02 - Special Delivery
Funny Games We Used to Play, a serial novel
This is Chapter Two of the serial novel, Funny Games We Used to Play. To start at chapter one, head HERE.
Lloyd patted down his own shirt pockets. Nothing. He swallowed hard and thrust his pelvis up against the steering wheel so he could reach down into his jeans’ pocket, first one side, then the other. Still nothing. He popped open the glove compartment, even though he hadn’t been in there for years: an old automobile manual, two ketchup packets stuck together, an expired insurance card, and a wad of narrow napkins, probably from a diner somewhere. He slammed it closed but it didn’t latch, simply fell back open like a broken jaw, so he slammed it shut again, and it fell open again. One more slam with a muttered profanity kept it in its place.
His pills were nowhere to be found, and he balled up his fist and hit his truck’s steering wheel. The cab of the truck smelled like expired black coffee, a smell from his childhood, his grandfather’s golden-brown Oldsmobile, and those early morning drives through the fog to the farmer’s market. Standing outside in the cold, waiting for customers. His grandfather’s gray hair, combed straight back, and his oversized sunglasses, and the saggy grin that stretched his lips lopsided.
But that was decades ago. The pills. The pills. Three lonely little pills he thought he had brought with him. He looked through the windshield towards the the warehouse, numb to the chaos of the loading docks, running once again through the progression of his morning—the bathroom, the kitchen, the car on his way to pick up the delivery truck. Three lonely little pills.
Warehouses surrounded the delivery yard where he had parked, and there was a middle-of-the-night darkness, even though morning was just around the corner. There were puddles from an overnight rain, slicked red with the brake lights of trucks coming and going, slowly, slowly, mindlessly, things being brought here and taken there for people who would never see these rundown warehouses, these crumbling lots, these dying trucks. They would only wake up to find a new thing outside their front door, magic.
Lloyd bumped the keys where they hung in the ignition and they swung back and forth.
Tick
Tick
Tick.
He moved to check under the driver’s seat but felt a quick stab of panic when he finally remembered—Mol had interrupted him in the dark of their bedroom asking for a glass of water, and instead of grabbing his heart pills, he had retrieved that drink, then fled the room before she could nag him for something else. Out the door, into the dark summer muck and humidity, he had felt nothing but sweet relief. And guilt about how much relief he felt whenever he left the house, whenever he got out of her needy clutches for the day.
Thinking of her, sadness threatened to rise, but what would he do with that? He had no tools for sadness. So he gathered all his little resentments and piled them on top of the sadness and it sank and sank and sank into those red-lined puddles in the cratered lot. Resentment. Yes. So much easier to carry.
A cold sweat lined his forehead, and he grabbed his pack of Winstons from the cupholder, pulled out one of the little white sticks and propped it between his dry lips. The pills must still be sitting on the vanity. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the sun visor—when had he become so puffy? Why were the whites of his eyes fading to yellow? How long would it take him to lose ten pounds, or twenty? He could certainly use it. Maybe he should start taking walks in the evening. He slammed the visor up.
He heard Stanley stomping around in the back of the delivery truck, and Lloyd’s mind tripped from his pills to his unlit cigarette to the enormous box they had somehow loaded into the back with the help of three guys from the dock. What the hell was in that thing, and how would he and Stanley ever unload it themselves once they got to their destination? The large box had an ominous feel to it, but he couldn’t decide if it was the weight or the way it just stood there, the rest of the trailer dark and empty.
What was in that box? It was like the thing had bored into his brain somehow, in through his skull, and taken up residence there, like a worm.
Someone tapped on the glass and he turned with an annoyed expression on his face. What was taking Stanley so long back there? But outside his window was his supervisor’s supervisor, a guy he hadn’t talked to since he was hired, a guy he occasionally saw around the warehouse but whose name Lloyd could never remember.
The man wore a flawless white shirt with a red tie, looking completely out of place in the pockmarked parking lot. And on the tie was some kind of a pin, a symbol. Lloyd knew it, but couldn’t place it exactly. Wasn’t it the membership pin for one of the local business clubs? Or maybe the guy was a Freemason? His lips were thin slivers of ash and he lifted his hand, rotated his index finger, similar to how you might suggest that someone was crazy but in this case an indication that Lloyd should roll down his window.
“Hey,” Lloyd said, unimpressed, only lowering the glass about halfway.
“No smoking in company vehicles,” the man said, his eyes flickering to the cigarette.
“I don’t smoke.”
The man looked up with something like disgust, sighed as if to say he was used to being lied to, it happened every single day of his life, and cleared his throat.
