JOSHUA THUSAT
There are things Larry wants.
As Larry turns the key and presses the ignition, he always breaks our stubborn morning silence. It is the silence of men cradling their own reluctances. It is the self-pity of a groggy pre-dawn routine and a day’s work ahead. It seeps into everything if you let it, your lunch mechanized, your walk creaky, your politics embittered, your dreams a bore. And Larry knows this, for his intention is unsubtle. “How are you doing this morning, Mr. Josh?”
And just like that, we inhabit ourselves again.
“We got a box to pick up this morning. And Mike asked us to stop at Wal-Mart on the way out.” We deliver to several Wal-Marts, but his tone tells the one he means. Sandusky. It’s not our route but someone must hit it right away. They need ice before they open.
Larry listens to me complain about the manager there and how it is not our responsibility. It is Bob’s route. Bob is another driver who is always bitching about the manager at Wal-Mart. Bob says, “That damn manager doesn’t let us take a pallet of ice through the store to fill the front freezer. He also yells at me if I leave an extra pallet of ice for them in the back when I can’t find him.” So Mike Luc, one of the owners, does that thing good statesmen do. He listens to Bob and chides him at the same time.
Mike responds, “The ice can melt in the store so he understandably doesn’t want you dragging a pallet up to the front”; “He has to confirm purchases before we drop a whole pallet.” Then behind the scenes Mike lowers the cost of a seven-pound bag for Wal-Mart to .35 cents so he can keep the account. Wal-Mart is always threatening to take their business to Home City Ice (scary but so big it would make sense and is therefore not a threat) or Sandusky Ice (the real threat because they are the local competition).
Once I went with Bob on his route and learned the man was not embellishing. It was easy to see how power, even the minor power of a retail fiefdom, corrupts. If the soul is a candle aflame behind the eyes, this manager’s glare had become a forest fire when he was promoted to serve as Wal-Mart’s standard bearer in Sandusky, Ohio.
I couldn’t imagine how Larry would handle him.
“I’ve heard all the stories. Yup.” This is all Larry says to my whining. He means to say, as Mike somehow does with his manner, I agree but this is the gig. So we go.
Possibly to mark the day as a good one before it even begins, Larry stops at the McDonald’s on Perry Street, wheeling the steering wheel in a madman’s gesture of glee, glancing at me as if we are complicit in how to exploit the freedom of this field we’ve chosen to plow.
Lunchtime can be moved to the start of the day. Who says it can’t if we can be trusted to do our work?
This is the breakfast that will eventually reveal Larry’s desires in life. This is the beginning of that day, when I learn, as I said, that there are things Larry wants.
******************************************
I don’t want him buying anything for me, but he does. An egg and sausage sandwich.
We sit in the truck to eat our breakfast, defrosted patties and symmetrical eggs, the day now a window cracked to fresh air. The Thermo King’s engine sputters its Song of Resistance above the cab, its ongoing complaint against the humidity. Each beat seems to enunciate its combustion. The sound bounces off the cold brown brick near the drive thru mouth.
It always feels like malingering when we eat in the truck in a parking lot. I chew furtively and serve as lookout at my window. Larry knows this about me, my anxious side. I can feel his amusement. “Slow down. We got time. Wal-Mart will take a pallet, maybe two. And not only are we picking up a box, but we’re replacing it with another. So there is a box back there taking up the space of a pallet. That’s three down, five to go.” He leans over and we cheers our orange juices. This news would normally call for high-flying feelings, but I have class tonight, so my day is bookended by work.
“Josh you should get less serious. You’re too young.”
He often says this to me. I am always too something for my age. This is my central malady. “You got that class tonight, right? What college class you taking in the summer?”
I tell him, slightly embarrassed by my imagined future, which seems decadent next to the cracked hands and face of this man, his awkward admission to suffering from hemorrhoids from driving trucks for decades, his stress pills in a travel pack of Advil on the windshield.
