NOT AN AMERICAN

by Stanley W Rogouski

  He reached into his messenger bag.

  "When I tell you this," he said, "you and I will be the only two people who know all about it, well, one other guy, and he's crazy, and another guy, but he probably got deported."

  Cathy Chegoffgan pointed at the clock. I don't care," he said. "I'll miss a day's work. If they fire me, they fire me. I need to tell you this."

  "It can wait," she said. "I have to be somewhere at 3. Can I meet you tomorrow? It's Friday tomorrow, right? Do you have to work?"

  "Yes."

  “OK. Let's meet at 10, at the fountain. I'll take you inside to meet David Sherrod. We can go to the press conference at noon. Then you can go to work. Later on, when you off, you can drop by my place. I'm always up late. We can spend the weekend together."

  "Really? You want to spend the weekend with me?"

  "Why wouldn't I?"

  "I thought I was just this social misfit you were being nice to."

  "I thought that's what you thought about me."

  "Not at all. I thought about you all winter. That's all I thought about. It's the only reason I stayed in town at all. Oh God, now you must think I'm an obsessive lunatic."

  "Being one myself, I like obsessive lunatics."

  "I'm sorry. I'm being an idiot."

  "No you're not. You're probably the single most interesting person I've ever met. You're the only guy I've ever met in Poison Springs who's my intellectual equal. I want to know everything about you, all your secrets. But I want you to tell me where you can take your time and I don't have to cut you off. And I have skeletons of my own."

  "Really?"

  "Yes, bad skeletons. I got a lot of opportunities when I was a kid. Then I fucked them up. I went to a fancy private school until I was 17. Then shit happened, some bad shit, some really bad shit, so bad you might never talk to me against when I tell you. Most people run away from me after they hear about it. But I think I can trust you. In fact, I know I can trust you. But I don't want to tell you in the food court at Scahentoarrhonon Station. I want to tell you at my apartment, where we can both get drunk, then let it all sink in in private. I can't tell you here. I'm sorry. But I can't."

  "So I'll meet you tomorrow?"

  "At ten by the fountain."

  "I'll be there."

  "But you've got to get to work," she said, pointing up at the clock a second time. "I don't want it on my conscience that I was just another episode in you're not being able to hold a job."

  "I'll be there at ten, at the fountain, on time, in my thousand dollar suit."

  "I'll see you then."

  John Avellanos stood up. Cathy Chegoffgan packed up her photographs, put them in the envelope, put the envelope in her knapsack, and the knapsack up against her chair. She pulled out her smart phone and started to browse the Internet. Avellanos, looking at the clock, finally realized that he had very little time to spare if he wanted to get to work. Had they really been talking for almost 4 hours? It felt like five minutes. He tore himself away, and quickly walked across the food court to the foot of the marble staircase. He turned around.

  "10 o'clock, he shouted.

  "10 o'clock by the fountain," she shouted back.

  "I'll see you then," he shouted, then turned around and bounded up the stairs.

  "Hey," she shouted back, still looking at her smart phone. "I found those articles in English about that guy Oscar Avellanos. They're by his son. He's like our age. He's like 22. Holy shit. He's dead. He's fucking dead. Did his father have him killed? Jesus. I don't see any pictures. Do you know if there are any pictures of this guy? I want to see what he looked like."

  But John Avellanos had already left the food court.

  Chapter 6 - The gold standard

  John Avellanos ran through Reagan Plaza, his long, strides carrying him along through the drizzle, hoping to catch his bus before his wool sport jacket got too soaked with water. When he reached the Great Lawn, however, he stopped. He looked up at the clock tower over City Hall, then let his eyes wander down to the war memorial and the pump house. Both of them were surrounded by a ring of tents and banners. "Repeal the Un-American and Racist CCIA," one said. "Organized Labor Is Our Heritage," another declared. Avellanos nodded. It was something he had walked past every day for most of the summer, but always made a conscious effort to ignore.

  The line of police officers restricting access to the Great Lawn looked bored. Avellanos walked over to a young female police cadet.

  “Good morning sir," she said.

