Wally

by Rowan Massey

  A few hours later, we woke up to the bang and crash of a couple of men tossing garbage bags into the dumpster. They pretended we didn’t exist, and we stayed still, returning the favor. As soon as they were gone, Spitz got up and slid the window on the side of the dumpster open. He lifted himself in, his torso disappearing, legs flailing.

  “Anything?” I asked, after a minute.

  He wiggled back to the ground and straightened his clothes.

  “Paper and bathroom trash.”

  “Nasty.”

  I sat up on the pallet and started rolling our blankets up. Spitz went to the sidewalk and looked both ways. The woman hadn’t even changed position. I sighed and flopped my legs out in front of me.

  “Maybe we could just go back to sleep,” I said.

  “Fiona isn’t going to school today,” he said, and came back over to sit next to me on the pallet.

  “Where are you meeting her?” I asked.

  He twisted his lip and showed me his palms.

  I shrugged. “It’s no biggie. I have the job at noon. Let’s go get vitamin stew.”

  “Do we have enough?”

  I took the little zipped bag of money out of my pocket and took a look, even though I already knew. He wouldn’t take my answer otherwise.

  “With a dime left over,” I said.

  “Death, taxes, vitamin stew,” he grumbled.

  I snorted and went back to getting our stuff together. We’d been on a steady diet of that weird pseudo-food since free school lunches. I could still remember the bus ads when the government came up with it. We were still going to middle school then, and there was a particular ad with a little girl on it. Red dress, blond hair, spoon in fist, and laughing almost hysterically over a big bowl of disgusting stew. I always felt like her eyes were just about to get wild and crazy. They must have hyped her up on caffeine and sugar for the photo shoot. Every day, a bunch of us would stop as we passed the bus stop and do something to her face. First it was just drawing on her with a pen, then mud, piss, dog shit and a lot of spitting. Her face wasn’t visible when we were done with it. It made us crazy that we couldn’t get at the actual picture behind the plexiglass.

  We’d left school for good three years ago when my mom disappeared. Spitz’s parents told him they were done as soon as they found out he’d taken fielders. They kicked him out. That’s what all parents did to save themselves the grief of watching it all happen in their house. Joke’s on them. They could have joined us. But we couldn’t escape vitamin stew. It was fifteen cents a bowl and kept us alive. That, and vitamin bars, but those weren’t filling.

  Before heading for the stew kitchen, we went down the street and poked around looking for bullets. We could get maybe a couple of nickles for them if we sold them at the gunsmith where they melted them down to be used again. We got lucky and found three. One had to be pried out of a wall with a knife.

  We moved on, and when we got to it, the outdoor stew kitchen was open, but when we went to the window, the man told us they were late heating it up. There were only a handful of other people there so early, and we sat at one of the long, metal picnic tables. The tables and benches were bolted to the concrete ground. The kitchen was just a trailer.

  “I wish it still had potatoes in it,” Spitz said for the hundredth time. They changed it up according to what they could get cheap, and he always complained for weeks after a switch-up.

  We sat fiddling for long minutes, feeling our stomachs dig into our spines. Spitz got out his food list. He had four pages of it, but somehow kept coming up with stuff he wanted to eat someday. Every little space on both sides of each paper was filled with small writing. I’d read it, and he seemed to put each way of cooking something in a different category: mashed potatoes with chunks and butter, mashed potatoes with gravy, mashed potatoes with peel in it and bacon. It went on like that and then moved on to waffles, pasta, cereal, cookies. I leaned way over the table on my elbows and saw that he was writing a list about donuts.

  Spitz slapped a hand onto the sticky table and made me jump.

  “Fiona! What are you doing here?” He stood and held his arms out. Fiona came from behind me, and they hugged and kissed. I watched and felt jealous. I wanted somebody to jump up and make out with me like that, like I was delicious. Honestly, I didn’t know why she wanted a smelly, scabby homeless guy like Spitz. There wasn’t anything wrong with her. She lived with her dad, went to school, and had long, clean red hair, and nice skin. She could have had any sort of guy, but she liked to brag about her boyfriend. Maybe she thought it was cool to date a loser. The thought made me wanted to laugh. I had to turn my face so they wouldn’t see me smirking.

