody goes around it, but we only found out about maybe half an hour ago and so I know there was some people who saw it and saw your name. I don’t know who-all of course,” he said. “It’s still early and nobody else is gonna see it.”

  “Thanks,” I stuttered, feeling sick.

  “I kind of think he used some kind of pressurized paint sprayer, not just a little aerosol can, seeing as how the paint went on pretty heavy and is deep in the stone,” the man went on, apparently worried he might be accused of not moving quickly enough to clean up an embarrassing graffiti about one of the Corporation’s high executives. “You’re talking about letters maybe five feet high, with the lines maybe a foot wide,” he went on. “I got my crew working on it. But I got to tell you, Mr. Whitman, that it’s going to be a couple of hours before my men get it cleaned up.”

  “Why?”

  “If he had just spray-painted on that regular cement out there next to the street, we could paint gray over it,” came the voice, matter-of-fact, certain of the physical world, if nothing else. “That woulda been easy. But it’s them polished Italian marble slabs that he hit with the paint. You can’t just paint over it, it’d look terrible. Won’t match all the swirls of white and black and everything. See, that stone comes from the quarry in Italy and it’s all polished up nice. But you got thousands and thousands of shoes goin’ over it every day and the smoothness gets worn down, like. It’s got these little seams and crannies and cracks that the red paint went deep into, so you got to get some high-concentration methylene chloride that heats the paint chemically and makes it expand. Then you can dig it out with a steel brush. I got my men pouring it on the marble.”

  I got out of bed then and into the shower, where I let the water pound my head.

  When I arrived at the Corporation plaza I walked around to the south side. There the men from the maintenance crew were, four of them, on hands and knees in their neat uniforms—blue pants and matching cotton sports shirt, with the Corporation logo on the breast. They’d set up work lights to see the stone better. I stepped closer.

  “Is it working?” I asked one of the men casually.

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking up, as the chemical bubbled in the cracks of the marble. “But it’s never going to look right again.”

  I was early—perhaps no one important had seen the graffiti. Inside the building, the same tired man pushed the floor polisher over the expanse of floor. Upstairs on thirty-nine I walked past every office on the floor to see who was in. It was only seven-fifteen. A few secretaries from the financial offices were making coffee—they’d just arrived, too late to have seen the message, I knew. But when I passed Samantha’s office, there she was, her hair in a ponytail, her back erect, red fingernails clacking lightly on the keys in front of her screen.

  “Jack?” she called while keeping her eyes on the screen. “That you?”

  “Morning.”

  I stopped in her doorway, trying to reconstruct her subway ride from the East Side and figure what direction she walked from the station. The corridors under Rockefeller Center led everywhere. Samantha looked at me, her blond hair perfect, her clothes bright and perfect, her legs long and perfect, her left eye not perfect, and a thought passed across her face before she remembered to trigger her smile. “What?” she said in her high voice. “Oh, good morning, just good morning.”

  I needed to get her started on another topic. “What’s happening with Herr Waldhausen and company?”

  “We’re close. I mean, I think we’re close. We’re talking about little stuff. Those guys from Salomon and Chase are working on it now. We’re going to have to make some sort of announcement in a week or so, about being in negotiations at least, is my guess.”

  “And then we’ll get a couple of dozen shareholder’s suits.” We had already discussed how to handle shareholders who were angered that a great American institution such as the Corporation had merged internationally.

  “Oh, we’ll get everything!” she said dismissively, fingering the bracelet of gold and ivory that encircled her wrist. “But it is going to work. How’re things with the Chairman?”

  “He hasn’t budged. I’ve given him the whole argument, too. Nobody should e
xpect that I’m going to be successful, because so far, nothing, got that? Morrison had better be prepared to muscle with the board of directors. It could come down to that, Samantha. You can’t make any kind of announcement without the Chairman of the damn Corporation going along with it.”