The Job: Based on a True Story (I Mean, This is Bound to have Happened Somewhere)

by Craig Davis

CHAPTER VII

  The happy leaves had waved goodbye and fallen underfoot, and the skies were lead. The days had dwindled to their shortest span. Arriving at and leaving work in the dark did nothing to lighten Joe B.’s outlook.

  Halloween had been a horror story of bargain basement candy rejected by tiny ghouls and zombies alike. Thanksgiving dinner paraded by, a pitiful banquet of humble pie, the poor fare a bitter dressing down for Joe B. With things beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Joe B.’s present seemed like no more than foiled plans wrapped in wreathes of smoke, and he was taking a ribbin’. He was fit to be Yule-tied.

  The family decided against a tree for the apartment, instead hanging some ornaments on a large potted plant. With their lack of discretionary income, Joe B.’s daughters learned the delight of baking Christmas presents. Faith helped her younger sisters accept the probability of a sparse holiday harvest, but little Hope remained optimistic. Joe B. determined in his head that each one would at least get one thing from her modest wish list.

  With this mission in mind, Joe B. left work one dim evening and boarded the train for the south side of town. In the poorer district he hoped to find discount knock-offs of the highly coveted brand names each girl had listed. Perhaps he might even score the real thing from a shady character on the street. Joe B. considered this approach little better than Dumpster-diving, and so he prepared his Self-Contained Under-the-table Buying Apparatus – cash.

  Night had fully fallen when he disembarked from the train. As Joe B. walked the sidewalk, with one eye he scanned the names of the stores lining the street and kept another on each careful step and yet another on the people approaching him. Old prejudices colliding with his new frustration made this an onerous job indeed. He tried hard not to make eye contact. In the far distance a silhouette caught his attention, sitting huddled against the dim light of a lamppost, waving its arm and calling out in an indiscernible voice.

  As he drew closer, Joe B. could make out the figure of a woman, bundled up against the cold in a rag-tag collection of hats and sweaters. She addressed the passersby in a thick central African accent, looking at each in only a general manner. From this Joe B. ascertained she must be blind.

  A young mother leading a little boy by the hand came up from the opposite direction, and the child silently and innocently attached his gaze upon the strange woman.

  “Don’t stare at the blind woman,” the mother said in one of those whispers meant for everyone to hear. “You’ll make her feel awkward.”

  The homeless woman jerked her head toward Joe B. and looked sharply at something just beyond his shoulder. “Files flies!” she yelled hoarsely, and grasped desperately at the air. “Fleas flees, flies files! Files flies through an open window!”

  Joe B. thought back to his first day in the mailroom, and the men renovating his office, preparing to throw his file cabinets from the Universal Whirligig building. He wondered how this woman could know about that.

  “What did you say?” he stammered.

  “Peace of mind, piece of pie – pizza pie won’t get you what you want!”

  Joe B. remembered his attempt to see the Big Boss with a snack machine. A shiver ran down his spine, as they usually do. He felt sure that something was going on here, or perhaps not. “Who are you?” he squatted down beside the woman.

  “My name Zola. Zola from far away land. Lando Calrissian. Buildings high in clouds!”

  “Like the Universal Whirligig building? What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Cease your foolish talk! You will answer to the man!”

  Joe B. wasn’t sure what to do with that information. He decided to pursue a more direct approach.

  “Did you say something about my files? What do you know about my files?”

  “The man see his rivals! Enemies seek high offices! Better to be regular Joe! Cup of joe.”

  Now Joe B. began to feel creeped out for sure. He stared at the woman as she absent-mindedly picked at one of her ragged, mismatched knit gloves, looking off into the sky. First she refers to his files, and then to his office – and was she calling him by name as well? He couldn’t shake the feeling she had something to say to him in spite of being an apparent homeless woman on the street. Still, he had no idea where she was from, and she had no idea where she was now.

  “I don’t take real good care of my toenails,” she stated.

  Joe B. was on the verge of giving up and simply walking away when she motioned with both hands for him to come closer.

  “I know the man!”

  “Who is this man you keep talking about? Do you mean the Big Boss?”

  “Grandest man I never met!”

  Partially out of curiosity, but also because he wanted to postpone his scavenger-hunt shopping, Joe B. probed further. “How could you mean the Big Boss? You can’t possibly know him. So who’s ‘the man’ – do you mean the police? Or society? Who is this man?”

  “Enemies of the man get no good! Cross the man, you get no good!”

  “I’m not the enemy of anyone. I don’t think I’ve crossed anybody.”

  “No good! You do no good! Nobody deserve good from the man!”

  Joe B. couldn’t believe his value to society was being scrutinized by perhaps not the city’s most solid citizen. But something about her words arrested his attention – maybe she did mean the Big Boss after all.

