I nodded. “I think you’re right.” I motioned to the waitress. “Give this man a drink,” I said, and handed her two bucks.
Next day, two or three times, I was on the verge of calling Margaret and telling her what I’d deduced. It could change your whole life, I told myself. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I wanted to nail it down.
That night I went to the synagogue. They were all there—the radicals, the scholars, Tilsen, the finger-man, the old gent with the skull cap. I took a wine and got right to the point with Rothman.
“You’d have liked to see Lloyd B. Jensen become president, wouldn’t you?”
He knew something was up. He didn’t take off the specs, just gave me a flat stare and nodded yes.
“Was he what the times called for? Was he historically necessary?”
“That’s a complicated question, McDonough. What makes you ask? Thinking of joining the Party?”
“No.” I stepped in closer to make sure he heard. “I’m thinking of telling Margaret Thornton who was behind her husband’s murder.”
He rubbed his beard and took that in. “Let me show you something,” he said.
He took me by the arm and guided me into the thick of things. The air was blue with eye-stinging smoke, and there were so many people talking at once—gesturing, shouting, laughing, cursing—that nothing they said was intelligible. The word that came to mind was babble, but Rothman had another term, which he imparted by shouting in my ear.
“These are the masses,” he said. “Every kind of person with every experience you can imagine is here. Hard workers, lazy bastards, money grubbers, thinkers, doers, devout men, unbelievers, gentlemen, killers. Somebody says something, somebody else hears, passes it on inadvertently or on purpose, pure or changed to suit his own self-interest, and sooner or later, who knows why, somebody does something that matters. Somebody acts.”
“And then it’s history.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “History is its own imperative. Anything can happen until something does. Then nothing else was ever possible. What are you going to tell Margaret?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, and I turned and walked out. I had goose bumps all the way to the bucket, wondering if someone was going to shoot me in the back.
I mulled it over for a while the next day, and then called Margaret on the phone. I didn’t want to behold her disillusionment, which she made no attempt to disguise. “I don’t know who was behind the killing of your husband,” I told her, “but it wasn’t Ford.”
“There’ll be no charge,” I added, to break the silence.
She didn’t thank me. “I thought you were infallible, Mr. McDonough,” she said, in reference to my lost reputation.
To this day I wonder why I acted as I did. It had little to do with Rothman’s denial, if indeed it was a denial. Maybe the look on her face when they were together did it, the way she kissed him on the cheek. When I told Slap, he couldn’t believe it. “That was your last best chance for a decent marriage,” he said.
It wasn’t Margaret’s, though. She and Rothman married. They have children now, three last I heard. Maggie Quinn moved in with me for a bit, but that didn’t work. We brought out the worst in each other. I actually hit her once, which so mortified me that I decided it was time to end it, and she agreed.
I can’t say that Margaret’s face haunts my dreams. Hoochers don’t dream, but we do have fantasies. Catholic school girls are mine. I’ve shortened their skirts and dirtied up their knee socks a bit over the years. They’re still walking away, but now one of them is looking back over her shoulder, at me.
Y
ou could spend a lot of time trying to figure out how three guys as different as Tom Leigh, Earl Dethaug, and Jorge Mendez ended up working together at the Minneapolis Impound Lot. What it came down to was that each of them, in his own male-impaired way, loved the other. But it took a lot of time and bad luck for them to figure that out. And like a lot of love stories, it ends as a tale of revenge.
The only snow Tom Leigh had seen before moving to Minnesota was snow that melted as it hit the ground. So he wasn’t prepared when he woke on an early November morning at his girlfriend’s apartment. Hung over. No idea that seventeen inches of snow had fallen since his last conscious moment. Or that the city of Minneapolis had something called Snow Emergency Rules. Rules so complicated they took three pages of closely printed type to explain.
His girlfriend got up first, took one look out the window, and said, “Shit.”
Tom rose on one elbow, eyes clenched shut to avoid light.
“Where’d you park last night?” Carla said.
Tom leaned forward slowly. A faster motion would have been disastrous for his gastrointestinal tract. Not to mention Carla’s bedding.
“Where’d I park?”
