MAÑANA - Part Four: La Cobranza
By SoulFire77
- 27 reads
He wrote the name on the second Tuesday in February, on the back page of the ledger, in the column where a name goes.
Then he went out to the shipping door at nine and stood inside it with the bolt drawn, and Nando came up the alley with his collar turned and his hands in his coat and stopped when he saw who was holding the door, and did not ask anything, because Aurelio had already said the only part of it he could say in a doorway, which was that there was something in the building on Tuesdays.
They sat two benches apart in the dark. Aurelio's own bench, and the bench across the aisle that had been Nando's since the spring of '26.
At ten the cabinet warmed and the room had the voice in it.
Nando's chaveta was in his coat pocket out of habit and he took it out and held it in his lap and did not set it down for two hours. When the chapter ended and the voice went quiet he sat on for a while, and then he said, in a whisper, as if the building had rules about whispering, "That's the part where he sends the money to the shipowner."
"Yes."
"We would have had that in December."
"Yes."
"I've been going to my sister's at night," Nando said. "There's nothing there either. She has a radio." He turned the chaveta over. "Tuesdays."
"And Fridays."
"Fridays," Nando said, and went out the way he had come in, and Aurelio bolted the door and made his eleven o'clock round with the lantern low and the punch clock hitting each station on the hour.
By the first week of March there were six.
They came separately and they came quietly, and every one of them had been told the same one sentence in a doorway, and every one of them had said yes before he finished. Aurelio wrote each name on the back page as it was admitted, dated, in the column.
The reading went on. The voice gave them the Count in Rome, in the garden, at the table of a man who had ruined him, and it gave them these things at midnight in a building with the boiler out and their coats on and their breath showing, and not one of the six missed a night in March.
The first week a man cleared his throat more than he needed to. The second week he did not join a conversation he would have joined. By the third his wife had begun to answer for him at the counter of the grocery on Twelfth, the way you do for a man with a cold, and by the fourth the grocer took the order from her without looking at him.
Aurelio heard the neighborhood get quieter, the way a stove goes out in another room. Children still made the same noise on Eighth Avenue after school, and the men on the benches still had the music over them. At the corner where the dominoes table stood, the game had begun to go on without any talk at all, six men and the click of the pieces and the awning flapping.
Baldomero began asking on a Wednesday.
He came down Aurelio's row at the noon half hour with his knife in his hand, the honey-dark handle turned from the spindle piece, and he stood at the end of the bench and waited until Aurelio looked up.
"Six of you go in at night," he said. He said it under the music, not over it. "Otero says the shipping door is unbolted on Tuesdays. Nando has stopped talking and he stopped talking a month after he stopped working, which is backwards." He set the knife on the bench with the handle toward Aurelio. "I put a piece of it in my apron because they cut it up in front of us. What do you have of it?"
Aurelio's throat had two words in it that day and he had already spent them on the foreman. He shook his head.
"That is not an answer," Baldomero said. "I sat on the committee with you for nine years."
He waited the length of a full breath, which was Esteban's length, and then he took the knife back and went up the row, and the music covered the sound of him going.
That Friday, between chapters, the voice said: "The old man from the selectors' room walks the floor at noon asking questions in a voice everyone can hear."
Nobody in the dark answered it.
"The next chapter is the trial," the voice said. "I will read it when that voice is not on the floor."
It did not say anything else about the old man from the selectors' room. It read the chapter before that one, which was short, and stopped early, and left them sitting in a cold room at half past twelve with the trial not read.
On Monday somebody put a note under the office door about company lumber going home in an apron.
Aurelio did not write it. He knew the hand of every man on the back page of his ledger, and the note was not in any of them, which meant it was in one he had not yet been shown, and he thought about that while Hays came down the aisle with the foreman and stopped at the selectors' room door.
Baldomero came out with the apron over his arm and his lunch tin in his hand. He walked the length of the galera to the man door, past three hundred benches, and the music was on, and the men rolled. He slowed at the end of Aurelio's row. Aurelio kept his eyes on the leaf and laid a wrapper back along a bunch and sealed it with a thumb, and he did not look up until the man door had swung twice and stopped.
That night the voice read the trial. It read it beautifully.
He tried to pay the following Tuesday.
He came early, before the six, and he took the pouch out of his coat and untied it and set it on the bench under the second post, seventy-three quarters in a canvas bag gone soft at the corners, and stood with his hand on it.
The cabinet warmed. The voice came in at its conversational volume, and it did not begin the chapter.
"Take that home," it said.
