Brief Encounters with the Enemy Page 7

  “Oooooh,” he said as I rolled down the window. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Nick.” The teenage humor from earlier was gone. Outside the walls of Walmart, he was all sniffles and submission. That’s what jail had done to him. Eight years in the penitentiary would have turned him into a rabid, raging fiend, but eight months in county jail had sapped his spirit. I felt a pang of remorse for having recruited him in a crime that was for my benefit only. “I’ll make this worth your while,” I said.

  I got out of the car, and together we pulled my big box of toilet paper and my other big box out of the dumpster. There was slime on the boxes, grease or something, but they were no worse for the wear. Mr. Bildman would take them.

  I chose wrong and took the expressway. It was bumper-to-bumper. Joey Joey passed the time by flipping back and forth through my spreadsheets. I checked my email. It was getting dark out, and my BlackBerry glowed with emails of cc’s. Every few seconds we’d crawl a foot and then stop. All the cars had flags on them, or red-white-and-blue bumper stickers, or some indication that we were in the midst. Occasionally someone would yell out a car window. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” they’d yell, or “Joey JoEYYYYYYYYY!” because we’d lived in this city all our lives and we knew everyone.

  “I could do this,” Joey Joey said, meaning my spreadsheets, meaning my job.

  “Why don’t you, then?” I said.

  He guffawed. Then he got quiet while he pondered. “Twenty,” he said, “thirty-three, one-oh-seven.” He pointed with schoolboy pride at the little empty city blocks on the spreadsheet.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “What about the weekend?”

  He pondered again. He tallied on his fingers. “Twenty-nine,” he announced, “thirty-four, two-eleven.”

  He was right, he probably could do my job. But he wouldn’t. He’d just talk about doing it. He didn’t have that thing anymore, whatever that thing was that got you ahead in life. He’d fallen hard and couldn’t get back up. Maybe he’d never really had that thing. Maybe he was the kind of person who was better at taking orders than giving them. “That boy moves like a coon,” my father once said. He was a boorish man, my father, unschooled and unskilled, pretty much like the rest of the people in my neighborhood. I’m the one who ended up accomplishing something, making something of myself, and now I had to live with everyone thinking that they could do my job, that what I’ve earned is because of some secret to which they don’t have access: ill-gotten gains. The real secret is I worked sixty hours last week, not including the work I took home. The week before I worked seventy. I get full benefits and three weeks’ vacation, but I’ve done the math, and when it’s all added up, my salary isn’t much above minimum wage. About the only thing that separates me from the associates is that I wear a white shirt instead of a blue one. Often I’ll fantasize about when times were simple and I carried a box cutter and waited around for someone to tell me what to do. Other times I fantasize about moving up to upper management, which is at least ten years away if things go right. In ten years I’ll be thirty-six. I’ll have a potbelly and I’ll be bald. I’ll look like the district manager who drives a yellow Mercedes with a license plate that says WLMRT-1. He says to me, “I was just like you once, Nick.” He wants to keep me motivated.

  I got off at Exit 12 and circled back down and took the bridge. I was speeding, I didn’t care, I was trying to make up for lost time. When I took the turn, Joey Joey had to put his hands on the dashboard. Down below, the river had a nice tint in the evening light, and on both sides of the river were the factories pumping out smoke for the war effort. Twenty-four hours a day, they pumped out smoke.

  “I should get a job down there,” Joey Joey said, tapping the window. He sounded wistful.

  “You’d be back in a week,” I said, “begging to be an associate again.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. He was looking at the river. He was talking more to himself than me. “Might go ahead and join up,” he said. “Might just do that.”

  I’d heard it before. He’d talked about it during the peace and during the buildup. He’d talked about it when the shooting first started. He’d be talking about it when everyone came home. He’d probably be talking about it during the next war. He didn’t have that thing.

  “Join up,” he continued, “head over there, see Chip, have an adventure. Blow some people up.” He snickered. “Get in shape.” He pinched his muffin top by way of example. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said.

