Now, the huffing did not work anymore.
The houses had changed. There was rebar in them, and glue that was stronger than wood, and inspectors who came around with clipboards. Chima’s father huffed at a house on his days off for eleven years and took down nothing but his own lungs, and he died in a chair with the television on, and at the service three wolves said he was a good provider, which is the thing they say when there is nothing else. Chima was fifteen. He wore a jacket borrowed from a cousin and his hands did not come out of the sleeves.
After that it was him and his mother, who worked days at the hospital laundry. They lived in the same house on opposite shifts and left each other notes on the counter, and in fourteen months they were in the same room, awake, perhaps forty times.
So Chima went to the warehouse.
Not to the warehouse, exactly. To a company the warehouse paid, that hired the crew that cleaned the floors after everybody else had gone home. There was a folding table by a side door and a clipboard with a column for your date of birth, and the hand holding the pen went past that column without stopping. They did not check very hard. There is a whole business in not checking very hard.
The sign on the warehouse said SOWERBY. So did the sign on the plant where his father had worked, the one that was empty now, with the weeds coming up through the seams in the lot. Nobody ever remarked on this. It was just the name that was on things.
They issued him the crew’s coverall out of a bin — white, hooded, elastic at the wrist and ankle — and the small ones were gone, so he got one two sizes too big, and it hung off him, and the cuffs came down past his fingers. Dee, who ran the
crew and was a ewe in her fifties, tossed it to him underhand and said, Small’s all gone, baby. Nothing fits any of you lambs anyway. She meant nothing by it. She never said it again.
He looked at himself in the scratched mirror bolted next to the door for one beat, and then he went to work, and for the next six months he pushed a floor scrubber up and down an aisle twelve meters high, in the cold that comes off concrete, wearing that.
And in the small hours, when the building hummed and his breath went out of him in a thin unimpressive little plume, he thought: there has to be a more effective way.