Maple Street Bridge
Short Fiction
"Are you a donut man?" the owner asked me.
I was surprised by the question and by his seriousness. I was interviewing for a job at a donut shop, so I knew I'd be asked about my work experience with donuts—with food prep and service in general. But I’d prepared for more typical questions. I'd walked circles around my small room in the halfway house and practiced my answers:
—Chocolate cream is my favorite, sir.
—Usually with coffee, sir, but good with milk, too. But never with soda. Don't understand people who think Pepsi or Coke is good with donuts.
—Never made donuts before, sir, but I grew up baking and selling bread and cookies with my Mom. That's how she made extra money to buy us school clothes and supplies and stuff like that.
—I was line cook at IHOP for two years. At Denny's for about six months before that, sir. Made hamburgers at the Tribal Cafe on my reservation when I was a kid.
—No, sir, I’m not allergic to anything so I can eat, or make, any kind of donut.
—No, I didn't cook when I was in prison. I washed dishes, sir. My sentence was three years so they gave the cooking jobs to dudes doing serious time. Doing decades. Doing forever. They wanted continuity in the kitchen.
Continuity. Continuity. That’s the word the prison used when talking about the lifers who did most of the cooking. And I instantly liked the sound of it. Con-ti-nu-i-ty. It’s one of those words that somehow sounds like what it means. It’s a word that keeps stretching. I'd kept it in my brain-pocket for later use—when I had a chance to impress somebody with my vocabulary. To win over somebody like the donut shop owner. I'm a smart guy—above average, at least—so I’ve learned there are words that can make you sound smarter. You have to be careful, though. There are some people who feel insulted if you use a word they don't understand. And if you insult somebody in prison then you might get four-knuckled in the face. Then, based on the unwritten rules, you’d have to four-knuckle them back. A few moments after that, there’d be a garden of four-knuckled blossoms bloodying the soil. Don’t get me wrong. Prisons are not gladiator arenas, at least not like you see on television and in the movies. They’re both better and worse than that. Prison is more about boredom—an excruciating tedium combined with sleep-destroying regret. Most inmates are just trying to do their time. Most inmates are addicts who did something stupid. Or did a long series of stupid. But there are plenty of dangerous inmates. Even some monsters. You had to stay silent and respectful in their presence. Any word you said might set them off. So I knew about the dangers of language. But I hadn't thought about how using a complicated word like continuity might screw up a job interview. How would that donut shop boss-man react to a five-syllable word?
"Hey," he said. "I asked if you're a donut man."
He was a small guy, barely over five feet tall and maybe weighed a buck-thirty. But his hands were huge. They didn't fit his body. Not even close. It was cartoony. Like he was a comic book villain named Big Fingers. He leaned across his desk and stared hard at me. He wanted an answer.
I decided to be honest.
"I don't know if I'm a donut man" I said. "I don't even know what a donut man is."
The owner smiled.
So I smiled, too.
The owner leaned back in his chair.
So I leaned back in mine.
My career counselor at the American Indian Center, Jana, had taught me how to mirror people. She said it creates a subconscious emotional connection. So I practiced mirroring her for twenty minutes during a rehearsal interview.
Jana was Lakota. A descendant of the Indians who hunted buffalo. And killed Custer. She came from a famous tribe. I come from the Spokane. We’re un-famous. There are people who live in Spokane who don’t know the city is named after us. Most other Indians have never heard of my tribe, either.
I liked Jana and wanted to ask her out. Maybe get coffee or something neutral like that. But a lowly Spokane like me dating a Lakota would be like an auto mechanic from Idaho dating a corporate lawyer in Seattle. Blue-collar people don’t get to shack up with white-collar people, not even in the Indian world.
I wondered if the owner of a donut shop was white-collar or blue collar. The whole thing belonged to him. That sounds white-collar. But he had to be blue-collar because of the callouses and scars on his hands.
"So," he said to me. "Do you want to guess at what a donut man is?"
It felt like a trick question. If a cop had asked me something like that, I would've demanded a lawyer and shut the hell up. I would have put my face on the table and stayed there until my Public Defender slumped in. But that job interview was only 49% interrogation, so I knew I had to give him an answer.
