by Steve Himmer
for Chris Hamill
An Atticus Shorts Original
Atticus Books LLC
3766 Howard Avenue, Suite 202
Kensington MD 20895
http://atticusbooksonline.com
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Himmer. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Sage Brousseau
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9840405-2-0
ISBN-10: 0-9840405-2-8
1
Stubborn daylight fades black as the bells above the door jingle with my arrival. Gloria looks up from the end of the counter, where she’s hunched over a spread of sales charts and display strategies and secret incantations for boosting beef jerky profits. She lays down a chewed white pen and stares at me with dark gerbil eyes that seem more sunken than they really are because of the shadowy bags underneath, no doubt the product of late nights at home modeling countertop arrangements of plastic lighters shaped like fishnet-clad legs that flare when you squeeze them together. She claps her hands, smiles like Marty Feldman’s walleyed Igor—who, now that I’ve noticed, she resembles more than she doesn’t—and asks, “Okay, ready to go?”
Mistaking my shudder for a nod, she hands me a dark blue apron with orange piping and watches as I slip it over my head and tighten the neck strap. “Tighter,” she says. “It’s loose in the front.” Then she holds out a plastic rectangle with a pin on the back and a patch of dim gold on the front, printed with my name in blocky black letters. “It came a little while ago. Just in time!” Her hand sways between us like a mother bird feeding its chicks until I reach out a palm.
“Make sure you wear that all the time,” she says, like she’s handing me keys to the kingdom. I slide the pin through two fang-sized holes with embroidered edges near the top of the apron, beside the store’s logo, and imagine the last person to wear it was drained by a vampire while working.
“That’s what makes the difference,” Gloria says.
I settle in behind the counter, performing semi-robotic functions gleaned from half-attention to yesterday’s training, and Gloria pores over her pages as a pink corner of tongue edges out of her mouth. One of us is a blazing comet of commerce rocketing to the glorious heights of their chosen career, and the other needed work for the summer. There aren’t many jobs to be had right now, but everyone I know has left town for the break so I’m willing to work overnight and that made it easier to find one. My face still stings from the close shave I’ve given myself, first for the interview because I thought that might help me get the job and again tonight before my first shift.
2
He stumbles in like a department store Santa on payday, out of his fat suit but eyes red and wild behind glasses held together with two kinds of tape. His white beard hangs low, ready to drop from the crusted brown weight of tobacco and rum, and his hair is like Einstein’s but so stiff with mud and who knows what else that it doesn’t move in the midnight breeze that follows him into the store. The bells ring overhead and he starts, twisting his long, ribby body to look at the ceiling. Expecting angels, perhaps, but the sudden motion almost topples him like his own brain didn’t see it coming.
“Shit!” he hollers in a thin, grating voice, the kind you can feel in the back of your throat like Lysol, or maybe that’s the stale cigarette cloud he brought in. He’s six feet tall, same as me, according to the measuring strip that hangs on the doorframe in case a robber pauses on the way out. “Shit!” he hollers again, then trips toward the counter where I’m standing in my blue apron. He takes a quick glance over his shoulder to be sure the bells haven’t followed.
3
A hooker asks, “What’s that shit you’re listening to?” She spends most nights on the corner in front of the store because apparently no one told her this was the quiet end of town. She’s the kind of hooker you’d tell a bad joke about but she’s already funnier than the joke could ever be, in fuzzy pink leg warmers she hasn’t taken off since they were fashionable, worn over white tights I accidentally read her life story through and wish I hadn’t. She breathes like whoever taught her to siphon gas from a car forgot to mention not swallowing.
“John Coltrane.”
“And what are you, reading? What is that?” she snarls, leaning toward me over the counter.
I hold up the cover. “Essential Haiku. It’s three different poets and...”
“Fuckin’ book people,” she spits back before I can say anything about Basho’s economy or Issa’s wit, about stripping away extraneous detail and distraction to reach only what is essential, about the clarity and depth of a moment seen in stark relief, and all the other things I read earlier in the book’s introduction. Then she turns on an LA Geared heel and leaves with a pack of GPC cigarettes (the cheapest we sell) and a dollar scratch ticket, pausing on the way out to see how she measures up against the tape on the door.
4
“Hey, how much for coffee?” skinny Santa Claus asks me on some other night, somewhere in the hours between midnight and eight.
“It’s 75¢ for a cup.”
“No, not a cup… just the coffee. How much for just the coffee?”
“Huh?”
He raises a crushed and stained Styrofoam vessel. “I found this cup, so I don’t need one. I just want the coffee. How much?”
“We only keep track of the cups, so there’s no way for me to charge you. Help yourself.”
“Really?”
“Why not.”
“Thanks, man. My name’s Pete.” He reaches across the counter with the filthiest hand I’ve ever seen in my life, worse than my own when I spent a summer pulling lobsters out of the water, and another washing a tourist trap’s dishes, watery jobs that both somehow managed to make my hands dirty. I put down the Help Wanted page of the paper so we can shake.
