by Iain Levison
“Fine. I don’t have to go back. I’m cured.” He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his soaked jeans and underwear, and took a towel from the hall closet. Standing naked from the waist down, he began toweling himself vigorously, careful not to rub his raw, burned scrotum.
“What happened to you?” Linda asked. The shock in her voice made Kevin look down and he noticed that his pubic hair had turned white.
“Oh Christ,” he mumbled. He stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
Linda burst out laughing. It was a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time. He set the water to cold and stood under the stream, shivering at first. Then the coolness of the water began to soothe his steaming crotch, and he gasped in relief.
Linda banged on the door, still laughing. “What the hell is going on with you? Why are you all white?”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” he yelled, irritated at the interruption.
There was silence. Ten minutes later, when Kevin emerged from the bathroom, Linda was back at her desk, looking at the bills. He felt better now, physically and mentally, and he watched her as she wrote a check, hoping she was still as lighthearted as she had been a few moments earlier. It had been a long time since he had seen her amused. It had been a long time since he had been free from the court system, too, and he felt like it would be a good day to go out and celebrate.
“I’m free,” he said to her back. “They let me off parole today.”
“Yeah, I heard you,” Linda said, not looking up. “Am I supposed to say congratulations?”
“Shit,” he said, annoyed. “I thought maybe we could go out and celebrate tonight, but I guess not.”
“Celebrate?” She sounded incredulous.
“Yeah, celebrate. But fuck it.”
“Celebrate.” She shook her head in awe and laughed coarsely, not happily, the way she had been laughing earlier. “What should we tell the waiter when he asks what we’re celebrating?”
“Is that what bothers you? How it looks to the waiter?”
“Where would we even get a sitter this late? And we can’t afford to go out, not this month. Have you looked at the bills lately? Do you even live on the same planet I’m on?” She turned back to the paperwork dismissively.
Kevin put on clean underwear and some loose-fitting shorts, in a hurry to leave. He had thought from her reaction to his bleaching that she might be in a lighter mood today, that he could share a moment with her. Clearly, it wasn’t the case, and now he just wanted to get away as fast as possible. He had a round of dogs to walk at four thirty, and even though it was barely three o’ clock, he grabbed his keys and headed for the stairs.
“I’m not the one who told you to grow pot in the basement, Kevin,” she called after him. Kevin wasn’t able to slam the door before she finished the sentence.
“BOB SUTHERLAND WANTS to see you in his office,” said Melissa, the office manager. She sounded mad, and Mitch knew right away he was in trouble. It was odd, the way secretaries adopted their boss’s anger as if it were their own. What the fuck had he done now? Mislabeled a display of lug nuts, perhaps? Permitted Charles to work seven minutes of overtime? Melissa was gone before he could even acknowledge her and he figured it was bad. Oh, shit, maybe they had found the missing invoices for the high-def TVs.
“Ooooh, that no sound good,” said Charles.
Mitch stood up and stretched. He and Charles had just finished an entire load of inventory. They had lifted, sorted, and stacked a tractor trailer’s worth of Accu-mart’s crap, and Mitch was in the mood for a break, not an interrogation. He sighed and handed Charles the clipboard.
“I might not see you again,” he said, suddenly aware that being fired was a possibility. He waved a hand at the dirty, oil-stained warehouse with candy and potato chip wrappers scattered across the vast floor. “Maybe tomorrow, all this will be yours.”
Charles looked concerned. “Why? What you do, man?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Mitch said, practicing his excuse. “I might have made some inventory mistakes.”
Charles said nothing and Mitch realized he would have to do better. Inventory mistakes? Didn’t sound right; too political, too guilty. It was something a congressman would have come up with. I have no idea what happened to those invoices . . . I never saw them. Better. That would be his lie, and he would stick to it, then throw the invoices out when he got home and bag the whole stupid TV-stealing idea, and maybe this thing would blow over.
