The Heavenly Table(92)
“Yeah, they are good doughnuts,” Cob replied.
“Well, not just that,” Jasper said, reflecting on what the dump keeper had told him the other day. “Sitting here in the sun with a new friend and watchin’ people walking to work or wherever they’re a-going this time of the morning. It don’t get much better than this, you know what I mean?”
Cob thought for a minute. He didn’t know if anyone had ever called him “friend” before. Not that he could remember, anyway. But then he’d never had doughnuts to offer anyone, either. “Yeah, I think so,” he said.
Jasper grinned and took another bite. It still amazed him how you could just be plugging along, stuck in the deepest depression, and then something a little bit wonderful happened that suddenly changed your outlook on everything, that turned your world from darkness to light, made you glad you were still walking the earth. Usually it was something that you didn’t have anything to do with at all. For example, like when his mother died. She’d berated him all that morning about the same old stuff, then locked him in his room while she went to church to get her favorite chicken blessed; and five days later the flowers were already starting to wilt on her grave, and he was having the best time of his life cleaning out ol’ Vern Melchert’s jake with Itchy. And what about this? Why, no more than a couple of minutes ago he was feeling like the loneliest poor soul alive, and now he was eating glazed doughnuts from Mannheim’s with a man he’d never seen before. It was all just a matter of sticking it out until the miracle happened.
Looking over at the fellow in the bibs, Jasper wondered if he knew anything about the importance of sanitation in a municipality the size of Meade. “Say, if’n you don’t have anything else goin’ on this morning,” he said, “would you like to go with me while I do a couple of inspections?”
“Inspections? What’s that?”
“Well, it’s sort of like when a doctor gives someone an examination, only the patient is an outhouse instead.” He reached down for his measuring pole, then stood up. “Come on, and I’ll show ye.”
Cob hesitated. He bit into another doughnut as he tried to think. Cane had warned him that talking to strangers was dangerous, but this one seemed all right. And hadn’t he and Chimney gone out last night and did whatever they wanted while he sat in the room by himself? Still, he didn’t want to get in any trouble. As Cane kept saying, they had come too far to mess things up now. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I better—”
“Oh, come on,” Jasper said. “It’ll be fun. Besides, what else you going to do today?”
“Well.”
The inspector smiled and stuck out his hand. “My name’s Jasper Cone.”
Cob looked blank for a second, then replied, “I’m Junior. Bradford. Junior Bradford.”
“Nice to meet you, Junior.”
At first he’d been a little nervous, but the longer Cob followed Jasper around that morning, the more at ease he began to feel. He listened to him talk on a variety of subjects: his old mentor, Itchy, and his boss, Mr. Rawlings, the art of killing rats, his father’s paper mill accident and his mother’s religious beliefs, his ongoing disputes with certain members of the city council, and on and on. Cob had never heard a man flap his jaws so much in his life. He watched Jasper conduct several inspections and write up a warning to post on the front door of someone’s residence whose shitter was on the verge of toppling over into the neighbor’s yard. After a couple of hours, they took another doughnut break, and then walked along an alley until they arrived at a backyard surrounded by a high wooden fence. Jasper pulled out a pocket watch and checked the time, then sat down behind the fence in the dirt and beckoned Cob to do the same. “They’s a woman here that’s as regular as clockwork,” he said. “In two minutes she’ll pop out that back door and head straight for the toilet, I guarantee it.” They watched through a crack in the fence, and sure enough, in ninety seconds a middle-aged lady in a long blue dress exited the house and hurried across the lawn. After she closed the door to the crapper behind her, Jasper said with an air of authority, “Now, just watch, she’ll be in there exactly four minutes.” He showed the watch face to Cob. A few minutes later, the door creaked open and the woman went back inside the house. “Pretty good, ain’t it, the way I got her figured out?”
“Yeah,” Cob said, “I reckon.”
“But I will admit,” Jasper went on, “she’s one of the easy ones. There’s people would probably pay a hundred dollars to have a digestive system as regular as Mrs. Jackson’s.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t believe how some of them struggle with it. Take ol’ Herb Cutright, for example. The most awful straining and crying and groaning you ever heard, and heck, from the looks of things, he probably eats a handful of prunes with every meal.”
“Poor feller,” Cob said.
“Well, let’s go check the level,” Jasper said, opening the back gate quietly.
The sharp odor of the woman still lingered inside the small space, but Jasper didn’t seem to mind. He showed Cob again how to measure the level, sticking the pole down the hole until it hit solids, then bringing it back up and examining it. “See,” he said, “it’s exactly two feet and five inches from the top of the hole to where you hit the excrement”—he’d been coaching his new friend all morning in the terminology: feces, effluent, fecal matter, solids, liquids, et cetera—“so she’s still got a ways to go before she has to have it emptied. She might even last through the winter at the rate she’s discharging.”