A Good Day's Work by John Demont Page B

the door, hair plastered to my forehead from some kids’ game, yank the fridge door open and just chug straight from the bottle.
    I reached for the milk jug for practical reasons: milk was cool and refreshing. It was not water. All these years later I wonder whether there is something infantile about milk’s attraction. Or whether a human body just naturally has a hankering for all the calcium and protein that led some marketing genius to label it “the perfect food.” I just know that the weight, texture and taste of milk—along with the feel of corduroy and the first few bars of the theme from
Get Smart
—never fail to transport me back to a time when a thirteen-year-old still pondered the great riddles of the universe: Who’s tougher, Captain Kirk or Gordie Howe? What exactly were SpaghettiOs? Betty or Veronica? And that when my time comes—when I lie in a bed unable to conjure up a few words to describe what the whole strange experience has been like—it is my firm belief that the taste of milk may be one of the few shards of memory still ricocheting through my hollowed-out cerebrum. Making Bill Bennett a perfect entry in a book such as this.

    BILL Bennett Jr. told me to wait under the big skim milk sign that marked the turnoff to the Farmer’s Dairy. “Be there at 1:40,” he said. That way, after getting the day’s load, he could pick me up in his van before starting deliveries. “You’ll know it’s me because my name’s on the side in big letters,” he told me over his cell. Usually Bill travelled alone. Which meant that once he had quickly rearranged the front of the van, my seat was an overturned milk crate covered by a blanket, to the right of the driver’s seat.
    â€œI could have done anything,” he said. “My mother’s mom had some money and she said she would pay for my education. But I got my grade ten, then stopped because I hated school, every second of it. That was around, let’s see, 1964. I had been working with my dad since before I could remember. So I started working with him in one of those old flat-nosed DIVCO vans.” You can see the miles in his face: the skin around his pale eyes, cross-hatched and wrinkled from all that staring into the dark; the grey flecks in his brown-red beard; the nose bent like a Bedouin chieftain’s. He radiates the kind of weary pride I’ve seen in five-hour marathoners, union organizers and bar-band bass players.
    Bill says he’s five foot ten,, but he looks shorter. After four decades of humping his dolly up and down stairs, through restaurant basement passageways and across convenience store parking lots, he’s got a permanent slouch, as if forever shouldering some unseen weight. Bill jokes about having a belly, though I don’t detect one. On the other hand, anyone can see what he means when he talks about having “bumps” on his hands from all those years of handling cold stuff without gloves.
    Today he’s in his “uniform.” Greenish fleece, blue T-shirt, navy work pants. Black shoes, like the ones old-time basketball referees used to wear, a blue Niagara Falls ball cap. The big surprise is his voice. Not so much the rasp, as unexpected as that is for someone who has reputedly never smoked a cigarette or drunk anything stronger than chocolate milk. I was expecting someone taciturn, maybe who had even lost the power of speech after all those years of working alone in the dark—the way that fish living deep in the ocean are blind because they no longer have the need to see. Truth is, this boy can talk. “Is what I do important?” he barks. “I never thought about it, but oh God yeah. People need milk, so why not do it? I’ve hurt myself many times. Falling down steps, I twisted my ankle. I never missed a day even when I had spinal meningitis. I went in and helped out. I even went to work when I had kidney stones, and