Pinkett circled the room like he was sizing each of us up. He power walked, pumping his elbows, and he sweated profusely. His white oxford shirt was drenched, and he smelled overwhelmingly of French fries. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t slept in days. He was in a delirious frenzy, and it was contagious. I could see others affected by his energy, beginning to bounce their heads and tap their shoes. I was, I have to admit, one of them.
“I am extremely proud of this group. I am proud of Hubert and Henry and Adam and Suzanne. I’m proud of you and you and you and you. I am monumentally, exasperatingly, meteorically, flamboyantly, almost erotically proud of this fucking group. Do you know how good you guys are?”
No one said a word, looking at each other confused, intrigued, bewildered, but no one responded.
“I say again, do you know how fucking great you guys are?”
“Great!” I shouted. A few of the others looked back at me, including Pinkett. He beamed. He turned red in the face, and he smiled with his whole body, bouncing up and down.
“How good are you?” Pinkett held his hand to his ear.
“Great!” more of us yelled.
“How fucking great are you?”
“Fucking great!”
Pinkett performed jumping jacks and skipped his way back up to the front of the room, his knees high, his hands pumping up and down. The music reached a crescendo, and we all joined him in clapping along to the rising melody.
“Stand up!” Pinkett ordered. “I want to hear you!”
We rose to our feet and cheered and clapped and bellowed our approval. It reminded me of church, a communal and singular belief in ourselves, in what we were doing. It was intoxicating, and all of it, down to me jumping up and down and hollering and clapping, felt monumentally right.
“This week has been a very good week. An epic week. One of those weeks when you just know everything we’ve worked so hard for has come together. This week, we’re unveiling a new leaderboard to add to our Big Three up here, and this one is very, very, very exciting. This week we’re going to unveil the regional leaderboard, and it will show all the offices in the southwest division. And we want to be the best, right?”
“Right!” we yelled.
“We want to destroy them, right?”
“Right!”
“What do we want to do?”
“Destroy them!”
“What?”
“Destroy them!”
“I can’t hear you!”
“Destroy them!”
“You know what?” Pinkett continued. He paced at the front of the room, arms swinging like he was securing a rebound. “I actually can’t wait any longer. Let’s go ahead and bring that out. Atchley.”
That was when I first saw her. And, looking back, it wasn’t all that spectacular. My heart didn’t palpitate, and I didn’t sweat. Time didn’t stand still. There wasn’t love at first sight, or second, or even third for that matter. None of that crap crammed down our throats in romantic comedy after generic romantic comedy. There was just a girl, and the reason she stood out was not because she was beautiful or sexy or smelled like lemon-drop rainbows—what grabbed my attention was she was so aloof. Here we were, yelling and clapping and stomping along in some euphoric, communal jubilation, and yet she wasn’t affected like the rest of us. She was calm and disinterested, mouth set firm in a line, eyes sleepy and devoid of makeup. She had her hair pulled up into a ponytail and wore jeans so wrinkled they appeared they hadn’t been washed in weeks. And it wasn’t that I found this charming or attractive. I was intrigued. What made this girl so immune to her surroundings when the rest of us couldn’t help but follow along?
“Drumroll please!” Pinkett said, as we all started drumming on our laps. “And Bam!”
Atchley pulled out the leaderboard. It was made from construction paper and glued to white Styrofoam board. In big block letters at the top, it read, “Southwest Assassins,” our regional name, and below it were five empty slots.
“Let’s start us off with number five, shall we?” Pinkett continued. “Coming in at $45,872 is Shreveport, Louisiana.”
Pinkett pointed up at the board like a game-show host as Atchley reached underneath the white sheet, pulled out the Shreveport panel, and attached it to the leaderboard with Velcro, all the while her expression unchanged, one of complete and utter boredom.
“At number four, totaling $63,294 in sales for this period, is, dun da duh, Round Rock, Texas!”
Again, Pinkett pointed up at the board as Atchley posted it, the rest of us booing Round Rock and all that they stood for.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, for our current bronze finishers is, wait for it, wait for it … Oklahoma City!”
