Cans

Dan worked the alleys behind the restaurants on Tuesday because Tuesday was recycling day and the blue bins were out. You had to be there before seven when the trucks came through, but well ahead of the guys with bike trailers who could strip a block in ten minutes. Dan was fifty-four with bad knees and his last bike had been stolen years ago. He got what the pros left behind.

Lyca walked ahead of him. She was a brown mutt with one ear that stood up, and she knew the route as well as he did. He had found her four years ago tied to a fence behind a gas station with no water. He had stood there an hour waiting for somebody to come back for her, and nobody had.

Today, the bins had little left inside. Somebody had been through already. He got four beer cans from behind the pub and a wine bottle from the dumpster by the sushi place, and that alone was forty minutes of work for fifty cents. The alley smelled of fryer grease and the bleach the sushi place put down on its back step every night. His knees hurt already.

He was going to call it a day when Lyca stopped at the loading dock behind the furniture store and put her nose under the stairs, letting out a low whine. Dan wasn’t too keen on finding a stiff, but he bent down to look. There was a black contractor bag under there, pushed back against the concrete with a flattened box on top of it. Dan knew that wasn’t supposed to be there, like someone had stashed their loot while they were on the run. With a groan, he dragged it out. It was heavy and the contents clinked. He untied the top and saw cans to the brim, crushed flat to fit more in. Behind the first bag was a second one.

He knew what it was. Nobody threw out sixty dollars in empties tied up neat under a staircase. Somebody had been building this for a week or two, waiting for a day with a short line at the depot. Dan had kept a stash like it himself, two summers back, in a culvert by the river. Somebody had cleaned it out overnight, and he had gone around for a week wanting to kill whoever did it.

He didn’t have to think very hard about it. It was the end of the month and he had a dollar ten in his pocket. He put one bag over each shoulder.

“Hey.”

The man came down the alley from the street end. He was in a green rain jacket with duct tape on one elbow and a floppy hat with a low brim. He left his shopping cart standing so he could walk faster.

“Those are mine,” the man said. “You know those are mine.”

Dan did know. It made him angry to be told.

“I found them,” he said.

“You found them under my stairs. Put them down.”

Lyca started barking. The man got a hand on one of the bags and pulled, and the bag slid off Dan’s shoulder and hit the ground. Dan had the wine bottle in his coat pocket. He took it out by the neck and swung it into the side of the man’s head.

The bottle made a flat sound, but did not break. The man slumped down on the pavement from the impact. He looked up at Dan with his mouth open. Dan hit him again, on top of the head this time, and the man went over sideways and lay with his cheek on the asphalt. Blood came out of his hair and ran toward the drain. One of his feet scraped back and forth on the ground for a while and then stopped moving.

Dan stood there. Lyca had stopped barking and had backed up to the end of her rope. Nobody came to the mouth of the alley. A fan ran on the roof of the sushi place. It was seven in the morning and full daylight. Dan had been in fights his whole life and had never once hit a man who was sitting down.

He picked up both bags and walked out the far end. He started running when he was around the corner.

The depot paid him sixty-three dollars and forty cents. The kid at the counter ran the bags through without looking at him and Dan was glad of it. He bought a pint of rye, two cans of dog food, a pack of cigarettes and a gas station sandwich.

His tent was under the rail overpass on the east side of town, past the end of the bike path, where a strip of gravel and scrub ran between the embankment and a storage yard fence. He had picked the spot because nobody else was there yet. The camp in the park had fights every night and a fire about once a month. It had outreach workers with clipboards who wanted his date of birth. Up here there was a freight train every couple of hours and nobody asking him anything. At night the storage yard lights came on and turned the whole strip orange. The place smelled of creosote from the ties. From his spot the nearest other tent was a twenty-minute walk, and he had always liked that about it.

He fed Lyca, drank half the rye and zipped the flap. The rye did what he had bought it to do. He did not think about the man much. When he did, he thought the man had probably gotten up. People got hit in the head all the time. Dan had been hit in the head with worse than a bottle, and here he was.

Outside evening settled with a bite in the air, drawing the damp smell of river mud up to the tent. The gravel ground into his hip through the thin foam pad, and Dan felt a familiar ache that usually took an hour to dull. He laid his hand flat against the sleeping bag beside him with his fingers spread in the dark, still touching an empty space where his wife’s shoulder used to be. It was a ghost-habit that the booze always brought back until Lyca came to rest beside him and fill his hand with fur. He didn’t miss his wife’s voice or face so much as the comfort of knowing things had a reason. Now he lay there, listening to the storage yard lights buzzing like a trapped wasp against the high chain-link fence. Lyca whimpered and Dan reminded himself that he still had her. He closed his eyes and waited for the rye to stop making his mind race ahead to tomorrow.

Sleep finally took him and it was dull and dreamless.

He woke in the dark. Lyca was standing up inside the tent with her legs stiff. There was enough orange light coming through the nylon to see her by. Her fur was raised in a ridge along her spine. She kept her jaw shut, making no noise at all. Her nose pointed toward the bottom corner of the tent wall, her ears pinned flat.

A heel scraped the loose rock outside.

Dan sat up and laid his hands on Lyca’s back. The dog was trembling.

He heard it again, a heavy, uneven pull through the gravel. Just outside the tent.

“What’s out there?” Dan called out.

There was another drag of a sole, moving closer to the entrance. Somebody was out there, dragging their feet through the gravel one slow step at a time. The steps kept moving along the side of the tent.

Some drunk, Dan thought. Some guy from the park who had wandered up the tracks looking for a place to piss. Then he thought about how far the park was. Nobody came up here. That was why he was here.

“Fuck off,” he said. “I got a dog.”

The steps stopped. Then they started again and the nylon pushed in a little beside his shoulder before it went slack.

Lyca was growling now.

Dan got his knife out of his boot as the shuffling continued to circle the tent. He could hear no breathing out there and no voice, only the feet. Dan had slept outside for eleven years and he knew what a man sounded like through a tent wall. A man coughs sooner or later or shifts his weight. This one walked and did nothing else. Lyca lay down flat and pushed her nose under his leg, which she had never done before.

The footsteps stopped just as they reached the entrance. Dan waited. He stared at the silver zipper hanging in the orange glow, his fingers locked tight around the handle of his knife. His chest burned from holding his breath. The horror of it was the waiting, watching that tiny metal tab, terrified it was about to slide down inch by inch.

Then the bridge above them groaned. A freight train went by overhead, a sudden wall of thunder that wiped out every sound in the night. It took a long time to pass, the ground shaking under the tent floor the whole time, rattling the fillings in Dan’s teeth. He sat frozen in the roar, staring at the zipper, unable to tell if the door was opening or if the footsteps were coming closer under the noise.

When the last car rattled past, there was nothing. Dan waited what he guessed was an hour. Then he unzipped the flap a foot and put his head out.

The storage yard lights showed him the gravel all the way to the fence and the embankment all the way up to the tracks. Nobody was there. He looked at the gravel around the tent for marks and could not tell anything from it.

He stroked Lyca. He had liked it, being out here, twenty minutes from anybody else.

He did not sleep again.