by Adam Johnson
There is a freedom that comes with doom, and lately we use our large lot to play Frisbee in the evening or football in the near-dark, with Ruthie always outrunning one of us for the long bomb. Some nights the Filipinos who own the water store drift out under the awnings to watch us. They wipe their brows with apron ends and seem to wonder what kind of place this America is.
Honestly, I’ve lost most of my spirit in the fight against the Emporium. When we opened, we were cutting edge, we were thinking franchise. Our customers were middle class, people like us; they still wanted to believe but understood that, hey, once in a while you needed a little insurance. Their lives were normal, but nobody went out on New Years without a vest. To buy a vest ten years ago was to admit defeat, to say what’s out there isn’t just knocking at the door—it’s upstairs, using your toothbrush, saying good morning to your wife.
As the sun sinks lower, we watch the first pizza delivery boys of the evening zoom off in their compact cars, and it’s a sight that hurts to see. These are high-school kids, most of them too poor to afford or too young to appreciate the value of a vest. I mean, they’re going out there every night as is, which makes them all the more alluring to Ruth.
People used to make excuses when they came in to rent a vest—vacationing in Mexico, weekend in the city, reception at a Ramada Inn, flying Delta. Now they’re haggling over expired rent-nine-get-one-free coupons. Now they’re going to the Emporium to buy sixteen-layer Taiwanese knockoffs for three hundred bucks. The Emporium is 24-hours, something I’m philosophically against: you should see the tattoos on some of those guys coming out of there at 3:00 A.M. These days people are making the investment. They’re admitting the world’s a dangerous place.
Across the parking lot, we see Ruth pedaling toward us. She’s wearing a one-piece red Speedo, her training vest, and the Kevlar backpack. Her hair is still wet from freshmen swim practice. She meanders over, awkward on a Schwinn she is now too big for, and pedaling big, easy loops around us, announces that she’s an outcast. “Only dorks wear their vests to school,” she says. “You’re killing my scene.”
It feels good though, the open-endedness of the day, the last light on my feet, being the center of my daughter’s universe for a few minutes. Ruth pedals then coasts, pedals then coasts, the buzz of her wheel bearings filling the gaps in our afternoon, and I almost forget about the Emporium.
Later, after Jane leaves to find Ruthie and take her home for the evening, I’m sitting in the shop when Mrs. Espers comes in. She looks a little down, is holding the vest like it’s made of burlap and I know the feeling: it’s been one of those days for me too.
“How was the support group?” I ask as I fill out her receipt.
“I’ve crossed the line,” she says.
“How’s that?”
“I’m not afraid of flying anymore.”
I’m not sure what this means in terms of her group, of whether she’ll no longer be needing my services, but you know, I say, “Great, congratulations.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” she says with a certain formality.
“Wow, good, good.”
She pauses at the sight of her held-out receipt and shakes her head no. “I’m sorry, Bill, but I’ve made the decision.”
She says this and leaves, and I’m left thinking she’s decided to go to the Emporium to make the purchase. I figure some flying counselor talked her into the idea of permenant protection, but it is when I go to throw her vest atop the “in” stack, when I remove the titanium trauma plate, that I know she will never wear a vest again. The shiny titanium is lead-streaked, and as I rub my thumb in the indention some bullet has made, I can still feel her body heat on it.
I float out into the parking lot and watch her red taillights disappear into the night, and know that she’s right, she’s free, that nobody gets shot in the heart twice. I stand in a handicapped parking spot, rubbing the titanium, and I lean against the old shopping cart bin. The faint laughter of distant gunfire comes from the direction of the rail yard, and I look at the lighted windows of the few shops left in the mall, but can only see the darkened stores between them. In my hands, the bright titanium reflects the stars my fourteen-year-old already knows by heart, but I no longer have it in me to look up, to lift my head to the place of our dreams, Jane’s and mine, when we were eighteen.
I wander the mall, waiting for my wife to return, something that takes longer and longer these days. She gets a little melancholy now and then, needs a little space to herself, and I understand; these are hard times we’re living in. Leaving the shop wide open, I head for Godfather’s. But when I get there, I’m confused because I see my daughter through the window, the girl my wife said she was taking home.
