Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  Just a few more odds and ends to finish up, I thought, but when I turned around, my manager was standing there with a plate in his hand. “What’s this?” he asked.

  On the plate was a grilled cheese sandwich: the bread was almost black, but the cheese, as my manager showed me, had not melted.

  “How do you burn the bread, Ike,” he asked, “but not melt the cheese?” His face was kind.

  Outside, I stood under the restaurant awning. The rain was coming down in great sheets. The wind and the dark gave it the quality of a volcanic eruption. People were saying that this was it—the final rainfall—and that as early as tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon it was going to be sunny. They’d heard this said.

  I started walking. My umbrella was no defense. After two blocks, the black fabric tore away beneath the onslaught, so that I was holding only the sagging frame of an umbrella. Why could no umbrella be invented to withstand a downpour? When I was sixteen years old, I had filled out an application at school for a summer job and then forgotten about it until I was called one June morning to meet with the supervisor of an umbrella factory. It was a small family-owned place on the outskirts of town, where some factories still existed. I had to take three buses to get there. The supervisor was a perspiring man in a tie and a shirt with one button missing from the center. He was looking for an office clerk. He asked what my skills were, but I didn’t know what they were, because I’d never had a job. I told him I was a hard worker, because I assumed that this would be true if I was given the opportunity, and he seemed to accept it at face value. Afterward, he showed me around the plant. It was old and made of wood, and there were probably mice. A group of ex-farmers, or people who looked like they might be ex-farmers, stood around a long table spray-painting assorted logos onto umbrellas. I was curious about their work, and the supervisor took me closer so I could see. The smell of paint was pleasant and reminded me of my kindergarten days. “It smells great,” I said to the supervisor, grinning. He looked askance at me, and within thirty seconds the smell had become so overwhelming, so noxious, that I feared I might vomit. “Let’s get away from these characters,” the supervisor said. He showed me the office where I would be working. It had a file cabinet and a swivel chair and a window that looked out onto the factory floor. I pictured myself sitting at the desk and wearing a tie, and the image invigorated me. Two days later, the supervisor called to offer me the job, and I told him it was too far away for me, but I thanked him anyway.

  Three blocks from my apartment, I could see that I had left the lamp on in the living room. In the dark, it looked like a beacon of sorts. The hair on half of my head was matted from the rain. A car approached from the opposite direction, spraying water on both sides. It steered toward me, and for a moment I thought that it might be some punks looking to drive through a puddle and splash me. Then it slowed and stopped completely, and the window came down and the anorexic waitress leaned her head out. “Get in, silly,” she said.

  There was another girl in the car, so I got in the backseat.

  “I just live right there,” I said, pointing, but instead of turning the car around, she drove over the bridge, past the railroad tracks, up into the hills.

  “This is my friend,” the anorexic waitress said, looking at me in the rearview mirror, but the windshield wipers were clacking and I couldn’t catch the friend’s name.

  She was in college, this friend. Or about to go to college. The anorexic waitress was going to the same college in the spring. I couldn’t hear what she planned to study. She spoke as if she were already weary of it. Her thin hands gripped the steering wheel. In her black waitress blouse, her arms looked the diameter of fingers. Could those even be called arms? But she drove with ferocity. Up into the hills we went, those dark hills that looked as if they were encroaching on the city. Shortly we were in the thick of them, and I was surprised to discover that, rather than being the heart of the rural world, they were the heart of the suburbs. Nice houses that looked identical were set catercorner to one another off the main road. Billboards directed us to more houses about to be built, and to a mall I’d been hearing about for a while. Another billboard showed an illustration of a spinning earth with an arrow pointing to a small dot that presumably was where we were. THE EMERGING INTERNATIONAL CITY, it read.

  Soon we were dropping the friend off in front of her parents’ large house. The house was dark except for one light that illuminated the driveway. “Good night! Good night!” she called.

  I took the front seat and I noticed how wet my pants were. I noticed how close I was to the anorexic waitress. Back toward the city we went. In the gloomy swirl of rain, I could see the giant office building with its antenna that, in the darkness, looked like a cross on a church steeple.

  “Do you want to hear a riddle?” she asked out of the blue.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She smiled broadly. Her teeth looked discolored. “There’s a cabin in the woods with two dead people. They are both strapped to chairs.” She paused to glance my way. “The doors of the cabin are blocked and the windows are sealed. The people did not die from murder, exposure, dehydration, suicide, fire, asphyxiation, disease, or starvation. What did they die from?”

  She concentrated as if she were also trying to think of the answer. I thought about the word “starvation.” I had no idea what the answer was, so I guessed AIDS.

  No.

  I guessed again.

  No.

  “Should we really be talking about dying while you’re driving in the rain?” I asked. She let out a ghoulish movie laugh and pantomimed turning the wheel hard, as if to swerve into oncoming traffic. This made me tense. The windshield wipers beat out their rhythm. “What killed them?” she said again. We went around a bend, and the office building disappeared momentarily and then reappeared, so that its giant antenna resembled a needle stuck in an arm.

