"Dangerous Deliveries" by Sidik Fofana
“Dangerous Deliveries” was first published in our Spring/Summer 2011 issue. His debut collection, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs is now available from Scribner.
Kane is the head of deliveries, but he does the same job that Fitroy and I do. I don’t really care, because he drives the van, which is the bulk of the work. He still has to bring the groceries up the stairs and he still has to split the tips with us. He considers himself an old gangsta and, with his deep grainy voice, he tells us stories about jail in the third person.
“Kane never turned gay in the bing. It was always the Puerto Rican and Cape Verdean niggas who turned gay, getting themselves boyfriends and all that.
“I had three months left in my bid, and this white boy wanted to test me. I busted his whole grill. Hated that motherfucker. But you know what, when the C.O. came around, white boy didn’t say shit and I left on time.”
We drive by Newbury Street where all the fine white girls walk, and Kane stops talking. This white girl with blond hair and designer glasses stands in the middle of the crosswalk, sashaying her hips, waiting for our van to pass her. “A nice rasshole!” Kane says to Fitroy, who nods his head up and down. Kane sticks his head out the window and shouts to the girl, “Miss, you have the right of the way.” She says thank you, and he says, “By the way, I only drive a van part-time, would you like to get a little fudge brownie after?” The girl crosses the street. Fitroy and Kane chuckle.
All three of us work the day shift at Purity Supreme, a supermarket in downtown Boston. The store crowds up with rude white folks buying asparagus shoots and two-pound salads. I used to work in the store as a cashier, but Jerry C. got fired and the managers needed a third delivery guy. Now I tell all my boys at the registers about how I get to travel around the Beacon and Charles River, seeing the insides of penthouse apartments with central air-conditioning and condos with concierges and shit. Kane claims he has memorized all the big tippers.
“222 St. Charles. That’s ten dollars for each of us,” he says, double-parking the van crookedly near a fire hydrant. “Old lady. Got nothing better to do than flirt with black dudes. Just be nice.”
Fitroy and I each hold five heavy brown bags in our arms. Kane is holding six. We walk three long flights upstairs. Kane is kind of chubby and he’s pushing forty, so by the time we finish the first flight he’s wheezing. Fitroy, who is still in his twenties, is wheezing, too. When we get to the apartment, the old lady’s husband answers the door. He tells us to put the bags on the kitchen counter and not to step on his Persian rug. As we’re leaving, he hands each of us a bottle of water.
“Your wife didn’t leave anything for us to pick up?” Kane asks.
“Nope. Not that I know of.”
“Are you sure, sir…. Well, thank you very much, sir.”
As soon as we head back downstairs, Kane kicks a plant over by the door. “Frugal motherfucker. What we supposed to do with a bottle of water.”
“I’ll drink yours,” Fitroy says.
“Nah, that shit is mine.” They both jet outside to get to the van first.
Purity Supreme has always run in the family. My uncle worked with the delivery crew before he got his nine-dollar-an-hour gig as a security guard downtown. When I was in high school, I kept complaining to my mom that I needed money to buy Polo shirts and Nike Air Forces to keep up with the trendsetters in tenth grade. She did not want go into her purse for those frivolous things, so she begged my uncle to get me a job there. I loved the job at first. I was a bagger for three months, packing groceries, spot-mopping spilled bottles of relish, and setting up the Easter kiosk. I came to work on time every day with my green-and-orange Polo tucked into the pants. I didn’t even flirt with the girls like the other boys my age did.
Pretty soon, the managers promoted me to cashier and put me in cashier training. I was showing off my exam-school muscles, scanning items as fast as I could and typing produce codes with both hands. When I got on the register, customers marveled at my speed. Other cashiers envied how fast I emptied my line. The managers made me their ace.
By my sophomore year of college, the cashier thrill dulled me. I guess higher learning had me wanting a more sophisticated job. The thing is, I quit my Purity Supreme job during the school year, so by the summertime I was jobless, browsing Internet sites for administrative- assistant ads. My mom grew impatient and wanted to know why I was sleeping in until two in the afternoon. She couldn’t understand that I needed something more ambitious than ringing up groceries. She was more concerned about missing out on the hundred dollars I contributed to the family bills every week.
