Karl's Dilemma

Forewarned Is Forearmed

By Rish Outfield

A True Story

Karl Galen didn't believe in premonitions, although his mother had once had a dream that Mitt Romney would be elected president and overcome a vampire insurgence.  But today, right before leaving for work, he had a strange and sudden urge to go to his underwear drawer and open it.

Karl squinted at the bueruaeueo, wondering why he was looking at it, since he was already dressed and two minutes late for work.  But he had a feeling that he was forgetting something, so he crossed back through the room, opened the drawer, and looked inside.  There were several pairs of underwear, as well as an errant sock.  But nothing more.

Even so, Karl picked up the first boxer shorts on the pile and gripped them in his hand . . . as though they held significance.  "But what?" he heard himself say.

The answer was not forthcoming.  It was just a striped pair of underwear, one he'd had for a couple of years.  Nothing special.

"I don't have time for this."  Twice he had talked to himself today, which was not his habit (though, of course, neither was feeling like he was missing something vitally important about a pair of shorts).  But he couldn't put the underwear back in the drawer, even though his brain told his hand to do so.

He needed the underwear.  For some reason.

"Alright, alright," he said, thinking aloud for the third of four times that day.  And he closed the drawer, and headed out of his room, through his apartment, and out the door, the extra pair of underwear still in hand.

He drove to work, and made pretty good time, the lights seemingly working with him for a change.  At the one light he missed, at the corner where the Der Weinerschnitzel faced the First Communion/Quinciñera dress shop, he looked over at the truck's passenger seat, and the underwear that still sat there.  It was strange, but he still felt like it needed to be there.

He got to his job on time, which was nice, and drove around to the main office trailer to start work and find out today's assignment.  On his way in, he glanced back at the extra boxer shorts there on the seat, and grabbed them out of the truck, just in case someone came by and noticed him and, I dunno, made fun of them or something.  After clocking in, he stuck the underwear in his half-sized work locker.

JonJon, his boss, told him to go over to the site on Sica and Nicolas, where they were building a Target (one that had been scheduled to open almost six months ago and was still at least two months from finished).  He'd have to inspect all the ceiling tiles, which had been installed over the last week, making sure they were all there, all secured, and all undamaged.

It turned out that two of them were missing, in the far corner of the employee restroom, and he'd had to physically accompany the junior workman who'd marked it off as done from location to location to make sure it was finished.  "You hear that?" the workman asked, as he was coming down the ladder.

"Hear what?" Karl asked, though he'd been a little distracted by his stomach gurgling to listen for anything out of the ordinary. 

"I think one of the pipes might be backed up," the kid said.  "It was a sloshy water sound."

"Are you able to check on that yourself?"

"Not my department," said the kid.  But hey, the ceiling tiles had been his department, and look how well that had been done.

"But you think that a pipe was--" Karl began, and then his stomach made a wet, ominous rumble.  "Oh."

"Huh.  It was you, not a pipe," the workman said, rather obviously.

"Right," Karl said, trying to see the humor in it.

"But I guess that's kind of like a backed-up pipe, isn't it?"

"I guess so," Karl said, and signed the inspection certificate, tearing off the top sheet and holding it out to the kid.

"Oh no, you're supposed to give this to my supervisor, not me," said the workman, who'd wasted an hour of Karl's day by not having the keys to get into the trailer where the ceiling tiles were stored, despite having driven over there for that exact purpose.

"And where can I find him?"

"Her.  It's the twenty-twenties."

Karl thought that, if it truly were the 2020s, the operative pronoun would be They/Them, but didn't say it out loud.  "Okay, where can I find her?"

"She's probably with the forklift guys.  She likes to yell at them."

"Can you find out?  You have a walkie talkie," Karl said, though that should have been obvious.  It's how the workman had been called to accompany Karl on this irritating little errand in the first place.

"I turned it off," said the kid.

Karl was able to control himself enough not to yell at the guy to turn it back on and help him do his job.  "Could you find out where she is, please?"

She turned out to be outside of the building, on the other side, which Karl only found out after trying the wrong side first.  She was indeed shouting at the forklift driver, but shouting at him to go faster, since she was timing him in a race from the loading ramp to the fence.  She seemed irritated at the interruption, but was happy to have the inspection passed.  "Now, why couldn't you have this yesterday?" she asked, smirking.

"I don't know, were those last two restroom tiles done yesterday?"

She gave him a scowl and told him to have a nice day, smartass.  Karl walked to his truck, got inside, and started back toward the office, making sure he had the other two copies--both signed and stamped--that proved the inspection was done.  And then his stomach made that sound again.

He didn't feel sick, and he hadn't had lunch yet, so nothing he'd eaten had disagreed with him, but that sound was a scary one, like the growl of an angry dog, or a rumbling cloud before a baseball game.

He was back on the road and headed back when his stomach suddenly clenched up.  His body announced that he had to go to the bathroom . . . and then some.

He found it difficult to keep driving--he felt like a stick of dynamite, like in a Western movie, one with a long, long fuse . . . which had been lit.  

Karl had been in this situation a time or two before, though usually when he was at home.  He had to get to a bathroom soon, maybe within the next two or three minutes.  If not, he would be in the most awful kind of trouble.

But wait.  There was a Walgreens right at the end of Nicolas Avenue.  He'd used the ATM a month or so previously.  It was right up the road, only two blocks, three blocks at the most.  He could make it.

The lights, this time, were not with Karl.  His stomach made that ghastly, storm-threatening sound again, and he felt sweat appearing on his brow and at the back of his neck.  But there was the Walgreens, right there on the next block, and a car was pulling out of the spot right across from the doors.

He took the turn a little too fast as he pulled from the street to the parking lot, the truck thumping onto the corner of the curb, which did his overworked bowels no favors.  He made it to the spot and shifted into Park just as his stomach made a new sound, accompanied by an ugly, unbearable heave.  Shame and anger--in equal parts--flooded through Karl as his hands, on autopilot, undid his seatbelt to get out of the truck.

There was the building with the public restroom in front of him, so close he could touch it.  But he hadn't made it.

This was what his premonition had been about this morning.  But the extra pair of shorts he'd been so wise to bring along today were sitting in his locker at work.  "Oh no," he thought aloud.

the end