In Mike We Trust

by P. E. Ryan

“He was one of the head honchos?” Mike asked.

  “He was a general,” Garth said. “Kind of stubborn. I think I read that somewhere, or saw it in a documentary.”

  They carried on, and soon came to the traffic circle surrounding the massive monument to Robert E. Lee.

  “The guy from the news!” Mike said, leaning sideways to get a look at the statue.

  “Yep. Facing south, because if he were facing north, the earth would crack in half or something.”

  “What a strange place this must have been—maybe still is,” Mike said. “I mean, look at him. How high up he is on that marble base. The people who erected that must have revered him like some kind of god.”

  “God of the racists,” Lisa offered.

  Mike grinned and glanced at Garth.

  “We sort of get the Civil War stuff shoved down our throats around here,” Garth told him.

  “That makes sense, given the location.”

  “Yeah, but the whole what-it-stands-for thing is just kind of…depressing.”

  “It’s sickening, is what it is,” Lisa said. “I mean, what are they celebrating, anyway? Southern pride? Pride in what? Losing the fight to keep slavery alive?”

  “Hindsight is not always twenty-twenty,” Mike said. “Sometimes people look back at a situation, and they still don’t get it.”

  “Not only that; they stage reenactments of what few battles they won!” Lisa said. “I mean, how pathetic.”

  “Who’s that?” Mike asked, pointing up ahead.

  “Jefferson Davis,” Garth said. Davis—a somewhat gaunt, unbearded man—stood atop a column, flanked by a semicircle of other, taller columns.

  “Why doesn’t he get a horse?”

  “Because he was the president. He wasn’t in battle.”

  “Ah,” Mike said. “Like most politicians. They should have cast him in bronze behind his desk, with a cup of tea in his hand.”

  They crossed the Boulevard and rounded the monument to Stonewall Jackson.

  “How come all the horses are in different positions?” Mike asked.

  “It means how they died—in battle, or afterward, or whatever.”

  “It means he was a big racist pig who killed a lot of people,” Lisa groaned.

  “You should work for the bureau of tourism,” Mike said, grinning at her in the rearview mirror. “You could give the anti-Richmond tour.”

  “Any day,” she said. “I mean, it’s not the worst place in the world, but this Civil War stuff is just morose.”

  “Well, what else is there to look at?” Garth asked her. “Want to drive out onto the interstate and gawk at the Philip Morris plant?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll suffer my ancestors’ past with utter humility, like any other intelligent twenty-first-century person.”

  “Jackson had to have his arm sawed off in a tent hospital,” Garth said, turning back to his uncle. “When I was in the eighth grade, we took a field trip to the Museum of the Confederacy, and they have his uniform in a glass case—and the saw they used to cut off his arm!”

  “Do they have the arm?” Mike asked.

  Lisa cracked up. “That would be perfect.”

  “And who’s that bald guy with the world on his back? Don’t tell me it’s Atlas.”

  “He’s some mapmaker. And that”—Garth pointed up ahead—“is the monument to Arthur Ashe.”

  “He fought in the Civil War?” Mike asked.

  “Very funny. There was this really huge stink about whether or not they should put him on Monument Avenue or tuck him away in some tennis court.”

  “Where he wasn’t even allowed to play because of his color before he became famous,” Lisa added.

  “Well, the South in general isn’t known for its progressive thinking,” Mike said.

  He turned a block past the Ashe monument and headed back toward the Fan District on Patterson. The houses were nice and well kept, for the most part. In one window, a Confederate flag hung as a curtain.

  “See?” Garth said, pointing. “How crazy is that? And I still see bumper stickers that say things like ‘Dern tootin’ I’m a Rebel.’ What’s ‘dern tootin,’ anyway? It’s not even English.”

  “It must be a special language called Southern,” Mike said. “Very popular with the boondocks residents of Richmond, apparently.”

  “Richmond isn’t the boondocks,” Lisa said. “It’s a city.”

  “I guess by boondock, I meant ‘backward.’”

  “Some people are backward,” Lisa clarified. “That’s why it’s so depressing to be smart and live here.”