“Philosophy of Death and Dying.”
In response, Larry has his own philosophy on death—shit happens—but he doesn’t have a philosophy on the dying part. Larry will quote things I have never heard at 19, but by now know to be trite. For the philosophy of dying, the actual process of dying, where one imagines pain and suffering as the walls close in, Larry is circumspect. He suggests that even having a philosophy is futile because, as the boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Somehow, I manage to say that faith or some philosophy in place of faith might stop us from upending the work of our lives in the end. By this I mean our character, I think, a thing that might live on in people’s memories. It sounds confusing and I don’t know if he understands what I mean. I’m not quite sure what I mean.
“Should we be spending our precious time worried about how others will remember us when we aren’t even there to enjoy it?” I can tell he loves this conversation. The sandwich, death and dying, the work day ahead.
I finish my orange juice and promise to tell him what I learn in class.
“But what do you think about dying now?”
It is hard for me to think genuinely about dying while parked outside a McDonald’s. I want life to contain a warm core, a hearth fire that makes everything worth our work. This is the space usually reserved for God. A class with a syllabus and learning outcomes suggests a view behind a curtain.
Larry says that we must decide the center ourselves and there is nothing else “out there” to discover. We must decide the center of our own lives before we even concern ourselves with what is behind that door.
Larry is a man who decides what will be there after he dies.
The summer class suddenly seems useless.
In bad faith, to look manly, like a person with a position, I answer: “If the meaning behind death and dying is up to me, I will be scared. There is no way around it. If I’m dying, I don’t want people to think I’m weak or scared.” Is this the same point or a different one?
“Why the hell not? Dying is scary as hell. And I’m telling you. I know. It’s…mean.” I glance at his long wound, the bulge of skin that runs the length of his right forearm. It is blown up like a small water balloon, the flesh stretched smooth. People comment on it in secret, wondering at its origin story. Larry never seems uncomfortable, but it looks uncomfortable. Someone once told me, and I do not know if it is true, that Larry was a mechanic in the army and a serious injury required doctors to graft part of his stomach onto his arm to save his life.
“But it might be all people remember, right? How you died.” It is beginning to feel pitiable, my worry.
“Who cares what they think? Plus, aren’t you just talking about hiding your emotions at the end?”
I think, maybe character is hiding the wrong emotions. Maybe it is choosing the right ones to display. Larry starts to peel the Monopoly properties from his McDonald’s cup. There are two.
“But what does it mean to live a whole life that way? Not caring what people think?”
Larry smiles and nods while unveiling his property by removing the face. He looks at it and opens the other one. I begin to pull my own property apart. Mediterranean Avenue. I begin on the other one.
“But I thought we were just talking about dying. All I can say is caring what other people think is a sure way to be miserable. And not caring what anyone thinks is a sure way to be lonely.”
“I got Mediterranean.”
“I got that too.”
“And this one is GO.”
“And a railroad.”
He hands everything to me to place in the bag and revs the truck onto Perry Street and Route 2 toward Sandusky.
I say, “The GO says it’s a wild card. Double properties plus GO equals $1 million.”
“So what?”
I check the properties again. “We have two Mediterraneans and a GO. Can’t we use GO as Baltic and complete the set? That’s a million bucks.”
Larry laughs and says it’s a gimmick. He’s probably right. I stuff the properties in the McDonald’s bag and crush it under my foot. The sun is reflecting on the water. I’m being paid, momentarily, to sit and look at the rising sun, the bay glowing in a whiskey light. I recall swimming in it once, just once. As a careless kid.
Sandusky means water. A kind of purifying water. The word comes from the Wyandot Tribe.
Confederate officers were imprisoned at Johnson’s Island, glimpsed in the hazy distance, south of Marblehead and north of Cedar Point. The arguments that led to their confinement over a century ago seem meaningless when the light of the world is only now emerging on the horizon and you’re aiming to throw ice for a day. Big men now turned little; their war song cut to an elegy. If there is a historical marker here, or a lesson, not many know it.
