“I’ll repeat the question,” the cop said. “What exactly did you see?”
“It will be like this place never existed,” Trevor said. “The aftermath, I mean. People will walk out their front doors only they won’t have front doors anymore. God’s taking it all back.”
The cop clearly wasn’t interested in what Trevor had to say about the end of the world as they knew it. When Trevor tried again to suggest that the cop had better enjoy himself while he could because soon, maybe that very night but most certainly in less than a week, they’d all be fertilizer, the man shook his head. “The girl. I’m here about the girl. Daisy Gonzalez. Tell me what you know. I’m begging you at this point.”
That morning, before the store opened, Trevor and Kurt were loitering in produce, the boss educating them on the top five ways to spot a shoplifter—“coats in summer!”; “shifty eyes!”; “backpacks!”; “coats in spring!”; “shifty hands!”—when Trevor, who’d been distracted by a Seeing Eye beagle bitching about his master, had a thought. He knew Kurt liked him okay, because Kurt made no secret about whom he despised and why. He hated Henrietta for her habit of sweating out the top of her nose, Lois for her tuna lunches, the pretty teenage cashiers for their habit of reading People magazine between customers, and the boss because he was a fat windbag with an exaggerated sense of his own importance. The only time Kurt criticized Trevor was when he thought he took too much of the boss’s shit. Usually he just slapped him on the back and said he was all right, he didn’t yak incessantly like every other half-wit on the White Swan payroll and so he “was good in his book.” But Trevor wasn’t content with lukewarm praise. He wanted fire, devotion, a reckless, stupid love that, it seemed to him from the movies he’d watched with his mother, belonged only to men of mystery. Men who knew things others didn’t, men who harbored secrets that threatened to eat them up inside. So as the boss wrapped up his lecture and Kurt seemed poised to leave, Trevor shouted, “I know where Daisy Gonzalez is. I know what happened to her.”
At first the boss didn’t believe him. “Trev. Be serious,” he’d said, but Trevor said he was serious, he’d never been more serious in his entire life. He’d clearly made an impression on the boss because the boss immediately called the cops—well, the cop—and now that man was here in the break room, his sad face turned for the moment toward Henrietta and her bulky figure, poised at the edge of the loveseat like a Slinky about to topple.
“Jerk-wad,” Henrietta growled at the television. “Reprobate.”
The cop focused again on Trevor. “Whatever happened to Daisy might not be an isolated incident. Her kidnappers might hurt others, do more harm. Your sitting on this information could endanger countless lives. Have you thought about that?”
“Yes,” Trevor said. The soft skin of his palm gave way under his fingernails.
“Goddamn it.” The policeman stood up and paced for a moment, kicking at a ripped gum wrapper. He sighed heavily and sat down again, his voice gentler this time. “All you have to do is tell me what you witnessed. That’s it. Just tell me. Say the first word. I’ll try to help you with the second. Okay? Deal?”
Trevor shook his head. The words would not come out. The picture was there, but the words weren’t.
Henrietta threw a piece of orange peel at a doctor in navy-blue pinstripes. “Get a stylist!” she yelled.
The cop got a call on his cell phone. “Yeah?”
Henrietta tossed another peel at the screen. A tall blond woman with sharp collarbones and an even taller dark-haired man with a Fred Flintstone five-o’clock shadow were locked in an embrace behind a potted palm.
“He’s married to Theresa the redhead with the job at the phone company,” Henrietta said.
Trevor nodded. He remembered the redhead from the week before. She’d been crying into Fred Flintstone’s shoulder, convinced he’d never love her the way she needed him to. “Tenderly,” the woman said, “and with reverence.”
Trevor supposed he’d never be loved that way, either. Especially now, because the cop was standing, the cop was on his way out, his skull pink under his crew cut. “I have to go,” he said to Trevor, “but don’t think for a moment that I’m done with you.”
* * *
The people would scatter like flower petals. They would be scooped up by the wind and pushed on air currents to other states, other countries. New Yorkers would talk of a plague of obese people mid–microwave dinner falling from the sky, Canadians of televisions, big as boulders, cratering the Shield. Bostonians would complain to Katie Couric that their own houses were ruined by a hail of late-model American cars and corn silos and tulip trees.