“I don’t,” Lloyd said again. “I just keep one there.”
“Lloyd Ketterley?”
“In the flesh.”
“Look, Jake, your supervisor asked me to come have a chat with you.”
“Jake?”
“Yes. Glad your hearing’s turned on. Jake. Normally, I’d say this was Jake’s business, something he can work out between you and him, but he insisted, so here I am.”
“One of the higher ups,” Lloyd said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. “Special treatment.” The man’s name nearly came to him, but then it was gone again.
“Something like that.” The man’s voice was flat as iron. “Jake said you should get this delivery. He asked me to personally give you the paperwork. And to remind you that you owe him for this.”
Lloyd waited, a realization dawning, or something like a realization. The man paused, as if he didn’t want to do it, but then he loosened the clip on the clipboard, removed the triplicate form, and handed it to Lloyd through the half-opened window. But he didn’t let go of the paper right away, so that the two of them both held it between them in a kind of tug-of-war. The man cleared his throat.
“I don’t know what you two are up to,” he said in a flat, dead voice. “But I don’t want to know about it, and we never had this conversation. I owe Jake, I guess in some ways kind of like he owes you. So I’m doing this, I’m giving you this delivery, and then we’re all even.”
Only after Lloyd nodded did the man release the form. If Lloyd hadn’t needed his pills before, he did when he saw the address for delivery. He had been waiting a long time for this one. He took the unlit cigarette out from between his lips and put it in the cupholder beside the pack where it sat dry and lonely.
The man cleared his throat and took on a pained expression and spoke as if speaking to a child. “I don't want to hear about anything out of the ordinary. On-time delivery. No complaints. Obviously, nothing broken.”
“Obviously.”
“Give us a call back here at the depot by 8 p.m. at the absolute latest so we know everything is finished. Earlier if you can. The earlier, the better.” He stared down at his clipboard, as if checking notes to make sure he had mentioned everything.
Lloyd nodded. “And if something comes up, who should I call?”
The man stared at him, and the stare asked the question, Have you not heard a single, solitary word that I’ve said? And he went on staring, like someone having one of those catatonic strokes Lloyd had read about, when someone’s mind just freezes and they’re stuck there. What would that feel like, the entire world going on around you, the Earth still spinning, and at the center of it all, you, motionless? But the man—what was his name?—finally found himself, came back to the moment, spoke so quietly Lloyd could barely hear him.
“I’m sure nothing will come up. And because I know you need to do this, whatever it is,” he paused, “I’m not sending anyone extra with you.”
“I’ve got Stanley,” Lloyd said, trying to keep a serious look on his face. Stanley was hopeless.
“The old guy?”
Lloyd nodded, and for one split second he almost burst out laughing, which he figured would ruin the whole thing and probably cause the man to yank back the paperwork, step back away from the truck, and maybe even fire him on the spot.
The supervisor’s supervisor shook his head. “Just do whatever you’re doing and be done with it.” The man looked down at his clipboard again and clenched his jaw.
“Sure, sure,” Lloyd said, rubbing his shoulder. Was it pain or the anticipation of pain that he felt? Was his heart preparing to fail or was it a rising, pensive glee that this thing he had waited so long for was about to happen? “I’m sure nothing will come up.”
“So you understand?”
Lloyd nodded.
“No one here has your back, if something goes south.”
“Fine by me.”
The man turned and walked across the macadam, back to the warehouse, meandering here and there in order to avoid puddles and oil slicks and crumbling pavement. Lloyd noticed for the first time that the man’s shoes shone like an oiled shotgun, probably cost more than Lloyd’s entire wardrobe. Something about those shoes just really got under his skin and he watched the man walk, praying he’d step in a puddle. He didn’t. He kept his shoes clean.
Lloyd started the truck, hoping Stanley would take the hint, hoping the air conditioning would decide to work that day, but all that came from the vents was a burst of stale, warmish air the same temperature as the dark morning. Well, if that’s how it was, they had better be off before it got too hot. Lloyd reached one hand up and banged on the box truck’s thin plywood wall separating the cab from the trailer. It stung his hand, but when Stanley kept doing whatever it was that he was doing, Lloyd banged again, louder, then rubbed his palm. He heard Stanley’s movements stop. A moment later the back roll gate came crashing down, and Lloyd clenched his teeth at the screech of it.
“Just checking the straps,” Stanley muttered, pulling himself up into the cab.
“Easy with that gate,” Lloyd said, looking for his keys. “It’ll come right off.”
