Slide - Kyle Beachy [55]
I stood in the warehouse, watching the company's black workers run the bottling machine. Purified water, drawn from the city's wells and treated with some combination of chemicals and filters, got red caps. Turquoise was Natural Spring, from a spring somewhere in southern Missouri. Blue caps were saved for Premium, drawn from an exclusive, highbrow spring in rural Arkansas. Cheap, better, best. But the more I looked, the more it seemed all the waters were coming from the same giant drum. I was likely missing something simple and easily explained. But what an infinitely abusable system: the arbitrary assignment of quality and value based on color. These basic long-standing assumptions I held about goods and services and the way things worked—threatened every time Marshall pulled a lever to fill the bottles, which slid to Eddie waiting at the end of the belt. No check, no balance. One big drum. Eddie grabbed soft plastic caps from the boxes at his feet and hammered them onto a bottle. Bottles collected into racks arranged by color. Worth.
The van, though, was real. All the rust and all the stink surrounded me as I waited in highway traffic that made no sense and seemed to come out of nowhere. Two lanes thinned to one, and the left-turn signal of the car in front of me pulsed endlessly. But there was nowhere to turn. I began a series of maneuvers to alert the car's driver of his signal. I turned on my own blinker and let it go for a minute. I waved my left hand out the window. I tried to honk, but the only sound that came of it was that of fist pounding dead steering-wheel vinyl. A total breakdown of communication. The signal blinked.
Audrey always had difficulty reconciling the titanic danger of driving with the laissez-faireness with which most people approached it. Whereas otherwise her life was defined by a sort of reckless assertion, which I loved, behind the wheel she went turtle. The caution she exhibited at every corner or hillcrest, every highway on-ramp. Driving as if acceleration itself was to blame for the modern world's many crises.
“Green,” I would say with forced patience, which isn't anything like real patience. “Aud. Green light.”
“What's our hurry here exactly? Must you snap?”
Riding shotgun, I was implicated and therefore guilty to the force gathering behind us, the fully justified rile. Horns and the squeal of tires as drivers cut around us, then back into our lane. Glaring on the way by or slowing briefly to our pace and gesturing, yelling.
“It's just there's a contract in play. We all agree that when the light changes, we'll move forward. By not moving forward—”
“Am too moving.”
“By inching forward like this you violate the contract. Which explains the honking. And this guy with the finger.”
“Oh hurryhurry big hurry. We're, what, slaves to a lightbulb?”
And for the lightbulb comment I would fall back into love with her as we accumulated speed, only of course to stop at another light a few blocks down the road, be surrounded again by the same cars and fingers and the same eyes. Whole thing all over again.
I finished the day's deliveries by one-thirty and went directly to Stuart's. I stepped over a cat and made my way around the house. There was one body at the pool, a female person in a lounge chair. Marianne. This was becoming serious, and I felt myself inch toward some psychic sort of edge. Who was this farm girl? What really was she doing here, really? She waved to me, and the well-known guidelines said I was supposed to wave back and continue my approach. Then I realized it wasn't Marianne sitting by the pool waving but Deanna, Stuart's stepmother. I unlatched the fence and walked toward the pool.
“Can you believe it? Sometimes even little old me is allowed to use my own goddamn pool.”
There were two plastic cups and a crowded ashtray on the table next to her chair. The top to her swimsuit hung loosely and covered her in a way that seemed coincidental. She wore dark sunglasses, big black circles like two coasters hiding most of her face.