The Last Days of Video (5 page)

“Calm down, kid,” the handsome cyclist said.

“
You
calm down!”

“There's no reason to—”

“Shut up!”

The dark-haired man sighed, sat up, tested his pedals.

He pushed off and glided toward Jeff, who now, for some reason, found himself paralyzed.

The man punched Jeff in the mouth.

Jeff's vision rolled over white.

Seconds later, when he was able to open his eyes, Jeff saw the three cyclists slipping away into the darkness.

“Good luck with that job, kid!” his attacker called out, and the other men laughed as if this statement had made any sense.

Seconds later, they were gone.

Blood still pounding in
his ears, Jeff attempted to help Waring stand. But the old man yelled, “No!” and Jeff released his arm.

Waring rolled to his stomach, groaned, pushed on the asphalt.

More than a minute later, Waring stood unsteadily and looked up and down the street. He seemed even shorter than normal to Jeff, who towered over him by almost a foot.

“They're gone,” Jeff said.

“Mm,” Waring croaked. “I'm going inside.”

“Okay, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But I helped you.”

Waring: no response.

“Is this where you live?” Jeff said, looking at a small, decrepit ranch house that eerily resembled his and Momma's duplex back in Murphy. “Can I help you inside?”

Waring hobbled on his own up the dusty driveway toward the house.

“They were messing with you,” Jeff explained.

Waring climbed the house's front stoop, fumbled with his keys.

Jeff's voice cracked into a yell: “Aren't you even going to say
thank you
?”

Silence.

Finally Waring looked back, and he called across the weedy lawn:

“You're the one with the crush on Alaura, right?”

Jeff's mouth swung open. He felt his face warm over immediately.

“She's out of your league, Sasquatch,” Waring continued. “And don't even think about telling her about this.”

Jeff shrugged. He looked up at the dark, hazy sky and mouthed a prayer for emotional support.

“Oh Christ,” Waring said. “You don't believe in God, do you?”

Without thinking, Jeff responded, “My . . . my family's Baptist.”

Waring looked up to the heavens himself, and after teetering backward and almost falling over again, he said, “I guess we need all the help we can get. Pray away.”

Then Waring hocked a loogie into a nearby bush, turned, entered his house.

“Good night,” he said, almost too quiet for Jeff to hear, and the door smacked closed behind him.

JEFF, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE

The next morning, Jeff
found himself sitting in a straight-backed chair behind the rear pew at Tanglewood Baptist Church. He was exhausted. Freaked out. Ashamed.

To his right sat three suited men—the other ushers—chewing on their gums, actively ignoring him.

Jeff didn't want to be here. But his minister from home, Pastor Fiennes, had e-mailed Tanglewood's minister, Pastor Herring, and Pastor Herring had somehow located Jeff on Appleton University's online directory and e-mailed him that week with a request to fill in as usher. And how could Jeff say no, electronically or otherwise, to a Google-savvy Baptist pastor?

Jeff's worst fear had already been realized: As he had escorted congregants to their seats, many of them had first smiled, then squinted, then glared at his swollen upper lip, where he'd been punched, quivering on his face like a purple mouse.
Who is this thug we've admitted into our church?
they surely thought.
This mountain trash?
The other ushers had avoided eye contact with Jeff (or eye-to-lip contact), and it seemed inevitable that Pastor Herring would soon be informed of Jeff's condition and proclaim from the pulpit,
“Son, I'm afraid this isn't working out. You need to leave. And of course I'll be calling your mother.”

Pastor Herring trolled on and on, the same old sermon about taxation/homosexuality (bad) and Billy Graham/George W. Bush (good), and Jeff struggled in his agitation to settle his thoughts on God. To mingle with the Spirit. But like always, this process felt disjointed, perhaps even rudely presumptuous, and he thought, as he had been thinking often lately, that if God is this huge, unknowable, all-perfect entity—the glue that binds together the universe—then why would He bother with tiny pathetic humans on the tiny planet Earth?

The other ushers were standing. Jeff stood as well, two steps behind them, certain that he looked like a bloody, punch-drunk boxer.

An usher with a bulldog's frowning face handed Jeff a brass bowl—the collection bowl? At Berry Baptist in Murphy, they used small plastic baskets.

It must have been an hour later when he reached the last pew and discovered Alaura Eden.

Had Alaura been sitting there the entire service? Only yards away from him? It couldn't be her. But it was. She was dressed like a countess from some black-and-white movie: a rounded fascinator with a black lace veil draped to her nose line and a high-collared jacket rising almost to her ears. Her tattoos were hidden. Hands crossed in lap, back erect, chin pulled in, eyes closed—as if she were preparing for a posed photograph.

When her eyes opened, flashbulbs went off in his mind.

Her hand—gloved in gray satin—rose to her mouth in surprise.

Hi
, Jeff mouthed silently.

Recognizing him, she laughed. A Julia Roberts outburst. A happily terrified cackle. So loud that Jeff knew he should be embarrassed for her, and for himself, but he wasn't.

He saw the heads of nearby congregants turn in their direction. One man with close-cropped white hair shook his head and scowled.

But Jeff didn't care.

He smiled back at Alaura, and he gave her a little wave.

“I go to church
once a month or so,” Alaura said. “Different churches. Methodist, Catholic, nondenominational. Sometimes I even drive over to Raleigh or Durham. Leave early, cruise the streets like a gangster”—at this she giggled irresistibly for a moment—“until I find a church that strikes my fancy.”

