Reed Coleman - Hose monkey

“One second. Gimme a second,” a bodyless voice answered the knock.

Shit! There was that chill again. It was the voice. His voice. Just as he could not calculate the millions he had confiscated over the years, Joe could not count the hours he’d listened to that voice accuse and cajole, prompt and prod, jab and parry. He was tempted to leave the receipt in the mailbox and run, scream for Healy to send in a check.

But Joe Serpe hadn’t run from anything in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. Instead he cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face up close to the storm door. He looked at the framed collage of family photos on the staircase wall.

“Motherfucker!” he hissed. “It’s him.”

It seemed to take about a week for Healy to get downstairs with the money. At first, there was no sign of recognition in Healy’s faded gray eyes. The lack of recognition wasn’t lost on Joe. Maybe his invisibility was shielding him. But in his heart, Joe knew God would never pass up such a rich opportunity to fuck with his life. Sure enough, just as Healy began forking over the cash, a light went on in his eyes. Bob Healy’s pupils got small as pinheads. His mouth formed that wry, mischievous smile Joe had learned to despise.

“Fuck if it isn’t Joe ‘the Snake’ Serpe.”

Frank was finishing his entries into the computer when he noticed just how dark it was outside the office. He considered giving Joe a buzz to see how that last delivery was coming, but he decided against it. He didn’t want to insult the man. Anyone who could do buy and bust operations in the worst of the worst neighborhoods in New York City could handle a little snow and darkness. Frank had already decided to throw Joe an extra twenty for doing the stop. That would bring Joe’s pay for the day up to a nice round three hundred bucks. All in all it had been a nice payday for everyone. Besides, Frank had big troubles of his own, things he didn’t even want to think about.

Frank checked the window again. The snow seemed to be slowing its pace. Yet Frank felt unusually ill at ease. It was certainly true that he didn’t like having trucks out in the dark and that early in his tenure Joe had been a bit of a hot-rodder, but that wasn’t it. Frank loved reclamation projects, Joe best among them. Everybody who’d ever worked for him had been a reclamation project of one sort or another. There was Fat Stan the Psycho Man who had managed to get off welfare and get his life back in order while earning his keep for Mayday. What a character, Frank laughed, remembering the day he found Stan thumbing a ride outside the grounds of Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital.

Then there was King Kong. The jury was still out on him. He hadn’t shown up for work today. While it wasn’t the first time, it wasn’t exactly a chronic problem either. Even though the kid claimed to like working with Frank, he wondered if Cain wasn’t still feeling the sting of being tossed off the tugboat by Joe. He liked the kid a whole lot, but Frank had always been a little shaky about his decision to move Kong from working around the yard to hose monkey.

The group home was just a little ways down Union Avenue. If something went wrong in the yard, Frank could have someone from the home there in five minutes. The truck was something else altogether. It wasn’t the work itself. Christ, you could train a monkey to pull a hose to a fill and back. Hence the job title. No, it was the ‘what ifs’ that gave Frank pause. What if the driver got injured? What if the truck were robbed? What if there was a spill? An accident?

From the first, Frank understood there was potential for disaster written all over taking the kid on. The people at the home had made Cain’s history and limitations abundantly clear. The kid had always been polite and respectful around him and Joe, maybe a little less so with the other drivers. Then again, they’d been a little less respectful of him. That seemed a pretty normal response to Frank’s way of thinking. Yet Frank knew Cain had a history of sometimes striking out in anger and for going AWOL. But the kid’s goofy enthusiasm was contagious and King Kong did good work. After his latest no-show, however, maybe the time had come to admit defeat and put the kid back in the yard.

Then in the stillness of the snow and night, Frank heard the comforting low rumble of the tugboat turning onto Union. A moment later, headlights flashed through the office windows.

Frank’s words rang in Cain’s head: “When a man fucks up, he gotta take what’s comin’. A real man steps up. He don’t wait to get found out.”

Cain knew he was wrong for not showing up today without telling Frank. It killed him to disappoint Frank. He liked Joe Serpe a lot, but he loved Frank. Frank treated him like he wished his own father could. Frank taught him things. Joe taught him things, too, like how Serpe meant snake in Italian, but the things Frank taught him were life things, man things. Frank treated him special. His parents, the people at the homes, they all treated him like a dead end street. He didn’t have the right words for it the way Frank would. The people who worked with him at the homes, even the really nice ones, were sort of doing what they had to, but like in front of a brick wall, almost like he wasn’t there. The thing about Frank was that he treated Cain like he could learn anything.

That’s why he knew he had to come talk to Frank. It was what a man did. And Cain Cohen was a man in spite of his being M.R., slow, delayed, challenged, handicapped or any of those other stupid words that meant he was different. The problem was he’d hidden himself in a secret place where no one would be able to find him and now he was frozen stiff, starving and tired. At first, the chill made some of the hurt go away. Now it made it worse. Finally, he’d gotten the courage up to apologize to Frank for being bad, but just as he started crawling out of his secret place, he heard a truck pulling into the yard. He would have to wait a little while longer. For Frank, he would wait as long as it took.

Joe nosed in, swung around and backed up between the blue and red Macks. The constant beep, beep, beep of the reverse warning horn cut through him like fork tines scraping on an empty plate. There wasn’t much clearance and it was dark and there was ice on his mirrors, but he didn’t figure his night could get much worse. The tugboat slid in neatly between the trucks on either side. Joe remembered a time when he was afraid to even put the damned truck in reverse. Then there was the time he got cocky about his ability to squeeze through tight spaces and creased the side of the tugboat’s tank. Frank was less than pleased about that.

He pulled out the yellow parking brake on the dash. A loud pssst filled the night as the air brakes spit out excess pressure, kicking up a spray of snow and dust. He turned off the ignition key and choked the engine silent. Gathering up his paperwork, cell phone and map, Joe jumped down off the metal grate for the last time that day.

“A face from the past,” Frank teased. “I was gonna organize a fuckin’ search party.”

“Here.” Joe threw down his paperwork, map and phone in front of Frank.

“Hey, I’m sorry about that last stop.”

“Not as sorry as me.”

“I’m throwing you an extra twenty,” Frank said, figuring to lift Joe’s spirits.

“Keep it.”

“What the fuck’s eatin’ you?”

“You wanna know?”

“No, Joe, I asked cause I enjoy the sound of my own voice. Yeah, I wanna know.”

“Healy,” Joe barked, “the last stop in Kings Park.”

“What about it?”

“Bob Healy was the lead detective on my case.”

“Fuck! He was the-”

“That’s right,” Joe said, a sad smile spreading across his face. “Detective Robert Healy, Internal Affairs’ best and brightest. He was the guy that made the case against me and Ralphy.”