  “I heard there were a couple of drops on the field,” she said, pouting. They sat down across from me. “I had to come find you.”

  Fiona wasn’t a fielder, so sometimes it was a little intense with her. She got emotional and dramatic over it. Back when she and Spitz started dating, she couldn’t even handle going to the field with us very often. It had made her nervous, but I couldn’t make sense of why. She was fierce as fuck about most other things.

  When they were done smooching, feeling each other up, and giggling and all that shit, she took a couple of food bars out of her bag and handed them to us. They had dried berries in them and a lot of sugar. Very sweet. I tried not to eat it fast, but it was gone in seconds. We would still need the stew, but now we would be really nice and full.

  “You’re the queen of best friend’s girlfriends,” I told her, imitating what Nando had said to me, and digging food out of the back of my teeth.

  She grinned and twisted her finger around in one of her braids. She liked to do fancy braids and make girly things to put in her hair and share with her friends. She was wearing two green poofs that looked like they were made out of old teddy bear fur.

  “Then you won’t mind we’re going to my place for a while,” she said to me.

  When her dad wasn’t around, she took Spitz home with her for a real shower, food, and sex in a bed. I’d never been there. Not inside.

  I really wanted a boyfriend with a place. There was a picture in my head of an apartment with a warm bed. There would be clean and bare feet, lots of snacking, and learning all about sex. I didn’t know shit about sex. It was embarrassing.

  I pretended to be pissed at them, shaking my head like I couldn’t believe it.

  “Left out in the cold again,” I said.

  “He’s going to a job later,” Spitz told her, “in a couple hours.”

  I told her about the job. She frowned and kept looking at Spitz.

  “You’re cool with it?” she asked him. Her bright lipstick made her frown look clownish.

  He didn’t answer, looking at his lap. I felt like he was being dramatic over it for her attention. I rolled my eyes, and she reached across the table to smack my head, but I ducked and only got a whack on the shoulder.

  I did feel a little bad, though. It wasn’t about thinking Dr. Sardana was dangerous, it was that Spitz hated men. He’d come by his feelings the hard way.

  The stew guy yelled, “Ready!”

  I waved for Spitz to stay while I got our bowls. I payed with exact change and wrote our names down in the log all sloppy.

  We ate fast and told her how our night had gone, talking around full mouths. I could tell she was excited to take Spitz home, so as soon as we were done eating, I told them to go. We ditched our bowls and spoons in big plastic bins. Each bowl and spoon was etched with a number so they could find out who you were and threaten you if you stole it. People used to find ways around something so easy to game, and still sold bowls and spoons for the metal. Now they used a crappy type of metal nobody would buy.

  Foot traffic was picking up in the street when I headed towards the river. All the rich people lived over there where the tourists used to visit a long time ago because of the historical crap. Block after block, I felt more awkward until it was enough to make my palms feel sweaty. I stopped and ducked i
nto an alley where I took an old towel out of my backpack and wet it under a tap, then scrubbed at my face and neck. I knew there was dirt and dried blood in my hair. I tried to shake some of it out and wished I had a bandanna to tie around my head, even though I could put up my hoodie. There were scars around my forehead that I couldn’t hide. I put a ratty scarf around my neck to cover up my tat. The alley was the cleanest I’d ever seen, but I managed to find a plastic shopping bag in a trash can and stashed the dirty towel away in my backpack.

  If anyone saw me where I didn’t belong, I honestly didn’t know what would happen, so I snuck around in a hurry, back onto the sidewalk with my head down, keeping close to the walls out of habit. I still looked homeless but maybe not like a fielder.

  The streets horizontal to the river weren’t familiar to me. They were just numbers, but the wider streets had names that I knew. Dr. Sardana’s scrap of paper was getting soft and wrinkled in my hand where I was fiddling with it.

