The Runt by Daniel Scott- written version
Posted by Reader at 2/8/2008 2:59 PM 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: lying psychosomatic fear office building smoking trash cleaning anxiety misunderstanding motives
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: lying psychosomatic fear office building smoking trash cleaning anxiety misunderstanding motives
THE RUNT
Greeley and Dovanovich are smoking on the twelfth-floor terrace of a building on 38th Street. With a swiftness that belies his large size, Dovanovich lifts Greeley over his head and for a time it seems he will throw the smaller man over the guard rail to the street below. But he puts Greeley down again, saying it's all in fun. Immediately Greeley dashes inside and down the twelve flights of stairs. There’s no time to wait for the elevator.
In the lobby he meets the night security guard, Gordon, a black man with a Caribbean accent and a blue uniform that looks striking against his deep-colored skin. He knows Greeley is a janitor in the building. They have never really spoken beyond a nod and a hello when Greeley came in for his shift. But the janitor is so wild-eyed and breathing so hard that Gordon says, “What is it?”
“Upstairs.” He puts a hand on his heaving chest. “The guy I’m working with...I think he tried to kill me.”
“What? Who?”
“Dovanovich.” He hulks up his shoulders in an attempt to describe him. “Big guy,” he says. “Big chest.” His arms try to encompass the whole of the man. “Big,” he says.
Gordon blinks incomprehensibly. Apparently he doesn’t know who Greeley is talking about. But as a way of denoting the seriousness of the situation, he turns down the Caribbean music station he has on his radio and listens carefully.
The trip down the flights of stairs had been a terror-fueled blur. But now that he is in the lobby, beginning to breathe easier, Greeley wonders if maybe Dovanovich really had meant it as good-natured fun. After all, they had gone out to the terrace for a cigarette at Greeley’s suggestion. A law had recently been passed by the city making it a crime to smoke inside office buildings. It was true it was nighttime and he and Dovanovich were the only ones there, but all the janitors had been warned that any fines incurred would be taken out of their paychecks and Greeley feared the smell would linger into the morning.
He did not know Dovanovich well. While Greeley was a lifer -- he just marked ten years on the job -- Dovanovich had only been there a month or so. Greeley had seen a lot of workers come and go, and only a few stay on for any real length of time. It was not complicated work, but it could be exhausting and exhaustingly dull. His impression was that Dovanovich would not last half a year.
Out on the terrace, the new man accepted a cigarette with a smile. Alone, the terrace was not big; with Dovanovich, it was just a little too tight. The black metal guard rail rose to about the top of Greeley’s thigh. He was listening with interest to Dovanovich describing a wrestler he admired on TV when Greeley was suddenly grabbed and lifted into the air. It happened so quickly and with virtually no resistance from Greeley -- he instinctively sensed that any squirming on his part might well lead to his slipping from Dovanovich's grip. He went completely inert. He could not let go of his cigarette or the smoke he had sucked into his lungs just prior to being picked up.
Greeley was a small man. “Wiry” was the word often used. When she was angry his wife called him “you little runt.”
Suspended suddenly in the air, unable to hear Dovanovich, who was still speaking, he saw and heard the city as never before. Car horns were like stabs at the sky; the lights from far-off buildings wobbled as heat rose from below.
Then Dovanovich put him down. Seeing how rattled Greeley was, he assured him he meant no harm. But Greeley bolted.
Gordon listens carefully to the story, but in the end he does not know what to do about it, and he seems anxious to turn up his music again and return to the newspaper he brought with him.
Greeley goes out to the street to smoke a cigarette. When he finishes, he lights up another one. That one he tosses away before it’s done. He heads for the subway. His union contract affords him nine sick days a year and he has yet to take one.
He intends to go back to work the following night, but at the last minute he calls in sick. His wife, Lissette, seems angry to find him there when she comes in from her day job at an office-supply store downtown. She has grown used to having the apartment to herself nights. “What’s the matter with you?” she says.
“My head hurts.”
“You’re just sitting there watching TV.”
