Brief Encounters with the Enemy Page 18

  “You wanted something, Mr. M.?” I said. I tried my best for playful informality.

  He was having none of it. “I was about to page you,” he said. He leaned away from his desk as if about to stand. Instead he sat deeper. He was perspiring in his wash-and-wear suit despite the weather. The exchange was not going to take long. He’d have me packed and ready to go by the time he finished eating his cupcake. I once watched him tell a cashier of fifteen years, “You must gather your things, leave, and never come back.” That had been that.

  His gaze bore into me.

  “The faggots from the city blocked my car in,” he said. “Do me a favor.”

  No, I don’t have a problem shoveling. I hold the shovel in my good hand and the crook of my bad arm. Ten minutes in, I hadn’t been able to make much progress. The car looked like it had been wrapped in marshmallow, but the snow was packed hard like concrete. I chipped away at it, making small piles. Then I moved the small piles into big piles. Chink, chink, chink, went my shovel. The air was cold but clear, and every so often I would catch a faint whiff of the smoke coming off the factories. It smelled like bug spray. After ten minutes, I broke through to Mr. Moskowitz’s back bumper, where there was a red-white-and-blue bumper sticker that said HOLD STEADY.

  The man who collected the shopping carts rolled by with a train of fifteen. “That’s not in your job description,” he said. He was a union man from way back.

  “It’s in my job description now,” I said.

  He rolled on.

  Cars were beginning to fill up the parking lot, a long line of cars coming to load up with boxes and bottles, cans and bags, coming to eat and digest and excrete. Over by the loading dock, I could see a woman waving to me. I’m always happy to help customers load their groceries, and I’m also always happy to accept a gratuity, even though supermarket policy prohibits accepting gratuities. And when they see my arm, they are inclined to be extra generous. Toward the far end of the parking lot I walked, with my shovel resting on my shoulder like a miner, and as I got closer I saw that this particular woman didn’t have a shopping cart, in fact, didn’t have any groceries. What she had was long brown hair, and a coat with fur missing from the collar, and a face that was covered with acne.

  “Do you remember me?” she said as if our interaction had happened a year ago. She smiled. She was chewing gum and it had turned her lips a shade of purple.

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “I don’t think so,” because under the circumstances I thought it in my best interest to feign ignorance. For all I knew, Mr. Moskowitz was about to come around the corner at any moment. Followed by Ziggy. Followed by the district manager who stops in once every six months.

  She seemed surprised by my response. She had no response for my response. She stood on the opposite side of a foot-high railing where the jitney drivers have to wait, as if she feared that merely stepping onto supermarket property would be grounds for her arrest—which it might very well have been. I got the sense that she had rehearsed something to say but I had confounded her by veering from the script. Now she was onstage, at a loss for what to say or do next. In lieu of dialogue, she blew a purple bubble.

  I tried to think of something to say myself, something that might be appropriate at a time like this, but the best I could conjure was “Do you need help with your groceries?” There were no groceries, of course.

  She smiled at me, more of an embarrassed smile. Her teeth were very white and very straight; they stood in contrast to her imperfect face. I wondered if the cold air helped or hurt her skin. I wondered if she’d stolen the gum she was chewing.

  Then she snickered to herself and announced, “See you around sometime, Max.” The sound of my name in her mouth was electric. She turned and walked through the parking lot entrance where the cars were entering; she walked quickly and disappeared around the corner.

  The moment she was out of sight, I stepped over the railing and ran. I ran with my shovel. No, I don’t have a problem running.

  It was underneath the neon sign that proclaimed NOW OPEN 24 HOURS! that I caught up to her. She whirled around. Her eyes were wide.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  Her name was Amanda, and she was twenty-two years old, and she wasn’t a poor girl at all. She was a very rich girl. She lived in Amberson Valley, where I’d never been, because you have no business being in Amberson Valley unless you live there. Her house was set back from the road, at the end of a long driveway, and hidden behind some big trees with a hammock strung between them that was filled with snow.

  “We’re not rich,” she said, “we’re comfortable.”

  “Whatever you want to call it,” I said.

  Her parents were both professionals doing something or other, investing and psychiatry I think it was, and her little brother was ten years old and already talking about college. They had paintings on the walls, they had a library, they had a skylight, and the first time she brought me home, she took me down to the basement to give me a tour of the wine cellar.

  “This is from France,” she said. “This is from Spain. This is only for special occasions. This is for Christmas.” Then she stopped talking about wine and put her arms around my neck and pressed me up against the bottles. I was anxious, mainly about breaking something expensive but also about my bad arm. I hadn’t kissed anyone since eighth grade, when I’d danced with a girl in the school gym.

  Before it could go any further, her little brother screamed down into the basement, wanting to know what we were doing, wanting to know if he could come down.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Amanda screamed back.

  Then her father screamed down into the basement, “Don’t use that language in my house!”

  At dinner, we sat on opposite sides of the table, Amanda and I, our feet touching underneath. Before eating, we bowed our heads while her father said a prayer, a long meandering prayer about new friendship and good company.

  “Amen,” we said.

  Her mom said, “This wine is from Savoy, Max.”

