Don was fired from the warehouse. I think it happened too fast for him to let it register. Everyone was taken by surprise. Maybe he didn’t give a shit. The only word that came to mind when I saw him in the back of the squad car was Indifference, as if he said, “Yeah, it happened.” When you work somewhere for as long as he had I suppose it could be considered time to leave anyway. When they pulled the bodies out you couldn’t recognize Craig or Nancy–it was just a pile of flesh and hair and blood and cardboard.
Don is an ex-heroin addict who spent time in San Quentin during the San Francisco Hippy era. After he was released he found a job working long hours in the shipping/receiving dock at the warehouse for Evans Electrical Wholesale. He still drinks and after I started working there he and I soon became somewhat of buddies. We’d finish work and close at five o’clock every day, and then it was off to the Sunken Steam for a few rounds as the sun set over Hell. We’d watch whatever was on the TV and I tried to keep him from the bowl of mixed nuts. “It all comes out my ass in the end!” he’d say. Then he’d laugh. He lost most of his teeth to the years of snorting drugs. The powders ate the enamel away, and then the rest rotted and fell out. When he got real drunk he’d take out his falsies and smile that big-gummed smile of his.
When I reached the warehouse at the end of lunch the cops already had Don in cuffs and the paramedics were hauling out what was left of Craig and Nancy. I saw it in his face–he didn’t feel at fault and I couldn’t blame him. After all, it was Craig and Nancy who snuck off to meet at the cardboard bailer and risk their lives while having sex inside of it every day–how was he to know?
At lunch, all of the employees leave their posts for the hour we were allotted and close down. The whole warehouse would go on lunch. All duties were dropped. Forklifts were parked, phone lines were re-routed to answering services, doors were closed and signs were flipped. Almost everyone would eat in the break room and some would go to the drive-thru and bring it back. For Craig and Nancy, when lunchtime came, they’d rendezvous in the deep dark corner of the warehouse away from the chitchat and away from their daily lives at the bailer. Craig would climb in first, scope it out, make sure it was safe, then assist Nancy in hopping the barrier. They’d remove their clothes very quietly and stack them in neat little piles and then lie down and get into it. If the bailer were too full they’d wait until the next day. They were very, very discrete. Who knows if they would have ever been caught.
Craig was a player, mid-twenties, a nightclub rat with too much cologne and a cheese-ball smile. He handled outside sales and made a damn good living off of it. Nancy had a husband who spent more time with his music than with her. She answered phones and processed orders and cooked dinners and was always in bed by 9. She went to church, and she didn’t smoke. Or drink. No kids. The vanilla lifestyle.
Maybe it was the anxiety of reaching almost forty (although you couldn’t tell she was almost forty with that body of hers) without any passion in her life that drove her towards Craig in the first place. The two crossed paths one day that led to coffee after work that led to dinner sometime that led to a hotel room encounter or two that led to the large steel machine with an industrial press that could turn a car into a blanket.
Out of a warehouse of twenty-eight people, it was Alice that Nancy confided in. She told Alice her dirty little secrets, all of them, leaving nothing to the imagination, and Alice never turned Nancy away. They’d meet before work and Nancy would unload on Alice their choice of different positions, their favored ways of breathing quiet so no one, not even Abraham the stock supervisor, would ever catch so much as a whisper if they were to walk by. She revealed to Alice the heat that she felt, the excitement, the love. This is what she had yearned for, and Alice became her high priestess, the saint who accepted her confessions and kept the world from knowing that Nancy loves anal, that Craig would drink raw eggs and take ginseng and zinc so his pop shots would spray all over Nancy, rope after rope. They kept this routine up for months without suspicion.
Then the day came. At twelve o’clock everyone dropped what they were doing to carry out their usual lunchtime activities, eat their take-out or brought-from-home lunches, discuss politics, sports, current events, the usual blah blah blah. Nancy wandered toward the bathroom and then made a break for the bailer. The night before, it had been emptied. Craig had already been waiting and embraced her with a kiss. All was right in the world.
Then they were off–Craig was the first one in, then Nancy. They had been going at it for a few minutes when Don had yet to start his lunch because “some brainless shithead forgot to stock the 2-pole breakers again!” He had gathered six large boxes, loaded a cart, stocked the breakers, and was just finishing cutting down the boxes when it hit lunchtime. Instead of waiting until after lunch, he brought the boxes to the bailer, threw them over and in, right on top of the couple in the mid-fuck. It stopped them for just enough time to freeze, laugh quietly to themselves out of embarrassment and hold still and silent until they thought whomever it was outside was gone.
As that was happening, Don grabbed the latch and slammed closed the barrier and punched the green button. The press kicked up a hiss, gears went into motion, the machine was on. Don had started walking away when the couple inside realized they were trapped. Unfortunately for them Don is deaf in one ear and from his distance he didn’t hear their cries or the desperate banging and kicking over the noise of the great machine. Towards the end of lunch Abraham walked by and noticed the blood spilt like an oil slick from underneath the bailer.
Don was charged with Involuntary Manslaughter and did about six months back at Quentin. I picked him up at the gates and he had grown a beard. The first thing he said to me was, “I need a drink. Let’s get to the Sunken Steam.” So I took him to the Sunken Steam and we ordered a couple of rounds.
Author: Lawrence Goodwin
