Light Lifting (18 page)

In the middle of the river, the first hint of its approach is more than enough. She feels the throbbing of the engine coming through the water and hears the sound, a massive grinding, like a creature gnawing at the earth's crust. It is not visible yet, still out there and indistinct, but it is coming and she knows there will be no way around.

A raw terror sears through and demands an equivalent ferocity. She thrashes against the current, driven now by primordial instinct, the need to escape and a raw demand coming from a place she does not know. Her feet and hands pummel the surface. She snarls for breath, moving faster, harder than ever before. She is getting away, maybe, but there is no way to be sure. Every limit is unknown before it is reached. Very soon the prow, two hundred feet high, will emerge from the fog and it will part this water like the gargantuan head of an axe cleaving through. They are the native creatures of this place and the river is their natural habitat. Only the largest pass at night to avoid the complications of smaller boats. The propeller will be the size of a two-story house and the twin off-loading cranes will fold back like the wings of a resting insect. It will be a Leviathan, three football fields long, rusting red hide stuffed with 5,000 tons of salt. The river boils in its wake, a froth even the ocean cannot match. She tries not to hear it, tries to keep it out of her head, but the mechanical roar will not be commanded. It rises out of the dark, advances over the water and swallows everything in its path.

The Loop

T
he trick to riding a bike in the snow is to stand up on the pedals and push down hard on the front wheel. You need to lean into it and get all your momentum going forward so you can plough through that six or eight inches of slush that piles up on the side of the road. It's not a skill you can master. No matter how many times you go through and no matter how hard you think about it, it never gets any easier. That skinny little wheel still can't get a better grip on the ice-covered street. I used to think riding in the snow was the worst part of the Musgrave job, but in the end I had different reasons for quitting.

When you fall, you want to try and go down on the right hand side. As soon as you feel your tire slipping and the whole back end of the Supercycle moving away on its own, that's when you need to grab the bars tight and swing everything way over to the right, towards the hard line of parked cars. It has to be to the right because if you go down on the left you end up splayed out in the middle of the road, right at the peak of drive-home traffic, and all you can do then is hope those nervous Southern Ontario drivers – the ones who never buy winter tires – still remember how to pump their brakes in just the right way and swerve around you, carving a smooth S curve in the snow just a couple inches from your head.

The one time I went down like that, on the left, the delivery bag ripped open when I hit the ground and everything spilled out onto the street. I got tangled up in the frame and the shoulder strap got wrapped around my elbow and the snow-choked chain came off the big ring and the small ring at the same time. All the little white prescription bags and the brown bottles and the vials with their Musgrave Pharmacy stickers tumbled out. All the other stuff went too: the candy, the tampons, the eight-pack of toilet paper, the denture cream, the jars of medicated ointment and the magazines wrapped in plastic or discreet brown paper. I looked like a soggy hospital piñata that had been walloped into submission. The wet snow kept coming down in fat, lazy flakes and horns were squawking all around me. A steady stream of road-ragers chugged by, each one taking his turn to yell at me about how I better stay on the sidewalk or get the hell out of the way. There was a moment just after I hit the ground, when my head was still down there close to the asphalt and I saw one of those pill vials with the childproof cap rolling away from me, across the yellow line in the middle of the road. I was down right at eye-level and I saw it close-up as this black steel-belted radial came rolling down on it. The plastic tube made a quiet splintery sound and for a half-second I thought I saw a couple of blue and yellow capsules springing up maybe six inches off the ground before they were crushed into the blacktop.

When I finally got myself put together again and made it back to the store, Marlene, one of the nice older ladies who worked at the front counter selling film and batteries and stamps, took me into the tight bathroom on the other side of the dispensary. I remember the way she screwed the cap off a new bottle of rubbing alcohol and how she defiantly ripped open a package of the most expensive antiseptic-treated bandages we sold.

“The bastard,” she muttered to me, as if we were suddenly the same age and we both had been in our jobs too long.

“There's no place he wouldn't send you. Nowhere is too far. Just the thought of it. On a day like today. You're lucky you're still alive.”

She kind of cooed over me and tried to be as gentle as she could.

“It's going to hurt, Allan,” she said. “But what can you do?”

She pressed the alcohol swabs into the scraped red lines on my left shoulder and my left elbow. And there was a weird moment when I had to undo the top button of my jeans and pull down my zipper just a bit so I could reach the bad spot where my left hip had come down the hardest. Marlene turned away and closed her eyes. Then she reached back and held out the dripping gauze.

“That one you can do yourself.”

We both laughed.

When we came out, Musgrave was waiting. He was wearing a lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket flap and holding one of those special metal spatulas they use for counting pills and sliding them across the tray. He pointed the sharp end of the spatula at me, right at the bridge of my nose, and he asked me if I was sure, absolutely sure, that nothing had been left behind.

“Those medications are controlled substances, you know,” Musgrave said. “And from the minute they leave this dispensary, you are the one responsible for making sure they get where they're supposed to go.”

