todd of tacoma

Todd, alcoholic, came to in heavily drenched sheets, having peed the bed again and sweat profusely in it. He peeled the top sheet from his skin and was rising to grab a towel to sleep on when he fainted against a wall.

He woke up against the wall after a nanosecond’s sleep and barely stopped himself falling the rest of the way to the floor. He arched his back like someone who’d been asleep in the saddle and launched his arms out in front of him. One hand determined his path, the other positioned his legs and groped for the room’s exit.

A uric crust had dried over his stomach and pelvis and, as he toweled off in the bathroom, he imagined it falling away from him like dandruff or snowflakes. He rubbed himself vigorously over the tiles, scattering his dead cells on a dense, dark forest floor.

He woke up yet again, still somehow upright, having fallen asleep imagining things. He picked up the towel he’d dried and exfoliated with and carried it to his bed and laid it over the wet fitted sheet. He backed himself out of the bedroom again and turned and sped toward the kitchen, with silent vim, to grab three hard seltzers and his e-reader. Returning to the place where he’d almost fallen he cracked his first can open and woke up his fiancee and wondered what flavor he was holding.

A groan saturated the silent morning.

Black cherry.

“I’m going to read a little.”

“At least turn the brightness down!”

He did as she asked and could barely see the words filling the screen. He paged forward anyway. Labored reading had been the norm for more than three years but he’d felt the need to continue reading in spite of all, knowledge is power, hoping his sight would return along with his cognitive abilities. He firmly believed in the power to rehabilitate himself, with concerted effort, when the time came, but he also suspected he might never have seen or thought that well to begin with. This, like many things, scared him.

Six or seven pages later, he didn’t know how many even though he was counting, he opened his second hard seltzer precipitating an exact repeat of the previous volley with his fiancee. He opened his third right then and there to avoid a later argument and swilled the second. He was a technician. He drank only one half of the third one, so he’d have some fuel leftover to keep him from languishing in bed all morning or keeling over a second time upon rising for work.

He fell asleep on the now damp towel and paid careful attention to the alcohol rushing through and eddying in his veins. He felt like an old television set left on to pepper a room with black static and electric waterfalls. This would last fifteen minutes, and sleep would last an hour and forty-five.

It had taken him two years to perfect these steps and achieve his daily fifteen. He could do it till he died.

Recycling

There were no hard seltzers in the fridge or in the laundry room when he was up again, but there were empty wine bottles. He sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled out the glass recycling. Careful not to make a sound he surgically extricated the bottles from the tub, lined them up in front of him, and one by one uncorked or spun their lids off, whichever was required. Some of them he’d already drained completely, but even a drop was worth the effort.

He’d brought no cup with him so he had to suck each bottleneck like a calf at the teet. The final bottle contained almost a full sip of wine and as he tucked it back in with the others he deluded himself thinking that he’d drunk a quarter of a glass in all.

Work clothes from two days ago hung over a kitchen chair and he put them on. He tried not to think of his dried urine and sweat staining the drawers he still hadn’t changed. If he remained in the cooler areas of the warehouse, maybe, no odor would emanate. Tomorrow he’d give himself time to shower.

The line was long enough at 7-Eleven to slow his febrile brain and make him consider what he was doing to himself every day, including this one. But by diverting his attention to the store’s pop muzak and guessing which song was being covered he was able to brush depressing thoughts aside, or at least sweep them forward. He purchased three tall hard seltzers and no cigarettes thanks to a drained checking account and maxed credit. He double-checked his math that he could continue his daily regimen until payday.

Traffic was light on I-5 but he didn’t notice. He swilled half a hard seltzer and sipped the other half so it would last. In the warehouse parking lot he drank a second can and tapped a sentence he’d thought of into his phone, something about snow, but it was not good. His phone was where he did most of his writing, a self-mandated twenty-five words a day.

He crinkled his empties and tucked them in the passenger seat’s map pouch and attended morning stand-up. By nine a.m. he would be sober but he had the fortitude to last one more hour till break. He would go to his car then to drink the last, until six-forty-five, of his alcohol.