  “Some people, of course.” Mike shrugged. “But you made the point yourself: it’s the South. I mean, I’ve been all over the country, and people from the South are a particular…breed.”

  “And what breed are you?”

  Garth could detect a slight agitation in her voice. Her combative side was always ready to surface, in any situation. Maybe Mike had taken his South bashing too far—even though she was the one who’d started it.

  “Midwestian,” Mike said. “And I don’t have a lot of good things to say about that breed, either.”

  They were turning onto Robinson Street now, on their way back to Lisa’s house.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly, leaning forward with her camera in her hand. “It’s Mudpie! Can you slow down so I can get a shot of her, before she sees us?”

  “Who’s Mudpie?” Mike asked.

  “An ex-drag queen who does nothing now but sit around on benches staring at people. Slow way down! But don’t stop. I want to get a candid shot.”

  Garth was uncertain as to how Mudpie had gotten her name (and was pretty sure he didn’t want to know) and had never spoken to her, but she always seemed to be around. Or was she a he now? Drag queens, he knew from movies, liked being referred to by feminine pronouns. But did a drag queen who stopped doing drag go back to using the masculine pronoun? He had so much to learn. Mudpie was usually dressed in shorts and a dirty wifebeater, had an enormous belly, a filthy and apparently permanent plaster cast on one foot, and hair that sprang out from her head in arcing, twisted strands. Her face was set in a permanent scowl and she sneered at every passing car. He couldn’t picture her back in her “show biz” days: on a stage, working to please an audience.

  Mike slowed down and Garth bent into the dashboard so that he could fold his bucket seat forward. Lisa leaned into the opening and took one, two, three shots of the oblivious subject. Then Mudpie turned and caught sight of the Camaro—and the camera. A string of profanity spilled out of her mouth, most of it too raspy to be understood—and she raised her middle finger. Lisa took one last picture as Mike hit the gas.

  “Fantastic!” she said. “Especially that last one.”

  “You can title that one ‘Mayor of Freakville,’” Mike said, laughing.

  Garth laughed, too, though Lisa fell silent in the backseat.

  Mike dropped them both off back at Lisa’s house. In her room, they put on the Kazooster CD and downloaded the pictures from her camera onto her laptop.

  “I might shop in a little color,” Lisa said, studying one of the images of Mudpie.

  Garth flipped idly through a folder of printed photos. “Try brown. Wasn’t Mike’s reaction hilarious? He couldn’t get over the fact that someone would go by the name Mudpie. He kept saying, ‘Only in Richmond!’ I think ol’ Mud was his favorite part of the tour.”

  “I think he’s a little full of himself, if you want the truth,” Lisa said.

  “Mudpie?”

  “Your uncle,” she clarified. “‘Mike.’ I think he’s a little on the snobby side.”

  Garth hesitated. He knew Lisa could be judgmental; still, her comment surprised him. “What do you mean?”

  “For one thing, he cast a pretty broad net with his comments on the South.”

  “You brought it up! And besides, you totally agree with him. He didn’t really say anything that you haven’t already said to me—and to a
lot of other people.”

  She clicked on the mouse, resizing the image. “The difference is, I’m from here. So I can trash it and know that a lot of people—including you and me—live here and aren’t part of the…wave of dumbness, so to speak. He was just writing us all off as hicks.”

  “No, he wasn’t!” Garth said. “He didn’t mean it that way.”

  “‘People from the South are a particular breed’? ‘Mayor of Freakville’?”

  “He was just trying to be funny. Listen—” He closed the folder and searched his brain for something that would make her like his uncle. “I told him. About me. Today. And he was fine with it. I mean, he was totally fine with it. So he’s open-minded, I know.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad he doesn’t have any problem with it. But I stick by what I said before. There’s something a little too slick about him. Be careful.”

  “Be careful?” What did she think, that his uncle was going to knife them in their sleep? That he was going to rob them of house and home? (Not that there was much to rob.) Lisa, he decided, only had a sliver of the picture.

