Don Bruns - Stuff to die for

Em gave me a big smile. I love that mouth. “Em, how do you know all this?”

“She confides in me. I see her at the club, and-”

The club. Em’s friends belong to the club, and how can someone like me identify with the “club”?

“She told me.”

The waitress brought the pizza, the steam still rising from the hot, melted cheese. I took a whiff. I believe that God created pizza for the regular people. Em can be regular when she wants to. It’s cheap, it’s filling, and there isn’t a bad pizza out there. There are great pizzas. There are pizzas that aren’t as great as the great, but there are no bad pizzas. That’s what I believe.

“She said that Rick-”

“Rick?”

“Ricardo, her husband. She said Rick had moved the little blond into a condo and she wanted his stuff out. And then she told me something that I probably shouldn’t say to you. Hell, I shouldn’t say it to anyone.”

I loved this about Em. She fought with herself. Usually she was conflicted about her financial and social status. She wanted to be a pizza person, but she was this little rich bitch who could afford filet mignon. She had a lot of battles over that. But this time, it was something totally different. And again, I should have heard it and walked away. Away from her, away from the truck idea, and away from James. But no, I actually encouraged my cute little Emily. Partly because it was fun to torment her a little, and partially because I really was trying to understand how the other half lives.

“Come on, Em. Tell me. Please?”

She picked up a corner piece of pizza and took a tentative bite. Not too hot.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Em, you’re asking me to do a job for this lady. Tell me.”

“All right, but you can’t go to James with this.”

“Maybe. After all, he is my partner.”

“Eugene!”

“No James.”

“She thinks that Rick might be working for some subversive group.”

“Subversive?”

“I think she’s paranoid.”

“Subversive?”

“Things that he’s said. Spanish-speaking guys who call at all hours of the night.”

“So what’s he doing for these foreign guys?”

“I told you. He raises money for risky business ventures and charges a hefty percentage.”

I scraped the cheese off a square piece with my teeth, chewed and swallowed it, then took a bite of crust. I’ve asked some of the people at Paulie’s what was in the crust, and they act like it’s a secret. Actually, most of them are Puerto Rican and they don’t speak much English. They might have told me the ingredients, but I wouldn’t have understood.

“So he’s raising money for a Spanish business.”

“It’s probably just that. But she says they call or show up at all hours of the night. I think she just got freaked out. She thinks they are”-she paused dramatically-“terrorists-part of a subversive plot.”

I bit off another piece of pizza and this time savored the sauce.

“Anyway,” she asked, “should I call her?”

“Yeah. I think so. I mean, what’s to think about. The terrorist thing sounds like a lady who’s paranoid.”

“She thought about going to the FBI or CIA, Skip. She was that scared.”

“She was really going to turn her husband into the CIA? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Terrorists? God, it seems that everything that happens any more is terrorist related. “Well, hell, we could use the money, we’ve got the truck, we can load it. Where does she want it hauled?”

“Probably a storage unit. Maybe to the condo where the Mr. is keeping the mistress.”

“How much do we charge?”

Em shook her head and drained her glass of beer. “Skip, Skip. You’re a business major. Did you learn anything at all at Sam and Dave?”

“To be honest?”

“Call a couple of companies and ask what they would charge.”

And there it was. Our first hauling job. Hauling away the remains of some philandering guy’s marriage. Hauling away the possessions of some rich bastard, Rick Fuentes, who might be an international terrorist. And I wondered if U-Haul and Ryder started out like that. I bet they didn’t.

Y OU CAN SEE THE MARLINS’ STADIUM from in front of our apartment. It’s this space-age looking building, and when the Marlins play at home you can literally smell the noxious exhaust fumes from the thousands of cars leaving the game. It’s South Florida at its finest. Acres and acres of concrete surrounded by palm trees. From our spacious five-by-ten cement slab out back, we look directly at the back of the next row of apartments. Seven apartments to the right, the border of our property is defined by a narrow stream with shallow, dirty, brown water flowing slowly by. On the patios are broken tricycles, cheap rusting barbecue sets, and tenants’ freshly washed underwear thrown over old picnic tables and plastic chairs to dry in the hot South Florida sun.

Our neighbors behind us have a playpen all set up on their slab, with a plastic duck and some foam building blocks, and the only people we’ve ever seen coming in and out of the place are a black couple in their late sixties. We’ve never seen a baby.

“I told you. Listen to me, pally. In three months, we’ll have a second truck and we’ll be hiring employees.” James was figuring longhand on a brown paper bag. “Jeez, Skip. If we charge a couple of hundred a load, and we could get three gigs a day-”

“That would be six hundred a day.”

“See? That business degree is paying off.” He sat straight up in the cheap lawn chair. “And six hundred a day is like $3,000 a week. And $3,000 a week is-” He scribbled with his pen.

“$12,000 a month and $144,000 a year. The problem is, James, that I don’t think we can do three loads a day five days a week.”

He paused, squinting into the bright Sunday afternoon sun. “Yeah, I guess it would be pushing it. So, we up our price.”

“You’ve got to stay competitive.” I sipped on a Coke and watched water flow through the muddy dirt ditch that ran by on the edge of our complex. A big sign was posted.

NO FISHING, SWIMMING, SOAKING, OR WASHING

Like there was the slightest desire.

James tossed back the last of his beer-the last of our beer. He hadn’t contributed to the communal beer fund and I was damned if I was going to buy another six-pack. He drank four out of the six anyway.

“When is she calling?” James asked.

“Any time. She was meeting Jackie at the club.”

“Oh.” His finest English accent. “The club. The veddy important club. The fucking rich asshole’s club.”

“That’s the one.”

“Tell me, Skip. If you could belong, would you? Huh?”

I let it slide by. When I was very young, my father used to say to me, “I wish I had enough money to buy a herd of elephants.” I’d always counter with “What would you do with a herd of elephants, Daddy?”

“Well, son,” he’d say, “I don’t want the elephants. I just want enough money to buy them.”

Would I join the club? Hell, I wish I had enough money to make that decision.

“Anyway, we’ve got a job. An honest to God job. It’s just a matter of time, Skip. Hey, you can do a business plan, right?”

“Yeah, Basic Business 101.”

“Well, we need a business plan.”

“You need to have some goals. Some idea of where you’re going. Right now you cook crab and I suck at selling security systems. Where do you see this new venture going?”

James looked out over our dark brown stream. He tugged a Marlins’ cap over his perpetually sun-burned forehead. “I see us being successful. I see us light years ahead of my old man. This isn’t a hair-brained scheme, Skip, it’s real. It’s finding a need and coming up with the solution.”