By David Dufour
Every day Curtis counted his Monopoly tabs. “I’m almost at a thousand,” he said. He looked like a man meant to deliver something, his eyes dark and saggy. He tried explaining to me what each one meant. Some mornings he’d debrief me outside the warehouse. He said Water Works and Boardwalk were quite potent.
We were low-totem property handlers. Drivers of trucks and schleppers of crates. Our warehouse was owned by an auction house based in Manhattan, London, Paris. Everywhere. We worked mainly on the third floor. Below us was a manufacturer of baby bibs and baby dolls. Above us, a woodworking shop. I was renting a one bedroom. A place to lay my head, that was it. My girl kicked me out after one of those spats you never quite recover from. Dirty dishes, I think it was. My bedroom doubled as a studio, where I was painting a triptych of the rapture. My ode to Bosch.
It started a few months back. After lunch, Curtis brought in a ziploc baggie. Had all these clippings inside. He poured them on my work table, McDonald’s Monopoly tabs by the dozen. Little gold arches spread across the table.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“Evidence,” he took a brief glance over his shoulder. “It’s a recession indicator. Everybody knows that.”
“No evidence to me,” I said.
“How so?”
“You can’t just doctor some apocalypse theory from a large fry container.”
“It’s right here in front of us.”
A door slammed in the hall. High heels echoed. I wanted to see the legs they belonged to, but it was too late when I poked my head out.
Curtis put the tabs back in the baggie. As the door closed, I watched Willie roll trash down the hall. The doors opposite us opened to a wide window. Rain gathered outside in the purple-blue sky.
The day before I delivered a painting to a townhouse. The owners weren’t home. Never were. It was their designer, Hans, I met. Hans said he had a guy that could forge paintings better than the one I’d brought him.
“But this is real,” I said.
“My guy is perfect guy. Original frame cracked? He crack the new frame.”
“Where do you want this?”
“You want to replicate the pearly breast of renaissance girl? He can do that, too.”
When I got back to the warehouse, a black SUV was out front, the back door open. The high-heeled lady crawled in the back before it peeled off. I couldn’t find her face through the tinted windows. As it sped up, two mini Dominican flags flapped in the breeze.
Curtis and I made a place for the tabs. In the break room ceiling. Under Willie’s watch, we raised a grey ceiling tile and placed the baggie full of tabs between the ceiling beams. “Safe now,” Curtis said. He gave the open square a long slow look. Like he’d be certain no hand could touch them but his own. Then he replaced the ceiling tile.
“I wanna show you something,” he said.
We took the emergency stairs to the loading docks. He hit a button on his keys and his Prius chirped. Wild geese hanging around the docks hissed and pecked at passersby. Curtis had a cold roll in his jacket, and tore bite sizes of it. His snack trail pleased the mama goose.
“Do they want bread?” I asked.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “We all want bread.”
“Fair.”
He popped the trunk. There was, naturally, a brief case. He opened it to shiny rows of gold and silver coins. All perfectly kept under plastic.
Curtis’ combover danced in the wind. He looked at me how he looked when he had plans, when he knew the plans ahead. The ones they had. They, being the ones out there. I understood.
Higher-ups from the main office were in town. Inspection week. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” our manager said. Perfect. They just had some questions. Procedural stuff. Ever since Marv P.’s hand got sliced by a hundred year old window, we had to have these annual pow-wows. Everybody knew that. The HR lunk they sent wore a gray sport coat, had a weak chin. Began every sentence with, If I may.
Never caught his name. He said it to me once over break-room cookies, but I was blasting Coltrane in one ear. Sport Coat was what Curtis nicknamed him.
“What’s your politics?” Curtis asked.
“None,” I said.
“Enjoy being a target.”
“Oh please. I’m apolitical. I’ll date anyone.”
