***“Alright, Desmond,” Loreen was not unattractive, but Mule was not at the shelter to shop for women. “Good luck out there. I know the world can be a harsh place. Come on back if you need to.” Her attempt at doe eyed concern was genuine.
“You can keep that,” she offered a finger wiggling wave of her own, nailing elementary school coquette square on the head. If Mule didn’t have other things to do he would most certainly take advantage of every opportunity to do fantastically athletic things to her. He gave her a nod and turned for the door. The thin strap of his shoulder tote was cutting into his neck and pulling his green t-shirt askew. He reshouldered it, and struck a match, giving the cigarette a few healthy breaths before tossing the smoking match head into one of the leafy balls of shrubs lining the short walk to the street.***
Mule Rawling’s eyes opened to the dusty olive underside of the shelter bunk, a constellation of lint, strands of hair, and bits of thread forming a web of something usually found in a used snot rag. He yawned fitfully, unperturbed, turned his legs ninety degrees to the edge of his cot, and pushed himself to an upright seat. The gray light of dawn’s afterbirth told him it was an easy 6 A.M. and he had an hour to kill. With a leisurely tug his tote bag came loose from beneath the cardboard wafer disposable pillow and, resting the shoulder strap around his neck and across his chest, he got to his feet.
“You got a lighter, sweetness?” He wiggled his thumb in front of the black stick still pinned near the corner of his mouth. Loreen placed a matchbook on the counter.
Mule Rawling’s eyes opened to the dusty olive underside of the shelter bunk, a constellation of lint, strands of hair, and bits of thread forming a web of something usually found in a used snot rag. He yawned fitfully, unperturbed, turned his legs ninety degrees to the edge of his cot, and pushed himself to an upright seat. The gray light of dawn’s afterbirth told him it was an easy 6 A.M. and he had an hour to kill. With a leisurely tug his tote bag came loose from beneath the cardboard wafer disposable pillow and, resting the shoulder strap around his neck and across his chest, he got to his feet.
Not a soul in the 45 head room was awake and the air was streaked with the chemistry of digesting alcohol, the meat curing tang of cheap unfiltered tobacco, and the jaw numbing perfume of weeks of unwashed skin. He was reminded of his own vice and a warm sensation in the pit of his stomach sent his fingers into his deep hip pocket for his box of Trudees. His black and red sneakers were already on his blue jean topped feet so he proceeded toward the check in desk one floor down. Halfway down the short faux wood floored hallway he made his decision and rang the elevator, tamping out a black papered cigarette from the gold leaf pack and holding it between his lips before returning it to his hip pocket. He adjusted his bag, an old show tune coming to mind and remaining unvoiced. He tapped his toe instead.
The elevator doors opened. Dr. Jerrud stood inside, a plain button down white shirt, thick leather belt, polished shoes, and pressed khakis composing his uniform. He was an inconspicuous man for someone who nearly won the governor’s seat for all of Richmond county. “Getting an early start today, Desmond?” The doctor’s voice had an infectious upbeat ditty ring to it, but Mule was feeling perfectly immune to most of the lighter conversational pathogens.
“Steady as she goes, captain,” he spoke evenly as he took a short step inside the door, double checked the buttons, ascertained that the doctor was on his way up, and then decided to ride with him regardless. For a last day he wanted to do nothing unusual and the first time he met Dr. Jerrud at the homeless shelter was on this very elevator that he mistakenly rode in the wrong direction as he did now.
“With the flow, my friend. Keep that in your head and there will be nothing you can’t overcome.” Mule could feel the doctor smiling his matronly smile, but he didn’t care to return it, offering instead his usual nod of agreement. “Go where ever opportunity takes you and bring your best. Of all the unemployed and housing challenged here, you’ve set a fine example.” The floor’s ticked by, issuing their bleats dutifully. Mule knew, as his eye’s met Dr. Jerrud’s mid sentence, that the doctor was on the verge of commenting about his cigarette dangling form his lips and he could see him shrink back visibly from whatever it was he was about to suggest. “Keep it up and you’ll make out just fine.” The doctor straightened his thin rimmed glasses as the doors rang open. Mule neglected to step farther to the right and the doctor, and though similar in stature to Mule, he scurried on his way, taking care not to brush against the smoker’s t-shirted torso. He punched the door button and rode the lift back to the ground floor.
