by John Harvey
Doug stands there next to his father’s coffin with the five-dollar bill in his hand wondering what is the right thing to do here.
King says, ‘Okay, Douggie?’
Twelve thousand three hundred eighty-eight dollars, Doug thinks. It’ll be twelve-nine by tomorrow.
‘Okay, King,’ Doug says.
Knowing, shit, this is what the rest of my life is going to look like. It’s gonna suck. Major league suck. I’m nineteen years old and it’s already frickin’ over. He starts to put on his coat.
‘And Douggie,’ King asks, folding his body on to one of the metal chairs. ‘Long as you’re there, why don’t you get us some doughnuts?’
This is how Doug gets the tag Douggie Doughnuts.
So now every morning at seven sharp Doug’s at Dunkin’ Donuts getting a cream two-sugars, two blacks and a half-dozen chocolate glazed. Then he shuffles across the icy sidewalks – which are getting more like tunnels lately what with the sooty snow piled up high on both sides – to the offices of King Real Estate which are in an old Victorian house on Main Street. Every morning Doug sets the cardboard tray down on the reception table, takes out the coffees, then goes in and sets the doughnuts down on a paper towel on the kitchen counter. Then he puts one of the doughnuts on a plate and takes it and the cream two-sugars into King’s private office.
Same frickin’ thing every morning – he knocks on the door and King yells, ‘That you. Douggie Doughnuts?’
‘Yeah.’
And he brings in the cream two-sugars and the doughnut and sets them on King’s desk, and every morning King don’t even look up from the papers he’s working on but always asks, ‘Cream, two sugars?’
Like Doug’s some kind of idiot, he’s been getting these coffees for like six weeks now and he still don’t know King takes his coffee with cream and two sugars.
‘Yeah,’ Doug will say, then he goes out and pours rock salt on the sidewalk in front of the office, then takes a big ice chipper and scrapes ice off the sidewalk for a while, then he goes in and gets the garbage and takes it out, and then he checks with Whitey to see if anyone has anything for the gofer to go for.
And maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but either way Clark reminds Doug how much he owes as of that morning, which is always more than he owed yesterday morning no matter how much garbage he takes out or ice he scrapes or how many doughnuts he fetches.
So Doug is stuck.
He can’t get real work because King has him come in for the first two hours of the working day and the last two hours of the afternoon just so Doug can’t get a normal job. And he can’t get on a night shift anywhere because about half the nights King sends him on some dogshit errand just so he doesn’t get any ideas about becoming independent. And when Doug tries to get a ‘would you like fries with that’ gig at Mickey D’s, King puts the kibosh on it anyway.
‘What are people going to think?’ King asks him. ‘They go in and see you with a paper cap on your dome shoveling out Egg McMuffins? What are they going to think about me?’
So King has Clark toss fifty or sixty bucks cash a week for Doug to eat on, and Doug can make it on this by getting the dollar special – two eggs, juice, toast and coffee – at Main Diner, the six-inch sandwich deal from Subway at lunch, and a bowl of chili with crackers back at Chuck’s for supper. So Doug can eke it out on the fifty-sixty, problem is that Clark adds this money on to the debt so that every day Doug scrapes it out as King’s slave he’s deeper in the hole.
He even lives in one.
Camelletti lets him sleep on a cot in the basement boiler room at Ice World, in exchange for which Doug checks on the compressor and gives the hot water heater a smack with a ball bat once or twice a night to loosen up this rusty switch. Camelletti’s good with this arrangement because Doug’s been a rink rat since he was a little kid so he knows what there is to be done around the place. And if Doug sees something needs to be done, you can count on him he’ll do it.
‘Doug’s nothin’ like his old man,’ Camelletti tells the guys at the diner who tell him he’s nuts to have a Day living in his place of business.
‘He’ll steal the frickin’ ice,’ they tell him.
Camelletti don’t think so, but anyway, what’s he supposed to do? Let the kid freeze to death? Toss the kid out after midnight hockey, put him on the street? Don’t Doug have it tough enough, what with being Devon’s kid, and what with that prick Frank King doing him the way he’s doing him?
