12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  She had to admit she was curious.

  But inside, the shop was a little disappointing—she expected something grittier, something more American West. The place had a polished floor and fluorescent lights and impulse-buy items clipped to the counter. To be honest it looked like a 7-Eleven.

  Nicola chose a random aisle and wandered along looking at displays of cleaning devices, gun handles, and holsters. She picked up a three-tine frog spear that was for what, fishing? Defense? I guess this could poke out someone’s tiny tiny eyes, she thought. Near the rifle counter two Asian men were having a heated conversation in Mandarin—she guessed Mandarin—and she noticed that the clerks behind the counter were two mod San Francisco hipsters wearing unusual T-shirts.

  “It’s called tuna quiche,” said the one with square glasses.

  The second clerk was shorter and his head was shaved bald. Above them hung a sign with small white letters, “AMMUNITION IN STOCK,” and next to that a stocky no-nonsense girl was talking into a wall phone: “We have the merchandise but his papers haven’t come through.”

  “Tuna quiche? Tuna quiche?” said the bald one.

  “Just listen, Jer.”

  “I’ve never heard of tuna in quiche.”

  “Just listen. My mom made it.”

  “Your mom’s a good cook,” Jer said, bouncing on his toes a little. “But I don’t know about tuna in quiche.”

  “You get a package of pie crust mix,” explained the one with the glasses.

  They were young, in their early twenties, and could have been transported with no change of clothing to a comic book store. Where were their camouflage pants? Where were their T-shirts imprinted with American flags? Nicola noticed that Jer had a dark blue tattoo on his scalp and that reassured her a little. She had imagined gun shops to be full of Republicans or registered Democrats who voted Libertarian.

  She looked at her watch. “Excuse me,” she said.

  The one with the glasses turned slightly and Nicola read his name tag: Morgan. “Oh I’m sorry,” he said politely. “Do you need some help?”

  “I’m looking for your self-defense items.”

  “Self-defense, self-defense,” Morgan said. His eyes looked over the store. “Self-defense.”

  Was he confused?

  “Like if you’re attacked,” she explained.

  “Right. Self-defense in case you’re attacked.” He kept looking around the room.

  “Which is what self-defense usually means,” she said.

  “You’re right, you’re right.”

  “They’re over here,” Jer told her.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Morgan said.

  Jer was gesturing to the wall shelves behind him which, as Nicola looked more closely, were filled with pepper spray guns, stun guns, mini stun guns, and various other minor assault devices camouflaged as ordinary objects. Some were shaped like flashlights or pens. Others were canisters of noxious fumes which could be concealed in hand weights. There were bear deterrent sprays and strobe lights and sonic alarms and some of them came with naugahyde hip holsters in black or maroon.

  “Let me take this,” Jer said to Morgan, and Morgan swept his hand toward Nicola, offering her up.

  “We have many levels of self-defense,” Jer told her. He pointed to a lower shelf. “First off we have our pepper spray collection. That’s a level one. Then you go up a level to alarms and lights. This one’s called The Screecher and comes with a handy push-top activator. And over here, what’s this called, oh yeah, The Cry for Help. That one’s programmable in five different languages. Also you can change it to say FIRE instead of HELP. Some people think you’re more likely to get help if you say fire, it’s less threatening somehow, or I don’t know, maybe they’re less likely to scamper off in fear. Like they won’t get hurt if it’s a fire? Hah hah.”

  Nicola looked Jer over again—he was clearly enjoying this. Did everyone think people were so dangerous? She tried to imagine him twenty years from now, living off of roasted insects and roots in the wilderness.

  “And then over there,” Jer continued, “no over there, yeah, those are the stun guns and the very latest in stun gun pens. Now those are great; you can carry them anywhere. You can fit one in your hip pocket if you don’t want to carry a purse. I recommend them for guys actually. They’re small but highly effective. Up here is our crossbow collection. That’s the top level.”

  “Crossbows?” Nicola asked. “It’s legal to carry a crossbow?”

