The rain comes down so hard it cracks the night into a million pieces. All I can see through the windshield is glistening shards of cars and blacktop and the kaleidoscopic whorl of a woman skedaddling across the parking lot. I roll my window down a bit and stick my fingers out, and licking them afterward is like running my tongue along a galvanized nail. Old Neil’s whining about four dead in Ohio when Scarlett Johansson suddenly pops into my head stark naked. This has been happening a lot lately, and, frankly, it’s starting to piss me off. I mean, I’ve seen some of her movies, and she once strolled through a bar I was drinking in, but I’m not exactly a fan. I don’t tell Scarlett this, of course, not when I’m lying on top of her on a bed veiled by mosquito netting, syrupy waves kissing the sand outside our super-deluxe grass shack. Her pale, pale skin soaks up so much moonlight, she gleams icy blue, but her thigh throbs hot beneath mine, and sweat beads along the thin trail of hair that runs from her navel down the flat plane of her stomach to the balmy darkness between her legs. I snap at her nipples and growl like a dog, which makes her laugh and laugh. She places a hand under my chin and pulls my face to hers, the insistent prodding of her heels against my ass urging me to go to it. “Not so fast, Scarlett baby,” I say. “I didn’t ask for this, but I’ll damn sure make it mine.”
The rain has eased into a lacy drizzle. Small drops are overtaken and swallowed by bigger drops that slide down the fenders of the cars like great glowing tears as I follow Jim across the parking lot, holding up my pants to keep my cuffs from dragging in the puddles. His extra uniform doesn’t fit me too well, not even with all the safety pins and duct tape we used to take it in, and the gaudy tin badge hanging over my heart, SPECIAL OFFICER, is a surplus-store joke. Jim assures me that it won’t matter. He says most of the customers are Central American refugees who were so terrorized by their armies and police back home, they’re afraid to look a Cub Scout in the eye.
I want to trust him on this. I want to believe that for once we’re seeing the world through the same prescription, because it’s a rough neighborhood, graffiti twisting like angry black vines up the sides of the buildings, half the streetlights shot out. On the way down from the freeway we passed under a pair of Nikes dangling from a telephone line — a gang signal, I’ve heard, drugs for sale or something. The market itself is a windowless bunker that’s been tarted up with a thin coat of hot pink paint. A high cinder-block wall protects the loading dock and Dumpsters out back, topped by coiled razor wire that looks, if you squint, like the skeleton of some nightmare snake chewing on its own tail.
The automatic doors are on the fritz, propped open with coffee cans filled with cement. Mr. Ho, the owner, wobbles on a stool at the front of the store, behind a high desk surrounded on three sides by thick Plexiglas. He has skinny little legs and a big potbelly, and his forehead is shiny with the pomade he uses to slick back his thinning hair.
He says, “You late, Jim. What I gonna do with you?”
“I don’t know, boss. Shanghai me and sell me into white slavery?”
Mr. Ho spits out the coffee he’s drinking, he laughs so hard. He shakes my hand and welcomes me aboard and presents me with my very own time card. The three checkstands are manned by glum Chinese clerks in red aprons and bow ties — Mr. Ho’s sons and daughters — and during a quick tour of the store Jim introduces me to the butcher — Mr. Ho’s brother — and the produce man — Mr. Ho’s nephew. The way it’s going to work is, Jim and I will take turns walking the aisles for half an hour at a time, on the lookout for cereal swipers and Beanee Weenee thieves. The guy who isn’t making the rounds will stand beside Mr. Ho’s desk and cover the front of the store. Jim suggests that I go out first, to learn the lay of the land and such. I leave him and Mr. Ho talking about Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Ho loves Rush.
Because of the rain, customers are scarce. Whenever I pass any in the course of my patrol, I nod without smiling, friendly but stern. It’s families mostly, and none of them seem like they’re here to pull off the Great Kraft Dinner Heist, so after my third circuit I relax a bit, get into playing name that tune with the Muzak. Pig snouts are on special, seventy-nine cents a pound, mountains of them on display behind the greasy glass of the meat counter. Also pig feet, pig ears, and curly little pig tails oozing watery pink blood that pools in the corners of the trays. A fly that’s succumbed to the cold lies belly-up on the hamburger. I point it out to Mr. Ho’s brother. He reaches into the case, grabs the bug, and pretends to pop it into his mouth. Then he offers it to me.
