by Bill Peters
I slap the windshield with my palms. I climb on the roof. I slap the rear window, through which I see—Oh Please God No—Toby bracing his legs against the passenger-side door, holding the girl down with his shoulder while he wrestles with his fly and, hooking his thumbs into his shorts, shoves them down his thighs.
She screams, over and over. Then, for exactly one second, my eyes meet hers.
Her pupils are tightened to the size of pencil pricks. I don’t even know if she sees me. I think, maybe, three minutes before this, she was some girl who liked that band the October Project, or whatever short-haired lady did that song “Bohemia” that BER played when I used to station-surf while doing my homework.
Because, the nearest payphone is Godhowevermany miles away. Because, if I even try to call police, then I’m leaving this girl alone with Toby. I punch the window as hard as I can, and seconds later I open my eyes and I’m on the ground, doubled over my hand, nearly choking to death. I yell something that’s not a word to nobody in particular. I give a half-running start, but I don’t commit to it as much as I should, but when I extend my foot, I connect, and then a yardstick-sized spike of pain shoots up my right ass-cheek through my shoulder when I land on the gravel. When I look up, there’s a heel-shaped crunch in the glass. Toby and the girl are sitting up, staring straight ahead. The doors are unlocked. No cars come by. It’s so quiet above us. You can hear the mist in the air.
Future Nate is screaming at the TV: Take him to the police! But when I get in the car my brain is in a flooded crawlspace, and the only way out is to get Toby away from us. When I pull into his house’s driveway, he opens the door, looks at us, looks to the sky, and screams the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Each one of us!” he says. “Each one of us, are two ballerinas, turning, falling, infinitely. Never knowing—when we’ll land.”
My headlights blare against Toby’s garage. He slams the door and walks across his front lawn. In the grass, there’s a wooden cutout of a woman in a bonnet bending over to garden something.
When I get back on 490, I shake my head, and hope Toby’s girlfriend notices it.
“Sorry,” I say.
I can hear her sniffling. On the highway, there’s a pair of headlights way off on the horizon behind me, a pair of brake lights way off on the horizon in front of me.
“Any one of these gas stations has a payphone,” I say. “We can call the police there.”
“Don’t condescend to me,” she says.
Which I ignore. “Do you need anything? Police? Coffee?” I say. “I’m not tired at all.”
At her house, she opens my car door as little as possible, slips out, and eases the door shut so that the latch barely clicks and my Door Ajar light stays on.
Here’s something else, which is either terrific or another picture for the Failed Plan Hall of Fame Calendar.
Years later, at Eastview Mall, way after this story ends, I go into the Sears to buy a mini drain snake for my kitchen sink. My head is down when I enter the store, and a girl is just passing opposite me, walking out toward Eastview’s main concourse. She almost walks past my blind spot when I realize, suddenly, who she might be. I turn around, and only see the back of her head. She’s pushing a baby stroller. Some guy with a collared short-sleeve shirt and good triceps, sitting on a bench underneath a tree, stands up to meet her. He hangs his arm around her. I want to think she smiles here. Her orange and baby-blue clothing lead me to believe the girl is Toby’s once-girlfriend.
I have a good track record of this, of going a long time without seeing people and recognizing them years later, far past the point after they’ve stopped recognizing me. It’s her I’m seeing, walking past the display Kia Sedona being raffled off and the teenage girls wearing short skirts and the sunglasses kiosk and the hot-pretzel smell. I could catch up to her. I could talk to her, vaporize some guilt right then. I even stand there; I even debate myself over this, for a good four minutes. I even walk after her a few steps, before I lose sight of her completely. Afterward, I buy what I need and spend a half-hour at the pet store aquariums, looking at the neon tetras and the clown loaches. Bright-colored fish that begin dying the second you bring them home in plastic bags.