“Nice to meet you, Pete.”
“You’re better than that bitch here all day. What a bitch,” he says over his shoulder, pouring coffee from the pot on the Bunn-O-Matic.
“Gloria? With the bald spot? She’s my boss.”
“She’s a bitch. Why’re you working for her?”
“I need a job.”
“Bullshit. You gotta be your own man, man. Where do you keep the cream?”
5
For thirty-seven hours one night I watch through the glass front of the store as the few college students still in town for the summer walk back and forth between Town Pizza on one side of me and Big Boy Liquors on the other, buying beer to go with their slices and slices to go with their beer.
Then the stores close and the students go home and I stare over my cash register across the empty parking lot with its faded white lines, absently rubbing my palm along the stubble of my chin and hoping a piece of trash will blow through my field of vision and give me something to watch, or that someone, somewhere has run out of milk or white bread or tampons or the kind of vacuum-packed, over-priced hamburgers that can only be heated in an industrial steel microwave like the one staring me down from the other side of the room. Maybe gazing on me as its own piece of parking lot trash.
The clock on the register doesn’t change for a very long time and I think I’m stuck in a time warp but realize it’s the total from the most recent sale. I switch it back to clock mode and discover I really a
m stuck in a time warp so I punch a zero and stare at that instead.
All year I wondered what would be left if you took the university out of this town, what was beneath the constant hum of classes and books and ideas, of introductions made by major first and name second, and now I know that what’s left behind is me but I don’t know what to do with that answer.
6
The mumbly one looks familiar, graying hair snarled and unwashed around his face like an ugly fur-collared hood. A flannel shirt cut for an elephant drapes his body and he hunches like he wants to vanish inside it.
The sunshine of a woman who came in with him asks, “What kind of cigarettes do you want, Jay?” The guy’s head lolls around and his eyes roll across the ceiling and back and forth in their sockets under the bill of a stained green meshcap advertising tractors or feed or car batteries and I realize she said “J,” not “Jay,” and this is the guy from Dinosaur Jr. who it turns out is as creepy in person as he sounds on his albums. But he has the good sense and the money to smoke a name-brand cigarette. And maybe he’s a creepy, mumbly guy in a convenience store at two in the morning but he’s not the guy who works there and only one of us knows who the other one is without reading it off his name tag. Which he doesn’t even bother to do.
7
When I come in at midnight I replace Carl, who works second shift and looks like that black astronomer I see on TV some nights while I’m eating breakfast/dinner and getting ready for work. The one who does the short segments between other shows, badly shot with horrible graphics and bad sound effects and a blurry white rim around his whole body where he stands out against the stellar background on a green screen. I’ve never seen anyone on TV or in person who enjoys his job as much as that astronomer does and he’s more amazing to me than any comet.
Carl is already balling up his apron by the time I ring through the door. The measuring tape tells me I’m the same size I was that morning when I went home.
I ask him how long he’s worked in the store and he says, “Ten years. It’s good. I don’t have to think much, you know?” Then he punches out, steps around the counter so I can sell him cigarettes and a scratch ticket—we aren’t allowed to ring ourselves up—and heads for his ancient, cranberry-colored Pontiac in the parking lot, turning its engine over and over for a long time before it finally catches and rattles away.
8
“How much are cigarettes?”
“What kind?”
“Does it make a difference?” Pete asks.
“Name brands are $2.26, generics are… what, $1.75?”
“Gimme a pack of Camels.” He leans across the counter and reaches past me into the cigarette rack overhead. His body smells like you’d expect from the body of a man who sleeps in the woods and drinks too much and smokes a lot of pot and doesn’t take many showers, and I lean away as his wiry arm waves around like a blind eyestalk hunting down Camels by sight.
“You gonna pay for them tonight?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Can I borrow $2.26?”
“It’s not borrowing if you don’t pay it back.”
“What do you care?”
“It comes out of my paycheck, Pete!”
“So shut up and give me your paycheck.”
“Here’s your Camels,” I sigh, sliding the pack across the glass. “You need matches?”
“No!” he says, indignant. “I have my own matches!”
9
A Twizzler-thin girl with straw growing on her head and not quite filling the tube-top she holds up with one hand bobs on her toes beside the cardboard page-a-day calendar announcing the date eighteen years ago by which potential smokers must have been born and says, “Guess what? Today is my birthday!”
“Happy birthday. How old are you?”
“Seventeen. Can I have a pack of Marlboros?”
When I say no, she glares at me through the transparent plastic cylinder half-emptied of caramel Cowtales. I want to tell her I get it, that those are just numbers and not who she is. Something she was stuck with and nothing she asked for herself. I want to tell her all that but I don’t because the fines I would pay if I got caught are just numbers, too, but much bigger ones than her age.
