Christmas 2006, I was working holiday for UPS. I rode in the passenger seat of a UPS truck and jumped out to drop off the packages while the driver organized the next drop. It was okay work. It gave me lots of time to ponder the worth of a college degree. I was also trying to get into grad school, get an MFA so I would be qualified for a more expensive kind of uselessness. Well, you know those artsy types, those tea-drinking professors who scorn literature as a source of “fun” or “pleasure”, who honestly believe that poetry still has something to give humanity, they vomit in disgust if presented with a piece of science fiction or fantasy. This was my effort to write a realistic story, something that could happen in real life, but still felt “deep”. Everybody told me to take out the weird hallucination scene with the Burger King king, but I wouldn’t do it.

… I didn’t get into the program. For which I give thanks every day.

Dog Street
By Jens Rushing

With Christmas coming and the bank account empty, I went to work for UPS. It wasn’t so bad. I’ve never enjoyed physical labor. I know there are certain types that claim to find it calming – people who claim to enjoy simple, repetitive motions, to find solace while lifting boxes or filing papers or mowing lawns. These people are liars. I have never found anything in physical labor other than exhaustion and discomfort. I have my own meditation exercises. I can draw crude genitalia in the sand of my tiny rock garden. I can sit in the park and imagine myself suffocating on the barren surface of the moon.

UPS afforded me no time for thinking. I was a driver helper. I rode around on the folding bitch-seat and ran the packages out whenever we stopped. I moved constantly. It was hard work, and cold, too; we didn’t have time to open the door at every stop, so it hung open, and the wind shrieked in and peeled the frozen flesh from my bones. The trucks, clearly not intended for operation by human beings, had only one heating vent in the center of the dash. It bled hot air directly to the outdoors, doing a wonderful job of increasing our infrared profile, but a shitty job of actually keeping us alive. My hands were purple by the end of the day, and needles of pain perforated them when I finally got home and thrust them under warm water.

The first day passed easily enough. As instructed, I met the truck in the CVS parking lot. My driver was a friendly black guy, thirtyish, who said first and foremost: “Man! I like that hat!” I liked him right away.

“I’m Leo.”

“Deon.” We shook hands. “We got bullshit work today, Leo. Never work too hard, Leo, because then they fuck you. See this?” He waved at the back of the truck. Boxes filled it, floor to ceiling. “Yesterday I made two hundred stops in seven hours. So today I get five hundred goddamn packages. Can’t go home til we’re done.”

“Gotta keep standards low.”

“You said it.” Deon went in the back and tossed packages around and swore profusely, maintaining a rich and constant stream of profanity. The profanity seemed a byproduct of his work, the way a properly operating vehicle spews exhaust. He levered a package into place: “Fuckin shit.” He scanned a shipping label: “Hell ass yeah.”

I stood, not wanting to just sit while he worked. I wanted to earn my pay, so I asked if I could help. “You just sit your sweet ass down and wait,” he said. “Take a break.” I sat my sweet ass down and waited. I watched a slatternly woman carry one kid and drag another into the CVS. The dragged kid cried and screamed. The carried kid just cried.

“Got any kids?” I asked.

“Got a little girl,” he said.

“You married?”

“Hell no,” he said.

“I am,” I volunteered. “Six months now.” I looked at my ring. Six months in and it was scratched all to hell. On our honeymoon in China I had absently banged it all along a quarter mile of the Great Wall, humming “La Marseillaise” and marking time with the click of gold on timeless stone. Lexi had thrown a fit.

“Entropy is the way of all things,” I told her. “Mountains crumble into the sea. All the works of man are for naught.”

“I don’t care!” she shrieked. “Don’t destroy our things! Entropy doesn’t need your help!” I couldn’t say anything; she was absolutely right. Lexi shrieked in much the same way when she found me idly whittling the computer desk or holding an open flame to a plugged-in extension cord. I had no explanation for my actions.

We began our route. It took us through a hideous part of town – a new development of low-income housing, nice houses, but all new. Brick boxes stretching out of sight. No trees more than a year or two old. As we crested a little hill we could see the entire zip code – an unbroken stretch of grey suburban roofs rendered in ersatz Cubism, angles and planes and no perspective. Perfectly hideous.