Everyone in town with any guize knows what King is doing to Devon Day’s kid, and they know why. One, he’s making an example – you ain’t going to welsh on a debt to King just by dying – and two, Frank is doing this for the same reason a dog licks his own balls – because he can.
Can turn a strong young man like Doug Day into Douggie Doughnuts.
There’ll be a lot of people at Frank King’s wake, Camelletti thinks, God speed the day. All of them smiling into their sleeves.
So at least Doug has a place to lie down and splash a little water on his face in the morning – from the janitor’s sink in the mop room – but beyond that life is a little like his father’s wake – no frills. And every day he sinks a little deeper into the hole.
‘This isn’t working out,’ Clark says to him one morning after he drops off King’s doughnuts.
That’s no shit, Doug thinks.
‘You know how much you owe now?’ Clark asks.
‘Kind of I’ve lost track.’
‘Twenty-six nine,’ Clark says.
Almost twenty-seven ger, Doug thinks. Might as well be twenty-seven mill, because either way I can’t pay it.
‘You remember Tommy LeClair?’ Whitey asks.
Doug definitely remembers Tommy LeClair. Used to play hockey with Tommy until someone stove Tommy’s right foot in with a tire iron. Tommy don’t skate any more. Tommy don’t do much of anything except chug pain pills and drag his foot around behind him, even with that special-built shoe the Goodwill people got for him.
‘I remember Tommy,’ Doug says, feeling like he’s about to yank, happy for once he’s got no breakfast in his stomach because if he did, it might be coming up.
‘No one’s talking about doing a Tommy on you,’ Clark says. ‘But this situation you’re in. Well, it’s just not working out.’
‘You got to take some steps to help yourself,’ Whitey says.
‘Some positive steps,’ Clark adds.
‘What are you talking about?’ Doug asks.
‘How would you like King to forgive your entire debt?’ Clark asks. ‘Interest and principal?’
‘How would I like that?’
‘A second chance in life,’ Whitey says.
Doug wasn’t raised to believe in second chances. He grew up in a series of rooms over bars, so if he saw a guy get a second chance it was usually a second chance to get fucked.
‘What do I got to do?’ he asks.
A little favor, that’s all.
A little favor.
Kill this guy.
‘No frickin way,’ Doug tells them.
No frickin’ way.
There’s things you do and things you don’t do, Doug thinks as he tromps toward the warm air and hot coffee of Main Diner.
It’s one of them north-west Connecticut mornings, cold as steel and twice as hard. A wind straight from the Arctic Circle bites into Doug’s face. He’s got his old peacoat on, and a knit watchcap pulled down over his ears, and his hands are shoved deep into his pockets and he’s still frickin’ freezing.
It’s his feet.
Because what he’s got on his feet are a pair of old Chuck Taylor hightop basketball shoes meant for banging hot asphalt in the summer. Sure, he’s got wool socks on underneath, but one of them’s got a hole in the heel and the other one a hole in the big toe and his feet feel like they’re going to break off, but he’d get frostbite before he’d ask King for money to buy new socks.
Never mind winter boots.
Winter boots are going
for fifty or sixty bucks a pair, even at Target out on the highway, and Doug don’t see himself going without food for a week to get a pair of boots, and anyway winter has to end some time.
But right now it’s definitely winter and he’s cold and he’s hungry, which makes him colder. I’m always frickin’ hungry, he thinks, as he puts one foot after the other toward the diner. I’m always frickin’ hungry and I’m always frickin’ cold, except when I’m trying to sleep in the boiler room except the furnace is so frickin’ hot, glowing red about five feet from the cot, that I’m lying there tossing around in my own sweat half the night. So you’re either too hot or too cold but always too hungry, and you could put an end to all of that just by doing this little favor, but there’s things you do and things you don’t do.
And killing somebody is one of the things you don’t do.
Maybe they ask me to join a crew, take down a truck or a warehouse, maybe drive a load of hijacked ciggies or something, maybe even help rough some guy up, start working off the debt, maybe that’s something I think about and says yes to, but I ain’t killin’ nobody.
