Locker 315 was my second published story. I had a totally different experience publishing this one than my first. The editor-in-chief of the now defunct New Orphic Review, Ernest Hekkanen, would print the emailed draft as-is with no cuts or corrections, the one and only time that has ever happened in my career. Perhaps it was the only time I deserved it. Later, I would use Ernest as a reference for a failed bid—my third—to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I can’t express how appreciative I was that he would take the time to do that for me. As for the story itself, I worked as the on-site/front desk/manager of a mini-storage facility for three years, and Locker 315 is effectively a time capsule of my experiences on the job. A lot of it has been exaggerated, of course, but some parts are pretty much exactly how it was. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is which. Also, if God is a spider, I’m toast.
Arthur Bell lived in his storage locker. At least, I was pretty sure he did. Every day he left within the first hour we opened, and every night he returned just before we closed. Of course, because we were a twenty-four hour facility, it was perfectly acceptable for him to be in his locker after office hours, so long as he didn’t sleep. Sleep was the condition that distinguished living at a place from visiting it. If Arthur stayed awake every minute he was here, then he would be perfectly in his right; but if he slept, and I found out, then he was as good as gone.
***
Early one morning Arthur asked my boss, Dan Cox, who was also the mini storage owner, for permission to move to locker 315, having noticed that it had just recently become vacant. Locker 315 was one of our more luxurious units. The locker was spacious (two hundred square feet), had rolling doors on either side, and was heated.
Dan came into the office to update me on the situation. He had a neck like a turkey wattle and hobbled because of a crooked right foot. He also smelled constantly of stale cigarette smoke, a scent which he bore as if it were his eau de toilette.
“Arthur’s moving lockers,” he said, itching his neck.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Which one is he moving to?”
“315.”
“He wants more space?”
“Guess so.”
“Are we giving him a discount?”
“How much is he paying now?”
I opened Arthur’s file on the computer. “One fifty.”
“What’s locker 315 cost?”
“Three fifty.”
“Ah shit,” he sighed. “Give it to him for three twenty.”
“You got it.”
“When you’re done with that, Arthur needs your help out back. He’s got some heavy stuff he says he can’t lift on his own. And, if you could, take a look inside 315 first to make sure it’s clean.”
I grabbed the broom and sauntered across the lot towards locker 315. The mini storage was outdoors, so spiders were a constant issue, even more than dust and leaves. My mother believed it was bad luck to kill spiders: I did not. I was a spider assassin. I opened the doors on both sides of locker 315 and stepped inside, wielding the broom like a sword. I scrambled the webs overhead and brought them crashing to the floor. Then I crushed the momma spiders underfoot and swept their corpses, brood and webs to the wind. I gave the rest of the ground a quick sweep. Clean.
Arthur currently rented locker 245. I found him observing a set of four treadless car tires sans rims. He was clothed in the usual out-of-season winter ware, complete with fingerless gloves and toque.
“So what is it I can help you with?” I asked.
“Just ‘cause you’re helping me,” said Arthur, “doesn’t mean I trust you. I don’t want you touching any of my stuff until I ask you to. I don’t want you looking at anything I don’t want you to look at. I have a right to my privacy.”
He was nuts if he thought he could stop me from looking at his stuff. In the time it took him to tell me not to I had seen pretty much everything I could possibly see. There wasn’t really a lot to look at. He had a grey Dodge Caravan, a red tool cabinet, the four tires, fifteen or twenty boxes, and what looked like a carburetor.
He continued to stare at the tires. While I waited for his instruction, I tried to make polite small talk. Although he had been renting with us for two years, I only knew his name. “You owe this” and “here’s your receipt” had been the extent of our conversations thus far.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“Why don’t you tell me what you do?”
“I work here.”
“Well,” he said, “so do I.”
“Oh. At Binders?”
The mini storage was neighbours with a local gravel business called Binders.
“No. Right here.” Arthur pointed to the ground. “Right over there.” He pointed in the direction of locker 315. “I’m working on my business. That’s why I need the bigger locker: my business.”
“What kind of business?”
He narrowed his wild eyes. “That’s none of your business.”
Arthur bent over and picked up one of the tires. His pockmarked face twisted into a pained expression. He threw the tire aside and collapsed onto the pavement in a motion that looked staged. I went over to help him on his feet.
He swatted my hand away. “Don’t touch me! I’ve got back problems. I don’t need you injuring me more than I already am.”
I let him get up by himself. He winced with every little movement.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“You’ll need to move most of what I got,” he said, clutching his back. “I don’t think I’m going to be any help.”