A collective groan erupted from the crowd.
“Now, now,” Pinkett said, “it’s okay.” Atchley put OKC up on the board in third place, and some of the veterans at the front balled up pieces of paper and chucked them toward the leaderboard. Atchley stepped to the side and stuffed her hands into her pockets.
“We’ve come a long way now. Two weeks ago, we were ranked seventh. Last week fifth. This week third. If we keep this up, guys, we’ll take over first place. I just know it. Nobody is going to be able to stop you.”
Atchley placed the second- and first-place cities up on the leaderboard, Phoenix and Dallas, respectively. Pinkett put the music back on and acted like he was riding an invisible horse, lapping the table, the rest of us clapping and urging him on.
“And now the fun stuff!” Pinkett said as he stopped behind the table, pulled the sheet, and revealed a set of cleavers and butcher knives. They were large and shiny and I wanted them. I didn’t really know why, but I wanted them. “First, we’re going to unveil the top salespeople of the week. Atchley, if you please.” Atchley picked up the first name to be placed on the leaderboard, but she didn’t reveal who it was, instead holding it backward so that we couldn’t read the name. “Coming in fifth place, we have Zach Hughes!”
Everyone clapped and Zach stood to take a bow.
“As a reward for Zach’s gallant efforts this week, he has earned a new toy. A bread knife.” Pinkett held up the knife and handed it to Zach as if bestowing a sword to a samurai, head bowed, grip offered in reverence. Pinkett continued in this way, giving out bigger prizes to fourth place, a sharpener; third place, a chef’s knife; second place, a butcher’s knife, until he made it to the top prize of the week, the coveted first place. “This is a very exciting week,” Pinkett said. For the first time since starting the meeting, he didn’t shout. Instead he took a serious tone and demeanor. “For the first time in the history of the Oklahoma City office, our top salesman for the week is a newbie. Yes, that’s right, a brand-new salesperson outdid our top candidates. And by a long shot. By a wide margin. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Coming in at $4,593 in sales, nearly doubling our second-place finisher, is the one and only, fresh and ornery, Billie B-B-B-Booker!”
My stomach dropped. I felt queasy. I felt nauseated. Besides that, though, I felt happy. Ever since I’d been locked up in juvenile detention, I’d been marginalized and drummed down, beaten up and scolded, my conscience unbearable, my living conditions worse. The other inmates derided me, called me the false prophet. They called me crazy and held me down and stuffed dirty socks into my mouth. When I complained, the counselors were disinterested, their attention and resources already spread too thin by an ever-increasing population of traumatized and unruly boys, and so I’d felt alone and useless, beaten down into an automaton, a biological shell that ate and shit and pissed and drank and slept and stared, but nothing else. But this was different. For the first time since the church, someone believed in me, recognized me, made me feel as though I amounted to something, mattered to somebody. I was special, and—I couldn’t lie—it felt good.
“Come up here, Billie,” Pinkett said as he waved me up onstage like Bob Barker. When I joined him, he handed me a cleaver and unveiled a watermelon. “Here,” he said. “Take this.”
“Go ahead. Smash it. Destroy it. Make that fruit your bitch.”
I blinked again, unsure.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I promise.”
And so I swung. I swung the cleaver like an axe. I brought it over my head and used my entire weight to bring it down. I did it again. And again. And again. Until pieces of watermelon splashed the entire first row, Pinkett, and me. I swung until the table splintered in two. I swung until my hands were bruised, and the cleaver slipped from my hands. And then we all just stopped. Everyone looked stunned. The salesmen, Pinkett, everybody. Their jaws dropped and their eyes were like saucers, until Pinkett raised his arms in triumph and let out a shriek and the rest of the crowd followed suit, all of them standing and jumping and whistling, with the exception of Atchley. She just brushed the fruit from her clothes and walked out of the room, a piece of watermelon still dangling from her hair.