He stood there.
"I have no use for it," the voice said. "It never bought me. It bought a man in a vest who came down off the platform at the bell and went to a café. It bought the hour. You are not buying the hour anymore." The hum steadied. "Put it back in your coat and sit down. You are keeping something out of the room that belongs in the room, and it is not money."
Aurelio tied the pouch. His hands did it the way they did the leaf, without instruction, and he put it inside his coat where it had been since the twenty-seventh of November, and he sat down on the end of his bench, and the reading began.
On the Sunday he went up the outside stair on Fifteenth with the words in his coat pocket, printed on the back of a company card in his sure hand.
Esteban had a fire that day, a small one. He looked at the card for a while.
"Say it aloud," he said.
Aurelio had four words that afternoon. He gave two of them, and they came out in the register of a man breathing on a window, and Esteban leaned in and did not ask him to repeat it.
He opened the second volume at the ribbon. The page had gone the color of weak tea at the edge where the ribbon lay across it, and the print under the ribbon was the print everywhere else, and he put his finger on the line and read it silently and then read the next one, and then he closed the book with his finger still in it.
"Word for word," he said.
He got up and went to the window and stood with his back to the room, and the shoe repair below them started its machine and stopped it.
"When I was made to stop," he said, "I had the rest of that sentence in my mouth. I have had it in my mouth since November." He turned around. "Who else is in the room when it reads?"
Aurelio wrote six on the card and turned it toward him.
"Six," Esteban said. "And in June?" He did not wait for a number. "I will not come. Tell them the old man is holding a reading at the Centro on Thursday at seven, in the small hall, and it is free, and I will read the chapter after the trial, out of my own book, in my own voice, and afterward anyone who wants may speak."
Eleven people came on Thursday. Four were women from the mutual aid society who had come for the coffee, and one was a boy sent by his mother, and six were from the back page of Aurelio's ledger.
Esteban had put on the vest. He stood at a table in a room with a radiator knocking in it and read for forty minutes out of the second volume with the ribbon hanging, and his voice was sixty-one and it was three months out of practice and it went at the end of the long sentences. He came to a word he had to take twice. He drank water. Somewhere in the middle of it the gas heater at the back put itself out, and a woman got up and lit it again, and he waited with his thumb on the page.
At the twenty-minute mark one of the six got up and went out, and at the thirty another one did, and neither of them made any noise about it, and both of them came in at nine on Friday through the shipping door.
Aurelio stayed to the end. He was the one who put the chairs back against the wall afterward, because he could do it without a voice, and Esteban stood at the table putting the ribbon back in the page with a touch like a man moving a sleeping child's arm.
"Well," Esteban said. "Now they have heard both."
Ramón came home on the fourteenth of March, in a coat that was not the one he had left in.
They kept him for the parade and then they kept him on a charge that was never explained to his mother, and when they let him out he walked from the county jail to Ybor with another man from the seventeen, and by the time he got to his mother's house on Ninth the whole street knew, because he had told everyone he passed.
He talked in the kitchen for two hours. He talked about the food and the man in the next cell who sang, and the lawyer from Tampa who came twice and then stopped, and the guard who kept his cigarettes in the toe of a boot, and he named all seventeen of them and where each one was, in order, and he did it standing up with his hat still on. His mother sat with her hands around a cup and did not drink and let him.
Aurelio stood in the doorway. Ofelia had brought the copybook in her bag, because she brought it everywhere now, and she wrote nothing while her sister's boy was talking, and she watched the doorway more than she watched the kitchen.
On the sidewalk after, Ramón caught up and walked with them, and he was still going, and he said, "They say the readers are done for good. Is that so?" and did not wait, and said, "There'll be another one. There's always another one. A floor can pay a man out of its own pocket if it wants to, it did before, my father paid for one," and his breath went up white and there was a great deal of it.
Aurelio did not answer him. Ofelia answered him, and asked him about the food again, and kept him talking until the corner.
On the last Friday in March the voice read the chapter where the last of the men who ruined him comes to the door.
When it ended, the ten seconds went by.
"There were three hundred benches on this floor," the voice said. "There are six."
The cabinet hummed above the second post.
"Your list has one line open."
Aurelio's hand was inside his coat. It had gone there when the chapter ended, the way it went, past the pouch, and the pouch had seventy-three quarters in it and the one still knotted in the handkerchief his sister-in-law had put in his palm at the gate in November, and his fingers found the crease of the spine and the pencil in it.
"The boy who came back talks in the street," the voice said. "Give me his name."
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