  "Good morning officer," he said. "I wonder if you can help me."

  "I'll try."

  "I'm from out of town but I'm the president of a small landscaping company negotiating with Mayor Catalinelli for a maintenance contract. I'm a little worried about those protesters. I don't want anything happening to my people. Do you know if they're dangerous? I also heard that since Catalinelli's given in on the statues, they might leave. Then I heard that you guys were planning to raid them and kick them all out. Would you be able to tell me anything definite? City Hall's giving me the runaround."

  "I'm sorry sir. I don't know anything more than you do."

  Avellanos noticed that another officer had overheard their conversation.

  "Don't let anybody tell you any different," he said. "They're going to stay there until Catalinelli repeals the CCIA, which I doubt will be any time soon. But I don't think you have anything to worry about. They’re there. We're here. And everybody else is out there. We don't allow them to harass the public."

  "Thank you," Avellanos said, nodding his head.

  Avellanos continued along the North/South traverse past the fountain circle out to Reagan Plaza South. He caught the Number 81 on Reagan Plaza South. The bus was crowded. He paid his fare, then grabbed the only available seat, up front right next to the bus driver. He took the waterproof, plastic envelope out of his messenger bag, and put it down on his lap.

  "I'm just curious," the bus driver said, leaning over when he stopped at the red light on the corner of Reagan Plaza East near Scahentoarrhonon Station. "I see you staring at that envelope every day. What are you looking at, if it's any of my business?"

  Avellanos showed him the small photograph, then the large photograph, then the Xerox copy of the newspaper article.

  "It's basically just memories," he said." My mother was brought up in this town. She told me that she and her boyfriend used to sit in his car and listen to Jim Morrison, right over there by the side of the train station, on AM radio. Can you imagine that, hearing Light My Fire on AM radio? Can't you just hear the tinny speakers, the poetry of the music trying to break out of the inadequate amplification system? What do you have now? Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Clear Channel."

  "Why not just turn it to FM?" the bus driver said. "Or buy a dock for your iPod?"

  "You could," Avellanos said. "But I'm trying to construct a metaphor for the progress of North American society from cool to uncool, from Jim Morrison to Bill O'Reilly. My mother was 15 when she watched the Chicago Police beat up high school kids in Grant Park on TV. That was 1968. It made her so angry she put her hand through her bedroom window. They had to take her to the hospital. Do people feel that kind of passion and outrage anymore? They watch TV. They bleat like sheep. Do you know why? This country rejects its best people. My mother struck a violet blow against tyranny and racism. But then she had to spend the rest of her life in hiding. If the United States of America had been worth anything they would have welcomed her back like a queen. Instead they flushed her down the memory hole. Even in this town she's been forgotten."

  "It's a goddamned shame," the bus driver said as he pulled out onto Route 1081, deeply regretting that he had started the conversation. "It's a goddamned shame."

  Later that evening John Avellanos, for that was his legal name, was sitting at his desk at Loading Bay C at WillyMart, eating a slice of pizza, drinking a can of Diet Coke, and looking out of the open bay at the West Hill Coal Breaker in the distance. At dinner
break, just after the sun went down, West Hill was almost beautiful, illuminated but no longer silhouetted in the gentle twilight, the industrial scars of the past hidden in the growing darkness. The West Hill Coal Breaker had once provided jobs for half the city of Poison Springs. Now they all worked for WillyMart, or made money online, or took seasonal jobs to the ski resorts, or cooked meth, or lived on government disability payments, or didn't work at all.

  It may have been foolish for Michael Catalinelli to let the Winterborn Center Corporation build their massive shopping center underneath West Hill, but Avellanos understood why he did it. The meadow along Route 1081 below West Hill was the biggest stretch of flat, underdeveloped land in the whole county, perhaps in the whole northeastern part of the state. It was right alongside the intersection of Routes 1081 and 1080, visible from both, highly accessible to the entire Tristate area. But most importantly of all, it would have been a symbol, the new retail economy replacing the old industrial economy, Americans buying stuff instead of making stuff.

