I Got Pictures, Candy, I'm A Lovable Man

He drove. Slowly, carefully, suspension creaking and groaning from all the extra weight it was ferrying. It was July, he was about wrung out from the oppressive heat, and all he wanted to do was give up and go sit in the house in front of a fan to wait for the liquidators. But for some reason, he persevered.

There had been a massive recall at Bil Mar: several people had died of listeria poisoning. The factory was shut down; since he was part time, he was shown the door till it was safe to pack meat once more. To make ends meet, he was delivering phone books. Every day, he drove to the warehouse, loaded up his car, and headed out to a different neighborhood. Every book had to be stuffed in a plastic bag; the good routes had hooks attached to curbside boxes that he could hang the book on, and the bad routes had mail boxes or slots up on the house. At these homes, he was supposed to get out of the car, walk the book to the front step, and set it down gently. Since he was getting 27 cents a book, this was not exactly cost effective. So he tried mightily to hustle rural or suburban routes with the handy hooks. If a route he delivered was discovered to be substandard, he could be docked or even not paid. It was a lousy-ass way to make a living. Most of the other people who were doing this job worked in teams, or had children-slaves to stuff bags and run to doorsteps. He was flying solo. Of course.

On this day, at about 5 PM, he was dead tired. He'd delivered all the books he had bagged in the front and back seats, but could not remember for the life of him whether he had any more bundles of books left in the trunk. A small boy was passing on a bike, here on this subdivision street. No sidewalks, no curbs, rural mailboxes. He rolled down his window and popped his trunk. "Excuse me. Could you please tell me if I have any books in my trunk?"

The boy was about eight. He looked at him, then at the open trunk. His eyes got wider and wider; his mouth opened, and a wail began then spiraled into panicked shrieks. He turned his bike and pedaled away as fast as he could, shrieking.

He hadn't exactly thought it through, had he? It had never occurred to him that instead of appearing to be what he was, a dead-tired dead-broke redneck in a beat-up Buick trying to earn an honest living, he had appeared to this small child as a sweaty, leering kidnapper. He decided that this particular route had better be finished another day, as he did a U turn, burning a bit of rubber as he fled the scene of the non-crime. Why couldn't anything ever be easy?