“No thanks,” I say, and we’re both startled when the fly suddenly twitches back to life and zooms up to bounce against the jittery fluorescent tubes mounted on the ceiling.
Mr. Ho’s brother laughs and says, “Jesus fly. Easter fly.”
Two carts can’t pass in the narrow aisles without one pulling over. The glass in the doors of the frozen food cases is cracked, and the milk is warm. There’s a single brand of mustard on the shelf, two of toilet paper, and something somewhere really fucking stinks. Dented cans, stripped of their labels, are stacked under a sign, YOUR CHOICE 50 CENTS. I pick one up and shake it. Whatever’s inside squishes back and forth. My first official act as a Special Officer is to tell a little boy to stop running. His dad grabs him by the arm and thumps his head. Over the kid’s sobs, he asks where the beer is.
Then Jim and I trade places. Hands clasped behind my back, chest puffed, I try to compensate for my baggy uniform with a hawkish demeanor as I stand beside Mr. Ho’s desk. When he asks me to carry a round of change to one of the registers, I practically march there, and I know I’m in trouble, that this job isn’t going to last any longer than the others, because I almost burst out laughing at myself. After a while Mr. Ho starts in with the kind of questions only an idiot or an asshole asks someone in my position.
“Jim say you went to college?”
“Once upon a time.”
“So what you study?”
“English.” I designed my own major, actually, a scramble of cinema, literature, and anthropology that culminated in a multimedia senior thesis exploring Charles Manson’s influence on popular culture, but I’ve been lying about it since the day after graduation.
“English!” Mr. Ho clucks his tongue and shakes his head. “Oh, man, that no good. What you gonna be, a teacher? You see my kids.” He sweeps his arm over the checkers, one of whom is absentmindedly picking at a patch of acne on his face, then smelling his fingers. “Business, chemistry, business. They gonna be rich when they finish school.”
Scarlett overhears this. Her mouth tightens, and her eyebrows collide over her nose. She rams a shopping cart into Mr. Ho’s desk and flips him off through the Plexiglas.
“Hey,” he says. “You that girl in that movie.”
She ignores him, throwing her arms around my neck to pull me down for a kiss.
“Don’t you get a coffee break or something like that?” she asks.
“Go, go,” says Mr. Ho. “Take five.”
What can I do? She’s come all this way.
Scarlett wants me to quit working and move in with her, and loves me because I won’t. She brags to her friends about my shitty jobs, tells them I’m a genius, and compared to the pretty-boy wake-and-bakers she usually dates, I guess I am. Hermann Hesse was her idol when I met her. Steppenwolf, blah, blah, Siddhartha. I turned her on to Kerouac and Bukowski, stuff I’d long since gotten over, but that I knew she’d fall for. The problem is that now I have to accompany her and her annoying friends to the worst skid row dives, and we always end up fucking in some piss-smelling alley or cheap motel room with bars on the windows, which bores me to death, because I already played the same part for too many USC sorority girls way back when.
As I’m showing her around the store, she takes my hand and slides it up the back of her leg, up under her dress, to let me know she’s not wearing any panties. It’s the saddest thing that’s happened to me in a while. She thinks she’s the first woman to ever pull this one on me, and I wish she was, I reall
y do. The impossibility of us almost kills me, but I haul up the proper response. I moan low in my throat and cup her ass cheeks, which, to be honest, are somewhat larger and less firm than they appear on the screen, and then I lift her onto a shelf, where we grind away, boxes of laundry detergent toppling to the floor around us.
On my third patrol of the evening, I’m reading a recipe for shepherd’s pie on the back of a box of instant mashed potatoes. A skinny black woman wearing four or five sweaters shuffles past in slippers that used to be pink and fluffy but now resemble dirty drowned kittens. She takes a can of tuna from the shelf and drops it into the big purse she’s carrying, and when I crane my neck, I see bologna in there, too, and tampons. With me following close enough to touch her, she continues down the aisle to the deli case, where she adds some cheese and a pack of hot dogs.