“Checking out, Loreen.” He tossed the slip of paper, taped on both sides with contact paper in a poor man’s effort at lamination, on to the chest high desk top and it slid, spinning, off the counter and down onto Loreen’s work station keyboard. “It’s been sweet, but I won’t be coming back.” He tossed her a wink. They kissed in the first week when he arrived with his eviction and gambling combination story and his perfectly rehearsed tears, but since then the wink was the first sign he offered her that she meant anything to him. Loreen’s heart nearly fluttered from between the straining buttons of her blouse as she looked up at Mule’s midnight shadowed face, jet black eyebrows, and hair that grew to just beneath his ears that seemed to ask every woman he spoke to for more than ten minutes if they knew a good hair stylist.
“Alright, Desmond,” Loreen was not unattractive, but Mule was not at the shelter to shop for women. “Good luck out there. I know the world can be a harsh place. Come on back if you need to.” Her attempt at doe eyed concern was genuine.
“You got a lighter, sweetness?” He wiggled his thumb in front of the black stick still pinned near the corner of his mouth. Loreen placed a matchbook on the counter.
“You can keep that,” she offered a finger wiggling wave of her own, nailing elementary school coquette square on the head. If Mule didn’t have other things to do he would most certainly take advantage of every opportunity to do fantastically athletic things to her. He gave her a nod and turned for the door. The thin strap of his shoulder tote was cutting into his neck and pulling his green t-shirt askew. He reshouldered it, and struck a match, giving the cigarette a few healthy breaths before tossing the smoking match head into one of the leafy balls of shrubs lining the short walk to the street.
During his four weeks in the low rise, low rent, junior city at the edge of the mouth of the Hudson, he grew fond of the sharp, clean tasting air’s contrast with the perpetual stink of urine emanating from what he now believed to be every single closed down store front portico within the city’s limits. A bounce came to his stride as he headed for the Local 414 Dock Worker’s Union chapter hall fifteen blocks away. Riding the bus crossed his mind, but the day was too beautiful and too nubile to pass up for a cage on wheels that reeked of wet nine day old newspaper and rodent feces. He wasn’t absolutely certain, but as he waited at a crosswalk he thought he could taste the suggestion of rain on an errant breeze. He loved rainy days in low rise towns the most. The way it bore down and scoured away the odors of hard lives and harder realities touched one of the otherwise untouchable chords of compassion in Mules body.
The light flickered yellow, then red. Mule resumed his stroll. His shoulder bag bounced lightly against his hip and he held it down with the same hand holding his cigarette, tapping in time on the black nylon woven thing to the beats between his strides. Some moments, moments between the important strikes of the hammer of decision against life’s anvil, allowed him many minutes to wonder if would ever pursue musicianship if he ever really received an opportunity to lay it all on the line some day. He still had at least 30 years ahead of him before he could even think about retiring. Before he could ever do that he would have to pick a place to settle down for good and land a steady job.
“I’m talking to you buddy. No one get’s in here before the bell without idea. You should know that.” The large flat hand of a booth hermit rent a cop was against Mules chest. He arrived. Mule shrugged off his bag, and his irritation, to fish for his paperwork.
“I’m sorry sir, it’ll only be a minute.”
“You’re here mighty early aren’t you? The 3rd shift lock out is still in effect.” The guard stepped entirely out of his booth, his belly swinging free of the door like a papoose full of custard. He stood square in front of Mule, hands on hips. He knew the guard was enjoying his comic hero position of power as he bent over his bag, but Mule was never so easily ruffled as to lash out at a gesture that infantile.
“I know. I wanted to meet with Friendly and Cooper. I’m not feeling too good about the strike talks and I wanted to get in some face time in case things get crazy later today,” he pursed his lips impatiently as the guard took the union identification card and considered the photo and stats. He tilted it toward the still pale sunlight. The hologram flickered.
