Looking back, I know Pat's play was helpful. Though I hate to admit it, he schooled me swiftly and absolutely in the laws of this new culture. After that, I thought twice about snitching, and my place in the order of things clarified. That is, I was on my own, and there was no order of things. Well, none aside from having the upper hand or being subjected to somebody else's. You were either on the forks or behind the wheel, and that structured your day in a rhythm of ambush and survival. Part of my job was to take it on the chin, my chin usually pressed to the cold oily steel twenty feet above Pat's shit-eating grin. Besides, how could I rat to Greg after mopping my own brain off the floor?
The forks rocked back and forth and eventually settled. Pat kept on trucking with laughter. Pat in his sleeveless Slack Alice t-shirt and high purple nylon shorts, hockey-hair Pat, Pat who made me sweep the parts aisle while he smoked behind the assorted diving boards. Pat who, one week later, backed the forklift into the SRVIVR van.
After the accident, he was suspended from all forklift duties, except riding on the forks. That was fine with me. Somebody had to drive. I was next in line and a natural choice, I thought, not necessarily out of poetic justice but because I had, for some reason, also made misreading the big, black felt invoice numbers a bit of a habit and an irritation for Greg.
I liked my boss, Greg. He was in his late twenties and had worked at Great West for five or six years. A farm kid, he had
an almost oppressive work ethic. Somehow he also convinced us this ethic set a just and reasonable expectation. Not too many other bosses could do that. I had to admire him and suffer his example. Work was just something you did, no complaints, no wasting time pissing and moaning about it. If I whimpered about the heat in the warehouse, he'd say, “I'm so sorry. Would you prefer to work tomorrow when the weather is more suitable?”
From anybody else that would have seemed blunt, but you were reminded, by Greg's manner and tone and by his example, always in the warehouse himself, sometimes simply sweeping and tidying when things were slow, that work by any other name was duty, and duty is hard to dodge without sacrificing respect. Greg bull-worked days at Great West Pool, then helped his father nights and weekends with the care and handling of their family's two race horses. Labour, in short, was the key to much of his character, and I had to respect him for it.
Greg's sense of humour, like Pat's, was physical, but it lacked the cruelty I'd come to expect when I was on the clock. Greg went for theatrics, often loading a semitrailer in Monty Python character or breaking into weird horsy sounds and galloping boxes between warehouse and truck. I never knew what to do with that kind of acting out. It was embarrassing, nerdy, but it was a relief. Maybe his humour was a farm kid thing, too, because it made sense as a way of working. All that hop-to-it left little room for play, so his sense of play had to be as physical. It had to integrate itself into the task at hand. You couldn't stop to tell a joke; you couldn't just
drop what you're doing to shoot your lunch. No time for that. But a strange whinny and a gallop actually got the boxes into the trailer and seemed to entertain Greg and the rest of us at the same time.
Greg was also observant. I learned that by becoming a subject of his study. It began one day when he stopped calling me Knighton, opting for the more editorial “Bumbleton.” That was the day Pat's forklift keys landed in my hands. It wasn't without some debate, though. Greg was reluctant to let me drive, so I finessed him, giving it my teenage rhetorical all.
“So, like, do I get to drive now, or what?”
“Whoa there, cowboy. I don't know if that's such a good idea,” Greg said, stroking his thin moustache.
Pat, Greg, and I sat around the dirty lunchroom table, pictures of buxom Miss June on the calendar behind me. We were well into July. Pat leaned back in his chair CEO-style, his grubby high-tops on the table, his legs crossed, and his eyes pinned to the calendar. A smug smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. The expression clearly attached itself to the thought that either I wouldn't get the plum job of driving, or he might get it back at my expense. Evidently either option satisfied.
“C'mon, Greg, you said I could drive soon, and you need someone to drive now.”
“I dunno. I dunno if you're a good gamble. You're a bit of a bumbler, Bumbleton. You have to admit you miss a lot of stuff.”
Pat's smile broke loose and he let out a guffaw. “Bum-bleton.”
Greg knocked Pat's legs off the table. “You're a pig. You know that, don't you? A pig.”
