The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter Nine
Having failed to interpret a delivery time estimate of “between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.” as 5:00 p.m., I found myself waiting, pacing, and waiting some more on the day my renovation supplies were supposed to arrive. You’d think I’d have factored in a two-hour lag time, minimum, considering the last experience I’d had with a delivery truck; but I took pride this day in keeping my calm as the afternoon frittered away.
Of course, the truck finally did arrive, a twenty-foot flatbed with a pierced and tattooed youth (aren’t they all, it seems) at its helm. He pulled up, parked his eight driver-side wheels on the sidewalk next to me, and hopped from his cab, his silver eyebrow ring flashing in the late afternoon sun as he strode my way.
“You Jim Kearns?” he asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“You wanna check over the order, then I can start unloading.” He handed me the clipboard in his hand.
I checked the order, noting the numbers of sheets of drywall, lengths of two-by-tens, screws, boxes of drywall compound, windows, the skylight, and the bevy of other items I barely recall being sold. I nodded, handed it back to him, and he began.
He started by deploying a hydraulic leg onto the sidewalk to stabilize that side of the truck, thus allowing him to swing out packages as large as twenty sheets of banded-together drywall on his boom arm without excessive listing, but somewhere between the hydraulic-leg unfurling and the actual boom-arm swinging, he took the time the climb back into his cab and crank up an Evanescence CD to volume ten.
At last prepared, there he stood: all ink and silver and sinew, a veritable video protagonist, the youth of today, glistening in the sun as he hooked his first big load and swung it out over our driveway, nodding his dyed-blonde, buzz cut–crowned, precious-metal pierced melon to the music blaring from the front of his truck as he worked.
And as I watched him, all I could think was this: What if it were 1967 right now and I were the same me, the about-to-turn-forty-six me, studying this kid as he bobbed away to an angst-filled wailing that I thought repetitive, droning, and, at its core, not much more than musical sniveling? Would I be thinking, Goddamned hippy? Then, as if on cue, in the periphery I noticed just a slice of Weir’s sly face poking through his living room blinds, that fancy-Dan, book-readin’ professor’s face that made me want to kick the shit out of him, and in the next instant I thought, Maybe that’s what I’m turning into: one of those dicks of the sixties, the Nixons and Daleys — the kind of dicks anxious to shake their fists and jowls at anything they couldn’t agree with or understand.
Eric and Rachel stood beside me now, I noticed, watching with me as the delivery guy operated his boom and Linden Avenue slipped into its post-work-hour bustle. But the traffic grew thicker than usual as the drivers, who normally exceeded the speed limit down our street at this time (to avoid the lights at Greenwood Avenue), found themselves slowing to stare at the delivery truck, too. Soon, they’d backed up from the stop sign at the south end of the street all the way to our house, forming a chain of idling vehicles spewing fumes from their hot pipeholes and into the air around us. The last car in this lineup, a slick sedan purring at the far end of the delivery truck, held a man in his late 50s with graying hair, white sideburns, a crisply tailored suit, and a flashing pinkie ring; he eyed Rachel covetously.
Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe in these days of my despair, I’d fallen prey to easy stereotyping, imagining the worst of everyone, not just myself, and that look in his eye was one of sheer appreciation of youth, or maybe fond remembrance of a granddaughter dandled on his knee. But he did give himself white-collar burn and possible whiplash when he noticed me noticing him performing his inspection.
The whole situation felt hot, ugly, and close, as if I were experiencing some semi-urban version of hell. I sucked on a cigarette and waited on edge, expecting … what? Blaring horns? An outthrust head, a neck thick with veins, and ensuing words over the congestion I was causing? Or just more of what was taking place — isn’t that what hell is all about? Then the driver dropped from his flatbed, landing nimbly beside me.
“Just the windows left,” he said.
“And . . .?” I replied.
“Well, the wood and drywall and stuff on your lawn can be unstrapped and each piece moved individually, but the windows and skylight are heavy suckers so I thought maybe you’d like a hand.” He looked at me, then to the kids, and added, “Unless, of course, you’ve got someone else to help you?”
“No, no. I’m by myself,” I said. “But you don’t have to—”
“It’s okay, man,” he said. “I showed late; it’s the least I can do.”
The windows lay prone on the flatbed; he unwinched their strapping and we grabbed the first one. Its weight didn’t seem so bad, maybe a hundred pounds, although the black ink from the numerous “CAUTION: FRAGILE” warnings printed all over its cardboard box added to its presence.
I barked out, “Be careful, okay guys?” to the kids (more in response to the looming vermin in their getaway cars than anything else) and we started walking towards the house. But by the time we’d reached the front door with our load, I discovered that I’d miscalculated my strength. Age, my recent lack of physical activity, the ever-present summer smog on top of the cigarettes: all these factors left me masking my inability to catch my breath. “We can leave them all on the porch if you want,” I said hopefully. “They’ll be safe here.”
But when the delivery guy found out the windows were headed for the third floor, he seemed even more enthusiastic.
“Yo, dude,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel right leaving you in the lurch like this.”
So we continued, with the driver shouldering more than his share of the load, whistling his Evanescence tunes in absence of the CD, and generally making me long for the comfort of the rush-hour street again, until we at last found ourselves at the foot of the pull-down stairs for the last time, with the two-hundred-pound (including the protective wood framing) skylight between us. What the hell had I been thinking when I’d been sold this thing? How was I going to install it?
But just getting it to the attic had become my first priority. It had been packaged with handles, at least, reducing its numerous disadvantages mostly to one, sheer weight, as we bulled it up through the third-floor opening. I pushed from the bottom and the driver pulled from the top, and for the few minutes we struggled with the thing, I tried not to think about the six hundred pounds (four hundred of it flesh and bone and glass perched above me) on that rickety old ladder.
When we’d finished, even the young guy looked worse for wear, his tight white T-shirt now soaked with sweat and powdered with third-floor silt. A charcoal smudge capped the tip of his nose, like he was auditioning for Cats. He looked around at the stripped-bare desolation of the room for a moment then peered out through the tiny, south-facing window.
“So, dude,” he said, not turning back to look at me. “Is this place, like, yours?”
“Yep.”
Maybe the question was stupid, or maybe it wasn’t: he probably dealt with contractors all day long. On the other hand, the way I’d talked to Rachel and Eric had to imply . . ..
He asked about them next. “And the kids? They’re yours, too?”
“Yeah. We’re all part of one big, happy package.”
He kept staring out at the city for a moment, his hands now on each side of the window frame, his torso forming a solid V against the sky behind the glass; he looked and behaved twenty years old, tops, and catching him in that pose made me wonder what he went home to in the evenings. His parent’s house? A pretty girlfriend and a well-furnished duplex? A bachelor apartment and a hotplate? A situation I couldn’t comprehend?
Without turning around, he admitted only this: “You’re a lucky man.”
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this short chapter. Next week, Rose tries to move a mountain - and yes, that is a reference to Mohammed.