by Nancy Adams
The moment he did, I reached for my phone and made a call.
JOSH
These past weeks, my sexual tension had been growing inside of me like wildfire through a dry timber wood, and, after Sarah’s earlier rebuff, it had been all I could think about in the shower. Now, driving to the store, it remained with me like smoke clinging to cloth. Her talk of marriage had seethed inside of me. I wanted her so bad, so very bad, and couldn't recall the last time I’d experienced such a barren spell in my sex life. The animal in me saw instant shades of red when she’d talked of marriage. “Marriage!?” it had cried out indignantly. “Fuck marriage, give me your body now. Give it to me!”
And now I was driving dutifully to the store, when I should have been driving her body dutifully to ecstasy!
“Fuck it!” I exclaimed out loud and tapped the steering wheel with the palm of my hand.
I just had to let it go. It was another test, like walking away from my father, or getting that god-awful job. Another test that would prove my love for her and prove my worth in this world, prove that I was determined to be good. I had to stay strong, had to build up a wall of resolve that would morph me into a better person.
Twenty minutes after setting off, I made it to the main store. I walked in, down the cluttered aisles, found the coffee, big jar as requested, paid for it, and was soon driving back to the apartment. Another twenty minutes and I was parking up in the lot, grabbing the coffee and trundling back up to the apartment, my legs and back still aching from the week of backbreaking labor.
When I opened the door, however, I was given a surprise. In fact, I was welcomed with the very word, as several people shouted out, “SURPRISE!”
“What the heck!?” I uttered as I was greeted by Sarah, Roy, Lucy, Kay, Charlie and Mrs. Hodge, their faces lit up with broad, beaming smiles, greeting me with a glittering of happy faces.
Above them, a banner hung from the ceiling stating: “Happy First Week at Work!”
My own mouth maneuvered into a beaming grin as Sarah stepped forward and threw her arms around me.
“Happy first week, baby,” she whispered into my ear, before kissing me delicately on the lips.
After that, everyone took it in turns to congratulate me, as though I’d spent the week on the moon rather than at some filthy warehouse. I was then further startled when Sarah came out of the kitchen holding a cake she and her sisters had made, the words ‘Happy First Week’ in icing across the top. It all made me smile and my earlier grouchiness, as well as my sexual tension, appeared to dissolve in the happiness that surrounded me in that room. I had a slice of cake and we all stood around, a little music in the background, drinking beer and wine.
“So how’d the first week go?” Roy asked.
“It was okay. Just unloading trucks of frozen and refrigerated food. They’re pretty tough there, so it’s hard work. But I guess I did okay.”
“I’m proud of you, kid,” he replied. “I can’t imagine how hard it must be. I constantly deal with clients who’ve had accidents at places like that and know a little about how shitty they make it.”
I glanced around to see that Sarah wasn’t within earshot. Seeing that she was busy chatting with Mrs. H and her sisters, I leaned forward and in a hushed voice said:
“It really is shitty.”
Roy smiled and replied in a similar hushed tone, “You shouldn’t feel any shame in admitting that. You think you’ll get used to it?”
“I hope so. Or at least I hope I find something better. I was gonna give it a month and then, if I still hate it, start looking for another job during the day. I just hope that I’m not too tired after my night shift to be able to do anything about finding something else. At the moment, I’m sleeping every hour I can.”
“It’s to be expected. You’re raw to this.”
“Yeah, but I’m a fit guy. I jog regularly, used to use the gym at my dad’s. But nothing could have prepared me for this.”
“There’s a big difference between an hour workout and a ten-hour shift.”
“You can say that again.”
“What’re the guys there like?” Charlie interjected.
Turning to him, I replied that they were pretty miserable but some of them had a sense of humor.
“You talk with them much?” he wanted to know.
“Not really. I prefer to stay quiet. They seem to admire that. I answer their questions, usually with lies.”
