Men with Boxes
22nd Annual Tamarack Award
Fiction By Eric Braun
Photo by Darrell Eager (Photo Illustration)
(page 3 of 4)
The driver pulled over, but Robert’s panic had subsided now, and he settled back into that feeling, like the yard of clean snow was opportunity. And anyway, when he thought of going home to tell Vicki he’d been fired, riding a few more stops didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
The driver waited.
“Didn’t you signal?” said the salesman.
“Hey, Third Ave!” the driver bellowed.
Robert looked around and shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
The bus drove back into traffic. Robert lifted his box, stood, wobbled briefly in the aisle, and slipped into the seat next to the salesman, pinning a corner of the man’s overcoat beneath his leg. The salesman bridged his eyebrows as if Robert had made a pass at him, but Robert just handed him a book. A column of black ants marched across its cover.
“You work at a bookstore or something?” the man said. He smelled of spearmint.
“Publishing.”
The salesman opened the book to a close-up photo of a leaf-cutter ant carrying a piece of leaf over its head. The leaf was about 20 times bigger than the ant, but the ant looked graceful. “Look at that,” Robert said, touching his finger to the glossy page. “That’s beautiful.”
The bus slowed to another stop. Riders who climbed on and off looked at the two men with their boxes crammed in right next to each other. Outside, a young woman in heels slipped and fell, and three plastic-wrapped men’s shirts scattered from her shopping bag across the sidewalk. Her friend helped her up. Robert said, “They’re playing baseball down in Florida.”
“That’s where I’d like to be,” the salesman said reflexively.
“Now’s our chance, right? Green grass. Short sleeves. Crack of the bat.”
“Sounds good,” the man agreed, but he squirmed closer to the window. The skirt of his overcoat still stuck under Robert’s leg. He handed back the book, and Robert put it away.
The two men folded their arms on top of their boxes.
Employees were allowed to claim hurt books, a privilege Robert had taken full advantage of because he enjoyed learning about new subjects and because he thought reading nonfiction to Evan was better for his cognitive development than reading him fiction, whether he could follow the logic or not, which, of course, he rarely could, even in the final and most mature year of his life, when he was three. Simply hearing the rhythm and cadence of facts was what mattered. So Robert had brought many books home over the years: Lions, Dolphins, Manatees, Bessie Coleman, Betsy Ross, Canada, Colombia, Kwanzaa, How a Bill Becomes a Law. Dozens of others. Evan got to hear storybooks from Vicki and from Robert’s older sister Carol, and when Carol was over and they had all three together put Evan to bed, and taken turns reading him a book, one apiece, and kissed his forehead and smoothed his hair, and then were back downstairs drinking wine amid the napkins and dripping candles at the dinner table, the women teased Robert because he couldn’t let anything, even something as sweet and plain as putting a child to bed, just be what it was and not a part of an equation. The solving of the problem of how to optimize cognitive development. His and Carol’s dad had never read to them except sometimes baseball recaps from the paper, and Robert was determined to be a better dad than that.
After Carol had gone home, Robert and Vicki crept up the creaky steps to their room, where they undressed without speaking by the light of a small lamp. Vicki seemed already asleep when he pulled the lamp’s chain and crawled in next to her, but after a moment she said, “Read me a story.”
“The light’s off.”
“Read me that fairy tale about how coal is turned into electricity.” More teasing. She touched his ankle with her toes.
He said, “They burn it in these tall silos.”
“Yeah?”
He said, “The heat rises up and turns these turbines.”
They were quiet for a few moments, and Evan coughed in his sleep, and Robert tried to remember if he’d blown out the candles, and then he remembered he had, and he tried to remember locking the doors, and then he remembered doing that. He’d nearly released himself to sleep when Vicki said, “I’m a lucky woman,” and he was pretty sure she was only partly joking.
Days later Evan was killed, and she hadn’t joked since then. She was filled with rage like a snowstorm—cold and softly building. Soon, she would be snowed in. She hated the babysitter and she hated the person driving the minivan that hit the babysitter’s car, both of whom suffered only minor injuries. Robert, though, had been desperate to connect with Donnie. He’d wanted it to be true that he could help him heal. So he returned to talk again the night after that first night in Donnie’s room. This time he asked about the cast on his hand.
“You know what I did?” Donnie said, looking at it.
“I’m asking.”
“I collected a jelly jar full of bugs. Mostly ants, and a couple ladybugs. Even a potato bug.”
“Okay.”
“Got it, like, halfway full. It took forever. I would’ve collected more, but it takes forever.” Donnie bounced the racquetball back to Robert and pretended to pick ants from his bedspread.
“Sure.”
“And then I poured a little orange juice in there, and pounded it.”
“Come on.”
“Yeah. And I ate a dog turd.”