“Still raining?” I ask, making sure my badge is visible.
She squints at me like I’m someone she can’t quite place, then turns and walks away. Duty-bound, I jog to the front of the store to alert Jim, and we find her in the produce section. Jim crouches behind a tortilla chip display and hisses for me to join him. Instead I walk over and stand next to the woman as she tosses a few mushy bananas into her purse.
“How’s life on Mars?” I ask, loud enough that Jim can hear. “I take it the invasion is proceeding according to plan.”
She doesn’t even react this time, just wanders off to get some carrots. Jim’s waiting for me with his arms crossed. All his Buddha-boy cool disappears as he lectures me about protocol and arrest procedures and blowing the bust.
“It’s a question of professionalism,” he says.
We used to call him Ping Pong because of his balls, but never to his face. I shrug and say fuck it.
“You see,” he says, disgusted.
“What?”
“I’m trying to help you.”
He knows how broke I am. He knows he’s got me over a barrel.
“Okay,” I say. “Ten-four, good buddy.” Ping Pong. Motherfucker.
We go up front to wait for the woman to make her next move. A few minutes later she steps over the chain blocking off a checkstand that’s been shut down for the night and scuffs past us, hugging a box of Cocoa Puffs. Everybody’s watching her — Mr. Ho, his kids, all the box boys — but it isn’t shoplifting until she’s actually out the door. When she steps over the threshold, we’re on her.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Jim says.
She keeps walking, off the curb and into a fresh downpour, each drop flaring like a match as it hurtles through the abrasive orange glare of the mercury vapor lamps that ring the parking lot. She’s skinny and pitiful, and her cereal’s getting soaked. We’re getting soaked, too. The rain stings my eyes and burrows through my hair to chill my scalp, and I’m just about to tell Jim that it’s over, I’m through, when he steps in front of the woman and turns to face her.
“You’re under arrest,” he says.
She doesn’t break her shuffling stride, so Jim grabs her wrist, but he isn’t ready for the fight she puts up. All her limbs go at once, kicking, punching, scratching, and Jim barely manages to disentangle himself. He backs off a bit, then lunges, catching her in the throat with his elbow. They both fall splashing to the ground, and in an instant Jim’s kneeling between her shoulder blades, immobilizing the upper half of her body while the bottom tries to crawl away. He tosses his handcuffs to me, and I kneel and cinch the stainless steel around her wrists, careful to avoid her grasping fingers with their ragged, septic nails.
She comes easy to the break room with us, crying some, and Jim sits her in a folding chair and secures her to a pipe on the wall with another pair of cuffs. His sopping wet shirt is missing two buttons, and a scratch puckers his face from the corner of his eye to the bottom of his jaw. Me, I’m shaking so bad, I’m sure he can see it. I can’t help thinking I could have stopped what happened, but I don’t know how, which is the way I feel about most things in my life these days. Just to be doing something, I buy two cups of coffee from the vending machine and pass one to Jim. The Muzak’s loud in here, that Carpenters song about birds suddenly appearing.
The woman has lost her slippers. Her bare feet look sad and strange tapping on the linoleum. She hums to herself and rocks back and forth in the chair, head down. Jim turns away to tuck in his shirt. He’s still breathing hard and sways a little when he asks the woman for ID. She doesn’t have anything to say to him.
“Fine,” Jim continues. “Let the Man deal with your shit, then. I don’t need it. I just want you to know I’d have given you the money to pay for that stuff if you’d asked, okay. Think about that when you’re doing your time, how close you came to the good side of this world.”
I can’t decide whether he’s trying to teach her something or make her miserable. Not that it’s relevant, because she’s still rocking, still humming, oblivious. Jim and I step into the hallway, and he gives me the keys to the cuffs.
“Walk her out to the parking lot and let her go,” he says.
“After all that?”
“The bitch is crazy. A couple days in jail isn’t going to change it.”
He’s going guru on me again, smiling enigmatically.
“Stop fucking around,” I say. “I know you, and you know me, and this is bullshit.”
