Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (4 page)

“Corporate whore!” Edie spat with a sneer.

Troy chuckled. “I just work there, you know,” he said. “It’s not like I have some vested interest in the company or anything.”

“Oh, come on,” said Edie. “No one
has
to work there.”

“No,” said Troy, “I could always go work at the Mega Mart up the street instead. Or at one of the fast-food places. Nobody outside of Cedar Avenue is hiring these days, and you gotta work someplace.”

“But someplace like
that
?” Edie asked.

“Hey,” Troy explained, “Andy, this one guy I work with, says that retail is, like, the modern equivalent of going to work in the mines. At least I’m in one of the nice, well-lit mines that doesn’t smell too bad. I could even get insurance if they gave me enough hours. Plus, if I die in a cave-in or something, they’d probably alert the proper authorities. Mega Mart would have my clothes up on the rack before I was cold.”

“Why didn’t you just get a job here?” asked Brian.

Troy laughed again. “You don’t get that lucky,” he said.

“Trinity did,” said Edie.

“That wasn’t luck,” Trinity interrupted.

“She had to sleep with, like, five people to get this job,” Troy said. Trinity socked him in the arm. Hard.

“I did not,” she said, while Troy rubbed his arm and mouthed the words “She did.” “I was bagging groceries for a year and a half while I waited for an opening here. And it was a pay cut.”

“Hmmm,” said Edie, clearly not convinced.

“Look,” said Troy. “Would you like me better if I told you I was bringing the place down from the inside by not working very hard?”

“Well,” Edie said, “I guess so. In a way.”

“You know, Troy,” I said, “we were just talking about Wackfords. Do you think anybody would notice if people set up an office in there?”

He shrugged. “Not really. Everyone acts like it’s the office anyway. I’ve had people ask me to keep the noise down when the blender was running so they could talk on their phones.”

“Edie wants us to take them over like pirates,” said Jenny, “but we think that might be a little bit extreme.”

“Might be a little bit illegal, too,” said Troy.

“Just let them try to stop us,” Edie muttered.

“Actually,” I said, “we were thinking of filming a scene where we set up a regular accounting office in there, just to see if anyone even really notices. We could probably do it without getting in your way at all.”

“That might be kind of cool,” said Troy. “I can maybe help you pick times to come in when it’s just me and Andy working. I know he’d look the other way and let you guys do what you gotta do. Even if you don’t do the takeover thing, you should at least come and talk to Andy. He’s a McHobo.”

“What’s a McHobo?” I asked.

“As I understand it, it’s anyone who bums from job to job and never stays anywhere long enough to specialize. But he gets really philosophical about it. You could probably make a whole movie just about him.”

The music over the speaker suddenly changed from a waltz (I think) to something that sounded like a tango, and Trinity said, “Troy! Dance!” and pulled him up from the chair where he’d been sitting, then proceeded to lead him around the store, tango dancing. He looked like he was just following along as well as he could without falling on his ass, but he played along like a good sport.

“We are
so
learning how to do that, Brian,” said Edie.

Brian kind of shrugged sheepishly.

“Well,” Anna said as Troy and Trinity danced farther and farther away, “I’d probably better get going in a minute.”

“Me too,” said Jenny.

So everybody began packing up. I hung around Anna as she bundled up. She’d be walking home, even though it was still hellishly cold out. She lived right near the triangle, which I don’t think was coincidence. I could imagine her parents wanting a place near the old downtown—if they had to live in suburbia, they probably figured they might as well choose the best location they could find under the circumstances.

“That was a really good idea,” I said. “I think this’ll make a great movie. Even if we don’t stage a corporate takeover.”

Anna chuckled. “Edie’s weird, that’s all,” she said. “There’s this fine line between being an activist and just mouthing off, and she wouldn’t know it if it marched down Venture Street at the head of an oompah band.”

“Ha,” I said. I leaned in and kissed her, just on the cheek, which I figured was pretty safe. She didn’t stop me or anything, though she also didn’t kiss me back, I noticed. And it bugged me.

“Nighty night,” she said, and I think she might have been trying to say it really sexily on purpose. Sometimes I just couldn’t tell. It certainly sounded sexy to me, but she could have been talking about cleaning her cat’s litter box and I probably would have thought she sounded sexy.

She smiled and took off down the road.

I decided to stick around a little while to make sure I missed the evening’s grilling adventure. Trinity and Troy were still dancing around—or anyway, Troy was hanging on to Trinity while she danced around. Pretty soon Troy was just sort of standing there while Trinity danced around him—all around him. There were times when it looked like she was rubbing her entire body against his; then her leg would wrap around him and she’d be rubbing specific parts of herself against him. I made up my mind right away that Anna and I were
so
learning to do that, too.

Then George, the owner, came out of the back room carrying a bag of coffee beans. George was a good guy—he was in his forties or so, had a scraggly brown beard, and wore a straw cowboy hat. When he was the only one working, the music tended to be acoustic classic rock—the Eagles, James Taylor, early Elton John, Grateful Dead, and whatnot.

“Hey, George,” said Trinity, pausing from dancing at a point when her crotch was pressed right into Troy’s side.

“Consorting with the enemy, eh, Trin?” George asked.

“If that’s what you want to call it, sir,” said Troy.

Trinity pried herself off Troy and smoothed her dress. “I’m prying corporate secrets out of him the old-fashioned way,” she explained.

“Well, do what you have to do,” said George. “Whatever it takes to keep us from going out of business around here.”

“Can we do it on the counter?” asked Trinity.

“Whatever.”

“How about in the back, by the ice machine?”

“Hey,” said Troy, “I didn’t agree to any of this.”

“You’ll do as you’re told,” said Trinity cutely.

