In For a Penny (16 page)

The wooden handle clanked against hollow metal, something that must be nearly at the bottom of the bin. The sound of it resonated up his arms, stopping him cold. Full of excitement, he dropped the stick, leaning into the bin and tossing aside trash, trying to expose whatever it was that lay beneath. The trash and garbage cascaded back down, thwarting his efforts, and he was forced simply to pitch it out onto the asphalt of the parking lot, whole handfuls of debris, the reek of old meat and garbage nearly making him weep.

One of the shop doors opened and a woman stepped out into the glow of the light, looking at the debris on the ground and then at Mason with a mixture of loathing and repulsion.
“I’ve
already called the police,” she said simply, dusting her hands together in a meaningful gesture. “Scrounging in these trash cans violates the city ordinance. It’s right there in plain sight. Right on the side of the bin. And this is littering.” She gestured at the ground, which was an ungodly mess. “You can wait for the police or you can damn well get the hell out of here.”

The word ‘police’ struck him with an intense fear, an image of the car wreck and the shooting hydrant appearing in his mind. He let go of the mop handle and moved away from the bin as the woman disappeared back into the shop, slamming the door behind her. He heard the dead bolt slam home as he took off toward the car. Halfway there he hesitated, his mind a furor of contradictory impulses: surely she was lying about the police. … He nearly turned back, recalling the hollow sound of the mop handle against metal, imagining what might be inside such a box, and he heard on the evening wind the voice of the face in the garage window. “A king’s ransom,” it whispered.

But at that moment he heard another siren—a police car? —somewhere off in the night, and he realized that he was dangerously close to disaster. This was no time to take chances. He hurried to the car, sliding in and firing it up, looking longingly back at the trash bin, which glowed with a golden halo. The dashboard clock caught his eye: seven o’clock! He had killed twenty-five minutes.

In order to avoid the scene of the fire hydrant collision he took backstreets as he headed east, silently cursing the woman at the shop. On the boulevard Saturday night traffic slowed him down. He honked the horn at a slowpoke in front of him, then zoomed around, passing the car on the right, braking and swerving back into the lane in order to avoid hitting a car exiting a freeway offramp, then pulling across two lanes and into the video store parking lot to the sound of car horns. When he finally strode into the video store and found the movie, the checkout line was apparently petrified, and he waited impatiently as the minutes ticked past. People glanced at him and glanced away, as if he were on display, and he tried to smooth his hair down and compose himself. His shirt, with it’s dark line of greasy dirt, was half untucked, and somehow all of the Dumpster diving had pushed the zipper on his pants halfway down. He arranged himself, scowling openly at a teenager who gawked in his direction. To hell with all of you, he thought, crossing his arms in front of himself to hide his shirt.

By the time he hurried out the door again he was another fifteen minutes behind, and during the trip to Mr. Lucky’s he hit every possible red light, his mind almost unhinged with anger at the people and traffic that conspired against him. He forced himself to breathe regularly and to picture the pearls and silver in the garage, but the thought of them only made him see how pitifully insufficient they were—a treasure for a poor man, the kind of treasure that he would have to budget and conserve. On some not-so-distant day he would find himself like a character out of a French novel, bartering his last pearl, cursing the day that the fates had raised his hopes to such a point and then laughed in his face. The image of Mrs. Fortunato came into his mind, and he was full of hatred for her, for what she had done to him. …

Suddenly he was aware that he was passing Mr. Lucky, and he cursed out loud again and hung a squealing right hand turn down a street adjacent to the parking lot, where he pulled over to the curb. Get a grip, he told himself, looking at his shaking hands. This was no time to lose his mind. If he could keep his wits about him he still might find his heart’s desire, unless, of course, he had left it lying in the trash bin.

When he entered the restaurant the crowd was as bad as it had been in the video store: half a dozen people at the bar and another dozen waiting for tables. He saw what must be his food on the counter, the carryout boxes packed into a grocery sack with a receipt stapled to the top, and he sidled towards the register, pulling two twenties out of his wallet, waiting while the host seated one party after another. Finally he paid the tab and went out again into the night. He could tell just by holding the bag that the food was cold, which wasn’t surprising: he would have been gone nearly an hour by the time he got home.

As he hurried down the sidewalk he passed the open rear door of the restaurant. He could see into the kitchen, where several white-aproned cooks worked furiously at long chopping blocks. Just outside the open door there was a pile of discarded boxes, and farther on, in a shadowy little recess in a cinderblock wall, was the usual trash bin, full to overflowing.

Hell, he thought, hesitating there on the sidewalk. It wouldn’t take another thirty seconds to peek inside a couple of the boxes. One lucky strike, after all, and virtually everything would be justified, even cold Chinese food. And this
was
Mr. Lucky’s for God’s sake. …

He set his bag on the ground and started picking up and discarding boxes, all of which were empty. But each empty box fueled his resolve, arguably narrowing his search, which at the same time became more apparently futile. His angry mood surged back in like a tide when he picked up the last box from amid the now-scattered cartons. It was full of wadded up newspapers, but by God it was heavy enough to house something more than that.

He yanked the paper out, his mouth open in anticipation, his heart pounding, only to find that beneath the paper was a litter of cigarette butts and a broken Jim Beam bottle lying in a pool of spilled whiskey, which leaked like a faucet through the torn corner of the box and down the front of his shirt and pants. He threw down the box, cursing at it, and tried to wipe himself dry with the wadded newspaper, which smeared his clothes with newsprint and cigarette ash.

“Shit!” he hollered, pitching the crumpled paper against the wall. He saw that an Asian man was regarding him from the open kitchen doorway. Mason picked up his bag of food and moved back toward the car, getting in and driving away without a backward glance. Five minutes later he was home. He held the bag in front of him when he entered, hoping that Peggy wouldn’t spot him until he’d had time to change out of his shirt. But she was right there in the kitchen. He worked his face into the semblance of a smile.

