An Assumption of Filth

            Earl’s hand smoothed the inside curve of his toilet bowl.    7:30 a.m.  Every morning, the same thing. He refused to sleep in any later, adamantly avoiding that slippery slope.  This was Tuesday, damn it, not Saturday.  He was not on vacation, he reminded himself as the tile gradually imprinted grooves across his knees.  Except for gloves, he was naked while he cleansed.  Best time to catch it was immediately after his shower, before the steam clustering around the broken vent began to fester. As with most things, the trick was to not get out of habit, he thought as his toilet-brush scoured. Regularity was reassuring, as the sponge swiped curling hair.

By the time he finished the bathroom, cleaned his hands, selected his shirt, pants, tie, shoes, and got dressed, it was pushing nine-thirty.  He sat at the breakfast table, paper and mug neatly arranged before him.  As he crunched down brittle bites of toast, Earl reminded himself to get jam and butter.  And coffee, and milk: despite the ice cubes, the tap water in the mug clung to lukewarm.  On occasion, he would almost forget everything, assume as he opened the refrigerator door that Debbie was still keeping the fridge stocked, and at these times he was utterly unprepared to find only the gleaming blankness of white wire shelves.

He surveyed the headlines, the sports scores, everything but the classifieds.  He refused to rush to the Help Wanted ads like some desperate bum.   When he finally got there, a half-hour analysis of the section yielded nothing. He crumpled the classifieds into the rest of the paper and shoved the whole mess into the trashcan, angry but careful not to let his sleeves smear against the olive-green bag. He’d been in management, for God’s sake!  Being laid-off should not mean having to do entry-level food service, joining pimply kids on the fry-line, oily hands grasping slivers of yellow potato and cramming them into plastic cartons, grease on grease as the fries slide and mush through their fingers –

Earl swallowed and shook his head.  The phantom odor of grease & acne skirted bthe perimeter of his nose, peeking in here and there.  He eased his way into the living room and slid into the recliner. 

            He should go to the unemployment office.  Would go, today.   He’d been hesitating on this for weeks.   Why couldn’t they just post all the available jobs in the paper?  They arranged it like a punishment, forcing everyone to stack up in lines, like cattle waiting their turn through the chute.  No room in those places.  You had to stand like a fence-post to prevent rubbing against people.  But no matter how statuesque you became, there was always somebody unwary, a construction work or at least you hope he’s in construction since he’s covered in dirt head to toe.  Then it happens: the dusty corner of a passing flannel leaps out, smudging your arm.  And his hand!  Like muddy sandpaper across your skin.  You want to wash the hand first thing when you get back home, but your bladder betrays you halfway there.  You handle yourself as little as possible with the dirty hand, using your hips to guide the daisy-colored stream.  Soon golden pinpoints glisten from the rim like eyes, puckered eyes . . .

            Earl awoke, belly gurgling in discomfort.  On his way to the bathroom, the clock glared at him.  12:05 p.m.  He sat down on the toilet, breaking wind in a blistering trumpet solo before getting down to business.   His face shrank against the stink: how could just toast do that? He flushed, then flushed again – just to make sure – before putting on a fresh set of cleaning gloves, getting out the liquid cleaner, the abrasive, the scrub brush. 

He was fifteen minutes into the cleaning when his fingers burst through the tips of the gloves like overcooked sausages.  His hand almost lapped the toilet water, but he yanked it clear in time.   Just to be safe, he washed the hand twice, wincing as the steam rolled off the faucet stream.  This was his fault.  Well, partly his fault. He kept forgetting to buy bigger gloves, so he kept cramming his plump fingers into the skinny yellow ones Debbie had used.  Barely used.  That should have been the tip from the beginning. 

            Earl contemplated the ruined glove.  He really did need to get groceries, anyway. He had no food for lunch, or supper.  And it was early afternoon; that should cut down on the crowds, right? If nothing else, he was definitely going to need more gloves. Earl cleaned his toilet four times a day, and he was only on number two. So to speak.

