Who knows what she put in the pie. I made it my mission to beat her. And I did. I squashed her. Maybe it was because, thanks to her biological warfare, I had shoes, graphic tees, hats, plus denim to cover while she was stuck in PoleFace™. Maybe it was because winter was warm that year. Maybe it was that I’m the greatest goddamn salesman this store has ever seen and ever will see. But I squashed her. I’ve been lead ever since. Wendy was gone by New Year’s. I put the extra commission money toward some controllers for my GameBox.
I make it to the food court where the smell of food wafts over the stench of the freshly deceased like a muzzle on a rabid dog. There are survivors, champions of the first wave, pulling bags stretched to their capacity. Using the last of their energy to haul their newly purchased happiness home. And there are the dead, everywhere. I get two dollar-menu burgers, a small fry, and a drink from BurgerLand. The man at the cash register has seen so much and had so much caffeine that I have to remind him to take money from me. Even as he takes it, he stares forward, past me, looking at nothing. I sit at one of the white tables in the food court that doesn’t have a corpse on it.
I bite into my burger and chew slowly. If I hold a bite in my mouth long enough, it softens into something that feels almost like stuffing. While I eat, a woman drags a television in a box to the table in front of me. She pushes a woman who is lying facedown in a small puddle of red blood out of the chair. Then she sits down. I recognize her from the store. One of her ears looks like it’s been mangled by teeth; the other still has a large gold earring. Her gray scarf is gone. But she’s wearing her new coat. When I look at her, she hisses and shows her pointy white teeth.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I helped you.” She looks at me, confused. “Um, SleekPack, coal,” I say in Black Friday, pointing to myself, then back to her. The creases on her face smooth. She relaxes into her seat and rubs her cheek into the faux fur of the hood.
“Good haul?” I ask. She nods hard and pets the face of the television box. “Family still shopping?” I ask.
The woman dips her pointer finger into the blood puddle in front of her.
“Forty-two inches, high-def,” she says.
This is the only time they can afford it.
With a red finger she makes a small circle, then points two small eyes onto the cardboard box, and drags a smile beneath the eyes. The blood dries out before she gets all the way across the face.
“What?” I ask.
“Dead,” she says. “BuyStuy. Trample.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
“She was weak. He was weak. I am strong,” the woman says as she pets the face on the box. It hardly smears at all. “Weak,” she repeats.
“Got it,” I say.
I finish one burger, then I toss the second to the woman. She catches it, tears the paper away, and eats gleefully. My phone moves in my pocket and I grab it. I still have fifteen minutes, but it’s the store.
“We need you!” Richard screams.
“I just left,” I say, getting up and starting to walk.
“Duo just quit.”
“Oh.”
“He said he needed to go on break, and I said wait a few minutes, and then he just left. He’s gone.”
“I’m coming,” I say.
I get up, walk toward the escalator. I step to the conveyor and float down. Coming up on the opposite escalator is Duo.
“Hungry?” I say.
“I couldn’t do it, man. That shit is sad,” Duo says.
I grunt something because I don’t have the words to tell him that it is sad but it’s all I have.
“It’s a nice coat,” he says. “But that’s it.”
“What?”
“The coat isn’t proof. She knows. You don’t need to, bro,” he says, turning around and rising up the escalator.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “Not to me.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah,” I say, and then Duo flies away.
My third Black Friday, the company wasn’t doing great. There was no commission and no prize. I still outsold everybody.
Back in the store, there’s a new body in the body pile and in PoleFace™ a young woman is trying to kill Angela. She’s clawing and screaming, and even from the store entrance, I know what she wants. Angela is pinned against the wall where the SuperShells are. It looks like the girl is about to bite Angela’s nose off. Lance is rolling a teen toward the body pile, and Michel is helping a customer in the shoe section. Richard looks at me and points to Angela and the girl. I know what the girl wants.
