Count Twice (1)

The first bus came through at five fifty, and Dail Prosser was folded and swept before its headlights crossed the depot fence.

He worked in a fixed order. Blanket shaken twice, rolled tight, strapped to the pack. Spare trousers out from under the head end of the cardboard, refolded along the store crease they had carried for six years. The cardboard stood on end behind the meter housing, where rain could not find it. Last came the wallet, which had spent the night inside his shirt. He thumbed it open and checked the card behind its cloudy window. PROSSER, DAIL R. The eagle. The ten digits. The laminate had bubbled at one corner where the library's press had run cold, and his thumbnail rode the ridge of it once, the way a tongue rides a chipped tooth. He buttoned the wallet into his front left pocket and pressed the button flat.

The spigot behind the depot ran rust for a ten count and then ran clear. He washed his face and neck, wet his hair and combed it with a comb missing two teeth, and shaved by feel with a disposable he kept in a soap tin. Twelfth week on the blade. In the dark glass of the depot office his reflection stood the way he required it to stand, and he gave it the same short nod he gave the drivers.

The storage yard opened at seven. His unit was a five-by-five at the end of the second row, and he went there Tuesdays to take one tin of mackerel from the case and to look at the ledger book he did not carry on the street. This Tuesday there was a sheet of paper taped inside the office window. EFFECTIVE SEPT 1 ALL 5X5 UNITS $52 MONTHLY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS. He read it twice. Fifty-two was fourteen more than thirty-eight.

Inside the unit, the footlocker sat under the shelf where he had squared it. A box of kitchen things sat on the shelf, wrapped in newspaper gone yellow, the lid marked KITCHEN — FRAGILE in a hand that was not his. He had stopped reading the lid a long time ago and read it now anyway. Then he sat on the footlocker with the ledger open on his knees and did the month again with the pen braced against the edge of his knee.

Plasma paid thirty-five a visit, Tuesdays and Fridays, the legal ceiling. Seventy a week. The locker took its cut, and the laundromat, and the mackerel and the rye and the blade and the bus fare he allowed himself when the sky went wrong. What was left went into the bottom line of the ledger, and the bottom line stood at two hundred eleven dollars against the three hundred that the woman on Calder Street wanted down for the second-floor room. He had seen the room once, in June, from the doorway. A bed, a chair, a window with a paper shade, a door with a bolt on the inside of it. On the ledger's inside cover, where a man might write his address, he had ruled a faint line and left it blank.

Fourteen more a month for the locker moved the room from October to December, and December moved it to a season he did not let the pen reach. He closed the ledger, squared it on the footlocker, and locked up.

The library opened at ten. He read the paper on its wooden spine, the front section and the legal notices, and he sat with a western until his clothes forgot the night's damp. The librarian with the glass beads did not ask him anything, which was the kindness he preferred. At eleven forty he returned the western to its exact gap on the shelf and walked the twelve blocks to the plasma center with his sleeves rolled down.

BioSera Donor Center kept its glass clean and its carpet gray. The scraper mat took what his boots carried, and the air inside smelled of cold coffee and iodine. He took lane three. The clipboard came across the counter with the intake form squared under the clip, and he filled it out with his own ballpoint, block letters, no strikeouts. Permanent address: the box marked NO. Emergency contact: NO. Attending physician: NONE. Occupation: LOGISTICS, FORMERLY. The pen wanted to keep going after the comma and he lifted it.

The technician behind the glass had nails the color of antifreeze that ticked against her keys. She pulled his ledger card from the file without looking above his collar, took his pulse at fifty-four, ran the copper drop test and watched the drop sink. Cleared. He rolled his sleeve. The chair in Bay 2 took his weight the way it always did, and the needle went in cold and settled warm, and the machine ticked and drew and gave back what it did not keep, and for ninety minutes he counted the ceiling. Fourteen tiles across, eight deep. One hundred twelve. Three carried brown stains near the vents, and the stains had not grown since March.

They loaded thirty-five dollars onto the card and he was reaching for his coat when a man came around the counter with a different clipboard. Short-sleeved shirt, lanyard, a manager's soft hands. The badge read ASST. MGR.

"Mr. Prosser." He said the name right. "You're a two-a-week."

"Tuesdays and Fridays."

"Your protein's good. Veins are good. We've got a compensation study starting up, new anticoagulant lot, extended yield. One session, after close on Friday, runs about three hours." He turned the clipboard. The sheet held a dozen lines and two sets of initials. "It pays one fifty."