He was clever; I would give him that.
I moved the tires first. Meanwhile, Arthur followed close behind and talked to me about the business I wasn’t allowed to know anything about.
“...and so I’m going to rent some chairs and set up the equipment that is in those boxes and teach them about documentaries. I worked for the National Film Board from when I was twenty-five to about ten years back. This was when I lived in Toronto. Anyway, they flew me up to Baffin Island one year to document the migration of walruses in the Arctic Circle. I made a movie just like that penguin one. What’s it called again? Mine was called Walrus: Friends of the North. I almost got nominated for an Academy Award for short subject. Missed it by one vote. I’ve been all over the world shooting documentaries for the Board. Texas, El Salvador, Zambia, Sri Lanka--I could write three Johnny Cash songs for all the places I’ve been. March of the Penguins! That was it. The point is I’ve got all this knowledge and nobody to give it to. That’s what my business is about. People should know what I know, and I might as well get paid for telling them. If you can get paid for what you know, then you’re golden. You can’t lose what you know. Once it’s yours, it’s yours for good....”
We moved the van last. It had a dead battery and so had to be pushed. Arthur asked me to wait at the trunk while he crawled around inside it doing god knows what. If he were living in his storage locker, as I suspected, then he probably slept in the back of the van. I tried to peek inside, but he had put polka-dotted bed sheets over the windows.
Arthur rolled the driver’s side window down and popped his head out. “I want you behind the van at all times,” he said. “I don’t want you coming around the front. I have a right to my privacy.”
As the van rolled out of the locker, he shouted his demands out the window. He also made sure to remind me to stay behind the van. I pushed while he controlled from the driver’s seat.
When we finally got the van inside locker 315, I was sweaty and exhausted. Arthur rehung the bed sheet on the driver’s side window and in the windshield, stepped out of the van and came over to me.
“Thanks for all your help,” he said.
He pulled a twenty dollar bill from his tattered wallet and held it out for me to take. This sudden act of generosity struck me in an unexpected way.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I insist.” He waved the money in the air.
I believed it rude to refuse any gratuity twice, so I took the bill and slid it into my pocket. I promised myself that I would find a way to return the gesture somehow.
“I think I trust you now,” Arthur said. “I don’t trust a lot of people, but you seem like a trustworthy guy.”
***
Every so often I got to see what stuff tenants paid us to store. After three months of non-payment, a tenant’s stuff became our stuff, and Dan and I went treasure hunting. Our main objective during these hunts was to determine if what the tenant had in storage was worth more than they owed. If it was, we confiscated and sold their stuff; if it wasn’t, we continued to hound them to pay. Dan pretended curiosity was the reason he came along, but I knew it was because he didn’t trust me. He fantasized about finding sacks of cash or gold bullion. He thought if I beat him to the score I would take it for myself and tell him I had found nothing.
Sometimes Dan would let me pick out something from a locker to keep. His only rule was that he had to approve of everything I took before I took it. The first time he encouraged me to do this I had stumbled upon a coin collection hidden inside a Cuban cigar box. In it were US silver dollars, coins from Franco’s Spain, and Canadian nickels from the nineteenth century.
“What about these?” I had asked, showing him the box.
“Would you look at that,” he had replied. “You know, my grandkids collect this stuff. I bet they would like that.”
And he had taken them to his Ford F-150 and drove off, the coins jingling on the passenger seat all the way to the pawn shop.
More often than not, however, all we found during our treasure hunts was junk. We rarely found anything of real value, like the coins. Most tenants paid us what their stuff was worth in the first year. This is not to say that there weren’t savvy tenants who used storage in the way it was meant to be used, as a garage or a temporary holding place between moves. They were just the exception.
Ever since moving to locker 315, Arthur had seemed destined for arrears. I knew he sometimes paid his bills late, but never later than a month. Obviously he had been unable to afford the increase in his rent. Thinking back to the promise I had made myself in regards to Arthur’s twenty dollar tip, I asked Dan if we might reduce his rent even more to help him out.
“If he can’t afford it,” Dan had said, “he can always move back. I mean, Jesus, I already gave the guy a discount as it is.”
At that time Arthur was a week away from finding himself the next X on our treasure hunting map. I worried about what would happen to the film equipment he had mentioned if he ever got on that list. I could already picture Dan, cigarette in his mouth, hobbling towards his Ford with a box full of cameras and film.
“My grandkids will love this,” he would say.
