by Maria Flook
The waste barrels couldn’t go to the Johnston landfill and had to be hauled to a transfer station or to Stablex, where the waste materials were incorporated into concrete slurries. It was harsh work, mostly heavy lifting, which he begged off because of his broken wrist. Instead, he inspected the loads. The barrels weren’t always sealed correctly; they had leaky bungholes and sometimes fumes escaped. The best part of the job was riding with Carl Smith, who didn’t keep his rule book with him. Carl Smith lived on a disabled trawler, the Tercel, which he had purchased for a dollar. The ship wasn’t seaworthy but he could keep it moored at Warwick Neck cheaper than paying rent on an apartment. With Carl, everything was a matter of money. One time, Willis went out to the Tercel for Brompton cocktails. His party with Carl lasted a whole weekend, but Willis couldn’t tell you what happened in between daybreak and nightfall and from dusk to dawn.
“Carl likes those heroin Slurpees? That’s a bit hard-core,” Fritz said when he heard about it.
“I’ll try anything once,” Willis said.
“You’re not going back for seconds?” Fritz said.
“No. Carl’s not my social equal,” Willis said.
Fritz said, “The day I punch a clock is the day time stands still.”
“There’s no easy money, dickhead. Your freelance jobs end up being twice the work. Remember, I got busted with just a carload of Kools,” Willis told Fritz.
Fritz said, “That’s not too shabby. That was honorable. There’s nothing wrong with a carload of Kools. For starters—”
“At WASTEC, I just show up and I’m on the payroll. I don’t know what they do with the stuff. It’s ‘repackaged, transported, disposed, and manifested.’ I don’t lift a finger.”
“Did you look up that word in the dictionary?”
“What word is that?”
“ ‘Man-infested.’ Sounds like some girls got “maninfested’ in an alley. Doesn’t it? It has that porn sound—”
“You like to hear things,” Willis said.
“Okay, I like the sound of it.”
“Want to know a funny thing?”
“What funny thing?”
“That lettering peels off the truck. It’s magnetized. I could steal that word for you if you want.”
“You could get me that word off the truck? What would I do with it?”
“That would be your decision. I’m just saying, you think it’s such a hot word, you can have it if you want.”
Willis had known Fritz since middle school days. They were paired up by the school psychologist to receive counseling when the boys suffered coincidental deaths in their immediate families. The same week that Willis was orphaned, Fritz lost his little brother in a freak accident when a sand dune collapsed. After a nor’easter, there was severe beach erosion and a section of dunes became unstable. Signs were posted. The warnings said: LIVE SAND. Fritz was running the top ridge with his brother when the shelf broke loose. Fritz tried to dig his brother out, scooping the sand off, but the hill kept shifting and he wasn’t excavating the exact place. EMS workers had to drag Fritz off the beach, his fingertips bleeding with raw abrasions. Rescue workers found six open graves in the dune where Fritz had searched with his bare hands. These were serious mortal chores left incomplete. The emergency crew had to bring in a backhoe and grade the dune to find the body.
Willis and Fritz were classmates until Fritz spent his senior year in the Training School in Cranston, behind an electric fence, and from there went to New England Technical College for one semester, where he developed a high-toned engineering vocabulary, just enough to irritate Willis.
The Rhode Island coastline, its unruly surf, was not a good place to abandon property and Willis decided to sink Fritz’s stolen items in the freshwater marsh near his stepmother’s house. Fritz said, “Why can’t we leave the items in the back of Ames Discount with the bales of crushed boxes?”
Willis said, “Look, you’re dying to fit into this mode? You want to be in business by yourself? Do I have to tell you? Stolen property can’t be left around with our dabs on it. It has to disappear. Think of it this way. Taking a loss is preferable to leaving a detail. A detail on the loose can show up down the line. An unattended fact can wag its tail months after. We’ve got the Coast Guard sniffing around because of the oil spill.”
“True,” Fritz said.
“Fuck, yes, it’s true. They’re everywhere. They get a team effort hard-on with these oil spills.”
