The man chained to the trolley offered me five hundred. I said I would have helped for nothing, which was true, but not the first thing I thought.
We were in the shuttered mall, after the clearance crews had gone. I was supposed to mop from the fountain to the west entrance and leave before midnight. The trolley stood outside a shoe shop with no shoes in it. Its chain circled the man's ankle and ran around the bottom bar.
"There's a cutter in the maintenance cage," he said.
I knew where it was. I also knew the cage key belonged to Sedge, who cleaned the east side and had lent me money when my agency forgot a week's wages.
"Who did this?"
The man looked toward the fountain. Sedge was coming around it with two paper cups. He saw me and stopped.
"Go home, Jules."
The chained man had been about to say something. He closed his mouth instead. For a moment all three of us listened to the fountain pump running beneath the dry bowl, another thing management had not bothered to switch off.
"You can't leave him here," I said.
"I brought him tea."
Sedge put a cup beside the trolley. The man kicked it over. Tea spread beneath the wheels, and I moved my mop without thinking to keep it from reaching the clean section.
The man had collected a debt from Sedge. That was the phrase Sedge used. The collection involved an account emptied before rent day, charges added for letters he had not received, and a visit to his sister because he stopped answering calls. He told me this calmly. The man on the trolley kept interrupting to say each thing had been permitted.
"Permitted by who?" I asked.
"It isn't your business."
"It is if I have to mop around you."
He looked down at my bucket as if noticing what kind of person I was.
Sedge held out the other cup. I did not take it.
"Morning crew will find him," he said. "He can spend one night thinking."
"He's bleeding."
The chain had rubbed a raw strip around the ankle. The man's trouser cuff was wet. He tried to hide it beneath his other leg when Sedge looked.
"I couldn't sleep for three weeks," Sedge said.
That was true too. I'd heard him call his landlord from the service stairs, going up a flight whenever he started to cry so nobody below would hear.
I went to the maintenance cage. Sedge followed me. He put himself between me and the key hook.
"You remember what I did for you."
"I paid you back."
"That's not what I mean."
He was right. He had wanted me to owe a kind of agreement. I took the key from the hook beside his shoulder. He could have stopped me. Instead he asked whether I had no loyalty, and I felt the question more sharply than I would have felt a hand.
When we returned, the chained man was holding a loose length of shelf bracket. He had dragged it from the empty shoe shop. He slid it beneath his leg before Sedge noticed, but I saw the bright end against the dark trousers.
"Give me that," I said.
"Cut me loose."
The loading doors would open at midnight for the night delivery. I checked the clock above the fountain. Eleven forty-three. I had seventeen minutes to keep these two from doing the thing each thought the other deserved.
Behind the maintenance cage was a little storeroom with a separate door into the loading passage. I pushed the trolley toward it. The man protested until I told him the cutters were in my hand. Sedge watched from beside the fountain.
I rolled the trolley inside, stepped out and pulled the grille closed. Then I passed the cutters through the bars.
"You do it," I told the man. "And put them down before I open anything."
He worked on the chain while I stood between the grille and Sedge. The effort made his face shine. He cursed me for giving him a job his hands could barely manage. Sedge cursed me for helping him at all. I finished mopping the spilled tea, staying where I could see both.
At midnight, I heard the delivery crew in the passage. I went around through the main loading entrance and opened the storeroom's rear door from that side. The man came out limping, without the bracket. He pushed past me toward the crew and demanded a telephone. I told them to get someone to look at his ankle.
Sedge left through the east entrance. I never put the two men in the same space again.
The agency received two complaints. One said I had interfered with a private dispute. The other said I had failed to assist promptly. Neither mentioned five hundred, tea or the shelf bracket. The deduction for the cut chain came out of my next pay.
On my following shift, Sedge had already filled my bucket. He left it at the west entrance and went to his own section. I used the water. When I finished, I emptied his bucket too, without going to find him.
