Free The Slide: A Novel by Kyle Beachy Page B

she wasn’t coming back on schedule while I carried ignorantly on. I dropped the note into the toilet. I opened the window and threw the balls into the neighbor’s backyard. I flushed the toilet. Then I got dressed and drove to Stuart’s pool, where I drank and drank and then slept with my green shirt as a pillow. The next morning I woke up, put the shirt on, and drove to my first ever day of professional work.
     
     
    Pine Ridge Water abided by no real system of inventory, neither for bottles nor coolers, so I erred on the side of abundance. I pulled bottles from great four-by-three-by-four metal racks and wheeled them to the van on a splintering dolly. Loaded one at a time, forty pounds each, gripping around the neck and pinching. I leaned and pushed shut the rusty door, climbed behind the wheel, and reversed out of the warehouse.
    The van was old and white and windowless. And creepy . Only a Pine Ridge door magnet distinguished it from the gazillion cable and plumbing and child-molesting vans like it. With just one exterior mirror, cracked badly, the van gave little more than a vague idea what was behind me at any time. But it did move, and this was key.
    In North City neighborhoods famous for criminal desperation, low-pressure fire hydrants sprayed sad arcs of water while unimpressed children sat on nearby stoops, clenching bright Popsicles that melted over their hands. I’d never used this word, stoop, but these couldn’t have been anything other. Roughly every third building’s windows were boarded, shattered, or simply gone. I scanned the few addresses I could find and smiled at the kids. The green polo and rusted van and the cooler I carried all functioned as camouflage. Behind an open door I saw five grown men in folding chairs, cardboard scattered across the floor. One more man than fans: two rectangular box fans resting in window frames while a standing fan occupied the room’s corner, oscillating in stuttered bursts, the fourth shaking as it spun overhead.
    “Damn if it isn’t about time.”
    One of the men stood and introduced himself as Carl, fella who’s been calling over and over again. I smiled. The others laughed and then coughed from laughing too hard. Carl said he didn’t care where I put the cooler, as long as it worked. Warm air circulated through the room. They continued to laugh and I threw in a sleeve of paper cups, then thought what the hell and added two Premium bottles, gratis. Harmless gift. The old men clapped and whooped and laughed and coughed.
    Other deliveries were as brief as setting bottles on a porch, collecting empty bottles, and tossing them into the back of the van. Mine was an antiroute of sorts, half drawn from the MUST DO stack of complaints in the office, half in response to the Summer Special. Into the kitchen nooks of houses bigger and colder than museums of modern art, switching out bottles while housewives looked through Lands’ End catalogs. Audrey now hairless, Audrey now at the hands of the robot with her emotionless finalities, her ones and zeros. Meanwhile, my daily routine was to become one of penetration into these homes dense with history, displayed like exhibits for a highly specific and private audience, which suddenly and mysteriously was me. The water guy. Potter Mays.
    I was the first back to the warehouse and rushed through my paperwork with the immediacy of a man pursued. Back home I found a small collection of luxury sedans and medium SUVs parked in front of my house. My father was on a trip to Detroit for a convention on the Decline of the American City. I could hear my mother’s company as I went immediately upstairs from the front door, a chorus of loaded laughter echoing through the house. I took my time showering before returning downstairs. I stood at the border between kitchen and living room, clinging to this small bit of separation. The room was full of divorced women drinking white wine. Six of them plus my mother over by the window, all