Richard Lange - Dead Boys - Stories

He says, “You late, Jim. What I gonna do with you?”

“I don’t know, boss. Shanghai me and sell me into white slavery?”

Mr. Ho spits out the coffee he’s drinking, he laughs so hard. He shakes my hand and welcomes me aboard and presents me with my very own time card. The three checkstands are manned by glum Chinese clerks in red aprons and bow ties — Mr. Ho’s sons and daughters — and during a quick tour of the store Jim introduces me to the butcher — Mr. Ho’s brother — and the produce man — Mr. Ho’s nephew. The way it’s going to work is, Jim and I will take turns walking the aisles for half an hour at a time, on the lookout for cereal swipers and Beanee Weenee thieves. The guy who isn’t making the rounds will stand beside Mr. Ho’s desk and cover the front of the store. Jim suggests that I go out first, to learn the lay of the land and such. I leave him and Mr. Ho talking about Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Ho loves Rush.

Because of the rain, customers are scarce. Whenever I pass any in the course of my patrol, I nod without smiling, friendly but stern. It’s families mostly, and none of them seem like they’re here to pull off the Great Kraft Dinner Heist, so after my third circuit I relax a bit, get into playing name that tune with the Muzak. Pig snouts are on special, seventy-nine cents a pound, mountains of them on display behind the greasy glass of the meat counter. Also pig feet, pig ears, and curly little pig tails oozing watery pink blood that pools in the corners of the trays. A fly that’s succumbed to the cold lies belly-up on the hamburger. I point it out to Mr. Ho’s brother. He reaches into the case, grabs the bug, and pretends to pop it into his mouth. Then he offers it to me.

“No thanks,” I say, and we’re both startled when the fly suddenly twitches back to life and zooms up to bounce against the jittery fluorescent tubes mounted on the ceiling.

Mr. Ho’s brother laughs and says, “Jesus fly. Easter fly.”

Two carts can’t pass in the narrow aisles without one pulling over. The glass in the doors of the frozen food cases is cracked, and the milk is warm. There’s a single brand of mustard on the shelf, two of toilet paper, and something somewhere really fucking stinks. Dented cans, stripped of their labels, are stacked under a sign, YOUR CHOICE 5 °CENTS. I pick one up and shake it. Whatever’s inside squishes back and forth. My first official act as a Special Officer is to tell a little boy to stop running. His dad grabs him by the arm and thumps his head. Over the kid’s sobs, he asks where the beer is.

Then Jim and I trade places. Hands clasped behind my back, chest puffed, I try to compensate for my baggy uniform with a hawkish demeanor as I stand beside Mr. Ho’s desk. When he asks me to carry a round of change to one of the registers, I practically march there, and I know I’m in trouble, that this job isn’t going to last any longer than the others, because I almost burst out laughing at myself. After a while Mr. Ho starts in with the kind of questions only an idiot or an asshole asks someone in my position.

“Jim say you went to college?”

“Once upon a time.”

“So what you study?”

“English.” I designed my own major, actually, a scramble of cinema, literature, and anthropology that culminated in a multimedia senior thesis exploring Charles Manson’s influence on popular culture, but I’ve been lying about it since the day after graduation.

“English!” Mr. Ho clucks his tongue and shakes his head. “Oh, man, that no good. What you gonna be, a teacher? You see my kids.” He sweeps his arm over the checkers, one of whom is absentmindedly picking at a patch of acne on his face, then smelling his fingers. “Business, chemistry, business. They gonna be rich when they finish school.”

Scarlett overhears this. Her mouth tightens, and her eyebrows collide over her nose. She rams a shopping cart into Mr. Ho’s desk and flips him off through the Plexiglas.

“Hey,” he says. “You that girl in that movie.”

She ignores him, throwing her arms around my neck to pull me down for a kiss.

“Don’t you get a coffee break or something like that?” she asks.

“Go, go,” says Mr. Ho. “Take five.”

What can I do? She’s come all this way.

Scarlett wants me to quit working and move in with her, and loves me because I won’t. She brags to her friends about my shitty jobs, tells them I’m a genius, and compared to the pretty-boy wake-and-bakers she usually dates, I guess I am. Hermann Hesse was her idol when I met her. Steppenwolf, blah, blah, Siddhartha . I turned her on to Kerouac and Bukowski, stuff I’d long since gotten over, but that I knew she’d fall for. The problem is that now I have to accompany her and her annoying friends to the worst skid row dives, and we always end up fucking in some piss-smelling alley or cheap motel room with bars on the windows, which bores me to death, because I already played the same part for too many USC sorority girls way back when.

As I’m showing her around the store, she takes my hand and slides it up the back of her leg, up under her dress, to let me know she’s not wearing any panties. It’s the saddest thing that’s happened to me in a while. She thinks she’s the first woman to ever pull this one on me, and I wish she was, I really do. The impossibility of us almost kills me, but I haul up the proper response. I moan low in my throat and cup her ass cheeks, which, to be honest, are somewhat larger and less firm than they appear on the screen, and then I lift her onto a shelf, where we grind away, boxes of laundry detergent toppling to the floor around us.

On my third patrol of the evening, I’m reading a recipe for shepherd’s pie on the back of a box of instant mashed potatoes. A skinny black woman wearing four or five sweaters shuffles past in slippers that used to be pink and fluffy but now resemble dirty drowned kittens. She takes a can of tuna from the shelf and drops it into the big purse she’s carrying, and when I crane my neck, I see bologna in there, too, and tampons. With me following close enough to touch her, she continues down the aisle to the deli case, where she adds some cheese and a pack of hot dogs.

“Still raining?” I ask, making sure my badge is visible.

She squints at me like I’m someone she can’t quite place, then turns and walks away. Duty-bound, I jog to the front of the store to alert Jim, and we find her in the produce section. Jim crouches behind a tortilla chip display and hisses for me to join him. Instead I walk over and stand next to the woman as she tosses a few mushy bananas into her purse.

“How’s life on Mars?” I ask, loud enough that Jim can hear. “I take it the invasion is proceeding according to plan.”

She doesn’t even react this time, just wanders off to get some carrots. Jim’s waiting for me with his arms crossed. All his Buddha-boy cool disappears as he lectures me about protocol and arrest procedures and blowing the bust.

“It’s a question of professionalism,” he says.

We used to call him Ping Pong because of his balls, but never to his face. I shrug and say fuck it.

“You see,” he says, disgusted.

“What?”

“I’m trying to help you.”

He knows how broke I am. He knows he’s got me over a barrel.

“Okay,” I say. “Ten-four, good buddy.” Ping Pong. Motherfucker.

We go up front to wait for the woman to make her next move. A few minutes later she steps over the chain blocking off a checkstand that’s been shut down for the night and scuffs past us, hugging a box of Cocoa Puffs. Everybody’s watching her — Mr. Ho, his kids, all the box boys — but it isn’t shoplifting until she’s actually out the door. When she steps over the threshold, we’re on her.