Jeff nodded, blissfully confused. Alaura had removed the cap with the veil and her high-collared church coat, revealing a more Alaura-typical band tee shirt. But who are the Ramones? Jeff wondered. They were walking slowly down College Street, from Tanglewood Baptist in Appleton toward Star Video, where they were both scheduled to work at noon. It was the first week of September, and a break in the heat promised by the Weather Channel had never come to pass. It was over ninety degrees. They passed the huge antebellum houses of the Historic District, each adorned with silver Historical Society plaques, their perfect lawns bursting with dahlias and gladiolas and daylilies, clearly competing with one another in some heated bourgeoisie gardening competition. Then Jeff and Alaura crossed the concrete bridge over the pottering strip of Nile Creek, lined on both sides by smooth boulders and weeping willows, and they moved into West Appleton, which seemed a world away. They passed dingy student apartment buildings, a locally owned organic taqueria, a locally owned deep-fried sandwich shop, and several other restaurants with patios chattering with activity—students and locals who hadn't gone to church, which Jeff could tell by their grubby clothes and hungover expressions—everyone drinking frosty pints and laughing, not a care in the world.

Once again, Jeff was struck by how happy and relaxed everyone was . . . happier and more relaxed than he ever seemed to feel.

“I went to church as a kid,” Alaura was saying. “Usually alone. Sprinks only had two churches, one Baptist, one Methodist. But I guess I always found church, I don't know, intriguing. The search for truth, et cetera.”

Jeff nodded again. “We always go to church.”

“You and your parents?”

“Me and my momma.” Jeff quickly corrected himself, “My mother. She's real religious.

“Not my daddy. His is the Church of Coors Light Almighty. He's not a bad drunk or anything. Just an always drunk. He's a good man.

“My mother's a good woman. She's . . . pretty strict, I guess. Didn't want me moving down here. But I think she's doing okay about it.”

Alaura nodded. “So your parents are divorced?”

“Um . . . um,” Jeff stuttered.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to pry.”

“That's okay,” he said, struggling to recover his composure. “Uh . . . yes, my parents are divorced. My dad . . . I don't really know him.”

“I never knew my mother,” Alaura said.

A pause.

“So,” Alaura said softly. “College must be a big change for you.”

Jeff looked up and around the town, at all the activity and happiness. He smiled. “This place, Appleton, West Appleton, it's a different world—”

Then they saw Blockbuster, and another silence fell between them.

In the course of only a few days, the building had completely transformed. It had been retrofitted with royal blue paneling along the outside, the parking lot had been paved dark black, and the walls inside had been painted a glossy, antiseptic white. At this rate, Blockbuster must be opening soon, maybe within a few weeks, or even a few days.

Both Alaura and Jeff stared at the building as they walked past, but neither spoke a word. Star Video quickly appeared, moments later, on their left.

“So what the hell happened to your lip?” she finally asked.

“Um . . .” but Jeff's voice faltered again. For some reason he couldn't remember the lie he had prepared. Like last night when the café girl's sweet laughter had incapacitated him.

He didn't want to lie to Alaura. But he also didn't want to risk his job by incurring Waring's wrath.

“Sorry,” she said. “You probably don't want to talk about it.”

“Um?

“A man of mystery, I can dig it. By the way, I saw that you checked out
Killing of a Chinese Bookie
a few days ago? By Cassavetes? That's awesome. What did you think?”

All at once, Jeff's nervousness redoubled—he didn't want her to know he had hated
Chinese Bookie
, hadn't even finished it. That it had been dull and sort of amateurish and kind of morally gross—all those strippers and drinking and gambling, not to mention the Chinese bookie, who apparently gets killed, though Jeff hadn't made it that far before passing out.

“It was okay,” he muttered.

“Okay?”

“I mean . . .”

“No, Jeff. Never pretend to like a movie that you didn't like. But when we get to the shop, I have to show you something.”

“Huh?”

“Part of your movie education.”

In Star Video, Alaura
and Jeff relieved Rose, who had opened that morning and who had been watching Looney Tunes on the store's central TV.

As she was leaving, Rose stopped at the door, turned back, and said, “Have a nice day, Jeff.”

Surprised, Jeff looked at her; this was the first time she had ever spoken to him directly.

He smiled awkwardly to her in farewell.

“Here,” Alaura said, breaking his attention from Rose. “You need to watch this. Cassavetes.”

She inserted a VHS tape into the store's dusty player.

“Our DVD of this is scratched,” Alaura explained. “It's awesome we still have it on VHS.”

“Oh,” Jeff said. “Is
that
why we still carry videotapes? And are we ever going to start carrying Blu-ray—”

“Waring's noncommittal on Blu-ray. It's fucking annoying. But let's talk about this movie, Jeff. It's Cassavetes.”

“But I just don't think Cassavetes is for me,” Jeff admitted. “I've watched some of his movies, but I—”

“Say that too loud, and Waring'll fire you.”

“What? Is Waring here?”

“I don't know. He's probably passed out in
The African Queen
.”

“Oh.”

“Cassavetes is maybe a little too indie for Waring,” Alaura said, rolling her eyes. “A little too fast and loose for his tastes, but he still—”

“His tastes?”

“Classics,” she explained. “Old movies. That's his jam. He's got wide-ranging tastes, of course. You've probably noticed he knows more about movies than God. But I'm not sure that he's actually
enjoyed
any movie made after 1979.”

“But didn't Cassavetes make movies, like, back in the sixties?”

Alaura shrugged. “Jeff, you need to watch this. I know you love movies. That's why I hired you. And you've got a more-than-decent foundation of movie knowledge, enough to help most customers—”