by Iain Levison
“Yeah,” Mitch said, his heart pounding from being startled. Bob-Fucking-Sutherland needed to wear a cowbell. He was going to give Mitch a heart attack.
“I noticed a pattern,” Sutherland said. “Sometimes you can tell which distributor it is just by the bar code. Back when I was a department manager, you could read me the bar digits off any piece of inventory in electronics and I could tell you what it was.” Sutherland beamed with pride at the memory.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed patterns,” Mitch said, hoping he wasn’t going to have to cite one. Who the fuck studied bar codes? Isn’t that why you had bar codes, so you could not memorize them? Could this man be any less interesting?
“Hey, Mitch, your eyes are really red. Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Mitch said. “Just a little tired.”
“You don’t have pinkeye, do you? A new hire in house-wares had pinkeye. We had to let her go.”
“I don’t have pinkeye,” said Mitch.
Sutherland leaned in and stared into Mitch’s eyes, close enough to be inhaling pot fumes. Mitch could smell Sutherland’s cologne. He stifled an urge to giggle while Sutherland studied his eyes.
“You and Charles always have red eyes,” he said finally. “Do you think you guys might be allergic to something back here?”
“Maybe the air fresheners,” said Mitch, relieved to have an excuse provided for him. “I’ve been wondering about that. They’ve been making me . . . you know . . . stuffed up.”
“Do you know anything about computers?” Sutherland asked.
Cool. This was it. He was going to get transferred to the coveted computer department, where he could earn commission and work in a clean environment, and not get oil stains and dust all over him. He could talk to the pretty secretaries who asked questions about software, instead of a bunch of gruff middle-aged grease monkeys with clogged fuel filters. All because of his allergy to air fresheners.
“Sure,” Mitch said. “I know a ton about computers. I’ve got a Dell at home with a 200 gig—”
“Why don’t you help Karl with the inventory sheets then? He’s got a whole stack of them he needs to punch into the computer.” Sutherland walked off, calling over his shoulder, “Charles’ll take care of things around here.” Sutherland stopped, stared at a display of air filters, adjusted one slightly, looked happy with himself, and turned the corner, missing Mitch giving him the finger while scratching his face.
“Hey, Karl,” Mitch said. “I hear you need help with the inventory.” Karl was the electronics department manager, a techno-geek who could reel off specs about hard drives and operating systems and one of the few souls at Accu-mart who seemed genuinely happy, which was part of why Mitch avoided him. Mitch also avoided him because he was deeply religious and had his own marketing business, so any conversation with Karl eventually turned to how Mitch should either go to Karl’s church or buy Excel-Tone housecleaning products.
“Great, great, thanks for coming by,” said Karl, as if it had been Mitch’s idea. “I have a stack right here. Just punch the inventory numbers into the fields with a red asterisk.”
He handed Mitch a five-inch-thick stack of inventory forms, and Mitch heard angels singing. They were for the audio-visual electronics, not the computer electronics. The stock control numbers for the forty-two-inch plasma TVs were on the top of the pile.
Karl stood up and looked at his watch. “I have to be at a meeting in about five minutes. You don’t mind doing this for a few hours, do you?” He sounded genuinely concerned.
Karl went to meetings, usually with the store brass. It was a sure sign he was on his way up the company ladder. Mitch had never been invited to the store meetings, probably because he spent his free time smoking pot with the hourly employees in hiding places, rather than devoting himself to the more useful practice of memorizing stock numbers. He was cannon fodder to the top management, he knew, and probably had been since day one. He was trusted with brake pads, but not with anything valuable, except accidentally. Like today.
“Sure, dude, go ahead. It gets me away from the parts department for a little while. I’ve got some serious allergies to the air fresheners.”
“Allergies? Oh, no. Perhaps you could transfer over to work with me . . .”
“They need me back there,” Mitch said, and the unspoken words hung heavy in the air. They’d never let me transfer. They need me to do the grunt work. Karl nodded.
