Men with Boxes
22nd Annual Tamarack Award
Fiction By Eric Braun
Photo by Darrell Eager (Photo Illustration)
(page 2 of 4)
THE BUS BOUNCED over potholes, and vehicles in the road sprayed smoke behind them into the dirty gray air. Someone was hollering into a cell phone: “Password is rock. R-O-C-K.” Robert got off at his stop and hurried past the bus-stop shelter, which smelled like urine, retracing the tracks he covered every day, past the Army surplus store, past the trendy nightclub where pro football players sometimes got arrested, and into his office building.
At 10:30 he was trying to decide if it was too early to eat his sandwich when Diane, his supervisor, called him to her office. He sat in a canvas chair with a photo of her and her husband facing him on the desk.
“I’ve been put in a bad spot,” she said, holding out a tin of mints. “A shitty spot.” Robert shook his head, and she closed the tin without taking a mint for herself. He’d never heard her swear before and understood that she was trying to make things more comfortable by acting as a peer, an ally.
She said, “All the time you’ve missed has been very destabilizing,” and before going on she dipped her head and squinted, as if through great concentration she could make sympathy shoot from her eyes like a superhero’s laser vision, like one of the characters Evan had just begun getting into: “We feel you need time to be with your family—your wife.” Since returning from his leave after the accident last summer, he’d missed another two months of work, an accumulation of single days when he stayed home with Vicki because she seemed dangerous, charged with anger—brawling with him over things like forks being tines-up in the dishwasher—or physically sick, the grief beating on her body. Sometimes he took her to the doctor. Diane had been supportive, if not a friend, through everything. She projected little personality but was reliable in the department, every day, doling out responsibility, praise, encouragement, and help in just the right amounts, just when they were needed. He decided to help her.
“Returns have been awful,” he offered.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “They have been awful.”
“I understand.”
She let out a breath. “This is for the best, Robert.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
The photo showed Diane and her husband inside a stone temple in Rome, and Robert wondered what time of day it had been when it was taken. He’d seen the photo four hundred times before, but now he wondered. Did they go to lunch afterward? Or maybe it was late, and they were about to go back to their hotel room. He tried to imagine it. All these people in Rome, out in large numbers even after dinner, wandering around, drinking coffee, returning to hotel rooms, or not. No worries. Vicki had cousins in Naples and had talked about visiting, maybe when Evan had turned five or six and could appreciate it. He could have looked at the temples and statues and catacombs. But they didn’t talk about that any more.
Diane was standing. “So,” she said.
“Right,” Robert said, rising. “Sorry.”
Together they walked in silence to shipping, picked up a cardboard box, and returned to his desk, and while she watched he filled it with his things—mostly books, and a bag of cough drops, and from the back of a drawer he pulled a framed snapshot of Vicki feeding Evan at ten months. Evan had just wrested the tiny, plastic-coated spoon from her hand, and the backlash from her release had sprayed rice cereal all over his face and space-shuttle jammies and the wall behind him. Vicki’s face was lit up in surprise and delight, her eyebrows leaping, her mouth a happy O. Evan’s eyes were on the spoon. Robert had shoved the photo into the back of the drawer when he returned to work after the accident last summer.
Outside, the sun blazed. Bright snow caked the boulevards like hard sugar; in parking lots it was plowed into piles the size of SUVs. He squinted as he stepped onto the bus, shifting his box under an arm and fumbling with his pass, and after sitting, the box on his lap, he took off his gloves and rubbed his eyes.
The bus chuffed away from the curb. Office buildings glittered, the streets shone clean and wet, people strolled along in sunglasses and no hats, as if the world had been lively and good after all, but only during the late-morning hours, when Robert had been moving figures on a spreadsheet, stuffing envelopes, and stamping checks. Robert had loved his job, was proud of it, and was sad to leave it, but it felt good to be riding through downtown Minneapolis on a beautiful winter morning with nothing to do tomorrow except—what? Make love to his wife, if she would. Or read to her. Shovel snow, listen to music, buy a dog and take it to the park. His day, his week, was blank: a yard of clean white snow.
His body pressed suddenly against the window, and he looked up in panic: The turn was too soon. He was on the wrong bus. “Crap.” He pulled the signal cord for a stop.
Compared to rush hour, the bus was dead. No ring tones or coughs, and none of the dozen passengers spoke. Each rubber handle swayed overhead like a silent wind chime. Whole rows were empty. Strange, then, that Robert hadn’t noticed until now, as he considered his path to the front of the bus, the man across the aisle who, like him, held a cardboard box—loaded with notepads, framed photos, a calculator, books, a toothbrush and toothpaste—wedged between his torso and the seat in front of him.
“Bad day,” Robert called, nodding at the man’s box and scooting from his window seat to the aisle.
The man looked over, registered Robert’s box, and offered the appropriate smile for the moment, one that showed he was strong but concealing worry and pain. They were two men against all the idiots of the world. “No kidding.” He had short hair and a young, fleshy face.
“How long were you at your job?” Robert asked.
“Eight years.”
“Wow, long time.”
The man nodded, fat bunching under his chin. “In sales. They took my company car on the spot.”