  “Soft bed, warm house, cardboard box – nobody deserve good from the man,” Zola continued. “Stop your foolish talk! The man will hear! Howard?”

  Joe B. still had no idea what she was thinking. “The Big Boss has already heard me, I’m sure, though he’s got no answer for me. His answer is silence. He’s bound to do whatever in the world he wants to do.”

  “It a short walk from upbeat to beat up. The man come down hard on his enemies! Beware the man!”

  “Look, if I thought the Big Boss was my enemy, I wouldn’t hope he’ll do right by me someday. And I wouldn’t bother trying to talk to him.”

  “The man – he everywhere!”

  “You know, that’s something that’s kind of bothered me – I know he’s in the same building with me. We walk the same halls, take the same elevators – sort of – but I never see him. Never once have we crossed paths. I know he’s there, he’s busy at work all the time, but I have never cast an eye on him even once.”

  “Infidel! Do not tempt the man! Little you know the wrong you do the man! Panic early and often. Beware! Beware!”

  Joe B. caught his breath. “Look, just what do you know about the Big Boss?” he asked without considering whether he might get a lucid answer.

  “Everyone a man pass by in life, he pass by a second time. Will he be fooled twice? Beware the second!”

  Joe B. didn’t know how to take this, but it sounded wise to him, so he went on. “Please, tell me what you know about the Big Boss. I don’t care so much anymore about my career. At my age, that opportunity is gone and won’t pass my way again. What bothers me most now is how my family has to suffer, and the Big Boss can still change that. My children will barely have any Christmas because of what he’s done. Their lives are completely out of control, and there’s nothing I can do about it. If you know anything about him, please tell me.”

  “The man know who in control! Ground control to Major Tom.”

  This pearl did not sound like wisdom to Joe B., and he nearly got up to go when her words again stopped him.

  “Zola tight with the man – the man care for Zola. He no care about record. You get better records, the man like you better. Good records – hit records.” Her eyes wandered.

  “Are you talking about my files again? Did you find them in the trash or something? My records were perfect!”

  “Hush up foolish talk! Shame, shame on you! Zola tell you what the man say! Zola know what the man say.”

  Once more the woman’s peculiar talents changed in Joe B.’s mind from crazy to savant. He was ready to grasp at any straw. “You know what the Big Boss will say?
When? Are you saying you see into the future?”

  “See the future easy – Zola just look east.”

  Joe B. rolled his eyes at his own question. “Sure, but what about the Big Boss? What do you think he will say?”

  “I know what the man say. Zola know.”

  Somewhere, a fuse blew. “What?!!” Joe B. spewed.

  Zola paused. “Should five percent appear too small, be thankful I don’t take it all. The man.”

  Joe B. fell upon his bum and bowed his head into both hands. “What am I doing here?” he moaned, and wary shoppers rushed home with their treasures. “I’m sitting in the dark on a cold sidewalk, talking to a woman who’s completely daft. What has happened to me? I must be a raving lunatic myself.”

  “You go against the man, you not be so happy for very long. You pay for your wrong sooner than later,” Zola offered in encouraging tones.

  “Happy? You call this happy? I’m wasting my time here, when I could be wasting my time in some dollar store – you obviously don’t know anything about me, or my files, or the Big Boss.”

  “You the enemy of the man?”

  “Oh, shut up. If I were enemies with the Big Boss, I wouldn’t care what he has to say. But you can’t tell me what that might be, can you?” Joe B. turned downright surly.

  “Zola no enemy of the man!”

  “Who said you were? You’re the one accusing me!”

  “No more foolish talk! The man, he come down hard on such words! No foolish talk in Zola’s ears! The man send you down, down!”

  “I’m afraid all the foolish talk is coming from you, madam.”

  “The man send you down! My brother – Zola’s cousin – someone – back in Zola’s homeland, he climb tall tower. Up, up he climb, all the way to the top. Up high, he lean out the window, and the man send him down! Down he fall – ‘AAAAAAAA!’ – tomato! Flat! The man knock him down! Send you down too!”

  Joe B. smiled at this. “You think the Big Boss will throw me from the Universal Whirligig building, maybe? I’m afraid that wouldn’t solve my problem, or at least my family’s problem. As it is, it would have been better if I’d never been hired.”

  “That the most unheard-of thing Zola ever hear of. Cease your foolish talk! Crazy talk!”

  “I guess you could say that. Especially you. For the rest of us, maybe so and maybe not. The Big Boss always seemed kind of mysterious tucked away in his offices, but now his silence feels like a punishment added to demotion. It’s worse than never having his favor at all. Now that I work in the mailroom, I feel really far removed from him, but I’m still on his payroll. He’s still the boss. But there’s no way to get through to him regardless of what my job is. I can’t make him talk to me.”