“Six months,” said George to Troy. “Six months and we shut down. I’ll probably have to go on welfare and live in a box by next Christmas. Tell your manager.”

What?

“Yeah,” said Trinity. “So get back there, clean up the area around the ice machine, and take off your clothes. Move it!”

She pushed him in the chest in the general direction of the back room.

“Excuse me?” said some woman at the counter. “Can I get some service here?”

“One second,” said Trinity, walking back over to the counter. “You!” She pointed at Troy. “Back there and strip. Now!”

Troy just stood there for a second, grinning.

“Move!” she said more forcefully as she got behind the counter.

Troy headed for the back room.

George snickered. “You crazy kids,” he said.

“We’re seriously gonna do it, George,” said Trinity. “The things I do to save this store from the Wackfords!”

“I appreciate it, Trin,” said George. “I really do.”

I wasn’t sure which I had to process first—the fact that Trinity was acting so randy at work and getting away with it, or that George had said Sip was closing in six months.

I looked around the place and didn’t see any going out of business signs, but there was also nobody else there, other than Jenny and the woman standing at the counter. Business wasn’t exactly booming. The tip jar on the counter looked pretty vacant. And six months is a bit early to put up going out of business signs.

Maybe it was true. It made perfect sense—everything else in the old downtown was dying, after all, and Wackfords was surely sucking up most of what coffee business existed in town. George wasn’t acting like he was kidding.

Those bastards.

I wandered out of the store, ready to call for a ride, feeling a sort of a throbbing in my head. Sip was about the last good thing left in town. If it was gone, there’d be nowhere for Dustin to read his poems. I mean, we could always go to Fat Johnny’s instead, but they didn’t serve coffee, there was no open mike, and I doubted that they’d be around long, either. The only time you ever saw anyone there was after the high school football games, and if another pizza place opened closer to the high school, they’d be toast.

Pretty soon the old downtown, and the neighborhoods where Anna and I lived, would just be old houses in the middle of a wasteland of strip malls and new subdivisions without any sidewalks, streets that didn’t go anywhere, and one white house after another. The local papers were talking about the town like it was suddenly being born, but none of them seemed to notice that it was actually dying.

Until the week before, I’d never really been bothered by it, but suddenly, just thinking about the new downtown was giving me a serious headache.

I was just about to call my parents for a ride when Jenny showed up outside, breaking my train of thought.

“Hey, Leon,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “You got a ride coming?”

She shook her head. “I’m supposed to be out running wind sprints in the neighborhood,” she said. “If I call asking for a ride from here, I’ll be dead meat.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

She pointed down the road. “Way out in Oak Meadow Mills,” she said. “I started walking right after you called me.”

Oak Meadow Mills was one of the new subdivisions off of the highway. It wasn’t really walking distance to anything.

“Jesus,” I said. “You’re gonna freeze to death if you try walking clear back there now.”

For a second I thought I should offer to get her a ride with my parents, but then I remembered that it wouldn’t be my mother and father picking me up, it would be Lester and Wanda: Grilling Americans. I certainly didn’t want her to see them like that.

“Wanna split a cab or something?” I asked, thinking as quickly as I could. I could probably afford to share one, I figured, though I really didn’t have any idea what it cost to take a cab. The rule was that I had to call for a ride. It didn’t really specify
who
I was supposed to call.

“A taxi?” she said. “Do they have those around here?”

“I think you can get one if you call a cab company or something,” I said. “It’ll probably cost a few bucks, but we can split it.”

“I’ll pay for both of us!” she said quickly. “I have cash.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ll get my share.”

“No,” she said. “I insist. I’m loaded. I get allowance, but I’m never allowed to spend it on anything.”

“Well,” I said, “if you say so.” I was never one to turn down free money, after all.

I pulled out my phone, dialed information, and asked to be connected with a cab company in Cornersville Trace. There was only one of them, but they put me right through to a guy who said someone could be at the triangle in ten minutes.

“This is so cool!” Jenny said. She was actually bouncing up and down, though it might have been just in an attempt to stay warm or the effect of all the espresso. “I mean, I thought only people in places like New York and Chicago took cabs.”

“My parents are gonna freak out,” I said. “I’m supposed to call them for a ride, but technically, there’s no rule saying I can’t get a cab.”

She laughed and jumped some more. It was a good prank for me and all, but it was really living on the edge for her.

“That is so awesome,” she said. “I mean, you always have the best ideas. That movie you made last semester was so cool, and then there were riots and stuff…. I’ll bet it’s the kind of stuff Jim Morrison did when he was in eighth grade.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “They weren’t really riots, exactly, just, like, gatherings. And they were mostly over in five minutes.” It’s hard to stage a proper riot when most people have to catch a bus home.

“Still,” she said. “I just, like, totally admire people who can do things like that. That’s how people should live, like, taking risks, pushing the boundaries of reality, and things like that.”

I’d never thought of the movie as pushing the boundaries of reality—pushing the boundaries of what you could do in a school sex-ed film, maybe, but not reality. This is not to say that I minded praise or anything.

“Are you going to do the new movie with us?” I asked.

She smiled again but kinda did this thing where she half rolled her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’ll help any way I can, but if you guys end up taking over the Mega Mart, there’s no way. My parents would chain me to a wall in the basement until I turn eighteen if they found out I was involved in something like that. Or send me to military school.”

“That’s just Edie talking,” I said. “There’s no way we can take over the Mega Mart.”

Just then, it occurred to me that the thing about taking over the Wackfords might be an even better idea than I thought—and not just setting up an office there, like Anna suggested, but taking it over like pirates, like Edie wanted to. If Trinity could still save Sip with some strategic sexual escapades, taking over the Wackfords probably couldn’t hurt, either. This was certainly something to consider.