He was a son-of-a-bitch, no doubt about it. To his very core, he was mean and bitter and spiteful. When he spoke, his words were infused with poisonous arrows and daggers and they flew from his mouth engulfed in flames. He would sit at the table, bathed in complete disdain, and would squint his eyes as if he could not bare to look at whomever was talking, the sound of their voice almost inconceivable and certainly intolerable. He did not listen, but merely waited for the annoyance of your voice to stop torturing him, for the love of God. I am sure he must have known his share of heartache and heartbreak to get to such a miserable point, but I held no sympathies. I hated him from the very first moment I met him, and grew to like him less with each passing day.
I was twenty-three years old when I took a job with Harwood City Streets and Sanitation, helping to fill potholes, resurface broken curbs and smooth out sidewalks that had fallen beyond repair and towards a potential lawsuit against Harwood. My direct supervisor that spring was a grey-haired man named Sarge, who had flushed cheeks and the saddest eyes I had ever seen. I could not bear to look at him. His eyes hung so low, the skin drooped and revealed sullen, bloodshot pupils — it was if he had been bathed in tears for months on end. A basset hound at the scene of an earthquake. He was a nice man, a kind man, who smiled only occasionally but he was completely uninterested in anything more than making it through each day, as he inched his way toward pending retirement. He told me that several times a week, just as he told each of the 12 men who worked under him.
I did my job, tried to learn skills and techniques that were completely foreign to me and made great pains to fit in, with men who, in some cases, were old enough to be my father. As the summer came to a close, my muscles began to ease into a comfortable rhythm, settling into some of the movements I had been forcing on them for months. My body forgave me and allowed me to wake in the morning without pain and void of apologies. The fall schedule involved more clean-up work, and some of the contracted help was let go. Even though I was one of the last hired, I was kept on. I started to do more paperwork for Sarge. I filled in the Work Request Forms for those residences which didn’t fill them out with us – which was practically all of them, by the way. He also asked me to organize some files that were stacked on the file cabinets or tables, or at least “do something, just make them fit in the goddamn cabinet. Please.” I grouped some files together and broke others out. At first I told Sarge about each small accomplishment or would asked him questions, but I could see that this part of the job didn’t interest him at all, especially with eighteen months to go, so I kept my mouth shut and made the best decisions I could make on my own.
One morning, Sarge set a dark green canvas pouch on his desk in front of him, slid it across desk, and told me to take it to Holloway. I looked around the room but there was nobody there.
“Who?” I asked.
“Holloway. Take it to Holloway.” He looked at me as if he was pleading. “Just do it, okay? Just do what I tell you.”
“Who’s Holloway?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You ain’t ever gone there? Seriously?”
“No, I don’t what you’re talking about.”
“Holloway is my boss. Or rather, my boss’ boss. You will actually meet him in some rountables we have. We’ll have those later. But then we also gotta go see him, at his office, once a week. Not all of us, just one of us. Anyway, he doesn’t actually work for the city but we make him happy just the same. Actually more happy than anyone else. Does that make sense to you?”
He picked up the pouch and held it out to me, his sad eyes drooping lower, as if offering an olive branch.
“Yeah, okay, where do I go? What do I do?”
Sarge wrote down the address and told me which streets to take to get there.
“Go on upstairs, don’t worry about the signs. Tell them that you have something from District 62. It’s easy, no worries, nothing to think about. Just make sure you hand this to him, personally. Nobody else. You understand? If he is not there — but he’ll be there, he’s always there — bring it back. But he is always there at this time of day. You gotta get going though, okay? No stops. If you need to make a stop – bathroom, McDonlald’s, gas station — take your stops on the way back. Make sense?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Yeah”
I did as Sarge had told me. I did not occur to me, at the time, to refuse to do so or even question any part of it. I hopped into the front of a Streets pickup truck, took the route he told me to take, parked across the street so I could see the building at a distance, and walked into the side entrance marked “Fire Exit,” just like he instructed me to do.
A dark-haired woman in a solid green polyester suit was sitting behind a large wooden desk. She didn’t even ask me who I was, barely looked at me. Without a word, the woman stood up, turned and lead me down a hall and up to a closed door. She knocked twice and swung the door open. She bowed her head slightly, to avoid my glance, and held the door open with her extended right arm as I walked in. I inched past her and into the room. A large room, huge ceilings, and large steel beams littering the space. The man behind the desk was the size of a brick wall. Sweat bubbled on the top of his head.
“Who are you?” he said in a low gravely voice, without looking up. The giant woke from his slumber.
“Uh, I have a package from District 62. I was asked to bring it.”
“I didn’t ask what you have in your grubby little hands. Don’t you understand English? I asked who you are. You sorry piece of shit.” Still the brick wall did not look up.
I hesitated. “I, uh, I’m from District 62.” I didn’t know what else to say. I thought it best not to give my name, although it was odd that if he was so interested in who I was, the least he could do was raise his fat head and look at me.
“Put it on the table.”
I set the pouch down on the table and wiped the sweat from my hands along the front of my pants.
He did not speak and I stood, awaiting the next question.
Finally, still, without looking up, the brick wall spoke once again. This time his voice rose and I could feel his spit spray my face. “Get out of my fuckin’ office.”
I turned and left.
