Things Withered (11 page)

“His name’s really Raymond,” David said.

The warehouse went into a temporary shutdown, but most of the guys saw the writing on the wall. Everybody went back to work the next day, but little was accomplished. They mostly did things half-heartedly, and it wasn’t just because the boss was dead, because even Daisy seemed drag-ass and uncertain. They mostly stood around in a clutch talking about the possible reasons the old guy did himself in. That’s what they said,
did himself in.
Not once did they say,
committed suicide
, for instance, or
killed himself
. It was mafia movie talk. Harris’s widow, Justine, had come around a couple of days after the funeral—which most of the guys attended, since no one got docked for funerals. She said that there were a number of
issues
that had to be
dealt with
and that they were shutting down for a few days so they could get an accountant in to take a look at the company’s
viability.

“With pay, of course. At least for the first week,” she said. Her face was red, but not with tears or grief, they all agreed, but embarrassment. No one expected either full pay or their job at the end of the
viability
thing.

“Guess he went broke,” Barry said. They stood around Daisy’s desk after Mrs. Harris left. Only Daisy sat, looking defeated. David realized Daisy would lose his job, too. His was a cushy job. Ever since Harris had done himself in, Daisy had wandered around in a kind of haze, mouthing the same trash he’d always said, but without conviction.

“Tough break, you finding him like that,” Osprey, who worked in Receiving, said. He grinned. “Screamed like a little girl, didn’t ya?”

Only David and Daisy had seen the body. The other guys didn’t have a snapshot of Harris to carry around inside their heads, tucked into a file folder inside their heads, with their girlfriend’s Aunt Beddy in a pool of tomato soup. Harris had been much worse, of course. His face all purple like a face shouldn’t be. He knew it ran through Daisy’s mind, too, because Daisy glared at Osprey.

“Shut your mouth, asswipe,” he said. Osprey did. Daisy was still foreman, at least until the end of the day.

There were handshakes all around at quitting time.

David wanted to find work at another warehouse after they closed down Manitoba Shipping, but Myra thought he should set his sights a little higher. “Apply at the meat plant,” she said. “But not in shipping. Shipping is where they put the imbeciles, and you’re no imbecile, David. You’ve got to start thinking bigger.”

He’d told her, of course, his reason for going into Mr. Harris’s office in the first place that day, and she was thrilled with his gumption. She’d wanted to hear what he was going to say. When he gave her his little speech (without the handshake) she nodded with approval.

“You probably would have got it,” she said. There had been a final cheque from Man Shipping but missing forever was the 3% evaluation raise. There were no letters of reference, although there was a contact number they could use for “enquiries.” He figured at his next job interview, he would just explain what happened when they asked him,
why did you leave your last position?

My employer did himself in. Just kidding.

He would never say it like that.

David went drinking with some of the guys he worked with at the warehouse on the Friday night after the big to-do, and got very drunk.

“You know,” he slurred to Shamus, who worked mostly at the dock, “Life is very fragile. One minute you’re there, and
poof
!” he snapped his fingers and leaned indelicately close. “And the next minute you’re lying in front of the TV, in a bowl of soup.”

“Hey, did he shit his pants?”

“Huh?” David slurped beer from the bottle. The table was littered with empties, the waitresses busy on Friday nights.

“Harris. He shit his pants? I heard you shit your pants when you die. Especially when you kill yourself.”

“I dunno.”

“That would be an awful thing to happen. So private, you know?”

David nodded sagely. “Dying should be private.” Then indignantly, “People should die on their
own
time.”

Lorna had called seven times between Tuesday, when David found Mr. Harris hanging from the beam in his dirty office, and Thursday when he went back to work. Myra had counted. The first time she called Myra told her that David was napping in front of the TV. After a few calls, Lorna finally got through to David and Myra had to listen to only one side of the conversation. It consisted of a series of, “Ya, Ma’s” followed once in awhile with an “Aw,
Ma
.” The other two calls had been for Myra, exclusively.

“Is he there?” Lorna asked covertly.

“Yeah,” Myra said, “I’ll get him.”

