A person needs company. And it’s not often you find a pal like the one I had.
Old Shining Armor, the son of a bitch. Called him Shiny, or the Shine. He’s a rare one. Tight-lipped and loyal. Sun Tzu said don’t ever hang out with degenerates, they’ll pull you down. And he was right. But it cuts both ways. You end up with somebody like the Shine around you—somebody with no guile and no bullshit; only the truth, and a simple truth at that—and you can’t help but return the favor and be a little better than you are.
That’s assuming you’re any kind of decent human being anyway, which most of us aren’t. Maybe especially not me.
But I never let him down, you know?
Never smoked, and I never let the Shine down. Not even when fists were flying and my boss fat Dave, that fucking tomato, was frothing at the mouth, crashing his post office duty van over the sidewalk under the Fremont Bridge with the bums and urchins scattering like crows around a highway carcass.
I stuck with my old pal through all of it, let me tell you.
Joe gets a job.
Me and Shine met on the job. Coworkers, if you want to call it that. We were assigned together, or I guess I was assigned to him—to look after him, you see? The Shine is simple and that’s the beautiful thing about him, but he’s also easily confused. Blind, half the time. Too dumb to ask questions and lost more often than not. Shining Armor has good instincts, but he needs a caretaker.
So that’s me.
I’m out on a rainy afternoon with a six-pack of tallboy Rainiers under my arm, a spring in my step, the goods wrapped in a brown paper bag like a Christmas present. Walking past the post office, I see this fella wearing a fuzzy red sweater like it had been knit straight around him, tighter than a sausage casing. He’s a real little guy but fat, panting even, a beard clinging to his face like a chinstrap while he struggles to staple a flyer to a telephone pole.
Slowing, I can’t tell what has him so heated up. It’s sort of raining, just spitting really, and the afternoon is bruised and brooding. My favorite kind of day.
So I go ahead and ask the red balloon what about it, and the guy invites me right in for an interview. Says he’s hiring for the easiest job in the world. Any sucker can do it. That sounds like me, so I follow him into the main post office, across those squeaky polished floors from a 1950s high school and into a cramped office lit up under a fluorescent tube like the devil’s night-light.
“You really want to hire me?” I ask him.
“We’re hiring anybody who’ll take the job,” he says.
“Delivering mail?”
“Yeah,” he says, with an evil smirk. “Delivering the mail.”
I’m sort of intrigued. Perched on the edge of my chair, I wind up and take a breath and get all ready to explain away the DUIs and the rest of the record, to try to laugh them off, which never works but I have to at least try. But the furry mound says this doesn’t involve driving—just a whole lot of walking. And I sure as hell get excited then because I think that’s terrific. I’m a born walker. My whole family has long shanks, and I don’t care about the weather either. Living in Portland you’ve got to be waterproof. All kinds of proof, pretty much.
He shoves over an employment contract stuck to a clipboard.
But now I’m picking up on how the guy is acting kind of snide. He’s laughing at the light in my eyes, trying to sound convincing but laughing at me, really. And I start to get it that he thinks I’m dumb. Which is fine, why should I care what he thinks of my intelligence or lack of it? This guy—“Dave,” I see now, because he’s wearing a name tag on his sweater—he’s no captain of industry. But the thing that worries me is how he seems to have this in-joke, like I was signing up for the army and a war just broke out.
I sign anyway. Fuck it. Nobody much is offering me jobs.
“How old are you, chief?” he asks.
“Old enough, Dave,” I say, and he shakes his head.
“You look older than that,” he says.
Ah, well, fuck him. I shrug and pick up my sack of beers.
“Good luck with your flyers,” I say, showing him my back.
He laughs once, kind of in disbelief. But before I can book it out of there, I hear his desk drawer grate open. There’s this thunk and a rattle as I walk out the door.
“Here, you’re gonna need this,” he says.
Oh boy.
I just gotta turn around to see, so I drop the prima donna act. And there on his desk, I swear to God, is a leash.
“That’s in your hand eight hours a day, five days a week until you quit or get fired,” he says.
Now old Dave has got my gears turning. I’m not thinking about those cold tall ones for the first time in a long time. I’m keen now, looking to find out what’s got the crimson spud so hot and sweaty.
I pick up the leash and turn it over in my rough hands. It’s a silver coil, real futuristic. Some kind of attachment at the end, with little pins in it like the cables people sometimes use to charge their lumps of black glass at the bar.
“So what the hell is this for?” I ask.
“Not what,” says Dave, smirking again, his double chin eating that chinstrap beard like a free buffet. “It’s who.”
I can already tell Dave’s going to be a dick of a boss. And right then I almost toss the leash down and go. I am actually starting to crave one of those beers sweating in the paper sack, and plus I know I don’t have the patience to make sure this ends well.
So I give him one more second. And that’s enough.
“C’mon,” says Dave, standing up.
I follow the chicken nugget down a cramped hallway into a beat-up little storage room. There’s cardboard shreds strewn everywhere, dotted with packing peanuts like croutons, as if somebody unpacked something with some anger.
And that’s how I meet the Shine. Isn’t that terrific?
