Count Twice (5)

By the last Thursday of October the dark came down at six, and he woke below the bricked-over storefront with the whole of a long night in hand.

He took the den's inventory before going up, as he took it every dusk, by candle stub and habit. Water, four gallons, untouched, kept against no need he could have entered in any column. Candles, nine. The memo book, squared to the shelf edge. Beside it, wrapped in butcher paper gone soft at the corners, the package addressed in block letters to the Courier, the address still good, the wrapping never opened since the night it was wrapped. And against the wall where the count could find it without hunting, one pallet slat, oak, split true along the grain, thirty inches, its point dressed smooth with a pocketstone. He counted the water and the candles and touched the two long items each once, the paper one and the oak one, the way a man touches his hat and his keys going out, and went up into the evening.

The clinic's glass was dark when he came to it, the day shift an hour gone. He stood at the black pane while he worked the loading key on its ring, and his reflection stood in the glass and worked its key. He raised his chin to settle his collar and the glass raised its chin with him, to the instant, entire. He held still and hunted the lag the way he had hunted it every night since the laundromat, the syllable's width where a man could once have fit one word, and the lag was gone. Glass and man moved on one clock now, reconciled, the accounts agreed between them, and he looked at the agreement a moment longer and then let them both inside.

The program ran Thursdays and ran full.

Twelve stood in the queue by seven, under the sign, breath showing, and some of the twelve were faces he could post from memory now, weekly men, because the word had gone around the district the way all words went around it. The evening study paid fifty, cash card, no questions past the form. The form had a carbon under it. The volumes came off conservative, entered true, checked twice. There was juice after, and cookies from a warehouse club, and when the last draw cleared, the van ran men back to the missions and the camps through the cold with the heater going, the same van, the same driver, who kept both hands on the wheel now at all hours and had learned to say watch your step at the door.

Dail worked the back of the house with a lanyard the manager had found him the first week, the sleeve of it empty, no card behind the plastic, and no one in five weeks had asked the blank badge its name. The manager brought him the night sheet at seven and stood off a half step while he read it, and where Dail's finger stopped, the manager initialed. The tech with the taped glasses ran the chairs and did not look toward the back booth, had not looked toward the back booth since September, and did his work well, better than he had ever done it for the other management, and dotted his figures like a schoolboy. Nothing was said among any of them that a recording could have kept. The whole of it ran on procedure, and procedure was a thing Dail could produce in any quantity required.

The gray quadrille book had taken no entry since August. He had ruled its last page off himself, a single line, and started the new book with carbons, and the new book balanced against no broker and carried no column headed DISP, because the column was retired, and the men who had once filled it walked out the front door now at half past midnight with juice in them and fifty dollars and a van waiting. He had made it kinder in every particular a particular could be named, and he had made most of the particulars himself, on the night sheet, in his own hand. Two crackers to a packet instead of one. Caps stayed on in the chair, because a man in a chair with his cap off is a man being worked on. The gauze went two turns past what the gauze needed and the tape came off the roll square. Bay 4 was closed and stayed closed, and the split arm never got taped again. In the fourth week the manager brought him the sheet and stood off his half step and said the yield was up, and did not say by how much, and Dail found it himself on the third line: eighteen in a hundred over the old program, on lower volumes, from men who came back. He read the figure twice and ruled it and carried it forward. The queue was longer for it. The district came to the glass twice a week now of its own accord and signed its own name and put out its own arm, and he sat at the back of the house with the night sheet and could not always tell, reading his own neat columns, which side of the ledger the kindness posted to.

At the end of the night, when the van had gone and the chairs stood empty in their rows, he took his own draw standing at the open case fridge, from a marked unit, cold, alone, the door's light on him and the hum for company, the way a shift man drinks the last coffee out of a machine. It took a minute. It touched no one. There was no boot to fold money into and no breath to count across a dark, and that was the improvement, and he stood in the fridge light while the improvement went down cold and said nothing to him at all.

Somebody had left a newspaper folded on a waiting-room chair, and he took it to the back booth at ten because pages got read. He went through the front section and came to the legal notices, which he had read every Tuesday for six years, and read them now in the same order, and found the storage yard's name among them. PUBLIC LIEN SALE. Units listed by number for delinquent rent, contents unknown, sold as a lot, cash day of sale. His was the fifth number in the column. The sale had been held on the eleventh of October at ten in the morning, in daylight, and a man he would never see had carried out the footlocker and the shelf and the box with the newspaper wrapping and the lid in the hand that was not his, and had paid some figure for the whole of it without opening anything. Dail read the line twice. Then he squared the paper along its own fold and set it on the counter for the recycling and went back to the night sheet, and the figures on the night sheet were where he had left them.