  4

  Peterson’s Department Store (“Fine Products and Good Eatin’ Since 1947!”) sat on Broad Street and was probably half the size of a football field, but it felt a mile wide when Garth worked it. During any given four-hour shift, he had to sweep every aisle with a rickety push broom, mop the old terrazzo floor, and vacuum the rectangle of carpet that demarcated the women’s clothing section. He had to restock the shelves, keep the stockroom organized, scrub down the men’s and ladies’ rooms—often while trying not to gag. Worst of all, he had to occasionally clean out what Mr. Peterson called the “trash pocket.”

  There were always surprises. The plethora of rats and mice that lived in the stockroom (when he’d walked through the double doors his first day on the job, he’d heard a scurrying beside him and had turned around in time to see a long, pink tail as thick as a finger curling out of sight behind a box). The pair of panties he’d found on the floor of the kitchen supply aisle (not a brand of panties the store carried). The graffiti in the bathrooms (more prominent in the ladies’ room than in the men’s, though less dirty). And the bizarre and truly disgusting list of items he’d had to dig out of the toilets by means of a coat hanger and rubber gloves: a plastic breath mint box, a set of keys, a Slinky (!), and, once, a cell phone that had startled the hell out of him by ringing as soon as he had it in his gloved hand (he hadn’t answered it).

  The graffiti in the men’s room was, for the most part, stupid and occasionally insulting (as was Mr. Peterson’s blanket order to “scrub those faggot words off the wall”). HERE I SIT ON THE POOPER, GIVING BIRTH TO A STATE TROOPER was one of the more recent additions, along with G.A.Y. = GOT AIDS YET? One long paragraph was written in tiny letters and described very specifically what the “author” wanted to do with another guy, and then named in graphic detail what he’d already done with guys in various public restrooms around town. IF YOU’RE INTERESTED, CALL ME, the paragraph concluded, followed by a phone number. Garth assumed that the person who could write such a thing would be gross, maybe even dangerous. He couldn’t imagine having sex with a total stranger and certainly not in a restroom, but the thought that there were guys out there actually doing what he regularly fantasized about made him feel more isolated and hopelessly virginal than ever. People dropped dead every day, didn’t they? Heart attacks, brain aneurysms, car crashes. What were the chances that he might die a virgin? Underneath CALL ME and the phone number, he’d written in pencil I WISH, and then hurriedly scrubbed all of it away.

  He had nothing to compare his job at Peterson’s to, since he’d never worked before, but it was hard to imagine more demeaning employment. Mr. Peterson, who’d been nursing a cold since the day he was born and yet still managed to talk through his nose, treated Garth like an idiot. He wouldn’t even use his first name, would call him only “Rudd,” stretching the one syllable out so that it might have emanated from a squeezed lamb.

  “Rhhuudd, more bags on register two, pronto.”

  “Rhhuudd, mop up that perfume spill on aisle seven.”

  “Rhhuudd, there’s a situation in the popcorn machine.”

  The “popcorn machine” was nothing more than a wheeled, plastic case with a heat lamp inside: a holder for the massive bags of stale, prepopped popcorn the store ordered in bulk. A “situation” usually meant a mouse.

  Peterssuuun, Garth dreamed of saying one day, there’s a pound of dandruff on your shoulders and you smell like blue cheese and lighter fluid.

  The old man had to be close to seventy. Mr. Peterson’s dad had opened the store when he’d been a teenager and then left it to him when he died. The store was the only place Mr. Peterson, like Garth, had ever worked. He was skinny and slope-shouldered, wore black-framed glasses repaired (probably years ago) with a safety pin at one of the temples, and suffered back pain that prevented him from standing completely upright. He moved about the store like a worn-out prison guard, jangling his giant key ring and eyeballing each and every one of his employees with equal mistrust.

  That Tuesday, as soon as he saw Garth come in, he called from across the stationery aisle, “Rhhuudd, trash pocket.”

  Kill me, Garth thought. “I just did it two weeks ago.”

  “And if you do a decent job this time, it might not need it two weeks from now,” the old man muttered.

  I’d rather die a virgin than wade into that hellhole today, he thought. But he knew he had no choice—not if he wanted to keep his job.