Diverting

They staffed Todd in diverting. For five hours he pushed some boxes from one conveyance onto a perpendicular conveyance and let some other boxes go by. There was another diverter fifteen feet north of him, an independent hip-hop artist named E, who recorded and mixed his last album ten years ago.

Only the one, but a more than commendable first effort. You can find it online.

Every day Todd would try to ignore E and soon give up. He had an impossible vitality, often singing and always shouting punchlines from old jokes to associates across the warehouse. Even if you resurrected Falstaff and put him in a baseball cap you couldn’t find a man more full of himself.

Todd liked this one game. He and E would assemble outlandish basketball teams using narrow, overly specific rules and pit them against one another. Best point guard from the nineties with the best Dream Team power forward. Best Sixth Man shooting guard, any era, and the best All Defensive First Team small forward from Europe. Pick a center six-foot-ten or under who did not lead his team in rebounds, and go. Seven-game series.

More often than not E would dominate and Todd obsequiously fold.

Today, though, E did not set their game in motion. Todd learned over the course of the morning he’d developed a dependency on cocaine and was sometimes up all night finishing his supply. Last night, while Todd was peeing his bed, for example, he was licking all his baggies clean.

M

On lunch, after a hard seltzer in the car, Todd reunited with E amid a group of smokers at the front entrance. Among their number was M, an overgrown boy who moved more boxes through the warehouse than any other associate. He was made of electrical wire and would not in his lifetime find a t-shirt that fit. His baseball cap bore the inscription No Homo and his belt tip, he frequently bragged, hung almost as low as his dick. Lining his satanic grin was a mustache so thin you wanted to hand him a napkin.

He hated the way Todd spoke, timid and often confused, so Todd never spoke to him. On top of that he hated E’s glacial pace building pallets. It’s a crime, he’d say, to make the hardest worker in Lacey, Washington, wait all day for some old shit to wrap his shit up. The meek vexed him and the elderly pissed him off.

“Yo, did you go wee-wee in your pants, bro?”

Todd would not answer.

“What the fuck, bro, you smell like fucking piss.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Downwind, motherfucker! Jesus, it’s bad, isn’t it?”

He implored his group and the groups around his group. But no one spoke up to agree or disagree, until E, who’d been waiting to speak up about something all morning, cleared his throat.

He spoke to Todd directly at first, but for everyone’s benefit.

“That piece of shit. I’m going to actually kill him.”

“What’d you say, fatso?”

E stepped out his cigarette. Confrontation was his bread and butter.

“I said I’m gonna crack a fucking stick in half today, you feel me? I’m gonna knock you the fuck out and toss you to my dog.”

It started out great, but their banter quickly sank into racial epithets. People at first watched, then left uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Todd constricted his neck and bent surreptitiously over his knees, as close to his underwear as modesty would allow, and sniffed deeply of himself. He knew it was there but could not locate his odor.

“Yo, what’s your boy doing? Trying to get fucked out here?”

E held up two fingers and a thumb in the shape of a pistol aimed at M.

“God, just pop! pop! Be doing the world a favor.”

“And how you gonna do that? Got a piece in your car?”

“Don’t need one. I killed dumb cunts like you with a slingshot.”

“You ain’t killed shit.”

“Man, fuck you!”

E was crouched to finally maul M and get it over with when he looked around and thought better. There were tinted windows, in buildings and on cars, and people watching everywhere. He imagined their now curious faces turning rubberneck-smug and ghost white.

M considered this hesitation his victory and, in celebration, held up two of his own fingers and a thumb in the shape of a gun, which he brought to his heart.

“Meet me back out here at six-thirty? Or nah?”

“There are cameras everywhere, moron.”

“You scared?”

“You wanna get fired or some shit?”

E walked away pretending the last word belonged to him.

Todd followed.

“Awww, go back in, homos! Play your little basketball games!”

Everything that happened in the warehouse he seemed to know something about.

Sorting

For five hours that afternoon E and Todd sorted boxes, lifting them off conveyance lines and stacking them in cages to be wheeled to docked semi-trailers.

