The delivery truck rolled down stone-walled lanes, muddied and puddled by befuddling rains. Ivy reached over the rocks while weeds and grasses crawled through the cracked concrete.
Brooding oaks leaned overhead, while rumbling clouds grumbled above their boughs. Leaves slickened under balding tires and rivulets cavorted in ripples of the pavement.
The thumpety thump of centerline buttons jarred awake the dreaming driver. The hint of dawn yawned on the horizon as his eyelids popped fully awake.
The breadbox truck lurched toward the sunrise as it did every morning for seven years or centuries whichever seems less. Rubber always rolling onward.
A gust of wind shoved the billboard bulk of the breadless box sideways. Tires squealing, water hydroplaning, wall approaching, cliff inviting, the van skidded toward another challenging day.
The delivery warriors were awake and on the road!
Fill Wantless didn’t want much. He just wanted a little bit.
A little bit of love, a little bit of respect, a little bit of money and a little bit of life.
He was apparently unaware that all these things come from within, not without, but Wantless was constantly looking to the world askance, unaware that what he thought of himself, no one else did. Some disliked him for his loud guffaw amidst a high school basketball game while others endured his long, tedious and nearly pointless stories of his Norwegian ancestors. A few loved him deeply, madly blah blah blah, truly, but never once let him know.
He would fill his chest and suck in his massive gut, then lean in, whiskey-scented breath exhaling, and launch into yet another tedious story about how his grandfather John the John had died as an infant on a tiny island off the craggy shores of a Hanseatic seaport town. There, the VasNess family hunkered down against the winter winds, the summer swells, the runs of fish and gone. They scratched the rock-overgrown ground with meager tools, growing what they could in the impolite soil.
John the John had lived. He was washed by baptism just to make sure, but he seemed to be alive and then that’s when all the trouble really began. He was a wanderer from the moment he popped down Olga’s channel (which had popped out eight previous children), nearly flying off the sweated bed, slick as a Christmas pig. The midwife somehow caught him mid-flight as his crinkled old young baby man body soared into life.
That was just a taste of things to come, Wantless would whisper through the whiskey.
“He soon learned just how challenging life could be,” he would intone.
No one really listened to him. He used to pick up women with his familiar stories but that was a long, lonely time ago. The guys would go, “Huh,” but come up with some reason to wander off from Fill’s wandering reports of life on the plains of wherever it was.
He meant no harm yet he caused ripples wherever he wandered.
“Who?” asked a second (or is it a third?) narrator looking down on the scene where the long dead Wantless whiskied his time away, unaware that years hence, that moment right there in the seedy, sideways sloping bar meant something more than he knew. The molecules, perhaps, that he spit sometimes during his effusive story-telling, or the warmed whiskey left to water the plants, or the din of sound all around, the pool sticks clacking the shellacked balls, the tinkle of liquor on ice, the murmur of congregants at the watering hole of mis-communion, or the influenza virus seeking another host among the supplicants.
But Fill finally bid the folks he barely knew a goodnight and wandered back to his bread box truck where he’d hooked up a hammock and had a portable heater to sleep off the old stories before morning. He bundled up in a thick Down sleeping bag and pulled the hood tight around his head.
“Another tequila sunrise, da da da da da dah,” sang across the universe of memory. The words kept him awake for some while, but he finally nodded off before sunrise.
Key cranked. Plugs jumped. Engine poppety-pop, then urr, urr …. But, no, that was only the soundtrack he’d rigged his electrocar startup to play.
Still snug in his hammock, Fill uses the ornately decorated walking stick to hit the start button. No more cranking keys, he sighed, no more pistons popping to life, no gasoline fueled rigs.
No, now it was all cubic. Was that the word? You know, those cubes you see everywhere now. Those replaced me, he would wait for the electric vehicle to drive itself. Soon. Soon. Maybe today, as he programmed the cube to roll somewhere away from the alley behind the tavern.
He then suddenly thought about tomorrow’s sentence, the rubber rolling on wetted pavement, early morning, looks like the sun will shine all day.
A black mood usually smothered the Feckless Delivery driver on Black Friday. The darkness took hold, not because he hadn’t bought some useless gizmo for 90 percent off or because Fill had gotten into a donnybrook with a huge elderly matron as they both grabbed the last box of e-goods on the shelf, nor even because he had to work that sales day. No, Wantless was black of thought because he knew in about three to five days, all those e-gadgets would be rolling down conveyor belts to be loaded onto Feckless delivery trucks. The Peak season got peakier following Black Friday.
The Feckless Delivery Co. driver lost traction in life like he did on the interminable road, day after day. Every mile, fewer breaths left to breathe. Every package a Pyrrhric victory in the endless Package Wars. “Marley Christmas,” he snorted under his breath to the ungrateful sod standing on the porch in his bathrobe, as Fido gnarled his gleaming teeth. The black night swirled beyond the house and delivery truck. More dark roads to conquer, more boulders to roll uphill.