Most of Colliersville’s full-time residents would end up on dry land, draped over fences and half-buried in fields, but a chosen few, Mayor Rodgers and his family and the boss and the Yoders probably because they were rich or had been rich anyway, would be dropped in the ocean for the sharks and the mermaids to feast on. No news coverage for them, only swirling waters and a glimpse of Atlantis.
He had to warn Kurt. After the cop left, Trevor shuffled over to seafood, ignoring the nasally calls for extra help up front. “Trevor to checkout,” Lois called. “Trevor to checkout.” Lois and the pretty cashiers could bag their own groceries for once. The customers could walk a few extra feet to the corrals and get their own carts. He had more important things to do.
“So,” Kurt said, spotting Trevor over the counter and wrapping up a pink wad of salmon, “how’d it go with Magnum, P.I.?”
Trevor shrugged. “We need to get out of here.”
Kurt weighed the fish and told an old lady in navy polyester pants to pay at checkout. “You okay, man?”
“This place is going to blow.”
“It already does.”
“No. Listen. This is important. There’s going to be a storm—”
Kurt came out from behind the counter and threw an arm over Trevor’s shoulder. Kurt smelled strongly of fish, but Trevor didn’t move away.
“You’re overwrought, dude. You need to get your mind off that girl. How ’bout you come home with me after work? You can meet my kid, have a few beers.”
Trevor wasn’t supposed to drink. Alcohol reacted strangely with his medication, made him feel like a character in a video game instead of part of his own life. The last time he drank, after the intervention with Pastor Rush, he ended up dragging Viv into the yard in the middle of the night to save her from Donkey Kong. Booze meant more scenes, which meant more pill bottles, and more pill bottles meant Trevor floated a few inches above his shoes at all times. The carts got hard to grab.
“Sounds good,” he said.
They stood for a few moments more, Trevor relishing the heavy feeling of Kurt’s arm on his back. The store was full of summer shoppers stuffing their carts with hot dogs, hamburger patties, potato salad, chips, and pre-cut fruit. Trevor couldn’t remember when the place had been so busy, packed as it was not only with customers, but with pre-holiday help in deli, floral, and cleanup. The poor kids, Trevor thought, watching as a skinny boy plagued with acne sliced roast beef into a plastic bag. They have no idea what’s going to happen to them.
“Go ahead,” said a girl lobster, banging an oversize claw against the glass. “Feel sorry for those assholes, but as for us crustaceans, you clearly couldn’t care less. Very nice.”
When the tornado came through, White Swan would be one of the first buildings to succumb to its fury, boxes of cereal and bulk bran and cartons upon cartons of eggs coating the town like batter. There’d be a blanket of laundry soap on the Ranasack, a river of mayonnaise where Main Street used to be. The store’s supply of shopping carts would come crashing down in Akron, wheels up in a just-poured road, the child safety flaps banging in the breeze.
“You okay?” Kurt asked again.
Trevor cringed as Henrietta huffed past him. She’d told the policeman not to blame Trevor for stonewalling. It wasn’t his fault she said. He’s a retard from way back.
“Oin
k, oink,” he whispered to no one in particular.
* * *
The day was almost over but not quite and Brianna Pogue was in aisle nine. She seemed to be staring into the grape juices. Trevor knew her for her stringy hair and way of squinting. He hoped he could walk by her this time without being seen but then he heard her holler his name and so he turned back, unable to disobey her even now.
“Trevor Hochstetler,” she said, and her voice grew silky. “Killed any gerbils lately?”
Trevor looked at the floor, which was still sticky from a glass bottle of cranberry a kid knocked over that morning.
“I come in here every week thinking maybe, just maybe, Trevor Hochstetler will have moved on, found a real job, but it’s always the same old story.” Brianna dropped her purse at her feet. Glitter fell out. So did a pair of six-inch heels, a few joints, a roach clip, and a pack of cigarettes. She gathered everything up hurriedly and threw the purse back over her shoulder. “There you are now, looking just as hopeless as before, asking if we want paper or plastic. Paper or plastic. This is your life, Trevor Hochstetler. If you were ever on that old game show, it’d be the loneliest episode ever. Just a line of grocery carts coming out to greet you. Pathetic.”
