NOT AN AMERICAN

by Stanley W Rogouski

  John Avellanos examined the photo that accompanied the article. Laura Felton was a very young woman with brown eyes, a premature hint of gray in her dark brown hair, a long graceful neck, and soft regular features very similar to his own. She could have been the subject of a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough or Marisa Berenson's understudy in Barry Lyndon. But there was a serious, determined quality about the way she looked at the camera.

  "The Poison Springs native," it began, "and the subject of an intensive manhunt after setting off a deadly explosion in a Cambridge, Massachusetts physics lab has been declared dead after prematurely setting off another bomb she was building in a safe house in El Paso, Texas. Ms. Felton had always maintained that she intended to harm only property, not people, and only as an act of protest, but she had also refused to turn herself in after it was discovered that a night maintenance crew had been working inside the laboratory after closing time. A temporary janitor died 3 days later. Two others were injured. 'I'm glad she saved the taxpayers some money, Cambridge Police captain Richard Murphy was quoted as saying. 'Shovel what's left of her into a shoe box or feed it to the pigs. Makes no difference to me.'”

  Avellanos put the newspaper article and the two photos back inside his messenger bag when he saw the sign for Winterborn Center on the right. That meant thee bus had already made the U-Turn and was on the northbound side of Route 1081. It pulled to a stop at the bus shelter near the employee entrance at WillyMart.

  "Route 1081," the bus driver called out, "Winterborn Center. Stop here for WillyMart, Home Depot, The Wine Repository, and Angie's Unisex Hair Salon."

  John Avellanos stepped down onto the sidewalk, and briefly glanced at the bus shelter before he continued along the side of the big, soulless building. He showed his employee ID to the security guard at the employee entrance, held out his messenger bag to be inspected, and continued into the warehouse. The employee locker room was packed to capacity with the shift change.

  A week after he was hired, Avellanos had been required to watch an orientation video. That locker rooms and showers were provided to employees was given as one example of how the enlightened labor policy of the WillyMart Corporation had made unions all but obsolete, but most people who worked at WillyMart Poison Springs showed up already in their uniforms. Only one unfortunate cashier, who lived in his car, used the filthy, poorly kept showers. Avellanos rarely if ever wore his uniform. He rarely if ever interacted with customers. WillyMart at Poison Springs had recently fired most of its regular shipping employees, and replaced them with contractors, many of whom spoke little or no English, and Avellanos, who had been hired to drive a forklift, mainly because he was bilingual, had also become the unofficial liaison between the company's drivers and the men who unloaded their trucks.

  Bob Yapper, the manager in charge of the second shift, was a small man in late middle age with thinning brown hair, and a pair of thick black, square frame eyeglasses.

  "Martin Ruiz," he said, tapping Avellanos on the shoulder, "and no I won't call you John."

  "Good evening Bob."

  "We've hired a new driver. He got fired from his last job, so keep an eye on him."

  "What did he do?"

  "I have no fucking idea."

  "Why did you hire him?"

  "None of your goddamned business."

  "What's his name?"

  "George Kozlowski," Yapper said, laughing. "Get another 99 of them and you can screw in a light bulb."

  "I don't understand," Avellanos said.

  "You don't have to understand. Just make sure he's not shipping any personal stuff on company time, and I'm warning you. If you don't get that lice infested mop cut, you'll be looking for a new job."

  "I'm going to cut it over the weekend."

  "You won't be here," Yapper said. "The district manager's coming in over the next few days, and when he sees you he's going to fire you on the spot."

  "What time do Kozlowski and the temps come in?"

  "About 7 o'clock."

  "Why if I get it cut now?" Avellanos said. "I can take my dinner break now instead of 7 o'clock."

  Yapper waved him away in a dismissive manner.

  "Do whatever you want," he said.

