Fresh Kills

by Bill Loehfelm

  “So I’ll meet you at the food court?” she said.

  I couldn’t imagine I’d have much of an appetite, but I knew Julia was afraid she’d find me still pinned to that wall in two hours. “I guess. I’ll stay with you if you want,” I said. “You know, for the quality time. I’ll behave.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “Besides, I couldn’t relax with you pacing outside the store.” She kissed my cheek. “Go hide in the music store. You know, like you used to.”

  Julia squeezed my hand before drifting away into the current of passersby. I watched her ride the escalator to the second floor. She looked calm, relaxed, her eyes scanning the names of the stores. Seeing her like that made me feel better. When she was gone, I pulled myself off the wall, turning left against the flow of traffic, trying to remember what end of the Mall the Sam Goody was on.

  Meandering along, people pushing past me on both sides, I remembered the music store was next to the barber where I got my hair cut. Where was that? The other end? Should I double back the other way? I stopped and looked around. I realized I’d managed to go several years without setting foot in this place. None of the stores around me looked familiar. I read the names: Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Kenneth Cole. Their lesser cousins and clones stretched as far as I could see in either direction. An enormous Saks anchored that wing of the Mall.

  I couldn’t recall having set foot in any of those stores, here or anywhere else. I’d absorbed the names, I guessed, from ads and other people’s clothes, other people’s lives; I didn’t live in a cave. But nothing around me interested me. I didn’t wear those clothes, or walk around with those logos splashed across my chest. I realized I’d stopped in front of a Verizon Wireless store. I peered through my reflection in the store windows into the display.

  I had no use for those silver gadgets behind the glass, couldn’t even name them, never mind use them. I could barely operate the remote for my stereo, really still hadn’t figured out the satellite TV we had at work. It was a running joke there, and I wore my dinosaur status as a badge of honor. Standing there in the Mall, I felt vaguely proud of my ignorance of fashion and technology, and a lot like I’d been dropped off in the middle of Beijing.

  Several members of Team Verizon, in their matching red shirts and black pants, stared at me, pained grins on their faces. One of them touched some plastic gizmo in his ear. I waved. Gizmo waved back. I felt like I was about to be shoved into a white van and whisked away for reprogramming, or like I was at the zoo, on the wrong side of the glass in the reptile house. I thought for a moment about asking one of them where a music store was, sure both the Sam Goody and the barbershop were long gone. But I couldn’t bring myself to walk into the store. Those guys gave me the creeps.

  I got moving again, took my time, watched the girls go by. Once you got out of Sears, it wasn’t just middle-aged women with kids anymore. I ducked outside for a cigarette. A gaggle of college-aged girls clicked by in high heels and short skirts, headed for their cars, shopping bags brushing their bare knees. The skin, sunshine, and nicotine made me feel better. I decided against checking the map by the doors when I went back inside. I was having an adventure, why ruin it? There had to be a Virgin or a Tower in here somewhere. Maybe there was still a bookstore. I’d find something to kill the time eventually. I was in no hurry, I thought, pulling the door open and stepping back into the AC. I laughed to myself, at myself, lost and clueless at the Mall. It was hard to believe I’d once spent so much time here that I’d memorized the layout.

  Like a lot of other guys at Farrell, my first job was at the Mall. Unlike the other guys, it wasn’t at the McDonald’s. I worked at a bakery, some chain with a fake French name. Of course, the stuff we sold was all prefab, like everything else in a Mall. Everything came to us premade and frozen in big, color-coded boxes. Bagels had blue stickers, cookies had red, bread had yellow. No matter what color the stickers were, though, all the dough was always the same color: beige.

  My job on weekdays after school was hauling the boxes out of the freezer, laying the next morning’s bake on metal trays, sliding the trays into the baking racks, and rolling the racks into the cooler, where the dough would defrost by the next morning. Every Friday I’d put on a hat and gloves and organize the freezer by color. It was monkey work, but it made me money, and it kept me out of the house.

  When the summer came, I took over the baking, if you could call it that. All I did was roll the racks out of the cooler and into the oven, set the timer, and drink a pot or two of coffee. Maybe give the poor schmuck who took over for me a head start on laying out the next day’s bake. I got grief for it, for being a baker, from my friends. It wasn’t sexy, or tough, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t flipping burgers. And while they jumped from one fast-food joint, or grocery store, or gas station, to another, bored or fired or both, I held on to that same job. By the end of my tenure there, I had my own keys to the place.

  The only difficult part was the hours. To have everything ready by the time we opened at ten, I had to be in by four-thirty in the morning—five at the latest. But I got used to it. And starting so early had its perks. Hours of solitude, for one. No one else came in until nine. I liked slipping into the Mall before sunrise. It was clean and dark and quiet. No sunlight yet through the skylights, the escalators still, acres of pristine, faux-marble floors, freshly scraped of gum. There was something pure about the stillness, the silence, the half-light. I hated when the people, all noise and demands and complaints, came and ruined it.