“Agree. They’re forcing us into the interior.”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll keep this local, a site-specific event,” Fritz said.
“Only ants should crawl on it.”
Easton Pond was a big freshwater lagoon behind First Beach, right off Memorial Boulevard. Bailey’s Brook fed the pond, and its water level wasn’t affected by tides. At its deepest point, it was only fifteen feet down. It was a city reservoir and the water department patrolled the area now and then, but it was a better choice than driving over to the Mount Hope Bridge. Their dump-load was too heavy to lift over the railing. They would have looked conspicuous parking at the crest of the bridge where fishermen staked out some favorite spots between the lantern posts. Even in the middle of the night, no matter what time of day, these single-minded men pulled in scup and hake, bony fish that collect around the legs of bridges.
Willis steered the car into the marsh grass and cut the lights. He worried that it might sink in the muck, so he stopped just four feet shy of the lip. It wasn’t close enough to the bank to haul the heavy tools. He tapped the accelerator until the windshield sloped when the front tires touched the mush. It was his stepmother’s big sedan. He took it over from Rennie without assuming official ownership.
Fritz said, “Let me just say this, I didn’t plan on asking for your help.”
“You can’t blow the paper off a straw without my assistance.”
Fritz scratched his face. Little pimples had surfaced midline on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth. His rosacea was coming back, a winter rash, and nerves made it worse. Fritz was high-strung and skinny. There wasn’t much to him. His physique was slight, legs like window poles. He walked on the balls of his feet, as if at any given moment he might be required to sprint ahead of the group. In cold weather he shivered in lightning-fast tugs and rolls of his shoulders, vibrating like a tuning fork. And always, his face was blank. He never had any expression. He never had anything on his face. Willis envied how that gloom lived outside of Fritz instead of in his head. Fritz went right along, wearing it on the outside when Willis had a buildup, a pinging, a roaring noise he couldn’t escape.
Willis had seen local Cape Verde women in Newport. If one of these women was widowed, she wore black for months, sometimes years, waving her flag of grief; yet she went about her business, shopping at the Almacs, chatting away at the Norgetown. The only bitterness was in the dark clothing. In the same way, Fritz was safe behind his blank mask. Even eating ice cream Fritz looked bleak, but he also looked peaceful, as if giving in to it was easier than fighting it off; chocolate stained the expressionless corners of his mouth.
“So tell me, how did you pinch this stuff to perfection?” Willis said.
Fritz said, “I drive my sister’s car into Metric King. The shop at Two Mile Corner. I was interested in some wipers. Just some wipers.”
“Blades or the whole arm?”
“That’s what I was going to find out. No one was around but Albert—”
“Which Albert are we talking about?”
“The young guy. Sweet Albert. Princess Feet. And guess where he’s at. He’s in his van behind the place. The windows are misted up.”
“Princess Feet has company.”
“Magazines. That’s my feeling. I’ve seen some of these gay rags. I saw one called Inches.”
Willis said, “Inches?”
“The official title above the masthead.”
“It’s to the point.”
“Anyway, the
garage is empty. Cleared out. I hear a voice. The voice says, Help Yourself. I see the Porsche thing. I tip it into my backseat. The wrenches—in metal drawers and trays. I load them up like egg cartons. Fifteen minutes later my shopping list is complete. I’m across town.”
“And where are you now? The minnow piss-hole.”
“It got fucked up,” Fritz said. “My brother-in-law’s snooping around on the carport, writing down serial numbers. Can you believe this? He says he’s going to put the squawk on me unless I unload the whole package. It’s out the window.”
“What about your sister?”
“She’s ready to throw me out. I’ll be homeless. I’ll be on the grass triangle in the center of town, with all those ginks sleeping in their paper bags.”
“No man is an island.”
“I’m telling you. I can’t live outdoors. I can’t snooze under Venus and Mars,” Fritz said.
“Maybe you can practice,” Willis said, “because you’re not getting rich this way.”
Willis looked back at his friend’s face. “What’s the matter? You’re having that old nightmare?”
