by Bob Bannon
When he zipped up the pack today, it felt somehow deflated, with the second set of clothes all laid out there was a lot of room to spare. He hated to leave them, but knew that nothing would dry inside the pack.
He had one minor last thought and checked his breath, catching it in his hand. It was overwhelmingly peanut buttery. He went into the bathroom and rinsed his mouth numerous times and made sure to gargle and spit. Then he brushed his teeth with his index finger and repeated the whole process three or four times. When he checked his breath again, it was better, but by no means clean. He wondered if he could buy toothpaste for a dollar and fourteen cents.
He left the bathroom and pulled on his coat. He was just on his way out when he stopped, unzipped the pack and dug out one piece of bread. Then he zipped it back up and put it on his back. The bread he pressed into a hard little ball.
He hesitated at the door, but didn’t know why. When he turned the handle and heard the lock pop, there was a subtle relief, another confirmation of safety. He closed the door behind him and went down the stairs.
At the bottom step, he pitched his little ball of bread toward Grouchy’s nest. It hit the wall behind it and ricocheted into it. There was a screech of surprise and some activity, but Grouchy seemed to have buried himself deep in the barricade of debris this afternoon.
“Just say thank you and shut up!” Jonah said to the nest. And then he went out.
Jonah began to fall into a pattern, of sorts. Some days he would wake up to the sound of the big truck rumbling down the street. On others he would wake up late in the afternoon and suffer through the debilitating pain behind his eye which could last as long as twenty minutes.
At the very least, he was feeling somewhat more secure in his nest in the warehouse. Two weeks after the blanket and the food showed up, more bread had shown up with a jar of grape jelly and a two liter bottle of lemonade. The bread was of a different type than the last. It looked to be from some kind of bakery and had a hard crust. It was good none the less, and at least it was placed outside the office door and he found the door was still locked.
There had been no new notes and, from what he could tell, no new robberies in town.
Each day he would eat something and then wash himself and his clothes. He had washed each pair of jeans only once. The first time, he found that the jeans took three days to dry and, after the first day, he could see a fine crust of frost on them. They also tended to feel kind of crusty for a few days after, he thought maybe it was because he could never be sure if he rinsed all the soap out of them properly. The sweaters he would only spot clean if they needed it. He doubted the material the sweaters were made of would ever dry completely if he soaked them in water.
He packed up what belongings he could, tucked them away in the door under the stairs, and then he would take his tablet and go to the mall.
The first thing he took note of was the patterns of the mall security guards. Since he was there so often and for such a long period of time, he would move to different locations, sometimes an hour there and, maybe, an hour and a half over there. There were three security guards who patrolled different areas and Jonah knew where the main security office was. He tended to stay away from that area.
There was a heavy-set guard with kind of a bull-dog face who patrolled the older section of the mall, which was one floor. An older, very skinny guy with gray hair was in the newer section of the mall and his beat generally consisted of both floors from the entrance from the Promenade to the central fountain. There was another heavy-set guy who looked like a nicer fellow than the bull-dog faced guy, who would walk both floors of the newer section from the central fountain on back and around the corner where the mall ended in a large department store. Jonah found he could spend hours on that side of the mall, since the younger large guard would take his time walking the department store.
He found that the security guards never took much notice of him. He would always sit on a bench in one of the seating areas, never on the floor or on the central fountain, where someone would be noticed as a bit out of place.
The most he’d seen the security guards do was quiet down high school kids who got a little rowdy in the food court and on two separate occasions he had seen them bust a few people for shoplifting from the CD store, but Jonah would always unplug the tablet and move along when an area became of interest to the security guards.
The first thing he would do at the mall was walk the entire circumference. He would window shop, making mental notes if he saw something that interested him, so he could look it up on the internet and read about it. He watched as late fall clothes turned into full winter season apparel and the window decorations went from falling leaves to piles of fake snow.
Then he would find a place to sit, usually picking his first spot at random, trying to never start in the same place.
He would read the local news. There was still no mention of the house that blew up just outside of town and no mention of a body count either, but there were interesting stories about robberies in other local towns.
Someone had actually broken into the lumber yard down in Masonville three separate times and stolen roughly fifteen hundred dollars of wood plank. The town, according to the included map, was fifteen miles south and had been built up over the years surrounding the lumber yard and the accompanying mill. There was no other industry down that way, so the town was exceedingly small, and unaccustomed to a ‘crime wave’ of this sort. The lumber yard had no security cameras, but did have a full-time guard, who saw and heard nothing. The mystery was that there was only one entrance to the yard and the total of wood that was taken would have required a small truck to escape with. No tire tracks were found and the surrounding barbed-wire fence had not been tampered with.
