John Avellanos stood up looked at a line of campaign signs stuck into the grass on the other side of a small green fence. Michael Catalinelli was a handsome, smug looking man in his 50s. Elizabeth Felton was an attractive, dark haired woman in her late 30s with olive colored skin and brown eyes that seemed green in the right shade of light. He sat back down, opened up the Winterborn Daily Post and turned to the editorial page. Dan Grossinger, a man in his early 30s, pictured wearing a fedora -- "all the better to piss off radical feminists," he would often joke -- a poor man's Matt Drudge for a scaled-down New York Post, had a new column. "Elizabeth Felton," the title said, "A Progressive in Sheep's Clothing."
“I'm not one to stoop to name calling," the column began. "You'll never hear me call Elizabeth Felton Queen Elizabeth or the Emperor Elizabeth, daddy's little girl, or the Preppy Progressive of Poison Springs. However entertaining Mayor Catalinelli can often be, this election is too important to joke around."
"There's no question that Ms., and I'm sure at age 40 she prefers Ms. To Miss, Felton, the daughter of our late, fiery, ultra-liberal Senator, has mounted a formidable campaign. Not only has she garnered sympathy from the recent death of her father, a much loved if controversial figure in the civic life of the Winterborn County, she has demonstrated a remarkable ability to raise funds, and mobilize student volunteers. In spite of her far-left-wing ideology, Ms. Felton has enjoyed a brief surge in the polls, which, thankfully, appears to have ended."
"But this is no time to declare victory and go home, to let the game slip away like a mediocre football ahead at halftime but without the will to close out the second half. As badly as Michael Catalinelli has handled the defection of David Sherrod, his former press secretary, and the man once considered his designated successor, this city needs to give him, the greatest mayor in our history, a seventh term. Elizabeth Felton is a left-wing extremist in sheep's clothing. Not only did she spend most of her 30s abroad running a Soros-funded non-profit, she also had a column in a notorious left wing British newspaper where she regularly mocked her home town as "hate city" -- her little slip up this August wasn't the first time she's used the term -- and once referred to the United States of America as a "tired, spent empire, capable of little more other than repression and violence." Most important of all, Elizabeth Felton is not only the daughter of Nicholas Felton, a basically well-intentioned if shrill man, she is the niece of Laura Felton. Lest anybody forget who she was, let me remind them."
Avellanos put the newspaper back in the messenger bag, and moved onto the New York Times, then Romeo and Juliet. While he normally found Grossinger entertaining, the incident with the picketers at the bus stop had lowered his tolerance for right-wing opinion pieces. He looked up through the gushing jets of water at the clock tower when the bells chimed out that it was two o'clock. He looked at the other people sitting around the fountain circle. There was a group of elderly men, two middle aged office workers, a pair of women with a stroller, and a 30 something man in a cotton summer suit with a bow tie and a loaf of bread feeding the pigeons. There was also a woman about his own age on the other side of the fountain. She was somewhere between the age of 20 and 25, had short blond hair, and a heavy pair of work boots. She was fumbling through a knapsack. Something about her looked familiar, but her face was partially obscured, and he concluded that he had, once again, seen her only in his imagination. He felt himself getting sleepy.
"My name, dear saint," he mumbled, "is hateful to myself."
John Avellanos, for that was his legal name, felt his head snap back when someone put her hand on his chest. He looked up to see the young woman he had noticed on the opposite side of the fountain circle. It had been her after all. She pulled a set of dog tags out from under his shirt, and held them in her hands.
"Ruiz, M, J," she said, "blood type O, 298091878, USMC, religion Protestant."
She let them fall back down on his chest.
"Chegoffgan, Cathleen, Mary," she said, extending her hand, "blood type, I haven't got a clue, social security number you're not getting, religious affiliation, Catholic ex."
He shook her hand.
"The M stands for Martin," he said, "but you can call me John. I don't answer to Martin."
She sat down.