“Better than a Bumbleton,” Pat jeered, “I'd be a pig before a Bum-bleton.”
Time would measure Pat to be twenty years old, but part of him remained back in those developmental years when the word “bum” is a thrill.
I didn't know how to defend myself. “What do you mean I miss stuff? I work hard, don't I?”
“Yeah, you do,” he said, “but although Pat here is an accident, a walking, talking error, you are accident-prone, and that's not a good thing to put behind the forks.”
Pat nodded with sage and serious agreement.
“C'mon, you must have noticed it,” Greg continued. “Sometimes you trip over stuff right in front of you, like that box of scraps this morning, the one that was blocking the door to the sales office. Or, like the other day, when I pointed to that case of PH chemicals and said, âKnighton, grab that for me,' and you're like, âGrab what?' And I pointed again, and I'm like, âGrab the case right there. It's right there, sitting in the middle of the aisle,' and you're like, âWhere?' It makes me crazy. Then there's the matter of taking down the wrong liners. I don't know if you need your glasses checked or what, but, for chrissake, you get them wrong more often than Pat does, andâ”
Greg paused, perhaps sensing he'd crossed a line, gone from presenting his reasons to ranting. I was burning red, embarrassed and confused, which hadn't been his intention, so Greg tried to repair the damage in a way we could all appreciate. He inflicted damage elsewhere.
“I mean, you read them wrong more than Pat, and you and I both know Pat's illiterate, so I want you to stop making him look good.”
Pat shot up from his chair and scowled. “Fuck you, Greg, fuck you and your love for Bumbleton.” He stormed out of the lunchroom and humped back down to the shipping area. Within minutes our boom box belted out Pat's favorite hurtin' ballad, Led Zeppelin's “Black Dog.”
I knew two things at that moment. The first thing I knew was I didn't want to work as a shipper-receiver for the rest of my life. Warehouse work was hard, crappy; the pay was lousy; and the Pats outnumbered the Gregs. The other thing I knew, and didn't want to admit, was Greg's insight. He had hit the target when he called me a klutz. I knew deep down he was right. How could I account for it? I hadn't always been inept, not at home, not at school. I commented when Judy in sales cut her hair; I caught footballs; I had a good eye. So, I did the next best thing to explaining my flubs. I tried to worm my way out of them.
“The liners,” I began, “it's just that it's so dark up there. It's hard to see the numbers, you know? It's black felt in the shadows, that's all. And the box I tripped over, I was carrying a bin of filters and I couldn't see around it and then, wellâbut I pay attention, Greg, and I work hardâ”
Greg's lunch still sat untouched on the table between us. He took a sandwich out of the brown bag and began to unwrap it. “I never said you don't work hard, Ryan. You do.” His tone shifted. He became quieter, concerned even. “If hard work was an issue, Pat would go before you. But I just
don't know if I can trust you behind the wheel when you are, well, so clumsy. Sorry to say it, but I don't know what else to call it. We need someone to drive, though, a lot of orders to load in the summer peak weeks, so I've either got to trust you behind the wheel or hire somebody else, and that'll cut into your hours and Pat's hours, unfortunately.”
He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed, not looking at me. I didn't know what else to say, so I waited. Greg finished his lunch while I stared at Miss January and Miss February on the wall behind him. Great West Pool was not living up to its promise. My job was making me into a strange and hamfisted version of myself, one suspended between the beginning and end of the school year. I felt like I was dangling from the tips of a forklift. My first summertime blues.
Greg crumpled his lunch bag and shot it basketball-style into the waste bin, then broke into a Monty Python voice.
“Oh, hello, sir. I came here for an argument. Do you have one, an argument? I would like an argument, please.”
“No,” I muttered. “I don't. No argument from the feeb.”
“Well, sir, Sir Feeb, let's just say I like you, so we'll just skip all the argument for now and see how you do for the next few days. You drive, just do your best, and most of allâand I mean itâpay fucking attention fucking all the fucking time, sir.”
As I said, I liked Greg.
“And stay away from boss-man's van,” he added.