“So?”
“So you don’t look like your head hurts.”
The next day Greeley begins to imagine that his head really does hurt. He watches TV laid out on the couch, with a pillow from the bed and the extra blanket they keep in the hallway closet. But after Lissette goes to bed, he admits to himself that he’s faking. It’s a ruse to avoid having to work with Dovanovich again.
That night he falls asleep thinking he’ll go back to work the next night, but when the next night comes he just stays on the couch. It is Friday after all, and he could have Saturday and Sunday without wasting any more sick days. And he figures the longer he stays away, the longer Dovanovich will have to do a two-man job by himself and the more likely he will quit.
Lissette kneels next to him. “What is it, Runty? You’re really starting to scare me.”
“Don’t be scared. I’m alright.”
“I think you should go to a doctor.”
He shakes his head and assures her again that he’s alright. In the course of the weekend she suspects his goldbricking, he thinks, but she doesn’t say anything about it. She hasn’t even complained about his taking up the couch. She sits in the big rocking chair to watch TV with him. She makes him soup. She gets aspirin when he asks for it. She can be nice, he thinks, when she wants to be.
Late Sunday night he gets up to go to the bathroom and is shocked by his image in the mirror. His skin looks yellow and there are dark rings around his eyes. He believes that his ribs are more visible than usual. He steps on the bathroom scale. He is several pounds lighter than what he assumes himself to be, but then again, he rarely weighs himself and couldn’t say at any given time what his weight is.
He turns and Lissette is in the doorway. “Look at yourself!” she says. She points into the mirror. “Look!”
She starts to cry. He steps off the scale and comforts her. She pleads with him to go to the doctor. He swears to her he will call him in the morning.
But what he really thinks is that he will go back to work the following night, stop wasting his sick days and scaring his wife.
In the morning, with Lissette off to her job, he is awakened by the ringing telephone. It’s his supervisor asking if he plans to ever come back to work.
Of course he does, but Greeley takes umbrage at the supervisor’s uncaring tone. Greeley knows he’s not really sick, but the supervisor has no reason to suspect that.
“I’m not sure,” Greeley says, affecting a sniffle.
“What the hell is wrong with you anyway?”
“Not sure. Could be a few things.”
The supervisor grumbles. “Well you only have four sick days left so you better get better soon.”
“I’m really touched by your concern, Jerry.”
“Look I’m telling you this for your own good. You use up your sick days you gotta get a letter from a doctor.”
“I know that.” A brief silence follows.
“I suppose Dovanovich can’t handle the place on his own?” he says. Just saying the man’s name sends a shudder through him.
“He’s not working alone.”
“He’s not?”
“No we got somebody working with him.”
“Who?”
“What difference does it make? Look just get your butt in here as soon as you can.”
So Greeley does not go in that night like he planned. He feels it is a shame, in a way. He had wanted to surprise Lissette by not being there when she came home. He wanted her to find a note saying “Hi honey. I’m feeling better and went in to work.”
But instead she comes home to find him on the couch watching TV.
“Did you call the doctor today?” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “I have an appointment for next week.”
“Next week?”
“Yeah. It was the earliest they had. I mean, they asked if it was like life-or-death or something and I couldn’t really say that, you know?”
“But won’t your sick days run out before then?”
“No. Don’t worry. I told them if someone cancels then call me.”
He will go back to work the next night for sure, he says to himself.
But whenever he thinks about going back to work, he thinks about Dovanovich and when he thinks about that man he thinks of how helpless he was in that man’s large hands, how those hands were big enough to dispose of him in so many ways.
And so he does not go back the next night. Or the next. Or for the rest of the week. He stays on the couch, in front of the TV. Fleetingly he feels restless, but mostly he is surprised at how content he is being bored. Lissette tiptoes around with what he thinks is a detached expression, as if she has begun to give up on him.
The morning of his last sick day, he receives another call from the supervisor. He is to produce a doctor’s letter stating his condition and why it prevents him from coming to work or he will be fired. He has to go back.
