Switch

by Grant McKenzie

  ‘What’s up, Ken?’

  ‘Uh, nothing much. What you doing? Over.’

  Sam chuckled.

  ‘Just having a bite to eat and admiring this TV I’ll never afford.’

  ‘Cool. Hey, I saw your commercial this afternoon on the sports channel. You were great. Over.’

  Sam groaned.

  ‘I transform into a giant rodent, Ken. Not exactly Oscar-winning material.’

  ‘Uh, no, but . . . uh, I thought you were very convincing. Over.’

  ‘Thanks, Ken, I appreciate it. Gotta keep my hand in, you know?’

  ‘Sure, sure. Lots of actors get discovered doing commercials, don’t they? Over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘Me and Jodie Foster, kid.’

  ‘Jodie Foster did commercials? Over.’

  ‘When she was two she starred in a spot for Coppertone. Eleven years later she was nominated for an Oscar.’

  ‘Oh, wow. Uh, I didn’t know that. Over.’

  ‘Yep.’ Sam laughed. ‘But then, she’s Jodie Foster and I’m playing the freakin’ Portland Beaver.’

  ‘Uh, but you did it well, Sam. You had me laughing, anyway. Oh, and I burned it on disc for you. I’ll give it to you later, OK. Might be good for your résumé. Show you in action, you know? Over.’

  Sam paused, touched by the support of his co-worker and embarrassed by his own ingratitude.

  ‘That’s really thoughtful, Ken. I don’t think my daughter has seen it yet. That’ll be nice to show her.’

  ‘No problem. I just thought it was so cool seeing you on TV. I showed my mom, too, and she was thrilled. I heard her bragging to the neighbours that I was working with a famous actor. Over.’

  Sam laughed again. ‘Why don’t you do your rounds, Ken? Check all the doors. We’ll meet up later for coffee.’

  ‘Yeah, OK, sure. Over.’

  Sam swallowed the last mouthful of coffee and screwed the plastic cup on top of his thermos. As he walked to the trashcan to dump his empty sandwich bags, he caught himself reflected in the dark store windows.

  The security guard’s uniform – crisp black trousers, light blue shirt with darker blue accents on the pocket flaps and shoulder epaulettes, rugged black belt and holster with gun, flashlight, aerosol mace and expandable baton – was designed to mirror the Portland City police. That illusion was intended to instil fear in shoplifters and respect in the regular shoppers.

  In theory, anyway.

  Over the last few years, the daytime security guards’ role had changed from a babysitting service for the stores’ merchandise to the more pro-active chore of making sure the customers felt safe. That meant working in tandem with local authorities to crack down on drug dealers, pimps out to recruit naive schoolgirls, hopped-up muggers in need of a quick fix, plus patrolling the parking lot for opportunistic car thieves.

  The overnight shift, however, was still just glorified babysitting. And that’s exactly the way Sam liked it. As a mall sitter, he didn’t have to think too much, and more importantly, he didn’t have to care.

  As he walked the long, lonely halls, checking doors and sipping coffee, he could allow his mind to ponder the screenplay he was going to write one day. He often imagined himself pulling a Stallone and telling the major studios they could only produce the movie if he got to star.

  Unlike Rocky, however, Sam still hadn’t come up with a sure-fire plot that would make moneylenders salivate.

  His two-way radio crackled again.

  ‘Uh, Sam, you there? Over.’

  ‘Yeah, Ken. What’s up?’

  ‘I heard something. Over.’

  Sam sighed. The kid was so nervous, he would jump a mile at the sound of a mouse fart. And everyone knew vermin in the Pacific North-west were never that rude. This wasn’t L.A., after all.

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Err, voices, I think, and a muffled bang on the side door behind the jeweller’s. Over.’

  ‘Did you check it out?’

  ‘Yeah, the door wasn’t locked. I must have missed it on my first pass. I think someone’s inside. Over.’

  Sam dropped his trash in the circular bin and brushed the cookie and potato-chip crumbs off his shirt.

  ‘Stay where you are, Ken. I’ll be right there.’

  He walked at a steady pace across the mall, past the food court and down the frozen steel teeth of the sleeping escalator. On the ground floor, he headed up the hallway towards the public washrooms and through the Authorized Personnel Only doors to the labyrinth of corridors and storage bays beyond.

