Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

“What difference does it make?” Seth replied. “The Pepsi is on sale. We need to get as many cans as we can.”

“I don’t want a lot of cans of Pepsi! I want less cans of Coke!”

“Brandon,” Natalie said as she approached with her vegetables. “Do you want Pepsi or do you want to drink water?”

“I want Coke !”

“So you’d rather drink water, is that what you’re saying?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s Pepsi or water. Your choice.”

“Fine. Make it Pepsi. Even though I hate it.”

She dropped her load of produce into the shopping cart, which was nearly full already. Potato chips, rice, beans, peanuts, cereal, two boxes of dried milk. They could have been preparing for a wagon trip to the frontier, except there was no wagon and no place to go.

“Is this enough?” she asked Seth. “Can we get in line now?”

“I think that ought to do it. This will get us by for a week or two, and surely by then there will be a relief plan in motion.”

“You think?”

“There are too many smart people and too much money at stake to let everything go to shit.”

Natalie appreciated Seth’s confidence, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what Thomas had written.

They found Blake beside a cooler at the front of the store. A couple of teenaged girls were standing nearby, handing out Styrofoam bowls of free ice cream. Before Natalie could stop them, each of her sons stepped forward and accepted a bowl. The Food Pyramid girls smiled and held out more bowls. For some reason Natalie felt like screaming at them. How could they stand there with retail smiles on their faces, doling out treats, at a time like this?

But instead of screaming, she looked over at Blake and tried to smile.

“Did you get enough food?”

“I don’t know how much is enough. But this ought to last me a week or so.”

Seth positioned himself at the end of the register line and motioned Blake to fall in behind him.

“This is gonna take forever,” Seth said.

At the front of the line, an elderly gentleman fidgeted as his cart of groceries was processed. For each item, the checker, a middle-aged woman with leathery skin and disheveled brown hair, called out the name of the product and its size. Next to her stood a lanky kid of about twenty, dressed in a black sweater and orange knit beanie, consulting a thick stack of printed pages.

“Prego spaghetti sauce, roasted garlic and herb, twenty-four ounces.”

The kid flipped through his list, a stack of pages so thick it must have numbered in the thousands, and finally called out a price, which he wrote down on a pad of ruled paper.

“Ronzoni Healthy Harvest whole wheat pasta, thin spaghetti. Twelve ounces.”

The kid went flipping again. He flipped and flipped.

Finally, he looked up and said, “No record.”

And that’s when a third store employee, a burly, balding fellow wearing a white oxford shirt and blue pants, stepped in.

“Max, we need a price check!”

A reedy, tanned kid with long, sandy blonde hair skipped off in the direction of the pasta aisle.

The elderly man, purchaser of the spaghetti, looked perturbed. The conveyor belt was crowded with groceries and he’d unloaded only half of what was in his cart.

Natalie counted ten people in line ahead of them.

“We’re gonna be here forever,” Brandon moaned.

They stood there waiting for the sandy-haired kid, who finally returned with a price. The checker processed two more items before running across another one that wasn’t on the list.

“Max, we need a price check!”

Ben groaned.

When all the man’s groceries were finished, he pulled a checkbook from his back pocket and requested a pen. The checker glared at him and said something Natalie couldn’t hear.

“Are you kidding? I always pay by check at this store! A check is the same as cash! Always has been!”

At that point another store employee walked over, thin and officious-looking. His moustache looked like gray wire and his beady eyes made Natalie wonder if he molested children in his spare time. He murmured something the elderly man didn’t like.

“I don’t care what the situation is! You should treat customers with respect, power or no power. I spend six hundred bucks a month in this store and always pay by check. Why should today be any different?”

The officious store employee murmured something else, and once again the elderly man took offense.

“I don’t give a crap about your computer system! I—”

The store employee said something else.

“There’s a bank branch not thirty feet away! Right over there by the deli counter. That’s where my money is. Go ask them.”

But when it became clear the officious employee would not relent, the elderly man grabbed his checkbook and marched toward the exit.

“You’ll be hearing from my attorney about this! I won’t stand to be humiliated!”

When the man walked out of the store, he left a full cart of processed groceries standing there alone. Natalie felt a collective shudder move through the line of customers. A woman raised her hand and gestured at the officious employee until she had his attention.

“Um, are you accepting credit or debit cards?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but due to the unusual nature of this situation, we will accept only cash. We announced this a few minutes ago and there’s a sign posted by the door.”

“We didn’t see your damned sign,” another shopper yelled. He was severely overweight and dressed in a black knit shirt with a car logo on it. “No one uses cash anymore!”

“I understand,” said the store employee. “But with the power and computer networks out, there’s no way to know if these non-cash methods of payment are valid.”

“Who are you to decide who gets to eat and who doesn’t?”

“I’m the manager of this store.”

“So you’re going to deny honest, hardworking folks the food they need just so you can follow your stupid rules?”

“I’m sure the power will be back on shortly, sir. In the meantime it’s my job to protect the financial integrity of this store. You would do the same if you were in my place.”

“You just turned away an old man!” a woman yelled.

“I’m sorry,” said the store manager. “I can’t pick and choose who to apply the rules to.”

“So none of us who don’t have cash is gonna be able to buy food today?” someone else asked.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Truly. But until the power is restored, we can only accept cash. U.S. currency.”

“And what do we do in the meantime?” someone yelled. “We can’t exactly go to the ATM and get money!”

The store manager nodded. “I’m sure the banks keep hardcopy ledgers. It may take some time, but eventually you’ll be able to withdraw your funds.”

Natalie glanced at the desk for Bank of Oklahoma. As far as she could tell there was no one on duty. Was the staff on lunch break, or had they simply gone home?

“This is bullshit!” someone else yelled. “Be reasonable, man. We just want to buy food from you. That’s all. Be a human being, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Right,” the overweight man said as he pushed his cart of groceries into a display case and walked toward the door. “I bet you wouldn’t feel so sorry if I came back here with a gun.”

Over the next couple of minutes, at least half the people waiting in line left the store without their groceries.

Even so, it was more than an hour before Natalie and her family finally made it to the register.

So they were really going to do this. They were going to leave behind the relative security of his house, abandon things like food supplies and the generator and the water pump, in order to make a trip of more than two hundred miles to check on a family connected to Thomas by nothing more than an ancient high school crush. It was terrible what Seth had done, or tried to do, but the awful truth was that after the pulse, a single suicide was but a drop in an ocean of death.