The Trouble Way (27 page)

“I’m waiting,” Mr. Braunswine said, turning his gaze to Mr. Hedd.

“I’ll get someone on it right away.” He turned to Dwight, motioned him to approach, and gave him instructions to stack the merchandise in an orderly fashion.

The rest of the stockroom tour went in a similar manner, filled with sarcastic, degrading comments and instructions for Mr. Hedd to follow. All in the most disrespectful way, in front of employees.

The District Manager’s tour lasted over an excruciating hour before he made a quick tour of the cash office where he bent his considerable weight to the floor and used a yardstick to make a sweep under the safe. To his enormous gratification, he fished a quarter and a penny from the dust covered floor and with a smile and handed them to Mr. Hedd.

“
Attention to the small stuff, Mr. Hedd, attention to the small stuff,” Mr. Braunswine said as if he had made a truly profound statement then turned to leave.

“
Mr. Braunswine, there is just one more incident you should be aware of,” Mr. Hedd said directing Mr. Braunswine toward his office. “Maybe we should go into my office.”

“
He’s headed in your direction,” Mr. Hedd said. “A word to the wise, you might want to check for scat in your stockrooms.”

“
It’s rat shit,” he said, “rat shit.” He lowered the receiver, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. “Say goodbye to your year-end bonus Dick Hedd. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“
It was Bertie, Mr. Hedd,” Dwight said, looking at the liquid draining out of the perfect rectangular hole punched in the bottom of the fifty-five gallon drum.

“
What in tarnation was Bertie doing driving the forklift on the receiving dock? Has she been trained?” Mr. Hedd, standing in the white slippery liquid, bent to see the hole the fork on the machine left near the bottom of the drum. Liquid nearly covered the receiving dock. “What the hell is it?”

“
Oh yeah, she’s been trained. She’s better at driving it than I am,” Dwight said. “I think it is concrete sealer, At least, that’s what it looks and smells like. Someone wrote that with a crayon on the side of the barrel.”

“
Get it cleaned up before someone calls the fire ---”

The fire engine, as if on cue, roared around the end of the building and came to an abrupt stop next to the receiving dock. No less than five firemen in full white protective gear including the headwear and oxygen masks, like the scientists in an episode of
“The Twilight Zone,” responding to a deadly attack of poison gas, bounded out of the crew cab. Two more jumped down from the rear bumper, just like in a Charlie Chaplin movie. The only thing missing was the accompanying organ music.

“
Who in the hell called the fire department?” Mr. Hedd asked of nobody in particular.

“
That would be Bertie,” Dwight said. “I heard her on the phone in the receiving office. She said she didn’t know what was in the barrel and she, for one, was not about to be exposed to some goddamned poison gas.”

“
It’s concrete sealer,” Mr. Hedd said when a fireman got to the person in charge.

“
You know, Sir, this will have to be analyzed. There is no label on the container. That in itself is a violation of environmental codes.”

“
It’s concrete sealer,” Mr. Hedd said. “It says it right here.” He pointed to the crayon label.

“
Sorry sir, but that is hardly an official label,” the fireman said. “Who know what’s in that barrel.”

“
It’s goddamned concrete sealer.”

The firemen ignored Mr. Hedd and turned and began herding curious employees away from the receiving area and onto the sales floor.

“That may be the case, Sir, but we can’t be one-hundred percent certain,” the fireman said over his shoulder as Mr. Hedd followed him to the sales floor. He took off his protective headgear, noticing nobody was keeling over from escaping poisonous gasses.

“
Well, I am one-hundred percent sure,” Mr. Hedd said, resigned to the fact he was arguing losing battle.

“
Sir, it is my job to be one-hundred percent sure and that, my friend, is exactly what I intend to do.”

“
Fine,” Mr. Hedd said and turned toward his office.

