As in:
On his last delivery of the day Wallace had slipped at the bottom of the ramp, causing the dolly to lose its pivot point and forcing him, suddenly, to bear the load of 150 lbs. directly on his dorsal vertebrae. The result was a pinched nerve that kept him awake for hours before the fatigue of the day trumped the pain and he drifted into sleep. A small thunderstorm arriving from Beaufort had rumbled, rinsed and dissipated. Cooler air bled through his quarter-open window bringing in the therapeutic fragrance of wet magnolia blossoms.
What woke him first was the sound of a chain, and then what sounded like a truck backing up in the parking lot.
“Move back,” a man’s voice called. “Back. Hold it.”
“Oh dear God,” Wallace whispered to himself thinking, at first, it was a robbery. He’d done this before, rushed in his boxers down to the lot to bust up car break ins. But it would be stupid, he reasoned, for him to rush down now, when he could barely walk.
“No!” he heard. This time it was a woman’s voice. “No!”
The way she yelled “no” the second time told him it was Cookie Barnes, the recently divorced girl’s basketball coach down in 200G.
“Neeeoooooo!” she wailed.
And then glass began to break. Windows? Windshields? He pulled himself to the window to look. No. It was Cookie hurling bottles. She was completely naked except for the white towel wrapped tight to her hair. She’d pulled her recycling cart into the lot with her, and was firing bottle, after bottle, at the repo men’s truck.
“Cut it out!” one yelled at her, after a Vodka bottle shattered on top of the cab.
But she kept throwing bottles, and not at all like a girl. Cookie had an arm like CC Sabathia and she was letting loose with everything in her power, and not the least bit self-conscious about doing so after having come completely out of her bathrobe. And then she let fly with what, to Wallace, was the most magnificent stampede of cuss words he’d ever heard, involving preposterous sexual deviancy and blasphemies to all major religions.
The chain rattled, the truck revved, glass shattered again. Then a wail from Cookie, whom he could now see squatting and sobbing in a constellation of broken glass, her shadow bent toward his window, in the peculiar shape of what looked to be a large rabbit.
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