Shovel Ready: A Novel Read online

  She pulls the baggie out. Holds it up. Laughing now. Teasing.

  What, you deal coke? Is that how you afford this place?

  I snatch the bag back.

  No. I do a bit of butchering.

  Really?

  It’s a hobby.

  Cool. So what’s that? Please tell me it’s bacon.

  No. Not bacon. Just bones. For stock.

  Well, look at you, Mr Julia Child. Let me know if you rustle up some bacon. I’m not a big meat eater but I’ve had weird cravings of late.

  Rubs her belly.

  I stash the bag. Close the freezer. Step between her and it.

  Try to smile.

  Can’t let the cold out.

  I don’t have many visitors. So I get sloppy. Forget.

  A freezer is a very bad place to keep your souvenirs.

  10.

  Lazy Sunday. Me in an armchair. Her on the sofa with Sports.

  Regular Cleavers.

  I flip through the Post.

  A22. Tiny item.

  DEATH DINER DOUBLE SLAY.

  The American Century.

  I fold the paper back. Read it. Fill in the parts between the lines.

  Surveillance tape caught him: Buzz cut. Aviators. Left the cash in the cash drawer.

  Odd detail. Before he left, everyone dead, he holstered the pistol.

  Stopped at the sink.

  Washed his hands.

  Buzz cut. Aviators.

  Fondness for firearms.

  This must be Mr Pilot.

  Retracing our steps.

  Bus-fare option doesn’t seem like an option anymore.

  I fold the paper up, slide it under the chair.

  You know, you could stay here again tonight. A few more nights. I’ve got plenty of sweatshirts.

  She yawns. Stretches out on the leather. Leather squeaks.

  I just might.

  Turns her head. Freshly showered hair.

  Might even learn how to sleep with the door unlocked. If you’re lucky.

  Well, you’re welcome to. Stay, I mean.

  I gotta ask you again. Why are you being so nice to me?

  Everyone’s got to be nice to someone, right?

  I get up. Pretend I’m tidying the kitchen. Try to plot plan B.

  She turns back to Sports. Then stops. Sits up.

  Stares me down.

  My father sent you. Didn’t he?

  I stand like a dummy. With a dishcloth.

  Who?

  You know who. T. K. Harrow. Man of God.

  I’m not religious.

  Don’t fuck with me. He sent you. It’s the only way this makes sense.

  I’m no good at lying. Same as acting.

  Yes. He sent me. To find you.

  (Technically true.)

  And do what with me?

  Keep you safe.

  (Less true. Much less true.)

  Bring me back?

  Something like that.

  She sits up straight. Picks up the bowie knife in its sheath from the coffee table.

  Turns it in her fingers.

  Well, let me tell you about how things work in my family, just so you know what kind of people you’re working for. I stopped in on my uncle. In Brooklyn. For help? You know what he did for me?

  (More acting. I hate this.)

  No.

  Set me up on a blind date. A double date. With two rapists. Or white slavers. Sex-trade assholes. Who the fuck knows?

  Sounds like a charmer.

  Lucky for me, the only place they didn’t want to stick their grubby hands was in my boot.

  She pulls the blade from the stained sheath.

  Last I saw them, they were bleeding in a van in Red Hook.

  I affect a shrug. Hapless Mitch all over again.

  Sounds like they got better than they deserve.

  She inspects the blade.

  Does come in handy.

  Sheaths it.

  As for my father. The great T. K. Harrow? Leader of men? Pastor of sheep? Instrument of God?

  Pulls the blade out again.

  You’ve probably seen him on TV, right?

  Don’t watch TV.

  That’s okay. He’s got bigger plans than that. Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into? Do you have any idea what kind of man my father is?

  I’m starting to get some idea.

  No. I don’t think you do.

  Sheaths the blade.

  But if you’re on his payroll, you should know.

  Puts the sheath down.

  He’s my father.

  Pulls her knees up. Hugs them hard.

