by D. M. Guay
“Your T-shirts look like they came out of a cheap souvenir shop in Branson, Missouri,” she said. “Wear something that doesn't hurt my eyes when I look at you, something with personality. But not 'church camp' or 'dumb frat guy.' Seriously. You don't have anything else? Isn't there, like, a gamer chic look? You're cute, Lloyd. You need to show it off.”
And...I got a full-on chub. Yep. There it was. One smile and a compliment and I was tingling all over. She owned me. I may as well lie face down in a ditch filled with mud for all eternity, because I would do it just in case she might need to step on me that one time to keep her shoes clean.
“We can work on the clothes,” she said.
Oh God. We. I'm cute and 'we' can work on my outfits. Isn't that, like, step one on the twelve-step program to steady girlfriend? They dress you and improve you. That's what chicks do. And we let them because, dude, vaginas! Wait. Wait. Focus, Lloyd. Focus. Not on panties, on the big picture! “How can you afford all this? How long have you worked at Dairy...uh...Demon (gulp) Mart.”
I tripped on the words. Some things felt worse and more sinister when said out loud.
“Almost three years now. And you know how well we get paid. That job is a golden ticket.”
“I don't know. Money's evil. That's why rich dudes are assholes.”
“No, silly. Assholes will be assholes, rich or broke. Money is neutral. It's a tool. Use it well, and you can get the life you want. This is what I want: A college degree and a condo that I own, free and clear. Well, and to be a ninja, but money can't buy that. It's still a work in progress. What do you want, Lloyd?”
I didn't answer because it was too embarrassing. I wanted to be able to see the sky from the bottom of the deep hole of debt I'd dug. I wanted to break even. Start fresh. Actually building a future, owning something, seemed as possible to me right now as flying to the moon by flapping my arms really hard. DeeDee must have judged from my clueless silence that I didn't want her to press the issue. She was kind enough to change the subject.
“Did you know Junebug worked the graveyard shift for seven years? Seven! She's a legend,” DeeDee said. “No one's ever lasted that long. Word is she went out in a blaze of glory, too. Fought off a horde of flesh-eating ghouls with her silver sequined scrunchie and a fistful of Slim Jim Monster Meat Sticks.”
Help me, Jesus. Did she say flesh-eating ghouls? As in...“zombies...?” My mouth had suddenly gone bone dry. “Are...real?”
The words barely squeaked out. I broke out in a sweat.
DeeDee was giving me the same look of “Are you stupid?” she'd given me when I asked about the vampires. Something hit my ankle. I looked down. Angel eight ball rolled partially out from under the sofa, triangle face up. Of course. Always an opinion. “Zombie rule number one: Cardio.”
Shut up. I kicked it back under the sofa.
“Junebug moved to day shift after that. Guess she felt she couldn't top it. And, you know, for Ricky.”
“Ricky?” The porcine, terrified day manager who was eternally painted head to toe in size too small plaid polyester? I looked down at my polo shirt and too-small khakis. Okay. I was going back to cargo shorts and T-shirts. Man muffins were not a good look. “Why? Are they like, a thing?”
I'd have to kill myself if a guy like that was getting sweet love on the regular, but I wasn't.
“No, it's not like that.”
Phew. One less reason to kill myself.
“Junebug is super protective of Ricky, like an aunt. She's friends with his mom. They're neighbors. They all live in the Paradise Isles trailer park off of Emerald Parkway. Anyway, Ricky was hired for graveyard, but his first night was his last. I mean, ghouls on your first night? Can you imagine?”
Uh, I got a snake dude in a trench coat sucked into a Michael Bolton CD on my first shift, so yeah. I can image.
“Junebug talked Faust into moving Ricky to days. He needed the job, but he couldn't hack the graveyard. Long story short, his mom has some serious health problems or something and he takes care of her. Yes, Ricky still lives with his mom,” DeeDee said. “But you probably guessed that by looking at him.”
Yep. Mouth even drier, body even sweatier. I still lived with my Mom. Could she—could other people—tell by looking at me? Was my life path leading me to either be a Homer Wiley or a Ricky the Day Manager?
