Pirates of the Retail Wasteland

by Adam Selzer

  Maybe it was true. It made perfect sense—everything else in the old downtown was dying, after all, and Wackfords was surely sucking up most of what coffee business existed in town. George wasn’t acting like he was kidding.

  Those bastards.

  I wandered out of the store, ready to call for a ride, feeling a sort of a throbbing in my head. Sip was about the last good thing left in town. If it was gone, there’d be nowhere for Dustin to read his poems. I mean, we could always go to Fat Johnny’s instead, but they didn’t serve coffee, there was no open mike, and I doubted that they’d be around long, either. The only time you ever saw anyone there was after the high school football games, and if another pizza place opened closer to the high school, they’d be toast.

  Pretty soon the old downtown, and the neighborhoods where Anna and I lived, would just be old houses in the middle of a wasteland of strip malls and new subdivisions without any sidewalks, streets that didn’t go anywhere, and one white house after another. The local papers were talking about the town like it was suddenly being born, but none of them seemed to notice that it was actually dying.

  Until the week before, I’d never really been bothered by it, but suddenly, just thinking about the new downtown was giving me a serious headache.

  I was just about to call my parents for a ride when Jenny showed up outside, breaking my train of thought.

  “Hey, Leon,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “You got a ride coming?”

  She shook her head. “I’m supposed to be out running wind sprints in the neighborhood,” she said. “If I call asking for a ride from here, I’ll be dead meat.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  She pointed down the road. “Way out in Oak Meadow Mills,” she said. “I started walking right after you called me.”

  Oak Meadow Mills was one of the new subdivisions off of the highway. It wasn’t really walking distance to anything.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You’re gonna freeze to death if you try walking clear back there now.”

  For a second I thought I should offer to get her a ride with my parents, but then I remembered that it wouldn’t be my mother and father picking me up, it would be Lester and Wanda: Grilling Americans. I certainly didn’t want her to see them like that.

  “Wanna split a cab or something?” I asked, thinking as quickly as I could. I could probably afford to share one, I figured, though I really didn’t have any idea what it cost to take a cab. The rule was that I had to call for a ride. It didn’t really specify who I was supposed to call.

  “A taxi?” she said. “Do they have those around here?”

  “I think you can get one if you call a cab company or something,” I said. “It’ll probably cost a few bucks, but we can split it.”

  “I’ll pay for both of us!” she said quickly. “I have cash.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ll get my share.”

  “No,” she said. “I insist. I’m loaded. I get allowance, but I’m never allowed to spend it on anything.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you say so.” I was never one to turn down free money, after all.

  I pulled out my phone, dialed information, and asked to be connected with a cab company in Cornersville Trace. There was only one of them, but they put me right through to a guy who said someone could be at the triangle in ten minutes.

  “This is so cool!” Jenny said. She was actually bouncing up and down, though it might have been just in an attempt to stay warm or the effect of all the espresso. “I mean, I thought only people in places like New York and Chicago took cabs.”

  “My parents are gonna freak out,” I said. “I’m supposed to call them for a ride, but technically, there’s no rule saying I can’t get a cab.”

  She laughed and jumped some more. It was a good prank for me and all, but it was really living on the edge for her.

  “That is so awesome,” she said. “I mean, you always have the best ideas. That movie you made last semester was so cool, and then there were riots and stuff…. I’ll bet it’s the kind of stuff Jim Morrison did when he was in eighth grade.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “They weren’t really riots, exactly, just, like, gatherings. And they were mostly over in five minutes.” It’s hard to stage a proper riot when most people have to catch a bus home.

  “Still,” she said. “I just, like, totally admire people who can do things like that. That’s how people should live, like, taking risks, pushing the boundaries of reality, and things like that.”

  I’d never thought of the movie as pushing the boundaries of reality—pushing the boundaries of what you could do in a school sex-ed film, maybe, but not reality. This is not to say that I minded praise or anything.

  “Are you going to do the new movie with us?” I asked.

  She smiled again but kinda did this thing where she half rolled her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’ll help any way I can, but if you guys end up taking over the Mega Mart, there’s no way. My parents would chain me to a wall in the basement until I turn eighteen if they found out I was involved in something like that. Or send me to military school.”

  “That’s just Edie talking,” I said. “There’s no way we can take over the Mega Mart.”

  Just then, it occurred to me that the thing about taking over the Wackfords might be an even better idea than I thought—and not just setting up an office there, like Anna suggested, but taking it over like pirates, like Edie wanted to. If Trinity could still save Sip with some strategic sexual escapades, taking over the Wackfords probably couldn’t hurt, either. This was certainly something to consider.

  Jenny walked over to the fire hydrant and ran her finger over the top of it, I guess to see if it was covered with ice or something.

  “Careful,” I said. “You know what dogs do to those things!”

