Brief Encounters with the Enemy (8 page)

“I know,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of them.”

We were coming back over the railroad tracks that were about a mile from my apartment. A dishwasher from the restaurant once managed to elude the police who had come to arrest him in the middle of his shift, and not knowing where to go, he had run all the way to the tracks and hidden in the underbrush. They’d found him three hours later, covered in dirt, and taken him to jail. At his trial, he had pleaded no contest on the advice of his court-appointed lawyer so that he’d get only a three-year sentence. He had not known what the phrase meant, though, and so, standing in the courtroom in his baggy suit, he had said, “No
contents
,” and everyone in the courtroom had laughed.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked me abruptly. “What are you so quiet for?”

I told her about the dishwasher, and she said, “That’s a funny story.” And then she said, “That’s a strange story.”
After that she said she had thought about studying law but decided against it. But might study it after all.

“You’re a funny boy,” she said. “You know that?” And it was my turn to smile, because it’d been a long time since anyone had called me a boy. When had I crossed that line from boy to man? Whenever it was, the line had been so faint, so subtle, that I had missed it entirely. Maybe if I had been paying closer attention, things might have turned out differently for me.

“ ‘Boy,’ ” I said. “That’s a weird thing to call me.”

So she said it again. “Boy … boy … boy.” Teasing now. But suddenly she was no longer saying just “boy” but “pretty boy.” Or perhaps I had misheard her. “Pretty boy.” I wanted to ask if I was hearing her correctly, because the rain was loud, and the car was loud, and she was driving with great vigor along the wet streets, all the power of her skeletal limbs surging into the car. I watched her mouth, waiting for it to speak again. A wide mouth with wide lips. Her lips were the fleshiest part of her body. The second I looked back toward the street, I heard her say it again.

“Pretty boy,” she said. “Pretty, pretty boy.”

“Really?” I asked her. “Really?”

It was about a month after the war began that I took two boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, considering I’m the assistant manager, but I was in love with a girl who might or might not have been in love with me. Either way, this was the necessary course of action.

When the truck pulled up to the loading dock, I opened it myself and walked around being a pest with my clipboard, punctilious and official, examining things, checking things off my list. The driver kept sighing and coughing and making all manner of frustrated sounds. “It takes as long as it takes,” I said. Finally he went to piss, and while he was away, I grabbed the boxes and fled to the mop closet. I took a big box of toilet paper, sixty-two count, and I took a big box of something else that I didn’t bother to look at. I just grabbed it. Cookies or
cupcakes, I think it was. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Mr. Bildman didn’t care either. He took whatever you brought him. He took motor oil. He took nail polish remover. He took apples and oranges.

About an hour later, I tracked down Joey Joey in the break room, talking to three cashiers. He had his feet up on the chair like he owned the place, like an asshole. When he saw me, he stood up and saluted. The girls laughed. Jenna and Haley and Lisa Marie. He was putting on a show for them.

“I’m going to need your help with something,” I said.

“You got it, cap’n!” he said.

He calls me “cap’n” all the time and I’m not sure what he intends by it other than to irritate or possibly humiliate me. When he isn’t calling me “cap’n,” he’s calling me “sarge” or “colonel.” It might have been tolerable if there’d been some trace of irony in his voice. We’re friends, after all, we grew up together, we played Little League together, we graduated from high school together. But I’ve been promoted three times and he’s remained an associate. “You know why, right?” he said once. “It’s because you’re good-looking.” No, it’s because I’m more diligent than he, more industrious, and somewhat more intelligent. It’s also because while I was working my way up at Walmart—beginning with cleaning the bathrooms—he was selling prescription drugs, dressing as if every night was prom night, carrying a roll of money the size of a baseball, and driving around the city in an SUV with
ROAD TO THE RICHES
hand-lettered on the side. He was sure that this was it, that he had found his calling and the good times would never end. But the good times ended when he got arrested and the fear of God was put in him. I went to visit him twice at the county jail
with Chip, who also went all the way back to Little League. A window with fingerprints separated us and we had to talk over a telephone, Chip and I taking turns. There was a disconcerting hitch in the mechanism so that Joey Joey’s lips moved before I heard the words in the receiver. It was like I was watching a movie that had been dubbed in English. He was wearing a baggy green shirt and an ID bracelet, and if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought he was a patient in a hospital, which I guess in some ways he was. He had a small bruise on the side of his head, and when I asked him how he had come by it, he told me he’d dropped a dumbbell lifting weights. It was a story I found hard to believe, since he’d never worked out in his life. He spoke at length about his innocence, about how it was all a misunderstanding. He was facing six to eight years, but he managed to affect an assertive, nonchalant voice, highly enunciated designed to persuade the authorities who were presumed to be listening in on the conversation (which may have accounted for the delay on the telephone). But his eyes were the opposite of confident; they were wide, white, and tense. The next time Chip and I went to visit, the warden had locked down the jail and visiting hours were suspended. We left Joey Joey twenty dollars on his account, along with a porno magazine. Not long after, he went to court with a decent lawyer and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. He ended up serving eight months. Ever since then he’s had some catching up to do.

