No Return

Calvin pulled his 1990 gold Corolla into the back lot of the warehouse earlier than usual that Monday morning.  He parked on the far side of the dumpster, next to the litter-strewn woods.  Joel and Travis wouldn’t be there to open up for at least another half hour.  A rare moment to himself—no little boy crying, no woman complaining, no boss telling him what he was doing wrong.

He needed time to get his anger under control, time to think about things from a different perspective.  He had two more weeks of work at CMG, and they weren’t going to be easy.  Kill em with kindness, his grandmother had advised him that weekend.  The expression made his skin crawl; it felt so Uncle Tom.  But she was right.  He needed Joel as a reference to get another job.

Joel had never given him the alarm code, even though they’d known each other for over five years, ever since he’d worked part-time for Joel’s mow-and-blow company.  Meanwhile Travis, a friend of Joel’s from college who’d worked at CMG for about the same amount of time, could come and go as he pleased.  Calvin liked Travis all right, but he couldn’t help taking the unequal treatment personally.

Calvin knew Joel didn’t trust him entirely, and it burned him up.  Sure Joel let him drive his car around town on errands, and he’d leave Calvin alone in the warehouse sometimes for an hour or two during the day, but he still hadn’t given him a key.

It didn’t matter now, though.  Now he just needed a job, maybe even a place to live, since he and his children’s mother, Denise, had just broken their lease.  They’d decided to move to a nicer apartment complex, one with a washer/dryer hookup and a nice pool for the kids.  Denise had found the place and had been pushing for it, despite Calvin’s financial worries.  Now the management company at the new apartments probably wouldn’t rent to them, since no longer Calvin had any steady income.

Raindrops splattered and slid down the windshield, making the gray woods in front of him look liquid and animated.  The effect was heightened by the drag he’d just taken off the tail end of a joint.  His cousin had left it at his place after they’d gone clubbing on Saturday night.  It was cheap Mexican dirt-weed, but it would do.  He’d sworn off pot two years ago when his second child was born, and made it about a month.  Then he’d given it up again when Joel had hired him part-time at Ceramic, Marble & Granite.  But things kept going the wrong way and pissing him off too bad for him to stick with his resolutions.

The Corolla’s upholstery was soiled and pockmarked with cigarette holes put there by his buddy Terry, who’d sold him the car for $700.  Calvin didn’t smoke, at least not cigarettes.

The radio played low, a Tupac song.  Calvin kept time on the brake pedal and steering wheel.  He took another small drag, then dabbed out the ash with his fingers and put the stub back in the crinkled piece of foil and tucked it beneath the seat.

In his twenties he’d smoked his share of good weed, back when the small hip-hop label he’d started with Terry looked like it might take off.  Lots of wild nights at the Cashbar, hanging with the big names on the Atlanta rap scene.  Black mafia even showed up some nights.  Calvin had managed to live through that time without getting into any trouble he couldn’t get out of.  Terry hadn’t been as fortunate.  The only thing that had kept him from getting shot was getting arrested.

But Calvin didn’t feel fortunate.  He was about to be unemployed, again.  The warnings of the talk radio blowhards that blared in the warehouse each morning mocked him now:

…Go ahead, vote Obama into the White House.  But if he becomes president and raises taxes on small business owners, and your boss lets you go, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The Friday before, Joel had stopped Calvin as he was leaving the front office to pick up his daughter from her elementary school.

“We got some bad news yesterday,” Joel said.  His voice was collected, but practiced and tense.  “The loan we thought we were going to get fell through.”

Calvin guessed the punch line, and he was right.

“We’re going to have to cut every expense we can just to keep our doors open.  Stuart says we’ve got to use temp workers in the warehouse for now.  We can’t afford the liability insurance.  So, the long and the short of it is, CMG can pay you for two more weeks, and then we have to let you go.”

Calvin bit his upper lip and fixed his eyes on some dismal point in space.  “I knew something like this was comin.”

“Man, I hate this,” Joel added.  “But it isn’t up to me.  I’m sorry.”

Calvin nodded as if his entire vision of the world had just been confirmed, his eyes still disengaged from Joel’s.

“Like I said, we can give you another two weeks of work.  After that, you could still work with us through the temp agency, but I know you probably won’t want to do that.”

Calvin finally looked at Joel with sullen eyes.  “Aaight.”  He picked up his sweat jacket and bumped the door open with his shoulder.  “I’ll have to get back to you on the two weeks.”