“First mistake right there. I knew you weren’t clear of mind”
Clarity is everything. He taught me this. If the mind is muddled, you can be told anything. A weak link. A charity case. Focus your thoughts on one physical point, he said. Become solid. Unshakeable. I tried to focus on a lazy goose, its feathers, long neck. Nothing else. I closed my eyes and opened them. The goose got up and waddled over to its family, and my focus was shot.
I was outside watching the geese. They gathered to flap their wings together in idiot clusters. Recessions were imminent. Any day now. His exact words. Any day now you wouldn’t be able to buy or sell without a chip in your head. A thing no bigger than a grain of rice. Count your gold and silver. Pray, or at least think really hard, about the person you will be. What excuse will you have when your dollars are worth absolutely nil.
Sport Coat wanted to see us. He handed over two pieces of paper. Surveys. Typical stuff. “If I may, gentleman,” he said. “This is quite standard. I just need you two gentlemen to grab a pencil and answer these questions.” One question wasn’t really a question: I feel safe in my workplace: TRUE or FALSE. And then, Do you feel respected by your co-workers? Sport Coat placed his hands on the desk, twiddled his thumbs.
Curtis had put in years there. He asked a few times what my ambitions were. I mimed like a saxophone was in my hands. Coltrane in my ear. He didn’t believe that I ever played. My hands weren’t sax player hands, he said.
The manager told me to find a vase. Something on the sixth floor, our extra storage room. “This is for the Geneva client,” he said. “Do you understand?” I shook my head. “Nothing, and it should be understood, absolutely nothing, not a blemish, a nick, nothing should be anything less than perfect.” Curtis went with me.
We took the elevator up. The whole room reverberated when I unlatched the door. Dust got in my face. Spiders crawled over aging crates and made their webs between them. Black specs crawled up and down the concrete columns, probably mold. I reached for the breaker but nothing was there. Big windows overlooked the street. Dense white powder rose from the construction worker’s drilling below. You could see down to the loading docks where Willie was smoking, covered in a powder-cloud.
I jotted possible inventory numbers, scanning the rows of crates. Names of designers tagged on their sides. Heart Talk, Everything by Choice, Aphorism. Shit name after shit name. None of them were right. Nothing here was right. I wasn’t right. The whole deal was dead.
Next day I kept looking. Up on the sixth, Sport Coat didn’t seem to bother me, so I huddled among the crates. The vase couldn’t, and probably wouldn’t, be found.
I heard it every day. You should start stacking gold and silver. Stack that shit, Curtis said. Before it’s gone. He went “Boom!” with his hands, eyes wide. Know what I mean, he said.
Still haven’t finished my triptych. Waiting for the right shade of cloud. Clouds will open in the rapture. For the Lord. I see them now, baby pillows. A little blue, a little grey on the bottom. I’m sleeping, I think, but not really. Some heavenly sliver of light burns my forehead through God’s magnifying glass. The clouds part for me. Now I know their colors.
Curtis wanted to take a ride. “Let’s drive over the bridge,” he said. We drove over the bridge and past stooped branches leaking Spanish moss, the world curling over us.
He wanted to see his boy Rico’s pawn shop. “About what,” I asked, but I already knew the answer. Gold and silver. More for the collection. No number seemed to satisfy.
The shop was nudged under an overpass. You’d miss it if you weren’t wise to the recession. If you weren’t looking, seeing, that is. Inside Rico had the standard rifle and shotgun wall. Deer and racoon taxidermy decorations. I said very little, not wanting to tip Rico off to our collections, or the briefcase in the trunk. In a negotiation, you want to speak less than the other guy. Let them spill. Tell you who they are.
Curtis had some old baseball cards, a Navy badge. He thought that’d be enough for a handsome sum of cash. Enough to trade later on the appropriate markets for crypto. Rico gave him some money, seemed impressed enough. The dollars he gave us were already worthless, but he didn’t know that. Above me, the buzzy lights nearly made me doze off. Curtis counted away the night. He tapped the stack of bills on the counter like a hand of cards.
I didn’t speak.
I was clear-minded, a stone.
