The man who’d poured my coffee every morning for nine years pressed charges over $4.19 of sardines and crackers, and when the officer asked if he was sure, he said, “Let the county feed him for once.” So at sixty-eight I stood in a courtroom in handcuffs, and nobody in it knew who I’d been until something fell out of my coat.
Juan Landry knew me when I still had an apartment in Pueblo and a truck that started.
Four days on tap water does something to a man, and I slid the tin into my parka and walked past his register.
He caught my sleeve at the door.
“I gave you credit two winters, Rey,” he said. “You don’t get a THIRD.”
The cop who cuffed me kept apologizing and had a cartoon dinosaur bandage on his thumb.
By morning I had an ORANGE shirt on under my own coat.
The prosecutor, Lizette Kingsley, read me off her sheet like a shopping list.
“Retail theft. No permanent address. Two prior trespass citations. The state asks that he be held, Your Honor.”
HELD. For sardines.
Judge Lindahl never looked up, reading glasses on a beaded chain, forty more of me before lunch.
I kept my hands folded so the cuffs wouldn’t rattle.
Then the deputy pulled my elbow and my coat pocket tipped.
The coin hit the floor.
It rolled in a long lazy circle across the tile and stopped against her bench.
Nobody moved.
She bent and picked it up herself.
Brass, worn almost smooth, my name and unit on the back, because in 1991 some lieutenant wanted every medic in the battalion carrying one.
She turned it over. Then AGAIN.
“Mayo,” she said. “R. Mayo. Forty-Eighth Medical.”
Her glasses came off and landed on my file.
Lizette started in about the docket, and the judge raised a hand without looking.
Then she got up. ALL THE WAY UP, her chair rolling back into the wall, the coin shut in her fist.
The bailiff stood because she stood. Then the clerk. Then both cops in the back.
She leaned toward the microphone, and it wasn’t her courtroom voice.
“Specialist,” she said. “Specialist Mayo, I was…”
The twenty-sixth of February
“I was in the back of your ambulance,” she said.
The microphone carried it to the last row.
“Twenty-sixth of February, 1991. I was the kid from the fuel company who put her truck on its side in a ditch. You rode with me the whole way back. You kept your hand on my leg, and you would not shut up about your mother’s green chile.”
I knew her then.
Not the face. The face was fifty-five now, lines at the mouth, gray in the part.
I knew the name. You know a name you said out loud a hundred times to keep somebody awake on a stretcher.
“Lindahl,” I said. “You had the ponytail. You wouldn’t let them cut it.”
“They cut it anyway,” she said.
Somebody in the gallery laughed, one short breath of a laugh, and then nobody did.
She sat down slow. She pulled her chair back to the bench with one foot, the coin still in her fist.
“Let the record reflect,” she said, and stopped, and started over. “Let the record reflect the court knows this defendant personally. I can’t hear this matter. It goes to Division Three this afternoon.”
Lizette Kingsley was already on her feet.
“Your Honor, the state’s position on custody doesn’t change because of…” She looked at the fist. “Because of that.”
“I didn’t ask the state,” the judge said.
Then she came down off the bench.
Judges don’t do that. The bailiff took half a step like he might stop her and then couldn’t think how.
She put the coin in my hands. Both hands, because the cuffs held them together. She closed my fingers over it with her own, and her fingers were cold.
“You keep that where it can’t fall out,” she said.
Then she went back up and called the next name on her list. There were forty more of us, and it wasn’t ten o’clock.
The deputy turned me toward the side door.
The side door is at the far end, past the gallery, so you walk the whole length of the room to get there.
Half the gallery was still standing, like nobody had told them they could stop. The two cops. A woman with a baby carrier. A kid in a Broncos jacket waiting on his own name.
Juan Landry sat in the last row in his store apron. He hadn’t stood up at all.
Landry’s Market at five-thirty
Juan opens at five-thirty.
He has opened at five-thirty since his father had the store, and his father opened at five-thirty because the day shift at the steel mill went in at six.
I started coming in nine years ago. I was fifty-nine and fixing tires at a shop two blocks up.
A dollar for coffee. It came out of a steel urn behind the counter, and Juan poured it himself into the foam cups. The one time he let a customer pour, the customer burned his hand and talked about suing.
“Black,” he’d say. Not asking.
“Like it comes,” I’d say.
That was most of it, the first few years. The coffee and the weather and the Rockies’ bullpen, which Juan had opinions about he would share with a fence post.
He knew I’d been in the Army. I said so once, standing at that counter, the morning the radio was going on about some war somewhere.