“That’s fine,” Joel replied to Calvin’s back.

Later that afternoon Calvin had called the office to ask Joel if was eligible for unemployment benefits.  Joel said he should try, but since he’d been a contract worker, he might not be eligible.  Then he’d almost rung Joel again to call bullshit on the whole insurance excuse, seeing as how CMG had never given him a damn bit of insurance.  But then he remembered Joel saying liability insurance, not health.  He didn’t know what the regulations were on that, or how expensive it was, so he gave up the argument.  But the whole thing rang false to him.

Now, three days later, as he sat in his car and stared bleary-eyed into the Monday morning rain, it still didn’t add up.

That’s just the way it is / Some things will never change… sang Tupac.  A white dude may have written the song, Calvin said to himself, but Tupac made it real.  He stuffed the rest of his McDonald’s sausage biscuit into his mouth and started the engine, then pulled around to the front of the warehouse and waited for Joel or Travis to show.

When Travis pulled into the CMG lot, he was surprised to see Calvin’s car beside Joel’s.  He’d figured Calvin’s pride would get the best of him, and that he’d decide not to finish out the two weeks.  Travis was glad to see that wasn’t the case.  He knew Calvin needed the work.  He liked him, despite his moodiness and lack of attention to his work.   But he wasn’t looking forward to the awkwardness he knew was in store.

Travis generally split his time between the office and the warehouse, though now that Calvin was leaving, he knew he’d be working the warehouse more.

“Well, he showed up,” Travis said after exchanging a sober greeting with Joel.

“Yeah, he’s back there putting together orders.  He apologized for blowing up on the phone yesterday.”

“That’s good,” Travis agreed, waiting for his computer screen to come to life.  When it did he opened up his email and began vetting the morning’s messages.  “It really could turn out to be a good thing for Calvin.  As long as he’s here, he’s not going to go find something more substantial; he’s never going to take a pay cut and bust his butt when he can slide by here.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” Joel replied, clearly tired from days of worry over the decision.  “He’ll be alright,” Joel added.  “His family will help him out.  He won’t starve.”

But Travis knew that without a college level degree, or even rudimentary computer skills, Calvin’s prospects were slim, especially given the bleak economic news blaring at them over the office radio as they spoke.  If things got much worse, Travis knew he could be out of a job, too.  He knew what it felt like to be let go.  But he’d been single then, with a college degree under his belt.  Calvin had talked about going back to school, but he couldn’t afford it on his part-time pay at the warehouse.  His “woman” Denise already carried more than her share of their expenses.  Any full-time job he took would probably pay less per hour than CMG, hardly worth the daycare expense he and Denise would take on.  The work environment would be stiffer, too.  Calvin would probably have to take a drug test, and he’d have to stomach someone new telling him what to do.  Pride wasn’t Calvin’s only problem, thought Travis, but it was a big one.

That morning he lingered in the office with Joel, checking his email and shuffling through files, wondering what exactly he’d say to Calvin when he went back to the warehouse.  CMG had hung Calvin out to dry.  But what choice did they have?

He and Joel worked quietly, listening to the morning news on the radio.  Travis knew that Joel, despite his matter-of -fact resolve about firing Calvin, felt as uncomfortable as he did.

When Travis finally entered the warehouse and walked back to the shipping station, Calvin was on the far side of the warehouse loading a pallet.  Travis turned on the radio to drown out the baritone buzz that emanated from the hundred or so fluorescent lights high above, and also to avoid any awkward silence between himself and Calvin.  He booted up the dusty computer and began sorting through the few small orders that had come in over the weekend.

A few minutes later Calvin came around the corner on the forklift.  Travis nodded to him, but Calvin avoided eye contact.  He laid a pallet of ceramic floor tiles down and stepped off the forklift.

“Hey, Calvin.”

Calvin grunted in reply.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.”  Calvin’s tone was sullen but not hostile.

“You know you can use me as a reference.  You’ve got my cell phone number.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Calvin picked up the roll of stretch wrap from the shipping table and began wrapping the pallet of tiles.  Travis stuck his face back in the computer screen.  Silence was okay with him.

Then about halfway through his wrapping job, Calvin stopped.

“They’d rather hire temp workers up in here than me,” he said indignantly.  “You believe that, shit?  I’ve known Joel for damn near six years.  He didn’t put up much of a fight with Stuart, don’t seem like.”