It terrifies him so that he forgets to leave a note for Lissette, which he had planned to do. Instead he calls her from a pay phone at the subway station and leaves a message on their answering machine. He tries to sound as upbeat as possible.
When he arrives at the building, Gordon welcomes him with a handshake. The supervisor is there and says, “Well if it isn’t the sickie.” He means it to be funny, but not even he laughs. Greeley senses that is because of what he looks like. There is no sign of Dovanovich.
He takes the elevator to the twelfth floor. He wants to have a cigarette to calm his nerves. Almost maniacally he wants to revisit the terrace and smoke there like he has for the past ten years. Once there, he smokes two cigarettes, and something about the mist shrouding the skyline has as calming effect on him.
He takes the elevator to the basement, where the floor buffer is kept in a closet. As he is unlocking the door, the elevator opens and Dovanovich emerges. Immediately he is struck with terror. He realizes he is in a basement with no easy means of escape. Dovanovich spots him and bounds up to him. “Hey, buddy,” he says. “How you feeling?”
Greeley mutters something -- he isn’t sure what. Whenever Dovanovich takes a step or gestures toward him, he shrinks visibly. Finally Dovanovich shakes his head, grabs a mop and bucket, and disappears back into the elevator.
The ordeal is very draining to Greeley. He has to sit down. He feels extremely tired. He has gotten into the habit of sleeping at night and being awake in the day. Inside the closet, there is a space on the floor next to the buffer. Only someone as small as Greeley could fit in it. He covers the space with some cardboard and lays down on it, shutting the door and falling asleep in the darkness. That is where Dovanovich finds his body just before he was to go to lunch. At first the police would surmise that he had suffocated, but they will come to doubt that the closet was airtight. The blame would then be laid on the fumes from several open bottles of cleaning agents found in the closet. The space was so small and enclosed, they would say, and the dead man had been sick lately and was in such an obviously deteriorated physical state.
Dovanovich flips over a bucket, strides it, then
sits. His shoulders tremble. Gordon retrieves a roll of paper towels from the bathroom and hands it to him. The big guy cannot keep his face dry though, no matter how much he wipes it. The supervisor sends him home for the rest of the shift.
Greeley and Dovanovich are smoking on the twelfth-floor terrace of a building on 38th Street. With a swiftness that belies his large size, Dovanovich lifts Greeley over his head and for a time it seems he will throw the smaller man over the guard rail to the street below. But he puts Greeley down again, saying it's all in fun. Immediately Greeley dashes inside and down the twelve flights of stairs. There’s no time to wait for the elevator.
In the lobby he meets the night security guard, Gordon, a black man with a Caribbean accent and a blue uniform that looks striking against his deep-colored skin. He knows Greeley is a janitor in the building. They have never really spoken beyond a nod and a hello when Greeley came in for his shift. But the janitor is so wild-eyed and breathing so hard that Gordon says, “What is it?”
“Upstairs.” He puts a hand on his heaving chest. “The guy I’m working with...I think he tried to kill me.”
“What? Who?”
“Dovanovich.” He hulks up his shoulders in an attempt to describe him. “Big guy,” he says. “Big chest.” His arms try to encompass the whole of the man. “Big,” he says.
Gordon blinks incomprehensibly. Apparently he doesn’t know who Greeley is talking about. But as a way of denoting the seriousness of the situation, he turns down the Caribbean music station he has on his radio and listens carefully.
The trip down the flights of stairs had been a terror-fueled blur. But now that he is in the lobby, beginning to breathe easier, Greeley wonders if maybe Dovanovich really had meant it as good-natured fun. After all, they had gone out to the terrace for a cigarette at Greeley’s suggestion. A law had recently been passed by the city making it a crime to smoke inside office buildings. It was true it was nighttime and he and Dovanovich were the only ones there, but all the janitors had been warned that any fines incurred would be taken out of their paychecks and Greeley feared the smell would linger into the morning.
