Hose Monkey Read Free Page A

channel. There was a baby standing on his tippy-toes in a playpen a foot or two in front of the TV. The baby stared at Joe with happy eyes. A woman dressed only in a nicotine-stained nightshirt lay unconscious on a blue vinyl couch, her arms and legs splayed carelessly at unnatural angles. Seated perpendicular to the couch in a ripped up recliner behind the playpen was the man who had been on the porch. He held a thin glass pipe in his hand. One end of the pipe was pressed to his mouth; he held a disposable lighter to the other. Diaz sucked hard on the pipe, white smoke shooting into his lungs.
    Disgusted, Joe ripped the yellow receipt copy and screamed in his pidgin Spanish:
“Donde esta
the money?”
    The man, smoke leaking out of the corners of his mouth, pointed the cheap lighter at an envelope at the foot of the door. Joe counted the money. Exact change. He slammed the door shut. He could hear the baby begin crying behind him. He did not look back.
    Almost from the first day he’d taken the job with Frank, Joe had noticed his gift of invisibility. Even now, three years later, he had trouble believing the things people let him stand witness to. His stop at Casa Diaz wasn’t the first time he’d been treated to a box seat at crackhead Nirvana. In Wyandanch, he’d had to wait for a guy to finish shooting up before getting paid, and Joe had had more pot smoke blown in his face than he cared to remember. He’d watched parents smack their kids around, men beat their dogs and a woman slaughtering chickens. Invisibility had its perks. Semi-clad women of all shapes, colors and sizes often came to the door to pay him, some so scantily dressed that he was convinced he must indeed be invisible.
    It was to laugh, he thought, turning onto Sunrise Highway from Fifth Avenue. When he was working Narcotics, what he wouldn’t have given for the gift he now enjoyed. He had always known God was a bit of a mindfucker. God seemed to make a point of proving that to Joe at every opportunity. What Joe couldn’t figure out was why God got such a kick out of beating the same dead horse over and over again. Joe looked up. “I get it,” he said. “I get it.”
    Fuck! His bladder was screaming at him. He had forgotten to piss. He pulled to the service road curb, got out, and walked around to the passenger side. He positioned himself so that passing traffic could not see him. Joe knew the Almighty too well to rely on his intermittent invisibility. As the burn ebbed slowly away, he tried not to think about the baby’s happy eyes.
    Cain could barely contain himself, watching the clock blink the red seconds away until he went down to breakfast. It wasn’t breakfast that so excited him. Breakfast was all right here; better than in some of the homes he’d been in, worse than others. Sometimes they helped him pick out his clothes for the day, but not today, not on Saturdays. On Saturdays he wore the rugged Carhartt uniform Frank had bought for him.
    He thought his dusty black Wolverine work boots were really cool even though the staff hated the way they smelled of oil. When he first got the boots, Cain tried polishing them up after each shift and washing off the soles to get the stink out. Now he just let them be. He had come to love that smell. And like Frank said, “You’re a workin’ man. There’s no shame in smelling like one.”
    Frank was right. Frank was right about a lot of things. Frank was smart. Sometimes Cain thought that if he were normal, he’d want to be just like Frank. Frank treated him with respect. His parents never treated him with respect. They still talked at him like he was a baby. He was retarded, not stupid. He was a man now, not a baby.
    Cain found himself getting agitated, thinking about his folks. That wasn’t good. When he got like this, he got in trouble. But nothing could ruin his day. It was Saturday. He got to work on the truck with Frank. He had only a few more minutes before heading downstairs.
    He