Jake Skowran is back.
A
sixteen-year-old kid named Jughead shows me around the Gas’n’Go and explains how to use the cash register while Tommy goes home for dinner. He doesn’t make eye contact with me once and he mumbles, but fortunately Tommy has provided me with a corporate pamphlet which outlines my responsibilities. I can’t understand anything Jughead says, but things are easy to figure out. The Gas’n’Go uses a scanner for everything, so I don’t have to know prices, and the register totals everything. My main job is to make sure people don’t shoplift or try to shoot me.
Because of the events of last night, the gun which the store usually keeps behind the counter is in a police evidence room, so if anyone does try to shoot me, the plan, I gather, is for me to try to conceal my main arteries. I’m also supposed to be comforted by the fact that surveillance cameras, with which the Gas’n’Go is liberally sprinkled, will catch people in the act of shooting me. The fact that the surveillance tapes are in an unlocked room which anyone could get to by stepping over my body makes the whole forty thousand dollar system worthless, to my mind, but this is corporate security. This is them taking care of us.
Before the factory closed, there wasn’t a single armed robbery in this town for as long as I can remember. Since the layoffs, the late-night convenience stores have become fortresses, the six-dollar-an-hour nightshift workers there the equivalent of combat veterans. Every one of them can tell a story of a gun battle. Jughead doesn’t seem the least bit fazed by hearing the police have just gunned down his co-worker. When I ask him about it, he shrugs and says, “Agasta mel.”
“What?”
“I gotta stock milk. Washaresta.”
“Watch the register?”
“Yeah.” He is gone.
I sit by the register and read my pamphlet, a nineteen-page tiny-print roman à clef describing the exciting and rewarding career on which I have just been launched. The cover shows a stunning blonde wearing a Gas’n’Go uniform smiling broadly as she hands change to a well-dressed, beaming customer. Inside, I learn it is only a matter of time before I move up the Gas’n’Go food chain to become regional director of all the Gas’n’Gos in the Midwest.
A car pulls up, an old orange BMW covered with rust spots. I eagerly await my first customer, but before I can pleasantly welcome him to Gas’n’Go, Jughead comes out from the back and says, “Reddonplay.”
“What?”
“You gotta write down the plate.”
“What plate?”
Jughead is clearly irritated with me. He pushes past me and pulls out from under the counter a small keyboard. He looks at a tiny color video monitor and types in the car’s license plate number, then puts the keyboard back. “All old cars,” he tells me. “Anything suspicious.”
“You think he’s suspicious?”
“It’s an old car.”
“But he’s already on the monitor. If he does anything the cops’ll get him.”
Jughead reaches down and shows me the keyboard, which is hooked into the wall with a thick black cord. “Gusta cops,” he says. It goes to the cops.
Miraculous. Modern technology at its best. When I type in a plate number, the plate is run through a police computer. If it’s a stolen car, or a car registered to someone with an outstanding bench warrant, a police car is immediately and automatically dispatched to the Gas’n’Go. Jughead stares fondly at the keyboard. He finds this technology intriguing, and it gives him a sense of comfort. For my part, all I see is the increased likelihood of a shoot-out right in the store. I make a mental note never to use this feature.
The customer, a middle-aged, potbellied, unshaven man with grease on his hands, comes in and hands Jughead a five dollar bill for $2.97 in gas. He doesn’t look at either of us. Jughead doesn’t look at him as he hands him $2.03. No words are exchanged as the man leaves, pushing the glass door open with his blackened hands, smudging the glass.
“Yagattaclindor,” Jughead says, as he goes back to stocking the milk. I gotta clean the door. “Agasta mel.”
Jughead goes home at seven because there’s a state law prohibiting minors from working at night. The only other employee on Tommy’s roster was shot last night. So tonight, that leaves me here until seven in the morning, a fourteen-hour shift for someone who doesn’t have any idea how anything in the store works.