If this were a Detroit warehouse, E boiled, M would have been cut into pieces already and stuffed in boxes and shipped across the country. He walked Todd through the logistics, as well as a few alternatives to murder. But, he admonished him, never rule death out, killing’s a survival skill. Word gets out you shied away from a fatal blow to your enemy, that you even once held back, and you’ve lost all respect. It takes a lifetime to earn respect.

Todd corroborated.

“Even self-respect.”

E could barely hold back the pity he felt for his weak friend. The brown in his bloodshot eyes pulsed orange and green and a few other colors before settling back to relative normal. The two men could have embraced.

“Only reason I backed off back there’s the cameras. Not giving white people the satisfaction.”

The course of action E settled on, for the situation at hand, was slashing M’s tires at the Nisqually Shell station. He saw M there every day after work, sitting at a window table, sucking the marrow from hot wings.

There were no outside cameras, that E was aware of, and only a few junkies around to see them, and so what. He asked Todd if he wanted to witness M’s humiliation and Todd said yes because at the gas station he could purchase a case of hard seltzer that fit within his budget.

“But get me, ain’t enough I just slash them. He has to watch me slash them and can’t do nothing about it. It’s gonna get heated. You game?”

Tailing

Boxes continued trickling down the lines at six-twenty-five even as associates headed toward the exit with their lunches and backpacks. It was a five-minute walk, you couldn’t believe the size of this place, and M was always first to leave, so E bolted early, too. Chased by Todd.

Todd drove his car to a restaurant parking lot where E was waiting to pick him up.

“I shoulda asked you to park and walk. My bad.”

“Why?”

“Our cars side by side like this? Shit start to a tail.”

E had learned the art of discreet tailing in Detroit, a redundant skill given that they knew where M was headed.

“College point guard.”

He was setting up the parameters of a new game.

“Hm?”

“College point guard without a championship.”

Todd was not ready.

“Charlie Ward, I guess.”

“Okay, okay, and no NBA highlights. I see you.”

E rolled down Todd’s window, then his own to be polite.

“God Shammgod. Remember God?”

“A little.”

“Providence College! He was a fucking Friar. Get the hell out, right?”

“Kind of on the nose.”

“One-handed crossover broke motherfuckers’ ankles. You know where he got his name?”

“No.”

“His dad!”

Todd held his stomach. He was on E’s withdrawal rollercoaster now. He questioned whether he was in any condition to humiliate or maroon M, much less survive a second confrontation with him.

“I don’t care if he was garbage time in the NBA. He’s a fucking legend, dog.”

Stakeout

M’s car was parked close to the Shell’s entrance, but M was not at the window table, so E hid his car behind a pump with line of sight to the front door. He put only five dollars in his tank because he didn’t really need gas and didn’t have any money. When he finished pumping he opened and shut his hatchback and returned to the driver seat with a twelve-tip screwdriver.

“Everybody thinks you wanna use the Phillips, but you gotta turn it. Regular’s the sharp end.”

“What about star?”

“Man, fuck star.”

He popped and flipped the tips around until he found the smallest flat one. He locked it in place and sanded the edge with his fingertips like he was sharpening a blade, even checked it on the meaty part of his palm.

I-5 traffic was building up while they sat there. No one could speed past anyone and it was unnaturally peaceful. You could hear music from the canopy speakers and a song came on that made E knock his head back against his headrest.

He turned his car stereo dial counterclockwise.

“Look.”

He turned the dial again, laughing.

“I fucking tried to turn it up!”

Todd did not laugh. He had neither the grit nor resolve to sit motionless, not after ten hours of work, and his forehead was gushing sweat. He wanted to go in and purchase a case of hard seltzer and chew through it like a werewolf, but E wouldn’t let him out of his sight until the job was done.

The job.

An elderly woman honked politely for E to move his car forward. He waved her to another pump.

“Some country artists, they only listen to hip-hop when they record their albums. But I flipped that equation, bro.”

“Oh?”

“I only listened to classics and dad rock when I recorded mine.”

He pointed at the canopy speakers.

