Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  “Because I’d give myself away,” he had responded solemnly. He was slow like that sometimes.

  He winked at me as we passed each other. He knew what the girl was up to, and he knew that I knew. He loved this. He lived for this. I’d known him since middle school, where he had developed a passion for tattling. He once tattled on a girl for copying off his math test, even though it was no skin off his back. Her parents had to be brought in for a conference. Things like that can mar you for life. Now he earned twice as much as I did, and he didn’t do anything but spend his day strolling up and down the forty-eight aisles, gazing at the assortment of products, studying, pondering, selecting, then handing me his shopping cart at the end of his shift so I could return every single item to the shelves. Most days he was just an endless shopper full of suspicion of other shoppers, hoping for his intuition to be proved right to affirm him and release him from his tyranny of wandering. His original dream was to be a cop, but like a lot of people’s dreams, this one was dashed, mainly because he failed the written exam three times. “They’re all idiots anyway,” he told anyone who would listen, near tears, inverting the judgment. He was thinking about joining the army now. Once the war ended, of course. Or the marines. He was chubby and easily winded, but I supposed he had a shot. “Keep striving for your goal,” I encouraged him. It was what my father always said when he found himself at a loss for what to tell me next.

  Ziggy passed me as I passed her. She had moved on to sampling the broccoli soup. I wanted to hang around long enough to see the exciting moment of revelation when the soldier takes his true form and removes his store ID, but the loudspeaker clicked on just above my head, and Mr. Moskowitz, as if he were a fire captain ordering his men into the burning building, screamed with great urgency, “There’s a cleanup in aisle thirty-nine!” So I had to wheel my trash bin around and return the way I had come, through the maze of aisles, past the cheese court and the chocolate confectioner and the ice cream parlor, to the back room, where I retrieved my mop and bucket from the mop and bucket closet, then hurried all the way to aisle thirty-nine, where someone, through negligence or spite, had knocked over a display of molasses. A half-dozen bottles lay smashed in the middle of the floor, and from them oozed a great puddle that was widening slowly, almost imperceptibly, oozing across the aisle as if it were a lake at the beginning of time that, if left long enough, would engulf the entire supermarket.

  No, I don’t have a problem cleaning: I hold the mop in my good hand and the crook of my bad arm, and I swing it like a normal person, and when I need to rinse it out, I dip it in the bucket, keeping it tight against my chest as if I’m dancing close, and I wring it out with my good hand, and that could also be just like a normal person.

  Midway through my endeavor, three cashiers walked by on their way to the break room. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, Max,” they said. Sabrina and Jessica and Melanie. They wore fake nails. They wore eye shadow. They chewed gum.

  “Hiya,” I said, and I paused to watch them sashay their way down the aisle.

  After that, Pink from coffee came past, high on pot and wired on caffeine, wearing his giant watch that glinted in the fluorescent light. I was waiting for him to get fired so I could take his job. How hard is it, really, to pour a cup of coffee?

  He said rapid-fire, “Working hard or hardly working?” Which is what he says almost every time.

  “Workingly hard,” I responded.

  He never stopped thinking this was hilarious, and he laughed in slow motion, bending in two and propelling himself forward as if ascending a mountain.

  And then Howie from deli came past. I could smell him before I saw him. He reeked of salami and cologne, the latter of which he used in an attempt to camouflage the former. He wasn’t much older than me, but he acted like an elderly man, joyless and embittered, whose best days were behind him, which they probably were. He slouched noticeably to his right, almost like a hunchback, because he spent eight hours a day slicing four-pound blocks of meats and cheeses. I’d switch jobs with him any day too. He didn’t look up when he walked by. He said without any trace of humor, “What’d you do, Max, huh, take a shit on the floor?”

  When the customers came by, they were all smiles, real sweet smiles, real sympathetic smiles, and they stepped lightly and took an extra-wide berth to show their consideration and compassion.

  “You’re an inspiration, Max,” they’d say, addressing me by way of my name tag.

  At one point, a husband and wife arrived with two shopping carts and five children, three of whom wanted to play in the puddle of molasses. The other two stared at me while they aimlessly waved small American flags that were being sold at the front of the store for ninety-nine cents. While the wife was trying to corral the younger ones, the husband took the time to tell me that I was living proof that if people really wanted a job, they could have one.

  “There’s good and bad in all people,” he said.

  “You got that right,” I said.

  “That’s why we’re in this mess today,” he said, meaning the war and meaning society. He was getting worked up and wanted to keep talking about the guys he knew who were over there fighting, and the guys he knew who were over here doing nothing. I would have let him keep talking, but his wife said they should go so I could get back to work.

  Before she left, she leaned in close, discreetly, and said as if telling me a secret, “You’re one of God’s angels, Max.”

  When I got back to the back room, justice was running its course. The girl with the acne was sitting on top of a giant cardboard box filled with containers of laundry detergent. One of her wrists was handcuffed to the steam pipe that ran two hundred feet to the ceiling, and she was rocking back and forth, explaining how it was a big misunderstanding. They all said it was a big misunderstanding after they’d been caught. I once watched a man try to claim he had no idea there were eight packs of cigarettes down his pants.

