Just as Big Bertha neared the edge, when the pallet was in position to be dropped, Jeremy pretended to pump the brake, in case someone might be watching. The battery engine whined with the weight of the load, but Bailey did not look up.
It was part of his job to align the heavy skids at the dock’s edge for the early pickups.īailey was crouched low by the wall, scuffing at a flattened cigarette pack, when Jeremy rolled Big Bertha toward the edge. He had slipped the forks into a pallet of fifty-pound bags of Sakrete. When Bailey came from the elevator and jumped off the dock, broom in hand, and prepared for his first swath along the edge of the dock wall, Jeremy angled Big Bertha toward the bobbing head. The brakes were soft: often Big Bertha rolled ten feet before stopping. The electrical connections in Big Bertha were loose the Forward pedal often had to be pumped to connect. Doran is an undergraduate at Harvard University. Jeremy mounted Big Bertha, the orange heavy-duty forklift, and waited for Bailey to enter the parking pit. Bent over the broom, he would not be able to see over the top of the dock. Jeremy knew Bailey would come back down in a few minutes to sweep off the asphalt. Jeremy had heard him say it regularly for three months, since he had quit his nonthinking, private-minded assembly-line job at Westinghouse and had come crosstown to work at the hardware wholesale warehouse in Concordia, Indiana, and had met Bailey, whom the other workers seemed able to ignore. Bailey always said he would spit his Copenhagen juice anywhere, even on the company president’s white shirt, if he felt like it. He inspected the brown stain on the toe of his boot. Jeremy dropped the pallet of handles at the bin for Cleveland’s Express, always the first to make a pickup, leaving then for the mills in next-door Chicago. He had been on his way upstairs with empty trash barrels when Jeremy had met him at the elevator. Bailey swept out the parking area each morning before the big warehouse doors opened. He rode near the edge of the platform lined with splintering timbers that buffeted the rude rear bumpers of the trailers backing in, starting at nine (still half an hour away), to make their first deliveries and pickups.
Jeremy steered the lift along the dock, not looking back at Bailey. Bailey stood aside, the fringe of his blond mustache tipped with tobacco juice. The cold control lever felt strong in his palm. Still staring at the floor, he balanced on the tip of the forklift, above the single front wheel, and rolled out the load. The day had not even begun he had not even hung his jacket in his locker. Unspeaking, Jeremy watched the juice darken the worn leather of his ankle boot. Bailey spat, and the spurt of juice, spreading like a tiny fisherman’s net, flattened on the toe of Jeremy’s boot. As Jeremy stepped from the elevator to lead out his lift, he heard Bailey gurgle his tobacco juice. Tilting the barrel, he rolled it to one side of the elevator door. Al Bailey stood exposed, leaning on a trash barrel, grinning at Jeremy like a man on stage. With one foot on the rattling load of shovel handles from the fourth floor, Jeremy slid the control lever to D and sank to the ground floor, He hauled on the canvas-web belt, and the front wall split in two, half sliding up, half sliding down the bell stopped ringing. The building muttered like a bedtime house, wood floors creaking, solitary footsteps going for drinks of water but the elevator bell still hammered beside Jeremy’s right ear.
The upper stories were still cool from the night electric fans had cleared the indoor air of diesel fumes from the previous day of shipping and receiving.
The dark plank floors sounded with short, heavy heelsteps as men turned from aisles of wholesale hardware to load pallets for Jeremy to run to the dock with his forklift. Occasionally a finished order in a tight box rattled down a ramp of chrome rollers to the shipping room. The rest of the morning workers, hushed with hurry throughout the five floors of the warehouse, were finishing orders halfpacked and piled the day before, boxes of hardware with gummed labels slapped wetly askew when the horn had blown at five. He wanted to start early to help the day go more easily. Jeremy had taken the elevator to the fourth floor as soon as he had punched in he still wore his gray jacket with elastic cuffs. Someone was calling from the warehouse dock, leaning on the button. SOMEONE was ringing impatiently from below, and Jeremy was trapped with the bell in the elevator when he slammed shut the door.
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