I despised that arrogant punk Aaron the moment I laid my eyes on him. He was a kid who apparently had an in with the night supervisor because he had worked at Lowe’s since his high-school days. He obviously thought nothing of me—just another middle-aged loser applying for a job in the same hardware store he used to make his beer money, maybe make a car payment, while he lived at home. He gave me one of those limp-dick handshakes and tossed me my red vest. He told me to bring all the spring display gardening tools from the warehouse and bring them to Freddie in the Garden Center. I asked how I was supposed to get them and who Freddie was and he told me to “figure it out.”
I had been out of the hospital for three weeks and I was desperate for work. Anything, the shrink said, to keep my mind occupied. The whole problem was that my mind was too occupied of late. I had lost everything: wife, kids, job—a good job with a research institute—and every friend I had, not to mention my reputation.
Nervous breakdown, they said. Work stress, so sad. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass was what it all added up to.
What they didn’t know was that my wife was cheating on me, my kids were sampling every kind of pharmaceutical known, and my work on photothermal therapy for cancer treatments was stolen by two of my R & D colleagues. They had even filed for a patent and cut me out.
By the time I had the boxes of tools on the electric rider pallet jack and was about to wheel them out of the warehouse, the kid came by with one of his pals, an older youth who was the Freddie in question. His smirk gave him away before his nametag.
“Freddie don’t need those tools until tomorrow,” my little punk said. “Go get those twenty pallets of driveway sealer and bring them out.”
And so it went all day. And the day after that and the day after that. He was either giving me jobs that he canceled at the last minute or took up a lot of time and had to be done over the next day because I “didn’t do it right,” or he was sending me on errands that made no sense. When I was an eighteen-year-old deckhand on the Great Lakes, we had a deckhand who was about twenty-five but he was mentally impaired. The third mate was a mean-spirited bully with the nickname the Smiling Cobra, who used to send the kid down to the engine room for “a can of steam” or up to the top of the pilot house to look out for dolphins while we were sailing over the icy emerald waters of Lake Superior.
Now at my age I understood that man’s shame and rage at being so humiliated.
I was scheduled to work Saturday night. My punk would have all kinds of time to jerk me around.
It didn’t happen. I actually was able to help out a few customers find the equipment and tools they needed and did my assigned jobs with ease and finished every task thanks to a co-worker who took me under his wing and told me not to “mind that snotnosed little creep.”
“You must mean Aaron,” I said and smiled. “He’s a young man. I’m sure he’ll learn to treat his staff with more kindness when he gets a little seasoning.” I smiled so he would not mistake my comment for irony. I wasn’t about to plant the seed that I resented him.
“You got to be kidding, right?” He just looked at me as if I had started to babble Aramaic. “That kid’s the Grand Marshal in the Losers Parade,” he said.
About twenty minutes before my shift ended I was hosing down the concrete in the back of the warehouse where the decorative stone and bags of topsoil were kept when I saw my snotnosed creep approaching with that little swagger of his. He didn’t look happy or pleased to see me.
“Hello, Aaron,” I said.
“What the hell are you doing?” he snarled.
“You told me to wash down so I’m washing down—”
“Never mind that crap now,” he said. “I’ve got something. It has to be done right away.”
“What?”
“You hear those friggin’ birds up there?”
The rafters of the warehouse were full of birds. Maybe a couple dozen. At times they were loud. They were mourning doves, pigeons, and every kind of blackbird up there. I never knew how they got in but sometimes they’d set up a real racket with their billing and cooing. Actually, I liked the sounds they made; it was soothing compared to the whine of the forklifts and their warning bells going off in that cavernous space.
“Pick up that nail gun over there, fill it up, and use the lift truck to kill them. Boss wants it done tonight. He’s tired of that one pigeon shitting all over the place.”
“What?”
“What what? Are you friggin’ deaf? Am I speaking French here? I just said what to do, now go do it.”
He was a homely kid even when he wasn’t making a scrunched-up face like now: big, watery pop eyes, a little pubic fuzz of a moustache that would never grow in, acne-scarred cheeks, and hair that looked like an otter when it comes out of the water. This is what I was reduced to: taking orders from a pathetic, insecure, bullying little zero like him. His boss, a mid-thirties fellow named Phil or Fred, I can’t recall, sported one of those Douglas Fairbanks pencil moustaches, and was complaining about the birds to some workers in the lunch room on my first day of work. He seemed more amused than annoyed, however, as far as I could tell and even seemed to like the idea of sending people around the place with rags and mops looking for “pigeon goo.”
“I like birds,” I said to him. “I won’t kill them.”
“Th’ hell you won’t. I just gave you an order! Now do it or get the hell out of here,” he said.
I paused a long second and looked him in the eye. His face started to flush but with embarrassment or anger, I could not say. “Listen to me,” I said. “You put me on this forklift all week and you gave me jobs that could have been dangerous for someone who didn’t know how to calculate load centers, but I know more math in my little finger than you’ve ever learned, so I did it all and I did it with efficiency.”
