by Jay Smith
“How’d you get here?” It’s a simple question that helps pass the time, but also rides that line of impolite conversation that pulls citizens out of that carefully constructed reality we’ve built for ourselves. It’s that little rule enforced by our collective insanity that implies, “We’ve always been here, Jill. What is this world outside you speak of? There is no world outside, only death and rot and blood. HELL is outside these walls, so enjoy this earthly paradise while you can. Before you become like the soulless eaters wandering around outside.”
We don’t talk about that last night before the steel shutters fell. That’s not a law or a rule that gets you a day with Jeb if you break it. I think the collective shame and horror of our experience outside makes it a subject even Jebediah doesn’t want to tackle. It’s why citizens of HG World are not allowed up on the roof for the most part. It’s why the paint department of the store was handed over to a dozen bored people with some artistic talent so they could paint pastures and trees across the wall… and a permanent sunrise in the north… and snowmen on a tropical beach in the west. But it’s also why Manager Jack had the wall of lost souls painted over. He didn’t want us to dwell on the people we lost or left behind. Even writing their names was too much. And we just agreed to allow those names get buried under another coat of sunshine and sky.
I bought myself a little bit of freedom writing this newsletter piece. I can sit here on the steps of the Mayor’s house and not attract the attention of the constables. I get some strange looks from the other residents, but none of them have been bold enough to ask me what I’m doing. That’s another manifestation of our Collective Trauma – as my abnormal psyche prof would say. If you don’t ask any questions, you won’t have to deal with anything that might challenge the thin fantasy you’ve built up around you. A probing question or an uncomfortable answer might come between you and your next meal…or your child’s…or your ability to sleep through the night.
The Mayor isn’t home. He’s left his massive showroom house and office here in the middle of HG World to work up in the offices. I can see him standing in the skybox overlooking the warehouse floor, with Manager Jack, Jebediah and some men I’ve never seen before. They look down over us like the gods on high, waving and gesturing as though it’s making their vision reality as they speak. They don’t seem to notice me down here. They don’t seem to notice anyone in particular. Now I know what a SIM might feel like. Or a goldfish. Or a sea monkey.
CHAPTER ELEVEN – RED MOLLY
Part 1
I just started my final pass on Chapter 10 when I heard someone ask: “Is The Mayor in?” It took a few seconds for me to realize the woman was asking me and that I was going to have to break my train of thought. I looked up from my laptop and noticed, first, the oversized sweatshirt of the bright obnoxious color you only see on construction workers or on people from the 1980s. It was so bright, my eyes had to get used to it before I could clearly see the person wearing it. I’d never seen her before, which was really not a surprise. She stood there on the fake front lawn of The Mayor’s House looking like Veruca Salt after snatching some weird gum in Wonka’s candy factory or like a four year old forced to wear dad’s shirt because she got ice cream all over her bib overalls. Not that I know anything about that, you understand.
I shook my head, eager to get that image out of my head and back to my journal before I lost a thought. I pointed to the hanging sign on the oak front door under the one reading “OPEN DOOR POLICY .” It read “CLOSED .”
“Damn,” she responded… but did not leave. “Know when he’ll be back?” I lost that thought. Resigned to taking a break, I tried to figure out what was to do about Day-Glow Girlfriend hanging out in my shady spot.
Her look of disappointment seemed significant. Not “darn I forgot to TiVo ‘Vampire Diaries’”-disappointed but more “Damn, I really need a laxative and the pharmacy’s closed.” I pressed a little bit to see what she needed. She said she only wanted to talk to the Mayor. He could help her, she declared with forced confidence. I leaned on her assumption that I was associated with the Mayor to see if I could help.
“Is there anyone else in the Manager’s Office who could help,” I asked.
