The men's toilet was a horror. Earlier in the evening Jack might have vomited in sympathy, but now he actually seemed to be getting used to the stench . . . and that was somehow the worst thing of all. He drew hot water, dumped in Comet, and began to run his soapy mop back and forth through the unspeakable mess on the floor. His mind began to go back over the last couple of days, worrying at them the way an animal in a trap will worry at a limb that has been caught.
3
The Oatley Tap had been dark, and dingy, and apparently dead empty when Jack first walked into it. The plugs on the juke, the pinball machine, and the Space Invaders game were all pulled. The only light in the place came from the Busch display over the bar--a digital clock caught between the peaks of two mountains, looking like the weirdest UFO ever imagined.
Smiling a little, Jack walked toward the bar. He was almost there when a flat voice said from behind him, "This is a bar. No minors. What are you, stupid? Get out."
Jack almost jumped out of his skin. He had been touching the money in his pocket, thinking it would go just as it had at the Golden Spoon: he would sit on a stool, order something, and then ask for the job. It was of course illegal to hire a kid like him--at least without a work permit signed by his parents or a guardian--and that meant they could get him for under the minimum wage. Way under. So the negotiations would start, usually beginning with Story #2--Jack and the Evil Stepfather.
He whirled around and saw a man sitting alone in one of the booths, looking at him with chilly, contemptuous alertness. The man was thin, but ropes of muscles moved under his white undershirt and along the sides of his neck. He wore baggy white cook's pants. A paper cap was cocked forward over his left eyebrow. His head was narrow, weasellike. His hair was cut short, graying at the edges. Between his big hands were a stack of invoices and a Texas Instruments calculator.
"I saw your Help Wanted sign," Jack said, but now without much hope. This man was not going to hire him, and Jack was not sure he would want to work for him anyway. This guy looked mean.
"You did, huh?" the man in the booth said. "You must have learned to read on one of the days you weren't playing hooky." There was a package of Phillies Cheroots on the table. He shook one out.
"Well, I didn't know it was a bar," Jack said, taking a step back toward the door. The sunlight seemed to come through the dirty glass and then just fall dead on the floor, as if the Oatley Tap were located in a slightly different dimension. "I guess I thought it was . . . you know, a bar and grill. Something like that. I'll just be going."
"Come here." The man's brown eyes were looking at him steadily now.
"No, hey, that's all right," Jack said nervously. "I'll just--"
"Come here. Sit down." The man popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail and lit the cigar. A fly which had been preening on his paper hat buzzed away into the darkness. His eyes remained on Jack. "I ain't gonna bite you."
Jack came slowly over to the booth, and after a moment he slipped in on the other side and folded his hands in front of him neatly. Some sixty hours later, swamping out the men's toilet at twelve-thirty in the morning with his sweaty hair hanging in his eyes, Jack thought--no, he knew--that it was his own stupid confidence that had allowed the trap to spring shut (and it had shut the moment he sat down opposite Smokey Updike, although he had not known it then). The Venus flytrap is able to close on its hapless, insectile victims; the pitcher plant, with its delicious smell and its deadly, glassy-smooth sides, only waits for some flying asshole of a bug to buzz on down and inside . . . where it finally drowns in the rainwater the pitcher collects. In Oatley the pitcher was full of beer instead of rainwater--that was the only difference.
If he had run--
But he hadn't run. And maybe, Jack thought, doing his best to meet that cold brown stare, there would be a job here after all. Minette Banberry, the woman who owned and operated the Golden Spoon in Auburn, had been pleasant enough to Jack, had even given him a little hug and a peck of a kiss as well as three thick sandwiches when he left, but he had not been fooled. Pleasantness and even a remote sort of kindness did not preclude a cold interest in profits, or even something very close to outright greed.