  He found Ken biting his nails beside a set of double doors that led out to the rear parking lot. Even in his blue-and-black uniform, Ken looked exactly like what he was: a geeky, knob-kneed kid who had just enough upper-body strength to wrestle an eight-year-old girl to the ground. If she happened to be on Ritalin, so much the better.

  Ken had also been cursed with a bout of late-blooming acne that, despite a vigorous cleansing routine, turned his cheeks, forehead and chin into a lunar landscape of shiny pink pits. When you combined this with his general geekiness, Sam was amazed at how the kid still managed such a positive outlook on life.

  He knew the credit must belong with Ken’s loving mother who always put sweet little notes (which Ken was never embarrassed about reading aloud) in his bagged lunches. She was so thoughtful it wasn’t unusual for her to send along extra treats for Sam.

  As he approached his partner, Sam was relieved to see that Ken hadn’t unclipped his company issued revolver from its holster on his hip.

  ‘I stayed where I was, Sam.’

  ‘Just like we practised.’

  Ken’s smile grew wider. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So what’s next?’ Sam encouraged. He knew that if Ken could concentrate on all the things they had taught him, he was less likely to collapse to the floor and curl into a foetal position.

  ‘We confirm there’s an intruder, secure the area, and then call the police.’

  ‘Excellent. Now, where did you hear the voices?’

  Ken pointed down the short, dimly lit corridor that turned sharply behind the jewellery store.

  ‘I’ll take point,’ said Sam. ‘Stay close behind, and keep your weapon holstered. Do you understand?’

  Ken nodded and gulped.

  Sam moved quickly and quietly down the corridor, stopping at the corner to regulate his breathing before darting his head out to take a quick peek beyond. The next corridor was empty, too, but Sam caught a ripple of sound that didn’t belong.

  ‘There’s someone here,’ Sam whispered. ‘But we need to make sure it’s not one of the store owners. Someone might have forgotten to tell us they planned a late-night stock-take.’

  Ken reached for his weapon.

  ‘Leave it,’ Sam said sharply. ‘I don’t care what kind of training the company gave you, this isn’t the shooting range. We don’t use our weapons, OK?’

  ‘But the manual says—’

  ‘Fuck the manual, Ken. We’re not paid nearly enough to put our lives on the line for some overpriced junk. If the intruder has a weapon, we back away and let the cops handle it. OK?’

  Ken nodded, but still looked unsure.

  Sam grabbed him by the shoulders.

  ‘You have to be with me on this one. More security guards lose their lives from friendly fire than anything else. That’s because we don’t have the practical training to really know what the fuck we’re doing. We get paid shit wages because our job is to eat sandwiches, drink coffee and stop the bums from sneaking in and using the storage closets as personal drug dens and toilets. So keep it holstered or go home right now.’

  Ken sighed his agreement.

  ‘Good. Now wait here while I check the situation.’

  Leaving Ken at the corner, Sam moved cautiously down the hallway, past the undisturbed rear entrance to the jewellery store, and stopped outside the sliding door that led to The Candy Factory. The latch on the door was broken.

  Sam pres
sed his ear to the door and heard soft grunting noises beyond. Nervous sweat began to bead on his forehead as he unsnapped his baton and slid open the door.

  In the darkness, the store’s gaily coloured tubes of bulk candy – jawbreakers, boiled sweets, Licorice Allsorts, gummy soothers and jelly beans in 1,001 flavours – looked sadly plain. The grinning plastic clowns and cuddly bear masks that protruded from the ceiling and walls had a creepy, haunted-house quality.

  Sam moved slowly and carefully to the cash register and looked around. The register hadn’t been disturbed. He stood listening, his right hand gripping the metal baton by his side.

  A rustle of plastic wrap whispered from beyond a large metal rack filled with brightly coloured gumballs.

  Sam crept to the far side of the rack. The rustling had turned to wet slurping and Sam suddenly wondered if, instead of a burglar, he was about to catch some creepy store manager giving a naive new employee the unauthorized after-hours tour.

  Click!