“Every little kiss, every little wah-oooh-oh-oh-oh-awn, every little one. Bruce Hornsby and The Range.”

“You like this?”

“Didn’t at first.”

“Why did you listen to it?”

“No influences. Everything has to come from me.”

The Shell’s door opened and E shot up ready, his left hand on his door handle.

It was a tall, wire-haired woman, as lanky and crudely assembled as M, in oil-stained designer jeans and a ripped tank top, walking out with no purchases and no car to go to. She sat down in a handicap parking space between E and Todd and the entrance and seemed to live there. Sucking an unlit half-cigarette she gazed nowhere, embracing her knees and rocking her butt on the parking block. Todd imagined her jean pocket studs gnawing the cement and drifted to a light sleep at the sound in his head.

E released the handle.

Hunting

“Todd, Todd! Man, look!”

Todd opened his eyes and looked out the rear window. A deer, young buck, two-point, its back half hidden behind a dumpster, staring where the wire-haired woman stared, into object-less space. He lolled and chewed on something and licked his nose with the tongue of a serpent.

“Me and my dad always went without a license in Michigan.”

He pointed his fingers at the buck.

“You pass these little guys up. Gotta be full grown to shoot.”

First week in November E’s dad would take him into the forest. November snow showed the best tracks, cloven holes punched in an icy crust. Father and son could follow these dots deep into the woods in the middle of the day and E would look up at the sun from beneath the old pines and the treetops looked like long knives out there.

Sun on your face then, when you’re a child, it’s warm every season.

The snow would sometimes pull off E’s loose-fitting moon boots and he’d stagger in socks trying to catch his huge father, a rodeo bull of a man, swift enough to play linebacker and corner on the high school football team and power forward on a college basketball team that liked to run.

Dad hurtled fallen trees and swatted boulders aside while E simpered way behind with wet feet.

“What’s the biggest you ever shot?”

E thought about it without answering.

“What’s the biggest your dad shot?”

He would be his dad’s age now.

The buck, if you could call him that, lowered his long mutant neck to eat some manner of grain or rice. The asphalt was stained with fryer grease and motor oil and he had to peck like a bird around windshield glass to find any food, if what he chewed was food.

“There’s the motherfucker.”

Todd turned to see M pass a white to-go bag around his back and bound from the sidewalk toward his car. He might as well have pirouetted. He snapped his fingers in front of the wire-haired woman’s face and she came to and spat vainly at his feet.

And when M reached his car he spotted E and Todd. Just sitting there like dipshits. He reached into his to-go bag and pulled out a plastic butter knife and with it mimed puncturing his own tires.

“Pssshhht! Psssssshhhhhhhhhh! I see you! I see you!”

E’s fingers slipped off the door handle and he fumbled the screwdriver to the floor.

With only his olive-black eyes M dared E to pick it up, whatever it was that fell. He tossed the butter knife in his car and brought his hand, in a gun shape, up to his heart.

“Yo, I’m kidding you, man, I’m shitting you, I’m shitting you!”

He waited two seconds for one of the dipshits to speak and grew happily impatient. A cartoon devil could not have grown a bigger smile.

“Todd, for real, though? You smell like fried pussy meat. Take a shower!”

He rolled down his window as he left and bade the parking lot good night.

Seconds later a new song was playing under the canopy and the deer and the woman had left. There was some honking on the interstate. E turned his key in the ignition and was halfway down the road before his car was even in gear. Far from Michigan, far from his greatest artistic achievement, far from a paycheck large enough to afford him coke.

Todd felt chills run over his body and grab him by the shoulders.

“Oh shit, can I go in now?”

Driving

I-5 traffic was seven hard seltzers long, cutting too deep for comfort into twenty-four, so Todd stopped at 7-Eleven to supplement his loss with three tall cans. He parked his car a block away from home and drank one of them. He crumpled and hid the empty beneath his seat. It rattled against some others. Before going the rest of the way home he hid the two unopened tall ones in his lunch bag so his fiancee wouldn’t think he had a problem. The rest he could carry in with him.