My boss, name of Ross Hayden, really liked the way I handled his business. When the shipping trucks were three days late and our entire supply of white cement ran out, I kept everything in order. At closing time, just as the clock whistle began to blow, the trucks rolled into the parking lot and cruised right through the gate, almost hitting one of the part-time guys trying to close the chain-link doors. The Kenmore trucks sat in the lot with their lights beaming into the storeroom and Ross ran around shouting at them. “Three days you’re late, and I’ve got all my guys already going home. What in the hell am I supposed to do?”
“It’s all right, boss; I can handle it. I’ll make sure we have things where we need them.” I rattled the keys to the warehouse. “You go home and get dinner. This is handled. When you come back tomorrow, everything will be just fine.” After he left, I worked for two hours getting the flats of cement into the warehouse. I cut the shipping wire and hauled the jangling strips of metal to the trash. In the morning, when Ross and the other guys came in, they just looked at the stuff I had done on my own time and shook their heads.
I could get a customer to do anything. For instance, this joker pulled up in a pickup truck that he must have modified himself; the thing supported a plywood house built on the back, painted barn red with white trim. I could tell he would be trouble as soon as he dropped out of the truck and slammed his door. He hitched his belly over his belt buckle, a brass-plated disc that read “The Potholes 1977,” and threw open the barn doors on the back of his pickup truck, letting out some sort of music with accordions and horns. Lumber that the warehouse had discontinued months ago filled the truck bed. “I want to make a return,” he said.
“Sorry, sir,” I said, “but we can’t take back this merchandise, as it has been discontinued.” I saved the man the trouble of closing his barn doors and closed them myself.
He said, “I have my receipt.” He shook it in front of my face so fast I couldn’t tell whether it was a piece of paper or a pom-pom.
“If you would read our return policy, you’d see we won’t take back anything that has been discontinued. Your merchandise has been discontinued. Sorry.” The man rolled the paper up into his fist. He flung open one of the barn doors. Inside I could see shelves with old paint cans and tools and gasoline drums just sitting there where they could explode if anything set them off. Before I could tell him what a moving disaster his barn was, the man turned back to me. He said, “Go on, take them. I bought them here, and I’m going to return them here. You’re the guys who took my money.”
At this point, Ross appeared on the scene. He said in his silky, I-am-the-manager-and-I’m-here-to-please-you-like-no-one-else-can voice, “Can I do something for you?”
“This guy,” Potholes said, “won’t take back my lumber even though I’ve got a receipt.”
Ross looked at the receipt and handed it back to Potholes. “Looks fine. Milton, help this man unload his lumber.”
“Sure,” I said. The man rolled his tongue around in his mouth as I flung open the barn door. I dropped the tailgate. I started to slide the sheets of mahogany plywood from the back. About halfway through, I palmed my pocketknife and scratched a gash on the first board, and then I did that with the rest of the sheets. I kept my body over the wood as I worked. On one hand, I don’t know exactly why I did this. On the other hand, it did exactly what I wanted. Potholes had to keep his lumber and we didn’t have to unload it.
Potholes stood behind me. “What’s taking you so long?” he said. “They heavy?”
“I just saw something in here, lard-ass.” That’s when he looked at me. He began to assess me. Before that, I had been some sort of flunky, but now who I actually was dropped in front of him like one of those character cards in Dick Tracy. He saw that the weight of these pieces of wood was nothing for arms like mine. He could see that I could swing his fat guts over my shoulder by his ankles and bash his head off against the side of his barn. His head would snap off his body like a Ken doll’s. I pulled the panel out. “It’s got a two-foot scratch. How are we supposed to take these back?”
“I don’t know,” Potholes said.
“We won’t,” I said.
I slid his outdated, gaudy lumber back into his truck. I slammed the doors as he left. As he drove off he didn’t burn rubber or anything.
Ross wanted to know where the guy was going. I shook my head. “That lumber was discontinued. But you knew that.”
“Sure,” Ross said. “Sure.” He looked at me, checking my head, my shoes, everything. “Your shirt needs to be untucked,” he said. “And get your hands dirty, you’re supposed to be working around here.” He watched as I pulled my neatly tucked shirt out of my Levi’s.
