STICKERS by Daniel Scott - written version
Posted by Reader at 2/8/2008 3:54 PM 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: family crafts fairs noise short story; printing press; career flea market; basement
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: family crafts fairs noise short story; printing press; career flea market; basement
STICKERS
Erhardt never knew where the face came from until one of his sons showed up, nearly in tears, on the cellar steps.
The kid had just seen something on TV about the man who owned the copyright for the face. He was cracking down on illegal users of it. Two people were shown being taken away in handcuffs. The kid wanted to know if Erhardt was going to be taken away in handcuffs too.
“Of course not! That’s a stupid question. Those people weren’t printing stickers, were they?”
“No.”
Erhardt stood up from behind the press, where he was replacing a broken belt. He tried to seem casual as he wiped his hands with a rag, but his voice swerved a little when he said, “What were they doing?”
The kid said, “I don’t know.”
Erhardt tossed the rag aside. “Get upstairs now.” He was about to resume printing and the kids weren’t allowed in the cellar when the press was running. “And don’t say anything about this to your mother,” he added, but the kid did anyway.
Erhardt scoured the next morning’s paper until he found the small mention of it. Some guy in Ledgeville, Florida was busted for heading up a counterfeit T-shirt operation that extended to three states. Erhardt dismissed it elaborately, mostly for the sake of Brenda, his wife, who worried a lot. “I’m not running any kind of operation,” he told her and even if he was it was only in one state and that state, Massachusetts, was one hell of a long way from Ledgeville, Florida.
Brenda had gotten up with him like she had every Saturday and Sunday morning for the last two months. It was still dark out. She served him breakfast as he tuned to the local station that read off a list of schools in the area that were holding weekend fairs, which they did every year around this time. Brenda sat down with a cup of coffee for herself. She broke off a thread hanging from the sleeve of her housecoat.
“Do you think we’ll get in trouble, Joe?” she said.
“No, honey.”
“Could they put you in jail for this, Joe?”
“Brenda, please. I’m trying to hear this.” He jotted down six locales he could hit in the course of the day. He tried not to stray more than fifty or sixty miles from home, but lately the perimeter was stretching.
He looked up and Brenda was squinting at the newspaper article again -- eyebrows lifted, lids quavering, head lowered to within a few inches of the tiny print. She rarely complained but Erhardt was well aware she needed new glasses. She’d had the same pair since before they were married.
Erhardt tugged the paper away from her, saying he needed to check the almanac.
Brenda packed him a lunch and a thermos of coffee. She threw a jacket over her housecoat and helped Erhardt load the boxes of stickers into the back of the van.
“Do you suppose Al Hurley knew about this when he gave you the plate for that sticker, Joe?” she said. “Do you think he’s breaking the law too?”
“Nobody’s breaking the law, Bren. Stop worrying.” He lifted the van’s hood to check the coolant. She went back into the house, where the kids were up to watch their Saturday cartoons. She heard the van start and drive away. She was tired all day.
*
On the drive to the morning’s first fair, Erhardt concluded that Al Hurley probably did know he was breaking the law. Hurley was a friend, a graphic artist who had worked up a good likeness of the face and made a plate of it. He had given the plate to Erhardt in exchange for all of the printer’s future artwork business (allowing Erhardt’s printing company ever got off the ground, of course).
Before then, Erhardt had never seen or heard of the face, but Hurley said the kids were wild for it, and that the merchandising was “through the roof.” There were T-shirts and hats, backpacks and notebooks and bike baskets. It even had its own brand of gum, according to Erhardt’s own kids, and a Saturday morning cartoon they were probably watching at that very moment. The appeal of the face was lost on Erhardt; to him, it was nothing more than a jaunty sketch, with black zigzags for eyes, no nose, and a big electric scribble of a mouth that turned upwards at the ends in a vague suggestion of parentally unauthorized pleasure-taking. The face had a name...something Erhardt could never remember. . .Easy [capitalized?]something ...something easy[capitalized?] -- though it was explained to him by one of his daughters that it was actually “E.Z.,” like they were initials. “Oh,” he had said to her, “and what’s that supposed to stand for?” The kid just rolled her eyes and left the room, unable to believe her own father would ask a question like that.
Erhardt made the stickers in the six colors of ink that were cheapest to buy and easiest to mix -- blue, red, yellow, green, orange, and purple -- plus white, the color of the paper.[Does he have to mix the color of the paper?]
At the fairs where he sold the stickers for fifty cents apiece, Erhardt kept to himself. At some point he had learned he was supposed to have a vendor’s license. He also found out they were not hard to get, except for the $455 fee. No one had ever asked to see Erhardt’s license, despite even[omit “even”?] the makeshift appearance of his enterprise: just the aging van he carted his load of children and wife around in, with no special paintjob or stenciling like most of the other vendors’; a small collapsible card table for a display, a relic from the days when he and Brenda did things other than feed and clothe children; and untidy stacks of the variously colored face stickers held in place on breezy days by pebbles he picked up off the ground.
Once he set up, it didn’t take long for the kids to flock around. Erhardt typically did a brisk business, though today he would find a fair bit slower than usual. There was even a stretch of ten or fifteen minutes when no one at all was at his table. It was during this odd lull that he felt he was being watched from behind, and he was.
He recognized the man as one of the other vendors he had seen around from time to time. This man always wore tight, dirty T-shirts that showed the sags and folds of his torso, and his hair was shorn to a fine buzz that was silver in spots and black in others, giving his head the appearance of a giant speckled egg. Erhardt remembered that he sold novelties. He always suspected the man of being one of the illegals, like himself.
The man said his name was Wright and stuck his hand out. His grip was greasy, and Erhardt wiped his hand on his pants afterward, and not discreetly. Up close the man’s T-shirt showed a picture of a shapely young woman in a bathing suit that might have been inappropriate for a school fair if the image weren’t so faded and hard to make out.
“You’re doin’ good with those stickers, aren’t ya?” Wentzel said. “I see all the kids with them. Is that all you sell?”
Plainly that was the case.
“Where are you getting them? Who’s your distributor?”
Erhardt just smiled. It was a good approximation of the face on the sticker, or at least for a fleeting instant it felt that way to Erhardt. He nodded at a couple of kids who were walking by, but they didn’t stop. He was starting to think Wentzel’s presence was scaring away his customers.
Wentzel picked up a sticker and examined it front and back. “I’m not looking to mess up your deal,” he said. “Maybe I can get some through you. You know, you can make a little extra for yourself. I’d pay whatever price you felt was fair.”
“You’re getting that smudged...please put that down.”