I was afraid of the answer, so, naturally, I changed the subject. “Faust is the devil. Aren't you the least bit worried about hell and eternity? He said there was a gate for doomed souls. Do you want to end up in there, like Homer?”
“Who?”
“The reddit dude who possessed Caroline Ford Vanderbilt!” How could she forget? I hadn't stopped thinking about it.
“Oh God, her. She's suing the store, you know. Good luck with that,” DeeDee chuckled and took a sip of tea.
“Gah. But, hell!”
“Okay. You need to relax. I've already said you aren't gonna burn in hell or suffer eternal damnation because of your job. Well, unless you run a leveraged buyout hedge fund. I'm pretty sure there's a commandment against that,” she said. “Maybe number twenty-five? I'd have to double check.”
“But there are only ten commandments.”
She rolled her eyes. “You haven't read your employee manual yet, have you?”
Gah. Enough with the lectures! “How can you be so sure all this is on the up and up?”
“I'm a philosophy major. Duh,” she said.
I blank stared.
“Are you familiar with the concept of free will?”
I may or may not have blank blinked a few more times.
“Free will is the idea that you, through your choices, thoughts, and actions, control the outcome of your life and the fate of your eternal soul. Plato. Aristotle. Aquinas. Descartes. Kant. Sartre. Philosophers have grappled with what free will means for literally millennia.”
Blink. Blink. Did you catch that? Me either. “Sum it up.” I also wanted to say 'and keep it simple, like third-grade reading level,' but those weren't really the words that make smart chicks respect you.
“I've read all the theories. All the long, blathering arguments. It's easy to make it complicated, but it's really very simple. Every day, we make choices. Your choices either hurt people or help people. If you hurt people, and you don't care. If you only care about yourself, at the expense of others, you're gonna burn.”
“That's it?”
“That's it.”
“It can't be that simple.”
“Yes, it can. It's all right there in the bestselling book of all time.”
“The Cat in the Hat?”
“The bible, stupid.” She eye-rolled me. “Book of Revelation: 'God searches hearts and minds, and will repay each of you according to your deeds.' Romans two: 'He will repay according to each one's deeds. Glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good'.”
“I never pegged you as a bible quoter.”
“I read. A lot, but sometimes the first source is the best source,” she said. “TV preachers these days say faith is all that matters, but I call bullshit. It's about actions. How you treat people, especially those who are poor, who are different, down on their luck. Me and you? Faith wouldn't be enough anyway, because we know. We know it's real. Heaven. Hell. Demons. Angels. All of it. So we have to rely on doing good things. And what bigger, better good thing is there than keeping monsters in hell where they belong?”
Wow. So, this was a lot to process.
“Anyway, working for Faust doesn't damn us, our choices do,” she said.
“And you trust Faust? You don't think there's a catch? That the money, all of it, is too good to be true?”
“The money is hazard pay. And protection against bribery. You can't be trusted to do a good job if you aren't being appreciated. Corruption and temptation would be too dangerous,” she said. “And, yeah, I do trust him. Faust respects free will. He's an excellent judge of character. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows what lies in o
ur hearts.”
Gulp. “About that...”
“Relax. It's on the up and up. He wouldn't abuse that knowledge,” she said. “My point is, you don't need those church camp clothes. Faust hired you. That alone proves you're worthy. You have a pure heart. So do I. So does Kevin, as hard as that is to believe. So do Junebug and Ricky. Pure of heart, all of us, deep down. That's a job requirement, so you're already on the right path.”
“Why would a pure heart (whatever that means) matter?”
“Because sketchy people can't be trusted to hold the fate of the world in their hands,” she said. “Look how that's working out in politics.”
“Good point.”
“The world is a shit show, Lloyd. We're neck deep,” she said. “Every one of us is born with a shovel. At the end of your life, you'll be judged by one thing: Did you use your shovel to clean up your little corner of the world? Did you, by existing, make the world less shitty? Me? I'm using my shovel. I've chosen to start digging. I'm going to leave my corner nicer than it was when I found it. Part of that is my job. So, Lloyd. Tell me. Are you going to dig, too?”
