Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

  “What the fuck am I doing?” she says to herself, aloud, inside the Barracuda.

  She jumps out of the car, starts to walk to the diner, then turns back, pulls open the door, and grabs the keys from the ignition slot.

  A gust of steamy air hits her as she pulls open the metal door and steps inside the diner. Lon almost drops his rubber tub of dirty dishes trying to say hi to her. She slides into the first booth and nods hello. The table is littered with the debris from the last customers. There are two breakfast plates coated with the hardened yellow remains of fried eggs, large glasses with grainy traces of tomato juice, side bowls dusted with the last brown crumbs of Harry’s secret-seasoning home fries, toast crusts, orange rinds, coffee mugs. She guesses that both customers were men, probably truckers, possibly in their mid to late forties. Then she stops herself, annoyed that she can’t even take a seat in a lunchcar without reflexively analyzing the landscape like a crime scene. She can’t turn off being a detective, looking for the tiniest evidence that might reveal something more. But what? What is ever revealed that’s truly of use? It’s the process, the breaking apart of the immediate environment, sifting it fragment by fragment and looking at each particle from all perspectives, dusting it, photographing it, putting it down and picking it up again—this is what has become important to her. The method. The technique. The system. The idea that she can no longer sit in Rollie’s Grill without her mind taking over, shifting into an inspect-and-analyze mode, reconstructing a common diner-booth’s previous occupants—she finds this pathetic beyond words.

  Behind the counter, Harry raises a full coffeepot toward her and she nods again. Lately, she’s noticed that inside the diner, communication is often assisted by the gesture and the hand signal accompanying normal, audible words. She assumes this is because of the number of different primary languages that all the inhabitants speak. As far as she knows, only Isabelle is terribly fluent in a second language.

  Isabelle manages to get her instructions across to everyone. She snaps Spanish at her own extended brood, handles a beautiful, rhythmic English with the customers, and cuts what, by her own admission, is a broken, sometimes humorous Khmer dialect. She is the translator through whom all interracial communication must pass. She referees the fights between her Uncle Jorge and Harry’s cousin Lon.She relays Harry’s words about clean grill to her sister Luisa. She’s able to barter with both of the odd, lanky “sales reps” from both the Mekong Market and the New Ponce Bodega. And she’s able to keep Karl, the redneck milkman who calls the diner “the town’s own goddamn United Nations,” harmless and under control.

  Lenore watches Isabelle now as she comes out of the storeroom wiping her hands on her apron. She’s a large woman, but she moves like someone half her weight and age. Though Lenore has to admit, she has no idea how old Isabelle actually is. Lenore envies her grace behind the counter, not just in the way she moves, the ease and agility of her body—Lenore thinks she could match that—but her easy manner of dealing with people. Lenore has never seen her blow up and yell. In any language. She’s never seen her grab the front of someone’s shirt or throw a water glass or serving spoon across the room. Even in those moments when the diner is packed to capacity during a dinner rush and boothfuls of college kids are screaming rude insults about their wait and cousin Lon has burned a second omelette and the dishwasher has started to leak again, Isabelle just dances through each crisis, attending to one thing at a time, cajoling the college boys with refills of coffee and her smooth voice, patting Lon on the back with a soft word to relax, even taking a monkey wrench to the bottom of the old Cleansomatic.

  Lenore feels that put in the same position, she, too, could handle all the problems. But it’s the method that differs and how things are left in the wake of the job’s completion. It’s not a comfortable thought, because her method for dealing with all problems arises out of the core of her personality. Her schematic is simple—confront the problem and take the shortest, most direct route toward its solution. Every other consideration is superfluous. She’s never doubted this before. It’s been the first holy truth. The truth of truths. But in looking at Isabelle, she sees a woman—and it’s an important fact that she’s a woman—capable in an all-pervasive, almost primal way. And yet there’s no blood left in her wake, no jumpy casualties, no pockmarked landscape.

  The disparity of their jobs is no answer. Lenore can actually see the diner as a microcosm of Quinsigamond. It’s not that much of a stretch. A bunch of unassimilated people side by side, droning and bitching from time to time in a native tongue, serving drunks and head cases and average hungry schmucks, passing time. The fact is that even behind the counter, in a much more insulated and controlled world, Lenore would be bullying her way toward the last clean plate and the end of the day.

  Lon appears with a dish bin and an embarrassed smile. He clears the table of all the dirty dishes, wipes it down with a damp rag, and heads back behind the counter with this endearing, scampering run. Isabelle walks up in front of her and slides a black coffee onto the table.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of this place?” she asks.

  Lenore shakes her head. “This is my free zone, Isabelle. This is where I relax.”

  “Free zone,” Isabelle repeats, smiling. “I like the words.”

  “Got a free minute?” Lenore asks, and Isabelle rolls her eyes like some old-time Hispanic soap opera star. Then she slides in on the other side of the booth.

  “Busy day?” Lenore asks.

  “Average. They’re all average.”

  “You ever get away from this place? You ever take a vacation?”

  “I don’t think that word goes into Cambodian.”