“There’s serious snow out there, and the tow trucks just hit my block. If you parked on the street…”
“Tow trucks?” Tom said, still not hearing anything that warranted opening his eyes.
“It’s a snow emergency, numb nuts. You park on the wrong side of the street, wrong day, wrong time—during a snow emergency—and your car gets towed. And from where I stand, it looks like my side of the street just hit the snow emergency trifecta. They’ve already loaded a bunch of cars…”
A surge of bile hit the back of Tom’s throat. He dropped back on the pillow. He was pretty sure he’d parked directly in front of Carla’s apartment, but he was also pretty sure he didn’t much care.
“So they tow my car. They’ve got to bring it back after they plow, right?”
Carla was still at the window when she said, “There it goes. That is definitely your car. A pile of snow fell off when they loaded it on the flatbed. And no. They don’t bring it back. You have to go get it. Which is going to be a problem. Buses probably aren’t running and there’s no way you’re going to get a taxi in this weather. With tow fees and fines, it’s going to cost you, like, two hundred dollars to get your car back. And impound fees, if you don’t get down to the impound lot to pick it up…”
Tom was out of the bed, naked and farting, running toward the door. He grabbed his jacket off the couch and made it down to the front door in seconds.
Then he hit the snow. It would take a shovel and fifteen minutes to get him from where he was to the street. All he could do was stand there, watching the tow truck turn the corner, heading toward downtown, Tom’s car on the flatbed.
It was then he felt the cold. It was then he realized he wasn’t wearing his jacket. He was wearing Carla’s jacket, which stopped about seven inches north of his cold-withered dick. And it was then that his beleaguered gut gave way, leaving Tom no choice but to drop his butt down in the snow and let loose. Standing up, he made the mistake of looking back at the darkened snow where he’d sat. His reaction to what he saw was reflexive, born out of years spent as a floundering French major.
Noir neige
. Black snow. Who said being a French major had no practical application?
The city impound lot is located under the I-394 overpass at the western edge of downtown Minneapolis, shadowed by tons of concrete. A couple dozen columns, each maybe six feet in diameter, support the nonstop vibration of cars crossing the overpass. It’s a forbidding sight. But what was really depressing was the line of people snaking toward a concrete block building at one end of the lot. There must have been two hundred of them. Miserable-looking people. Cold. Unkempt. Mad. Every one of them looked mad.
Tom had not been able to feel his feet for more than an hour by the time he made it through the line to a bleak, unheated hallway leading to the service windows. Behind the windows, two guys processed tickets. And behind them were handmade signs that made clear this was the kind of place where the customer was never right.
Minnesota Nice Stops Here
We charge extra for excuses
We don’t make the rules, we just take your money
It was Tom’s first sight of Earl Dethaug, one of the two guys behind the windows. The first thing you noticed about Earl was that he was fat. The way you get fat if you only eat white, yellow, and brown food. What Tom could see of Earl’s clothing was a dirty T-shirt and a down vest with wisps of white feathers sticking out of the seams. His arms were heavily tattooed. The tattoos suggested Earl had once been thin; they had faded as his skin spread over expanding girth.
The next thing Tom noticed about Earl was how unconcerned he was by the nonstop abuse he took from each and every person who presented themselves, rumpled tow tickets in hand.
The guy directly in front of Tom drove his fist into the window after finishing his business with Earl. It was a mistake. The window was bullet proof, and from the sound of the impact, Tom guessed the guy broke some bones.
From the window speaker, Earl said, “Next.”
At which point the guy turned fast, bumping into Tom. He spat in Tom’s direction and said, “Move your dumb ass!”
Tom didn’t even have to think about it.
“Fiche-moi le
camp!”
he called after him. And then, louder,
“Va te faire
foutre!”
Earl was staring at him as Tom stepped up to the window. “I personally impose a surcharge on anybody who don’t speak English, buddy.”
“I speak English,” Tom said. “But I curse in French.”
Earl continued to stare. “You speak anything else?”
“Spanish. Some German.”
“Hot damn,” Earl said. “You want a job? One of my guys is out sick. Georgie. The one that speaks spick. We’re getting killed. How about it, Frenchy. I’ll give you seventy-five bucks to work from now until 10 o’clock tonight.”
