Before You Go

by James Preller

  “And just pray you don’t get stuck at Zack’s Bay,” Roberto said emphatically. “That place is like another planet, believe me.”

  “So where do I want to work?” Jude asked.

  Roberto held up crossed fingers. “West End Two,” he said. “It’s way out there, almost at Long Beach, not far from where they shot the tollbooth scene in The Godfather. Remember that, when Sonny got shot, like, fifteen million times?”

  Jude remembered. You spend any time on Long Island, somebody’s bound to point out those tollbooths where Sonny got shot.

  Roberto continued, “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from here, so if one of the bosses decides to pull a surprise inspection, we’ll get a call from our spies before he’s even in the car. But the best thing about West End Two? I hear that Kenny ‘Half-Baked’ Mays is back as closing manager—working for that guy’s a trip and a half.”

  A few minutes later, they were on their way. A different supervisor had picked them up—Jude guessed it was his job to taxi around different workers to the far-flung concession stands. This guy was thick and fiftyish. He wore tinted, wire-rimmed glasses, a ten-gallon hat, and told the boys he was new to the area, originally from Houston, Texas. He had that avuncular Southern thing going full blast, so he blabbed the whole ride over. “Call me Ed,” he instructed the boys, “Big Ed, Eddie, I don’t give a rat’s patootie.” He looked into the rearview mirror at Jude. “You met Mr. Keating this morning, huh?”

  Jude nodded cautiously.

  “So what’d you think?” Big Ed inquired.

  Jude knew a trap when he fell into one. “We didn’t really get a chance to, um—”

  Big Ed laughed, a hearty whoop. “You know what we say about guys like him back where I’m from? He’s all hat and no cattle.”

  Roberto laughed out loud, smiling and bobbing his head at Jude. “I like that, Big Ed. All hat and no cattle.”

  “Texas is a great place for expressions, lots of colorful people back there,” Big Ed mused.

  “So how’d you end up here?” Jude asked.

  “That’s the $64,000 question, ain’t it?” Big Ed replied. He looked out the driver’s side window, clicked his wedding ring on the steering wheel, and his wondering eyes scanned the dunes and the ocean beyond it, as if looking for something that wasn’t there. “I guess it was time to go, simple as that. Besides, I’m near retirement. Time for a new beginning.”

  It was a nice ride. Big Ed was a good guy, laid-back and quick to laugh. He talked to Jude and Roberto as if they were equals. Big Ed was a boss and they knew it; he didn’t need to club ’em over their heads with it. Best of all, Big Ed dropped them off at West End Two. “Work hard, boys,” he called after them in a Texas lilt, “from can till can’t. You ever need a lift, give Big Ed a shout.”

  THREE

  Roberto led the way through the back door, which opened from the parking lot into a gray room about the size of a train car, cluttered with shelves, metal tables, and boxed goods of every size. No one seemed to be around.

  Acting as tour guide, Roberto pointed to various doors and explained that they opened to closet-size storage rooms, a large walk-in refrigerator (with kegs of beer), a freezer, and the manager’s office. Though the door was partially open, Roberto knocked on it and waited.

  The manager’s name was Denzel Jessup—no lie. He recognized Roberto from the previous summer, when Roberto spent a week filling in over at Field Six. Jessup had the look of a thoroughbred: tall, taut, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned. As manager, he earned the right to wear a white button-down shirt and a cheap black tie. Somehow on Jessup it looked almost sharp. He stood tall, acting neither friendly nor unfriendly; kept it neutral, all business. It took Jessup about a minute and a half to casually let drop that he was an upperclassman at an Ivy League school, that he was too smart for this shit, and that if everybody did their jobs, it would all go fine and he wouldn’t have to crawl into anybody’s ass.

  Jude would spend the rest of the summer trying to purge that disgusting image from his mind.

  Jessup grabbed a clipboard and filled out time cards for the new employees. He exhaled heavily, obviously bored, and intoned, “I’ll say this once, so listen up. This is your time card. It’s how you get paid. Unless you are doing this job for free out of your deep love for fast food, mouse crap, and cooking grease, you will need to keep track of your hours.” He put a hand on a clunky, square clock mounted to the wall. “This is the time clock. Are you following me so far?”

  “Time card, mouse crap. Got it,” Jude said.