Melissa was in Bob Sutherland’s office when Mitch got there, with a tape recorder and a microphone, which Mitch found odd. She was staring right into the microphone, not making eye contact with Mitch. Sutherland was reading a file, pretending not to notice Mitch had entered the room. This was not going to be a happy-smiley type of meeting.
Melissa, a stiff-haired and efficient woman in her fifties who in the past had bonded with Mitch over their only earthly connection, a nicotine addiction, and who was now pretending not to know him, turned to Bob and said, “OK, it’s ready.” She hit a button on the tape recorder.
“You’re being taped,” said Bob Sutherland.
“I’m being taped?”
Mitch turned to close the door, and Sutherland said, “No, leave it open.” Mitch saw rage and hurt and offense in his face and put on the mystified expression which he had decided would be his best defense. That and, of course, continually repeating that he was not good with detail-oriented tasks and he maybe might have made a mistake.
“You’re a real piece of work aren’t you, Mitch?” Sutherland said.
How did one answer that? Neither denial nor admission really moved things along. Mitch just stared.
“Can you explain this?” Sutherland asked. He handed Mitch a sheet of paper with thousands of tiny numbers written on it. About halfway down, one ten-digit number was highlighted, and Mitch immediately recognized it as the telephone number of Dave Rice, the guy he had called about pretending to be the Webmaster general. He tried to piece together how Sutherland had started with this and somehow wound up with knowledge of the stolen TV invoices. How did this incriminate him? Best to just act ignorant.
“What is it? It looks like a sheet with phone numbers on it.”
“Quit playing around, Mitch,” Sutherland snapped. “You know what it is.” Sutherland leaned back in his chair, and Mitch noticed Melissa was staring at him with what appeared to be hate. He smiled at her and her expression did not change. He might still be able to save his job if he gave the right answers.
“There’s a number highlighted,” Mitch said, trying to sound helpful. His brain was firing in every direction, trying to figure how Sutherland, the world’s stupidest man, had been able to find the missing invoices from Mitch’s conversation with Dave Rice. What was going on?
“Why don’t you tell me about that?”
“About this number?” Mitch stalled.
“Yes. About that number.” Sutherland leaned farther back and glared at Mitch malevolently. It was intimidating, all the hate in the room. “About how that number got called from Karl’s office, on his day off.”
Sutherland was enraged but he was also enjoying himself. Was a demotion coming? Could Mitch possibly be demoted any lower? Was there a cleaning closet he could be made to work out of or a hidden department of the Accu-mart more dirty and mind-numbing than auto accessories to manage?
“I . . . think it’s the number of a friend of mine,” Mitch said and for a second he imagined that they might just be mad because it was a long distance phone call, and he could offer to pay for it, and the matter would be behind them. Then he imagined something else: that Dave Rice had called and pretended to be the Webmaster general, as they had agreed he would and Sutherland had not been amused. Other more severe scenarios presented themselves: Dave Rice using the word asshole, as he had been prone to do when he’d worked at Accu-mart; Dave Rice telling Sutherland he was stupid. Also prone to that. Now that Mitch thought about it, having Dave Rice play a joke on Suth
erland might not have been the most excellent idea.
“So this number is the number of a friend of yours?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
Mitch was aware of a person in the hall outside the opened door; his main thought was embarrassment that they would overhear this conversation. He had an impulse to get up and close the door but when he turned his head to look, he saw it was one of the store security guys. It struck him that Sutherland had arranged to have a store security guard outside the door to escort him off the property after their “discussion,” which gave Mitch the sudden confidence of a man with nothing to lose.