She shook her head and sneered like I was tech support asking if she’d turned her phone off and on again to solve her problem. It wasn’t an intentional thing or an insult to me. I got the impression I got was that she was so wrapped up in her drama that she wasn’t really seeing me at all. I understood why going to the management wasn’t the best option. The Mayor was “elected” by the residents (well, maybe a dozen or so of them who voted) to represent the needs of the residents TO the Management. “I understand,” I told her. “If you’d like I’ll write him a note you were here.”
With this, her mind seemed to finally catch up with her actions and she stopped to consider me for a moment. She looked tired, distracted and perhaps a little scared. The look on her face suggested she was trying to decide if I was worth the risk talking to. She seemed to desperately need it. Not having a hound in that hunt, I didn’t push any further. I waited for her and tried to keep a pleasant smile and neutral expression.
This woman is maybe my age, a head shorter with a little more mileage on her showing up as a few lines on her face that I see in chronic club hoppers or single moms. If the clothes she wore weren’t just picked up from the swap meet, I imagined she’d lost a lot of weight. Even her leggings were loose. Her dyed red hair had faded and was growing out into blonde at the roots. Despite how it sounds, it wasn’t a bad look for her. A lot of women were already reverting to their natural colors and accepting the faces and shapes god gave them. It was refreshing to see, to be honest.
“Jill,” I finally offered with a hand outstretched.
“Molly,” she finally replied and took my hand a second later. She also took a seat on the porch stairs next to me and the sweatshirt collapsed around her like rolls of blankets. Her next move was to try and pull a non-existent pack of cigarettes out of an invisible breast pocket; a habit she tried to gracefully turn into a check for something else in the non-existent pockets of her leggings. Nervous gestures, heavy exhales… she was guilty of something or very scared. She smelled like the perfumed soap we get for the showers. She began to nervously inspect her fingernails, cutting bits of what appeared to be scabs from underneath.
“You okay? I think the Mayor’s upstairs with the Managers.”
She asked the question trying to make it sound like a joke, but hoping the answer was not. “You don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you?” I shook my head.
Molly folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward like she was cold. That was her body throwing a fit for lack of nicotine. According to David, there were still enough contraband smokes in the warehouse to keep people hooked and drive up the barter price to include manual labor or other favors from those without the means to trade away their belongings. Along with the moonshine and prescription drug racket, it’s another ingredient in the gunpowder we’re making inside this place, I guess. While I worked out a way to suspend my last journal entry and focus on Molly, she asked: “You ever do something you never thought you’d do for something really meaningless?”
So much for small talk. In the back of my head I pictured a scene from a Bob Dylan song playing out: a lonely rolling stone making a deal with some mystery tramp. She’d looked into the vacuum of his eyes, I was sure, and it didn’t matter who I was. She was going to tell me what was on her mind.
“I think we all have, Molly. These days I think it’s the exception if you didn’t.” True fact! And not one that is surprising to anyone, but the interesting thing was that Red Molly wanted to talk about it. Everyone around me in the warehouse had gone through some tour of hell to survive this long, but once we all emerged into this Medician Purgatory, we all started to pretend like none of it ever happened...at least openly.
“I guess so,” she sighed. “What’d you do?”
I al
most laughed. I closed my laptop and shifted my butt around so I could face her. “That’s a little personal, isn’t it? Besides, you’re the one asking.”
She looked hurt and embarrassed, like her question escaped without due consideration. I wasn’t upset, but I was caught off guard and didn’t have a good answer. After letting her hang there a moment, I added, “It’s okay. I just don’t like thinking about the outside. So, you trying to bum a smoke off the Mayor or what?” I tried that one with a smile. No effect.
“Do you know Hank,” she asked, dropping the name to a whisper “…the pimp?”
Oh. Yes. I knew of Hank the Pimp. Not really a pimp in the classic Huggy Bear style with the big fur coats and purple silk suits, but nicknamed for his reputation in Wishwell for tricking out redneck trucks and fixing up crappy, abandoned houses. Also, selling drugs, contraband and… he certainly represented that mystery tramp with vacuous eyes.