"OK John," she said. "Every time I see you, you're passed out on a bench."
"What's it been?" he said. "About a year?"
She reached over and passed her finger over his eyebrow.
"10 months, almost to the day. I see your black eye's gone."
John Avellanos sat back and examined Cathy Chegoffgan, who, in turn, examined him, tilting her head to the right when he tilted his head to the left, and tilting her head to the left when he tilted his head to the right. She had brown eyes and blond hair. Did she dye it? The red flannel shirt, the heavy work boots, and the matted, unwashed hair seemed designed to create the impression that she didn't care about her appearance. But a few other details, the carefully tweezed eyebrows, the crisp way she rolled up her shirtsleeves, the natty way she tucked her jeans inside her heavy work boots, argued that she did. Avellanos laughed nervously at the way she seemed to be memorizing each detail of his face.
"That cut was only a scratch," he said.
"You look too young, and you look too much like a hippie ever to have been in the military. I guess you spent your whole enlistment in some cushy office job."
"I may look like a hippie now. But I won't for long. My boss gave me an ultimatum. Get a haircut, or you're fired."
Cathy Chegoffgan pulled her knapsack up onto the bench. She took out an old medium format, film camera, and flipped open the viewfinder. The camera looked older than either of them, but it had been so well-maintained, the chrome carefully polished, the 80mm lens cleaned of every speck of dust, the hinges on door of the waist level viewfinder well-oiled and silent, that it was clear she planned to use it for as long as she could get film.
"So get a haircut. But let me take a portrait of you while you still look like Jesus Christ."
John Avellanos, for that was his legal name, seemed uncomfortable being photographed, but before he could object, she was finished.
"All done," she said, closing the viewfinder.
He tucked his dog tags back into his shirt.
"That's an interesting old camera."
"It's a Hasselblad 500C."
"Why don't you use a digital camera like everybody else?"
She picked up his copy of Romeo and Juliet.
"What's that?"
"It's a book."
"Why don't you use a Kindle like everybody else?"
"That's different?"
"Why?"
"Film is expensive."
"I have enough to last me three lifetimes. Books are expensive."
"I paid 25 cents for that one."
She held up her smart phone.
"I have a Kindle app for this. I can get any book I want on the Internet."
"It costs money to buy books from Amazon."
"Buy? Are you kidding? I've never bought a book in my adult life. There's a place on the Internet where you can go to get anything you want."
"That's copyright violation."
"So call the FBI."
"I'm joking."
"I like to make big prints, I'm too poor to afford a Nikon D800. This is basically a 300 megapixel camera, and it was free. I inherited it from my grandfather. He was a navy photographer back in the 1960s."
"So you'll develop that and send me a copy."
"Yep. It's going into my gallery of men who look like Jesus Christ."
"I do not look like Jesus Christ. Jesus was a short, dark skinned, Middle Eastern man with wiry hair and coal black eyes. In fact he was probably black."
"I've seen pictures. Jesus Christ looked exactly like you," she said, putting the Hasselblad back in her knapsack. "So what kind of a name is Ruiz anyway?"
"Ruiz is the 21st most common Hispanic surname."
She zipped up the knapsack.
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"You don't look Hispanic."
"Yes I do."
"You're too tall. Hispanics are short and squat. And they stand on the side of the road with leaf blowers. Where's your leaf blower? I don't see it."
"Well, my mother was mostly Swiss and English, and probably a little bit of Scottish, you know, the kind of people the English subjugated, stripped of their culture, then sent to America to be their storm troopers against the Indians. But I guess I'm lucky I do look like the white hippie surfer Jesus Christ of the northern European imagination, and not the real one. White privilege comes in handy, especially in this town, especially with a name like mine."
Cathy Chegoffgan took a package of cigarettes out of the pocket of her flannel shirt, put one in her mouth, and then lit it with a disposable lighter.