“Oh, look at that. I guess I owe ya -- what is it? -- fifty cents?” He took a Kennedy half-dollar from his pocket and handed it to Erhardt. Erhardt didn’t take it outright so Wentzel placed it on the table with a snap. “Well? Whadaya say?”
“Why should I get you any stickers?” Erhardt said. “Right now I’m the only one selling them, as far as I can tell.”
“I’m heading down to Connecticut and Rhode Island in a couple of weeks. I keep heading south, the colder it gets. You can’t tell me you were thinking of going down there?”
“I can’t? Why can’t I?”
“Well, for one thing, you got that wedding ring on. You probably got kids too. You wouldn’t wanna just run off and leave them.”
Erhardt looked at the man. He hated how much he believed in his own rotten assumptions. He hated how sure he was that Erhardt believed them too. He looked in the direction opposite Wentzel and said, “How many are we talking about?”
“How many fills up one of them boxes you got there?”
“Ten, twelve thousand.”
Wentzel nodded. “I’d say ten boxes would do me good. Fifteen if you can swing it.
There came to Erhardt’s eyes a glint of interest, which he tried to disguise with surprise: “You got room for all that in there?” Wentzel drove and apparently lived in a black Winnebago. It had some sort of satellite dish on its roof.
“I got room for whatever I make room for,” Wentzel said. “I’ll be at the Ainsbury fair next Saturday. Let me know if you can set something up. It would definitely be worth it for you.”
Erhardt was noncommittal in his response.
Wentzel folded his sticker in half and slipped it in his shirt pocket. “You could charge more than fifty cents a pop for these, you know,” he said.
“Yeah, well. I don’t like to gouge the kids.”
Wentzel waved that off as he started back toward the Winnebago. He said, “Kids have all kinds of money these days.”
With Wentzel gone the kids began coming around Erhardt’s table again. He was so busy he hardly had time to think about anything Wentzel had said until he arrived to set up at the day’s second destination, where he quietly upped the price of a sticker to seventy-five cents. They sold just as well, and at his third stop he went for a dollar and again they sold just as well. He kept the price there for the rest of the day.
That night in bed, Brenda asked him what the trouble was. He said there was no trouble, except that he was tired and had to get up at four thirty in the morning. He laid awake thinking how he had never seen a black Winnebago before. All the ones he could remember seeing were a cream color. You got it mixing four parts white with one part yellow. Usually they were inscribed with names that invoked free-spiritedness or affection. But he had never seen one with a name that ran along the back of Wentzel’s: Salamander, in orange block lettering.
The extra cash he pulled in that day still wasn’t enough. No matter what he charged, there was really no such thing as profit. Whatever came in went out just as fast. There was never a moment when someone in the family didn’t want for something. He knew he needed the money too badly to turn down Wentzel’s offer.
In the morning Brenda asked him again what the trouble was. “I told you nothing,” he said. She stepped away, but not before a look that said she believed he was lying.
He wished he could have assured her there was no trouble, but there’d already been too much for her to ever believe that. Admittedly, it was he who started it. He had a job that at least sustained them, running a press at Victory Printing in Dorchester. Since he lost it, after deciding to siphon off a few customers for himself, he often thought he should have left barely enough alone. How Victory found out they wouldn’t say, but Erhardt suspected it was through one of those stolen customers, a man named Frank O’Brien. O’Brien denied it when Erhardt confronted him, but there was a lot of apologetic sympathizing and a promise to send a big order of bologna labels Erhardt’s way -- a promise that three months later he had heard nothing more about.
On Monday he started filling Wentzel’s order. To do that and keep up his own supply of stickers meant he had to run the press all day and well into the night. There was not a corner of the house the [noise] failed to reach. Somehow the kids slept through it fine, but Brenda laid in bed with a low throbbing that afflicted her behind the eyes. She was always straightening the clock on the kitchen wall or turning up the TV. Erhardt thought she was holding up pretty well until the middle of the week when Bud Kailer from across the street came over.
He had come to the back door instead of the front, which Brenda thought rude. They stood there, unhappy to have to look at each other, the press roaring underneath them. “What in God’s name is going on over here?” Kailer said.
Brenda tried hard to behave like everything was quite ordinary. She shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t know what I mean? Are you deaf?”
“Oh, that. That’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing!”
“It’s just -- Joe’s working on something -- not working, I mean, but...” She felt a little woozy, and she swayed. Kailer looked the way she imagined he would if she woke from fainting to find him over her. She shook her head and said, “I don’t know what Joe’s doing, exactly.”
Abruptly the press ceased. It was as if a cold clean breeze had suddenly swept through the house and Brenda felt relieved though she knew she shouldn’t have. They both listened as the printer ascended the cellar steps, emerging with red ink smeared on the front of his T-shirt.
“Hi, Bud,” he said.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Kailer was looking him up and down. “What’s all over you? -- paint?”
It seemed to Erhardt that any idiot would know the difference between ink and paint.
“It’s nothing,” Brenda said. “I told him it was nothing, Joe.”
“And what was that truck that was here the other day?” Kailer went on. “You can’t have eighteen wheelers coming down this street.” Erhardt had ordered some paper.
“We had a delivery!” Brenda blurted.
“Of what?” Kailer demanded.
Erhardt took a step forward. “I don’t think it’s any of your business, Bud.”
Two of the kids, wearing pajamas, ran in and suddenly halted. They stared up at Kailer, which made him uncomfortable.[point of view]
“Well,” he said. “Please try to keep it down. It’s against the law to run a business from your home, you know.” Kailer and his wife were childless, and he looked at the kids like they were some new species of weed that had cropped up on his lawn, which he tended to obsessively. He left without another word.
Erhardt had gotten [to]the point where he wondered if there was anything he had to do to survive that wasn’t against the law.
From then on, with urging from Brenda, Erhardt decided he would only run the press during the day. So he cranked out as many of the faces as he could in that time. If that meant fewer stickers for himself to sell, then he would charge Wentzel even more for his order.
When Brenda wasn’t upstairs with the kids, she was down with Erhardt. She would sweep up or help him sift through the freshly printed batches of stickers to weed out the bad ones, though she often let bad ones go by.
Later, in the bedroom, she worked with a nail file at removing a blue face that had ended up on the bottom of her slipper. She said, “I don’t know what they see in these things.”
“What?” Erhardt said. He had already begun to fall asleep.
“What’s it supposed to be anyway?” she said.
Erhardt turned over. “The kids like it,” he said.
“It looks like it’s on drugs.”
“It’s just a face, Bren.”
“Well I hate it.”
“I do too,” he said.
On Saturday Erhardt got up as usual and listened to the radio. There was indeed a fair at the Ainsbury Elementary School. It was a tiny town and he had to unfold his map of the state. Brenda, serving breakfast, watched his finger trace the route, stopping way out past Worcester. He had told her he would never go that far.