"I don't like guessing at things," I said.
The owner nodded his head. Had an amused expression. I think he liked my answer. I felt like maybe I had a real shot at getting that job. I'd already been turned down by twenty-six other places since I'd gotten out of prison.
"Don't let this demoralize you,” Jana the Lakota had said about my marathon of no, no, no, no.
"Demoralize," I'd said. "Good word."
The donut shop owner rose, walked around his desk, and stood next to me. I was sitting down but I was still taller than him.
"Guy came in yesterday wanting this job," he said. "I asked him if he was a donut man. You know what he said?"
"What?" I asked.
"That guy looked me in the eye," the owner said. "And he swore he was a donut man."
"You didn't believe him," I said.
"What makes you say that?"
I said, "He ain't here."
The owner laughed and clapped his hands.
“You're a smart one," he said. "You see things."
"Sometimes," I said.
"Sometimes is better than no times."
"I guess it is," I said.
I was shaking a little. And sweating. Your own nerves sometimes feel like they've made plans that don’t necessarily include you.
"You know what else?" he asked
"What?" I asked.
"The job is all yours."
I almost cried. Because happiness can be a cut-onion fuming your soul.
"Thank you," I said. "I'm going to work hard for you."
"I know you will," he said.
He opened a tall cabinet, grabbed an apron off a hanger, and handed it to me. I stood and knotted it around my waist. I felt better than I had since I was a kid.
"Hey," I said. "What is a donut man?"
"Hell if I know," the owner said. "It's a bullshit question I made up yesterday."
The owner laughed.
I laughed.
Just like Jana said, Be the mirror.
The owner's name was Wes Walden. The shop's name was Superstar Donuts. It was on Maple Street in Spokane. Yep, a donut shop on Maple Street. Wes said he never realized it until a customer pointed it out to him.
"It’s just a coincidence," Wes said.
“You should’ve changed your name to Coincidental Donuts,” I said.
Wes stared hard at me.
”You trying to be a smart-ass?” he asked.
Yes, I said inside my brain but “No” is what I said with my mouth.
Wes had owned the place for over thirty years. There were five dining tables and twelve chairs for our customers to eat inside. But it wasn't just a shop. It was a donut factory, too. We baked donuts in bulk and delivered them to local restaurants, coffee shops, and convenience stores.
We made at least 2,000 of them sweet circles every day. I don’t know exactly how much money was flowing into the shop, but Wes had put a couple kids through college. Copies of their diplomas were hanging on his office wall. A blue-collar father begets white-collar children—that quin-tes-sen-tial American story.
Howard was the head baker. Betsy kept the books. Darren and Sarah were the assistant bakers. Eddie helped with the baking and supervised the other delivery truck drivers. He was Indian, too, a Yakama born and raised in Spokane. I was happy to meet an Indian with a straight-up job. All my other Indian friends were in jail or probably heading that way soon. I loved them but I knew they’d pull me into the shit-barrel again. I was the kind of man who could tell himself he was lonely. So I was hoping Eddie and I might become friends. Considering our strange working hours, Eddie was probably my only real chance at making a friend.
Wes Walden was in charge of everybody, of course, and everybody else was in charge of me. But that was cool. I was only making minimum wage but any cash feels like a fortune-inferno when you start from below-zero.
I did whatever needed to be done. I filled in the gaps. I baked, ran the cash register, bussed the tables, and cleaned up the store before opening, during working hours, and after it was closed. Forty hours a week usually turned into fifty or fifty-five. But Wes didn't pay me time-and-half or double for working overtime, and he didn't pay me for each and every extra hour I worked. He shorted me maybe thirty or forty bucks a week. But I figured that was the price I had to pay for being an ex-con. Most times, it felt like rehabilitation was just another form of punishment. And I had to accept the tiny tortures if I wanted to stay on the good side of the prison walls.
Shrug, man, shrug.