  “You don’t understand!” the girl gasped.

  The day’s delivery hadn’t come in yet, and the back room was empty, like a stadium before a game. In the vacant space, the girl’s cries were amplified and her size diminished. Ziggy was unmoved. He was all business, oblivious to her beseeching. He was in the process of pulling things out of her fur coat like a magician: cookies and lipstick, chips and cheese, it was endless. He didn’t care about the strawberries or soup in her stomach. They were the least of it. When he was satisfied that he had bested her sleight of hand with his own sleight of hand, he snapped open his briefcase with authority, showing how wrong the police force had been for passing him over three times.

  On the wall behind the girl’s head was an array of photographs, almost like a memorial, of the people who had been apprehended over the years, with name and age, staring out at the camera with their bounty held in front of them, their shame lasting into eternity. Once caught, they could never return to the supermarket, but I had become so familiar with their faces that it was as if they shopped there every day. Children with candy, moms with milk, men with meat. To this collection of hundreds of unhappy faces, sullen, grim, imploring, occasionally smirking faces, would soon be added the girl’s face. As I put away the mop and bucket, her voice echoed behind me.

  “You, you, you, don’t, don’t, don’t, understand …”

  And then Ziggy responded with his own plaintive call for help: “My forms!”

  His face was red and anguished, embarrassed and humiliated, as if he had been the one caught cheating on the spelling test. He held up his empty briefcase, showing how right the police were for passing him over. “Goddammit, Ziggy!” he scolded himself in the third person, and he kicked his way through the swinging doors with his combat boots, Lieutenant Ziggy en route to procure the necessary paperwork. The doors banged back and forth six times before coming to rest.

  Soon the day’s delivery would arrive, three hundred pallets of groceries—double the amount since the factories reopened—to be unloaded from the eighteen-wheeler by the
night turn manager, Tom or Tim, depending. Among my many tasks, it was my responsibility to make sure the loading dock was clear and accessible, so that nothing would be in Tim or Tom’s way when he got to work, so that nothing would slow him down, since the drivers made forty dollars an hour—and I made eight—and the manager had to get them back on the road as soon as possible. Every once in a while I would ask Tom or Tim if he might consider putting in a good word for me with Mr. Moskowitz about the possibility of becoming a stock clerk. How hard is it, really, to put cans on a shelf? But they’d hem and haw and make up some excuse about how the time wasn’t right, Max, about how they’d see about it later, sometime later, about how I should remind them about it later. I’d heard it all before. In the meantime, they’d say, “Time is money, Max. Let’s keep the loading dock clear.”

  I pushed the green button and the gate churned upward, letting daylight into the back room and the smell of the factory smoke coming from along the river. It smelled like melting plastic. There was also a breeze, coming unimpeded through the parking lot, reminding everyone that winter was going to be early this year, that winter was going to be bad. Sitting on the dock were some saggy bags of garbage, filled and leaking, alongside a cart piled with cans and bottles, dropped off by concerned customers, and which needed to be sorted and recycled. I placed the bags of garbage in the cart and wheeled it inside, and then I threw everything down the garbage chute, every single can and bottle and bag of trash, because I have too much to do and I don’t have time to sort and recycle.

  When I turned around, I saw that the girl was staring at me. She was quiet and had stopped rocking back and forth. She seemed resigned to her fate. Her hand, held aloft on the steam pipe by the handcuff, made her appear to be in the process of trying to hail a taxi. I tried not to look at her because it’s embarrassing to be free when someone else is captive, but in the dim daylight of the back room, her face was very pretty, her acne less acute, and her chocolate hair had regained its luster. I moved awkwardly, self-consciously, trying to keep my good side facing her way, although it was most likely too late for that. She had discovered what everyone eventually discovers, that my left arm is considerably smaller than my right, about half the length. I make sure to always wear a three-quarter sleeve to save everyone the predicament of having to see my arm twisted like a corkscrew and topped by a withered and nearly useless hand, three fingers only, no thumb, more fish fin than human limb, and which I can use to do things like unscrew the cap on a bottle, but that’s about it. “We all have our burdens to bear,” my minister had told me years ago when I was about twelve years old, taking me aside one Sunday after service and quoting at length some scripture that he said applied directly to my situation, and which I felt emboldened by at the time but can no longer recall.

  Looking out at me from the great tableau of faces on the wall above the girl’s head was one in particular, that of a young boy, redheaded and freckled. In the photograph, he is holding a bag of pretzels in front of his chest as if it’s a prize he’s won, and he is smiling at the camera because he isn’t quite sure what’s happening and because he was taught to smile whenever he has his picture taken. He was apprehended years ago and would be a man by now, maybe older than I am, but he has been preserved forever in that photograph at age ten. No matter what he goes on to accomplish in his life, he will never outlive this crime.

  I happen to know that hidden behind the photograph is a spare key, and it was that key I used to unlock the girl’s wrist from the steam pipe. She yielded with a whimper. Her wrist was pliant and thin. I led her to the loading dock and I clicked the red button so that the gate began to churn down. Then I let her go, releasing her the way trainers release birds back into the wild. She ducked beneath the closing gate without hesitation and without thanks. The last things I saw were her feet.