  Jessup titled his head to look at Jude, as if he wasn’t sure he liked what he heard. His eyes flickered with cool assessment. “Do not check in before your assigned starting time,” Jessup continued. “Not if you arrive five minutes early, not if you arrive two minutes early. If your shift starts at ten, that’s when you punch in. Got it?”

  Jude nodded. It wasn’t hard to get.

  The building itself was basically a large square box, divided by a long, chest-high counter that ran across its length. On the far side of the counter, there was an open area for the public to mill around, search through squat freezer cases for ice cream, line up for hot food. There were also a few wire display containers with bags of chips, Doritos, Cracker Jacks, that kind of stuff. Beyond that there was a row of five cashier booths, where customers paid good money for bad food.

  The walls at the front of the high-roofed building were made completely of glass, offering an open view of the big sky, the beach, and the Atlantic at least two hundred yards beyond. West End was a huge beach; it was a long, hot trek to the water. A few people sat at round, yellow picnic tables, shaded by green umbrellas. Mostly indolent girls in bikinis, sipping on straws, watching their napkins blow away in the breeze.

  Things were slow, Jessup explained, since it was only a little after ten o’clock, but it would pick up soon. A skeleton crew of six worked on the business side of the counter. During peak hours, as many as twelve orange-shirted laborers crammed behind it. There was a long grill for burgers and hot dogs, a pizza oven, one of those glass warming boxes for soft pretzels, a couple of deep fryers for popcorn chicken, French fries, and onion rings. There was a place to serve soda and beer. Jessup paused there. “In New York State, you must be twenty-one to serve alcohol. You must be twenty-one to drink it.” He looked directly at Jude. “If I catch you stealing so much as a sip of beer while I’m on duty, you’re gone. I will fire your ass, and I will not blink twice. Got it?”

  “Yep.” Jude nodded. But even so, it was pretty cool to have cold beer right there, free-flowing from those silver taps. Jude liked beer, more or less, but didn’t love it, though it wasn’t something he admitted out loud. Jude guessed a lot of guys felt the same way—all standing around, phony as Monopoly money, taking their first sips of beer, faking it. And though he’d been around it enough, Jude usually passed on the opportunity to get plastered and throw up on himself. He figured it might be in his blood, that one day he’d get all slurry and puke-faced, but he wasn’t in a hurry to get there. Jude didn’t like the idea of losing control, bumping into things, falling down face-first. He thought of his mother. She hadn’t taken a drink in six years. But he still remembered when she did. Mom and her cocktails. She didn’t drink for fun back then—it wasn’t about good times for dear old Mom—and it never ended pretty.

  “Almost forgot,” Jessup said. “Here are your hats. Wear them at all times when you’re working the counter.”

  He handed the boys two flat, folded pieces of thick white paper. Roberto pulled it open and stuck it on his head. The hat didn’t sit well on his squarish skull. He eyed himself in the reflection of a glass fridge.

  Jude laughed at him. “Dude, that’s a bad look.”

  “You kidding?” Roberto said, face brightening. “On a guy like me, with the shape of my face? This hat is a babe magnet. Those girls out there will see me in this hat and think, Fat guy, paper hat, I gotta get me some of that. It’s all over, fellas. I
’m going to be punching fresh numbers into my cell all day long.” He tapped an index finger into his palm for emphasis.

  “Save a few girls for the rest of us, huh?” Jessup said, finally loosening up.

  Jude held the hat in front of him. “Do we really have to wear these?”

  “This is food service,” Jessup said, no longer smiling. “Heads must be covered. It’s state law.”

  “What if I wore, like, a baseball cap,” Jude ventured, “or some other kind of—”

  “Oh, you mean, as a way to express your individuality?” Jessup asked. “Would you prefer a red beret? You want to stand out from the rest of the crew?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of something a little less hardcore dork,” Jude offered.

  Jessup laughed. “Put on the paper hat, Mr. Fox, and welcome to West End Two.”

  FOUR

  The next few hours rolled in like a big wave, a tsunami of new responsibilities. The work crew grew in size—a diverse group of characters, white, black, Hispanic, all young, all wearing paper hats—and yet they soon grew overwhelmed by the demands of the hungry, sun-kissed hordes. The customers came in droves, tanned and muscular, gorgeous and lean, fat and T-shirted, wanting burgers, wanting drinks, wanting service, now, now, now.