“Why usually with lies?” Roy inquired, taking a sip of his beer after he had.
“Look, Roy, you have to understand that the last thing I want is for them to know that I come from money. Those guys seem to get jealous over the smallest things. One of them won a car on some scratch card over three months ago and you should hear them bitch and moan about it. Instead of wishing the guy his luck, they simply hate him for it. One of them even promised to key the thing when he sees it next in the lot.”
“Envy is a powerful sin,” Roy remarked.
“Yeah, so you can understand that the last thing I want them finding out is that my father is Andrew Kelly, billionaire.”
At some point during the evening I found myself with Charlie on the end of the sofa. All night he’d been asking me questions about the job, and something told me that it wasn’t so much his eagerness to know as it was something else that he wanted to say. Finally, now was the time that he opened up.
“So it’s a fact,” he was stating, “you hate this job.”
“Yes, I do,” I let out gently, taking a sip of my beer.
“Then what if I was to tell you that I may know a way for you to go back to college this year; in fact, next week, when I do.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, my brows furrowing into a look of bewilderment.
“I don't get it,” I let out. “Have you raided your piggy-bank?”
“Huh!” he grinned. “Nothing like that. I don't have the money yet. But there’s a distinct possibility that I could get ahold of it for you.”
“And how’s that? Your legs aren’t looking too good, so I can't see you running into a bank and sticking the place up.”
“Nothing quite so criminal.”
“Not ‘quite so criminal’!? Then how criminal?”
Charlie glanced around the room to see if we were out of earshot of any prying ears, his furtive eyes especially keen to see where his mother was within our proximity. Having gathered that he was safe to go on, he said:
“Cards.”
“Oh no, Charlie,” was my immediate answer to this. “Last time it ended real bad.”
“But this time we’ll pull it off. I learned the hard way last time.”
“If by hard you mean having both your arms and legs broken in several places.”
“Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I got carried away last time. I won’t this time.”
“No, Charlie. I can't ask you to do that for me. No way.”
“Hear me out. I want to do this for you. It would be for a good cause. We could easily walk away with the thirty grand we need. But this time we don't do one of those low-level establishments, we hit one of the big, commercial venues. Somewhere where the worst thing to happen would be them calling the cops. If we go slow and only hit the smaller tables, they won’t suspect a thing.”
“You’ve really been putting thought into this haven’t you?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for some time. I even went online and looked it up. If you stick to the smaller money, you’re ninety percent likely to slip away unnoticed. It’ll take longer to get the thirty-three grand we need, but I calculated that if I play slow it shouldn’t take me any longer than seven hours.”
“But those places won't let you in unless you’re twenty-one,” I put to him, “and you’re only nineteen.”
“That’s why yesterday I had a fake ID sent to me. It’s extremely good. An outer city driving license. It cost me three hundred dollars, but it looks amazing. They got a guy at the car registration office who steals the cards
, so it’s even got the hologram and everything.”
“You really are determined. I feel like our places have been swapped.”
“What do you say?” And he looked me straight in the eyes, giving me the impression that he was hypnotically installing his will into my mind.
I looked around the room and laid my gaze upon the form of Sarah. As though sensing my look, she instinctively turned around and smiled at me. I returned the smile and noticed a daub of color fan out like the petals of a flower on each of her cheeks. I thought about her, about how much better things could be if I could return to college next week instead of in a year, or even two. The way I’d felt these past days returning home from that warehouse had made me wonder whether the bitterness my father warned me about would eventually take hold and turn me even against her. I feared that after a year or so I could be a spiteful wreck—a Stan—taking it all out on her. I imagined myself as some despot making her life hell as she meekly submitted and did her best to make me feel better, soothing me, only for me to turn her away because I knew it would hurt her, because my spite demanded that I somehow unload my anger onto another undeserving being. This party, for instance, showed me that to ever harm her in any way, whether it be emotional or other, would be intolerable to my soul.
