Adam Johnson - Emporium

Bill shrugs his shoulders, lights a menthol, and pops in Viva Las Vegas , as if Elvis can soothe her anymore, as if Elvis wasn’t 187,000 miles away.

Jane begins to toy with the register, hitting no sale, no sale, a sound she knows can wound him. But Bill’s busy doing “R&D,” as he calls it. First he thought bulletproof teen wear would save the business, and he made Ruthie wear a “training” vest to school for two years to drum up business. Now she won’t take the vest off for her life.

His ongoing obsession is a bulletproof baby carrier, something he’s reworked twenty times, and if there’s anything that offends Jane more than the grandeur of his optimism, it’s the notion of wanting to make infants bulletproof, of fusing the two ideas into the same breath. The whole idea is fatally flawed, she knows as she teases the few remaining twenties in the register. It’s not what’s out there you need to look out for, but what’s closer, what’s making your cereal crackle, what’s tinkering in the garage, or crashing all around like unseen cars.

Bill tugs the straps of his Kevlar carrier, trying to simulate every force that could come between a mother and child. Then he begins stuffing the carrier with videotapes — Clint Eastwood, Annette Funicello, Benji — until, he seems to decide, the carrier takes on the mass and weight of a small person, and he is off on tonight’s R&D, running laps around the abandoned drive-in to gauge the carrier’s give and take, its ability to cradle a baby at full speed.

Now that he is gone, Jane unfastens the chest-crushing vest, and it smolders off her with all that body heat. She pinches the sticky shirt from her side, runs her hand underneath, over creases in the skin she knows are red. She wakes up some nights, thinking the oven has been left on. She can feel the coils glowing downstairs, but she won’t go check, she won’t give it that. Now she pulls the twenties, tens, and fives from the till, for safety’s sake, she thinks, so she can feel the lightweight cash in her pocket.

Wandering, she strolls along the grit-worn sidewalk, stares at stars through holes in the Kmart awning. This way it all looks black up there, the occasional star the rarity. There are bullet holes in the masonry between her and the old Godfather’s, and she stops to twist her pinkie in the lead-traced pocks. Mr. Ortiz, the Filipino who owns the liquor store, has started keeping a gun in his register, she’s sure. She hasn’t seen it, but there’s a weight in the cash drawer that nearly pulls the register off the counter when he makes a sale.

There was a day when she was scared of guns, when the vest store seemed like the right idea, a public service even. Jesus, they had really said that to each other. Though she has never touched a gun, she’s confident now she could heft one pretty handily, squeeze off a few rounds, rest it warm against her cheek and smell the breech.

Where the masonry meets glass, she thinks she gets a glimpse of him reflected out there, an aberration in the dark lot. Behind her, she’s sure it’s his arms glinting, racing nearly invisible in a sheen of black Kevlar. But she does not turn to be sure.

At the pizza joint, she sees through the window her daughter stretched across the empty bartop, drafting two beers into Styrofoam cups. Ruthie’s hair is still wet from JV swim, and she wears loose-hanging jeans over her red Speedo. Now she’s got her trauma plate pulled out and is using it as a lipstick mirror, drinking between applications. This is something Jane has never before seen, Ruthie so loose with her trauma plate, and this makes Jane stop outside and stare.

There is a boy, one of those big Ortiz kids it looks like, and he and Ruthie are drinking hard and fast together. Jane looks at them for some time through the soap paint on the window, an interstellar pizza scene. Ruthie laughs, they drink, something is said to her, and she punches him hard. He thumps her back, there, in the chest, and then she’s holding him again, cupping his chin in the open throat of her palms, the Vulcan oven glowing behind them. She holds him, they dance three slow steps, he spins her. They drink, they laugh, they box each other’s ears, they drink again, laughing till fine mists of beer shoot pink from their mouths in the neon light.

This is a careless spirit Jane has forgotten. As she sees them whisper, she remembers a time before Bill, and tries to read her daughter’s lips. Ruthie rubs her forehead against the jut of this boy’s cheekbone, whispering, and Jane almost thinks she can make it out— let’s make a break for Texas, her daughter might be saying, and I want my Monte Carlo back, Jane thinks. She imagines a car she will never see again, enters it under maroon T-tops, feels the rocking slosh of dual fuel tanks, smells the leather, hears the spark plugs crackle to life, and swivels in custom seats to see it all disappear behind her.

Later, after she has dropped Ruthie off at home, Jane steers the Caprice the long way back to the shop, where she will wait out the last hour with Bill before closing. He will want to make love tonight, she knows — Westerns always do that to him, especially The Treasure of Sierra Madre —and that’s okay with her. But there’s one stop she needs to make.

She slowly eases past the Body Armor Emporium, and just getting caught in its gallery lights is enough to draw her in. She’s been here before, enough times it would kill Bill to know. Inside, the lights are of the brightest variety, the walls white, expansive, always that smell like aspirin coming off the rows and rows of black nylon vests. Jane could care less about every vest in the world, but she runs her fingers down whole groves of them because unlike her husband, she feels safe in the arms of the enemy.

There is a tall man, older, with close-cropped gray hair and no-fooling shoulders he seems almost embarrassed of — a by-product of the joy of exertion — and he beckons her into the fitting mirrors where she sees herself in satellite view, from three different angles. For a moment, there are no blind spots and she is at ease. This man takes her measurements quietly, as he has done many times before — humming and storing numbers in his head — the little green tape zipping under his thumbnail as he circles the wings of her pelvis and cliff dives down to her pant cuffs. He is calm, confident, placing his hand warm on her sternum to demonstrate where the trama plate will be. She closes her eyes, remembering a time when she still believed, feels his fingers measuring over, under the cups of her breasts — Jane inhaling — for the purchase she will never make.

III

Let’s say you’re seventeen. Your mom checked out a while ago. Some nights she just disappears, the Caprice peeling out in front of the family rental store, and maybe you’ll see her near morning, standing out there in the parking lot, buzzed, taking potshots at the giant drive-in screens two miles away.

Your old man’s a little whacked-out too. Let’s say you’re crashed out with Hector, both of you sleeping in the Home Improvement section of Kmart, his hand over the nylon vest he again tried to remove tonight, and even though you quit the team, you’re dreaming you’re swimming the butterfly. Stroke stroke, dig dig, Mr. Halverson is yelling in the dream but you can go no faster. Hector is swimming under you, upside-down, telling you use your back, your chest, put your shoulders into it, but it is useless because these are the parts of you that are always, always off limits.

So you’re sleeping, 3:00 A.M. say, when your dad rents a vest to some punk who uses it to rob the Filipino drug store two doors down, and after, Mr. Ortiz, Hector’s dad, stands waving his Colt.45 and saying he’s going to put a hole in your old man big as a mantel clock. And there is your father, facing him in a vast black parking lot, wearing an Israeli alz-hesjhad forty-eight-layer combat field vest and he’s shouting come on, come on and get some. You watch this scene with Hector from the bankrupt pizza place, both of you curious if his dad will shoot your dad, and Hector tells you he’s heard there’s a smell when the hot bullet melts the nylon on its way toward Kevlar. Like a cross between Tanqueray gin and burning hair, he says, a green-black gum. You remember that Canis Major was wheeling overhead that night.