  When I finally found the house, it was right up against its neighbors and looked like no place I’d ever set foot in. It was big. The shutters and front door were blue, almost like fresh paint. The rest was brown brick.

  “Fuck my life,” I said to myself. My knees were bouncing, and I kept rechecking the house number. If he wrote it down wrong, I’d kill him. Strangers would call the police on me for sure.

  The front door opened, and there was the doc, looking more fancy than ever in a button-down shirt, a wool vest, and tan pants. He was wearing loafers too. Something about that made me smile. It was like he was wearing slippers.

  “Did you get lost?” he asked.

  “Um, no.”

  I took the three steps up to where he stood, and he turned sideways to let me in, but he was frowning at my head. My hand made a fist around the scrap of paper while the other spread out over my head to hide the slightly itchy crust of filth that I hadn’t felt self conscious about for years. But now I felt naked with him staring at it up close in the daylight.

  “Maybe you should start off with a shower,” he said.

  He wanted me to take a shower in his house? Alarm bells went off, and I remembered stories Spitz had told me.

  I watched Doc shut the door and lock it with a key. I wished Spitz was with me.

  “Does the lock make you nervous?” he asked. “The key is right here if you want to leave.” He set it on the skinny table near the door. That did make me relax. I reminded myself I’d known the guy for a long time and that I did stink. Of course he didn’t want me to smell up his lab. I looked around the place. I’d only seen science labs on TV, and maybe TV was wrong, but I still knew this wasn’t anything more than a living room with a long hallway leading to what was probably a kitchen. There were a couple doors I couldn’t see into and a stairway going up on the left.

  I did a double take. There was a gate over the stairs at the level of the ceiling. I’d never seen anything like that before. I leaned a little to look through the bars. There were a couple of guns hanging on the wall up there.

  The doc gestured for me to follow him to a door just beyond the stairs. There was a security gate over a regular door. He unlocked the two doors; one opening out and the other opening in. I went ahead of him. I was surprised it was a landing to more steps, these going down. It made me dizzy for a split second. It was a little steep. I went a couple steps down to get out of his way, and he locked the doors behind us. I could smell something weird right away—nothing like I’d ever smelled before—and wrinkled my nose.

  “I keep a lot of chemicals,” he explained. “It doesn’t smell good, but I keep it well ventilated.”

  We went all the way down. The place was big, without walls or rooms like upstairs; just white walls and pillars. All the windows were bricked up. It was so big that I realized it went under the houses next to the one I’d walked into. I notice Doc putting his keys on the table nearest the stairs. A gun rack beside it had three kinds of guns on it.

  There were tables everywhere, covered in machines, glass containers, bottles, papers, on and on. Things I’d never seen before in my life. I couldn’t take it in. There were giant, shiny metal closets. Three desktop computers were in one corner, gallons of different liquids were stacked on the floor against one wall. There were shelves in line like in a library, all full of bottles and boxes and bins. There were three big sinks, all with weird looking taps and hoses. To my left were two closed doors. The middle of the place was taken up by four long tables, all pushed edge to edge to make wider table space, and covered in what even I could recognize as a the kind of stuff chemists used. I pointed to a little stack of pill bottles like an idiot.

  “You make drugs in here!”

  “I make a handful of things for a variety of reasons.” He pointed to one of the doors. “Bathroom. And the other is laundry. Help yourself, and don’t touch anything from the lab while I’m upstairs. I promise you, I know where everything is in here.”

  He gave me a look, like he thought I’d already been planning on stealing his shit. Well, maybe I had been thinking about it a little. I nodded and went and locked myself in his bathroom. It was the first dingy room I’d seen in the house. Everything look old. Things were dirty in a dusty way. It made me much more comfortable than anywhere else in the house. There were towels on a shelf and all-purpose soap in the shower. I tried to be quick and not steam the place up, even though the heat was so amazing I felt high. The water and soap stung my scalp and sent pink lines of blood down to the drain. When I got the crud out, I could feel the scars and scabs all over my head. I wondered how noticeable it was when my hair was clean, and if boys would never date me because of it. I was always wondering stuff like that, but in the end, I figured it probably didn’t matter. Anyway, I just wanted somebody who liked me. I wasn’t looking for some perfect heartthrob. It was probably the same for other guys.