Deon drove with a surprising lack of skill. He ran the truck over curbs several times, each time executing the action with studious concentration, his brow wrinkled and lips puckered like he was planning chess stratagems rather than driving on someone’s lawn. I came to appreciate his driving style, as I might appreciate a painter who eschews technical achievement in favor of personal expression. I told him so. He thumped his chest. “Yeah, I drive from the heart.”

My job mainly consisted of finding clever hiding spots for packages. We concealed them behind any of the usual crap with which homeowners bedeck their porches: enormous planters, ceramic frogs, benches, bikes, pillars, packages from competing parcel services. Any would do. We had one box that was way too big to hide on the porch. I held the package while Deon cracked the gate to the backyard and peeked through. He whistled a few times. He opened the gate and stepped in, creeping cautiously to the corner, giving me hand signals that made no sense, his every nerve alert like a soldier in Nam searching for a tripwire. He sprang around the corner and quickly leapt back. His whole body trembled. “It’s okay,” he said. “No dogs.”

We dropped the package and returned to the truck. “I was bit once,” he explained. “Hurt!”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah! It was a little dog, but a mean bastard. One of them little brown and white dogs.”

I nodded. I knew just what he meant.

After an hour or so I had the job down. It was a simple job, but I found some small satisfaction in it. We came to a stop. I picked up the box and thought: “I feel competent! How good it is to be competent!” Then I fell out of the truck. I missed the two steps completely and fell on the curb and sprawled face-first on the grass. The package went flying. Deon hooted with laughter. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah, just… stupid,” I said. My face burned with the distinct sensation that I had done a very idiotic thing. When I was in seventh grade, I went to the state level of the national spelling bee after a brilliant performance at the district level. In the first round, on statewide television, I spelled “scroll” without an “r”. Of course I knew how to spell “scroll,” I just chose to be a fuckup at exactly the wrong moment. This same feeling descended on me now. I tried not to think about being twenty-five, degreed, married, and falling down stairs that a chimpanzee could have navigated with grace and aplomb. This fucking – no suitable noun came to mind. Leo’s indignation had no object beyond Leo.

I refuse to be that sort of bastard on principle, so I brushed the grass off my very attractive UPS uniform and dropped the damn package. I climbed back into the truck, which was moving before I got into my seat. One of the hundred humiliations we must endure daily. The human organism has coordination problems; you miss steps and tumble from a truck. The mind, stapled to this marionette, must bear it with dignity. My organism wasn’t done with me yet. Later that day, while examining a bruised knuckle, I walked directly into the side of the truck, missing the door completely. Deon laughed again. I was frozen. My knees hurt from jumping in and out of the truck. My ass ached. I tore a long strip of skin from my index finger somehow. I was an aching, bleeding, frozen mess.

“Shit,” Deon said as we rounded a corner. I assumed he was cursing at the recycling bin he had just flattened or the tiny sparrow caught in the grille. I paid it no mind. Soon I realized that we were circling, driving down the same street again. “There’s a dog,” he said, “bastard doesn’t chase anyone but me. Here he comes.” He pointed, and sure enough a small brown and black beast bounded from a yard. It fell into place beside the truck, two or three feet from the wheels, barking ferociously. “We’ll go around and do the other drops and come back here later. Maybe he’ll be inside.” His voice quavered.

I laughed. “It’s cool,” I said. “I’ll drop the package. I got a special way with dogs. They like me.” This was in no way true, but I hated to see that kind of fear in a grown man. I wanted to get the drop over with as soon as possible and put Deon’s fear out of my mind. It was embarrassing to behold.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” I said. “He’s all bark.”

“Okay…” He slowed and I vaulted through the door. I hit the ground fast and stumbled, then found my footing and sprinted for the house. The vicious little hound streaked for me, snarling and howling. I dropped the package and doubled back. It wouldn’t bite me, it was all bark. But the thing leapt for me, fangs bare. I ducked to the side and it sailed past. Before it could recover and mount a new assault I was in the truck. Deon gave it gas and the truck roared away.

