Matt Brown

In America, a hardware store called Harbor Freight. I walked in to buy one roll of black electrical tape. Seventy-nine cents. At the register, a bearded clerk named Frank scanned my tape, reached beneath the counter, and placed a massive red five-gallon plastic bucket between us. "Free bucket weekend," he said. I looked at the price tag on the bucket. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents. I looked at my tape. Seventy-nine cents. I stood before the register while basic arithmetic died in my hands. "The vessel costs six times the tribute," I informed him. "If you do this for every customer, your house will fall before winter." "Been doing it for years, chief. Take the bucket." In my land, when a lord grants you a vessel larger than your purchase, you are expected to fill it in his service. I held the wire handle with both hands and asked Frank what a man does with such a bucket. He looked at me the way a monk looks at an uninitiated boy. "Everything," Frank said, "except carry water." I thought he was speaking in riddles. He was speaking the literal law of the land. I have now inspected four garages on my street, and I must report that the entire residential infrastructure of the United States rests upon five-gallon plastic buckets. Nobody puts water in them. The first bucket holds rusty bolts from machines that died during the Bush administration. The second bucket is inverted so a man can sit on it while staring at a lawnmower he has no intention of fixing today. The third bucket is an emergency step-stool so a father can stand fourteen inches closer to a smoke detector that will not stop chirping. I carried my red bucket home and set it beside my garage door. On Saturday morning, my seventy-four-year-old neighbor Walt walked past my driveway with his coffee. He stopped. He looked at the red bucket. Then he looked at me. Without a word, Walt walked back to his own garage, returned sixty seconds later, and dropped a brand-new yellow sponge and a brass hose nozzle into my bucket. "Saw you finally got your bucket," Walt said, tapping the plastic rim twice. "Welcome to the street, kid." I spent seventy-nine cents on tape. They gave me a throne, a toolbox, and citizenship on my block.