Brief Encounters with the Enemy (24 page)

She got out of the car and her brother came out on the porch. He was holding a snowboard. “I’m on the snowboarding team,” he said.

When I got back home, I checked to see if she’d stolen anything. I checked everywhere, kitchen, bathroom, dresser drawers. I couldn’t find anything missing.

Halloween was coming. The days passed. The temperature rose. The snow melted and turned to slush. Everyone who had complained about the snow now complained about the slush. When the slush finally disappeared down the sewers, everyone complained about the cold. It was only October and it was going to be a winter full of complaint.

The war continued to hold steady, and we continued to lose ten to fifteen men a day, which wasn’t that many, all things considered. The experts said you had a better chance of dying
in a swimming pool than dying in a war. The bodies came home in coffins draped with flags, as we held steady. Driving home at night, I’d pass the Halloween displays in front of the stores and homes. They were exceptionally imaginative and gruesome this year—bodies impaled, bodies decapitated, bodies on fire, along with the conventional artifacts of unease: pitchforks and black cats and spiderwebs. By late October, we were losing twenty-five men a day, which still wasn’t that many.

At the supermarket, business continued to boom. The deliveries increased to three a week and then four. In the afternoon, there’d be a line of eighteen-wheelers pulled up to the loading dock like cattle at the trough. Mr. Moskowitz ordered the guys on night turn to come in two hours earlier, but even that wasn’t good enough, even with Tom and Tim shouting like drill sergeants. In the morning, the back room would be filled with pallets of every kind of food imaginable, stacked floor to ceiling, so that I had to push my mop and bucket through narrow paths as if I were a mouse in a maze of cardboard skyscrapers. Everyone was trying to cut corners, trying to do things faster, including the stock clerks, who got into the habit of pulling their boxes out from the bottommost pallet and undermining the foundation, so that one afternoon, about thirty minutes before I was supposed to punch out, an entire skyscraper of produce collapsed. It sounded like an explosion when it fell. Two hundred pumpkins lay crushed on the floor like bodies in a disaster. I was the one who had to clean them up. I had to use two mops and a shovel. This time when Pink from coffee came past, he didn’t bother to make his usual joke about hardly working. His big fake watch told him
he had five minutes left for his break. “Hardly hard?” I called after him. He didn’t think it was funny. Howie from deli walked by, reeking of aftershave and cheese and saying somberly, “I wish that was my head on the floor.” The cashiers passed, not saying hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, because they were working double shifts, and so were the butchers, and the bakers, and the baggers, and so was the man who collected the shopping carts in the parking lot whose hands were red from the cold. “That’s a safety violation” was what he said when he saw the mess. The only person who wasn’t having a problem with the workload was Ziggy, who was catching an average of three shoplifters a day and having the time of his life posting new photographs on the wall in the back room.

But on Halloween things changed for the better: we were on the move again, making progress toward the capital. That day, every thirty minutes, Mr. Moskowitz would click on the loudspeaker and announce, “Forty miles to go!” He’d shout like he was calling bingo. “Thirty-nine miles to go!” A great and spontaneous cry would rise up across the forty-eight aisles, people shouting and screaming, customers and employees alike. Everyone was happy and everyone was excited and everyone was breathing a sigh of relief. Thirty minutes later, the loudspeaker would click again. By the time I punched out, we had closed to within twenty-five miles.

Amanda’s parents were off at a fund-raiser or something, so it was up to us to accompany Oscar trick-or-treating. He was dressed up like a soldier in camouflage, a flak jacket, a plastic helmet, and a plastic bazooka. Since it was cold, he had to
wear a coat and hat and scarf, so the only thing that made him look like a soldier was the bazooka. He didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t such a bad kid.

It was such a long walk between each big house that it took a while for us to get from one destination to the next. In the dark, you could hear people calling “trick or treat,” but you couldn’t see them, you could only see glowing pumpkins. Oscar held Amanda’s hand, and Amanda held my hand, and I imagined that this was what it might be like for me, twenty years in the future, walking with Amanda through some rich neighborhood on Halloween with our son or daughter. She probably wouldn’t marry me, though. She’d marry one of those successful guys with a college degree and a normal body. That was most likely what the future held in store for me, I thought.