The road to Ainsbury passed through several small towns, each with their own creeping speed limit. As a result, the trip took longer than he’d allowed for. He arrived late.
He got a spot near the entrance of the school grounds and quickly set up his display. The fair was in full swing, meaning the few rides were up and operating while the grounds were traversed with docile small-town children and adults with puffy eyes and hair a little messier than it would be during the week. [awkward sentence]
Erhardt scanned the scene for Wentzel’s Winnebago, but did not find it. Immediately a dread took hold of his chest. His breathing became hard; there was nothing else to do but ask around.
He walked over to a vendor he had seen a lot, a seller of flavored ices, a chancy business in the waning months of the year. He eyeballed Erhardt skeptically as he approached.
Erhardt nodded and forced a smile. “I’m just wondering if you’ve seen that guy around today? He’s got a Winnebago. Sells, you know, things like those glass balls that you shake up and it looks like it’s snowing?”
The ice man’s eyes narrowed as his head shook out a no.
Erhardt asked one or two others, to the same effect. He headed back to the van. A gaggle of kids interrupted his path. He saw that some of them were carrying stickers showing the face. They were printed on a glittering silver paper that Erhardt knew was expensive. “Hey sweetheart,” he said to a little girl with one, “where’d you get that?”
“Over there.” She pointed to the other side of the school grounds. Erhardt could not be sure exactly where she was pointing. When he turned back, she was gone but a boy with an identical sticker was nearby.
“Hey kid. How much you pay for that?”
“Fifty cents.”
Erhardt made it back to his table. He had kept his eye on it the whole time. No one had approached it. He lowered his price to fifty cents. There was a nip in the air, and he sat in the van with the heater running. Quickly it became too hot. He shut the heater off and cracked the window.
He spent the next two hours like that. Three times he got out of the van to make a sale. He kept watching the gate for any sign of Wentzel. In that time it occurred to him that every instinct he ever had in his life had steered him wrong. Every seemingly good idea -- Brenda, the kids, the notion that he could work for himself -- turned out to be a trap. In the rearview mirror he could see the boxes and boxes of face stickers. He flipped the mirror to its tinted nighttime position, and tried to keep himself from calculating the loss. [Couldn’t he sell them eventually?]
The last of the other vendors began to pack up. He
got out and did the same. He wasn’t careful about it as he usually was, but instead folded up the table and threw it inside the van. He even left a few stickers lying on the ground, and ran over some as he backed up and then tore ahead. A man in a rumpled sport coat hailed him as he approached the gate. It was not clear who the man was, though Erhardt believed him to be a teacher or the principal. He had an overgrown moustache that was exactly the pale brown color of his coat, and thick glasses that made his eyes look like small muddy lakes.
Erhardt pulled up and the man leaned into the vehicle. “Take it easy, pal. This isn’t the Mass Turnpike. There’s still kids around.”
Erhardt said nothing as he started the van forward.
“Whoa!” the man said, and Erhardt stopped again. “I’d like to see your papers, please.” Apparently he didn’t like Erhardt’s attitude. Erhardt stepped on the gas and the man tried frantically to disengage his head from the window. In his panic he grabbed the steering wheel and the van lurched to the left. Erhardt broke his grip and righted the vehicle. Somehow the man freed himself, though not before whacking his head against the open car window. As he sped off, Erhardt heard him swearing in a way that he thought was particularly filthy for someone concerned about the kids all around.
He made his way to the state highway and headed south, the direction of Rhode Island. Wentzel had said something about Rhode Island. He looked all around for the black Winnebago. He knew he wouldn’t find it, but he kept looking. Several times the state highway became a local road, then a state highway again. After that, it was a long residential street where the houses got nicer and the cars newer the further[farther] he went. Then he stopped. He had to. In an hour’s time he had driven the length of the tiny state. He had reached the ocean.
He stopped the van in a parking lot. He got out and stood to watch the choppy gray water. The strong breeze made him zip up his coat. To his left he could see a small ship at a dock. People were boarding. He walked down to get a closer look. He had lived all his life near the ocean and had never been on a boat. He had no objection to boats, but in thirty-four years the opportunity had never come up.
He had come close enough that a man in a booth came out and said, “Twelve dollars, guy.”
“What?”
“Ticket is twelve dollars, round-trip.” The man was wearing a blazer and a variation on a train conductor’s hat.
“Where does that go?” Erhardt said.
“That’s the ferry to the island.”
“What island?”
“Block Island. This is the last weekend it’s running.”
“Why?”
“Doesn’t run in winter. Are you buying a ticket?”
“How much is a one-way?”
“No one-ways. Round-trip only. Twelve dollars.”
Erhardt took out his wallet. He had barely half that much. The man went back to his booth.
Erhardt stayed to watch the ferry. A loud horn blew when it was ready to go. The people on the deck talked like they were on a street corner or an elevator. They acted like they didn’t know they were on a boat. It took less than fifteen minutes to disappear from Erhardt’s sight.
He went back to his van and pulled it into a gas station. He spent the six dollars on gas for the trip back to Massachusetts. He took the straightest route there, but he didn’t hurry. He didn’t know what he would tell Brenda, who would surely expect an explanation.
But when he returned, his wife met him at the door with glowing eyes.
“Frank O’Brien was here,” [I had forgotten O’Brien by this point] she said. “The order came through.” She guided Erhardt to the kitchen, where everything O’Brien had brought -- artwork, plates, a check equal to ten percent of the total payment -- was carefully laid out on the table. Erhardt sat down gently, as if any sudden movement might cause it all to scatter.
The order was bigger than Erhardt ever expected. O’Brien was acting as broker for the SuperWay chain of supermarkets, which wanted labels not only for their store brand of bologna, but beef bologna, Genoa salami, olive loaf, and P&P loaf as well. He sorted through the materials as Brenda served the supper she’d been keeping warm. He stared at each label a long time. They were three-color jobs that really looked sharp. And he liked that they were real labels, labels with a purpose. People would look at them and learn something. O’Brien had left a note: “They want this by Friday -- sorry for the rush -- your labels will be in supermarkets all across southern New England!”
Brenda slid into the adjacent seat. She kept her arms off the table so as not to interfere with his careful sorting. “I was getting kind of worried,” she said. “You never came home so late before.”
“Accident on the highway.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.” He thought this would be a good place to elaborate a little, make the lie more believable. Shattered glass everywhere. Blood on the road. But he didn’t say anything. And not because he didn’t want to lie to her. He was just tired of explaining everything to her. Since he lost his job,[Did you mention earlier how long ago he lost his job? Maybe I missed it.] he and Brenda had been together every minute, except for the time on weekends he spent at the fairs.
