Eight Minutes
I walked down Zodiac Street with a cartload of packages. A guy coasted alongside me in an old yellow Plymouth. He had a red face and a Fu Manchu.
‘Hey, Buddy!’ he yelled.
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘You hear that FedEx and UPS merged?’
‘I’ve heard that joke.’
‘You know what they renamed it?’
I ignored him.
‘FED UP!’ He continued to coast alongside me. ‘Don’t you get it? FED UP!’
I kept walking with my dented metal cart.
‘Hey, Buddy!’
‘Yeah?’
He screamed, ‘Get a fucking sense of humour!’
The Plymouth sped off, and I hustled down the sidewalk. It was 10:22 and I had four priority deliveries left in the next eight minutes.
I opened the door to Bukowski’s Alternator Shop. Two guys were punching each other and the shorter one fell against a metal cabinet.
‘Ugggnh!’ the shorter guy cried out. ‘Oh God! Ohhhhhh! Uggh!’ He held his bloody chin with both hands.
I walked to the back of the shop but it was empty. When I returned to the front of the store the two guys had resumed exchanging punches. The smaller man punched with great speed but no accuracy. The taller man punched slow
and methodically with greater force. I stepped between them with a clipboard and said, ‘Who wants to sign?’ The shorter guy stumbled toward the front door.
‘Next time I come back here that better be fixed, right!’ the shorter man yelled as he exited.
‘I’ll get you yet, you little pecker!’ the taller man shouted. He turned to me and muttered, ‘Bout time you got here.’
He signed with a name that did not match the one on his nametag. It was 10:24.
‘Hey!’ the taller guy yelled as I opened the door. ‘You better be smiling the next time you come in here!’
I continued up Zodiac. I walked into a bookstore and the woman behind the counter held a fawn pug in her arms like it was a baby.
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘My breakfast is here.’
‘Breakfast?’
‘I had a pineapple over-nighted from Hawaii. Yesterday I logged on to pineapples-overnight.com, and ta-da! Here is my breakfast by 10:30.’
‘Huh,’ I said.
She signed for the box; I was out the front door at 10:26.
I stepped into a gas station. The guy behind the counter asked, ‘What’s in the box?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘where’s the parcel from?’
‘Texas. Line 23, please.’
The guy scribbled his name with a bunch of dots and weird lines.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Allah, Allahbenfartan,’ he said.
‘How do you spell your last name?’
The guy sighed. ‘A-L-L-A-H-B-E-N-F-A-R-T-A-N.’
10:29 with one stop left. I sprinted up Zodiac and thought about the loaded Saturday night special in my dresser. Maybe tonight was the night. I passed a guy dressed in long white robe with a red beard. He carried a cross about seven feet tall and three feet wide down the street. His eyes were serene and unblinking. I stepped into Hank’s Camera Shop and scanned the package.
The guy talked on the phone as he signed. As I walked toward the door the guy slammed the phone down,
‘Hey! I wanna talk to you!’ he yelled.
‘Yes?’
He held the unopened box he had just signed for. ‘When I push my fist into the one side of this box it caves in. When I push the other side of the box it does not push in.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Well,’ he marched toward me, ‘I want you to make a note of this damage with your computer.’
He pointed at my tracker.
‘What do you want me to make a note of? The box doesn’t look damaged to me.’
The box looked fine except for his pushing on it.
‘But this box shouldn’t cave in like this!’
‘It just caves in when you push on it.’
‘But it shouldn’t cave in when I push it!’ He craned his face up to mine. ‘The box has been compromised!’
His chest heaved and sweat poured down his forehead.
He held his breath for a second and whispered, ‘Listen. There is a very expensive camera in this box. I want it noted, before I open this, that when I push on one side but not the other it starts to cave in, OK?’
There was no button on my tracker that transmitted data stating ‘this guy’s box caves in when he pushes it’. I typed into my tracker that I was beginning my break and then pointed it at his box. I pressed the button to begin my break and the tracker emitted a ‘BEEP’ sound. The guy nodded at me satisfied and strode away.