He did not know Dovanovich well. While Greeley was a lifer -- he just marked ten years on the job -- Dovanovich had only been there a month or so. Greeley had seen a lot of workers come and go, and only a few stay on for any real length of time. It was not complicated work, but it could be exhausting and exhaustingly dull. His impression was that Dovanovich would not last half a year.
Out on the terrace, the new man accepted a cigarette with a smile. Alone, the terrace was not big; with Dovanovich, it was just a little too tight. The black metal guard rail rose to about the top of Greeley’s thigh. He was listening with interest to Dovanovich describing a wrestler he admired on TV when Greeley was suddenly grabbed and lifted into the air. It happened so quickly and with virtually no resistance from Greeley -- he instinctively sensed that any squirming on his part might well lead to his slipping from Dovanovich's grip. He went completely inert. He could not let go of his cigarette or the smoke he had sucked into his lungs just prior to being picked up.
Greeley was a small man. “Wiry” was the word often used. When she was angry his wife called him “you little runt.”
Suspended suddenly in the air, unable to hear Dovanovich, who was still speaking, he saw and heard the city as never before. Car horns were like stabs at the sky; the lights from far-off buildings wobbled as heat rose from below.
Then Dovanovich put him down. Seeing how rattled Greeley was, he assured him he meant no harm. But Greeley bolted.
Gordon listens carefully to the story, but in the end he does not know what to do about it, and he seems anxious to turn up his music again and return to the newspaper he brought with him.
Greeley goes out to the street to smoke a cigarette. When he finishes, he lights up another one. That one he tosses away before it’s done. He heads for the subway. His union contract affords him nine sick days a year and he has yet to take one.
He intends to go back to work the following night, but at the last minute he calls in sick. His wife, Lissette, seems angry to find him there when she comes in from her day job at an office-supply store downtown. She has grown used to having the apartment to herself nights. “What’s the matter with you?” she says.
“My head hurts.”
“You’re just sitting there watching TV.”
“So?”
“So you don’t look like your head hurts.”
The next day Greeley begins to imagine that his head really does hurt. He watches TV laid out on the couch, with a pillow from the bed and the extra blanket they keep in the hallway closet. But after Lissette goes to bed, he admits to himself that he’s faking. It’s a ruse to avoid having to work with Dovanovich again.
That night he falls asleep thinking he’ll go back to work the next night, but when the next night comes he just stays on the couch. It is Friday after all, and he could have Saturday and Sunday without wasting any more sick days. And he figures the longer he stays away, the longer Dovanovich will have to do a two-man job by himself and the more likely he will quit.
Lissette kneels next to him. “What is it, Runty? You’re really starting to scare me.”
“Don’t be scared. I’m alright.”
“I think you should go to a doctor.”
He shakes his head and assures her again that he’s alright. In the course of the weekend she suspects his goldbricking, he thinks, but she doesn’t say anything about it. She hasn’t even complained about his taking up the couch. She sits in the big rocking chair to watch TV with him. She makes him soup. She gets aspirin when he asks for it. She can be nice, he thinks, when she wants to be.
Late Sunday night he gets up to go to the bathroom and is shocked by his image in the mirror. His skin looks yellow and there are dark rings around his eyes. He believes that his ribs are more visible than usual. He steps on the bathroom scale. He is several pounds lighter than what he assumes himself to be, but then again, he rarely weighs himself and couldn’t say at any given time what his weight is.
He turns and Lissette is in the doorway. “Look at yourself!” she says. She points into the mirror. “Look!”
She starts to cry. He steps off the scale and comforts her. She pleads with him to go to the doctor. He swears to her he will call him in the morning.
But what he really thinks is that he will go back to work the following night, stop wasting his sick days and scaring his wife.
In the morning, with Lissette off to her job, he is awakened by the ringing telephone. It’s his supervisor asking if he plans to ever come back to work.
Of course he does, but Greeley takes umbrage at the supervisor’s uncaring tone. Greeley knows he’s not really sick, but the supervisor has no reason to suspect that.
“I’m not sure,” Greeley says, affecting a sniffle.
“What the hell is wrong with you anyway?”