You go to hell for that.
So he tells them no, tells them the same thing every day for the next month and a half while the debt piles up like the dirty snow on the sidewalk.
Not that you can see the sidewalk. You can’t. The actual concrete is buried under about fifteen layers of crusted snow and ice. Shit, half the time people don’t even bother to shovel it, and you can only walk on it because people have trampled the snow into hard-packed little trails. Especially out front of the stores that have closed.
Which is most of them.
Doug walks down Main, he passes Stewart’s Furniture: closed; Cristofaro’s Plumbing and Hardware: closed; Kenyon’s Department Store: closed. Doug remembers Kenyon’s from when he was a little kid and would stand in front of the big window – boarded up now – and look at the Christmas display they did, with a big toy train running around the whole window case, and little mechanical elves and shit, and pretty clothes for pretty women draped over nice couches and chairs, and a big tree in the center, lit up with all them lights and ornaments and shit, and even though Doug knew he wasn’t going to get any of that stuff or anything else for Christmas it was still nice to look through that window Christmastime.
Now that window is just a big sheet of plywood, and no one has shoveled the snow out in front.
Camelletti calls this a vicious circle.
‘It’s a vicious circle,’ he tells the other guys having breakfast at the diner. Him and Arthur and Petit always have breakfast at the diner and sit in the same booth by the window. ‘The factories shut down and some stores close. Some stores close, fewer people come downtown, more stores close. Maybe some company’s looking at coming in, opening a factory, but they look downtown, see there’s no stores and say what the hell we want to locate in a town where there’s no stores and they don’t shovel the snow? So more stores close . . .’
‘So you’re saying what?’ Arthur asks. Arthur’s is the diner’s designated cynic. He reads the front section of the paper and writes letters to the editor. ‘You’re saying if we shovel the snow the factories will come back?’
This is the conversation Doug walks in on.
He comes through the door and the hot, stale air of the diner feels like heaven. He opens his peacoat to take in the warmth, shucks off his watch cap and plops down on a red vinyl stool at the counter.
For Doug the diner is the last best thing in town. It’s a real diner, too, an old sheet-metal art-deco place that’s been there since before World War Two. The diner serves real food, not that fancy ass shit they dish out in the yuppie places that have sprung up like mushrooms in the old Victorian houses where families used to live. Those places that cater to the people who drive their Beemers in from Danbury or Avon and plop down platinum cards for some dink piece of chicken on a bed of rice and some vegetable nobody ever heard of.
No, the diner serves food. Fried eggs and bacon and home-fried potatoes with little chunks of onion and red peppers in them, sprinkled with paprika and shiny with grease. The diner serves cheeseburgers and hot dogs with the buns still moist from the steamer, and you can dump as much relish and mustard and onions as you want, and that’s lunch. The diner serves big bowls of chili with lots of hamburger in it and cheese if you want it, and that’s supper, or there’s hot open-faced turkey or roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and thick, greasy gravy and green beans out of a can. The diner serves, for dessert, wedges of apple pie, peach pie, rhubarb pie with cheese or vanilla ice cream on top. The diner serves doughnuts, coffee cake, crullers and cinnamon rolls, the kind that leave your fingers sticky for the rest of the morning no matter how many times you wash your hands.
The diner serves coffee.
Not cappuccino, espresso, latte, decaf machiato with low-fat milk in breast-size mugs the color of nature – the diner serves coffee. Acid, bitter, loosen-your-bowels coffee, in white cups stained brown from generations of working men and women getting their morning will to go another day of making tools, making axes, making things from steel or iron that people use to make other things. Because that’s what this town used to do – it made things. Not service or information or high-tech, it made things people put in their hands and held on to. That kind of coffee for that kind of town.
And the diner pours you your second cup before you finished your first, and you don’t have to listen to no milk steamer hiss and bubble and you don’t have to listen to some grunge-folk-rock singer whine about his daddy only sprung for a pre-owned Mercedes.
And the diner has milk and sugar in those old metal pitchers and bowls with hinged lids and a spoon stuck in the notch, and the coffee is hot, which is what you need on a morning like this, which is what Doug is thinking about when he comes in off the street, because that bottomless cup of coffee comes with the dollar breakfast.