“Help!” Angela yells, turning to look at me. She has a reach between her and the girl, but she won’t last much longer. I turn and go to the back room. I look up at the only large SuperShell parka hanging there. I pull it off the hanger. I go outside, and the girl can smell it. She looks in my direction and howls like a wolf.
I won’t be alone with this, she’s saying. They’ll like me now.
She rushes toward me. I dangle the coat out to the side like a matador. She runs toward it, and I let go and leap out of the way as she comes crashing through the parka. Then with the coat in her hands, she says, “Thank you,” in a raspy voice. I watch her at the register. “Have a nice day,” Richard says, as he rings her up. She growls, then says, “You, too.” I punch back in at the computer. Angela puts a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks,” she says.
“Yup,” I say, and then I go back to my section.
A herd of shoppers stops in front of the store. They see the PoleFace™ we have left. I climb on top of my cabin. The people stampede. Some bodies fall and get up. Some bodies fall and stay down. They scream and hiss and claw and moan. I grab my reach and watch the blood-messed humans with money in their wallets and the Friday Black in their brains run toward me.
I smile out at the crowd. “How can I help you today?”
They push and point in all directions.
The Lion & the Spider
He yelled and jumped at us, making the long fingers of his left hand Lion’s claws that viciously tickled our ribs. “One, two, three rabbit children all swallowed up in one bite,” my father roared. We jumped and laughed and screamed. He shook the bed we, the children, shared. But watching way up above us was another character who hid in the fist of his right hand, which opened slowly. Anansi the spider appeared before us. “You silly cat,” Anansi said before scurrying to the woods, across the mattress and our heads, his tiny legs quick-moving fingers. He disappeared into the bush searching for something special.
Graduation was two weeks away. My father: gone for months.
The day he’d left, my father had said, “I have some business I need to see to.”
“And you’re leaving today?” I’d said as evenly as possible. I had become a devotee to a religion of my own creation. Its most integral ritual was maintaining a precise calm especially when angry, when hurt, when terrified. People like my father, who yelled freely in English and Twi whenever things were bad, were heretics to be ignored or hated.
“Yes. Flying out later. I’ll be back in two weeks. Your mother is doing fine. The doctors say she’s all right. You’re in charge for now. Make sure your sister keeps up with her studies.” He’d handed me forty dollars. This was the first I’d heard of the trip. He would fly across an ocean to the country where both he and my mother were born and raised.
“Be back soon,” he’d said that afternoon as he got into the cab.
“Okay. I’ll see you later, I guess.”
When he’d first left, I’d gone to my mother. She’d been quiet and reserved. She’d been sick for a long time by then. Unable to work, she spent most of her days in our house. Then foreclosure swept us up, and she spent most of her days in the apartment we’d rented my senior year.
“He’ll be back soon,” she said. Her calm hurt and impressed me.
Now, after months without, I’d decided that he wasn’t coming back and was settling into life at the home improvement store. I spent five to eleven, six days a week, diggin
g away at the guts of dusty, cavernous shipment trucks. My title was “unload specialist.” There were three of us.
If our adventures unpacking the truck were made into a movie, Cato, who was only a few years older than I was, would have been the strapping young hero. The one you looked to in times of crisis. The other guy, Reese, was probably the same age as my father. He would be the wily old adventurer on his last legs, on the brink of giving up, a few missed cigarettes from a breakdown, but persisting because his experience in the field made him one of a kind, because he was the only one of us who knew how to use the forklift, and because maybe he hadn’t quite found his treasure yet. My role, I knew, was the guy who would lose an arm in the second half of the film, maybe saving one of the other two, or one of the real stars would get hurt saving me, which would set me up to lead in the sequel. We were the Unload Team, not unlike the Justice League or the Avengers. The Specialists.
Before every shift, we tossed on red and blue vests, and were transformed. They were thin nylon, weightless but still annoying. Reese wore a company-issued back supporter. Cato wore one of the company hats turned backward. I didn’t have any special thing, but not having a thing when the other two did was kind of like having a thing in its own way.
