Free In the City of Shy Hunters by Tom Spanbauer Page B

Ricardo? I said.
    The super, she said.
    Super? I said. What’s that?
    What’s a super ? Mrs. Lupino said.
    Shit from New York Shinola.
    The custodian, she said. You know, the superintendent. The guy who takes care of the building.
    Where is he? I asked.
    Who knows? she said.
    How can I get hold of him? I asked.
    You can’t, Mrs. Lupino said, Unless you catch him in the building for some reason. But he’s never in the building.
    But, I said, He takes care of the building.
    You got that right, she said.
    Then: There’s a kid who sets the garbage cans back on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, Mrs. Lupino said. Ricardo’s kid, I guess. But it won’t do you any good talking to the kid, unless you speak Spanish. Even if you do, it won’t help.
    So what do I do, I said, With this carpet?
    There’s a day for bulk pickup and a number to call, but I don’t know them, she said. If you just leave this shit out here, Ricardo will get a citation and he’ll have your ass. If Ricardo don’t kill you right out, he’ll put a voodoo curse on your fucking ass so you wish you were dead, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
    But I can’t live with this cat-shit smell, I said. And the cat hair. How many cats did you have in there?
    I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Lupino said, And I don’t care, she said. So go fuck yourself.
    Mrs. Lupino slammed her window down and stood at the window and kept on yelling at me, cats crawling all over her.
    I looked both ways on the street for Ricardo, the super, the voodoo custodian who was going to put a voodoo curse on my fucking ass.
    As I looked, there was a sound, a huge roar down the street. An orange Dumpster crashed down off a truck onto the asphalt.
    The way I did it was I rolled up sections of carpet and sections of foam pad. I walked like I knew what I was doing, walking causually around with carpet and foam pads under my arm. When I got to the Dumpster, I kept walking, didn’t break my stride, just tossed the sections of carpet and foam pad into the Dumpster and walked on like I had never seen a stained beige cat-piss saturated carpet and crusty foam pad in all my life. Did that eleven times, then bought a cup of coffee at Café 103. The jukebox was playing my favorite Blondie song about the monster that ate everything. No Charlie 2Moons. I finished the coffee and returned to the scene of my crime.
    Two guys were standing in the Dumpster, and the back gate of the Dumpster was open. One of the two guys, the one who was probably Ricardo the voodoo custodian, said he was going to fucking kill the motherfucker who’d dumped that motherfucking shit in there.
    Didn’t stop, didn’t look, just kept walking.
    New York drop-dead fuck-you was easier than I thought.
    THE REFRIGERATOR LOOKED like an old ’53 DeSoto. I moved it out from the wall, and cockroaches and mice went every which way. Had to stop and roll a cigarette. Hundreds of crusty scurryings back into vasty dark. Same with under the sink. Under the sink it was alive. Fuck roach motels, I needed a roach grenade.
    I unplugged the DeSoto and filled the garbage can with four jumbo kosher pickle jars, mostly juice, a crusted jar of Grey Poupon, a box of Jiffy mix, six cans of opened cat food, and whatever else was in the refrigerator. I carried the garbage out and dumped it in the cans out front. Then I carried out what was in the freezer—didn’t check to see what was inside the four foil-wrapped bundles—just pried the bundles from the glacier in the freezer, carried them out, and dumped them, ice and all, into a garbage can.
    When I got back from the hardware store, there was an old man sitting on the sidewalk. He had taken all the jars from the garbage can and set them around him. He was dipping a pickle into the Grey Poupon and he ate the pickle. The four frozen bundles were stacked next to him: unwrapped frozen cats,