alone together

originally published in The Humber Literary Review Vol. 10 Issue 1, Spring Summer 2022

Jamie Hill steps into his white coveralls and zips them up. It’s a little tight going over his belly despite sucking in, and he catches his t-shirt in the teeth.

“Shit.”

He pulls it free and is left with a dime-sized hole in front where the zipper bit through. It’s his favourite t-shirt though it doesn’t look like much. It’s just a plain white t-shirt with a crew neck and a chest pocket he’s never put anything in. The bottom hem is already ragged from being washed and worn so many times and the threads are disintegrating, but it’s his lucky shirt and, as long as he keeps it tucked, no one’s any the wiser.

He puts his finger through the hole. Yup. Clean through, alright. He’ll have to leave the coveralls on for the day to hide it. He’s not about to change into a new one, not on his first day on the job.

This shirt has brought him luck since he picked it up in one of the stalls at the CNE. He’d worn it the night that he got into a fight at the racetrack. Some drunk guy in a Harley hat thought Jamie was hitting on his girlfriend and clocked him in the chin, and, when he fell, stomped Jaimie’s knee. The next thing Jaimie knew, he’d pulled out his blade and stabbed the guy in the liver. Selfdefense! That’s what he’d argued in court and it was true, for the most part.

He was lucky because the guy lived and he’d only gotten eighteen months in county and not life in Kingston. He was lucky because the judge had taken pity on him on account of his knee which the doctors set wrong and now he walks with a limp. There goes your lacrosse career, his cousin, Jesse, had joked when Jamie was released, and Jamie had laughed because he was never the athletic type to begin with.

Yeah, he felt lucky.

But even an eighteen month time out can cause trouble with work. They’d let him go at the construction site and, now, with a record, no respectable place wanted to take a chance on him. Other guys might go the usual route, break-ins and other petty stuff, but not Jamie. His mother expected better than that, despite being raised hand to mouth. No, if he was going to make money, he’d have to get creative.

He’d gone in with Jesse on an old cargo van. It was the last of the nest egg his German grandma on his so-called father’s side willed him and was supposed to be for higher education, but what else could he have done? His back was against the wall and the old lady was long dead. 

He and Jesse had taped up flyers on telephone poles hoping to hire themselves out as movers and they’d managed to get a few bites. They’d cleaned out junk from abandoned rentals and helped empty nesters downsize into condos. They’d driven boxes of dead people’s memories to estate auctions in the warehouse district.

Then Jesse broke up with his girlfriend and shot himself in the head and business petered out. Who was going to hire a one-guy ex-con moving company? The van sat idle in his mother’s driveway while Jamie washed dishes under the table at a nearby fish and chip place. He’d sat in the back between shifts reading the Pennysaver and that’s where he’d seen the ad. Street Sweepers wanted. Anyone can apply. Well, shit, Jamie had thought. I’m anybody.

Jamie remembers the street sweepers from when he was a boy. They drove tractor-looking vehicles with big round brushes on them and went down the gutters sweeping up cigarette butts and leaves and trash. He and his friends used to chase it down the street. They’d heard stories about kids getting caught in the brushes, so they’d follow along, watching, not knowing what they’d do if it actually happened. Would they watch the kid get brushed up, making a big red skid mark running down the street or would they play hero and risk themselves to save the day? Jamie still wonders about things like that, about what he’d do if it came down to it. So far, he hasn’t had to find out.

The ad for Street Sweepers wasn’t that kind of sweeping though. There weren’t any tractors with brushes as far as he knew. You were expected to bring your own vehicle. So he’d put on his lucky shirt, fired up the van, and went down to the meetup to see what it was all about.

The job was for a different kind of street sweeping, the kind you do with power washers instead of brushes. Fifty-some-odd guys showed up. A couple of women, too, but they didn’t last long because, you can sugarcoat it any way you like, the job was pretty gruesome.

Plus, you had to have your own vehicle, a big one like a truck or a van, and that thinned out the herd from the start. Not many people had the vehicle for it, not in the city. You needed a power washer too but the guy was offering them with monthly instalments, no interest for the first year. Jamie had rubbed his hands on his lucky shirt and signed up on the spot.