He’s standing there in the middle of the room, wavering a bit on his sturdy steel legs—a little slope-shouldered fellow with a face like a transistor radio. He stands up to about my midsection on backward ostrich legs and he smells like a warm battery, kind of humming to himself.
“A friggin’ robot?” I ask.
“Bipedal mail delivery unit,” reads Dave off a piece of paper, scowling as he brushes packing peanuts off its metal-plated dome. “USPS is testing them out, seeing if they can’t find a new kind of postman.”
“You seem thrilled.”
“You picking up on that?” he says, voice rising. “This piece of crap is going to take my job. As soon as it learns the city routes. And that’s why I have to hire somebody like you to lead him around by the nose until he can map the neighborhood. It could take six months. It could take a year. But the writing is on the wall.”
Somebody like me, huh? Right then, I decide I love the little piece of crap.
Kneeling down, I let my fingers skim over the robot’s plastic face. The metal casing over his shoulders and thighs is gleaming silver and warm. He has short little arms with flat hands like mittens. A blunt peg is sticking out of his back, for hanging a mail bag on, I figure. His eyes are round and glossy black. He blinks at me slow with a little click.
I think he’s handsome, like an old hound dog. But a lot shinier.
“Like a little knight in shining armor,” I say, but Dave doesn’t hear me. He’s muttering to himself, sweating rivers under that ridiculous sweater. And right then, I get the queer feeling this little fella standing here is the harbinger of big things to come.
Joe and the Shine become good friends, and inseparable.
So here’s the deal with the Shine—he doesn’t judge, doesn’t interrupt, and he goes with me everywhere. When he walks, it makes this nice wheezing sound. His narrow little feet are coated in a layer of tacky rubber and each step lands quie
t and smooth. And he always keeps up.
The two of us walk together, a lot, and we make quite a goddamn sight.
Everybody is on about the drones to deliver everything. And hell, maybe they’re okay for the suburbs and the country. But in the city, there’s no spot for those things to land with all the trees and power lines and buildings.
It’s a hoof-it-or-bust proposition when you’re downtown.
Technically, Shine is a postman, but he doesn’t carry any mail. Not yet. Dave says he’s being trained, and the most important thing for him is to memorize every route at all different times, in all different weather, and with all the different changes of scenery that come along across the year. Plus, the eggheads are looking for what they call “outliers”—all the crazy shit that wasn’t likely to happen and yet it did.
That’s pretty much my specialty.
I take the Shine with me everywhere, and we observe. I show him the patterns that I love—the flow of the shopkeepers, the tourists, and bums. The way the leaves form waving shadows on the sidewalks and how the new LED streetlamps shatter their light into grids of glowing squares. Even the traffic.
He soaks it up, and I flatter myself that he appreciates it.
I can hear what you’re thinking, all right? And look, I get that he’s a machine. Not even that smart of one, except he’s pretty good at walking. But I don’t care. I’m not a judgmental type of guy. If the itch is scratched, I’m happy. And striding through the city with the Shine on my heels, his leash tucked through one of my belt loops—well, it makes me happy. It’s just satisfying, to have somebody by your side.
So maybe you think there’s something sad about that. But there isn’t. And besides, you’re free to screw off anytime. Nobody’s keeping you here.
Lucky for me, Dave doesn’t care when the miles get logged, so long as they do. Meaning I’m free to keep to my regular schedule of walking in the mornings and day drinking. And even better, a couple weeks in I discover a compartment over the Shine’s hip. Like a glove box. It’s just big enough for a flask of Jameson. From there, you can predict how things went with me and the Shine.
We spend a lot of time together at the Goose.
People stop and gawk every now and then. Sometimes they take pictures of him, like he’s a really pretty dog. At some point, some kids slap their skateboard stickers on him while I’m taking a leak or grabbing another round. And he falls once or twice, collecting some scrapes and scars like the rest of us.
The Goose regulars each have their own reaction, or nonreaction.
Old Hemingway shuffles out the wooden front door of the Goose with his curled-up newspaper pages and his hearing aids. He looks at the robot, looks at me, and shakes his head. Keeps going right past and on to tend to his piggies.
Sherry—her majesty, the queen of the Goose—is the one who doesn’t care for the Shine. She roosts next to her husband in the soaking grotto at the end of the bar, joking and bullshitting with her crowd: Adrian the busker, old Hemingway, Mallory (who’s there as a captive audience), and whatever ragtag reprobates have straggled in.
Sherry sits in front of a tall glass of grapefruit and vodka. Mostly vodka, honestly. She’s got a figure like an hourglass with football pads on. That may not sound good, but it’s all right. She’s also got this nice cackle that kind of punctuates the babble of drunken talking that goes on in there.
The windows are always open, so I hear what they say, even though it usually washes over me as pure sound without meaning. Which it mostly is, anyway.
But from my spot to her spot, it’s only about ten feet.
The way I figure it, our getting together was pretty much inevitable. Proximity, you know?
So it’s too bad Sherry doesn’t take to the Shine. Not at all.
