The Delivery Man

By Fred “Max” Roberts

Dave Smith, a proud 48 year-old African-American man in an interracial marriage, grew up poor in North Carolina, and hes poor today. But there was a time he almost had it all....

Five years earlier, seeking his share of the American Dream, Dave tried his hand at entrepreneurship and sank every penny he and his wife owned into Daves Bar, a former barbershop on Atlantas historic Auburn Avenue. The business flourished, and he believed hed finally achieved his Dream. He bought his wife, Linda, expensive presents, and sent her on luxurious vacations while he stayed behind to watch over the bar. There was little choice there, since the bars Auburn Avenue location attracted an eclectic but motley crew of customers who always required a close eye, as well as the occasional bartender who either stole or shared the bars alcoholic bounty with their family and friends.

Life is marvelous, Dave thought. And life was terrific . . . until a swanky new competitor opened across the street. Within a few short months, Daves Bar became a statistic.

Now, six months later, unemployed and with the big Five-O fast creeping up on him, Dave reads the want ads in the local newspaper and fends off his wifes frequent worried questions. Within four months, he quits two jobs he feels are beneath him. Money worries stress his marriage to the point of open conflict. As the bills mount, so does the tension.

Linda, a Southern Belle and an assertive buxom blonde, is as supportive as shes able to be, but is fast losing patience. The manager of a staffing agency, shes the only one bringing home the bacon right now. Fed up with chiding Dave for not trying harder to find steady work, she offers him an entry-level job with her company. He doesnt want a job his wife found for him, plus he doesnt like or trust her boss, Charlie, a rich playboy Linda dated before they were married.

Deeply conflicted over what life even means anymore, his marriage strained to breaking, Dave leaves to visit his family in North Carolina, hoping to find answers to the unanswerable.

The Delivery Man is a coming-to-middle age story populated by eccentric, fascinating characters and a window into whether a man can reclaim the good life he once knew before its too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 20, 2007
• ISBN: 9781477162934

Fred “Max” Roberts

Fred “Max” Roberts was born the youngest of three in Rowland, North Carolina, and attended the local public school. His father, a church deacon, and his strong-minded mother made sure their children learned to read and write. But young Fred did more than that—he learned to love writing. When Fred isn’t working on another book, he loves traveling, music, art and photography. The Homegoing of Howard Lee Johnson is Fred’s third book in the series Tales From Dave’s Bar. His first book, The Delivery Man, and second book, You Can Go Home Again, are the prequels.

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THE DELIVERY MAN

______________________________________________

Fred Max Roberts

Copyright © 2007 by Fred Max Roberts.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4257-9327-2

ISBN:          Ebook                                      978-1-4771-6293-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

41782

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my mother, Lucile Roberts

I give a new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.

John 13:34

Enter ye at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way,

that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,

which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Matt. 7:13-14

CHAPTER 1

TGIF it’s Friday! The time is eight-thirty a.m. and we have a beautiful weekend ahead. Right now in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s partly cloudy, sixty-five degrees, sixty-nine-percent humidity. No major traffic problems…

I switched the car radio off, muttering, "No major problems, huh? So you say."

It was summertime in Georgia. Cotton may have been high, but the living wasn’t easy. By the time I left home for the three-hundred-mile drive to my mother’s place in North Carolina, my guilt had grown that my wife couldn’t come along for the weekend getaway. And then, I felt more guilt: I was glad she didn’t want to. Even so, I reasoned, canceling the trip wouldn’t have helped matters. To assuage the remorse, I lowered the driver’s side window of the black Ford Explorer. A blast of cool morning air rushed into the interior, blowing over my black face and bald head. I inhaled deeply and expelled the air from my lungs, feeling as though I had escaped from hell.

Home was in a tree-lined neighborhood of identical-looking ranch houses built during the late 1960s in Stone Mountain, Georgia: ironically, also the site of the Klu Klux Klan’s reemergence back in the 1920s. Leaving the city behind, I accelerated down I-20 East at seventy miles per hour through the city of Conyers. I spotted men wearing hard hats and operating cranes and bulldozers as they built the Stone Crest Mall shopping center. Men with jobs. Which, as of yesterday afternoon when I finally decided I’d had enough, I didn’t currently have.

What a difference a day makes, I thought, remembering the fight last night when I told Linda what I’d done, and the second, more frightening argument this morning. Why and when did we start the journey down the road of perdition? How could I make it right?

Four-thirty a.m. came with the alarm clock sounding in our darkened bedroom, prodding me awake. I placed the pillow over my head, wanting to return to sleep. Linda arose immediately, turned on the lamp and silenced the alarm.