Here it is, thought Travis.  He searched for a way around Calvin’s remark about Joel.  “Man, I…I don’t know what to say.  Hell, the way the economy’s going, I might be right behind you.”

“Nah, you don’t have to worry,” Calvin said with a dismissive wave.  “They won’t cut you.  They need you too much.  Me, shit, I’m just a warehouse nigger.”

“Come on, it’s not a racial thing,” Travis said, immediately wishing he hadn’t.  There was a fragile camaraderie between them, and he didn’t want to shatter it by starting the wrong conversation.

“The hell it ain’t,” Calvin said.  “Look at all the people round here working on the docks, taking out the trash, cleaning the bathrooms.  They all black.  Warehouse niggers, that’s what we are.”  He laughed as if to let Travis know he wasn’t getting all uppity about it, just stating a fact.

Travis shrugged.  What was he supposed to say?  He’d worked the dock too, and he’d taken out the trash and cleaned the bathroom more often than Calvin had, though he’d done these things without being asked.  He knew that made a big difference.  If only Calvin would do things without being asked, take more initiative…

“I’m just speaking my mind, you know,” Calvin continued.  “That’s the way I am.  I say what I think.  Some people sit there and think all sorts of things and never say em, cause they afraid what other people will think.  I ain’t like that.”

“I respect that,” Travis said.

He knew Calvin probably thought of him as one of those people who hid their thoughts.  If so, he was right.  What good would it do for Travis to say what he thought?  Maybe you should keep more of your thoughts to yourself, Calvin.  Focus more on your job.  Sometimes you do good work.  But a lot of the time you just don’t give a shit.  You complain about not having enough hours, but then you leave early every other day.  I know you’ve got family responsibilities, and it’s hard to care when you’re doing this kind of work, but it’s the only way to get ahead.  We have to recheck every pallet you pack and every count you take.  And getting high before work doesn’t help the math skills.

The only thing that would come from Travis speaking his mind would be a fight.  If anyone were going to say these things, it would have to be Joel.  And he’d already opted not to.  Joel hadn’t exactly lied; Stuart really had suggested they use only temp workers to save money.  But Joel had been complicit in the decision.

Travis turned back to the shipping computer, hoping to let the conversation lie, but Calvin ignored the hint.  Standing there with a roll of stretch wrap in his hands and a half-wrapped pallet in front of him, he held forth.

“Even a lot of folks who say they ain’t racist still are,” he continued.  “They may not even know they are.  They act like they cool with you on the job, cut up with you and all.  But when it’s closin time, they go hang out with they white friends.  And you ain’t invited.”

“Do you ever ask them to hang with you?” Travis asked, directly but without accusation.

“Hell, yeah.  If a white dude’s hanging around me and my boys, and we got somewhere to go, we’ll say, ‘Hey, come party with us.  Gonna be some booze and some fine women.’  And if he go with us, even if he’s the only white dude in the room, we gonna act the same way we always do.  We cool as long as he is.”

“That’s good.  I know a lot of white people who would do the same, though.”

“Well, a lot of em wouldn’t.  More than you’d think.  All I’m sayin is there’s still a lot more racism out there than some folks think they is.”

Travis nodded.  “Maybe so.  But you’ve got to admit things have gotten a lot better in the last few decades.  I mean, we’ve got a black president now.  Half black, anyway.”  He and Calvin had talked a lot about the election that fall in the weeks leading up to it.  Calvin had come in excited the day after.  Travis had never seen him so happy.

“Yeah,” Calvin conceded.  “I’ll give you that.”  His tone suddenly changed, and his scowl faded.  “My grandmother came over and cooked us a big fat dinner that weekend after the election.  She was smiling like I ain’t seen her do in a long time.  Says we got to understand how important this moment is.  Goin on and on about Jack Johnson and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.  Hell, she didn’t have to tell me bout all that.”

“I guess she thought she’d never see it.”

“Naw.  Never thought I’d see it.  Now I can tell my kids ‘you can be the president if you want’ and mean it.  They gonna get a college education.  I ain’t gonna let em end up like me.  My days are pretty much over now.  I got to make sure they get the chances I didn’t.”

“You’re only twenty-nine, Calvin.  You can’t give up on yourself yet.  Lots of people start new careers in their thirties or even their forties.  Hell, I’m one of them.”