Man, Doug can smell that breakfast.
He’s had about thirty-seven minutes of sleep, what with tossing and turning next to the heat of the furnace and with thinking about King’s offer, so he’s tired and cold and hungry, and all that can be fixed by that dollar breakfast.
Doug gets the same thing every morning. Two eggs over easy, home-fried potatoes, rye toast, coffee. He’d like to get bacon with that, but bacon don’t come with the special and he can’t afford it. But anyway the eggs and toast taste real good and what he does is he dips the toast into the runny egg yolk and washes it down with the coffee. Saves the last slice of toast and spreads grape jelly on it, and though it isn’t as sweet or sticky as a cinnamon roll it still does the trick.
So Doug comes in, nods a hello to Camelletti and Arthur and Petit, and says to Andy behind the counter, ‘Breakfast special, please, Andy.’
The diner suddenly gets real quiet.
Camelletti and Arthur and Petit leave off the usual sports-economics-sex seminar and they all look at Andy kind of embarrassed like.
Doug wonders what’s up.
Then Andy says, ‘No more breakfast special.’
‘What?’
‘No more breakfast special,’ Andy says, a little hostile, like he’s covering up being embarrassed. He sees the look on Doug’s face and says quietly, ‘I’m losin’ my ass here, Doug.’
‘Yeah, but shit, Andy.’
‘Shit nothin’, Douggie.’
Andy shrugs, which Doug understands as a rustbelt New England gesture which takes into it that the factories are shut down, the store windows are plywood, and the white-collar yuppies from the frickin’ dot-com companies are buying three-dollar double-lattes in go-cups they can drink from while they drive to Danbury, and there ain’t nothin’ Andy can do about any of it, including that Doug’s small thief alkie father died leaving him a ball and chain, and the jobs are gone for good and there ain’t gonna be a diner for anyone to eat a dollar breakfast this time next year.
Doug gets all that
It’s like, www.gofuckyourself.com
> The men in the diner are all staring out the window now because their table is stacked with plates shiny with grease, salt crystals sparkling like little diamonds, coffee cups sitting there waiting for the refill.
They’ve had their breakfast, Doug thinks.
Mine’s in Mexico, or China or Korea or some place where the factories have moved, they don’t have to pay minimum wage.
Some sunny, warm frickin’ place.
‘So what can I get for a buck?’ he asks Andy.
‘Toast, coffee,’ Andy says.
Doug feels bad for him because Andy’s a good guy. He needs to raise prices, he needs to raise prices is all. Doug looks up at the menu board behind the counter and sees that even at a buck for toast and coffee, Andy’s cutting him a deal.
‘You know what?’ Doug says. ‘Forget about it.’
He jams his watchcap back on and takes his coat off the hook.
Andy says, ‘C’mon, Douggie, don’t be that way.’
‘I’m not being any way.’
‘Have some coffee.’
‘See you guys later.’
The wind smacks him in the face the second he steps out. He slogs down to Dunkin’ Donuts and picks up the usual order. Ducks his head against the wind until he makes it to King Real Estate. Sets the doughnuts down on Clark’s desk and says, ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Your little favor,’ Doug says.
Kill this guy.
But, like, who?
‘You don’t need to know “who”, yet,’ Whitey tells him. ‘First you need to know “how”.’
He drives Doug out into the country, which doesn’t take long because most of north-west Connecticut is second growth forest sprung up from what used to be farmland until even the New Englanders gave up trying to grow stuff on rocks.
Arthur has this theory that the famous New England dour personality is a product of the soil, or rather, the lack of it. ‘Of course they got grouchy trying to farm this land,’ he tells the other denizens of the diner. ‘It costs fifty dollars to bury your cat, for Chrissakes.’
Anyway, a lot of what used to be fields is forest again, a lot of it turned into state parks, and that’s where Whitey takes Doug, up Route 8 to Winsted, then east on Route 44 and north on 183, where they drive alongside the Farmington river through People’s Forest.