I wonder if the Gas’n’Go CEOs are aware that things like this occur, their hundred thousand dollar business left in the hands of the likes of Jughead and myself. Judging by their pamphlet, I’d guess not. I think they honestly believe that we smile a lot and wear pressed uniforms and our customers are full of delight. I’m wearing torn three-year-old jeans and I’m happy if the people I hand change to don’t have guns. I wonder how this division began, the line between the pamphlet and reality. Did the suits who wrote this never visit one of their stores? Perhaps it’s just this store, in this wrecked town, which is an embarrassment to the Gas’n’Go empire. I suspect not. I suspect all of America is slowly sinking into moral and financial decay while the pamphlet-writers sit in their offices with a view of rivers or valleys and make a sport of pretending not to notice. What difference does it make to them, unless there is actually a revolution? This pamphlet was written to pacify stockholders. I tear it into small pieces in front of a surveillance camera, and as the hours pass, I tear the pieces smaller still, until, by three in the morning, I have confetti, and by sunrise, dust.
Throughout the night I get customers and I learn things. An overweight woman in her fifties with unwashed, stringy black hair comes in at two in the morning and buys three gallons of whole milk. She hands me what looks like a credit card, but instead of a bank logo, this is plain white and has a faded government seal on it. I look at her suspiciously.
“Run it,” she says.
I shrug and swipe it through the credit card machine. Nothing happens. She looks at me, I look at her.
“Are you new?” she asks me. She is wheezing with the effort of carrying the milk to the counter.
“Yeah.”
“That’s an EFS card. You have to push the EFS button on the machine.” She smiles at me patiently.
I figure she’s a mental patient, and this card is probably an access card to a parking garage in Iowa. I decide to let her have the milk. She obviously likes milk a lot and we’ve got plenty.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “Just take the milk.”
“There’s a switch, an EFS switch,” she says, getting impatient, or annoyed at being treated like a charity case. Then I see a tiny switch at the bottom of the credit card machine marked “EFS.” I click the switch, and I’m amazed when a receipt prints up. She signs a copy and walks off, limping under the weight of three gallons of milk which she appears to be carrying home through the cold. It must be for a family’s breakfast. I look at the receipt, and it says, “Electronic Food Stamps, Inc.”
Electronic Food Stamps, Incorporated. Not Electronic Food Stamps, but Electronic Food Stamps, Incorporated. This is a business. Somebody’s making money designing ways to get government aid to people who have been tossed aside. Some money grubbing software designer has a government contract because we all lost our jobs.
That’s the biggest insult of all, that we are being fed off. The destruction of my life, my town, represents a business opportunity to someone else. Nine months ago, this woman walking through the cold was probably a factory employee, or perhaps the wife of one, and her children had health insurance and she had a car and she bought milk in the daytime, with money. I am suddenly filled with the urge to find the fucker who owns this EFS company and shoot him right in the fucking face. I feel that someone owes me an explanation, not a corporate public relations-type explanation, but a down-on-your-knees-begging-for-your-life explanation, which is the only kind worth listening to.
But he’s not the only one. From now on, I have to make a list of people who need to be shot in the face. There needs to be a real bloodbath, to equal the financial and emotional one which has just been drawn for all of us.
Tommy comes in at six thirty and puts coffee on and looks around. During the night I have mopped the floor three times, cleaned all the glass, scrubbed the coffee pots and polished every inch of stainless steel.
“The place looks good, Jake,” he says. “How do you like it so far?”
“It’s easy enough.”
“Does the night shift bother you?”
“I’ll get used to it.”
“Got any questions about anything?”
“How do you understand Jughead?”
Tommy laughs. “He’s a good kid. He’s worked here since his dad got laid off at the plant. Jughead’s the only person in the family with a job.”
“Who was his dad?”
“A truck driver. Johnny something. Prezda, that’s it. Johnny Prezda. You remember him?”
I think back. I can’t remember much about the factory, the faces fade away more each day. It has become a distant memory, and sometimes I walk around and wonder if there ever really was a factory, a center to this town. Did we ever all get off work at five on Friday afternoons and head over to Tulley’s and drink and laugh and debate whether or not to split an eight ball of coke? Did I ever have a girlfriend named Kelly who was beautiful and sweet, and did she and I ever go for long walks at night when it was starting to rain and talk about having children and what kind of car to buy? I shake my head. “I don’t remember him.”