  “It’s the highest level of personal protection without the hassle of paperwork—felon checks and so forth. I could sell you one right now with nothing more needed. You can’t do that with guns.”

  “So if I’m a felon I go for the crossbow?”

  “Are you a felon?” Morgan asked.

  “Not yet,” Nicola said.

  “Of course they’re harder to conceal,” Jer said. “Some women I know carry them around in a shopping bag. But that means you have to carry them around in a shopping bag.”

  “I was thinking more of pepper spray, a stun gun—something small like that.”

  “Of the two I recommend the stun gun. Do you know how a stun gun works?”

  Nicola shook her head.

  “Here’s how it works; let me show you.” Jer took a device from under the counter and placed it on the glass top. “That’s a stun gun,” he said.

  Nicola picked it up and turned it around. “It looks like a yellow highlighter.”

  “It’s supposed to,” said Morgan.

  It was so small. How could something so small possibly save her?

  “Here’s how it operates,” Jer said. “Press this level and out pops—there. See those two metal prongs?”

  “The stunners,” said Morgan.

  “Well that’s what we call them. Those prongs carry, in this case they carry one hundred thousand volts and when you touch a would-be assailant with them—Morgan, do you want to be the would-be assailant?”

  “Here I come,” said Morgan, and he put his hands out toward Jer.

  “Stop!” Jer said and touched Morgan on the arm with the gun.

  “Can I try that?” Nicola said.

  “It’s not actually on,” Jer said.

  “What’s this little orange light then?”

  “Oh, I guess it is on. Did you feel that, Morgan?”

  “Shit,” Morgan said. “That was cool.”

  “Well, what happens if you do it right—I didn’t really touch Morgan on the arm, or just for a second, but if you do it right, if you hold it for three or more seconds it causes the would-be assailant to experience temporary loss of balance and also some mental confusion. It does this by scrambling the nervous system. And it scrambles it by sending energy at a very high-pulse frequency making the muscles work quickly but not very efficiently. It also depletes blood sugar by converting it into lactic acid. Morg, are you all right? That’s why the would-be assailant usually falls down. Morg, you okay?”

  “Yeah. Shit,” Morgan said. His speech was slightly slurred.

  “So, anyway, the combined effect of energy loss and so on, the mental confusion and so on, all this makes it difficult for the attacker to move.”

  Nicola took the pen in her hand again. Amazing. Amazing, if it was true. There was a titillating combination of technology and basic human survival here that intrigued her. “And then what?” she asked.

  “You run,” Morgan said. He smiled a loopy smile.

  “How long does the mental confusion last?”

  “Long enough for you to get the hell out, ha!”

  “Now this one looks like a little flashlight,” Jer continued. He was holding a plastic package with a slender blue stun gun over a picture of an American bald eagle. “It can be carried on a key chain. It also comes with a key flail backup,” he said.

  “What’s a key flail backup?”

  “You flail your keys. Aaaa-aaa-ar!” he demonstrated, waving the package in her face.

  * * *

&n
bsp; On the other side of the San Bruno hills, back in the city, Scooter and Dave were standing in the middle of Golden Gate Park. They had had a small run of bad luck and were now taking a break.

  “It’s fucking freezing,” Dave said. He was wearing a long flannel shirt as a jacket. “They must be hiding out in their pen.”

  They were looking for buffalo. Scooter peered over the fence. “I don’t want to leave until I see one,” he said. “Nicola and I used to come here and feed them.”

  “You can’t feed the buffalo.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “You could never feed the buffalo.”

  An hour ago they decided to take a breather from customizing the dog racing database—a task that was taking much longer than either one anticipated and added to that it was almost unbearably boring. Plus they lost money on their last two races, too, and were beginning to snap at each other. Dave suggested a burrito from a burrito shop just outside the park, and Scooter came along even though he was trying to cut down on carbs because a) he was tired of sitting on a semi-broken lounge chair in Dave’s parents’ basement and b) he wanted to see the old neighborhood again.

