SIX

It took fifteen minutes from the campus to my job, a brisk half-sprint across railroad tracks, past warehouses, trucks reversing up to shipping bays, air brakes gasping.

When I saw Chief he was throwing a tarp over the back of his truck. The gray canvas was navy surplus, ALAMEDA NAVAL SHIPYARD in faded black stenciling. The new yellow nylon rope squeaked as he tugged it through the grommets, green brass holes along the border of the stiff cloth.

Chief gave me a look of exaggerated surprise. “The crowd goes wild,” he said in a sports-announcer voice.

I gave a little wave to the invisible crowd, a superstar too cool to show any feeling.

“You’re early,” he said, dropping his voice, implying something, not wanting to come out and say it.

I stepped in beside him and tied an ordinary slipknot. This new yellow rope was slick, like lizard skin; it was hard to get a grip. The loading dock of Outlet Spa was empty, a wooden shelf like a theater stage. The shipping area was crushed white rock, like the gravel in the exam. Morning clouds were burning off, leaving the air silver and hot.

“You should use all the time they give you,” he said.

Outlet Spa is in the warehouse district, several blocks west of Laney College, but another world, brick buildings with trucks backed up to the empty shipping bays, cranes and shipping containers, wooden shipping stacked among weeds. Chief swung up into the cab. He slammed the door of the GM truck and a little more paint sifted down from the rust scrape in the side.

He found the ignition without looking. “Since you’re here,” he said. Despite his casual manner, he had deliveries in far flung reaches of Northern California for the next week, and I knew if I didn’t show up, Chief would hire someone else.

“I have to punch in,” I said.

“I’ll sign you in tonight,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

I walked into the office just to prove something, and then I couldn’t find my time card in the slot with all the Ms, hardly anyone else working on Saturday. The office was empty, desks overflowing, a computer left on, bright blues and greens, amount payable blinking in the lower right. I leaned over to one of the bookkeeping department’s phones. I called my dad’s number and I got his machine, his wife sounding breathless and sexy, sorry they weren’t in.

It was noon. The traffic was light. Chief shifted gear with difficulty up the on-ramp, the clutch having one of its bad days. The cab smelled of old iron and crankcase oil, the black vinyl seats crisscrossed with silvery duct tape. We both stared ahead through the bug-dotted windshield, a ghost-gray cabbage butterfly, what was left of him, fluttering under a windshield wiper. The rest was grasshoppers, order Orthoptera, undifferentiated wreckage, except for a tiny scrap of Painted Lady, a pretty variety of butterfly, one of my favorites, next to his AAA sticker.

“I bet you didn’t double-check your answers,” he said.

Chief’s real first name was Bernard, and I had assumed his nickname had been awarded him because of the independent bounce in his stride, a tribe of one. He had tried to tear down my image of him, told me his name had been a family joke because he was “the chief complainer” when any rule was invoked, bedtime, bath time, time to go to church.

He had nagged at me, telling me how he regretted dropping out of school in San Diego, thinking he was going to be a roadie for rock groups, the Ice Capades, because he had a friend who did the lights for Disney on Ice. He had been driving a truck of one sort or another for fifteen years. His encouragement regarding the GED test was generally indirect, challenging: “I bet you’ll get diarrhea that morning, not even show up.”

“This is a rich family,” I said. “The family we’re delivering to.” He took the clipboard from between us, the bill of lading addressed to a site in Napa.

“You aren’t going to tell me how you studied all night, making sure you knew the U.S. presidents backwards.”

“A Saturday delivery, the 9910 Turbo.” That was the top of the line, coral pink, seating twelve people, three-speed jet action to ease pain in the lower back. “They’ll give us a tip.”

Chief was bouncing around behind the steering wheel, a short man, having trouble sometimes manhandling the truck despite his experience. He was used to me, and he knew I didn’t like to tell everything right away.

