Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [78]
Mr. Bridge resumed his survey of the weeds in the yard.
But while he contemplated the dandelions his thoughts went back to the time he had been working on the ice wagon. He thought of the black-leather vest which buckled at the waist and hung down almost to his knees like a garment from the Middle Ages, and the iron tongs, the rag he strapped across his shoulder so the cakes of ice would not be quite so painful, the grizzled old man whipping the struggling horses up the wintry hills, the bumping wagon, the dampness, and the sleet bouncing off the long blocks of ice. He lifted his right hand and considered the palm. He rubbed his thumb across his palm where the calluses used to be. Now the hand was as soft as the hand of a surgeon.
82 Bleh!
A few days later Douglas reported that he had a job in the produce department of Horkey’s Grocery. He was to run errands for the produce manager, sweep the floor, keep the vegetable bins stocked, spray the lettuce, shuck the corn, and so forth. It was legal, it was reasonably clean.
Before long everybody was sick of hearing about life in the produce department, and the threatening figure of the produce manager appeared regularly at the dinner table.
“I mean, and that’s just a single little example,” said Douglas one evening after a lengthy account of the boorishness, lack of imagination, stinginess, unintelligence, and hypocrisy of the produce manager. “What I mean is, well, listen, like today for instance, you know, we get this great huge shipment of lemons, see. Really, there was about ten billion lemons, at least. So anyhow this imbecile manager decides he better do something fast, because they’re just sitting there blocking traffic, and he can’t think of anything better so he decides to make somebody take them out of the crates and put them in littler boxes, so naturally I happen to be the first poor sucker he catches sight of, so he has me sorting these lemons for about a thousand hours. I almost didn’t get any lunch. I’m just sorting these lemons from about nine o’clock this morning, see? Well, and so anyhow after a while this dumb cluck can’t figure out anything to do himself, so he naturally has to stand around watching me. There’s this waste barrel, see, where the bad fruit goes. The rotten fruit you throw away because you can’t sell it and if you leave it in with the other stuff, why, pretty soon the rest of it gets rotten.”
“Come to the point,” his father said.
“I am, for gosh sakes. If you’ll just let me finish. I was just about to tell you what happened. So I’m there sorting these lemons and naturally I throw some of them away, so this produce manager comes marching over and picks up one of them I just dumped in the waste barrel and he says I just threw away the day’s profit! He wasn’t kidding, either. That’s really what he said. He said ‘You threw away the day’s profit.’ I thought he was kidding.” Douglas looked at his father to gauge the effect of this information.
Mr. Bridge looked around the table to see if anyone was ready for another piece of chicken.
“Anyhow, this lemon I threw away had a lot of white mold all over it, so nobody was going to buy it, that’s a cinch. Not exactly all over, I guess actually it wasn’t as bad as some of them, but it was going to get rotten in another day or two, so that’s how come I threw it away. But this dumb cluck practically has to hit the ceiling. He goes marching around like Captain Bligh just holding this lemon up between two fingers for everybody in the produce department to look at, like it was the crown jewels or something, and says if I don’t know how to do my job right he knows how to find somebody who does. Wow! I mean, how stupid can anybody get!”
“Were you paying attention to what you were doing?”
Douglas was insulted by this question. “Sure I was! Even suppose it was a fairly