Mat Johnson - Drop

Office rumor said: the temp agency didn’t screw up account procedure last pay, they just didn’t have any money. That sounded pretty crazy, since we’d found out from a temp in accounting that the agency was paid $12.57 for every $6.30 hour we made, but we could all sense it was true. The broke can smell the broke. To make it worse, this week the agency not only had to pay our money for this check, they were going to have to cover the back wages for the two-thirds of the temps who’d been stiffed the week before. Reggie started taking bets on the checks not clearing, but then realized that if he won nobody would be able to pay him.

Pay dispersal time was one o’clock Thursday afternoon, over on 33rd and Arch behind the railroad tracks. If we were going to play musical chairs with the cash, nobody wanted to get caught standing up, so at twelve-thirty the office cleared out. Lynol and me were supposed to stay, but ten minutes after the rest of the temps had left, Mrs Hutton took her purse and walked out to lunch. Lynol followed, telling me he was going to the bathroom. Thirty seconds later, when I snuck out, I could see his lying-ass running a block in front of me.

Everybody was there; we could barely fit into the office. Every temp from the electric company had turned out. Some people I hadn’t even known were scabs until I saw them there, hungry for their money. Temps from other sites too, maybe from the gas company, crowded in as well, looking just like us but with different faces. Clive, who hadn’t bothered to show up for work that day, had decided to make an appearance here instead. He wore a dress shirt, but only the two buttons at the bottom were done. That skinny chest had more hair than I would have thought it did. For pants he wore pajama bottoms. For shoes, his bare feet sat loosely in black rubber galoshes.

Instead of Mary, the receptionist, just handing out the checks from her desk drawer, smiling and waving and not even having to bother to get off the phone, reinforcements had arrived. In the eye of the mob of eighty some people who surrounded him, a big white guy waved a fist of check-filled envelopes over his head where nobody could reach them, his stomach hanging over his waist like a trash bag filled with water. Seeing the money, the room got quiet. The boss man started the discussion by apologizing for the previous week’s mistake, mentioning the possibilities for repayment of insufficient funds fees, how the agency’s greatest asset was its workers, how he would like to give his sincerest apologies—

‘Is that all?’ Cindy asked. Cackles and laughs. Aqua-belly blushed.

‘No. No, it’s not. That isn’t all. I also brought donuts,’ he said. Mary went into an office and pulled them out. They came in large pink boxes that seemed awkward in her arms, but nobody bothered to help her. When they were placed on a table at the far wall Mary turned around and said, ‘Dig in,’ but the only person who went over there was Clive. His hair was knotted and unpicked, his eyes thick and glazed like the donut he grabbed for, all pretense of hiding his piper status gone. Reaching for another before the first one was completely in his mouth, he ate standing, staring at the blank wall as if it were a goldfish tank. I don’t think he knew where he was.

Somehow it was decided that alphabetical order was the fairest, then the checks were handed out. Adams. Snatch, run. The sound of feet banging down carpeted floor, doors slamming behind him. Anderson. Snatch, run. The sound of feet banging down carpeted floor, doors slamming behind her. Anthony. Snatch, run. The sound of a man banging his knee into the corner of a desk as he ran for the door.

‘People, people, I can assure you on this, there is enough money in the account. The last pay was an anomaly. Everyone will be paid. I can guarantee all of you that everyone’s check will clear. I haven’t even paid myself yet,’ he said, holding his check up to the room. I tried to see the name on it through the cellophane window but the type was too small. ‘Honky needs to get busy before I plant a foot in his ass,’ someone said beside me, followed by hmmphs in the affirmative. But that was lazy. His being white and us being black didn’t have much to do with anything; there were tons of bourgeois negroes in this city, more than most, and broke-ass crackers were everywhere. It was just that he was full, and we were hungry. That was the pain of this place to me: not that I had been full once and had been reduced to hunger, but that hunger is what I always was and no matter what I consumed, this reality would always be a paycheck, a payment, a meal away.

‘Chris Jones.’

Check in hand, damned if I ain’t running. People between me and the bank were casualties to be apologized to later. I didn’t want to be Clive any more. Out in the street, my sprint gained form. Head down, nose to my chest. Aiming north up 33rd Street towards Market, pushing off the balls of my feet, hoping I wasn’t pacing myself too fast but refusing to slow down. Carlton Jones, who got his check right before me, pulled up in a black Jeep, air fresheners hanging like grapes from his rearview window. Slowing briefly at the stop sign beside me, he looked my way and I caught his eyes. Ride? Wheels started spinning, skidmarks writing themselves on the road in front of me. F you, too.

At Market Street, I turned left and headed downtown. The agency’s bank was the main branch of CaneState, by the Clothespin and City Hall. If you were to shoot an arrow from my face straight seventeen blocks down, it would land on the middle of its front doors. Oh so free, running like God made me to. Business shoes slapping and tie blowing over my shoulder like a dragon tongue. In my hand the glorious crinkling of paycheck cellophane, the kind that had my name underneath it. People in cars looked at me as if I was doing something important. Move man, move. They could feel it, too, that I had to win this one. White people checked to see if there was a cop behind me. Passing 30th Street Station, I thought of catching a taxi, but cars were slow, cars had laws. And I was keeping all this money, had to: couldn’t be giving away magic beans. Look at me. I was running, finally moving again. Oh shit, am I alive? How long had it been? Knees so high they tagged my nipples, hands chopping the air to punish it for getting in my way. Check in my hand. Best part of the day because there it was, right there, in my hand.

Temps I was passing. First some of the old ladies, some of the Browns and the Davises, I recognized them from the office. Cindy was in there with them. Seeing me coming, she tried to speed up her walking, but it was useless. Her legs had forgotten swift movement and she had on high heels anyway. One of the women, last-named Baumen from accounts receivable, tried waving me over, like she had to tell me something. Chris, wait, you forgot … She wasn’t playing me for a sucker. I waved back happy and kept going going gone, running through a red light and dodging a SEPTA bus, the number 64. It honked, I kept moving. We were both happy.

At 22nd and Market, I passed a bunch of young guys, Douglasses, Jeffersons, and Hamiltons. Look at how content they were, smoking and laughing as if their checks had already cleared. Weren’t the Washingtons screwed? Crossing to the other side of the street, I tried to run silent, keeping behind a UPS truck that was going about my speed. Hugging its side, making sure not to get squished between it and a parked car. I had just made it past them when the truck stopped. Flying out beyond it, I was revealed. When I looked over my shoulder they had seen me.

‘Yo black, wait up! Wait up!’ Giving the nationalist fist, I kept running, leaping over a pothole the size of a sauna before it could take me down. A couple of them started to run after me. There was a guy getting out of a car ahead, his door cutting off my path. The sidewalk was crowded, the gaps between the parked cars too narrow to reach it at this speed. Moving my legs faster, I cut in front of the moving car to my left and made a racetrack out of the meridian, one foot for each white line. Taxis swerved at me, cars honked, people cursed, but it was all worth it because at 16th Street I looked over my shoulder and the brothers were gone, lost in the crowd. On the street, Carlton Jones’s black Jeep circled the cop-infested block, searching for a place to park. I pushed through the bank doors, my chest was thumping like it held something living inside.