But being shorted money wasn't the worst part of the job. Wasn't even close to being the worst part. You see, I had to wake every day at 2:00 a.m. in order to shower, shave, and ride the bus to start work at 3 a.m. If you've ever worked the graveyard shift then you know how weird and slightly disconnected it makes you feel. Like you're an alien living on a planet that is only five inches away from Earth. But it's ten million times worse to wake up at two in the morning. After a week of that, you don't even feel like you have a human body. You become an oil slick on the bus route. You become the wind rattling a traffic signal. You become a low bank of clouds obscuring the downtown skyline.
I felt unreal working a donut man's hours. But I was still grateful for the employment.
So the job was broom and dustpan and garbage sack and dumpster. And it was mop and bucket and floor cleaner. And it was toilet brush and bleach. And it was dirty plates and cups and forks and spoons and knives and a sink full of soapy water so hot that I lost three fingernails. And it was sugar and eggs and maple and flour and cooking oil and chocolate sauce and coconut sprinkles and cinnamon.
You've probably seen donuts being made at Krispy Kreme. You've probably seen them rolling along on that conveyor belt, all smooth and clean and fresh. We also had a donut-making machine with a conveyor belt, but it was an antique. A working relic. Like it had made the very first donut. Like it was constructed from Adam and Eve’s ribs.
That machine had so many nooks and crannies and gaps and bolts and screws and chains and rollers and washers and metal and plastic and rings and tubes that it took me at least four hours to clean it every night. Using rags and a bucket of water, I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.
My hands bled.
That clean-up accounted for most of my overtime hours. Some of that bloody work went unpaid. When I finished cleaning, I'd close up the shop and catch the bus back to the halfway house, fall asleep at two or three in the afternoon, sleep for eleven or twelve hours, and wake up and do it again.
Circles, man, circular.
After three months at Superstar, Wes Walden asked me if I wanted to be a backup delivery driver. There’d be more money and some sky-blue freedom from the shop’s sugar-thick air.
"Yeah," I said. "But I don't have a driver license anymore. I don't even know if they let ex-cons get a driver license."
"Find out if you can,” Wes said. “You get your license and Eddie will teach you the delivery route."
Jana the Lakota drove me to the DMV to see if I could renew my license. I was worried. But it turned out the state doesn’t care about ex-cons renewing their drivers licenses unless they were convicted of some car-related crime. I only had to take the eye test to prove I could see and then I was street-legal again.
The next morning, I climbed into the passenger seat of the delivery van. Wearing sunglasses, Eddie looked at me and said I couldn't smoke in the van.
"That don’t matter,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
"I thought everybody smoked in prison," he said.
"It was all contraband,” I said. “Cigarettes, cigars, vaping. All against the rules.”
"Huh," he said, as if I had revealed something important.
"Yeah, huh," I said back.
"So what did you do?" Eddie asked.
I knew what he meant. It was a rude thing to ask of an inmate—inside and outside. So I played him along.
"I worked at a few restaurants before I came here," I said.
"That’s not what I meant,” he said. "Why did you go to prison?"
I lowered my voice and said, “I killed a donut delivery driver.”
Eddie didn't laugh.
"You're not serious, are you?" he asked.
"Actually," I said, "I robbed a Starbucks."
"Wow," he said. "I've never even heard of that happening. How much did you steal?Did you just walk in with a gun like it was a bank?"
"I robbed the drive-through," I said. “And I was riding a horse."
That pissed him off.
"Come on, you asshole," he said. "Tell me what you did."
"It's none of your business," I said. “And I'm guessing you asked Wes about me. And he didn't think it was any of your business, either."
”I could just look you up online,” he said.
“Look all you want,” I said. “I’m not famous.”
"Whatever,” he said, started the van, and pulled onto the street that was empty of traffic at 4:30 a.m.
I don't know why Eddie and I had suddenly decided to dislike each other. It was my fault, I guess. I don’t do drugs but I’ve always been addicted to sarcasm. We rode in silence for a while. Then Eddie started talking business.
"Okay," he said. "We have twelve stops. Each place takes a different amount of donuts, but it adds up to 72 dozen assorted."
"864 donuts," I said after doing the quick math in my head.
Surprised at my number skills, Eddie glanced at me.
"Whatever," he said again.
The imaginary headline: EX-CON ADDS QUICK.
The other imaginary headline: ARROGANT INDIAN GIVES SHIT TO HIS CO-WORKER.