·         

He stepped out into the daylight cautiously. May’s afternoons lacked the humidity of the coming summer but made up for it in glaring brightness. Spring was everywhere, flushed in hyper-color and threatening heat.   Even sun-bleached Kenton Street seemed to stretch extra far in its vivid grayness.  It looked deserted, peaceful.

Houses and apartments kept pace with him as he walked, blending together in their sub-par uniformity: just-off shades of paint, almost-connected gutters.  Wedged between the buildings and the sidewalk were tiny stripes of yard so green they hurt Earl’s eyes.   The grass’s moist fertility hung in the air, draped itself heavily around him, creeping somewhere between taste and odor.   Earl registered it as a lump deep in his throat.  The lump suddenly ripened, bloated sticky rich, and Earl broke out coughing as he hurried past the logged pyramid some dog had deposited nearby.     

When Earl encountered people at the bus stop, he was almost grateful: the fresh stimuli distracted him from the lingering aroma.  As the smell faded, though, so did the relief, edged out by fidgety shopping bag rims in front of him.  Explosive sneezes from behind.  Earl risked a peek back and found a woman whose runny eyes and gummy lips said she was on her way to the doctor’s.  He tried to discreetly slip away from her without brushing against anyone.

He shrugged when the bus pulled up, as if trying to dispel a shudder.  The car had been in Debbie’s name, even though he was the one who’d driven to work everyday.  He’d thought public transportation wouldn’t be a problem: might as well use it, his tax money was paying for it.  That was before he had stepped through those accordion doors, funneling his way down bleak rows of aquamarine bench-seats.  Even through the soles of his shoes, he felt pebbles probe, dirt dig in, old gum grasp.  The air-conditioning billowed in wind-tunnel fashion, chilling the smells of the twenty-odd passengers to within a few degrees of each other like some great Social Equalizer.

Earl took a seat midway back as the bus lurched forward. He pulled both arms close to his body and locked his elbows on his lap.  Herb’s Market was only ten minutes away.  An all-in-one supermarket was actually closer, but Earl preferred Herb’s.  He’d seen the advertising, all the sparkling, not-a-smudge-anywhere footage on TV.  All those smiling, eager-to-serve faces.  He didn’t buy any of it for a minute.  How could they possibly keep a 24-hour grocery store the size of a warehouse appropriately clean?  Eighty, maybe a hundred employees, and he’s supposed to believe they’re all washing their hands after using the bathroom?  At least he at least knew Herb’s, trusted it.  After Debbie, he didn’t trust much.

            The bus bumped to a stop, but no one boarded.  Earl peered forward; he could hear the driver beckoning some kind of encouragement.  Slowly, very slowly, a head ascended over the rows of seats, growing down into slumped shoulders, dangling arms, shuffling legs. Grey hair jutted from beneath a webbed baseball cap.  The lazy eyes were swallowed by flabby wrinkles that washed down into a bewildered smile. 

            Retard, Earl realized. As he began to pass, the driver stopped him with a light touch.   Earl winced as the driver’s hand closed around the stained flannel. 

            “Remember, Billy Lee, no bothering people, right?” 

            The figure considered this for a moment, then simply nodded.  He struggled down the aisle, his head swaying as he searched for an open seat.  But he passed one vacancy, and then another.  Suddenly it became clear to Earl where the retard was headed, even as Earl closed his eyes, mentally projecting a desperate not me, please not me . . .

            The retard took the seat across the aisle from Earl, and the driver shoved the bus forward.

            “Hel-lo.”

            He could feel the retard’s tiny eyes burrowing in on him from behind his thick glasses.  Earl stared ahead, not allowing his gaze to drift left. 

            A flicker in his peripheral vision, and Earl flinched, inadvertently looking over.  

            The retard had raised his hand up in a stationary wave.  A smile crept across his face, secretive and dumbly jolly.  “Hel-lo, again.”  He paused, popping his lower denture plate out of place with his tongue before sucking it back in.  “My name” . . . pop suck  . . . “is Billy Lee.”  Pop suck, pop suck.