  Yes. I know. I know he’s your father.

  No. You heard me wrong.

  Hugs them harder. Arms round her knees. Arms round her baby.

  I said, he’s the father. He’s the father. That’s what I said.

  11.

  I worked as a garbageman for ten years, more or less. Lost my father, my union card, and my marbles, in roughly that order.

  Father went first. Died of a heart attack he worked a lifetime to earn. Strict regimen of smoking, bacon, and television. Man loved his Jets. Claimed they were Jersey’s team. Forty-five millionaires in green helmets somewhere, carrying his heart into battle every week.

  He didn’t die on the job, thank God, stink of other people’s garbage in his nose, not that he would have cared. When people asked his line of work, he never faltered. It was a good union wage and he wanted the same for me. My first day, he took me out to the truck yard, pulled the gloves on, drew a deep breath.

  Smell that? That’s security, son.

  He was felled too young, in his own backyard. The plot of ground he’d bought by hauling other people’s trash.

  Barely room enough to fall down.

  My mother sat on his chest, pumping, wailing, waiting for an ambulance that came ten minutes too late. Two streets with the same name. One avenue, one lane.

  They picked wrong.

  My mother tried. She was a nurse. Not the kind that fix feed tubes to rich people either.

  By then I’d married my Stella. A Jersey girl, she swore never to live in Jersey by choice. I said Queens. She said Manhattan. We split the difference and ended up in Brooklyn. Carroll Gardens. South, down by the expressway. The part that’s not so gardeny.

  My parents wanted to see a family. We were trying, but we weren’t in a rush. We tried long enough to worry something might be wrong, but then we decided to stop worrying. We were young. My Stella wanted to be an actress. She rode the train to Times Square every day. Acting class in a shabby studio. Half my union wage.

  I rode a route up through brownstone Brooklyn. Nicer neighborhood than we could afford. Nicer garbage too.

  Boys on my truck gave us a nickname for a joke. Not garbagemen.

  Trash valets.

  It’s hokey but it’s true. You learn things hauling trash.

  Lesson one. Don’t buy cheap bags. They always tear. If not in your hands, then in mine. No discount bag ever went to its grave without being loudly cursed along the way.

  Lesson two. There is nothing, and no one, that you will become attached to in this life that you will not one day discard.

  Or they discard you.

  Or you die.

  Those are the only three outcomes.

  A bartender I know once quoted me a poem, by a guy named Idol or something similar.

  Every human being who’s ever lived has died, except the living.

  Lesson three.

  You’ll leave a trail of trash on this Earth that will far exceed anything of worth you leave behind. For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.

  That’s not a poet. That’s me.

  What can I say? Sometimes you’re on the toilet and you’ve already read all the magazines. Inspiration hits.

  But that’s the lesson. Your real legacy will be buried in a dump somewhere.

  And the richer you are, the more trash you leave behind.


  After the first attacks, the ones on 9/11, so they tell me, they took the rubble of the towers to a landfill.

  Fresh Kills.

  Sifted through it, searching for bodies. Bits of bodies. Bits of bits. Did their best and found what they could and left the rest of it there, buried.

  True story.

  Landfill became a graveyard.

  The landfill doesn’t care.

  Never more than a whisper of difference between them to begin with.

  Every garbageman has funny stories of stuff he’s found on the job, of course. False teeth, brand-new flatscreen still in the box, a fake leg, a stuffed ferret. A double-ended dildo switches on, leaps out of the bag, twisting like an electric eel. Stuff like that.

  People don’t know what to do with something, they toss it in the trash. Brush off their hands. Expect it to disappear. Like magic.

  Every garbageman has a funny story like that.

  Here’s mine.

  We ran a route that looped past the crane yards by Columbia Street. Not six blocks from Long Island Hospital. We were done for the day and doubling back.

  I was on the rear, riding shotgun. Like I’m security on a Wells Fargo stagecoach.