"First stop is Al's Grocery," he said. "They get three dozen."
"All right," I said, then took out my little notebook, and wrote down details.
"What are you doing?" Eddie asked.
"Want to make sure I get it exact," I said.
"I didn't know you math geniuses needed to write things down."
"I'm no genius," I said, trying to play peace now.
"Whatever," he said for the third time.
So we delivered 864 donuts in total to Al's Grocery Store, Ferch Coffee Stop, two diners on either side of the Greyhound station, a little cafe inside the Amtrak Station, the restaurant in Sacred Heart Hospital, the dining room of a retirement community on the South Hill, and at a few 24-hour Fast Marts.
I wrote down all the pertinent addresses, names, and numbers. I figured that I would have it all memorized after I ran the route three times. Or maybe four times since my brain was boggy that early in the morning.
"How long did it take you to get used to these hours?" I asked Eddie when we returned to Superstar.
"Been working here five years," he said. "And I'm still not used to it."
"Damn," I said, depressed about the constant fatigue that awaited me but also happy that Eddie had told me a true fact about himself. Maybe we still had a chance to be friends. Maybe we could’ve road-tripped to local powwows and got our hearts broken by reservation women. It had been a long time since I’d been romantic.
"Hey," I said, "I'm sorry I was a jerk earlier."
"It's okay," he said. "It's the hours. We all snap at each other once in a while."
“Cool," I said. "And, hey, all I did was shoplift shoes from Foot Locker."
“That's all? You went to prison for shoplifting?"
“Well, I broke into Foot Locker around midnight and tried to steal some Nikes.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, I was trying to steal all the Nikes in the store. Had three garbage bags filled with kicks.”
“That still doesn’t seem like enough for prison.”
“I also knocked over the shopping mall security guard.”
“You punched him?”
“Nah,” I said. “I pushed him and he tripped over some shitty Adidas. I wasn’t trying to steal them Adidas mutants. Them three-stripe monstrosities. It’s Nike or nothing. I got brand loyalty.”
Eddie laughed.
I laughed, too.
And I kept laughing because I was lying to him again about what I’d actually done.
Back in the shop, Wes Walden smiled and clapped and welcomed us back.
”How'd it go?" he asked Eddie. "Can our new guy handle the route if you can't?"
Eddie hesitated before speaking. He looked at me. Looked back at Wes. Then he went carnivore.
"I'm sorry to say this," Eddie said. "But he has a problem with details. He writes things down but he still forgets stuff."
My first instinct was to punch Eddie in his lying mouth.
But if I punched somebody then I'd end up back in jail. I'd served my full sentence and I wasn't on parole. But every ex-con is forever on unofficial parole. I realized that I would always be subject to quick and easy judgment. I also realized that I couldn't contradict Eddie. He'd worked at Superstar for years. He had seniority and had earned trust. I was the new guy, the unknown factor, the captured and released criminal.
Some people don’t get options. They don’t even choose what time they get to eat.
"Hey," Wes said to me. “Why didn't you tell me you had memory problems?"
I wanted to shout the entire list of names, addresses, quantities, and flavors of that delivery route. I already how it down pat. I could have shouted what drink the barista at Ferch Coffee was brewing when we delivered the donuts to her. I could’ve shouted all the details of our trip. I’d been paying attention. But I knew how my shouting would’ve gone. That aggression, even if it was just words, would’ve got me fired.
Eddie had sabotaged me.
Expecting to see a smirk, I looked at him. But he appeared to be genuinely concerned for me. That dude was a great actor. A cold-hearted thespian. Colder than half the guys in prison. It didn’t matter at all that we were both Indians. I don’t know what I’d been thinking. Indians have been betraying Indians since long before white people first showed up.
I had to admit that I was impressed by Eddie’s tactics.
He’d won the battle that I hadn't realized that we’d been fighting. I knew he was afraid of me. I understood that. It’s natural to fear an ex-con. But I also realized that Eddie had been afraid that I would take his delivery job. He knew I was smarter than him. And, okay, it wasn't a glamor job, but it was his job. And he'd wanted to end any threat to his money, to his work, to his identity.
