johnfulmer

The woman from the other storage shed walked up to our truck carrying a box, a lilt to her walk, and with smile I still can’t forget, bright and suffused with a wild spirit barely under rein. An imp, the smile an invitation to mischief, she bounced a little as she walked, carrying that box, which we could tell was a gift, neighbor to tragic neighbor. But we weren’t tragic yet. We could tell she was. In a way, this neighborly gesture in the flesh, moving toward us was portentous. Might there be a reversal of fortune in the works?

We stood in the rear of the truck, and I sat on a box marked Cream/Clapton/Blind Faith/Derek& and tried to act nonchalant. It was early afternoon and it was late-January, New Orleans warm. Not like the winter warm of Florida but a less-muggy version of summer, as if there were a giant rheostat somewhere that could be used to dial down the intensity. Like the woman and her cardboard box, the weather that afternoon held the weight of portent.

I felt mild trepidation, and pulling at my wedding band, made it feel resistance at the knuckle; she made me nervous, walking up to us like that with her little sashay. I mean, what was in that box? I twisted the ring, made it kind of hurt. Knuckle. What a word. Pronounced correctly it was resistance itself, and the ring could have been a chastity belt. I thought it was. Even though I wasn’t even married, it still meant something. It should have meant something.

Brownie and I had been fighting, and anger and resentment had draped itself on the record crates and hung like crepe on metal racks pushed against truck-box walls and used to shelve the loose LPs. OK, it was Day Two and Brownie spent a lot of time with his “I Told You So” bullshit. His whole attitude, bustling around the truck bed like he owned the goddamned thing. Giving me orders. Him the ex-con ne’er-do-well drug dealer. I was wrong. So what? Don’t rub it in. But two days in and we were just halfway through our storage shed.

And I’d had to make him stop loading the truck in the way he’d been doing. Jesus Christ! He was the kind of guy who thought loading a truck was an art. He got all sensitive because, one time, after bumping a load of boxes up the ramp in a hand truck, and bumping them back down, the grated ramp and the empty hand truck combining for a pleasant, slightly anarchic texture-your fingers, holding onto the hand truck, started to tingle as the day wore on–I noticed that the truck was leaning precipitously. Yeah, the concrete between the rows of storage sheds had a swale cut for drainage. But this was too much lean. The truck looked like it might topple over.

And Brownie, all puffed up with his “I Told You Sos,” couldn’t stop tell me he had a Ph.D. in packing, and here comes this woman with her box of who-knows-what.

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