I SPENT ALL MY TIME at the office after that. The first couple of hours, I sat with Pinkett while he conducted interviews. The entire interview process was a sales pitch. From the ad to the phone call to the scheduling to the moment the applicant walked through the door. The entire act was scripted. Pinkett sold the job like we were supposed to sell knives, and he was good at it. He made you feel special, like you were bestowed this wonderful gift for being selected when in reality anyone who showed up was hired.
“Don’t tell anyone, though,” he said. “This stays between us.”
I also spent time with Atchley, asking her questions, mentally cataloguing her answers, jotting them down in a notebook when I got home at night. I tried to come off as genuinely interested in her, which I was, but looking back I must have seemed crazy, this odd interrogator asking endless, bizarre questions: “How do you like to cook your eggs?”
“Have you ever broken a bone?”
“What song most often gets stuck in your head?” To her credit, she answered every single one, no matter how off-putting or random it seemed, and she never made me feel stupid for asking either. She gave each of her answers genuine thought and consideration, sometimes even saying she would get back to me on something, then three or four days later giving me an answer, always with a straight face, always with poise.
“Why do you want to know these things?” she once asked me, a couple weeks after I’d started with SlashCo. We were at her desk, where she shared a space with her counterpart, Kari, the other girl charged with scheduling interviews. As always, Atchley was genuine when she asked, not distancing herself from my interest with sarcasm or derision. I found this irresistible and charming. I felt remarkably sane with her, not consumed with crippling self-doubt and loneliness.
“I don’t know,” I told her, though that was a lie. I asked her personal questions because I wanted to know everything there was to know about her. I wanted to know her so well I could predict what she was going to do even before she did it. I wanted to anticipate where she would be and what she’d be doing twenty years from now so I’d never be surprised by her, so I could be there for every important moment in her life, revel in her successes, comfort her in her failures. It was a strange impulse, I knew, but it was there nevertheless, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to diminish it.
“Okay,” she said, staring straight at me. Not in a way that made me uncomfortable, but in a way that emboldened me. “Ask away.”
“What is the most embarrassing moment of your life?”
“Easy,” she said. “I once peed myself while on a first date. The waiter made me laugh so hard I pissed all down the front of my dress. It pooled on the floor, and a busboy slipped in it.”
“Where were you when the Oklahoma City bombing happened?”
“I was in elementary school, Mrs. Sullivan’s class. We were working on spelling words, and she was getting aggravated because we kept misspelling the words on purpose. She wanted to scream at us. She wanted to yell and throw things and beat the ever-living crap out of us because we were just laughing at her, and there was nothing she could do about it.”
“Who do you hate most in the world?”
“Oprah.”
“Really?”
“She buys her audience with appliances. Seems disingenuous.”
“Okay, then. Oprah it is. Have you ever been arrested?”
“Once for public drunkenness and once for stealing.”
“What’d you steal?”
“Temporary tattoos and a Snapple.”
“You like Snapple?”
She shrugged. “I like the Snapple lady.”
“If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?”
She squinted at me like she was sizing up the veracity of my question, and if I was somehow going to use the information to hurt her in some way. For a while she just sat there and stared at me. “I wish I wasn’t so much of a coward,” she said, and left it at that.
I smiled, and she smiled, and that was all there was to say.
“For fuck’s sake, you guys,” Kari said. “You guys are weird.”
At ten a.m. I made my sales calls, scheduling appointments for that afternoon. Most of the time, I met with women, because they generally were the ones who did the cooking for the family, but every once in a while, I met with a man. One afternoon I met with a guy who owned a military-surplus store, and in his spare time he liked to cook. He watched Food Network and followed Rachel Ray on Facebook, and he owned every single item SlashCo had to offer.
“You a Republican or a Democrat?” he asked as soon as he answered the door. The way he said “Democrat,” with his tongue splayed against his teeth, I already knew the right answer.
“Republican,” I said. “We got a good one in W. Kerry would’ve been a disaster.”
“Good man,” he said and opened the door wider, letting me inside.
