The Bucket
By Teddy Burnette
The crowd in front of the apartment building he lives in with his grandma keeps him from getting to the stairs. He mutters, Let me through, c’mon, but no one really moves at all for him, and he stands back a way and tries to get a sense of what’s going on. There’s a truck parked in front, one of the trucks that’d be brought out if the trees needed to be tended to, where someone needed to be taken up into the branches so they could trim off the ones that might fall onto walkers’ heads. He tries again to push his way through, saying, This is a road, this is a sidewalk, just let me get through please, it’s my home, but again no one lets him through and he falls back again and catches his breath.
Sees his grandma over on one side of the group and walks to her and says, What’s going on, I can’t get to the door, and his grandma points at an even older woman than her standing next to the bucket that’s operated from the truck and usually takes people up to do work in the sky. He watches the woman near the bucket arguing, and hears her say, Just let me go up in the bucket. I’m 87-years old and I need to be in that bucket. I’ve been emailing with your boss, and other people who are greatly invested in this project for quite some time now, and the most important part of my accomplishing this task is that I need to be in that bucket, which will support me in the air while I work on the statue and molding and everything else that needs updating on the outside of this building.
Remembers her, for a second, she must have stayed in the apartment at least once before, though she looks much older now than she did then, and he asks his grandma if that’s who he thinks it is, if it’s K, and his grandma says, Yes, and says, She’s lost 40 pounds, she doesn’t have the money for food or housing usually, she sticks it out living at other people’s places until a job like this comes along.
K is arguing still, looking upwards at a man in a hardhat. She’s wearing a blue summer dress, it’s loose on her and billows softly in the wind, seemingly never coming into contact with a substantial part of her body. Her head argues and her body exists under the dress somewhere, and he listens to her speak, and she’s saying, I must be in the bucket, and the man in the hardhat says, There’s no possible way ma’am, that we allow you to go up in this bucket, even given the extensive safety measures we have in place to make sure everyone’s safe. If anything, it’s nearly impossible, the tiniest of chances that you’ll be injured even at all, and that’d be our liability anyway. But, seeing as, or—what am I saying? With all that said ma’am, even with our utmost confidence in the safety of our equipment, there’s absolutely not a chance you’ll be spending time in our bucket today.
K is losing her mind, turning around and trying to find someone to support her. She turns back to the man in the hard hat and says, It’s simply because I’m so old then, yes? Ageism, and I’m poor and frail, and this is, well, I’m going to be beaten down and swallowed up by your assumptions about me. I need to be in the bucket. The bucket needs me, it’s as simple as that. I need the bucket, the bucket needs me, the building needs me in the bucket up in the air doing my work. Let me through.
He’s starting to remember K. She’s friends with a neighbor in the apartment building, who put her up in his grandma’s apartment, and K said she was staying for one night but ended up staying for three and talked loudly into her phone well past midnight most evenings. Lying in bed, listening to her talk on the phone, yelling sometimes, asking for help, redialing a number and saying, I need you to put me in contact with your superior, I have money coming from the Middle East, it’s in transit as we speak, this should take only a short time and I can’t seem to get through to you so, and so on like that, and he asks his grandma if she ever got her money and she says, No, and they watch her yell and scream and demand she be put into the bucket. She says, I need both you men to lift me up, each put an arm on my back and arm under my armpit and lift me gently and with great care into the bucket and then operate the machine, so I’m taken up into the air and allow me to do my work. I will signal when I need to come down for bathroom breaks, food, coffee, a smoke or to end the day.