“It’s important work back there. You know, the parts department turned the third largest net profit last quarter,” Karl said cheerfully, then remembered that this was the type of information discussed at the meetings with the store brass, to which Mitch was never invited. Karl quickly looked at his watch. “Thanks again. Thanks so much.”
“No problem.”
Karl looked at Mitch as if he was a hopeless case. “You know, we’re having a church picnic on Sunday morning. There’ll be some nice girls there . . .”
Nice girls. What good were they? “I’m scheduled Sundays, but thanks.”
Karl left, after thanking him again. Mitch turned back to the computer. He flipped through the inventory sheets for the plasma TVs. There were fourteen of them. He punched in twelve and slipped the last two into his pocket.
“HERE’S WHAT YOU do,” Mitch said. He let out a stream of pot smoke and passed the bong to Kevin. “You pull up to the loading dock, hand them that piece of paper, and they’ll put a forty-two-inch plasma TV in your truck.”
Kevin looked dubious. “I’m still on parole, man. I don’t know about this.”
“Dude, it’s no-risk. You’re not really doing anything wrong. Worst comes to worst, just say I gave you the slip to pick up the TV. If you don’t want to do it, just let us borrow your truck. We can’t use my car, because the loading dock guys know my car.” Mitch shrugged. “Doug’ll do it.”
Doug nodded. “I’ll do it. But I’d like to have Kevin with me.”
“Just keep him company,” said Mitch.
Kevin still looked dubious.
“Dude, it’ll be over in, like, five minutes. The only thing is, you have to park in the parking lot first and switch license plates. I’ll get you a fake plate. I’ve got one in the basement, an old Nevada plate, like from the seventies or something. You just have to put that on the car, for the loading dock security cam. Hand ’em the paper, and you’ve got a seventeen-hundred-dollar TV.”
“And then what?”
“Well, you keep it in the basement here for a few days. We can watch a playoff game on it next Sunday. Then I’ll have to give it to my landlord.”
Since adjusting the inventory sheets a few hours earlier, Mitch had developed a complex plan with his roommate, Doug. Originally they had wanted to keep the TV, but they had decided that would be too risky. Then, out of the blue, their landlord had dropped by and asked Mitch, with a wink, if he could get any “discounts” from Accu-mart, and a fence operation was born. In exchange for two months’ free rent, at $500 a month, he would take the TV.
Kevin stared into the bong. “What do I get out of this?”
Doug and Mitch looked at each other. They were discussing practical issues now. It was becoming a possibility. “Two hundred,” Mitch said, and Doug nodded.
“You guys get a thousand, and I only get one fifth? That’s bullshit. It’s my truck.”
They looked at each other again and shrugged. “OK, one third. Three thirty,” said Mitch.
“Three thirty-three,” corrected Kevin. “And thirty-three cents. Point three repeating.”
“Hell,” said Mitch. “You know what? You can have three thirty-four.
”
“Three thirty-five, even,” Doug said. “But you have to keep me company.”
They heard Linda come home, heard footsteps in the kitchen above them. She walked down the first few basement stairs and stared at the three of them, high on the couches, suddenly quiet.
“Hi, Doug,” she said, then retreated back into the kitchen.
Doug waved.
Kevin looked at Doug. “Why the hell did she say hi to you?”
Doug shrugged.
Mitch, who also thought it was odd, quickly turned the conversation back to the issue at hand. “OK then, we do this next Monday. I’ll get you the license plate tomorrow morning.”
“Let’s do it Friday,” Kevin said. “Then we can watch the Steelers game over the weekend.”
“We can’t. I dated the stock slip for Monday.” Mitch was glad to hear Kevin push the date ahead, because he felt that Kevin was either reluctant or only half-listening, not as involved as he and Doug. “If you give them a stock slip dated three days ahead, they might notice.”
“They’ll notice that we’re TV buyers from the future,” Doug said into the bong, and giggled at his own joke.
Mitch felt the battle plan might degenerate into giggling and joking, so he quickly added, “We have to wait until it gets dark. Like six o’clock or so. Sound good?”