Ruth is leaned up against an ancient Donkey Kong machine, talking to a delivery boy on a backward chair. She is wearing her training vest with nothing on under, you can tell, and this boy stares at the exposed plane of her stomach. She has her cheek against the side of the video game, chatting about something, while the boy subtly marvels at how the fine hairs around her navel hum pink in the neon beer light, and I am roaring through the door. I walk right up to my daughter and thump her trauma plate to hear the squish of a cigarette pack and the crack of a CD case. Out of the pocket that should cover her heart forever, I pull Aerosmith and menthols.
I grab her by the wrist. “Where’s your protection?”
“Jesus, Dad,” she says and starts to dig in the backpack at her feet.
The pizza boy looks like he’s about to pipe in, and I wheel on him, “Your parents don’t love you.”
“Dad, nobody wears their vests to school. I’m a total outcast.”
This is my daughter. This is the age she is at.
Jane eventually returns, finds me watching Cool Hand Luke in the dark store, and neither of us says anything. She puts her hands on the counter when she comes in and I ask no questions about where she’s been. I place my hands on hers, stroke the backs of her fingers, and then turn out the lights, closing up shop a little early.
Lately we have taken to cruising late at night under the guise of R&D. We’ll pull the tarp off the ’72 Monte Carlo her mom left us, the car Jane used to run wild in. It has the optional swivel passenger seat, black leather, that can turn 180 degrees. We grab the foam cooler and Jane swivels the seat all the way around so her feet are on the backseat and her head reclines to the dash, so she can watch me drive her wherever she wants to go. We’ll glide by the boarded-up Ice Plant where we once drank on summer nights, feet dangling off the loading ramps. We prowl past by the Roadhouse with our lights off and count the Ninja motorcycles lined up out front. The cemetery these days is fenced and locked and a security guard cruises the old stadium in a golf cart, but we circle nonetheless.
Midnight finds us rolling through the waves of the old Double Drive In, the gravel crunching under our tires, the Monte Carlo’s trunk bottoming out like it used to, and all the broken glass, beer caps, and bullet casings now sparkle like stars.
We park and sit on the warm, ticking car hood and look off at the Emporium across the street. We have his-and-hers binoculars, 7X40s from her father on our tenth anniversary, and we sit here, side by side in the dark, as we check out their customers. We train our lenses at the bright displays. Jane rolls her focus in and out.
“Is that Fred Sayles?” she asks. “By the baby armor.”
I focus in on him fondling the competition’s goods. “That son of a bitch.”
“Remember the night he streaked through the second feature?”
“We all turned on our headlights. The Day the Earth Stood Still, right?”
“Plan Nine From Outer Space,” she says. “Remember window speakers?”
“Remember high-point beer.”
“Nash seats.”
“Trunkloads.”
“Keys left in the ignition.”
“Mars Invades.”
We both look up.
II
It is a moment near
the end of things, a point at which, seated in a lawn chair amid the vast emptiness of a Kmart parking lot, Jane is forced to reflect. Her husband is giving driving lessons to her daughter, who loops circles around Jane in the old Caprice they are now reduced to driving. The circles are big and slow, impending as Jane’s thoughts, which come to focus on the notion that Ruthie’s sixteen, and Bill should have taught her this a year ago.
The Caprice stops, backs up, parallel parks between a pair of worn yellow lines somehow chosen from the thousands in front of the closed-down discounter. It’s just like Bill, she thinks, to worry about lines when there’s not another car for miles. Jane lifts her hand and the sun disappears. In this brief shade she notices the moon, too, is up there.
Check your mirrors, she can hear Bill say, even from here, as he trains her daughter to always, always be on the lookout. But Jane knows Ruthie’s come to be on intimate terms with her blind spot. It’s one of the few things they share these days.
Behind her their small rental store is empty. These days, the final ones, he has a VCR running all day in the shop. Over her shoulder she can hear the melancholic coo of Jailhouse Rock—Bill’s choice today—and it feels like it is their whole history looming behind them: the mom-and-pop store, those liberal-arts dreams, their own let’s put on a barn dance notion of being their own bosses, here, in a strip mall. She has the cordless phone with her, but it doesn’t ring, has not in we don’t talk about how long, and Jane reclines some in the heat, points her feet toward the horizon.
