Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  Over my divider, I can see the girl shuffle down the center aisle, moving pretty slowly, and no one’s here to watch her. The first four aisles on that side, including the front displays, are Seasonal: lawn and weed care, grills, push mowers, weed whackers, and the garbage cans. I don’t know why the garbage cans are Seasonal—the red plastic snap lids, the brown leaf cans, the metal “Critter Dome” brand, the blue oversized trash bins, even the gray contractors’ buckets—but Frank’s right, we sell a lot of garbage cans in July. People cleaning out, in the summer, getting rid of what they don’t care about anymore. Maybe it’s nice weather to throw out stuff.

  I can’t see Hakim. I could page him, but the store’s small, and Frank likes us to holler, he thinks it’s more friendly and it makes the store seem like somebody’s house and we’re all the dad. I don’t like to holler.

  The girl worries me. I’m trying to see why.

  Some customers like to wander the aisles, up and down one, up and down the other, never reading the signs hanging from the ceiling, the helpful signs, but trying to remember what else they want. If they see it, they’ll know. Frank says customers come looking for one thing and then they find everything else they need—“That’s a hardware store!” he likes to say. Those customers, the ones who wander, some of them can be in the store a long time, especially when they’ve wandered the whole store, and then they go back to aisle five (Stains, Paint, Brushes) because they remember what they want, a four-inch Wooster brush with natural bristles for oil-based staining. I’m on my chair, at the register. I’m ready to help them check out, to ask if they have a Bing’s Buyer’s Card, if they want to give a dollar today to the Kiddie Korps Foundation that runs the after-school musical theater program. I greet those customers when they come in the store, I’m nice, and I see them appear and disappear as they wander the aisles, and I think that my life’s been like that, too. Here and gone, turning a corner, heading back, turning another, one aisle and then the next.

  Other customers like to ask me right away where something is: they walk into the store, and I’m on my chair at the register, and I ask if I can help them, and they say, “I think so…” or “I hope so…” or “Yes, please…” or they don’t say any of those things, they just say, “Do you have a four-inch Wooster brush with natural bristles for oil-based staining?” If I know where in aisle five those brushes are, I tell them, and if not, I look it up on my laminate. My feelings aren’t hurt: there are different ways to be nice. My way’s my own, because I don’t like to talk. I would have even said that to my Monica, if she had ever stopped talking enough to ask.

  Maybe Frank’s with a distributor or a sales rep, Hakim’s probably hiding in the stock room or actually on a real break, Mark’s got a propane tank refill, Sal and Walonda are in the office, and the security monitors are up there in the office, the four TVs they keep that no one sees a reason to watch. We’re short a couple of people. It’s a quiet Tuesday afternoon in July. There’s nothing worth being worried about, I tell myself.

  What is a tall, scrawny teenager in a black hat and combat boots, who looks kind of like she’s dressed for Halloween, doing at Bing’s on a Tuesday afternoon by herself, wandering like a regular person? I scoot up to see, peek over the divider with the Maglite display and the Top Choice Knives case that’s padlocked (Frank has the key) that blocks my view of the back left of the store. I think she’s in twenty-eight—Shop Vacs, Vacuum Equipment, Mops/Brooms, Squeegees—but I can’t see for sure, and she hasn’t come out to the main aisle again, and now I’ve got a customer, and I have to work the register. It’s the girl’s hat that worries me; the hat doesn’t make any sense in July. I’m not a guy who senses stuff, but I know what’s peculiar.

  “Is that all for you today?”

  My customer’s a guy not as old as me. He’s got a brush mustache, which you can tell right away he’s proud of, and bits of spackle shining in his hair. He’s changed his T-shirt to come to Bing’s, I think. We see a lot of work people in the middle of the workday, on the job, they run out of something.

  Like Tony Malone did, I think. He was walking. He was on the job, on a nice day in March, walking along, easy as he goes, easy peasy. Smack in the middle of his life, walking downtown, stepping off a curb, bang, just a little girl on a bike. That’s a morbid memory, I know, but having these kinds of thoughts keeps me from holding onto them too long. I’m trying to think the thing away.

