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8. Please give your shopping list to the crew boss by seven o'clock in the morning.
9. There should be no more
than half a dozen people on the roof at any one time.
If there were a few more rules, Homer couldn't read them because the page had been ripped off. Homer handed the torn paper to Big Dot Taft.
"What's all this about the roof?" he asked Debra Pettigrew.
"You can see the ocean from the roof," Debra said.
"That ain't it," said Big Dot Taft. "At night you can see the Ferris wheel and the carnival lights in Cape Kenneth."
"Big deal," said Homer Wells.
"It's no big deal to me, either," Big Dot Taft said, "but those darkies really like it."
"They sit up on the roof all night, some nights," Debra Pettigrew said.
"They get drunk up there and fall off, some nights," Florence Hyde announced from the bedroom wing.
"They break bottles up there and cut themselves all up," said Irene Titcomb.
"Well, not every night, they don't," said Big Dot Taft.
"And one night one of them got so drunk and sweaty, running the press, that he passed out in the cold storage and woke up with pneumonia," Debra Pettigrew said.
"You don't exactly 'wake up with' pneumonia," said Homer Wells. "It's more complicated than that."
"Excuse me," Debra said sulkily.
"Anyway, nobody pays no attention to them rules," Big Dot Taft said. "Every year Olive writes them up, and every year nobody pays no attention."
"All the pickin' crews we've ever had are just children," said Florence Hyde. "If Olive didn't go shoppin' for them every day, they'd starve."
"They never get themselves organized," Irene Titcomb said.
"One of them got his whole arm caught in the grinder," Big Dot Taft recalled. "Not just his fool hand--his whole arm."
"Yuck," said Debra Pettigrew.
"Yuck is what his arm was, all right," said Florence Hyde.
"How many stitches?" asked Homer Wells.
"You're really curious, you know that?" Debra Pettigrew asked him.
"Well, they don't do no harm, except to themselves," said Irene Titcomb philosophically. "What's it matter if they want to drink too much and roll off the roof? Wasn't nobody ever killed here, was there?"
"Not yet," said Grace Lynch's tight, thin voice, her words strangely amplified because she was speaking from the bottom of the thousand-gallon vat. The combination of the strangeness of her voice and the rareness of her making a contribution of any kind to their conversation made them all silent.
Everyone was just working away when Wally drove up in the green van with Louise Tobey; he dropped Louise off with her own bucket and brush and asked the rest of them if they needed anything--more brushes? more paint?
"Just give me a kiss, honey," said Florence Hyde.
"Just take us to the movies," said Big Dot Taft.
"Just propose to me, just propose!" cried Irene Titcomb. Everyone was laughing when Wally left. It was almost lunchtime, and everyone knew that Squeeze Louise had come to work particularly late. She usually arrived with Herb Fowler, more or less on time. Louise looked especially pouty this morning, and no one spoke to her for a while.