"Now you sound like my politically correct ex-boyfriend. He used to tell me to check my cishet privilege and I was like 'what the fuck is that' and he said 'I shouldn't have to tell you.' One day I saw him in a pink t-shirt that said 'this is what a feminist looks like.' That's when I dumped the passive aggressive little asshole."
"Well I wouldn't be caught dead in one."
"Thank you. But you do talk about white privilege. White privilege this and white privilege that. White privilege my ass. My mother is a redheaded, fish bone white, crazy as a shit house rat Irish Mick," she said, inhaling then blowing smoke in his direction. "That's about as white as anybody can get. And privilege is one thing I've never had. My definition of rich is being able to afford Budweiser instead of Pabst."
Avellanos pointed in the direction of Reagan Plaza North.
"Those people over at the bus stop were harassing two innocent women just because they had the wrong skin color. Then they interrogated me, even though I have the right skin color. I don't think they would questioned me about whether or not I could speak English if I had been talking to your mother."
Cathy Chegoffgan laughed so hard she snorted through her nose.
"Those losers?" she said, slapping him on the side of the arm. "Punch them in the fucking mouth. Look at you. You're 6'4?” she said, feeling up his arms, his shoulders, and then his chest. "What a waste of God given muscle."
"God given muscle?" he said, laughing. "Oh please. I'm just that big dork with big feet all the short guys with something to prove used to beat up in high school."
"You're not in high school anymore."
"I felt like I was."
"Get over it. You know what privilege is? Privilege is being able to go anywhere in town you want, anytime you want, and not have to worry about getting sexually harassed."
"That's male privilege not white privilege."
"Yeah. Yeah. White privilege. I suppose if I got strung in a basement somewhere and gutted by a serial killer I might get more attention in the media than some black girl or some Hispanic girl but so fucking what. Little good all that privilege is going to do me when I'm dead. But if I looked like you, oh hell, if I looked like you I wouldn't let anybody fuck with me. If that gang of loser redneck assholes gave me a hard time I'd just walk right up to the biggest one, punch him in the mouth, and make him eat the sidewalk. Then I'd say 'the rest of you. Clear the fuck out.'"
"You're right," he said, looking down, ashamed. "I failed."
She took another drag on her cigarette.
"Then again," she said, "when I met you at the bus stop last year I told you you shouldn't get into any more fights, so I guess you were just following my advice."
"No. You're right," he said. "I had an obligation as a man to protect those two women and I failed, but I'm not a coward. Honestly, I swear. I just don't know what motivates people like that. I froze. I was shocked."
She threw her cigarette to the ground.
"You want to hear my theory?"
He nodded.
"If you're a redneck with bad credit you're basically an illegal immigrant with white skin, and everybody in this town is a redneck with bad credit. Take my dad's friend. He lost his job ten years ago. He went broke. His credit went to hell, and he couldn't get a real job, so he started working off the books, and who were you competing with 10 years ago if you worked off the books?"
”Mexicans?"
"Exactly. He lost his fucking mind," she said, stomping out the cigarette butt with her foot. "He started buying gold. He stocked up on canned goods. Then he started to believe all the canned goods were made by the government and they were trying to poison him, so he threw them all away and started buying survival seeds and drinking raw milk and wasting all kinds of money on shit I never knew existed. Then he became obsessed with illegal immigrants."
Avellanos laughed.
“I work on the books, and I can't afford to buy gold, so what's he complaining about?"
"He's crook and a drug dealer. Mexicans took all the highly sought after leaf blower jobs, so what was he going to do? Starve? It all worked out for the best."
Avellanos looked up at the clock tower when the bells rang out that it was three o'clock. Had they really been talking for almost an hour? He stood up, but she pulled him back down.
"Don't you want to hear me bullshit some more?" she said. "Yeah. I talk a lot, don't I?"
John Avellanos, for that was his legal name, looked back up at the fountain, catching the mist from its cascading jets of water on his face. He smiled. The unpleasant incident at the bus stop seemed like a thing of the very distant past.
