Ledman Pickup

Six

  If it had to sum up its overall sensation in one word, the word would be 'wrong'. It was developing a sense of propriety, of the way things ought to be, as opposed to the way things were. Wrong to be on the floor, for one thing. Doubly wrong to be wedged beneath a giant rack of rusty shelves. Triply wrong to be enshrouded in cobwebs and surrounded by dust motes flying everywhere. It sensed rustling and scurrying from behind, and muffled booms above. There was creaking and shifting and sudden hot breezes stirring up the particles of dirt that rained upon it. It had known a more orderly arrangement and could definitely appreciate it more and more. To be on top of tables. To be in stacks with other boxes, square to the wall, nicely aligned for sliding onto hand trucks, down ramps and into shiny clean silvery ledges on wheels. That was the way things ought to be. Instead it had spent the morning in the gloom, ever since it had felt that lifting and tossing and sliding and banging against the floor and the wall and coming to rest.

  Voices came and went, sometimes clearer, sometimes hazy. Important items overheard or so it considered. It registered each sound and placed the voices in their categories. The tosser. The runner. The laugher. The tosser made the most noises, or at least it made the noises on the wavelength that got through the best. The tosser threw words that repeated, that became clearer, that had definitive declarations. It sorted and arranged the words and lined up several ideas. The ideas, for example, that Miami was better than Indy, and that Green Bay was better than San Francisco. These had connotations that rang bells. San Francisco was something familiar. It was on the label. Green Bay was apparently something like San Francisco, only "better.” It was worth considering.

  Other phrases and random words made less impact, such as "your mom likes my home cooking" and "you can suck on this.” It diligently filed all these away, sorting and arranging in a sort of ad hoc schema. Each new sequence was keyed by the loudest of the bunch. "Eightball" was associated with both "lucky" and "behind.” It keenly waited for new inputs, while continually examining those already captured and cycled through them, considering and committing.

  There were trumpets as well, bringing new smells on wheels at one point. The laugher passed by the most often. That one seemed to roam throughout the dark and airy warehouse filled from floor to ceiling with shelving, most of it vacant, much of it littered with foul-smelling pellets that seemed to follow the scurrying sounds. On occasion there would be an engine resonating from that opening of light at the far other end of the place, and then some lifting and shifting and sliding could be determined, and the roaring roared away after a time had passed. On those occasions, the warehouse generally became emptier. The day went by. It was not a day to remember, particularly. It was a day for reflecting and judging and coming to decisions. It was a day that had caused an awakening.