Light Lifting Page 13

  “You’re certain you got everything?” he said.

  It was obvious he was worried mostly about his labels, about all those stickers with his name on them.

  I thought about the crushed capsules again, about the stuff that was already gone, stuck to a tire somewhere and still moving across the city.

  “There’s nothing left,” I said. “I brought back everything I could.”

  The guy really should have paid me more. Musgrave was always sticking me into tight situations I had to squirm out of on my own. A couple of years earlier, some high-school kids tried to rob me as I cut across Benson schoolyard. They thought I was carrying harder stuff they could use or re-sell and they tore through the packages looking for anything with codeine in it, for a big bottle of Tylenol 3s, or Percocets, or something with lots of ephedrine for making Crystal Meth. Today, they’d have been after the OxyContin.

  When all they got was the regular stuff – the antacids and nasal sprays and laxatives and those sheets of little beige felt pads that you’re supposed to stick to the corns on your feet – they turned angry. One of them knocked me over and held me down while another one pulled off my shoes. Then they tied them together and took turns swinging them above their heads, trying to throw them up as high as they could. After five or six cracks at it, one of them finally got it right and the shoes ended up tangled around a telephone line twenty feet above the street. They laughed and thought it was just perfect and left me alone after that.

  But the shoes stayed up there a long time. Whenever I passed under them – if I was out on my route again or just out walking around near my house – I’d look up and feel that little sting coming up through the bottom of my socks, the same sharp digging pressure you get if you ever have to push your bare foot down onto the serrated edge of a pedal.

  The place isn’t even there anymore. A few months after I left, Musgrave gave it up completely and the store flipped into a Vietnamese grocery with roasted yellow ducks hanging in the front window and bushel baskets of fruit I didn’t recognize. I think he held on for as long as he could, but he knew. Like the rest of us, Musgrave understood he was stuck at the end of things. It was during that period when the whole city wanted to go in a new direction, directly away from us, and the papers kept saying that we needed to tear down the old buildings on Pitt Street and “re-vitalize” everything. By the time they opened the brand new Shoppers Drug Mart, it was pretty clear. The new pharmacy had big windows that went all the way around the building from the floor up to the ceiling and every week they printed up a different full-colour flyer with all their specials in it. Shoppers Drug Mart had a fleet of blue and white delivery trucks driven by a crew of middle-aged men in matching coats. The trucks had a computer-tracking system, like a courier company, and every customer had to sign their name on a little digital pad before the driver would hand over their bag. They made their own cheaper, generic brands of everything. Soap and shampoo and vitamins and eye drops and aspirin and toothbrushes. Everything they sold had the word “Life” written on it, spelled out in this red slanty font. Nobody could compete with that.

  “We’re a dying breed,” Musgrave told me once as he flipped through their latest flyer and stared at those glossy magnified photographs of hair dye and antiseptic mouthwash.

  “Pretty soon, it’s going to be impossible. Impossible for anybody to make a go of it on their own.”

  I’m pretty sure the customers I delivered to didn’t know anything about the trucks or the better prices at Shoppers Drug Mart. Musgrave sent me mainly to the quiet floors of rest homes – to Golden Gate and Whispering Pines – and then out to his special harem of shut-ins and old women who had outlived their husbands. The other half of his customers were lonely single guys who’d been injured at the plants and were off on long-term disability. I had that job for almost three years, up to the end of elementary school, and except for a couple crashes and near-misses it was all pretty routine. From Monday to Friday between 4:00 and 6:30 I raced back and forth across the city, dodging cars and swerving around sewer grates with my bag always hanging over my shoulder and the weight in it clunking against my knee every time my leg came around for another turn.

  I made a different plan for every trip. Before I left the store, I plotted the route out in my head and thought of all the short cuts I could take. And when I made the loop, I imagined it like a big connect-the-dots picture where I had to draw the lines between every separate person. I’d drop the right medicine at each house and maybe pick-up the prescriptions that needed to be filled the next time around. Every stop was its own thing but I held them all together in my head and I kept the whole sequence in order. It’s like that for any delivery job. There’s one address and then another and you keep leaving and arriving, but in between there’s nothing.

  I think the guys on disability had it roughest. They weren’t as old as the women I delivered to and they didn’t have the glaucoma or the osteoporosis that used to wear down the ladies. Instead, most of the guys had been wrecked by those steady, grinding jobs they used to have at the plants before everything got ergonomic and automated. Some of the men were so twisted up with tendonitis they couldn’t tie their own shoes and when they went to shake your hand all you got was this flaccid jumble of separate fingers that wouldn’t squeeze together right. They had joint and muscle problems and arthritis that was way worse than it should have been in people their age. And their lower backs were so messed up they had to sleep on sheets of plywood or lay on the floor when they watched their sports at night and their American soaps during the day.