10
I forget I have a body sometimes after standing so long in the same spot at the counter, not moving my feet or my legs, only turning a bit to one side or the other to grab cigarettes or condoms or punch numbers into the lotto machine. The counter space is designed for that, for not moving and for speed and convenience, but sometimes I have to step out from behind it, step down off the platform that makes me taller than any customers except the basketball player who comes in sometimes (I recognize him from the university paper), and stand next to the measuring tape to make sure I exist.
And in the morning, at the end of my shift, there’s always an ache in my back and a crick in my neck from standing so long and looking down on strangers from at an unnatural angle. If I let my eyes fall where they want to, the height of the riser makes me stare at everyone’s chest, so most nights I make an effort at eye contact instead and a few hours of that really hurts. Most of the customers just stare at my apron, and why not, because they aren’t the ones getting paid for the pain in their neck.
11
When you make a piñata you blow up a balloon and layer it with wet strips of paste-soaked paper until it takes shape and stiffens and then you pop the balloon. If you wrapped only one coat of paper around a pear-shaped balloon and popped the balloon while the paper was still wet so the whole bubble jiggled and shook in the slightest of winds and then you turned it into a person, you’d end up with the guy who comes in every night after the bars close to buy cigarettes. His T-shirt is too short to reach his belt and his pants droop too low to meet it halfway, and his eyes are so bloodshot I’m always afraid they’ll start bleeding.
“Dude. Dude,” Mr. Mâché mumbles, gripping the edge of the counter in front of him as I pull down a pack of Marlboro Reds. “Dude, every night I come in here, and… and, like, every night I come in here and I’m like so fucked up and you sell me my cigarettes and you’re like working and you help me out and like, dude, I feel bad for you ‘cause you’re so cool to me and you have to work and I wish you could be fucked up, too.”
“Well… thanks. That’s actually the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all summer.”
“Dude, we should totally party some time.”
12
When there’s too much cash in the register I take out small stacks and push them down into the safe, through a slot in the counter. I lay the bills across the slot and shove them in with a thin plastic wedge, like the scrapers I used in another job I once had to scour grills caked with butter and grease. The idea is if someone robbed me, they’d only get what was left in the drawer and not clean the store out, but there’s no point because the safe is never actually locked and I would tell a robber that right away if he asked. And the cameras on the ceiling are fakes—they aren’t wired to anything. Only the measuring tape on the doorway is real.
Every time I push money into the safe I think of a poem I read about a leaky vessel, something I wrote about on an exam I crammed for all night, and it’s fitting, I guess, that I can’t remember it now. Any more than the customers I talk to in here are likely to recall what we talked about later. They’ll remember a blue apron with a glimmer of gold pinned upon it, and someone to blame when their lottery tickets are worthless.
13
The Man in the Mayonnaise Stained Shirt leans over the counter, his gut pressing against the glass edge and pushing the cardboard rack of fake Zippo lighters emblazoned with alien heads and pot leaves so it backs up against the register and totters, ready to fall. He watches me punch his chosen numbers into the lotto computer to make sure I get them all right and don’t keep him from collecting the fortune that surely is his.
“D’you know what I read in the paper this morning?” he asks as I hand over his seve
nteen dollars of failure. “It said you have the second most dangerous job in America, right after taxi cab drivers. Better be careful!” Mayo Shirt laughs as he wobbles through the door. He turns, leans his head against the measuring strip, and adds, “You’d better see how tall I am in case I come back to rob you!”
14
“Did you remember to mop the floor last night?” Gloria asks as I count the cash in the register. She‘s sliding a revolving wire rack of terrible sunglasses back and forth in front of the window, in search of maximum visibility.
“Of course,” I lie.
“Must have been a lot of people with muddy shoes in this morning.” She sniffs the air in front of the counter as she walks by. “Has someone been smoking in here?”
“The morning coffee guys bring the smell in. You know how it is.”
“Right.” She eyes me across the counter and I try not to stare at the swath of visible scalp and white roots running through her black hair like a skunk crawled on her head in the night and she hasn’t noticed yet.
“You’re looking a bit scruffy there,” she tells me before I leave. “Keep that beard neat if you’re going to have it.”
15
Around three o’clock in the morning Pete stumbles down the sidewalk in front of the store. Some guys sit on the hood of their car behind him, smoking and drinking cans of Budweiser. One of them says something to Pete, I can’t hear what through the glass, and slow as clockwork running down he bends, reaches into his sock, draws a Buck knife and pulls it open with so much effort he stops paying attention to staying upright and almost falls over. He waves the knife at the kids as they slide off the car and back away, then catches his foot on the sidewalk or on a mote of thin air and crashes face-first into the hedges, arms spread in a cross and the rusty blade standing up from his hand like an antenna awaiting further instructions from the home planet.