I turned back to Charlie and said, “Okay, we’ll do it”—the kid instantly smiled—“but this time we’ll do it somewhere without any risk whatsoever.”
“Yeah, and where will that be?”
“We’ll do it at one of my father’s casinos.”
Charlie’s grin almost lifted off of his face.
“Then it’s on,” he announced in a hushed voice.
To this, we chinked our beer bottles together, as good as any handshake.
SARAH
At around eleven, we wished everyone goodbye and received a warm hug, both Josh and I, from each of our departing guests. We waved them off and shut the door behind them. Then Josh took me lovingly in his arms and gave me a tight squeeze.
“I’m sorry that I was so offhand with you earlier,” he whispered into my ear, his words a soothing flow of cool air upon my soul.
“It’s perfectly okay,” I stated back. “I know how frustrating it is for you.”
“Yeah, but that doesn't give me the right to be an asshole.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, beaming all over and squeezing into him.
We began the arduous job of cleaning the place up, and Josh appeared to be in much better spirits than he had been in earlier. I was glad that my little surprise get-together had lifted him up and shown him that people were proud of him, that people cared about his commitment. Once we’d cleaned the place up, I pulled the bed out and, having undressed, we curled up under the duvet.
“Thanks for tonight,” he said to me once we were.
“You deserve praise, Josh. I wanted you to know how proud I am of you for what you’re doing. You’re taking on the necessary suffering that is needed, and that’s no more than any person can be expected to do. It takes guts to do what you’re doing.”
He pulled me to him and rubbed his nose along the nape of my neck, making me tingle inside.
“I love you,” he blew into my ear.
Another tingle electrified my body as it lay cradled within his magnificent arms.
“You wanna watch a movie together?” I asked him.
“Let’s just lie like this for a little while. I was gonna read a book at the dinner table when you’d fallen to sleep. You must be tired.”
“I am,” I had to confess.
“So let’s just lie like this until you fall to sleep.”
I said nothing and merely smiled, kissing the hand that held me by the bosom. Gradually I slipped seamlessly into the slipstream of unconsciousness and found myself lustfully once more in his arms, this time within the realm of no consequence where I could lie with him as a lover, and not compromise anything other than my imagination.
JOSH
That week, I returned back to work after the blinking of a weekend. I felt myself only partially renewed in a physical sense, but more assured in a mental one. Charlie’s plan—and it was definitely his this time—had invigorated me. Of course that’s not to say that Sarah’s efforts hadn’t helped lift me up also; the sweetness of her heart had alleviated me partly. It was just the thought of going back to college in a week and telling Stan the man to fuck off felt much better than her wholesome pride in me. The rewards were much bigger, you could say.
That first night back at work, a trailer with a busted freezer unit came rolling in. The unit had apparently gone down only an hour into its journey, stuck in the stuffy hull of some cargo ship for more than two days. So when we opened it, the smell that came marauding out at us through the unlocked doors instantly made myself and the two guys with me gag. In fact, the cloud of stink filled up half the loading bay and everyone within a hundred yards began pulling their shirts up over their face and nose.
“Holy shit!” Leroy, one of my fellow hand-ballers, exclaimed once he’d spent almost a minute spitting over the edge of the loading bay, trying to evacuate the pungent aroma that stuck to the inside of his nostrils and throat. “This is a real nasty motherfucker! I ain’t seen this shit for at least a year.” Then, turning to me, he added, “Must be your lucky day, newbie. Start of your second week and already you got a badass bitch.”
When the steam inside the thing had cleared, we saw rows and rows of defrosted boxes of salmon, the whole lot dripping and rotting, the freezer unit now a hot box of putrid pink flesh.
“Well what now?” I asked Leroy from underneath my pulled-up shirt.
“Now, we got the pleasure of taking this motherfucker to the other side of the yard, clearing it out, before power hosing the shit out of it.”
“We gotta do that?”