  We roll past three bags, dropped in a vacant lot. Look like dim-sum dumplings sitting there. Illegally dumped. People miss their day so they hump their trash down the block. Can’t stand the stink in the kitchen. Commonplace. These jokers couldn’t even be bothered to drag the bags to the dumpster, maybe twenty yards away. Property of a private disposal company.

  Company name stenciled on the dumpster.

  SPADEMAN.

  Bags in the dumpster are not our problem.

  These three bags. Our problem.

  Technically our shift’s done. Plus no one’s watching.

  Still, I slap the side of the truck twice.

  Driver stops.

  Figure, our job is to keep the city looking nice. I’m a new neighbor here.

  Let’s make it look nice.

  Pick one bag up, swing it overhead like a hammer toss. For a laugh.

  Fling it in.

  Second bag, swing it sidearm like David’s slingshot, sighting Goliath.

  Bullseye.

  Third bag.

  Lift the bag.

  Funny heft.

  Lower it. Slowly.

  Though the God’s honest truth is that I never would have opened it if I hadn’t heard the gurgle.

  They must have chickened out. Thought the plastic bag would finish it.

  Cheap bags.

  Always tear.

  I carried a box-cutter to slash problem trash. Unbroken boxes, tangled twine. Shit like that.

  Popped the blade up. Sliced the bag as carefully as I could. Like surgery.

  Peeled the bag back.

  Baby still breathing, barely.

  That’s my funny story.

  First and last time I ever held a baby in my arms.

  Not six blocks from Long Island Hospital.

  They could have left the baby on the front door, rung the bell, run.

  Instead, vacant lot became a landfill. Became a graveyard. So they hoped.

  Six blocks.

  So I took the trip they couldn’t be bothered to take.

  In some other version of the story, I adopted the baby. Named it. Raised it with my wife as our own. Told it the story, when it was old enough, of Baby Moses, left in the bulrushes, the one I learned in church as a kid.

  This isn’t that story.

  I left the baby at the hospital. With a nurse. Answered a few questions. Signed a few forms. Went home to my wife.

  Didn’t check back. Didn’t want to know.

  And didn’t tell my Stella until she read about it the next day in the Post.

  Saw another item in the Post a few days later.

  BAG BABY BURIAL.

  Buried deep inside the paper.

  Not even front-page news.

  They needed a scandal. Baby left in a garbage bag? Story like that demands a villain. Someone to wear the black hat.

  No one knew who left it. So that left me.

  Post said I found it. Dumped it at the ER.

  Didn’t do enough.

  Didn’t even stick around to see if it would be okay.

  I took a six-month leave. Union mandated. Half pay.

  Weekly psychiatric consultations.

  Daily visits to the bar.

  Nightly nightmares.

  Then the mayor finally busted the union. I tore up my card and cancelled my next visit to the shrink.

  And I went back to work.

  Someone’s got to pay for all those acting lessons.

  Even my Stella didn’t understand. Not really.

  She let it be. But I could tell.

  Guys on the job too. Even the guys on my truck. Guys who were there.

  Figured at the very least you stay. Cheer that baby back to life.

  Maybe they’re right.

  Truth is, I wasn’t going to sit in a waiting room so a nurse could tell me that the baby I just found in a garbage bag died.

  I peeled that bag open so carefully it was like I was delivering my own baby.

  So scared of what I would find inside.

  I couldn’t do that twice. Wait for news. Wait to know.

  Sit there. Hunched over. Waiting.

  Clutching my garbageman gloves.

  In the waiting room.

  With all the other expectant dads.

  12.

  Pass me not O gentle Savior,

  Hear my humble cry.

  Whilst on others thou art calling,

  Do not pass me by.

  Street-corner church service. Soap box preacher. Big crowd.

  More popular in these end times.

  Persephone’s news put me back on my heels.

  I don’t like to be back on my heels.