  We made small talk about the snow, about the war, about the wine, about whether or not there was going to be a draft.

  “What does the future hold in store for you, Max?” her father asked me.

  It was a legitimate question, but it put me on the spot. He put down his fork and waited. His wife waited too. They were going to wait as long as they needed. The table was silent. From the moment I entered the house, I’d been sure I was going to say or do the wrong thing. Or break something. Now, with all eyes on me, I had no idea what to answer about the general trajectory of my future. Meanwhile, Amanda was rubbing her foot up my leg.

  “If I give one hundred percent,” I said, trying to affect some expertise, “I get one hundred percent back.”

  Amanda’s father looked at me as if he’d never heard anything like that before. “I think there’s some real truth to that, Max.”

  “I think so too,” Amanda’s mother said.

  Amanda’s brother took it as an opening to list all of his activities. “I’m on the debate team. I’m on the tennis team. I’m on the Monopoly team.” He sounded like he was going to grow up to be a real asshole.

  Midway through the meal, Amanda had to take her acne medicine. Everyone got quiet as she took out the bottles and shook the pills into her palm one by one, big colorful pills, pills for a horse. She swallowed them with a tall glass of water.

  Her mother said, “I think I’m beginning to see a change, honey,” and her father said, “I think so too,” and her little brother said, “I’m not seeing any change.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Oscar!” Amanda said.

  She was a thief. That had already been established. The only surprise was that she admitted it so openly.

  “I’m a kleptomaniac,” she told me. She wasn’t proud, but she wasn’t particularly ashamed. “It’s a phase.” She shrugged.

  “How long does this phase last?” I asked.

  She didn’t know. />
  She was a thief and she was about to finish college. “I want to help the world,” she said.

  On our first real date, I took her ice-skating at the rink at the mall by the river. They’d decided to open the rink early this year. If it was so cold, you might as well make use of the cold.

  COME IN FROM THE COLD, the sign read, which was a joke, because the rink was outdoors.

  At the entrance, Amanda wanted to see if we could forgo the admission and get in for free by sneaking past the guard who was barely paying attention. “Please, please, please,” she said. “I want to, I want to, I want to.” The compulsion was laid bare. Her eyes were intense but also blank.

  “Sneaking past a guard,” I said, “doesn’t count as kleptomania.” That seemed to put her at ease, and she let me pay the full price.

  The rink was crowded with people, half of whom I knew. “Maaaaaaaaaax,” they called out when they saw me. Amanda and I went around in a circle, her hand in my good hand, taking our time. “You’re so sweet, Max,” she said, and she put her head on my shoulder. I could smell her shampoo and I could smell the factories burning.

  It turned out she was a good skater, but I was better. I would have been a hockey player if the story had been different for me. I would have been a lot of things.

  Around and around we skated, without variation, like a merry-go-round. It was trancelike. “Look at the time, Max,” Amanda said, and we saw that it was late, that it was night, that it was past dinnertime.

  So we went to Burger King, where I knew the guy who worked the register, a guy named Mordecai from high school. He’d been at Burger King six years and had a brother in the military. When he handed me my order, there were extra fries on the tray. He winked.

  “Tell your brother I said hi?” I said.

  “My brother?” he said. His eyes dropped. “He’s dead, Max. You didn’t hear?”

  I said, “I sure am sorry to hear that, Mordecai.”

  “Come on, man.” He laughed. “My brother just got promoted to lieutenant!”

  As we sat at the table, stuffing our faces, Amanda said, “Do eating these extra fries count as shoplifting?” She had a point.

  I didn’t live that far away from Burger King, so I brought her over to my apartment. “Just to stop by for a second.” I wanted it to seem casual, like an afterthought. Meanwhile, I was wondering if I could get her undressed.

  I gave her a grand tour of the apartment. “This here is from Walmart,” I said, “this here is from Kmart.”

  There was fake wood paneling and green carpeting and the smell of cigarette smoke from the neighbor below. The green carpeting was in every room, including the bathroom.

  “I’m planning to put down new carpeting,” I said.

  “Your house has charm,” she said. She thought everything had charm. She thought Burger King had charm. She thought the supermarket had charm. She thought I had charm.

  We made out on the couch. The couch that I’d gotten from Walmart. I put my good hand straight up her sweater and she didn’t resist. Her stomach was smooth. Her bra was smooth. Her breasts were smooth. I thought about doing things with her, things I’d seen in videos, a number of which were hidden under the very couch we were sitting on. She must have been thinking things too, because she tried to pull my shirt straight over my head in one motion. That put an end to the proceedings. I pulled away and tucked my shirt back in. “I have to work in the morning” was what I said.

  I drove her back home over the bridge. We had a good view of the factories all lit up.

  “I should get a job down there,” I said.

  “Like doing what?” she said.

  “Like stoking the furnaces,” I said. What did I care? I pictured myself wearing overalls and a hard hat.

  “You think you can stoke furnaces, Max?” she said.

  “I can do whatever I set my mind to,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “You’d be back at the supermarket in a week, begging to mop floors again.”

  She was probably right.