“A long time ago,” I said, and he let it go.
Juan was good at letting a thing go. I liked that about him.
I never showed him the coin.
I never showed anybody the coin. I was thirty-three in 1991, the oldest specialist in the company, because I’d gone in late, after the mill laid off half of Pueblo. The kids called me Pops. I carried the coin because carrying it was easier than throwing it away.
I never went to the VA either. The VA was for the men who got hurt. I was the one doing the wrapping.
Then the tire shop closed.
Sixty-three is a bad age to look for work lifting tires. The apartment went the next spring. The truck had already quit the winter before, and I sold it for parts to a guy from Avondale for two hundred dollars, which tells you about the truck.
Next door to Juan’s is a laundromat that’s been closed since before I knew him.
Juan owns that building too. His father bought both of them in the seventies.
The laundromat has a doorway set back maybe four feet from the sidewalk, with one step up, and the wind off the street doesn’t reach the back of it.
The first night I slept there, I meant to be gone by five. Juan came out at five-twenty to put the sandwich board on the sidewalk and found me still rolling up.
He looked at the bedroll a long time.
“Gone by six,” he said. “And if I find a bottle, you’re gone for good.”
He never found a bottle, because there wasn’t one.
A week later he handed me an empty Folgers can, the big one, with the plastic lid.
“For your papers,” he said. “So they don’t blow all over my step.”
I kept my razor in it, and my discharge papers, and a picture of my mother at a church picnic in 1972 holding a pan of chile like it was a baby.
That was four winters ago.
The credit started the second year. A loaf of bread. A jar of peanut butter. A can of soup when the weather turned.
Juan kept it in a green ledger under the register. A cheap spiral thing off his own shelf, with a price sticker still on the cover, ninety-nine cents.
Every line had a date and an amount and my initials. He made me write the initials myself.
“R.M.,” he’d say, and turn the book around on the counter.
Two winters of that. Then one morning I asked him how I could pay it down, and he looked at his floor.
So I mopped.
Five to five-thirty, before he flipped the sign. The aisles and the front by the door, where the salt comes in off people’s boots. Then I’d stock whatever came off the bread truck.
Juan wrote it in the book under my line. Work, minus 8.
Eight dollars a morning. I didn’t argue it. It was his book.
Twice this year a cop found me in that doorway.
Once in March. Once in August. Both times just after five-thirty, after I’d mopped and gone back next door to roll up my things. Both times the cop said the owner had called.
I asked Juan about it, both times.
“Wasn’t me, Rey,” he said the first time. “Insurance. They send a guy around to check the property.”
The second time he just said, “I’ll talk to them.”
Those were the two prior trespass citations on Lizette Kingsley’s sheet. A hundred dollars apiece I didn’t have, a court date I made both times, and a magistrate who turned them into community service. I picked up trash along the river in a vest.
In October a man came by with a measuring wheel. He walked the front of both buildings, the market and the laundromat, clicking off the feet. He wore a tie with a fleece vest over it.
“Appraiser,” Juan said. “Taxes went up again.”
At the end of October my line in the green book came to zero. Juan drew a line under it and wrote PAID in capitals and turned the book around so I could see.
“That’s it,” he said. “No more.”
I said fine. I meant it.
Cans paid my bus fare after that, and not much else. A bag of cans is about a dollar ten at the yard on a good week.
I’d been on tap water four days when I put the tin in my parka.
That’s how I got here. In a holding cell under the courthouse, the old-timer in the corner wanted to know what the judge had said to me up there.
“She said keep it where it can’t fall out.”
I put the coin in my sock.
Division Three
Allison found me at one-thirty, in the little room with the bolted chairs.
She was the public defender for the afternoon docket. Forties, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, a rolling crate of files she steered along with her foot.
“I’ve got eleven of you today, so I’m going to talk fast,” she said. “You’re Reynaldo Mayo.”
“Rey.”
“Rey. Judge Lindahl’s clerk walked all the way down here to tell me to read your file first. That never happens. So I read your file first.” She sat. “It’s a thin file.”
“It’s thin sardines,” I said.
She didn’t laugh. She wrote something down, though.
There was a second woman in the room I hadn’t heard come in. Younger, a lanyard from the VA, a binder on her knees.
“This is Sunita,” Allison said. “She’s with the VA’s justice outreach. When a defendant’s a veteran, she can…”
“I’m not with the VA,” I said.
“You don’t have to be with it,” Sunita said. “You were in it. That’s the whole requirement.”
“I never filed anything.”
“That’s fine. We file it now.”