  The cleanest clothes in my pack were dirty, but less dirty than what I’d had on. I put them on. When I came out, he was still upstairs. I checked out the washer and dryer. He had a bunch of weird cleaners in the cabinets, but plain laundry soap too. The machines seemed pretty simple like the ones in laundromats, so I dumped my stuff in and used a whole scoop of his soap. If he didn’t want me to smell like hot garbage, I’d be using plenty of his soap.

  I heard him coming down the steps. The front door of the house felt far away. I was underground in a place that smelled and looked like nothing I’d been around before. I leaned back against the wall with my arms around my chest. Should I be nervous? I didn’t know.

  “Do you want a snack?” There was a crinkle of plastic. When I stepped out of the laundry room, he held out a bag of corn chips and a couple bottles of fancy juice.

  Hell yes! Juice is amazing!

  Whatever fears I had disappeared, and I held my hands out. He poured several chips into my palms. One fell, and I held the others against my shirt to lean down and pick it up and eat it.

  He laughed.

  “The floor isn’t clean enough to eat off of,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  He went to the computers in the corner and sat down in his office chair. I walked behind him and sat on an empty spot on a table against the wall.

  “Am I going to learn computers?” I asked.

  “If you like. Today, I’m teaching you to take inventory. It’s going to be the most tedious thing you’ve ever done.” He gave me a smile that was half joking and half apology.

  “Okay. I don’t know what that means, but I’ll do it.”

  I shoved the last chip into my mouth and wiped my salty hand on my pant leg. He gave me one of the juices. It was orange, so I thought it would be like orange juice, but it tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before, almost like flowers. The label said mango. I made a face but drank it because it was sweet.

  He wheeled his chair closer and gave me a clipboard thick with papers. Taking it from him and holding it in front of me the way he did every night on the field made me feel grown up and importa
nt.

  “It doesn’t matter if you know what all these things are, or how to say them, just try to memorize what the words look like, and where to find things labeled exactly that way. Just count everything up and write it down. I’ll look it over and order anything I need. Eventually, you’ll do some of the ordering for me.”

  He got up and waved me over to the wall where all his weird liquids were. I matched a label to a word on the clipboard without him having to tell me. A lot of the names had numbers attached, or a different second name, so it was kind of complicated. I felt important holding the clipboard just the way he did. It seemed like a big responsibility to give me on the first day. I stood straight and grinned. He tilted his head and gave me a funny look, but smiled back.

  “There won’t be anything you need to count on the middle tables here,” he said, waving at all the equipment and clutter. “In fact, you should probably avoid touching any of this. Some of it can be sensitive. Now and then, you might work on it next to me, but never when I’m not down here. Understood?”

  I nodded.

  “You’ll end up spending a lot of time counting the vials and bottles in the refrigerator. Don’t reorganize it.”

  That seemed important so I went over and opened the fridge. Little bottles tinkled in the door shelves. There were lines and lines of stuff with labels on the shelves to keep it organized.

  “Easy,” I said, but I swallowed and bit my lip. It seemed easy enough, sure, but maybe it wasn’t, and I was about to fuck something up.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be right here at the computer. Ask me anything. I’d rather hear a hundred questions than fix a hundred mistakes.”

  “Yup.”

  He nodded and went back to the computers. I decided to start back at the gallons of things, since I’d already spotted some of them on the first page. When I was done with those, I figured out that the pages listed things in sections according to the way things were placed around the room. I did some shelves of office things next, some bottles on a table, then the fridge. When I came to some boxes on a shelf, some opened with items taken out, some still sealed, I had to ask how to count them. I was so focused that time went fast, catching me off guard when I paused and realized how long it must have been. I was dazed, my eyes dry from not blinking enough. There was no clock anywhere, but it must have been hours.