by Jack Martin
As he pulled in next to the curb he saw Raul’s back inside the glass, bent over the counter and a copy of Kustom Kars Magazine. Steam was rising from the electrified sign and the parking lot was black and shiny as a snail track. He set the parking brake, left the motor running and dashed in.
As he swung the door open, two cars screeched into the parking lot in the manner of drag racers and braked in tandem at the walkway, their chrome bumpers stopping inches from the glass. A Marshall Tucker tape reverberated from the interiors of both cars. Stereo, he thought. He started to step through.
Just then he heard footsteps from the far side of the lot.
From around the trees an uncommonly large person—male or female?—came walking in slow, oddly regular steps. But before the figure reached the throw of light from the storefront, one of the car doors opened and blocked his line of sight. Distracted, Challis let the heavy door to the store close behind him and turned to the brightly lighted interior.
He ignored the magazine racks and aisles of wine and deli food and headed straight for the sundries, hoping against hope that he would spot something for a nine-year-old girl or a seven-year-old boy, or both. That’s right, he reminded himself, I have to bring something for each of them. Or I’ll never hear the end of it. If there’s only one present they’ll tear it apart in front of my eyes and it won’t do either of them any good. It would almost be better to come without anything.
He came to a display of Frisbees stacked like Day-Glow pie plates, plastic value-packs of remaindered comic books, hot water bottles, disposable diapers, infant formula, the latest in aluminum cookware from Hong Kong, and a half-row of the newest fad, something called Shuttle Shoes.
He opened one of the boxes.
They were roller skates with see-through wheels and pictures of the space ship Columbia embossed on the sides. The box promised that there was a built-in AM-FM radio receiver in each pair. Very futuristic. Not bad, he thought. Absurd, of course. But not that bad. They might like it.
What size? he wondered in a panic. Wait, maybe they come in three convenient sizes. They would both be medium, wouldn’t they? Or no, Willie would be small and Bella would be medium. Or maybe they’re marked according to age. He shuffled through the stock.
Then he saw the price.
Right, he thought. Shuttle Shoes would just have to wait for a more important occasion, like a birthday. Or a raise. If he was still alive by then.
What do you want for Christmas, Bella?
Shuttle Shoes, Daddy! Oh, please!
Shuttle Shoes? Why, of course, angel. I know right where to get some. If your mother hasn’t bought them for you already.
He gritted his teeth and made his way to the checkout.
Raul was busy ringing up cigarettes, beef jerky and L’eggs pantyhose for a painted alabaster hooker. Behind her, two guys who looked like they operated heavy machinery by day were weighted down with a pair of Olde English 800 six-packs each. Challis shuffled his feet and took his place in line.
The lights of the store beat down on him with an almost palpable pressure. He pinched the bridge of his nose. The two in front of him were talking.
“. . . So she says, ‘Don’t stop, lover boy, you’re just like a goddamn machine!’ ”
The first one, whose moustache drooped so low over his thin-lipped mouth that Challis wondered how he managed to eat (through a straw?) nudged his partner and howled.
“Well all ri-i-ight!” said the partner, and broke up guffawing.
Just like a goddamn machine. That’s it, thought Challis. That’s what they want to be these days: as much like machines as they can possibly make themselves. For unfathomable reasons some people delight in pretending to be as machinelike as the law will allow. It’s an old story. It goes back to goose-steppers and the whole military mystique. No, it goes back further than that. A lot further. People who act like machines, machines that imitate people. Cute. Real cute. The height of chic. It’s growing all around us, the Fourth Reich, like smog and inflation. I wonder what it’s really about?
Challis breathed deeply to clear his head. His eyes wandered.
There was a closed-circuit TV camera mounted in the corner above Raul. It panned the register area slowly, making a potential arrest record out of everyone and everything. Smile, thought Challis, you’re on “Candid Camera.” For a wild second he considered making a face for whoever was watching. The watchbird, he thought, is watching me watch it watch me, and so on, to infinity. Like mirrors. It made him dizzy. He forced his eyes elsewhere.