  John Avellanos stashed his messenger bag away in his locker, and went back outside to Angie's Unisex Hair Salon to get his hair cut. From the window of the waiting area he could see the Number 81 bus shelter. Not much had changed since the previous November. As many times as the management at WillyMart complained, the city had not fixed the sign, which still hung askew, or replaced the map of the Poison Springs Metro System, which had been covered in graffiti for as long as anybody could remember. Avellanos tried to recall what it looked like in the middle of a driving snowstorm.

  "Just cut it short," he had said to the hairstylist as she draped the white cloth over his shoulders, "as short as you can get without shaving it."

  An hour later, he walked back through the employee entrance at WillyMart. He looked so different that he not only had to show his driver's license a second time, he had to answer questions about his birthday and his height, almost forgetting to say "six feet but that's barefoot so I seem taller" instead of "six feet three," or, worse yet, "191 centimeters." He showered, then changed into his official WillyMart uniform. Clean shaved, and with short hair, he was completely transformed. When Bob Yapper came back into the locker room, he didn't recognize his young employee.

  “If you see that hippie dirt bag Martin Ruiz, tell him to come into my office."

  "I'm right here," Avellanos said. "So what do you think?"

  Yapper did a quick double take.

  "You looked like a freak with long hair. Now you look like a freak with short hair. I just wanted to remind you to keep an eye on the new guy. I've got a bad feeling about him. I want an excuse to fire him. Find me one."

  "Is he here yet?"

  "How the fuck should I know? Loading Dock C, get out there."

  John Avellanos, for that was his legal name, walked out of the locker room, and made his way out to the warehouse, looking out of the bay doors to check for the minivan that would bring in the evening's batch of "independent contractors." Not seeing the minivan, he continued onto Loading Bay C, which he always preferred to Loading Bay A or Loading Bay B since, instead of a blank white wall or a bare chain link fence around an empty lot, it offered an unobstructed view of Route 1081, Winterborn Center II, and the West Hill coal breaker.

  The West Hill Coal Breaker in Poison Springs was the very last large scale, anthracite coal processing plant left in the Northeastern United States. The great industrial ruin had become so closely identified with Poison Springs that even Michael Catalinelli promised it would never be demolished. Seattle had the Space Needle. Paris had the Eiffel Tower. New York had the Empire State Building. Rio de Janeiro had the state of Christ the Redeemer, and Poison Springs had the West Hill Coal Breaker.

  Now that it was generally accepted that the West Hill mine fire had not been extinguished in the 1970s, that it raged below the old coal breaker that it would one day consume, West Hill and the surrounding landscape had once again become the setting for lurid speculation, rumors, and urban legends. That Spring the Winterborn Daily Post has run a wildly popular, but completely unsubstantiated series of articles about how the mob would dispose of the bodies of trafficked women by dumping them into an old railroad car and sending it down into one of the burning coal seams. Avellanos, in fact, would often stare so intently up at West Hill that his coworkers would occasionally speculate out loud about whether or not he had "left something" up at the old coal breaker. "Haven't you ever seen Breaking Bad?" he would always say. "That's why they make hydrochloric acid."

  Halfway to Loading Bay C, John Avellanos burst out laughing. He shook his head, reached into his wallet, and took out the pamphlet the anti-immigrant protesters had given him earlier that afternoon. He unfolded it.

  "Who's Stealing Your Country?" by George Kozlowski.

  He stuffed th
e flier in his pocket, and continued on his way. The new driver was wearing a neat, pressed, brand new WillyMart uniform instead of a leather motorcycle jacket, but there was no mistaking the slight Mongolian cast of his features, those blue eyes peering out of those slits in that brown, leathery skin, or the neatly trimmed goatee. It was indeed the man who had given him the pamphlet earlier in the day.

  "You must be George Kozlowski," Avellanos said, extending his hand. "I'm Martin J. Ruiz. But call me John. That's what the J stands for. I don't answer to Martin."

  "I'm pleased to meet you John," Kozlowski said, shaking his hand.

  "Actually you should probably say you're pleased to meet me again," Avellanos said.

  "What do you mean?"

  Avellanos showed him the leaflet.

  "You gave me this."

  Kozlowski looked at the leaflet and handed it back.