The minimum wage in New York was three dollars and forty cents an hour--that information had been posted in the Golden Spoon's kitchen by law, on a bright pink piece of paper almost the size of a movie poster. But the short-order cook was a Haitian who spoke little English and was almost surely in the country illegally, Jack thought. The guy cooked like a whiz, though, never allowing the spuds or the fried clams to spend a moment too long in the Fryolaters. The girl who helped Mrs. Banberry with the waitressing was pretty but vacant and on a work-release program for the retarded in Rome. In such cases, the minimum wage did not apply, and the lisping, retarded girl told Jack with unfeigned awe that she was getting a dollar and twenty-five cents each hour, and all for her.
Jack himself was getting a dollar-fifty. He had bargained for that, and he knew that if Mrs. Banberry hadn't been strapped--her old dishwasher had quit just that morning, had gone on his coffee-break and just never come back--she would not have bargained at all; would have simply told him take the buck and a quarter, kid, or see what's down the road. It's a free country.
Now, he thought, with the unknowing cynicism that was also a part of his new self-confidence, here was another Mrs. Banberry. Male instead of female, rope-skinny instead of fat and grandmotherly, sour instead of smiling, but almost surely a Mrs. Banberry for a' that and a' that.
"Looking for a job, huh?" The man in the white pants and the paper hat put his cigar down in an old tin ashtray with the word CAMELS embossed on the bottom. The fly stopped washing its legs and took off.
"Yes, sir, but like you say, this is a bar and all--"
The unease stirred in him again. Those brown eyes and yellowed scleras troubled him--they were the eyes of some old hunting cat that had seen plenty of errant mice like him before.
"Yeah, it's my place," the man said. "Smokey Updike." He held his hand out. Surprised, Jack shook it. It squeezed Jack's hand once, hard, almost to the point of pain. Then it relaxed . . . but Smokey didn't let go. "Well?" he said.
"Huh?" Jack said, aware he sounded stupid and a little afraid--he felt stupid and a little afraid. And he wanted Updike to let go of his hand.
"Didn't your folks ever teach you to innerduce yourself?"
This was so unexpected that Jack came close to gabbling out his real name instead of the one he had used at the Golden Spoon, the name he also used if the people who picked him up asked for his handle. That name--what he was coming to think of as his "road-name"--was Lewis Farren.
"Jack Saw--ah--Sawtelle," he said.
Updike held his hand yet a moment longer, those brown eyes never moving. Then he let it go. "Jack Saw-ah-Sawtelle," he said. "Must be the longest fucking name in the phonebook, huh, kid?"
Jack flushed but said nothing.
"You ain't very big," Updike said. "You think you could manage to rock a ninety-pound keg of beer up on its side and walk it onto a hand-dolly?"
"I think so," Jack said, not knowing if he could or not. It didn't look as if it would be much of a problem, anyway--in a place as dead as this, the guy probably only had to change kegs when the one hooked up to the taps went flat.
As if reading his mind, Updike said, "Yeah, nobody here now. But we get pretty busy by four, five o'clock. And on weekends the place really fills up. That's when you'd earn your keep, Jack."
"Well, I don't know," Jack said. "How much would the job pay?"
"Dollar an hour," Updike said. "Wish I could pay you more, but--" He shrugged and tapped the stack of bills. He even smiled a little, as if to say You see how it is, kid, everything in Oatley is running down like a cheap pocket-watch someone forgot to wind--ever since about 1971 it's been running down. But his eyes did not smile. His eyes were watching Jack's face with still, catlike concentration.
"Gee, that's not very much," Jack said. He spoke
slowly but he was thinking as fast as he could.
The Oatley Tap was a tomb--there wasn't even a single bombed-out old alky at the bar nursing a beer and watching General Hospital on the tube. In Oatley you apparently drank in your car and called it a club. A dollar-fifty an hour was a hard wage when you were busting your buns; in a place like this, a buck an hour might be an easy one.
"Nope," Updike agreed, going back to his calculator, "it ain't." His voice said Jack could take it or leave it; there would be no negotiations.
"Might be all right," Jack said.
"Well, that's good," Updike said. "We ought to get one other thing straight, though. Who you running from and who's looking for you?" The brown eyes were on him again, and they drilled hard. "If you got someone on your backtrail, I don't want him fucking up my life."
