Snitch Factory: A Novel by Peter Plate Read Free Book Online

don’t know what she read on my face. Maybe she saw insecurity, unacknowledged envy, a smidgen of resentment, the pathos of being on the fast track to nowhere in my thirties. Whatever it was, it was none of her business. If she wanted to turn this into a test of will power, fine. On principle, I’d break her pearly balls if I had to.
    “We’re not going to see eye to eye on this, Lav. I said it before, you’re setting me up.”
    Until the doors of the Otis Street complex were shut and locked, the courtyard abandoned and buried in debris, and until the windows of the DSS were boarded up, I wasn’t going to stop handing out food stamps. That’s what had cemented the antagonism between Lavoris and myself.
    “You watch yourself,” she said.
    With this recommendation, Lav pushed off, leaving me alone in the cubicle. I sank into the chair, thought about nada for a minute and then, knowing the atmosphere
left behind by Lavoris’s temper wasn’t going to settle down, I got up and went outside.
     
    While I demolished a Marlboro Light in the courtyard, the sun dappled its etiolated rays on the ten-storied towerlike walls of the record management building next door. Iron Mountain was the biggest file storage company in America. Millions of files were kept in that place. Even on a chilly day, it reeked with the odor of aging manila folders.
    For every application made for welfare, there was a scrap of paper documenting the facts and the numbers, and all of it went into Iron Mountain’s vaults. It didn’t matter if the data was useless. Everything San Francisco residents said was put on file, verified with the police and district attorney’s office and secured inside the drafty warehouse.
    “Hey, Hassler!”
    A Pinkerton was calling to me. “You haven’t seen a tiny white kid wandering around by itself, have you, man? You know, wearing a parka and shit?”
    I shrugged; no, I hadn’t.

twelve
    T he neighbors used to have a cocker spaniel when I was six. A bitch that lived in an enclosed porch at the rear of their home. That summer, after the spaniel gave birth to a batch of puppies, I skipped across the street to see them, sneaking inside the house through the unlocked back door.
    The mother spaniel was nursing her brood on a maroon, hair-clotted blanket, keeping her babies out of the sun. And while they rested in the shade, emitting wet, squishy noises, I made up a game to play.
    I herded the mother and her puppies outside into the yard through the doggie door that’d been installed for their use. Once they were out back, I squatted down on my haunches. Whenever the spaniel or any one of her brood tried to re-enter the house, I’d slam the stout rubber flap of the doggie door on their noses.
    Doing this, the hours went by on a torrid July afternoon. If I’d abuse the dogs, the void in me would be lessened. The flood plain of my troubles would recede. If I could just transfer my problems to somebody else, that was my plan.
    At five o’clock, their owner came around the corner
of the house and frowned when he saw me sitting on the steps. His frown got blacker when he realized what I was doing.
    “ Chica, what is this?” he asked.
    Me, I burst into tears, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to tattle on myself. I’d never confess; it was my secret, not his. My darkness, not his world.
     
    Closing time found me zipping up my skirt in the women’s bathroom. There’d been a discharge on my panties. This was to be expected: I’d been eating lots of sweets lately. Cookies, ice cream, carrot cake, chocolate muffins. If I wasn’t cautious, I’d come down with a yeast infection. On my way out of the can, I bumped into Bart Rubio.
    “Hey, girl!”
    “Yeah?”
    “You know I got my hepatitis C test results back.”
    “Well, what were they?”
    “Take a guess.”
    “C’mon, give.”
    “Negative.”
    “Congratulations.”
    “You gonna party with us later?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Why can’t you just commit