Mark Costello - Big If

“And you stole me off to Maryland just to hurt him back.”

“Is that what he says?”

“No, that’s what Brandy says.”

“Who the hell is Brandy?”

“She’s his fiancée. She’s the coolest lady in the universe. She does traditional African massage technique at her tanning salon in West Hollywood. They’ve been together almost seven months now.”

So this was the final blow. Brandy.

Tevon found his stance again. “Come on, put the token in.”

There were four major supermarkets in Gretchen’s town, assuming that her town was Seat Pleasant and not some crooked gerrymander. There were other minor supermarkets and a million minimarts, but only four with everything she ever needed, whole departments for meat, booze, frozen foods, toys, pets, greeting cards. She pushed the cart along. They were somewhere in the coffee, tea, and powdered cocoas. Tevon was behind her, tarrying and loitering and up to no good, still in his full replica Oriole uniform and his pumped-up high-tops.

She remembered loving shopping with her son when Maryland was new and he was small. He would ride in the seat part of the cart, facing her, kicking her, nibbling a cheese-and-peanut-butter cracker, the brown-and-orange kind. She always saved the torn-open package so that they could scan it at the checkout counter. But now he ran around the place, ashamed to be with Moms, and she shopped alone. She saw him down the aisle with a Ho-Ho and no package.

“Tevon! How are they supposed to scan it, man? Get your buttside over here this minute.”

He waited almost the full minute, testing her raw nerves, then came ambling up the aisle.

She said, “Tell me what you ate so I can pay for it.”

He said, “Ho-Ho.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. Just Ho-Ho.”

“I saw you with Cap’n Crunch in the meat department.”

“That was from the sample table. They’re giving them trial-size boxes away free. They’re doing a blind taste test.”

“Against what?”

“Um.”

“See, you’re lying, Tevon Williams. They can’t test anything against Cap’n Crunch. There’s nothing even similar to Cap’n Crunch.”

“That’s not true, there’s Kix.”

“Kix? We’ll see about that.”

Gretchen found the manager, a Sikh in a bow tie. She asked him if there were any blind Cap’n Crunch taste tests scheduled. He consulted a printout and said there were no taste tests of any type scheduled until Wednesday afternoon.

Gretchen pushed the cart with one hand, pulling Tevon with the other.

She said, “If you eat things, son, and don’t save the packages, they can’t scan them when we leave. That means I can’t pay and that’s as good as stealing. Now tell me what you ate.”

“I told you, Ho-Ho. The Cap’n Crunch was free.”

“That’s it — no computer for a month.”

“I’ll wait until you leave. I’ll wait until the minute that you’re gone.”

“I’ll tear it out of the wall.”

“I’ll plug it in again.”

“I’ll lock it in the basement.”

“I’ll bust the basement door.”

“I’ll give your computer to the retarded people’s center.”

He was quiet after that, pondering his life with no computer. Then he said, “Chill out, Moms. It’s not stealing till we leave.”

They went to the checkout when the cart was full. The lady scanned the Slim-Fast canisters, the tomatoes, the carrots, and the greens, the frozen dinners, the chicken parts, the cans of soup, the bread, the milk, the juice, the cereals and tuna fish. The lady totaled it.

Gretchen said to Tevon, “Tell her what you ate.”

He said, “Ho-Ho.”

The lady waited.

Gretchen said, “What else?”

“Nothing. Only Ho-Ho.”

“Please don’t be a liar on me, son. It kills me when you act like no one raised you.”

She was begging. The other people in the line looked at her with pity and impatience, here’s another woman who can’t control her kid. Tevon saw the people pitying his mom. Pride rose up inside him. They had no right to pity her.

“Cap’n Crunch,” he said.

The lady rang it up.

He said, “Nutter Butter, little bag of smokehouse almonds, single-serving Pringles.”

“You must be thirsty,” said the woman.

“Coca-Cola Classic. I left the bottle in the paperback best-sellers. You’ll find it, aisle ninety-one.”

The lady gave him credit, five cents for the return.

The thing she couldn’t figure out,driving to the house, was how it all began. Why did her son go searching for himself in cyberspace? At one level, it was natural, of course — the curiosity, and Gretchen knew that she was to blame for not taking the necessary preemptive steps (she was pretty sure that you could disable the databases on a kid’s account; she’d have to call AOL and ask them). So, yes, it was bound to happen sometime, but why did it happen now?

Tev was eating pizza in his lap, a gooey slice from Papa Gino’s at the mall, a little slice-sized box/plate in his lap catching crumbs and drops of orange grease. She glanced at him, going down the P.G. Highway. She thought of what her mother had said that morning, how Tev had seen her on TV moving through a crowd. She thought about it for a mile and two stoplights, remembering the wet snow at the airport in Des Moines, the VP moving down the ropes, Gretchen and Vi Asplund moving with him, scanning hands and scanning hands, the blur of thumbs and palms, looking for the muzzle of a pistol coming up, or conceivably a knife or homemade grenade, or anything metallic they could not identify as not a pistol/knife/grenade, or a fist coming up holding anything they couldn’t immediately see. She had the Dome in her ear when she worked a crowd, the traffic back and forth, the snipers in concealment, the fast extraction team, aircrews on the gunships overhead.

“Tevon, did you see me on TV?”

“I always see you,” Tevon said. “You look pretty scared out there. My friends say you look bored, but I know it’s scared.”

Gretchen drove in silence. Someday she would tell him all about it, how she felt out there, hanging on the VP’s flank, deep in what the agents called vacant mode, a stone defensive Zen, the mind both clean and empty except for what it sees. People leaning out, straining, almost falling over ropes. They touched his hand and took his hand, falling back to reestablish balance, and the mass effect of these human movements was to slow the VP, pull him closer, hands now up his arms and around his neck, dangerous, so dangerous. Every crowd sucked them in, a blind hydraulic suck. Gretchen’s job, straddling his leg, her shoulder to the crowd, was to counteract the suck, to drive and guide him through her pelvis to his thigh, to force him down the ropes, and yes it was a bit like giving birth, the push against the suck, and yes it made her think of Tevon and the night she forced him into light, pop and burst, the openness, pain hallucination, and no man to help her there, no so-called man to help. It was brutal in that way, saving the VP. Later, on the plane, she would cramp up from the pushing. She’d be talking to some colonel, he’d be talking flight plans and MAC-hops and gunship-tasking, his lips moving, and she would be so cramped up inside that she couldn’t listen to the moving lips. She’d sign off on whatever this fool wanted, then hurry to the nearest empty head, slide the latch and lock the door and sit on the pot, her skirt hiked up, fat hands between fat legs, and massage herself through scratchy pantyhose until her knots went slack and she could think again. She’d splash her face and try to picture Tevon growing up in Maryland, growing up in peace, growing up with soccer balls and roller blades and shoot-’em-up computer games and every other gift she could think of and afford. Life in vacant mode — someday she would tell him all about it.