  First response, usually, is extend my box-cutter, find someone to apply it to.

  But that will not help in this situation. Much.

  What I need is information. So I call my newspaper buddy.

  Rockwell.

  The one who says I’m always burying the lede.

  I leave Persephone at the apartment, tell her don’t open the door for anyone, no matter what.

  Then I meet Rockwell at a bar on Washington. Main artery in the proud heart of Hoboken. This bar opens early on Sunday. Most do. It’s not crowded inside, but it’s not empty either. A different kind of communion.

  Bartender’s the owner. My poet-quoting friend, Sebastian, from the Dominican. Named for the saint. So he says.

  Sets us up with two shots.

  Rockwell used to work for the Times, then he got fired. Turns out he has a lying problem, at work and in life. He once told me he’s a descendant of the great American painter. Luckily I don’t care much either way.

  Now he publishes his own paper. The Rockwell Report. Conspiracies and cover-ups. He’s the sole reporter. You can pick it up on any street corner. Literally. From a big pile. He leaves them there. For free.

  Also runs a website, of course, on the old-fashioned Internet. But he likes the feel of paper, the stink of ink, so he says. Salvaged two copy machines from a bombed-out Staples near Times Square. Ran the Geiger counter over them. Only clicked a little bit, he claims.

  Plus he wears horn-rims. So at least he looks like a reporter.

  Tell me about T. K. Harrow.

  What do you want to know that you don’t already know?

  Just empty the file.

  Okay. Well, he runs that big church down South that sounds like a country singer. Hope Baptist. Hallelujah Hall. Something like that. Wait. Crystal Corral. That’s it. So there’s that.

  What else?

  The TV. That’s where it all started. And it’s lucrative.

  That many people still watch TV?

  Sure. You should get out of the city more often, you’d be surprised how many rabbit ears you still see. Not everyone’s ready to jam an IV tube in t
heir arm every time they want to escape, you know? Plus TV’s basically free—at least, besides the money you send to your favorite evangelist in a little white envelope every week. Which adds up.

  I guess so.

  As for political clout, Harrow runs a weekly Washington prayer breakfast that’s attended by, like, twelve senators and forty members of the House. So there’s that. He more or less got our current president elected, first genuine fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumper in the White House. So there’s that. And then he’s got this new thing. Paved With Gold.

  This is good. This is useful. This is enough to buy Rockwell another round.

  Sebastian sets them down.

  Paved With Gold. What’s that?

  It’s this limnosphere thing. Signs up converts. Promises them heaven right now, here on Earth. Why wait, that’s the pitch. Gold mansions. Endless happiness. Harp-playing-fucking-angels. All that stuff. Paved With Gold. You know, like the streets of Glory.

  I thought the road to hell was paved with gold.

  No. That’s good intentions.

  But how do people afford it? A bed alone is a fortune. Not to mention monthly tap-in fees, feed-bags—

  Harrow subsidizes. He’s got a camp somewhere down South. Rows and rows of beds. So they say. Limited space, so he can only accept the elect. How he chooses, God only knows. It’s his earthly mission, he claims. Reason God put him here. Deliver his people from the torments of this bodily world.

  Rockwell empties shot two. For him, two shots is just the stretching before the marathon.

  So how big is his ministry?

  How big? The biggest. When you can convince half the US government to get up at dawn to listen to you tell them what fucked-up sinners they are, that’s pretty big. I don’t know much about this fake heaven of his, but he’s already amassed enough gold here on Earth to pave plenty of streets. Plus the political pull. He’s got the president’s ear. All that stuff. The only ripples on his pond I ever heard about are his kids. He has trouble with his daughters. So I hear. The oldest one supposedly went AWOL. Can’t remember her name. Grace something.

  Chastity.

  Rockwell gives me a look.

  Now why in the world would you know that?

  Lucky guess. Figure it’s got to be one of those virtues. You know. Constance. Charity.

  Funny. Those are his other daughters.