“Okay pal, go ahead under the gate.”
“The usual room,” he asked, tucking the card back into a flap inside the tote.
“I don’t see why they wouldn’t be in the cafeteria,” the guard tried to roll his eyes and achieved an oblong exasperated shiftiness instead. Mule offered no thanks as he ducked beneath the orange and black arm barring the entry road. Directly in front of him was the main office and motor pool. Joining it in all of its red bricked gray grouted glory was a small square building. The dock hands mess hall and the home to Local 414. Beyond that lay cranes of various proportions and the dark shapes of moored tugs, barges, and tankers awaiting crews to off load them. He pinched the ember off of the end of his cigarette and tossed the butt of it into a shallow puddle of oil and dark water.
Normally the entire industrial park would be bustling with life, Mule knew from his previous three weeks working the site. Shifts were coming and going 24 hours a day. Whenever a registered dock man like himself saw a tanker it was either in the process of being simultaneously gutted and stuffed, coming into port, or being tugged to deep water.
That changed when the jobs dried up. The demand for dock hands plummeted and talent skyrocketed. The union that owned every port in the greater tri-state area picked off Richmond like a bird nabbing a tick swollen and waiting to burst. Negotiations for higher pay and fewer hours went on and off for nearly six months, but it was clear that a strike would be unavoidable from the start and was beginning to be borne out as the city’s power brokers allowed fewer and fewer shifts to work and forced more and more idle cargo to mount in the hopes that workers would feel the income pinch hard enough to dissuade them from all out labor strikes. Mule would have been in the area sooner if he wasn’t wrapping up loose ends in New Jersey.
The chipped brown paint of the door to the mess hall always irritated him; almost as much as having to keep up with his many bits of documentation. At the far end of the cafeteria, a janitor was opening a final row of tan folding chairs underneath half of the over head lights. The other half of the lights remained switched off. Farther beyond the janitor stood Cooper and Friendly. Friendly was the union head and cooper was the complainant’s liaison, the smiling public relations veneer that covered the boiling opinions of the grime nailed dock hands. They either did not see Mule enter or did not care as they stood close to one another, speaking and gesturing, but not loud enough for Mule to discern their words. He proceeded to the lavatory, and closed himself into the spacious handicap stall.
Four weeks of shadowing the union, incorporating himself into the culture, staying at the shelter to leave no credible trace of his arrival, temporary residence, and departure, all waiting for a moment that the union, the local city hall, and the people with the power to take action knew was coming 20 weeks ago, was about to net him a decent payday for the eighth time in what was shaping up to be a solid year.
Opening the flap of his tote bag he untucked a smallish black tablet no larger than a box of cereal. Depressing a heavily sprung switch on its side the, box split in half and swung by a hinge at one end into a rectangle, cooling fins adorning one end, the other crafted into a crude L shaped butt stock. A pistol grip and 30 round magazine, nestled inside its tacky surface, descended from beneath the barrel end. Reaching into the bag again he removed a 10 inch cylinder and screwed it onto the finned muzzle. Squeezing and sliding the safety to the open position he dialed the collapsible carbine to its fully automatic configuration and checked his watch. The rest of the dock hands were not due for another three hours to begin staging the first day of the walk out, depending on what Cooper and Friendly tell them at the union’s morning meeting.
“Okay,” he shouldered his more or less empty bag, “easy as breathing,” he reminded himself aloud. The job was four week investment. He had to wait for the decision day. No phone call came at the shelter during the night indicating the port’s shareholders came to an amicable agreement. Now it was up to Mule to make up Local 414’s minds for them. As he left the bathroom stall and headed for the three men standing between him and a fine injection of cash into his pockets, the carbine loose and steady at his hip, he considered Richmond and Loreen. “Wouldn’t stay permanently,” he thought as he tugged the bathroom door open quickly and silently, “but maybe,” the black finned and silenced long nose of the carbine came up to his shoulder, “maybe I’ll visit again when I’m not on business.”
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