Night Shift

This afternoon Henry was at the counter; Bill Pelham, Bertie Connors, Carl Littlefield, and me was tipped up by the stove. Outside, not a car was moving on Ohio Street, and the ploughs was having hard going. The wind was socking drifts across that looked like the backbone on a dinosaur.

Henry'd only had three customers all afternoon - that is, if you want to count in blind Eddie. Eddie's about seventy, and he ain't completely blind. Runs into things, mostly. He comes in once or twice a week and sticks a loaf of bread under his coat and walks out with an expression on his face like: there, you stupid sonsabitches, fooled you again.

Bertie once asked Henry why he never put a stop to it.

'I'll tell you,' Henry said. 'A few years back the Air Force wanted twenty million dollars to rig up a flyin' model of an airplane they had planned out. Well, it cost them seventy-five million and then the damn thing wouldn't fly. That happened ten years ago, when blind Eddie and myself were considerable younger, and I voted for the woman who sponsored that bill. Blind Eddie voted against her. And -since then I've been buyin' his bread.'

Bertie didn't look like he quite followed all of that, but he sat back to muse over it.

Now the door opened again, letting in a blast of the cold grey air outside, and a young kid came in, stamping snow off his boots. I placed him after a second. He was Richie Grenadine's kid, and he looked like he'd just kissed the wrong end of the baby. His Adam's apple was going up and down and his face was the colour of old oilcloth.

'Mr Parmalee,' he says to Henry, his eyeballs rolling -around in his head like ball bearings, 'you got to come. You got to take him his beer and come. I can't stand to go back there. I'm scared.'

'Now slow down,' Henry says, taking off his white butcher's apron and coming around the counter. 'What's the matter? Your dad been on a drunk?'

I realized when he said that that Richie hadn't been in for quite some time. Usually he'd be by once a day to pick up a -case of whatever beer was going cheapest at that time, a big --fat man with jowls like pork butts and ham-hock arms. Richie always was a pig about his beer, but he handled it okay when he was working at the sawmill out in Clifton. Then something happened - a pulper piled a bad load, or maybe Richie just made it out that way - and Richie was off work, free an' easy, with the sawmill company paying him compensation. Something in his back. Anyway, he got awful fat. He hadn't been in lately, although once in a while I'd seen his boy come in for Richie's nightly case. Nice enough boy Henry sold him the beer, for he knew it was only the boy doing as his father said.

'He's been on a drunk,' the boy was saying now, 'but that ain't the trouble. It's . . . it's . . . oh Lord, it's awful!'

Henry saw he was going to bawl, so he says real quick:

'Carl, will you watch things for a minute?'

'Sure.'

'Now, Timmy, you come back into the stockroom and tell me what's what.'

He led the boy away, and Carl went around behind the counter and sat on Henry's stool. No one said anything for quite a while. We could hear 'em back there, Henry's deep, slow voice and then Timmy Grenadine's high one, speaking very fast. Then the boy commenced to cry, and Bill Pelham cleared his throat and started filling up his pipe.

'I ain't seen Richie for a couple of months,' I said.

Bull grunted. 'No loss.'

'He was in . . . oh, near the end of October,' Carl said. 'Near Halloween. Bought a case of Schlitz beer. He was gettin' awful meaty.'

There wasn't much more to say. The boy was still crying, but he was talking at the same time. Outside the wind kept on whooping and yowling and the radio said we'd have another six inches or so by morning. It was mid-January and it made me wonder if anyone had seen Richie since October - besides his boy, that is.

The talking went on for quite a while, but finally Henry and the boy came out. The boy had taken his coat off, but Henry had put his on. The boy was kinda hitching in his chest the way you do when the worst is past, but his eyes was red and when he glanced at you, he'd look down at the floor.

Henry looked worried. 'I thought I'd send Timmy here upstairs an' have my wife cook him up a toasted cheese or somethin'. Maybe a couple of you fellas'd like to go around to Richie's place with me. Timmy says he wants some beer. He gave me the money.' He tried to smile, but it was a pretty sick affair and he soon gave up.

'Sure,' Bertie says. 'What kind of beer? I'll go fetch her.'

'Get Harrow's Supreme,' Henry said. 'We got some cut-down boxes back there.'

I got up, too. It would have to be Bertie and me. Carl's arthritis gets something awful on days like this, and Billy Pelham don't have much use of his right arm any more.

Bertie got four six-packs of Harrow's and I packed them into a box while Henry took the boy upstairs to th~ apartment, overhead.