The Good Brother Page 2

  The cars in the lot were ten to twenty years old and American-made. They sat low on one side or high on the other. Mufflers hung by wires. Some cars had cardboard taped in place of missing windows. Several were two-toned from salvaged doors, hoods, and quarter-panels that matched the make and model but not the color. The back seats were filled with tools and toys.

  Virgil joined a crowd of men in caps who circled a car, drinking coffee from thermos cups and smoking cigarettes. A pup sat on cardboard in the front seat. Rundell Day leaned against the hood. Hair grew from his ears like gulley brush.

  “By God, boys,” said a man, “that’s one set-up pup, ain’t it.”

  “I had his job I’d quit mine,” said another.

  “I’d not give a man two hundred dollars for a pup,” said another.

  “That ain’t just any old dog you’re looking at. Hey Rundell, what’s it do for that kind of money? Tricks? Roll over? Punch the clock for you, what?”

  “It’ll flat tree,” Rundell said.

  “Shit, that dog couldn’t tree a leaf.”

  “I ain’t for sure that is a dog, boys. My opinion, that’s a possum in a dog suit.”

  “It might have some possum to it.”

  “Boys, I don’t know, now. I believe what it looks like ain’t possum a-tall. Take a good long gander now. See them ears. See that mouth hanging open whopper-jawed. Boys, if you was to ask me, that’s one dog looks a lot like Rundell Day,”

  “Shoot, I see it.”

  “What are you doing, Rundell? Trying to get your kin on the job? Best take it in to see the Big Boss, ain’t you.”

  “It’s a dog,” Rundell said. “And it’ll out tree ary a dog you fellers got.”

  “Boys, watch out now. Rundell says it’s a dog.”

  “Can he guarantee it?”

  “Two-hundred-dollar dog ort to live in a tree.”

  “I got a three-legged dog that’ll out-tree that pup.”

  “By God, there’s something to brag on. A man keeps a three-legged dog around.”

  “It’s the kids’ dog. Old lady won’t let me kill it.”

  “What else won’t she let you do?”

  “She don’t much care.”

  “Listen at him. His own wife don’t care. By God, mine was to hear me say that, she’d cut every ball on me off.”

  “She’d not need but a butter knife.”

  “Time is it?”

  “It’s time.”

  The men began moving toward the main building where the time clock was. Rundell opened the passenger door and the pup sprang to him, paws sliding on the vinyl seat. Rundell leaned his face for the pup to lick.

  “You be good, now,” Rundell said. “Don’t you pay no attention to them boys. You’re a good old dog, yes sir, a good old dog.”

  He kissed the dog on the face and locked the door. He and Virgil walked across the lot. Surrounding the town were high hills, their tops in mist.

  “You really give two hundred for it?” Virgil said.

  “Why, no.”

  “What did you give for it, Rundell?”

  “You in the dog buying business?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll tell you, Virge, but don’t say nothing. I found that pup on the road this morning.”

  “Just giving them something to think on?”

  “When I go to sell it, I’ll get a hundred and they’ll think it’s a real deal.”

  They opened the blue door of the maintenance building. The men were strung in a line down the hall, at the end of which hung the time clock. It ticked and the first man dipped his card into the slot and went out the door. The line moved forward.

  As each man left the building, he went to the crew shop where the boss assigned the day’s work. The hierarchy placed electricians at the top, followed by carpenters, painters, landscapers, and garbagemen. Off to the side and on their own were the custodians of individual buildings, quiet men who moved slowly, ignored by students and faculty. Virgil headed for the garbage dock. He cut through the main building instead of going around, walked down a hall, and came out a seldom-used door. He closed it very quietly. He stepped around the corner and stomped his feet. Two men turned quickly, half-rising from their seats. Footsteps from that direction could only mean the Big Boss.

  “Don’t get up, boys,” Virgil said. “I know you all are studying on important stuff.”

  Rundell spat coffee. “I wish to hell you’d not do that, Virge. Damn near woke Dewey here up.”

  “I ain’t asleep,” Dewey said.

  “You were asleep and you know it. You’re the only man I ever seen who can sleep standing up.”

  “I don’t talk the wax out of a man’s ears,” Dewey said. “Now let me alone.”