COSIMUS BELVENDE, GEORGE EASTMAN
Walking out of the 3-Mezz elevator, way down the cinder-block hallway, there’s a red door on the left labeled VENTILATION. Through that door, a large aluminum ventilation shaft, wide as a dump truck, angles gradually downward from the ceiling as I walk, a football field’s walk, to where the shaft meets the opposite wall. In the three-foot space below where the vent meets the wall, on the floor, in the dark, I find a white blanket and pillow.
The pillow’s stuffing is bunched up into three or four knots. If this were The Proto-Stachening of Nate: The Movie, this would be where I discover a dead body or a Grail. I fold the pillow in half and set my head on it. The heat from the vent is lint-scented, strong enough to warm the gray-painted concrete floor. I close my eyes, feel my leg twitch and my eyeballs crazy-dance—“Good evening, sir, welcome to Club Sleepybats,” the doorman says, and unlatches the velvet rope.
On other days, I make more Sleepybats: to get through an hour when the conveyors are turned off; to beat back a hangover until it’s speck-sized in my head; to relax after the 10 a.m. canister rush.
Then, one morning, a Friday shift, I’m flung awake by a noise that sounds like the entire building gagging up a house-sized cube of iron.
Red lights, suddenly, go on everywhere. An alarm sounds, apocalyptic, low, like an angry dial tone, loud enough to give you a nosebleed. My cleansuit wedgies when I run down the hallway. I can’t hear my footsteps. “Nathan Gray. Please call 1184. Nathan Gray. 1184,” the PA says. I harpoon my hand to the doorjamb and swing around back into the chemical recycling room, where canisters are backed up across the entire length of the conveyor. “Nathan Gray. 1184.” I plug my ear with my right finger and, with my left hand, pull what canisters I can off the line.
Then, I hear a loud click, which echoes through 3-Mezz’s steel beams, and the alarm sound winds down, getting lower-pitched and quieter. Yelling arrives from down the hall. Two men who I have never seen before, in white cleansuits and hairnets, jog toward the bag dispenser. I realize I have no idea what color anybody’s hair is here. One of the men, carrying a clipboard, presses the dispenser’s green Go button repeatedly, and corkscrews violently toward me.
“What happened?” he shrieks. I can’t tell if he has eyebrows. The boniness of his face makes his sweat extra shiny.
“Is the line stopped?” I say.
“Jesus Christ!” He wings the clipboard to the floor, where it tumbles over itself and skids until it hits a pallet of spare bag rolls. “I’ve never seen this. Never once in my twenty-two years.” The men swing their arms hard walking away.
“Colonel Hellstache,” I mumble.
The clipboard man wide-strides back to me and points his nose down at my eyebrows. I feel my tear ducts squirming. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“The fuck, did you say?” His face is shaking.
“I didn’t say anything. ‘Crap.’ I said ‘crap.’”
He walks away, swiping his arm down to pick up the clipboard. I make a crossbar with my left arm and uppercut my right bicep into it to make a giant middle finger.
Because, I’ve started saying phrases to myself, mostly to get them back—Maverick Jetpants, Colonel Hellstache, Hashbrown Gargoyle. Because it’s not my fault I hate my job. Not my fault I’m in this huge room, and can hurl canisters against the wall all twelve hours without anybody noticing.
After 6 p.m. relief, the locker room belt rack on the wall has belts hanging down that are almost as tall as me. Pictures of old Jordache models curl on the brown, blistering paint on the insides of men’s lockers. Mustached men, who no longer care if anyone sees their dicks in the shower, shower.
I round the corner and Todd Vick appears. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Nat
e. Could I see you a second?”
I remember that he hasn’t talked to me at all since I started working here. His goggles are propped up on top of his hairnet. Without them, his eyes look like dots and parentheses. He waits for two men to walk by us and lowers his voice.
“Kodak has hired a consultant to assess our current production model, and I’d like to squeeze in a performance evaluation with you on Monday before I meet with them,” he says.
“I’m off Monday,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “Plan to be here anyway.”