Chapter 14
Right about now, you probably have two questions. Yes, my hand did shrink back to normal size, thank you very much. And no, I did not get the chance to jerk off using my monster hand, so I will never know if it would have truly felt like the caress of a stranger. And since we're being totally honest here, I'm a little bummed about that in retrospect. Get it while you can, right? Seriously, don't judge. I'm lonely.
Wait. Those weren't your two questions? Okay then. Nothing to see here.
In other news, if you must know, I was not planning to go anywhere near the doughnut case ever again, no matter how much the stupid things called out to me. If touching one was enough to give me a troll hand, I didn't want to find out what would happen to me if I actually ate one.
So here I was, back at work, steering clear of the doughnuts. And I'd survived to see another payday. I'd thought a lot about what DeeDee said about money being a tool and using your shovel, yada yada. I wasn't sure selling slushies and forties, or making sure succubus strippers made it to center stage at Sinbad's on time, qualified as shoveling shit out of my corner of the world as far as earning my ticket to heaven, but DeeDee did get one thing right. Cold hard cash, used strategically, could change your life.
For the first time probably ever, I had crawled far enough out of my debt hole to see grass at eye level. Exterminator bill? Paid. Car repairs? Done. (I still couldn't afford insurance, though. Dudes under thirty practically had to sell a kidney to pay for a policy.) Cable bill sent to collections? Paid in full, debt officially erased. Student loans? Okay, not paid off, but today was Friday. Payday. With the cash in my locker right now I'd be able to make all the payments I'd missed, plus interest and fees, and get current on the loan. If I was lucky, I'd even have a bit of extra cash to put in my pencil case in my sock drawer. That hadn't happened since I was eleven.
If I played my cards right—as in, avoided being slain or mutilated by hell beasts until next Friday—I might actually be able to pay my parents back for that semester of community college I totally borked up. I never, ever thought I'd say this, but being responsible felt good. Like, really good. (Pinkie swear RIGHT NOW you'll never tell my Mom I said that because she'd hold it over my head forever.)
If you really must know, things were different, warmer, between me and DeeDee since that day at her apartment, too. She smiled at me more and eye-rolled at me less. We'd become pals. And maybe, just maybe, if I played my cards right and the stars aligned, we could be more than friends. I think she liked me. If I was smooth, I bet I could convert that into liked me liked me. Need I remind you, she said I was cute?
“Keep dreaming,” Kevin said, snapping me out of my sentimental haze. “She's way out of your league.”
Dude. How did he zone in on my brain waves like that?
“Your name tag, dipshit. That's how we communicate. I don't have human vocal cords, so I'm not actually talking out loud. This is all smoke and mirrors. Psychic gypsy New Age Wicca crap,” he said. “It's in the manual which, let me guess, you haven't read yet.”
I stared. He shook his head, annoyed, then scuttled across the speakers, pulling a thin copper wire behind him.
“What are you doing?”
“Hand me a couple of rocks.” He pointed to the pile of weird crystals under the counter.
“Can you be a little more specific? There are, like, a hundred of them.”
“Hold on. I made a list.” Kevin looked at a tiny piece of paper he was holding in one of his teeny roach hands. “Don't just stand there. Get moving, noob.”
“Fine.” I squatted down in front of the rock collection. There were tiny labels on each cubby, but the letters had faded. Why did we need so many magic rocks, anyway? Everyone knew healing crystals were all hippy-dippy crap.
“I hate hippies, too, kid,” Kevin said.
Gah. I was not cool with this psychic mind-reading connection.
“Not my fault,” Kevin said. “Just keep it clean, okay? I don't need to know what you're thinking when you're standing by the porno mags.”
“Wait. I—”
“Zip it. Moving on,” Kevin said. “I need a selenite and a pyrite.”
“That isn't helping me.” A rock was a rock, as far as I was concerned. Although, this collection was a lot more sparkly than gravel.
“Um...one looks like a white crystal tube with brown spots on the ends. And the other is fool's gold, so it looks like a bunch of little gold spray-painted chunks all stuck together.”