“You see any other stupid motherfuckers around that's gonna do it for us?”
I merely laughed at this and shrugged my shoulders.
Me, Leroy and our other co-worker closed the doors back up, before following the trailer to the other side of the yard. The other co-worker was a Russian immigrant by the name of Sergei who spoke no English and simply smiled all day, while he worked as hard as two men, for which he got little to no respect. He was a foreigner and, as such, appeared to hold a lowly position within the social microcosm of the place, no matter how much of his lunch he shared or how many extra pallets he stacked.
Leroy went off to the storeroom and came back with paper overalls for us all to put on as we stood clear of the back of the trailer.
“Now when this shit is done,” he said as we slipped into the garments, “you gonna wanna throw your clothes away. I did one of these last summer and the smell got into me, man.”
“What do you mean into you?” I felt the need to ask.
“I mean into me, motherfucker. Like my pores had absorbed the shit into my blood and I was sweating the shit out for a month.”
“That’s good to know.”
Sergei opened the doors again before immediately running back to us, not wanting to gag again on the smell inside. Then the three of us stood there gaping into the mass of rotten fish, about two inches of stinking, stagnant water covering the metal floor of the unit.
“Well, it ain’t gonna clean its mother-fucking-self,” Leroy announced after we’d been there for at least a minute contemplating the job at hand. “Sergei, you Rusky son-of-a-bitch, get that Slavic ass up in there.”
Sergei, understanding nothing but his name and the tone of Leroy’s voice, immediately knew what was required of him and he marched up into the container. The moment he was in there, he covered his face with his forearm and we could hear him wretch and cough underneath it.
“Guy’s a goddamned machine,” Leroy repeated to himself. Then shouting up to Sergei, he stated, “Just kick what you can out.” Then making a kicking gesture, he shouted it once more.
The little Russian understood and began kicking the lower boxes toward the back
door while Leroy and I fetched a large garbage pail on wheels and placed it at the end, so that the boxes of rotten fish could be shoved straight in there. I went to jump up inside, but Leroy placed his hand on my chest and said, “Let him get the first lot done and then we’ll help out. No need for three motherfuckers inhaling that shit. It’ll get better in a half-hour or so once the unit’s aired.”
“I don't know. Isn’t that a little unfair?”
“Motherfucker, life’s unfair! If he didn't want to be scraping shit outta trailers, he should’ve stayed in Moscow.”
I felt uneasy to let the cheery little Russian take all the shit while we watched, and Leroy could tell that.
“Well, fuck it then, new boy,” he said. “If you wanna jump up in there, be my guest.”
I sprung up into the trailer and, my nostrils exposed to it, had to stop for a moment as the stench invaded me all the way, it seemed, to my stomach, almost forcing my breakfast out. But I held myself firm, using the knowledge garnered from a thousand nauseous hangovers, and managed to sway my gut enough to begin helping Sergei remove the boxes and throw them into the bin at the end. When I joined his side, the Russian smiled and slapped me on the back.
“Spasibo,” he announced from his grinning face, and I knew this to mean thank you.
Soon, the first garbage pail was full and Sergei and I had a little rest while Leroy wheeled the thing away and fetched a new one. He must’ve felt a little guilty for letting us do all the filthy work, because he refused my offer of help with wheeling the bin.
Another ten bins and we were finished with the first part of the job: clearance. Leroy had jumped in and helped after the initial three bins, making the whole thing much quicker, and by then, our senses had become accustomed to the stench. Once the unit was emptied, it now came down to the second part of the job: power-hosing it clean. This part was much more fun, for obvious reasons—the introduction of gas-powered hoses that sprayed out intense jets of water. We worked hard, but would playfully catch each other with the occasional burst of water. Bending over was a very dangerous game, and once or twice I almost had my ass split by a violent shoot of water hitting me like a blunt spear, as I would turn around sharply to see my co-workers laughing.