“No,” I said.
She shut the binder. She didn’t look hurt. She looked like a woman who’d heard no before and would hear it again by Friday.
She left a card on the table. I left it there.
Allison went over the offer.
The state would take a plea to petty theft and third-degree trespass. Forty-five days in county, credit for the one night I’d done.
“Forty-five days,” I said. “For four dollars.”
“For the trespass,” she said. “That’s your third. The theft is nothing. The trespass is the pattern they’re selling.”
“I didn’t trespass. I was in his store. I bought nine years of coffee in that store.”
“I know that. I’m telling you what they’re selling.”
Upstairs, Division Three was a judge in his sixties with a cough and no patience.
He read the file. He read a yellow note clipped to the top of it, and his eyebrows went up and stayed up.
Lizette asked for the hold again. Retail theft, no permanent address, two priors, risk of flight.
“Flight to where, counsel?” the judge said. “He doesn’t have a car.”
He let me out on a personal recognizance bond.
Two conditions. No contact with Juan Landry. Stay one hundred yards from the address on the complaint.
Allison leaned over to me. “The address on the complaint covers both buildings. The market and the laundromat.”
“My things are in that doorway,” I said.
“Probably not anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
They gave me back my parka at the property window. The orange shirt they kept.
In the hall Lizette Kingsley stood by the elevator with her folder against her chest. She talked to Allison and not to me.
“The offer’s open till pretrial. Forty-five days.”
“Why forty-five?” Allison said. “Thirty is standard on a third trespass. You know thirty’s standard.”
“It’s what the victim’s comfortable with,” Lizette said.
“The victim asked for a number?”
Lizette stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed before she had to answer.
The bench across the street
That night the shelter by the rail yard had a bed, number fourteen, by the door.
I borrowed the desk phone at eight and called the number on Allison’s card. I asked her for one thing.
“Call him,” I said. “Ask him to drop it. Tell him I’ll stay off the block. He doesn’t have to see me.”
“That’s not usually how it goes, Rey.”
“Call him anyway.”
She called back at a quarter to ten. The man at the desk handed the phone over the counter and stood there listening, because there was nothing else on.
“I talked to him,” Allison said.
“And?”
“He said tell you to take the forty-five.”
That was all. I gave the man his phone back.
At five-fifteen in the morning I was on the bus bench across the street from Landry’s.
I’d counted it on the way. From the bench back toward his door, my steps, which are a yard. They were a yard in the Army when it mattered. A hundred landed in the middle of the street. I sat on the far side of it.
At five-thirty the lights came on in the market, same as nine years of mornings.
Juan flipped the sign. He put out the sandwich board. He went back in behind the urn.
The laundromat doorway was empty.
Not just empty. Somebody had pressure-washed the tile, and the step was a lighter color than the sidewalk now. A steel accordion gate was bolted across the whole doorway, padlocked at the middle.
My bedroll was hanging over the edge of the dumpster in the alley. The Folgers can was on its side on the asphalt below it, lid off.
I had six dollars and forty cents in my pocket from cans. I sat on it.
At seven a silver car pulled up in front of the market.
The man with the measuring wheel got out, same tie, same fleece vest. A woman got out of the other side with a clipboard and a roll of tape.
She went to the laundromat window first. She taped up a sign, red letters on white, and stepped back to check if it was straight.
UNDER CONTRACT.
Then she did the same on the market’s front window, right beside the hours.
Juan came out wiping his hands on his apron. He shook the man’s hand, then the woman’s.
The man pointed at the doorway. Juan pointed at the gate. The man laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.
The woman took a picture of the clean step with her phone.
They went inside. Juan stayed out a minute, looking at his signs.
Then he looked across the street.
He looked a long time, the way he’d looked at the bedroll that first morning.
Juan stood in his window and looked straight at me, and picked up the phone.
Seven twenty-five
The squad car came at seven twenty-five.
It was the same cop. He parked across the bus lane and sat a minute before he got out, and he put his hat on like it weighed something.
“Mr. Mayo.”
“Officer.”
“Mr. Landry says you’re inside the hundred yards.”
“I counted,” I said.
“I figured you did.”
He walked it anyway. Across the street, to the corner of the laundromat, his lips going. Then back. He was a big kid, maybe thirty, and he counted all the way back to the bench out loud at the end.
“Hundred and thirty, give or take,” he said. “You’re fine.”
“He’ll call again.”
“He’ll call again,” the cop said.
He stood there. He didn’t go back to the car.
“You kept saying sorry,” I said. “That night. In the store.”