“Hoo-ha!” I crowed. Exultation filled me. One thrilling encounter with a savage beast per day would make me a happy man. We drove a few blocks away and Deon parked with one wheel cocked rakishly over the curb. He put his head on the wheel and his arms over his head. Then, to my utter astonishment, a sob shook him, and another. He cried, muffled by his arms, and I squirmed in profound awkwardness. He stopped soon enough and wiped his face.

“Last time I saw my little girl,” he said, staring straight ahead, “her mama threw me out. I walk through the door and give my baby a hug and her mama says, ‘Nuh-uh. Get on out, nigger. You worthless. No good.’ And she spit on me, Leo! Right here!” He indicated his cheek. “I had nothin to say. Couldn’t say nothin to that. Couldn’t spit back. Couldn’t hit her. My little girl, she looked at me like – I don’t know. But I had to go right then, and I ain’t seen her since.”

I didn’t know what to say. What can you say to that? No advice or expression of comfort would fail to sound idiotic and useless. So I just squeezed his shoulder in a vague gesture of manly support. “All right. That’s kind of random, Deon.”

“Every time I pick up the phone to call her, I think of that fuckin dog.”

“I see,” I said. I did not see. Something occurred to me. “Hey, if you run over that dog in the course of duty, are you liable, or is the company?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’d be worth finding out,” I said.

So ended my first day. I got home after dark and banged on the door. I wore my uniform and carried a box under my arm. My wife opened the door. “Yes?”

“I have a package for you, miss,” I said. “I also have this box.”

“Oh, my, UPS man, do come in. Let me fetch you a beer. You just sit down.” Lexi got a Shiner and sat on my lap. She put a finger to her lips and arched an eyebrow in speculation. “Hmm,” she said, “what can Brown do for me?”

I told her about my day. She told me about her day and what her mother had done now and why she was going crazy. We baked chicken and potatoes and ate while watching television; afterwards I kissed her and she said, “My head hurts,” so that was that. “I have a long day of falling out of trucks tomorrow,” I said, and we went to bed.

In the last ten minutes of sleep, a vision came to me, an idea of amazing perfection and focus. I dreamed out a rock musical with a complete score. It was called “Here Comes the King.” A sleepy seaside village is shocked one day to see a King rising from the waters. He is the Burger King mascot, with the full robes and the big plastic face. The King merrily informs them that their lives are now his; those who dissent are decapitated and those who comply are likewise decapitated (the King can’t trust them). He rounds up all the women for his harem and enslaves the men in the construction of an enormous statue, a colossal likeness of the King. They doubt his power, so he rockets into the sky and flies out over the ocean, then plunges beneath the waves. He reappears shortly thereafter, hauling a whale by a fin. The King slices the whale open from stem to stern, and there, in its belly, is his throne made of bones. The bones are made of gold. The throne is crowned with sharpened femurs. The King rocks out on a double-necked guitar, the villagers dance, and a redhead harem slave teaches him the true meaning of love.

I sprang out of bed, knowing that I must record this magnum opus before it evaporated from my brain, and scribbled fragments of the libretto on a legal pad, chuckling at their wit, astounded that my subconscious had come up with such a bizarre yet intriguing creation. Then the words came slower, the melodies grew vague, and I re-read what I had written. It was garbage. I crumpled the paper and bounced it off Lexi’s forehead. She went “hmm” in her sleep and rubbed her nose. Deep dissatisfaction settled over me. A tremendous creative impulse had burned in my brain and been frustrated, stifled like a roman candle firing in a plastic bottle. I climbed onto Lexi’s recumbent form. “How can I give you everything within me?” I whispered, and bit her ear. She whimpered and backhanded my left eyeball. I tried not to sound banal, but naked emotion always sounds banal. “I have many hundreds of ambitions and hopes, all frustrated,” I said, and licked her cheek. She elbowed my temple and said, “mmm.” I went to work, strange thoughts percolating through my brains all the way.