  With one foot, she stepped up onto the top of the hydrant and stood on it, lifting her other foot into the air and howling at the moon. Trying to set the night on fire, I suppose. I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody having such a good time just standing around outside a coffee shop, but in a way, I knew where she was coming from. There was a certain thrill just to being out on the streets, after dark, without any parents—mine or anyone else’s—around. I was getting kind of used to it, but my parents weren’t overprotective in the slightest compared to Jenny’s.

  A minute later the cab pulled up. It didn’t look like a cab to me. I always pictured the yellow things with the black and white checks on the side, but this just looked like a little maroon sedan that said “Bonaventure Taxi Service” in white letters on the door. It looked sort of dingy. But it had the light-up thing on top like cabs always have on TV, which was good enough for me.

  I opened the back door, and Jenny climbed in, and I got in after her.

  “Where to?” said the guy driving the cab.

  “Uh, 7942 August Avenue, please,” I said.

  “And from there to Oak Meadow Mills,” said Jenny.

  “Sure,” said the guy.

  And he took off.

  The driver had sort of a shag mullet and a mustache, as though he had found a look he liked in 1978 and had just stuck with it ever since. He had clearly been blond at one point, though his hair was mostly gray now. His fingers drummed on the dashboard, keeping the rhythm to a classic rock song on the radio.

  “Any objection to Led Zeppelin?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Good.” He turned the stereo up a bit and drummed harder. I got the idea that this was how he’d spent every night of the last few decades—driving around, drumming along to classic rock. Not a bad life, really.

  I took a quick whiff of the air. I’d always heard that taxi drivers were known for not bathing, but this one smelled like a mixture of cigarettes and air freshener, which, together, smelled like a forest full of old people—nothing too offensive.

  We got about a block before
Jenny looked over at me, smiling so wide I could only assume that she’d be sore in the morning. “This was a great idea, Leon. Thanks.”

  “Hey, thanks for the fare,” I said.

  “You know,” she said, suddenly smiling a bit less, “I’m not really sure I understand what’s going on with you and Anna.”

  She had taken off her hat and was kind of playing with her hair.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s complicated, I guess. One of those things.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like sometimes I think you’re a couple, and sometimes I think you’re just friends.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s somewhere in between, I guess.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  And she turned to look out of her window, still playing with her hair, wrapping it around her finger, then unwinding it and starting over.

  I looked up at the cabdriver, eager to change the subject. “Have you been driving a cab long?” I asked. I always saw guys in movies asking that.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” he said. “Nineteen years now. Hey, you guys mind if I smoke a bit?”

  “Go ahead!” said Jenny. He opened up the glove compartment and pulled out a pack of smokes and a lighter.

  “Have you been driving in Cornersville all that time?” I asked.

  “Hell no!” he said. “Nineteen years ago there wouldn’t have been nobody to drive in Cornersville. I still don’t come out here much, on account of the cops out here are insane, but it’s easier work than in the city, and some nights I just wanna rock, ya know?”

  “Hell yeah,” said Jenny.

  “Until a few years ago you never got nobody out here. It was just a little, you know.” And he made a weird noise like a duck having sex, which I guess meant that until a few years ago, the town was just a little place where ducks got it on.

  “The town’s gotten a lot bigger, hasn’t it?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s what happens when you build a town near a city, man. I remember when I first started all this, people thought that Shaker Heights was just a little crap town out in the middle of nowhere.”

  Shaker Heights was the next town between Cornersville and the city. The two towns were creeping closer and closer together; I figured that in a few years, there’d be no space between them, just a big field of subdivisions connecting the borders like stitches.

  “And Preston will be next,” Jenny said. Preston was a small town, quite a bit smaller than Cornersville, about five miles north, past a long stretch of farmland.

  “Oh, just watch,” said the guy. “In ten years there won’t be any space left between Cornersville and Preston. Some developer’s gonna buy up those farms, and that whole area’s gonna explode like shit. Just watch.”

  I kind of got a kick out of the fact that the driver was cursing and smoking in front of us. Most adults seem to be under the impression that people my age don’t know what all the cusswords are. Still, I wasn’t sure I liked the image of anything exploding like shit. Ew.

  About this time he pulled up to my house, rolled down the window a crack, and blew some smoke out into the air.

  “I’ll get all the fare when we get to my place,” said Jenny.

  “This where you get off, then?” the cabbie asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I looked over at Jenny. “And thank you, too!”

  Jenny smiled. I smiled back, and was just about to climb out, but I was totally unprepared for what happened next: she leaned in closer and kissed me. Not quite on the lips or anything, it was on that little corner between the mouth and the cheek, like maybe she’d been going for one or the other but ended up in between.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Good night.”

  I practically jumped out of the car and shut the door, then ran around the front of it and into my driveway.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said to the cabdriver.

  “Rock on, my good man,” he said.

  “Rock on,” I said, making the devil sign with my hand.

  She kissed me. Jenny.

  And there was a fifty-fifty chance she had intended to kiss me on the lips.

  I stood there in the driveway sort of blindsided for a second as the cab pulled away, drove up August Avenue, and turned onto Eighty-second Street.