*****
That was my first experience with Holloway. Charming man that he was. I had no desire to see him again, and with each passing meeting, my hatred grew deeper. As did his depth of anger and unpleasantness. In our second encounter, he told me I was worthless and that it was a wonder I was allowed to be born at all. He scratched his head and said, “How you fucking live day-to-day is a fucking wonder. Okay, piece of shit, get out of my office.”
At first I was shocked for I didn’t get a chance to do anything, say anything, to provoke such pleasantries. How could he be so mad? At what? It confused me. But on the drive back each day, the confusion would dissipate and the anger would bubble inside me. I couldn’t believe this animal had so much blackness to give, each day. And I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. How could I? As far as I knew, I was bringing him a bag full of money each week, and I did so without speaking, without anything, and I was the worthless sack of shit? The days were all the same. When I was in that room, I found myself continually stunned, in utter disbelief, unable to speak. His anger wasn’t logical nor was it arguable and so I could not put my finger on it, I just couldn’t understand it. He bullied you, shoving his venom, his spite, down your throat when you least expected it, before you had a chance to defend yourself. It was like being hit over the head with a bat as soon as you opened your eyes in the morning. There was no time to react.
“What’s the deal with him?” I finally asked Sarge one day as I tossed the keys back on his desk.
Sarge just smiled.
“He has a black heart,” he said. “Nothing more than that.”
“He makes me so angry, so . . .mad that I can’t speak, I don’t know what to do.”
Sarge looked me in the eye. “Get used to that feeling, kid. Seriously. I put nothing past him and all the stories I have heard over the years, I believe. So it is best that you cannot speak, that you don’t know what to do, so you won’t speak, you won’t do anything. I hope that you never find your tongue with him. I would shudder to think what would happen.”
“Seriously,” Sarge added. “I hope he keeps you speechless.”
He held out a yellow sheet of paper and I took it and walked out of the office. “Now, I need to you handle this request. Missed garbage in Knowlwood Court. Here.”
I would think about Halloway each night. I would go over the dialogue from earlier in the day, however one-sided it was. I would remember the things he said, his tone, the color of his skin. And I would listen to myself as I stumbled and stammered, at last finding words that were inadequate, to both Halloway and to myself. I so wanted to give him a fistful of confidence right back, to answer him in tones that equaled his, at least in weight, to give him a little back what he had given me. I would lie in bed each night, staring at the faded shapes of light that danced like water on my bedroom ceiling. I would eventually fall to sleep with a scowl on my lips, angry that this man with a black heart had pushed his way into my dreams.
I debated asking Sarge if he could start choosing someone else to make that weekly trek for the drop-off. But I couldn’t. I kicked myself, tried to encourage myself to standup, to be strong, to not give in, to not be bullied by a brick wall. Each day, I vowed I would give as I got, I would not let him walk all over me. But then I thought of Sarge’s warnings and I remembered that there were stories, that there was something behind his threats, behind his vulgarities. Better to be alive and a little humiliated, I thought, than the alternative. Proud and dead is still dead.
It was a Tuesday afternoon when I knocked on the door, was led up and announced “District 62,” just as I did with each visit, and laid the pouch on the table, the same as always.
The brick wall of a man did not move, did not speak, though I knew better than to initiate the next step. I could not move without him barking or yelling or grumbling or waving his large arm my way, the back of his hand swiping me away in disgust. I stood and stared at the top of his head, at the painting hanging on the wall behind his desk, olive green oil paint swirls making a dimly lit vase with a loose arrangement of thin daisies and falling around the lip. I waited. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, never forgetting to keep my body straight and confident, ready for an errant blow, a verbal uppercut.
Still he did not speak, he did not move. He did not look up. He finally brought the back of his right wrist to his face and rubbed it across his eyes – over and back again.
“Okay,” he said, “Okay, you can leave.”
I did not move. I was sure there was more to come. I waited for the litany of curses. And waited.
“Thank you.” The words He said these words softly, so softly that, to this day, I am still unsure I heard them correctly. His head was bowed and I could not really see his face, his eyes, his mouth. Perhaps I willed what I heard but I don’t think so, I though I saw a bottom lip tremble. I am convinced that this day was different. It was a turning point, a day Something happened to him and then to me. I believe that he spoke those words with all the strength he had, for that was all that could come out of him.
I turned and walked to the door, put my fingers on the knob and waited just a moment. The air had cleared and I felt as if I were on a rooftop, with blue skies filling me from every direction. I finally opened the door and stepped into the hall.
As I drove back, I leaned my arm on the door of the truck, with the window open, and felt the traffic open in front of me, red light changing to green. I drove past the mini-malls, the storefronts, the small Cap Cod homes whizzed past me in a majestic whirl of glorious colors, bright and vibrant, reaching out to me, brushing against my shoulder.
When I got back to the office, Sarge watched me walk by and said something like, “Just forget about it. You didn’t see nothing.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but it struck me funny. I thought about that afterwards. It was as if he knew something, but I could never be too sure.
I went back the next day, unsure of what I would meet up with, who I could come across. I was greeted by a snarl, eyebrows ablaze, curses and the familiar refrain to “just put it on the damned table, for Christ’s sake, and get your worthless ass out of here.” I smiled at that mean son of a bitch and left.