He heard a soft ding as the hooker, leaving, passed through an electric eye at the door. Jesus, he thought, the familiar sound of a bell ringing hollowly in his ears, I feel like I’m still on duty. It’s all the same. I can’t get out of the hospital; it’s with me wherever I go; it’s inside me. That’s why there’s never any peace.
Well, he tried to tell himself, it’s a living, such as it is.
Yeah. What you get is a living. What you give is a life.
The door whispered shut and a draft of air disturbed strands of crêpe paper over his head. Orange and black. On one looping strand a cutout witch flew a broomstick toward a soft landing in a pyramid of Charmin bathroom tissue. He smiled tightly. The witch bore a strong resemblance, he could not help noticing, to Linda.
Halloween. It was coming—it was here—and nothing could stop it. As if those advertisers with all their money could let us forget. And this Halloween seemed so much more oppressive and commercial than ever before. Maybe it was always like that and he had never noticed.
Halloween, he thought, is a state of mind. It’s always here. Only the true ugliness of their money-grubbing doesn’t show through so blatantly the rest of the time.
The guys with the beer left. It was his turn. He stepped forward and scanned the counter. Nothing there but TV Guides, cigars, blister-packs of Bic disposable pens and Bic disposable lighters and Bic disposable razors, the usual. Nothing to interest a kid.
“Hey, Raul,” said Challis. “How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain.” The night man gazed past Challis as if he didn’t recognize him. Or didn’t care to. “What you need tonight?”
That, thought Challis, is a pretty tall order. Don’t ask.
“My kids. It’s their birthday,” he lied. “I wanted to pick up a little something extra before I go home. What would you recommend?”
Raul waved his hand to indicate the displays. “Take your pick. It’s all good stuff. Just what the doctor ordered.”
Challis ignored the unintended irony. “See, the thing is, I thought maybe you’d have something, you know, special. Not a hell of a lot of places open tonight.”
“We’re it,” said Raul. “What you see is what you get.”
This could go on for hours, thought Challis. A sham conversation unencumbered by content. He’s programmed. Like he doesn’t even see me. Or maybe it’s just that I’m like all the rest who come in here, the tired, the desperate, the walking mad. What does it matter who I am to somebody who works in a Stop ’N Start Market? And what does he matter to me? Or any person to any other, for that matter? You pay your money and you take your choice . The only difference is when you can establish some kind of human contact. And there’s not enough of that to go around lately.
Challis surveyed the candy and kiddie novelties. Gum in the shape of miniature garbage pails and hamburgers and gold nuggets. The latest Star Wars trading cards, with a picture of a cute robot on the wrapper. A glass case full of Polaroid film and radios or cigarette lighters, he couldn’t tell which, designed to resemble cans of beer and soda pop, a made-in-Taiwan copy of a Swiss army knife. Shit, he thought, this is all junk. Linda wouldn’t let stuff like this in the house. Her picture-perfect house.
The night man lost interest and returned to his Kustom Kars Magazine.
Challis was feeling helpless, beaten. But before giving up, he made a last-ditch sweep of the displays on the off-chance that he had missed somethin
g the first time.
Then, from nowhere, he heard a man’s voice.
“Thank you for joining us,” Challis thought it said.
“What?”
Raul looked at him blankly.
“Did you say something?” asked Challis.
He noticed that Raul was fiddling with a small television set on the counter. It was angled toward the register, so even if it had been on all the time Challis wouldn’t have noticed. He craned his neck.
It was Sierra Mesa’s own star TV reporter doing another one of his local news breaks. Challis observed that the fellow looked like an underdone veal cutlet with curls.
“Sorry,” said Challis. “I thought—”
“. . . REPEATING TONIGHT’S TOP STORIES. WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST, A NEW GOVERNMENT IN LATIN AMERICA, THE SECRET SERVICE DONS SCUBA GEAR AS THE PRESIDENT GOES WATER SKIING, AND BRITISH AUTHORITIES ARE STILL BAFFLED BY A MYSTERIOUS THEFT AT STONEHENGE. DETAILS AT ELEVEN.”