We chose a booth, red vinyl seats you slid across all the way to vinyl padding on the wall. Except the seats weren’t red anymore, dark around the edges. The surface of each table was designed to look like marble, shadowy veins, all the tables identical.

I asked Chief if he had watched the news last night.

“Harriet won’t let me watch the news,” he said, yanking paper napkins out of the dispenser. I didn’t know if his remark meant that Chief and his wife had a sizzling sex life, or whether she just hated television. He rarely mentioned his wife, preferring to talk about his days playing softball, the time he drove a truck for a skateboard company, how he got a commission because he always sold extra boards.

“There was some trouble with those kids from Hercules. The ones who cruise the lake, looking for a fight.” I said this with my voice rising at the end of each sentence, like a question, encouraging him to ask. Maybe I wanted to brag a little, how we had protected the pride of Oakland.

He gave me a look, a little ribbon of lettuce on his chin, full of some kind of good feeling that had nothing to do with me. In a previous life he must have been a very eager dog, or an otter, always at play. But his smile faded. “You walked out of that test, didn’t you?” he said.

“I think you wish I did, so you can needle me.”

“It’s not funny.”

Even when I had stood there in the bookkeeping office, my lips parted to leave a message for my dad, I just couldn’t do it; I couldn’t talk. Sometimes I can’t shut up.

Chief had ordered both of us liverwurst on wheat berry, no onions. I paid attention to what I was eating for a second, liver-flavored glue.

“At least,” I said, “I don’t walk around with a dog-sex tattoo on my arm.”

This was maybe going too far. Chief kept his sleeves rolled down over that fading artwork on his arm, even on a warm day. He gave me a wink—score one for me—but I could tell I had hurt his pride. Even his glasses had a knocked-together quality, the frame held together with black electricians’ tape. The adhesive tape was fraying, getting hairy along the edges.

Chief carried a bowie knife thonged against his right leg. Here at this roadside place beside Interstate 80, the Chinese people who rolled the utensils in paper napkins and counted out our change were used to him. Sometimes in coffee shops up and down the state a police officer stopped and asked him about his knife, in friendly, cop way.

Cops don’t start out You are now under arrest. They act friendly; Whoa, party’s over. It wasn’t against any law to carry a nine-inch blade against your leg, a tool of his trade, a sharp edge to cut through cardboard and packing straps.

It was the knife that had caught my eye months ago when I was looking for work, in and out of factories, laid off for the second time in a year. I filled out five or six applications a day, able to write my previous employer as a reference. I was never fired—there just wasn’t enough entry-level work. I saw this man who needed a shave, scampering up and down the loading dock, a happy buccaneer. I wanted to work with that guy, I thought. I wanted to be that guy, armed and ready.

Later that day I was able to tell my dad that I had a new job, better than the one at Garden World. All Dad had to do was talk Mom into signing some waivers so Outlet Spa couldn’t be sued if I dislocated a gut carrying fiberglass hot tubs.

I still liked Chief, but not as much as I used to. I pointed to his plaid shirt, where the shred of lettuce had fallen. He brushed it off.

“What did you do,” he continued, “storm out—How dare you ask me questions like that. Or did you saunter out, like this?” He cocked his shoulders without getting up, an arrogant look on his face exactly the way I wish I had looked leaving Mr. Kann’s class.

I ignored him, like my mom looked when someone farted.

It was late that afternoon when I got home and saw my mom’s note under the Federal Title Company magnet, a plastic outline shaped like the United States. Her writing is all slashes, the dots on the i’s sideways lines like cartoon characters showing surprise. Good news! Call Sgt. Hollingsworth.

Sometimes I can’t do something right away—unwrap a present, answer a phone. It drives people crazy. Why is he taking so long? I knew what my mom’s note meant. I was excited. But I had to take some time.

First I called my dad’s number and got his sex-kitten wife on the machine again. The message light was blinking, other messages, other news. I paid no attention, sure they had nothing to do with me.