  “It’s an airplane, silly,” she said. “They’re seat-belted into the cabin of an airplane that’s crashed in the woods.”

  I thought about this, piecing it back together from the opposite end. “That’s a good riddle,” I said at last.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of them.”

  We were coming back over the railroad tracks that were about a mile from my apartment. A dishwasher from the restaurant once managed to elude the police who had come to arrest him in the middle of his shift, and not knowing where to go, he had run all the way to the tracks and hidden in the underbrush. They’d found him three hours later, covered in dirt, and taken him to jail. At his trial, he had pleaded no contest on the advice of his court-appointed lawyer so that he’d get only a three-year sentence. He had not known what the phrase meant, though, and so, standing in the courtroom in his baggy suit, he had said, “No contents,” and everyone in the courtroom had laughed.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked me abruptly. “What are you so quiet for?”

  I told her about the dishwasher, and she said, “That’s a funny story.” And then she said, “That’s a strange story.” After that she said she had thought about studying law but decided against it. But might study it after all.

  “You’re a funny boy,” she said. “You know that?” And it was my turn to smile, because it’d been a long time since anyone had called me a boy. When had I crossed that line from boy to man? Whenever it was, the line had been so faint, so subtle, that I had missed it entirely. Maybe if I had been paying closer attention, things might have turned out differently for me.

  “ ‘Boy,’ ” I said. “That’s a weird thing to call me.”

  So she said it again. “Boy … boy … boy.” Teasing now. But suddenly she was no longer saying just “boy” but “pretty boy.” Or perhaps I had misheard her. “Pretty boy.” I wanted to ask if I was hearing her correctly, because the rain was loud, and the car was loud, and she was driving with great vigor along the wet streets, all the power of her skeletal limbs surging into the car. I watched her mouth, waiting for it
to speak again. A wide mouth with wide lips. Her lips were the fleshiest part of her body. The second I looked back toward the street, I heard her say it again.

  “Pretty boy,” she said. “Pretty, pretty boy.”

  “Really?” I asked her. “Really?”

  ASSOCIATES

  It was about a month after the war began that I took two boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, considering I’m the assistant manager, but I was in love with a girl who might or might not have been in love with me. Either way, this was the necessary course of action.

  When the truck pulled up to the loading dock, I opened it myself and walked around being a pest with my clipboard, punctilious and official, examining things, checking things off my list. The driver kept sighing and coughing and making all manner of frustrated sounds. “It takes as long as it takes,” I said. Finally he went to piss, and while he was away, I grabbed the boxes and fled to the mop closet. I took a big box of toilet paper, sixty-two count, and I took a big box of something else that I didn’t bother to look at. I just grabbed it. Cookies or cupcakes, I think it was. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Mr. Bildman didn’t care either. He took whatever you brought him. He took motor oil. He took nail polish remover. He took apples and oranges.

  About an hour later, I tracked down Joey Joey in the break room, talking to three cashiers. He had his feet up on the chair like he owned the place, like an asshole. When he saw me, he stood up and saluted. The girls laughed. Jenna and Haley and Lisa Marie. He was putting on a show for them.

  “I’m going to need your help with something,” I said.

  “You got it, cap’n!” he said.

  He calls me “cap’n” all the time and I’m not sure what he intends by it other than to irritate or possibly humiliate me. When he isn’t calling me “cap’n,” he’s calling me “sarge” or “colonel.” It might have been tolerable if there’d been some trace of irony in his voice. We’re friends, after all, we grew up together, we played Little League together, we graduated from high school together. But I’ve been promoted three times and he’s remained an associate. “You know why, right?” he said once. “It’s because you’re good-looking.” No, it’s because I’m more diligent than he, more industrious, and somewhat more intelligent. It’s also because while I was working my way up at Walmart—beginning with cleaning the bathrooms—he was selling prescription drugs, dressing as if every night was prom night, carrying a roll of money the size of a baseball, and driving around the city in an SUV with ROAD TO THE RICHES hand-lettered on the side. He was sure that this was it, that he had found his calling and the good times would never end. But the good times ended when he got arrested and the fear of God was put in him. I went to visit him twice at the county jail with Chip, who also went all the way back to Little League. A window with fingerprints separated us and we had to talk over a telephone, Chip and I taking turns. There was a disconcerting hitch in the mechanism so that Joey Joey’s lips moved before I heard the words in the receiver. It was like I was watching a movie that had been dubbed in English. He was wearing a baggy green shirt and an ID bracelet, and if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought he was a patient in a hospital, which I guess in some ways he was. He had a small bruise on the side of his head, and when I asked him how he had come by it, he told me he’d dropped a dumbbell lifting weights. It was a story I found hard to believe, since he’d never worked out in his life. He spoke at length about his innocence, about how it was all a misunderstanding. He was facing six to eight years, but he managed to affect an assertive, nonchalant voice, highly enunciated designed to persuade the authorities who were presumed to be listening in on the conversation (which may have accounted for the delay on the telephone). But his eyes were the opposite of confident; they were wide, white, and tense. The next time Chip and I went to visit, the warden had locked down the jail and visiting hours were suspended. We left Joey Joey twenty dollars on his account, along with a porno magazine. Not long after, he went to court with a decent lawyer and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. He ended up serving eight months. Ever since then he’s had some catching up to do.