  How could anybody have known the mine fire underneath West Hill could have spread so far, so fast? There should have been plenty of time to excavate a small, burning coal seem a mile away and 600 feet above Route 1081. But it wasn't a small, coal seam fire in a remote area. It was deep, wide spread, and massive. Most of it was too far underground to make any difference. But occasionally, part of it would rear its ugly head above ground, bubbling up in some unexpected place like some grim remainder of the past, and of the future, for it was only a matter of time now before it burrowed under Route 1081, cut the Winterborn County's main highway right in half, destroyed the city's economy once and for all. 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, it didn't matter. It could even be tomorrow. Once it happened, people would be faced with the reality they've always known about, but didn't have the will to confront. Poison Springs was built over a hell mouth. The Winterborn County was the gateway to eternal damnation.

  Avellanos threw the greasy paper plate into the trash, reached over, unzipped his messenger bag, and took the waterproof plastic envelope out again, something he rarely did on the floor at work. But the bus driver had sent his mind back to the past fall. This time he left the Xerox copy of the newspaper article and the 8x10 photograph inside, and took out the small, wallet sized photograph. He examined it carefully, holding it by the edge with his two fingers so as not to get it stained with grease.

  George Kozlowski came up behind him.

  You shouldn't eat that," he said. "It's poison."

  Avellanos laughed. The day before, George Kozlowski had proved to be such a fast learner that he barely had to disrupt his routine. The middle aged man with the slightly Mongolian cast to the blue eyes peering out of narrow slits in his brown leathery skin had not turned out to be anything that Avellanos had expected. Kozlowski had no trouble working with the "temps" who unloaded his truck. On the contrary, he even seemed to like them, and they seemed to like him in return. Only one of the "temps," a man named Carlos, who recognized Kozlowski from one of his "America's Guard" picket lines, and who kept remarking in Spanish how about how "that ugly old man threatened my wife," seemed decidedly hostile. A very young man of 24 who meets the girl of his dreams and realizes that she almost certainly reciprocates his feelings, is the most forgiving person on the face of the earth. John Avellanos now considered George Kozlowski to be a friend.

  "It's only pizza," he said. "How can it be poison?"

  "GMO tomatoes, and Aspartame. You do know it causes brain cancer, right?"

  "If everything they said about Aspartame were true, I'd already be dead."

  So who's the guy in the yellow hat with the ducks?" Kozlowski said, pointing to the wallet sized photo, which Avellanos still had between his two fingers. "You two look like twins. Is he your brother?"

  "I don't have a brother," Avellanos said, putting the tiny print back into the waterproof plastic envelop and the waterproof plastic envelope back into the green messenger bag. "He's just some guy I met in town. We decided to get that photo taken as a joke."

  "Can I see it again?"

  "I don't want to get grease on it. Maybe later"

  "I've never seen two people who look so much alike."

  Avellanos, almost against his better judgment, took the photo back out of the waterproof plastic envelope and handed it to George Kozlowski.

  "Holy shit. Look at this. This has got to be Photoshop. He looks a little bit older than you. Are you sure this isn't your twin brother?"

  Avellanos stood up and pointed up to West Hill and the West Hill Coal Breaker.

  "What if I tell that I'm an illegal immigrant from Mexico and that I wanted his identity? So I killed him and dumped his body in the West Hill Mine fire. Now he's gone, and I have an American passport. Now I can start moving drugs into the Winterborn County and white girls down to Tijuana to service my compañeros in the cartels."

  George Kozlowski burst out laughing.

  "You sure have a vivid imagination. You're about as Mexican as I am. It's the accent that gives it away."

  "What do I sound like?"

  "Like you grew up down the block from me."

  Avellanos was suddenly, genuinely interested in what Kozlowski had to say.

  "Yesterday, at the bus stop, you interrogated me about whether or not I even spoke English."

  "That was the joke," Kozlowski said. "You were quoting Shakespeare like some pretentious college professor, but you weren't fooling anybody. That's probably even a fake Spanish name you made up to get the girls. Admit it. You're just a regular American like all the rest of us."

  Avellanos was far from insulted. On the contrary, he seemed intrigued.

  "You're the first person in town who's ever mentioned the accent."