  The both laugh and Harry eyes them suspiciously from the chopping table at the other end of the counter. Then he can’t help himself and breaks into an approving smile.

  “Does he understand what you say?” asks Lenore.

  Isabelle shrugs. “When it’s convenient.”

  Harry calls something down to her, a series of short high-pitched syllables. Isabelle laughs and makes a long kissing sound back toward him.

  “It must be strange sometimes,” Lenore says. “Two different cultures and all.”

  Isabelle smiles. “My grandmother used to say it’s good to mix the blood. Keeps things bubbling. No dead water.”

  “Dead water?”

  “What’s your word? Stagnant?”

  “Yeah. That’s it. I think I see what you mean.”

  There’s a pause. Lenore sips coffee and Isabelle watches her, then says, “Everything okay today?”

  “Isabelle, I hope, I don’t mean to …” She stops and starts again. “Is it possible to love someone you don’t really understand?”

  Isabelle shakes her head, bites away a smile, lowers her voice. “Who do we really understand?”

  Lenore shrugs, tries to ignore a chill rolling up her back. “Too easy an answer.”

  Isabelle lets out a long, heavy sigh and makes a hedging, slow nod. “You never been married, have you?”

  “You know,” Lenore says, “this is an area I really want to make people clear on. I really believe, firmly believe, okay, that there are people who, for whatever reason, are not suited to the married life. And I’ve always thought that if these people let themselves go out and fall into a marriage, enter a legal arrangement, because of pressure or doubt or whatever, I’ve always thought, how goddamn unfair to everyone in that picture. So no, I’ve never been married. And the reasons are that first, I value independence above almost anything else, and whether anyone can accept it or not, I honestly enjoy long stretches of solitude, of just being alone. And secondly, I don’t know, maybe I’ve got these ridiculous standards or something, but I’ve never met anyone whose company I’d want to be in for more than a couple of months. Tops. More than two months is pushing it. You start to go brain-dead. You start to have conversations about the color of his socks.”

  Isabelle leans back in the booth, looks at L
enore, takes a sip from Lenore’s coffee, sways her head slightly from side to side, like she was giving herself time to think about this speech she’s just heard.

  “Maybe,” she finally says. “But for me, Lenore, there’s this time, sometime, every night, midnight maybe, when we”—she gestures toward Harry with her skull—“get out of here and we’re gone upstairs, we’re lying down, we’re watching the black-and-white reruns of The Honeymooners, we’re drinking from the bottle of Riunite, my head’s on Harry’s chest and he’s laughing, which you really don’t hear him do down here, and my head’s going up and down with the laugh … I think, this is it, Isabelle. This is the island. You’re safe now.”

  They stare at each other, then Lenore can’t help herself and she says, “Safe? That’s it? You want safe?”

  “That’s part of it. You’re lying if you say it isn’t.”

  “Part of it. Bingo. Part.”

  “And then there’s the rest.”

  Isabelle straightens up a little and then leans back again. She seems to be getting a little angry. She says, “What are you asking? You asking do I love Harry? Yes. Simple answer and it’s yes. You can believe that or not. You don’t have the last word on anything, girl.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you—”

  “There’s no offense,” she says, an edge clear in her voice, “but, for your own benefit, I’ve got to say, you’re a vain girl, Lenore, girl, woman, a vain woman.”

  “I have to disagree, Isabelle. I’m a realist. I’m a pragmatist. I know what my abilities are and I know my limits.”

  “Vanity.”

  “I guess we define the word differently.”

  “Suddenly, you think you want love—”

  “Excuse me, who said that? Did someone say this?”

  “I, too, know my abilities, Lenore.”

  “Simple statement. I place a high value on independence, Isabelle.”

  “Independence? This is the reason for the twitches? The chills?”

  “Jesus, everyone’s a guidance counselor today. I’m coming down with a cold, is all.”

  “Listen to me, Lenore. There are many diners open in the city. They all serve hot coffee. But you’re sitting here. And you ask me about Harry and loving someone without completely knowing them.”

  “Friendly discussion, Isabelle. I didn’t mean to set you off.”

  “I’m not set off. You’re a very smart woman who I know almost nothing about. Harry and me, we fix your meals for the past year. Fill you with enough coffee to swim in. You smile and you talk. You make Lon’s day every time you come in the door. You know that, don’t you? You pay your check and you tip our people. But we don’t know you, Lenore. We don’t know you at all. Isabelle’s been around a little bit longer than you. She knows some things. Harry too. You’ve got some problems that are not going away. Like that chill and the twitch. No aspirin going to take that away, Lenore. Smart woman like you knows that.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake,” Lenore mutters, looking out the window at her car. “You always talk to people you don’t know like that?”

  When she looks back, Isabelle is shaking her head no.

  Lenore gives her a forced smile and says, “‘One of these days, Alice …’”

  Isabelle starts to slide out of the booth.

  “I’ve got a stew to put on,” she says. “Your coffee’s on the house.”

