You arrive at the third loading dock on the mountain side of the plant, itself a huge, blue, aluminum-sided mountain. You are there at 8 o’clock, as you were told. You are the only one there. The loading dock is closed, the big aluminum door pulled down. It faces a parking lot, empty, except for a huge dumpster, pushed up against the fourth loading dock. And there is a car, parked alone, across the lot. There is a man in the car. The man sits with his head down, leafing through a pile of yellow forms in his lap. He doesn’t look up at you. You stand there, staring up at the hazy mountains on the horizon, pretending you are enjoying looking at them.
What you really want to be looking at right now is a cigarette. You ran out of cigarettes the night before, and you are itching for a smoke. You normally keep a pack by the mattress and light one first thing in the morning, before you unwrap yourself from your surplus sleeping bag. You can’t afford heat or food, but you always came up with a buck thirty-five for cigarettes—until last night.
Standing here on the loading dock, you are very cold. You can see that the man in the car is smoking. That bastard, you think. He is filling that car up with smoke. You consider banging on his window and asking for one. But then, suddenly, the man jumps out of the car, the cloud of smoke evaporating into the snowy mountain air behind him.
The man walks up to the platform and passes by you. He pulls out a long ring of keys. He rattles them into the padlock and pulls the steel door up. “Come on,” he says, waving a fat arm at you.
You follow him into a huge, cavernous plant. Piles of yellow phone books, towering, sit in stacks eight feet high, and at least a hundred yards deep.
“Where’s the other guy?” the man asks.
“What other guy?”
“Goddamn it! The other guy I’m paying the agency for! Where is he?”
The pack of cigarettes in his short pocket makes you itchy again. They look like they might pop out, and he might not notice.
“I don’t know,” you answer.
“What did the agency tell you?”
“They told me to report here at eight o’clock.”
“Well, I don’t care how many of you people they send. I need an empty warehouse, not a warehouse filled with last year’s phone books. I need you to get these phonebooks out of here and loaded into the trucks. I’m coming back here at five o’clock, and they better be gone. Trucks, and phonebooks, and you. If not, I’m calling that goddamned agency and getting my money back, and you’ll be out on your ass with the rest of those hippies living up in those caves in the mountains.” The man waves a fat arm up at the mountains, looks at them for a moment, and shutters. “I got to go now. You got your orders?”
“Where are the trucks?”
“Oh, they’re coming. Two big cowboys. And they don’t like hippies, so you better watch your ass. Anything else?” he asks rhetorically.
The man climbs off the platform and walks toward his car, putting a new cigarette in his mouth.
“Can I have a cigarette?” You ask him.
“Sure you can,” the man yells back. “Anybody can have a cigarette.” He climbs into his car and drives away, leaving you alone with the phone books. You sit on the edge of the dock, staring up at the mountains. You’re beginning to enjoy looking at them now. The snow looks like powdered sugar. The sun climbs above them and they take shape, each mountain with its own lines and patterns. I suppose I can make a run for it, you think, before the trucks get here.
But then two big trucks pull into the lot, one behind the other. The driver of the first nods at you. He has a huge bushy beard and a vest. He turns and backs into the loading dock, the second driver close behind him. The first driver climbs onto the dock.
“Them there the phone books?” he asks.
“That’s them,” you say.
The driver pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shakes one out for you and one for him. He offers you a light. The smoke heats everything inside you. “Well then, we better get started,” the driver says to you. “Thanks so much for helping out.”
“What do you want me to do?” you ask. “Oh, don’t sweat it buddy,” he says. “We got it covered.” He pulls a palette jack out of his truck; the other driver has one as well. They load the full-stacked palettes onto the trucks, filling them quickly with phone books.
You follow them around, occasionally picking up a couple of phone books that fall of the stacks. “Hey, thanks a lot buddy,” they say, and offer you another cigarette. In an hour they are finished. “You need a ride back to town?” One of the drivers asks you after they are finished.
“No thanks,” you say. “I think I’m supposed to wait for the man to come back at five.”
“Okay then buddy, thanks for your help,” the driver says.
He throws you a full pack of smokes from the cab of his truck and they drive back off toward the mountains.