“That one you can do yourself.”
We both laughed.
When we came out, Musgrave was waiting. He was wearing a lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket flap and holding one of those special metal spatulas they use for counting pills and sliding them across the tray. He pointed the sharp end of the spatula at me, right at the bridge of my nose, and he asked me if I was sure, absolutely sure, that nothing had been left behind.
“Those medications are controlled substances, you know,” Musgrave said. “And from the minute they leave this dispensary, you are the one responsible for making sure they get where they’re supposed to go.”
He stared down at me through his bifocals and kind of swayed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Depending on how I looked up into his glasses from the other side, I could make his eyes change shape just by moving my head up or down.
“You’re certain you got everything?” he said.
It was obvious he was worried mostly about his labels, about all those stickers with his name on them.
I thought about the crushed capsules again, about the stuff that was already gone, stuck to a tire somewhere and still moving across the city.
“There’s nothing left,” I said. “I brought back everything I could.”
The guy really should have paid me more. Musgrave was always sticking me into tight situations I had to squirm out of on my own. A couple of years earlier, some high-school kids tried to rob me as I cut across Benson schoolyard. They thought I was carrying harder stuff they could use or re-sell and they tore through the packages looking for anything with codeine in it, for a big bottle of Tylenol 3s, or Percocets, or something with lots of ephedrine for making Crystal Meth. Today, they’d have been after the OxyContin.
When all they got was the regular stuff — the antacids and nasal sprays and laxatives and those sheets of little beige felt pads that you’re supposed to stick to the corns on your feet — they turned angry. One of them knocked me over and held me down while another one pulled off my shoes. Then they tied them together and took turns swinging them above their heads, trying to throw them up as high as they could. After five or six cracks at it, one of them finally got it right and the shoes ended up tangled around a telephone line twenty feet above the street. They laughed and thought it was just perfect and left me alone after that.
But the shoes stayed up there a long time. Whenever I passed under them — if I was out on my route again or just out walking around near my house — I’d look up and feel that little sting coming up through the bottom of my socks, the same sharp digging pressure you get if you ever have to push your bare foot down onto the serrated edge of a pedal.
The place isn’t even there anymore. A few months after I left, Musgrave gave it up completely and the store flipped into a Vietnamese grocery with roasted yellow ducks hanging in the front window and bushel baskets of fruit I didn’t recognize. I think he held on for as long as he could, but he knew. Like the rest of us, Musgrave understood he was stuck at the end of things. It was during that period when the whole city wanted to go in a new direction, directly away from us, and the papers kept saying that we needed to tear down the old buildings on Pitt Street and “re-vitalize” everything. By the time they opened the brand new Shoppers Drug Mart, it was pretty clear. The new pharmacy had big windows that went all the way around the building from the floor up to the ceiling and every week they printed up a different full-colour flyer with all their specials in it. Shoppers Drug Mart had a fleet of blue and white delivery trucks driven by a crew of middle-aged men in matching coats. The trucks had a computer-tracking system, like a courier company, and every customer had to sign their name on a little digital pad before the driver would hand over their bag. They made their own cheaper, generic brands of everything. Soap and shampoo and vitamins and eye drops and aspirin and toothbrushes. Everything they sold had the word “Life” written on it, spelled out in this red slanty font. Nobody could compete with that.
“We’re a dying breed,” Musgrave told me once as he flipped through their latest flyer and stared at those glossy magnified photographs of hair dye and antiseptic mouthwash.
“Pretty soon, it’s going to be impossible. Impossible for anybody to make a go of it on their own.”
I’m pretty sure the customers I delivered to didn’t know anything about the trucks or the better prices at Shoppers Drug Mart. Musgrave sent me mainly to the quiet floors of rest homes — to Golden Gate and Whispering Pines — and then out to his special harem of shut-ins and old women who had outlived their husbands. The other half of his customers were lonely single guys who’d been injured at the plants and were off on long-term disability. I had that job for almost three years, up to the end of elementary school, and except for a couple crashes and near-misses it was all pretty routine. From Monday to Friday between 4:00 and 6:30 I raced back and forth across the city, dodging cars and swerving around sewer grates with my bag always hanging over my shoulder and the weight in it clunking against my knee every time my leg came around for another turn.
I made a different plan for every trip. Before I left the store, I plotted the route out in my head and thought of all the short cuts I could take. And when I made the loop, I imagined it like a big connect-the-dots picture where I had to draw the lines between every separate person. I’d drop the right medicine at each house and maybe pick-up the prescriptions that needed to be filled the next time around. Every stop was its own thing but I held them all together in my head and I kept the whole sequence in order. It’s like that for any delivery job. There’s one address and then another and you keep leaving and arriving, but in between there’s nothing.
I think the guys on disability had it roughest. They weren’t as old as the women I delivered to and they didn’t have the glaucoma or the osteoporosis that used to wear down the ladies. Instead, most of the guys had been wrecked by those steady, grinding jobs they used to have at the plants before everything got ergonomic and automated. Some of the men were so twisted up with tendonitis they couldn’t tie their own shoes and when they went to shake your hand all you got was this flaccid jumble of separate fingers that wouldn’t squeeze together right. They had joint and muscle problems and arthritis that was way worse than it should have been in people their age. And their lower backs were so messed up they had to sleep on sheets of plywood or lay on the floor when they watched their sports at night and their American soaps during the day.
Those kinds of injuries came from working on the line. They showed up in people who’d been holding the same pneumatic gun for too long, tightening the same eight nuts on a million half-built minivans as they floated by, one every 44 seconds, like a string of hollowed-out metal skeletons, maybe. If you’ve ever been in there you know what it looks like. Other guys got hurt in those nasty burn accidents down at the Ford Foundry where they used to stand on these little platforms while they poured the molten steel directly into the casings for the engine blocks. And there were some men and women who got permanently bent over from working at the trim plant, feeding those thick vinyl seat covers into a heavy-duty sewing machine.
For a while, a couple of years earlier, there’d been some fraud cases in the news and there was a lot of talk about how the whole Long Term Disability claims system was corrupt. GM hired a couple of private investigators to go around taking hidden pictures and videos of some of these broken-down guys who were supposed to be so permanently damaged they couldn’t pick up a six-ounce wrench or sit in a chair pushing buttons for thirty-nine bucks an hour. They caught a lot of those guys on tape, banging out grand slam home runs and stealing a few bases in their beer-league softball games or going on ten-day fly-fishing trips with their buddies up in the Muskokas. They got one guy who was just bouncing on a trampoline in the backyard with his kids and another one who helped his neighbour build a deck, but that was enough to get them in deep trouble.