“That’s right. The same one. I wake up. I’m one of three on a bench at the ACI.”
“And why do you think it’s always three?”
“Three is a spooky number, isn’t it? Shit, I don’t know why it’s three.”
Willis said, “It’s like Calvary. When I was in Norfolk, I saw those three crosses. They’re everywhere. In a field. In the woods. They surprise you. It’s supposed to be Jesus and the two thieves. You think, who in the hell put these crosses out here? It’s the nineties. Who went to all the trouble? It’s real spooky shit.”
“Jesus and the two thieves? Shit, I forgot about them.”
“I guess you did. Never mind, we sink the stuff. Splash. We’re in rinse water after that.”
Fritz got out of the car and went to find the dinghy he’d left in the tall grass earlier that day. He pulled the blunt-nosed wooden pram parallel to the car. It was a tiny, bright yellow boat, a local mascot. The diminutive rowboat was usually moored in a reserved slip in front of The Black Pearl, an upscale restaurant on Bowen’s Wharf. Its stern said Crouton.
Willis said, “The Crouton. Shit, I’m impressed. How did you get it?”
“Like it? I knew you’d like it.”
“Really. You thrill me to death. You just walked off with the Crouton?”
Fritz said, “You definitely like it?” Fritz rested his head on his shoulders, enjoying it, tasting relief in his friend’s approval. “I knew you would like it.” He was almost grinning, an intense flat line. “I rowed it out to the other end of Thames Street. It was simple. Preps were watching right out the window, drinking Heinekens. From glasses. I just shoved off.”
“With their Crouton.” Willis liked the story.
The stolen tools were still in trays wrapped in an Indian blanket. The Porsche electronics were in a big console on casters, maybe they could roll it, but the grass was long and thick. Willis started to load the wrenches into the dinghy.
“Point. Boat goes in the water first, don’t you think? We launch the boat first?” Federico said.
Willis didn’t like to make little mistakes like this and he had to shift it over to Fritz somehow. He couldn’t see how, so he clucked his tongue in random rhythmic phrases. Fritz shoved the pram into the blackness ahead of the car until it lofted on the water and Willis held the stern rail with his good arm. Fritz dragged the weighted Indian blanket over the spartina, raking its silvery stalks. They went back to the car and lifted the console out. The readout panels caught the moonlight in glowing bars. They tipped the heavy machine into the boat and shoved off. Willis lifted a glossy oar and snapped it in the oarlock; its new coat of shellac smelled sweet in the cold air. He shoved the oars to Fritz.
They glided through the darkness, watching the house-lights along the hillside, trying to judge where the center of the pond was by the corresponding landmarks. Fritz rowed out. He started singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Willis used his teeth to nip the fingers of his single glove until he had it off. He hit Fritz in the mouth with its heavy leather cuff. “Shut up. Stop dicking around.”
Fritz kept singing.
“You idiot. You’re a Chinese fire drill, you know that?”
Fritz went ahead with the ballad until Willis was laughing against the heel of his hand. Again he told Fritz, “Shut up, Federico. This isn’t Star Search. I’m sticking my neck out sitting here.”
When they reached the middle of the pond, Willis unwrapped the tools from the Indian blanket. They watched the occasional traffic on Memorial Boulevard in the distance. Willis took a handful of the wrenches and opened his fist under the water. Both men immersed fistfuls of the expensive tools; shiny jaws glittered and were gone. All sizes of SuperKrome sockets like scores of silver knuckles. Universal joints, some flexes. The crowfoots went in, the wobbles. Willis took his time, resting the wrenches on his knees before pitching them in. He recognized a sense of waste. The chrome tools caught the light from a wide girth of stars, bright enough to illuminate the silver bones as they sank beneath the surface. The electronic console was a different matter; they had to tip it over the gunnel and use their weight to counter it, submerge it slowly so it wouldn’t splash. The cabinet screaked against the boat, making a minor racket. Cormorants lifted off the bank and circled the pond, their taut canvas wing beats made an upsetting, prehistoric flapping. More birds hooted bloodless tones, then quieted. The cabinet sank under the water.