Kevin was baked, staring at his own TV, which was on but muted. He was smiling, which could have been in appreciation of Mitch’s excellent plan or from seven bong hits of White Widow. Mitch was watching his expression carefully. “Shit,” Kevin said, and shook his head, chuckled. “Nevada license plate. You’re funny, Mitch.”
ON THE WAY back to their apartment, Doug and Mitch stopped at the All Night Fillerup for cigarettes and so Doug could stare lovingly at his Mexican girl. There was a girl who worked behind the counter whom Doug obsessed about, but in a year of buying cigarettes from her he had never spoken to her. He was biding his time, he explained. Didn’t want to rush things. Months ago, Mitch and Kevin had made fun of him, told him she would be married with grandchildren by the time he struck up a conversation. Kevin, who despite being married, had a better way with women than either of the other two, had even offered to talk to her for him, which had sent Doug into a panic. Mitch and Kevin had just looked at each other and shook their heads, convinced it was never going anywhere, just another one of Doug’s fantasies.
“Just wait,” Doug had said.
“We have waited. Are you going to do something about this or not?”
“When the time is right.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, seriously. Just wait.”
Mitch was getting concerned for Doug, who was showing more and more of a tendency to live in his head. After getting what he felt was an unnecessary speeding ticket a few weeks ago, Doug had talked incessantly about all the things he was going to say to the judge. He was going to put the whole traffic system on trial. If he was going to pay $150, he was going to have his say, about how speed traps were just an unfair form of taxation, how the only people who benefited were the insurance companies and the tax collectors, how working people were getting victimized by an unfair power structure which could charge whatever it wanted. One hundred fifty? Why not five thousand? He had rehearsed his speech over and over at every one of their smoke-out sessions for weeks until Mitch and Kevin were rolling their eyes. Then he had gone to court on his date and quietly paid the ticket. “I just wanted to get out of there,” he had explained. “The place was, like, uh, crawling with cops.”
Mitch was sitting in the driver’s seat, bopping his head to Def Leppard, when Doug came back to the car. Mitch turned the radio down. “Your girl there?”
“She was there,” said Doug, handing him the smokes and his change.
“You talk to her?”
“She was busy. Tonight, like, wasn’t the night.”
Mitch nodded. Better to say nothing. Wasn’t it always? They drove home, the windows down despite the snow flurries, with “Pour Some Sugar on Me” shaking the glass and bolts of the car.
“MITCH, DO YOU know anything about computers?” Apparently, when Mitch had answered that question the previous day, he had been in stealth mode, invisible and inaudible. Sutherland’s employees frequently found themselves in stealth mode when they were talking to him, the real conversation going on behind Sutherland’s eyes, the employee’s existence unnoticed.
“Yes. I punched in all the inventory sheets yesterday.”
“You don’t seem . . . to have any allergies today.” Sutherland stared into his eyes.
“They usually don’t kick in till after lunch.” Mitch lifted a heavy case of tire bolts, placed them on a stack, and turned to face Sutherland. Why did this guy keep dropping by? Car accessories could run itself. It was almost as if Sutherland was lonely.
“I need you to contact the Webmaster,” Sutherland said. “I want you to have him call me. Set up a time when we can talk.”
“You mean the guy who runs our Web site?”
“No, no, no. The Webmaster. In Washington. If it was the guy who ran our Web site, I could do it.”
Mitch made a face. “The Webmaster of which . . .” He trailed off, aware that he had gone into stealth mode again.
“I usually have Karl do it, but it’s his day off.” Sutherland walked away, clearly irritated by Mitch’s inability to follow. “Use his office. I’ll open it for you.”
The Webmaster in Washington? What the hell did that mean? And since when did Karl have his own office? Karl was a department manager just like Mitch. Was Sutherland calling the computer office Karl’s “office”? Mitch’s office was an alcove in the stockroom, more of a design flaw than an actual room, and it was furnished only with two filthy crates that he and whomever he was talking to could sit on while eating snacks.