  “Will that be all for today? Did you find everything you need? Do you have a Bing’s Buyer’s Card?”

  The transaction goes on, I say what I say, I don’t have to think, and the customer takes his jug of Rug Doctor Carpet Cleaner and leaves. He declines to donate a dollar. He doesn’t need a bag. I’m glad he’s gone.

  The customers are okay. But yesterday morning, first thing, Hakim and I had to scrub the brick wall by the parking lot, the graffiti somebody sprayed onto the brick facing of Bing’s Hardware and Garden Center a swirly mess of letters no one could read. Sometimes there’s been hateful graffiti, not just bragging words. What’s the point of that, I wonder.

  “Mr. Richard, did you see the Internet last night?”

  Hakim’s a news addict: he is always on websites, and he keeps up with events. He likes to see the news as it happens, he says. I can’t do that; the news is different when you’re older, plus I’m happy with my military history. There’s always enough history to keep me in books, more news in military history than there is in the news, and that’s fine. I don’t like what happens, I want it to be history.

  Hakim might still aim to be a reporter, he did for a little while last year, but he doesn’t think journalists make enough money. Hakim has to make a lot of money, and who can blame him. He hopes to own his own store of some kind, but not a hardware store, he’s sure of that, although first he wants to go to business school at night, maybe for accounting, once he finishes high school. I think he could own a hardware store: he has a great memory for all of the doodads, what they all do, which Allen wrench a string trimmer needs.

  This morning, we were working on cleaning the graffiti again, which made it easier not to respond to Hakim’s blabber. I didn’t. I was confident that one bucket of diluted Wipe-Out would be enough to handle the job, and since the arthritis in my hands wasn’t so bad, the work was okay. But I get mad at whoever’s graffitiing the store—I admit it—even though it’s not my store.

  “There was a bombing in a market in Pakistan, a suicide bomber, they think a girl. If I was a girl, I wouldn’t do that. Not for anyone. Not for Al-lah—” Hakim said the name in two syllables. I say it differently. “Not for my mother and sisters. Maybe for my mother, maybe. A boy’s mother is his light, his way in the world, right, Mr. Richard? My mother, she has taken me from the darkness. A boy’s mother is his sacred duty, Alhamdulillah. If I were a girl, that would be different, but a boy…don’t you think?”

  Hakim is kind of round, a big young man who will be a really big old man if he’s not careful, bigger than Tony Malone was. Hakim likes sweets, stealing Life Savers from my courtesy dish, and chips, and he especially likes his Funyuns. That boy can eat bags and bags of junk food, like he’s eating to catch up, which might be true. His eyes do funny things when he eats—he looks to the side, instead of at his food. Nervous, as though I might steal his Funyuns. Like I would ever want Hakim’s Funyuns.

  Big as he is, Hakim gets sweaty, even at nine in the morning. His hands sweat in the gloves we wear, his forehead sweats, and when he takes off his boots, his socks are soaked through. Early on, Hakim wore sandals to work one day, but Frank didn’t approve, and he gave the boy a talking.

  I like Hakim. I like how smart he is, and how he’s going to be successful. Of course, I wish he would shut up, although I think that’s the case with most people. He’s living proof of hell, I think, because he’s been through it. So I remind myself that he’s a good person—even when he’s being immature and obnoxious, a little game he plays, let’s get Mr. Richard upset, isn’t this
amusing.

  “You would do that for your mother, wouldn’t you, Mr. Richard? You would die for her? Now, I know she is dead, may she rest in peace, in God’s arms, so you don’t have to answer. But if you were a girl, would you do that for your mother? You would be a funny girl, Mr. Richard…”

  Hakim’s father was killed in the war, and his mother and his three sisters and Hakim were sponsored by a relief organization, and he got out, left Africa for Canada. Then his cousin knew someone in DC who knew someone in Saxon Hills who sponsored him and two of his sisters, one older and one younger, to come live here. His mother stayed in Toronto, for now, with his youngest sister, who must still be very young. His mother and sister are there until Hakim can bring them up, he says. Canada’s north of us, so technically he would be bringing them down, but I don’t say that, and he’ll learn when he reads history eventually. Hakim’s not the oldest, but he acts like he is, because he’s the boy.

