The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (3 page)

Rose didn’t know how long Henry had been driving around, how long she’d had her eyes closed. Not too long, of course. You couldn’t drive around this town for too long before you were driving out of it, but with the windows in his truck rolled down, the hot air blowing across her face, Rose didn’t feel any immediate urge to open her eyes, to see what the hell this stranger was doing or where he was driving her in his truck.

Then she became bored.

She opened her eyes just in time to see two girls she knew standing on the side of the road, looking over something dead on the pavement, giving it serious consideration.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Rose said. “Pull over real quick.”

Then she leaned out of her window. “What the hell are you girls doing?”

The taller girl, Patty, looked up, squinted, crinkled her nose. “Hey, Rose. We were coming to get you.”

“What is that?” she said, nodding at the thing dead in the road, pretending like she didn’t notice or care that fucking Patty had given Henry her name.

“Squirrel,” the shorter, dark-haired girl, Gina, said.

“What’s so goddamn interesting about a dead squirrel?”

“It ain’t dead,” Gina said. “Just smashed.”

“Oh,” Rose said, and then she slipped out of the truck before Henry could stop her. “Let me see.”

It was a sad sight, that squirrel.

The back half of it had been flattened into the pavement by someone speeding down the two-lane road, but the front half of it was still moving, had managed to pull itself a good two or three feet. At that moment, it seemed to be taking a break. Then its front paws started moving again, and she tried to imagine it pulling itself across the road. Tried to imagine the pain—did squirrels feel pain?—and the effort. The confusion, maybe, of having just recently had back legs that worked, of once being quick and acrobatic, able to climb trees and jump branch to branch, terrorize blue jays and mockingbirds, taunt cats and dogs.

And now this.

Where did it think it was going?

Gina and Patty were chatting about something behind her and maybe one of them asked who was that driving her around and another one might’ve asked what had happened to her shoes, but she didn’t pay them much attention, or rather, she listened to them just enough to know they were dead interested in who she was with and what she was doing driving around with this strange man, dead interested, in other words, in her, which was part of the point, wasn’t it?

Making people dead interested?

The squirrel’s chest beat rapidly, and Rose wondered if the beating was its lungs struggling to take in breath, or its heart struggling to pump blood into parts that were leaking that blood
straight out again. Watching how fast its chest was beating, she felt that they should do something.

Then she heard the truck door open and slam and she turned to see Henry walking toward them. He was carrying a small hammer in his left hand. He nodded at Gina and Patty, and Patty smiled back because that’s how Patty was and Gina took a slight step back because that’s how Gina was. Henry got up close to the squirrel and said, more to the squirrel or to himself than to the girls, “What have we got here, buddy?” He dropped down into a squat. He pressed the hammer to the squirrel’s head and Rose, suddenly sure of what was about to happen, sure and unhappy about it, said, “Hey, wait,” but before she could say anything else, he drew the hammer back and tapped it sharply on the squirrel’s forehead—if squirrels even have foreheads, Rose thought. The tap wasn’t too hard, just hard enough that the squirrel collapsed and the rapid movement of its chest slowed and then stopped. Someone, Gina or Patty, gasped behind her, and she imagined the two of them flinching, turning their heads into their shoulders.

Pussies, she thought.

Henry gave a small smile, more of a grimace, and said, “There you go.”

“How in the fuck,” Rose said.

He shrugged. “Just a matter of where you hit it,” he said. “Find the right spot,” he said, “squirrels, birds, dogs, cats.” He shrugged again, as if this were common knowledge, that there would be one spot on the skull just vulnerable enough that knocking that spot with a ball-peen hammer would do a thing in. “People, even,” he said.

“Where?” she asked, standing up again. “On a person. Where would you have to tap a person like that?” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well.” Henry smiled at her. “Everybody’s different, you know.”

She knew where, though, knew exactly where you’d have to tap a person on the head in order to send him on his way. Or where you’d have to tap her, in any case. There’d been a spot on her own head that had been itching to be touched, deeply touched. She could feel where it might be with her fingertips but the spot that urgently needed pressing against was too deep inside her, covered by layers of skin and bone and whatever else it was that was held inside her head. She’d been feeling this for the past couple of days and had tried pressing hard against her head with the palm of her hand, and when that didn’t work, had pressed her head against the warm glass pane of her bedroom window, and then the sharp corner of the headboard of her bed, and against her bedroom wall. She’d pressed the eraser points of pencils and the blunt end of a pair of scissors there, too, all to no avail.

She’d never considered the dull tip of a hammer, though.

“Right here?” she asked, pointing to that spot on her head, just at her hairline, straight up from the bridge of her nose.

He barely looked at her, where she was pointing, and then, flustered, focused his attention on the squirrel flattened on the road, and said, with a bit of a hitch in his throat, or maybe that was Rose’s imagination, “Maybe, I guess, I don’t know.”

Then he said, “It’s dead now, anyway.”

Looking at Gina and Patty behind her, he said, “You want me to leave you here with them, then?”