  "I used to be a musician," Kozlowski said. "I have a very sensitive ear for music. You my friend are a native of Poison Springs."

  "I'm not. But my mother was. I must have gotten it from her."

  "You're too fucking tall to be Mexican anyway."

  "There are people over 6 feet in Mexico."

  "But you're like 6'5."

  "6 feet."

  Avellanos pulled out his driver's license and handed it to George Kowalski.

  "You see? 6 feet even. Or wait. Maybe it's not my driver's license at all. Maybe it's the guy with the yellow hat, the one I pushed into the West Hill Mine Fire. You told me we looked alike. Hold the photo of the guy with the yellow hat up next to this one. They're the same guy, aren't they? Now look at me. You don't believe I'm 30 years old, do you? I killed that guy in the photo and took his driver's license."

  George Kozlowski could barely control his laughter.

  "You my friend have a vivid imagination. You can't even go up to the West Hill Coal Breaker anymore."

  "You could last year."

  "All that GMO food is going to your head. That's what it does. You've been brainwashed. Stupid DMV doesn't even know how to measure a guy's height. If you want to know what socialism would be like, think about spending the rest of your life at the DMV. You wait in line all day, and when you finally get your turn, they get it wrong. That my friend is big government."

  "Maybe they'll mistake my 4 inch penis for a 9 inch penis."

  "More likely they'll mistake it for a two inch penis, then chop it off just to see if it matches up. But do you know who you really look like?"

  "Who?"

  "You sir are a dead ringer for our late Senator Nicholas Cecil Felton."

  "People tell me that once in a while."

  "Same jawline, same height, same air of authority, I suppose the cops call you sir and the girls can't wait to spread their legs."

  "Oh I wish. Now can I have my photo back?"

  George Kozlowski gave John Avellanos the wallet sized photo. Avellanos put the photo back inside the waterproof plastic envelope and put the waterproof plastic envelope back into his messenger bag. He straightened the collar of his uniform when he noticed that the "temps" were filing back in for dinner break.


  "Those people have no rights," Kozlowski said. "They can't even use the locker rooms. I don't know why you defend them being in the country."

  "Maybe giving them rights would be better than kicking them out."

  "I have nothing against immigrants," Kozlowski. "My great grandparents came here but they came here legally."

  "Let me tell you about rights," Avellanos said. "None of us have them. This is a work at will state. Either of us can be fired at any time, for any reason. Now let me give you a warning. Do you know Bob?"

  "Bob Yapper?"

  "There's only one Bob around here and it's Bob Yapper. Bob Yapper is a verbally abusive little asshole who hates people for no other reason than that he hates them. He doesn't like you. In fact, he hates you so much he's looking for an excuse to fire you. And he wants me to find something. So if you're doing anything that can get you fired, I don't want to see it."

  "Thanks a lot."

  "But here's how it works," Avellanos said. "There's really nothing to worry about. Bob hates people but he also forgets them. He hated me the first few weeks too. Now I'm his trusted little spy. Get through the first few weeks and you'll be fine. He'll forget about you and move onto hating someone else. Maybe he'll even move onto hating me again."

  Kozlowski extended his hand.

  "I owe you one," he said.

  John Avellanos shook George's Kozlowski's hand. He picked up the messenger bag to go back inside and put it back to his locker, but George Kozlowski stopped him. Kozlowski's manner had taken on a conspiratorial air.

  "Let me show you something," he said, indicating that he wanted Avellanos to come and look inside the cab of his truck. "I have my own ways of getting over on this company."

  "Did you not hear what I just said?" Avellanos said. "If you're doing anything that can get you fired I don't want to see it. Don't give Bob a reason to fire you. It would make him too happy. Me. All I want is plausible deniability.”

  "Oh come on. Don't be so uptight."

  Avellanos shrugged. He put the messenger back down on the chair, and followed Kozlowski down off the loading dock onto the parking lot, a few of the "temps" looking on, not necessarily interested in what they were doing, but too bored and fatigued from the first half of the shift to look away. Kozlowski stepped up onto the cab, and came back down with a small container of milk.