“I don’t give two shits what you know, old man,” he fumed. “Now go get that friggin’ nail gun, get on that friggin’ reach truck, and go kill that motherless pigeon—or take off that smock and get out of here!”
Heights make me nervous. I grabbed the nail gun, loaded it, and climbed aboard the platform. In seconds I was a good thirty feet off the ground. I looked down at Aaron staring up at me.
There were about a dozen birds roosting on the lip of the soffit panel where large panes of smoky Plexiglass had been attached to the fascia. A pair of lovely mourning doves with their iridescent lavender chests, a couple redwing blackbirds sporting those brilliant scarlet chevrons that almost glow in the dark, and some feisty grackles, all looking as if their heads had been dipped in oil. The birds were raucous up close, all squawking, some settling in for the night and others competing for space. No big pigeon, however.
I grabbed the handle the platform lift and slowed it to a crawl, the slight pneumatic hiss of air barely audible. I didn’t want to frighten the birds as I loomed upward before their curious gaze. Not that they couldn’t see right down to the pores of my nose, incidentally, because a bird’s head cavity is taken up with cones and filters for their marvelous sight, which leaves little for their tiny brains—ergo, the apt slur birdbrain. I thought of Aaron’s mackerel-shaped head and bulging eyes. They say we’re all related to one another genetically because of a near-extinction event back when a few thousand breeding females saved the human race in Africa. I take more comfort in the knowledge that I have seventy-five percent of a tablespoon’s chromosomes than in the fact that Aaron and I have a tighter genetic kinship.
I picked the nail gun up and held it toward them ever so slowly. I had loaded it with ten-penny-sized nails. They were now eyeing me with intense curiosity, the slow-moving doves less agitated than the sparrows and blackbirds.
One more glance below showed me right where Aaron was standing. Then I lifted the gun and fired a barrage of nails that ripped the Plexiglass overhead into fragments and shards and rained down below.
The birds flew every which way, not a feather harmed on a single one. Some circled the warehouse perimeter and then flew out the gaping aperture I had made.
Aaron’s scream were music to my ears. Some of the bigger pieces hit him and opened up ugly gashes.
I heard him make a pathetic Ow-ow-ow-ow noise like some dimwitted Buddhist learning to chant backwards.
I swung the reach’s speed lever into high and kept my eyes on Aaron, dancing around below, and holding one arm. I could see a steady drip of bright blood between his feet.
I hopped down and confronted him. His eyes were mad, frenzied, and he was hopping from one foot to the other as if the floor were electrified.
“That’ll take a few stitches, I bet,” I said. I gave him a big smile.
“You crazy, lunatic, son of a—”
I raised the gun and nailed him—right between his bulging eyes.
He dropped like a manhole cover; he just didn’t make the same noise when he hit the floor.
He was a lightweight, a sack of loose bones. I set him onto the platform next to the nail gun and tried to arrange his limbs in a natural way. I laid the gun next to him and pressed one of his palms onto the handle. It was clammy. Even in death, he was repulsive. For good measure I curled his fingers over the trigger guard. I draped one of his arms over the lever and watched its slow ascent with its inert baggage.
I could risk a polygraph if it ever came to that. My serotonin levels are so flattened out by my prescription tranquilizer I don’t register much. Even so, my story is airtight. Aaron went up in the truck reach to show me how to do it because I’m such a screw—his word for me, officer. Plenty of witnesses here can attest to that. The nail gun must have jammed when he shot out those panes by accident, and I guess when he turned it around, the lift must have jerked, and he squeezed off a shot. Alas, Aaron we hardly knew ye . . . Something like that. When the time comes to tell it, I’ll have all the right gestures and facial movements. You can be sure of that.
Fortunately, I had bought the fifty-two inch flat-screen television after my ex moved out. I settled into my La-Z-Boy and thumbed through the channels. I love high definition, don’t you? I had a highball in one hand and the remote in the other. Bliss.
I felt the tension drain away. I thought of the look in Aaron’s eyes when he saw the gun pointing at him and a smile creased my face so wide it almost hurt. How’s everything in hell, Aaron? I told you I won’t kill birds. It’s a shitbird like you I don’t have a problem with.
***
BIO.
Terry White writes noir, hardboiled, and mainstream stories. He has published in several online and print magazines including Storyglossia, Hardboiled, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, Flash Fiction Offensive, Thrillers, Killers ‘n Chillers, and Powder Burn Flash. He has an unpublished full-length suspense thriller and submitted several scripts to screenwriting competitions. He regularly writes book reviews and does interviews for Tom Huff’s Boxing World published out of Ohio. So far Hollywood and NYC are totally unaware of his existence, which is OK because he likes his quiet, uneventful life in his little town on the shores of Lake Erie. He is a long-lapsed Catholic and an unrepentant existentialist.