I’ve taken control of my life—not that it was a wreck, but I grew up with parents who were always on the move. I slept in so many different rooms and places as a child that I needed a certain afghan to fall asleep. It had a motif of the Pony Express on it. I could wrap myself in this blanket anywhere, and suddenly I would be in my room. In school I was the new kid and, many times, the kids in my classes didn’t know my name too well. They didn’t even really see me. Now people can’t help but notice me. I work out daily. I run around a track three times a week. I read the best sellers.
Ross never saw me. Even a dickheaded customer like Potholes saw me. Even women who didn’t know me saw me; at least the ones who were unimportant to me. Sometimes, when I went out drinking after work with a few of my friends from shipping, a woman’s eyes, just beginning to gloss, swept across the bar and I knew she really saw me. She noticed the way my shoulders fed into my arms, the extension of my triceps—and if she was familiar with bodybuilding, familiar with power, she couldn’t help but notice that the arms under my T-shirt were legit.
The smoke choked me in those places. One time, my friends and I sat around a small table. We sort of stood while we leaned against these too-tall stools. We couldn’t even see to the next table through the blue haze of cigarette smoke. I caught glimpses, through the gradual breaks in the mist, of the next table; several women had filled the tabletop and the ledge behind them with empty glasses. The glasses reminded me of the milky white glass figurines my grandmother collected in her bedroom, so many hoarded throughout her life that when she finally died we couldn’t give the things away; instead we rolled them in toilet paper and left them in a cardboard box in the attic of the house she had been renting. These women had all the fancy glasses, the kind that looked like upside-down bells, the tall, skinny kind that opened toward the top like stretched flowers. It took me awhile to get all this through the rolling clouds of smoke. I slapped one of my buddies on the arm. He couldn’t hear me over the noise of the music, the bartender shouting Sour up!, and the cocktail waitress careening through the small islands of tables, beer foam spilling down her arms as she screamed Excuse me! ’Scuse me! My buddy grabbed my arm and I half-pulled him out of the chair for trying to muscle me. He tipped his head at the next table. “Hos!” he shouted, but in the racket it sounded like a whisper.
I walked by the table with the women, checking out their black skirts, bulky gold necklaces, earrings—visible through the murk of smoke like fishing lures in muddy water—and halos of hair lifted unnaturally from their scalps with sprays, mousses, and gels. Their hair caught the light like distant moons. I caught one of them looking at me, examining me with the standard head-to-toe route. She made stops, I knew, at my jawline, at my shoulders, and at my midsection. Slight love handles sat just above my belt line; actually, as handles go, they weren’t big. Sometimes when I’d work out I thought I should just cut the crap and work them out. Inevitably it occurred to me—why the fuck bother? This woman, for instance, stopped at the sag of my flesh-filled shirt and I knew what she thought; she believed I was a generous guy. I had a soft spot, maybe a little too visible, but something she was going to catch.
I took a swing around the bar and walked back to the island of women. The one looked at me again. When I sat down at the table my buddy shouted into my ear. “Well? What’s the action?”
“Shit,” I said, “all shit.” I grabbed a cocktailer who stumbled by our table and ordered a Mai-Tai for the woman who had scoped me out. Before the cocktailer turned away, I changed the order to a White Russian; I decided to make her a White Russian kind of woman.
Ten minutes later, the cocktailer brushed by our table and shouted to me, “She says come by her table.”
I sat next to the woman and I saw she was somewhere in her twenties. Her eyes had starter wrinkles and her makeup—too much, too neat—made her look like one of those dolls with a hard face whose eyes follow you across toy stores. Her lips glowed bright red. They ended abruptly in the white polish of her skin. She didn’t have a single exposed mole. I couldn’t see her body. I figured I would find out. I said some things that made her laugh while I checked her out. Her friends had their backs to us, three boxy shadows with glowing heads of hair.
“We should go outside to talk better.” I said this and gestured toward the walls to make her understand.
She nodded and leaned into her friends. She stood and I saw her body. Nothing bad or exciting, the kind of body you’d expect on someone who sat behind a desk all day.
I dropped some cash with my buddy; then the woman and I walked outside to the covered sidewalk. Wet cars filled the parking lot. Beyond the lot I saw the marquee for the movies, the letters not quite visible through the rain. She picked me because of my love handles. She knew I wouldn’t be put off when I pulled off her bra and her tits sagged into the folds of her stomach. She could loosen up a little around a guy like me. We laughed on the way to my apartment. She laughed extremely weird, it sounded like one of those hobo musicians playing a wood saw. But I didn’t care because her face was so tidy that I didn’t have to think about the way she would look when we banged. I already knew.