Rose looked at the squirrel and then at Patty and Gina and then at the truck and Henry. She knew the right thing to say to the strange man who’d picked her up on the side of the road and had just killed a squirrel with a hammer. Yes, go on ahead, I’m fine now. But she was drawn. She wasn’t sure what she was being drawn to but it seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than what she’d be left with if she let him go.

Gina, who’d been studying Rose out of the corner of her eye, spoke up. “She’s fine with us,” she said. “Right, Rose?”

But Rose shook her head. “Actually, you mind running me to the store? I told my momma I’d pick something up for her and I lost my flip-flops back there and don’t want to walk barefooted.” She said this and didn’t look back at Gina or Patty, sure she knew what kind of look she’d see on their faces, Gina’s anyway.

“Let’s go, then,” he said. And then as they pulled away, Rose looked back at Gina and Patty still standing next to that dead squirrel, Patty waving limply until Gina noticed this and grabbed her arm and shook her head, and then the truck turned a corner and Rose couldn’t see them anymore.

Rose had gone too far down the shaft. She didn’t know how far too far, but too far, she could sense it.

Should’ve taken that left back at Albuquerque—that was her dad’s saying, although Christ if she knew what the hell he was ever talking about. Whatever, though. It was Henry’s fault, somehow, his fault for distracting her and maybe her fault just a little for being so easily distracted.

She pulled herself up, hand over hand, ten feet, fifteen, twenty. She was beginning to wonder when she’d get back to her turnoff, just how far below it she’d lowered herself, when she came to it, the opening—if it had been a snake, it’d have bit you, which was another one from dear old Dad—and Christ, how could she have missed it?

She swung herself to it, close enough to grab hold of the ledge with one hand. She was going to let go of the rope with her other hand, climb into the new shaft branching off to the left, and be on her merry way, but she stopped. She couldn’t say exactly why she stopped, but she did.

Something felt . . . off. Told her, Hold on, now, what’s wrong with this picture?

But then something else told her, Nah, this is it, go, go, you’ve got shit to do.

Except her arms weren’t tired, and her legs weren’t tired. Nothing was tired. And she was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so why the rush, right? Let’s figure this shit out. Let’s use the Force, Luke, and all that other seeking-deep-within-ourselves-for-the-True-Answer bullshit she had been fed at Assassin Training Camp.

She let go of the ledge, held on to the rope, pushed herself off the wall into a gentle bit of pendulumming. She closed her eyes and went deep, went real fucking deep inside herself.

And here’s what she saw:

A map, in her head, a detailed motherfucker of a map, not just of the ventilation shaft but of the whole ordeal: travel agency, director’s office, training rooms, employee break rooms. Each girl had this same map stuck inside her head. Hell, if she wanted, she could pull up the secret compound in upstate New York, too. So.

Where was she?

A pinprick of light glowing hotly in the ventilation shaft.

Okay. Where was she supposed to be?

Same fucking light.

Good. All good, except, it wasn’t right. She could feel it. Something was still wrong, with her or her map or the fucking shaft.

She felt this overwhelming urge to open her eyes, to just look around and see, Hey, there’s the opening I need, but she wouldn’t let herself. Whatever it was that was wrong, her eyes were in on it, she was sure. Her body—fingers, legs—in on it, too.

Devil’s advocate: Security had been fixed by their woman on
the inside, or that’s what she had told Henry and Emma, had told all of them, and Rose had made it this far—the others, too—without sounding off any alarms, so the intel seemed good enough. The opening was dead-to-rights right in front of her. She’d been on this rope for ages and was on a strict schedule. So what was her hesitation?

Counterargument: That she was hesitating at all was her goddamn hesitation. She’d never been one for thoughtful consideration of action and consequence, had been a headfirst, why-the-hell-not kind of a girl, and if anything made her pause even a little, well, fuck, that seemed suddenly enough to make her pause a lot.

Time ticked by.

She opened her eyes. The rope dropped out of sight and into the darkness below her. It stretched out of sight above her. She’d stopped swinging ages ago. Everything was pointless. She closed her eyes again, frustrated.

She had to do something. She couldn’t just hang there.

Okay, just playing devil’s advocate one more time: What if the whole thing is a setup? What if the whole point of this is to stop me in my fucking tracks? What if it all only feels wrong just to make me hang here, immobile and useless, until it’s too late and the whole shebang is finished and I’ve fucked up the whole operation?

Counterargument: Fine. Fuck it.

She opened her eyes. The opening looked as real as it ever had. She swung her legs back and forth to get some momentum and then grabbed, finally, hold of the ledge. It felt as real as it had just five minutes ago. So far so good. She let go of the rope with her
other hand and grabbed fully on to the ledge. And then everything she was looking at, everything she was holding on to, flickered like a hinky picture on a shitty cell phone, and then it was gone and she was holding on to the smooth, purchaseless side of the ventilation shaft, or, rather, not holding on to it, not holding on to anything, and she fell.

The wind from the truck window caught hold of Rose’s hair, pulling it out of Henry’s truck. Henry wasn’t doing much talking and she didn’t feel like talking much, either. She watched the landscape pass by, familiar and dull, and only half listened to whatever was on the radio in the background.

