Slide - Kyle Beachy [25]
“Then I'll make a copy of your driver's license, okay, and we'll get hopping.”
Outside her office, I was given a deep-green parody of a Polo shirt with the company's logo embroidered on the left breast. I met Dennis Looper, a pockmarked delivery manager in his upper forties with anemic gray hair running laterally across his head. He took me along for a day's work and made me follow our progress on a road map in my lap. He showed me how to carry bottles so your hand doesn't fall off. My hand almost fell off. He espoused copious opinions on race, gender, the endemic idiocy of the world. He gave me step-by-step instructions for filling out the invoice, which part you give to the customer, which you keep to file back at the office. He showed me how to calculate sales tax. I was quite obviously an idiot.
And the other drivers, I was pretty sure, hated me. When the day was through, Dennis sat me down in the Pine Ridge lunchroom. Gradually they arrived, middle-age white males trained to operate heavy machinery, skin-hardened men who had license to drive forklifts and four-axle trucks. The drivers worked slowly through their day's paperwork at the wobbly table in the Pine Ridge lunchroom, sharing tired accounts of children and ex-wives, VFW bars and ball games. Adhering to body language I hoped illustrated nonjudgmental interest, I quietly listened to this runoff from a world I'd never known. Insurance premiums were on the rise. A wife's shit-worthless brother kept asking to borrow money. About the crew who worked the warehouse I heard nigger and chocolate, terms uttered quietly, semi-illicitly Words my exclusive West Coast liberal arts school would react to with a series of candlelight vigils, silent nighttime marches, and solemn classrooms.
I wasn't sure why I was still there.
When Dennis began speaking to me, I realized he'd waited for the room to fill so he could make a production of it. Smiling, he said he didn't care whose son I was, Jesus H. Christ Himself's for all he cared, first time I showed up late I'd be fired. Grown men with wrinkled faces chuckled and watched. I nodded slowly. He said if I didn't think, if I even thought to have the thought that I couldn't handle all the lifting, then how's about I save us both the trouble and step aside now. The drivers crossed thick arms and leaned back in folding chairs. They murmured and laughed con-spiratorially and I felt a new wave of sweat emerge from a million tiny holes. Dennis promised the job would be nine times harder than anything he imagined a still-baby-pudged boy like myself had ever been called upon to do. He said college diploma be damned, you waste my time I'll find a way to take it back from you. Boy.
Look hard enough into eyes and you can see through them, glimpse the machinery operating these faces, the classical distaste for untested youth. The squint of judgment, the vacant gaze of absolute indifference, the steely eyes of those gauging privilege. The child sits among men, quivering.
“I don't plan on letting anyone down.”
“Then I suggest you pull that ass back here at eight o'clock tomorrow A.M. Prompt.”
At home, I found a new package sitting at the foot of the table inside the front door. White and rectangular, no bigger than a shoebox, with one top corner covered in postage and international ink stamps. Poste Italiane.
No, no, I would not let this one beat me. This inanimate box. Upstairs I set it on the bed while I peeled drenched cotton from my frame. I carried it into the bathroom, closed the toilet lid, and placed the box on top. Then a shower, shock of cold water on filthy-hot skin, the slowly achieved equilibrium. I dried with a very soft and very large towel.
I was still naked when I opened the box. I stood in front of the sink and cut the tape with a nail clipper, then probed inside with a finger. Counted two objects, smooth and cool and rock solid. Spheres. There was a note also, which I set aside while I let the balls roll around my palm and clack together. There was a redemptive, simple beauty to these balls—a peacefulness I could appreciate