The Second Most Dangerous Job in America Read online

  16

  “Can you believe this?” Carl asks as soon as I’m through the door. Two guys my age look up from the cooler full of blue drinks. He doesn’t wait for me to answer and says, “They cloned a sheep. Cloned it. A sheep.”

  “So?”

  “So? What’s wrong with you, son? Didn’t you stay in college long enough to learn anything?” The twitch in Carl’s face becomes faster and more frantic than usual.

  “That poor sheep—Dolly, that’s what they named her—is going to live her whole life in a box. Poked and studied and I don’t want to know what. And all you say is, ‘So?’ What kind of life is that? It’s no life. Not even for a sheep.”

  The bell rings on the door as those guys leave without buying anything, or maybe without paying for it since neither of us was paying attention. We’re alone in the box of the store, the two of us at the counter and our two reflections a few feet away, the measuring strip between us and its colors much brighter than the weak blue of our aprons against the dark glass.

  “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

  “I guess you haven’t,” says Carl.

  17

  A teenaged couple with their hands in each other’s back pockets, all gangly, uncontrollable limbs and skin shiny with the overlapping auras of grease and love, set their pizza box from next door on the counter as they choose just the right chocolate bars. He slides bony fingers under the tail of her shirt and they giggle while perusing the rainbow of candies and dehydrated meat as I stare at the tops of their heads.

  With a Charleston Chew and a Baby Ruth on the glass and me ringing them up, the boy whispers something to the girl and she nods. Then he asks me, hesitant and shy, if I’d like some of their pizza. I must look hungry or lonely or like the kind of person whose life could be improved by free pizza, which I am.

  He leaves me one of their paper plates and two steaming wedges of pepperoni and onion as they giggle off into the night with six more slices between them, pausing to measure themselves and share a kiss beneath the open door’s bells.

  18

  There’s a guy with a funny gray soul patch on a melon that may not be so big, really, except that his body is so short—at least from the riser behind the counter—and so stick-built that his head bobbles like one of those baseball players people have on their dashboards. He comes in with big, wheeling eyes in the middle of the night to buy cigarettes and cartons of awful store brand vanilla ice cream. He asks me what I’m reading sometimes.

  One night I’m reading a book of poems by James Tate, something I bought off the “Local Authors” shelf at the store, and when I turn it over there’s a picture of him and his soul patch on the back of the book and I say, “Holy shit!” right out loud. That one poem of his, about ships passing islands in fog, I read a whole bunch of times in a row. I try to memorize it, but all that sticks in my head is, “Fogged in all day, the long, low horns of another ghostship,” and, “Let go of your island,” and I’m not even sure I’ve got those lines right.

  He doesn’t come in on the night I spend reading his book.

  19

  “Lemme use the goddamn bathroom,” Pete screams in my face.

  “Fine, if you stop yelling,” I wheeze against the gin cloud of his breath. “It’s back there. Turn left.” I point toward the opening at the end of the dairy case then go back to reading my novel. It’s Danish, all snowfall and empty gray landscapes; I’m thinking of going to Iceland but not really thinking about it. Pete runs toward the back of the store in pants tucked into his socks and a coral pink t-shirt stained black with bicycle grease, and a second later I hear the bathroom door squeak and the snap of the latch.

  When he’s been in there long enough for me to forget and finish the book and fall half-asleep then wake up again at the counter, he comes out with his chinos unbuttoned and flies flapping free over the sunburnt rat’s nest of his crotch.

  For the record, Pete goes commando.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Pete,” I holler, “put your pants on!”

  “Eh, loosen the fuck up,” he laughs and it rattles and rasps the way the instant cappuccino maker does while warming up to spit gobs of thick “coffee” like the ones caught in his whiskers.

  “Beard’s lookin’ good,” he tells me, then wobbles out to the parking lot where his rusty Schwinn woman’s bicycle waits against a cinderblock column.

  Later, in the deep calm of the hours between homebound drunks and early workers, I go out back to open boxes for stocking and find the entire carton of outdated porn mags awaiting return has been dragged from the hallway into the bathroom, dozens of Playboys and Penthouses and Barely Legals spread across the floor in front of the toilet and the room is rotten with the stench of whatever Pete’s been putting into his body and whatever has been coming out.

  20

  “Don’t you have extra-large condoms?” asks a Ken doll while his mute clone sways in a cloud of barroom air and pretends not to be peering over my shoulder at the skin mags racked beneath the counter.

  “That’s them, in the blue box. They look the same as the regular ones, but you and I will know the difference.”

  “Fuck you,” he says, and I lose the sale and have to pick up the box of condoms from the floor where he throws them before storming out.

  21

  I’m reading some stories by Henry Lawson set in the outback and eating beef jerky from the countertop bucket because it seems like the right snack for the stories, full of drovers and their wives left behind, stories of men alone with each other and alone with their sheep and alone, sometimes, with hardly a snack in the middle of nowhere but in a country so young and so old at once that nowhere is everywhere, too. I’m thinking I should go back to Australia, that maybe I shouldn’t have come home to start college, and that finding this book in the 25¢ rack was a sign, but the Australia Lawson wrote about doesn’t exist any longer if it ever did and it isn’t the same one I saw, and neither is the one I’d find if I went back because the world seemed so much bigger before I spent this year learning about it. Before I knew all the same things as everyone else who took the same classes and read the same books, when I had more room to myself in my head. So I go back to the outback and beef jerky and wait for something to come through the front door, a bullock or sheepdog or snake, or a customer if it’s all I can get.

