Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (28 page)

I round the corner and Todd Vick appears. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Nate. 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.

“What are you doing?” Mindy Fale says. “What is wrong?”

I flex my stomach muscles to keep from screaming. I also get pants, which, like everything else I do now apparently, is no longer funny. The cashier radar-guns the items and swipes my ESL card. The swipe machine makes a long, microwave-type beeping noise. She swipes it again; beeping noise. I slap
at my neck. She folds a plastic shopping bag around the card and swipes again. Same beeping noise.

“This card's being declined for whatever reason,” the cashier says.

Mindy Fale sighs, head rolling toward her left shoulder.

“Can you cover this for me?” I ask her.

People in line behind us hang clothes over their forearms and shift their weight.

“I can't do that,” Mindy Fale says.

“My paycheck comes Tuesday, I swear.”

I step aside from the line. I tell Mindy Fale: “You have no problem blowing $150 on your friends at Outback-freaking-
Fake
house!”

“That's different.”

“It's not different! How?”

She looks past me, face completely flat expression-wise. “It's just different.”

I hang the clothing on a rack of girls' pink winter coats and walk out after her. She throws a quarter in the fountain, this blue-tiled thing with a pile of plastic rocks that the water runs down. I flip up my hands.

“I was saying a prayer,” she says.

“Jesus charges twenty-five cents per prayer? A prayer for what?”

“I'm not saying.”

People walk past us: a man in a sweater tapping on a PalmPilot; a toddler in a pink dress holding the hand of a large, shaved-headed guy with a black T-shirt that says
ALKQN
in gold, medieval-looking lettering.

“Give me your purse,” I say.

She stops. “No. Freak.”

“I get paid next week. Just give me your wallet.” Suddenly I'm cranky. I always forget that two pints at a restaurant makes you way more cranky than two pints at a bar.

“No. That's assault.”

A chinfat man with a Flutie jersey. A red-haired kid with a shirt that says
LOSER
, who mock-punches a tall skinny kid in a Celtics tank top.

Mindy Fale starts walking. “Wait,” I say. I reach toward her to see if she'll let me touch her. And on accident, I hook my ring finger and pinky into her purse strap. Her shoulder yanks back, she swings around, and her arms are thick and bullish and, on accident or on purpose, the heel of her hand flies into my cheek. “Damn!” someone yells.

The embarrassment dulls the pain. More than anything, I'm concentrating on standing up straight, trying to look as casual as possible: “We've got a live one here,” I say, apparently, to everyone here.

She draws her fist back. I flinch, my shoulders seize. But she checks her swing, and when I open my eyes she's walking away again. Then I follow her to the car and she drives us home.

She doesn't say anything until we get on the highway, and she flips her blinker on to go around a truck. “I just don't think you understand how much of an insult it is,” she says. “You think I like taking calls all day about property and casualty? I don't like my job either. But I still work hard so we can at least have money. I paid for your dinner, paid to get you drunk
tonight, and you thought nothing of it. And you whine and whine about this job that was handed to you by your friend.”

“I'm not whining; I'm complaining.”

A Mustang with an undercarriage blacklight streaks past us.

“My dad gave Jamie $50,000—for permits, whatever, to open that rims shop,” she says. “But he went out and bought trunk speakers for his Civic. Even after he sold his ring, he still owes me $4,000—credit card payments, a certain trip to a certain clinic he said he'd pay for. For you to have to borrow money, this quickly, is a bad sign.”