Despite his exhaustion Erhardt was up the next morning five minutes before the alarm. He slipped from the bed quietly and took a fast, hot shower. He crept downstairs and looked over the SuperWay order again, deciding which label to run first, what blend of red and yellow would achieve the orange they wanted for the background. Then he put the order aside and switched on the radio. All school fairs were on for that weekend, weather permitting. He jotted down the possibilities. When he looked up, Brenda was standing on the threshold.
“We don’t have to do this anymore, Joe,” she said.
“Yes we do. Go back to sleep.”
“We’ve got the order.”
“That doesn’t solve everything.”
“It’s gotta be done by Friday.”
“Brenda, go back to sleep.” And to his surprise, she tightened the housecoat around her body, and went back upstairs. She knew he always woke up hungry. He could have made breakfast himself -- he had done so on the odd occasion, there was even a time when his Sunday mornings were spent making cheese omelettes for the kids. But instead he grabbed his thermos and his coat and he left, making no effort as he usually did to be quiet about it.
He felt sure that Wentzel would be at one of the fairs he visited that day. Every school he approached filled him with the sense that something was about to happen. All day, Wentzel was nowhere to be found.
To make matters worse, he sold the fewest face stickers he had since he started selling them, and at the old price of fifty cents. The kids just didn’t seem as interested as they once were.
He returned to the house a little later than usual. The van was still filled with the boxes of stickers. Brenda didn’t say anything about that, even though she took the van that night, to where she didn’t say.
Afterward she stepped carefully into the cellar, where Erhardt was readying the press for the SuperWay order. She had a pair of glasses in her hand. He recognized them immediately as the pair the school principal was wearing. They must have fallen off in the struggle.
“Whose are these?” Brenda said.
“They’re no one’s.” Then something occurred to him. “Try them on,” he said.
“These look like a man’s. Why were they under the car seat?”
“Try them on,” he said. “They might be just what you need.”
She couldn’t be sure if he was kidding, but she slipped them on. They were far too big for her face, and she had to perch them high on her nose. She looked around. She picked up the artwork for the salami label and focused in. She took the glasses off. “They don’t help at all,” she said.
“Throw them out then,” he said. She took them upstairs with the intention of throwing them out, but she threw them into the kitchen drawer that held a lot of other junk.
Erhardt was up at five the next morning. By seven the kids were off to school and Bud Kailer had gone to drive his wife to her job like he did every morning. When he returned, as Erhardt had seen for himself, Kailer filled his day by peeking through his window blinds at intervals, mowing his lawn when it didn’t need it, and forcing the mailman into longer chats than his route really gave him time for. “What kind of guy is that?” Erhardt said. “He lets his wife work for him?”
“He gets a pension,” Brenda said. She was a little heartened by her husband’s conversation. “He has some disability. That’s what Sally told me.”
“Sally who?”
“At the liquor store.”
Erhardt worked as if in a dream. The obliterating roar of the press at full speed was a backdrop against which his thinking was clearest and his senses their most attuned. In the racket he could make out the various musics of the machine: the claw and grab of the gears, the grinding pave of the rollers, the stripping of the excess paper from the die-cut labels. He could hear instantly went something went wrong, though it hardly ever did; the job, though huge, printed almost flawlessly.
He worked all day, and through supper. At nightfall, Brenda descended the stairs. “It’s time to quit for the day,” she said.
He shook his head. “I got the whole night ahead of me,” he said.
“Bud Kailer was out on his lawn earlier. He was staring at us.”
“I’ve got bigger problems than that jerk,” said Erhardt. The truth was he would have to work every night this week to have the order done by Friday. He never told Brenda that, but she understood it now.
From time to time during the week, she came down to bring him a sandwich or help pack the finished labels into boxes or just get away from the kids, who to Erhardt became like ghosts constantly moving overhead. Mostly she left him alone but sometimes she would feel lonely and, in the intervals when the press was not running, she would talk about anything.
“I wonder what p&p loaf is,” she said, looking at a roll of that particular label.
“I don’t know,” said Erhardt.
She squinted at the ingredients, then gave it up. “I wonder who eats this stuff,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Erhardt said.
The only interruptions in the work came when Brenda rapped on a pipe in the bathroom. The pipe ran down into the cellar, and Erhardt easily detected the sound in the all the noise. Swiftly he silenced the press; this was their signal for Kailer. Brenda kept watch. On three separate occasions, all at night, the neighbor made his way through the winding stone path that circumvented his lawn and showed up at the back door. Each time Erhardt listened on the cellar stairs to Kailer’s complaints and threats to call the police. Brenda stayed calm and said, “It won’t happen again.” Then, when Kailer disappeared into his house, the press resumed.
Erhardt was still finishing the last of the job by Friday when O’Brien came by with a check and two young men who looked like faint replications of O’Brien. They were there to load the boxes of labels into the minivan idling in the driveway. O’Brien politely pretended to be fascinated by the small talk of Brenda, who he called “Linda,” while Erhardt hurriedly packed the last of the order. After that, there were smiles all around -- even the little Erhardts, sensing it was alright, got into the act.
All night Brenda was, if not light-hearted, then at least serene. Most of the relief came from finally having some money in the bank, but she was pleased too at not having the press running. In bed, she turned away from her husband and softly began to snore.
Erhardt did not sleep. The clarity he had gained from the week of work had not left him, and it prevented him from feeling too much at ease. The money from O’Brien was substantial, but again there was no profit to be had. It would all be spent in six or seven weeks’ time, and there were no new orders in sight, and Christmas loomed now. Soon, they’d be right back where they were.
The next morning, Saturday again, Erhardt was up early. He heard Brenda sigh into her pillow as he left the bedroom.
The radio made no mention of any school fairs in the area. The time for those was over. Still, Erhardt filled his thermos and readied to go out and find Wentzel.
The kids were getting up, and he heard Brenda in the bathroom. The brood crowded the den, filling up the couch and the floor, munching from their bowls of cereal as they watched their cartoons.
Erhardt stopped by the den. He had his jacket on but he hadn’t left yet. “Is this the one with that Mr. Easy in it?” he said.
“What?” said one of them, very irritated. “No.” She seemed unable to fathom how she and someone that stupid could be in any way related.
Erhardt went to the kitchen window and looked out at the gray sky. With Brenda still in the bathroom, he slipped down into the cellar. He took his jacket off and started cleaning the rollers of the press, which were filthy. Brenda did not come down.
Later he came up and piled her and the kids in the van. They sat on the boxes of stickers as he drove to the town incinerator. The kids had a lot of fun throwing handfuls of stickers into the air and watching them flutter into the pit below.