  Virgil opened the door to the garbage crew’s tiny office. Inside was a desk, three chairs, and an industrial coffee machine that had been salvaged from the trash. He filled a styrofoam cup and went outside.

  “You’re on wheel, Virge,” Rundell said.

  Rundell had run the garbage crew for twenty-three years and divided all aspects of the work equally. Four men could fit in the cab of the truck, and each week they rotated among driver, cabman, outside man, and gearshift man. Rundell was set to retire in a year and he’d marked Virgil as his successor.

  “Where’s Taylor at?” Virgil said.

  “Ain’t here yet,” Dewey said.

  “I can see that. But is he on the job?”

  “Well.” Dewey gave him a sly look. “His card got punched.”

  “Then we got to wait on that sorry son of a bitch.”

  “He’ll be here.”

  “Now I ain’t trying to tell you what to do, Dewey,” Rundell said. “But you’d best watch punching him in that way. If you know he’s coming late, it ain’t nothing. But that Taylor, he’s likely to be in the jailhouse as in the bed. Get caught fooling with his card and you’re out of a job. I’ve seen it happen, boys. More than once.”

  Across the back of the lot, Taylor came slipping through the gate.

  “Look yonder,” Virgil said. “If it ain’t the old girl hisself. Watch this.”

  He ducked into the office and hid all the styrofoam cups but one. He used a finishing nail to make a series of small holes around its brim and set the cup by the coffee machine.

  Taylor came slowly across the lot, walking in a stiff way to keep his head level. His clothes were wrinkled and dirty. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and his lips were cracked.

  “Boys,” he said. “Somebody shoot me. I can’t stand this no longer.”

  He went in the office and closed the door. He kept a half-pint of whisky inside, but as long as Rundell didn’t see a man drinking on the job, he could deny it. Taylor came out of the office upright. The whisky had given his face some color, his eyes a little life. “Who’s got a smoke?” he said. Dewey tossed him a cigarette and Taylor put it in his mouth and pulled out a Zippo. He leaned his head away and tilted the lighter at an angle opposite his head. The flame shot six inches into the air. Taylor sucked hard and capped the lighter. “My hat on fire?”

  The men chuckled and shook their heads.

  “Boys,” he said. “I feel like I been shot at and missed, shit at and hit.”

  He sipped the coffee. It came out of the holes onto his chin and a few seconds passed before he registered the burn. “Goddam you son of a blue-balled bitches. Every one of you!”

  He jerked the cup away from his face, sloshing coffee onto his hand. He passed it quickly to his other hand, but held on to the coffee because of the whisky he’d dumped in it. He lifted the cup and bit off part of the rim to get rid of the holes. He spat the styrofoam and drank, lifting his eyebrows to Rundell over the cup.

  “What are we waiting on?” he said. “Time to hit a lick, ain’t it.”

  Dewey smiled, dark gaps speckling his mouth where teeth should be. Rundell clamped his lips like two bricks because his laugh was a high-pitched giggle that embarrassed him. Taylor choked hi
s laughter off, lifting his hand to his forehead, his face twisted from the pain.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Damn it. You boys are harder on a man than a preacher. I knew I shouldn’t have come in.”

  “Why did you?” Virgil said.

  “Hell, I wrecked my car last night. I woke up still in the ditch and I was closer to work than the house. I just come in for a drink to feel better.”

  The men laughed on the cement dock, blowing white gusts of breath into the chilly air. The sun showed above the eastern hill. After a few minutes, they began drifting toward the truck. Virgil climbed behind the wheel, marveling at the way they moved as a group with no clear sign from Rundell, like a flock of geese. Other crew bosses had rituals that told everyone it was time, such as looking at a watch, or standing, or simply a nod. With Rundell it was an attitude. He assumed an air of resignation, as if he didn’t want to be the one to say, but he had to, which prevented him from having to speak at all.

  Virgil used his old driver’s license to clear frost from the inside of the windshield. The dashboard was covered with items of potential value that the men had found in the trash, including a headless Barbie doll and a one-legged GI Joe that Taylor put into sexual positions. Virgil shifted to first and the truck jerked forward.