  Sam froze at the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

  Then the candy rack exploded – packets of gumballs, Pez dispensers and gummy spiders flew around him like sugared shrapnel.

  Startled, Sam stumbled backwards, stepped on a runaway cluster of jawbreakers and lost his balance. As he crashed into the overstocked candy shelves, two teenagers launched themselves through the cloud of confusion, their pockets and cheeks stuffed with sweets. Grinning, teeth coated a raspberry red, one of the boys turned, his hands clutching a highly sophisticated gun.

  Sam recognized the weapon’s silhouette as a variant of the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine-gun. With a retractable stock and its barrel threaded for a silencer, it was the type of gun favoured by the US Navy and anyone else who needed to fire 800 lethal rounds per minute. To enhance its accuracy, the teen had attached a sophisticated laser sight.

  Sam saw the sight’s red laser cut through the darkness and candied flotsam. Then the boy found his target and squeezed the trigger.

  Sam grunted as he was punched twice in the belly, the impacts buckling his knees and sending him sliding on to his ass.

  Gasping for breath on the floor, his heart thundering in his chest, Sam reached for the wound in his belly and felt a warm, sticky mess oozing over his shirt. When he lifted his hand, his fingers were covered in bright Day-Glo yellow paint.

  Shit, he thought as he tried to calm himself, a bloody paint gun.

  Then a second, more alarming thought: Ken!

  He scrambled to his feet and rushed out of the store, screaming at the top of his lungs to warn his partner the intruders were only kids. His warnings were lost in metallic thunder as something meaty slammed into the exterior exit doors.

  When Sam breathlessly reached Ken, the guard was standing rock still, his hands raised in surrender, five bright-yellow splotches of paint decorating his uniform from crotch to chin. His face was streaked with tears.

  ‘I–I thought I was a goner, Sam,’ he said shakily. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’

  Sam smiled, relieved he wasn’t the only useless member of mall security working tonight. He patted the young man’s shoulder.

  ‘You did exactly the right thing, Ken. You didn’t panic, and more importantly, you didn’t put a bullet into two stupid kids. Hell, you’re practically a hero.’

  Ken smiled weakly. ‘Really?’

  ‘Why not? If you had pulled your gun, we both would have lost our jobs and those kids’ parents would have sued our asses off. And I, personally, have precious little ass left to sue.’

  Ken pondered this information for a moment before adding, ‘I think I peed myself.’

  Sam snorted with laughter and slapped him on the shoulder again. ‘You know something, I think I did, too.’

  5

  At the end of his shift, Sam unloaded and secured his gun inside its locked case, which he kept inside his locker, and hung up his heavy holster and belt.

  He slipped out of thick-soled work shoes and changed his uniform for street clothes: comfortable, over-washed GWG jeans, plain black T-shirt that he bought in packs of three at Wal-Mart, a pair of black Reebok sneakers and an insulated, sleeveless Eddie Bauer vest to keep off the pre-summer chill.

  Once dressed, he bundled his soiled uniform in a plastic shopping bag for the dry cleaner’s.

  Before leaving the converted broom closet, shared by the six full-time and two part-time guards, Sam looked at himself in the full-length mirror and sucked in his stomach.

  The face reflected back at him was still handsome. Not soap-star pretty, granted: more Clive Owen with a fuller face, slightly sharper nose, Paul Newman eyes and thick black, close-cropped hair that could stand up to a tornado and barely move.

  His mother once told him the hair, and his bone stubbornness, came from his great grandmother, the first black Mrs White. That mixing of the gene pools had also miraculously kept away the inevitable grey from his temples, at least for the moment. The same couldn’t be said of his beard, which he now preferred to keep cleanshaven.

  At forty-two, he was too damn young to display grey hair.

  Sam had moved his family to Portland from L.A. nearly ten months earlier on the promise of a steady acting gig on a new weekly TV series. As it turned out, the show, like so many others, didn’t get picked up beyond its pilot. When the series went under, his wife of fifteen years gave him an ultimatum: get a real job or leave your family behind.

  Sam surprised himself by how quickly he agreed not to return to the lights of L.A., and instead settle down in his original home town. His wife had been good about it, too. She didn’t complain about the lousy wage his lack of useful skills earned, and she still encouraged him to audition for the occasional commercial, voice-over or small-budget movie that came to town.