Wake up! She placed her hand on my shoulder and shook me violently. You’re not going to sleep after keeping me awake half the night!

You started it, I mumbled as I removed the pillow from my head and saw what many believed I shouldn’t see: a Southern belle in a transparent white gown that left little to the imagination. She sat on the king-size bed, resembling a scantily clothed woman in a girlie magazine.

When I said Southern belle, I meant it. Born and raised in Alabama, Linda was an authentic daughter of the South. An attractive forty-something buxom blonde, she was also the kind of woman men looked at twice even though she carried a few extra pounds. She had aged gracefully, and looked as alluring and beautiful as the day I married her twelve years earlier. The law of opposite attraction sealed our fate. Love brings love. And hate brings hate.

You should’ve warned me you planned to quit your job, she’d said, looking drowsy from lack of sleep.

"Did Rosa Parks discuss her plans to start a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama? I asked, sitting up in bed.

You’re not Rosa Parks! she bellowed.

I didn’t plan to quit the damn job! I yelled back. And I didn’t. Ten minutes before quitting time, my supervisor handed me my paycheck and asked me to work overtime. Again. I told him my back hurt, and I didn’t want to get stuck in rush-hour traffic and elevate my blood pressure. He said, ‘You got no choice.’ I told him bullshit, take the job and shove it. I quit!

Linda was right. I wasn’t Rosa Parks. I was, however, a forty-eight-year-old black man only a few credits shy of a bachelor’s degree. As a driver delivering auto parts for a national-chain store, I was overqualified for the job.

Honey, all the company cares about is money, I said. They don’t care about their employees. C’mon, it’s not like I murdered somebody. My soul isn’t for sale. Something better will come along. There has to be a better way, and I’ll find it.

You should’ve worked overtime, and that’s the bottom line, she said.

Linda, the job elevated my blood pressure and endangered my health!

So will a burger and French fries, drinking soda pop, eating donuts, trans fats, and a lot of other things. And thank God it’s Friday. She sprang to her feet and left to take a shower.

This time, at least, her voice was more pleasant. Linda and I both were born in the South, reared in Christian homes, and grew up saying Yes ma’am and Yes sir. We were proud of our Southern heritage. No matter how bad things had gotten last night, her voice always came back to that polite tone she’d used now.

I crawled out of bed and dressed in my shorts, walked down the hallway and heard her in the shower. I longed to join her and wash her body and have her wash mine, the way we did when we first married. But after our heated argument last night, that wouldn’t happen.

I retrieved a black carry-on bag from the closet and thought about my trip to North Carolina. I needed the weekend getaway to clear my head, to figure out how to deal with my problems. With Mother confined to a wheelchair by her handicap, she rarely ever left her house, so I had decided to visit her. Actually, being honest, this was my first visit in five years. My father, a sharecropper’s son, suffered a fatal heart attack several years earlier at age sixty-four. He was eulogized as a man of faith and compassion. He proved it as a husband and father. God rest his soul. But Mother would be delighted to see me, and I’d be happy to see her and my sister Debbie, a schoolteacher who’d never married, but had once been engaged to a first lieutenant who died while in the Army. Debbie had dutifully taken care of Mother since Daddy died.

I placed the carry-on bag on the bed, unzipped it, opened the dresser drawer and removed undershirts, shorts and socks and placed them next to the carry-on, then retrieved a couple of pairs of trousers and short-sleeve shirts from the closet. Linda reappeared from the bathroom, removed the white terrycloth towel from around her waist and sat on the bed next to me.

When are you coming back? she asked, drying her legs.

Sunday night, I replied, avoiding eye contact, placing underwear and socks inside the carry-on.

Give my regards to your family. Her voice sounded melancholic but sincere.

I will, I replied, and neatly folded a pair of pants.

She sprang from the bed, stood nude in front of the mirror and applied deodorant, then opened the dresser drawer and removed a pair of peach-colored panties and matching bra. She bent over and stepped into the panties and pulled them up smugly around her waist, then placed her DD breasts inside the bra cups and fastened it. From her closet, she selected a gray pantsuit, inspected it carefully, and put on the pants.

Then she said, as though discussing the weather, I need a driver. At the agency. Steve is leaving.

I eyed her suspiciously. As a branch manager for Southern Temporary Placement Agency, a day labor employment service, Linda supervised six people: three office workers, two sales representatives, and Steve, the sixty-eight-year-old van driver.

Oh? I said carefully. Why’s Steve leaving?