This did not shake Jack's confidence much. He wasn't the world's brightest kid, maybe, but bright enough to know he wouldn't last long on the road without a second cover story for prospective employers. This was a Story #2--The Wicked Stepfather.
"I'm from a little town in Vermont," he said. "Fenderville. My mom and dad got divorced two years ago. My dad tried to get custody of me, but the judge gave me to my mom. That's what they do most of the time."
"Fucking-A they do." He had gone back to his bills and was bent so far over the pocket calculator that his nose was almost touching the keys. But Jack thought he was listening all the same.
"Well, my dad went out to Chicago and he got a job in a plant out there," Jack said. "He writes to me just about every week, I guess, but he quit coming back last year, when Aubrey beat him up. Aubrey's--"
"Your stepfather," Updike said, and for just a moment Jack's eyes narrowed and his original distrust came back. There was no sympathy in Updike's voice. Instead, Updike seemed almost to be laughing at him, as if he knew the whole tale was nothing but a great big swatch of whole cloth.
"Yeah," he said. "My mom married him a year and a half ago. He beats on me a lot."
"Sad, Jack. Very sad." Now Updike did look up, his eyes sardonic and unbelieving. "So now you're off to Shytown, where you and Dads will live happily ever after."
"Well, I hope so," Jack said, and he had a sudden inspiration. "All I know is that my real dad never hung me up by the neck in my closet." He pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, baring the mark there. It was fading now; during his stint at the Golden Spoon it had still been a vivid, ugly red-purple--like a brand. But at the Golden Spoon he'd never had occasion to uncover it. It was, of course, the mark left by the root that had nearly choked the life from him in that other world.
He was gratified to see Smokey Updike's eyes widen in surprise and what might almost have been shock. He leaned forward, scattering some of his pink and yellow pages. "Holy Jesus, kid," he said. "Your stepfather did that?"
"That's when I decided I had to split."
"Is he going to show up here, looking for his car or his motorcycle or his wallet or his fucking dope-stash?"
Jack shook his head.
Smokey looked at Jack for a moment longer, and then pushed the OFF button on the calculator. "Come on back to the storeroom with me, kid," he said.
"Why?"
"I want to see if you can really rock one of those kegs up on its side. If you can run me out a keg when I need one, you can have the job."
4
Jack demonstrated to Smokey Updike's satisfaction that he could get one of the big aluminum kegs up on its rim and walk it forward just enough to get it on the foot of the dolly. He even made it look fairly easy--dropping a keg and getting punched in the nose was still a day away.
"Well, that ain't too bad," Updike said. "You ain't big enough for the job and you'll probably give yourself a fucking rupture, but that's your nevermind."
He told Jack he could start at noon and work through until one in the morning ("For as long as you can hack it, anyway"). Jack would be paid, Updike said, at closing time each night. Cash on the nail.
They went back out front and there was Lori, dressed in dark blue basketball shorts so brief that the edges of her rayon panties showed, and a sleeveless blouse that had almost surely come from Mammoth Mart in Batavia. Her thin blond hair was held back with plastic barrettes and she was smoking a Pall Mall, its end wet and heavily marked with lipstick. A large silver crucifix dangled between her breasts.
"This is Jack," Smokey said. "You can take the Help Wanted sign out of the window."
"Run, kid," Lori said. "There's still time."
"Shut the fuck up."
"Make me."
Updike slapped her butt, not in a loving way but hard enough to send her against the padded edge of the bar. Jack blinked and thought of the sound Osmond's whip had made.
"Big man," Lori said. Her eyes brimmed with tears . . . and yet they also looked contented, as if this was just the way things were supposed to be.
Jack's earlier unease was now clearer, sharper . . . now it was almost fright.
"Don't let us get on your case, kid," Lori said, headed past him to the sign in the window. "You'll be okay."
"Name's Jack, not kid," Smokey said. He had gone back to the booth where he had "interviewed" Jack and began gathering up his bills. "A kid's a fucking baby goat. Didn't they teach you that in school? Make the kid a couple of burgers. He's got to go to work at noon."
She got the HELP WANTED sign out of the window and put it behind the jukebox with the air of one who has done this a good many times before. Passing Jack, she winked at him.