He looked over at the market. Juan was behind the urn. The man in the tie was holding a foam cup.
“You got a lawyer?”
“Public defender.”
“Good.” He took his hat off and put it back on. “I can’t tell you anything about a complainant. You understand that. It’s not mine to tell.”
“All right.”
“But your lawyer can pull the dispatch logs on your two priors. Not the citations. Those just say what I wrote. The calls.”
“What’s in the calls?”
“I’m not allowed to say what’s in the calls, Mr. Mayo.”
He walked into the alley.
He came back out with my bedroll under one arm and the Folgers can in his other hand. He’d picked the papers up off the asphalt and put them back in, and put the lid back on.
He set it all on the bench beside me without a word.
My discharge papers were on top. My mother’s picture was gone.
He’d tucked a page from his notebook under the lid. Two dates, and one word: CALLER.
5:36 a.m.
Allison’s office was in the basement of the county building, past the boiler room.
She had a desk, two chairs, and a window at the top of the wall that showed people’s shoes going by.
It took her eight days to get the logs. She had them printed out and laid flat on the desk when I came in, with the two dates circled in pen.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat. She turned the pages around so they faced me, the way Juan turned the book.
The top sheet was March fourteenth.
There was a lot of it I didn’t know how to read. Codes, a unit number, a column of times.
But there was a box that said CALLER, and it said LANDRY, JUAN. And a box after it, RELATION TO PROPERTY, and it said OWNER.
The time was 05:36.
She put her finger on the second sheet. August second. LANDRY, JUAN. OWNER. 05:38.
“Five thirty-six,” I said.
“Does that mean something to you?”
“I was mopping his floor at five-thirty.”
Allison took her glasses down out of her hair and put them on.
“Say that again.”
“I mopped his floor. Five to five-thirty, most mornings. Then he’d flip the sign and say go roll up, I’m opening. And I’d go next door and roll up.”
“He’d tell you to go next door.”
“Every morning.”
“And six minutes later he’d call the police.”
I didn’t say anything. I looked at the box that said OWNER.
“Was he paying you for the mopping?”
“Off my tab. Eight dollars a morning.”
“Written down?”
“He writes everything down. It’s in his book. A green one, under the register. My initials on every line, and the date. He made me write the initials.”
Allison wrote GREEN BOOK on a sticky note and stuck it to her lamp.
“There’s one more,” she said.
She slid a single sheet across. A form from the police department with a city seal at the top. A trespass authorization program, it said. An owner signs it and the police can remove anybody from the property without calling the owner first.
It listed two addresses. The market. The laundromat.
It was signed J. Landry, and dated the ninth of April.
“He told me it was the insurance,” I said. “They send a guy around.”
“Rey, when he caught you at the door. What exactly did he say? Exact words.”
“He said he gave me credit two winters. He said I don’t get a third.”
“A third what?”
“I thought he meant winters.”
She didn’t answer that. She didn’t have to. She turned to the last page in the stack, the arrest report, and found the complainant’s statement near the bottom. She read it to me out loud in a flat voice, the way you read a thing you’ve already read twice.
“‘This is his third time on my property. I want him kept off it through the eighteenth of December.'”
She looked up at me over the glasses.
“What’s on the eighteenth of December, Rey?”
The green book
The pretrial was the eighth of December, back in Division Three.
Allison had subpoenaed the book. Juan brought it in a plastic grocery bag from his own store and held it on his lap in the front row like it might get away.
The cop sat in the back row in his uniform. He sat in the same seat Juan had sat in the first morning.
Lizette Kingsley called Juan first. It was short. Nine years he’d known me. Two winters of credit. The tin of sardines, the sleeve of crackers, four dollars and nineteen cents. Two prior trespasses on his property.
“No further questions,” Lizette said.
Allison stood up with nothing in her hands.
“Mr. Landry, would you open the book to March fourteenth of this year.”
Juan opened it. He licked his thumb to turn the pages. The judge told him to read the line out loud.
“‘Rey,'” he said. “‘Work. Minus eight.'”
“What work?”
“He mopped,” Juan said. “I let him mop. Look, I didn’t have to let him mop. Nobody else on that street would let him in the door.”
“What time did he mop?”
“Five. Five to five-thirty, before I open. You don’t mop with customers in.”
“And the dispatch log for March fourteenth shows you calling police at 5:36. About somebody in your doorway.”
“I own that doorway.”
“You’d told him to go there.”
“I told him I was opening.”
“Would you turn to August second.”
He didn’t turn to it. He shut the book on his thumb.
