Busy Travis
By, Chuck Beikert
Disclaimer: This story contains subject matter that may be unsuitable for sensitive readers
Traffic.
Even on a day as beautiful as the one in question it turned Busy Travis into a stressed out mess.
Busy Travis liked to be on time. He’d missed out on the ends of baseball games, skipped dessert, skipped breakfast in order to ensure his timely arrival at whatever destination lay ahead. On those occasions when extenuating circumstances had made him late, which happened with alarming damn frequency in his own opinion, he would begin to perspire and curse everything under the sun. Damn cars, damn drivers, damn roads, damn clouds, damn trees, damn job.
His job. Awaiting him at the bank was Old Will. Old Will had trained him eight years prior if you had to be trained to sit in a chair behind security glass and push a single button twice a day. They worked a pair of mag-lock doors between the public side of the bank and the secure loading facility where hundreds of thousands of dollars moved in and out almost daily under armed guard. Buzz them in, buzz them out. Read a book. Do a crossword puzzle. Bite your nails (if your name is Busy Travis.) Plan your next Disney vacation (if your name is Old Will.)
He thumbed his cell phone to life and tapped on the “Favorites” button. The one and only number listed under that heading was WORK, just like that, in all caps. Lower case letters made Busy Travis suspicious.
An ambulance wailed behind him as the phone in the fishbowl began to ring. The fishbowl was what Old Will called their office. In truth, calling it an office was a stretch. There was a wire waste basket. There were monitors for every security camera on the first floor, including the loading dock even though they were forbidden from responding to any incidents they might witness on them. There was an older model PC that mostly got used for playing solitaire or finding creative ways to view explicit videos not blocked by the network web filter. There was no printer. There was a tiny refrigerator containing exactly one can of diet root beer. Old Will was perpetually on some kind of diet. Under the desk were mounted two weapons, a Winchester pump action twelve gauge shotgun and a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol. Calling the office a fishbowl made Busy Travis want to unload both of them into Old Will’s face.
“Fishbowl! William Hortert speaking.” A sunny voice came through the speakers in Busy Travis’ Dodge Dart.
“I’m stuck in traffic.” spat Busy Travis through clenched teeth while he envisioned Old Will’s expression as he emptied the Desert Eagle into his abdomen.
“I’m catching the 4:03 bus my boy. Whether you’re here or not!” it was a lie and they both knew it. The fishbowl was never allowed to be empty and no one had a key to open it after business hours anyway. Neither of the guards had one and the only way in was to be buzzed in by the guard on duty.
“There’s never traffic at this hour. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Well hurry…” Busy Travis disconnected the call before Old Will could place the unrealistic demand on him.
“Hurry Up?” he mused. As if hurrying was an option. To his right an ugly woman stared straight ahead and blinked her eyes at the unmoving cars. The ambulance shoved its way through those that had wedged out left and right to let him through. Busy Travis saw the driver laughing as he passed by. The tires rolled over road jerky, an unidentifiable mammal chewed and flattened by unceasing commuters and the siren brayed on.
Time passed and wheels turned slowly, pausing more than stopping. The strand of brake lights visible in the gentle upward curve of the roadway blinked on and off like cheap Christmas lights avoiding rhythm. Busy Travis didn’t like the radio but he drummed his fingers absently on the steering wheel in time to Toto’s Africa, plainly audible from the ugly woman’s car. When he realized he was doing it he stopped and frowned at himself in the rear view. He performed a hundred kegel exercises staring at himself in loathing.
Before he reached the point of incident a fire truck came through singing the same song as the ambulance in a lower, less organic pitch. Busy Travis wondered if they would sound well together and frowned at himself again. One hundred more kegels.