My meditation technique:

The park is windswept and barren in winter. All the trees are bare of leaves, all the grass is brown and dead. I sit on a bench and the wind howls around me. I close my eyes and use the cold to transport myself to the moon, where the vacuum rips the oxygen from my lungs molecule by molecule, like bubbles rising from champagne. The molecules effervesce through my skin. I am completely alone, of course, and as I die, I behold the entire world. It looms in the blackness before me and fills up the whole sky. Distance renders its affairs picayune; my perspective grants me perfect clarity. That I don’t know the content of this clarity doesn’t matter; I simply acknowledge this clarity, and that’s enough to grant me a comprehensive if vague understanding of the day-to-day. It always works. I always go home filled with beneficence and patience sufficient to annoy everyone around me.

I met Deon at the CVS again. He was excited. “I asked, man, and guess what? The company takes liability as long as damages aren’t over two hundred dollars. And that dog’s a mutt! Can’t be worth more than fifty. What you think?”

“Maybe fifty,” I said.

“Today’s my girl’s birthday,” he said. “She’s seven.”

“That’s great. D’you get her anything?”

“We got only four hundred packages today,” he said. “Should be able to get this knocked out by seven.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” I said. We got to work. My seatbelt was broken. I had to mash the button repeatedly and tug on the buckle every time. Policy required that I wear it whenever the truck was moving, so it slowed us down quite a bit. I quit wearing it. I quit using the seat, too. I just stood in the cab and held on tight as we careened around corners on two wheels. We came to a nice two-story house with white columns flanking the door. Very tasteful. “I can’t deliver this package,” I said. “I had sex with that man’s daughter, and he knows it.”

“Bullshit,” Deon said.

“Really!”

“Just do it! Ring the bell and shout ‘UPS!’ and you’re done!”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Man, you can’t let this sort of bullshit hang you up. You got to face your fears.”

“Says the guy who’s scared of a little brown mutt.” That was too far. I regretted it. But Deon just grinned and punched me in the shoulder.

“Is,” he looked at the package, “Mr. Worley gonna bite you?”

“He very well might.” This whole time, of course, we were parked on Worley’s front yard, with a string of Christmas lights crushed under the tires, so the man himself stepped out to receive us. He was a tall guy, and he had “Semper Fi” tattooed across one muscular bicep, and I admit I was very much afraid of him. I sprang out of the truck, thrust the package at him, mumbled “UPS”, and pivoted on my heel.

“Do I have to sign for it?” he said.

Shit. He did. I got the pad out and punched up the signature screen.

“Thanks,” he said, scrawling his name in big block letters, “Leo.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. Then, because I am an idiot, I added, “How’s Sally?”

“She’s doing well! She just started med school. Yep! That kid’s going places.”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s really great.”

“How long you been at UPS?”

“Uh, I’m just working here for the season. A little extra cash, ya know. Nothing permanent.” I waved, a gesture encompassing the magnificent career before me.

“What’s your degree?”

I winced. “Communications.”

“I see.” He crossed his arms and nodded. “Yeah, you might wanna consider staying on at UPS. I understand they got great benefits. You might not be able to get something that good in the field of… communications.”

“We got to get going. Great seeing ya, Mr. Worley.”

“Mmhmm. I think our pool guy has a communications degree. No, wait. He has a communications MA. Have you considered that field? What about landscaping?”

“Don’t think I could handle it. Talk to ya later, Mr. Worley!” I ran back to the truck. My ears burned and I took off my hat to let the cold assuage my embarrassment.

“Not so bad!” Deon laughed.

“Fuck off and die,” I said. Mr. Worley stood in the yard and watched the truck until we drove around the corner. I wadded my hat in my hands and thought, “I am on the surface of the moon. I am on the surface of the moon.”

That whole day I gleefully anticipated our delivery to Dog Street. The moment of adrenaline – the rush of the canine lunge – the snap of jaws on empty air! Exhilaration! We ate our bag lunches in the parking lot behind 7-11 and while we ate I told Deon of an article I had read that morning. Five years ago, some teenage hooligans hurled a chunk of concrete from an overpass. It smashed through a woman’s windshield and shattered her collarbone. It tore the skin from her shoulder, neck, and cheek. Stunned, she drove her car into a pylon. She was paralyzed from the waist down, disfigured from the waist up. The paper interviewed her. They wanted to know how she had coped with her crippling injuries for five years. She wanted her anonymous attackers to know that they had been forgiven.