Tommy shrugs. “See you at five?”
“Five it is.”
On my walk home, I pass Kristy’s, the breakfast place where Kelly and I used to go on Sunday mornings. There was usually a line out the door by nine o’clock. The place still isn’t boarded up, but I can tell it soon will be. There are three cars in a parking lot that was built for one hundred. A black man in a shoddy jacket with a worn woolen cap is waiting outside the front door to beg customers for change, but there aren’t any.
A freezing rain has started, and the man calls to me. “Hey pardner, can you spare some change? I’m trying to catch a bus.”
I know this is a lie and I don’t care. He’s bummed money off me maybe twenty times and he never remembers me. He’s been saving up to catch this bus for several years now. It must be an expensive fare. I’ve snagged a few quarters from the register during the night, and I give them to him.
“Thanks, man.” He takes the quarters and points to Kristy’s, behind him. “Don’t nobody come here no more.”
“Costs money, man. Nobody’s got any.”
“’Cause the factory closed?”
“I figure.”
“I gotta get out of this town.”
“Good luck with that.”
I walk home and think about a guy from the plant I used to work with named Tim Gregg. He was forty-six and he had a wife and two children, and about a month after the factory closed, because I was a department manager, the company sent me to a list of employee’s houses to make sure they had begun receiving a government benefit. It was three days’ work, so I took it. Gregg was the last person on my list for that day, and when I got to his house, I found him in the garage attaching a rubber hose to his exhaust pipe. He looked pale. He had been trying to asphyxiate himself in his garage, only the hose had come off and the garage was worn and full of holes and didn’t make for much of a gas chamber. He was working on the problem when I showed up, and tried to act as if he was just tidying up the place.
“Tim, man,” I said to him. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
He just sat and looked at me and didn’t say anything. Then he signed the papers I needed him to sign and he waited for me to leave, so that he could go back to finishing himself off. I wouldn’t leave.
“You can go now,” he said.
I knew I couldn’t leave. If I heard about him dead the next day I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. And I couldn’t call the cops, because all the cops ever did around here was give people DUIs and generally piss on you. Nobody in my town called the cops, it just wasn’t something you did. So I hung out, and we talked about sports. After a while, he realized I wasn’t going to leave, at least not until he yanked the rubber tubing out of the exhaust pipe and opened up all the garage doors. We talked for a couple of hours, never touching on any subject like the plant closing. It was mostly about Brett Favre or Elway. Then he started undoing stuff while we were talking, pulling duct tape off the holes in the roof and unplugging the hose from the exhaust. Then his wife came home, and I chatted with her for a bit, then left.
The last I’d heard of the Greggs, they had moved to Minneapolis to live with Tim’s mother.
The thing I remember about it is talking to him, thinking, I don’t even know this guy. I’ve never worked a shift with him, but I’m going to make it a point to see that he doesn’t kill himself. I’m going to look after him, if only for a day, because he’s not a whole lot different from me. What he does after today, that’s his business, but he’s not killing himself with me standing here pretending it isn’t happening.
That decency in me is gone now, along with the Greggs and the factory. If I showed up at his house today and he had a noose around his neck and a gun in his mouth, I’d just get the signature and be gone in time not to hear the shot. I gave the bum some quarters because I had them in my pocket, but if he spends it on bad smack and is rotting in an alley by the time I get home, I don’t care. If he catches the mythical bus and reunites with his loved ones after years of begging for change outside Kristy’s, I don’t care. Either is fine with me.
I don’t care anymore. You got your problems and I got mine.
I go to sleep on my couch, exhausted for the first time in months, exhausted from doing a job, from working and earning money. The sleep is sweet and refreshing. I am wakened from it at about ten in the morning by a phone call from Denise at Consolidated Financial.
Denise has a voice so gentle and sexy she should be working a different kind of 1–800 number. The people at Consolidated Financial must have thought, after I screamed at Mike Murty, that they could catch more flies with honey. It works. I’m so relaxed and surprised to hear a sweet female voice on the phone that I don’t hang up, even after she introduces herself as an agent of the collection service.