The Delivery, page 8
* * *
He was moving toward something, and that something was: getting it right. This, he concluded, was being-a-man-about-things, which meant insisting, and then accepting (no, embracing) the penalties for such insistence; declaring one’s feelings, and being rebuked if necessary (rebuked, sure, but no, not by her; not by her). This was it. And it turned out that timing had nothing to do with anything; nor counting; nor the when of it. It meant not waiting for a cue. But clapping those cymbals together loudly, at will. Early, late, whenever: but stopping everything in its traces. Yes, there were new debts-to-be-repaid, and yes, the new path was not without perils, but the delivery boy now noticed a fresh excitement surge out from some subterranean spring—an excitement at traveling outside the tightly belted limits of his old, circumscribed life. He was full up, ready, as if the world were suddenly and unaccountably available, affordable, proffered.
(The delivery boy, throughout these transports, neglected to consider N.’s expression as she stood outside the warehouse building: that look, an unprecedented, truly unguarded look, and what this expression might have truly meant. It was, in fact, the only sign he should have read more carefully. But he didn’t. And again: How could he have?)
But then, in that moment, he felt nothing but this strange, upwelling sense of agency. He released his grip, tucked his legs up, closed his eyelids slightly against the almost tropical wind, and felt it play on his teeth and on the back of his throat.
He opened and closed his mouth.
And as he did so the wind in his mouth produced the snap of a bitten (red, yellow, green) fruit.
* * *
The bike ran, clicking, a bit hot, but fast.
The delivery boy saw the borderlands of his old neighborhood as a new series of discrete pictures, as if he were already transcribing the saga of his own great journey.
* * *
A tall striped stack made of stamped tin, jutting out of the middle of the avenue, gouting smoke. He and the rest of the traffic divided around it, and slackened, as if the street and all its noise, motion, and commerce (and even the delivery boy himself) were powered by currents of underground steam, which, now leaking, lost vital energy, and slowed the entire apparatus.
An old man, angled forward, bent almost in half as he walked, his hands clasped behind his back.
A young man leaning against a lamppost, smoking. He had a dog on a leash. A young woman approached, bent down, and spoke to the dog. The young man took a last drag of his cigarette, flicked it away.
The late-afternoon sun, perched directly on a chimney, like an egg in an eggcup.
A man flipping and dropping a coin, while another man watched.
A doorman spraying down the (already wet) sidewalk with a hose.
Three women gathered over a phone and smiling, as if they were bending over a cradle.
A man driving past him in a car that was shiny and yellow (and though the delivery boy thought the yellow was wicked, he wondered what it must be like to drive that car on days when the driver felt sad).
A (visibly) crazy woman, gibbering into a roadside helpbox.
A man carrying a mirror across a street. Which is to say: an unexpected (if brief, and blurred) portrait of a ragged, determined delivery boy.
* * *
The wind against him, he chugged up a hill, and when he came over to the other side he saw the neighborhood’s main commercial street, and the demarcation of its northern boundary. 1. Coffee chain. 2. Tobacconist. 3. Appliances. 4. Purveyors of Ladies’ Underwear. 5. Sporting goods. 6. Bath balms and soaps. 7. Candy. 8. Computers, phones, and other electronic appliances. 9. Hotel. 10. Another coffee chain. 11. Fast food. 12. T-shirts. 13. Another fast food. 14. Shoes. 15. More clothing. 16. More clothing. 17. A retail park. 18. Pub. 19. Makeup store. 20. Mattresses. 21. Family restaurant. All fronted by glass display windows. People streaming in and out of oversize chrome doors, thumping music leaking out with the air-conditioning. Cars double-parked (always a hazard for delivery boys) and generally lawless sidewalks, swarming with tourists and shopping bags. People bustling, arguing, sulking. A child wailing. The atmosphere carried (like the atmospheres in municipal offices, or in waiting rooms) a mood of depleted power: the sense of a vital force having been sapped, despite the outward prosperity of it all. The delivery boy felt the energy leach from his legs, and for a brief moment it seemed as though he might have to get off his bike and rest (and he remembered how, in the Emporium Market and Department Store, he had sat down on one of the plush banquettes for only a moment; mirrors all around him, color everywhere, sounds bearing down, and the trouble he had had then, rising again, after having given in to the siren song of lethargy, which had overwhelmed him, the strong and suffocating lassitude) but not now—there would be no resting. Not with so much in the balance. He shook his head, slapped one of his cheeks, attempted to revive himself.
He pedaled. Several blocks later, at the next rise, he saw, in a space between two large buildings, a view (a view from which he could see out farther). His head cleared instantly. The clouds ahead were massed into tall, pale towers against the yellowing sky. These clouds were north of the city, maybe over Manor Grove. Imagining the blurred outlines of his destination, out across the broad river, he then felt another, new kind of longing. He turned off the power-assist just so that he could feel his own muscles working. He needed the toil, after the shopping district, and he craved the horizon, and so he pedaled toward it.