Eddie was a donut man.
I knew about people in prison who'd beat the holy hell out of other prisoners for five-dollar debts. So I understood Eddie was protecting his position in the world.
"Coming from an Indian tribe, from a reservation, and from jail," Jana the Lakota had said to me. "That makes you part of three honor cultures."
"What's an honor culture?" I'd asked.
"It means you are culturally obligated to defend your reputation," she'd said. "And depending on your circumstances, it means you'll defend it by any means necessary."
Who knew that a donut shop could also be an honor culture? I guess that Eddie was responding to some warrior impulse. Or maybe he was just a vindictive prick.
My only option was surrender. I had to choose my words carefully. I had to tell one lie and one truth.
"I can't do the route," I said to Wes. "But I still want my job."
"The job is still yours," he said. "But I have to admit I'm disappointed. I had hopes for you."
Same hopes as me, I thought, but did not say.
My mother died of cancer while I was in prison. She told me she was terminal during her last visit to me. My father never came to visit me. Not even once. And, after I’d received my release date, he told me on the phone that he wouldn't allow me to move back into our family house after I was free.
Banished. Banished.
You ever eaten a donut sprinkled with shame? They taste even shittier than you can imagine.
I kept working at Superstar. But I felt only marginally better about my work than when I washing dishes in the prison kitchen.
I felt like my whole life was minimum.
Then, three weeks after Eddie had screwed me, as I was scrubbing the donut machine, I had an epiphany.
I realized that I could clean that machine much faster and more thoroughly if Superstar bought a garden hose spray gun and a 40-gallon wet-dry shop vacuum. I'd be able to water scour all the nooks and crannies and suck up all the dirty water in minutes instead of hours.
Feeeling proud, feeling like I might elevate myself in the maple-scented courtroom of Wes Walden’s mind, I took my idea to him.
“You think I’m an idiot?” he asked
“No,” I said.
”You think I don’t know my business?”
”No.”
”I’ve been making donuts for 33 years. I’ve had that machine the whole time. You think that machine is a stranger to me?”
”No.”
“Then why are you trying to tell me how to run my business?”
I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t scared of Wes and his little-man rage. But I was humiliated. I was at the mercy of the next paycheck.
I had no way to make money that was truly my own.
”This job ain’t supposed to be easy,” Wes said. “No job is supposed to be easy. A good man is exhausted at the end of every work day. I buy a shop-vac and I’m making life too easy for me. And too easy for you.”
He pointed at me. At my face. At my eyes. He wanted to know that he saw me. Saw into my keloid-scarred soul.
“I’d think you’d want a hard job,” he said. “Considering that you’ve made the easiest choices your whole damn life.”
He was right about me. My easy choices had led to a hard life. But he was wrong about the donut machine and shop-vac. I squeezed my hands into fists. Wes noticed. He wasn’t afraid.
“You just keep cleaning that machine the way you’ve been taught,” he said. “Now get back to work.”
I was trembling when I returned to my mop and bucket.
Never in my life have I understood how a kind human can also be hateful and how the cruelest people can sometimes be saintly.
Wes cheated me out of money and he believed that I couldn't handle a twelve-stop delivery route, but he’d hired an ex-con and paid me well enough to keep my small life going.
I knew a prison guard who snuck extra peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the elderly prisoners, even as he bullied every other inmate who even looked at him.
Humans are filled with more contradictions than bones.
Later that day, after Wes and my co-workers had gone home, and after I’d finished cleaning the donut machine, I logged onto the company computer, searched for the best image of a 40-gallon shop vac, and printed it on regular paper. It was a blurry picture but it would work. I taped that image of the vacuum onto the conveyor belt. And I wrote a note on it: "Dear Mr. Walden, this donut machine is clean. But it could be cleaner."
Then I commuted home, slept for sixteen hours, woke, and rode the bus over to the Indian Center.
"Jana," I said to that white-collar Lakota. "I need a new job."
She knew all of the stories that had ever been told. So she didn't ask me what had happened with the donut job. She smiled, leaned toward me, and said, "All right, then, it's a new search."
I leaned toward her, smiled, and said, "Let's begin."