  What could he say, he was kind of sentimental. He wanted to look at the building where he and Nicola once lived, and say hello to the bicycle guys who ran the shop below them, and maybe get some raw organic food from the raw organic food store. But the bicycle shop was now a three-star Asian-fusion restaurant and the organic food store had been turned into a furniture shop selling mostly, as far as Scooter could tell, small trunks from southern Indonesia that could be used as end tables. So while Dave was at El Taco Scooter bought a raspberry banana wheat grass smoothie and then suggested they go into the park because at least the buffalo would still be there.

  But he forgot about the pen, he forgot that the animals might not want to come out. Scooter moved the smoothie straw up and down in the lid making plastic music as he strained to see just one animal. But he couldn’t see anything. A sign by the upper paddock read: American Bison (bison bison). But all Scooter could see were a couple of wheelbarrows with some hay sticking out of them. He stopped pulling the straw up and down and sucked on the smoothie, even though it was making him even colder and in addition to that he really had to pee.

  “We named one once, a female one,” he told Dave. “We called her Erna.”

  Dave snorted.

  “After Nicola’s grandmother,” Scooter went on. He didn’t want any more of his smoothie, which had some weird protein boost taste to it, but he took another sip of it anyway since it was in his hand. He and Dave were standing just off the road on the grass in front of a long, fenced-in field where, as Dave said, the buffalo so-called roamed. It was impossible to see inside the pen, which was a quarter mile back at the western edge of the field. Down the road, toward the ocean, stood the windmills and next to them was Queen Wilhelmena’s tulip garden, where men met each other at night for a quick date in the long grass.

  “A female buffalo—what would you call that? A sow?” Dave asked. He was holding onto the first wire fence, the one not electrified, with his fingers.

  “Not a sow. Maybe a cow.”

  “You call female lobsters hens,” Dave said. “I learned that at the Monterey Aquarium.”

  “School trip?”

  “Kinda. My parents were Christians and they kinda Christian homeschooled me until I was twelve.”

  “Cool,” Scooter said.

  “Yeah. It was pretty lame though. We studied the rainforest, sign language, art—we water-colored—and the recorder for music, and what do you call it, health or gym or whatever you call it when you go to the Y.”

  Scooter pulled his straw up and down a few times, then walked down a few feet and looked through the fence again. “This is a better angle,” he decided.

  “We were living in Daly City then. My dad drove the church bus and we used to go on all these field trips. Mostly we went to other schools who were having some lame religious event, like a puppet show or a play based on the Bible. But once we went to the aquarium. I liked that trip best. We got to stay in a hotel with a Jacuzzi in the basement.”

  “Huh,” Scooter said. He started making puckering noises with his lips.

  “In Monterey, I mean. That was about the only non-school place we went to.” Dave looked toward the animal pen. “I think they’re pretty dumb,” he said.

  “Buffalo?”

  “School events. They were mostly plays, like Noah’s Adventure in the Twentieth Century. I remember that one. Or Sodom meets Gomorrah in Downtown Los Angeles.”

  “I detect themes.”

  Dave said, “Are you kidding?”

  “Wait, I think I see movement,” Scooter said. “Whoa, here they come.”

  Two heavy-shouldered beasts moved slowly out of the pen, looking neither left nor right. Their shoulders were so big that they appeared off-balanced and they walked slowly through the short grass as if they were ex-professional athletes with bad knees.

  “They’re not really that big,” Dave said.

  “Is that a joke?”

  “I always think they’ll be bigger.”

  “I really remember feeding one celery,” Scooter mused.

  “Anyway,” Dave went on, “we stopped all that when my dad got into an accident with the church bus. He smashed up the kneecap; they had to reconstruct it all and they did this by splitting the bone. He got four rods put up there, some of them permanent. And that was the end of his faith.”

  Scooter was following the buffalo along the fence. They were walking at a diagonal away from him and he noticed again how their fur seemed to be in a continuous state of molting. “Doesn’t sound like he had much to begin with if that’s all it took.”