She likes to keep all the attention to herself, as it turns out, and if she had her way she’d knock him to hell with a wrench. From my point of view, the Shine can’t help attracting some notice. But she doesn’t see it that way. Stealing her spotlight, you see?
So, she takes to scowling at us through the window. Which is okay by me, I guess. There are a lot of cackling fish in the sea, so to speak. And even some without husbands.
Joe and the Shine witness a crime.
The day everything goes to shit starts like any other.
I roll out of bed at the crack of dawn and hump it over to the post office back lot. Usually, I’ll sneak a quick beer from the minifridge in my apartment or, if it’s cold out, a flask of some liquid fire to warm me up. But today is going to be a nice summer day, the sky still pink, so I’m content with smelling the chlorophyll and enjoying the gentle sounds of the city waking up.
Hoofing it all the time, you learn the ins and outs of where to go, depending on what you’re looking for. If you’re in the mood to see young people with different colors of hair and a little baby fat still clinging to their cheeks, riding bikes without the blessing of gears and going through the motions of being adults—why, walk past the art school. You want to see the new moms and their puppies and babies and round rear-ends wrapped in the most advanced materials known to man, well, that’s the Pearl. And if you’re in the mood to see the truth, or hell, just to see somebody who isn’t doing as well as you, even if you’re headed back to a creaking old empty apartment where the dish bowl for a cat who died three years ago is still lying out, well, those somebodies live in a stripe of shadow under the Fremont Bridge.
What kills me is how young they are. You’d think the folks who’ve struck out would be older—the haggard types. But no, those ones have got it figured out by now. Those old slobs are all at the Goose or doing a route between Mike’s Cellar and Yore’s and the Black Jack. Letting themselves down slow, one step at a time.
People can get good at anything, you know? Even losing.
No, the ones I find under the bridge are mostly kids. Urchins, really, who still think they have something to prove. The weight of that bridge hasn’t crushed their souls down into fine powder yet—they’re still in the middle of it, and it’s a rocky time.
I don’t walk that way much.
The post office parking lot is abandoned this early, a sprawl of blue-black asphalt and dirty warehouses and rickety old mail trucks. The place is a throwback to when this neighborhood was an industrial wasteland. Then it got trendy. And then less trendy. But it’s always been where the big postal trucks root around like groaning dinosaurs—all chain link and exhaust and dark puddles reflecting gray skies.
The Shine has his own room behind a metal rolltop gate. Dave gave me the key, if you can believe that. It was even kind of touching. The first key any employer ever trusted me with. I’m starting to think the gray hair I’m sprouting is giving me some kind of a gravitas. I never earned it or wanted it, but I’ll take it.
Anyway, I yank up that gate and there’s the Shine, all plugged in and ready to go.
“How about a little nip?” I ask him.
I pat him down and take a pull off the flask that I keep in his hip pocket. Then I toss it back inside and slam his compartment shut. Snap the leash onto his shoulder and drop it through my belt loop and we set off legging it down the street.
“What do you want to do today?” I ask.
He gives me that blank puppy dog look.
“You read my mind, Shine.” I wink at him.
We do a long silent loop through the hillside neighborhoods before I finally slide into my usual spot outside the Goose, feeling the sun pushing fingers through the tree that leans out here with me. Up and down the sidewalk, tourists are coming out in full force. I can’t remember when they started showing up, exactly. But here they are, filtering through the neighborhood like ants over a picnic. Snapping pictures of the place like they were at Disneyland, and I’m playing the role of a lamppost.
God, but they love
those pigs.
The big metal sculptures are bolted to the ground a few feet away from me. On summer days like this, people are jamming cash into the things hand over fist. Pretty good haul for old Hemingway, and I’ll bet he can do more than pay his bar tab with it. Between us, I think he really even donates some of that cash.
The old man hobbles out right on schedule and tosses his papers down. Kneels and unlocks the box and empties out the bills and change. He’s doing his thing just like clockwork. Problem is, when you’ve got money lying on the sidewalk for long enough a certain type of person will notice.
A kid is slouching toward us on a BMX bike that’s been spray-painted black and scabbed over with duct-taped repairs. He’s wearing a backward ball cap and a black bandana over his face, sort of like an outlaw. Whatever he’s up to isn’t great, but me and Hemingway move too slow to react. Kids like this are living life at twice our speed, flitting around like hummingbirds.
Interesting to watch—scary even—but tiring.
When you can’t help but move slow, you learn to just relax and accept whatever the hell is going on. And this time around, what’s going on is that Hemingway and his pigs are getting robbed.
Another urchin comes around the smoking corner, also with a bandana on his face. And this one has a knife gleaming in his hand. He’s waving his arms, young, shaking with adrenaline, eyes wide and scared over the bandana.
“Give it,” he says, as his friend pops the curb and rolls up behind.
Old Hemingway just sighs.
Slowly, he manages to stand back up. With one hand, he makes a dismissive gesture at the wad of bills spilling out of the box like stuffing from a torn couch. Greedy, the kids drop to their knees and start stuffing bills into the pockets of their hoodies.
The Shine and I just sit and watch. Real heroes.