  Those kinds of injuries came from working on the line. They showed up in people who’d been holding the same pneumatic gun for too long, tightening the same eight nuts on a million half-built minivans as they floated by, one every 44 seconds, like a string of hollowed-out metal skeletons, maybe. If you’ve ever been in there you know what it looks like. Other guys got hurt in those nasty burn accidents down at the Ford Foundry where they used to stand on these little platforms while they poured the molten steel directly into the casings for the engine blocks. And there were some men and women who got permanently bent over from working at the trim plant, feeding those thick vinyl seat covers into a heavy-duty sewing machine.

  For a while, a couple of years earlier, there’d been some fraud cases in the news and there was a lot of talk about how the whole Long Term Disability claims system was corrupt. GM hired a couple of private investigators to go around taking hidden pictures and videos of some of these broken-down guys who were supposed to be so permanently damaged they couldn’t pick up a six-ounce wrench or sit in a chair pushing buttons for thirty-nine bucks an hour. They caught a lot of those guys on tape, banging out grand slam home runs and stealing a few bases in their beer-league softball games or going on ten-day fly-fishing trips with their buddies up in the Muskokas. They got one guy who was just bouncing on a trampoline in the backyard with his kids and another one who helped his neighbour build a deck, but that was enough to get them in deep trouble.

  Musgrave lost a few customers after that crackdown, but most of the people I delivered to were the real thing, guys who just wanted to go back again and put on their safety glasses and their steel-toed boots and find another good spot on the concrete floor beneath the fluorescent lighting. For most of them, the ones who couldn’t return, it wasn’t about money. The LTD payments were big enough and they could go on forever, but without the job, the days spread out too far and there was nothing to look at. Lots of those guys pulled all the way back and faded out of the normal world. They changed their internal clocks and went on completely different shifts so they could stay up all night and not have to wake up again until one or two the next afternoon. Then they’d start it up right away with the gin and tonics as soon as they got out of bed, and by the time I came by with their packages some of them would already be half in the bag and they’d have to stagger out or kind of half-crawl to the door. The guys who lived alone were separated from their w
ives and could only see their kids every other weekend. They made their minimum support payments and dumped the rest into the cable bill and the big-screen TVs that took up half the wall in those little war-time houses on Rankin or Josephine. Some of those guys looked like they came straight out of the Hells Angels or the Desperados. They were way up over two hundred and fifty pounds and they had mean-looking goatees and shaved heads, but sometimes when I came by to drop off their medications, they’d be completely wrapped up in some mid-afternoon episode of General Hospital or pretending not to cry over the latest crisis on One Life to Live.

  Most of my trips started with Barney. He was this horrible, fat, nearly naked guy and he had everything wrong with him. Diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney problems, a liver thing and some kind of circulation issue that made his feet swell up so badly that he couldn’t wear shoes and could barely walk. Barney had been laid up like that for years and there was no chance he could ever go back to work. He even had one of those Medic Alert buttons that he was supposed to wear around his neck all the time and never take off. It had a flashing red light that told you the battery was okay and I guess if Barney ever felt himself slipping away, or if he felt his heart giving out or whatever it was, he was supposed to push that button and some kind of help would come screaming down the street to save him.

  He was Musgrave’s most regular customer and he was there with me from beginning to end, getting three or four deliveries every week. Barney had a standing account at the store and he paid for everything with a credit card over the phone so I never saw one cent from that guy, but that didn’t stop him from piling on his extra stuff. He ordered from the pharmacy like it was a grocery store and every time I went to his house I’d have to haul a half-dozen heavy cans of Chef Boyardee. Musgrave kept it in stock just for Barney. Sometimes I’d catch him gobbling it down cold, straight out of the can.

  In the summers, Barney used to sit outside on this one sagging lawn chair he kept on his front porch and in the winters you’d find him sprawled out on the couch in his front room by the TV. Those were his only two places. He wore almost no clothes, never any shoes, and usually just a pair of nylon track shorts that almost disappeared when they got sucked between the folds of his rolling gut and his wide, hairy thighs. Once in a while he might pull on a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt that he would never button closed and when the real humidity started up in July, Barney’s whole body would get this greasy sheen. A puddle of salt water would drip out of him and pool under the lawn chair until it almost seemed like he was one of those stinky, exotic plants from the rainforest that need a heavy, regular watering every day.

  He was famous mostly for his hernia. It was this red pulsating growth about the size of a misshapen grapefruit and it bulged way out of the lower left hand side of his stomach. It seemed like something impossible, like one of those gross, special effects from an alien movie that was supposed to make you think there was a smaller creature in there. Just the shape of it, and the way it stuck out of him, and how it seemed to come right at you, could make a person squirm if they weren’t used to it. But he refused to get it fixed and he was always making a big deal about how tough he was and how it didn’t bother him at all. He thought it was funny to pull back his shirt and scare the little kids as they walked by.

  “It ain’t hurting me,” he used to say. And then he’d poke at his own stomach just to prove it was true. The finger would go deep down into the grapefruit and when he pulled it out, the creature inside would kind of tremble.

  “What do I care?” Barney used to say. “I’m not going to lift another goddamn thing as long as I live and I’m not letting nobody cut me open.”