  At the top of the hill I made a left into Winchester Parks and then a right. It was called Winchester Parks but there wasn’t anything green about it anymore. It’d been an Italian neighborhood, it’d been a Jewish neighborhood, now it was up for grabs. Way down at the end of the street, I could see the long row of stores, with Bildman’s shop in the middle. It had a red neon sign that was lit up: BILDMANS SH P. On one side of the shop was a pizza place and on the other was a Chinese store that sold remedies. I slowed down because I was suddenly nervous about seeing Zlottie, suddenly unprepared, suddenly didn’t know what I was doing or why exactly I’d come. “I thought you said you weren’t coming anymore,” she’d say. She’d be confused. I’d be embarrassed.

  At the stop sign, I took a long time. Out in front of Mr. Bildman’s shop were boxes filled with little American flags being sold for ninety-nine cents each. The pizza place had a sign saying that if you were a soldier, you could get a slice for half price. “I should tell them I’m a marine,” Joey Joey said.

  I pulled over and checked my face in the rearview mirror. I checked my teeth and I checked my email. I leaned over and popped the glove compartment and took out a tin of Altoids. There were five tins of Altoids in the glove compartment. I’d bought them at Walmart. Almost everything I owned I’d bought at Walmart: toothpaste, socks, you name it. Walmart helped keep me alive and I helped keep them in business. I put three Altoids in my mouth.

  “Can I have one?” Joey Joey said.

  I gave him a whole tin. “Wait here,” I said.

  The door jingled when I entered the shop. I was anticipating seeing Zlottie on the ladder, the way she had appeared in my late-night and early-morning fantasies. Instead, I saw her father. He was standing behind the counter with a handful of slips of green paper. His black hat was on the counter and his head was bald. He was wearing his black wash-and-wear suit that he wore every day. His enormous white beard seemed to have grown more enormous since the last time I’d seen him, more cloud than beard. It looked untrimmed and unwashed. The shop looked unwashed. It was small and cramped, about the size of the customer bathroom at Walmart, and it was loaded floor to ceiling with anything you might ever need in life. I’d once seen a boy come in and ask for a can of sardines and a pack of baseball cards, and Mr. Bildman had them bagged and ready to go in under a minute.

  At some point we’d swallow this shop whole. I’d be the district manager by then and this would be my district. That would be an example of irony.

  Mr. Bildman looked up from his green slips. He didn’t seem particularly happy to see me. I stood in the center of the store holding my boxes of merchandise like one of those trainers who showcases a dog at the tournament. I hoped he liked my boxes.

  “Put them in the back,” he said.

  I wanted to ask him where his daughter was, because if his daughter wasn’t there, I wasn’t interested. But I went dutifully to the back room. There was a gunmetal desk standing like an island amid towers of more odds and ends. I set the boxes on the desk and sat down in the swivel chair and waited. I was prepared for something to fall on my head. I checked my BlackBerry. Now and then I would hear the door jangle and I would listen for Zlottie’s voice but it was always a customer. Every customer wanted some kind of break. “I’ll pay you the rest next week,” they all said.

  I started to wonder if Zlottie had taken off, moved or something, gone to Israel. She’d talked about Israel the way old people I knew talked about Ireland. She’d also talked about going back to school. We’d had heartfe
lt discussions while I was waiting around for Chip to get his money. She would stand on the opposite side of the counter with the cash register, but it felt close, like the counter was a part of us and we were pressing our bodies against it as we stood staring at each other. She was the only person who ever asked me what my plans were for the future, and I’d tell her about becoming a district manager. “Wow,” she’d say, “that’s exciting, Nick.” It sounded like she was sincere, but who knows. I always made a point of encouraging her to get her degree, because I wanted her to see that I was one of those kind of people who could be optimistic and helpful. Now I regretted it. I should have encouraged her to remain in the shop forever.

  Mr. Bildman came into the back office. He didn’t look at the boxes I’d brought, he just said, “I’ll give you sixty for everything.”