His mother wasn’t impressed. She’d looked over the paperwork and slammed her hand on the table. “Dammit, Jamie. What are you doing? This isn’t a job for a decent man. You’d be better off selling smokes out of your cousin’s trailer.”

“You won’t be so mad when the money starts rolling in,” he’d said. Jamie had big plans. This wasn’t an hourly wage job. He’d be his own boss, a real entrepreneur.

The training wasn’t all that hard. He already had first aid that he got back in high school, not that he saw any pressing need for it as a Sweeper but you never know. His trainer was impressed with Jamie’s van. He’d said that white was a good color for a Sweeper van. It inspired hope. Then the trainer had put his hand on Jamie’s shoulder and looked around at everyone else in the room while they looked at their feet.

Besides a vehicle, there weren’t any particular requirements for the job. The trainer said it was one of the benefits of the business model. Street Sweepers merely provided a roster of independent businesspeople available for hire. Some of the guys were even hiring themselves out for illegal side work which the trainer didn’t condone but didn’t exactly ban either. Jamie tried to ignore the stories. He’d spent enough time behind bars.

The white overalls shush between his legs when he walks. He puts the bag with his gloves and ventilator in the van’s glove box, and throws his Stanley thermos on the passenger seat along with a couple of magazines to thumb through while he waits. Then he heads downtown.

The job is at King and Yonge, 11am, according to the app. He has a couple of hours to kill until then. He rides up and down the denser parts of the city keeping an eye out for clusters of people. That’s how you know something’s about to go down, the trainer told them. There are still unscheduled events, though the city’s been cracking down on them which is understandable. Unscheduled events mean the city has to pay for the cleanup and try to collect afterwards.

He doesn’t know if he wants to pick up an unscheduled. The trainer told them that the city is slow to pay and sometimes you have to wait months before you see a dime.

Jamie pulls over. His stomach is growling. Even though his stomach is churning, he could do with a bite and a coffee. He goes into Jo Jo’s and sits at the counter. He’s been going to Jo Jo’s Diner since he was a kid. All Day Breakfast. Now that he smells the bacon frying, he’s ravenous and orders the Hungry Man Feast. He hunches over his plate dunking toasted triangles into soft yolks with one hand and feeding sausages into his mouth with the other.

He can see some of the other diners staring at him while he eats. Sweepers hasn’t been in business that long but everyone already knows who they are. Some people are glad for the convenience but not everyone wants to see it take off. There have been petitions, online and off, and protests outside of the downtown office.

Jamie ignores the stares, watches the tv on the front wall and chews. Basketball players are fighting over a ball and the announcers are getting wound up. He doesn’t really like basketball but he’s not watching the game. He’s watching the ticker at the bottom of the screen for today’s number. There it is. Seventeen. After eleven, it’ll be eighteen. He gulps down his coffee not waiting for it to cool and it burns his throat.

When he gets back out to the van, there’s a small slip of paper flapping under one of his wipers. Great. Fucking great.  Jamie tears off the ticket and stuffs it into one of the pockets of his coveralls, climbs in and drives over to King Street. He’s not allowed to park on the street but he does because the city has been looking the other way. Now that he’s on the job, he gets out the Sweepers decal and slaps it on the side door. It’s a cartoon of a man in white overalls leaning against a broom. He’s smiling. Then, he gets back into the van and waits.

Soon enough, parking enforcement comes wandering down the sidewalk, sees the vinyl sign on the side of the van and hustles on by. They know what it means and they want no part of it. Not the before and certainly not the after.

Jamie gives the officer a grin as she passes and she gives him the finger but keeps walking. Jamie laughs and puts his seat back. He grabs a magazine and flips through it, looking at the pictures.

The crowd grows around him, a mix of commuters trying to get to work, tourists, and assorted voyeurs jockeying for position, climbing up on cars and dumpsters, trying to get the best view. Jamie watches their excitement, and, while he doesn’t share it, he’s not disgusted by it either. He’s got a job to do, after all. He has to maintain a professional distance.

The first time Jamie saw one of these, it was online. Jesse had sent him a link to a video and they’d watched it over public WIFI, trashing the file afterward.