“
One moment Sir. If the spill had been contained to the exterior of the building, we would let you keep the store open. I see that quite a large portion ran into the receiving area. I’m afraid you’ll have to shut the store down until it gets cleaned up and the danger has been assessed and contained.”

“
Why me?” Mr. Hedd said, looking up at the ceiling, noticing a now familiar brown stain nearly to the stage of dripping. “Shit … shit … shit.”

“
Mr. Hedd, line one for you,” Dwight said. “A reporter for the Seattle Times wants to talk to the store manager about a tip they got of a rat infestation in our store.”

“
Goddamnsonofabitch. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Present

I was suspicious long before I actually knew for a fact the employees were planning treachery against Peter Hedd. Not only old Pete, but the DM, Braunswine as well. In fact, the entire company of Big Richards. There were too damn many things going awry for it to be just a coincidence. Hell, I didn’t find out for sure of a worker’s conspiracy till years later after I’d been fired from the goddamn place.

W
hen I think back on it, that was definitely the best thing ever happened to me, getting the boot. At first, I was pretty depressed about it, but after a while it dawned on me I should have quit the company when it first crossed my mind around the second year I was with the damned outfit. I kept putting it off, thinking I’d better save some bucks, for a cushion. I was thinking maybe ten-thousand before I cut and run. After I’d saved that, it didn’t seem to be quite enough. Then, it seemed too late, they had me by the golden cuffs. Maybe they weren’t golden, more like toy plastic handcuffs with flaking gold paint on them. Anyway, they had me bluffed for a while, years actually. Maybe I was just too chicken-shit to quit.

The way it was put to me, the conspiracy thing, was that none of the employees who were doing all that stuff had anything against the manager personally. It was just like it is today, a hundred years later, they felt like they weren
’t even getting the smaller half of the Hershey bar. Half hell, they weren’t even allowed a whiff of the foil wrapper. I know, I was in management. It was the business plan to give the workers as little as possible. Maximize profits was the theory. Maximize profits for upper management was the reality. It wasn’t just the low-end workers that were the pawns, it included the low-end and middle managers as well.

Back then, the minimum wage was about a buck and a quarter for hourly employees. Employees catch on pretty quickly when they
’re getting their very personal cavity unpleasantly and repeatedly invaded and they weren’t about to settle for that any more than a worker today will settle for seven bucks. It may be that their paycheck shows seven bucks, gross, but you can bet your shiny butt they are getting exactly what they think they’re worth, one way or another, guar-an-fuckin’-teed, as ol’ Roy used to say.

I read somewhere the other day that corporations lose somewhere around twenty billion dollars to shoplifting per year and around ninety percent of that is employee theft. It
’s employees giving themselves what they are certain they deserve. It was the same a hundred years ago when I was an assistant manager at Big Richards.

And, it
’s not that they are getting all that in cash themselves. If they can’t pocket it, they are sure as shit going to denying it to
The Man
. I know it for a fact, first hand. I’ve seen it and I’ve heard it from the mares’ mouths. You’d think that it is men who dominate employee theft. Wrong-a-mundo. Many, but not all, are pretty young women ... and all of them are highly skilled.

I
’ve never told anybody about it before. It is not really all that important, if you want to know, but it’s kinda funny. It’s a good example of the minimum wage earner getting their just rewards for hard work.

I have a hard time remembering names, but the names aren
’t important anyway. I’m guessing here but think her name was Bertha or Bertie. Yeah, Bertie. She was the garden shop manager in one of the Big Richard stores I worked in. It happened in the rat-plagued store, but it could have happened in any one of the twenty stores I had worked in.

Bertie appeared as though she drove through life as if her headlights were on low beam. That was the impression management had of Bertie
’s abilities. If Bertie’s resourcefulness was a target nailed on the barn door and management aimed at it and fired, they’d have hit the chicken coop. She was a genius at making a profit for Bertie. She’d have made a good candidate for upper management. She played management for flippin’ fools; they were the ones driving without their brights on.

