Trust (3 page)

“Well, now it’s fifties they’re passing,” she said. “So it’s fifties now, we’re not taking. And bad’s I got burned, the first part of May, at least I’m glad it was twennies. Cost me, I hadda give Chuckie a hundred and eighty, taken right out of my pay. And Al and Lucy, and Chuckie himself, they all got nailed pretty bad too. Those bastards got into us a good thousand bucks, before the bank tipped us off. So, you got something smaller, if you wanna buy this stuff?”

“Oh,” he said, fumbling for his wallet again. “I didn’t know. Lemme see here. My boss always pays me, he pays me in cash. He just paid me that one last night. But maybe I got here …” He pulled out a number of one-dollar bills that had been wadded up and then smoothed out. He began to count them out. “Nine,” he finished. He pushed them toward her. “That oughta do it,” he said.

She picked up the soiled bills and raised her eyebrows. “How long you had these items?” she said. “Your mother at your confirmation?”

He grinned and tried to look sheepish. “I’m not very good about money,” he said. “I buy something, I always use the biggest bill I got, ’cause it’s easier’n counting out singles. Then I get the change, and I stick it in my pocket till I get home and change my pants and I just put it in my wallet.”

She rang the drawer open and gave him his change. “You, ah,” he said. “I’m looking, the Beachmont Motel?”

“It’s downah road,” she said, jerking her head to indicate the direction. “You should’ve followed those
three lugs with the beer—that’s where they were going. Goddamned kids. Hiding out in college so they maybe miss the draft. Which they seem to think gives them the right, just roll right over everybody. Call a cop on those kids, they start whining right away: ‘I’m gonna be in ’Nam next year.’ Bull
shit
is what I say. They’ll figure out another wrinkle. Wish my kid was like that.” She paused. “Or,” she said, “four-five years ago, you could’ve followed your showgirl. She used to spend
lots
of time there. Most of it on her back. But now that she’s married, the owner, lady of leisure and all, she never goes near the damned place.”

“That guy with her, he’s the owner?” Earl said.

“Yup,” the cashier said, extending her left hand to receive the purchases of one of the middle-aged men who had finished his deliberations. “Good old Jimmy Battles. Looks as soft as a bowl fulla custard, but meaner’n snakes when he’s pissed. And the closest thing to a jackhammer I ever saw in bed.” She glanced back at Earl. “You’re thinking of staying, staying at Jimmy’s, I’d change my mind, I was you. I know that joint on the inside and out. There’s not a bed in it, ’ll fit you.” She snickered. “ ’Less he cuts you down to size, like he does everybody else. Or has his beefboys do it.”

“I can take care of myself all right,” Earl said, picking up his goods.

“
Oh
,” she said. “Well, that’s too bad. Jimmy don’t like guys like you. Takes care of them himself.”

The Beachmont Motel was a two-story cinder-block building shaped like a splayed V and set on a narrow, paved lot carved out of a small hillside (it was destroyed by fire two weeks after Labor Day in 1986; the fire chief in Lafayette told reporters the fire was one of “suspicious origin,” with “clear evidence of the use of accelerants,” and the office of the attorney general conducted an investigation; no charges were brought). It was painted sea green. It had a flat roof that overhung the cement balcony walkway giving access to the rooms on the upper floor. The roof was supported by wrought-iron grillwork, and the walkway was enclosed by waist-high wrought-iron fencing. All of the ironwork was painted white. The doors of the rooms and the frames of the picture windows fronting on the parking lot were painted pale turquoise. At the northeasterly corner there was a dark blue Dempster Dumpster. There were two brown and chromium ice machines, one at the crook of the V on each floor. The sign at the edge of the road was mounted on an orange trailer and fringed with light bulbs; black movable letters advertised “
34
AIR-COND RMS, SOME W/DINETTES. TV. FREE COFFEE. VACANCY, $10.00S. $14 DBL
.” Off to the southeast of the V was a square green cinder-block building with a sign on the door that said “
OFFICE
.” It had a small porch under the roof overhand on the front. There were two green metal lawn chairs on the porch, and a spindly white metal table with a glass top between them. There was a can of Miller beer on the table next to the chair nearest the door.