  I spent the rest of my shift avoiding Ziggy. It wasn’t that hard. I’d catch sight of him in the aisles and head the other way. It slowed me down but I got most of my work done. I finally ran into him in the break room, where he was eating a bag of chips like a pig, leaving crumbs all over the floor—perhaps as an act of revenge. He looked at me glumly, sitting there in his fatigues, but all he said was “It’s snowing.”

  It had never snowed in September. It hardly ever snowed in October. When I exited the supermarket, the flakes were fluttering in the parking lot lights as if suspended on invisible wires. It was nine o’clock at night, but customers were still coming. They pushed past me as if they were trying to get into a rock concert with shopping carts. Two hours later they’d be pushing their carts the other way, filled with five hundred dollars’ worth of groceries. Next week they’d do it again. My main concern was that they would be tracking snow across my floor.

  A couple of the stock clerks were getting off at the same time and they stopped to watch the flakes with me. So did the guy who scoops ice cream in the ice cream parlor. So did the travel agent. So did some of the cashiers. Night turn was just coming in and they stood along with everyone else. It was like we were watching fireworks in July.

  Howie from deli stopped too. He smelled like bologna and deodorant. “If it’s snowing in September,” he said, “what’s it going to be like in January?” He ruined the moment. We all got in our cars and drove home.

  The next morning the sun was out but there were eight inches on the ground. School was canceled and children from the neighborhood had assembled in the street to have a snowball fight. I sat in my kitchen and watched them play: they were fearless and they were ruthless, and they hit each other in the face. Half were the Americans and half were the enemy. “Kill, kill, kill,” they screamed. The snow made everything in the neighborhood look white and clean and newly restored, like in the photographs from fifty years ago when times were good. Before I got in the shower, I opened the window and gathered snow off the windowsill and made a snowball about the size of a cantaloupe. It took me a little longer than the average person, but I got it done. “Here comes the atom bomb,” I yelled, and the boys and girls looked up at me with terror and delight as I hurled it down on their heads.

  They said, “Do it again, Max! Do it again!”

  “But you’re all dead,” I said.

  “Do it again!”

  I had to get to work.

  Since we were an important city, a vital city, the mayor had sent trucks round-the-clock to clear the roads, and I had no trouble making it to the supermarket on time. Nearly everybody else was late. There were five cashiers when there should have been nine, and there were three baggers, and there was no one in dairy, and the flag displays were all empty. The managers ran back and forth like fools, trying to figure out what to do next.

  In the locker room, Pink from coffee was slowly changing into his uniform. It was nine o’clock and he was already high. How he’d made it to work on time, I had no idea.

  “Check out my watch,” he said. He displayed his wrist. He always had a new watch, always larger the last one. This one had a gold face with diamonds around the edge. You could tell the time from a block away.

  “That sure is a nice fake watch,” I said.

  “I can get you one,” he said. He looked at me significantly.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t need to tell time.”

  He thought this was funny. He laughed hard but with no sound. Two late baggers sauntered in as if they were on their way to a day at the beach, and I wanted to tell them that I’d take their job any day. How hard is it, really, to place objects into a bag?

  When I took off my shirt, everyone looked away.

  “Check out my watch,” Pink said to the baggers.

  Mr. Moskowitz had the door to his office wide open, and as I was coming out of the locker room, he called out to me like a general ordering his soldier to the front line. “Max!” he said. He sounded angry, he sounded exhausted. Everything that came out of his mouth sounded angry or exhausted. The day he hired me, he sighed, leaned far back in his swivel chair like he was about to
fall asleep, and said, “I guess I’ll take a chance on you.” I wanted to tell him, “Don’t do me any favors, pal.” I wanted to tell him that I knew he was getting a tax break for hiring me. Instead I said, “Thank you, sir. You won’t be sorry, sir.” Because the truth was, I needed all the favors I could get. “You don’t need to call me sir,” he said.

  This morning he was halfway through a Hostess cupcake, presumably his breakfast. His belly was pressed against the desk, which was littered with spreadsheets of facts and figures—the lifeblood of the supermarket. He worked six to six, he worked six days a week, he’d been here twenty years. He’d be here another twenty years, then he’d retire and move to the suburbs. On the wall behind him was his framed diploma from college, and next to it was a recruiting poster that showed a group of smiling models dressed like stock clerks and cashiers, standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, above a caption that read, WE OFFER FREE DENTAL EXAMS.

  He was staring at me hard from behind his desk. Angry and exhausted. Suspicious too. Also disappointed. He didn’t take his eyes off me. His stare chilled me. I understood suddenly why I was being summoned. Namely the girl from the day before. Ziggy had ratted me out after all—just like the poor little girl with the math test. What could I say? I had breached the company’s trust, maybe even committed a felony. And here I was, a company man at heart. It was too late to make amends now. The supermarket had taken a chance on me and I had repaid it with dishonesty. “If you give one hundred percent,” my schoolteachers had told me years ago, “you get one hundred percent right back.” It was a phrase I had heard often, and it returned to me with the full force of its haunting implication: you get what you deserve.