Chapter 32: The Feeder Tray
Here is a day, because I want one of these on the record in full.
Six-forty, bathroom.
Six-fifty-five, lunch made and in the bag.
Seven-fourteen bus. Kesler Street at seven-forty-one.
Marisol arrives at eight-ten and never earlier.
The front room has two chairs, a counter, and a laminated sign with the office hours and the words CASH, CARD, OR PROPERTY.
Behind the counter is the safe, the surety files, and the wall calendar with court dates in four colours.
My room is the back. Scanner, monitor, hole punch, staple tray.
The morning stack was on the chair, not the desk, which meant Marisol had brought it in herself the night before.
Fifty-one files. Bail applications, indemnitor agreements, collateral receipts, court notices, three forfeiture packets.
An indemnitor agreement is the document a mother signs when she promises a company her house.
It is four pages.
The signature block is on page four and the part that matters is on page two, in a paragraph nobody reads at the counter.
I have scanned about nine hundred of them.
In about forty, the indemnitor had initialled page two in the wrong box.
I flagged them with a yellow tab and left them on Marisol's chair, and she fixed every one, because an unfixed initial is a bond a court will not enforce.
That is the whole job.
You are not reading for meaning. You are reading for the places where a document has failed to be itself.
At nine-twenty the feeder jammed.
A double feed with a fold in it, drawn crooked, and the leading edge went under the roller instead of over.
You do not pull it.
Pulling it tears the sheet and a torn sheet is a document with a hole in the record.
You open the cover, back the roller off with your thumb, and lift the page out along the direction it went in.
It came out with a crease and a grey smear.
The page was the second sheet of a bond application for a man named Ruiz, twenty-six, held on a probation detainer.
I flattened it, rescanned it, checked the image against the paper twice, and wrote JAM 9:22, RESCANNED, VERIFIED on a sticky note.
Marisol read the note at eleven and said, “Good.”
That was the third word she had said to me that week.
Lunch is twenty-five minutes on the back step.
Cheese sandwich, water from the tap in a bottle I kept.
The step faces a car park and a chain-link fence and a tree that had been cut back to a stump with four shoots coming off it.
Afternoons are worse than mornings because the light in that room comes in low through a window with a broken blind.
At two-fifteen a woman came into the front room and I could hear the whole thing through the wall.
Her son was in county. Bond was set at ten thousand.
The premium is ten per cent and the premium is not refundable.
She had six hundred and forty dollars and a car title.
Marisol explained it twice, plainly, without softening it and without pushing.
Then she said, “Go home and think about the car. The car is how you get to work.”
The woman left. She came back the next day and did it anyway, and the son appeared at every date, and eighteen months later Marisol handed the title back across the counter.
I know that because I scanned the release.
At four-eighteen I finished the fifty-one files. Four hundred and twelve pages.
I noticed the number.
I would like to say I did not, but I stood there and looked at the counter on the screen for a while.
At four-twenty-five Marisol came into the back room, which she did about once a fortnight.
She put a key on the desk.
Brass, with a green plastic cap on the head.
She said, “Front door. Not the safe.”
I said, “All right.”
She said, “You open Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'll pay you the extra half hour.”
Then she said, “You lose it, you tell me the same day.”
I said I would.
She went back through and I heard the drawer of the filing cabinet, and then the radio, which she put on at four-thirty every day and never before.
I picked the key up.
I had not held a key to a building in six years.
I put it in the front pocket of my bag, then took it out and put it in my coat pocket, then took it out again and put it back in the bag, because the coat goes on a hook at Cranmore and the bag does not leave my hand.
That is not a feeling. That is a decision about where a key goes.
Then I cleaned the rollers with the cloth and the little bottle, which takes four minutes and which nobody had done in the eleven weeks before I started.