  At six o’clock I left the store with my spreadsheets and a cup of coffee. “See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough,” the cashiers called out sycophantically.

  A long line of customers was filing in with their shopping carts and their babies and I had to jostle my way to get through. It was chilly outside but getting warmer day by day. It had been a rough winter and now we were hoping for a nice spring. The clocks had just been set ahead and the sunshine was pleasant but disconcerting. It made me feel like the last ten hours spent indoors had been doubly squandered. I drove my car around to the back where the garbage dumpsters stood in a row. No one was around. No one had any business being around. I turned on the radio and drank my coffee and listened to some news about baseball and about the war. I shut it off. Sitting in the silent cocoon of the car, with the sun beginning to go down, familiar fatigue came over me, originating in the soles of my feet and emanating upward until I felt soft and heavy. Even the coffee couldn’t offset the effects. It was warm in the car and I turned on the AC and it blew in my face. I took out my BlackBerry and checked my email. I have a tendency to check my email compulsively, especially when I’m idle. There were four new emails, all from work, all forwarded by people who had cc’d fifty people. It was what you did when you were trying to get out of responsibility, when you wanted to pass the buck to the next guy—you cc’d everyone. “Accounts Payable Protocol” was the subject line of one. I didn’t bother to read any of them.

  In my lap lay my spreadsheets, rows and columns of blocks, some of those blocks filled, some of them empty; by tomorrow morning they’d all be filled in by me. They looked like a road map of sorts, my spreadsheets, an aerial view of the city, little block by little block, and I considered the drive I was about to make to Winchester Parks and whether I should take the expressway or the bridge. I thought about Mr. Bildman, and I thought about Mr. Bildman’s daughter, Zlottie. She liked me, but I wasn’t sure if she liked me as more than just a friend. A slight tremble of anxiety passed through me, briefly counterbalancing the fatigue. It had been a while since I’d had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, mainly because I was shy, but also because I worked all the time and I couldn’t find any girls I liked. But Zlottie was smart, she was also sophisticated, and she had the darkest eyes. She had the darkest hair too. In short, she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met.

  The last time I’d seen her was right before Christmas. I’d gone to the shop with Chip. Chip had the connection and I had the car. He’d brought with him sixteen boxes of underpants that he’d taken off the truck at Kmart. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. He’d been at Kmart seven years and was about to deploy and had nothing left to lose. He’d lost it all already when he blew out his knee senior year and his basketball scholarship was revoked. He’d shown me the letter the college sent him upon hearing the news, a giant coat of arms telling him they’d be happy to still have him if he could come up with twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He was six-foot-six but walked with a slouch, all shoulders, no neck, as if trying to get back to normal height so he could forget the whole thing. Instead of going to college, he’d signed up for the reserves. When he’d gotten called up, I’d told him, “You’ll be back before you know it.” I’d been one of those fools who thought there wasn’t even going to be a war. Now that’s exactly where he was.

  When we’d walked into Mr. Bildman’s shop that final day, Zlottie had been right in the front, standing on a ladder stacking boxes of crackers. On the shelf behind her was one of those Jewish candelabras with half the candles lit. The shop glowed in a soft light, making Zlottie look dramatic on the ladder, like an angel descending. She was wearing the same thing she always wore: a long black skirt that dropped all the way down to her shoes like a curtain on a stage and which hid the good parts from view. Even so, I could make out the cu
rve of her ass. While Chip was in the back sorting out the details with Mr. Bildman, I broke the news that I wouldn’t be coming back. It was Chip’s thing, after all, and I was only the driver, and he was going off to war—and I wasn’t really a thief.

  “That’s that,” I said. I tried to sound detached.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She didn’t seem to be affected by it that much. Apparently I was the only one with feelings. It was dark enough in the store that Zlottie, in her dark outfit, was almost beginning to disappear before my eyes. Then she caught me by surprise by saying, “Well, I’m just glad it’s not you shipping out, Nick.” Her voice sounded poignant in a time of war.

  Since then I’d masturbated every day, sometimes twice a day, thinking about her working in that dusty shop, with that long black hair and that long black skirt, me entering with a box of whatnot, and the candles lit romantically.

  From around the corner of the loading dock, Joey Joey appeared, pushing a big green dumpster that said WALMART on the side. He looked lethargic. His blue shirt was half untucked and there was sweat under the armpits. His pale face and round head added to the quality of lethargy.