First Avenue (9 page)

“I’ll check and see if he’s working this morning.”

The policeman walked into the next office and came out carrying a long clipboard with many pages held in place beneath the clamp.

“Yes, he’s working. What is it you would like to see him about?”

“I’m a relative of his.”

“A relative.”

She could not tell if he was asking or merely repeating what she had said. She was sure, however, that he was looking at her black hair and her skin that must now be turning red. “A distant niece,” she said.

“A distant niece. Explain to me now what that means.”

“I came from
Alaska
.”

“Oh, well, that is distant, isn’t it. What is your name?”

“
Maria
.”

He wrote
Maria
on a piece of scratch paper.

“Last name?” he asked.

“He won’t know me.”

“That’s all right. I always like to know who I’m talking to.”

“Simonson,”
Maria
said so that the policeman could finish his line.

“All right,
Maria
. Why don’t you sit down there on the bench, and I’ll give
Officer
Wright
a call.”

She went to the first bench and sat closest to the counter. The policeman returned to his desk and she heard his voice. She thought he was talking on the telephone.

“Radio, have Officer Wright on David-4 return to the station and see the hole crew as soon as he can. Right. Thank you.”

A moment later from the speaker on the wall, she heard the radio operator calling for 1-David-4. She listened intently for the return voice. There was none, and in the silence that followed she smoothed her dress across her lap with one hand while the other remained protectively on top of her purse. She sat straighter on the bench so that her backbone barely touched the wood. Again the voice on the radio called for 1-David-4, and again there was silence. She heard the telephone ring in the office beyond the counter, and the police officer answered it and spoke briefly. She heard his chair scraping on the floor, and he appeared at the counter.

“
Officer
Wright
is out of the car right now, and we can’t raise him. He probably has his radio turned off. When he clears, I’ll call him again.”

“Thank you.” She tried to smile.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” the policeman asked. “I’ve got some here.”

“No thank you.”

“It shouldn’t be too long. He told Radio he was going into the Donut Shop at First and Pike. He seems real fond of that place right now. I hear him logging out there a lot. You sure you wouldn’t like a cup of coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“All right. Sit tight, then. I’ll call him as soon as he clears.”

Maria nodded and the policeman returned to his desk. She could not see him from where she sat.
Maria
strained to listen to the radio speaker, for the voice of 1-David-4. There was no voice. Nothing had gone right so far.

Maria removed a book of poems from her purse. She opened it to the back and looked for the hundredth time, for the thousandth time, at the picture of
Sam
Wright
on the worn paper cover. He was standing in his police uniform in front of an old brick building. There was a half-formed, half-gone smile on his face.

In the book most of the poems had something to do with police work, but three poems were completely different. Those three, first in the book, were about her mother. Because of them, because her mother had read them to her when even her smiles could no longer hide the bad news,
Maria
had traveled all this way. She sat listening for a voice to come from a tiny box just as she had listened to her mother’s voice reading grown-up words she could not understand. For years the book had been hidden in the bottom drawer of her dresser. It was out now.

She began to read the first poem, but something was terribly wrong. Something was missing. She looked up from the bench at the green walls on all sides of her. They were like the hospital walls where she waited for her mother to die. They were exactly like the hospital walls. They closed tighter around her, and she realized that she had lost the sound of her mother’s voice. Instead the words came up from the page in a strange voice. It was a voice she had never heard and it frightened her in a way that she had never been frightened before. She closed the book. What if
Sam
Wright
came and she had lost her mother’s voice? She stood abruptly and went to the counter and would have left without a word if the older policeman had not raised his head immediately.

“I’ll have to come back,” she said.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Is everything okay? I can try to raise him again.”

“No. Please don’t bother. I’ll come back later.”

“All right. I’ll leave him a message.”

“No. I’d rather see him. Where was it you said he was? That doughnut place?”

“First and Pike, but there’s no telling how long he’ll stay there. Not long, probably.”

“That’s okay. I just need to leave now. Could you tell me how to find it?”

“Sure, if that’s what you want. You go down the hill two blocks. That’s
First Avenue
.” The telephone rang and the policeman put on his glasses. He looked toward the telephone and then back at her. “At First Avenue, turn right,” he said over the second peal of the telephone bell. “It’s six or seven blocks to
Pike Street
.” His hand was already moving toward the telephone.

“Thank you,” she said. She was moving, too.

He raised his other hand in a farewell gesture as he placed the telephone to his ear. She saw the green walls again, and her pace increased to the elevator. She pushed the down button twice, although it had lit the first time. It seemed as if she did not, could not, breathe until the elevator stopped for her and she was outside again. She breathed deeply there, inhaling the fumes from the buses that roared and shook and rattled as they left the curb in front of her.

She walked down the hill from the police station in a daze. She could not go back there, to those walls that reminded her of the hospital. She would have to try something else. Would he still be at the Donut Shop?

