Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

“You know why you don’t get ahead?” I said to him. “It’s because you don’t know how to follow orders.”

“Awwwwww,” Zlottie said. “That’s not nice.” But before I could explain to her what kind of person Joey Joey was, and what kind of person I was, and how he never listened, and how I was a hard worker, something like six customers came charging through the front door and our moment was lost forever. She didn’t even say goodbye.

On the drive home, I gave Joey Joey fifteen dollars. He took some cash out of his pocket, which he still carried in a roll like the old days, and which looked to be about twenty-five dollars, and he carefully folded my fifteen dollars into it. I waited for him to say thank you.

After a while, he said, “You know that hair isn’t real.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“The Jewgirl,” he said, “she’s wearing a wig.”

We were coming over the bridge now, it was night and the river was illuminated by the factories. We’d gone fishing down in that river, this is years ago, me, Joey Joey, Chip. Before the factories opened back up, the river had fish. For five hours we fished, but we didn’t catch a thing. It wasn’t until there was about thirty minutes of daylight left that Chip’s line drew taut. “I got something!” he screamed. The line got so tight that we had to help him hang on. Fishermen came and gave us advice. “It’s going to be seaweed,” they guessed. “It’s going to be a tire.” No, it was a turtle hanging from the end of the line, spinning in the air like a top, waving its legs. Chip took it home and kept it as a pet, named it Zero and painted its shell purple. It lived six years, and when it died we went back down to the river to bury it, but by then the factories had opened and you couldn’t get within five hundred feet of the shore.

“I’m not thinking about any Jewgirl,” I said.

But it wasn’t a week later that I took three more boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet.

I found Joey Joey in the break room with his feet up.

“I’m going to need your help with something,” I said.

“You got it, sarge!”

At six o’clock, the cashiers called out on cue, “See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough.”

I walked through the oncoming surge of customers and straight into a group of college students who make it a point to come by every Friday evening to cause problems. They were walking around in a circle, twenty or so, looking sentimental and holding signs with a long list of goals for Walmart, which, if ever achieved, would cost me my job. I had to walk through them like a gauntlet. I didn’t appreciate that. One of the guys held out a flyer.

“If you want respect, give respect,” I said.

He must have misunderstood my allegiance, because he laughed. “You got that right, bro.”

“I ain’t your bro,” I said.

Now he was confused and conferred with the others. I passed through them.

“Overrated businessman,” one of the girls yelled after me, but the comment had not been uttered with consensus. I could hear them begin to argue.

“We’re all bros,” half of them said.

“No, we’re not,” the other half countered.

No, yes, no.

Back by the dumpsters, I sat in my car. I’d just worked eleven hours and the exhaustion came over me like a wave. Slowly I changed out of my white shirt and into a new blue one from a three-pack I’d bought that morning. I wanted Zlottie to see me in something other than a white shirt when I asked her out. Just like I wanted to see her in something other than a black skirt. Looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I was surprised to find a much younger version of myself looking back, a self from when I was an associate and wore a blue shirt almost the same color as the one I had on now. My younger version was good-looking and optimistic, and he walked briskly up and down the aisles looking for the assistant manager to tell him what it was he should do next.

“Mr. McDonough,” I addressed myself in the reflection of the rearview mirror, “what do you want me to do next?”

“This is what you do next, Nick,” myself answered, “you take these three boxes off the truck and then you hide them in the mop closet and then you go find Joey Joey …”

I woke to the sound of Joey Joey tapping on the window. His pale face was an inch from mine, separated only by the glass, like I was back visiting him in jail, except this time his mouth was wide with mirth. I rolled down the window.

“You were drooling, Nick,” he said. He let out a howl. Sure enough, there was a wet stain on my blue shirt.

“Open the dumpster, jackass,” I commanded. I was in no mood.

The boxes were large and hard to fit in the trunk. Since he’d blown my moment last time with Zlottie, I handed him five dollars and told him I’d see him tomorrow.

“I don’t mind coming,” he said. I left him standing there by the dumpster, his blue shirt half-untucked.

I drove fast and I took the bridge and I practiced what I would say. I would try to be casual, but also charming, and I would lean on the counter with my elbows as if it were no big deal to say, “I’ve got Tuesday off, Zlottie, and I was wondering …”

“I’ve got the Thursday after next off, Zlottie …”

“I’ve got a Sunday at the end of the month …”

In less than twenty minutes I was coming around the bend into Winchester Parks. This time I didn’t linger at the stop sign but drove straight to the front of the store and parked. Once there, I procrastinated badly. I checked my email twice. I checked my face and my blue shirt. I checked my teeth. From the glove compartment, I took out three Altoids, put them in my mouth, and chewed them like candy. I checked my email again. Something had arrived, but it was from an unfamiliar address with a distressing subject line that read, “Not dead yet,” and which I thought must be spam until I opened it and saw that it was a message from Chip.

“Dear Nick,” he wrote, “I finally got my personal pfc. military account set up. They sure do have every thing down here.…” He went on to list the Internet café where he was writing from at that very moment, some fast-food places, and some other necessary hometown conveniences including a shoeshine stand, even though he’d never used a shoeshine stand in his life. He said things weren’t so bad overall. It was boring mostly. More boring than he thought it would be. It was colder too. He was hoping for some new gloves to come through. And some boots, size fourteen. Other than that, everything was fine. He had no real complaints. It was like being in the Boy Scouts, he said. He was hoping to see a little action soon so he could kick some ass and break up the monotony, but he wasn’t counting on it. He told me not to believe what I was hearing on the news. He said everything was exaggerated. He said it was all about advertising. In closing, he wanted to know how I was.

There was a time difference of some twelve hours, whether forward or backward I couldn’t tell, but as far as I could see, he’d sent the message a few minutes earlier. Hoping that I might have a chance to catch him before he logged out, I quickly wrote,

Does your army base have a Kmart?

Your friend,

Nick

Before I could click send, however, I had a second thought that this might come across more mean-spirited than witty, so I backspaced over it.

In its place, I composed something delicate and thoughtful, how at the very moment I was sitting in Winchester Parks with three boxes of Walmart merchandise in my trunk about to ask Mr. Bildman’s daughter out on a date, he, Chip, was sitting in an Internet café on the other side of the world. “By the way,” I asked, “were you being up-front on how much Mr. Bildman was paying you for the boxes?”