The Heavenly Table

53

THE NEXT MORNING, Cob awoke early, already thinking about doughnuts. He looked over at Cane, dead to the world, the book opened on his chest and the bottle nearly empty on the nightstand. He put on his new clothes and slipped out, quietly closing the door behind him. He headed first thing to the bakery where they had stopped yesterday. He went inside and laid five dollars that Cane had given him on the counter and asked the lady working if that was enough to buy a dozen doughnuts. Mrs. Mannheim, a thin, nervous woman with a fingerprint of flour on her forehead, immediately suspected that he was testing her. She glowered at him with bloodshot eyes. Two days ago, the city councilman known as Saunders had accused her of shorting him a nickel, even had the nerve to suggest that she was sending the money she cheated honest Americans out of to her relatives over in “Deutschland,” as he’d called it. She had lain awake all night worrying about what sort of trouble he might cause for her and Ludwig, her husband.

She looked down at the money on the counter. It was obvious that they had decided to send in one of their flunkies posing as an idiot to see if she would overcharge him. It was all a conspiracy, just because she and Ludwig were of German heritage. She had lived in Meade nearly fifteen years, and was as patriotic as anybody else in Ross County, but ever since America had declared war in April, she sensed that people were casting suspicious looks her way. The newspapers were urging everyone to be on the lookout for enemy spies. One little slipup and she and Ludwig would be on the shit list. After that, who knew what might happen? Burn their business down? Put them on trial for treason? She had shaken Ludwig awake last night, and told him they should start taking turns guarding the place at night. He had groaned and covered his head with his pillow to shut her out, but then he’d always been too trusting when it came to people. By the time he saw the light, everything they had worked so hard for would be in ruins.

“Of course, of course,” Mrs. Mannheim said to Cob. She bagged up a dozen and handed them to him. He turned and started out before she could make his change, leaving the five dollars on the counter. That was all the proof she needed; now she was certain something was going on. “Stop,” she said in a harsh voice just as he reached for the doorknob. “You forget this.”

“What?”

“Come back here,” she ordered.

Cob looked down at the money the woman placed in his hand, the same amount he had laid on the counter. He was confused. “But ain’t you…ain’t you supposed to…” he stammered.

“On de house,” she said loudly, slapping her hand on the counter. That would fix the bastards! Watching him take off his cap and scratch his head, a look of befuddlement on his round face, she had to admit he was a hell of an actor. Much better than that bunch of West Virginia cretins that called themselves the Lewis Family who were performing at the Majestic again this week. Ludwig was a big fan of theirs, he had probably seen their show, if that’s what you wanted to call it, a dozen times over the last couple of years. They were always sending over for a special request, hedge-apple turnovers or squirrel-brain pie or some other hillbilly treat. As if they were still back in the snaky holler they had crawled out of to win, by what had to be, she was convinced, some perverse alignment of the stars, fame and fortune on the stage. Ludwig was always repeating their stupid jokes to the customers. Not a one of them did she find funny. It made no sense, the way Americans sometimes went bananas over certain people for absolutely no reason, as if they were just drawing names out of a hat. She’d watched her own nephew go insane over his fixation with a doll-faced bimbo whose only talent was smiling prettily into a camera. How hard would Ludwig hee-haw, she wondered, when a gang of liquored-up vigilantes pulled them out into the street and hung them from a lamppost just for being German? “Patriotic murder,” she’d heard they called it. “On de house,” she repeated to the stunned-looking flunky, pointing at the door.

Detecting the anger in her voice, Cob ducked his head and left the bakery. He walked along until he found a bench to sit on. He was eating doughnuts and mulling over the woman’s strange behavior when he saw a man coming toward him wearing a white helmet and carrying a long stick. He was talking to himself and looking down at the sidewalk; and Cob thought he looked like he could use a little cheering up. “Hey, would you want one of these here doughnuts?” he asked. “The lady said they were on de house.”

Jasper Cone looked up, saw a stocky, round-headed man in new bib overalls smiling at him. He didn’t quite understand at first. Nobody had ever, except maybe Itchy a time or two, offered him a doughnut before, but then he usually didn’t partake of breakfast. It was a habit his mother had instilled in him when he was young. She had always stressed a morning fast to clear the head of dirty thoughts, mostly because she was convinced that anyone built like her son was probably oozing with them. “Don’t mind if I do,” Jasper said. Sticking his hand down into the greasy paper bag, he pulled one out and admired it for a moment, then sat down on the bench. He laid his measuring pole on the sidewalk in front of him and stretched out his legs, crossed one rubber-booted foot over the other.

They sat there for a while chewing in silence and watching the people pass by. Cob noticed that most of them moved over to the other side of the sidewalk as they neared the bench. Granted, the man had a certain ripeness about him, but still, that didn’t account for the cold stares and hateful looks they cast his way. Most people, Cob concluded, weren’t nearly as decent as they imagined themselves to be. Just look at the way he had turned out. Never in his darkest dreams would he have ever thought himself capable of killing a man, or stealing from one, and yet he had done both. Though he’d gladly give all the hams and pies and five-dollar bills in the state of Ohio just to see Tardweller ride by in his buggy, even he knew you couldn’t wish away the past. He looked over and saw the man swallow the last of the doughnut, wipe the grease and sugar off his hand onto his dirty trousers. Cob held the bag out. “This is nice,” Jasper said, reaching in for another.

“Yeah, they are good doughnuts,” Cob replied.

“Well, not just that,” Jasper said, reflecting on what the dump keeper had told him the other day. “Sitting here in the sun with a new friend and watchin’ people walking to work or wherever they’re a-going this time of the morning. It don’t get much better than this, you know what I mean?”

Cob thought for a minute. He didn’t know if anyone had ever called him “friend” before. Not that he could remember, anyway. But then he’d never had doughnuts to offer anyone, either. “Yeah, I think so,” he said.

Jasper grinned and took another bite. It still amazed him how you could just be plugging along, stuck in the deepest depression, and then something a little bit wonderful happened that suddenly changed your outlook on everything, that turned your world from darkness to light, made you glad you were still walking the earth. Usually it was something that you didn’t have anything to do with at all. For example, like when his mother died. She’d berated him all that morning about the same old stuff, then locked him in his room while she went to church to get her favorite chicken blessed; and five days later the flowers were already starting to wilt on her grave, and he was having the best time of his life cleaning out ol’ Vern Melchert’s jake with Itchy. And what about this? Why, no more than a couple of minutes ago he was feeling like the loneliest poor soul alive, and now he was eating glazed doughnuts from Mannheim’s with a man he’d never seen before. It was all just a matter of sticking it out until the miracle happened.

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.