She kicked me out of the house after she received a credit-card statement where I’d charged an expensive camcorder that I needed to shoot my documentary. You should have seen me on the Orange Line train with my two black suitcases, headed to my uncle’s house for an unexpected visit. I stayed there for, like, three days. He not only got me back my old job but also arranged it so that I was promoted to the delivery crew with Kane and Fitroy.
My uncle told them that I got good grades in school.
“Good, we need someone that’s good with numbers,” Kane said to me on my first day. “Lord knows Fitroy can’t count those bags.”
Kane always flirts with the female cashiers even though he is married. “It’s a common-law marriage,” he says, correcting us. He tells us he used to run the streets of Boston when he was younger and how chicks young and old used to dig his pistol and blue bandanna. Every other street we drive by on the way to the rich folk, he says things like, “That was where my forty-year-old piece lived. She bought me a Cadillac.” He still wears a Red Sox hat and a blue bandanna. He tells us the six-months of jail time in the summer he graduated high school was the longest stretch he went without pussy.
Kane still works the magic with the females. He’s always got stories about the women he pulled even when he was married. He says that ugly girls give the best head because they are more willing to sacrifice their face since it’s jacked up already. He also says that lesbians get insulted when you say you can make them like men again and that’s the mistake a lot of men make. The key, he says, is offering her one night. He told us about Tocara, that girl who runs the deli department.
“I was giving her a ride in the van, and I just started playing with the pussy, tickling her rasshole and all that,” driving the van, like, sixty miles an hour on a busy Boylston Street.
“I told her, ‘Look, I ain’t trying to change your lifestyle. We just both feeling each other.’ We was kissing and shit.”
Suddenly he becomes self-righteous. “I would have hit it, but I was thinking about my wife.”
Fitroy is Kane’s sidekick. He looks up to him, which looks funny because Kane is only five-nine and Fitroy is about six foot three. He is dyslexic, so he’s always holding the delivery slips right up to his nose to read them. Sometimes, he gets frustrated and gives them to me to read off the address. His eyes widened when I read them so easily. He’s always wiping his forehead with a dirty Bajan flag and making fun of customers. There’s an old guy with a fedora who always buys scratch tickets at the customer service booth. Fitroy whispers “Mr. Jiminy Cricket” to me and I start cracking up.
When Fitroy hears a movie line he likes, it sticks with him for like two days. Today, the line is “He’s gorging himself while his master is not looking!” He utters it with the same tone of surprise the character in the movie does. So far, he has said it once about a guy eating a panino in an outdoor restaurant and three times about people eating ice cream on the sidewalk.
After finishing an easy delivery near Copley Square, we are in the van headed to the next one, on Huntington. This is one of few addresses I know, so when Kane makes the wrong turn, I speak up.
“Isn’t Huntington back there?” I ask.
“Yes, my son,” Kane answers. “But Kane isn’t going to Huntington. Kane is going to get us some nice jerk chicken and roti.”
“Yay!” Fitroy exclaims, clapping his hands and bouncing in his seat.
I watch the neighborhoods change as we head for a restaurant for Caribbean cuisine deep in the inner city. Three dudes in black hoodies are smoking by the entrance. Kane double-parks the Purity Supreme van and I can’t help but notice how conspicuous it is.
The chairs and tables are worn down, but the food is good. We eat for, like, an hour and I’m eyeing the clock every five minutes. When we get up to leave, we pass by a man eating a plate of curry chicken.
“Look, Kane,” Fitroy says. “He’s gorging himself while his master is not looking!”
Kane nods. In the van, the dashboard phone flashes with seven missed calls.
Today is Rodney and Raven’s last day. Two weeks ago, they were in the employee cafeteria talking about how register 16 is the only one that the store cameras can’t get to. Instead of shooting the big bills through the store vacuum up to the money room, they were sliding them under the conveyor belt and picking them up after their shift was over. They could have gotten away with it, but they forgot that drawers get checked every shift for infractions, and that theft doesn’t just get you fired, it gets you charged with a felony.
But I try to stay out of things like this. A couple days ago, a chubby white detective with a heavy Boston accent stopped me while I was hauling groceries in the van. “Did ya see anything suspicious in the maa-ket?” he asked. I said no even though I remembered Rodney and Raven bragging during break time.
