Count Twice (4)

By the middle of September he had an economy again.

He drew small and he drew careful, sleeping men in the deep hours, a little from each and never twice from the same man in a month, and he kept the book on it the way he kept the book on everything. Each entry got its date and its place and its amount, near as he could reckon an amount, and each entry got its payment, folded in thirds, worked down into a boot or a coat lining where morning would find it. The payments came off the clinic card and then off the ledger's bottom line, the two hundred eleven that had been a room once, and he watched the room spend itself out into the boots of sleeping strangers at forty dollars a man and made the entries in block letters, no strikeouts.

There was one in the last week of September behind the fuel-oil yard, a man asleep sitting up against the tank cradle with his cap laid over his face and his ankles crossed. Dail lifted the cap off to get at him and set it on the gravel with the crown down the way a man sets his own hat, and put it back when he was done. The boots were black-polished and resoled by hand, the stitching waxed, kept that way in the open where nothing else was kept. He folded the twenty in thirds and worked it down into the left one and squared the pair before he went, and entered the date and the place and no name, because there was none to enter.

The strays kept his watches with him. He had quit shooing them somewhere in the first week, and what they did with his tolerance was arrange themselves. Dogs took the corners he could not see from wherever he stood. Rats worked the gaps. He never sent them anywhere, had no words for them and no wish for any, and still when the loading door behind BioSera opened on a Thursday night the first he knew of it was a dog two lots over coming up off its haunches, and the knowing traveled to him through the dark like a tug on a line. He stood his watches across from the clinic four nights a week and learned its second schedule. Thursdays the van came to the loading side at one and left at two, riding lower going than coming. He counted the difference in its springs. Some Thursdays the difference was product. He did not let the count say what it was the other Thursdays.

The river taught him the shape of his life on a Monday.

He had it in mind to walk to the VA annex on the north bank, where a doctor had twice a year looked at the warehouse knee and kept him, in that one building's memory, a name with a file. What he meant to say when he got there had not come to him, and he was still working on it at the approach of the Union Street bridge when his legs quit at the joint where the land ended and the water began under the deck. The same brake as the mission sill. He stood at the bridgehead with traffic going by into the ordinary north and put his hand on the rail and could no more follow his hand than he could have walked into the river itself. He tried the rail trestle a mile down and the trestle refused him at the same joint, over the same moving water, exact as a gauge.

He climbed the embankment and stood where he could see the whole of it in the last light. The river bowed around the south side like an arm, and the interstate cut the land side, running its own water in a concrete race, and inside the bow lay the yards and the depot and the camps and the missions and the storage lots and the clinic, all of it, the district entire. He had walked this shape for three years and called it his rounds. The clinic had drawn the same shape on some map in some office and called it something else. He stood on the embankment while the light went, a man looking at the inside of a fence from the inside, and then he went down and walked his rounds, because they were what there was.

On the way he passed the iron fence of St. Aldric's, where the burying ground ran along the street, and put his hand on the gate latch as he had done some nights for the plain quiet on the other side, and his legs quit at the gate line. He stood a moment. He took his hand off the latch, and entered a new heading in the book under the streetlight, and the heading was the shortest one yet, and he ruled it and closed the book and walked on.

The clinic kept no one on Sundays past six. He came to the loading side at three in the morning with the strays already stationed, though he had stationed none of them, and looked at the padlock through the hasp, and then took the hasp itself off the brick, screws and all, with a grip and a quarter turn, quiet as pulling a nail from wet wood. The strength was simply there, rated for the work, and he stood a breath with the hardware in his hand before he set it down and went in, because every new fact about his hands wanted a moment's silence and he had learned to pay it.

Bay 4 stood in the dark past the partition with its split arm taped. He gave it nothing and went on to the back.

The cold room held two boxes. The forward one wore inventory stickers and lot sheets in plastic sleeves, everything carboned, everything filed, the clinic that the daytime believed in. The rear one was a case fridge with dates in black marker on the units and no sheet anywhere, and beside it, on a shelf at hand height, wedged behind a carton of tubing, a gray quadrille book with its corners gone soft.

He took the book to the manager's desk and put on the lamp and opened it, and the count rose in him and locked on, and for the first time since the birdseed he did not fight it, because here at last was a spill worth the kneeling.

The entries ran back twenty months in three hands. Dates. Initials, the drawing tech's, in a code that broke in a minute for a man who had kept motor pools honest. Units taken. A final column headed DISP with a letter in it, the same letter nearly every time, R, and once in the spring a different letter with a question mark after it, and the question mark had been written over twice, hard, as though the pen were settling an argument.

Nine entries since the first of January carried the notation EXT. He counted them, and counted them again by another route, down the date column, and the figure held. Nine extended. Nine disposals. Nine men subtracted from a district that would not miss them in any book but this one, and this one kept them, carried as line items in a hand that dotted its figures like a schoolboy.

