The Route They Gave His Nephew

The first morning on the yard

I clocked in at five forty on Monday, twenty minutes early, and I got the broom from the closet by the wash bay.

Pam was at the dispatch window with her coffee. Pam has run dispatch at that depot for twenty-two years and she knows where every driver is at every minute of the day, and she knows things that are not on any screen.

“Walt,” she said, low, when I came past. “This is wrong. You know I think it’s wrong.”

“I know, Pam.”

“Kyle came in asking me how to find the turnoff by the reservoir. The turnoff you could find in your sleep.” She shook her head. “Nineteen years old. He’s a nice enough kid. He’s not ready for that route and everybody in this building knows it.”

I started on the far corner of the lot, where the wind had packed candy wrappers and strapping tape and a flattened cup against the chain-link. I worked a straight line and I did it right. The drivers came out to their trucks and some of them would not look at me and some of them said, “Morning, Walt,” quiet, like you would at a graveside.

A kid named Jeff, one of the younger drivers, stopped by me with his keys in his hand and started to say something and then could not find it. “Walt, this is,” he began, and I said, “I know, Jeff. Go run your route.” He went. It was easier on all of them if I did not make them carry it.

I kept my face easy and I kept moving. A man sweeping a lot with his head up is a different thing from a man sweeping a lot with his head down, and I had decided which one I was going to be before I ever picked up the broom.

By mid-morning the sun burned the overcast off and the lot steamed where it had been wet, and I pushed the broom in long even rows the way my father taught me to mow a yard, lap over the last pass so you miss nothing. I lined the carts up square against the dock. I knocked the mud out of the wheel wells of the empty trucks. If a man was going to do the lowest job in the building, he was going to do it so well that nobody could say the old man had let himself go.

There was a storm drain at the low end of the lot that had been choked with leaves and grit for as long as I could remember, and every hard rain the water backed up and stood ankle-deep by the fuel island and the drivers tracked it into the cabs. Nobody had ever been told to fix it because fixing it was nobody’s job. I got down on my knees Tuesday with a screwdriver and a bucket and pulled the grate and cleaned that drain out by hand, two seasons of black muck and somebody’s lost work glove, and when the next rain came the water ran off clean. A small thing. But I had driven over that puddle for four years wishing somebody would see to it, and now I was the somebody.

Pam watched me do it from the dispatch window and did not say anything, but the next morning there was a second cup of coffee set on the window ledge, black, the way I take it, and she did not say anything about that either.

By seven the lot was clean enough to eat off and the trucks were rolling and I had a long day of nothing left in front of me. So I started on the paper.