“No! I want to talk to you.”

Myra rolled her eyes, but no one was looking. David had been on the couch—his usual spot—watching
Jeopardy!
. Myra listened to Lorna at the same time she listened to David answering Alex Trebeck. He never answered in the form of a question; he always just said, “Connecticut,” or “leatherback turtle.” It drove Myra mildly crazy. Between the two of them, she could have
spit
crazy.

“Is he all right, Myra? In your opinion, is he all right?”

“Of course he’s all right.
He
didn’t die.”

“I realize that,” she sniffed. “It’s just that this sort of thing can have an effect on people. David is delicate.”

“No he’s not.”

There was a long pause, during which Myra rolled her eyes a couple more times. Then Lorna said, “Where is he now? Is he lying down?”

“He’s watching
Jeopardy!
.”

“Should I come by, do you think?”

“Everything’s fine, Lorna. He’s going back to work. The problem now will be whether or not he still has a job.”

“They can’t fire him for this!”

Myra held back a sigh. “Well they wouldn’t fire him for
that
. The owner of the company is dead. That might cause some problems. David said they weren’t doing very well or something. Maybe that’s why he did it.”

“Mmmm,” Lorna said, thoughtfully. “Myself, I would suspect marital problems. No one kills themselves over business.”

“What about the stock market crash in ’29? Didn’t people jump out of buildings and stuff?” She grinned evilly, but did not add,
You must remember that.

“Mm,” Lorna said again. There was another pause while the two women tried to think of something more to say. “Well, I suppose I should iron my uniform for tomorrow.”

“Yes, probably,” Myra said.

There was a breath and what sounded like the beginning of a word on the other end. “Did you say something?” Myra said.

“Well,” she said, “since you asked, there is something I wanted to bring up, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way, Myra.”

“Shoot.”

“I don’t think right now is a good time to go and get yourself pregnant again,” she said in a single rush.

Get myself pregnant?

“What are you talking about?”

“I just think that this is a bad time—with David’s job up the air, you never know what the fallout from this sort of thing will be—”

Myra took a quick peek into the living room. David was staring at the TV, looking just fine. “First, I did not get
myself
pregnant. What am I, a plant? And second of all, I don’t know why you’re bringing this up now. We have no plans to get pregnant.”

“Please don’t be offended, Myra. That was not my intention—” she said, with the same huff. “It’s just that with what happened with your aunt, now this situation, I don’t—”

“Lorna, I have to go. Nice talking to you. Everything is fine. We’ll see you Sunday.” And she hung up. Myra counted to twenty. Then to thirty. Eventually she was able to call into the other room, “Hey, David, you want dinner?”

Life was too short. As David lay on the couch, watching
Jeopardy!
and thinking about how fragile life was, listening to the comforting drone of Myra’s voice on the phone in the other room, he made a decision.

What would happen to him if something happened to Myra? What would he do without her?

He would have to marry her, he decided. Before it was too late.

On Friday night, David, red-faced and as earnest as he’d ever been in his life, asked Myra to marry him, asking her as she walked in through the door after her shift at the plant.

“This is so sudden,” she said, without a trace of irony.

“Well,” he said, “are you going to?”

She laughed a little. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “Of course I am. We were always going to, weren’t we?”

“I guess so, yeah,” he said. They grinned and decided to go out. Before they did, Myra called her mother and her sisters. “Hey,” she said, “David and I are getting married.” They went out for dinner, and except for that one little thing, everything was the same as it had always been, just a little more solid.

On Sunday they told Lorna when they showed up for supper at five o’clock. Without a word to David, she turned to Myra and said, “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to get pregnant.”

“
Ma!
”

“I’m not pregnant, Lorna,” Myra said.

Lorna looked down at Myra’s belly as though there might be a flashing sign. “Then why are you getting married?” she demanded.

“
Ma!
”

“No reason,” Myra said, and pushed past Lorna, into the living room where she turned on the TV and made small talk for the rest of the evening, bringing up the pending wedding about forty-six times. Her jaw was tight; David could see the muscles working there when she spoke. Lorna, for her part, seemed quiet.