I did. I gave it my best for the next few days, and I paid all the fucking attention I fucking could fucking pay. As promised, I did it all a safe distance from the SRVIVR van. I did just fine, too. Until I ran over Pat.
I remember barreling around the corner of the building, a box of lining on my forks, eager to load the waiting semitrailer as fast as I could. I was in a hurry because some of the invoice items had been misplaced, and things were getting backed up. When I rounded the corner of the building, I saw nothing other than a Patless straightaway to the trailer.
Along the edge of the building, in its shadow, just ahead of me and to the left, I saw the two or three towers of wooden palettes stacked under the rooftop overhang. I also saw bright sunlit cement and the bleached gray semitrailer, about thirty yards ahead. But I didn't catch, despite the twenty yards between us, Pat in the shade trying to pull a palette down from the stack, right there in front of me, between the forklift and the trailer. I must have stared at him and the space he occupied for a good five seconds as I sped towards him.
Then an image flashed. He materialized in my eye, just to the left of the forks, a body in contorted motion as he leapt out of the way, safe. Safe and toxic with rage.
Dumb as a lemming, I locked the brakes, and instead of driving ahead, as fast as I could, past the trailer and out of the parking lot, on to 200th street and south for home, or Mexico, or anywhere safe, I stopped to see if he was okay.
“Wow, sorry about that.”
Pat flipped his mullet.
“You dick, you did that on purpose!” He stormed towards me. “On purpose! You're fucking dead, Knighton, dead!”
Another lesson in warehouse culture steamrolled my way. Off came Pat's Slack Alice t-shirt. As he picked up speed, his hands balled into fists. He hurled threats and promises of
bodily harm, in customary preparation for heavy metal justice. In this kind of trial, court is a loading dock, and arguments are issued in the form of furious pastings. Through drubbings we were meant to reconcile differences or settle old scores. The jury of a few other guys didn't watch in silent judgment. They cheered for blood, anybody's blood.
“No! Pat, no, I didn't. Reallyâ” I pleaded. “It was a mistake, Pat. It was a mistake!”
For added denial, I waved the palms of my hands back and forth in front of me, as if wiping the accident away like a smudge in the air. Pleading only fueled him. He continued to bull my way, a shirtless fury hell bent on punching my clock. Without stopping, he scooped a heavy roll of packing tape from the ground and pitched it. I ducked and heard the sound as the doughnut of tape whizzed over my head.
From inside the semitrailer, Greg must have heard everything. He suddenly shoved me from behind, pushing me aside, and headed straight for Pat with one arm out, hand open like a crossing guard. The gesture, although softly enforced, meant enough to hold Pat in place. Pat raged on the spot. He deeked his face side to side, trying to see around Greg, all the while shooting menacing looks and imploring me to “c'mon, man, c'mon.”
“What the hell is going on?” Greg said.
Pat made a show of his answer. “Get outta my way, Greg. I'm warning you, I'm gonna deck this guy.”
With a surge of new effort Pat tried to push through but didn't get far. Greg switched fact-finding tactics and put Pat in a headlock.
“Let go, Greg, let go! Bumbleton tried to run me over. Ow, shit, ow.”
Greg said he'd let go when Pat calmed down. It took a minute, then Pat's body went sort of limp, his head still nutcrackered like a football in Greg's armpit.
“Knighton, go to the lunchroom,” Greg said. “I'll be there in a minute. Pat, you're gonna stay here and cool off. I'm gonna sort this out, and you two are gonna stay apart, and nobody's going to do nothing. Christ, I'm sick of you two.”
In the lunchroom I continued to stand my accidental ground.
“It was an accident, Greg, just an accident.”
Greg began to make coffee but slammed everything for punctuationâthe lunchroom door, the coffee pot on the counter, the old filter into the garbage can. The accident was my fault this time, no dodging it.
“Listen to yourself. Doesn't make sense, Ryan. How the hell do you miss Pat, or anybody, or anything, right there in the middle of a wide open space, and how do you just happen to drive straight for him or it or whatever? Doesn't make any sense to me. You're a klutz, no doubt about it, but nobody, nobody, is that much of a klutz. What you did was just plain stupid.”
I didn't know what to say. I didn't have an answer.