Tom thought about it. How hard could it be? And besides, after he paid the tow ticket and fine, he wouldn’t have any cash left for the rest of the month.
Tom said, “Is it heated in there?”
“We got infrared heaters above and floor heaters besides.”
Tom said, “You cover my tow bill and fine, and I’ll do it.”
Earl grimaced. Then he said, “I’ll cover if you stay until 7 tomorrow morning.”
That had been four years ago. Since then, whenever there was a snow emergency, Tom’s phone would ring and it would be Earl.
“Dirty drawers, Frenchy.”
Dirty drawers was Earl’s code for his personal snow emergency drill. Earl wore the same unwashed underwear he’d worn every snow emergency since he’d taken over the city impound lot. Tom made it a point not to ask how long that had been.
“It’s like this, Frenchy,” Earl said. “Snow emergencies—I don’t shave, I don’t shower. Hell, I don’t brush my teeth. And then I’ve got my specially aged underwear going for me. Gives a guy an edge. Know what I’m saying?”
It had never entered Tom’s mind that he’d be working at the impound lot for four years. When he thought about it, he considered the possibility he’d miss being the guy in control on the other side of the bullet-proof window when the pathetic hordes of towees showed up. He considered the possibility that he’d miss the drama of the twenty-four-hour snow emergency shifts.
There was always lots of drama.
Earl said, “I’ve had to duck twice working impound lots. The third time I have to duck, I’m out of here. Not gonna push my luck.”
The first time Earl ducked had been back when he’d run a private impound lot. He’d handled cars parked illegally on private property. Earl operated out of a ten-by-twelve-foot ice-fishing shack he’d bought off his brother-in-law for fifty bucks. He’d had a hole cut in the shack and installed a piece of glass with a pass window in it.
Three months after Earl started business in the shack, he’d dropped a handful of quarters on the floor. An eye blink after he’d bent over to pick them up, a brick came through the glass window, right where Earl’s head would have been if he’d been standing up.
The second time Earl ducked was after he’d left the shack to take a leak behind one of the impounded cars. He was maybe two car lengths away from the shack when he heard something behind him. Like a rock had hit the shack. It was another eye blink before the whole shack exploded.
The police bomb squad said somebody had lobbed a Vietnam-era grenade at the shack.
After that, Earl had a twelve-by-twelve cement-block structure put up. A bullet-proof window in front. A john at the back.
“Sweet,” Earl said, “but volume at the city was better. And I got benefits. So I sold the private lot. Came out ahead. Besides, once I read the city’s snow emergency rules—
ka-ching!
—I figured it was a license to print money.”
Jorge Mendez—Georgie to Earl—said, “What I hear is people are gonna be able to sign up for an e-mail notification on snow emergencies. That could hurt our business some…”
Earl rolled his eyes.
“Georgie, Georgie, Georgie. You worked here how long? A year more than Frenchy, right? And you still haven’t figured out that our customers couldn’t get it together to move their cars if you and me went out and personally whacked each one of them over the head with a two-by-four.”
As usual, Earl was right. Nine times out of ten, people who got towed were people whose lives were already seriously out of control. These were people for whom bounced checks, parking tickets, and overdue rent were a way of life. They were running on a short fuse before they got towed, and getting towed was just one of a lot of things that lit their match.
Tom liked Jorge almost as much as he liked Earl, hard pressed as he was to explain what any one of them had in common with the other. Maybe the one thing that Tom and Jorge had in common was that neither could explain why they’d worked for Earl as long as they had.
“Does it bother you that he calls you
Georgie
,” Tom said, “instead of pronouncing your name right?”
Jorge shrugged. “I corrected him a couple times when I first started working here. Then he put my name up on the schedule spelled,
Whore-Hey.
So I told him to skip it. Just call me Georgie. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is, stuff like when my mom was here from El Paso. Earl gave me extra to take her out for dinner. And the second year I worked impound, I had mono, and he paid me the whole time I was sick. That came out of his pocket, but he made me take it. With Earl, what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Know what I mean?”