Men at Work
by John Saward
The first weekend after we moved into our apartment I rented a U-Haul to pick up some furniture way out in the suburbs. This was about four years ago now. We’d been eating all our meals sitting on the bare wood floors, cross-legged at the coffee table, watching Vanderpump repeats and drinking cheap white wine, all our plants down there with us too, eye level, sitting in pots on the floor of the dining room in a little football huddle till we decided where to put them. But the U-Haul they gave me the keys to was much bigger than the one I’d reserved, only thing we’ve got in the lot, must have overbooked you, so big it made people laugh when I pulled up to intersections, this monster machine puking out an awful noise from deep inside its guts whenever you tried to get it moving from a dead stop, red warning stickers smacked all over the inside about certain bridges I wouldn’t be able to fit under.
On the drive suddenly it started to hail, it covered the whole highway in grey-white slush until you couldn’t see the lane markings, and it is just dumping on me now, fat fistfuls of what sounded like nickels and pennies chucking down on the flat metal roof of the empty trailer, all those loose straps and buckles clanging across the ridges in the aluminum floor.
The highway was like this for miles, me skidding in the approximate direction of Schaumburg as the windshield wipers whipped back and forth doing this rubbery shriek, a tiny ring of visibility these two pitiful little fellows were clearing for me on this huge piece of glass, more work piling back up behind them after each pass. Eventually the whole struggle seemed to give each wiper a kind of real and panicked human consciousness, their own personal crisis at the shitty job they were doing, the three of us alone in there with the radio off.
Keep us breathing fire!
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