At six o’clock I left the store with my spreadsheets and a cup of coffee. “See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough,” the cashiers called out sycophantically.

A long line of customers was filing in with their shopping
carts and their babies and I had to jostle my way to get through. It was chilly outside but getting warmer day by day. It had been a rough winter and now we were hoping for a nice spring. The clocks had just been set ahead and the sunshine was pleasant but disconcerting. It made me feel like the last ten hours spent indoors had been doubly squandered. I drove my car around to the back where the garbage dumpsters stood in a row. No one was around. No one had any business being around. I turned on the radio and drank my coffee and listened to some news about baseball and about the war. I shut it off. Sitting in the silent cocoon of the car, with the sun beginning to go down, familiar fatigue came over me, originating in the soles of my feet and emanating upward until I felt soft and heavy. Even the coffee couldn’t offset the effects. It was warm in the car and I turned on the AC and it blew in my face. I took out my BlackBerry and checked my email. I have a tendency to check my email compulsively, especially when I’m idle. There were four new emails, all from work, all forwarded by people who had cc’d fifty people. It was what you did when you were trying to get out of responsibility, when you wanted to pass the buck to the next guy—you cc’d everyone. “Accounts Payable Protocol” was the subject line of one. I didn’t bother to read any of them.

In my lap lay my spreadsheets, rows and columns of blocks, some of those blocks filled, some of them empty; by tomorrow morning they’d all be filled in by me. They looked like a road map of sorts, my spreadsheets, an aerial view of the city, little block by little block, and I considered the drive I was about to make to Winchester Parks and whether I should take the expressway or the bridge. I thought about Mr. Bildman,
and I thought about Mr. Bildman’s daughter, Zlottie. She liked me, but I wasn’t sure if she liked me as
more than just a friend
. A slight tremble of anxiety passed through me, briefly counterbalancing the fatigue. It had been a while since I’d had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, mainly because I was shy, but also because I worked all the time and I couldn’t find any girls I liked. But Zlottie was smart, she was also sophisticated, and she had the darkest eyes. She had the darkest hair too. In short, she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met.

The last time I’d seen her was right before Christmas. I’d gone to the shop with Chip. Chip had the connection and I had the car. He’d brought with him sixteen boxes of underpants that he’d taken off the truck at Kmart. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. He’d been at Kmart seven years and was about to deploy and had nothing left to lose. He’d lost it all already when he blew out his knee senior year and his basketball scholarship was revoked. He’d shown me the letter the college sent him upon hearing the news, a giant coat of arms telling him they’d be happy to still have him if he could come up with twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He was six-foot-six but walked with a slouch, all shoulders, no neck, as if trying to get back to normal height so he could forget the whole thing. Instead of going to college, he’d signed up for the reserves. When he’d gotten called up, I’d told him, “You’ll be back before you know it.” I’d been one of those fools who thought there wasn’t even going to be a war. Now that’s exactly where he was.