“What happened?” she asked anxiously. Clearly she was worried. But before he could answer the worry went out of her eyes. She wrinkled up her nose and said, “You smell like a distillery.”

“Can you believe they didn’t have the order?” he said, lying through his teeth. “So while I was waiting I managed to spill liquor on myself. It was a hell of a thing.”

“You were drinking again? Like whiskey or something this time?”

“No, I wasn’t
drinking
. It was just a whim. Anyway, I didn’t get to
drink
any of it. My shirt had the pleasure. And what do you mean, again?”

“You smell like a wet ashtray, too,” she said, ignoring his question. “Good God, what’s all that…filth?” She gestured at his shirt.

“I tried wiping it off with newspaper.”

“That was wise,” she said. But when she spoke again her tone had changed. There was worry in her voice again, the anger and irony gone. “You don’t look too good,” she told him. “You should have your blood pressure checked or something.”

“Okay,” he said, “That’s a damned good idea.”

“Maybe you better go change.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I should.”

He turned around and headed up the stairs, and when he looked into the glass he scarcely recognized the bloated and ugly face that looked back out at him. Maybe his blood pressure
was
at some kind of terminal level. Or maybe, and much more likely, the long and demanding day had simply beat him up. He put his head under the faucet and soaked his hair with cold water, rubbing his face with his hands as if to massage it back into its familiar shape. He smiled at himself in the mirror, winking and nodding, but the gesture was merely grotesque, and he toweled himself dry, combed his hair, put on a clean shirt, and went back downstairs, restless with the knowledge that the night was wearing on.

Peggy had the food on plates and the tea poured, but once again she didn’t look happy; she looked like the camel right before the last straw was laid on. “It’s cold,” she said.

“Cold?” He tried to look flabbergasted.

“Room temperature cold.”

“I guess I’m not surprised,” Mason said. “It took twenty minutes to get the video because of the crowd. And then, like I said, when I got to Mr. Lucky they’d mislaid the order, and so they had to start over again. The place was packed. It took about a half hour and then they brought me this. Now you’re telling me it’s cold?”

She stared at him fixedly now, as if he were the fabulous liar of the world, but he brassed it out: this was no time to change horses. “I bet I know what it was,” he said, inspiration striking him like a clapper. “I bet they had it all along but the cashier didn’t see it. You know, in the corner of the kitchen or something. And then they gave it to me anyway, when they
did
see it, instead of throwing it away and cooking it over again. That kind of lying pisses me off, but it’s got to be what happened.”

“Yeah, it kind of pisses me off, too,” she said, but he wasn’t sure what she meant.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. “I can take it back down there. Just say the word.”

“Let’s just try putting it in the microwave. But I’m going to call them up and tell then. I mean, thirty dollars worth of cold food …”

“I’ll
do it. They’ll remember me.”

“I’m
certain
they will,” she said, and while she put one of the plates into the microwave he dialed the number of the time operator.

“At the sound of the tone …” the recording said.

“Yeah, hey, this is George Mason. I was just in there to get a to-go order. That’s right, the kung pao chicken and broccoli beef? Well, it’s stone cold. We’ve got a house full of hungry people here and the chicken’s like a cesspool or something.” He winked at Peggy to show how clever the cesspool remark was, but she didn’t respond. He listened to the time again, and then, covering the mouthpiece, he said to her, “You want them to do it again? If you want I’ll go back down.”
Go for it
, he thought, sending out the message as hard as he could.

“Yeah,” she said. “The microwave’s turning it into leftovers.”

“We’re on our way,” he said, and hung up the phone. It was 7:38 and thirty seconds.

“I’ll go this time.” Peggy told him.

“No. You do another pot of tea.”

“We don’t need another pot of tea.”

“Then get the tape started. This is
my
screwup. I’ll go straight down there and make sure they get it right.”

He couldn’t fathom the look on her face this time, but there was no time to worry about that. He had to get the hell out before she wanted to argue. This was another lucky break, but he couldn’t expect any more.

. . .

In the golden lamplight he stood looking at the trash bins again. Someone had cleaned up the litter, probably the old woman from the shop. Serves her right, he thought, finding the mop handle again and prodding around in the trash and garbage, keeping quiet about it. Almost at once the handle thunked against it again, whatever it was, still waiting patiently for him.

He found the cushion from the stuffed chair in the adjacent bin and laid it onto the trash, then boosted himself into the bin and knelt on the cushion in a vain effort to keep himself clean. He moved debris aside gingerly, but the bin was at least as full as it had been, and time was wasting. Half measures weren’t going to cut it. In for a penny, he thought, simply digging down into the refuse until he found it—a box: smooth sides, small hinges and a metal ring in the front. He had to bury his arms up to the shoulder in order to heave it out. It was a bread box, painted white and with red roosters on it. He felt the heavy contents inside shift when he moved it, and there was the clink of metal on metal, like heavy coins.

Painstakingly careful, he climbed out of the bin and set the box on a wooden crate, getting down onto his knees before it on the dirty asphalt, desperate to look into it, certain beyond doubt that here in this Dumpster full of garbage he had found the rainbow’s end. In the yellow lamplight, the red-painted roosters might easily have been devils, and the rust that lined the edges of the metal was the ochre color of dried blood. As he reached for the pull on the front of the box, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and there came into his mind the curious notion that he was being watched, as if a silent, staring host had materialized behind him in the parking lot. He slowly turned his head to look, but of course there was no one: the lot was empty and dark, the night silent and waiting. Gingerly, tilting the box back so that nothing should spill, he took hold of the wire ring and raised the hinged front lid. The bread box was full of jewels, stuffed with them.