  It’s a good story, of Hakim and his sisters and his mother being saved. I’ve heard the best part many times; Hakim likes to tell it. He especially likes the bit about arriving in Toronto and staying there for the winter, and how cold it was, he thought he would die, he thought his nose and lips would freeze and fall off, his blood would freeze before his face hit the ground, that’s what happens at the North Pole. Then he loves the part in the story when he came here with his sisters, to Maryland in the springtime, how warm and green it was, and all of the flowers, you wouldn’t believe all of the flowers. Even in places no one lives. That’s always a funny idea to me, that he would expect flowers only where people live. I think they came here in the middle of his holy month, and that was confusing, but I don’t really understand that part. Not much use in that for me.

  “Mr. Richard, did you see the Internet…”

  “Mr. Richard, do you think there really are other galaxies?”

  “Mr. Richard, did you see the Internet, did you see YouTube, the lion and the puppy who are best friends? I am the lion and you are the puppy, Mr. Richard!”

  “Mr. Richard, would you cut off your finger or your toe, if you had to choose? A finger, you could still walk okay—oh, I am sorry, I apologize, Mr. Richard, your foot. I forget. I think this is not a conversation for you.”

  “Mr. Richard, I have decided you will adopt me.”

  “Mr. Richard, did you see the Internet, they shot those hostages? I want to be a man of peace, Mr. Richard, and I pray for Al-lah to show me how. Don’t you, Mr. Richard? We can be men of peace together, in sha allah.”

  “Mr. Richard, my older sister is feeling better, and now she’s not so mean to us anymore. You could consult my sister’s doctor, Mr. Richard, he could help you too. Then someone might like you.”

  Hakim is a talker, his mouth running out like a bathtub. I think I attract these people, because I don’t like to talk. He tells me stories all of the time, usually about his childhood, and sometimes about the war, but most of his stories start one way and then go another, and that’s when I stop listening. I have more important thoughts. Also, if I’m only half-listening because I’m working, or reading on my break, I don’t notice the story’s different, and then when I do notice, I realize that the story is about something else, and that it doesn’t matter, because Hakim doesn’t remember what he was saying when he started.

  When Hakim talks, I try to picture Africa, and I can see the dry plains and huge shade trees falling over with their heavy canopies, like enormous umbrellas that broke, and the kinds of animals on TV or on a safari coming to drink at the watering hole near the big tree, eyeballing each other. One of them’s going to eat the other. I know what Africa has to look like, and even though Hakim’s stories are different, and I try to see what he describes, I still have my image.

  Hakim’s family lived in a city. His father worked in an office doing import/export work to help the country of Ethiopia, and his mother worked in a clothing factory, on a machine, until she had too many children, four young children, three close together in age. Then she stayed home, which saved her life.

  When the war came, soldiers overran the city on armored Jeeps and in convoys of trucks, and they were brutal, house to house. It was awful everywhere. There were so many soldiers. It was like Vicksburg, only worse. That first night, Hakim’s father hid, barricaded in his office. Hakim and his oldest sister had to stay together at school, they couldn’t go home. Telephones were down, so no one knew where anyone was. The city was on fire a lot. That’s like Vicksburg.

  The first soldier to break into the office where Hakim’s father was hiding was no older than a kid, with big, scared eyes and an old Russian rifle—I know about those kinds of rifles, they’re advertised all over the back of the magazines—and boots too big that didn’t belong to him. The story’s not the story without the boots.

  Hakim’s father was behind his desk when the soldier squeezed between the plywood boards the office staff had hammered up, gun barrel first and then hands, and then arms, his body squeezing through sideways, and then the boy soldier’s young, bug-eyed face appeared. In the dark office, the electricity cut, he was not a good sight to see, he was so scared and ready for killing. Scared people are the worst, Hakim says, and everyone was scared. Hakim’s father was a big man, and he tried to hide behind a desk, but the desk was too small. So the young soldier could see Hakim’s father, and in his little boy’s voice, the soldier barked something at Hakim’s father, who stood up very slowly, raised his hands, stepped one step sideways, two steps sideways, out from his desk, and said, “I surrender.”