“Did you make up your mind?” said the night man.
“I’m still looking,” said Challis. Sorry for keeping you awake, he thought.
“Try the Shuttlers,” said Raul.
“The Shuttlers?”
“New kind of roller skates. Shuttle Shoes. All the kids got ’em now. Bigger’n skateboards. You can’t go wrong.”
“Yeah. Well. Their mother already got them some. The other day.”
Raul shrugged and eased up the volume, as the “NBC Big Event” came on. This time it was a TV movie, Shelley Winters: The Early Years, starring Melissa Gilbert.
Challis swept his eyes despondently over the shelves behind Raul’s head. Rows of liquor bottles, dimly reflective as dusty eyes. As a matter of fact a bottle isn’t such a bad idea, he thought. There’s always an escape clause if all else fails, even on a night like this.
Nestled between two half-gallon decanters of blended Irish whiskey was another TV, a small black-and-white monitor. It was hooked up to the camera in the corner. Under the excessive store lights its picture was all but unreadable, but Challis made out a murky wide-angle of the empty aisles. There was the edge of the counter. Challis could not find himself on the screen. Camera must be pointed somewhere else, he thought.
Just now as he watched the tube there was a smear of movement at the back of the store.
Someone was at the door. For some reason the thought made him nervous. He halfway expected to see the same tall shape from the parking lot, now about to march up behind him and, perhaps, lay an accusing hand on his shoulder. Why?
I haven’t done anything, honest. See? I’m just leaving. My name is Challis, Daniel Challis. I’m on my way home. My address? Why, uh, just give me a minute to think . . . Listen, whoever you are. As a doctor I advise you to leave me the hell alone!
The electric eye rang its blue tone again as a man and his child entered through the glass doors. Challis knew they were father and son; he could tell by the way the little boy was holding fast to two of the man’s fingers. They were coming this way.
“Help you?” said Raul.
“Masks,” said the man. “You know, the ones on TV. Do you carry them?”
“Who doesn’t?” Raul reached under the counter and brought forth three colorful masks, one each of a witch, a skeleton and a jack-o’-lantern.
“Yeah!” said the little boy.
“I guess those are the ones,” said the man with an easy smile.
“I want a punkin!”
“How much?”
“A bargain,” said Raul. “Two ninety-nine.”
“Is that right?” said the man with genuine surprise. “I expected eight, ten bucks. Look at that detail,” fingering the vivid puckers in the witch’s skin. “They sure didn’t have anything this good when I was a kid.”
“Don’t know how they do it,” said Raul. His eyes widened sincerely. “At that price I can’t keep ’em in the store. New shipment’s comin’ in tomorrow.”
“Some kind of promotion?” asked Challis, edging into the conversation.
“I guess,” said Raul. “Silver Shamrock Novelties. Jokes and stuff, Halloween toys.” He set out a container of rubber insects, bats, that sort of thing, all jumbled together and trembling realistically. “It ain’t junk. Solid quality. Must be ’cause they sell ’em in quantity.”
The shameless horror of the masks made Challis’s skin crawl. “Got any other kind?” he asked.
Raul cocked an eye at him contemptuously. “Smaller ones a buck-and-a-half,” he said to Challis, misunderstanding.
“Is he all right?” said Challis, staring past them.
The two men looked at him.
“Let me,” said Challis, moving between them. “I’m a doctor. Here, let’s get him up. Is he running a temperature, sick to his stomach, anything like that? There’s a lot of flu going around . . .”
The little boy was kneeling on the floor, retching. In front of him a pool of vomit glistened.
Raul leaned over the counter. The father dove to help his son.
“Oh God,” said the father, “I told him not two cheeseburgers!”
Challis went into action, his professional reflexes taking over. But before they could get to him the boy straightened up, grinning devilishly. Casually he plucked up the vomit and tossed it in the air. It was plastic. A perfect replica.
“Can I have it, Daddy? And I want some vampire bats for the party. Okay, Dad?”