“Wait a minute,” Willis said. “I can still see it.” They could find the top plane of the big cabinet, a pale square in the moonlit water. It was only two feet under the surface.
“You know. This is giving me a pain,” Willis said.
“Deepest apologies.”
“I’ll have to tip it over. Give me the oar.”
“Let me do it,” Fritz told him.
Fritz lowered the oar into the water and tried to shove the cabinet, knock it over. It wasn’t coming. Then Willis pulled his new boot off and handed it to Fritz. He peeled off his sock and Fritz pushed it inside the boot. Willis threw his leg over the side of the boat and kicked the machine. The water was icy and he felt the cold climb his leg and tighten like a vise. He leaned farther out of the boat and kicked the heavy machine off a muddy shelf. The cabinet sank away and the rotted muck floated up to the surface; blackened stalks of eelgrass drifted loose.
Fritz rowed the Crouton back to where the car was parked and got out of the boat. He tugged the dinghy on shore, through the weeds, with Willis still on the bench. Willis might have stood up and jumped out, to ease the weight, but he didn’t. Sometimes their relationship bled further, into an intimacy they couldn’t understand or acknowledge, but both men accepted their stations. Fritz pulled the dinghy into the high grass until the tall weeds splashed over its hull.
“Aren’t you going to return the boat?” Willis said.
“You’re kidding?”
“It’s an institution, isn’t it? It’s the Crouton. People will miss it.”
Fritz said, “Listen to yourself. You sound like some kind of church boy. Christ. Maybe I’m starting my own institution.”
Willis put his boot on and got into the car. He tried the ignition but it wasn’t turning over. He tried it a second time, and the engine grabbed; its open throttle growled over the wide surface of the pond. Coming out of the sand road, they peeled onto Eustis Avenue. A police cruiser was parked on the street; its engine was running.
“Watch it. His Kodak might be loaded,” Fritz said. Willis slowed his speed, but the cruiser was empty. Willis said the officer was probably in one of the houses getting a handout.
Willis switched on the heater to warm his wet pant leg. By this time his cast was firm, but Fritz had left little fingertip notches in the plaster. Willis wanted to find the Salve Regina girl to see if she had cooled off, but he didn’t know which dormitory to start at. They drove into town.
A few weeks before, the Chamber of Commerce had nailed huge green shamrocks to the elm trees to celebrate Saint Paddy’s. No one had collected them. The high beams hit the scalloped foil medallions.
“There are just enough of these party themes, one after the other, to keep me going,” Willis told Fritz. He pulled over and got out of the car. He tugged a shamrock loose, panned it under the yellow streetlight, then he walked around and put it on the dash. The decoration was for the Salve Regina nurse. Her farewell clover. He didn’t like their violent parting and he wondered if she felt sorry. He’d accept her apology and give her the souvenir. He wasn’t sure the shamrock was the right memento.
“I think she’s in Watts Sherman House. That big one,” Willis said.
Fritz whined, “Maybe she’s in Wakehurst or Carey Mansion. Who knows what dorm she’s in? She could be in any of those. She could live off-campus. My sister lived off-campus.”
Willis told Fritz, “You go inside and tell them to have her come down. I’m waiting.”
Fritz said, “Are you asking me to go up there? There might be some nuns inside there. I can’t deal with nuns.”
“You’re a chickenshit.”
“Point. A girl going to Catholic nurse school has big ideas. She wants a doctor someday. She doesn’t like it when someone like you gives her the heave-ho. It’s bad for her self-concept. If she did like it, you would have brought out the fox. Was she fox or bitch?”
Willis picked up the shamrock and fanned his throat. “Actually, we were an equal match, we were on the same card. That’s why she bored me, initially. I like to go outside my class.” His eyes felt blurry. His pain was surfacing again, making everything jiggly.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Fritz said. “A little Salve Regina pussy goes a long way. It lasts a lifetime.”
“A lifetime for you isn’t the same as for me,” Willis said.
Fritz said, “I’ll live twice as long as you.”