When we’d walked into Mr. Bildman’s shop that final day, Zlottie had been right in the front, standing on a ladder stacking boxes of crackers. On the shelf behind her was one of
those Jewish candelabras with half the candles lit. The shop glowed in a soft light, making Zlottie look dramatic on the ladder, like an angel descending. She was wearing the same thing she always wore: a long black skirt that dropped all the way down to her shoes like a curtain on a stage and which hid the good parts from view. Even so, I could make out the curve of her ass. While Chip was in the back sorting out the details with Mr. Bildman, I broke the news that I wouldn’t be coming back. It was Chip’s thing, after all, and I was only the driver, and he was going off to war—and I wasn’t really a thief.

“That’s that,” I said. I tried to sound detached.

“Okay,” she said.

She didn’t seem to be affected by it that much. Apparently I was the only one with feelings. It was dark enough in the store that Zlottie, in her dark outfit, was almost beginning to disappear before my eyes. Then she caught me by surprise by saying, “Well, I’m just glad it’s not you shipping out, Nick.” Her voice sounded poignant in a time of war.

Since then I’d masturbated every day, sometimes twice a day, thinking about her working in that dusty shop, with that long black hair and that long black skirt, me entering with a box of whatnot, and the candles lit romantically.

From around the corner of the loading dock, Joey Joey appeared, pushing a big green dumpster that said
WALMART
on the side. He looked lethargic. His blue shirt was half untucked and there was sweat under the armpits. His pale face and round head added to the quality of lethargy.

“Oooooh,” he said as I rolled down the window. “I don’t
think this is a good idea, Nick.” The teenage humor from earlier was gone. Outside the walls of Walmart, he was all sniffles and submission. That’s what jail had done to him. Eight years in the penitentiary would have turned him into a rabid, raging fiend, but eight months in county jail had sapped his spirit. I felt a pang of remorse for having recruited him in a crime that was for my benefit only. “I’ll make this worth your while,” I said.

I got out of the car, and together we pulled my big box of toilet paper and my other big box out of the dumpster. There was slime on the boxes, grease or something, but they were no worse for the wear. Mr. Bildman would take them.

I chose wrong and took the expressway. It was bumper-to-bumper. Joey Joey passed the time by flipping back and forth through my spreadsheets. I checked my email. It was getting dark out, and my BlackBerry glowed with emails of cc’s. Every few seconds we’d crawl a foot and then stop. All the cars had flags on them, or red-white-and-blue bumper stickers, or some indication that we were in the midst. Occasionally someone would yell out a car window. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” they’d yell, or “Joey JoEYYYYYYYYY!” because we’d lived in this city all our lives and we knew everyone.

“I could do this,” Joey Joey said, meaning my spreadsheets, meaning my job.

“Why don’t you, then?” I said.

He guffawed. Then he got quiet while he pondered. “Twenty,” he said, “thirty-three, one-oh-seven.” He pointed with schoolboy pride at the little empty city blocks on the spreadsheet.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “What about the weekend?”

He pondered again. He tallied on his fingers. “Twenty-nine,” he announced, “thirty-four, two-eleven.”

He was right, he probably could do my job. But he wouldn’t. He’d just talk about doing it. He didn’t have that
thing
anymore, whatever that
thing
was that got you ahead in life. He’d fallen hard and couldn’t get back up. Maybe he’d never really had that
thing
. Maybe he was the kind of person who was better at taking orders than giving them. “That boy moves like a coon,” my father once said. He was a boorish man, my father, unschooled and unskilled, pretty much like the rest of the people in my neighborhood. I’m the one who ended up accomplishing something, making something of myself, and now I had to live with everyone thinking that they could do my job, that what I’ve earned is because of some secret to which they don’t have access: ill-gotten gains. The real secret is I worked sixty hours last week, not including the work I took home. The week before I worked seventy. I get full benefits and three weeks’ vacation, but I’ve done the math, and when it’s all added up, my salary isn’t much above minimum wage. About the only thing that separates me from the associates is that I wear a white shirt instead of a blue one. Often I’ll fantasize about when times were simple and I carried a box cutter and waited around for someone to tell me what to do. Other times I fantasize about moving up to upper management, which is at least ten years away if things go right. In ten years I’ll be thirty-six. I’ll have a potbelly and I’ll be bald. I’ll look like the district manager who drives a yellow Mercedes with a license plate that says
WLMRT
-
1
. He says to me, “I was just like you once, Nick.” He wants to keep me motivated.