He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s history.

Anxiety edged up and began a slow squeezing in my chest. When? No, why? Why are you giving Steve his walking papers? You’re always saying he’s such a nice guy, a dependable worker. He’s been driving the agency’s van for years. I had chatted with Steve on several occasions, when I dropped by the office to visit Linda, and at their employee Christmas party and the July picnic in the park. A retired Army sergeant, Steve had served thirty years in the military.

When, or why? she asked with a quizzical expression, tucking her white blouse inside the pants.

Huh?

"You asked when Steve was leaving or why. Which question is yours?"

Both.

I decided a few days ago to terminate him, she said, looking into the mirror.

And you’re offering me his job?

Are you interested? she shot back, turning to look at me.

It reeks of cronyism. You’ll be accused of firing Steve to hire your husband. Won’t that bother you?

No, because I’ll be accused falsely. But let’s say you’re right. If you were the captain on a rapidly sinking vessel, would you go down with the ship or toss cargo overboard to remain afloat? She stared at me expectantly.

Linda, Steve’s a human being! He’s not cargo to be tossed overboard, for God’s sake!

Wake up! she snapped. Steve’s almost seventy! He’s a nice man, but he drives like a student driver or an old lady. Think of it as survival of the fittest. The human race couldn’t have evolved without it.

When I didn’t reply, she said, The job is yours if you want it. It only pays eight bucks an hour, but I can get you a twenty-five cent raise in forty-five days.

Cronyism, low pay, and supervised by someone who wasn’t happy with me lately; the prospects seemed a bit much. Then, I remembered: Charlie, Linda’s supervisor, founder and vice president of the company, a very rich man who loved antique cars and pretty women. Linda dated him before we were married. If I accepted the job, and I saw Charlie ogling Linda like he often did other nice-looking women, I’d regret it, and he would too.

Look, I appreciate the offer, I said, but I don’t think so.

I walked down the hallway and threw my undershirt into the dirty-clothes hamper. Linda came barreling down the hallway.

Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you! she hissed and grabbed my arm.

Then don’t talk to me like I’m a ten-year-old child who’s broken your rules! I shot back, struggling to control my voice and blood pressure.

"You just don’t get it, do you? Many days, I feel like quitting my job, but I’m a responsible person. I know we have bills to pay. You had a good job and quit it. You blew our life savings with your half-baked get-rich ideas, and now you won’t even hold down a job! You lazy black werewolf. You don’t want to work!"

That’s a lie, and you know it, I said. When I owned the bar I worked sixteen hours a day, and you weren’t complaining when the money was rolling in.

The bar is history! Get over it, and be happy you still have me!

I should be happy I have you?

That’s right, she said, "I don’t deserve this crappy lifestyle. You should be looking for a job instead of running home to your racist mama! I’ve begged you for five years to visit your family. You’re only going because you want to get away."

I lowered my voice and said, Excuse me? My mother is not a racist. And as you put it so well, I haven’t visited her in five years.

Linda’s voice dripped with familiar resentment. I wish I could afford a lawyer. I’d send your clothes and divorce papers in the mail.

She whirled around and walked away.

I yelled at her back, "Don’t let your big mouth overload your fat ass and write a check you can’t cash. Divorce is not an option, sugar."

By the time I finished, Linda had reentered the bedroom and I was bellowing, but I couldn’t help it. She knew any talk of divorce rattled me. And I refused to believe she was serious anyway. I cherished the day I married her and had no intention of allowing her to slip away. Soon, we’d celebrate our thirteenth anniversary.

As I returned to the bedroom, I felt a tingling sensation under my arms. I dug my fingernails under my arms, trying to keep from balling them into fists while I sat down on the bed and watched the daughter of the South artfully apply mascara to her eyelashes.

I’m not lazy, I said to her back. I take medication for high blood pressure daily. You know that. I have a responsibility to protect my health.

"Well, I work under stress, too. What if I quit my job just because I feel stressed? And what about the money we owe? I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul, and my shiftless husband quits his job!" She threw up her hands, as if words were inadequate to express her frustration, and then returned to applying mascara.

Just relax, we’ll manage. I assured her.

How? she said, scowling at me in the mirror. How am I going to manage on one paycheck?

She stared at me and waited for my answer. When I could bear the silence no longer I blurted, I’ll find a job sooner than you think.

And what will we do meanwhile? Apply for food stamps and government assistance? Worried blue eyes searched my face.

Why aren’t we loving anymore? I said. Why are we drifting apart?