Calvin made no reply but seemed to at least consider the advice as he finished wrapping the pallet of tile.  He returned to the forklift without saying anything more and drove off to pick another order.  Travis was relieved to have ended the conversation in relative harmony.  The worst was over, he thought.  It seemed Calvin was resigned to riding out the next two weeks without causing trouble.  Travis wondered if he might be able to dig up a couple of leads for Calvin before he left.  There had to be something he could do to help.  If he were in Calvin’s shoes, and skin, he might not be so different.  Calvin’s capacity for self-delusion was no greater than his own when he was Calvin’s age, which was only seven years ago.  They’d both had to give up their aspirations to a musical career.  It was just that he, Travis, had had more options to work with, a fact that had little or nothing to do with his innate talent or character.  So much in life was circumstance, he thought.  True, a person creates his own circumstances to some extent, but to create you have to start with some materials, and some people were given more materials than others.  That didn’t excuse Calvin’s apathy and erratic behavior, but it was a fact nonetheless.

After processing the day’s orders, he checked the pallets Calvin had packed so far.  The count was off on one of them, but he decided to fix it himself after Calvin left.  Then he headed back to the office in front to work on the stack of unpaid invoices on his desk.

“How’s it going back there with Calvin?” Joel asked.

“He’s okay, I think.  He did some venting, but nothing too bad.”

“Good.  Listen, Stuart’ll be here in a few minutes.  He and I have that lunch meeting with the guy from The Kitchen Store.  Then I have to take David to his soccer game.  You mind holding down the fort for the rest of the day?  I’ll return the favor later this week.”

“Sure.  No problem.”

Joel lowered his voice a little.  “And, um, when you’re closing up, will you check to make sure that far warehouse door is locked.  I don’t think Calvin would do anything stupid, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful.  I know he’s pretty pissed right now, and it’s not inconceivable that he could unlock that door.  A couple of packages of tile or slabs of marble would be worth a nice little chunk of change.”

“I’ll check it.”

“I hate to think that way, but I’ve got to.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Calvin should be out of here in another hour, if he doesn’t decide to leave early.  If anything gets weird, call me on my cell.  I’ll come back down.”

“It’ll be fine.”

When Joel had gone, Travis looked out the office window into the warehouse.  The near perfect columns of product, the tall steel scaffold racks, the stacks of pallets arranged along the walls gave him a strange sense of comfort.  After years of resistance, he’d finally come down from his ivory tower and joined the modern economic machine.  Its impersonal grandeur was impressive.  It was everything he’d detested and feared as a dreamy, idealistic youth, but those dreams and ideals had gotten him nowhere, he’d finally had to admit.  It felt good to be a small part of a giant system, at least for now.  It was a means to an end.  He wondered if Calvin had ever felt that way about a job, or ever would.

Calvin left the forklift and walked toward the bathroom next to the office.  He stopped at the full-length windows that overlooked the parking lot and watched as Joel climbed into shiny new Lexus SUV, the dealer tag still in place.  As the car backed out of the parking space, he saw that Stuart was in the driver’s seat.

Calvin ducked into the bathroom before Stuart saw him.  He couldn’t believe it.  He remembered Joel telling him that Stuart was trying to sell his 2003 BMW.

“Son of a bitch,” he said out loud, but not loud enough to be heard through the wall.  “Says he can’t afford me; then he pull up in a new ride like that.  Bet that shit cost thirty-five grand, at least!”  His voice was getting louder, “I ain’t got enough hours hardly to feed my kid and pay my half of the rent.  They can’t afford to pay me $300 bucks a week?!  It ain’t like they givin me benefits or nothin.  Hell, they ain’t even thinkin about that.”

When he got back to the forklift he was still talking to himself.  He hoisted one end of a four-foot red granite countertop and laid it on the padded forks.  Normally Travis helped him lift the heavy pieces, but Calvin didn’t feel like asking for his help.  As he pulled backwards to slide the rest of it onto the forks, he tripped over the second fork.   The hand he’d had on the bottom edge of the granite slipped, and the slab came down on his foot.

“Motherfucker!” he barked out, the call reverberating against the concrete and metal.  The pain shot through his body and into his brain, splitting open his thoughts and releasing a burst of omni-directional anger.

“Motherfucker-motherfucker-motherfucker,” he chanted and hopped around in a circle.  Then he struck the marble slab with the heel of his hand.  This caused new pain, which at least took some of the sting out of his foot.