  “That's mine, but you don't look familiar," he said.

  Avellanos crumpled the leaflet up into a ball and tossed it into the garbage can. He took his driver's license out of his wallet, and held the photo in Kozlowski's direction.

  "Maybe you don't recognize me because I just got my hair cut."

  "Oh my God," Kozlowski said. "You're Jesus Christ. We we're talking about you all afternoon."

  "So you recognize me now."

  "Yes I do. It looks like my flier had a good effect on you. Just this afternoon, I thought you were a bum. Now you look exactly like the kind of fine, clean cut, upstanding young man I'd be pleased to work for."

  Avellanos laughed out loud.

  "I'm not your boss," he said. "Bob just wanted me to show you around the first day."

  "Well that's a relief. Working for and not with a kid your age would have been a little embarrassing."

  "How old do you think I am?"

  "I don't know, 20 or 21. It's hard to tell at my age."

  Avellanos held up the driver's license a second time.

  "You certainly are a well preserved 30 years old."

  "Thank you. I don't feel a day over 25."

  "So what kind of a name is Ruiz?"

  "It's a last name."

  George Kozlowski laughed.

  "So what did you think of the pamphlet?"

  Avellanos laughed in turn.

  "I liked it better in the original German."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You're smart enough to recognize my accent, but you’re dumb enough to endorse Michael Catalinelli. Don't you see that man is playing you? And fuck you for harassing those two women. I should have punched you in the mouth you ignorant hillbilly."

  "Now I know you didn't read it."

  Avellanos walked over to the garbage can, plucked out the leaflet and began to read. It was dull, nothing but a banal mixture of libertarian conspiracy theory, anti-government paranoia, and pro-gold-standard boilerplate, exactly what he had expected. But when he came to the last line, he shook his head, surprised.

  "And that's I'm voting for Elizabeth Felton for mayor," he read out loud, "better an honest liberal than a shill for the New World Order."

  "You see," Kozlowski said. "You didn't read it."

  "OK I didn't read it," Avellanos said. "Color me surprised."

  "Her father was on the far left but he was always there for the Second Amendment."

  "So is Catalinelli. Every picture I see him in he's posing with a gun."

  "He's a fake. You're too young to remember but until he lost the Senate seat in 1996 to Nicholas Felton, he was all for gun control. He was going places as a liberal but it didn't work out for him, so now he's going places as a conservative. I bet that doesn't work out for him either. He's really just a slimy, opportunistic windbag. Look at the pictures. He doesn't even know how to hold a gun. He's not fooling anybody. At least Felton is what she is. At least you know what you're getting."

  Avellanos noticed the minivan come into the parking lot and the "temps" begin to disembark.

  "We'll continue this discussion later," he said. "Welcome to WillyMart."

  Chapter 5 - The scarf

  The next morning, John Avellanos took Number 18 bus back down to Reagan Plaza. In his dark, cotton slacks, wool sport coat, and Oxford shirt, he looked different, so different, in fact, that when he passed a line of police officers restricting access to the western third of Reagan Plaza, and one of them nodded, smiled, and said "good morning sir," he checked to see if his fly was open. Cathy Chegoffgan was already sitting at the Franklin B. Gowen Memorial Fountain Circle when he arrived. She was wearing a green instead of a red flannel shirt, and had kicked some of the dust off her steel toed work boots, but, otherwise had made no change in her appearance. She was sipping a cup of coffee, and reading his copy of Romeo and Juliet.

  "You ran away so fast yesterday, you forgot your book."

  "I read it in high school."

  "What did you think of it?"

  "I hated it."

  I guess it's inevitable that people hate books they read in high school," he said.

  "I hated it because of the so called hero."

  "You did?"

  "He was a douche bag."

  "Why?"

  "First he fucks a 13-year-old girl. Then he gets his best friend killed because he's pussy whipped. And then, instead of getting a bunch of guys together, strapping on his sword, and breaking his little piece of jail bait out of town, which any of the Prince's relatives who hated Tybalt for killing Mercutio would have helped him do, he comes up with an elaborate scheme where he gives her a knockout drug, fakes her death, and gives her to the priest who molested him. I cannot stress how much of a douche bag that guy was."