To start a shift, Carter, the overnight manager, would give us something like a pep talk as our cave of untreasures backed into the receiving bay. Beep. “We’ve got two big ones coming.” Beep. “But I know we can bust these things down.” Beep. “All the pallets are out, and there’s a forklift ready.” Beep. “Let’s get it.” Beep. “Let’s fucking go!” There was a thunderous cough when the mouths of the goliath white trailers kissed the opening of the bay.
We spent most of our time in that receiving bay: a huge concrete space with three giant garage doors. Reese would bring a bolt cutter to the lock that kept the trailer’s door closed. We made a little ceremony of it. Reese’s veins would puff from his neck as he squeezed the cutter’s arms together. We cheered when the metal snapped. Once the bolt was cut, Cato and I would pull the door and slide it up with a careful push. Sometimes an avalanche of tile sets, or caulking material, or whatever would fall out.
We used wood pallets to group things together. We had a system. “Have gloves on whenever you’re back here,” Reese had said early on. We used gloves with red wax on the fingers, but I still pulled splinters out of my palms almost daily.
Lion was very pleased with himself. His belly was full—at that, my father put air in his stomach and rubbed it to remind us what a full belly looked like. “It is a shame, though,” Lion said, while rubbing his belly. “I was in such a rush to eat I didn’t even get to taste the rabbit children.”
Lion fell asleep happily in a tree. In his sleep he dreamed of how shocked Rabbit Mother would be when she saw that her family had disappeared. Lion smiled as he thought of the trickster Anansi, who would have no time to plan some foolishness to keep him from the magic potion he’d promised if Lion was able to beat him in a race to the mountaintop.
For the Specialists, the truck trailers were villain, purpose, and home. Between eight and nine, we’d get to the heavy stuff, the big appliances. We’d use hand trucks and pallet jacks. Sometimes Reese had to drive one of the forklifts up into the truck. A fully preassembled workbench moves about as easily as an elephant, but dryers are lighter than you would expect.
One time Cato went for a tower of two stacked washing machines held together by a web of translucent blue plastic wrapped around the middle of their two cardboard boxes.
“Hercules,” he called out to us as he slid the lip of his hand truck underneath the cardboard. He kicked it farther in, then pulled back. That was his catch phrase. He’d say “Hercules” when he was showing off, soloing stuff that probably needed more than one person.
“Hercules,” I called back in support as I pulled a dryer onto a pallet jack. I was the sidekick and proud of it.
Cato made a sound like a piece of food was caught in his throat. By the time I looked up, the two washing machines were teetering, then tackling down. I made a lunge in his direction, but the crash came first. I yelled. Reese dragged as I pushed the washing machines off Cato. Our fear made us strong, and we tossed the heavy boxes aside quickly but carefully enough not to damage anything, because whenever there were damages to the big machines, the loss-prevention guy tried to chop our heads off.
Cato groaned beneath the boxes. I wasn’t sure how he’d be when we got them off him. We moved the washing machines and looked at him. His back on the dusty truck floor, the hand truck above him. “I’m good,” he said. The hand truck, as our safety tutorials had explained, had rods on either side that kept you from getting all the way crushed should a load ever be too heavy. He’d been pinned down, bruised up maybe, but he was fine.
“Hercules,” he mumbled, laughing off his embarrassment as me and Reese helped him up.
“Hercules,” Reese said back.
I didn’t have any brothers, but Cato was exactly what I imagined having one would be like. In high school, when Cato was a senior and I was a sophomore, he’d been one of the kinder gods of the school. He had been the second fastest in the state in the two hundred meters, and that meant he didn’t really have to be nice to anybody. He’d torn his MCL near the end of his senior year, and it’d been a tragedy for our school. The colleges that had shown interest in him snatched their offers back. And here he was still.