  Jude spent a long stretch hunched over the hamburger grill beside a more experienced worker, Billy Motchsweller, curly-haired and rail thin, with lightning-fast, caffeine-fueled hands. Sweat dripped off Jude’s face, ran off the tip of his nose like a leaking faucet. On Billy’s instructions, Jude hustled to the back for more burgers, trays of buns. But he didn’t know where those things were kept, got turned around, made wrong guesses, wasted time, and pissed off Billy. “No, no, not these, shit for brains. These burgers are frozen solid.” He grabbed two patties and clanged them together to make his point. “Go to the back fridge, not the freezer up front. There should be burgers that were thawed out last night.…”

  Jude nodded and hurried and earnestly tried not to screw up. He’d bump into someone, knock a drink out of another’s hand, slip on the greasy floor, and feel confused and pathetic. Of course, Billy was mistaken; no one had thought to thaw out the burgers last night, hauling the boxes from the freezer to the fridge. Billy shrugged. “Then let’s fire up those hockey pucks. It’s not like we’ve got a choice.”

  Jude now had to pry apart the burgers, chopping at them with a knife while trying not to cut off any of his ten digits. He lined the burgers up in rows on the grill, straight columns of five up and down. At the peak times, there were up to forty burgers cooking at once—sizzling, thawing, bleeding, burning. At the side nearest Billy, the burgers were completely cooked; at the other, raw and hard red discs. Meanwhile, Jude had to open and arrange the buns to meet Billy’s precise specifications. He preferred the bun warmed, not burned. Billy moved like a Japanese hibachi chef, flashing his silver spatula with dazzling dexterity. The guy was fast, a gunslinger of the Wild West. Billy made it look easy, piling up paper plates with burgers, yelling, “Come on, take it and move along!” verbally prodding customers on their way like cattle.

  “Fun, huh?” bloodshot Billy commented right in the middle of the worst of it, the building packed with people. Jude could see that it wasn’t a joke. Billy enjoyed the frenzied scramble, the long lines of beef-starved customers. “Time flies when you’re in the weeds,” Billy told Jude. “You’ll get used to it.”

  When Billy disappeared to take a break, it was Roberto’s turn to wilt over the hot grill. Jude worked at his side, on bun detail. Jude figured he wouldn’t touch another burger for at least a year, maybe two. Working with fast food does that to a guy. Nothing kills an appetite faster than an overweight kid with a spatula.

  Thing is, nobody cared—business boomed. The sun-dried mob demanded grease for their gullets. People were out of their minds with hunger, and the concession stand was the only source of food on the horizon.

  Roberto paused to take a drink. “Damn, it’s hotter than Hoth around here.”

  “Hoth?” Jude asked.

  “Ironic Star Wars reference,” Roberto explained. “A planet covered with ice and snow, native creatures include the tauntaun and the wampa. The Rebel Fleet had a base there, code name Echo.”

  “Oh my God,” Jude said as he realized it, “you’re a Star Wars geek.”

  “Was,” Roberto said. “Now I’m more of a Comic-Con kind of guy. But, yeah, definitely. I’m into all that stuff, Dungeons and Dragons, anime—”

  Jessup stopped by, tapped Jude on the shoulder. “Ivan will take your spot. I want you to work security.”

  “You’re putting this skinny guy on security?” Roberto chimed in, smiling broadly. “Oh, this’ll be good.”

  “What?” Jude asked. He didn’t know what any of it meant.

  “We’re getting ripped off blind,” Jessup observed.

  Jude glanced out at the crowd of milling customers. He could see that it was probably true, teenage boys concealing food under their towels, or snarfing down hot dogs before they reached the cashier.

  “Seriously?” he asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re the new guy, Mr. Fox. Do you want to keep your job, or do I need to find somebody else?” Jessup was once again enjoying his position of authority.

  So Jude followed his manager into the open area, a few feet before the row of cashiers, amid the slow-moving clutter of customers. “Okay, stand here. Spread your feet like this.” Jessup kicked at Jude’s feet. “Cross your arms and look like you mean business.”

  Jude felt embarrassed, sensed a few of the cashiers watching from behind. He didn’t like to be made to look foolish. It stung.

  “It’s prevention,” Jessup explained. “Don’t worry. If they see you, most people won’t try anything.”

  “What do I do if I catch somebody?”