Larry double-clutches to the top gear and the Number 10 truck, the one nobody wants to drive but him, growls and then is as silent as a smile. How many times has it crossed this bridge? How many times have I crossed it? I’ll commute this way again tonight to class at Firelands Community College.
I want to check our properties again.
Firelands sounds like a destination for a paladin in a fantasy novel, a place where a knight will win some magic to save a people. It is named for the Connecticut farmers burned off their land by the British and, as compensation, were sent here after the war. The Fire Suffers’ Land. Firelands.
We exit at Milan Road and take that left that leads right to the Wal-Mart, the parking lot a desert of asphalt, carless in the early morning. It’s Wednesday and the loading dock shocks us by being empty.
******************************************
I push the dock bell again and we wait. Larry begins to intersect the morning’s thoughts. “You think dying is easier if you have a million bucks?” He’s stroking his imaginary beard. The appearance of Larry mocking me – a short muscly man with camo hat, Liguran-blue ice shirt, wrinkled navy chinos, and hands as hard as hooves –is so funny that my eyes water with laughter.
This inspires Larry. “I know a millionaire still dies. Kennedy junior just did.”
The door opens.
“Stop,” I manage to say and turn toward the dumpsters.
The boy who greets us wordlessly lets us enter. His job is something else and he assumes we know our business. Larry thanks him and opens the back of our truck; the vapor escapes around him, an invitation to popsicles, ice cream, bon-bons. Even the boy stops to see whether it opens upon a Klondike, but it is a mere liquid turned solid. The only awe it inspires, which is incidentally the only way to make real money selling it, is mass production. For a moment we all stare at the rook-like stance of 8-10 pallets per truck, 240 seven-pound bags of ice per pallet in two rows. One of these trucks can deliver 2,400 bags, and during the hottest, busiest months, we sometimes take out two trucks in a day. My record is three. 7,200 bags of ice from one truck in 14 hours.
I press the button along the wall to lift the ramp, which also lifts us momentarily before flipping the ramp into the air and lowering itself into the back of our truck. Larry says his favorite line: “Work smart, not hard.” Working smart in this case means lifting an entire pallet off the truck—all 240 bags— with the motorized pallet-jack that belongs to Wal-Mart.
“Working smart is not in the manager’s interest.”
“Excuse me!” Larry says to the boy before he returns to the floor. “Is the manager here?”
The mute shrugs and then performs a miracle. “I haven’t seen him today. He’s sometimes here later.”
Larry looks at me: “What do you want to do? They don’t like any ice melting on the floor. Should we put the bags on carts and wheel them to the front? It seems like the only option.”
We both know this is the only option, but not the easiest. The manager is wrong about the best way to avoid ice melting on the floor. “If we break the plastic off a pallet and stack bags on carts, they will begin to sweat right away. If the bags stay together, they won’t melt as quickly.”
Larry nods.
“Can we just go for it before Judge Dredd appears? Plus, we aren’t Bob. We can plead ignorance.”
The docks smell like diesel and rubber and Chex Mix. “Well this shouldn’t be so hard. This isn’t Washington crossing the Delaware.” Larry agrees and says he’ll fill out the invoice while I do the honors. We disburse.
It is pleasing to steer the electric jack, sitting on the back of it like a kid on the bumper of a bus, leaping it over the ramp into the freezer and positioning its two prongs beneath the mountain of ice. It rises with the press of a little button and the pleasant zzhh sound, and I am moving 1,680 pounds of ice. I drive through the rubber employees-only flap and into the store, down a main aisle between cheese and lawnmowers. There are not many customers; two shoppers look amazed to see me hauling a glistening grid of ice, small poofs of water vapor trailing behind, a Jurassic turtle slinking forth.