(“Skim-ming. It means he says you are stealing from him,” N. had reported.)
Good, thought the delivery boy. Good. That fucker.
He biked faster, working himself hard, not noticing that he had just passed the boundaries of the old neighborhood and had entered a new one entirely.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
That wind flattened his hair to the sides of his forehead, parting his mop directly down the middle. He peeked in his rearview, and chuckled. (“Tu as l’air d’une noix de coco,” the girl with the French horn had said to him, in French class. This, her opening gambit.) His hair always had this propensity to form a soft ridgeline along the crest of his head. (Then, later, after class, she had passed her hand gently across his uppermost hairs, teasing. “Quit it,” he had protested, coloring happily.) He could feel her hand now, in the form of the wind, tickling at his roots. Even though he traveled directly in the breeze, there was something satisfying to him that it was blowing out of the north, as if this breeze were, like the clouds ahead—seen through gaps between the tall buildings—generated from the route’s terminus. Out north. And just across the river. Like the air was coming to provide him with a foretaste of his destination. He dilated his nostrils and tried to suck it all in: those sun-warmed, gust-delivered molecules of Manor Grove (a job well done; newly achieved courage …).
* * *
As the delivery boy was working his way up and through the area lying between his old delivery zone and the outer quadrants of the city, his pants began to ride up uncomfortably, and his ears itched with perspiration. He stopped in the middle of the block and looked around.
Once thriving, he thought, assessing the area.
It was obvious, as apartments gave way to town houses—a dignified line of them, crenelated, mansard-roofed, behind high, wrought-iron palisades—and the avenues widened out, bisected by enclosed parks. The unlit streetlamps and unoccupied benches were curlicued, and he even noticed dull green, horse-headed iron hitching posts studding the way at intervals. But everything here was now abandoned, derelict, ruined. Many of the houses had windows missing, and the slate roofs were gapped and forlorn. A listing trellis, a scrawled warning or boast, patchy crabgrass, refuse piled up everywhere in corners. No pedestrians in sight. No other delivery boys. Cars had their windows up and didn’t stop at the lights. This was, he decided, an impeccable backdrop for a haunting, or an assault. (He would know after all, as his own childhood neighborhood—so prosperous once, long before his time, with its fountains, broad avenues, and trim lines of poplars: a destination for local strollers and tourists alike—had, of course, after the insurgency, been reduced to just such an eerie state of abandonment and dereliction.)
He felt a tickle of fear, deep in his throat.
(Insurgency … Yes. Insurgency. But we could say: complot, junta, coup, putsch, popular uprising … Does it matter? Yes. But not here.)
And so he increased his pace, causing that same ridge of hair to tickle in the wind. He considered the helmet, but decided against it.
* * *
The girl with the French horn had lived, it turned out, not ten blocks from the delivery boy’s own home. It was a spacious attic apartment. She had invited him—and a few other schoolmates from the orchestra—to a tea with her parents, a shy and nervous older couple, who laid out a lace-covered table with tea and sweets for them. After the parents withdrew, the delivery boy and the girl with the French horn had stood away from the others, looking out over the green rooftops, passing a hard toffee back and forth between them. The delivery boy had tried combing his cowlick down for the occasion, but it was not holding, so she licked her hand, candy-sticky, and flattened his hair. Just so.
* * *
Red light. Out on the corner, a woman and her bony little kid. She held him by one hand, and his feet only glanced the sidewalk. He cried, and the more he cried, the angrier she became, and the farther up and forward he was tugged by that meager arm. The delivery boy imagined the mother and a son not speaking the same language, and so caught up in a loop of miscomprehension. Like that. They crossed right in front of the delivery boy, not noticing him. The delivery boy checked the handles of the plastic bags, hanging from the handlebars. They were stretching a bit, but not too badly. The light changed. Months earlier, there had been a new arrival in the warehouse—another one of the many new delivery boys. (They came and went.) This one was also a bony kid. The delivery boy had recognized him from the holding room. In the holding room, Bony Kid had been called up to go with the girl with the French horn, when the numbers went up. They went to the same place, according to these numbers. Something had gone wrong though. After, somehow, the Bony Kid had made his way north (to this, our delivery boy’s city) and when the Bony Kid got there, to the warehouse, he became another number: a delivery boy’s number. The Bony Kid and the delivery boy (our delivery boy) didn’t speak to each other more than was necessary. But one day when they were arriving at the racks at the same moment, the delivery boy asked the Bony Kid if he smoked, and they crouched in the doorway together and the Bony Kid took out a pouch and papers. They passed a rollup back and forth. (This thing—a passage on a vessel—was a shared history, but also a secret language between them, one they both understood, a language that included a cigarette, rolled in silence.) On that day, because the delivery boy had to know (or perhaps it was idleness, or perhaps some temporary and mistaken belief in his own resilience), the delivery boy asked the Bony Kid about what had happened to the girl with the French horn.
The Bony Kid did not know. Not really.
They had been sent out on different boats for the final leg.
Ah, said the delivery boy.