Look out, Bill yells, you just hit a Volvo, and slaps the dash for effect, leaving Ruthie momentarily breathless: she swivels her head to see the chrome and glass she must have missed, but there is only forty acres of empty parking.
The sun swoops low, Ruthie pedals off to junior-varsity swim practice, and no, Jane says, not The Treasure of Sierra Madre again. On the counter before them are two dozen bulletproof vests frayed to the point that they wouldn’t stop slingshots and sixty or seventy videos Bill got cheap when the Video-Utopia store closed three stores down. And here’s where we are, Jane thinks, between a Chapter 11 pizza joint and a store that has made the switch from water to spirits. This is the place we are at, around the corner from the drive-in theater where she and Bill spent their youth, a place she won’t even look at because these days, even worse than hope, nostalgia is her enemy.
Bill shrugs his shoulders, lights a menthol, and pops in Viva Las Vegas, as if Elvis can soothe her anymore, as if Elvis wasn’t 187,000 miles away.
Jane begins to toy with the register, hitting no sale, no sale, a sound she knows can wound him. But Bill’s busy doing “R&D,” as he calls it. First he thought bulletproof teen wear would save the business, and he made Ruthie wear a “training” vest to school for two years to drum up business. Now she won’t take the vest off for her life.
His ongoing obsession is a bulletproof baby carrier, something he’s reworked twenty times, and if there’s anything that offends Jane more than the grandeur of his optimism, it’s the notion of wanting to make infants bulletproof, of fusing the two ideas into the same breath. The whole idea is fatally flawed, she knows as she teases the few remaining twenties in the register. It’s not what’s out there you need to look out for, but what’s closer, what’s making your cereal crackle, what’s tinkering in the garage, or crashing all around like unseen cars.
Bill tugs the straps of his Kevlar carrier, trying to simulate every force that could come between a mother and child. Then he begins stuffing the carrier with videotapes—Clint Eastwood, Annette Funicello, Benji—until, he seems to decide, the carrier takes on the mass and weight of a small person, and he is off on tonight’s R&D, running laps around the abandoned drive-in to gauge the carrier’s give and take, its ability to cradle a baby at full speed.
Now that he is gone, Jane unfastens the chest-crushing vest, and it smolders off her with all that body heat. She pinches the sticky shirt from her side, runs her hand underneath, over creases in the skin she knows are red. She wakes up some nights, thinking the oven has been left on. She can feel the coils glowing downstairs, but she won’t go check, she won’t give it that. Now she pulls the twenties, tens, and fives from the till, for safety’s sake, she thinks, so she can feel the lightweight cash in her pocket.
Wandering, she strolls along the grit-worn sidewalk, stares at stars through holes in the Kmart awning. This way it all looks black up there, the occasional star the rarity. There are bullet holes in the masonry between her and the old Godfather’s, and she stops to twist her pinkie in the lead-traced pocks. Mr. Ortiz, the Filipino who owns the liquor store, has started keeping a gun in his register, she’s sure. She hasn’t seen it, but there’s a weight in the cash drawer that nearly pulls the register off the counter when he makes a sale.
There was a day when she was scared of guns, when the vest store seemed like the right idea, a public service even. Jesus, they had really said that to each other. Though she has never touched a gun, she’s confident now she could heft one pretty handily, squeeze off a few rounds, rest it warm against her cheek and smell the breech.
Where the masonry meets glass, she thinks she gets a glimpse of him reflected out there, an aberration in the dark lot. Behind her, she’s sure it’s his arms glinting, racing nearly invisible in a sheen of black Kevlar. But she does not turn to be sure.
At the pizza joint, she sees through the window her daughter stretched across the empty bartop, drafting two beers into Styrofoam cups. Ruthie’s hair is still wet from JV swim, and she wears loose-hanging jeans over her red Speedo. Now she’s got her trauma plate pulled out and is using it as a lipstick mirror, drinking between applications. This is something Jane has never before seen, Ruthie so loose with her trauma plate, and this makes Jane stop outside and stare.
