Count Twice (3)

Tuesday came, and for the first time in six years lane three formed without him.

He spent the day below a bricked-over storefront near the yards, in a utility basement whose padlock had died of rust a tenant of the seventies ago. He had tried the daylight hours in a stairwell first, above grade, behind glass, and sleep had circled him without landing, hour on hour, the way a bird treats bad ground. Below the street it landed. It landed like something dropped. He went down at gray dawn among the dead meters and the dirt showing through the broken floor, and the next thing he owned was dusk, arriving in him all at once, on time, requiring nothing.

His body was spending its last reserve and both of them knew it. The tremble in his hands had widened. Water passed through him whole. On the fourth night he counted his pulse against the freight whistle and got a number so low he counted it again, and the number held, and he entered it in the memo book because a count was a count.

The storm came in off the river on the fifth night, hard rain gone cold, the kind that kills men in August by inches. The mission on Marden kept its door propped on such nights, yellow light down the steps, men filing in with their bedrolls sagging. He climbed the steps with the rest because his body wanted walls, and at the top, at the sill, between one man and the next, his legs quit.

Nothing barred him. The doorway stood as wide for him as for the man ahead. His weight simply would not pass the plane of the frame, the way a hand will not go into the fire regardless of what it is promised, and he stood with the rain running off him while men stepped around him, and he set his teeth and drove forward and got nothing for it. His boots might have grown up out of the stone.

A volunteer inside looked over, a heavy man drying a ladle.

"Come in out of it, brother."

His legs came free like a brake let off. He felt the sill unlock, felt the doorway turn from wall to door because a man with a ladle had said five words, and he stood on the freed threshold with the warm air coming past him. The warm air carried the room out to where he stood. Wet wool and coffee and soup, and under all of it, from forty sleeping and sitting men, the other thing, the living thing, banked and red and everywhere, and his mouth ran wet under the coal.

He turned around and went back down the steps into the rain.

He walked the storm dry, or nearly, learning the new arrangement. Doors that belonged to no one let him pass. The depot, the laundromat, the drugstore, any glass that opened for money, opened for him. Doors that belonged to someone were walls until the someone spoke. He tested it twice more in the small hours, a rooming-house vestibule, a tenement propped with a brick, and the rule held both times, exact as a gauge, and he wrote it in the book under a heading he ruled slowly. Somewhere in the walking the rain quit, and he noticed a further thing, which was that the cold had opinions about other men and none about him.

The counting turned on him that same week.

It had been coming on soft, a helper, the shape of his old competence. Counts steadied him. Blisters, breaths, tiles, steps between lampposts. Then on the sixth night, on the path through the little park above the yards, he came upon birdseed spilled at the foot of a bench, a torn pound of it flung wide across the pavers, and his eyes took the spill in one motion the way eyes take a word, and his knees were on the pavers before any part of him was consulted.

He counted. He pushed the seed into ranks of ten with the side of his thumb and counted the ranks, and when a rank came up nine he began again, and the beginning-again was the whole of him, there was no Dail standing behind it deciding, there was only the seed and the next figure. When he surfaced, the sky had turned. Three hours had gone into the ground under that bench. His thumb was raw at the side. Around him on the pavers the seed lay dressed in perfect ranks like a battalion on a parade ground, sixteen hundred and forty strong, and a rat sat at the end of the first rank, still as a finial, keeping his count for him.

He got up and walked, and behind his teeth the coal had spread to his hinges and his throat, and he understood that the reserve was gone, that the body had presented its invoice, and that he would pay it now or be paid.

He told himself the terms while he walked, and the terms were these. Someone going anyway. A little only. Never a child. He said them in order like stations on a route, and the saying steadied him the way counting had steadied him once, and he did not examine what it meant that he had them ready, worded, in order, as though a clerk in him had drafted the form days ago and dated it and left it in the tray for signature.

At the culvert camps there was an old man whose cough owned the whole embankment, a sound like a spade in gravel, three seasons in the going by any ear that knew coughs. Someone going anyway. Dail came down the path with the river smell behind him and stood at the edge of the tarp light, and the old man looked up from his fire and knew him.

"Prosser," the old man said. "They said the clinic soured you." He worked a tin cup out of the coals with a stick. "Set down. It ain't coffee but it's hot."

Dail stood at the light's edge with the cup steaming at him and the cough tolling under the tarp, and the terms went to paper in his hands. The old man had a name for him and a cup for him. He could no more draw on that man than he could have eaten the fire.

"Passing through," Dail said, and his voice came out in working order, which was its own strange news, and he went back up the path with the old man's voice behind him telling him to keep dry.

Under the viaduct at the bottom of Osier Street a younger man lay sleeping off a bottle against a bridge footing, boots crossed, coat open, no fire, no dog, no name that Dail knew. Sleeping rough by accident or by habit, but sound, big through the chest, a man with seasons in him. Not going anyway. Dail stood over him for the space of ten breaths, counting them without wanting to, five of the man's to every one of his own, and the clerk in him took the first term off the form as neatly as a line struck through, and left the other two standing, as though two terms were a kind of honor.

A little only.

He knelt.

Afterward he sat against the opposite footing with his back teeth aching and the world gone loud and near, and he counted the man's breaths across the dark. That was the arithmetic that remained. Eight to the minute, shallow, then nine, then ten as the body rallied, climbing back toward its number the way a gauge climbs, and Dail sat with his knees drawn up and audited every one. The man's face had gone the color of the bridge concrete. The man's hand moved once, closed on nothing, and lay still, and breathed.

A little only. He had meant it the way he had meant every entry he had ever made. Somewhere in it the meaning had come loose from the doing, the way a needle comes off a gauge that reads correct to the last, and what he had taken was what the taking wanted, and the taking had wanted more than a little, and the man under the bridge lived because his chest was big and his seasons were many, and for no other reason on the audit.

The warmth began in Dail's own chest and went out along him to the last of him, patient, thorough, like heat arriving through a wall from a stove in the next room. The ache went out of his knee that had ached since the warehouse ramp. The rasp went out of his breathing. Sounds arranged themselves at distances and held formation. He looked at the blisters on his forearm and they had gone to smooth pink shine, eleven pale coins of it, days of healing done in the hour, and up under the viaduct the dark came apart into its particulars for him, every strut and rivet accounted for, the whole structure standing at attention.

He rolled the man onto his side the way the field manual said to leave a casualty who must be left, tucked the open coat around him, and set the crossed boots straight. Then he took two twenties from his wallet, folded them in thirds, and worked them down into the man's left boot where they would be found on waking and not before, and squared the boot again, and stood.

Payment upon completion. He was four steps gone before the phrase surfaced, in the assistant manager's voice, off the close-printed page with no carbon under it, and he stopped in the dark between the footings with the river going by and could not make the four steps back to take the money out of the boot. He stood a long moment. Then he walked.

At the head of Osier Street the laundromat burned its lights at nothing, empty, doors open to anyone. He stopped at the black glass of it, and his reflection stood in the glass the way he required it to stand. He raised his right hand to settle his collar. The reflection settled its collar. Between his motion and its motion there was a lag the width of a syllable, a beat you could fit one word into, and in the space of the lag the eyes across the glass held on him the way the rats held, patient, level, keeping his count, and then the glass caught up and was only glass, and a man in it was fixing his collar in the ordinary night.

He held his hands out under the streetlight. The tremble was gone out of them entire. They hung in the light easy and level, a tradesman's hands, rated for the work. He made a fist to call the shake back up out of wherever the body kept it, and clenched until his knuckles stood white, and opened his fingers.

Steady. Steady as a full bag on a scale.

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