“Bang bang!” Oscar said when the doors opened. In reply, the homeowners gave him generous handfuls of candy, which he didn’t mind sharing with Amanda and me.

At one point along the way, we stopped in the road to say hi to some of his little buddies from school. They stared at my empty sleeve and said, “What happened to your arm, mister?”

“It’s congenital,” I said.

“What’s that mean, mister?”

“It means it got shot off in the war.”

They liked this.

By the end of the night, we had ten pounds of candy.

“Can I stay up?” Oscar said when we got home. He wanted to count everything. He had chocolate all over his mouth.

“No,” Amanda told him. Then they screamed at each other. Then he went to bed. Then it was just the two of us.

It was quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock coming from somewhere deep within the house. We sat on the couch together. My good arm around her shoulder, her leg pressing against my leg.

I said, “This is what it could be like for us.”

“What could be like for us?” she said.

“You and me in this house.”

“We are in this house,” she said. She didn’t get it.

“You don’t get it,” I said.

She unwrapped one of her brother’s lollipops and stuck it in her mouth. She watched me watch her. She leaned over and put her lips close to my ear. I could smell the strawberry. “Come on,” she whispered, “let’s go upstairs.” Her breath made my toes curl. “I have to work in the morning” was all I could think to say. It was true. But I followed her up the big staircase anyway, tiptoeing past Oscar’s room, and then across the landing, and then up another staircase that led to her bedroom.

It was small and cozy, with slanted ceilings, and it was decorated with the pinks and purples of her childhood. She had fluffy pillows all over the bed. She had posters of kitty cats on the wall. Sitting on her dresser were a hundred tiny bottles and jars. On cue, she opened a tube and squeezed a small amount of cream on her finger. She rubbed it into her cheeks and forehead.

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to wake up in the morning and be cured.”

“If you believe it,” I said, “it will happen.” I was quoting.

She looked in the mirror at me. “Is that so?”

“Good things happen to good people,” I said.

She snickered. “Who told you that?”

I couldn’t remember.

Abruptly, she asked, “Do you think I’m pretty, Max?”

“I sure do,” I said. Because I did. And to show my sincerity, my romantic interest, I put my good arm around her waist and kissed the back of her neck. But she’d had enough with kissing. She whirled around and stuck her finger in my belt loop and pulled me against her. She was surprisingly strong and her breasts were pressed against my chest. She tugged at my shirt. I twisted awkwardly but she wouldn’t let go.

“Can’t we at least,” I said, “turn off the light?”

“No,” she said. “Please,” I pleaded.

Back and forth we went like this, me wiggling and squirming, she pulling and tugging, me the object of desire, she the kleptomaniac, until finally, too exhausted and embarrassed to go on, I succumbed.

“Okay, okay,” I said.

She relaxed her hold on me at once. It felt like a snake uncoiling. Then she reclined with a sigh onto her purple bed, her back propped up by a dozen pillows, her hands behind her head in a posture of luxuriousness.

I stood there in the middle of her bedroom, the lights blazing away, as bright as those fluorescent lights in the supermarket, and I did what she wanted: I undressed. The shoes first, of course, then the socks, and after that I took off my belt because I was stalling for time, and then I unzipped my jeans and stepped out of them, and after that I dropped my boxers, since I’d rather be naked from the waist down than from the waist up. But soon there was nothing left except my shirt, which I
unbuttoned as slowly as I could, until my chest was exposed with one sleeve hanging full and one sleeve hanging empty. Then I took it all the way off.

I stood there naked and silent, waiting for her to issue her verdict about my deformity, which presently she did: “What’s the big fucking deal, Max?”

Then she turned off the lights and pulled me onto her bed, where she spent the next few hours teaching me how to do all those things I’d only ever watched in the videos.

In the morning I woke late. I was late for work. I didn’t care. I lay there without moving, next to Amanda in her fluffy bed. Then very quietly I got up and got dressed and sneaked downstairs past her parents’ bedroom, where I could hear a white noise machine whirring, and out the back door.