“Those your friends?” Henry asked.

She had been biding her time, she realized. The last few weeks of summer, these first few weeks of school, sure, but even before that. These past few years. Maybe her whole life. Biding her time. She understood that now, and that here, even in Henry’s truck, she was still biding her time.

“Not really, no,” she said.

How was what she had been doing different from what Gina and Patty had been doing with their lives? she wondered.

They were biding their time, too. They just didn’t know it. That was what was different. They would finish out high school, Gina still a virgin, Rose was sure of it, and then each go off to college, with maybe a stop-off at the junior college for a couple of years first, and then, degrees in hand or not, they would wind their way back to this dump of a town, their eyes set on Randall Thomas (Gina) or Clem Buchanan (Patty), or boys of their ilk,
inheritors of their daddies’ body repair shops or small-town construction firms. They might work for a couple of years, teaching kindergarten or managing one of the antique shops on the square, and then quit working once it was time to start pushing kids out of their nethers. It was an oppressive and frightening thought, picturing the two of them not much different from their bitter, hard-smoking mothers. But it was a thought she kept close to the surface, a reminder, a sort of anti-goal she’d set for herself, alongside, Don’t wind up stuck here like your loser parents did, or, more simply, Don’t turn into your loser parents, her dad a shiftless asshole who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life (according to her mother), her mother a nagging, thickheaded harpy who couldn’t see a man’s potential, couldn’t see past the tip of her blunted nose (according to her dad).

Henry turned the truck into the Stop-N-Go and she came out of her head.

“What are we doing here?”

Henry smiled his strange, uncomfortable smile. “I need to get some gas, remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Won’t take a sec.”

She opened her door and slid out of the truck. “Since we’re here,” she said casually, tossing the words over her shoulder as she crossed the parking lot.

“Hey, wait,” Henry said, but she wasn’t listening.

She might as well get something good out of this shitty day.

Ian Honsinger had told her he’d be working the Stop-N-Go, and if she came by and she was nice to him, he’d get her some
cigarettes. Whatever being nice meant. That she had wound up here, by fate or accident, made her feel better about heading out with Henry. Plus she could use a cigarette.

Honsinger was at the counter, like he’d said he’d be, but seeing him, and his leering smile, and his cheap haircut, she wasn’t sure the cigarettes were worth the effort it would take to flirt with him.

“Hi, Rosie,” he said, stretching out the “e.” Then he looked past her and at Henry, and his eyes squinted and his mouth turned. “Who’s that you’re with?”

She looked casually over her shoulder, even though she knew Henry was the only other person at the gas pump. “Some guy. Henry, I guess.”

Ian stepped out from behind the counter and there was something puffed up and threatening about him now. She noticed, then, how he hadn’t stopped giving Henry the stink eye. “I don’t know him.” He looked down at her for a second. “I’ve never seen him before.”

She wanted to get a pack of cigarettes and a Coke and then get back into Henry’s truck, or maybe not that, either, maybe just the cigarettes and the drink and out of this gas station, which smelled strongly of Ian’s body spray now that he’d started moving around, casting the scent of himself into the farthest corners of this tiny little place.

Why was everything in this fucking town so damn tiny?

“Whatever,” she said. “Like you know everyone.” Then she poked him in the chest. “You gonna get me those cigarettes like you promised or what?”

He stopped staring down Henry, who hadn’t noticed anyway,
and looked at Rose, then grabbed her poking finger in that thick palm of his. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling his stupid smile again. “What are you going to give me for them?”

She smiled up at him, sweetly, innocently, then leaned in real close, and he leaned in close and draped his arms over her shoulders, and she could picture him at a school dance, homecoming or prom, maybe, his heavy arms weighing her down, his splotchy face too close to her eyes, and then she shook her head and almost laughed as she stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.

She’d been practicing this.

She’d seen something like it in a movie but was surprised she’d had an opportunity to actually try it out. She almost said, “How’s this for your troubles, loverboy?” But she changed her mind and backed off instead.

Just in case.

“That,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

He threw the cigarettes on the counter without asking which ones she wanted. She thought she’d heard him say something when he pulled the wallet out of his back pocket, slid the five dollars inside it.
Tease,
maybe. Or
cock-tease
. But she couldn’t see his lips when he said it, and it could have been her imagination.

She ignored him, anyway. “Thanks, Ian,” she said, singsongy and sweet again.

He looked at her and then back at Henry, waiting in the truck now, tapping his hands to some song playing on his stereo. Then he looked back at Rose and said, “Better be careful the kind of folk you run around with, Rosie.” He leered at her. “Strange man like that might look at a little girl like you and try to take advantage.”

She rolled her eyes. She backed herself into the door and pushed it open with her backside and said, “Fuck off, Honsinger,” and then did her best to flounce herself to Henry’s truck, and when she saw Ian was still staring at her, or at the truck, or at Henry, even though he couldn’t see Henry through her, she rolled her window down and flipped him off, and then they were gone.