The fourth of the nine was dated the second of March, and he could place the second of March, because it had sleeted that night and he had shared the recessed doorway of the tobacco outlet with a man who had a plastic sheet and gave him half of it. They had not traded names. The man had talked about a brother in Elizabethtown and a bus fare he was eleven dollars short of, and had been gone from the doorway before light, and Dail had thought about that eleven dollars off and on for a week and then not again. In the book the man was nine units and the letter R. Dail sat with his thumb on the line and could not put anything else on it. There was nothing else on it to put.

His own Friday was there. 8/1, his initials in their code, EXT struck through with a single line, and after it, ABT, and after that, COMP 150, and the entry balanced. He sat looking at himself as a corrected error until the lamp seemed loud.

The units in the case fridge behind him wore their marker dates, and two dates among them matched two of his bruises, which was arithmetic of a kind, and he made himself go down the EXT column one more time against those dates, and found 6/19. EXT, eleven units, DISP R. No initials for the man himself. No name anywhere, no intake card in the unsheeted world, nothing the daytime filing would ever be asked to produce. A date, a volume, a letter. Whoever had walked into Bay 4 on the nineteenth of June had gone out of the world's books entire, except that eleven units of him had waited in a case fridge with the hum for company, and on the first of August two of them had been pushed cold into the arm of a crashing man, and now stood at a desk lamp at four in the morning reading the only sentence ever written about him.

Dail closed the quadrille book and squared it to the desk edge. Then he took the drugstore receipt from behind his card, MEDICAL STUDY COMP, folded in thirds since the Sunday it was printed, and opened it flat, and laid it square in the center of the desk where the book had lain. He put the book inside his coat, against his ribs, and went out the way he had come, and set the hasp back to the brick with the screws seated in their stripped holes, close enough to hold for a hand that did not pull.

Tuesday he wrapped the book in butcher paper at the depot and wrote on the face of it the address of the Courier offices, which he had looked up at the library and copied out in block letters, and carried it to the blue collection box on the boulevard, and stood before the box with the package squared in both hands. The slot hung open on its hinge. Mail went north over the bridge in a truck every evening, over the water, into the ordinary world where such a package would be opened by a stranger with a letter knife, and the columns would come out into the daylight and foot in public, and the clinic would end, and the district would be, in that one particular, safe.

Under the address, in the corner of the butcher paper where there was room, he had put down some figures on the Tuesday and had not been able to say afterward why he had put them down. Twelve in a queue, twice a week, at thirty-five. The men in the camps who came in for it and the weeks in a winter. He had footed the column the way he footed every column, and the figure at the bottom of it was what the district took in at that glass door and would not take in anywhere else, and it stood there under the Courier's address in his own block letters where a stranger with a letter knife would have seen it first.

He stood at the box while a bus went by, and another.

Then the package went back inside his coat against his ribs, and his hand came off the slot, and the slot swung to with a sound like a small door.

Thursday at one he was standing under the lamp across the loading lot when the van came. The driver saw him first, half out of the cab, one boot on the ground, and went still with the door handle in his fist. Then the manager came out onto the dock with the night's paperwork and followed the driver's stillness across the lot to its object, and Dail stood in the cone of the lamp with his hands easy at his sides and let himself be read. The dead have a look. He had seen it in the laundromat glass, the lag, the level eyes. He gave them the whole of it across forty feet of asphalt. The driver's hand came off the door handle and went inside the cab and the lock went down under it, and stayed down, and the driver stayed in the truck. On the dock the manager's clipboard went out of his hands and struck the concrete flat and the sheets fanned loose and began to go one at a time off the edge into the lot, and the manager did not bend for them. He stood over his own paperwork with his back against the roll door and let it go past his shoes into the dark. Dail watched the pages leave and marked it down as what it was, a night shift that had stopped keeping its records, a man who had quit the procedure his whole operation rested on, and there was satisfaction in it, and he turned in his own time and walked into the dark with the book against his ribs, and behind him the van sat at the dock with its engine running and running and nobody came to load it.

Friday evening the clinic ran its lawful hours, and he watched the queue from across the street. Nine waited under the sign at the door. His eyes went down the line and the count went with them, sorting as it went, and it had them sorted before he knew the sort was running. The big man with roofer's shoulders, sixteen weeks of Tuesdays in him. The gray woman with the tote, poor veins, a drop that would sink slow. The kid at the rail, one-forty soaking wet, a scratch draw. The count ran the line twice and posted its figures somewhere in him he had never ruled a column for, and he stood on the far curb with the figures posting and could not make it stop, and did not entirely try.

At the end of the queue a man set down a bedroll to rest his back, and tipped his head to read the sign above the door. YES — WE'RE OPEN. The man took up the bedroll and moved forward with the line, toward the glass, and the glass let the light out onto him along with all the others, making no distinction that any passerby could see.

Dail stood on the far curb with the book against his ribs, and watched him go in.

To Be Continued...