“Someone did that to me, they wouldn’t be forgiven,” Deon said. “They’d be dead.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are you gonna extract bloody vengeance when you’re in a wheelchair? This lady can barely talk, she’s in so much pain.”

“Well,” he said, and continued eating. Deon was a very picky eater. He ate cucumbers, carrots, and yogurt every day for lunch. He was rail-thin. He ate circumspectly, nibbling his food and chewing it seventeen times before swallowing (I counted). The yogurt he ate in maddeningly small spoonfuls. Deon knew we were about to deliver to Dog Street. I could tell he was thinking about it. His spoon-hand shook and the yogurt rippled.

“Deon,” I said, “So what if it bites you? Won’t kill you. It’s a twenty-pound little bastard, Deon. No reason to be scared of it.”

“Shuddup,” he said.

“You got plans tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Not gonna see your little girl on her birthday?”

“Fuck you.”

“You could at least call her. My dad’s a total deadbeat. Only time I talk to him is on my birthday and Christmas. But he always calls. And it’s stupid, but I really appreciate that.”

“Her mama spit on me.”

“So what? You’re above that shit, Deon.”

He crumpled up his lunch bag and tossed it into the dumpster. He looked at me, and the sudden ferocity in his eyes startled me. “If I were that woman,” he said, his voice unsteady but fierce, “I’d find out who those bastards were. I’d go to all the gas stations nearby and get their security tapes, and put out an ad asking for information, and hire a private investigator, and all that shit, and get their names. And then I’d wait until they grew up, until maybe they had real jobs and wives and kids, and then I’d come after them. Wheelchair or not. I’d learn their schedules, and buy me a gun, and catch them alone, on a rainy street at night, and the last thing they’d hear would be my wheelchair, going squeak squeak, squeak squeak behind them.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Deon had constructed a fiction, like my Burger King fantasy. I understood. “That’s pretty fucked up, Deon.”

“But you believe I’d do it.”

“I don’t know, Deon.”

“Just you wait.”

We headed for Dog Street. Deon hadn’t said a single word since we left the 7-11. I got the deliveries for Dog Street lined up and ready to go. I wanted to move fast. This time I would lead the bastard on a wild chase – first, a contest of maneuverability, where I’d jump over lawn furniture and duck under clotheslines and maybe vault a fence. Then a flat-out race for the truck, my speed matched against his. God! It was going to be great!

The mutt streaked out of the yard like he’d been fired from a cannon, barking, barking. He fell into step beside the truck, not three feet from me, lips curled back, fangs exposed, hate roiling in his carnivore eyes. I stood in the doorway, gripping the handles, muscles tensed, ready to leap –

I almost fell out of the truck. Deon swerved, hard, and the huge tires rolled right over the mutt. A half-yelp escaped it, but the wheels crunched down, bones and organs pulped under their weight; the truck rolled on, leaving a lumpy red smear on the road. I dropped onto the bitch-seat. “You did it,” I gasped. “You crazy bastard, you really did it!”

“Hoo-ha!” he cried. Tension broke on his face, a big insane grin pent up too long. His hands shook on the wheel as visible relief rattled him. “Hoo-ha!” He began to speak, but his relief was too great for words; he only sobbed with laughter. I laughed, too. It was great.

We laughed until we cried. Deon took another street and stopped the truck. We laughed and wiped the tears and mucus from our faces. We laughed until it hurt. The laughter subsided in long shuddering bursts of giggles. Still chuckling, I picked up the package for that stop. I shook my head as I ran it to the door. I was light and bouncy. When I got back to the truck Deon had his cell phone out.

The End

I love dogs. It is not remotely funny to kill one, though sometimes, sadly, it is dramatically necessary.
Next week we will begin the truly epic tale of Crocodopolis.

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