“You know, I was just reading in the paper yesterday …” Karl pulls his bulk off the counter and swivels around toward me. He reaches down and switches off the polka festival. “… that there’s a decline in songbirds now that’s directly credited to the suburbs.”
“I didn’t know that.” I stare at his smooth, pink features.
“It’s true. Predatory animals that thrive in disturbed areas eat the songbird eggs and young. Vireos. Flycatchers. Warblers. Thrushes. They’re all taking a real beating.”
“That’s too bad,” I say, not knowing what else to offer. Karl is a facts man. His idea of a worthwhile give-and-take is to confront you with something you’ve never dreamed of, an obscure koan of history, a rash of irrefutable statistics such as that New Jersey has the highest effective property-tax rate in the nation, or that one of every three Latin Americans lives in Los Angeles, something that explains nothing but makes any except the most banal response inescapable, and then to look at you for a reply — which can only ever amount to: “Well, what d’you know,” or “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” Actual, speculative, unprogrammed dialogue between human beings is unappetizing to him, his ergonomic training notwithstanding. I am, I realize, ready to leave now.
“Listen,” Karl says, forgetting the dark fate of vireos, “I think we might be being cased out here.”
“What do you mean?” A trickle of oily, hot-doggy sweat leaves my hairline and heads underground into my left ear before I can finger it stopped.
“Well, last night, see, just at eleven”—Karl has both hands on the counter edge behind him, as if he were about to propel himself upward—“I was scrubbin’ up. And these two Mexicans drove in. Real slow. Then they drove off down Thirty-one, and in about ten minutes here they come back. Just pulled through slow again, and then left again.”
“How do you know they were Mexicans?” I feel myself squinting at him.
“They were Mexicans. They were Mexican-looking,” Karl says, exasperated. “Two small guys with black hair and GI haircuts, driving a blue Monza, lowered, with tinted windows and those red and green salsa lights going around the license tag? Those weren’t Mexicans? Okay. Hondurans then. But that doesn’t really make a lot of difference, does it?”
“Did you know them?” I give a worried look out the open customer window, as though the suspicious foreigners were there now.
“No. But they came back about an hour ago and bought birch beers. Pennsylvania plates. CEY 146. I wrote it all down.”
“Did you let the sheriff know?”
“They said there’s still no law yet against driving through a drive-in. If there were, we wouldn’t be in business.”
“Well.” Again I don’t know what else to say. In most ways it is a statement like the one about songbird decline. Though I’m not happy to hear about suspicious lurkers in lowered Monzas. It’s news no small businessman wants to hear. “Did you ask the sheriff to check by special?” A little more oily sweat slides down my cheek.
“I’m not supposed to worry, just pay attention.” Karl picks up his rubber-bladed fan and holds it so it blows warm air at my face. “I just hope if the little cocksuckers decide to rob us, they don’t kill me. Or half kill me.”
“Just fork over all the money,” I say seriously. “We can replace that. No heroics.” I wish Karl would put the fan away.
“I want a chance to protect myself,” he says, and makes his own quick assessment outside, via the customer window. I’d never considered protecting myself until I got bonked in the head by the Asian kid with the big Pepsi bottle. Though what I thought of doing then was concealing a handgun, lying in wait at the same place the next evening and blasting all three of them — which was not a workable idea.
Behind Karl I see the gang of state stoplight installers swaggering in a scattered group across the highway and on into our parking lot, still wearing their hard hats and thick insulated gloves. A couple are animatedly dusting off their thick pants, a couple are laughing. Half are black and half white, though they’re taking their break together as if they are best of friends. “I’ll have the big weenie,” I hear one say from a distance, making the others laugh some more. “‘She said hungrily’” someone else says. And they all laugh again (too boisterous to be sincere).
I, though, want to get out of here, get back in my car, jack the a/c to the max and lickety-split head to the Shore before I get corralled into building Polish dogs and serving up root beer and watching out for stickup artists. I occasionally hold down the fort when Karl takes off for some medical checkup or to have his choppers adjusted, but I don’t like it and feel like an asshole every time. Karl, however, loves nothing better than the idea of “the boss” donning a paper cap.
He has already started lining up cold mugs out of the freezer box. “How’s old Paul?” he says, forgetting about the Mexicans. “You oughta bring him out here and leave him with me a couple of days. I’ll shape him up.” Karl knows all about Paul’s brush with the law over filched condoms, and his view is that all fifteen-year-olds need shaping up. I’m sure Paul would pay big money to spend two free-wheeling days out here with Karl, cracking jokes and double entendres, garbaging down limitless root beers and Polish dogs and generally driving Karl nuts.
But not a chance. The vision of Karl’s little second-floor bachelor apartment over in Lambertville, with all his old furniture from his prior Tarrytown life, his pictures of his dead wife, his closets full of elderly “man’s” things, odorous old toiletries on dressertop doilies, the green rubber drain rack, all the strange smells of lonely habits — I’d be grateful if Paul lived an entire life without having to experience that firsthand. And for fear of a hundred things: that a set of “mature” snapshots might just get left on a table, or a “funny magazine” turn up among the Times and Argosys under the TV stand, possibly an odd pair of “novelty undershorts” Karl might wear only at home and decide my son would think was “a gas.” Such notions come to solitary older men, happen without plan, and then boom — piggy’s in the soup before you know it! So that with all due respect to Karl, whom I’m happy to be in the hot dog business with and who has never given a hint something might be fishy about himself, a parent has to be vigilant (though it’s unarguable I have not been as vigilant as I should’ve been).
All the state workers are standing outside now, staring at the closed sliding window as if they expected it to speak to them. There are seven or so, and they’re digging into their pockets for lunch money. “So how’s it going out there? You guys ready for a dog?” Karl shouts through the little window, as much to me as the state guys, as though we both know what we know — that this place is a friggin’ gold mine.
“I think I’ll sneak on out,” I say.
“Yeah, okay,” Karl says brightly, but now busily.