  His last gig had been just three weeks earlier: a thirty-second TV spot to kick-start excitement for the Beavers’ new season of Triple-A ball. The two-day shoot, in which he played a face-painting fan magically transformed into the team’s furry mascot, gave him a newfound appreciation for the Sci-fi actors who had to wear elaborate masks every working day. It had taken him almost a week to remove all traces of the beaver make-up, rubber, clay and glue from his ears, nostrils and other crevices.

  Sam couldn’t say he was happy with his new life, his failure to realize his acting dream still made him feel less than whole. But by removing himself from the constant rejection of L.A., he had to admit he felt closer to its embrace.

  He exhaled and watched his stomach roll out into the formative stages of a middle-age paunch. He needed to get back to the gym. After all, he told himself, one of these days, Hollywood might finally come callin’.

  The door to the cramped locker room opened and Ken walked in. He had already changed out of his uniform. The kid was too shy to change in front of other people, and often disappeared at the end of the shift to some other closet somewhere. Sam never questioned him about it. He had his own quirks.

  ‘You left this upstairs.’ Ken handed Sam his red thermos.

  ‘Thanks. I must have put it on the bench when you called about those intruders.’

  Ken opened his locker and grabbed an ugly orange and black-striped leather jacket off the hook. He dug in the inside pocket. His hand reappeared with a DVD, complete with a custom-made label that showed Sam as the winking mascot. He handed it over.

  Sam accepted it graciously, making sure he took a moment to look at the label.

  ‘Nice work. You do that?’

  Ken beamed. ‘Yeah, on the computer. I like teaching myself new things, you know?’

  There was a knock on the door and a gruff voice called out: ‘Are you night turds done in there? We gotta get changed.’

  Sam slipped the disc and thermos into the plastic bag beside his uniform before opening the door. Two day-shift guards stood in the hallway, arms folded to pretend fat was muscle, with shit-eating grins creasing their ugly mugs.

  ‘We’re just leaving, ladies, keep your knickers on.’r />
  Sam glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t like leaving Ken alone with the day-shifters. Too many people joined security as a way to flex their muscles without the restrictions of the police force. And no matter how much he may be part of the mall squad, Ken would always be easy prey for the bullies in their midst.

  ‘You ready?’

  Ken snatched up his motorcycle helmet and followed Sam out.

  6

  In the mall parking lot, Sam climbed into the black vinyl and duct-taped driver’s seat of his navy blue ’81 Jeep CJ5 and started the engine. The lack of doors and flimsy soft-top made him glad for his insulated vest. Cold air blasted over his legs as the engine coughed into life and the Jeep began to purr.

  Sam switched off the heater fan and reached into the pocket of his vest to dig out a tin pack of small Dominican Republic cigars. From the same pocket, he produced a gunmetal Zippo lighter adorned with The Who’s red, white and blue Mod target logo. After licking the chocolate-brown outer leaf to slow its burn, Sam stuck the cigar in the corner of his mouth and touched it to flame.

  As he exhaled the sweet, pungent smoke, he turned the fan back on low. Mild warmth began to fill the open interior of the rugged two-seater. If he restored it to its prime, Sam knew it could easily fetch several thousand dollars on the collectors’ market. The catch, of course, being that he would first need several thousand dollars to fix it up.

  As he put the Jeep in gear, Ken buzzed by on his orange and black Vespa scooter with matching bee-shaped helmet.

  Chuckling, Sam took off across the deserted parking lot to wind his way home. The one benefit he found in his job – hell, the only benefit – was how quiet and peaceful the streets were at 6 a.m.

  7

  Zack Parker stared at the Willamette River, the neck of a whiskey bottle gripped so tight it should have turned blue.

  His tailored silk suit hung from his bony frame, its shark-grey sheen streaked with ash and a confetti rash of ember burns. The knees of his trousers were smudged with grass stains, the once perfectly creased fabric stretched out of shape. The manicured lawn that had broken his fall had been smooth and soft and free of rocks, but that had been before Zack and the shattered remains of a pretty yellow house fell from the sky.