  It was a generous figure, far more than I’d thought it would be. It made me wonder if Chip had been duplicitous when he’d hand me fifteen bucks on the way home and tell me it was half.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  He had it right there in his pocket. He handed it to me. He wanted me out of the shop as fast as possible, as if he knew what I’d really come for. He was one of those fathers who didn’t want anyone to lay a finger on his daughter. I stood up and he sat down.

  “Tell Zlottie I said hi,” I said.

  He snapped his head sharply. “What?”

  I repeated myself. He nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her a thing.

  But as I came out of the back office, there she was, just like that, like a vision, standing on the top rung of the ladder stacking cans of soup. Here was my fantasy come alive. She was wearing the same black skirt with the same black shoes, and her hair was as black as I remembered. She must have thought I was her father, because she said something like “I’m almost done,” and then she accidentally dropped a can of soup. It banged and rolled. I bent down to retrieve it, and when I looked up, she was staring at me with surprise. I could feel my face burn red, and the heat from my face traveled straight down my body.

  “What are you doing here, Nick?” she said. She laughed, as if my appearance was comical. This wasn’t what I had fantasized. I stood there staring at her. She hovered above me in the air, five rungs high on the ladder, the shelves of merchandise floating behind her head.

  “I missed you, Zlottie,” I said. I wanted it to come out breezy, but it sounded earnest and maybe a little pathetic.

  I handed her the can of soup. She reached for it and her skirt rode up an inch past her ankle.

  “I missed you too,” she said, but she grinned so broadly that I couldn’t tell whether she was teasing or not.

  And then the door tinkled, and I heard someone saying, “Nick, hey. Hey, Nick. About how much longer you think you’re going to be here?” Joey Joey stood in the doorway with a slice of pizza.

  “You know why you don’t get ahead?” I said to him. “It’s because you don’t know how to follow orders.”

  “Awwwwww,” Zlottie said. “That’s not nice.” But before I could explain to her what kind of person Joey Joey was, and what kind of person I was, and how he never listened, and how I was a hard worker, something like six customers came charging through the front door and our moment was lost forever. She didn’t even say goodbye.

  On the drive home, I gave Joey Joey fifteen dollars. He took some cash out of his pocket, which he still carried in a roll like the old days, and which looked to be about twenty-five dollars, and he carefully folded my fifteen dollars into it. I waited for him to say thank you.

  After a while, he said, “You know that hair isn’t real.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “The Jewgirl,” he said, “she’s wearing a wig.”

  We were coming over the bridge now, it was night and the river was illuminated by the factories. We’d gone fishing down in that river, this is years ago, me, Joey Joey, Chip. Before the factories opened back up, the river had fish. For five hours we fished, but we didn’t catch a thing. It wasn’t until there was about thirty minutes of daylight left that Chip’s line drew taut. “I got something!” he screamed. The line got so tight that we had to help him hang on. Fishermen came and gave us advice. “It’s going to be seaweed,” they guessed. “It’s going to be a tire.” No, it was a turtle hanging from the end of the line, spinning in the air like a top, waving its legs. Chip took it home and kept it as a pet, named it Zero and painted its shell purple. It lived six years, and when it died we went back down to the river to bury it, but by then the factories had opened and you couldn’t get within five hundred feet of the shore.

  “I’m not thinking about any Jewgirl,” I said.

  But it wasn’t a week later that I took three more boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet.

  I found Joey Joey in the break room with his feet up.

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

  “You got it, sarge!”

  At six o’clock, the cashiers called out on cue, “See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough.”

  I walked through the oncoming surge of customers and straight into a group of college students who make it a point to come by every Friday evening to cause problems. They were walking around in a circle, twenty or so, looking sentimental and holding signs with a long list of goals for Walmart, which, if ever achieved, would cost me my job. I had to walk through them like a gauntlet. I didn’t appreciate that. One of the guys held out a flyer.