“That’s fucked up,” Jesse had said. Jamie hadn’t really seen anything on account of the shaky footage. Maybe it wasn’t even real. People fake all kinds of things online these days. Maybe it was CGI. “Sick bastards, filming this shit to make a buck.” They watched it a second time in slow motion. “Whatever,” Jamie had said at last.

Today won’t be CGI. It’ll be the real deal. Jaimie wishes Jesse was still alive so that they could watch together. He sits in the van with his feet up on the dash, waiting. He doesn’t have to be here until later, when it’s over and the crowd thins out. He could go back to the diner. They serve beer after eleven. But he’s here now, and he might as well stay or he’ll lose his parking spot. And he has to admit to a certain curiosity, not about the event but about his reaction to it. He thinks he should feel more than he does. Is there something wrong with him?

The crowd is bigger than he expected. They sip on big gulps and throw their cups in the gutter. They smoke like there’s no tomorrow and flick the cigarettes through the air, not bothering to butt out. Jamie wonders if he’s  responsible for cleaning up their mess as well. The trainer never mentioned anything about the trash the crowd makes. He sends a message to the app and gets a form email in response directing him to the FAQ. He sighs and puts his phone in his pocket and zips it up.

Soon enough, the van is surrounded so he gets out. Out of the air conditioning, he sweats in his coveralls. The fabric is nonporous, unforgiving. Rivulets run down his chest. He wishes he didn’t keep his jeans on underneath. The air stinks of cigarettes, B.O. and pot. He sniffs his own armpits. He’s going to need a shower when he gets home. 

And then the crowd swells forward, shouting. It’s happening. Hands point to the sky and he looks up, scans the buildings, floor by floor. 

Jamie follows the crowd forward without thinking. He doesn’t know what he hopes will happen, what he dreads is happening. He doesn’t think at all. He’s caught up in the movement of it, speeding up when the crowd speeds up, turning right and then left. From above, they must look like a single thing, opening up in the middle, ready to swallow.

Everyone has their hands in the air. He finds the dot in the sky, the dot that grows larger until it’s completely obscured by countless onlookers and when the crowd falls silent, just for a moment, he knows the jump has happened.

He feels disappointed.

The crowd, more or less, disperses. Some are crying, some are laughing hysterically, some pat each other on the back like they’ve done something worth doing. A woman holds another woman’s hair while she pukes into the gutter. Jamie makes a mental note of the location. He’ll get to it later with his spray washer. On the house.

A siren honks on and off and the ambulance crawls past. They give a professional nod to Jamie as they pass and he nods too and heads back to the van. They won’t be there long. A lot of the preliminary stuff has been dispensed with because it’s a scheduled jump. There are no cops, no investigation. They don’t even bother to cordon off the area. By the time Jamie rolls the van into the center of the scene and hops out with his gear, they’ve already loaded the body into the back of the ambulance.

“We got coffee over here if you want any,” one of the attendants says.

Jamie hold up his thermos and shakes his head. He’s good, he’s good.

Jamie looks down on the sidewalk where the body hit the ground. There’s less blood than he thought there’d be but enough to make a job of it. There’s also other stuff that turn his stomach when he tries to make out what they are. Better not to put two and two together. Just wash it away as quick as possible and everyone can get on with their day. That’s what his trainer said. Extra points for speed.

He gets right to work, spraying and brushing, picking up what won’t wash away and throwing it in bio containers. He picks up the trash too. The pop cans and fast-food wrappers, empty cigarette packs and wadded up tissues. He finds a shoebox and thinks someone must’ve dropped it on their way through. Some poor shopper who ended up going home with nothing. The picture on the box is for a pair of heels, high-end heels by the looks of it. Maybe they’ll fit his mom. Maybe then she’ll see that he made the right decision. But there aren’t any shoes in the box. Only a little dead bird.

Jamie holds the box up to his face to get a good look. He should know what kind of bird it is but he’s not particularly outdoorsy. He’s lived in the city his whole life. He doesn’t know what kind of bird it is and it makes him feel like less than he is. He puts the lid back on the box, the tiny body still inside, and tosses it into the bio container along with the rest of it, takes a last look around to make sure he hasn’t missed anything, then signs off on the app.

#ShortStory #fiction