After seeing the ugly woman pick her nose twice and smelling one potent whiff of marijuana they had crawled up around the bend enough to see that the cause of delay had been a one vehicle collision. A thousand feet ahead a concrete abutment divided the roadway from the ramp toward the bridge. Crashed into that was a hulking refuse vehicle flanked by the ambulance and fire truck. Firemen stood with hoses at their feet as water ran off the road surface into huge drains. The steaming garbage truck had hauled its final load. Tainted water poured from its intact trash compartment. The cab was scorched white and crushed on the far side. The ambulance drifted slowly into the right lane and blinked his emergency lights once before proceeding at a non-emergency pace toward the Catholic hospital, or maybe the University Medical Center. Busy Travis wondered if the Sanitation worker was in the back. Was he ok and just going in for examination or was he injured? Superficially or irreparably? He didn’t pretend to himself that he cared. He wondered about it the same way he wondered about the lottery, which he never played.
Rubberneckers.
Eleven minutes late just to get a look at a wet garbage truck. He envied the people who had seen it ablaze. He wondered if the driver had been burned.
“I missed my bus!” hollered Old Will when he’d buzzed Busy Travis into the fishbowl.
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have left earlier.” Busy Travis had a habit of eschewing excuses in favor of taking responsibility and serving mea culpa with a side of steely-eyed stare. Old Will never flinched but looked at Busy Travis’ shoulder or shirt pocket rather than meet his gaze. He’d look briefly with pursed lips after every sentence but then look away again as if to punctuate his meaning. Somehow he never felt satisfied that he had impressed Busy Travis and the looking away was supposed to communicate that he didn’t really care either. Old Will was 57. Busy Travis was 41.
“What happened? Somebody crash?” Old Will always wanted to make peace in the face of potential conflict as well. Now he was sorry for griping about the bus. He needed Busy Travis to let him off the hook.
“If I had left earlier it wouldn’t have mattered. Can I pay your bus fare home?”
“I have a pass. Don’t fall asleep now. Bank President was here today. Might come back again.”
“I certainly won’t be sleeping. Can I call you a cab?”
“I’m going Sonny. Read your book or whatever you do in here nights. Nobody’s scheduled except for that coin load going out. They’re destroying all of those pennies. Then they’ll melt them down to make more pennies. They’re already pennies for Christ’s sake!”
“Circle of life. Don’t forget your newspaper.”
“Do you want the crossword puzzle?”
“ No, thank you.”
“Too small for me now. I got stronger glasses but they make me tired or something. I get headaches.”
“I take aspirin for headaches. I think they have some at the store on the corner.”
“Ok my boy, ok. You have a good one.’
“Thank you Will. You as well.”
Old Will folded his paper under his left arm and rose from the tall chair at the desk. Passing in the small space caused his belly to rub against Busy Travis’ arm.
“Sorry.” said Old Will not looking.
“OK.” Said Busy Travis staring at the back of Old Will’s head and imagining a claw hammer protruding from blood matted hair.
When Old Will was gone and had passed by the last security camera that mattered Busy Travis set about cleaning the office. From beneath the desk he retrieved a bottle of blue glass cleaner and a partial roll of paper towels. The janitor left the partials outside of his supply room on a folding chair. Anyone could grab them and keep around as their personal stash. The dispensers in the customer lobby restrooms and the employee facility got new rolls every Tuesday and Thursday whether they were empty or not and they never were. Busy Travis had eight partials at his apartment and two in his car.
He began by cleaning the immediate work surface of the desk. The daily coffee mug ring and an ever changing melange of cookie, muffin, bread-crumbs all were swept into the wastebasket before a liberal dose of the ammonia cleaner was sprayed. The computer keyboard also got inverted and tapped on the edge of the basket. Busy Travis avoided wiping away a scribbled phone number on the cream colored desk surface before he copied the information on a sticky note and stuck it to the top of the computer monitor.
“Looking more like an office all the time.” He said out loud. His ghostly reflection in the bullet-proof glass frowned back. He owed one hundred kegels. The glass bore all of Old Will’s coughs and sneezes of the previous twelve hours and Busy Travis sprayed generic Windex (sold cleverly as WINDOW cleaner) and wiped them away.
