Spokane
Six A.M. Lights are up and we work the line, loading all the time. It’s all cardboard boxes everywhere, rumbling around metal trays and chutes, underneath there’s gears and rubber belts, bunch of whirrs and clanks and clatters. That’s the thing I’m inside for my eight hours, loading and loading and loading. Everything across the belts and into all the open backs of the trucks, or else you’re working farther back, forklifting or roller-carting pallets of stuff, making all the stacks neat and fast with the sthunk sthunk sthunk of cardboard stacking on itself.
Loader, that’s me, right, but I was training for a driver job, figure I make a little bigger paycheck and get outside, so I got for do a few ride-alongs and see how deliveries work. This was what, April. Of course one of the first routes I’m on goes right to the university and I was all, “I’m not going in there.” Carl, the driver, said, “The hell you talking about?”
The way he said it I could see the tooth that was missing, far right side just at the edge of his always-chapped mouth. Him every time with his skin like a pirate, not shaving for days and days. What a bald-ass, chewed-up haole. First day I went for a ride-along with him, Carl gleeked the last of his dip into a 7UP can with the top peeled off and asked from under his weird blue eyes, “What are you?”
I was like, What.
“I figure it’s like you’re black, but I dunno. You have Chinese eyes and hair like this one girl I used to know. She was a Jew, I think.”
I figure would’ve been bad to false-crack him right then so I just said, “Hawaiian Filipino,” the same I had to say to everyone, everywhere, except back home.
Then we was on our second run together and I bet Carl already couldn’t remember what I was. Us at the university and me still in the passenger seat in the delivery truck. The back side of the union was where we’d parked, where all the deliveries got done, and Carl was already starting for the back of the truck while I was still trying for figure out if any of the students going by was people I knew, or if they knew me, which was what really mattered.
“Help me stack all this,” Carl called from around back of the truck. “It’s always faster with two.”
For maybe a minute I was thinking I could probably just duck down right there, sit on the floor, and curl up, but I’m six five and there’s no way you can keep me hidden anywhere. And anyway I never liked hiding, so when students started walking past I just tried not for make eye contact with none of ’um. But I don’t think nobody even looked at the delivery truck—I know I never did when I was a student—so I was probably more invisible than I ever been before. I hopped out and went around back to Carl.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said.
“Kid wants a participation medal,” Carl said, stacking the bigger boxes on the handcart he’d set up. His bald head was all sweat and shine.
“Used to be I was at the student union all the time,” I said. “Late-night snacks and like that. I never really been around back like this before.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about your story, superstar,” he said. “Everyone does. Well, now you’re around back all right.” He chin-pointed to one of the biggest boxes in the back of the truck. “Lift that one there.”
We rolled the cart in toward the union and Carl went on about all the ways to be a top driver: Never ignore the GPS driving directions because the GPS is always right, park wherever the hell is closest to the entrance, just hit the flashers and unload, and always always always lock the back before you make the drop. More time you shave from the route without breaking the speed limit, the more bonus you can pick up at employee review.
We struggled the cart up the small hill at the loading dock, Carl was still talking. We went by all the weeping milk from the garbage overflow next to the tied-tight stacks of cardboard, Carl was still talking. We took the heavy freight elevator crashing and squealing to the second floor, Carl was still talking. Then it was the mail room, mostly staffed by work-study students, and so of course, even though had been two years since my last game, the girl and guy at receiving fully recognized me.
Chubby plain Jane with her caked-makeup cheeks and moled neck, and the guy with pink dyed hair that was starting for wash out, sharp-ass nose, and two thick earrings in one ear. Yeah, I can see the thing, when it happens, still. Them with their eyes up and on me like I’m just another delivery guy, then there’s this flex moment, where they’re like, Isn’t that Dean Flores? The guy smiled, even. Like he couldn’t wait for get off shift and tell his friends, Guess who I saw at the mail room today, no, at the mail room, delivering packages. He’d say it all happy because of how it was when I was starting two-guard and he was just another punk haole student at the school, and now here we are. I couldn’t let him get away with it.
“The fuck you looking at?” I said to him.