Bertie wasn
’t one of those pretty young women. She wasn’t even semi-good looking. What she did didn’t require looks, it required ingenuity, and that she possessed in abundance.

She would take lawnmowers to the repair shop to have them refurbished; lawnmowers disgruntled customers had returned to Big Richards for a refund. She
’d get cash from the main office to pay for their refurbishment and then take her car and pick them up. She noticed that management didn’t audit her actions when she returned the mowers to the store. Eventually, instead of bringing them back to the garden shop, she took ‘em to her home. Over a few months, she managed to accumulate a garage full of refurbished lawn mowers and sold ‘em herself. Not once did anybody check on her to make sure she brought the machines back to the store. For a little frosting, she claimed her mileage to and from the repair shop; she even added the mileage to her home.

As business grew, she devised additional marketing strategies. She got to where she would target likely customer
s shopping for a mower and offer them a hell-of-a deal on a refurbished one if they could pay with cash, no questions asked. She had a waiting list. In fact, she devised a ruse to have a friend buy a mower and return it so she could build up her stock of used mowers for her operation. She’d give the friend ten bucks and gave them the cash to buy the mower.

In the winter, she did it with snow blowers. She
was a goddamn marketing genius.

If someone questioned her on it, she
’d say, “Oh, I sold that mower to Mr. Johnson the minute I got it from repair. He bought it right out of my trunk. I would have had a hard time lifting it out of my trunk with my back and all. He did all the work for me. Paid cash.”

The
“paid cash” part may have been true; she just neglected to say she sold it from her garage and kept the cash herself. Never occur to anybody to question her integrity, thinking she was too dim to think of committing fraud. As far as I know, they never did catch her.

She was quite the merchandiser. All the lawnmowers were lined up by size on her front lawn with a real professional looking sign on each one. She had quite a line of bullshit. Something she was real proud of. Ann said she used to work in a carnival; told me all about Bertie years later, after I
’d been whacked.

The one that takes the granddaddy of purple ribbons was the trick Bertie pulled with the Christmas trees. That little venture cost Hedd about five-thousand bucks during one Christmas season alone.

Word on the street was that Bertie spent her off time at the track during the season and needed to finance her addiction.

Rumor also has it that that little sociopath, Candy, the rat hunter, was in on that Christmas tree scam.

Candy took Ann for a bundle too. She dipped into Ann’s peanut jar of cash and booked on her when the rent was due. Candy took her stash of weed too. That was one mistake Candy probably wish she hadn’t made. Ann and her friend, Linda, set her up and burned her ass, but good.

Shit, I remember one time I worked all night looking for dead rats, if you can believe that. Dead rats.

The worst job I’d had up to that point was digging a sewer for three days so I’d have the cash to go out with a girl I was infatuated with in high school, Bernadette. I think our phone call lasted less than fifteen second. She said “No thanks,” when I asked her if she’d like to go to a movie. That was it, “No thanks.” I was speechless so I just hung up the receiver. (I saw her about fifteen years later in a nightclub and asked her if she would like to dance … “No thanks.” Bitch.)

H
igh school, that’s when I was really a dumb shit. I’m embarrassed to say but to prove how dumb I was, I screwed Janis between her butt and the car seat. I thought it was awful rough and cold but, heck, I’d never done it before, and, actually, it felt pretty darn good. Obviously, after a little redirection, it was infinitely better. If that’s not dumb enough, I proved to be even dumber, if you can imagine. I did that exact butt-car seat thing with Rose, the second girl I’d had my way with; different car. The seat covers were cloth. It was warm and wet by that point. If Rose hadn’t said something, I’d have been completely satisfied. How the hell was I to know? It didn’t feel all that bad. In my expert opinion, if you’re going to fuck a seat-cover, go with cloth.