“Mitch,” Sutherland began, toying with him, Mitch now knew. “We’ve put a lot of time and energy into developing you—”
“You’re the stupidest fucking douche bag I’ve ever worked for,” said Mitch quickly, aware that his time was running out. He said it pleasantly but Sutherland was on his feet in a flash as if he had been expecting it, his face flushed. “Jesus Christ, Webmaster general? Seriously, are you retarded?” This last sentence was lost under the high-volume screeching of Sutherland screaming at Mitch to get out, which drew an instant response from the security guard, who rushed into the office as if Mitch were wielding a gun. The security guy was about a hundred pounds overweight and in his midfifties, and the excitement of the moment had him red in the face.
Mitch looked up at him. “What are you going to do, have a heart attack and fall on me?”
“Let’s go, NOW,” the security guy said in his roughest voice. Mitch had never had a problem with the guy, who was, Mitch suspected, borderline retarded and spent most of his time in the electronics department watching TV. He didn’t want his last act as an Accu-mart employee to be an assault on a man who was most likely handicapped, so he rose gracefully and slowly, careful not to show any signs of hostility. Maybe the security guy had overheard his retard comment to Sutherland and had taken it personally, or maybe he was trying to impress Sutherland and Melissa with his brute efficiency, because he grabbed Mitch’s shoulder unnecessarily and pushed him toward the door.
“Easy, you fucker,” Mitch snapped.
“GET HIM OUT OF HERE!” bellowed Sutherland.
Customers and store employees were now being drawn to the scene and when Mitch walked out of the office, everyone was looking at him. Denise, his pretty high school hire, who had come in to pick up her paycheck, stared at him, shocked. Despite the situation, a huge grin broke out on his face. He turned back to show it to Sutherland.
“See ya,” he said pleasantly.
The security guard pushed him in the back, and Mitch turned to him. “If you touch me again . . .” he said, the grin disappearing as he felt a surge of raw fury and the man backed off. Now that they were outside the room, without anyone to impress, the guard was meek again.
“You have to leave,” he pleaded, red-faced and sweating.
“I’m leaving.”
And he did. When the doors opened in front of him and a wave of cold air enveloped him, it was the refreshing air of freedom.
“Thank you for shopping at Accu-mart,” said the automatic recording.
“Go fuck yourself,” said Mitch, and he stared with loathing at the small speaker over the door. A middle-aged woman, who had clearly heard him cursing at the speaker, stared at him with disapproval as she walked into the store.
“Thank you for shopping at Accu-mart,” the speaker said pleasantly.
“Eat shit and die,” Mitch said to the speaker
Another woman entered.
“Thank you for shopping at Accu-mart.”
Mitch turned and walked to his car.
4
CHAPTER
“HOW COME YOU don’t have a girlfriend?” Linda asked. “You’re such a nice guy.”
Doug wasn’t sure he was comfortable with the question. They were driving home after a shopping trip to the mall, during which Linda had insisted he buy a shirt that he knew he would never wear despite her enthusiasm about it being “so in-style.” It was a dark green, striped monstrosity that Doug thought made him look like either an attention-seeking hipster or a Hispanic drug dealer, neither of which was a look he was going for. In fact, in his clothing choices, he wasn’t going for anything except affordable, which this wasn’t. He had laid out forty-two dollars for the shirt, mostly because he hadn’t wanted to hurt Linda’s feelings, but also because she had hinted, obtusely, that it would increase his chances of becoming sexually active again. But at $9.50 an hour, which is what he made at the restaurant, he calculated that, with taxes, he would have to pick up five extra hours this week to compensate for the damned thing, which would have to be on Sunday morning, the brunch shift, the only shift any of the other line cooks would willingly surrender. So on their ride back home, he had been secretly fuming that because of their little shopping trip he was now going to have to work Sunday morning, and then Linda, whom he had only recently decided was a decent human being, was suddenly asking him a personal question that he didn’t want to answer, or think about.
“Uh . . . dunno,” he said.
Linda was regarding him with amusement. “Is there anyone you like?”