Nevertheless, other than asking Dan to reduce his rent, I did nothing else to stop the inevitable. I saw Arthur every day of that week leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening, but I never went out to warn him of what was coming. Half of me hoped he would pay at the last possible minute; the other half hoped he wouldn’t pay at all. I was torn. As embarrassing as it was to admit, I wanted to rifle through his stuff, was damn near looking forward to it. I wanted to know if my suspicions about his sleeping situation were true. I wanted to find the original film roll of Walrus: Friends of the North.
When the three month mark inevitably passed, Dan and I went hunting. Dan kept an angle grinder and bolt cutters in his office for just such an occasion. Arthur’s lock was thick and so required the angle grinder to cut. Dan enjoyed cutting the locks himself, so I stood back and watched. He pulled down on the lock first, to make sure he wasn’t wasting his time, and then went about cutting it. The angle grinder buzzed like a giant mechanical toothbrush in his hand. He pressed it against the shackle. A steady jet of sparks rocketed into the air, cooled and then vanished from sight. Seconds later the lock fell to the pavement.
Dan set the tool down beside it and rolled the locker door up.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said.
This was Arthur’s worst nightmare. I felt Dan and I were doing something shameful, despicable. But the part about it that made me feel even worse was that if at the end of our hunt we decided to chase after Arthur to pay, it meant we had reckoned his stuff to be worth less than nine hundred and sixty bucks. My last paycheque had been just over that. For doing nothing. What if this was everything he owned? My excitement deflated like a popped balloon. All of a sudden I didn’t care what Arthur kept in his van or in his boxes. I became absorbed in a new purpose: protecting his stuff from Dan.
Dan went straight for the tool cabinet. He opened the top drawer and pulled out a Robertson screwdriver. In the second drawer he found an orange-speckled hammer and a set of five wrenches.
“Rusty,” he said. “Rusty, rusty, rusty.” He threw the tools back into the cabinet one at a time. “You find anything in those boxes yet?” He hobbled over to me.
I had started going through the boxes in the hope of finding Arthur’s film equipment and hiding it. So far all I had found was a box full of yellow newspapers and a box of cleaning chemicals.
“Nothing yet,” I said.
He went over to the carburetor, stared down at it, lit a cigarette and didn’t move until it was done.
“Do you think it’s worth anything?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he answered, guffawing. “Thing’s rusted to shit like everything else.”
Dan tossed the butt onto the pavement outside. He walked alongside the van, trying to see through the polka-dotted sheets.
I had to stop him before he reached the door.
“Dan,” I called. “Come look at this.”
I had stumbled upon a box of glasses and decided to pretend they were real crystal. I gambled on the fact that Dan wouldn’t know the difference, and succeeded.
“You sure it’s crystal?”
“Yeah,” I said. I handed the glass to him. “You can tell because of the way the light reflects along the rim.”
It was complete hogwash of course, but I had him hooked. He held the glass up to the sunlight shining into the locker and turned it back and forth.
“Would you look at that,” he said, mesmerized.
“There was another box like it,” I lied. “I just can’t remember which one.”
Dan bent down and began searching for the second box. I kneeled down beside him and made myself bothersome. After I had bumped into him for the third time, he finally shooed me away.
“Why don’t you go look inside the van,” he said. “And tell me what you find.”
“Okay, boss.”
I walked to the driver’s side door and opened it. A putrid smell billowed like smoke from out of the van. I turned my head, took a deep breath, lifted my shirt over my mouth and bravely entered. I climbed onto the driver’s seat and looked into the back. The back seats were gone, and in their place lay a sofa bed mattress, grey and lumpy. A fuzzy blanket decorated with a locomotive was bunched up on the mattress. In its huddled state the train appeared to have crashed in the middle of the bed, the cars one on top of the other, the engine folded up like an accordion. I closed my sore eyes and rubbed them. The polka-dotted sheets admitted dim, perforated light that covered the interior of the van with a thousand dark holes, making it difficult to look at anything for long.
Also, I thought that I had seen something I couldn’t have possibly seen. When I opened my eyes, I looked again just to be sure.
In the back corner of the van were three milk jugs and a five-gallon pail. Two of the milk jugs were full and the third, only half. Even though the lighting made it difficult to tell green from blue, I could see that what was in the jugs was yellow. I determined the purpose of the pail by association.
“Will!” Dan called. “Come here. I think I found something.”
I backed out of the van and closed the door. I pulled my shirt off my face.
“What is it?” I asked, walking over to him. I tried not to look sick.