  Okay, I thought. So she kissed me. It’s probably just a part of her whole “living on the edge” thing. Maybe she read that Jim Morrison kissed people all the time just as a way of saying good-bye. That was probably it. It had to be.

  But then I remembered her asking what my deal with Anna was. But I hadn’t told her it was nothing, or anything like that. I’d said we were sort of in between. Surely she hadn’t seen that as a license to start going after me herself, right?

  I sort of stood there in the cold for a second, letting the snow hit my face, while I tried to shake the feeling that I’d just cheated on Anna. Jenny had kissed me, not the other way around, and anyway, Anna and I weren’t really an official couple or anything. No rule said no one else could kiss me.

  For the first time that night, I really felt cold.

  I only had time to think about this for a second or so, though, before I heard my mother shouting at me.

  “Leon!” she shouted. “Get in here this instant!”

  I turned around and headed up to the front door, where she was standing, still wearing her Wanda gear.

  “What the heck is going on here? Was that a police car?”

  I laughed. “No. Jenny and I called a cab.”

  “A cab?” she asked, as though I’d said it was a carriage made of a pumpkin or something equally unlikely. “Leon, you know you’re supposed to call us for a ride!”

  “Aha!” I said. “The rule is that I’m supposed to call for a ride. There’s no rule about who I have to call.”

  My dad showed up behind her, still wearing his Lester hat. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Your son,” said my mother, “just came home from the café in a taxicab.”

  “No kidding?” asked my dad. “What did that cost you?”

  “Not much,” I said, not wanting to say that I’d let someone else pay.

  “Well, that was an okay idea,” said my dad. “But it would have been cheaper just to call us.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I was going to. But Jenny was going to be stuck walking clear back to Oak Meadow Mills, and it’s freezing outside, so I offered to split a cab with her.”

  “Well, that was nice of you, I guess,” he said.

  “Yeah, it was just a favor for a friend, that’s all,” I said. “I would have done it for any of my friends.” It wasn’t like I had ridden with Jenny because I had a thing for her or anything. I was telling myself as much as I was telling them.

  “Well,” said my mother, “I think that’s all beside the point. You know that when we say you’re to call for a ride, we mean to call us, not a cab. We would have given Jenny a ride home.”

  “It might have been implied,” I said, “but it was never explicit.”

  “Have you been reading legal thrillers or something?” asked my mother. “Because lawyer-speak isn’t going to get you out of trouble.”

  “Oh, Judith, there’s no harm done,” said my father. “He beat the system. Good for him!”

  I wasn’t too surprised that my dad thought this was clever; he was a lot more lenient on matters like this than my mother. But I’d never heard him say it was good to beat the system. Maybe that hair dye he’d used on the Mohawk had seeped into his brain.

  “Well,” said my mother again, “in the future, let it be known that you’re to call us, not a taxi, a bus, a hansom cab, a volunteer service for drunks, a stolen Soviet tank, or Air Force One. And even if you just get a ride home from Anna’s dad or something, call and let us know.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  My mother nodded and I headed up to my room, forgetting all about my parents and thinking about Jenny again. I couldn’t think
of any way I’d led her on, but I still felt guilty. But I reminded myself that it wasn’t really that big of a deal or anything. She was just trying, in her way, to live on the edge a bit, like Jim Morrison. Kissing me was her way of pushing the bounds of reality.

  Then again, it did seem like I spent every gifted-pool meeting with her butt on one of my arms. Maybe it wasn’t an accident.

  About twenty minutes later, I got an e-mail from Jenny. The subject line read “Plutonian Night.”

  Leon,

  Wasn’t that cabdriver awesome? On the way to my place he was singing along to the radio really loud, and he said the f-word twice. Hope I didn’t freak you out tonight at the end of the cab ride. I couldn’t help myself. I know you and Anna are sort of going out and all, but if that ever changes, I imagine you can guess that I’m interested. Ever since I started reading biographies of Jim Morrison I’ve wanted to live more on the edge, cause some more trouble, and, you know, actually live a bit instead of just doing homework all the time. And the only person I know who is actually doing that sort of thing is you. And I’m not going to go trying to split you and Anna up or anything, but I just thought you should know that I think you’re awesome. I hope this doesn’t weird you out or anything, and that thing scan still be the same between us as they’ve always been if you aren’t interested.

  Sincerely,

  Jenny

  Whoa.

  Well, that threw a bit of a wrench in my gears. No one had ever written me a letter telling me how great I was.

  I took a deep breath and thought about things. Sometimes I felt like Anna and I were sort of stuck in neutral or something like that, and I always felt like maybe I couldn’t keep up with her. I mean, she was about ten times smarter than I was, and despite the whole suspension thing, I didn’t think of myself as particularly rebellious. I mean, even Anna wasn’t all that rebellious—she was just better at living on her own terms than the rest of us. I imagine she probably would have been able to talk her way out of suspension if her movie had been the one Mrs. Smollet had a problem with. Anna and her parents were the kind of people I only hoped I could eventually be.