  “That’s what I thought!” Dave agreed. “That’s exactly what I said to him before he kicked my ass.”

  Scooter continued to walk along the wire fence, making puckering noises to the buffalo, which ignored him.

  “There is something just not right about these animals,” he said, walking closer to the fence.

  “The transition to traditional school was really hard for me. I mean, think about it: junior high school. It was so noisy, that’s what I couldn’t get over. No one looked at me, or if they did I didn’t want them to. It was better in high school when I found Dave. She was really nice to me, and I liked how she dressed. We had the same lunch period, that’s how we met. After that we always made sure we would have the same lunch period.”

  “We should probably go back,” Scooter said, pulling on his straw.

  “Now I don’t know what I’ll have,” said Dave.

  Neither one of them moved. Dave felt in his pocket for his mini-tool, then remembered that Davette still had her tool, too. He took it out and looked at it, then put it back in his front pocket. Scooter took another sip of the smoothie he did not want. After a few moments the buffalo stopped walking, but although Scooter and Dave waited and watched, the animals did nothing else—didn’t eat, didn’t move, didn’t yawn; they just stared straight ahead at nothing.

  “I don’t know what I’ll have now that Dave has defected,” Dave said again after a minute. “And you know who I blame?”

  “Hunh.”

  “Your wife.”

  “Ex-wife,” Scooter corrected. He was still watching the animals. “It’s weird,” he said, “I remember that they were more interesting than this.”

  They walked back to the car past a group of Korean men wearing thick nylon jogging suits. The ground was sandy and peppered with mole holes, and on the road a few cars slowed as they drove past the buffalo. Scooter unlocked the car door, then sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, drumming his thumbs.

  “Back to the dog races, eh?” Dave asked.

  Scooter stopped drumming and stared straight ahead. “God,” he said.

  Dave pulled his minitool out of his pocket again and looked at it. Wasn’t there a little toothpick on it somewhere? “I can’t believe we lost the four grand,
” he said.

  “We’ll make it back,” Scooter said automatically. “We just need to plug up some holes.”

  “Well, anyway, the database is almost done. Or, like, halfway.”

  But Scooter didn’t answer. The trees seemed heavy and full of some dense toxic gas and Scooter looked over at the two buffalo staring out into the middle of the field doing absolutely nothing. What were they doing? They both looked bored out of their minds.

  Scooter sighed. “I had plans for a great shining life,” he said.

  Dave glanced over at him. He noticed Scooter’s hands and feet were unusually still.

  “Can I have a sip of your smoothie? If you’re finished?”

  Without turning his head Scooter handed him the oversized Styrofoam cup. Dave took a sip. “Your wife really fucked you over, didn’t she,” he said.

  “Ex-wife.”

  “She always been like that?”

  “I don’t know what ‘like that’ means.”

  “You know, it occurs to me,” Dave told him, “that we should be the ones in charge, not her. I mean we already did a crime, didn’t we? You and me? We did a crime already.”

  “Yeah, but she foiled it.”

  “So what she foiled it, like so what. We did the hard part—we organized it, planned it, got it going, got it rolling. She messed it up, that’s all. It’s easy to mess things up; believe me, I should know.”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t inspire much confidence,” Scooter said.

  “You still in love with her?”

  Scooter started the motor. “For me love has always been a story of humiliation and despair,” he said mildly. He put the car in gear and looked back into the rearview mirror.

  “Listen,” Dave said. He took a long suck at the smoothie, then began pulling the straw up and down in its lid, making plastic music. “I have an idea,” he said.

  Nineteen

  Chorizo was looking for Nicola. He couldn’t leave it any longer. Nicola had seen him at his motel, she had recognized him, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to do something about that. Probably it meant nothing. Still, she was a link between the last girl—he hated the word victim—and his motel. He’d picked up the girl at the same café, the same day, after Nicola had turned him down. Melissa, her name was.