I replied I had, mentioning he once tried to sell me a stack of old magazines for two breakfast meal coupons. I left out seeing him near the women’s showers and creeping around the stockroom stairwells where I’m told he pimps his wares. “Not a nice person, I’m told. What about him?”
Through a long, stuttering, halting and snaking explanation, Molly told me about how she made a deal to go on ‘a date’. In exchange for a carton of Marlboros – a veritable treasure – and a few other “small items” she agreed to “go out with” Manager Jack.
If there is a creep in this place creepier than Hank, it’s Jack. With Hank, you can at least tell he’s out for himself and doesn’t care. If you don’t want to deal with him, you simply don’t. For those with vices or needs the facility can’t fill, that’s tough. But I don’t have that problem. Jack is a different story. He is in charge of the Constables. He is also the floor manager when the “big” manager isn’t around. If you need a better place to sleep or you’d prefer planting seeds to emptying trash cans, Jack’s the man you have to see and his decisions are usually based more on – well, I can’t really say. Maybe the voices in his head.
He stares through people and makes observations about people and situations that suggest he’s spying on residents around the site. He’s not loud or violent like Jeb. But he has two things that make life difficult for people like me; power and perversions. Jack is a scary guy. He has never shown emotion in my experience, even when it came time to shut the gates and strand people outside. I remember that day, seeing him with his hand on the kill switch, staring down at the frothy pink smear oozing up from under the door. Like every other situation, he confirmed the task was complete, the conversation over and he walked away to let others clean up the mess.
There’s also something… unnatural… between Manager Jack and the office secretary Ruby. Ruby’s this flighty, middle-aged bucket of neuroses who I guess Jack sees as an easy and willing outlet for his desires. Krantz once asked Ruby why she brought two outfits to work with her, knowing it’s because Jack likes to start off the proceedings by literally tearing Ruby’s clothes off, leaving her in a girdle and support hose. Ruby swears it’s because she’s “clumsy with coffee.”
For his own weird reasons, Krantz keeps one of Ruby’s torn rayon blouses in the Constable station near The Down Under. He found it in the trash after he and Ruby spent the afternoon together and pretty much trashed the office. Ruby showed up the next day with welts on her neck and bruises up and down her arms and legs. Horrified, Krantz asked if she had some sort of “Coffee Crisis” the day before. She laughed and kept a cold compress on her swollen eye the rest of the day.
That’s how Jack works. All that anger, pain and frustration doesn’t end up with the constables or the management. It ends up on Ruby or whatever meat puppet Hank sends his way. So you can understand why I was concerned that Molly would agree to “date” Jack for any reason.
It took me a few odd questions to get her to explain that “date” meant just that. It wasn’t, she assured me, a euphemism for going to some dark corner of the warehouse to let Jack rut on her. But it was actually worse than that. The deal was that Molly would go to dinner with Jack up in the Manager’s Office, eat the food they get to eat and drink wine, maybe watch some television on a soft couch together. No promises, no obligations… except that Jack must be…”happy” with the date for Molly to get her trade.
Good Lord, I wanted to say to her. Woman, are you out of your Day-Glo mind?
Of course, when you’re dealing with Jack and Hank, there’s no “on second thought”s or walking away. In short order, Molly found herself at the end of an entrapment situation. “Date” Jack or spend time in jail for soliciting contraband.
I asked her “when” and she said Jack was getting off work in about an hour. And that’s when it got weird. Hank the Pimp rounded the corner from Cedar Village and onto Main Street. Molly tensed and, when he made eye contact, prepared to bolt into the stacks. I put a hand on her shoulder and she stopped. Hank managed that sticky, rotting, poisonous smile reserved for new marks or the people who owe him and changed course up toward us. Molly trembled.
“Hiya, Molly. Miss Jilly.”
Over his shoulder, in the window of the upstairs office, I made out the pear shape of Manager Jack standing in the shadows. I imagined him staring down at his prey, counting down the minutes until she arrived. And I imagine Hank was there to make sure she didn’t disappoint him.