His house was filled with dead animals. On his walls were buck mounts and his chandeliers were made from antlers. A bearskin rug lay on the floor, and in the corner prowled a full-sized stuffed mountain lion. It reminded me of home in a way. My father had always been a hunter, and though Mom didn’t allow him to hang his trophies like this man did, the fall always smelled of venison cooking, a ten-point buck hanging from the ceiling in the garage, waiting to be sent to the butcher. I suppose this man’s house made me nostalgic in a way I hadn’t been before, missing my father, missing home before everything had crumbled around us.
The man’s SlashCo collection was impressive. He had the Ultimate, which was every single kitchen knife SlashCo manufactured, stored in a massive, 84-unit butcher block. The thing completely covered his kitchen island.
“Try to get them sharpened every few months,” the man said. “Nothing worse than a dull knife.”
I eyed the collection, knowing it would take me well over six hours to finish the job. Six hours of work while this man cleaned his guns at the kitchen table. He had an arsenal, 30.06 rifles and 9 mm semi-automatic handguns. He had a Colt .45 and a snub-nosed .48 and a shotgun. Having them all sitting there made me nervous. I hadn’t seen any guns since the night the feds raided the worship hall, and my throat constricted and my lungs threatened to collapse. To make matters worse, the room smelled of gun oil, and I had a hard time catching my breath. It made me dizzy, like I’d lost an inordinate amount of blood.
“So, tell me,” he said. “What is it about W that excites you? Not too often you find a young Republican such as yourself. Always seems like it takes a few dozen years before the stupid falls out. Know what I mean?”
“His support of the military, sir,” I said. “He did the right thing taking out Saddam.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean. You can trust a man like that. At least, you can trust him way before that traitor son of a bitch who turned his back on his buddies in Vietnam.” He picked up the snub-nosed revolver, unlatched the cylinder, and popped it open. The gun, to my surprise, was loaded. “You ever think about joining the service? I was in the Army myself. Two tours in the first G
ulf War.”
“I haven’t. No, sir.” The room spun, and the man split into two.
“To me, I think military service should be mandatory. Maybe the country wouldn’t be going to hell in a handbasket. Teach people respect. Responsibility. A sense of duty and reverence. Important things.”
He smiled and elbowed me like we were in cahoots. His teeth were yellowed and a large gap separated his two front teeth. I could clearly make out his tongue behind them, and I thought I might be sick. My breaths were short and sporadic, sweat poured from my brow, and I wanted nothing more than to run. In a moment, I was transported back to that night at the worship hall. I heard bullets firing. I heard people screaming. I smelled the worship hall burning.
“You okay, boy?” he asked.
My shirt was drenched. Everything went wavy. I was steeped in vertigo, and I reached out to catch my balance, but instead I knocked the customer’s butcher block to the floor. Knives spilled everywhere, and I fell. I fell and tried to catch myself but couldn’t. I landed on a butcher knife, my hand splitting at the heel. The cut was deep, and blood spewed from the wound.
“Jesus,” the man said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
I could make out bone. It glinted underneath the fluorescent lighting. The pain was intense. It shot up my forearm and through my shoulder and panged my chest like it was hammering my heart. Blood squirted everywhere. It shot up and out like water from a hose.
“Oh wow,” the man said. “Crazy, man.”
Blood splattered the island and the floor and his knives, and the man kneeled next to me, but I was so woozy and disoriented he no longer looked like the man. He seemed much shorter. His hair straighter and brown, parted in the middle. His complexion turned darker, and his voice an octave higher, though still gravelly. His voice was my mother’s voice, and in the distance I could hear the firing of gunshots, Sam screaming, and myself crying.
The man called an ambulance, and it took me to the hospital to stitch me up. It wasn’t far from the customer’s home, a short ten-minute jaunt by the turnpike. When I got there, two EMTs escorted me into the emergency room, instructing me to keep my hand elevated. It still bled, the loosely wrapped gauze stained a deep crimson. The pain was severe. I didn’t cringe or buckle over, but it was there, more pronounced than a dull ache, rather a monotonous stabbing agony. Strangely, I could feel my individual muscles contracting and relaxing underneath the wound, more acutely aware of how my body worked than before. It was a strange feeling in a way, unbearable and persistent, but one I was surprised to find I somewhat enjoyed.
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