“Exactly, grasshopper. Maya, the grand illusion. Now cut her loose.” He leaves me dangling with a little bow, and I have to say, philosophically speaking, I think I liked him better as a junkie.
I pull the woman up off the chair and practically have to drag her through the store. Outside, she doesn’t react when I free her from the cuffs, just stands stock-still at the edge of the parking lot.
“Fly away home,” I say. “Get along little dogie.”
She takes one or two stuttering steps that rev up into a run. When she’s halfway to the street, she turns back and yells, “Motherfucking Hitler!” and I fake like I’m coming after her until she runs again, disappearing into the rain. I light a cigarette and squeeze into a dry spot next to the pay phone.
Scarlett’s hair is wet and smells like peaches. She opens her coat and lets me crawl inside. I should be nicer to her than I am. She’s a good girl, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything quite as right as her warm body against my cold one. I tell her what Jim said, the illusion crap, and she laughs and rests her chin on my chest and gazes up at me with a look I’ve done nothing to earn, a look so full of love that it shames me, because I don’t even know what color her eyes are. Just as I’m squinting to find out, a flash of lightning erases everything. She holds on tight in anticipation of the thunder, and when it comes, it forces a tiny sob out of her.
“It’s not fair that God hates us so much when we don’t even believe in him,” she says.
“You know what,” I reply. “I think it’s time we end this,” and she cries even harder.
At eleven p.m., I take my last break. With only ten dollars to see me through the week, I skipped dinner, but now I splurge on a Snickers and a Coke to keep me awake until closing. The one checker still on duty grudgingly leaves his textbook and calculator to ring me up. There are no customers in the store at this hour, and I imagine them hunkered down for the night behind triple dead bolts and steel doors. They pay a price for that kind of security, sometimes burning to death because they can’t get out of their houses fast enough when fires start in the rotten wiring.
Cases of dog food and creamed corn and paper towels are stacked to the ceiling in the cavernous back room of the market. I’ve been in museums that have the same musty, dusty smell, and churches. Rain ticks against the roof as I arrange a few boxes into a kind of couch and stretch out on them. The wind keens in the rafters, and the candy hurts my teeth. I try to think a thought I’ve never thought before, a daily challenge designed to keep my brain from softening. Nothing comes.
The box boy who enters a few minutes later doesn’t see me lying in the shadows. He swipes an apple from a crate near the freezer a
nd bites into it. I rise from my bier like Dracula and bark, “Hey!” making him jump and sag against the wall. Then I take an apple for myself.
“That wasn’t cool, homes,” the kid says, his hand pressed to his fluttering heart. “That was fucked-up.” He’s a little Mexican guy whose short hair grows in a swirl that resembles one of those crop circles in England that everyone thought were made by UFOs until they turned out to be a hoax. I apologize for scaring him, and he says, “You didn’t scare me, you just caught me off guard.”
I take out my Swiss Army knife and help him break down some of the empty cartons piled up in back, in preparation for feeding them to the trash compactor. It’s not one of my jobs, but the kid’s funny and has a sweet way with a story. He shows me pictures of a trip his family took to Yosemite.
When he claims he can throw my knife more accurately than I can, I bet him that he can’t, even though I’ve never thrown my knife before. There’s a calendar with a picture of Jesus on it hanging on the wall, but the kid frowns at my suggestion that we use that as our target. He finds a Magic Marker and draws three concentric circles on a box of toilet paper instead, filling in the smallest, the bull’s-eye. We agree on five throws apiece. A broom handle serves as the foul line. I go first, and the knife bounces off the wall two feet from the target and clatters to the concrete floor.
The kid laughs and laughs and then all of a sudden he’s not laughing anymore. He goggles at something in the doorway behind me. The devil looms there, a red ski mask pulled down over his face, the snout of his sawed-off shotgun sucking all the air out of the room. I should apologize to the kid, as I’m definitely to blame for conjuring up this horror, having seen him before in countless nightmares and casual morbid thoughts — the Raiders jacket, the ratty Jordans — but before I can, the devil says, “You best move your fucking asses.”
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