He pointed at the box overtop of which he was leaning. I peered down into it. Inside were a Super 8mm camera, four small film rolls, a large black camcorder, the kind that recorded onto VHS, and an unwrapped package of five VHS tapes. Hardened, brittle cables like vines entangled the film equipment. Dan had broken some of them trying to get a better look.
“Do you know much about this kind of thing?” he asked.
“A little,” I said.
“Do you know if it’s worth anything?”
Only what it was worth to Arthur.
“It’s all pretty outdated,” I said, “so I wouldn’t think much.”
“Give me a number.”
“Fifty bucks.”
“Nothing then.” Dan jabbed the box with his crooked foot. “You find anything in the van?”
I didn’t think he would believe I had found nothing, so I made up something he could believe.
“Just some rusty tools.”
“Rusty tools,” he snickered. “We should start calling him Rusty.” He laughed in apparent surprise at his cleverness. “We should just call him Rusty,” he repeated.
While we went through the rest of the unopened boxes, Dan muttered variations on his new nickname for Arthur, each time deteriorating in laughter.
“Rusty with the rusty tools,” he said. “We should call him the Rustman.”
***
At the end of every treasure hunt, Dan and I replaced the locks we cut with red ones to keep tenants from trying to run off with their stuff. A red lock also let them know without us having to say that we had gone inside their locker. For that reason red locks usually foreshadowed an altercation. The colour red set off tenants the same way it set off bulls.
After we had gone through the rest of the boxes, Dan decided he would make more money squeezing Arthur than he would selling his stuff, so we put red locks on both doors of locker 315 and went into the office to wait for him to come. At first Dan was going to leave me to deal with Arthur, but I convinced him to stay. Unlike Dan, I knew what was at stake for Arthur.
Ten minutes before closing Arthur returned from wherever it was he went during the day. I waved to him as he walked through the gate, visible from inside the office. He waved back.
“Arthur’s here,” I called to Dan.
Dan was in the secondary office down the hall. I opened Arthur’s file on the computer.
Dan came out front.
“Where’d he go?” he asked.
“Around back,” I said. “He’ll be coming soon.”
Dan pointed. “Here he comes.”
Arthur came running around the gate and burst through the front door. The chimes hanging on it erupted into a cacophonous symphony.
“Call the police!” he cried. “Somebody’s changed my locks. I want to see your security footage from the last eight hours.” He grabbed his oily hair and tugged on it. “Oh please, please tell me they didn’t take anything.” When he let go, he left behind two giant horns on his head. He paced around the office like a nervous demon. “Do you have the footage yet?”
“Nobody’s taken anything,” Dan said. “You haven’t paid your bills. You know what happens around here when people don’t pay their bills.”
Arthur halted. His horns slowly toppled over.
“You changed my locks?”
“We cut your locks and put our locks on,” Dan corrected.
Arthur glanced at me and then back at him. “Did you go inside?”
“We did.”
“That’s illegal!” he screamed. “That’s, that’s goddamned unconstitutional! I’ve got a right to my privacy. That’s my private property.”
“It’s your property if you pay your bills,” Dan said, his voice rising to match Arthur’s. Dan snapped his fingers at me. “How much does he owe?”
“Nine hundred and sixty dollars,” I said.
“Nine hundred and sixty dollars,” Dan repeated. “What’s been going on with you? Why haven’t you been paying your bills?”
“I haven’t gotten my inheritance yet.”
“What inheritance?”
“From my cousin,” Arthur said. “He just died.”
Dan scoffed. “I’ve never heard of anybody getting an inheritance from their cousin.”
“Well, my cousin, Jamie, gave me one. It just hasn’t come yet.”
“You know I’ve always been fair with you,” said Dan. “I gave you a discount on the locker, and you’ve never had to pay a late fee. Hell, I’ve been more than fair. So I don’t like it when people I treat fairly try to take advantage of me by lying and making excuses and not paying their bills. I’ve got bills to pay too you know. What do you think would happen to me if nobody paid their bills? Do you think the floor you’re standing on was free?”
“It’s true, it’s true,” Arthur said. “I’ll have the money in a month. It’s already in the mail.”
Dan sighed. “One month?”
“Within the month.”
“Then that’s how long I’m going to give you to pay what you owe. Nine hundred and sixty bucks. I don’t care where you get the money or who you get it from: your cousin, your aunt, Betty, Bobby, Sue—I don’t care. Just get it to me in one month. Otherwise, I’m selling your locker.”
“Thank you.” He clasped his hands in front of him as if in prayer. “Thank you.”