Now police are escorting them out of the store in handcuffs. They walk by me. I know they’re wondering if I snitched.
Fitroy is by the holiday-card aisle shaking his head.
“Shit, if I needed the loot, I woulda gone in with ’em too,” he says.
He chews a taffy candy from one of the shelves, curls the wrapper, and shoots it in the big trash bag by the automatic doors.
We’re freestyling in the van on our way to a delivery on Marlborough Street. Fitzroy turns the radio all the way up when his favorite R & B song comes on. Kane and I are looking at each other, because Fitroy is possessed. “Fuck my babymama,” he raps. “I hope she happy / Bringin’ niggas to my crib / Wanna sue me? / Wanna take my daughter? / You ready for the slaughter....” He grins at us and asks us if we liked it.
“You spittin’ hot fire right there, Fit,” Kane says.
“I been reading the dictionary and shit. Tryna find new words.”
“You know what Kane thinks, though? Kane thinks you still love your babymama.”
“Yeah, I do a little.”
Kane drops a boneless chicken wing from the deli into his mouth and rubs his hands off on the steering wheel. He tells Fitroy it’s okay to still have feelings for his ex-girlfriend. Fitroy tells us that he misses going to the West Indian parade with her, and that he almost held a baseball bat to her new boyfriend at the train station. I’m in the back, sitting on the wheel cover, my khaki pants bumping as my ass smarts from the speed bumps. We pull up to a row of houses when Kane notices a Boston Duck Tour bus right behind us.
The bus is shaped like a boat, and the tour guides recite facts as if they were born to do the job. They love embarrassing folks on the sidewalk, always telling the tourists to wave to the meter man or ask the cabdriver to honk his horn. I can’t stand tourists. With their flip-flops and disposable cameras, buying Harvard T-shirts and asking for directions to the John Hancock Building. You can always tell when there’s a Duck Tour in the area because you hear the people on the bus go, “Quack! Quack!” all the way down the street.
We have four bags each in our arms.
“I hate the Duck Tours,” Kane says.
The bus inches up to our van, and the tour guide picks up his mic.
“Say ‘Quack, quack’ to the deliverymen, people,” he says and the passengers do it.
“Quack, quack, motherfuckers!” Kane yells back.
The passengers gasp.
“Charlie’s the guy you’re looking for,” Kane shouts. “He’s my supervisor. Dial him up and tell him how I’m doing.”
Janita Vasquez is this Puerto Rican dimepiece who works over on register 6. She has to be the finest cashier in the store. Seventeen-year-old queen with blond streaks and her tongue, navel, and left eyebrow pierced. She’s from over by Castlegate projects. That’s around my neck of the woods, but I don’t mess with her building ’cause they break bottles over people’s heads around there. She used to work at CVS on Boylston, but I’m glad the thirty-cent raise that Purity Supreme promised brought her over here. When her shift is over, she’s always in the employee locker room around a group of guys laughing. Rodney and Raven told me once that she was feeling me. I wouldn’t want to lose my virginity to a girl like her, because she would tell the whole store if it wasn’t good.
Today, there are no deliveries on the rack and I have a little downtime before the next run. I decide to bag for her. She’s too busy to smile. A middle-aged white woman on a cell phone drops many bags of vegetables onto the conveyor belt. Janita looks up at the ceiling, trying to figure out the produce codes for them. She types one out on the keyboard and sends a bag of broccoli down the belt for me to bag. I give it right back to her.
“You gotta void this,” I say.
“Why?” she says.
“These are broccoli crowns, not florets.”
“What’s the difference?”
“About two dollars per pound.”
The vast majority of the customers who buy broccoli don’t know the difference. I try to punch in the right code, but I don’t always. If the customer was rude or I just plain old didn’t like them, I would type in the more expensive kind. I tell Janita that I had three years of experience on the register and that she should be lucky that she is in the presence of such a guru. I also tell her I will give her $150 if she stumps me on any produce code.
“Fennel.”
“Four five one five.”
“Scallions.”
“Four oh six eight. You’re giving me easy ones.”
“Basil leaves.”
“Four eight eight five.”