The three men exhaled.
“Would have been a mess to clean up,” said Raul. “Really had you goin’ there, didn’t he? You want it?”
“Come on, Dad!”
The man considered, reaching for his wallet. “You do have a bag to carry it in, don’t you?” he asked.
They all laughed over that.
“Don’t forget the punkin!” said the boy.
“How about you?” Raul asked Challis.
“The small ones. Two of the small ones. You can throw in a couple of vampire bats while you’re at it. And a half-pint of Wild Turkey . . .”
Outside again, sitting in the car, Challis watched the father and son walk back across the lot, hand in hand. He felt an overwhelming pang of sadness.
The boy was no more than six or seven, about Willie’s age. Having Willie two weekends a month wasn’t enough. I have so many things to tell him, he thought. Only by the time it rolls around most of them have slipped my mind. Half the time when I call she won’t even let me talk to him. I wish he’d call me more often, thought Challis, a profound sense of melancholy blowing like a cold wind through his chest. I’ll bet he has a lot of things to tell me, too, things I’ve forgotten and things I’ve never heard before. I’ll slip him the hospital number again. She doesn’t have to know. He can call me from a pay phone, for God’s sake. Anytime.
Anytime you’re thinking about me, Willie. Thinking about your dad. If you ever do think about your dad. You do, don’t you, son? Sometimes? Sure you do. And I think of you, too, and Bella. All the time. And when I’m not I should be. I’m going to be thinking a lot more about you as the years hurtle by. I hope you know that.
If you don’t, then I guess it’s up to me to tell you.
He tromped on the clutch and shifted gears, noticing that the gas gauge was a quarter of a tank lower than when he’d started out. It was because he had left it running while he was in the store.
But that was all right. He had enough left to get him home. He would always have that much.
As he pulled away from the 24-hour market, he saw or imagined that he saw a tall, stiff figure walking deliberately out of the shadows and past the glass siding, away from or toward the entrance. He couldn’t be sure. On the other side of the glass, the store’s three video arcade games blipped on through the night, even though no one was playing them; the greenish glow from their cathode ray tubes sent an eerie spill of unreal light outside to tinge the edges of a gathering mist which was beginning to blow into the lot.
Whether or not there had ever actually been someone lurking there wa
s moot. It might as easily have been a branch, a reflection, a moving shadow.
Shadows that moved? There was no such thing.
It’s the bogy man, thought Challis, feeling nothing in particular about the realization yet, and drove on.
C H A P T E R
2
It was storming again by the time he reached the corner of the street where he had once lived.
Waves of rain broke directly against the windshield, so that he was unable to make out house numbers or even the configuration of the rest of the block. So much had changed in the last few months—trees trimmed back, at least two yards landscaped and a new sidewalk put in—that it was doubtful he would have recognized the house on the first pass, anyway.
He drove blind, steering between parked cars as if navigating a mined canal. Estimating his distance from the corner, he slowed and rubbed out a clear circle on the glass, straining to see through the downpour.
He spotted three lighted porches in a row. The one with the yellow insect-proof bulb would be his house. Her house. She had claimed she wanted the colored light, he remembered, for esthetic reasons. But he was sure she simply didn’t want moths congregating outside the door, her door. She had little patience with natural things, things she could not control.
A gust of wind sprayed the car and the yard outside dissolved. The wind made the oak trees shake like giant fists and bent the shrubbery nearly flat until one bush broke loose and obscured the doorway.
But wait.
He rubbed the cold glass again and peered intently.
It was not a bush that was moving.
It was the shape of a man.
He thought, Probably her newest gentleman caller on his way in or out; a nice, warm, cozy dinner for two. Why not? Get out the candles and the wedding silverware; make a good impression no matter what the cost. No matter that I’m on my way here to see my children. It’s only Dan who’s about to drop by (we don’t call him Daddy anymore) and he doesn’t matter. He’ll understand, and if he doesn’t that’s his tough luck. He thought, She’s showing a lot of class, as usual.
