Four bags. I counted four bags that day, and that was the best I could do. Where were the rest of them? I didn’t know, and no amount of snooping would shed any light. That’s all there was, just those four bags, and that’s all there was going to be. Maybe, if I’d been at it for more than just the six days at the end of May, I might have known that there was a pattern, that some days the bags numbered in the hundreds and some days they were in the single digits, but that knowledge was beyond me at the moment.
So I made note in my book: four bags. I didn’t have to notice the color or the shape or the design, just the number. I have to say that of all the jobs I’ve ever had, this was probably the dumbest, but I wasn’t asking any questions. In a recession, you take what you can get. If it doesn’t involve murder or prison time, it’s probably a good thing, at least as long as you get a paycheck. I’d heard of people who took jobs and ended up having to pay for them, but I think those people were morons, never bothering to read the fine print. I read the fine print. At least, I read the fine print when there is any, but for this — bag counting, at the end of May — there wasn’t any fine print. Just the bags, just the time card, just the tally sheet.
It was that last thing — the tally sheet — that actually sent me over the edge, put that Harry Belafonte song in my head, and every time I looked at the damn sheet te song started up again. Come, mister tally sheet, tally me banana… What in the world does that mean, anyway?
So that was the tally at the end of the day. Four bags, one calypso song, and no bananas. At least I got paid for my troubles.
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