A donor at the window wanted change for the vending machine near eleven, and Dail keyed the register drawer and lifted the coin tray to break a five. Under the tray, flat on the drawer liner where he had set it in September, lay the card. The laminate bubbled at one corner. The white crease across the eagle. PROSSER, DAIL R., face up in the drawer's dark, the ten digits keeping their file on a man as well as they had ever kept it. He made the change, counted it twice into the donor's palm, and let the tray back down.

The new man came in at half past eleven, at the tail of the queue, and wiped his boots on the scraper mat until the mat had everything.

Dail saw the boots first, black-polished, resoled by hand, the stitching waxed. Then the cuffs, folded twice each to the same width, and the coat brushed, and the cap carried, and the manner, which was the manner of a man arriving squared away to a place that had never once asked it of him. At the counter the man declined the clinic's pen and brought out his own ballpoint, and held the clipboard at reading distance, and worked down the form in block letters with no strikeouts. From the back of the house Dail watched him check the boxes, and the boxes came in the old order, and each one landed somewhere under Dail's ribs in the same order. Permanent address, NO. Emergency contact, NO. Attending physician, NONE. At occupation the pen stopped a moment, and then wrote a word, and then a comma, and then wrote FORMERLY, and lifted.

The tech reached for the clipboard, and Dail was at the counter before the reach finished, and took it himself.

The form was filled true. The name was printed plain and dated. Pulse fifty-eight, and the copper drop test cleared, the drop going down like a stone through the blue. Dail entered the figures and initialed where his own finger stopped, and the man stood easy at the counter with his cap in his hand and his eyes on the middle distance, a man practiced at being processed, giving the process no trouble.

"You're new to the evening program," Dail said.

"Saw the sheet at the mission. Fifty, it said." The man's thumb moved on the brim of the cap, riding a ridge in the felt where something lay folded in thirds under the band, once, the way a thumb rides what a man keeps. "That right? Fifty?"

"Fifty. Runs about ninety minutes." Dail turned the clipboard and set it down and squared it against the counter edge, the consent form up, the carbon under it where a carbon belonged. "Doesn't suit everybody."

"Suits me." The man took up the pen again. "Sign here?"

"Sign here."

The pen went along the line without hurry, and the man printed beneath the signature and dated it in the old style, day first, the way the service teaches it and the habit never leaves, and laid the pen down parallel to the clipboard's edge, and with that small parallel laying-down something in Dail's chest turned over like a page.

His hand was on the clipboard. There was a half second in which the hand meant to slide it back across the counter, and a word behind his teeth, one word, go, and behind the word a whole plain sentence about the district and the sign and the fifty dollars, ready and true and his own. The clerk had the figures already. Pulse fifty-eight. Protein good, veins good, sixteen weeks of Tuesdays in a man like that, a yield entered true and checked twice, and the column wanted its entry. The hand stayed where it was. The word stayed where it was. It cost nothing to keep, the way a figure costs nothing that is only carried forward.

"Bay 2," Dail said, and heard his voice come out in working order. "I'll take you back myself."

The chair took the man's weight the way it took every man's weight. He rolled his sleeve without being asked and laid his arm on the vinyl cushion, and the crook of the arm was clean and the vein stood up ready, a working man's vein, and Dail sat down on the wheeled stool on the other side of the arm and snapped the gloves on and swabbed the crook in a spiral, inside out, by the book.

"Sixteen gauge," he said, to no tech at all. "Good vein."

Above them the dropped ceiling ran its tiles to the back partition, fourteen across, eight deep, and the man laid his head back against the rest and found the tiles, and his lips began to move, faintly, without sound, left to right along the top row, the way a squared-away man passes ninety minutes in a chair. Dail watched the lips and found that he was already moving with them, tile for tile, on the same row, at the same rate, and had been since before he noticed it.

The needle went in cold and settled warm. The tube filled dark and looped down, and the scale took its first weight, and the pump turned over with a sound like a man clearing his throat in another room, and on the near side of the arm, behind his teeth, patient as a clerk at a tray of forms, the count began.

~End~