After that, because they were too small to be left by
themselves, he took them along with him and Brenda to the
glasses place at the mall.
Erhardt never knew where the face came from until one of his sons showed up, nearly in tears, on the cellar steps.
The kid had just seen something on TV about the man who owned the copyright for the face. He was cracking down on illegal users of it. Two people were shown being taken away in handcuffs. The kid wanted to know if Erhardt was going to be taken away in handcuffs too.
“Of course not! That’s a stupid question. Those people weren’t printing stickers, were they?”
“No.”
Erhardt stood up from behind the press, where he was replacing a broken belt. He tried to seem casual as he wiped his hands with a rag, but his voice swerved a little when he said, “What were they doing?”
The kid said, “I don’t know.”
Erhardt tossed the rag aside. “Get upstairs now.” He was about to resume printing and the kids weren’t allowed in the cellar when the press was running. “And don’t say anything about this to your mother,” he added, but the kid did anyway.
Erhardt scoured the next morning’s paper until he found the small mention of it. Some guy in Ledgeville, Florida was busted for heading up a counterfeit T-shirt operation that extended to three states. Erhardt dismissed it elaborately, mostly for the sake of Brenda, his wife, who worried a lot. “I’m not running any kind of operation,” he told her and even if he was it was only in one state and that state, Massachusetts, was one hell of a long way from Ledgeville, Florida.
Brenda had gotten up with him like she had every Saturday and Sunday morning for the last two months. It was still dark out. She served him breakfast as he tuned to the local station that read off a list of schools in the area that were holding weekend fairs, which they did every year around this time. Brenda sat down with a cup of coffee for herself. She broke off a thread hanging from the sleeve of her housecoat.
“Do you think we’ll get in trouble, Joe?” she said.
“No, honey.”
“Could they put you in jail for this, Joe?”
“Brenda, please. I’m trying to hear this.” He jotted down six locales he could hit in the course of the day. He tried not to stray more than fifty or sixty miles from home, but lately the perimeter was stretching.
He looked up and Brenda was squinting at the newspaper article again -- eyebrows lifted, lids quavering, head lowered to within a few inches of the tiny print. She rarely complained but Erhardt was well aware she needed new glasses. She’d had the same pair since before they were married.
Erhardt tugged the paper away from her, saying he needed to check the almanac.
Brenda packed him a lunch and a thermos of coffee. She threw a jacket over her housecoat and helped Erhardt load the boxes of stickers into the back of the van.
“Do you suppose Al Hurley knew about this when he gave you the plate for that sticker, Joe?” she said. “Do you think he’s breaking the law too?”
“Nobody’s breaking the law, Bren. Stop worrying.” He lifted the van’s hood to check the coolant. She went back into the house, where the kids were up to watch their Saturday cartoons. She heard the van start and drive away. She was tired all day.
*
On the drive to the morning’s first fair, Erhardt concluded that Al Hurley probably did know he was breaking the law. Hurley was a friend, a graphic artist who had worked up a good likeness of the face and made a plate of it. He had given the plate to Erhardt in exchange for all of the printer’s future artwork business (allowing Erhardt’s printing company ever got off the ground, of course).
Before then, Erhardt had never seen or heard of the face, but Hurley said the kids were wild for it, and that the merchandising was “through the roof.” There were T-shirts and hats, backpacks and notebooks and bike baskets. It even had its own brand of gum, according to Erhardt’s own kids, and a Saturday morning cartoon they were probably watching at that very moment. The appeal of the face was lost on Erhardt; to him, it was nothing more than a jaunty sketch, with black zigzags for eyes, no nose, and a big electric scribble of a mouth that turned upwards at the ends in a vague suggestion of parentally unauthorized pleasure-taking. The face had a name...something Erhardt could never remember. . .Easy [capitalized?]something ...something easy[capitalized?] -- though it was explained to him by one of his daughters that it was actually “E.Z.,” like they were initials. “Oh,” he had said to her, “and what’s that supposed to stand for?” The kid just rolled her eyes and left the room, unable to believe her own father would ask a question like that.
Erhardt made the stickers in the six colors of ink that were cheapest to buy and easiest to mix -- blue, red, yellow, green, orange, and purple -- plus white, the color of the paper.[Does he have to mix the color of the paper?]
At the fairs where he sold the stickers for fifty cents apiece, Erhardt kept to himself. At some point he had learned he was supposed to have a vendor’s license. He also found out they were not hard to get, except for the $455 fee. No one had ever asked to see Erhardt’s license, despite even[omit “even”?] the makeshift appearance of his enterprise: just the aging van he carted his load of children and wife around in, with no special paintjob or stenciling like most of the other vendors’; a small collapsible card table for a display, a relic from the days when he and Brenda did things other than feed and clothe children; and untidy stacks of the variously colored face stickers held in place on breezy days by pebbles he picked up off the ground.
Once he set up, it didn’t take long for the kids to flock around. Erhardt typically did a brisk business, though today he would find a fair bit slower than usual. There was even a stretch of ten or fifteen minutes when no one at all was at his table. It was during this odd lull that he felt he was being watched from behind, and he was.
He recognized the man as one of the other vendors he had seen around from time to time. This man always wore tight, dirty T-shirts that showed the sags and folds of his torso, and his hair was shorn to a fine buzz that was silver in spots and black in others, giving his head the appearance of a giant speckled egg. Erhardt remembered that he sold novelties. He always suspected the man of being one of the illegals, like himself.
The man said his name was Wright and stuck his hand out. His grip was greasy, and Erhardt wiped his hand on his pants afterward, and not discreetly. Up close the man’s T-shirt showed a picture of a shapely young woman in a bathing suit that might have been inappropriate for a school fair if the image weren’t so faded and hard to make out.
“You’re doin’ good with those stickers, aren’t ya?” Wentzel said. “I see all the kids with them. Is that all you sell?”
Plainly that was the case.
“Where are you getting them? Who’s your distributor?”
Erhardt just smiled. It was a good approximation of the face on the sticker, or at least for a fleeting instant it felt that way to Erhardt. He nodded at a couple of kids who were walking by, but they didn’t stop. He was starting to think Wentzel’s presence was scaring away his customers.
Wentzel picked up a sticker and examined it front and back. “I’m not looking to mess up your deal,” he said. “Maybe I can get some through you. You know, you can make a little extra for yourself. I’d pay whatever price you felt was fair.”
“You’re getting that smudged...please put that down.”
“Oh, look at that. I guess I owe ya -- what is it? -- fifty cents?” He took a Kennedy half-dollar from his pocket and handed it to Erhardt. Erhardt didn’t take it outright so Wentzel placed it on the table with a snap. “Well? Whadaya say?”