  Taylor finished his coffee. He held the brim with his teeth so that the cup covered his nose and mouth. He nuzzled Dewey, grunting like a hog. Dewey slapped the cup away, flinging coffee dregs through the cab.

  “Goddam it, Dewdrop,” said Taylor. “You got something against hogs?”

  “No. Just that you ain’t one’s all.”

  “You saying I ain’t a hog?”

  Dewey nodded.

  “Then what am I?”

  “You know what you are.”

  “He’s a cuckolder,” Rundell said.

  “Did you call me a cuckolder?” Taylor said.

  “Sure did.”

  “Think I ort to let him get away with that, Dewey? Calling me a cuckolder, by God.”

  “I don’t know,” Dewey said. “Maybe not if he called you it twice.”

  “He’s a cuckolder,” Rundell said.

  “He done it,” Taylor said.

  “I’d not let him call you three cuckolders,” Dewey said. “He’s lucky it ain’t me he’s calling one. I ain’t never held nobody’s but my own.”

  “No,” Virgil said. “The world’s lucky you ain’t one.”

  “What is one anyhow?” Taylor said.

  “Well,” Rundell said. “A cuckolder is what you’re give up to be half the time.”

  “Hell, it must mean drink whisky,” Taylor said.

  “No,” Rundell said. “It more or less means a man who fucks another man’s wife.”

  Virgil rounded a curve and junk slid along the dashboard. Last year’s leaves still clung to the hardwoods, while the maples were beginning to bud. Ground fog rose as if drawn by a fan.

  “Well,” Virgil said. “Nobody here’s married except Rundell, and I’d say Taylor ain’t got him worried too bad.”

  “That’s right,” Rundell said. “The old lady’d shoot him for looking at her funny.”

  “What does she use to shoot with?” Taylor said.

  “Ever what’s laying handy.”

  “Good woman,” Taylor said. “They mostly favor them small calibers that ain’t good for naught but beer cans and squirrel.”

  “You know why that is?” Rundell said.

  “Weaker sex takes a puny pistol, I guess.”

  “For a man says he knows as many women as you do, you sure don’t know a lot about them.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Reason women shoot little guns,” Rundell said, “is it’s men who teach them to shoot. Not many a man wants to give his woman a gun that’ll put him down. Me, I trust my wife and she can handle any gun in the county.”

  Virgil turned at a long building that housed married students. A narrow lane behind it held rows of overflowing garbage cans. The men left the truck and Virgil eased forward until Dewey signaled him to stop. He and Taylor emptied cans into the hopper.

  Rundell walked ahead of the truck, checking the garbage for buckets of paint and old motor oil, neither of which they picked up. His primary job was to set the pace. This was dependent on the condition of the men—the worse off they were, the faster the pace. The trick, he’d explained to Virgil, was in figuring out how to cover your own ass while covering the men’s, too. That was the whole key to being crew boss, he’d said, that and making them work.

  Virgil had spent two years taking courses while working part-time at maintenance, but hadn’t fit in with the students. An hour after sitting in a classroom, he’d be on his knees in front of the same building, painting the curb yellow. The majority of students came from the surrounding counties and tried to conceal their hill-bred traits, a doomed enterprise since everyone recognized not only the habits but the attempts to hide them. Virgil’s presence was a reminder of what they wanted to leave behind.

  His decision to quit school and stay in garbage perplexed everyone. What Virgil enjoyed was that no trash man could pretend he was more than what he was. Education was like a posthole digger, a good tool, very expensive, but worthless unless you needed pestholes dug.

  Rundell was moving fast and it wasn’t just because of Taylor being drunk. Emptying dumpsters was the sole chore for the day, which meant the sooner they finished, the sooner they could loaf. Garbage was impossible to fake like other jobs, because once it was picked up, you were done. As Dewey said, “If folk don’t want to put out their garbage, you can’t stop them.”

  People left the apartment building for school. Each time a woman drove past, Taylor smiled and waved, but couldn’t draw a glance. An old Nova went past, its big engine rumbling. A suspension kit had been added and the back end rocked gently over dips in the gravel road. Chrome mags flashed silver inside each tire.

  “A loud-looker, ain’t she,” Taylor said.