  “If you want respect, give respect,” I said.

  He must have misunderstood my allegiance, because he laughed. “You got that right, bro.”

  “I ain’t your bro,” I said.

  Now he was confused and conferred with the others. I passed through them.

  “Overrated businessman,” one of the girls yelled after me, but the comment had not been uttered with consensus. I could hear them begin to argue.

  “We’re all bros,” half of them said.

  “No, we’re not,” the other half countered.

  No, yes, no.

  Back by the dumpsters, I sat in my car. I’d just worked eleven hours and the exhaustion came over me like a wave. Slowly I changed out of my white shirt and into a new blue one from a three-pack I’d bought that morning. I wanted Zlottie to see me in something other than a white shirt when I asked her out. Just like I wanted to see her in something other than a black skirt. Looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I was surprised to find a much younger version of myself looking back, a self from when I was an associate and wore a blue shirt almost the same color as the one I had on now. My younger version was good-looking and optimistic, and he walked briskly up and down the aisles looking for the assistant manager to tell him what it was he should do next.

  “Mr. McDonough,” I addressed myself in the reflection of the rearview mirror, “what do you want me to do next?”

  “This is what you do next, Nick,” myself answered, “you take these three boxes off the truck and then you hide them in the mop closet and then you go find Joey Joey …”

  I woke to the sound of Joey Joey tapping on the window. His pale face was an inch from mine, separated only by the glass, like I was back visiting him in jail, except this time his mouth was wide with mirth. I rolled down the window.

  “You were drooling, Nick,” he said. He let out a howl. Sure enough, there was a wet stain on my blue shirt.

  “Open the dumpster, jackass,” I commanded. I was in no mood.

  The boxes were large and hard to fit in the trunk. Since he’d blown my moment last time with Zlottie, I handed him five dollars and told him I’d see him tomorrow.

  “I don’t mind coming,” he said. I left him standing there by the dumpster, his blue shirt half-untucked.

  I drove fast and I took the bridge and I practiced what I would say. I would try to be casual, but also charming, and I would lean on the counter with my elbows as if it were no big deal to say, “I’ve got Tuesday off, Zlottie, and I was wondering …�
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  “I’ve got the Thursday after next off, Zlottie …”

  “I’ve got a Sunday at the end of the month …”

  In less than twenty minutes I was coming around the bend into Winchester Parks. This time I didn’t linger at the stop sign but drove straight to the front of the store and parked. Once there, I procrastinated badly. I checked my email twice. I checked my face and my blue shirt. I checked my teeth. From the glove compartment, I took out three Altoids, put them in my mouth, and chewed them like candy. I checked my email again. Something had arrived, but it was from an unfamiliar address with a distressing subject line that read, “Not dead yet,” and which I thought must be spam until I opened it and saw that it was a message from Chip.

  “Dear Nick,” he wrote, “I finally got my personal pfc. military account set up. They sure do have every thing down here.…” He went on to list the Internet café where he was writing from at that very moment, some fast-food places, and some other necessary hometown conveniences including a shoeshine stand, even though he’d never used a shoeshine stand in his life. He said things weren’t so bad overall. It was boring mostly. More boring than he thought it would be. It was colder too. He was hoping for some new gloves to come through. And some boots, size fourteen. Other than that, everything was fine. He had no real complaints. It was like being in the Boy Scouts, he said. He was hoping to see a little action soon so he could kick some ass and break up the monotony, but he wasn’t counting on it. He told me not to believe what I was hearing on the news. He said everything was exaggerated. He said it was all about advertising. In closing, he wanted to know how I was.

  There was a time difference of some twelve hours, whether forward or backward I couldn’t tell, but as far as I could see, he’d sent the message a few minutes earlier. Hoping that I might have a chance to catch him before he logged out, I quickly wrote,

  Does your army base have a Kmart?

  Your friend,

  Nick

  Before I could click send, however, I had a second thought that this might come across more mean-spirited than witty, so I backspaced over it.