Water Days

Today is delivery day. I cruise along effortlessly along streets of the exact color and quality which King Henry VIII, to name at random, would have ordered the execution of his road builders for. I have about two tons of bottled water in the back compartment, and they thud against each other in the annoying manner of two women talking too loud in the theater. The noise irritates me, I almost run over a yellow-striped cat darting from behind a ratty box. I miss it by a heartbeat. To forget the noise I turn on the stereo, the radio station blares angry metal music. The exact song, in fact, which probably made van Gogh cut off his own ears. It was the furious sort of song that would have made World War Two Prisoners confess to fictional crimes lest be forced to listen further. But I don’t turn it off. Suddenly I feel like the boy in Clockwork Orange listening to his Beethoven while smashing people’s faces. Maybe a little like a French Revolutionary excited at the prospect of putting aristocratic heads on La Guillotine. Now I know all these stories because I used to drive around with someone who swallowed an encyclopedia or two. The singer screeches himself past oblivion even before the second verse, I tilt one wheel and send a trash bin flying into a corner store. I spot an orange something in the distance and gun the engine, it looks up and I see it is another cat before it makes that definitive squelch under the tires. I hit a few mailboxes, send envelopes fluttering like birds escaping from iron cages. More screeching, more noise than I can ever imagine shrieks out from the truck’s radio. A child is crossing the street, but is on the curb before I can do anything, but I catch his trolley and drag it fifty feet before it breaks and clatters back onto the hot pavement. I skid and slip and smoke my way through the streets. I don’t slow down when I see the humps, I go at it with full speed, and I literally fly off and come crashing down with a deafening thud. I figure some of the water bottles finally broke. Finally the song fades; I carve heavy black skid marks when I brake to stop in front of a water station. My driver, a heavyset man in his forties, frantically pushes open my door. He’s been trying to open it for the last four minutes, but I made the point to lock it. Can’t have him flying off at a hundred miles an hour, can I? He jumps down, knees weak and buckling, almost smashes into the store manager. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks, shaking him by the shoulders. Burned rubber stings the air. My driver is pale and sweaty and chokes off his own voice. “Something... Is... Wrong with that goddamned truck!” he drops onto the floor and tries desperately to breathe. He claws at his throat because the smoke is burning it. The store manager coughs, then stares at me and my overheating engine, he doesn’t know what to make of it. I laugh my little truck laugh they mistake for loose gears, shut my engine off and drift to sleep. Tomorrow is another delivery day.