Trevor’s shoe sole caught on the dried juice and he ground it around and around in the spot, enjoying the squeak and squish of cheap leather against the tile.
“How’s it feel to be voted ‘Most Likely to Be a Loser’ and have it come true?”
The boss said something over the intercom. Trevor heard his name and the word now, but Brianna didn’t seem ready to let him go. This was how it’d been years ago when he sat next to her in third, then fourth, then fifth grade, his desk slightly removed from the others because Brianna swore he smelled like poop and made her underperform on tests. She used to harangue him for eating paste and wiping his boogers on the bottom of his desk, and, because he’d drowned the gerbils, because he’d confessed to her that he’d flushed Adam and Eve, beloved pets of Room 226, down the toilet when they’d asked him to, Trevor felt compelled to listen to her until her words became barks, hisses, full-moon howls.
He started taking the pills that year, little green ones at night with a glass of milk. At first, they came in tinfoil-wrapped sheets. Later, bottles, so many bottles he used the empty ones as bowling pins. The colors of the capsules changed—from green to blue to orange and back again—but the feeling didn’t. He’d stopped crying about the gerbils because crying would have required he do something with his face. When he wasn’t dreaming of Daisy Gonzalez, Trevor dreamed he was a ship in a pill bottle, trying to rock himself out.
Brianna grabbed Trevor by his collar. She pulled him close. She whispered in his ear, “I know you think you saw something.” Spit hit his hairline. “You didn’t see anything. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“If you tell anyone what you saw, it will not go well. For you. It will not go well at all. I just might have to tell the police about your experience with helpless animals. You know what they say about serial killers, don’t you? It all begins with animals.”
“There’s going to be a tornado.…”
“What?” Brianna put a cigarette between her lips but didn’t light it. “I can’t hear you, Trevor.”
He began to tremble and hoped he wouldn’t pee himself. In his mind a vision appeared of Brianna being plucked from her pole at Miss Kitty’s by the twister, fishnet thigh-highs ripped off and snaked around her neck until her face turned purple and she was dropped into the ocean, dry blond hair bobbing on the waves. “It’s going to be an F5,” he mumbled, looking up the aisle where Kurt was waiting for him near an endcap of half-off laundry detergent. “That’s the big one—”
“Hey, buddy!” Kurt shouted. “Fuck the boss. Not literally. That would be disgusting. Ready to go?”
Brianna scowled, first at Trevor, then at Kurt. She started to walk away but turned back to Trevor and raised her pinky finger in warning. Trevor remembered that finger very well. Gerbils, she mouthed around her cigarette. Adam … Eve …
* * *
Kurt’s mother’s house looked like a chocolate cupcake. Round and low to the ground, it had brown walls and a pink roof and lime green–framed windows whose glass was foggy with canned snow.
“Don’t say anything,” Kurt said, parking his car next to a rusty pop-up camper. “This place makes me feel like Papa Smurf.”
Trevor couldn’t have said anything if he wanted to. He was still shaking from his meeting with Brianna, and being this close to Kurt for this long made him nervous. He quaked all the way up the walk to the front door and inside, where he could have sworn a tornado of country cuteness had already roared through, leaving in its wake a mess of ruffles and pastel teapots and little figurines of moon-eyed kids and bears in dresses and angels on their knees in dewy grass and wildflowers.
“This is Ma’s sitting room. Hell, isn’t it?” Kurt said. “Come on. I should introduce you to her or she’ll be on my case all night long.”
He led Trevor into a pie-shaped kitchen, where a woman in a turquoise smock stood at the stove, stirring a pot. She started when she saw them.
“Ma, this is Trevor.”
