Читать книгу In the Blind - Eugene Marten - Страница 12

IT has a shoulder. It has a root. It has a bow and a blade. A throat.

There are three dimensions: the depths, the spacing, the profile. Hold one and aim it at yourself so you are looking dead at the tip. This is its profile.

I learned this on the first day. Yusuf taught me this.

The machine is a motor with a blade. The blade is a small wheel. The carriage moves up and down, side to side. Two clamps are attached to the carriage, so that to move one is to move the other the same way. Do you see it?

The shop was open half a day on Saturdays. Ibrahim asked if I would come in. I didn’t have to, so I said I would.

Put the blank in one clamp, the original in the other. To move the carriage is to start the cutter. To push the original against the point of the guide, drag it across the bittings, is to move the blank against the blade exactly the same way. You’ve stood there on the other side of the counter, but you haven’t seen it.

You know how it sounds.

Yusuf would do it in two quick motions, left to right, right to left, barely looking, or just looking at me. As nearly as I could tell they were perfect copies.

“One hundred procent,” he said.

Put each one on a ring of its own.

“How you want to be pay?” Ibrahim asked me. “Every one week or every two?”

I would need my first check by the end of the week to cover the rent. It would be just enough.

People brought in keys and they brought in locks and bought new ones and came for the ones they’d left to be serviced. Sometimes what they came for had been there for weeks and still wasn’t ready. Or wasn’t there. This is how you knew they needed somebody.

A white-haired woman brought in a suitcase as old as she was. She didn’t have the key. She didn’t say if it was hers or if she’d found it, but she wanted to see if it was going to change her life. How much to open it while she waited?

“Half of what’s inside,” Ibrahim told her.

“Ain’t no days like that,” she said.

One ninety-nine for a car key. Two ninety-nine if it was double-sided. Two forty-nine for a color key or one with a rubber bow. Always ask if they want their name on the receipt. Sometimes I heard two different prices for the same thing and this is how you knew.

The board had numbers on top, letters on the side, but you could still get lost. Ibrahim wanted it all fed into the computer so the computer could tell you where to look. He sat behind the counter with the suitcase on his lap, using two slender tools. Held the tip of one steady in the lock. The other he maneuvered delicately, relaxed and patient so you couldn’t see the hurry he was always in.

The man with the newspaper came and sat on his stool and read his paper. He favored articles about new discoveries in science and nature. First he read the metro section.

Someone asked me if I was hungry. The carriage grip hummed in the palm of your hand. Burnish the key after you cut it. Hold it against the brush wheel and clean off the burrs, smooth the cuts. Hold it up in the light next to the original.

On Fords the door key would also turn the ignition, but not on GMs. After that I was in over my head.

Wanda made coffee. Ibrahim gave her money and she went out after noon and brought back things to eat. Lunchtime was working with food in your mouth.

“Enjoy,” she said. “Put some meat on your bones.”

“Wadiya,” they said, and sometimes they spoke in their own language, hard dry sounds and soft dry sounds, deep in the throat, rapid. There was a word you heard over and over. Yusuf apologized. He said it was nothing personal, it was just easier that way sometimes. I didn’t mind, but hearing them made me thirsty.

“Shufi,” it sounded like.

A key has a shank and a post, it has lands and grooves. A lock has a bible. The air conditioner made a lot of noise but didn’t do much else. And there was the phone.

A stocky guy in a gray workshirt came in with a skeleton key he wanted us to copy. Ibrahim said we’d have to make it by hand but it isn’t called a skeleton key, it is called a ward or bit key—a skeleton key is a master of the type. The guy said he’d come back. Meantime he needed a padlock, something for any kind of weather. I told him I was new. Wanda pulled something off the wall. Chrome-plated, steel shackle guard, interior dust cover.

I took his money, forget his face.

“Stop saying you’re new,” Wanda said. “Just ask. You’re sweating.” She stood close when she talked to you and smelled like cinnamon.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

I said something about boils, went home and changed, came back and took their money. If I didn’t look them in the eye when I asked for it, my hand wouldn’t shake when I touched it. There was no register, only a calculator, a drawer under the counter that opened when you pushed. And suckers for their kids. Count it up at the beginning of the day and at the end. At the end of the day cash went into an envelope in a desk drawer in the office. There was a safe. There was a basement.

The suitcase was full of pornography and dirty underwear. “What half do you want?” the old lady asked Ibrahim.

Cramped and dusty down there, the floor buried. Stock, tools, spare parts in clear plastic drawers, pinning kits, things you could only look for. Mice. Glass block windows. A workbench where they rekeyed locks, cut special kinds of keys like flat or bit keys, which you think is called a skeleton, which is also called a pass key. Sometimes an inch of rain.

