massive debt from years of substance abuse. His dog barked angrily from the back of his truck at anyone who walked past, and its snarls were the last thing I heard before I drove off to handle my own route.
9
I took my painkillers with my coffee as I drove to the station, but the toughest part was when I first arrived and had to assemble two hundred papers before the meds kicked in. Bagging papers was dull, mindless work, made even more difficult by the Deadhead’s preference for tuning the small radio on his worktable to a station whose playlist seemed to have been culled exclusively from the soft-rock soundtrack of my childhood: Cat Stevens continued exhorting people to board the peace train, Streisand and Gibb continued declaring they had nothing to be guilty of, and Joni Mitchell still wanted us to help her, she thought she was falling in love again. The deejay bragged about broadcasting these laments commercial free between midnight and 3, and the Deadhead would play with the reception until he got it just right, and then tap his foot and nod his head while he hummed along. The love songs and the sentimental childhood memories they evoked in me, juxtaposed with the thuds of stacked papers and grunts of the straining workers, made me feel my life had become the punch line of some arcane conceptual joke. After the Deadhead left to deliver, the remaining employees would talk about how much they disliked his music, but no one ever said anything to him. One night, after listening to Michael McDonald claim he kept forgetting we’re not in love anymore, I decided somebody had to make a stand for sanity, and I asked if there was another station we could tune the radio to.
“You don’t like this song?” the Deadhead asked, incredulous. “That’s the Doobie Brothers, man.”
“I’ve heard this song five hundred times.”
“It’s the only station that comes in good,” he said. “The others are fuzzed out because of all the metal in here, but I guess I can try-I don’t want to annoy anyone.” He started messing with the tuning, and for the next minute we heard nothing but static and garbled, distorted voices, until I had to tell him to forget it and just put it back where it was.
“Sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t know it was a problem.”
“Because you never asked,” I replied.
“Shit,” he said. “You’ve been here for a month? I’ve been here for three years. Just relax.”
“How am I supposed to relax when I’m constantly hearing all those shitty songs?”
“So I’ll just turn it off.”
No one said anything else. In the silence that followed, the sounds of everyone working were distracting and overloud. Even though I’d only said what everyone else was thinking, the silence felt like judgment. They considered me the bad guy, and I ended up wishing I’d never said anything in the first place.
10
Before she left, my wife claimed that she and I were driving each other crazy trapped in the house together all the time, and that with herself and the baby out of the way for a bit, I could apply all of my energy to my job search. Besides, she said, her parents would love to spend some time with their granddaughter. That I agreed with her when she said these things is not in dispute.
Olivia was starting to string together her first speculative, surreal statements at this time.
11
When my refills ran out, I decided to find a place where I could get some more. I chose a walk-in clinic in an old hospital in the rougher part of town, and waited my turn on the hard plastic lobby chair, while next to me an old Asian man sat with his head bowed and his eyes shut tight, absorbed by some internal difficulty. Across from me, a stocky man in overalls pressed a thick wad of blood-soaked paper towels to his forearm while he explained in detail what was unsafe about the motion he’d used with a box cutter. At the climax of his description, he lifted the paper towels to reveal the awful result. And there were at least three different exhausted mothers with small children who clung to their legs or lay on the thinly carpeted floors. The children whimpered quietly while streams of gray snot ran down over their bright red lips, and one stared at me suspiciously for upwards of ten minutes. Her eyes were dark, her lashes incredibly long, and I smiled at her once, toward the beginning of the staring, but she didn’t acknowledge it, and never changed her expression.
When I was called in to talk to the pimply young doctor, I complained of back pain-too many hours in the car, I said. I also mentioned neck pain, from craning my head out the window. I felt these were plausible injuries, and found I could speak confidently when I concentrated on the part that was true. When I wanted to demonstrate my pain, I just tensed the muscles in my shoulder, which sent pain rocketing through the joint-pain I ascribed to my back and neck, areas I knew were difficult to diagnose with accuracy. The doctor absently picked at a pimple on his chin and asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. I decided my pain was an eight, a nine being burning to death, a ten, crucifixion. The doctor looked me over, shrugged, patted me on the back, and wrote me a prescription.
12
I kept pills in a vial in the console of my car as I drove past the warehouses and factories and stevedoring businesses that populated my route. I also drove a stretch of undivided highway, two lanes each way, and delivered papers on all of the narrow residential roads that branched off and weaved their way up into the hills outside the city proper. Whole strings of large homes hid within the dense green foliage of those hills, though all a person could see from the road were the rundown little houses on truncated dirt or gravel drives that branched from the side of the highway at random intervals. Those little houses with their peeling paint and rusted motorcycles and long, dirty weeds depressed me, especially when the car’s headlights illuminated a small bicycle, soccer ball, or other toy abandoned in the weeds.
The house with the boy in the sleeper was one of those houses.
13
During the occasional phone calls I received from her, Sara updated me on the places she had taken Olivia: Pike Place market one day, the aquarium another, and always the park. She claimed Olivia enjoyed Seattle, which annoyed me, because how can a two-year-old even know the difference between one city and another? And there were things I wanted to show Olivia too-it’s not as if I didn’t see my share of animals or greenery. Hanging branches whipped past the windows of the car as I drove up a winding road to throw papers at the houses hidden