  22

  “What’s that you’re listening to?” Pete asks and points at the Radio Shack tape deck whirring beside a rack of cigars. “Ella fucking Fitzgerald?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “She oughta lose her other leg, the bitch.”

  “That’s cold. She died, you know.”

  “Ha! She won’t get around much anymore now!”

  “Shit, Pete.”

  “She sucks.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Hey, gimme a cup for some coffee.”

  23

  Benny, who would be the shortest member of Fat Albert’s gang if he were in that gang instead of his own gang of ten-year-old night owls among whom he doesn’t look so short until he stands on tip toes to rest his chin on the counter, asks, “Hey, can I have some cigarettes?” in a parakeet’s voice.

  I smile. “Got your ID?”

  Benny makes a show of patting each of his pockets, then slaps a palm to his forehead. “I left it in the car!”

  24

  Carl’s got the newspaper spread across the counter when I arrive, tight curls of salt-and-pepper hair bobbing over it while he reads with his mouth and whole head. Without looking up he says, “This Olympics guy. The bomber. He was a hero yesterday and he’s a terrorist today.”

  “Yeah,” I say, with no idea what he’s talking about. All I know about the Olympics is that last night or sometime this morning I listened to a few foreign reporters complaining on NPR that American television isn’t covering all the events, or all the winners and medal presentations, only the ones Americans win. I don’t know which events those are, but I know about the e
normous Coca-Cola Olympics display a delivery driver set up in our window last week.

  One of the reporters—the German, I think—said something about covering the Olympics from inside a hall of mirrors, and it struck me because when she said it I was staring into the windowed front wall of the store and seeing only myself.

  “Doesn’t matter if he did it or not,” Carl says. “You can’t ever get away from that kind of trouble.” He’s looking past me at the door, his face as melted as the Chipwich someone dropped on the sidewalk last week. “You are who everybody else says you are. That’s how it works in this world.”

  He goes back to reading, even though he can leave now that I’ve arrived, and a minute or two later asks, “Gloria giving you a hard time about growing a beard?”

  25

  I try to go a whole night without comparing even one customer to some famous person or cartoon or whoever, but if I don’t do that they all melt together—a goatee, a bikini, a broken leg and a crutch and an eyepatch with brown crust along the bottom edge—so by the middle of my shift the guy who looks like Bing Crosby had a kid with Ernest Hemingway has once more become Bingest Hemingby in my mind. It’s the only way I can remember what’s happened that night and can be sure time is actually passing. It’s the only way I know where I am.

  26

  If the Bananas in Pajamas were fatter and older and worked in construction, they’d be the two DPW workers who come in every morning to lose money on scratch tickets and argue about whether it’s worth buying more expensive Camels instead of the cheaper, generic brand Basics. They aren’t twins but they might as well be and they’re fanning the flakes of pasty gray scratch ticket residue across the glass of the counter when one looks up and says, “And gimme that new Playboy, too.”

  “Playboy?” asks the other. “Trouble at home?”

  “Nah, it’s got Uma Thurman in it. My wife taught her in kindergarten. Gotta see how she turned out.”

  Magazine in hand they turn to leave, but the Uma fan twists his head around to ask me, “Hey, you know what I read about your job in the paper?”

  27

  “My mom, man…,” Pete says as we drink the remarkable sludge that can only be made by carefully following the directions on a package of store brand coffee. “My mom’s upset with me.”

  “Where’s your mother?” I ask Pete instead of, “You have a mother?” which is what I’m actually thinking.

  “In Wendell, a few miles away. I used to live there, too, but it made my mom sad to have me around so I split.” He pauses to pour coffee into the brown-ringed hole in his beard and the warmth of it steams up his glasses, making the cracks more evident and his wet eyes glisten. “She’s old. I’m not good for her heart. So I came down here to camp.”

  “Where do you camp, anyway?”

  He squints, suspicious and moving away. “I don’t tell anyone where I camp. They might steal my things.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything.”

  “No, that’s cool, I can tell you, you’re okay. I have a spot behind Mill River Park down the road there, past the picnic tables and down the path.”

  “I didn’t know there was camping back there.”

  “There isn’t. There’s me. Hey, you should come by when you finish some morning. We can party!”

  “Oh.”

  “I got a great bag of weed from my mother’s neighbor—you know, Wendell grows the best weed in New England!”

  “I’ve actually heard that before.” And I really have, more than once, across this very same counter.

  28

  “Gimme a box a Gashas, homes.”

  “A box of whats?”

  “Gashas!” I give my blankest blank stare. “Fuckin’ Gashas, man! Gashas!” He waves a drunk finger, trying to point at something behind me. I look around as if there might be some item for sale back there I’ve never noticed before. “Gasha why Vegas! Blunts!” he yells.