Punk’s smile dropped through the floor. I seen the fear. “Sorry?” he said, like he didn’t hear me.
I was about to say more, but then Carl frowned at me so hard his face went like a raisin. “Boy,” he said. “Get the last of the stuff.”
I stared Punk down, though, just a minute more, so he knew what was what. Then I went back around the corner, to the door we’d come into the mail room by, got the last few boxes, brought ’um back. I could feel Carl watching me the whole time so I didn’t do nothing but what I was supposed to until we left.
“Trying to get fired on your second ride-along?” Carl asked, us back in the truck and the engine grumbling and the fibery smell of cardboard and old coffee all around.
I shook my head but didn’t apologize.
“You know that guy?”
“Nah.”
“This gonna be a problem, you doing a route through here?” Carl asked. Gave me one of his hard looks, one of his dad looks.
“Let’s just drive,” is all I said. “We’re losing time.”
ASK ME HOW IT HAPPENED.
How do you have the world by the nuts and then let go.
Shit is so simple anyone that’s not as dumb as me would’ve seen ’um coming. That sophomore season when I took over, our team went late in the tournament, made it all the way to the Final Four, with me leading in scoring and third on assists, double-double as easy as pissing in the shower. After a season like that, how could I not recognize what I was?
Howbout the party in me started small and got bigger, just a little here and there and then epic, all the time epic, blackout epic. Howbout reggae, howbout pass the dutchie, howbout freshman girl hips and my hips and everyone in the living room when the bass drops. Howbout those days I was missing the beach bad and wanted to bring all the aloha back. Howbout if you try hard enough you can make the beach show up anywhere, even Spokane in the off-season, a little beer a lot of beer couple other brown boys and good beats, girls down to their hot pants and scooped-out necklines and we go. My grades was barely enough through spring semester and summer. Howbout I can see now, can’t nobody do it that way, not for long. Howbout I remember when I should have started for pay attention, when summer league started and I tried for all my mongoosing on the court, dipping into the flow, and something felt syrupy slow and numb. But I was only twenty, how could that be? Howbout island love can only do so much, at least for me, since there was arguments at practice with Coach, always telling me what to do and I swear half the time he was wrong, even Rone and Grant and DeShawn, I dunno what happened but soon wasn’t none of ’um talking to me, and me right back at ’um. Get your shit together, you’re getting sloppy, you’re getting slow, you’re getting fat. Used to be I was a razor, sharp and flashy bright, till I went and dulled myself.
NOW IT’S JUST DELIVERIES. Whole string of 6:00 a.m.’s go, me with more ride-alongs. Boss is saying maybe I get to start on my own. Don’t even have to help the loaders, maybe just a little bit, stacking everything the way I like it in the back of the truck, which I get all kapakahi the first few weeks, like putting the big boxes for the closer addresses too far back in the truck, stacking all the crates wrong so that I’m always reaching bent over, like that. But I learn. I bet no one thinks I can, but I do. And Carl must have said something to someone for real about the university because I never gotta go that way again. I guess that’s his route anyway.
There’s the fuzz of the cardboard boxes, when I hold one I can feel ’um in my fingers like little hairs on some pet I gotta take care of. There’s the flex and whank sound when I step up into the back of my delivery truck, then all the angles and edges and the silver shine of the walls inside when the sun’s coming up and I’m delivering. I’m delivering.
Plenty times after work, me and Eddie and Kirk-guys all met in the back of the parking lot to tailgate, like we were headed to a ball game or something, but it’s just all us getting off our shift and chilling, just for a minute. Before some of the guys gotta run home to the edge of town in whatever small little house they’re all crammed into we stand around the back of Eddie’s car, far side of the parking lot, cracking beers from the trunk.
“Anybody going to the game tonight?” Eddie asked.
It gets all quiet.
“Right,” Eddie said, not looking at me. “Sorry.” His shitty little child-molester-looking mustache and squirrel cheeks, raising his can, everyone else did the same. Guys is slamming their beers since they gotta get home to their families, except a few guys that chilled and drank slow, like we was at a bar and trying for make it last so we don’t gotta order another, just stay and listen to the music.