Finally, I plop it in front of the ice box at the front of the store, shocked as always by the upcharge advertised on their glass-fronted freezer. The old ice in their fridge sags forward to make an O-shape.
I rotate the old ice to the side and stack the new ice along the bottom. Several bags on one end of the pallet leak a droplet or two of water on the floor, but I do not notice. I drive the ice back to storage, through the giant flap into the hidden area of employees-only again.
A man is yelling at Larry for letting his idiot helper drive a ton of melting ice through the store, so Larry rips up the invoice and gives them the ice for free. It is not enough. He says that the company continues to ignore his complaints and they will need to take their business elsewhere.
******************************************
It rained while we were in Wal-Mart, and when this happens the cab grows funky. The rubber and plastic flooring take on a sheen that backlights the detritus. The paraphernalia of an ice worker seems thrown together pell-mell: the account book, money pouch, rain jackets, unused gloves, the receipt book, extinguisher, CO2 tank, water bottles. Except in this instance, in the time Larry was writing the invoice, the Monopoly properties were salvaged from the crushed bag on the floor; they perspired enough in the fog for him to stick them in a perfect row on the dashboard in front of me.
I imagine a Greek cheerleader shouting: "Mediterranean! GO Mediterranean!"
Larry brings Number 10 to life and heaves her up the incline carefully, in one smooth motion. It is a constant struggle to avoid spilling the ice, which can happen whether the sturdy rows of rooks are strapped in or not, especially when a truck hops up a hill or it shudders when the clutch is popped. It can happen if the driver turns too sharply. You’ll feel it…a gyrating hulk in the back. You’ll know that now, no matter what, today’s truck will need to return empty, or every bag will need to be restacked on the pallets, which is nearly impossible without breaking up the ice so that they can meld perfectly into a new place.
Larry idles the truck alongside the back of Wal-Mart and waits for the cab to defrost. I stare at him. He knows I’m staring and smiles.
******************************************
The sun slowly emerges again, and Larry starts singing “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” The cleansing rain always makes him think of this song. His voice is old and it is closer to talking than singing, earnest but strained. He told me once why the song comes to mind when the sun comes out after rain. Something to do with his dad and fishing, a day when it rained and the dock was flooded. Larry’s dad held him in his arms and stood in the water, waiting, while everyone else ran. They stood patiently under their hoods refusing to mind the wet. I can imagine it, a father whisper-talking to a son up close, perhaps closer than they will ever usually be, two rods balanced under one arm, a boy in the other. And when the storm passed quickly, the waters subsided, and the sun came out, they had the dock to themselves and his dad sang out the whole song, trying to sound like Otis Redding.
“We need to stop in Vermilion,” Larry says when the song is over.
I continue to stare at him and he looks over and smiles again. “What?”
“I thought it was a gimmick.”
Larry shrugs. We drive awhile.
“What if it isn’t? We should at least check.”
Vermilion is another one of those names in the area, beautiful, making outsiders wonder how it came to be called that. But this one is simple. It takes its name from the Vermilion River, which takes its name from the reddish clay soil. But why not call it Red River? Unless the soil color is so particular, a kind of bright blood orange.
“If we split it, what’ll you do with your half?” I ask. He shrugs again, his face set in a serious line.
“You wouldn’t have to be an ice man anymore!” I am aware of my age as soon as I say it, the naivete of someone barely out of their teens. “I’d buy a house on the water, a perfect little one with a fireplace and a private beach.” These are the things people are supposed to want.
Larry smiles now. He is game. “I’d buy a new fishing boat. A nice one.” Larry took me out on his boat last summer, and it seemed like a nice boat to me. I guess nicer ones exist. “I’d buy one of those big screen TV's to watch ballgames on.”
Larry exits Route 2 at Rye Beach Road in Huron and makes his way to Route 6. It is not the fastest route, but he likes to cross Old Woman’s Creek and drive along Lake Erie. “You’ll be back here tonight,” he says, gesturing behind us to the south where the college is.