It was me and some guy named Dwight who were on the dead-rat hunting expedition. There was one girl who worked with us, Candy. Turns out, they were in it together. Candy and Dwight and a bunch of other employees were in this little loose-knit group that was out to get
The
Man
. They stole shit and ruined stuff ... caused all kinds of damage to the place.

I accidentally ran into one of the workers years later, Ann, and she told me a bunch of stuff. Ann wasn
’t all that happy to see me, but she was pleasant and we had a beer for old times’ sake.

Most of the employees, I don
’t even remember. I worked in a butt-load of stores and it’s impossible to remember all the names.

Anyway, Ann told me. I clearly remember her name because I slept with her. It was the first girl I fell in love with since I
’d divorced the lunatic, that’s really why I remember Ann.

I
’d overcome my seat-cover/butt problem by then and I got her pregnant. She had an abortion. One day, right after the abortion, I was standing by another assistant manager and she grabbed my tie, right in front of Gene, and synched it up really tight, enough to make my head feel like it was turning purple, and said, “Jake ... Leave ... Me ... Alone,” real slow and as serious as a broken neck. I damn near strangled. She must have practiced Judo. Embarrassed the crap out of me. Well, I can take a hint. I guess I sort of knew she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore on account of the abortion and I might have been sort of stalking her. (This was the “not happy part,” as Bella, my little three-year-old friend said to me. She was talking about a particular point in an animated movie, not about my love life.)

I couldn
’t seem to decide on what I wanted in life, girls or otherwise, after I got divorced from that lunatic, Janis. I just sort of cruised along for quite a few years after that. Janis really screwed with my head, mainly about girls.

Well, I did decide to marry my cousin, Priscilla, when I was nine or ten but then the
“not happy part” of my life started. That lasted for another ten or so years.

Bella is a million times smarter than I am. For example, Bella knows precisely what she is going to do in her future. She has already decided who she is going to marry, Dalton; he
’s three also.

She said when I asked her if she needed to go potty:
“I’m going to pee and then I’m going to poop.” I have to say, you can’t be much more precise than that about your immediate future. I wish she had been around back in my troubled years. I sure could have used her example.

It took a hundred years for me to actually get around to marrying my cousin Priscilla, the one I fell in love with when I was nine. I blame that on Janis too.

I slept with a lot of women that worked at the stores I was assigned to and, the fact is, I don’t remember hardly any of their names. One was the personnel manager of the first store I was in and I’ll be damned if I remember her name. That’s pretty bad if you can’t remember a personnel manager. She just knocked on my door one night with a bottle of wine in one hand and a smile on those big red lips of hers. She had the biggest knockers I’d ever seen on a skinny woman. Said her ol’ man was a cheat.

Anywho, we hit the sheets pretty quickly after we polished off most of that bottle of Merlot. It happened only once. She said I wore her out. Hell, I thought that was the point … wore me out too. Becky … that was it. Ms. Becky.

Anyway, Ann told me it was Dwight, the stockroom manager, who killed the rats and stuffed them in the ceiling and in the walls. He used big wooden rattraps to catch them. She found out from her friend, Linda, who used to go out with Dwight.

I slept with Linda too. She was a Pilipino, a gorgeous one, as a matter of record. She could sure kiss. I never could get the knack of the way she wanted me to do that. She didn
’t have a problem telling me how shitty I was at it either. On the up side, I got the knack of how she liked to be screwed though. Maybe I should say on the side-by-side, side. I’ll let you use your imagination on that.

Anyway, the store manager, Mr. Hedd, sent us on this expedition. We were supposed to find all the dead animals and get rid of them before the health department inspector showed up the next day. We smelled them but I
’ll be damned if we could locate any. Dwight kept guiding us to where he was sure the odor was coming from and the truth was, he was leading us astray. He’d point this flashlight into a cubbyhole and pretended to search all over the place and finally say, “Nope, nothing there,” and we’d look someplace else. I don’t know how he stood the smell of sticking his head in that hole. He really put on a show, convinced me.