The men walk away and confer amongst themselves and K stands there with her arms crossed, assuming a posture of authority, and he takes in the scene for a second longer, remembering where each person is standing and how their faces are positioned, and where their hands are, if they’re clasped or crossed, if they’re in pockets or hand in hand with others, he looks at feet and hair, he looks at bodies leaning on trees and buildings, on bodies standing straight and bodies slouching. And then he spies a seam in the crowd and he tells his grandma he’ll see her in a bit, that if she needs help getting back to the door let him know and he’ll come fight through and create a path somehow, someway or another, and she says she’s okay for now and he goes through the small path he saw earlier and arrives at the door, opening it and entering into a dim hum of what just was. His grandma’s been living in the apartment for decades and has the first and bottom floors. She sticks to the first floor usually, and he walks down the narrow, steep, old wooden stairs which creak and press and indulge any amount of extra weight, and then opens the door to his room and drops his belongings before sitting on the bed. He’s reading a book made up of a bunch of volumes about impressions and false ones, he’s reading about love and romance and death and society, he’s reading about life, he thinks, and the rug on the floor is Persian and mostly red, from what his grandma says, and the bookshelves are antiques and the pottery is worth more than a television, and he’s sitting in this old room and he’s trying to listen and hear if K is still out there arguing, and if she is, what’s she using as her case now?
He thinks if it’s actually her job, she should get to go up in the bucket, her age not being a limiting factor. He calls his girlfriend, who lives in the middle of the country and is moving here soon, where they’re planning to get an apartment for themselves, and he’ll finally move out of his grandma’s, where he’s been living since he moved from the middle of the country, where he lived much closer to his girlfriend. Six or seven blocks between them, long blocks which take a while to walk, but maybe 30 minutes by walking and ten minutes or less by bus depending on if people pulled the cord at lots of the preceding stops. They’d seen each other every day and now not at all, except for over video calls and listening to each other’s voices while one did something or another and the other did the equivalent. He calls his girlfriend and explains the situation. He says, You remember K? The one I couldn’t stop complaining about, that my grandma and I had to usher out of the house, long after she said she’d be gone and we were actually urging her, saying stuff like, it was so great having you here, and let us know when you get to your next destination, we’re excited to hear about your travels, your projects, and on and on, and it still probably was hours after the fact that she finally left, and his girlfriend says, I think I remember her, and he says, Either way, she’s outside, and is wanting to work on revitalizing, that’s what I heard her call it, or at least rehabbing, the outside of the apartment building. She wants to get in the bucket that’s connected to those trucks for tree pruning and be taken up to the top first. She said she wanted to start at the top and clean up and renew, that’s what she said, she wanted to renew the statue that’s at the top center of the building, and then work her down and clean up everything else and paint and chisel and replace and anything that else that might need doing while she’s up there. She says it’ll take her almost 20 weeks, and she’ll work every Sunday, and only on Sundays, because that’s the day the city will let her mark off a space and impede traffic and disrupt people’s days. His girlfriend says, I’m remembering her now. She said you were rude, that you’d been short-tempered with her, that you didn’t say hello when you passed her in the house. You need to be able to fake it with these kinds of people, you know that. He says, I know, I know. She said she was staying for one day that time and then it ended up being longer and I couldn’t stand her and she was messing up my routines, and I didn’t feel like I could talk as loud as I wanted to when I called you, and even then, even if I was whispering or talking quietly at least, I’d be sure she was listening so I wouldn’t say everything I wanted to, and say how much I miss you or how you’re going to be here soon, and that we’ll have our own space which we have control over and we can do whatever we like with and make it our home, our very own home. I know there’s been tough days and weeks, where we’re doing our own separate things and it feels impossible that we’d live in the same place and have the same home, and I couldn’t speak how I wanted to, because I’d need to convince you, assure you, remind you, that we’d have all the things we wanted, that I’d do whatever it takes, that you’d do whatever it takes, that it’s really as simple as that, that it requires needing and wanting and action, and we’re good at those things, that we’ll be in the same place soon, that we’ll fall asleep in the same bed, and I couldn’t say those things loudly or with the kind of emotion I wanted to, all because I thought she was probably listening or about to interrupt me. And it’s more than that, just generally, that she’d be sitting in the living room watching the news on TV when I was hoping to watch something, or she’d be expecting dinner to be made for her when she was only supposed to be there for a day and she went on and on about how she was going out to some fancy restaurant the first night and she didn’t know when she’d be back, and she ended up being home by nine and ate half the pasta we made and then fell asleep on the couch, and whatever else she’s done, I’m sure it’ll come to me. But I had to talk quietly on the phone even when she was being obnoxious and doing the opposite on hers and I couldn’t tell you what I needed to say, and now she’s outside begging to go up in the bucket.