“I’d buy a ‘79 Camaro.”
Larry wrinkles his face at me. “That’s specific.”
We pass a McDonald’s. I think Larry is going to stop and check our properties, but he doesn’t.
We pass Old Woman’s Creek and I imagine a new Ohio Monopoly with the places on our ice routes. Vermillion Avenue. Sandusky Railroad.
Ecology classes at Firelands take students to the Old Woman’s Creek Estuarine because it is a rarity on the Great Lakes. Professors stand in their Wellingtons talking about a Native American woman, Wintasta, and the two men who loved her, a French man named John Flamaron and a warrior named Ogontz.
They were probably Ottawa.
The story doesn’t end well: Wintasta jumps in front of an arrow to save Flamaron. Minehonto, her mother, drowns herself in grief in this creek, and the tribe calls it by her name.
But it was no doubt made easier to remember by calling it Old Woman.
Minehonto Water Works. Poor Minehonto. Poor Wintasta.
“I’d put my dad in a home, that would be better for him.”
The game changes when Larry says this. His dad is very old and doesn’t move well. Something about his brittle bones. Larry brought him fishing with us last summer and worried about him the whole time. His father didn’t speak much, except to chide me for cussing when a fish broke free of my line.
“You could work less and see him more, too!” I offer as support.
“Oh Josh, that’s not that much money. Plus I like doing this. I think I’d keep delivering ice.”
I laugh hard. A belly laugh. And the cab is silent into Vermilion.
******************************************
We move quickly at the Vermilion Farmers Market, so nobody complains about backing the truck up to the box. I hop out and stand next to the ice box as Larry swings Number 10 around. It’s a two-door Model 120 with the words Luc Ice in baby blue block lettering on the side. The whole thing is empty except for five bags. That will wipe out nearly a whole pallet. Between Sandusky and Vermilion and an ice-box-swap, I worry about the possibility of taking two trucks out today. We aren’t even on our route yet.
Larry and I work the accounts farthest away from Port Clinton, beyond Crocker Road in Westlake, all the way to a gas station on 83rd street in Cleveland. The Eighties, we say to each other the day before we must make the trip. On those days, we drive straight there and work our way back.
Number 10 beeps its reverse warning and I find the passenger side mirror to signal to Larry. He has taught me the ideal semaphore. Flatten your hands and separate your arms vertically as if pretending to be the mouth of a whale. Open the mouth wide enough to show the distance between the box and truck. Without a helper, this task is dangerous since the truck is so big; once centered, the driver cannot see the ice box. The lip of the rear doors must be close enough to fling the ice. As Larry reverses I close the mouth of the whale in relation to how much distance is left to close the gap. When it is time to stop, Larry insists that I turn my flat hands into rocks and bump them repeatedly. We must limit a miscommunication. When in doubt, lean into the histrionics. Overact. Become a bombastic, articulate mime.
I whip the door open and begin to climb into the freezer, but Larry is already there. He taps me and jumps up instead. He has a long broken-down cardboard box, which he unfolds as a kind of runway, a landing pad, for the ice. We will use this cardboard all day. By the last pallet, positioned near the front, we will need to have a good arm. I’ve told helpers in the past to remain outside the freezer all day because they cannot throw seven-pound bags of ice well. And if they are bad stackers too, I tell Mike to give me a different helper.
Larry is one of the best. He rips through the plastic wrapped around one of the stacks of ice and pulls a bag from the top. They are hard but the ice is fresh and will break apart easily into perfect ovals. Larry sets the bottom of the bag on his right palm and overhands it like a pitcher. It flies through the air staying mainly in its horizontal shape and lands on the cardboard, sliding forward and off the lip of the truck into my hands. I think of a Lucille Clifton poem, “May the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding…”
I toss it in the box. Occasionally the bag doesn’t fly out and I must reach up and grab it, but Larry throws them so the handle is facing me.