  Lenore watches her move behind the counter and start to pull vegetables from the refrigerator. When her arms are full with carrots, onions, celery, peppers, scallions, she dumps the heap on a cutting block and draws a huge chopping knife down from its holder mounted on the wall. She goes to work with speed and precision, hacking the vegetables, making a rhythmic chomping sound. Lenore finds the noise oddly pleasing, reassuring, almost peaceful.

  She watches Harry at the other end of the diner, writing up a check. She knows he still writes orders in his native language and she wonders what happens if he hands #2 breakfast plate, written in Khmer, to Uncle Jorge, who still speaks only Spanish. Has enough time passed for Jorge to know that the odd lines and slashes scratched on the green pad mean two eggs, scrambled, and a side of bacon?

  She thinks about where she can establish a new free zone. It’s getting harder and harder to find an unspoiled hole in the wall that’s fairly clean, uncrowded, cheap, family-owned, and open all night. It’s not that these places don’t exist, just that it’s become trendy, especially among the Canal Zone crowd, to find and usurp them, make them into clubhouses for whatever the ideology of the month might be.

  There was a place over near the vocational school that had been shut down for about ten years. She’s heard someone—Shaw or maybe Peirce—mention that it was up again and running. She’ll find time to swing by, make an inspection, see if it fits her basic needs.

  She glances out the window again and sees a motorcycle pull up behind the Barracuda. It’s one of those glitzy new models, a bullet bike, controversial because of its too-powerful engine and the absurd speeds it can reach. It’s an import, all metallic red and gold with silvery, speckle-paint lightning bolts slapped on the bulging gas tank. The rider, of course, is dressed all in leather, pants as well as coat. Zippers everywhere. He’s got one of those enormous high-tech helmets on, matte black and smoked visor. It makes him look like a robot extra in a pricey science-fiction movie.

  He’s sitting on the bike as it idles. He seems to be looking at the back of the hand he’s just pulled a glove off of. He raises his head for a second, looks at the back of the Barracuda.

  Lenore’s stomach starts to tighten a little. She raises herself up slightly off her seat, leans closer to the window. The biker pulls his glove back over his hand. He starts to pull down the zipper on his coat. Lenore is half standing in her booth, her nose almost touching the glass of the window.

  Then she sees it. It’s hanging from a black stretch-strap around the biker’s neck. She sees him cradle the main body against his chest as he starts to pull out from the curb.

  “Everyone down,” she screams, trying to lunge from the booth and at the same time pull her weapon from its holster.

  The biker screeches into the street. He’s got enough distance to pick up a head of speed before coming parallel to Rollie’s Grill. He angles his Uzi straight out from his body like some new mutant appendage, a third arm that can pump a projectile at over twelve hundred feet a second.

  The barrage hits the diner like the sound of a long string of wired-together firecrackers, amplified to some awful level as they pop off one after another in perfectly timed microsecond intervals. The bullets come in at window level, glass shattering, shards raining in a line down the wall of booths. The screams seem to come a second too late and they’re all that Lenore can hear as she jumps down the three small brick stairs to the outside pavement, sinks into a leg-spread stance, and manages a single burst from the Magnum, before the untouched biker rounds a corner and is out of her vision.

  She stands frozen for a second, then reholsters the gun and bounds back into the diner. The screaming continues, but it’s degenerated into a more common jag of hysterical crying. Customers are sitting in shocked, breath-grabbing hunches, glass still resting on their shoulders and laps. Uncle Jorge is already on the wall phone screaming in Spanish, “Ayúdenos! El está muriendo!”

  Lenore focuses on him for a moment, then makes herself approach the counter, lean her torso over the marble countertop, and look on the sight of Lon cradled on the floor in Isabelle’s arms, blood flowing down from pathetically small openings in his neck and chest. There’s a gurgling sound that’s achingly clear through the collective moan and cry of the diner.Harry is on knees at Isabelle’s side, his hands held together, flattened into pathetic pancakes, pushing down gently and futilely on his cousin’s chest, blood oozing between the spaces of his fingers no matter how firmly he presses them together.

  Harry’s head is shaking in short but violent jerks. Isabelle’s eyes are closed. Someone has grabbed the p
hone from Jorge and is yelling an address in English. Lon is motionless. His hand grips a spatula. His blood has made it down his waist apron to his knees.

  Now the gurgling begins to come and go and the change makes the noise even more awful. Sirens begin to become audible in the distance. Harry pulls his hands up from the wounds and covers his own face. His mouth opens and he lets out sounds, maybe words. It’s still a language that Lenore doesn’t know.

  There’s a logic that says that the last thing a mailman would want to do in his off hours is walk. But like everything else, this is not always the case. Ike enjoys walking on the good days. On the bad days, he needs it like food and shelter, a condition of survival. But today has gone beyond the definition of a “bad day.” Today has become something that just a week ago his imagination couldn’t conceive of. Today is a living horror story, a nightmare all the more sickening in its clarity, in its total sensual capacity. Today is like the vision of hell that every black-habited nun warned him about in his innocent childhood. Terrors your small brain cannot even picture, Mr. Thomas, terrors that are never-ending, eternal and absolute, pain and revulsion and sorrows beyond anything anyone who ever walked this sinful planet could ever concoct.