I was seeing a woman. I saw her twice a week. I didn’t know her name. But I called her Betsy. I’d thought about how sex would be with Betsy. First of all, Betsy was not just a stranger. Second of all, I’d thought about doing things with Betsy, like going to Seattle and walking around the Pike Place Market, me buying her some cherries or something and her sitting on the terrace that overlooks Puget Sound, the cold, salty wind rushing over our faces. Betsy and I had a built-in history. She was the only girl who was any good-looking who walked at the track. I always said, “Hey, Betsy,” when she passed me. I knew she must’ve liked me because every time I saw her at the track she always faced me. This meant that she just happened to walk in such a way that we always looked into each other’s eyes. Something was going to happen. Me and her. I could feel it.
I depended on seeing her at the track. I needed a witness. People had to see me at the daily task of exercise so I would show up and accumulate my effort into the hard roll of my biceps, the cut tendons of my calves, my strength. Be seen: this was my sole instruction. At the track, I nodded at the same people every day, and at the gym I high-fived my buddies. These things, this expected routine, kept me going, and I acquired witnesses who acknowledged the control I had over my body and my life.
Besides Betsy, I always ran past an old couple leashed to their dog. I ran past a guy who wasn’t a weight lifter. His chest was shallow. His shoulders only looked buff because he swung his arms so goddamn hard as he ran around the track. Even with such a butt-ugly face and wimped-out torso, he still waved at Betsy every time he passed her.
I ran by her. Mr. Wimp and I ran in tandem around the track. Sometimes I started to gain on him. I followed the silky hang of his red athletic shorts as they swung back and forth. I moved toward him, legs pounding the cinder track, spitting red clods of dirt along the backs of my legs. I jogged next to him and whispered, “Don’t talk to my Betsy.” But he didn’t hear me because I spoke just under my breath, and the words came out like “huff huff huff don’t talk huff to my huff huff Betsy.” He didn’t. Keeping himself away from her as he left, he contained himself to a small wag of his hand, like an imitation of Queen Elizabeth visiting Washington, D.C.
Betsy smiled at me.
I knew what her footprints in the track looked like. After it rained the cinder was smoothed and I liked to show up at the track, the first man to make my mark. And then she showed up in her yellow Civic and I watched her feet leave a trail of size seven footprints.
After it rained, the wall of windows that used to be the cafeteria at Woodrow Wilson High School sparkled and reflected the length of the old track, the distant fence, and the closed-down cement factory across the street. Four hundred freakishly unbroken panes stretched over the wall. I liked to look at myself as I ran around the track. From being a distant figure on the far side of the loop, I would come to the unwashed panes and my image would grow; I floated across the glass, a gray, long-legged shadow, and finally I would turn my back to the wall of windows. I thought of cleaning Woodrow Wilson’s windows; I thought of buying fifteen or sixteen spray bottles of Windex and going at the windows, like one of those berserk warriors in Thor who were supposed to go to Valhalla after they slaughtered everything in their path. I would clean every window in my path, wiping, spraying, cleaning. But I realized that after I cleaned the windows, they would be clear. In the sunlight the windows would show the empty and dusty space behind them; they would show the green and faded tiles of the cafeteria under a layer of left-behind Styrofoam cups, aluminum cans, and school milk cartons. They wouldn’t reflect me. I used to sit in that room with my friends and even some girls when the school was new. It’s not that way now. I don’t like to think about the time that separates the two things—the me then and the me now.
Even so, I keep in touch with my little brother Dillon. He’s what I could’ve been like, if I hadn’t taken it on myself to learn things. I wouldn’t have considered dropping school when my mother asked me to leave. Anyway, things turned out pretty good. I have my work.