“Not sure. Could be a few things.”
The supervisor grumbles. “Well you only have four sick days left so you better get better soon.”
“I’m really touched by your concern, Jerry.”
“Look I’m telling you this for your own good. You use up your sick days you gotta get a letter from a doctor.”
“I know that.” A brief silence follows.
“I suppose Dovanovich can’t handle the place on his own?” he says. Just saying the man’s name sends a shudder through him.
“He’s not working alone.”
“He’s not?”
“No we got somebody working with him.”
“Who?”
“What difference does it make? Look just get your butt in here as soon as you can.”
So Greeley does not go in that night like he planned. He feels it is a shame, in a way. He had wanted to surprise Lissette by not being there when she came home. He wanted her to find a note saying “Hi honey. I’m feeling better and went in to work.”
But instead she comes home to find him on the couch watching TV.
“Did you call the doctor today?” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “I have an appointment for next week.”
“Next week?”
“Yeah. It was the earliest they had. I mean, they asked if it was like life-or-death or something and I couldn’t really say that, you know?”
“But won’t your sick days run out before then?”
“No. Don’t worry. I told them if someone cancels then call me.”
He will go back to work the next night for sure, he says to himself.
But whenever he thinks about going back to work, he thinks about Dovanovich and when he thinks about that man he thinks of how helpless he was in that man’s large hands, how those hands were big enough to dispose of him in so many ways.
And so he does not go back the next night. Or the next. Or for the rest of the week. He stays on the couch, in front of the TV. Fleetingly he feels restless, but mostly he is surprised at how content he is being bored. Lissette tiptoes around with what he thinks is a detached expression, as if she has begun to give up on him.
The morning of his last sick day, he receives another call from the supervisor. He is to produce a doctor’s letter stating his condition and why it prevents him from coming to work or he will be fired. He has to go back.
It terrifies him so that he forgets to leave a note for Lissette, which he had planned to do. Instead he calls her from a pay phone at the subway station and leaves a message on their answering machine. He tries to sound as upbeat as possible.
When he arrives at the building, Gordon welcomes him with a handshake. The supervisor is there and says, “Well if it isn’t the sickie.” He means it to be funny, but not even he laughs. Greeley senses that is because of what he looks like. There is no sign of Dovanovich.
He takes the elevator to the twelfth floor. He wants to have a cigarette to calm his nerves. Almost maniacally he wants to revisit the terrace and smoke there like he has for the past ten years. Once there, he smokes two cigarettes, and something about the mist shrouding the skyline has as calming effect on him.
He takes the elevator to the basement, where the floor buffer is kept in a closet. As he is unlocking the door, the elevator opens and Dovanovich emerges. Immediately he is struck with terror. He realizes he is in a basement with no easy means of escape. Dovanovich spots him and bounds up to him. “Hey, buddy,” he says. “How you feeling?”
Greeley mutters something -- he isn’t sure what. Whenever Dovanovich takes a step or gestures toward him, he shrinks visibly. Finally Dovanovich shakes his head, grabs a mop and bucket, and disappears back into the elevator.
The ordeal is very draining to Greeley. He has to sit down. He feels extremely tired. He has gotten into the habit of sleeping at night and being awake in the day. Inside the closet, there is a space on the floor next to the buffer. Only someone as small as Greeley could fit in it. He covers the space with some cardboard and lays down on it, shutting the door and falling asleep in the darkness. That is where Dovanovich finds his body just before he was to go to lunch. At first the police would surmise that he had suffocated, but they will come to doubt that the closet was airtight. The blame would then be laid on the fumes from several open bottles of cleaning agents found in the closet. The space was so small and enclosed, they would say, and the dead man had been sick lately and was in such an obviously deteriorated physical state.
Dovanovich flips over a bucket, strides it, then
sits. His shoulders tremble. Gordon retrieves a roll of paper towels from the bathroom and hands it to him. The big guy cannot keep his face dry though, no matter how much he wipes it. The supervisor sends him home for the rest of the shift.
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