The carpet in the old shipping warehouse always smelled like damp wool and floor wax that had gone bad ten years back. I was standing near the breaker box by bay four because my left knee had been throbbing since five that morning. My shift on the loading dock didn’t start until noon, but I had come in early to drop off some paperwork for the supervisor before he headed out to the regional office. I was just leaning against the drywall, trying to take the weight off my joint, when the side door swung open and Walter walked in.
Walter was the new vice president of operations they had flown in from Atlanta three weeks prior. He wore these expensive silk-blend suits that looked ridiculous among the forklift grease and pallet dust, and he carried a leather folio tucked under his arm like he was guarding state secrets. Behind him trailed Arthur, our plant manager, who looked like a man being led toward his own hanging. Walter had spent the whole morning marching through the assembly bays with a clipboard, looking for inefficiency the way a hound looks for rabbits.
He stopped dead when he saw me standing by the breaker box. I wasn’t wearing a company vest because I was off the clock, and I had my sleeves rolled up past my elbows, showing the tattoo I got back when I was twenty-two down in Mobile. Walter took two steps toward me, his heels clicking hard against the concrete, and he gave me this sharp, thin smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
He loved an audience, and half the packing crew was standing ten feet away pretending not to watch.
“How much money do you make a week?” Walter asked. He didn’t bother lowering his voice. He said it loud enough for the whole bay to hear, like he was calling out a price at an auction.
I blinked at him. I was a little surprised, mostly because I didn’t work for him and my badge was tucked into my shirt pocket where it belonged. I figured he was one of those corporate efficiency hounds who thought he could buy and sell the room just by flashing a gold-plated watch. “I make four hundred,” I told him, keeping my voice flat. “Why?”
Walter didn’t even blink. He looked over his shoulder at Arthur, who was staring hard at the floorboards, and then he turned back to me with this smug, self-satisfied grin. “Wait right here,” he said.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned on his heel and marched back toward the front offices with that jerky, important stride of his. Arthur didn’t follow him immediately; he just gave me a long, tired look that said he was too old for whatever nonsense Walter was about to pull. Then Arthur turned and hurried after the boss, his boots scraping against the grit.
Nobody on the floor said a word for about thirty seconds. One of the forklift drivers, a kid named Ray who was nineteen and had grease permanently ground into his cuticles, leaned over a crate and spat into a paper cup. “What do you suppose that was about, Uncle Joe?” Ray asked me, wiping his forehead with a dirty rag.
“I don’t have the foggiest,” I said. “Probably wants to know how many pencils we use a week.”
We didn’t have to wait long. True to his word, Walter came striding back down the central aisle less than three minutes later.
He had a thick white bank envelope in his hand, and he was walking even faster than before, like a man who had just solved world hunger and couldn’t wait to tell the papers. He walked right up to me, pulled a wad of crisp fifty-dollar bills out of the envelope, and shoved the cash straight into my chest pocket.
“Here’s four’s weeks pay,” Walter said, his voice echoing off the corrugated tin roof. He puffed out his chest, looking around at the dozen or so workers who had stopped what they were doing to watch the show. “Now get out and don’t come back!”
Ray dropped his wrench. It hit the concrete with a dull, heavy clatter that made everyone jump.
Walter stood there rocking back on his heels, looking like a general who had just won a major battle. He swept his arm out in a grand circle, gesturing to the entire packing bay where the men were staring at him with expressions that ranged from complete bewilderment to quiet fury. He had this triumphant, barking laugh that grated on my nerves.
“Feeling like a boss now,” Walter announced to the room, loud enough to rattle the light fixtures. “Does anyone want to tell me what that goofball’s job was around here?”
The silence that followed was absolute. You could hear the distant hum of the compressor in the back room and the low rumble of a semi idling out on the access road, but nobody on the floor moved a muscle. Arthur had stopped near the time clock, his hand pressed over his eyes like he wanted to disappear through the brickwork. Walter looked around the room, waiting for someone to praise his decisive leadership, his swift execution of company policy, his mastery over the lazy element.
From across the room, near the large overhead door by bay six, a young guy in a red nylon jacket with a yellow Domino’s logo on the sleeve stepped out from behind a stack of empty pallets. He had a insulated hot-bag tucked under one arm and a receipt clipboard in his hand. He looked down at the twenty-four large pepperoni pizzas stacked on the folding table behind him, and then he looked right at Walter.
“Pizza delivery guy from Domino’s,” the kid said.
His voice wasn’t loud, but it cut right through the quiet of the warehouse.
Walter’s smile didn’t vanish all at once; it kind of cracked at the edges, like dry mud in the sun. He blinked once, twice, and then he looked down at me, then over at the stack of pizza boxes, and finally back at the kid in the red jacket. His face didn’t go white or pale, it turned this dark, mottled red, the color of a bruised plum. He opened his mouth to say something, but no sound came out past his teeth.
Arthur didn’t look up from the time clock. He just shook his head slowly, pulled his car keys out of his pocket, and started walking toward the exit.
I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out the sixteen hundred dollars in cash Walter had just handed me, and counted it twice just to be thorough. Then I folded the bills neatly and tucked them down into my back pocket alongside my wallet. I looked at Walter, who was standing there with his mouth half-open, looking like he wanted the concrete to open up and swallow him whole.
“I’ll keep the four weeks,” I told him, patting my pocket. “Appreciate the bonus, Mr. Vice President. But you might want to call the store and tell them thirty more minutes on those remaining orders, because this kid’s shift is officially over.”