She is laughing the whole time.
Kane left earlier today, so Fitroy is parking the van in the store’s loading dock at the end of our shift. It smells like sweat, cigarette ashes, and fried chicken. Stray receipts and empty soda cans litter its black rubber floor. Fitroy kicks some of the debris onto the loading dock and closes the van. We take the elevator up to the store floor, and Fitroy hands all the carbon copies of the delivery slips to the customer service booth. He is supposed to announce on the store’s intercom that deliveries are done for the night, but he is always too shy and nudges one of the floor people to make the announcement.
Fitroy and I walk to the train station together. We are on the outbound train to Forest Hills, when he leans over to tell me a secret.
“Take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
It is a withdrawal slip from his bank account. Under “Savings Available” it reads: $104,791. His ashy fingertips slide through each number.
“How did you get this money?” I ask.
“My father.”
When he was alive, his father owned a liquor store, according to Fitroy. He asks me if I remember the CBS news report from 1992 when three dudes got away with fifty dollars from the register, and I say no.
“They shot my pops in the head. That was all that was in the drawer.”
Fitroy hangs his head low. He urges me not to tell Kane about the money in his account and asks me what he should do with the money.
“Maybe, you should just save it and buy a house someday.”
“Yeah. I want to get some investments and shit. Invest my shit in different fucking stocks and all that. What’s it called when you doing business just for you and nobody else?”
“Entrepreneurship.”
“Yeah! I’ma be on some entrepreneur shit.”
Before we get off the train, Fitroy tells me why he doesn’t need this delivery job. He just works it because he is afraid of the money he has in the bank. He believes sometimes, he says, that it’s not even there. Just a number on a paper. The best feeling, he says, is walking around knowing that he doesn’t need this job. The train stops at Ruggles Station and Fitroy leaves with his uniform shirt slung over his shoulder.
Every Wednesday at eleven, our first delivery goes to an apartment complex on Mass Ave. Fitroy and Kane dread this one. It’s a middle-aged white lady who is always changing her newborn son’s diaper in the kitchen when we arrive.
“Goddamn, that bitch’s place stinks. Smelling like electric doo-doo,” Kane says.
Fitroy is laughing out of control. “Her baby shits like a forty-year-old man.”
We get to Tremont Street and the traffic is going kind of slow. Cars are on their way to work, with their drivers trying to get the morning paleness out of their lips with cups of freshly brewed coffee. The street is urban symmetric. The brownstones roll one after another in a nice line, yet no two buildings look alike. Some have construction workers on the roofs. Some have dark green paint on their facades. Every window has a different curtain. The sun is piercing through the van’s front window, but Kane has on the air-conditioning. Fitroy flips through The Source magazine, scanning the dimepiece section several times.
Lately, I have been thinking about what I’m going to tell my schoolmates when they ask where I worked over the summer. I’m gonna have to hear about endless law-firm internships, people studying on research grants, or people who got executive-assistant hookups through their uncles and godfathers. I’m wondering if it’s not too late to upload my résumé.
“Somebody’s been getting friendly with Janita,” Fitroy says, nudging me. “You want some tenderoni loving, huh? You trying to be the Prince of Zamunda?”
“Can’t that nigga have a little hoodrat pussy before he go back to higher learning?” Kane says, coming to my defense. He turns to me. “You used to that four-point-oh pussy. That president-of-the-debate- team pussy, ain’t you?”
I love this part and I hate this part. Anytime they want to know what college is like, they ask me these probing questions that they think are subtle. They sit there like giggly schoolgirls waiting to absorb any tidbit of insider information that I offer them.
“I bet you have naked broads coming to your room in Batman capes and shit,” says Kane.
“Man, if I was in college, I’d go around campus on Halloween with my dick out like, ‘Trick or Treat!’”
I want to indulge them. I want to tell them stories about orgies, fellatious women, and sex in the library stacks, but I don’t live that lifestyle. I don’t want to disappoint them. I want to make them want to go to college so bad. Something evil in me makes me want them to feel horrible about their lives, but at the same time I don’t want to lie.