  “Oh, Garcia y Vegas… it’s ‘gar-see-a eee vay-has.’ It’s Spanish.”

  “What fuckin’ ever, just give ‘em.”

  “Only when you say it right.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Do you have ID?”

  He reaches across the counter with a finger like the head of a pick, and taps my name tag, hard, once after “Fuck” and again after “You.” I’m confident if anything happens to me, the dummy cameras are watching.

  29

  “You wouldn’t believe those Amherst College kids,” Pete says while he smokes on the other side of the counter and I, in search of a chapter that might be worth reading, flip through a Patricia Cornwell novel off the rack that gets filled every couple of weeks by the same guy who brings the new porn and picks up the old.

  “Why not?”

  “The shit they throw away, man!” White caterpillar brows crawl up his forehead in shock. “I pulled a computer out of the dumpster today!”

  “A computer?”

  “Yeah, I wish I had electricity. Those rich kids, they don’t know a damn thing, throwing shit away when the limo comes to take them home at the end of the year.” He finishes smoking and drops the butt on the floor, then sees my face and picks it up to keep until he gets outside. “I got a new bike today. Someone left it beside a dumpster.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! Hey, there were more, I’ll bring you one.”

  30

  “I saw you, man,” says my piñata friend, back for more cigarettes. “Sleeping on the common, under that tree.” He laughs. “You looked like a bum, man, and I thought, man, that dude works all the time and he’s still homeless. That sucks!”

  “That was my day off. I went to get breakfast but fell asleep.”

  “That’s a shitty day off.”

  “Last week I fell asleep on a bus and rode around all afternoon, until the driver threw me off and I had to walk home.”

  31

  Benny and his friends are outside, leaning against the glass and stopping everyone who comes in to ask them something. Finally, a young guy who looks too much like Christopher Atkins in Blue Lagoon for it to be a coincidence, right down to the curly, blonde hair sticky and styled with something coconut-scented—something strongly coconut-scented—and clad in an appropriately surfing-themed T-shirt, talks to Benny for a minute and takes the money out of his hand.

  At the register, Christopher Atkins buys a scratch ticket, a loaf of bread, and some Marlboros and starts to take out his wallet before adding, “Oh, yeah, and a pack of Newports,” with a quick, involuntary glance at the munchkins slapping high-fives on the other side of the glass.

  “Which ones are for the kids?”

  “The Newports,” he says, sheepish.

  “Sorry, I can’t.” I slide Benny’s crumpled bills back across the counter then catch his eye on the other side of the window and wave the green box of cigarettes at him, shaking my head with a smile. Benny and his friends grin and wave back with a shrug of their shoulders, and go back to jumping off the trashcans to practice their wrestling moves.

  32

  Pete storms in one night hauling a black plastic trash bag over his shoulder, more like Santa than ever. “What’s up, Pete?”

  “Some motherfuckers trashed my motherfucking camp site,” he rages, crashing his sack to the floor with the sound of tent poles and canned goods and whatever else. He kicks the front of the counter hard enough for me to feel it on the other side and rakes an arm across the displays of lighters and Slim Jims and lollipops shaped like thumbs that fit over your real thumb for some reason I don’t understand.

  All of it scatters onto the floor and I say, “Pete, hey, what the fuck? I have to clean that up!”

  “Oh… sorry, man, I’m sorry,” he stutters, softly now toward his feet as he crouches to clean up his mess. “I’m sorry, I just… what the hell, you know? I’m just camping there, not hurting anybody, and some asshole has to come and wreck all my stuff, cut up my tent and smash my stove? What the hell, you know?”

/>   “I know,” I say, and come around the counter to help.

  33

  “What do you do all night?” Gloria asks one morning when she comes in. “You don’t stock anything. You don’t face the shelves. At least you mop, but there’s work you need to get done at night. You can’t just sit here.”

  “Did I miss something?” I ask while watching her bald spot bob around as she talks. When she doesn’t answer, I say, “See you tomorrow,” and pull my apron off over my head.

  “Where’s your name tag?” she asks. “I told you to start wearing it.”

  “I guess it fell off.”

  “Well, make sure you put it back on. Hey, did you see in the paper you’ve got the second most dangerous job in America? If you want to work days, let me know.”

  “Nights are okay.”

  Gloria shifts the display of fishnet leg lighters from one side of the register to the other, then back to where it began. “What you need is a little ambition,” she says. “And a shave.”

  34

  It’s pouring, a mid-summer thunderstorm I’d rather be watching from the back porch of my apartment with a whole lot of beer instead of from inside the fishbowl of the store. Lightning jags the dark and thunder rattles the boxes of rubbers on their display and a train whistle blown through the rain echoes outside like the horn of a ship. I think about a storm I saw in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, from my campsite over the tree line, where I was up so high it raged at eye level before sliding into the valley below. For an hour or so I thought I was inside one of those lightning globes you see at every science museum all over the world, the kind someone always gets talked into touching so everyone else can laugh when their hair stands on end.