Rage From the Edge

Josie was a big girl. She had a grease burn pattern of freckles that only splayed out on her nose and under her pale green blue eyes. Her hair was that half way point between red-ish and brown-ish, and looked like kinked wire most of the time, and most especially when she was huffing and puffing at work. Like most girls of her size, she had a tendency to be bossy. “Do-this-Do-that, yarr,” was something you could find coming out of her mouth as she pulled a hank of hair out of her face while she hefted boxes or tossed items onto a cart. She wasn’t mean, just had a misunderstanding with the world that made you think she was always demanding. I am sure she had a heart of gold someplace inside there, but to tell you the truth, I had never seen it. Our relationship was purely a business coupling. She was my frozen food manager and I was her boss. When time came around when she needed something, she had a way of turning you off by challenging you for it rather than just asking nicely. But for all that, I understood her as well as I understood any woman, and I thought of her as one of the people on my team whom which I could “go to” when I really needed a job to get done.

“Trucks comin in, boss,” her wide, almost child-like, face popped into my office. “I’m gonna grab a couple of these guys off the front end to help me unload it…six hundred piece truck…”

I didn’t even bother looking out the door to see if the front end was busy or not, it didn’t matter. She was going to take the people she needed regardless of the situation going on out there, and if I were to argue, it would have only made matters worse. I got up to go help the cashiers and baggers if they needed it while she physically maneuvered two of my cart boys towards the back room and the waiting truck.

“Gotta big one,” she said to one of the boys (who looked scrawny next to her presence and girth). “You sure you can pull a twelve hundred pound pallet off a reefer truck?” She added a hard clap on the back that only added to her jovial sarcasm towards work, towards men, and towards life most of the time.

When you meet a girl like Josie, you think they never cry. They have this untouchable attitude and swagger that belies the fact that at one point in time, during their lives of “being one of the boys,” they were somebody’s pretty little girl. I knew this about Josie. I knew that once, not quite so long ago, her mother had dressed her in lace, had gotten her pictures taken at Wal-Mart for framed nostalgia hung on the walls in the hallway. I knew that Josie had wished to be Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her kiss. She cried all right, and she cried just like any other woman. Because of this, I was the one who let her be the bossy slob she wanted to be.

On the day that Josie died, I found out that she had been involved with someone. I hadn’t known about it up until that point, but while she was in the hospital, her lover, one of my butchers, had called to let us know the bad news. From what I gather now, they had been pretty happy together and had plans to be married. Tentative plans yes, but there had been some discussion, so I guess it wasn’t just another one of those “work romances” that always ends badly while someone gets fired. He was a tall skinny guy who didn’t look like he belonged with her. In every way, he was the exact opposite of her.

He has this almost-handlebar mustache that he would finger nervously when she was around. Listening to her boss him as he cut meat in the prep room had almost cost him his hand, but he didn’t seem to mind. She was talking loud enough that you could hear her out on the sales floor and he was using the band saw to cut country style pork ribs. I only mention that it was country pork ribs because there is a spur of bone in that cut that is always tricky even if you are using a band saw. She was doing her brassy thing while he wasn’t paying attention, the saw caught on the bone and he ran his hand into the thing at an odd angle. Only a last second jerk had saved the hand, but he did manage to cut the top of two fingers and his thumb off…at a diagonal. Later, they put the pieces back on and he was fine.

So they had been lovers and it seemed that things were okay. Again, I have to stress that I had no knowledge of this, and was completely in the dark when the butcher called me on the phone. Josie and her lover liked to go horseback riding. Her grandfather had died and left here about thirty acres and a barn, and the two would spend weekends out there, getting drunk, riding the horses, and doing whatever an odd couple like that does under the sheets. He called me and his voice was even more shakier than normal.

“I-I-I d-don’t know how to tell you this, but Josie…she’s really sick. She’s in the emergency room and the doctors have given her a double mastectomy. “
“What???” why would they give her a double mastectomy? What was really wrong with Josie?

The butcher tried to explain to me as best he could what had happened. It seems that Josie had been climbing over a barbed wire fence on her farm and had scraped herself just under her pendulous and gargantuan boobs. The scratch, just a minor irritation, had been ignored and pretty much forgotten. A month went by and since she was no longer thinking about it, she didn’t think that her stomach pains had anything to do with the old rusty wound. But something was wrong with it. Some microbe or virus was on that barbed wire and the scrape had provided an entrance for it to enter her body. He was crying now, making little sobs into the phone. He then hung up, leaving me in my office, wondering what the hell was going on.

A few hours later, the phone rang again and all he could blurt out was “She’s…dead…” and then a nurse was on the phone, telling me what had happened. Somehow, horse manure had gotten on the fence and in that manure, there was a flesh eating virus that had attacked her through the scratch. Since it had taken so long to become a problem, nobody was thinking about the scratch at all, and were worried that something sinister was going on here at the store. More specifically, in her freezer. The county health guys came out and shut down my frozen food section for a month while we all got over the shock and loss we were feeling. Josie might not have been the nicest person in the world, or the most generous, but she was one of us and even if we didn’t like her, she was part of the team.

During the double mastectomy, air had gotten into the wound and sped up the flesh eating process. The doctors, trying to race ahead of the ravenous virus, quickly amputated her arms and legs. It was like they were taking her apart to keep her alive. The virus got into her heart and liver and she just faded out of life within a few short moments.

The store sent a few of us to the funeral and of course the casket was closed. It was a bright spring day and there wasn’t any of that cliché dark rain falling. The butcher stood at the end of the group, not saying anything and avoiding Josie’s family. Then we all left to go back to the store. When I got back, I put my jacket over the back of my chair and walked back to the freezer in the back room. I opened the door, breaking the county health department’s yellow seal tape, as a cloud of fog rolled out into the back room like a spooky wave. I walked into the freezer and wondered what I was going to do next.