The telephone rang.
All three of them looked toward it, startled by its abrupt shrilling. To Jack it looked for a moment like a black slug stuck to the wall. It was an odd moment, almost timeless. He had time to notice how pale Lori was--the only color in her cheeks came from the reddish pocks of her fading adolescent acne. He had time to study the cruel, rather secretive planes of Smokey Updike's face and to see the way the veins stood out on the man's long hands. Time to see the yellowed sign over the phone reading PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO THREE MINUTES.
The phone rang and rang in the silence.
Jack thought, suddenly terrified: It's for me. Long distance . . . long, LONG distance.
"Answer that, Lori," Updike said, "what are you, simple?"
Lori went to the phone.
"Oatley Tap," she said in a trembling, faint voice. She listened. "Hello? Hello? . . . Oh, fuck off."
She hung up with a bang.
"No one there. Kids. Sometimes they want to know if we got Prince Albert in a can. How do you like your burgers, kid?"
"Jack!" Updike roared.
"Jack, okay, okay, Jack. How do you like your burgers, Jack?"
Jack told her and they came medium, just right, hot with brown mustard and Bermuda onions. He gobbled them and drank a glass of milk. His unease abated with his hunger. Kids, as she had said. Still, his eyes drifted back to the phone every once in a while, and he wondered.
5
Four o'clock came, and as if the Tap's total emptiness had been only a clever piece of stage setting to lure him in--like the pitcher plant with its innocent look and its tasty smell--the door opened and nearly a dozen men in work-clothes came sauntering in. Lori plugged in the juke, the pinball machine, and Space Invaders game. Several of the men bellowed greetings at Smokey, who grinned his narrow grin, exposing the big set of mail-order dentures. Most ordered beer. Two or three ordered Black Russians. One of them--a member of the Fair Weather Club, Jack was almost sure--dropped quarters into the jukebox, summoning up the voices of Mickey Gilley, Eddie Rabbit, Waylon Jennings, others. Smokey told him to get the mop-bucket and squeegee out of the storeroom and swab down the dancefloor in front of the bandstand, which waited, deserted, for Friday night and The Genny Valley Boys. He told Jack when it was dry he wanted him to put the Pledge right to it. "You'll know it's done when you can see your own face grinnin up at you," Smokey said.
6
So his time of service at Updike's Oatley Tap began.
/> We get pretty busy by four, five o'clock.
Well, he couldn't very well say that Smokey had lied to him. Up until the very moment Jack pushed away his plate and began making his wage, the Tap had been deserted. But by six o'clock there were maybe fifty people in the Tap, and the brawny waitress--Gloria--came on duty to yells and hooraws from some of the patrons. Gloria joined Lori, serving a few carafes of wine, a lot of Black Russians, and oceans of beer.
Besides the kegs of Busch, Jack lugged out case after case of bottled beer--Budweiser, of course, but also such local favorites as Genesee, Utica Club, and Rolling Rock. His hands began to blister, his back to ache.
Between trips to the storeroom for cases of bottled beer and trips to the storeroom to "run me out a keg, Jack" (a phrase for which he was already coming to feel an elemental dread), he went back to the dancefloor, the mop-bucket, and the big bottle of Pledge. Once an empty beer-bottle flew past his head, missing him by inches. He ducked, heart racing, as it shattered against the wall. Smokey ran the drunken perpetrator out, his dentures bared in a great false alligator grin. Looking out the window, Jack saw the drunk hit a parking-meter hard enough to pop the red VIOLATION flag up.
"Come on, Jack," Smokey called impatiently from the bar, "it missed you, didn't it? Clean that mess up!"
Smokey sent him into the men's can half an hour later. A middle-aged man with a Joe Pyne haircut was standing woozily at one of the two ice-choked urinals, one hand braced against the wall, the other brandishing a huge uncircumcised penis. A puddle of puke steamed between his spraddled workboots.
"Clean her up, kid," the man said, weaving his way back toward the door and clapping Jack on the back almost hard enough to knock him over. "Man's gotta make room any way he can, right?"