I’m a little jealous. Stacking is not as fun by far.
Throwing bags of ice like this, sometimes 200 at a time, that pleasant pop and the slick plastic swoosh into someone’s hands is one of the most pleasing tasks I have ever known. It takes a little practice, but we’ve thousands of bags a day, each one the weight of a newborn baby.
“Five more,” I yell.
Plunk, swish. Plunk, swish.
"Three," I signal.
Bop, phew. Bop, phew.
“That’s it.”
Larry walks the last one to the board.
Pop!
I grab it and he squats to say something.
“I think Mike and Paul will sell the company someday.” My back is turned to him as I cram the last bag into the freezer and close the door.
“I couldn’t imagine the plant run by someone else.” Larry nods his head in agreement.
Most drivers ignore the straining Thermo King. Not Larry. A twenty-second exchange and he’s out, sometimes mumbling: “We ain’t cooling the outside. Stop heating the ice.” He grabs the door handle and pulls it down with his body, rappelling like a SWAT team. “They’d take offers, I’m sure. From Sandusky Ice even. Home City, maybe.”
In the cab I fill out the invoice. Seventy cents per bag times two hundred equals a cool $140. Frozen water. Who would think? As I’m looking up the account number, Larry’s voice changes slightly. “With my money, if I had it, I’d make an offer to them. Mike and Paul. I know half a million isn’t enough. Hell one million isn’t enough.”
“It’s fun to think about owning the business. I’d work for you.”
He shakes off his reverie. “No philosophers allowed.”
“But I’m grandfathered in.”
“We shoot all people who obsess about death and dying.”
“Give me ice or give me death.”
“Meh.”
“C’mon I am a born ice man philosopher.”
“Nope.”
“The world ends in ice, not fire.”
“I like it. Frost, right?” Larry grabs my receipt pad and rips the invoice out. And just like that he’s gone to deliver the bill.
******************************************
At the campground, the ice truck is an alien ship. Larry steers down a steep incline to the front office, where he enters alone to chat with the owner. He returns with information about where to locate the now-defunct icebox. There is only one dirt road to follow, with an apocalyptic entrance, a metallic junk-wall of old cars and hollowed out duck blinds.
“The box is at the bathrooms near campsite 1211. The guy was bitching and moaning about water everywhere and wanting his bags replaced.”
It is funny that Luc Ice takes responsibility for some of these things, like the electricity going out or general neglect. But they do.
The road requires Larry to make another steep descent, and the truck feels as if it is dropping into a gully. At one point, the cab tilts with a disquieting lurch toward a brush-covered bluff. We hold our breath. The doubled engine sounds of the truck and its refrigeration unit bounce crazily from tree to tree before echoing back to us. I have a feeling— a feeling I sometimes have on an ice truck early in the morning, an out-of-body existential moment that causes me to wonder what I am doing in Cleveland at 8am throwing bags of frozen water into a box. Except here at the campground, the feeling is uncanny. Two stoic boys in crisp new overalls and expensive fleeces teeter on the side of the road to make way, fishing rods held akimbo.
Finally, the road levels out again. We must be at the lowest point in Ohio. Several campsites come into view with numbers on wooden posts near each clearing. 1001. 1003. The road dead-ends at a fork with a sign pointing towards the 1100’s to the south and the 1200’s to the north. Larry turns right and the bathrooms spring into view, more like a large outhouse the size of a tiny garage. Along its brown-spattered walls an immaculate white ice box sits angelically amidst the stink. Larry cuts the engine, but the freezer above continues its noise. Atop the ice box, a grate covers the compressor. It is caked in mud and long-dead mayflies.