“Why should I get you any stickers?” Erhardt said. “Right now I’m the only one selling them, as far as I can tell.”
“I’m heading down to Connecticut and Rhode Island in a couple of weeks. I keep heading south, the colder it gets. You can’t tell me you were thinking of going down there?”
“I can’t? Why can’t I?”
“Well, for one thing, you got that wedding ring on. You probably got kids too. You wouldn’t wanna just run off and leave them.”
Erhardt looked at the man. He hated how much he believed in his own rotten assumptions. He hated how sure he was that Erhardt believed them too. He looked in the direction opposite Wentzel and said, “How many are we talking about?”
“How many fills up one of them boxes you got there?”
“Ten, twelve thousand.”
Wentzel nodded. “I’d say ten boxes would do me good. Fifteen if you can swing it.
There came to Erhardt’s eyes a glint of interest, which he tried to disguise with surprise: “You got room for all that in there?” Wentzel drove and apparently lived in a black Winnebago. It had some sort of satellite dish on its roof.
“I got room for whatever I make room for,” Wentzel said. “I’ll be at the Ainsbury fair next Saturday. Let me know if you can set something up. It would definitely be worth it for you.”
Erhardt was noncommittal in his response.
Wentzel folded his sticker in half and slipped it in his shirt pocket. “You could charge more than fifty cents a pop for these, you know,” he said.
“Yeah, well. I don’t like to gouge the kids.”
Wentzel waved that off as he started back toward the Winnebago. He said, “Kids have all kinds of money these days.”
With Wentzel gone the kids began coming around Erhardt’s table again. He was so busy he hardly had time to think about anything Wentzel had said until he arrived to set up at the day’s second destination, where he quietly upped the price of a sticker to seventy-five cents. They sold just as well, and at his third stop he went for a dollar and again they sold just as well. He kept the price there for the rest of the day.
That night in bed, Brenda asked him what the trouble was. He said there was no trouble, except that he was tired and had to get up at four thirty in the morning. He laid awake thinking how he had never seen a black Winnebago before. All the ones he could remember seeing were a cream color. You got it mixing four parts white with one part yellow. Usually they were inscribed with names that invoked free-spiritedness or affection. But he had never seen one with a name that ran along the back of Wentzel’s: Salamander, in orange block lettering.
The extra cash he pulled in that day still wasn’t enough. No matter what he charged, there was really no such thing as profit. Whatever came in went out just as fast. There was never a moment when someone in the family didn’t want for something. He knew he needed the money too badly to turn down Wentzel’s offer.
In the morning Brenda asked him again what the trouble was. “I told you nothing,” he said. She stepped away, but not before a look that said she believed he was lying.
He wished he could have assured her there was no trouble, but there’d already been too much for her to ever believe that. Admittedly, it was he who started it. He had a job that at least sustained them, running a press at Victory Printing in Dorchester. Since he lost it, after deciding to siphon off a few customers for himself, he often thought he should have left barely enough alone. How Victory found out they wouldn’t say, but Erhardt suspected it was through one of those stolen customers, a man named Frank O’Brien. O’Brien denied it when Erhardt confronted him, but there was a lot of apologetic sympathizing and a promise to send a big order of bologna labels Erhardt’s way -- a promise that three months later he had heard nothing more about.
On Monday he started filling Wentzel’s order. To do that and keep up his own supply of stickers meant he had to run the press all day and well into the night. There was not a corner of the house the [noise] failed to reach. Somehow the kids slept through it fine, but Brenda laid in bed with a low throbbing that afflicted her behind the eyes. She was always straightening the clock on the kitchen wall or turning up the TV. Erhardt thought she was holding up pretty well until the middle of the week when Bud Kailer from across the street came over.
He had come to the back door instead of the front, which Brenda thought rude. They stood there, unhappy to have to look at each other, the press roaring underneath them. “What in God’s name is going on over here?” Kailer said.
Brenda tried hard to behave like everything was quite ordinary. She shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t know what I mean? Are you deaf?”
“Oh, that. That’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing!”
“It’s just -- Joe’s working on something -- not working, I mean, but...” She felt a little woozy, and she swayed. Kailer looked the way she imagined he would if she woke from fainting to find him over her. She shook her head and said, “I don’t know what Joe’s doing, exactly.”
Abruptly the press ceased. It was as if a cold clean breeze had suddenly swept through the house and Brenda felt relieved though she knew she shouldn’t have. They both listened as the printer ascended the cellar steps, emerging with red ink smeared on the front of his T-shirt.
“Hi, Bud,” he said.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Kailer was looking him up and down. “What’s all over you? -- paint?”
It seemed to Erhardt that any idiot would know the difference between ink and paint.
“It’s nothing,” Brenda said. “I told him it was nothing, Joe.”
“And what was that truck that was here the other day?” Kailer went on. “You can’t have eighteen wheelers coming down this street.” Erhardt had ordered some paper.
“We had a delivery!” Brenda blurted.
“Of what?” Kailer demanded.
Erhardt took a step forward. “I don’t think it’s any of your business, Bud.”
Two of the kids, wearing pajamas, ran in and suddenly halted. They stared up at Kailer, which made him uncomfortable.[point of view]
“Well,” he said. “Please try to keep it down. It’s against the law to run a business from your home, you know.” Kailer and his wife were childless, and he looked at the kids like they were some new species of weed that had cropped up on his lawn, which he tended to obsessively. He left without another word.
Erhardt had gotten [to]the point where he wondered if there was anything he had to do to survive that wasn’t against the law.
From then on, with urging from Brenda, Erhardt decided he would only run the press during the day. So he cranked out as many of the faces as he could in that time. If that meant fewer stickers for himself to sell, then he would charge Wentzel even more for his order.
When Brenda wasn’t upstairs with the kids, she was down with Erhardt. She would sweep up or help him sift through the freshly printed batches of stickers to weed out the bad ones, though she often let bad ones go by.
Later, in the bedroom, she worked with a nail file at removing a blue face that had ended up on the bottom of her slipper. She said, “I don’t know what they see in these things.”
“What?” Erhardt said. He had already begun to fall asleep.
“What’s it supposed to be anyway?” she said.
Erhardt turned over. “The kids like it,” he said.
“It looks like it’s on drugs.”
“It’s just a face, Bren.”
“Well I hate it.”
“I do too,” he said.
On Saturday Erhardt got up as usual and listened to the radio. There was indeed a fair at the Ainsbury Elementary School. It was a tiny town and he had to unfold his map of the state. Brenda, serving breakfast, watched his finger trace the route, stopping way out past Worcester. He had told her he would never go that far.