  “Wonder what’s under the hood.”

  “I was talking about the driver,” Taylor said. “I’d eat a mile of her shit just to see where it came from. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Don’t reckon.”

  “Why? You got something against eating shit?”

  “More or less.”

  “What are you, stuck up?”

  “Yeah,” said Virgil, “I’m the first stuck-up garbageman to ever walk the earth.”

  “There wasn’t nothing snobby about your brother. You ever hear about the time me and him went to the bootlegger for a couple of half-pints?”

  Virgil shook his head. This was the first time that Taylor had talked about Boyd since the funeral. Virgil knew they’d buddied all over the hills for a spell. Boyd had a way of using people up. He ran with a man until he’d out-wilded him, then he’d go on to the next restless boy from the darkest hollow or longest ridge. Every season he extended his range, like an animal hunting food. His former running buddies included the incarcerated, the dead, and the recently religious.

  Taylor talked around his cigarette.

  “It was me and Boyd and another boy name of Hack Johnson. Nobody much liked Hack on account of him dropping a tree on a man while they was logging. But Boyd, he just never went in the woods with him. I was up front with Hack. Boyd sat in the back with a brand-new coonhound that Hack was afraid to leave at home and get stole.

  “We pulled up to the bootlegger and around the comer come the biggest German shepherd you ever did see. Blacker than the ace of spades. Hollering to beat hell. It was jumping at the window, tearing at the side of the car. That coonhound went right back at it. It was standing in Boyd’s lap, just filling the car with racket. I thought the window was going to bust out.

  “We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t get our whisky with that dog out there, Boyd told Hack to let the dogs fight, but Hack said no. Said that dog had cost him a hundred bucks and a good .38 to boot, and he wished he had that pistol now, he’d shoot that shepherd. He
asked if me or Boyd had a gun but we didn’t.

  “After a while, that coonhound started slowing down its barking in the back seat. So did the shepherd. When the coonhound stopped, the shepherd went back to the bootlegger. I looked back to see what made it stop, and there set Boyd jacking that dog off. Calmed it right down, by God. I started laughing, but Hack, he got mad. Said it would rain the dog for breeding.

  “Ol’ Boyd, he got mad right back. Told Hack, he said, ‘Go fetch that fucking whisky before I have to reach up there and do you like this dog.’ Well, Hack jumped out of that car like he’d got set on fire. He came back with the whisky and Boyd said to put that dog in the trunk. Hack didn’t want to. Boyd told him now that he’d gotten a taste for dog, he might just want some more, and Hack started driving fast, saying let’s get away from that shepherd first. He pulled over at the first wide spot. That coonhound was laying in a circle asleep and there set Boyd with half his liquor gone already. He had that big grin on him. Hack picked up his dog and Boyd looked at it and said ‘Bye, honey’ and Hack got so tickled he like to dropped that damn dog. He put it in the trunk.

  “We finished that whisky and went and got some more and drove all over hell and back and finally Hack asked Boyd what made him think to jack that dog off. Boyd, he just sat there a minute. ‘Give me a cigarette and I’ll say,’ he told Hack. Hack was the only one with smokes left and he didn’t like to give them up. He’d served two years in the pen over killing that man with a tree and the only change in him when he come out was getting stingy with a cigarette. Well, he gave me and Boyd both one and that was like a flat miracle for Hack.

  “Boyd opened his second pint and threw the lid out the window. He took a pull. He lit that cigarette. Said one time he’d been over to Mount Sterling drinking in a rough little bar and there was a boy wanted to fight him something awful. The boy was bad drunk. Nobody liked him. Said this old boy just kept swinging and missing and staggering, and Boyd hit him a couple of times but it was like hitting a cow. Didn’t do no good. Then the boy got a lick in and made Boyd mad, Boyd, he picked up a beer bottle by the neck and busted it and held the jagged part out at the guy. The bartender came up then and said to Boyd, ‘Hey, there’s people in here barefoot’ Boyd set the busted glass down and somebody took the little drunk outside. Boyd said he couldn’t sit down because he’d got a hard-on like a prybar jammed in sideways and hung on his underwear. Said when that dog started barking, he remembered all that. It just made sense to help the dog out that way.