             He stretched his arm forward, to shake hands.  His fingertips were crowned with black, grainy crescents.

           “Get away from me.” Earl hissed as the dirty nails approached.

            The hand hesitated, then continued forward. “What’s . . . “ pop suck “. . . . your name?” Pop suck. 

            Earl imagined an aura about the hand, a smeary stain leaching through the air toward him.  He could barely stand to think what some of the crude beneath his fingers must be –

            -tight and pursed, a puckered eye, lined in humus brown –

            “I said get away from me!”  Earl jumped up, barely aware as his feet skittered him two rows forward.  Billy Lee rose, the hand still stuck out at arm’s length.     

            The driver’s head shot up.  “No standing while the bus is moving.” 

            “You need to do something about him, he keeps grabbing at me!” Earl felt back on the school bus, tattling, but the fingers continued to loom.

            “Billy Lee, I warned you.  Sit down, please.”

            Billy Lee spread his arms before him, like a lawyer arguing his case. “Carol says” . . . pop suck . . . “good to meet” . . .  pop suck  . . . “new people.”

            “Not while we are moving.  You need to sit.  You too, sir.”

            Billy Lee squared-up even with the rows of seats.  The whole of his barrel-shaped body quivered, even as he began to gesture, lecturing the other passengers.  “All I want”  . . . pop such . . .   “is him to shake my hand.”  Pop suck.  “Shaking hands is” . . . pop suck  . . . “gentleman thing to do. Carol says.” 

              For effect, he flung his arms in short bursts, nearly chopping Earl in the head. Earl flinched and flailed, horrified those nails would connect with his skin.  The rest of the bus gawked, openly thrilled with the afternoon drama.

            “He’s trying to hit me!” Earl squealed.  “Did you see, he tried to punch me!”

            “Billy Lee . . .”

            Billy Lee stared at Earl, his features melting into betrayal.  “You lie,“ he protested. 

            Earl squirmed further forward.  “Don’t you touch me!”

            The driver stopped the bus and rose from his seat. “Billy, that’s it, “ he said, hand gesturing toward the door. “Carol warned you about this.  Come here.”

            “I didn’t do nothing!” He thrashed his body, almost hitting two more people.  The smell wafted over Earl, forcing his nose down into his shirt collar. 

           “Billy Lee, we are not doing this again.  This was Carol’s rule: act up on the bus, and you walk to work.”

            Billy stomped to the front of the bus, snorting outrage that bordered on tears.   He squeezed past the driver, then turned and jutted a finger at Earl.  “You liar assss - hole!” He gave an awkward “up-yours” sign as he almost fell down the steps.

            The bus pulled away.  Earl watched the figure of Billy Lee recede; he never moved, just stood there, arms hanging at his sides.   The air crackled as the driver radioed in the situation, asking someone to let the group home know what had happened.  The crowd on the bus remained unnaturally quiet.   A few gazed at Earl with what he thought was pity.  He hesitantly smiled, but they threw their heads and rolled their eyes.  He felt contaminated, probably by the smell, and watched the floor for the rest of his trip.  

              Earl spoke quietly to the driver as he got off.  “Thank you.”  Awkward silence followed, forcing Earl to say more.  “If they’re going to be out in public alone, they should really be better behaved than that.”

            The driver speared Earl with the same look he gave Billy Lee earlier.  “You know, he would have left you alone if you’d just shaken his hand.  Saved me a lot of grief later.” 

            Earl descended the steps in a flush, as if he, not the retard, was the troubled one.

·         

            The air conditioning at Herb’s was even icier than the bus’s, and somehow less pure.  It was as if Earl could feel the crystallized dirt drifting, settling against his clothes and patiently waiting for his return to the warm outdoors.  His trust in Herb’s dwindled: he kept spotting dust bunnies and neglected candy wrappers lurking in unswept corners as he hunted for the cleaning supply aisle.  Once there, he grabbed four packets of extra-large disposable cleaning gloves, then reconsidered and grabbed two more.  He’d been getting tired of cleansing Debbie’s tiny gloves, dunking them into boiling water until the near-melted rubber gave up its shape.  An image intruded: Earl, protected with double layers of the gloves, seizing the retard’s wrists and shoving his hands into the bubbling water, screaming They’re called nail clippers!  Use them!