We took our breaks at the same time, and when he had his mother’s car, he’d drive me home so I wouldn’t have to walk. I’d helped him create a comprehensive list ranking all the women in each of the store’s departments based on a complicated attractiveness matrix. Later, in response to our list, two cashiers made a list ranking all the guys. Cato, of course, was ranked number one. I’d ranked twelfth, which felt like an accomplishment. It was a big department store.
Sometimes, when we had lunch, Cato would get serious, and say something like, “You gotta get outta here, man. Don’t get stuck.”
I wanted to quit more than I wanted anything else the day Cato got pinned by the washing machines. If I’d known where my father was, if I didn’t need every cent of the $10.10 per hour I was making, I would have.
I had to stay. The trucks became night, and dreading the trucks became the day. I went from school to the trucks, and from the trucks to sleep. I hardly saw my sister or my mother. I avoided them. When I did see my sister, I tried to be fatherly. “How was school today?” I’d ask.
“You were there,” she’d reply. She was only a few years younger. She did me the mercy of pretending everything was normal. We were good at that. Acting, ignoring our own disintegrating.
In the foam bed on the floor, I’d whined and tried not to cry. “No! He didn’t eat Mother Rabbit’s children. It’s not fair.” I couldn’t accept it. The stories my father told us had great power. I made sure to let my outrage sing whenever they veered from the path I believed was best. Not to mention that Mother Rabbit’s children happened to have the same names as my sister, my mother, and I did. All his stories found a way to make stars of us.
My father shushed me. “Just listen to the story,” he said.
My collegiate ascent was a big topic in the shipment bay. The guys cheered me on. They joked that I shouldn’t forget them when I was a nuclear physicist or the president or a veterinarian. I didn’t tell them that the entire process had been halted by my father’s disappearance. If he didn’t return, I would remain and work up to a managerial spot. I’d become someone like Carter, a fate that filled me with an anguish that felt like lead in my stomach. So far as they knew, I was deciding between a school upstate, a school in the city, and another one in Connecticut.
“Well, you trust me,” Reese said to me one day while I was helping him lay bags of enriched soil out on a pallet. “They’re gonna be begging you to fuck ’em wherever you go.” Then he smiled the way he did whenever he said something inappropriate, showing his cigarette-stained top teeth.
Reese h
ad long skinny arms, and he always smelled like cigarette smoke. Often, he’d suck on his cheeks and move his mouth like something was stuck to his gums. I didn’t know anyone else like him. I would have liked to make him proud, even though, when I’d first started, Cato had put it in my head that Reese was some kind of racist.
“He said something about niggers, man,” Cato had told me my third week working in the store. “I heard it, hard er at the end of it, too. I’m 98 percent sure. He didn’t see me. He was on the phone. I think he was talking to his wife or something.”
I didn’t like to disagree with Cato if I could avoid it, but I told him that I didn’t think Reese was like that. I liked to think that if he was a racist, because of me and Cato, at some point he’d gone home to his wife, and while they were at dinner or just sitting in front of the TV, he’d have something on the tip of his tongue. He’d be fidgety, almost nervous, and eventually he’d say something like, “Did ya know I work with two niggers?” His wife, who was also probably racist, would look up at him, waiting for a point, and after sliding some peas back and forth a few times on his plate, Reese would finish his thought. “They’re not so bad.” And he’d say it in a way that wouldn’t mean that black people were generally okay. That would be too embarrassing for him to admit at almost fifty-two or however old he was. He’d mean it like we, specifically us two, were okay even though somewhere, by extension, he’d feel that maybe he’d been wrong about black people his whole life.
“Ah, Lion, I was beginning to think you had run off into the night,” Anansi said the morning of their big race. When he was Anansi, my father’s voice was wise and small. “Are you ready to run for the lives of the rabbit family? Remember, you have agreed that if I make it to the top of the highest of the Togo Mountains, you will cut off your own tail and leave the rabbit family alone for good.”
Since the night before, Lion’s belly had pained him terribly. My father held his stomach and groaned. Lion could feel the three rabbit children in his stomach. They were much heavier than Lion had anticipated.
Friday Black Page 11