  The “trash pocket” was a sealed-off corner of the stockroom accessible by a regular door on the inside and a metal garage door on the outside. The garage door opened onto an alley where, in theory, and on some unspecified biweekly schedule that Garth could never keep track of, a garbage truck would appear, unlock and roll up the door, and empty the dozen or so trash cans into its bowels. The problem was that Mr. Peterson’s employees—underpaid and overworked—didn’t care about actually getting the trash into the trash cans; they simply opened the inner door and let the bags fly, including trash bags from the cafeteria that contained half-eaten food, spoiled food, rotten food. Add to that a few random holes punched into the walls over the years and a spigot near the floor in one corner that constantly dripped over a drain long-ago clogged, and you had a rodent’s paradise. The bags were tossed from the doorway, missed their mark, burst open. The garbagemen refused to take the trash away unless someone gathered it into the cans. That someone, armed with a shovel and yet another pair of rubber gloves, was Garth.

  As with the hedges on his chore list, he performed all of his other duties and saved the trash pocket for last. There was always the faint hope that some emergency might come up that would prevent him from getting to the pocket before his shift was over (say, a fire that would burn the store to the ground). Unfortunately, that day, as slowly as he allowed himself to move without being obvious about it, he was still left with an hour on the clock; the old man made sure of it by telling him the bathrooms didn’t require cleaning, and the vast floor needed to be swept but not mopped.

  Groaning, Garth stormed into the back of the store, heard the regular chorus of scurrying claws (the creatures in the stockroom had long since stopped bothering him—at least they were on their way to somewhere else when he passed, which was more than could be said for the tenants of the pocket)—and gathered up the shovel and gloves. Having learned from experience, he tucked his T-shirt into his jeans and tucked the cuffs of his jeans into his socks. Then he opened the inner door.

  The smell was horrific. And the little room, no more than five feet by seven feet, was alive: shifting, gnawing, and scraping with life—the pulse of ravenous diners. He reached a hand inside, felt along the wall, and switched on the single, bare lightbulb fixed to the ceiling. The only part of the floor not covered with trash was the corner where the spigot dripped. A pink-eyed, white-furred rat the size of an eight-week-old puppy crouche
d over the puddle, paused to sniff the air, then resumed drinking. In a nearby, torn-open bag of sour hamburger buns, a colony of gray mice climbed over one another, into and out of the tunnels they’d made. Something hidden under the refuse near the garage door bit or scratched something else; the something else squealed in anger—or pain.

  Garth took a deep breath and set to work.

  The task took nearly all of his remaining hour. The garbage was wet and the shredded plastic bags made the shoveling difficult. More difficult still were his efforts not to kill any of the mice or rats. (As much as they disgusted him, he didn’t relish the idea of accidentally chopping one in half with the shovel blade.) The smaller ones crawled up his socks and latched onto his jeans until he swatted them away. The larger ones did their best to ignore him. Eventually, they all got the message, and those that weren’t happily scooped into the trash cans with the rotting food moseyed back to the various holes in the walls and disappeared.

  He had just finished scrubbing his hands in the stockroom’s utility sink when he heard a scream from somewhere in the store. This was followed shortly by “Rhhuudd, aisle ten!”

  He untucked his jeans from his socks and pushed through the double, swinging doors. An elderly woman was standing in aisle ten, her feet close together and her purse clutched under one arm. She was staring down, and when Garth rounded the corner, he saw Mr. Peterson crouching over the floor in front of her with a paper bag in one hand, a whisk broom in the other. “I don’t know how this happened,” he was saying. “It’s the first one I’ve ever seen in this store, and I’ve worked here since I was a boy. It must have come in from outside.”

  “It’s disgusting,” the woman said.

  “You’re absolutely right. And I apologize.”

  He closed up the bag as she walked away. When he saw Garth, he frowned, handed him the bag, and said, “Take that into the stockroom and step on it, then throw it in the trash.” Jangling his key ring, he started off after the woman hollering something about extra coupons.

  Garth unrolled the top of the bag and looked into it. A small, gray mouse stared back up at him, its front feet testing the paper walls for traction and finding none.