David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

She had two home lines and a bulky mobile phone and two office patch codes but used pay phones for personal business. She was neither attractive nor ugly. Except for a certain anemic intensity to her face there was nothing to attract or repel or cause any more notice than a thousand other Peoria women who’d been described as ‘cute’ in their bloom and were now invisible. She liked to come in under people’s radar. The only person who might have noticed her hanging up the phone was someone who’d wanted to use it himself. Two women and a reddish man in flannel were filling their tanks. A child in one of the cars was crying, its face a knot. The cars’ windows rendered its weeping a dumbshow. Its mother had a caved-in face and stared stolidly by the tank, smoothing her hair’s plastic as the hose dispensed gas on auto. The station’s flagpole’s flag’s rope’s pulleys and joists clinked dully in the wind. Her own car’s slight idled throb behind her, the two dogs hunkered down in identical postures. She slowed just enough to lock eyes with the child as she passed the rear right window, its face clenched and red, her own face empty of intent as for a moment the whole lot and street blazed with intensity, a nonconnotative tone in her head like a rung bell. Interesting the way some people will stand still by the tank and let it fill and others like the pudgy woman up ahead cannot, must busy themselves with small tasks like squeegeeing the windshield or using blue towels to wipe at the brake lights, unable to stand still and wait. The man dispensed by hand, rounding off to an even sum. Half the child’s face was cut off by the window’s reflection of the sky and flag that popped high above her. And she liked the sound of her own footfalls, the solid sound and feeling the impact in her teeth. #6 tube was hard enough to go in all the way and soft enough that driving it made little sound; three at the base would do for any tree.

The Tumor’s inside had a grocery’s bleached light and was laid out with glass doors of pop at the back and two aisles of corporate gauge retail coffee and pet food and snacks E-W with your sundries and tobacco behind the orange counter where the young woman in denim workshirt and red bandanna done up slave-style with tiny rabbit ears at the back asked about fuel and totaled beer and snuff and sent change down an anodized chute into a steel cup. Behind the door at the rear of the second aisle was the stockroom and manager’s office. The larger chain models had introduced video cameras, but these Ramp Tumors were blind. There were five other US citizens in the store and then a sixth when the woman sans child came in to pay, and while Toni selected enough items to fill a bag she observed them interact or not and felt again the acquaintance she always assumed all strangers in rooms she entered enjoyed, the conviction that everyone in the room all knew each other well and felt the connection and sameness they shared by virtue of what they had in common, the quality of not being her. None of them was affected by her in any way. One can of Mighty Dog Gourmet Beef was 69¢, which given wholesale and overhead was still a 20 percent margin of pure cream. The counter woman, who was in her early thirties and had incorporated her weight into a country mother presentation that involved pink cheeks and a laugh like a roar and a worldly good-humored sexuality, asked if she had any fuel today.

‘Full up,’ Toni said. ‘Stopped to use the phone and come in to get out of the damn wind!’

‘Still tootin’ out there I see.’ The counter woman smiled, totaling pet food Toni would throw away on a cut-rate NCR 1280 that totaled receipts on a one-day roll they stored in canisters and had to be taken out and unfurled to run a Field, the office filled with eighty-foot strips like a liner’s bunting at sail.

‘Like to blow me right off the road comin’ in,’ Toni said. The counter woman seemed unaware that Toni Ware was affecting the exact accent and cadence of her own speech. The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

‘Got you some dogs that can do some eating.’

‘Don’t tell me. Don’t I know.’

‘That was $11.80.’ The smile long-practiced to seem so sincere. As if Toni would be remembered one moment after she forced the door and staggered off under the flag like the rest of them. And why the conventional was? The stunted creature behind her smelled of hair oil and ambient breakfast; she imagined particles of meat and eggs in his facial hair and under his nails as she produced a Treasury note.

‘The big Two-O,’ the counter woman said, as if to herself, punching the keys with the slight extra force a 1280 takes.

