Peter Rabe - The Box

The wheels of the pick-up were still round, but this had no visible effect upon the truck as a whole. Each spring-there were four-worked like a pogo stick, and no pogo stick would have anything to do with any of the other pogo sticks. Inside the cab a man was fighting to keep from flying into the roof. What kept the canisters in back from rocketing away was the thick tarp that had been tied across the bed of the pick-up, and this tarp was ripping through at one end. When the pick-up stopped by the warehouse there was a silence of exhaustion.

“Quinn,” Whitfield said quietly. “We are both seeing the same thing, aren’t we? Say yes.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Quinn, have you ever seen anything like it before? Don’t lie to me, Quinn.”

“I won’t lie. I’ve only seen this once before.”

“Thank you, Quinn. I now need my siesta, but first,” Whitfield cleared his throat, “first I must speak to the sainted driver.”

The sainted driver had not yet come out of the cab. He was sitting behind the wheel, gripping the wheel, as if uncertain that the ride was over.

“You can come out now,” said Whitfield. “You’ve made it.”

The driver did not move.

“You can let go of the wheel,” said Whitfield, “and nothing will happen, really.”

The driver moaned, and then got out of the cab. He moved with care and disbelief. Then he closed the cab door carefully and sat down on the running board. Seen from the top, there was a visible lump on his head.

“Will you look at that,” said Whitfield. “Must have struck his head against the roof for some reason or other. Now then, Ali. I say, Ali?”

The man looked up carefully. This showed a bruise under his chin.

“Must have struck his chin on the wheel, repeatedly,” said Whitfield. “Ali, can you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have no tires on these wheels, Ali.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Will you tell me where they are?”

“They took them.”

“Who?”

“The two who took them.”

Whitfield breathed deeply. Quinn said, “Must have struck his head against the roof repeatedly.”

“Don’t confuse matters, Quinn. Ali?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did anything happen that you can explain to me?”

“The camel wouldn’t get out of the way and then he hit me.”

Whitfield nodded. Then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. “Naturally,” he said. “It would be a he. A female camel would never beat a man over the head. Now then. Ali.”

“That’s all I know, sir. Everything.”

“Well,” said Whitfield, and slapped the clipboard against his thigh, “it is now clear to me that somebody stole the sainted tires.”

And then he thought of something else and went quickly to the back of the pick-up. He unlashed the tarp, pulled it back, and sighed when he saw the canisters. He reached over and lifted two of them at random and sighed again.

“Thank you, sainted heart,” he said.

“Didn’t touch the cargo, is that it?” said Quinn.

“Thank God.”

“What is it, liquid gold?”

“No, but it’s convertible. Ali, drive that stuff into the warehouse. Do you realize you’re two hours late?”

“Please sir, please-” said the man on the running board.

“I think he doesn’t want to drive any more,” said Quinn.

Quinn drove the truck into the warehouse. It is, he thought to himself, only poetic justice that I should do this. What with the jumping and the rattling, all of which was transmitted directly into his skull, it took him all of the fifteen yards which he had to cover before he had formulated the whole thought.

When he got out of the cab he could see the driver walking slowly away from the warehouse, slow like a farewell walk, but straight and steady, as if he would never come back. Then Whitfield came around a stack of bales and brought two Arabs. They immediately began to unload the canisters and wheeled them out to the pier on little wagons.

“Tell me,” said Quinn. “Where’s Bea this time of day?”

“Hotel most likely. It’s just before her siesta.”

Quinn smiled and left the warehouse. Two days, he thought, with hardly anything to do.

She was drinking something orange and oily and when she saw him coming to her table she was not sure whether she liked seeing him or not. Of course he was new. But it seemed to her there had been something else before, something she missed.

“You looked,” she said to him, “as if you were heading straight for my table.”

“I was. May I sit down?”

She nodded and watched him sit.

“You look positively like you’d had a good day at the office.”

“I did,” he said.

They did not talk while the waiter took his order, and when the waiter was gone they still had nothing to say. Bea sipped and then licked her lips, which were sticky and sweet. She concentrated on that, trying to forget the platitude she had used on him, and that he had answered it in kind. Quinn lit a cigarette.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.

“Now that I’m in civilization I’m taking up all kinds of civilized habits.”

She put her glass down and looked at him. “You say that without a smile and it sounds nasty. You say that with a smile and it sounds cagey.”

“Which did I do?”

“Don’t you know? You did both.”

Quinn waited till the waiter had put down the drink and left the table. He made out to himself that this was the only reason he didn’t say anything right away. Then he folded his arms on the table.

“You know what you sound like, Bea?”

“As if I disliked you.” She gave a small laugh and said, “Strange, isn’t it? I don’t know why.”

Quinn did not know what to do with that answer and looked into his glass. He drank and thought, how did I used to do it? I don’t remember ever sitting like this, not knowing what next.

“And then again,” she was saying, “if you were to ask me right now, now I don’t dislike you at all.”

This did not help him at all. He lost all touch with her and felt only suspicion.

“Look,” he said. “Naturally you don’t like me. First of all, you don’t know me from Adam. Second of all, what you do know you got from somebody else.”

“What was that?”

“You’re thick with the mayor, aren’t you? So naturally, listening to him-”

He knew he had missed as soon as he heard himself say the sentence. Bea sat up and looked at him as from a distance.

“You know something, Quinn?” She flicked one nail against her glass and made it go ping. “I just caught why I don’t like you. When I don’t like you.”

“I’m interested as all hell,” he said. The anger he felt seemed to swell his face. She went ping on the glass again and that was the worst thing about her, he thought idiotically.

“Here you sit talking to me, but not with me. Oh, no. It’s not even about me. It’s about the mayor. You have some thing with the mayor and nothing else matters, and when you get around to going to bed with me, that will probably be from spite too.”

Quinn sat hunched with his arms on the table. Then he pushed away and picked up his glass. He kept looking at her when he tipped up the glass and let the ice cubes slide down so that they hit his teeth.

“You don’t have to look at me like that,” she said.

He put the glass down and lit a cigarette. I’ll give her this silence, he thought, so she’ll be as confused as I am.

“And now I’ll tell you why I like you when I do like you,” she said, but he could not let her finish. He did not want to hear what she had to say about liking.

He exhaled and said, “Are you drunk?”