The road to Ainsbury passed through several small towns, each with their own creeping speed limit. As a result, the trip took longer than he’d allowed for. He arrived late.
He got a spot near the entrance of the school grounds and quickly set up his display. The fair was in full swing, meaning the few rides were up and operating while the grounds were traversed with docile small-town children and adults with puffy eyes and hair a little messier than it would be during the week. [awkward sentence]
Erhardt scanned the scene for Wentzel’s Winnebago, but did not find it. Immediately a dread took hold of his chest. His breathing became hard; there was nothing else to do but ask around.
He walked over to a vendor he had seen a lot, a seller of flavored ices, a chancy business in the waning months of the year. He eyeballed Erhardt skeptically as he approached.
Erhardt nodded and forced a smile. “I’m just wondering if you’ve seen that guy around today? He’s got a Winnebago. Sells, you know, things like those glass balls that you shake up and it looks like it’s snowing?”
The ice man’s eyes narrowed as his head shook out a no.
Erhardt asked one or two others, to the same effect. He headed back to the van. A gaggle of kids interrupted his path. He saw that some of them were carrying stickers showing the face. They were printed on a glittering silver paper that Erhardt knew was expensive. “Hey sweetheart,” he said to a little girl with one, “where’d you get that?”
“Over there.” She pointed to the other side of the school grounds. Erhardt could not be sure exactly where she was pointing. When he turned back, she was gone but a boy with an identical sticker was nearby.
“Hey kid. How much you pay for that?”
“Fifty cents.”
Erhardt made it back to his table. He had kept his eye on it the whole time. No one had approached it. He lowered his price to fifty cents. There was a nip in the air, and he sat in the van with the heater running. Quickly it became too hot. He shut the heater off and cracked the window.
He spent the next two hours like that. Three times he got out of the van to make a sale. He kept watching the gate for any sign of Wentzel. In that time it occurred to him that every instinct he ever had in his life had steered him wrong. Every seemingly good idea -- Brenda, the kids, the notion that he could work for himself -- turned out to be a trap. In the rearview mirror he could see the boxes and boxes of face stickers. He flipped the mirror to its tinted nighttime position, and tried to keep himself from calculating the loss. [Couldn’t he sell them eventually?]
The last of the other vendors began to pack up. He
got out and did the same. He wasn’t careful about it as he usually was, but instead folded up the table and threw it inside the van. He even left a few stickers lying on the ground, and ran over some as he backed up and then tore ahead. A man in a rumpled sport coat hailed him as he approached the gate. It was not clear who the man was, though Erhardt believed him to be a teacher or the principal. He had an overgrown moustache that was exactly the pale brown color of his coat, and thick glasses that made his eyes look like small muddy lakes.
Erhardt pulled up and the man leaned into the vehicle. “Take it easy, pal. This isn’t the Mass Turnpike. There’s still kids around.”
Erhardt said nothing as he started the van forward.
“Whoa!” the man said, and Erhardt stopped again. “I’d like to see your papers, please.” Apparently he didn’t like Erhardt’s attitude. Erhardt stepped on the gas and the man tried frantically to disengage his head from the window. In his panic he grabbed the steering wheel and the van lurched to the left. Erhardt broke his grip and righted the vehicle. Somehow the man freed himself, though not before whacking his head against the open car window. As he sped off, Erhardt heard him swearing in a way that he thought was particularly filthy for someone concerned about the kids all around.
He made his way to the state highway and headed south, the direction of Rhode Island. Wentzel had said something about Rhode Island. He looked all around for the black Winnebago. He knew he wouldn’t find it, but he kept looking. Several times the state highway became a local road, then a state highway again. After that, it was a long residential street where the houses got nicer and the cars newer the further[farther] he went. Then he stopped. He had to. In an hour’s time he had driven the length of the tiny state. He had reached the ocean.
He stopped the van in a parking lot. He got out and stood to watch the choppy gray water. The strong breeze made him zip up his coat. To his left he could see a small ship at a dock. People were boarding. He walked down to get a closer look. He had lived all his life near the ocean and had never been on a boat. He had no objection to boats, but in thirty-four years the opportunity had never come up.
He had come close enough that a man in a booth came out and said, “Twelve dollars, guy.”
“What?”
“Ticket is twelve dollars, round-trip.” The man was wearing a blazer and a variation on a train conductor’s hat.
“Where does that go?” Erhardt said.
“That’s the ferry to the island.”
“What island?”
“Block Island. This is the last weekend it’s running.”
“Why?”
“Doesn’t run in winter. Are you buying a ticket?”
“How much is a one-way?”
“No one-ways. Round-trip only. Twelve dollars.”
Erhardt took out his wallet. He had barely half that much. The man went back to his booth.
Erhardt stayed to watch the ferry. A loud horn blew when it was ready to go. The people on the deck talked like they were on a street corner or an elevator. They acted like they didn’t know they were on a boat. It took less than fifteen minutes to disappear from Erhardt’s sight.
He went back to his van and pulled it into a gas station. He spent the six dollars on gas for the trip back to Massachusetts. He took the straightest route there, but he didn’t hurry. He didn’t know what he would tell Brenda, who would surely expect an explanation.
But when he returned, his wife met him at the door with glowing eyes.
“Frank O’Brien was here,” [I had forgotten O’Brien by this point] she said. “The order came through.” She guided Erhardt to the kitchen, where everything O’Brien had brought -- artwork, plates, a check equal to ten percent of the total payment -- was carefully laid out on the table. Erhardt sat down gently, as if any sudden movement might cause it all to scatter.
The order was bigger than Erhardt ever expected. O’Brien was acting as broker for the SuperWay chain of supermarkets, which wanted labels not only for their store brand of bologna, but beef bologna, Genoa salami, olive loaf, and P&P loaf as well. He sorted through the materials as Brenda served the supper she’d been keeping warm. He stared at each label a long time. They were three-color jobs that really looked sharp. And he liked that they were real labels, labels with a purpose. People would look at them and learn something. O’Brien had left a note: “They want this by Friday -- sorry for the rush -- your labels will be in supermarkets all across southern New England!”
Brenda slid into the adjacent seat. She kept her arms off the table so as not to interfere with his careful sorting. “I was getting kind of worried,” she said. “You never came home so late before.”
“Accident on the highway.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.” He thought this would be a good place to elaborate a little, make the lie more believable. Shattered glass everywhere. Blood on the road. But he didn’t say anything. And not because he didn’t want to lie to her. He was just tired of explaining everything to her. Since he lost his job,[Did you mention earlier how long ago he lost his job? Maybe I missed it.] he and Brenda had been together every minute, except for the time on weekends he spent at the fairs.