“I thought evaluations were in February. Is this because of, you know, today?”
He raises his eyebrows, like maybe he wasn’t expecting the question, and draws a breath: “Building 17 conference room. 9 a.m.”
I check my balance at the ESL ATM: $73. And, the way a python swallows a pig, I drive home and begin the slow, brain-dark work of worrying down the weekend until Monday.
And Mindy Fale: I don’t even know what her problem is. She’s gained twenty more pounds. She has not Brought the Funny since Bilingual Cock. She will treat you like every one of your mistakes was made on purpose.
Because, at home, Mindy Fale, already in pajama pants, has removed a back cushion from the couch and is using it as a pillow against the couch’s armrest. CNN is on mute. I sit down next to her and lay my head on her thigh.
“I got yelled at today.”
“Why?” she says, not running her fingers through my hair or anything.
I stick my hand between two of the couch cushions, which makes my knuckles smell like toasted fiberglass. “I stopped the line. Todd said I have to attend a performance evaluation on Monday.”
Her leg muscle tenses. “What’d you do.”
I clench my teeth. A whole Anger Montage of Fists steams through my head. “Nothing! I was tired. I take melatonin that doesn’t work, and wake up at 4:15 a.m. to get to work by 5:30.”
“Are you trying to get fired?”
I push myself up away from her.
“That’s what they do!” she says. “They give you a shitty evaluation so they can make it easier to fire you.”
“You could be a little more supportive,” I tell her. “It’s a million-dollar accident that happened. I really don’t appreciate this right now.”
Her eyes widen. “You don’t appreciate!” She’s almost laughing.
I go into the bathroom, dump maybe a third of her bottle of astringent into the sink, and run the faucet to wash down the smell.
The next day is the weekend, so Mindy and her friends from work or wherever go out to dinner at Eastview. Eastview is the only mall in Rochester that’s actually getting bigger, in this way where I imagine the mall is some huge magnet that can pull buildings to it—Mexican limestone and Moscow onion domes.
Walking into the mall, I still feel the world’s possibilities, like I can afford things like refrigerators and massage chairs. It’s airy and white-tiled, a palace made of aspirin, with skylights the size of Olympic swimming pools. A mall-breeze goes through my Thurman jersey—NFL issue—because that’s what I wear to the mall. Mindy Fale, though? She’s wearing black work pants and open-toe high heels, dark, humorless brown lipstick that, like all lipstick on her, makes her look as if she’s hated me all along.
The entrance of the restaurant faces the mall’s concourse and has small, round, thick tables, each with a votive candle, stumpy wooden chairs and menus with wooden covers with the logo—J.T. Something-Or-Other’s; Est. Whenever—carved into them. Mindy Fale stops holding my hand the second we see her work friends, already at a table.
She sits diagonally across from me, next to this bleach-haired guy with a hemp necklace, who you know totally owned a motorcycle in high school but whose bad-assery has since been whittled down to untucked button-down collarless shirts, like the one he’s wearing now, and owning a parrot. Her other friend is some girl with muttony arms—blotches of pink like they’ve been slapped. I’ve forgotten about her before I can even remember her.
“This guy came in with headphones and poked a wand into the floor,” the girl says. “He found the leak in two minutes. Three hundred dollars.”
Which, that statement alone I will let speak for itself. The hamburgers here are $12. Labatt’s are $4. I get paid $250 a week. But rent is due next week—$600 total, and Mindy Fale pays $400 of that, so minus $200 for my portion of the rent will put me at $123. But renter’s insurance is due this week, so minus $30 or so puts me at $93. Mindy Fale pays cable, and groceries, and the only thing I have to take care of is the phone bill, which should put me at $33 or $23 at the very worst.
As if she has no idea how frequently I do try to math out my problems, Mindy Fale closes her eyes and leans her head against the guy, the Parrot King’s, shoulder. Which, maybe they’re just good friends.