* * *
The Bony Kid had heard something though. He wasn’t sure if it was true, but. But what; what had he heard? (Drag, linger, puff, flick.) The Bony Kid had heard that the girl with the French horn and the others with her were put out on a boat at night to cross a river, but the boat was, in fact, nothing more than a child’s toy from a swimming pool, and that there had been too many people—the water was freezing, the current strong—and so after such a long passage, at the very last step of the way … The Bony Kid from the holding room trailed off, dropped and stepped on the ragged butt, and shrugged, beyond caring, really. The Bony Kid moved on from the warehouse after a few weeks, and that was that. (Moved on, or something else. It could have been anything. That “anything” could have been the Supervisor himself, who had never liked the Bony Kid—his fragility—which for some reason particularly angered the Supervisor, and the Supervisor might have simply “taken care of” the Bony Kid, to relieve himself of a nuisance—and what might have been an unwelcome reminder of the Supervisor’s own, irrepressible urges. Though honestly, who knows. “Who knows,” N. had said, conclusively.)
Never mind.
The delivery boy, drifting up the middle of the street, now approaching a traffic stop, also shrugged, also beyond caring.
“Je suis une noix de coco,” he said, out loud to no one, adding, after a moment, “hard and sweet. Hard and sweet.”
* * *
The delivery boy obeyed the red lights. Mostly out of habit, as there was no one around to make him do so. He couldn’t see a soul. As he waited for red, he heard a squeak, and craned. The delivery boy had stopped beside an empty schoolyard. The swings were moving in the wind. A small puh-dul had collected under each one, as if children had melted there. He shuddered, and then pulled out, for the first time ever, before the light changed.
More dilapidated town houses then, their front yards high with weeds. There was a stray dog, sitting in the middle of the road. The delivery boy slowed, and thought that he would love to touch it, say hello. The feel of its yellowing fur … but. 1. “No fucking around.” And 2. The dog might be mean, and a biter. So the delivery boy carefully steered around it. The dog didn’t budge, not even a little. Didn’t so much as look his way. Just continued sitting there on its haunches, staring out at whatever it was it was interested in (food) or afraid of (another dog perhaps). The delivery boy was getting that feeling again—that “garbage ghost” feeling, and he wondered then if he were even there at all, present—discernible and distinct from the hydrants and manholes and awnings and smokestacks and trash and trucks and lampposts and so on. He looked back at the dog he had just passed, and let out a howl, his voice coming out surprisingly rough, and embarrassingly loud.
The dog simply continued his vigil, untroubled.
Then there was a long stretch of empty street again.
* * *
(“Neigh-bor-hood means area,” N. explained, as they bent over his device and its map, early on. The city was patches of simple, bright color. He had been reminded then, for the first time, of the picture he’d seen, of the town and the river: the entire world in miniature. But here, “the entire world” was an entirely different one. Central Hill, Town Hall, Downtown, Riverfront, Parkview, Suncrest, High Street … Then, farther north, what he learned were “bad neighborhoods.” These lay between Downtown and the river. “Bad neighborhoods are where delivery boys get robbed.”)
She never sent him there. (The warehouse rarely sent anyone to bad neighborhoods—not out of fear for the well-being of the delivery boys, but because the Supervisor did not want to risk losing his property to thieves.)
There had been robberies anyway, in the other neighborhoods. Of course. Robbery was a big part of delivery life.
But the delivery boy had been spared.
* * *
1. Red. 2. Green. 3. Green. 4. Green. 5. Green. 6. Red.
(The delivery boy observed, but now disobeyed all of these prompts. He did not think it interesting, how, under this new dispensation, the colors might revert to being once again: colors. Though I find it interesting, now.)
Red light (whatever) and then: another stretch of nothing. No people, dogs, cars. Farther down the same road, he stopped to reattach the flashlight, which had begun to become loose on the handlebars, and rattle. Then a set of area boys leaked from a hole in a fence, loitered for a moment to tie shoes, lean up against one another, kick trash, write on the letter box with fat markers, exchange a few jabs … Then they spied the delivery boy and began jeering at him. The delivery boy was sufficiently far away to feel emboldened, and made a rude gesture in their direction.
The area boys, far off, conferred with one another briefly, and then, suddenly, exploded, like a flock into flight, sprinting toward the delivery boy.
* * *
Oh … fuck!
The delivery boy spun the pedals into position and tapped on the power-assist.
Except that it didn’t turn on.
He tried again.
(A few facts the delivery boy bore in mind throughout the assault: Delivery boys are and always have been obvious targets for robbers. 1. Delivery boys are vulnerable, not knowing the people, not speaking the language, not knowing the culture, not participating in city life as valid citizens, etc. 2. They are unarmed. A Supervisor would never allow an armed delivery boy, as such a delivery boy could turn on a Supervisor. 3. They carry valuable items, i.e., the items they are charged with delivering. 4. They carry money, meaning: the money their customers pay them for purchases and deliveries, and the money the customers tip them.)