Four days later, a very large home improvement store had been ransacked over in Clapton, which was on the other side of the surrounding Bane Woods forest, about ten miles southeast. The report said security camera footage was vague at best, but it appeared to be a single, very large man who was only seen in flashes before cameras were ripped from the walls. Others who had seen the footage thought it might be some type of large ape, which brought the reporter to the hardware store robbery here in town and Mister Fred Kingsly, who swore his store was invaded by a large ape as well, although he never could tell if anything was exactly missing because of a recently-former employee’s poor inventory skills. The alarm of the home improvement store had been activated, then deactivated within the forty-five second grace period so it was never triggered.
The home improvement store listed a variety of items as missing. There were small things, like several boxes of aluminum roofing nails. Then there were some plumbing hoses and electrical cords of different lengths and gauges. Most of the small things were difficult to trace through inventory, but the aisles that the thief had been in were evident.
Next on the list was a small but powerful electric generator, but, most curious of all, was a small claw-foot bathtub that was a floor model. Police were baffled as to how someone could have gotten away with something of that size without leaving so much as a tire tread, but they could also find no signs that the tub was simply destroyed as an act of vandalism either.
Jonah also checked the internet for games he could play on his tablet. He found a free game that he actually liked called “Kat Skratch”. In the game, a man was attacked by a mysterious cat in an alley and then the cat climbed to the top of an impossibly tall building. The man begins to develop certain powers at each level of the game in order to help complete that level. Jonah had passed the seventh floor, at which point the man actually turned into a cat-man, and was now on the tenth floor at which point he could be either the man, with some powers, or a cat, with different powers. Jonah liked being the cat.
Other than that, Jonah people watched. He would watch mothers shopping with very young children who seemed fascinated by everything and wanted shiny objects in windows. He would watch teenagers that were his age loaded
down with shopping bags or showing off things they’d just found and bought on impulse. There seemed to be teenage girls everywhere. Groups roamed from one end of the mall to the other and most would stop at random and burst into cackles of giggling at something they saw in a store or on someone’s phone.
His observations of people in the mall also helped in his somewhat low-level criminal career. Each day around six in the afternoon, Jonah found that the mall would slow down to a crawl. Fewer people would come in one entrance or another. He would take these opportunities to go to one of the small wishing-well fountains and grab some change before running out the door. He was always thankful that the mall seemingly never cleared out the fountains, but he always felt terrible doing it. He began to make himself believe that he was making wishes in reverse. He would wish he wouldn’t have to do this and then plunge his hand in. He didn’t know if a wishing well could work like that, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he really doubted it did.
He usually ended up with the same amount of change, somewhere hovering around a dollar. Sometimes he would use it to buy a soda at the older end of the mall and drink it as he window shopped. Since the two-liter bottle of lemonade had shown up on his door step, he had simply been collecting most of it.
With his latest haul, he currently had four dollars and twenty-seven cents. He knew exactly how he wanted to spend it. He stopped at the warehouse nest and gathered up every last penny.
When he was on his way to see Jenna at Red’s Diner he stopped short of going in. Wouldn’t he look like a crazy person if he wanted hot chocolate and he pulled out a handful of nickels and dimes? Or would he just look like a boy who had saved every penny? He didn’t know, so he decided to walk down to the gas station at the corner and see if he could maybe trade in his change.
The gas station had two pumps out front covered by an illuminated T-shaped car cover. The lights on the side Jonah approached from seemed to be going out, they flickered at random intervals. It gave the appearance that the gas station had seen better days.
There were beer signs in the windows, some of those flickered on and off too.
Inside, there was a very old man in overalls behind a thick sheet of glass. He was cleaning his glasses on his sleeve. Jonah sort of nodded a greeting and the old man nodded back.
There were rows and rows of convenience store items. He thought he might have a quick look around and see how much food here was before blowing his cash on hot chocolate. He looked at peanut butter and he checked the price of jelly. Bread here was two dollars and twenty-five cents. There were cans of food for under three. Nothing seemed to be over six.
It was good to know, but the idea of hot chocolate won out. He hadn’t noticed that the old man had put his glasses back on and was eyeing him as he went around the store pricing food.
Jonah went up to the register. “I have some change here. I was wondering if I could get some dollar bills?” He said.
The old man had his glasses slid halfway down his nose and looked at Jonah over them. “Ummm..Yup,” the man said in a long drawl as if the two words were one.
Jonah started pulling the various coins from his pocket and spilling them out onto the counter. The man started flicking the coins this way and that through a small square hole in the glass, at once counting and separating them. When this had concluded the old man said “Four dollars, twenty-seven?”
“Yes, sir.” Jonah said.
The man opened the register and scooped in each pile of coins according to what they were and scooted one quarter and two pennies back to Jonah’s side of the counter. Then he handed Jonah four dollars. Jonah put all the money back in his pocket. With a big grin he said “Thank you, sir.”
“Ummm..Yup,” the man said in the same one-word drawl.
Jonah left and headed up the street towards Red’s Diner.
The very first snow began to fall in a light drift. Jonah put up his hood and stuffed his hands in his pockets, happily anticipating hot chocolate. People hurried to and fro, it looked like they wanted to be in their cars before the snow started piling up.