  Hakim raises his hands to tell the story. The boy soldier was shaking, Hakim said. His father didn’t know what else to do. Everyone else was still hiding; the women in the office had put a chair on a desk and climbed into the ceiling to hide, and the other office workers had replaced the ceiling tiles and taken the chair away. If the office burned, the women would be trapped, they would burn to death in the ceiling.

  Hakim’s father looked at the boy soldier. “Boy,” he said. “Do you want to surrender?”

  The boy soldier raised his rifle, probably an old AK-47, and then he shot the desk. He shot Hakim’s father’s desk again and again. The recoil sent the boy backward and he was knocked around with the gun’s power, but still he shot and shot until the cartridge was empty, all of the rounds until the bullets were gone. The smell of the gunpowder made Hakim’s father cough, and there was smoke from the barrel of the gun, and the darkness in the room felt worse. Hakim’s father was worried that one of the women in the ceiling would cough too.

  Then the boy soldier fell to his knees. In his own language, which Hakim’s father didn’t understand, the boy soldier said something that must have been like “I surrender.” Hakim’s father was safe.

  Hakim’s father was killed not long after the city was taken, probably soon after the boy soldier surrendered in the office. I don’t know how Hakim’s father died—Hakim doesn’t tell that story. He thinks the story of the boy soldier killing the desk is a much better one. Atta-tat-tat-tat-tat, Hakim tells the story of the boy soldier killing the desk.

  When Hakim first arrived at Bing’s, he was a charity case. Somehow, his sponsor and his cousin and the Bing family were connected, and Hakim was hired. He was less talkative then, or he just wasn’t talking to me all that much. He was like a newborn. One day, I saw him pull pieces of supermarket fried chicken from his pants pockets and eat: he had stashed supermarket chicken legs in his pockets, he didn’t know any better, and the pants might have been from yesterday, who knows how old the chicken legs were. When I saw that, I was glad again that Monica and I never had kids.

  I see the girl turn the corner of aisle sixteen—Storage Tools, Casters/Glides, Shelving, Closet Hardware—although really, I only see her black hat. Luckily, she’s tall. I can keep track of her this way, without being too obvious or closing down my register. Frank wants someone on a register at all times. Makes sense, we’re a hardware store.

  What doesn’t make sense: the
girl. We have a very specific clientele, and she’s not one of our regulars. What could she want? I would prefer Hakim return from his break, or wherever he is hiding, and I could tell him to follow her, or to scurry up to the office and check the security monitors—or, he could even just walk up to her and ask.

  Hakim will know what she’s doing. He’s almost her age.

  Seeing the girl’s hat, and her skinniness, then seeing her disappear again, down aisle fifteen, makes me think again about Tony Malone. When people die, sometimes they get bigger in our thoughts. I don’t know how to explain that. When a man dies badly, and a funeral can’t do justice, that’s what I think. Although I can hear Monica telling me to stop sulking, which is what she thought I did all of the time instead of talking, that I was making everything worse. If I worry more than other people, it’s because I think more, because I don’t talk as much, that’s what I would tell Monica. Reading military history is enough to make a man a worrier, I would say. Visiting Mrs. Malone every other Sunday—that’s plenty, too. It’s no fun there, even if the Steelers win.

  Everyone suspects I don’t have any worries. Not talking means not complaining, so who would know anything about me? It’s true I don’t have much happiness in my life, that I like working at Bing’s well enough, that I really miss having a dog and I would get a different kind, not a Mini Schnauzer, and that when I see a kid on a bike, I think about Tony Malone, how different he was after the Vietnam, and I wonder how different he would have been after the bike accident, if he hadn’t died.

  How different would I have been after fighting in a war? Soldiers who like fighting don’t like civilian life, and today, they’re even more unhappy because of the VA and all. I hear they’re killing themselves all over. Tony Malone didn’t mind being home, at least not when we were hanging out drinking beers, especially during football season. That Steelers team of ’76 was the best—we both agreed on that. What a year.