The Maple Tree

When you deliver pizzas, you learn to forget that driving a car is a dangerous activity.  More likely to die on the way to the airport and all that jazz.  You play hard rock you don’t like but has that fast power chord riff, and you weave through traffic like Picabo Street down an Alpine mountain.  It’s like The Fast and the Furious except you’re hairier and fatter than Vin Diesel and you don’t suck as hard.  When it’s slow, you lazily meander the latticework streets, stopping at convenience stores and returning rented movies.  All-in-all, there are worse things than driving back from an out-of-town delivery, reaping the spoils of summertime to the soothing sounds of AM radio baseball.

When you deliver pizzas, you often work late hours.  While scientists haven’t yet pinpointed the exact cause, drunk people would piss themselves for pizza, and often piss themselves anyway.  They often pass out while waiting for their bar time cuisine, limbs akimbo on a swaybacked porch swing with wadded-up bills resting on bellies distended by beer.  The porch-sleepers rarely tip well, but it’s better than a frustrated return trip with their food in tow.  You never know how much they intended to give you, so you always take it all.

When you deliver pizzas, you often share midnight roads with the drunk as well as the usual stupid.  Sometimes as you drive out of town, some teenaged miscreant crests the hill ahead of you at a rough and wild eighty miles-per-hour.  Your music is loud, but his is louder.  You hear it clearly for a few brief moments, and you can almost put yourself in the passenger seat.  You can smell the Jameson on his breath and shy away from the exhilaration written all over his face.  You want to tell him to slow down, but you don’t.  You know that if you were him, you would only speed up.  Faster, always faster.

When you deliver pizzas, you see the abnormal and outrageous.  Sometimes as you drive into town, you see a Camaro tied around an ash tree like a tattered red ribbon.  You’re afraid to pull over, but you pull over.  A body lies in a mess of impossible angles beneath a maple tree behind the ash tree.  As you approach him, you know he’s dead.  You can’t smell, touch, hear, or taste it, but you can feel it.  The boy is now compost, and you’re mad at the tree for not caring.  For wanting it..  You wonder if the sappy, rough bark of a springtime tree rushing towards you could look like god reaching forward or beckoning you home.

When you deliver pizzas, sometimes you notice the way brain matter clings to maple wood.  A skull is thick and hard, but at eighty miles-per-hour into anything, it might as well be an eggshell.  You mentally piece together the windshield that gleams in the moonlight around a now-dead boy.  You sew it back together.  You wonder what careless undertaker would drop a glassy shroud on a now-dead boy so it would shatter so.  And, despite yourself, you’re happy.  No one else is dead.  He didn’t kill you as he raced by you mere minutes earlier.  You know that oftentimes the circles of tragedy and natural selection cannot help but intertwine, and you’re almost mad at the now-dead boy for making the decisions that he did.  For choosing to die like this.  For keeping you from work.  For wasting your time.

When you deliver pizzas, you often meet new people.  You didn’t see her in the car, but she was there, groggy and in shock.  She speaks behind you in a slurred whisper.  Is he dead?  He can”t be dead.  You don’t say anything, but you think.  You think so hard hoping that she will hear it.  He can’t be dead?  You see that grey and white Jackson Pollack decorating that tree?  That’s his brain.  You see that lasagna at our feet?  That’s his face.  Yes, you fucking dumbshit, your friend, boyfriend, brother, whomever or whatever–he’s dead.  Despite yourself, you start to laugh.  You can’t help but laugh.  It isn’t mirth or hysteria.  It isn’t insantiy.  But it is certainly laughter, and you can’t stop.  Stop! she screams.  Stop laughing!  You can’t stop, but you do think her stupid.  She is stupid.  She is so fucking stupid you can’t believe it.

When you drive an ambulance, you see amazing things.  Awesome and awful things.  Late at night, you sleep fitfully, afraid of missing a rescue call.  Your wife hates it, so you often sleep on the couch in the den.  You are asleep there when you get a call about a car accident on a highway at the bottom of a hill.  You hurry.  Minutes can divide life and death, so you shave seconds off the interminable commute by going upwards of eighty miles-per-hour.  As you approach the crash site, you see an awesome and awful thing.  A bruised and lacerated girl crying as she rains punches on a pizza delivery guy’s face.  He is on the ground laughing, just feet away from a now-dead boy sleeping beneath a tree.