He read. He searched for images of burning garbage trucks. He read the Wikipedia entry for horseshoe crabs and then another about coconut crabs. After the bank closed he put his feet up on the desk and slept for 15 minutes at a time, his cell phone alarm waking him regularly vibrating in his blue uniform shirt pocket. He raised his cap to look at the monitors and through his window and lowered it again. He did this every evening before eating his apple and graham crackers. Tonight he’d also eat Greek style yogurt and peanut butter. Busy Travis hated Greek Style yogurt but he had been ashamed to buy the old kind when a woman was standing next to him in the dairy section. He had chosen plain because she had picked up a plain just before him. He’d hoped she would look at him but she replaced the plain and selected Honey flavor instead. Busy Travis had frowned.
“Honey flavor?” he thought.
At nine o’clock Sergio, the front guard came to the mag-lock door with a grinning young woman.
“Trista Travis, Travis Trista.” had been the exchange and Busy Travis buzzed them through. He watched, leaning back in his chair as first she performed oral sex on him, then he on her, before he entered her from behind while she bent over a pallet of shrink wrapped bills.
“The Million Dollar Fuck.” Sergio called it even though there was rarely a million dollars in the entire bank. He had been screwing girls on stacks of one dollar bills for almost four years cheating them by at least 900 thousand dollars every time. Busy Travis didn’t mind. Sergio was always good enough to keep all the action in the frame.
Sergio left and Busy Travis read. He ate his apple and his graham crackers. He dipped each into peanut butter and then plain yogurt and didn’t mind the Greek style as much that way. Nonetheless he vowed to maintain his resolve next time and buy the traditional American style yogurt, the runny kind prone to separation. Strawberry banana or peach. Either way.
At midnight the coin truck would come and remove twenty three sacks of coins. There would be armed guards ready to repel anyone foolish enough to make a grab in the brief space between the truck and the building, a space barely wide enough for the burly men to stand while their partners loaded the sacks. The men would weigh the sacks and signal thumbs up to the guard at the right of the truck who had his weapon slung on his shoulder and a clipboard in hand. At every thumbs-up gesture he would make a check mark on a carbon form indicating the weight of the sack was correct.
Busy Travis set an alarm for 11:50. He pulled down his cap and dreamed of a farm. A big locust tree grew in the center of a hayfield and he and his father chopped it down with long-handled axes, sweating through their clothes and telling each other jokes. He couldn’t remember the jokes or they didn’t make sense but he knew they were jokes because they were laughing. They felled the tree and then dug underneath the stump. A man came in an old Ford truck with dynamite and it was huge, red, and cylindrical. Busy Travis always dreamt of sweaty sticks of dynamite, with big drops of nitro-glycerin running down the sides. In his dreams the man always wiped off a drop and slung it against a rock to produce a terrifying report. He jumped at the sound, both in his dream and in his chair, his sleeping body jerking violently. A puppy in the man’s truck would hop up at the window and put his paws on the glass yipping. Busy Travis would go over to the truck and look at the puppy wishing that he could open the door and play with it. The Dynamite Man and his Father would stuff the explosive under the tree stump and then walk toward the truck, every time. Every time Busy Travis would be looking at the puppy. His father would yell “No!” and Busy Travis would look in his direction. His father would be running with a look of horror on his face, his eyes wide, his arms flailing. A rush of air at his feet from under the truck and a short but awesomely loud popping sound followed by a whine, a soaring high note that went on and on. The tree stump would crack into a hundred flying pieces and batter the side of the truck fragmenting the windows. The Dynamite man and his Father would fall flat on their faces with the backs of their shirts on fire. Each and every time Busy Travis would look in at the dead puppy on the truck seat.