After that we expected Arthur would leave, but he remained exactly where he was, hands still folded in front of him. His plaintive eyes darted back and forth between us.
“You got anything else you want to say?” Dan needed a cigarette; his voice grumbled with nicotine lust.
“The locks—” Arthur started to say.
“I’m not letting you into your locker.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want you running off with your stuff.”
“I promise I won’t,” Arthur said, hand on his heart. “On my cousin’s grave.”
“One promise at a time,” Dan said. “Pay your bill by the end of the month, and I’ll let you in. For now you’re just going to have to wait.”
Arthur realized there was no use arguing, so he left the office in a sulk. I was sure he would be back the next day and every day after that ad infinitum to try to convince us to let him in. I imagined he would tell all kinds of crazy stories.
Dan and I watched Arthur meander around the gate and into the back.
“What’s he going back there for?” Dan asked.
I shrugged.
“If he tries any funny business, I’ll take it all to the dump. I don’t give a damn.”
Dan opened the front door, used his crooked foot as a door stop and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted into the office and disappeared up the vent in the centre on the room.
“You think he’ll pay?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll keep at him if he doesn’t.” He took a drag. “We’ll keep at him until he does.”
***
There was a reason why Dan was so strict about people living in their locker, and it dated to a story from the mini storage’s second year of operation, three years before I was hired. Dan had told me about it my first day of work. He had wanted me to know why he made exceptions to every rule except that one.
The story began with a tenant named Eddie Mayer. Eddie rented one of our basic, unheated lockers in December of that particular year, on sale at the time two hundred dollars for three months. Dan had had even more trouble renting lockers in those days, so these specials were common, and usually attracted the down and out. Nevertheless, because he needed the business, he rented a locker to anyone willing to put forward some money and sign a contract. He wanted every locker occupied. As long as there was stuff in a locker, there was always the possibility of that stuff becoming his to sell.
Eddie had looked to Dan like the sort of character who might give him trouble, but, because Eddie had fifty dollars on him and a good signing hand, Dan had taken a chance. Dan had the manager, the predecessor of my predecessor, print out a contract, and that afternoon Eddie moved in.
Three months later Dan added Eddie Mayer to his substantial list of tenants in arrears. A week passed before he finally got around to searching Eddie’s locker. The first thing Dan noticed was that the lock on the door was unlocked, a good indication that the tenant was inside. Dan called his name out twice and, receiving no answer, rolled open the door. He discovered Eddie curled up in the centre of a deflated air mattress. Eddie had died from exposure.
The police were called, the body collected, and Dan questioned as to whether he knew or had even suspected Eddie was living there and allowed it. Dan pled ignorance, of course, to avoid getting shut down or fines or criminal charges. But when he told me the story, he had concluded it by saying:
“You know, I suspected Eddie would be using it for something like that when he walked in here. If not for drugs, then for squatting. But I just didn’t care: fifty bucks was fifty bucks. I thought, ‘Whatever happens I’m going to play Sergeant Schultz with this guy. I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing.’”
***
I returned to the mini storage later that night. I opened the gate with my keycard and drove around back towards locker 315.
I found Arthur in front of the back door. He was bent over the red lock, hitting the shackle with a rock the size of a walnut.
The moment my headlights flashed over him, he flung the rock away and cried, “I didn’t do nothing!”
I shut my car off and got out.
“Will?” Arthur asked, squinting.
“I came to let you into your locker,” I said.
He lifted his arms to the sky and shook them.
“I knew I could trust you,” he said. “I said it right from the start. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”
“But before I do that,” I continued, “there’s something you have to know.”
“What’s that?”
“I saw inside your van. Dan didn’t, but I did. I know that you’re living in your locker. I know that you’re sleeping in your van. I didn’t tell Dan because I knew he’d never let you have your stuff. And I wanted you to have a chance to get your stuff before you leave.”
“What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying that you can’t stay here. I’m saying that you have to go. Tonight.”
The joy left Arthur as if it had drained out of his feet and onto the pavement.
“Where?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere else.”
I walked over to the locker and unlocked the red lock. I helped him roll his van out, got the jumper cables from the trunk and gave it a boost. I offered to help him pack, but he wouldn’t let me. With that, I wished him luck and left.
The next day Arthur was gone. Anything he had been unable to lift by himself, he had left behind.
At first I tried not to wonder about him, where he had gone and if he was all right. Whenever the thoughts crept in, I stomped them like momma spiders. But, like spiders, they kept on getting in until, eventually, I had no choice but to allow them a tiny corner in my mind to spin their web.