            The sixth package of gloves slipped from his fingers.  He absently bent to retrieve it, and an odor slammed into him: fingernails, hot and soft from a fresh scalding, brown remnants now runny and dripping down.   Earl tasted bile and stood up too quickly.   He sniffed, cautiously.  The smell had dissipated but lingered as an undercurrent, as though a pile of clipped fingernails were hiding behind the liquid soaps.  Earl carefully walked down the aisle, drawing his breaths slow and deep.  He rounded the corner only to find himself in the meat department.  One look at the freshly ground beef and more mental film rolled: a figure tossing in bed as it dug and scratched at its backside, nails ripping through toilet-paper in their clumsy wipings . . .

When Earl was actually able to focus on his surroundings again – when his attention wasn’t all-consumed with the effort of shutting out the images and the smells – he found himself almost four blocks from Herb’s.  All six packages of gloves were cradled clumsily in his arms; judging from his lack of a bag, he hadn’t paid for them.  No one appeared to be chasing him, but he wasn’t about to wait around and see.  He fled for another ten minutes before his stomach let out an enormous snarl of hunger.  It was only then he realized he’d gotten no groceries.

He was still busying puzzling down at his stomach when his nostrils filled with a pungent aroma: the thick waftings of cheese and tomato.  A pizzeria named A Slice of Italy sat a street corner away.  

The odor of the pizza practically dragged him through the front door.   Fresh hot food was a memory, a memory of Debbie that had been replaced with soggy microwave dinners. He ordered a large pepperoni from the mawkish teen at the counter, mouth fairly watering.  The pile of dog turds, the retard, the episode at Herb’s: all were beginning to fade under garlic and oregano saturation.  He stepped to the side, glancing at the customer behind him  – 

Earl froze.

            - The man had never seen Earl before.  And in fact, Earl had seen him just one other time.  He had caught the profile of the man’s lusty head bobs in the vanity mirror that reflected Earl and Debbie’s bed.  After ten seconds or so, Earl had fled quietly, or at least had attempted to.  He’d crept across the living room – he’d been beyond words, had just needed to get outside, to think – but the screen door betrayed him, slipping out of his fingers and slamming shut.  He’d heard a flurry of stopped noise from the bedroom, a suddenly crouched silence, and then he couldn’t take it.  He’d sprinted down the sidewalk, not returning for hours.  When he came back, he hadn’t bothered with the long note on the kitchen table, had just gone to the bedroom and stared at her deserted half of the closet - .

            There was no flash of recognition as the man placed his order, no embarrassed, down-cast eyes.  He didn’t even recognize Earl.  His eyes were elsewhere, probably picturing Debbie’s boobs, on their slide into late middle-age but still considerable in size as they sloshed beneath him, her hands clamped onto his ass, fingers clawing, cranking his cheeks wide open in her enthusiasm.  This is what Earl had encountered when he came home earlier from work one day – the last day he’d come home from work, in fact.  A stranger’s anus bouncing in his bed, contemplating him, a puckered eye lined in brown-

            Earl felt all of the restaurant rising: floor, walls, even the temperature, dilating.  The piles of gloves slipped through his arms, forgotten.  A waitress laden with pizza passed in front of him; the squirts of tomato sauce, red pupils among cheese, stared at him.  They smelled like shit.  Just like that, their hearty aroma had twisted, grown overripe and too moist, like cow pastures in August.   A child screamed past, and Earl almost fainted.  How many weeks since that thing had been bathed?

            It was the man, Debbie’s guy.  He was polluting everything, befouling the very air that passed through him.  He shifted slightly from foot to foot.  Oh, that nasty dirty bastard.  It was a nice try, but Earl had heard it, had even seen the subtle but noxious that puffed against the rear of his pants.  Silent but deadly. 