At 11:50 he awoke at the first note of the digital tune he’d chosen for his alarm. He’d listened to the entirety of the tone initially when he first set the alarm but each time since he’d heard no more than one or two notes before turning it off with that fear in the pit of his stomach that every alarm caused him to feel. This afternoon he’d felt it when the ambulance passed and again when the fire truck came. He felt it now as he shook off the dream and straightened his cap. He stood and smoothed out his shirt and looked at the monitors. To his surprise the coin truck had arrived.
Early arrivals weren’t unheard of but they were very uncommon. All of the trucks were GPS monitored and forbidden from speeding or any course deviation. Therefore they maintained a very tight and efficient schedule. Normally they were spot on time.
Busy Travis rubbed his eyes and saw the driver lean out the window and wave toward the security camera. He didn’t recognize him but it didn’t matter. The first two years he had been employed at the bank the same crew had come in every time. An old man driving and handling the coin bags with two armed guards, younger and well muscled. A fourth would sometimes join them but Busy Travis had ascertained that on those occasions a trainee had been assigned to the crew. After the old man retired an ever changing cast of personnel had begun to rotate in and out. Seeing an unfamiliar face became a familiar occurrence.
Busy Travis hit the button on the roll up door and the truck backed into position at the dock entrance. The guards took their places at either side of the rear doors and the driver opened them and walked toward the entrance of the security office.
Busy Travis bristled. Armored Truck guys never came up to the office. They had digital scanners to check in and out. There was no need to enter the public side of the bank, ever. There was no reason. None. Busy Travis tapped his foot. He tossed his apple core and his rubbish into the wire wastebasket in shame.
The driver tapped on the glass and said something. Busy Travis pointed to the round brass grill in the hole at the center of the glass and made a talking sign with his other hand. The driver corrected and spoke through the louvers.
“Crapper’s busted. I gotta take a leak. Can you let me in so I can use yours?”
“That’s irregular.” Intoned Busy Travis but he calmed a bit hearing the unthreatening voice come through the speaker hole.
“I know buddy. I gotta piss though and we’re on a schedule here. Help me out?”
“How do you know the rest room out there is out of order?”
“There’s a sign on the door, come on buddy!”
Busy Travis moved toward the button to let the driver in but first glanced at the security monitor that displayed the camera aimed at the right side of the roll up door. To the extreme right the rest room door was visible and it was plain white, bearing no sign of any kind.
Busy Travis reached under the desk and felt the grip of the Desert Eagle. He reached beyond that and felt the stock of the shotgun mounted just to the rear of the button that deactivated the mag-lock. He looked at the driver quizzically.
“Can you buzz me in?” he asked performing the dance of urgency.
“I am. Try the door.” As he said it he was wrapping his hand around the grip of the pistol.
“It’s not working.” He tried to shake the door which was impossible. It was solid steel and the mag-lock was built to rival the force of a pick-up truck yanking with a log chain.
“I don’t know what could be wrong with it. It was working today.” He had the pistol halfway out of the plastic holster. Busy Travis disengaged the safety.
“Can you try it again? Maybe push it a few times. It might be worn out.”
“I’m doing that now. Try the door again.” Busy Travis had the .50 cal pointed directly at the driver’s groin area. He had no doubt that the bullet would still do significant damage even after slamming through the wall in between them.
“It’s no good. I’ll have to piss off the loading dock.”
“That’s charming. I’m sorry. I hope you make it.” He eased the gun back into the holster reengaging the safety as the driver turned around and flapped his arms.
Busy Travis looked underneath the desk to see the weapons perched there. He loved looking at them and he usually took each one out during his shift to admire them in solitude. He was looking at the wooden stock on the shotgun when the fire hose crashed through the speaker grill.
Water gushed into the office with terrific force knocking Busy Travis onto the floor and underneath his chair.