Part 2
Some men can pull off the sleeveless flannel shirt look, or wear a trucker cap with a sense of irony. Not Hank the Pimp. The torn jeans and the exposed gray boxer shorts, the high top sneakers…it’s his uniform, his brand, and he is proud of it. He doesn’t care that he walks and talks like a cartoon. But his heart and mind are very dark. The way he looks at women, the way his tongue laps his cracking lips as his eyes scan up and down a woman’s body- it is an attempt to humiliate them, to tell them he is better and more powerful than anything without a penis. To Hank, women are cattle; weak and needy. The sad thing is that there are enough women here that believe this is true.
I studied his ugly, dirty face and the curls of greasy brown hair stuffed up into the stained hat that advised me that he was “born on a mountain and raised in a cave” and that “party, Pabst and pussy is all I crave.” Oh, I did not mask my disgust, which he answered by flashing me his candy corn-colored teeth.
“Are you doing a story on Miss Molly here, Jilly? She’s got quite the story, I tell you. All the way from York, Pennsylvania, born and raised. City girl. Grew up on…what was it, honey… North George Street.”
I cut him off before he could weave his first embarrassing detail into the biography. “I’m not writing about Molly. We were talking about the weather. Might be rain later today. Yep. Just sitting here on the Mayor’s lawn waiting for rain.”
This certainly derailed Hank’s train of thought, or at least his little choo-choo of thinky-thinks. He just stood there for a moment, breathing out of his mouth and looked me over again; this time with some dumb irritation -- like I might have something to prove. Molly remained still, eyes down at her clenched hands.
“Molly, you haven’t been telling stories out of school, have you? You can’t be giving out my business secrets to Brenda Starr here because what would I do if another handsome Henry Hill sets up shop on my block?”
“Jesus, Hank,” I laughed. “Who the hell writes your material? Brenda Starr? That’s the only example of a female journalist you can come up with from the last fifty years? Come on: Kara Hash lives in this bunker and she’s a real award-winning reporter. Brenda Starr? Why not Lois Lane?” He glared at me with what must have been the look he saved for people who didn’t have enough to cover what they owed him. But I wasn’t in the mood. I was feeling my inner Constable. “You know what, Hank? I’ll trade you for that expression. Hang on, let me see what I got here in my invisible Sampler Box of Assorted Fucks. Do I have a Fuck I could give? Hm. No. I got no flaming fucks, no rooty-tooty fruity fucks. Maybe I have two shits – that’s the
going rate for a fuck, right? Two shits? Hang on, let me check my invisible bag of giving shits. No…a little tiny shit? Sorry. No. I don’t have a single shit or fuck to give you for that stupid look on your face. So stop giving it to me. It isn’t profitable.”
Of course, the cardboard villain had to point out my “dirty mouth” and throw out a few veiled sexual threats about cold, dark, hidden corners and lustful desires of immoral men. I let him lay out his little brand of foreplay a bit before cutting him off in mid-fantasy.
“Hank. Since we’re both opening up and sharing, I want you to know that Harris and Jeb BOTH hate you very, very much. They hate you the way parents love their children. They DO know that you’ve been breaking the little deal you have with the constables about NOT peddling to the school kids or their guardians. They know you’ve been stealing from the commissary, too. And if anything should happen to me…or Molly…or any slender, pretty things you might want to use as your little punching bag later on…you will not be protected. If you think I’m joking, I want you to consider how it is I know you have a beer case full of medications and alcohol in Stack 39, row…”
Before I could get the whole location out, Hank barked something about not meaning nothing by anything and other double negatives covered in spittle. He didn’t seem nervous, but he was suddenly a few inches short of a grown man. He half-apologized and tried to play off what I “knew” as rumor, danced and drawled about trouble right here in River City…until he caught Molly’s eye. And he froze in mid 2-step like someone paused him on their TiVo.