  During the summer, I made sure my mother never knew exactly what time I got off work, so there were never too many questions about where I was. If I brought home enough cinnamon buns, she forgot to ask questions altogether. My father always worked until deep in the evening. But I always made sure Molly knew when my workday ended. So the job also bought me a lot of hours with Molly.

  The Mall was our default date. When we’d seen all the movies we wanted to see, couldn’t stand another trip to the comic book shops, the Fantastic Store at the train station by her house, Jim Hanley’s Universe at the train station by mine, there was always the Mall. I was already there. It was a short bus ride from her house. It was just a place to do what we liked best, be together.

  We wandered its confines for hours, arm in arm, me smelling like French bread, muffin batter under my fingertips, her smelling like vanilla soap and strawberry shampoo. We spent a small fortune, one quarter at a time, in the arcade, typing our initials into the middle regions of the high-score list, me making sure my name was always under hers.

  We bought each other peace-symbol pins for our knapsacks and denim jackets, bargain bin cassettes for our omnipresent Walkmen. I bought her posters for her room. She always had them up on her walls by the next time her parents were out and I came over.

  It meant something to me seeing those posters on the wall, even if they were pictures of men I knew I would never be. And it wasn’t just that Molly was sitting under them, flush in the face and half undressed, though I’m sure that didn’t hurt. I liked havingcash in my pocket and liked having earned it. I loved being with someone who made me want to be generous. And, of course, I loved Molly like crazy, like only a teenage boy can love.

  On the rare weekend days I wasn’t with Molly, I made Mall excursions with Jimmy McGrath, stealing all the same things I bought when I was with Molly. I stole things for her, though I never told her the gifts were stolen. I replaced every bandanna I bloodied three times over. I enjoyed taking on her behalf almost as much as I liked giving to her. Taking risks for her felt romantic and rebellious. Knowing I could give to her, whatever I had to do, made me feel like a man.

  I was a good thief. Fearless. Jimmy tried to keep up, but he lacked, at least in those days, my nerve and my skill. Of course, I had certain advantages over him, experience being the main one. I’d started stealing back in junior high, as soon as my sister fell in love with drawing. Paper, markers, colored pencils, charcoal—I thieved whateve
r I could get from the art classroom. I had other experience to build on, too.

  Compared to my father, what were underpaid clerks and overweight rent-a-cops gonna do to me? Living with my father, I’d learned when I was being watched, and when I wasn’t. And what was one more beating if I got caught? There was always one coming down the pipe at me anyway, I figured. But I never did get caught.

  When we weren’t stealing, Jimmy and I leaned against the wall in the black light glow of the arcade, waiting for a machine to open up or just modeling our weekend uniforms, our dress code as strict as the one we despised at school. Tight jeans. Black T-shirts advertising bands that had broken up before we were old enough to buy their albums. Denim jackets emblazoned with the logos of our more contemporary heroes: Van Halen and Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Rush. We taunted the preppies and the guidos, deriding their uniforms, their turned-up collars, or their gold chains. We were rookie tough guys in training, a pair of sheltered puppies pretending to be strays, itching for a fight we were grateful never materialized. We laughed, a lot.

  Walking around the same but different Mall fifteen years later, I realized I probably wasn’t the thief I thought I was back then. I couldn’t remember taking anything that made me worth chasing. I did wonder if I could still get away with it. Not that it mattered. I didn’t see anything worth buying, never mind stealing. I wondered whatever happened to the bakery chain with the fake French name, if it had gone out of business. A Starbucks probably replaced it. I decided I’d look for it when I went up to the second floor. I needed another cup of coffee, even if it had to be Starbucks.

  When I smelled the Bath & Body Works, I realized I’d made a complete circuit of the first floor. I slipped on my sunglasses and wandered outside for another cigarette before tackling the second floor. As I lit up, a kid, about fifteen, sixteen, big diamonds in his ears, his shorts and his T-shirt both four sizes too big, stepped up to me. He asked for, no, demanded, a cigarette. I tucked the lighter into the pack and the pack into my jacket, next to my wallet.

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  He took half a step closer to me. I closed the distance by half again, stepping into a fog of cologne. I took an exaggerated drag on my smoke, realizing I’d love nothing more than to put it out in this kid’s eye. I looked over his shoulder at his friends. Four of them plus the tough guy made five. I wished there were more of them. I got a sour taste in my mouth. My palms itched. I could do this. I could wipe the fucking floor with these guys. I needed it. I thought of my arcade days. I wasn’t a puppy anymore. I held up my lit cigarette in front of his face.

  “You want a cigarette,” I said, “take this one.”

  I switched it to my left hand and put it back in my mouth. I hoped he’d try. I realized that I’d wanted to pound the shit out of someone since Purvis had delivered his news. I hadn’t been in a good fight for years. Something told me that if I did this, I could sleep through the night. All I wanted was a reason to swing first.

  “Fuck you, motherfucker,” the kid said.

  “Creative,” I said. But not enough. I wanted to fucking snap, to come unhinged, not just swing for the hell of it.