“Everything’s tight,” Stanley said, putting on his seat belt so conscientiously that it made Lloyd either want to punch him in his long-nosed face or slam his own forehead against the steering wheel over and over. It wasn’t the wearing of the seatbelt that drove him crazy; it was the way he fiddled with it, kept track of the belt so that it didn’t kink where it ran through the guide, then took three slow seconds to tighten it just so, as if he was an astronaut going through a prelaunch checklist and not a part-time stiff delivering other people’s shit. Again Lloyd wondered how he and Stanley would unload that monolith in the back, but he knew his supervisor’s supervisor was right: he didn’t want to bring anyone else along.
“What was taking you so long back there?” Lloyd asked. His pent-up frustrations and concerns emerged in the form of nagging.
“I said I was just checking the straps,” Stanley explained again, looking away, out the passenger side window. His voice wavered and his bony hands shook with palsy. “That box, though.” And Stanley rubbed his arms, as if trying to dispel a chill from his skin.
“What do you mean, that box?” Lloyd asked, even though he already knew. That thing had given him the creeps, too.
Stanley shrugged. “Did you hear something coming from it?”
“A sound? From the box?” Lloyd shook his head. “No.”
But he had, and then he had thought it was his imagination, or the truck, or some machine running in the distant warehouse. He had heard it, though, a low-grade kind of hum, like there were bees inside. Maybe it was a bunch of hives inside the cardboard. That was possible.
Stanley looked over at Lloyd. “Well, maybe you didn’t, but I did. I heard something. And I don’t like it, not one bit.”
“Maybe it’s a bunch of bee hives,” Lloyd grunted, wondering again why he had chosen his old brother-in-law for the job instead of one of his nephews. But he knew why. Stanley would keep his mouth shut. Anyone else, who knew.
And he was still calculating how much time it would add to swing by the house and pick up his heart pills, but then he remembered where they were going. There wouldn’t be enough time. It was too far. And too important. He realized he was staring at the triplicate delivery form.
“What? What is it?” Stanley asked. Lloyd just chucked the paperwork at him and rubbed his forehead, grabbed the single loose cigarette and stuck it in his mouth again, the paper sticking to his lip. He had been propping cigarettes but not lighting them for five years now. How he could taste the smoke! If he ever needed one, an actual lit one, it was now.
He wearily turned the ignition of the old delivery truck, and it whined and complained and turned over three times, four times, five times, before rumbling and coughing and roaring to life. There was no time to go home, even though this woman was his one and only drop of the day. He had been waiting for this for a long time. It would take every moment they had to drive to the location and get this thing delivered, find what he was looking for, what he was owed. And that meant no detours, and “no detours” meant no pills.
“Nothing,” he said, the cigarette hopping like a live wire between his dry lips. “Nothing.” He wondered if lighting the cigarette would ease his stress. Honestly? Probably not. And then he’d be worrying about what Mol would say when he arrived home smelling like smoke. Lord, she would go off the deep end at that.
“What is it?” Stanley asked again, practically begging, and Lloyd had never realized before how much Stanley sounded like Mol.
“I had a problem with this woman before, that’s all.”
“What woman?”
“The woman we’re delivering that thing to, whatever it is.”
“What? You know her?” Poor old Stanley sounded lost.
“No, I don’t know her.” What an idiot. “But Mol did.”
“My sister Mol?”
“What other Mol in the whole world do you know?”
“Geez.” Stanley nursed his pride for a minute. “How’d she know this woman?”
“Mol worked there.”
“Wait.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“This is the place?”
“That’s what I said. Mol worked there.”
Stanley’s face went flat. “So, that’s where we’re going?”
“Read it,” Lloyd said.
“What?”
“Read the address, I said. Just read it.”
Stanley unfolded the triplicate purchase order and held it away from his face. Again Lloyd was reminded of just how old Stanley was.
“Lion’s Head, Citadel, New York.”
“That’s it. That’s the place.”
“What’s Lion’s Head?”
“The name of a house.”
“The name of a house?”
“Houses big as this one, they have names.”
Stanley unclicked his seatbelt, held it up to his mouth, and blew on it to remove debris, then carefully reinserted it. Lloyd stopped at the checkpoint, showed his ID, mumbled something to the security guard, and pulled onto the dark, early morning road. It was empty of cars.
But before he worked up to speed and the sound of air coming through the windows drowned everything else out, Lloyd heard it again, through the wall: that humming, that distant static, coming from the back of the truck, coming from the box.
The line “He had no tools for sadness.” Ugh. Brilliant.
Well. I'm properly intrigued and hooked.