Dail looked at the number printed at the top of the sheet, and then at the two sets of initials, and his thumb found the button of his front left pocket.

"Does it screw my Tuesday?"

"Counts as your Friday. You're back on schedule next week like nothing happened." The manager clicked his pen once. "Doesn't suit everybody. Think it over. Ask for me Friday if you want in."

Dail said he would think it over, and the doors let him out into the afternoon.

He thought it over for two days the way he did his arithmetic, from the bottom line up. One fifty on Friday put him at three sixty-one. Three hundred down on Calder Street left sixty-one, and sixty-one covered the locker and the week besides. Wednesday evening he walked past the house. The porch light was on. The woman was sweeping the boards, and she stopped sweeping while he stood at the gate with his cap in his hand.

"Second floor's still open," she said. "I hold nothing past the fifteenth. First come with the deposit."

"Saturday," he said. "Noon."

"Saturday noon, then." She went back to the broom, and he stood a moment longer looking at the window with the paper shade, which was dark, and which had a shape to it like a thing kept.

Thursday he ate light and drank water on a schedule, the way the pamphlet in the clinic rack advised ahead of a draw. He slept badly for no reason he would have named, woke twice to the freight sound, and both times his hand went to his shirt and found the wallet where it lived.

Friday at seven forty the lot behind BioSera held four cars. The glass doors were locked and a man let him in when he knocked, one of the day techs he half knew, glasses mended at the hinge with tape. Inside, the main tubes were down to half power and the gray carpet had gone the color of dishwater. The chairs stood empty in their numbered rows like a church between services.

The assistant manager came out from the back with the clipboard. "Mr. Prosser. Glad you came in." The sheet he offered now was a single page, close-printed, no carbon under it. Dail read it standing up. The words ran long, in the way of words that have been made to cover ground quietly, and among them he found extended yield and investigational lot and compensation upon completion. There was no box for an address, because they had his card on file, and no line for a witness.

"Regular form's got a carbon," he said.

"Study's run separate. Different filing." The manager held out his own pen, a heavy one. "One fifty, end of session."

The pen was warm from the man's pocket. Dail signed his name the size he always signed it and printed it beneath, block letters, and dated it, and the manager took the sheet away without squaring it against the clip.

They put him in Bay 4, at the back, past the partition. The chair there was older, the vinyl split and taped at the arm. A second tech came around, a big man in a windbreaker who did not give a name, and behind the partition somewhere a door opened to the loading side and shut again, and a vehicle idled and stopped. Four of them, then, counting the manager. The tech with the taped glasses swabbed the crook of his arm and hung a bag on the scale hook, and the bag was a size he had not seen before.

"Sixteen gauge," the tech said, to the other tech. "Good vein."

The needle went in cold and settled warm. The tube filled dark and looped down. The machine here did not tick. It hummed, lower than the tubes overhead, and the pump turned with a sound like a man clearing his throat in another room.

Dail laid his head back and found the ceiling. Fourteen across, eight deep. He counted them left to right by rows, the way he had counted pallets in a warehouse the width of a runway, back when a battalion ate and moved because his columns footed. One hundred twelve. Three stains. He started again, right to left this time, for the discipline of it.

The manager passed through twice, checking the scale, saying nothing. The big tech leaned on the counter by the cold room door with his arms folded. The idling sound came and went once more out on the loading side.

The room began to come loose from him quietly, the way warm water comes up a sleeve. His lips cooled first. The count went ragged at the sixth row, and he brought it back and lost it again at the fourth, and he let his eyes close for the length of one breath because a man is allowed one breath.

Hands were at his coat where it lay over the chair arm. Straightening it. Tucking something into it, or taking something out. The coat slid and was caught, and his wallet came out of it into the work light with the cloudy window facing up.

Away off, the pump cleared its throat and kept drawing.

The tech with the taped glasses stood holding the open wallet, and he had gone as still as the chairs. His thumb lay flat across the gold of the eagle and the ten digits under it, pressing, as though the card were something that could be put out like a match. The bag hung fat and dark on the scale hook, a pound and more past any bag Dail had ever filled, and the scale's needle trembled at the top of its arc, and nobody in the room was breathing that he could hear.

"Hold the line," the tech said. Not loud. Then, louder, toward the partition: "Hold it. He's in the system."

The last thing to reach Dail was his own count, coming back to him from a distance, looking for the fourth row. The tiles had gone the gray of the carpet. The gloved thumb stayed flat on the card, whitening at the knuckle, and the pump drew, and drew, and drew.

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