  I watched his eyes as he breathed stale French fries into my face. I wondered if he was high, but his eyes were clear, intense. I was disappointed. Hopped up on something, he’d take that much longer to put down. He had the beginnings of a mustache on his lip. In another six months he could start shaving. He wore braces. They’d tear his mouth and my knuckles apart if we started swinging.

  I took another drag and let the smoke float out of my mouth and into his face. One of his eyes twitched and I relaxed my shoulders, set my weight forward on my toes.

  One of his friends walked up behind him, his eyes on me, and put a hand on his shoulder. Tough Guy snapped around. “Wha’?”

  “Cab’s here, dawg.”

  Tough Guy backed away, his arms loose at his sides, easing back into the group. Together, they drifted toward the cab, watching me. At least two were afraid. The cabbie leaned on his horn.

  “You a lucky motherfucker,” Tough Guy finally said from the curb.

  He lifted his T-shirt, just enough for me to see the handle of the gun tucked in his shorts. My blood went hot, rushed to my heart. Too late. I was pissed, furious he hadn’t done that thirty seconds ago.

  They all stared at me through the back window as the cab drove away, two of them flipping me the bird. I watched the cab until it disappeared into the Richmond Avenue traffic.

  Waiting for the adrenaline to recede, I watched the gulls circle the Dump across the street. I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow that little prick had managed to steal something from me. My hands shook. Sweat trickled down my rib cage.

  I needed to figure out how much longer I had before I met Julia, but I couldn’t get my head straight. It’d upset her to see me all jacked up. If I didn’t take some time, some air, to calm down, she’d read it right off my face. I decided to circle the Mall from the outside, afraid that if I went inside, I’d hit the first person who bumped into me.

  The sun baked the back of my jacket, but I didn’t want to take it off. I walked fast, like I knew where I was going. A security truck slowed as it rolled up behind me. It followed me for a while, making sure I wasn’t casing the cars in the lot. I stopped, turning my head far enough for me to see him but not far enough for him to see my face. I told myself that if he wanted to talk, I’d do my civic duty and tell him about the kid with the gun. Unless he gave me attitude, in which case I might have to drag him from the truck by his plastic badge. The truck idled for a moment then turned away and cruised deeper into the lot. Apparently, I still wasn’t worth the hassle for a few bucks an hour.

  Walking on, I thought about the kid with the gun. Seeing it hadn’t frightened me. If he’d meant to use it, he would’ve made a move for it right away. He’d only flashed it to impress his friends, to save face. It was probably his big brother’s gun. He’d stash it back under the bed when he got home, before his brother realized it was gone and whipped his ass for taking it. That kid, he was armed, but he was really no different than I was at fifteen. He’d rather brag about the fight that almost was than shed his blood over the real thing.

  A real predator didn’t stare you in the face, didn’t wait for someone else to make the first move. He materialized out of thin air, moved with quickness and efficiency. Decisiveness. Authority. He didn’t weigh consequences. A real killer didn’t give you a chance to finish your sentence or light your cigar, never mind swing first, or fight back, or run.

  A real killer stepped out of a car, shot you dead, and disappeared before anybody saw his face. He left a corpse at the feet of half a dozen dipshit witnesses who couldn’t do any better than “big and white.” Left an old man’s blood and brains splattered on shop windows. Left the cops drawing on the sidewalk. Left a big, empty house where someone’s daughter, where my sister, wept over pictures of people and places she didn’t remember, asking her brother questions he couldn’t answer. A killer left my sister, my baby sister, buying fucking funeral dresses at the fucking Mall. And all I could do about it was pace the parking lot looking for a fight, which, I decided, wasn’t nearly enough.

  I walked up to another entrance. I pulled the door open hard, but I let it go when the cold air hit me. The walk had done me no good. I watched my reflection appear in the glass as the door closed. The sunlight stung when I pulled my sunglasses off. I closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose. My eyes burned. The pain got worse when I rubbed them. I couldn’t breathe, my throat dry, my lungs constricted.

  I thought of my sister in a store, standing at the register, a black dress on a plastic hanger tossed on the counter. I could see her digging through her purse for her credit card, telling the salesperson why she’d spent so long in the dressing room, why her eyes were red and puffy. Telling a complete stranger her father was dead. Not even noticing, or caring, that the salesperson wasn’t even looking at her. I could feel Julia’s c
hest heaving as the words rushed out of her, clearing space for the cool air that’d make her lighter for a while. Light enough at least to get to the next store and the next dress.

  I’d told Molly I was happy someone had shot my father. I’d said something stupid like that. I thought of her sitting silent on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall. I tried to see myself going to her, saying something to her, anything, that I didn’t punctuate with a chuckle and a smirk. But all I could see was her getting up as I sat down. I tried to picture myself with a black suit tossed on a counter in front of me. Tried to imagine handing over the cash, telling someone the suit was for my father’s funeral. Just saying it, waiting for the air to rush into my chest. But I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it. The only place I could see myself was in a dark alley, beating some big, white guy’s head against the pavement.