Yesterday the whole warehouse had to evacuate. We held our noses as we filed outside. A few guys in hazmats crawled through the ceiling. Hours passed. The geese weren’t hissing. Maybe they smelled it, too. The plastic fire. What you’ve got is a plastic fire, a hazmat guy said. He had a round face, seemed trained for this sort of thing. Talking people down. What happened was a baby doll melted. It was recalled Chinese materials they were using, highly toxic stuff. The toy maker responsible stood on the curb, chainsmoking, cursing the warehouse in slang Mandarin.
Curtis hunched over his work. A jigsaw puzzle of Napoleon on his horse, sword held high. Work got so slow we tried puzzles.
“Some say Napoleon was gay. Notice how he held his sword.”
“You make a case.”
“Look out. Or up. At anything. Things mean things,” he said.
“Things as in?”
“As in an eighteen wheeler driving across the country all night with a truck load of toothpaste.”
He also could’ve said soy bean burgers, or single-use plastics. It got so that Curtis couldn’t go without reporting the meaning of plastic. How grand things were when you really thought about it.
The tabs weren’t currency, he told me. They were the first sign. The groundhog’s shadow. The first larvae at the root of a corn stalk.
Curtis glanced out a big upstairs window. A construction worker motioned intercourse to his pals. Signs of orgasm, big and strong. Curtis was pale. More so than he always had been. He’d been sulking since his tabs got scorched.
“They can’t shit your spirit out of you.”
I tried eye contact. I caught instead a leer, his gaunt side eye under a grey brow.
“Useless. You, them. There’s no place for me here.”
“You could try the downstairs construction. That’s a place.”
“I’m thinking negative on that. I won’t be here long.”
Won’t be here long. As in, this company? The earth? The options seemed dizzying.
Post hazmat situation, Sport Coat started wearing masks and gloves. Nitrile, latex. No evidence suggested they made a difference. But Sport Coat swore the plastic fire left speckles of carcinogen dancing in the once-pure breathing air.
I got back from a route one day. Found him berating Curtis. There was Sport Coat: pointing up at the freckled beak of Curtis, tapping one foot to seemingly steady his whole being. He said, No, no, no, no, no. He said, I saw what you did. You walked right past the soap dispenser. I’m somehow, he said, the only person in the building aware of the air’s new fatal properties. As you know, I’m not a smoker. I run 5ks and love overnight oats. He raised to his tippy toes at oats.
Curtis just stood there, taking it. He looked at me over Sport Coat and I knew he was a goner.
After they fired him, he sent lots of mail. Letters from a place. A commune. I got a post card. It had trees surrounding a wooden sign. The sign said BE WELL.
Not much had been working for me. Not in that city. I was still at the warehouse job until I got a call from Sport Coat. Sorry, he said. Money’s tight, the market’s not what it was. People aren’t buying art and who could blame them. Some cuts were made, and you were one of them. I’d just woken up. Winnipeg or wherever Curtis was sounded about right.
Another postcard was delivered. It had a picture of Curtis smiling with his thumbs up taped to the back. It just said:
Friend,
My heart these days is heavier because times are indeed heavy. I can’t carry them by myself anymore. Keep your wits right now, put them in your pocket if there’s room. Something very very much reeking of fish is afoot. There’s always a place for you out here in the piney woods. The kitchen makes a mean mystery slop. They made a way for me, and one can be made for you if you want it. They have steps you can follow. Think about it.
Best,
C
I tacked it right next to all the others he’d sent. Life here was doable. But nobody, not even me, said doable was something to aspire to. ‘Do what you can’ became my motto. Curtis couldn’t handle doable. I tried passion, ecstasy, lust, fervor. Seemed getting to where Curtis was at required a total do-over of me. Something seemed to rattle my whole building. When I walked outside, there it was: a big truck railing past my apartment, with those big golden arches, a shade of red I’d recognize anywhere. The Monopoly man bespectacled and giddy with his fistful of bills.
David Dufour is a writer from Louisiana.