"Maybe you should think about that while you’re in North Carolina. And oh, while you’re at it, think about all the bills."

No way could I avoid the question, not while I had her attention. I lost the bar, I lost weight, am I losing my wife too?

Sighing, she shoved the mascara brush back into the tube and screwed it closed. Let’s change the subject. Give my love to your mother and Debbie.

I nodded and swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. I wish you were going with me. Will you be okay?

She rose from the dressing table and stepped into her shoes and gave a shrug that was meant to be offhand, but failed when her shoulders drooped. There’s no rest for the weary, she said. Somebody in this family has to work. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Enjoy your trip. Besides, she added with a smile, your mother doesn’t like me.

That’s not true! I said.

Bullshit, Dave. Sarah’s a racist.

Mother calls a spade a spade, has some irritating habits, but she isn’t a racist.

Again, I say bullshit, Linda said, looking into the mirror. Remember when you told her we were getting engaged?

I did. Mother had stated, quite bluntly, that she believed white people and black people shouldn’t marry. That’s true, I admitted, but your Uncle Roger said some of the same things.

Uncle Roger feels that way because he’s a racist, she said calmly.

Be that as it may, you married me, not Mother. We— Mankind is one species, and true love is colorblind. A person should be free to marry whomever they want to marry. I leaned back on the bed, my toes curled tightly.

She didn’t say anything else, so I watched her touch her gold earrings and check her appearance in the mirror, giving a final tease to her blonde hair and pushing the shorter hairs toward her scalp with a comb. Then she put on the suit jacket, spun around and gazed at me with blue eyes that were holding back tears. Won’t you at least think about it? The job, I mean.

Honey, I’d be working for Charlie, and I don’t like him, I said.

Forget about Charlie. You’ll be working for me. I’ll handle him.

Okay, I’ll think about it, I told her after a moment.

She threw the strap of her brown leather shoulder bag over her shoulder and picked up her black briefcase from the floor. Call me when you arrive, and tell Sarah and Debbie I send my love. Bye. She called these words over her shoulder on the way to the front door.

I love you, I called after her.

I love you too, she said, but her voice had a hollow ring, and so, I realized, did mine.

CHAPTER 2

And that, was that. Now I traveled up the expressway, wondering whether to accept the job offer.

I definitely needed a job. Badly. Yet not just any job. And, being honest, not one my wife had to find for me. What I wanted was a well-paid job that inspired and highly motivated me, one that connected my heart with my head and challenged me to put forth my best effort daily.

Truth be told, she can be a bitch, I thought. But I suppose that could be true of most women, and I couldn’t imagine life without her. Linda was everything I ever wanted and all I ever needed.

So why am I not turning this truck around right now?

My mind traveled back twelve years, to when I met Linda at a charity event in Atlanta, one founded after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Hosea Williams, one of Dr. King’s closest confidants. In the early 1970s, his Hosea Williams Feed the Hungry Program began feeding the homeless in Atlanta with a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day. Other holidays were eventually included. Within a few years, his organization fed as many as 30,000 people on a single holiday.

Two weeks before that Thanksgiving Day Dinner, a reporter from a local TV station thrust a mike in front of him and asked what he still needed for his dinner. Hosea responded in his raspy voice, We desperately need food, money and volunteers.

When I heard his plea on the evening newscast, I reached for the telephone and dialed. By the time I hung up, I felt like a millionaire. Now, I would get my chance to help prove to hungry and homeless men and women they weren’t alone. I also wanted to shake hands with Hosea, because he was a living, breathing black legend in my book.

On Thanksgiving Day, I arrived at a parking lot so full, I had to park my pickup truck nearly a block away. Volunteers and hundreds of homeless men, women and children roamed the building’s corridors. My eyes searched faces in the crowd for Hosea, or anyone I might recognize. Finding no one like that, I headed down a flight of stairs, thinking I’d ask someone for directions. I saw a small group of black men clustered around a balding, middle-aged black man. I was certain the man wasn’t Hosea; I’d seen Hosea’s picture many times in Jet and Ebony, and would’ve recognized him instantly. But, thinking, Maybe he’s a staff member or an organizer, I hurried toward the group.

As I approached, the men roared in sudden loud laughter, and the balding black man said, "I got another one. Did you hear the one about the redneck who went to see his lawyer? The redneck said, ‘I want a divorce.’ The lawyer asked, ‘Why? You must have grounds.’ The redneck said, ‘I got five acres up in North Georgia.’ The lawyer said, ‘That’s not what I mean. You must have a case.’ The redneck said, ‘I had a case, but