He was welcomed to the diner with a blast of nice warm air. There were more people in here than the last time. There were more people working too. Two waitresses he didn’t recognize were working the booths and tables. He took an empty spot on a barstool at the corner of the counter.
Just then he saw Jenna coming out from the double doors that led to the kitchen area. She was laughing about something. “I’ll get you later,” she said with a giggle to someone out back. Her hair was up again, as it had been last time, but it looked shorter. She had probably had a haircut since the last time he was here.
She grabbed the coffee pot and went down the line of customers at the counter asking if they were “good or not?” Some she re-filled, others she nodded and passed.
“Hi!” she said to Jonah with a big grin. “Hot Chocolate right?”
“Yes!” Jonah said, a little too excited, and then blushed.
“I never forget a guy with beautiful eyes,” she said, turning to return the coffee pot to a warmer and going to the hot chocolate machine.
He blushed a completely different shade of red. Were his eyes beautiful?
There was that odd sensation again that she was much older than he was. She was someone with a job and an air of confidence that he didn’t think he had and that made her seem more grown up.
She brought the cup over and he reached for it a little too fast. “Hold it,” she said.
He looked up at her afraid to know what the problem was. He instantly reached into his pocket and pulled out the four dollars, wondering if she was asking if he had money to pay.
She bent underneath the counter and returned with the bag of miniature marshmallows. She saw the money in his hand and gave him a look that said that’s not what she meant. “A whole handful, right?”
“Yep,” he said with a breath and a smile. “Please,” he added.
Once again, she loaded the cup with marshmallows until it seemed it was almost a marshmallow with hot chocolate instead of the other way around.
She left and went about her other duties. He put the money on the counter and started in on the cup.
After she had made another round of the counter, gave some people plates of food, and made sure no one needed more coffee, she returned, putting her elbows on the counter and resting her chin on her hands.“So what brings you back? Do you live around here? I haven’t seen you.”
“No ,” he said, scooping marshmallow out of the cup with a spoon. “My dad has meetings around here.” He found it was easier to lie if he concentrated on the cup.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I remember now. So any food tonight?”
“I don’t think so. I only brought the four dollars this time. It’s from my allowance.” He wasn’t sure why he added that, but he figured it gave him some realism.
She took the four dollars and went on with other tasks. He almost asked for the other dollar back, he remembered hot chocolate only costing three, but he figured he owed her for the slice of pie last time.
He was almost hoping she’d offer him another slice, but he figured he might turn her down just on principal. He didn’t want her thinking he just came in here for free pie.
He took his time with the cup. He drank and then he’d put it down and spoon some marshmallow. He tried to make it look like he was taking his time waiting for someone to get out of a meeting. But he was enjoying the warmth, from the air as well as the cup. He even took off his coat.
He was enjoying watching her as she worked. She was pretty. And she seemed to be extremely friendly with everyone. Each time she caught him watching, she’d smile. He’d try to smile back, but he’d feel a flush that he was sure made him turn rose-red.
When he was finished, he looked up at the clock above the counter. It was eight o’clock. He looked outside and saw that the snow was still just a flurry, but seemed to be piling up on the metal windowsill.
He put on his coat and she came over and took the cup.
“No refill?” She asked.
“I can’t. I have to go.” Jonah said.
“Oh. Okay. Bundle up. It looks cold out there. See you soon?”
“I don’t know,” he stumbled.
“Well, you take care,” she said, and then turned and walked away.
He flipped up his hood, zipped the coat all the way up, and walked into a freezing night.
He made it back to his warehouse nest in record time. The air was cold and stung his face. The snow whipped around him. Even climbing into the warehouse stung his hands.
There was no activity from Grouchy’s side of the warehouse. If he was smart, he’d be burrowed down deep.
Jonah took the stairs two at a time, bounding up them. Once inside, he closed and locked the door behind him. It made little difference with the window overlooking the rest of the warehouse broken out.
He raced to plug in the electric blanket and then immediately got under it, shoes, jacket and all. He warmed up after a few minutes. After a few more, he was downright toasty.
Jonah took off his coat and boots and got up to use the bathroom.
He found that the electric blanket also worked as a bit of a space heater. The bathroom was cold, but when he walked back into the office, he could tell the temperature difference in the general vicinity of the blanket.
In his haste to get warm, he had forgotten to grab the backpack from the little door under the stairs. He decided that if it had been safe all day, he wasn’t going to worry about it right now.
He went back to the bathroom and drank some water directly from the tap and then slid under the blanket.
VII
Jenna Worth waved goodnight to her co-workers at Red’s Diner and went out into the cold night air, stuffing her hands in her pockets and squeezing her thick leather jacket around her.
She had changed out of her uniform into a yellow cashmere turtleneck and blue jeans and replaced her sneakers with fur-lined boots.