It took me a few minutes, but I found them. At least, I found rocks that kind of fit those descriptions. I handed them to Kevin. Okay, I couldn't technically hand them to him. They were bigger than he was, so I sat them on the counter next to him. He wrapped the copper wire around one rock, then looped it around the next, connecting them together. He plugged one end of the copper wire into the speakers and the other into the intercom system.
“What are you doing?”
“Dialing it up to eleven. Literally,” he said. “These rocks should amplify the sound, so we can feel the spirit of Dio rocking directly in our souls.”
“Great.” You know I didn't mean that, right? But he was my boss, and he had stereo dibs. No use arguing.
“You're welcome,” Kevin said anyway. “Hold on to your butt, kid. I'm about to press play.”
I waited for “Rainbow in the Dark” or maybe “Stand Up and Shout,” or “Straight Through The Heart,” or any of the too many of Kevin's favorite Dio songs I now had stuck on a loop in my brain, to rip across the speakers. But it didn't. Kevin had his hand on his Zune, but he didn't press play. Instead, he stared at me and made a subtle motion with one of his legs. A move that looked eerily like a “look behind you, but don't make it obvious.”
Gulp. Dear Lord, if you're listening? No hell spiders. Please don't let it be hell spiders. That's when something cold and hard pressed against my temple.
“Don't move,” said a man in a shaky growl. “Put your hands up where I can see them. Then turn around real slow and open the register.”
Oh, boy. It's a gun. We're being robbed.
“Duh, Sherlock,” Kevin said. “FYI, this guy looks totally nuts. You've probably got about a seventy percent chance of taking a bullet on this one.”
Suddenly, my knees turned to noodles, and I was wobbling in sheer terror. I tried to contain it because no sudden movements was kinda rule number one in the don't get shot playbook. Okay, yeah. On a one-to-ten scale of terror, demon Frito gnats should probably rate higher than a desperate human with a gun, but see how rationally you react with a bullet pointed right at your brain.
I turned around as slowly as I could, hands up like I was the perp on a cop reality show. I took one look at the guy with the gun and yep, I was going down. The robber didn't scream stability or strategic planning, or “I care enough about my future not to kill a dude and add a mansl
aughter charge to my rap sheet.”
He wore a pair of those nineties wide-leg raver pants. What were they called? Oh yeah. Phat pants. And he looked like he'd been wearing them since 1998 without washing them once. He was bone thin, gaunt. His body and his gun were shaking. And not the 'I'm scared to be committing a crime' shakes, more like coming down off a high and need a fix, stat, and I don't care who I need to kill to get high, shakes. Addict shakes.
Great. I was gonna get shot, just when my life was on an upswing. Can't win for losing, right? Grandpa was onto something.
“Give me the money. All of it.” He bared a row of rotten yellow teeth. He looked like one of those mugshots on the news, the meth heads caught in police stings who looked about fifty when they were actually in their twenties, worse for wear. Road hard.
Kevin was on the register now, waving some of his legs to get my attention. “Follow the robbery protocol, step by step,” he said. “And be careful. This joker made it past the Go Away charm, so he's super desperate. Don't die here or you'll end up like me.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I was so stressed, I said it out loud. I totally forgot Kevin could zone in on my brain waves. The robber thought I was smack talking him, so naturally, he was angry.
“It means give me the money, asshole,” jittery meth-mouthed robber said. “What are you, stupid?”
Stupid. Why did everyone keep calling me that? It was starting to hurt my feelings. I hit the no sale button on the register, and the cash drawer slid open. I glanced over at Kevin because it seemed like he was going to coach me through this robbery protocol thing step by step. But no. The register was roach-free. He'd tucked and rolled.
At that moment, DeeDee walked up next to me. Thank you, Baby Jesus! She hadn't hung me out to dry. For once.
“Where did you come from?” The robber yelled at her and then aimed his shaking gun at DeeDee. I tried to slide in front of her because, you know, gentlemen take bullets for ladies they secretly love and one day hope to put their penis inside of, but DeeDee pushed me aside. “Hands up, bitch!”