A memory of five years ago, when I was fifteen. My father is released from prison, and he takes me to grandma’s house in Fremont to get his car. It is a strange idyll, a rural image of American life, the father and son working on a car together in the yard. The ’79 Camaro had been sitting in the field for three years. Dad hops right in, turns the key, and we both shake with delight as the car grumbles to life. “They don’t make them like they used to,” Dad says. We both smile into the middle distance before one long dark snake after another pushes its way out of the engine block under one headlight. I am hypnotized. There are so many. I count to twelve.
Larry reaches behind his seat and pulls out the Co2 tank. “Should we make some floating balloon animals?” He always says that, though it is not helium.
Larry says, “Let’s leave the top on. Look at the thing. We know why it’s not working. It’s filled with shit. Let’s just blow it out, put the ice in and go. That guy was an asshole. He doesn’t deserve a new box.”
As he steps down, he says, “It’ll take thirty seconds. Go stack ice in the back.” Larry is still frustrated by Wal-Mart and our game. He hefts the tank over his shoulder like a bazooka and slams the door. I get down from the truck and come around the front. Near the headlight, I back away, thinking of those snakes. A small hose is attached to the Co2 tank, so drivers can aim it into the compressor and blow the dirt away. Larry aims the hose at the grate and turns the knob to open the tank. The tssss sound starts and the air spews from the nozzle.
I’ve seen a compressor cleaned this way twenty different times, but the size of the dirt is stunning. Because it’s not all dirt. Giant flecks shoot out the other side, but instead of falling to the ground, they hover and move back towards the ice box. It takes a moment for my brain to register the wasps. Larry doesn’t notice at all.
“Wasps!” I want to cry out a warning, but I’m hypnotized again, like I was with the snakes and my dad. I have turned into the idiot helper. Instead, I stand watching as Larry is stung once, twice, before realizing and swinging the hose around like a gunner fending off warplanes in a dogfight. For some reason he doesn’t turn the tank off or drop it. Instead, he backs into the trees and turns to flee. He looks like a robber fleeing with the entire cash register. He limp-runs quickly into the woods, spraying the hose behind him yelling, “Hive! Hive!”
******************************************
Is this a story, a day of delivering ice? Should it be a song? On the way home, I drive. Larry rubs the ointment on his stings. Once we get to the Sandusky Bay, I sing to lift his spirits.
“I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.”
I think of those mules attached to boats on the water, pulling them along, and what those days must have been like. I think of DeWitt Clinton, the man for whom Port Clinton is named, a key figure in the construction of the Erie Canal.
“We hauled some barges in our day, filled with lumber, coal and hay. We know every step of the way, from Albany to Buffalo.”
Moments before, we stopped for a milkshake to end the day. I went into McDonald’s to order. I took our properties, Mediterranean, Go Mediterranean, and asked if we were millionaires. Unfortunately, our properties only permit us to enter a drawing; it does not mean we’ve won.. We aren’t any closer to a new boat, a house by the water, a nursing home for a father or even a big television for baseball games. We aren’t any closer to buying an ice company.
To my surprise, softly, Larry picks up the song.
“Low bridge, everybody down! Low bridge yeah we’re coming to a town.”
And we both take it up: “And you’ll always know your neighbor and you’ll always know your pal if you ever navigated on the Erie Canal.”
This part of the day seems made-up, maudlin even, and I think it is made-up and maudlin as it is happening.
Larry asks, between the two of us, who is Sal in this song, the ass hauling barges along the canal?
Soon I’ll call the college and drop death and dying.
Joshua Thusat is an essayist and fiction writer. He is also a professor of literature and writing in the Chicagoland area. His work has been featured in Five South Journal, Spectrum Literary Journal, Doubleback Review, and Change Seven Magazine, among other publications. He was able to afford his graduate degree in literature from Bowling Green State University by delivering ice across northern Ohio, in towns with beautiful names like Vermilion. Sometimes he misses it and thinks that being an ice man could very well be the frame for his entire life.
Author Index: Joshua Thusat
Twisted River Review ~ Issue 1: Winter 26/27