Annabel - Kathleen Winter [124]
“I wouldn’t blame you,” Steve said, “if you hated me now.”
“I don’t hate you, Steve.”
“You can if you want.”
“Once I like someone, no matter what they do, I keep liking them.”
“That’s what Miss Cramm used to say. She was my teacher before she went away. She let me make top hats for the school play and I didn’t have to be in the play, and that was a good thing because I can’t remember any lines. But now I have Miss Fiander and she doesn’t like me one little bit. Are you working today?”
Wayne had been devising a way to go in and load up his truck without Frank King seeing the cut on his face. He knew Frank took the same lunch break every day and ate at Wendy’s. He wanted to make his deliveries after dusk, but it was nearly June, and every evening the light lasted longer.
“I’m having a problem,” he told Steve, “with the thing I told you about. How I want to go after dark to deliver the meat. Last night it was still light at almost nine o’clock, and no one wants a delivery man coming later than that.”
“I can do it!” Steve looked overjoyed to be able to make it up to Wayne. “My mom has my supper ready at five thirty, after I come home from Caines, and at six o’clock I can come here and we can go in the van and I can go up all the driveways and you can stay in the van. Anyway, you don’t look that bad, if you went and bought yourself some clothes that weren’t so baggy on you.”
Wayne let Steve make the deliveries. He let him go up the driveways with the meat and come back down to the van with the money. And he went to Frank King’s warehouse to load up between 12:40 and 1:30 every day, when he knew Frank was down Thorburn Road eating a double cheeseburger and a baked potato with grated cheese and cheese sauce at Wendy’s, so that Frank would not see him.
But one day Frank came back early because Wendy’s had run out of cheese sauce, and he spied Wayne.
“You definitely need,” he said, “to become more image conscious.” Frank looked at Wayne’s jeans, his shirt and
boots. “Clean, clean, clean.” Frank circled around Wayne,
and Wayne knew it was his body, not his clothes, that unnerved Frank.
“There’s something about your image,” Frank said, “that doesn’t quite . . . I can’t put my finger on it. Go to Tony the Tailor and get him to fit that shirt for you. He only charges seven dollars. Customers want a cleaner look than what you’ve got here. They’re going to take one look at you and they’re going to shut their doors.”
At night, after his deliveries, Wayne dropped Steve off and drove down to the waterfront and watched the cranes. Sometimes he watched them from his van, but police were always on the lookout for people loitering on the docks, and he did not want to have to answer as to what he was doing down there at midnight. So he went, in the June nights, to sit on the ground under the Southside bridge, and he watched the cranes from there, the lattice booms lit yellow and orange, and the sounds of seawater smacking the dock, and up above, on Water Street, the howls of drunk people on George Street, and honking taxis, and the hum of cars driving between the hotels and steak restaurants and late night bars.
He sat there and he saw men drinking across the road behind the Murray Premises, and he saw other things too, things that reminded him of what his father had said on the phone about what happened to people who did not plan their actions carefully, who lived in the city and had no training, who had not thought of economics and had not looked ahead, and had gained entry to the criminal side of life that was waiting for them. He looked up at the bridge above him, the Southside bridge, and he thought of all the bridges he had once sketched and studied, and he thought how this bridge was not like any of those. It was utilitarian and did not have the beauty of an Italian bridge, and it did not even have the ugliness of London Bridge. It had its own ugliness that