I tell them that living in the dorms is like living in the projects, but instead of another family living next door, it’s another person your age. That person could be a boy or a girl and that person could be hot. The dorms all over campus are like that. Kane asks on average how many fuckable girls are on each floor, and I say about three or four. Fitroy asks if bitches walk around in pajamas, and I say right before bedtime.
We pull up to the apartment complex on Mass Ave., and Kane parks in the garage. He ties his bandanna around his face and grabs five grocery bags. Fitroy ties an extra uniform shirt around his face so tight you would think that it was suffocating him. I just prepare to hold my breath when we walk up.
“Y’all ready for this? This shit’s gonna be tough,” says Kane.
We run up five flights of stairs and Kane rings the doorbell several times. Lo and behold, the lady answers the door with a diaper in her hand, while her naked newborn son is wailing on the kitchen counter. Kane and Fitroy rush in and throw the bags by the counter. The lady jumps back for a second because she thinks that the cloth tied around their faces represents some sort of gang thing, but then she sees they are holding the cloth to their noses and she settles down. Then she looks at her son, and the soiled diaper lying in the trash can, and blushes. Kane and Fitroy are scurrying, and I follow right behind them, but not before I give the lady a look that shows her that I’m not one of them.
Kane and Fitroy jet down the stairs, letting gravity help them chase each other into the street and into the van, where they quickly shut the door. All of our hearts are racing inside. It is fun, but I still can’t shake off how the lady blushed when she realized what was up. Kane and Fitroy are coughing, wheezing, and laughing.
“We got outta there like superheroes, huh, Kane?” Fitroy asks.
“We on a mission in this job. This shit is like dangerous deliveries!” Kane says.
During break time, the deli workers are down in the basement meat room. As soon as their supervisor sends them on lunch, they throw their plastic gloves in the big industrial trash can and head to the employee cafeteria. They come in with one-dollar croissants with ‘PAID’ stickers on them from the sales floor. They drop a few quarters into the vending machine for a generic bottle of water. They breathe hard when they eat, and nasty crumbs hang on their faces.
I walk into the cafeteria, bracing myself for the burping and the smell of raw meat. To my surprise, I find Janita alone, eating chicken nuggets and studying a chart of all the produce codes. I grab a folding chair and sit a distance from her at the same table.
“I’m trying to get good with the codes like you,” she says to me.
“You don’t need memory as long as you have the chart,” I say. “Besides, I’m just a different breed.”
“I bet you I still get paid more than you.”
“My tips are more than your check.”
She digs into this cute purse with gold rings and pulls out a torn envelope with her pay stubs. She shows me one for the week, for six hundred dollars, a good two hundred dollars more than my weekly check including my tips.
“How did you get this money?”
“I’m supposed to be in summer school, but I don’t go.”
I never get that. Kids who skip school to go to work. You might as well just start your life early. That would be a nightmare for me, going to work every day without the opportunity to escape this hell for university life. I feel sorry for Janita, but she is looking real pretty. She has her blond streaks in braids today and her fingernails done up with French tips.
“Well, you’re gonna have a lot of haters, so I suggest you don’t eat lunch alone,” I say.
“Oh, yeah, who’s gonna eat lunch with me?” she asks.
“Not me,” I say.
“O.K.,” she says. She twiddles her finger around one of her pay stubs.
“Sike!” I interject. “Lunch breaks I’ll be down here. Will you?”
“Yeah.”
I’m surprised at how cool I am. I should table this and save it for when I really start messing with girls. Janita and I promise to meet each other downstairs for break tomorrow, and she asks me to give her a quiz on produce codes then.
I wake up two hours late for my shift and I am panicking. The delivery crew is rolling two-deep without me, so I know Kane and Fitroy are having a fit that I haven’t showed up. More important, today is my lunch date with Janita. I even typed out a quiz for her in which I list twenty vegetables and she has to write the corresponding codes.
My mother and I had an argument last night. I wanted to take the last week off deliveries to pack, but she insisted that I needed the money for school. I told her that I had a work-study job waiting for me at my school’s social-work library, but she kept saying how I was still throwing money away. She almost cried, telling me that no matter how much education I had, no job was below me. We were up until three in the morning arguing and I didn’t even feel like going to work today.