“You want to know about August? Fine. I’ll tell you about August.” He was talking to the judge now, not to Allison. “I listed those buildings in March. Both of them. My father bought them in 1974 and I have stood behind that counter since I was nineteen years old. I’m sixty-one. That store is what I have. That’s my retirement. You understand? There isn’t any other.”
“Mr. Landry,” the judge said.
“The first buyer walked in April. He walked because there was a man asleep in my door when he came by at six in the morning. He said it right to my face. ‘You’ve got a transient condition.’ A transient condition. That’s what they call Rey.”
He pointed at me without looking at me.
“So the new ones, the contract has a clause. Condition of premises at closing. If there’s a man living in my door on closing day, I give them forty-one thousand dollars back. Forty-one thousand. You know how many cups of coffee that is? I know. I did the math one night. It’s forty-one thousand cups.”
“Mr. Landry,” the judge said again.
“I fed him. Two winters I fed him. Peanut butter, bread, soup, I gave him a can for his things. Ask him. I let him sleep there four years and I never once called anybody until I had to. And then one time, one time, I need something from him. I need him gone for six weeks. Let the county feed him for forty-five days and I close on the eighteenth, and after that he can sleep wherever he wants. Is that so much? After four years?”
The courtroom was quiet.
Lizette Kingsley was looking at the yellow pad in front of her. She had written forty-five on it, in the margin, the first morning. I could see it from where I sat.
Allison didn’t move for a second. Then she said, “Mr. Landry, did you ever ask him to leave?”
Juan opened his mouth.
“You never asked him,” Allison said. “You called.”
“Nothing further,” she said, and sat down.
The judge coughed into his fist for a long time.
Then he dismissed the trespass count from where he sat. The defendant had been on the premises at the owner’s invitation, as an employee, by the owner’s own book. He said the word invitation twice.
Lizette stood up.
“Your Honor, in light of…” She stopped. “In the interest of justice, the state moves to dismiss the remaining count as well.”
Allison turned around and looked at me. She was smiling, a little.
I stood up.
“I took it,” I said.
The judge peered at me over his glasses. “Mr. Mayo, the state is offering to dismiss.”
“I put it in my coat and walked past his register,” I said. “I took it.”
Allison put her hand on my arm. I let her leave it there. I didn’t sit down.
So I pleaded to petty theft. The judge took it. Ten dollars’ fine, court costs waived. He asked if I understood it would be on my record, and I said I understood. It would be the first thing on my record with my name spelled right.
“And restitution,” I said. “Four nineteen.”
I took the change out of my parka. Cans money. Quarters, dimes, two nickels, a lot of pennies. I counted it out on the wooden rail in front of the front row, in stacks, the way you count pills.
Four dollars and nineteen cents, in front of Juan Landry’s knees.
He didn’t touch it.
The bailiff said the court would see the money got where it was going. Juan stood up with his grocery bag. His face was a bad color.
He stopped in the aisle beside me.
“I poured your coffee nine years, Rey,” he said.
“Eight dollars a morning,” I said.
Five-thirty, January
The shelter by the rail yard opens its kitchen at five-thirty.
The man who used to do the coffee quit right after New Year’s. I’m up anyway. So now it’s me at the urn.
Sunita’s card was still in my parka from the bolted room. I called it the day after the pretrial, from the desk phone. The forms took two hours in her office, and my discharge papers were in the Folgers can, and I signed in the parking lot because my hand wouldn’t do it inside.
She says the claim takes a while. I’m fourteen on a list for a room.
Landry’s has a yellow sign now. Some company out of Texas. They took the sandwich board and put a rack of propane tanks where it was.
The steel gate is still across the laundromat door. Nobody bought the laundromat. It was part of the same deal, and I hear the deal got smaller.
I walk the far side of the street. Nobody’s told me I have to.
The coin is in my shirt pocket now, with a button on it.
The line at the urn is long on cold mornings. The cups are foam. I pour, and they say thank you, or they don’t.
A kid near the end of the line, maybe twenty, held his cup out this morning and didn’t let go of it.
“Can I owe you for this?” he said.
“It’s free,” I said, and filled it to the top.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who still pours coffee for the same face every morning.
For more stories about lives colliding in ways no one expects, read about the child saved from a speeding van in “Her Mother Hugged Me, Then Watched the Corner” and the neighborly bond in “I Babysat His Mother Under That Crabapple Tree When She Was Nine”. And for a different kind of hard-won respect, there’s “I Put the Chief Down, and He Asked Virginia for the Time”.