There is a boy, one of those big Ortiz kids it looks like, and he and Ruthie are drinking hard and fast together. Jane looks at them for some time through the soap paint on the window, an interstellar pizza scene. Ruthie laughs, they drink, something is said to her, and she punches him hard. He thumps her back, there, in the chest, and then she’s holding him again, cupping his chin in the open throat of her palms, the Vulcan oven glowing behind them. She holds him, they dance three slow steps, he spins her. They drink, they laugh, they box each other’s ears, they drink again, laughing till fine mists of beer shoot pink from their mouths in the neon light.
This is a careless spirit Jane has forgotten. As she sees them whisper, she remembers a time before Bill, and tries to read her daughter’s lips. Ruthie rubs her forehead against the jut of this boy’s cheekbone, whispering, and Jane almost thinks she can make it out—let’s make a break for Texas, her daughter might be saying, and I want my Monte Carlo back, Jane thinks. She imagines a car she will never see again, enters it under maroon T-tops, feels the rocking slosh of dual fuel tanks, smells the leather, hears the spark plugs crackle to life, and swivels in custom seats to see it all disappear behind her.
Later, after she has dropped Ruthie off at home, Jane steers the Caprice the long way back to the shop, where she will wait out the last hour with Bill before closing. He will want to make love tonight, she knows—Westerns always do that to him, especially The Treasure of Sierra Madre—and that’s okay with her. But there’s one stop she needs to make.
She slowly eases past the Body Armor Emporium, and just getting caught in its gallery lights is enough to draw her in. She’s been here before, enough times it would kill Bill to know. Inside, the lights are of the brightest variety, the walls white, expansive, always that smell like aspirin coming off the rows and rows of black nylon vests. Jane could care less about every vest in the world, but she runs her fingers down whole groves of them because unlike her husband, she feels safe in the arms of the enemy.
There is a tall man, older, with close-cropped gray hair and no-fooling shoulders he seems almost embarrassed of—a by-product of the joy of exertion—and he beckons her into the fitting mirrors where she sees herself in sat
ellite view, from three different angles. For a moment, there are no blind spots and she is at ease. This man takes her measurements quietly, as he has done many times before—humming and storing numbers in his head—the little green tape zipping under his thumbnail as he circles the wings of her pelvis and cliff dives down to her pant cuffs. He is calm, confident, placing his hand warm on her sternum to demonstrate where the trama plate will be. She closes her eyes, remembering a time when she still believed, feels his fingers measuring over, under the cups of her breasts—Jane inhaling—for the purchase she will never make.
III
Let’s say you’re seventeen. Your mom checked out a while ago. Some nights she just disappears, the Caprice peeling out in front of the family rental store, and maybe you’ll see her near morning, standing out there in the parking lot, buzzed, taking potshots at the giant drive-in screens two miles away.
Your old man’s a little whacked-out too. Let’s say you’re crashed out with Hector, both of you sleeping in the Home Improvement section of Kmart, his hand over the nylon vest he again tried to remove tonight, and even though you quit the team, you’re dreaming you’re swimming the butterfly. Stroke stroke, dig dig, Mr. Halverson is yelling in the dream but you can go no faster. Hector is swimming under you, upside-down, telling you use your back, your chest, put your shoulders into it, but it is useless because these are the parts of you that are always, always off limits.
So you’re sleeping, 3:00 A.M. say, when your dad rents a vest to some punk who uses it to rob the Filipino drug store two doors down, and after, Mr. Ortiz, Hector’s dad, stands waving his Colt .45 and saying he’s going to put a hole in your old man big as a mantel clock. And there is your father, facing him in a vast black parking lot, wearing an Israeli alz-hesjhad forty-eight-layer combat field vest and he’s shouting come on, come on and get some. You watch this scene with Hector from the bankrupt pizza place, both of you curious if his dad will shoot your dad, and Hector tells you he’s heard there’s a smell when the hot bullet melts the nylon on its way toward Kevlar. Like a cross between Tanqueray gin and burning hair, he says, a green-black gum. You remember that Canis Major was wheeling overhead that night.