“There was a lawsuit I read about, against PVC pipe makers in China,” the guy says, squeegeeing off the sweat of his water glass with his thumb. “Front yards: dug up all across Mendon.”
When the waitress takes our drink orders, Mindy Fale goes: “Can I get a Red-Headed Slut?”
“What’s a Red-Headed Slut?” Parrot King asks.
A smile forms at the corner of her lip. “You can have a sip,” she says to the Parrot King.
Parrot King waggles his head and smooths his collar-tips. Ham it up, asshole. “Sounds like a job for”—he turns his head away, swings it back around and shakes his goatee at her—“The Hedgehog!”
Mindy Fale cracks up. Suddenly the back of my neck is hot. I scan the restaurant’s dimness for any girl with bare arms, any girl who would do me the charity of wearing shorts as the nights get colder. And I think about telling Mindy Fale that I’m sick of her multiple personalities—how she’ll grow cuddle-fur when it’s us in the apartment, but in public she transforms into Spring Break Avalanche, Night at the Stalls edition. I think about telling her that I know that men are supposed to joke down these situations, to charm her back to you when she’s being hit on, but it gets so hard to think creatively around her.
“Colonel Hellstache,” I cough into my arm instead.
Mindy Fale narrows her brow at me, mouth open and chin stuck out a bit.
“What was that you said?” Parrot King asks.
“Tell him, Nate,” Mindy Fale says.
“It’s just this phrase,” I say. “It’s stupid.”
“Maybe I’ll start saying that,” the guy says, which is either earnest or the meanest thing anyone has said to me.
“Tell them how it’s everything you hate,” Mindy Fale says.
There’s pressure on my cheeks; my ears are getting red the way Lip Cheese’s used to when he was embarrassed. I wish I could have done everything differently. I’ve never explained Colonel Hellstache to anybody. Even worse, nobody, apparently, has cared before to ask.
“Basically, I think, me and Necro—a friend—rode our bikes all the way into the city one time. We saw a flier for this band, stapled to a telephone pole outside the Bug Jar. Astrojanitor Records Presents: The Black Arrows, and this other band, Dago Frogstache. That’s where Stache came from, and we started putting Stache at the end of everything we said that day. Hell came from Hell, which became Hellstache, after me and Nec—this friend of mine—later that day got stuck in a rainstorm riding back to my house. Then, I guess, we just moved it up the ranks. General Hellstache. Colonel Hellstache.”
But that can’t be all there is to it. Mindy Fale’s friends have finished their iced tea. “Oh,” is all the girl says.
“But, yeah,” Mindy Fale says. “I heard Chinese copper, in some of these new houses, can spring leaks like—”
“Don’t interrupt me,” I say.
She blares her eyes and relaxes her shoulders. “I thought you were done. Sorry.”
Mindy Fale runs her hand hard against her scalp. Our drinks come. Mindy’s is this pink-looking thing with no ice in a whiskey glass. She’s drunk before she even drinks it. She downs the whole thing, turning her
chin toward Parrot King, her tongue clearly at the bottom of the glass.
“Come on,” I say. “I am right here.”
I let her know it, too. I stare at her through the entire meal. Mindy asks the waiter for two checks—one for us and one for her friends—and she smirks when he sets the check booklet for us down in front of me. She plunges her hand into her purse—making a whole opera out of it—and takes out her credit card. So I drop the bill in front of her, throw my hands up, walk away, and wait for her by the host desk.
Outside the restaurant, I see the Bon-Ton at the opposite end of the mall and walk toward it. Mindy Fale stays about three feet behind me. Because I’ve figured this out now: I have nothing to wear in Mindy Fale’s world of work. I need shirts and ties for this evaluation at Kodak. I need shirts and ties for the rest of my life.
A circular table at the Bon-Ton dress section, which I’ve never not been in without my mom, has a display of shiny dress shirts, paired with ties, and laid out fan-like in a rainbow color pattern. I sling a gray tie over my shoulder.