It was clear she’d been crying. Her light green eyes, exactly the color of Kurt’s, looked small and painful behind pink plastic glasses. With the exception of her eyes, she bore no resemblance to her son. Her light, fluffy hair stuck wetly to the base of her neck and a long cross necklace hung low over a flat chest. She had two bright spots on her cheeks like a doll. “Any friend of Kurt’s,” she said, holding out a bony hand.
Trevor took it and tried to smile at her but he had that crushing feeling on his heart again. Everything was a little too familiar—the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen, the pastel walls, the Bible under the phone, the phone under the crucifix, and the crucifix hung just so beneath a delicate border of pansies. He wondered if Viv and Kurt’s mother were in some secret society together, a club that required its female members to adhere to a strict dress and decorating code. Maybe Kurt’s mother had a scrapbook somewhere full to bursting with morbid memorabilia and a gay cat lurking in the corner.
She wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry for the state I’m in. I’ve been listening to one of my programs.”
It wasn’t until Kurt flipped it off that Trevor realized the radio was on at all. “Fucking Amish love stories. How can you listen to that crap?”
“Hush,” she said.
Kurt fluttered his hands near his cheeks. “Love among the zipperless.”
“Kurt Allen. Please.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
“Dad!”
A boy about eight years old darted into the room, ramming a dark head into Kurt’s thigh. Kurt grabbed him by the waist and flipped him upside down until he squealed.
“You’ll drop him,” Kurt’s mother said. “One of these days. Mark my words. You’ll drop him.”
“Shut up, Ma. Jesus Christ.”
She rolled her eyes skyward and turned back to her pot. “Forgive him, O Lord. Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
The boy, a small version of Kurt sans unibrow, was right side up and on his feet again. “Who’re you?” he asked.
“This is my friend Trevor. We work together.”
“Lobsters taste good,” Charlie said.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Trevor.
Charlie frowned. “Really?”
“I can’t eat shellfish.”
“No shit,” Kurt said.
“Language,” said Ma.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kurt said. He and Charlie grabbed a bag of chips from the top of the refrigerator and three cookies from a porcelain jar painted to look like a girl squirrel and a boy squirrel rubbing noses. Charlie dropped one of the cookies on the floor as he and Kurt jostled each other down a dark hallway.
“Five-second rule,” Charlie said. Then he scooped the broken cookie up and popped it in his mouth.
“Do you hav
e any pets?” Trevor asked, his chest tightening further as he followed them.
Charlie stopped and looked at Trevor. The gap in his two front teeth was the size of a pencil eraser. “Not a dog or nothing. Just two fish. Red Fish and Blue Fish.”
“Charlie’s allergic to dander.” Kurt said. “It’s like you and the lobsters.”
They emerged into a small white room whose only ornament was a fake Tiffany lamp hanging from the ceiling and a poster of Princess Leia swinging a whip. While Kurt grabbed two beers from a minifridge in the corner, Trevor studied her, noted her perfect breasts behind the shell-like bikini and her long legs, her strong yet womanly waist. Pastor Rush had used a similar picture to try to woo Trevor away from the dark side, but the girl simply looked cold to him. Later, after Pastor Rush had left with his projector and dusty film strips, Praying the Gay Away and AIDS: Gay Killer, Trevor drew a shawl on her shoulders and Sharpied her a pair of sweatpants.
“This is our man cave,” Kurt said, joining Charlie on a small plaid couch. “No doilies here, thank God.”
Trevor sat down on a director’s chair next to Kurt and watched while Charlie hooked up a video game system to a hulking television in the corner. The fish were on the floor in front of the TV, swimming in circles in their small tank and, as far as Trevor could tell, arguing about which direction they should take tomorrow. “Clockwise,” said the red fish. “Counter,” said the blue.
Princess Leia. Charlie’s mom. Kurt liked girls. Plain and simple. Heaven, once it got its hands on Kurt, would keep him. In reality, Trevor had known this for quite a while, had understood in the back of his heart that Kurt just saw him as a friend, but still. He’d allowed himself to dream, to fantasize, and now, sitting in the middle of Kurt and Charlie’s man cave, Trevor realized how ridiculous those fantasies had been. He popped a green pill onto his tongue and cringed at the battery-acid sting of it.
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