  “Just ask ’em to put it back,” Jessup said. “Trust me. Nobody will mess with a tough guy like you.”

  Jude stood about four inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than Jessup. “Look at me,” Jude said. “I’m not going to scare anybody. You really think they’re going to listen to me?”

  Jessup didn’t answer, just returned to his office behind the counter.

  Roberto called out to Jude, “Hey, Jude! Hey, Judy, Judy! Don’t stress, my brother, if there’s any trouble, we got your back!” The way he laughed along with Ivan and a couple of other guys, Jude was pretty sure the exact opposite was true.

  There wasn’t much to it, actually. Jude wasn’t a security guard by nature; he wasn’t going to go out of his way to catch offenders. But Jessup was right—by merely standing there, a frowning presence, Jude deterred most of the amateur felons, the hot-dog wranglers and burger burglars. The cashiers behind him received a steady flow of customers. Jude caught one cashier in the middle booth watching him with a look of amusement. Her eyes were wide set; her hair, black whorls and corkscrews and curlicues. Skin olive-inflected and smooth. Jude grinned, a little goofily, and she gave him a sympathetic shrug.

  Each cashier at West End Two was female—it must have been corporate policy. A large, lumpen girl was stationed at the extreme left cashier’s booth—Jude hadn’t learned her name yet; Billy hadn’t bothered to give Jude the lowdown on her, unlike the others—and she sat, frowning and bored, obviously miserable, with all the charisma of a garden slug. Daphne was next, a pale small blonde with bee-stung lips and dark bags under her eyes. She was either sick, undernourished, or a future runway model. Roberto had already joked that he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to bang Daphne or rush her to the emergency room. Which was pretty funny if you asked Jude. The girl in the middle booth, aside from a few glances Jude’s way, worked steadily. Billy had told Jude her name. What was it again? Jude remembered: Becka something. She looked great without trying, smiled at patrons, competent at her job. The fourth booth was closed, with a girl named Kath at the farthest booth to the right. There was something unnerving about her, with frizzy black hair, large bust,
and tight pants. Even from a distance, everything about her cried, “loves sex.” No, that wasn’t entirely true. Because after her body cried “loves sex,” the expression on her face added, “but not with you.” This made her an early target of fascination among the guys behind the counter. Honestly, she scared the bejeezus out of Jude. Kath looked like the black widow of minimum-wage cashiers.

  Trouble took the forbidding form of three tattooed bodybuilders, ridiculously jacked guys with military haircuts. College guys, probably, former high school football players, almost certainly. Jude watched as they piled cardboard trays high with burgers, pizza, soft drinks, and pretzels. Gathered in front of Jude, out in the open for everyone to see, they began to wolf down the food before reaching the cashiers. Their arrogance annoyed Jude; they didn’t even try to hide it. Jude stepped toward them, and in the friendly tone of a co-conspirator suggested that maybe they try to be more subtle about it. You know, wink-wink, keep it on the down low. He explained that it was his job to work security, and he hoped they’d understand.

  The biggest one, with pectorals the size of hubcaps, swiveled his thick neck to Jude and said, “Huh? What?”

  Jude glanced from this Cro-Magnon to his steroidal buddies. “I’m just saying, could you maybe try to be more discreet about it. It’s my first day on the job and—”

  The mouth-breathing behemoth, under heavy lids and dead eyes, finished chomping on his burger. His hands were huge. He swilled a large soda. “I’m still hungry,” he growled to his pals, smacking one of them in the chest. “Food here sucks, though. Right?”

  “Yeah, you shouldn’t eat that stuff.” Jude forced a chuckle, interjecting himself into the conversation (such as it was). “People have actually died from eating those burgers.” Jude really, really didn’t want to get punched in the face. But at the same time, some shred of dignity kept him from backing off.

  The mouth breather grew tired of Jude’s presence. He defiantly stuffed half of a soft pretzel into his gaping gob. “Whaddayagonnadoaboutit?” he challenged Jude. Very Jersey Shore. Then he did the puffy-chest dance that guys like him do, his shoulders stiffening, one step forward into Jude’s space, a vein in his forehead pulsing with animal hostility. It was a dance he had probably performed hundreds of times—before pummeling his hapless victims. Jude wondered if his adversary took human-growth hormone. Or horse steroids. Or whatever else those weight lifters took to grow so freakishly scary-looking.