In the daylight, the Halloween displays had lost their power to frighten; they were flat and wilted and wet. During the night the ghosts and goblins had fallen or been torn down, and now the roads were covered with pillowcases and cardboard, pounded into the ground by a succession of cars, mine included. The American flags were flying, though, they were flapping in the wind, and when I came over the river, the factories were going strong.

Everyone said that it was only a matter of time until we took the capital, maybe a matter of hours. But every time the loudspeaker clicked on that day, it was just Mr. Moskowitz letting me know that there was a cleanup in such-and-such aisle, and I would wheel my mop and bucket the other way.

For two days people walked around holding their breath,
looking expectantly at one another. For two days everyone waited to hear what would happen next.

And on the third day the draft began.

Pink from coffee was called right away. So was Howie from deli. So were three baggers and someone from fish and someone from bakery. Ziggy was called. He’d gotten his wish after all.

You could tell who was going by the way he walked, slowly, deliberately, as if groping his way through a rainy night. If I happened to make eye contact with one of them, they would look startled. I tried to avoid them when I could. Within a week they had gotten their papers, and they had gotten their physicals, and the day before they were to depart, we had a surprise going-away party for them. Everyone gathered in the back room, including some customers who’d been shopping in the supermarket for years and knew everyone by name. When the recruits arrived, they pushed their way through the swinging doors, and we shouted, “SURPRISE!” But the surprise was on us, because they’d gotten their heads shaved and they looked strange, like newborns. I couldn’t even recognize them. The baggers looked like they’d give anything to go back to bagging.

“You boys look so handsome,” one of the cashiers said. The men tried to smile, but they knew the truth. They stood with their arms folded meekly in front of their chests.

Mr. Moskowitz said, “Eat up, everyone!” And we ate our free doughnuts and drank our free sodas that Mr. Moskowitz had gotten the district manager to donate. No one really knew what to say. We tried to mill around, but it was difficult because the back room was cramped with the day’s delivery, the
pallets stacked one on top of another, ten high, towering over our heads. It was a reminder that all of these boxes would soon be opened and unpacked, so as to make room for the next day’s delivery—life goes on.

Eventually Mr. Moskowitz said he wanted to make a speech. Everyone got quiet and he stood on a box and started by saying how he was proud of each of the guys, even though they didn’t have any choice in the matter.

“What you’re doing,” he intoned, “what you’re about to do …”

Ziggy and Howie stared straight ahead—they already had the stare of soldiers. Pink had his eyes closed because he was high. The baggers stared at their feet.

“I know it’s going to turn out all right for you,” Mr. Moskowitz said, “because you’re good people.”

The room said yes to that.

“You’re going to be back soon,” he said.

The room said yes to that too.

“It’s not easy,” Mr. Moskowitz said, “but it’s important.” His voice was rising, and his face was getting red, and some of the cashiers were wiping their eyes, and the mood was becoming even more doleful and downcast, and the back room was hot, unbearably hot, and I had the feeling that we were at a funeral, not a going-away party, that this was it for Ziggy and Pink and the baggers. They wouldn’t be coming back. Their faces told the story.

So I shouted, “Shoot some motherfuckers for me, fellas!” And that broke the tension. The back room erupted, everyone applauded, including Pink and Ziggy and the guy who collected shopping carts in the parking lot. After that, we ate and
drank our fill and talked about other things until Mr. Moskowitz said it was time for us to get back to work.

Later that day, as I was coming out of the locker room, Mr. Moskowitz called me into his office. “Max,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “Come in, Max, and shut the door.” The knot in his tie was loose because it was the end of the day, it was casual time. He put his hands on his spreadsheets and looked at me from across the desk, a paternal, patient look. A look of forbearance.

What wrong thing, I wondered, had I done now.

“If you give one hundred percent, Max,” he said, “you get one hundred percent right back.”

And the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, I changed into my new uniform and took my place behind the coffee bar. I had been right, it’s not hard to pour a cup of coffee, especially when you have a five-dollar raise to go along with it.