“You couldn’t just buzz me in, huh? Well now you’ll drown in there you creep. I was gonna just put a tiny little bullet through your skull but this’ll be more fun to watch.” Water was halfway up Busy Travis’ calf, filling the miniscule room faster than he could ever have imagined, not that this was a thing that he’d ever imagined. He saw the two guards, their rifles leaned against the front of the truck, filling black duffels with stacks of cash. They had broken the shrink wrap from Sergio’s stack and taken thousands in small bills immediately. They now appeared to be hunting higher denominations.
Icy cold now, the water passed his knee caps in seconds. Busy Travis climbed on top of his chair and shook in terror while the truck driver shrieked with laughter. He turned and shouted at his compatriots.
“Faster you two! Three minutes!”
Busy Travis looked at his clock high on the wall as water reached his crotch. 11:55. Five minutes until the real coin truck came. They needed to be gone before the other arrived.
He climbed off the chair and water was above his navel. He took a breath and submerged under the desk to grab the Desert Eagle. Thumbing off the safety he yanked it from the holster and held it up in front of his head, showing it to the driver.
“Nice gun. What are you going to do with it?” he laughed as he looked at the time on his wristwatch.
“I’m going to blow your head off!” shouted Busy Travis as water touched the bottom of his nametag.
“Better hurry then, unless you have an oxygen tank in there I’d say your time is about to run out!”
Busy Travis reached the button and pushed it and hooked the door handle with his foot. He yanked but the door held fast.
“Oops!” said the driver holding up the wire that should have connected the mag-lock to the button. It failed in the “locked” position. Busy Travis was trapped.
He thought about firing the pistol through the hose and even pointed it at the driver’s face once but before he could act he was underwater. He had a giant lung-full of air but it didn’t last long and he blacked out.
He dreamed very briefly of playing with the puppy. They ran side by side and looked into one another’s eyes. Then someone was shouting at him.
“Travis Bisbee! Travis? Can you hear me?” a paramedic wearing rubber gloves and aiming a flashlight directly into his eye screamed, somehow calmly.
“I think so.”
“Are you Travis Bisbee?”
“Busy Travis.”
“Travis what day is today?”
“Today?”
He looked to his right and saw the driver of the bogus coin truck lying face down on the floor in a pool of bloody water. Beyond him were the two bogus guards slumped over Sergio’s Million Dollar Stack. They were both dead and looked as if they had been killed in the act of love.
“Yes, Today Travis. What day is today?”
“Today…” Travis trailed off. He felt very tired and wanted a pillow and blanket.
A slap across his face, light but deliberate brought him back.
“Stay with me pal. You’re lucky to be alive. Never saw anything like it.”
Police officers were standing in front of the fake coin truck. The guards from the real coin truck stood with them, their rifles slung over their shoulders. They were answering questions and looking in disbelief. Water was everywhere.
“What happened?” asked Busy Travis. He was almost ready to put it all together but he was shivering now and still so tired.
“Those guys showed up just in time. Ahead of schedule. They got here and caught these three robbing the loading dock. They found you floating by the ceiling in your office. You’re lucky they were able to smash the security glass with that fire axe. It took them almost three minutes but they got you out of there. You weren’t breathing.”
“How….?” He trailed off looking at the serious men with their serious rifles. Both now looked in his direction and offered him thumbs-up.
“I don’t know how anything bud. Listen, you’re alive. Now help me out. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Traffic.”
“Traffic?" What kind of traffic? Did you have a lot of people through here tonight?”
“No.”
“What traffic? Commuter traffic earlier? Are you a commuter pal?”
“Yes. I’m a commuter.”
“You remember the traffic?”
“Yeah. I remember. I saw the garbage truck.”
“Ok Travis. We’re going to get you to the ER and let the doctors have a look at you. Hold still and we’re going to put you on the board here.”
“I wanted to…” Busy Travis vomited a volume of water then and coughed hard. His lungs hurt and felt cold but after coughing he felt a little better. He was seeing stars.
“You wanted to what pal?”
“I wanted to see the garbage truck on fire.”
