Kevin Sampsell - Portland Noir

A hazy, half-realized scene of my wife and daughter backing out of the drive in the car began repeating on a short loop in my memory. I couldn’t even remember if I’d kissed Olivia before they left-I could just see her strapped securely in her car seat, looking at me as I waved to her through the side window. What remained clearest, the thing my memory rendered with the finest, most delicate detail, was the confused expression on Olivia’s face. The memory didn’t include the expression on my own face, of course-how could I see my own face?-but since children are such skilled mimics, maybe my daughter wasn’t actually confused, but was simply mirroring what she saw in my own expression. Or maybe both of our expressions were authentic, and the same. It’s a tough thing to unravel, the origin of an expression.

The next time I saw the boy, I was glancing through the screen door as I always did, my eye scanning the bright rectangle of light. The adults were there as usual, smoking cigarettes and watching television, but standing at the door was the child in his sleeper, looking back at me.

After I drove away from the house and accelerated back onto the highway, I found myself so angry that I had to pull the car to the side of the road to try and compose myself. I stood on the gravel-covered shoulder and watched a freight train roll past until its whistle pierced the air for no apparent reason, and then I climbed back into the car and waited for a logging truck to go by. Its trailer was filled with the trunks of felled trees stacked eight or ten high-strings of wet, pendulous moss hung from the trunks, swaying heavily in the breeze as the truck roared away down the road. I pulled back onto the highway to resume my route, but the image of the boy in the doorway stayed with me. The night was one of the warmest of the summer, and though I was sweating profusely, I also felt chilled. I opened the vial in my console to retrieve another pill, but my fingertips found nothing, and I became confused, unable to decide whether the vial had simply gotten low without my noticing, or if I’d lost track and had accidentally taken too many pills. I felt jittery and anxious, and almost started laughing as I watched my hand shake when I reached to turn on the car’s heater. By the time I threw my last paper, a bitter nausea had risen in my stomach, as if my intestines had become entangled within some slowly winding gear.

I made it back to the station and into the bathroom in time to disgorge the contents of my stomach into the dirty toilet. After spitting the last of the humid brown stew from my mouth, I sat on the bathroom floor, my back against the wall. When I looked up a few minutes later, the Deadhead was standing in the doorway. “Your car’s running,” he said.

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“You need anything?”

“I’m just a little sick,” I said. “If you could just leave me alone for a few minutes…”

I closed my eyes, but I could sense him standing there, studying me. “What’s your problem?” he said.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

“What’s going on, Dale?” I heard Carl ask, and when I looked up he was standing next to the Deadhead, looking at me like I was an animal that had wandered into the station.

“He’s sick.”

“Is his route done?”

“It’s done,” I said.

“You can’t spend the night here.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “I just need a minute.”

Carl disappeared from the doorway, but the Deadhead, whose name was apparently Dale, remained. “Why are you even doing this?” he asked.

“Why are you bothering me now?” I said. “Why at this moment?”

“Because this is a shitty job I do because my life is fucked up. You walk around here like you’re better than us, which makes you an asshole. But you’re probably right. So what are you trying to prove?”

I hoped that if I ignored him, he would go away, but he didn’t.

“You should at least take better care of yourself,” he said.

“Especially since you have a kid.”

“How do you know I have a kid?”

“You were just talking about her last night. Or can’t you remember last night?”

“Listen,” I said as carefully as possible, “I don’t need your help right now.”

“You just puked into that shitty little toilet and now you’re laying on the floor, but you don’t need help. I used to say shit like that too.”

“So then you probably know how much I wish you would leave.”

“Have a nice day,” he said.

I heard his footsteps recede, and I was alone again.

Later, I stood up, splashed some water on my face, and walked out into the empty station. An oscillating fan on a stand had been left on, and it nodded back and forth, as if speaking to someone it was unaware had left the room. When I stepped outside, my car was still sitting exactly where I’d left it, the radio on and the engine running. It was the only car in the lot.

The next time I talked to my daughter on the phone, she informed me that Doggy make a walk with a flower sky flower. When the phone was transferred to my wife, I asked if they’d gotten a dog now too. “No, but we did buy flowers,” she said. She was focused on her new job as a receptionist in a real estate office, and I was the only one of us, it seemed, who realized Olivia was delivering important information. I’m sure my wife didn’t write out our daughter’s sentences on notebook paper and study them the way I did, with a mix of pride and concern.

“You don’t sound good,” my wife told me.

“I’m just tired,” I said. “I’ve been working a lot.”

“Other than the newspapers?”

“No, the newspapers are every night. It’s not easy.”

“How long are you going to do that?”

“As long as I have to.”

I heard her sigh, and could picture her expression, the way she pursed her lips when she was frustrated. “Why haven’t you ever, even once, asked about coming up to visit us?”

My jaw tightened. I could feel the blood pounding in my head. “Are you trying to get me to?”

“Don’t start that,” she said.

“We own a house here. This is where I live.”

“I don’t even know why you’re saying that. What does that mean?”

“It means I have to work to pay bills, to pay the fucking mortgage.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“So you don’t know what I mean, and I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m going to say goodbye now,” she said. “Don’t call me again tonight.”

I was still rehashing that conversation when I got to the distribution station later and found a rubber-banded stack of white envelopes on my table. I asked what they were, and the woman in the purple sweatsuit said, “It’s bill night. They should be in the order of your route. You just keep them next to you and slip them in right when you’re about to throw the paper.”

“That’ll take forever,” I said. “They’re ruining our night so they can save the price of a stamp?”

“They’re penny-pinchers,” the Deadhead said. “They don’t give a rat’s ass about us.”

“You know what?!” Carl yelled down from the loft. “I’ve had enough of listening to all of you bitch and moan. If you don’t want to deliver the papers tonight, with the goddamn bills in them the way they need to be and the way it’s your job to do, then you can just walk out the door right now. And you won’t ever have to come back, because I’ll replace you tomorrow with someone who’ll just shut up and do the work.”