Doug was staring out the window, watching the town go by. On days like this, wintry and wet, Wilton looked dirty and the snow that everyone said looked so beautiful when it was falling had been shoveled into exhaust-blackened piles at the edge of every parking lot. All the supposedly beautiful snow ever did was showcase all the environmental damage caused by everyday events like driving, and the cold and moisture made the diesel fumes from buses and trucks hang heavy in the air, giving Doug the feeling that the town wasn’t dying as much as it was being killed.
“I don’t want to date anyone here,” he said.
“In Wilton?”
“Yeah.”
“Why not?”
Doug grunted and pointed out the window as if to say, Look at this. Don’t you want to escape? Linda just laughed, seeing it as an attempt to change the topic, and asked again.
“I’ve been thinking about moving out West,” Doug said finally.
“I thought you were going to be a chopper pilot.”
“Yeah. Out West.”
Linda rolled her eyes. “You need a girlfriend.”
“Why?” The conversation was making Doug defensive and he was starting to see why Kevin was always complaining that Linda was a nag. She seemed to have a need to constantly improve everyone around her.
“So she can get your shit together.”
“My shit is together.”
Linda laughed again and Doug smiled. He figured that she had improve-yourself conversations with Kevin all the time, that she did it instinctively, and it was nice for her to have one with nothing at stake. It was like a cat practicing its predatory skills by playing with a toy.
“What about that girl at the convenience store?”
“Awww, man. Kevin has a big mouth.”
“What? He shouldn’t have told me about that?”
Doug grunted.
“Are you blushing?”
“No.”
She regarded Doug cheerfully for a second as she pulled onto his street. “I think you should go into the convenience store and ask her out. Wearing that shirt.”
Doug was playing with the door handle, indicating a desire to escape the vehicle. “I gotta go to work,” he said.
Linda pulled up outside his apartment and, to Doug’s surprise, shut the engine off, giving him the impression he was supposed to ask her to come in. He didn’t think it would be a good idea as Mitch’s car was in the driveway and Mitch never had a good thing to say about Linda, and, besides, he had to be at work in an hour.
“Mitch is home,” Doug said, hoping she would get the hint.
“Yeah, I know.” Linda was looking at him again, more intensely than he liked, the fact that he found her pretty all of a sudden just adding to his discomfiture. He had noticed that at the mall the salespeople they had spoken to had considered them a co
uple, and he had realized that he missed that feeling, the feeling of being seen as part of a unit. How long had it been since he’d had a girlfriend? Coming up on two years now, he thought. His last girlfriend had been a waitress at the restaurant, a seemingly shy hippie girl who had inexplicably turned into an obsessive and domineering motormouthed bitch after just a few months, and her subsequent decision to move to New York City and not invite him to come had sent him into a black hole of emotional devastation which had lasted for over a year. Even thinking about her now, or hearing her name, Annalisa, sent him into a funk. Mitch, noticing this, had eventually dubbed her The One We Don’t Speak Of. It was an attempt at a joke, but Doug found the terminology strangely helpful, as if it was the actual mention of her name which caused pain.
“Honestly, I never really liked The One We Don’t Speak Of,” Mitch had offered one day while they were getting high in a field outside Wilton, looking at the smokestacks of the metal-refinishing plant belching soot into the sky.
“Her name’s Annalisa,” Doug had said, and knew that it was over, that he might still care but that he had survived because saying the name didn’t cause a stab of misery anymore. The misery had been experienced and it had left. There was no sense of victory, just relief. Not the pure type of relief that causes happiness but the type of relief you might feel if you had driven off the road, crashed through a guardrail, plummeted into a ravine full of alligators, and then realized that, physically, you were OK. You still had problems, but things could be worse.
And here was Linda, suggesting he plummet back down into the ravine.
“I have to pick up Ellie,” Linda said, her voice suddenly heavy. Doug thought she was sad, that she wanted to say something else, and he was going to ask her if she was OK but then she added, “I want you to promise me something.”
“OK.”
“Promise me you’ll wear that shirt. Just once.”