Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

Stevick, meant to be job-hunting, wasn’t. Too-generous severance had blurred his motivation in the months when it would have mattered. Now, season slanting to Memorial Day, the flag of Manhattan’s office life was at half-mast until September. So Stevick was propped like a morning crow on that bench when the truck arrived. His front-row seat recalled to him memories of childhood puppet shows, of gazing up at the slotted stage from which Punch and Judy and their like protruded. The soapy-coffee theorist was curled over some device, brow knit, thumbs-deep in a text-message campaign, making Stevick the only witness to the disembarkment of the truck’s occupants.

They parked, apparently heedlessly, in the space in front of a hydrant, but without coming nearer than three feet to the curb. Cars slowed to pass. Stevick doubted that a garbage truck could have made it through. Surely a temporary placement, a compromise, then. The vehicle was an ungainly bolted-iron thing, resembling some reconfigured laundry or diaper truck, not massive like those used for transport of money but solid enough in its way. Two men in jumpsuits popped out of the cab, and within a minute had orange traffic cones up to claim the territory that extended a few feet behind the truck, as well as between it and the curb. One contemplated the hydrant and then wryly topped it with a cone, which perched there like a dunce cap. It made an effective preemption of any indigenous neighborhood protest, an easy trump: The men in jumpsuits seemed to have some official function, even if their truck was unmarked.

The tools with which the two men dug the hole were notably quiet and efficient. After first marking a square of asphalt with yellow spray paint, using a band saw of daunting size and intensity they carved the blacktop along the lines of drying paint. At this point, Stevick’s might still have been the only eyes attending. Perhaps these activities had drawn distracted, unsustained glances from a passing postal worker or nanny. Certainly nobody emerged into the chill morning from the café’s interior, where those not obliviously earbudded were likely hunkered in routine annoyance against the saw’s zip, much as they’d be for a passing siren or the clunk of a truck’s axle in a pothole — nothing off the ordinary urban-decibel scale. The soap complainer had wandered away when Stevick wasn’t looking.

The jackhammers, though, drew complaint. Several exasperated café denizens packed their laptops and muttered in the loose direction of the truck and its jumpsuited operatives as they fled the scene, like birds flitting to another treetop, and no more courageous. One of the café’s counterpersons, a chubby guy in an apron, seeing business spooked, made a more forthright protest, even shaking his fist. But the small dimension of the task blunted his protest: By the time the jumpsuited pair had ignored the counterperson for a minute or two, minute smiles perhaps rippling their lips — or was this an effect of the device’s vibration? — they were shifting the jackhammer back into the truck in favor of shovels and picks, with which they deftly cleared the hole of shattered black chunks. Stevick nodded consolation to the counterperson, who had, after all, poured his soapy coffee forty-five minutes ago. What remained of it was cold.

*

The excavation was complete by the time Stevick wandered by half an hour later, having picked up his dry cleaning from the Korean and used his own bathroom before circling back to the café. Rain still threatened, hadn’t arrived. Stevick couldn’t say why he was enthralled by the activities that had commenced with the truck’s arrival; some intimation, he supposed in retrospect, though it wasn’t uncommon for him to buzz the café two or three times in a procrastinating morning. The hole was steep and accurate, hewing to the spray-painted plan still visible in two corners where the lines of paint, meeting, had pooled and blurred: an inverted phone booth of emptied dirt and rubble. Three fat fitted planks lay stacked beside the hole, sized to make a rough cover, Stevick guessed. The hole’s former contents had been heaped precariously at the curb — the hydrant wasn’t likely to be back in commission too soon, at this rate. The orange cone remained, like an ill-fitted condom stuck on its head. The truck, however, was gone.

And then it was back, jerking to a halt at the curb before him, as if responsive to Stevick’s own presence, to his attentions; however absurd this notion might be, Stevick had conceived it. With an unhurried persistence, the jumpsuited men emerged again and opened the van’s rear, then stepped inside to wrangle out what at first might have seemed another object but then revealed itself to be a man, a human captive. The man was dressed in the same uniform, as though recently demoted from their company. But his skin, Stevick noted wearily, as if this fact beckoned to outrage he ought to feel rising within him but didn’t, was darker than theirs. His head shaved, where their hair was intact; his two- or three-day beard rough, where theirs were, in one case, trimmed into a goatee and, in the other, shaved clean. So the jumpsuits, rather than suggesting equivalence between the three, framed difference. A cruddy cloth gagged the captive’s mouth; another bound his wrists in front of him. His eyes didn’t trouble to plead as his captors led him to the fresh hole and lowered him within, taking care not to scuff his elbows on the crumbled lip. They’d measured well: The captive nestled just underneath the three fat boards when these were fitted over his head. One of the jumpsuited operatives stood atop the boards, testing their firmness with apparent satisfaction, while the other quickly loaded the cones into the back of the truck. Now, at last, the rain began to fall.

“How—?” Stevick began, then faltered, unsure of his question. “How long are you going to leave him in there?”

The two could barely be bothered to hesitate, in their hurry for the shelter of the truck’s cab. “We’re on installation and delivery,” the clean-shaven one said as he assumed the driver’s seat. “Pickup’s another department.”

“Are we talking hours or days or weeks?” Stevick said, locating, perhaps belatedly, some faint civic courage, a notion that he’d absorbed certain duties as a local witness to the open-air procedure, perhaps by default, but no less legitimately for that. Besides, others inside the café might be watching through the window. His question was perhaps a feeble one, but for anyone observing, the fact that he’d stood up from the bench and begun some sort of stalling interrogation could be seen as crucial, either in a deeper intervention to be conducted by more effective or informed members of the community or in some later accounting of Stevick’s comportment and behavior.

“I really didn’t look at the schedule in this case,” the driver said. “But they’re rarely installed for more than three or four days in a single location.”

“Anything longer wouldn’t be seen as humane, I suppose?”

“More like these measures simply aren’t effective beyond a certain point. Listen, we’ve got to go.”

“Those boards are in no way tight enough to keep the rain from falling on him,” Stevick pointed out. By placing their hole so near the hydrant, they’d prevented a parked car from giving shelter to the hole. On the other hand, perhaps they’d spared the hole’s inhabitant something terrifying in being doubly pinned by the low ceiling of a vehicle’s undercarriage. Probably Stevick was guilty of overthinking: It was impossible to find a parking space in this neighborhood, so they’d settled on the obvious solution.

“That’s generous of you to notice, citizen,” the driver said. He gestured to the occupant of the passenger seat, the goateed man, who’d been sitting with his arms crossed and rolling his eyes, miming impatience. Now this silent partner produced something from the floor of the truck’s cab: a compact black umbrella — the inexpensive double-hinged kind you might purchase at a shoe-repair shop, having ducked in during a gale. He handed it to the driver, who passed it through the open window to Stevick. “This is why we’re grateful you came along when you did,” the driver said, nodding to indicate the hole. “Don’t be afraid to stand on top — it’ll easily support your weight.”