            Earl dodged without thinking, stepping on a second little piggie, probably on it’s way to play in the urinals.  It squealed but Earl ignored it, on the move to the counter.  He needed out, out of here now.  Even downwind, the man’s stench throbbed against Earl’s back like radioactive waste.  He gripped the counter, blubbering,  “Mercen, large pepperoni for Mercen, I’m in a rush, my . . . my wife’s waiting for me . . . “  Did that give it away?  Oh God, what if he realizes?  Earl imagined those fingers festering on his shoulders, the smell invading his skin as the voice leeched through the air,   “Say, don’t I know your wife . . .?”

            “Mercen, goddamnit! Mercen-” 

            “God, here!” The teen behind the counter shoved the box at Earl.  “Twelve ninety-nine!”

            Earl flopped a twenty onto the counter and grabbed at the pizza, whacking someone with his shoulder in the process.  He scurried out the door in the wake of a woman’s husky “Asshole!” 

            Despite his commotion, Earl was quickly forgotten by all the patrons and employees at A Slice of Italy.  All except one, who smiled as he stared at the door of Earl’s exit.

·         

            The clusters of humanity gathered at the bus stop drove him away.  If he stood amid a group of people right now, he would throw up.  Instead, he hurried up the ten blocks toward his apartment, as if running from something.  He was.  The odor from the restaurant –from Debbie’s lover - was following, threatening to invade his nostrils with soupy tendrils.  The smell of the pizza helped block them out, and so he tilted the pizza box closer and closer to his nose as he scampered.  He was cradling the box beneath his chin by the time he opened his front door.

            Earl flopped the pizza box open on the coffee table, pawed at the first piece, shoved nearly half of it in his mouth.  He ignored the squirt of grease that sizzled his tongue.  The savory bite knocked Earl to the verge of tears.  This was getting bad, he had to talk to someone. That smell couldn’t be real, couldn’t really be following him -

            There was something on his pizza.

            Earl stared at the slice immediately under his nose.  Even cross-eyed, he could make out the brown spirals, like chocolate shavings but darker, grittier.  More freshly organic.  

            No.  

            He inhaled, summoning the aroma of pizza.  They filled his nose, the smells of boiled tomato, spiced pork, mozzarella fermentation . . . and something else, a masking cloud that soured the sauce, spoiled the meat, curdled the cheese.

            Earl reached into his mouth like a man in a trance. He fished around, found something curved and hard.  Like a fingernail.  

            He drew it out. The fecal crescent bowed before him.

            Earl gasped in realization, and that knowledge sucked a lump of cheesy dough straight to the back of his windpipe.  He gagged on instinct as the lump dropped in and got stuck.  He gagged from lack of oxygen when he was halfway to the kitchen, feverishly trying to remember how to give himself the Heimlich over the back of a chair.  He gagged again as his legs buckled, and gagged again, and again, solely from the smell, which filled his throat as surely as the half-chewed wad of pizza.

·         

            He got off the bus about 7:30 that night. Carol was waiting for him on the group home’s front porch.  

            “Hello, Billy Lee.” She said wearily.  She was only halfway through her double shift and already whipped.

            He shuffled toward the front door, too slowly.  “I met“  . . . pop suck . . .   “a man today.”

            “You did?  Well, you can tell me all about it when you get inside.” Carol had come down the steps, to encourage him along.  Almost nine more hours.  Ugh.

            “He was mean.” Pop suck.

            “Oh, that’s too bad. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.”

              They had almost crested the steps when Billy tried to turn.

            “I made . . .” He staggered.

“Billy Lee, be careful!” She steadied him.

            “ . . . a pizza today.”

            “I thought they only let you fold boxes.”

            “Special pizza.”

            “Well that’s nice.  We’ll talk more inside.” 

            Carol really had meant to ask him more about his day, but by the time she had gotten him inside and into the bathroom, it was clean out of her mind.  Besides, from the looks of his hands, she didn’t want to think about him around food.  Billy Lee was a good little guy, God love him, but she sure hoped that pizza place made him wear gloves.   His hands were absolutely filthy.