Earl parked the Dodge alongside a charcoal gray Lincoln Continental in front of the office. There were six other vehicles in the lot: a carmine Firebird Trans Am, a black Camaro, a neon green Dodge Charger, a black Plymouth Road Runner with oversized tires, a GMC four-wheel-drive truck with oversized, off-the-road cleated tires that gave it two feet of ground clearance, and a silver Honda motorcycle. The door to the fourth room to his left on the first floor was open; a four-wheeled cart equipped with a brown laundry bag on the front, festooned with large plastic bottles of spray cleaners, stood beside it. He could hear a man and a woman arguing inside the room.

“Well,” the man said, “it’s very fuckin’ simple. It’s not hard to understand. It’s almost five o’fuckin’ clock, and you’re not fuckin’ done. You’re supposed to get in here, and get the fuckin’ work done by
three
o’fuckin’ clock, and you didn’t fuckin’ do it. As fuckin’ usual. Now I don’t have to fuckin’ tell you, why this’s important. The best we got in this place is a short season, all right? And this is the fuckin’ season, which so far sucks, and we got to have stuff ready. We got to scratch for bucks. And the way we fuckin’ scratch for bucks is we do our fuckin’ work. Now I look at it this
way, and you don’t? Well, fuck me, then—and you can fuckin’ quit. I bet I can find someone that’ll take your fuckin’ job, and be fuckin’
grate
ful to get two-five-oh an hour, in this godforsaken hole.”

The woman’s voice was half plaintive and half angry. The volume increased and the pitch rose as she spoke. “Mister Battaglia,” she said. “I don’t
rent
these rooms, these goddamned … 
animals.
I don’t bring the beer in here, and throw empties all around. I don’t throw up in the bathrooms, onna walls and onna floors. I don’t shit in the bathtubs. I don’t pull the curtains down and break the goddamned springs, so they won’t go up again and you have to take them down and roll them up. Isn’t me, that falls asleep, eating pizza, I’m in bed. And then rolls around in it and stains the goddamned sheets. You know why there’s no chairs in Twelve? Because the bastards broke them. I guess they threw them out the windows—they’re out the back, back parking lot. You know why there’s no blankets, in the laundry room? Because last night they ruined four, least they looked like that to me. You wanna let these cannibals in? Fine. Go and take their money. But don’t expect me, make it like, they never were in here. I can’t do it. Nobody can. They tear the place apart.”

The man in the white polo shirt and shorts emerged from the room. He paused at the door and pointed his right forefinger back into the room. “All
right
,” he said, “all right. You made your fuckin’ point. Now I will make my point, again, and what you should do is listen. It’s a short season here, and it isn’t being that
good
a season, and when it’s over, it’s gonna be over. So, as a result of which, I’m gonna keep this place running, we all got to dig in,
and work.
You got me? Because
if we don’t do that, you, or me, or anybody else, pretty soon I’m gonna have to
close
the fuckin’ place, and you’re gonna be up shit’s creek without a paddle, down the McDonald’s in Westerly, up to your hogans in grease. All right? And that means I oughta have most of these rooms,
all
these rooms, ready to rent by two. And the rest of them by three. Because that’s when people come around and start renting the rooms. Okay? Early afternoon. They get where they’re going, they wanna stop, rent a room, change their clothes and go the beach, bake their asses off. Not at four. Not at five. Two. Two in the afternoon. And I don’t care, you think of their morals, or what they do makes you sick. They pay me the money, they get the damned room. Maybe looks like a pigpen when they get out, but when they go in, it is clean. Okay?”

Earl walked over to the office porch and sat down in the chair farthest from the can of beer. He clasped his hands over his belt buckle. The blocky man hit the cleaning cart with the heel of his right hand and stomped his way to the porch. He collapsed into the vacant chair and picked up the beer can in his left hand. He drank deeply and wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand. He put the beer can down. He clasped his hands at his waist. He stared at Earl. “Yeah,” he said, “the Vermont guy.”

Earl extended his hand. “Earl Beale,” he said.

The blocky man ignored the hand. “Yeah,” he said, “so you’re finally here. I finally get to meet you. I thought it was you when I saw you. You put on some weight, right? Since you quit playing ball? Put on a few pounds, you got out of the can? And also: you’re late.”

“Saw me,” Earl said.

“Saw you scoping Maria, the packie,” the man said. “Thinking: ‘Jeez, what a nice ass she’s got.’ ”

“Oh,” Earl said. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and crossed his legs at the knees. “Yeah, that was me. And she does.”

“Better’n that,” the man said with satisfaction. “That, my friend, is a
perfect
ass. When that broad come down the assembly line, God’s going through the parts bin there, and He fishes into it and comes up with it, and says: ‘Jeez, a perfect ass. Don’t see many of these things, these days. Well, easy come.’ And slapped it on her.”