Despite his exhaustion Erhardt was up the next morning five minutes before the alarm. He slipped from the bed quietly and took a fast, hot shower. He crept downstairs and looked over the SuperWay order again, deciding which label to run first, what blend of red and yellow would achieve the orange they wanted for the background. Then he put the order aside and switched on the radio. All school fairs were on for that weekend, weather permitting. He jotted down the possibilities. When he looked up, Brenda was standing on the threshold.
“We don’t have to do this anymore, Joe,” she said.
“Yes we do. Go back to sleep.”
“We’ve got the order.”
“That doesn’t solve everything.”
“It’s gotta be done by Friday.”
“Brenda, go back to sleep.” And to his surprise, she tightened the housecoat around her body, and went back upstairs. She knew he always woke up hungry. He could have made breakfast himself -- he had done so on the odd occasion, there was even a time when his Sunday mornings were spent making cheese omelettes for the kids. But instead he grabbed his thermos and his coat and he left, making no effort as he usually did to be quiet about it.
He felt sure that Wentzel would be at one of the fairs he visited that day. Every school he approached filled him with the sense that something was about to happen. All day, Wentzel was nowhere to be found.
To make matters worse, he sold the fewest face stickers he had since he started selling them, and at the old price of fifty cents. The kids just didn’t seem as interested as they once were.
He returned to the house a little later than usual. The van was still filled with the boxes of stickers. Brenda didn’t say anything about that, even though she took the van that night, to where she didn’t say.
Afterward she stepped carefully into the cellar, where Erhardt was readying the press for the SuperWay order. She had a pair of glasses in her hand. He recognized them immediately as the pair the school principal was wearing. They must have fallen off in the struggle.
“Whose are these?” Brenda said.
“They’re no one’s.” Then something occurred to him. “Try them on,” he said.
“These look like a man’s. Why were they under the car seat?”
“Try them on,” he said. “They might be just what you need.”
She couldn’t be sure if he was kidding, but she slipped them on. They were far too big for her face, and she had to perch them high on her nose. She looked around. She picked up the artwork for the salami label and focused in. She took the glasses off. “They don’t help at all,” she said.
“Throw them out then,” he said. She took them upstairs with the intention of throwing them out, but she threw them into the kitchen drawer that held a lot of other junk.
Erhardt was up at five the next morning. By seven the kids were off to school and Bud Kailer had gone to drive his wife to her job like he did every morning. When he returned, as Erhardt had seen for himself, Kailer filled his day by peeking through his window blinds at intervals, mowing his lawn when it didn’t need it, and forcing the mailman into longer chats than his route really gave him time for. “What kind of guy is that?” Erhardt said. “He lets his wife work for him?”
“He gets a pension,” Brenda said. She was a little heartened by her husband’s conversation. “He has some disability. That’s what Sally told me.”
“Sally who?”
“At the liquor store.”
Erhardt worked as if in a dream. The obliterating roar of the press at full speed was a backdrop against which his thinking was clearest and his senses their most attuned. In the racket he could make out the various musics of the machine: the claw and grab of the gears, the grinding pave of the rollers, the stripping of the excess paper from the die-cut labels. He could hear instantly went something went wrong, though it hardly ever did; the job, though huge, printed almost flawlessly.
He worked all day, and through supper. At nightfall, Brenda descended the stairs. “It’s time to quit for the day,” she said.
He shook his head. “I got the whole night ahead of me,” he said.
“Bud Kailer was out on his lawn earlier. He was staring at us.”
“I’ve got bigger problems than that jerk,” said Erhardt. The truth was he would have to work every night this week to have the order done by Friday. He never told Brenda that, but she understood it now.
From time to time during the week, she came down to bring him a sandwich or help pack the finished labels into boxes or just get away from the kids, who to Erhardt became like ghosts constantly moving overhead. Mostly she left him alone but sometimes she would feel lonely and, in the intervals when the press was not running, she would talk about anything.
“I wonder what p&p loaf is,” she said, looking at a roll of that particular label.
“I don’t know,” said Erhardt.
She squinted at the ingredients, then gave it up. “I wonder who eats this stuff,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Erhardt said.
The only interruptions in the work came when Brenda rapped on a pipe in the bathroom. The pipe ran down into the cellar, and Erhardt easily detected the sound in the all the noise. Swiftly he silenced the press; this was their signal for Kailer. Brenda kept watch. On three separate occasions, all at night, the neighbor made his way through the winding stone path that circumvented his lawn and showed up at the back door. Each time Erhardt listened on the cellar stairs to Kailer’s complaints and threats to call the police. Brenda stayed calm and said, “It won’t happen again.” Then, when Kailer disappeared into his house, the press resumed.
Erhardt was still finishing the last of the job by Friday when O’Brien came by with a check and two young men who looked like faint replications of O’Brien. They were there to load the boxes of labels into the minivan idling in the driveway. O’Brien politely pretended to be fascinated by the small talk of Brenda, who he called “Linda,” while Erhardt hurriedly packed the last of the order. After that, there were smiles all around -- even the little Erhardts, sensing it was alright, got into the act.
All night Brenda was, if not light-hearted, then at least serene. Most of the relief came from finally having some money in the bank, but she was pleased too at not having the press running. In bed, she turned away from her husband and softly began to snore.
Erhardt did not sleep. The clarity he had gained from the week of work had not left him, and it prevented him from feeling too much at ease. The money from O’Brien was substantial, but again there was no profit to be had. It would all be spent in six or seven weeks’ time, and there were no new orders in sight, and Christmas loomed now. Soon, they’d be right back where they were.
The next morning, Saturday again, Erhardt was up early. He heard Brenda sigh into her pillow as he left the bedroom.
The radio made no mention of any school fairs in the area. The time for those was over. Still, Erhardt filled his thermos and readied to go out and find Wentzel.
The kids were getting up, and he heard Brenda in the bathroom. The brood crowded the den, filling up the couch and the floor, munching from their bowls of cereal as they watched their cartoons.
Erhardt stopped by the den. He had his jacket on but he hadn’t left yet. “Is this the one with that Mr. Easy in it?” he said.
“What?” said one of them, very irritated. “No.” She seemed unable to fathom how she and someone that stupid could be in any way related.
Erhardt went to the kitchen window and looked out at the gray sky. With Brenda still in the bathroom, he slipped down into the cellar. He took his jacket off and started cleaning the rollers of the press, which were filthy. Brenda did not come down.
Later he came up and piled her and the kids in the van. They sat on the boxes of stickers as he drove to the town incinerator. The kids had a lot of fun throwing handfuls of stickers into the air and watching them flutter into the pit below.
After that, because they were too small to be left by
themselves, he took them along with him and Brenda to the
glasses place at the mall.
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