Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

Looking over at the fellow in the bibs, Jasper wondered if he knew anything about the importance of sanitation in a municipality the size of Meade. “Say, if’n you don’t have anything else goin’ on this morning,” he said, “would you like to go with me while I do a couple of inspections?”

“Inspections? What’s that?”

“Well, it’s sort of like when a doctor gives someone an examination, only the patient is an outhouse instead.” He reached down for his measuring pole, then stood up. “Come on, and I’ll show ye.”

Cob hesitated. He bit into another doughnut as he tried to think. Cane had warned him that talking to strangers was dangerous, but this one seemed all right. And hadn’t he and Chimney gone out last night and did whatever they wanted while he sat in the room by himself? Still, he didn’t want to get in any trouble. As Cane kept saying, they had come too far to mess things up now. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I better—”

“Oh, come on,” Jasper said. “It’ll be fun. Besides, what else you going to do today?”

“Well.”

The inspector smiled and stuck out his hand. “My name’s Jasper Cone.”

Cob looked blank for a second, then replied, “I’m Junior. Bradford. Junior Bradford.”

“Nice to meet you, Junior.”

At first he’d been a little nervous, but the longer Cob followed Jasper around that morning, the more at ease he began to feel. He listened to him talk on a variety of subjects: his old mentor, Itchy, and his boss, Mr. Rawlings, the art of killing rats, his father’s paper mill accident and his mother’s religious beliefs, his ongoing disputes with certain members of the city council, and on and on. Cob had never heard a man flap his jaws so much in his life. He watched Jasper conduct several inspections and write up a warning to post on the front door of someone’s residence whose shitter was on the verge of toppling over into the neighbor’s yard. After a couple of hours, they took another doughnut break, and then walked along an alley until they arrived at a backyard surrounded by a high wooden fence. Jasper pulled out a pocket watch and checked the time, then sat down behind the fence in the dirt and beckoned Cob to do the same. “They’s a woman here that’s as regular as clockwork,” he said. “In two minutes she’ll pop out that back door and head straight for the toilet, I guarantee it.” They watched through a crack in the fence, and sure enough, in ninety seconds a middle-aged lady in a long blue dress exited the house and hurried across the lawn. After she closed the door to the crapper behind her, Jasper said with an air of authority, “Now, just watch, she’ll be in there exactly four minutes.” He showed the watch face to Cob. A few minutes later, the door creaked open and the woman went back inside the house. “Pretty good, ain’t it, the way I got her figured out?”

“Yeah,” Cob said, “I reckon.”

“But I will admit,” Jasper went on, “she’s one of the easy ones. There’s people would probably pay a hundred dollars to have a digestive system as regular as Mrs. Jackson’s.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe how some of them struggle with it. Take ol’ Herb Cutright, for example. The most awful straining and crying and groaning you ever heard, and heck, from the looks of things, he probably eats a handful of prunes with every meal.”

“Poor feller,” Cob said.

“Well, let’s go check the level,” Jasper said, opening the back gate quietly.

The sharp odor of the woman still lingered inside the small space, but Jasper didn’t seem to mind. He showed Cob again how to measure the level, sticking the pole down the hole until it hit solids, then bringing it back up and examining it. “See,” he said, “it’s exactly two feet and five inches from the top of the hole to where you hit the excrement”—he’d been coaching his new friend all morning in the terminology: feces, effluent, fecal matter, solids, liquids, et cetera—“so she’s still got a ways to go before she has to have it emptied. She might even last through the winter at the rate she’s discharging.”

“Who does that?” Cob asked.

“You mean empty them? Well, they can do it themselves if they want, but most people hire a scavenger if they can afford it. That’s what I used to do before the city begged me to take this job. We got two operating in Meade now, Dwight Harris and Elwood Skaggs. I’ve made those ol’ boys a lot of money the past few months, let me tell ye.”

It had been a busy morning — seven outhouses inspected, a wasp nest pulled down and burned, two tickets written, and four rats taken out with a blackjack — and the time had flown by, but when the church bell at Saint Mary’s struck noon, Cob suddenly remembered Cane back at the hotel. “I got to go,” he told Jasper.

“What’s your hurry?”

Cob thought the question over. Fortunately, Cane had coached him a little yesterday afternoon in what to say if he found himself in a tight spot, and though he wasn’t sure if this qualified as one, he figured he better be careful just the same. “Tom will be wonderin’ where I’m at,” he finally said.

“Tom? Who’s that?”

“My brother. He’s at the hotel.”

“Hotel?” Jasper said. “What ye do staying there? Are ye just traveling through?”

“Yeah,” Cob replied.

“How long you plannin’ on staying?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a day or two.”

A flicker of disappointment passed over Jasper’s face, but then he reminded himself it was always better to look on the bright side. “Well, look, if you’re still here in the morning and want to get in on some more inspections, just meet me at that bench around the same time, okay?” As he watched Junior turn and hurry off, he vaguely wondered where he and his brother might be going. He’d always wanted to take a trip himself, see how people did things, say, over in Indiana or up in Michigan. He hoped they stuck around for a while; it had been nice having someone to talk to who didn’t make fun of him or call him names like Crapper Cop and Shit Bucket. In fact, it was better than nice; he figured it had been the best day he’d had since before Itchy died.

SHORTLY AFTER NINE o’clock that morning, Cane had awakened to find Cob missing. He shaved and washed up hurriedly and threw his clothes on, then spent the next two hours walking up and down the streets looking for him and regretting he’d ever drank that pint of whiskey last night. The last thing he remembered was Richard III limping along a gloomy corridor talking crazy shit to himself. What the hell would they do if Cob got lost, or, God forbid, got himself arrested for some trivial offense? Would he be able to keep his story straight? Cane was headed back to the McCarthy to see if his brother might have returned when he came upon a bookstore he had passed by earlier. Fuck it, he thought, ten minutes wouldn’t make much difference one way or another. A bell rang when he opened the door, but he didn’t see anyone behind the counter. He was looking through the shelves when a pretty, dark-haired woman by the name of Susannah Chapman came out of the back and asked if he needed any help finding something. Cane glanced at her, then quickly returned his gaze to the shelves. His throat constricted a little as he realized he was probably standing as close to a real lady as he ever had in his life, but after a moment, he managed to ask, in a slightly hoarse voice, “You wouldn’t happen to have one called The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, would ye?”

“No,” Susannah said, “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that one. Is it something new?” It sounded trashy to her, and her father made it a point not to carry such books, which was a noble idea, but also an impractical one when it came to doing business in a factory town like Meade. Most people here weren’t interested in expanding their minds or learning something new or reading the classics; they just wanted to be entertained a little in between another boring supper and another dead sleep.