The train is taking mad long, so when it does come I get off a stop earlier and run through the mall to get to the store. I get to the employee cafeteria five minutes after Janita usually takes her break, with my uniform and produce quiz, but she is not there. The only person there is Fitroy, slouching on one of the folding chairs.
“Kane hit an MBTA bus.”
“What! Are you serious? Is he all right?” I ask.
“Yeah, but the people who saw it are saying it’s his fault. It’s just us two today.”
I get up for a second and look across the basement. I see Kane in Charlie’s office. He has his Red Sox hat off and I realize that it’s the first I’ve seen his head.
I do not trust Fitroy behind the wheel. He can barely read, let alone read street signs and drive at the same time. He does not have the delivery routes memorized and neither do I, so I can’t just chill in the back. I have to navigate. He’s running red lights, turning the wrong way on one-way streets, and trying to squeeze into alleys only meant for cars. He’s got both hands on the wheel, but it’s still a bumpy ride.
We have a delivery on Marlborough in this extravagant brownstone. Fourteen bags and two crates, of milk and orange juice. It would be a hard task for three, so just imagine Fitroy and I having to carry those bags and crates up all those stairs. The mom who ordered the groceries is not home, and some white boys are sitting at the top of the front steps. They’re playing cards, just bantering and whatnot, with their well-broken baseball caps, faded Abercrombie shirts, and chokers. They look at us struggling with the bags and smirk.
“I guess this job is harder than it looks,” one of the boys says, giggling to the others.
Fitroy drops his bags and the contents topple down the stairs. He gets in the boy’s face and points a finger at him. He takes out an envelope of four hundred dollars, all in twenties, and waves it in the boy’s face.
“Look, I have money! Look at all this cash, so fuck you!”
He leaves the bags on the ground and storms to the van. I wait for him to calm down, then I say, “You didn’t have to show them your pay. You should have just ignored them.”
“Nah, fuck that. These motherfuckers always wanna think you broke and shit. I don’t have to do this job. I could retire right now if I fucking felt like it.”
“They’re a bunch of rich motherfuckers. They don’t understand,” I find myself saying.
He barely nods. He starts the van engine. He pulls out from the curb, then changes his mind, turns the van off, and puts on the emergency signal.
“I’ma really show these motherfuckers.”
Fitroy reaches for the glove compartment. He pushes all the sandwich wrappers and discarded delivery slips onto the van floor. He brushes through a pile of papers before he settles on the one he’s looking for. He slams the van door and runs up the stairs to the stoop of white kids.
“Look here, bitches,” he shouts, brandishing his bank-account slip. “Ninety-eight thousand five hundred dollars. I could buy your whole house if I wanted to.” He slides his ashy fingertips through each number of the withdrawal slip. He runs right back to the van, laughing.
“I fucked their head up with that, huh, brother?” he asks me.
I nod weakly.
“If I hadn’t spent all that money on the beach last week, I could have shown those motherfuckers six figures.”
He peels off into the sea of cars on Marlborough Street, and at this point I hope no one files a complaint to our supervisor.
Charlie already asked Kane to turn in his van keys. The bosses also found out that Kane lied about not being a felon on his job application. The tips have been good for Fitroy and me since we are splitting it only two ways, but the job has taken a toll on us. When we are on the road Kane calls us from time to time. He tells us he is on indefinite suspension, but Fitroy still wants to know when he is coming back.
“After my man makes sweet love to Janita,” he says about me. “When that happens, then I’ll come back.”
I’m done with this job. I’ve already shipped my boxes back to my dormitory hall, but I haven’t given Charlie my two weeks’ notice for leaving. I’m thinking I’m just gonna be out when it’s time and never look back. I don’t want to leave Fitroy hanging, though. I promise him that he can visit me when I’m in school.
“Good, I can visit you and then get some sticky green. Knock two birdies out with one stone.”
I’m clearing out my locker for the last time when I see Janita at the customer service booth getting her check. I rush to get to her before she leaves for the day, but the register lines are crowded with people all the way back to the food aisles and I can’t wade through them quick enough. I bump into one of the customers in line and he gives me a look. I stop and watch Janita walking out the store with her braids bouncing around on her shoulders. I follow her strides until the automatic doors shut behind her.
Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named a fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection is available from Scribner