In the office Travis had just printed out a new order and was about to return to the shipping station when heard the faint cursing coming from the warehouse.  He crossed the office and opened the warehouse door.

“You okay?” he called in the direction of Calvin’s voice, which came from one of the aisles to his left.

“Fuckin granite fell on my foot!”

“Shit.  Did it break any bones?”

“Naw.  Just hurts like hell.”

“Well, take a break and get some ice on it.  I’ll grab a towel or something for you to wrap the ice in.”

After a beat of silence Calvin answered, “I’m aaight.  Just need to walk it off.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Travis shrugged and walked back to the shipping station.

Calvin’s anger, augmented by the shooting pain, boiled over.  He let it take control of him.  He wouldn’t be told when to take a break, not by Travis, and not by Joel.  Not anymore.  I’m gonna give em my resignation, effective immediately.  Gonna hand-deliver the motherfucker.

He grabbed the granite top and slid it onto the forks, then hopped onto the forklift, raised the forks off the ground a foot or so, and throttled forward.   He navigated out of the pick lane and into the main aisle, then brought the forklift to full speed.  His eyes were red and hot.  The granite countertop pounded against the forks each time the wheels hit a divet in the warehouse floor.  Travis heard the noise and looked up from the shipping station computer.

“He’s gonna run into…” Travis said out loud, before disbelief stole his speech.  The forklift made a sudden jerk to the right and the countertop slid sideways on the pallet about a foot.  He was now headed directly toward Travis.

“Jesus!”  Travis backpedaled away from the computer and started toward his left.  But Calvin adjusted his course away from the shipping station and toward the wall that separated the office from the warehouse, his eyes wide and unblinking.

“Calvin!” Travis shouted as the forklift neared the wall.  Twenty feet, fifteen, ten…  Travis cringed and turned away in anticipation of the crash.  Then he heard the brakes of the forklift seethe and hiss, and felt the floor beneath him shake as the granite slab shot forward off the pallet and crashed to the ground at the base of the wall.

Travis lowered his arms and opened his eyes to see Calvin slumped over the steering lever, his head in his hands. He could hear Calvin whispering a prayer of some sort, though he couldn’t distinguish the words.

He walked quietly toward the office to survey the damage.  The granite had torn a foot-long gash in the drywall and peeled off a length of rubber molding at the base, but there was no real structural damage done.  The forklift, which had tipped onto its forks when Calvin braked and then righted itself, slam, back down onto all four wheels, seemed okay as well.  The countertop had broken, but only into three pieces, two of reusable size.  It would cost Calvin, but not as much as replacing a wall, and God knows what else.  Stuart could press charges, of course, but Travis didn’t think he would.  It wouldn’t be worth the money, time and bad feelings.

But if Calvin wasn’t in his right mind, then Travis wanted to get him the hell out of there, or get himself out.  Should he call Joel?  No, he didn’t think he needed to.

“You okay?”  Travis asked, almost whispering.  It was the first thing that came to him, though clearly Calvin was not, in a holistic sense, okay.

Calvin kept praying with his head down and didn’t answer.  When he’d finally finished, he raised up and looked toward the ceiling.

“Guess that’s the end of this job for me,” he said after a while.

“Listen, I know you’re dealing with a lot right now, but…”

“No, you listen.  I can’t explain to you what I was thinkin, cause it wouldn’t make sense to you.  Yall ack like you know me.  You think I’m not as smart as you cause I don’t know about computers and shit.  But I know a lotta things you don’t, like about growin up in the projects.  You ain’t ever had to worry bout getting killed walking down your street, or bout whether your mamma’d be able to pay the heat bill in the winter.  Never had dudes you didn’t know call you nigger when you was in school, or the cops shake you down just cause you smiled at em the wrong way.  You never been thrown in jail, or slept up under a bridge.  Yall don’t know bout all that.”

“You’re right, I don’t.  But I know that if I were you, I’d leave here as soon as possible, before someone decides to come by, or Joel comes back.  This was an accident, and you got upset and left.  Okay?  Joel will call you, I’m sure.  But right now you should just leave.”

Calvin stared at Travis sharp-eyed for a moment, then looked away.  “No returns.  Ain’t that the policy round here?”

Travis made no response.  There was nothing else to say.  He wished he could give Calvin some word of encouragement, or at least shake his hand, but under the circumstances neither seemed appropriate.  Calvin climbed down from the lift, walked slowly toward the office door, and left the warehouse without looking back.