“Yeah,” Earl said.

“So,” the man said, “I’m Battles. You’re Beale. And you’re late. You gonna give me, the courtesy an explanation? Or’re you like everybody else these days, I practically got to kiss their ass for them before they’ll get to work.”

“I got hassled by a cop, the way down,” Earl said.

“Son of a bitch,” Battles said. “ ‘Hassled by a cop.’ What was he, a basketball fan? Hadda a yard or two on Saint Stephen’s, some night you went inna tank?”

Earl shifted in the chair. “You know,” he said, “this’s my afternoon off. Wednesday and Thursday nights, I’m gonna have to work late to make up. My brother maybe calls me up, tells me to get down here. But that don’t make up for the commissions that I might’ve got today, and if I don’t get commissions, boy, my draw goes down the sewer. Plus which, I drive about a hundred sixty miles, you know, see this guy that I don’t know, and my
brother
doesn’t know, because my brother called me? Because his friend asked him to? And for this I’m taking shit? Because you’re a
friend in need, a guy I don’t even
know?
Who is it needs the favor here? Isn’t me, I know.”

“Yes it is,” the blocky man said. He grinned. “You got in the shit once. And
you
needed a favor. And you got it from the guy that knows your brother, all right? Now, the guy that called your brother, he owes
me
a favor. Because I did him a favor when a friend of
his
got dirty. So that is why you’re down here, pal—because
you
need a favor. You got to pay things back.”

“I don’t have any trouble with that,” Earl said. “Paying things back, I mean. I just don’t like gettin’ a lot of shit for my trouble, all right? You wanna piss on someone, fine. Go ahead and do it. But don’t bring me down here, all this way from Boston, so you can do it on me.”

“Well,” Battles said, “I see they didn’t break your spirit, any fuckin’ thing like that. You got a fresh mouth on you, pal. Anybody tell you that?”

Earl shrugged. “I did my time,” he said. “I owe nobody nothing.”

“Yeah,” Battles said, “but you didn’t do as
much
time, as everybody thought.”

“Hey,” Earl said, “prisons’re overcrowded. Everybody knows that. I didn’t make any trouble. Kept my mouth shut, did my chores. So they let me out early. I’m supposed to complain? It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be, but I wasn’t about to complain. ‘Get outta here,’ they say, and I got.”

“Kept your mouth shut, huh?” Battles said. “That’s interesting to hear. There was some talk around, you weren’t doing that. And that’s how you got out so fast.”

“There’s always talk around,” Earl said. “Look at the
papers they sell in the markets. ‘I Got Knocked Up by an Alien.’ ‘Rabbit-faced Baby with Ten-Inch Ears Born to Buck-toothed Mother, Loves Carrots.’ ’Fifty-seven T-Birds, for sale for fifty dollars, ’cause the owners died in them and rotted in the seats.”

“Then there was,” Battles said, “you got out, but for a while you’re not around. Nobody ever saw you. Guys inna can behind you saw you walk the fuckin’ door, but nobody on the outside sees you, must’ve been a year.”

“I was finding myself,” Earl said. “That’s what my daughter’s doing—she’s finding herself this year. You know where she’s looking? Greek islands. I get a couple under my belt, I’m out after work one night. I always get sentimental, I drink—just a regular slob. So I call up the former bride, just to see how things’re going. How’s her new guy treating her? Has he got a ten-inch dick? All that happy horseshit. And she tells me Sarah’s scrubbed the college, which I already paid about three hundred for the goddamned applications and the fuckin’ goddamned tests, and the down payment, deposit, all of which I hadda
earn.
And I say: ‘What the fuck is going on? She had her room already. I give her the TV set and I sent in the money. She’s not going out to U. Mass. Amherst, Boston isn’t good enough?’ And I get told, well, it’s my fault. ‘She never had a father.’ ‘Fuck you, she didn’t have a father,’ ’cause by now I’m getting mad. ‘She didn’t have a father, then how come I got all those goddamned canceled checks?’ ‘It’s not the same thing. Not like you were around.’ Well, that’s what I was doing, all right? Except I was older, and nobody sent me money. I got out the can and I dropped out, a while. And then I run out of the
money, and I didn’t see nobody standing by to buy me meals and keep me warm, so I went and got a job.”

“Or our uncle got one for you,” Battles said.