"I'd love to hear you bullshit more. I was going to ask you for your number, so you could send me a copy of the photo, but I also have to be at my on the books job by 4 o'clock, and if I don't catch my bus, I won't even have to worry about getting that haircut."
"Why not meet me here tomorrow? I can show you your photo. We can have lunch. We can reminisce about what you looked like when you looked like Mr. Jesus H. Christ. Where do you work?"
Avellanos looked embarrassed.
"At WillyMart," he said, laughing bitterly. "They have a program where they hire Iraq War vets. It was the only job in town I could get. Hopefully I won't be working there forever."
She laughed.
"You work at the same WillyMart where we met last year?"
"The very one."
He took a small note pad out of his green messenger bag and started to write.
"I should have given you my name," she said. "I should have asked you yours. I should have given you a ride. I can't tell you how happy I am to see alive. I left you out in the middle of a fucking blizzard. You failed? I fucking failed."
"You can't make yourself responsible for every strange man you meet in a parking lot. As you said, I'm tall, menacing, and probably a little scary when you don't know me. For all you knew I was a rapist or a serial killer."
"Oh bullshit. It had nothing to do with you. You're about as menacing as a stray puppy. I still lived with my mom back then, and all I could think of was getting home to shovel the snow. She's obsessive compulsive. She used to keep track of my entire day down to the minute. I'm actually amazed I stopped and talked to you for even the five minutes I did. That very next day I decided I wasn't going to listen to the voices in my head anymore. I was only going to do what I wanted. So you see? You are Jesus Christ. You liberated my soul from the devil, my mother."
Avellanos continued to write. He handed her the slip of paper when he was done.
"There's my home phone number and address. I don't have a cell phone so you'll probably have to leave a message."
"That's' a pretty swanky address. How can you afford to live in East Poison Springs working at WillyMart? And why don't you have a cell phone?"
He stood up.
"I don't have a cell phone because I don't like carrying a GPS tracking device on me. I get home pretty late, so I think your idea's a good one. Why don't we just meet here?"
"I have to do some things in the morning, so how about 11 or 12?" she said.
"How about 11?"
"It's a date," she said. "I'll see you tomorrow."
; "I'll see you then."
Chapter 4 - Welcome to WillyMart
John Avellanos caught the Number 81 bus on Reagan Plaza South with only a few moments to spare. He jumped up on the steps, getting out his wallet and money in one motion, panting violently as the bus driver handed him his change. He turned to find a seat, breathing easily, relieved that he hadn't missed his connection.
Suddenly, Avellanos let out a shriek of horror. A waterproof envelope, a plastic mailer that you could buy in any stationary store, had slipped out of his messenger bag down onto the sidewalk. He wheeled around, jammed his body into the door to prevent it from closing, reached down, picked up the envelope, and stepped back onto the bus. The bus driver stuck out his arm.
"If you ever do something like that again, I'll call the police and have you arrested."
"I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."
"You bet you weren't," the driver said, pulling back his arm. "Just use your brain from now on. Go."
John Avellanos walked to the back of the bus and sat down. He put the waterproof plastic envelope on his lap, and leaned back. As the driver pulled out onto the street, he took out two photographs, one large, the other wallet sized. He put them both face down on the empty seat next to his, and took out a third object, a Xerox copy of an old newspaper article. The bus driver stopped at the light near the entrance ramp to Route 1081, then pulled onto the highway after the light turned green. Avellanos read the old newspaper article as they passed West Hill and the construction site at Winterborn Center II, both of which were about 2 miles south of Reagan Plaza, and a mile north of WillyMart and Old Winterborn Center. The newspaper article, published on May 4th, 1971 in the Winterborn Daily Post, was almost exactly two decades older than John Avellanos. Yet, judging by the number of fingerprints on the Xerox copy, it had deep personal significance.
"Laura Felton," the title said, "Radical Activist Killed in Blast."
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