Myra held back with the guys at the meat plant, not saying anything for a week, about David asking her to marry him. There was an intimacy working the line that you had to experience to understand. On the surface it usually looked just like bantering and kibitzing; whatever jokes were making the rounds usually got heard on the line. Everybody had a nickname, and the nickname never left the plant.

Joe Alexander was “Rocky,” because he sparred at a place downtown. He was a most unlikely looking boxer, skinny from head to foot, with a chest that seemed to have been deflated, like a beach ball that had lost some of its air. Plus he was a real gentle guy.

Tami Clammoti was called Tammy Faye after the long-dead Tammy Faye Bakker, some evangelist’s wife mostly famous for wearing too much makeup and having a jailbird husband. She didn’t wear too much makeup, though, and she wasn’t married to a preacher, but she was already named Tami, and that was her misfortune. The line was rife with middle-aged tabloid readers.

Bradley was Badly. That came from an accident with the slicer.

Sue Ellen Morgan was Vegas cause that’s all she ever talked about from Christmas until the end of February when she and her husband went off on one of those under-$300, round trip weekends to gamble. She talked about gambling for months and planned strategy, and wondered out loud about ways to beat the club, but as far as Myra knew, never won anything substantial.

Arlen Tibbs was Dube and since he was there before Myra, she didn’t know how he got his nickname, and considering, it wasn’t something she was going to ask about.

Everybody had a nickname.

Myra was Baby Girl, because when she started, she was the youngest person on the line. She still was.

But, after David found the second dead guy, the guys on the line—Badly particularly—had taken to calling her Crypt Keeper, like the bony dead thing from the comics. She was good-natured about it, and thought it wouldn’t last, that they would—even if just out of habit—go back to calling her Baby Girl eventually.

Things on the line, though, moved slowly and every day, every minute, really, was much like the last. After your first few days your hands flew, and your mind wandered, searching constantly for things to amuse it. Something, anything, different was welcomed, embraced. Even Vegas’s constant rattling on about gambling was welcomed by the time it came around; she always had a new scheme and everyone put their two cents in, having seen such and such on TV the night before, having read this and that in a magazine at the doctor’s office (where they were probably having stitches removed from an accident with the slicer).

As such, in the constant search for novelty, stories about one’s life outside the line came naturally. There was an intimacy, a familiarity, about everyone’s life that didn’t exist in friendships outside the line. The others literally knew everything about you. It came up as naturally as the weather, and was discussed as deeply as the bomb and the end of the world and the possibility that the current president (whoever he might be) was the Antichrist.

When Tammy Faye lost her baby and was off the line for a few weeks, Myra told everyone about her and David and their pregnancy in high school. When Rocky’s girlfriend went in to have a mole removed, everyone heard about everyone else’s surgeries. They knew who was fixed and who wasn’t. They knew about every close call ever experienced in and out of marriage. They knew that Dube’s brother was gay. They knew Badly had once been part owner of a thriving computer business and that his partner had absconded with all the assets leaving Badly with all the debts and nowhere to go but down with the ship. They knew his wife left him over it, packing up the kids and moving to Kitchener, and that he only got to see them a couple of times a year at best. They knew that he considered it his own damn fault because he had left all the accounting to his partner, never once even looking at the books, which had not just been cooked, but fried. They knew he was up late into the night sometimes thinking about the what-ifs and making himself crazy and getting an ulcer.

They all knew Trace had gotten herpes from her ex-husband and that she hadn’t had sex since 1999 because she left him over it and couldn’t face telling someone about it. They were all sorry for her, and after the first couple of weeks of knowing, got over not wanting to touch her, stand near her, or certainly, eat anything she touched. No one ever offered to fix her up, though. They all knew that Tammy Faye and her husband were trying to have a baby and that she took her temperature every day at lunch and sometimes met him in the parking lot. They speculated as to what they were doing out there, but no one ever—not even in a spirit of fun—went out there to see. They talked about it every time, though, grinning when she snuck out.