He sat down in the computer office and tried to figure out what Sutherland was talking about. Then he played FreeCell for forty-five minutes, just to get warmed up for computer work. Then he called Karl at home.
“Dude, sorry to bug you on your day off.”
“No problem, Mitch. What can I do for you?” On his days off, Mitch would sleep in, wake up, smoke a bowl, maybe do laundry by dinnertime. His appearance and demeanor for the whole day was that of a bear just awakened from hibernation. Mitch imagined that Karl was sitting at a breakfast table, wearing a pressed shirt, his pretty wife serving him eggs Benedict with homemade hollandaise. The table would be laid out with fresh fruit and breads, the sun shining through a picture window.
“Sutherland just asked me to call, like, some Webmaster guy in Washington.”
Karl laughed. “Yeah. He thinks the Web is like the post office. You know the way there is a postmaster general? He thinks there is a Webmaster general. A politician or something who runs the Internet. I’ve explained it to him like three times, but he just doesn’t get it. What he really means is the Web site administrator.”
Mitch laughed. “So I’ll just call him?”
“Yeah. His number’s in my Rolodex.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Have a good day. Say, we’re having a sales meeting for Excel-Tone products at my house on Monday evening—”
“I’ve got to work, man. Thanks anyway.”
“Take care.”
Mitch hung up, leaned back in the chair, and folded his arms behind his head with an evil smile. Sutherland thought there was a Webmaster general in Washington. Hee-hee-hee. How amazingly stupid was this guy? He could supposedly run a multimillion dollar enterprise, but he didn’t understand even the basics of the Internet. Mitch thought for a few seconds. What was the name of that guy that had worked in the one-hour photo department? Dave Rice. Dave Rice had left to finish a four-year degree and was now in law school at Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. Dave Rice had been a cool guy. Maybe he wanted to have some fun. Mitch searched for Rice’s name on the Internet, found it easily, then picked up the phone.
THE PHONE WAS ringing, and Doug wondered who the hell was calling at ten to eight in the morning. The debt collectors had to wait until eight. It was a state law. Doug didn’t know state capitals and hadn’t read a book since high school, but he knew about regulations for debt collectors, and about pharmaceuticals, and he could answer any trivia question about rock bands from the eighties. Things that mattered.
If it was after eight, he would have let it ring, but he figured this might actually be important. Maybe the nursing home calling about his grandmother. He got out of bed, grumbling, tripping over a box of recycling Mitch had left outside his room. It was Doug’s week to take out the trash. OK, Mitch, I get the fucking point. Now there were plastic soda bottles and empty milk cartons all over the floor.
“Yuh,” he mumbled grumpily into the phone.
“Good morning. Did I wake you up?” He recognized Linda’s voice; she sounded upbeat and alert. Was she serious? How many people who worked in restaurants would be awake at this hour?
“Yuh,” he said.
“I’m sorry. You want me to let you go back to bed?”
“No,” he muttered and flopped onto the couch, curling up in a fetal position. “It’s OK. I’m up now. Wassup?”
“Are you working today?”
“Not till four.”
“I want to take you shopping.”
Doug let this sink in for a moment. He had never really been “shopping.” Occasionally he went to the mall when he had specific things he wanted to buy, but it was a chore, like laundry or brushing your teeth. It wasn’t an activity one looked forward to. “OK,” he said.
“Really?”
Apparently, Linda had expected an argument. Hell, it was something to do. And since he had hung out with her in her kitchen, he had realized that Linda was a lot cooler than Kevin made her out to be. He certainly didn’t want to get involved in their marital difficulties, but he figured he could be friends with both of them. Plus she got high, which was a big surprise to Doug, as she had never joined them in their basement smoke sessions. “Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
“I dunno. I thought guys hated shopping.”
Doug shrugged, aware that the gesture wasn’t visible over the phone. “I don’t really even know what you mean by shopping. But I’ll try it.”
Linda laughed. “You don’t know what I mean by shopping? We’re going to buy you some clothes.”
