Emporium

by Adam Johnson

  “Shit,” I tell her. “It’s dye. We got mixed up with it in the bed.”

  I climb out of the cab, and she shows me her hands. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s yellow dye. It won’t come off for a while, a couple days.”

  She rubs her hands on her jeans. “This is some kind of joke, right?”

  “Come on,” I tell her. “Let’s try to get you cleaned up. This dye is strong stuff.”

  “Forget it,” she says and turns to leave.

  I grab her arm. “You can’t go in there. Jack’s right there.”

  “You don’t get it. He’s so guilt-racked right now. He can’t even look at me while my eye’s like this. I could punish him all week, if I had the spirit to, but I don’t anymore. I really don’t.” She pulls her arm back and then uses it to touch my shoulder, squeezing it once, before letting go. “That’s why I’m with you.”

  Then she walks down the street, following the neighbor’s lawn and garage, and turns up her driveway. She ducks into her own garage, where she passes a hanging speed bag, stacks of iron plates, and a husband who lifts his head to watch her before reclining again when she’s gone inside.

  * * *

  In the morning, I drive to the end of Ocotillo, a quiet street with small, thick-walled houses. I didn’t sleep well, so I’m early and my dad’s not here yet. I park in the alley and unload tools for a while. The job is to repair a backyard wall smashed by a car that didn’t stop when it reached Ocotillo’s dead end. Two whole panels of block lie in a pile of rubble. There’s glass and motor oil everywhere, and one thing’s for sure, whoever cracked up was on his way back from the grocery store. As I sift through the block, I find a potato, a thing of Aquafresh toothpaste, and a can of creamed corn. I drop these things in the holes of the wall that still stands.

  I upturn a grout bucket to sit on and start chipping the old mortar off the blocks with a mason’s hammer, throwing cracked and oil-soaked block to one side, and stacking the ones I chip clean to the other. About half the block looks okay, and I set out to save as much of it as I can. Where the old block will meet new, the wall will look patched, but there’s nothing else to do. I come across a broken cassette tape called Aloha, Elvis in the pile and then an onion. I toss this junk in the wall. There’s also individual grapes everywhere, and it’s pretty amazing that there was enough force to pull the grapes off the bunch, and yet the grapes are still not squashed.

  An older man comes out of the house to watch me work. He stands a little bit away, on the grass, with his arms folded in a brown suit, and I don’t figure him to speak English until he says, “Enrique has departed to his occupation.”

  “Yeah,” I say to the guy. “Enrique probably talked with my dad.”

  “Concerning the payment, you must dialogue with Enrique.”

  “Sure,” I tell him. The old cement’s really hard to chip off the blocks, which means they used plenty of lime in the mortar.

  There’s a pack of Breath-O-Fresh gum, still good, in the pile. I undo the wrapper and stick a square in my mouth. The gum has a liquid-flavor center, and it’s perfectly okay. I offer the old guy some, but he kind of backs up. Under the next block I move is a Volvo emblem. It looks like silver, but you can tell it’s really made of plastic. That sucks because those cars are supposed to be real safe. I picture some guy spending a lot of money on a Volvo—he’s a regular guy who likes his corn and potatoes and rock ‘n’ roll—and then bam! Here’s this wall.

  I notice some sheared bolts and cut metal on the ground, which means the fire department has been here. I pick up a cracked Gerber jar of strained carrots, and the old man and I look at it. I drop it in the wall, where it falls with a thuk.

  “Horribly accidental,” the old man says.

  “Hey, what happened to these people?” I ask him.

  The old guy doesn’t say anything. It’s like he can speak the lingo but not understand it. I stand up and walk through the broken wall to the sidewalk, and there’s no skid marks in the street that I can see, only patches of kitty litter, which the tow truck drivers spread around. That’s a bad sign. Maybe the Volvo guy just fell asleep or something or maybe his brakes went out. I take a closer look at the exposed wall, and it’s just like one we would build—deep footings, mortar-filled pilasters, and extra rebar—not a very forgiving thing to hit.

  For some reason, I think of Mr. Doyle’s daughter, the one who was killed, and the whole thing starts to give me the willies. I look for my old man’s truck coming down the street, for the familiar way that he smokes and drinks coffee and drives all over the place with his knees, but the street is empty.

  On the ground I see a package of condoms, and I pick them up. They’re ribbed.

  The old guy crosses himself.

  Then I notice these assorted kid-size boxes of cereal, from a variety pack, and it makes me spit out the gum. When I start to think about this Volvo guy’s story, I feel awful, just horrible. Here’s this guy, he’s got a kid and a new baby, and he likes music, but things are not going so good for him at his small stereo shop. His wife wants another kid, but he’s like let’s wait a while, and maybe things aren’t so good between them right now, what with his long days at the music store, and she’s going nuts with the kids, and he doesn’t even get off work until dark, when he has to go to the market, but maybe tonight things are looking up for him, you know, he’s bringing home the bacon, got some Tony Tiger cereal for his son, and he’s got some Rolling Stones playing in his Volvo with a moon roof and he’s cruising down Ocotillo, feeling tired and mellow, tapping his fingers on the wheel. He’s just driving down the street, and he’s got no idea, no clue at all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  These stories have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Your Own Backyard,” Sundog: The Southeast Review; “The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite,” New England Review; “Trauma Plate,” Virginia Quarterly Review; “Cliff Gods of Acapulco,” Esquire; “The History of Cancer,” Hayden’s Ferry Review; “The Canadanaut, Part I,” Harper’s; and “The Canadanaut, Part II,” Paris Review. Several of these stories also appeared in Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops, Best New American Voices, and Speak.

  I am indebted to the support of the Kingsbury Fellowship at Florida State University, the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and the generosity of my mentors: Ron Carlson, Robert Olen Butler, John Wood, Janet Burroway, Virgil Suarez, Mark Winegardner, John L’Heureux, and Tobias Wolff. I also wish to recognize the various experts with whom I consulted while researching these stories: I’m grateful to Dr. Todd Pierce for advice on the behavior of exotic species; for his expertise in African folklore, Dr. George Clark will always enjoy my gratitude; concerning coastal meteorology, Dr. Russ Franklin proved invaluable; and thanks to Professor Neil Connelly for access to his archives and for his vast knowledge of the early days of Canadian space exploration.

  Special thanks go to Warren Frazier, the prince of literary agents, and to my editor at Viking, Ray Roberts. Thanks to Julie Orringer, ZZ Packer, Angela Pneuman, Ed Schwarzschild, and, of course, Gay Pierce. Thanks to Michael Knight.

  My mother, Patricia, always believed and was always there. My father, Donald, gave me his ear for stories. And nothing is possible without my wife, Stephanie—you are my satellite, my white flash, my outside heart.

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