James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

“Yes, sir.”

For the moment the lobby and parking lot are empty. I send two of the boys out to sweep the sidewalks.

VJ says when I sit back down, “How tight’s the ship?”

“Tight. Lazy day.”

“So, tell me another dream.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Tell me one of yours.”

“I know what my dreams mean.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don’t.”

VJ is like this. He tells me I’m wrong, and I don’t get mad.

“Okay.” I remember another dream.

This one starts where I’m driving a bus in the fog and I see myself walking down a street, Orchard Avenue. The steering wheel is huge and horizontal. I lean over it and crank hard to steer up the hard bump of the sidewalk. The bus snaps off parking meters; slams aside parked cars. The me on the sidewalk looks up, turns, lumbers away, thighs too fat to run. Dead end. The me on the sidewalk turns, covers his face. I squash me into a blue dumpster. Big splash of hamburger grease on the windshield, just my hands visible at the bottom of the glass, like five-tentacled octopi.

I start laughing, and then someone touches my shoulder. It’s Tillie. She takes my hand and leads me down the aisle; the sun breaks through the fog and slants through the windows. Dust motes circle slowly. She stops at a huge bench seat, schoolbus green vinyl, sits down, lays back, pulls her skirt up. Her pubic hair is black, straight and vast, like a porcupine has curled up between her legs. But Tillie’s real hair is tightly curled and thin. I told her once she ought to just shave, for all there is.

She says, “Climb on the bus, sailor.”

VJ says, “Climb on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what else happens?”

“That’s it. That’s the end of the dream.”

“And that’s what’s bothering you?” He tilts his head off his right shoulder, moves in a complicated convulsion that switches his head tilt from the right to the left shoulder, a mirror image of his former position.

“Yeah. Sort of.” I can’t tell him about the other stuff that’s started happening when I’m awake. I mean, most people have dreams, but this other stuff seems crazy. Most people believe street people like VJ are insane, because they dress weird or they’re dirty or they mumble to themselves, but I’ve found them to be just like anybody else. I don’t want him thinking I’ve flipped.

He starts humming the Burger Land theme song. “You deserve a dream today,” he sings. I pour him some more coffee. A wind blows the back door shut with a loud squeak and rain splatters against the roof. “How come you don’t have Burger Land dreams?”

That’s scary that he would ask that, because Burger Land is part of what I can’t tell him about. So I say, “You don’t dream what you do. You dream what you want.”

“Exactly.”

“You think I want to kill myself and make love to a woman who looks like my wife but isn’t anatomically correct?”

“Maybe. What do you want?”

I think about Howard Fisk.

Howard Fisk took the night managing job when Mr. White promoted me. The night job is really a split shift and I was glad to give it up. Howard Fisk comes in every morning at nine and inventories produce. Takes an hour. Then we have a meeting and I go over the last night’s receipts with him and he takes the money to the bank. Sometimes he has to exchange cash for change and he brings that back. At four he comes in, eats dinner and starts his shift at four-thirty. I don’t know what he does in the middle of the day.

“Why aren’t our dinners bigger, Howard?” I asked once.

“The kids work hard.” He wouldn’t look up at me.

“Lunch was huge yesterday. Twenty-two hundred bucks. Biggest of the five stores, but you brought in eight hundred for the rest of the day.”

He shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He’s a little guy, thirty-five, my age. Single. Ex-Navy man. He’ll never be day manager though. Too wimpy. Afraid of everyone.

I tried to get him fired.

“Look at this, Mr. White.” I held up a chart with a night receipts graph that looked like a pyramid starting at the bottom when I took over the nightshift, peaking the week before I changed to days, and dropping off since Howard Fisk took over. “We’re losing money.”

He said, “ You’re not losing a thing.” I shut up about Howard Fisk. Mr. White will figure it out eventually.

Above the door into the back room, just out of the customers’ sight, a sign says NO PERSONAL MUSIC PLAYERS IN THE PREP AREA. That’s my rule, but I know Howard lets the night crew use them anyway.

Howard Fisk is a doormat. He makes me queasy. He looks at me when I’m not paying attention, but I’ve never caught him at it.

I pushed him into a corner. He tried to stand up straight, but I kept bouncing my hands off his chest. I’ve got this problem with physical confrontations. I mean, I like them. So I go to a group counseling session once a week. It’s part of my separation agreement.

“Howard,” I said, “if you don’t enforce this rule, then what will the employees think?”

“I don’t know.” He tried to sidle away from me. I pushed him again. I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds.

“They’ll think I’m a fool, Howard. We don’t want that, do we?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted to hit him, I mean really belt him, over and over, but I backed off. “Good,” I said.

VJ’s waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff: make a million dollars, get laid a lot, kill Howard Fisk,” I say.

“What does Howard Fisk want?” he says.

“Who cares?”

“What does he dream about?”

I don’t know how to answer that. He finishes his coffee.

VJ says, “I’ve got to go now. It’s almost four o’clock.” If he’s not at the shelter by nightfall, they won’t let him in. I fill a thermos with coffee for him. He fills his pockets with sugar and ketchup packets.

Howard comes in and orders dinner. I see him talking to Rideth at the register. Rather than saying anything to him, I inventory the walk-in freezer. Wisps of steam waterfall off the sides of the fifty pound boxes of fries. I’m hot, and the cool air feels good. In the semidark I start a daydream, which is what I wasn’t able to tell VJ about. My vision doubles, like a migraine, and then I hallucinate.

I’m sitting in the dining room and I can see my hands cradling a burger. I’m bringing it up to my mouth. My fingers are skinny, bony and small, like a child’s. I know that I’m really in the freezer, but I’m also eating a burger. The red checkered print on the Formica table top picks up the red in the molded plastic bench seats. In my hallucination the dining room is empty. I’m thinking about Burger Land’s latest television commercial. The camera pans the walls of a cluttered apartment kitchen where a middle-aged man works on a blueprint of a house, his house, on a tiny table. His pregnant wife tiptoes in behind him carrying a Burger Land takeout tray with two Styrofoam Big Burger boxes and two drinks on it. The camera cuts to the blueprint where the man is penciling in a word, “nursery,” on one of the rooms. The wife looks over his shoulder and sighs. She puts down the tray and they embrace. The focus softens and “Let our dream be your dream” scrolls on the screen.

In my hallucination I think, “People who can’t dream deserve this.” I look up from my burger and my tiny hands and into the rainstorm that is pelting the darkened parking lot. My face is reflected in the glass. It’s Howard Fisk’s face.

I’ve been dreaming Howard Fisk’s dreams.

I shake my head and fall backward against the wall of the freezer. My shirt sticks for a second, pulling out of my pants, as I slide down to sit on the woodslat floor. I toss my clipboard away from me. I shiver, then roll onto my hands and knees and retch loudly once. Nothing comes up. My cheek presses against the frosted wood. In my earphone someone says, “Two Big Cheeses, two large fries and an apple pie to go.” My elbow is pushed up against a cardboard box stiff enough that when I move away it crackles. My breath fogs the air each time I exhale. I imagine my body stiffening, so much meat.