She opened her purse, took out what was in it, and gave it to me.
I counted it. “It’s not much,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“But you’ll take it?”
Way out on the freeway, I heard a car horn, very faintly. Somebody was losing his temper. Then the traffic was whispering along smoothly again. The sun felt good on my face. I could smell the hot vinyl seat and the girl sitting beside me with her fists in her lap, waiting. She didn’t use perfume, just regular soap. I got out my wallet and tucked her money inside.
“Don’t they always?” I said.
2
Chain
I watched her car out of sight, and then climbed back on the roof and finished the row. I didn’t like to leave it all cranksided like that. To pass the time I thought what I sometimes do. I think, What if it was my house I was working on. I think about how I’d finish the roof, or the driveway or what have you, and how I’d get a truck then and move some nice furniture in, and hang up some curtains, and some pictures, and put some dishes in the cabinets and some food in the fridge, and how it’d be done then, my house, and how me and some nice woman would move in and live our lives. I didn’t think about moving in with Rebecca while I was finishing the last row. I wasn’t that dumb, not yet. So the little woman didn’t have a face or name, but I’ll admit she did wind up on the tall side. When I was done I stacked up the loose tiles for the next guy, if there was one, and gave each of my tools a wipe with an oily rag as I put it away. I like a good set of tools. I closed the toolbox and climbed back down, leaving the ladder where it was. There was supposed to be a truck coming by each evening for things like that. I put my tools in the trunk of my car and went to see the boss.
Ortiz & Son had a little office in Inglewood. It was basically just a gravel parking lot with a wire fence around it, big enough for a couple of cement mixers and a few cars and, in the corner of the lot, a two-room shack. One of the rooms was so the laborers would have somewhere to wait for the truck. The other was for Nestor Ortiz. From what I hear, old Ortiz had always been a stand-up guy, but he was gone now and if anyone had a good word to say about his son, they hadn’t said it to me. Nestor Ortiz always wore a jaunty little porkpie hat with the brim turned down in front like a fedora. He was a dapper little guy, and he knew every man on every one of his sites by name, and their families’ names, and he’d go around asking all the guys, How’s your family. I don’t have a family and it didn’t sweeten me. When I opened the door, he spread his hands and said, “My friend! My friend, I know all about it.”
“Hello, Nestor,” I said.
“Raymond, my friend,” he said. “I know all about it and is terrible. I stand before you this moment in shame. In shame.”
“It’s been three weeks, Nestor.”
“I know and is an awful thing. Awful. Everybody coming to see me, all good men like you, who work hard, and they need their pay, and what can I tell them? What? I’m not getting any money, I can’t give any money, and I don’t blame you one moment if you quit.”
“I am quitting, Nestor.”
“I don’t blame you a moment.”
“I still need my pay.”
“And you gonna get it, every cent. But right now you got to be a little patient because it isn’t so good. I can’t pay I don’t get the money from Olindas Estates. And where is Olindas now? Do they pay me? No.”
“Nestor, you are Olindas. You’re forty percent of Olindas.”
“That’s only forty percent,” he said. “My friend, I assure you I am completely and totally and absolutely broke at this moment we’re speaking.”
“I’ve seen where you live, Nestor. Have you seen where I live?”
“I assure you it is impossible right now for me to pay everybody asking.”
“I’m not asking you to pay everybody,” I said, trying to get my breathing under control. “I’m asking you to pay me. Seventeen dollars a day times thirteen days. No, I quit early today. Call it twelve days. Two hundred and four dollars. This isn’t the first time you’ve tried to short me, Nestor.”
“I hear,” he said patiently, “what you are saying. Do you hear what I am saying?”
“I did the work, Nestor. I want to be paid for it.”
“Is that all you can say the same thing over again? I heard you already, your pay. I am trying to talk to you like a reasonable civilize human being. Can I do that, you think?”
“Nestor,” I said.
The first time you use a jackhammer, your hands are so swollen at night that you can’t close them. You can barely pick a fork up off the table. That’s the way my whole head felt just then. That’s how it takes me. It’s as if the front of my brain was swelling, locking up, and all I could think was, I want my pay. I want my pay. I didn’t blame Nestor for being sick of it. I was sick of it myself. I told myself to turn around and walk out. I wasn’t listening. I leaned forward on my hands and took a breath. Nestor looked up at me, unimpressed. I said, “Nestor.”
“Lissen, what do you want,” he said. “Think about what you really want. You want me to call the cops, that what you want?”
“Yeah, you want the cops here, Nestor. You want them here real bad. Nestor, I’m telling you. Give me my goddamn money, all right?”
“And I am telling you, you are a goddamn big stupid cabrón of an ape. And you gonna wait for your pay a long time. And how ’bout that?”
All right. It was out of my hands now. Anyway, that’s what I usually tell myself. The room was crammed full with rolls of tarpaper, coils of wire, cartons of bathroom tile. There was a two-foot length of heavy chain on the corner of Nestor’s desk, an open padlock hooked into the last link. I unhooked the padlock, picked up the chain, and came around the desk. “Oh, now you’re gonna be a big tough guy,” he said. “Now you’re gonna scare me. Big tough guy. Now you’re gonna threaten.” I scooped him out of his chair, mashed him one-handed against the wall, and wound the chain around his neck. His little hat fell to the floor. I slipped my fingers in between the chain and the side of his neck, gripped the chain, and twisted. Nestor made a squeaking noise back in his throat, and then he made no noise at all except for the scuffling of his feet against the floor and the clacking of his teeth as he opened and closed his jaws. His bulging eyes didn’t leave mine. They seemed to be searching for some sign that I was somehow kidding. I loosened the chain and said, “I want my pay, Nestor.”
“You’re crazy!” he croaked. His voice whistled in his throat. “Crazy!”
I tightened the chain again and he was quiet. He was staring into my eyes, and then he was staring past them. His little belly heaved convulsively and his fingers scratched at my chest. “I want my pay,” I said.
I loosened the chain again.
“Crazy! Crazy!” he whispered.
“Two-hundred and four dollars,” I said, towing him over to the desk by the chain. He scrabbled in a drawer and pulled out a checkbook. I took it and dropped it back in the drawer. “Checks can be stopped, Nestor.”
He pulled his wallet from his breast pocket and threw it on the desk. He began to curse me in his whistling, broken voice. I tightened up a little and he stopped. “Count it for me,” I said.