He stared down at me through his bifocals and kind of swayed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Depending on how I looked up into his glasses from the other side, I could make his eyes change shape just by moving my head up or down.

“You're certain you got everything?” he said.

It was obvious he was worried mostly about his labels, about all those stickers with his name on them.

I thought about the crushed capsules again, about the stuff that was already gone, stuck to a tire somewhere and still moving across the city.

“There's nothing left,” I said. “I brought back everything I could.”

The guy really should have paid me more. Musgrave was always sticking me into tight situations I had to squirm out of on my own. A couple of years earlier, some high-school kids tried to rob me as I cut across Benson schoolyard. They thought I was carrying harder stuff they could use or re-sell and they tore through the packages looking for anything with codeine in it, for a big bottle of Tylenol 3s, or Percocets, or something with lots of ephedrine for making Crystal Meth. Today, they'd have been after the OxyContin.

When all they got was the regular stuff – the antacids and nasal sprays and laxatives and those sheets of little beige felt pads that you're supposed to stick to the corns on your feet – they turned angry. One of them knocked me over and held me down while another one pulled off my shoes. Then they tied them together and took turns swinging them above their heads, trying to throw them up as high as they could. After five or six cracks at it, one of them finally got it right and the shoes ended up tangled around a telephone line twenty feet above the street. They laughed and thought it was just perfect and left me alone after that.

But the shoes stayed up there a long time. Whenever I passed under them – if I was out on my route again or just out walking around near my house – I'd look up and feel that little sting coming up through the bottom of my socks, the same sharp digging pressure you get if you ever have to push your bare foot down onto the serrated edge of a pedal.

The place isn't even there anymore. A few months after I left, Musgrave gave it up completely and the store flipped into a Vietnamese grocery with roasted yellow ducks hanging in the front window and bushel baskets of fruit I didn't recognize. I think he held on for as long as he could, but he knew. Like the rest of us, Musgrave understood he was stuck at the end of things. It was during that period when the whole city wanted to go in a new direction, directly away from us, and the papers kept saying that we needed to tear down the old buildings on Pitt Street and “re-vitalize” everything. By the time they opened the brand new Shoppers Drug Mart, it was pretty clear. The new pharmacy had big windows that went all the way around the building from the floor up to the ceiling and every week they printed up a different full-colour flyer with all their specials in it. Shoppers Drug Mart had a fleet of blue and white delivery trucks driven by a crew of middle-aged men in matching coats. The trucks had a computer-tracking system, like a courier company, and every customer had to sign their name on a little digital pad before the driver would hand over their bag. They made their own cheaper, generic brands of everything. Soap and shampoo and vitamins and eye drops and aspirin and toothbrushes. Everything they sold had the word “Life” written on it, spelled out in this red slanty font. Nobody could compete with that.

“We're a dying breed,” Musgrave told me once as he flipped through their latest flyer and stared at those glossy magnified photographs of hair dye and antiseptic mouthwash.

“Pretty soon, it's going to be impossible. Impossible for anybody to make a go of it on their own.”

I'm pretty sure the customers I delivered to didn't know anything about the trucks or the better prices at Shoppers Drug Mart. Musgrave sent me mainly to the quiet floors of rest homes – to Golden Gate and Whispering Pines – and then out to his special harem of shut-ins and old women who had outlived their husbands. The other half of his customers were lonely single guys who'd been injured at the plants and were off on long-term disability. I had that job for almost three years, up to the end of elementary school, and except for a couple crashes and near-misses it was all pretty routine. From Monday to Friday between 4:00 and 6:30 I raced back and forth across the city, dodging cars and swerving around sewer grates with my bag always hanging over my shoulder and the weight in it clunking against my knee every time my leg came around for another turn.

I made a different plan for every trip. Before I left the store, I plotted the route out in my head and thought of all the short cuts I could take. And when I made the loop, I imagined it like a big connect-the-dots picture where I had to draw the lines between every separate person. I'd drop the right medicine at each house and maybe pick-up the prescriptions that needed to be filled the next time around. Every stop was its own thing but I held them all together in my head and I kept the whole sequence in order. It's like that for any delivery job. There's one address and then another and you keep leaving and arriving, but in between there's nothing.

I think the guys on disability had it roughest. They weren't as old as the women I delivered to and they didn't have the glaucoma or the osteoporosis that used to wear down the ladies. Instead, most of the guys had been wrecked by those steady, grinding jobs they used to have at the plants before everything got ergonomic and automated. Some of the men were so twisted up with tendonitis they couldn't tie their own shoes and when they went to shake your hand all you got was this flaccid jumble of separate fingers that wouldn't squeeze together right. They had joint and muscle problems and arthritis that was way worse than it should have been in people their age. And their lower backs were so messed up they had to sleep on sheets of plywood or lay on the floor when they watched their sports at night and their American soaps during the day.