  Joe B.’s words lurched to a halt, and he wondered why he was explaining himself.

  “Fiend! You make your own plans!” Zola went off like dynamite. “Where do you put the border? You serve yourself! Self serve! Soft serve. You plot against Zola! Against the man! The man see you! You will fall hard for your smirking jokes now!”

  This outburst took Joe B. by surprise. “Huh?” he quipped.

  “You love the taste of wickedness; you chew every bite and swallow it slow! But your food turn sour and poison your belly! The man will take away the wealth you gobble down! You will die at the fangs of vipers! Your deeds will end in nothing gained, when you cheat the poor and take their homes!”

  A glazed malevolence rolled across Zola’s blank eyes like a fog, and shook Joe B. Her whimsical craziness had taken a turn. What was all this talk about poisonous snakes? And the only one who’d lost a home was him.

  “Greedy people want everything, and they never satisfied!” she continued. “When nothing left for you to grab, you be nothing! Once you have everything, despair will strike you down! The man make you swallow his blazing anger! All evildoers wiped out! Listen to what the man say.”

  “Believe me, lady,” Joe B. interrupted angrily. “I’ve already done the despair thing! I think the Big Boss has already had about all he the revenge can if he’s angry at me! He even keeps me around so he can vent his anger on a daily basis. So you see, I’m not being wiped out, I’m being kept alive. And besides, wouldn’t you say that only the good die young?”

  “Never hesitate to push the hero button,” Zola said nonchalantly.

  Joe B. didn’t try to figure out what this declaration meant, if anything, but he thought it would fit nicely on a billboard. He decided to proceed with caution. “I never wanted to be a hero, and I don’t want to die of snake bite. I just want to do the best work at Universal Whirligig I can and retire with some satisfaction. Some will retire as executives, and others just as wage earners, but everyone will eventually retire. It looks right now like I’ll be the wage-earner. But where there’s a job, there’s hope, I guess. At least I’ve still got that.” Zola sat directly down from his nose as he looked at her.

  Zola’s agitation matched the level of Joe B.’s disdain. “Cease the foolish talk!” she blasted, catching Joe B. by surprise again. “You run from native spears! But arrows of bronze, they kill you, the shiny tips go right through you! You will be trapped in your terror, and what you treasure most you lose in the dark!”

  Joe B. had finally had enough. This pitiful woman was obviously blind in more than just her eyes. Her wild imaginations swirled now into a storm of pained spite, and Joe B.’s fascination with her repartee had run thin under her onslaught of bronze arrows. He rose to leave.

  As he stepped away down the sidewalk, Zola’s voice rang after him. “The man send flames, destroy you in your home! Everyone talk against you! All your possessions they will drag off when the man get angry! This the man say against all evildoers!”

  The snow danced in the air, looking like silence, turning the paved ground back into nature. Joe B. shook his head slightly as he turned Zola’s accusations over in his mind. He didn’t know whether to hate or pity her, or why to hate her at all. Maybe deep down he feared she was right, and for years he’d simply been setting himself up for a fall at Universal Whirligig. Yet another insult added, for a crazy woman to mine this suspicion well-hidden within him. He felt like Elmer Fudd, outsmarted by a rabbit.

  “Everyone thinks they have all the answers,” he thought as he walked along, back to scanning the store signs but not really reading any of them. “Everyone thinks they know all my problems and have all the solutions. I don’t have any answers, so how could any of these numbskulls? The more I hear, and the more I think, the less I know.

  “How can these people really believe they know me? How can they pretend to understand the Big Boss? He’s not like the rest of us — he doesn’t let anyone in on his secrets. They’re just plain arrogant, that’s all there is to it, trying to fit him into a box. They’re all as nuts as that woman – they’re all knocked silly bumping their heads on their puny thoughts. What passes as wisdom boils down to nothing more than foolishness. ‘Stop that foolish talk!’ ” he mocked Zola, safely out of earshot.

  Joe B. sighed heavily. “If only I could see the Big Boss. But that’s not going to happen.”

  A faint tinkling sound gradually came to Joe B.’s attention as he made his way. He turned a corner and met with a familiar navy blue uniform and red kettle. The young woman ringing the bell smiled warmly at him, and snowflakes lit upon her long lashes. Joe B. stopped in his tracks and watched her graciously thank a child for the quarter carefully donated with a clink. Suddenly he realized that as bad as his life had turned, Zola’s was worse, and as little as he understood, she understood even less.

  He turned on his heel and marched double-time back to the blind woman, and without speaking pressed twenty dollars into her frazzled glove.

  “Stop bogarting the mustard,” she said to his general direction.