Ibrahim held a flame to the blank till it was black. He put it in the vise and used tinfoil and a warding file. In the basement.

The man with the newspaper read an article about a two-thousand-year-old computer found at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. Bronze gears and plates, a hand crank.

A customer came back and said the key I’d made didn’t work. It was one o’clock.

Some of them were transparent and you could see a transistor chip embedded in the blade between the shoulders. You have to measure the resistance of the chip to know which blank to use. Another machine.

A woman who managed apartments, a pound of metal on half a dozen rings. When she tossed them in the air they made a single shining sound. Five of this one and five of this one. She’d need her name on the receipt and it was still one o’clock.

The ignition off a moped. A schoolkid who’d forgotten his combination. Ibrahim threw him out because his shirt said a dirty word.

Just one of this one, two copies of this one, and she lost me. I was new. I gave her suckers for her kids, and when it was slow I cleaned the bathroom.

WANDA said something. Yusef and Ibrahim were out on service calls. They were always out on calls.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” Wanda said.

I told her what I thought she’d said.

“It’s not a word I use casually.”

“Who?” I said.

“Rikki.”

“Doris,” the man with the newspaper said.

“Doris,” I repeated.

“That big fat station wagon that keeps rolling by out front?”

“Now that you mention it.” I wasn’t sure. “What about it?”

“Just keeps rolling by like she’s got nothing better to do?”

“Maybe she doesn’t,” the man with the newspaper said.

“I would if I didn’t have to work.”

“Me too,” the man with the newspaper said. I’d had no idea he was employed.

“She is hooked up, I’m telling you. Set for life. She must have noticed we hired someone—probably checking you out.”

“Probably is,” the man with the newspaper said.

“Who is she?”

“Calls herself a Jehovah’s Witness.”

“Seventh Day Adventist,” the man with the newspaper thought.

“I know what she is,” Wanda said.

“Seventh Day Adventist can do worldly things on Sunday.”

“Rikki’s wrong all week. Nothing against Puerto Ricans but you saw those scratches.”

“Are we talking about one person or two?” It was kind of interesting not knowing who Doris or Rikki was.

“If we are they’re both from hell,” Wanda said.

“She can’t have kids anymore,” the man with the newspaper said.

“Thank God,” Wanda said. “I’m terrible,” she said. “You wouldn’t think I was brought up Catholic.”

“The boy isn’t so bad.”

“Ibrahim treated them like his own.”

“So they were married,” I said.

“Family,” Wanda said. “That’s Ibrahim.”

“Quiet kid,” the man with the newspaper said. “Just sits there with his word puzzles.”

“That’s what broke them up—not what she claims.” With her finger Wanda drew a line in front of herself she would never cross. “I don’t sleep with my employer. That’s rule number one.”

“Maybe she is a Witness.”

“Ten years,” Wanda said.

“Eight.”

“. . . one of those green card things at first . . . they built all this together out of scratch.”

“She’s a good head for business,” the man with the newspaper said.

“I’ll give her that,” Wanda said, “but does that entitle her to an arm and a leg?”

“She got the shop?” I said.

“Everything but,” the man with the newspaper said. “Doris.”

“Sawed-off heifer,” Wanda said. “Goddamn soap opera . . . the house,” she said, “the car.”

I said something just to say something. I wished the phone would ring or a customer would come in, but we were dead in there.

“A lump sum. Child support—let her keep the kids.”

“The boy is nice,” the man with the newspaper said, “but the girl is a bill of goods.”

“But nothing is final.” Wanda sighed. “She won’t sign. Ibrahim goes to court and she isn’t there. Her lawyer keeps stalling, she keeps running her game.” She looked out the window. “She keeps driving around the block not getting a life.”

“Ibrahim don’t take no shit from no one,” the man with the newspaper said, “except women.”

“It’s out of spite,” Wanda said. “Out of revenge.” She raised the palm of her hand. “But I swear, it wasn’t till after they were separated. That ain’t me.”

I didn’t want her to say any more. I liked her and I was no longer curious. It was more interesting when you didn’t know the whole story. I said something about marriage, just to fill the gap. Then I wished I hadn’t.

“You’re not married, are you?” Wanda asked.

A big station wagon cruised slowly past the storefront. The windows were tinted so you only saw shadows inside. More than one.

“Look who’s driving,” she said.

“Who’s that?”

“Not who, what. . . . I can’t even say his name.” She crossed herself. “You know I grew up Catholic.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” the man with the newspaper said.