  She clicked open the visor and examined her face in the mirror. She took out a tube of lotion and put some on, rubbing it in small deliberate circles, clockwise and then counterclockwise. It smelled like lavender. I wondered if she’d stolen it. She used all sorts of lotions and potions, each one the one that was going to be the miracle cure.

  “I think I’m beginning to see a change,” she said.

  “I think so too,” I said.

  “Really?” she said.

  But I wasn’t so sure.

  When I got to her house, she kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she reached in her pocket and handed me ten packets of ketchup that she’d taken from Burger King.

  I said, “You know those are free, right?”

  She got out of the car and her brother came out on the porch. He was holding a snowboard. “I’m on the snowboarding team,” he said.

  When I got back home, I checked to see if she’d stolen anything. I checked everywhere, kitchen, bathroom, dresser drawers. I couldn’t find anything missing.

  Halloween was coming. The days passed. The temperature rose. The snow melted and turned to slush. Everyone who had complained about the snow now complained about the slush. When the slush finally disappeared down the sewers, everyone complained about the cold. It was only October and it was going to be a winter full of complaint.

  The war continued to hold steady, and we continued to lose ten to fifteen men a day, which wasn’t that many, all things considered. The experts said you had a better chance of dying in a swimming pool than dying in a war. The bodies came home in coffins draped with flags, as we held steady. Driving home at night, I’d pass the Halloween displays in front of the stores and homes. They were exceptionally imaginative and gruesome this year—bodies impaled, bodies decapitated, bodies on fire, along with the conventional artifacts of unease: pitchforks and black cats and spiderwebs. By late October, we were losing twenty-five men a day, which still wasn’t that many.

  At the supermarket, business continued to boom. The deliveries increased to three a week and then four. In the afternoon, there’d be a line of eighteen-wheelers pulled up to the loading dock like cattle at the trough. Mr. Moskowitz ordered the guys on night turn to come in two hours earlier, but even that wasn’t good enough, even with Tom and Tim shouting like drill sergeants. In the morning, the back room would be filled with pallets of every kind of food imaginable, stacked floor to ceiling, so that I had to push my mop and bucket through narrow paths as if I were a mouse in a maze of cardboard skyscrapers. Everyone was trying to cut corners, trying to do things faster, including the stock clerks, who got into the habit of pulling their boxes out from the bottommost pallet and undermining the foundation, so that one afternoon, about thirty minutes before I was supposed to punch out, an entire skyscraper of produce collapsed. It sounded like an explosion when it fell. Two hundred pumpkins lay crushed on the floor like bodies in a disaster. I was the one who had to clean them up. I had to use two mops and a shovel. This time when Pink from coffee came past, he didn’t bother to make his usual joke about hardly working. His big fake watch told him he had five minutes left for his break. “Hardly hard?” I called after him. He didn’t think it was funny. Howie from deli walked by, reeking of aftershave and cheese and saying somberly, “I wish that was my head on the floor.” The cashiers passed, not saying hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, because they were working double shifts, and so were the butchers, and the bakers, and the baggers, and so was the man who collected the shopping carts in the parking lot whose hands were red from the cold. “That’s a safety violation” was what he said when he saw the mess. The only person who wasn’t having a problem with the workload was Ziggy, who was catching an average of three shoplifters a day and having the time of his life posting new photographs on the wall in the back room.

  But on Halloween things changed for the better: we were on the move again, making progress toward the capital. That day, every
thirty minutes, Mr. Moskowitz would click on the loudspeaker and announce, “Forty miles to go!” He’d shout like he was calling bingo. “Thirty-nine miles to go!” A great and spontaneous cry would rise up across the forty-eight aisles, people shouting and screaming, customers and employees alike. Everyone was happy and everyone was excited and everyone was breathing a sigh of relief. Thirty minutes later, the loudspeaker would click again. By the time I punched out, we had closed to within twenty-five miles.

  Amanda’s parents were off at a fund-raiser or something, so it was up to us to accompany Oscar trick-or-treating. He was dressed up like a soldier in camouflage, a flak jacket, a plastic helmet, and a plastic bazooka. Since it was cold, he had to wear a coat and hat and scarf, so the only thing that made him look like a soldier was the bazooka. He didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t such a bad kid.

  It was such a long walk between each big house that it took a while for us to get from one destination to the next. In the dark, you could hear people calling “trick or treat,” but you couldn’t see them, you could only see glowing pumpkins. Oscar held Amanda’s hand, and Amanda held my hand, and I imagined that this was what it might be like for me, twenty years in the future, walking with Amanda through some rich neighborhood on Halloween with our son or daughter. She probably wouldn’t marry me, though. She’d marry one of those successful guys with a college degree and a normal body. That was most likely what the future held in store for me, I thought.

  “Bang bang!” Oscar said when the doors opened. In reply, the homeowners gave him generous handfuls of candy, which he didn’t mind sharing with Amanda and me.

  At one point along the way, we stopped in the road to say hi to some of his little buddies from school. They stared at my empty sleeve and said, “What happened to your arm, mister?”

  “It’s congenital,” I said.

  “What’s that mean, mister?”

  “It means it got shot off in the war.”