A moment later Toni was out around the side of the store, sheltered from the lot’s view by the Kluckman Ice dispenser, with the plastic bag’s top whipping and popping between her shoes as she removed a traveler’s Kleenex from her handbag, tore it in two and again, and wrapped a quarter of the tissue tightly around her little finger, whose nail was perfect and almond-shaped and done in arterial red. Up into the right nasal cavity and around in a comprehensive spiral, and what came out included a standard-colored clot, both viscous and hard, with even a tiny thread of capillary inside the right border. The only thing someone in a store or line might remark about her was a faint affective abstraction, a quality of detachment that was not the detachment of peace or a personal relation with Our Lord Jesus Christ. Which she carefully wiped onto the left lapel of her cream-colored coat, with enough pressure to give it some length but not enough to compromise its adhesion or distort the nougat at its heart. A plasticized flatness about her reminiscent of processed air, airline food, transistorized sound. This was merely to pass the time until her order at Butts Hardware was assembled. The stockroom as she entered it had only paper goods and large cardboard boxes and borax in the floor-wall seam for roaches, and the manager’s little office door with its snap-on pinups and Peace with Honor poster of an eagle with a ski-jump nose and 5:00 shadow was ajar and emitted Dutch Masters and the mollified twang of country on a pocket radio. The day manager, who had no nametag (the counter woman was ‘Cheryl’) and had his feet up reading just what she’d have imagined, and who had a high convex forehead and one of those rapid and overhard blink rates like someone almost wincing when they blinked that signified something just a little neurally amiss, just a bit, swung his feet around and rose with complex squeaks of the chair as her timid knock and the force with which she all but staggered through the door spelled out all the innocent shock anyone’d need to read in her character. She’d drained her face of color and kept her eyes open in the wind on the way back from side to storefront, which wetted her eyes, and had her shoulders up and arms out in an attitude of speechless defilement. She appeared both smaller and larger than she really was, and the manager with the ticcy blink did not move or come around or find within himself the power to respond even during her setup, which was halting and hypoxic and sketched a scenario in which she was a frequent nay even habitual customer at this QWIK ’N’ EZ Ramp Tumor and had always received not only good value for the hard-earned money she earned taking in mending at home which as the single mother of two was all she could do, even though she’d been trained as a legal secretary over five years of night school during the time she was nursing her blind mother through her lengthy terminal illness, not just value and gas but always cheerful and courteous service from the gals at the counter, until — here a shudder that brought the manager, still holding the remains of a Little Debbie product in his left hand, halfway around the desk to comfort her until he saw the two-inch mess on her left lapel, which was the result of several Q-Tipless days and near-sneeze feeling and was indeed a mucal clot of sheer clock-stopping horror — until today just now, just, she didn’t know how to say this — her strongest impulse had just been to drive half-blind with tears home to throw the coat that had cost months of going without to buy so she could take her two babies to church in something they didn’t have to feel ashamed to be with into the low-income housing development’s dumpster and spend the rest of the day praying God to help her make some sense out of the senseless violation she’d just had happen and to avoid forever thereafter this QWIK ’N’ EZ out of degradation and horror but no, she’d always had such good value and service at this establishment that she felt it almost her duty, however embarrassing and degrading to account, to tell him what the employee behind the cash register had done, even though it made no sense, to her least of all, who certainly looked normal and even friendly and to whom she’d tried to be pleasant and had done nothing more than try to pay for the items she’d elected to buy here, who had, while she’d reached for her change and while looking her steadily in the eye had, had, with the other hand put her finger up her nose and then reached out and… and… here giving way completely to sobs and a kind of high-pitched keening sound and looking down at the lapel of a coat she gave the impression of somehow trying to back away from in horror as if the only reason she hadn’t already taken off the green-dolloped coat was that she couldn’t bear to take it off, feeling the clonic blinks upon the wad to note even the thread of red blood that made it more ghastly, then turning to stagger out as if too upset to continue or press for redress, lurching out until the transistor’s song of whiskey and loss had receded and she was back in the bleached light of the store itself, the sound of her heels in the aisle and lot rapid and satisfying as the counter woman’s wave and farewell-till-next-time receded unacknowledged and the manager stood there working his way from the shock to outrage and the boys silent and docile as gargoyles in the back even as she leapt into the car and all but peeled out, in case the manager had made it out front yet which she doubted, fishtailing onto the Frontage Road with such hysteric force that one dog was thrown into another, steadying herself with a right arm against the bag of bricks, half-humming the country tune’s refrain, coat defiled and already half off one shoulder, mailbox-bound.