DelSanto’s Beach
Joe Kapitan
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Remy, the foreman in Weighing/Sorting, says I should never have been hired in the first place (Human Resources needs to start giving attitude tests, not aptitude tests, he says). Feldman has taken to sitting at another lunch table, the same Feldman who used to ask me daily if I was going to eat that fruit I’d packed, as if my brown paper sack was full of charitable donations. Truth be told, I am fine with viewing Feldman from across the dingy cafeteria, sitting with his new friends from Shipping, the taut, shiny skin of his swollen face looking like an overripe melon. Most of my other co-workers in Receiving are just drifting away, an inch at a time—fewer comments at the water cooler, less invitations for after-work beers. If asked, they would deny it, of course, and if pressed, they’d just blame me: why do you have to do this, with the persistent questions and the endless wondering? Most would, but not all. There’s DelSanto, the new hire in Quality Control. She has hair as black as a raven’s shadow, the kind that belongs on an actress in a famous foreign film that I should have seen before yet somehow never have. Her eyes are sea-green; not in a visual way, but in an aural way—they sound like waves washing across the smooth white beach that is the inner surface of my skull. Of the tens of thousands of looks exchanged daily between the two hundred employees of the Apex depot, she owns one precious crooked smile that’s reserved for me and me alone, the way one questioner can recognize another, without words.
*
I’m called off the dock Friday afternoon, right in middle of a big offload, a trailer packed to the rafters with little packages, and The Boss tells me to report to Human Resources. I say, how about as soon as I get this semi emptied? Boss says no, Reeves, now. Feldman stops his tow-motor and shoots me a look that says: bye-bye, fella.
The greetings assistant, Ms. Gupta, escorts me from the outer HR office to the inner one, where Ms. Simmons asks me to take a seat on the orange plastic chairs and fill out a request form. “But I’m not requesting this,” I say. “You must,” answers Ms. Simmons. “The Vice President of Human Resources can’t meet with a worker unless the worker requests it.” “Ah, procedure,” I say. “Yes, exactly,” she responds.
Procedure. I’ve worked at Apex Redistribution for eighteen months, which is seventeen months longer than needed to understand that “procedure” means the mutually-agreed-upon consumption of tasteless, formless, meaningless bullshit.
After ten minutes, Ms. Simmons says I can see Ms. Lafferty now.
Ms. Lafferty is tall and blonde, but not the kind you’re picturing. She’s big-boned, and her hair is cut short against her head, like Charlize Theron in The Astronaut’s Wife. She’s attractive, but only in the way that would have you asking her permission first before you even ventured the thought. I’ve seen Lafferty on Sunday mornings; she goes to the same church we do, my wife Ellie and I, but only my wife knows her. They’re both in the Holy Book Postulate Group.
Ms. Lafferty takes a breath and dives right in.
“So, you wanted to see me, Mr. Reeves?”
“No ma’am, the boss told me to come here. Please, call me Norman.”
“It wasn’t your choice?”
“No, ma’am.”
“But that’s not what you wrote here on your request form, Mr. Reeves.”
“I know, but Ms. Simmons said…”
“So, you lied on your request form?”
“No. I mean, sort of. Yes. I’m just doing what I’m told.”
“I see. Well, now that you’re here, Mr. Reeves, can I ask you about the questions?”
“On the request form?”
“No, the ones you’ve been asking around the plant, for weeks now. Questions about Apex.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Lafferty, but is that against procedure, asking questions? I meant no harm by it. It’s just that I have an inquisitive mind.”
“We’d prefer you have an industrious mind. For instance, why do you need to know what’s in the packages?”
“Well, I handle them all day, every day, so I guess I got to wondering what’s inside them—the big ones and the little ones.”
“Mr. Reeves, do we pay you to wonder, or to unload?”
(She has a point. And more on the way, I’ll wager.)
“Mr. Reeves, our customers rely on Apex to deliver (on time) the precise combinations of packages they require. Your group, Receiving, unloads the shipments of big and little packages. Quality Control makes sure the big ones are big enough, yet not overly big, and the same for the little ones. From there, Weighing/Sorting pulls together the orders our clients require, and Shipping delivers them in a timely fashion. What’s so hard to understand?”
(This is where I just should stand up and walk out. This is where acting un-Reeves-ish would be preferable, but no).
“Ms. Lafferty, doesn’t it seem like our customers could just order big ones and little ones themselves, directly from the manufacturers, and assemble their own orders?”
Lafferty clenches her jaw so hard that a blue vein erupts on her temple. She stands and walks to her office door, closing it gently before she commences shouting.
“Are you trying to put us out of business? Why do you even work in the redistribution industry if you entertain blasphemous thoughts like this? Has anyone else heard you spewing this garbage?”
She sits down and attacks the keyboard on her desk, typing words into some file. “You’re on probation, Reeves. If you can avoid screwing up again during the next thirty days, you just might save your job.”
The blue vein in her temple is still throbbing, and now I’m not sure how I thought she resembled Charlize Theron.
