Hose Monkey Read Free

apologies. “Sleeping.”
    “You Mr. Diaz? You ordered fifty gallons, right?” Joe began the scripted dialogue, some version of which he repeated more than 120 times weekly.
    “Si,
feefty gallons.”
    “That’ll be $102.45 cash when I’m done pumping. Okay?”
“Mucho dinero, jefe.”
    “Si,”
Joe agreed. “Muy
mucho.
You got it?”
    “I got,” Diaz answered, staring at his bare cold feet on the concrete porch.
    “That the fill pipe there?” Joe pointed at a black pipe extending about a foot out of the front of the house just left of the stoop.
    “The pipe, si.” Diaz turned and went back inside.
    Joe went into action. He reached into the cab of his old Mack, took out a fresh ticket, wrote it up and slid it into the meter at the back of the truck. With a quick forward twist of the dial at the side of the meter, he locked the ticket in place and cleared the mechanism. He set the meter at fifty, opened the tank valve, slipped on his once-orange gloves and primed the pump. He lifted the nozzle from its holster, threw the hose over his left shoulder and marched it to the fill pipe. At the fill, he unscrewed its cover, screwed the nozzle in place and slid the pumping trigger open. Joe had repeated this routine so often, he found himself acting it out in his sleep. More than once he’d startled awake dreaming he’d dropped the hose.
    Almost immediately upon sliding open the trigger, Joe heard music to an oilman’s ears—a whistle. When oil goes into a tank, air is displaced and that air comes howling up through a vent pipe. Only two things ever come out of a vent pipe: air, if you do the delivery right, or, if you fuck up, oil. When the whistling stops, the tank is full. Keep pumping after the whistle stops and you’ve got oil gushing through the vent pipe. Air was good. Oil was bad. It was that straightforward. That was one of the things he liked about the oil business. It was all black or white, good or bad, air or oil. Early on as a cop, Joe had learned that a cop’s universe was shades of gray.
    There was little chance of a spill when they ordered fifty gallons. Standard tanks held between 250 and 275 gallons. Joe knew that only poor people or fools ordered only fifty gallons. In this weather, fifty gallons would last five, maybe six days. Then he’d be back. At fifty gallons, oil was almost two bucks a pop. Smart people or people with money ordered two-hundred gallons. It was forty cents cheaper per gallon that way.
    “They’re idiots,” he had said to Frank during training. “Why order so little? You get hammered that way.”
    “They’re not stupid, Joe, just poor,” Frank explained. “Poor people gotta make choices most of us don’t ever gotta make. Some weeks, it’s oil or food.”
    Joe felt silly for opening his mouth. Frank was right. He remembered how it was on the cops, in the bad neighborhoods. There, it was drugs or food. It was Joe’s experience that drugs were more powerful than food or oil or God.
    The whistle stopped almost before it got in full swing. Joe’s old Mack might be a rickety piece of shit with no radio, but it pumped like a motherfucker. New equipment was an anathema to Frank. Sometimes Joe thought his boss would buy used oil filters if he could. But he respected Frank. He owed Frank a lot. Frank had saved him. Frank gave him a job when no one would touch him with someone else’s ten-foot pole. Joe Serpe had his faults. Disloyalty wasn’t one of them. He knew plenty of cops who might disagree.
    Now Joe went through the routine in reverse: unscrewing the nozzle, replacing the cap, pulling the nozzle back toward the tugboat, reeling in the hose, taking off his gloves, closing the tank valve, unlocking the ticket from the meter with a reverse twist of the dial. He wrote up the price, added the tax, totaled the ticket and marched up the front steps. He opened the storm door and knocked. The front door pushed back.
    Joe saw the TV was on, tuned to a Spanish language