They talk for a while longer and his girlfriend says at some point, If she’s actually been speaking with the right people, and has the clearances, she should be allowed to go up in the bucket. He says, The men aren’t going to let her, they’d never let a woman of her age go up in the bucket, even if she did have all the sign-offs that she needed. They’ve decided she’ll die if she enters the bucket, and she says, It’s not actually the men outside who own the bucket, they can’t make these kinds of binding decisions. It’s the company, or the city more likely, who need to make the final decision. The men are only using that truck for the day, week, whatever amount of time but it’s not actually theirs. He says, But the men have come to see that bucket, and the truck, as their own, especially if they’ve been driving it and using it around the city for weeks or months or even years. They have personal items on the dashboard I bet, and have given friends rides when they’re off-duty, and there’s probably a sticker or two inside the bucket, where the city officials or their bosses can’t see what they’d call vandalism, but the truckers just see as personal pride, as marking their territory, you know? She says, It’s still not their truck. Sentimentality isn’t going to change that. He says, You’re right. At that moment, a swell of noise comes in through the windows in his room, looking out onto the basement steps leading up to the sidewalk, where a smattering of voices, mostly of the deeper variety that he assigns to the men who arrived in the truck, and he makes out snippets and cries of it’ll never happen and this is off-limits, please stand back and a number of other attempts to get K to leave. He tells his girlfriend he’s going to go outside again, and he’ll call her back, and after he puts the phone down, he enters out onto the sidewalk from the basement steps and walks towards K and the men, and says, She has to be allowed to do her work. She has the documentation; you can’t challenge it. She has the signoffs and approvals from the relevant city employees and departments, and she has a resume that includes work like this, at a similarly advanced age, that haven’t resulted in any injuries for her or the buildings. She has to be let into the bucket. It’s not your bucket, I’m sorry, I want it to be. I know there’s an attachment here, but it’s not yours.
The men yell and one or two come towards him, wearing their stern faces, wearing their practiced intimidation, and push him back on the ground, one of them coming down towards him with an arm raised to punch, but the crowd pull the man and the rest of them back and settle everyone down. They drive away in the truck, and he finds his grandma in the crowd, and they walk inside, nodding to K as they go by. He calls his girlfriend again and tells her what happened.
A couple of days later the truck reappears and so does K, in the same spot outside on the sidewalk but this time without the crowd, and she enters the bucket, the men making sure she’s secure and safe and then in order to ignore the action taking place, they scroll their phones or smoke off to the side, as she glides and sways slightly in her ascent to the statue at the top of the building. She has her tools at her feet, and she slowly leans down and grabs a tool at a time, flicking away paint and residue on her fingers, and 20 weeks later she comes down in the bucket for the last time, and takes her work in in its final form, and then leaves in a taxi she hails, her tools collected in a small box she carries at her side.
His grandma and him watch her go and he says, At least she’s not staying here again, and his grandma says, The building looks terrible, and he goes downstairs and calls his girlfriend and tells her K is gone, that she’s done working, that the building looks terrible, that he doesn’t like the idea of coming home to building that’s been designed or at least renovated or reinvigorated or whatever word she used, by K, and she says, We’ll have our own place soon, just like you said, and we’ll have our own couch and windows and our own view, and we’ll fall asleep right next to each other, so don't’ worry, that’ll all be here before we know it.
Teddy Burnette (he/him) is a writer living in NYC. His novel, Heartfelt Anything, was published with Expat Press in 2022. His fiction has appeared in X-RAY Lit Mag, Hobart, Apocalypse Confidential, Expat Lit Journal, and Maudlin House, among other publications.