I report back to the dock. I have just enough time to finish the unload before the quitting-time bell. I hurry to the locker room to grab my coat, hoping no one is looking too hard at my waistline. The little packages are little, but are they little enough to be inconspicuous?
*
A few years ago, I watched a late-night talk-show interview with Charlize Theron. The host asked Charlize why she’d never married. Her answer was simple: no one has ever made me not want to be single.
*
At home, Ellie is in the kitchen, staring at me, and I’m staring at the little package sitting on our granite countertop. It’s roughly cubic, four inches all around, and sealed in a gray plastic wrapper just like the gray, plastic look on Ellie’s face.
“Great, now you’re stealing packages from work. Are you trying to get fired, Norm?”
“Of course not, El. I just want to see what’s inside. Then I’ll re-wrap it carefully and bring it back Monday morning. The new girl, DelSanto, told me that she won’t be inspecting the fresh load of littles until first break, and there’s no overtime this weekend. Plenty of time for her to slip it back into the pile. She’s in on this with me. No worries.”
Ellie’s look is sharper now, hotter, as if the mere mention of DelSanto’s name is accompanied by the whiff of another woman’s perfume. She approaches me like she’s charging up for a slap, but her arm darts to the countertop and snatches away the little package. She hides it behind the small of her back. “I’ll give it back to you when you leave for work Monday,” she says. “And don’t ever mention that woman’s name in this house again,” she adds, a blue vein appearing like punctuation.
*
Saturday night, I have this dream: I’m walking on a beach, and ahead in the distance lies a dark shape on the sand. Seagulls dance around it—rising into the air, settling again. As I approach, I see the shape is ragged and gray and I hope it’s not a body. It’s not. It’s a package from work; one of the bigs, torn open along one side, its contents spilled across the sand. The big package is full of little ones, some already starting to float away. Among the littles rests the body of a dead gull. The waves tug at it gently, then push it back again, as if the sea has never seen such a thing.
*
On Sunday morning, Lafferty and I pretend not to see each other across the center aisle, but I notice that she must have gotten her hair done again yesterday because it’s even shorter now, like Charlize Theron as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Lafferty sits on the right side, near the band, and Ellie and I usually sit on the left side, near the light control console. The church itself is a cross between a cathedral and a theater; up front, resting on the altar/stage, is the Holy Book in all its hermetically sealed mystery. The preacher delivers a fresh take on what he surmises The Book says about free will; that we should act the way we’re supposed to act because the almighty one, the hidden one, who is infinitely smarter than we are, has already laid out for us the freest path possible, and all we need to do is adhere to that path. This is followed by some amens, some songs, the passing of the basket, and then coffee/donut time. During coffee time, Ellie and Lafferty and some others march off to a conference room to further speculate on what The Holy Book might say. They walk together, chatting, and my coffee is cold, and I do not think the two are unrelated.
*
Monday morning comes, and I’m at the depot early so I’m sure to meet up with DelSanto by the employee entrance. I slip the little package into the pocket of her coat. She answers with the eyes and the smile, and they both bring the wave’s gentle crash between my ears, and this time, I swear, the cry of a seagull.
It takes me most of the day to unload one trailer of bigs, and a second one of littles, and it’s a half hour before quitting time when I’m called to Lafferty’s office again. Gupta passes me right to Simmons, who doesn’t need a form this time. I’m shown right into Lafferty’s office.
“Hello, Norman,” she says, our cleaned-up Furiosa.
“Hi,” I say, waiting for it.
“You know, I like your wife a lot. I look forward to talking with her on Sunday mornings. We agree on many things. For instance, we agree that you want to do what’s right, but you’re readily tempted. If temptations are removed from your life, it will be easier for you to stay on the path. Ellie wants you to keep your job, and so do we. We’re willing to help you. Norman. Will you accept our help?”
I swallow hard. “I never opened the package,” I say.
“I know you didn’t. That’s how I know there’s hope for you. But don’t do it again. Stop wondering, stop questioning. As The Book most likely says, trust what’s been laid out in front of you. I hope I don’t need to see you in here again.”
I leave HR and head straight for the locker room. I know before I get there that DelSanto’s lock is gone, her locker empty. Feldman stands nearby, sneering, a variation of his bye-bye-fella look, and I wish that just once I could ram my fist straight through the rind of his overripe melon.
I drive home in silence, the kind that’s only created by a fresh bloom of questions. By the time I reach my driveway, they’ve all coalesced into one: if Ellie and Lafferty and The Book and the depot hold the path that’s best for me, then there shouldn’t be so many questions, right? There should be more waves than wonderings. There should be more seagulls.
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Joe Kapitan (he/him) writes fiction and creative nonfiction in Cleveland. He is the author of a chapbook, a short story collection, and over eighty individual pieces published online or in print, including an editor’s highlighted selection in Best Small Fictions 2023. Joe serves on the Pithead Chapel staff as an assistant CNF editor, and recently presented at Literary Cleveland’s 2024 Inkubator Writing Conference.
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