  The cops used to come around Barney’s place every once in a while to give him tickets for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace, but there was no way to really get rid of him. All kinds of bad rumours circulated around his house and people used to say that Barney had a thing for kids and couldn’t keep his hands off little boys.

  During the last week of every month, or whenever the new issues came out, Barney would make sure Musgrave sent along the most recent copies of Penthouse or Easy Rider or Swank. He’d call it in early and by the time I finally made it to his house, he’d have been sitting there for hours, sweating it out in his slick, excited state, just waiting for me to show up. He’d pull the magazines out right away and start flipping through the pages and he always wanted to stretch out the spines and unroll the centerfolds to show me.

  “Look at that one,” he’d say and he’d hold up some crazed picture of an orgy that was supposed to be taking place in a working garage with five or six people, men and women, all tangled up around each other and bent over the hoods of the cars.

  “You wouldn’t have the first idea how to treat one of these ladies,” he used to tell me. “You wouldn’t have a goddamn clue what to do.”

  I made my own rules for Barney. He was always the first stop on my shift so I could get past him as quick as possible and outside of the most basic stuff, we never talked. When he tried to get at me with his pictures and his attitude, I never gave him anything to work with. To this day I bet he wouldn’t know my name. I had to draw borders around him, safety zones, and when I brought over his stuff in the summer months, I only went as far as the top step of his porch and I stayed out in the open where everybody could see me. In the winter, I put down a hard line right at the threshold of his door. Even if it was driving snow or minus twenty or if the rain was coming down in heavy sheets – and even if he kept calling out from his couch, telling me to come in – I just stayed on my side and waited until he finally got angry enough to work up the guts and wince his way over to the door.

  “You’re a goddamned-lazy-ass-motherfucker, you know that?” he’d say as he grabbed the bag out of my hand and slammed the door in my face.

  “You’d make a cripple walk before taking one step.”

  None of it fazed me. I might have my toes pressed up right against the sill, but I didn’t cross over. I kept my distance and stayed out of reach and I never turned my back or gave him any kind of opening. It was the same thing every time. As soon as I made that turn onto his street, I started flipping through the different ways I could hurt him if I ever needed to get away. As far as I was concerned, it was self-defence and there was nothing Barney didn’t already deserve, nothing that would be too much for him. If he made even one aggressive move in my direction, I’d unleash every jolt of energy I had. I could see myself screaming out for the neighbours and driving my foot straight into that hernia and scratching at his eyes. In my head, I had it set up like Barney’s house was a kind of black hole that kept trying to pull me in and every time I left, it felt like I’d escaped again and I was free to go on for a whole other day.

  The old ladies on my route were completely different and you couldn’t say no to them. I might be the only person they’d talk to or meet face-to-face for an entire week and when I came to drop off their stuff they always wanted to have a real conversation and invite me in for a little visit.

  “I have the tea all set up,” they’d say as they came to the door.

  In the winters, I’d have to take off my boots and leave them on a mat and then I’d go into the kitchen or the living room and sit down for maybe five or ten minutes, never more than that.

  “You know I only have a second,” I would tell them. “I have to keep going, you know. People are waiting.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” they’d say. “But God knows there’s time for a little bite to eat, isn’t there? And something wet just to keep you alive.”

  The snacks were all the same. There’d be a cool cup of tea with too much sugar in it and usually some kind of baked thing, a heavy piece of homemade pound cake, maybe, or a cold, rock-solid square with raisins in it that had just been pulled from a Tupperware container in the freezer. Probably a piece of cheese, too. I always tried to drink at least half the tea and eat half the square before getting up. I thought that was my part of the deal,
like Santa Claus.

  Their houses were full of family photographs. The late husbands and other relatives and shots of the grandchildren in their school pictures stared out at you from the shelves and the walls. They were all pretty much the same: the missing front teeth and the hair sticking up on one side, the bad teenage acne, the graduations and the weddings and the framed notices cut out of the paper for the twenty-fifth and the fiftieth wedding anniversaries and the obituaries. The kids were always sitting in front of the same pale background with the same pattern of pink and blue laser beams criss-crossing behind their heads. If you swung your head around the room, you could watch them growing up, getting fatter and more tired looking. Occasionally, the lady might give out a tidbit about one of them.

  “Still in college,” she’d say and she’d point at the serious-looking seven-year-old in his glasses. “When he was only little, he used to say that we were ‘best buds’ and we had a little secret handshake we’d do whenever he came over.”

  “That one there is broken-up with her husband now and the kids are ruined,” she’d say, or, “Never been the same since the accident,” or “Now that she’s got her fancy la de da house in the country, we don’t see much of her anymore.”

  I did a lot of favours for those ladies. Like if there was a special Thanksgiving turkey platter up on the top shelf that needed to be brought down or if there were hanging plants that could use a little water, I’d do that. And I carried more than my share of dripping garbage bags to the curb. They were just little things, stuff anybody would do, but the ladies always made a big deal out of nothing.

  “Thank God you came by when you did,” they would say. “I’d never have been able to get that box of Christmas decorations out of the attic without you.”