At
First Avenue
she turned right and began to pay attention to her surroundings. The street seemed to go slower than the others. Some people were not moving at all. She kept a count of the blocks as she walked and looked at each street sign far in advance. She looked for the blue uniform of a policeman and for the familiar face and strange smile.

Instead she saw other men who looked strangely at her. Far up the sidewalk as they stood at the curb or walked toward her, they would begin looking at her. One time she returned the stare, and the man stopped and waited as though she would stop. She continued walking. What did they want?

Sunlight crossed
First Avenue
at each intersection. The rest of the street stood in shadow. The wind felt cold as it circled around buildings and blew into her face.

She approached a building with one door and no windows. Big signs advertised girls. “Girls, Girls, Girls,” it said. So that was what the men were looking for. Not me, she wanted to shout.

She looked ahead for a way to escape and saw instead the sign for
Pike Street
. There was also a sign protruding from a brick building at the corner that said “Donut Shop.” She forgot the men with watching eyes and the building with “Girls, Girls, Girls.” She walked to the corner and looked sideways into the windows like the men who had watched her. She did not see him.

Maria walked inside and stopped close to the door. There were only a few customers. He wasn’t there. A man behind the counter with greasy black hair waited impatiently for her to decide what she would do. She walked up to him and ordered a doughnut.

“What kind?” he asked.

She looked down at the glass counter smudged with fingerprints. She could hardly see through it. She pointed to a tray of doughnuts that had the least amount of topping. She wondered why he liked this place or why he would want to spend time here.

“One of those,” she said.

“Do you want anything to drink?”

“A carton of milk, please.”

The man nodded and walked slowly back to a refrigerator behind him. As he opened the refrigerator door, he looked beyond it to the kitchen where the doughnut machine stood and a boy was wiping the side of the stainless steel machine.

“Use more soap,” he said. “You’re just smearing the grease around.”

The boy looked up from his work. He had no interest in removing grease. Without speaking he walked over to the sink and turned on the faucet. He stuck his finger into the stream of water and watched the water run down the drain. The man shook his head and closed the refrigerator door.

“Everybody likes to eat, but nobody likes to work.”

It was the friendliest thing he had said so far.

“Seventy-two cents,” he said. “The two cents is for me. The rest is for everybody else.” His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he had not slept for a long time.

She gave him the correct change and took her doughnut and milk over to a table beside the front window. She saw the man walk back to the kitchen, heard voices, and heard the water running again. She opened the carton of milk and inspected the rim. She had forgotten to ask for a straw. She took a sip of milk and a small bite of the doughnut and looked out the window. A police car passed slowly on the street. There was a man inside, but she could not see his face. Even so her stomach churned. She watched the car pass from sight, then put the doughnut down on the napkin and pressed her fingers to her lips.

The boy who had been in the kitchen walked to the front door and threw it open. He left without a word, but once outside and beyond the vision of the man behind the counter, he raised his finger in a gesture flung toward her. It was not meant for her, she realized, but toward the doughnut machine or the man who stood at the counter. The man did not move, but his face hardened into an angry mask. Perhaps he had seen the gesture. When she looked toward the street again, she saw that it was not possible.

An old man came through the door. He bought a cup of coffee at the counter, but his hands shook most of the coffee out of the plastic cup before he reached a table. A woman pushed a shopping cart heaped with bags and boxes past the window where
Maria
sat and parked it at the front door. She plodded wearily inside, and the odor of her body beneath winter clothes followed her.
Maria
would have left if the woman had sat close. However, the woman did not even look at a table. Her dull eyes stared straight ahead, but at nothing. She took her two doughnuts outside and ate them beside her cart. Two men wearing hard hats squeezed past the woman at the door and came in together. Their heavy boots echoed from the hard floor. Both wore dusty blue jeans, and their hands were dirty. Their loud voices took up all the space. They gathered their doughnuts and coffee and sat at a table in the center of the room.
Maria
was glad they had come. They were like people she had seen before. They seemed to know the man at the counter.

“Hey,
Pete
, how come you’re working alone?”

“The boy quit.”

“No kidding. Maybe you should pay these kids more money.”

“How can I pay more? If I double the wage, will you pay double the price?”

“Not unless they taste a lot better than these.” The two workers laughed together.
Pete
did not laugh.

“They eat all the doughnuts they want.”

“Now there’s a benefit we don’t have. We’ll have to talk to the union about that.” The two men took turns talking. They might have been brothers.

“You hire that boy, you and your union,”
Pete
said. “You see if you make him work.”

“Well, not much of a loss. Didn’t know how to smile.” The other man said, “Find somebody with a pretty smile like that girl who used to be here. A pretty smile, and you don’t mind what the doughnuts taste like.”

When the construction workers finished their coffee, they left their cups and napkins on the table. They waved to the proprietor and said they would be back tomorrow. The proprietor smiled until they were outside, but he didn’t go to their table to clean it off. He stood behind the counter with his hands on his hips and watched the door.

The old man got up to leave, wiped the table with his napkin, and dropped his cup into a wastebasket. The man who seemed to be the owner did not acknowledge his departure.