  "That's a very creative misreading of the play. But it wasn't Romeo's idea to give Juliet the knockout drug. It was Friar Lawrence's. Romeo had already left town, remember?"

  "Then you've got your heroine, Juliet. I tried to put myself in her place. It didn't work. So Friar Lawrence, what's the plan? Well Juliet, we're going to give you a knockout drug and bury you alive. Then later, when things have calmed down, we'll come and get you. Sure Friar, that'll work. But why don't you just rape me like a normal man who gives a girl a roofie, you sick son of bitch. Put me in a fucking tomb? Are you kidding? And what a dumb little cunt Juliet turns out to be. I'm reading this book and I'm like a black person shouting at the screen in the movie theater. No. No. Don't do it. No. Juliet. Don't. Don't take the knockout drug, don't. But does she listen to me? Nope. She takes the fucking knockout drug and lets herself get buried alive. Then, to top the whole off, she finds Romeo in the tomb lying next to her, dead. So she kills herself, stabs herself in the heart for some jackass who took poison without even shaking her to see if she was still alive. Me. I'm not going to kill myself for a guy like that? No fucking way. If that had been me, I would have said see ya. Buh bye Romeo you fucking loser. Then I would have walked out of that tomb, married Paris, got him to put me in the will, poisoned his ass, and lived happily ever after. That's how it's done."

  "Romeo had no way of knowing about the knockout drug."

  "Yes. It was that stupid."

  "You are looking at Shakespeare from the point of view of a post-feminist, North American woman in 2014. You have to see it from Juliet's point of view. We still have sexism, but, for the most part, teenage girls are equal to teenage boys. We don't have arranged marriages. We don't give girls away at 13. We don't disown them when they reject our dating advice. This innocent 13-year-old girl had the entire weight of an oppressive patriarchy coming down on her like a ton of bricks and she still said no mom, no dad. Fuck you. I'm not going to marry that rich drone you set me up with. If I can't marry the man I love, I'd rather stab myself right through the heart than go on living. Juliet was the greatest rebel in all of English literature."

  Cathy Chegoffgan laughed when John Avellanos jumped up on the bench, gestured to the clock tower above City Hall, and started to recite Juliet's lines. With his tall stature and in his dark sport coat, he was a striking figure. His voice gave evi
dence of some training as a professional actor. Soon he had the attention of most of the people sitting around the fountain circle.

  "O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,

  From off the battlements of yonder tower;

  Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk

  Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears;

  Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,

  O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,

  With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;

  Or bid me go into a new-made grave

  And hide me with a dead man in his shroud;

  Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble;

  And I will do it without fear or doubt,

  To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love."

  People cheered after Avellanos finished his lines. He sat back down next to Cathy Chegoffgan, who had been cheering along with them. She punched him in the arm.

  "Showoff," she said, giving him back the book.

  "Keep it," he said, writing his address on the inside of the front cover. There's a second copy of my address. Now that we've talked about it, you'll remember it."

  Avellanos handed Cathy Chegoffgan back his copy of Romeo and Juliet. She put it in her knapsack, took out a black ski cap and put it on her head. She rolled down both her sleeves and buttoned them at the wrists. Avellanos noticed that she had already buttoned her flannel shirt all the way to the top, and that she had a long sleeve shirt on underneath. There was a hint of drizzle in the air, and it was a least 20 degrees colder than it had been the day before. A few leaves had fallen out of the trees above the fountain circle. The year had come full circle. It was getting cold again.

  He flicked a leaf off her shoulder.

  "I told you it gets cold here early in the year," she said, almost as if she had read his thoughts.

  He reached into the pocket of his sport coat, and came up with a black cashmere scarf. It had been dry cleaned very recently, but there was the hint of bloodstain at the edge of the cloth. He pointed to the monogram, the letters RC.

  "You told me that when you gave me this," he said. "I thought the initials were yours."