As a sixteen-year-old freshman at Wilson High I worked full- to part-time at a gas station fixing cars and trucks. I worked all night at a gas station on Pacific Highway South. I would go into the station with a six-pack of RC Cola and lie under the bellies of rundown Fords and go to town on them. The men I worked with always dressed in blue jumpsuits with so much grease accumulated in the fabric that when they sat down on the garage chair they left pools of oil. These guys always had lit cigarettes sticking out of their mouths. I joked with them that if they dropped a match they would burn like a junkyard tire fire. They would burn and burn and no matter what we did, spray them with the special chemical fire retardant in its fluorescent yellow fire extinguisher—no matter what—they would burn until they turned as brown and dark and boiled as the backside of a rusted-out Ford pickup truck.
“You’re a handsome guy,” my mother told me one night before I moved out for good, “and you work full-time. When you left the first time, I didn’t think I would see you for a while. I thought you were about to go out into the world and make room for yourself.”
“I did,” I said, “there’s just not room enough for me yet.”
“You’ve got a lot going for you, Milton,” she said. She took my hands and looked at me. We were both smoking Marlboros—her cigarettes. She smoked anything a man smoked. She had Camel wrappers all over the back of her crappy Ford that I usually spent my days off fixing. We didn’t say anything. We just sat looking at each other’s smoke swirl and then I looked outside at the parking lot of the apartment building she had moved into, at the Nova missing a headlight, at the Caprice Classic spray-painted black. After she left Dad, she had lived for a while at a place in Carnation along the Snoqualmie River. Now we lived here, close to her job at Ed’s #1 Diner on First Avenue South.
I had bought a Chevy—1972 Malibu, lime green. I planned on fixing it. Now I sat at the table with my mother and she told me I had to go. She summed up how well I could take care of myself when she finally added, “And you have a sweet auto.”
“What about your car? It ain’t sweet and it’s not auto—it needs me.” That crappy car needed more than me, it needed its own full-time, fully staffed garage. Fucking Ford.
“I can manage. Nathan can fix it if it breaks down.” Nathan was her boyfriend. He didn’t live here then, thank God, but I could maybe see why she wanted me gone. She wanted me out of the house so Nathan could move into her place and Dillon could move the hell out of the living room into my old bedroom. Without me, they could have people over and watch TV, play cards, whatever the fuck normal people did with their living room. All Dillon did of any use was read. My brother Dillon went to school and came home with nothing to do but watch TV and read from his schoolbooks. Now, when he shows up at my apartment, he always has a book in his hands, even though he’s well out of college. He gets paid less than me, which might account for him wanting to drink the beer I pay for.
“In a place of your own,” Mom said, “you can have anything you like. You can do anything you like. You’re the one who’s always making sure this place is vacuumed, cleaned, and spit-shined. I’m not here to do that. In your own place I won’t be there to screw it up.”
“Another reason I should stay—I fix your car and I clean up your house.”
“Nope. One—I don’t need the house cleaned up by you, because you throw all kinds of shit out—shit I’m saving. Two—the car is taken care of. Three—if you won’t take a hint, Mr. Milton, you’re old enough not to be living with your mother.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“You turn seventeen in four months.”
“Okay. I’m gone.” She thought she could take care of herself. I had taken care of her for seventeen years.
I left the gas station and her crappy apartment. I meant to call. I didn’t, though—out of sight, out of mind—and we didn’t talk. My perpetual excuse was work.
I had to keep them happy at work. Sometimes Ross would start firing people and anyone could go; even when one of my buddies who had worked in shipping with me ran half an hour late after a night of drinking, Ross fired him. Ross just looked at him. “Fired,” he said.
I kept things in good shape for him. I made certain I did that. I even went into sections I didn’t normally work. The nuts, bolts, and rivets section almost always needed ordering. Screws had specific widths, measured in millimeters separated into plainly marked bins. Anyone could see that this woman didn’t belong in the fastener section with her painted fingernails and her dress flapping up and down the aisles. She mixed the screws like she was preparing hors d’oeuvres by following the directions on the back of a box of Chex. She threw the 1.50s into the 2.0s. She mixed the Phillips-head screws with the straight-head screws. She screwed everything up.
I saw her reach into a bin and hold a handful of metal in her hand, walk halfway down the aisle, and then hold one of the screws up to her eyes like the magnification would mean something. She dropped the whole handful into a bin of nails.
I approached her. I tapped her on the shoulder and told her politely to leave. “Ma’am,” I said. “You’re going to have to leave.”
“Hello,” she said. “Do you work here? I can’t find a Phillips-head screw like this one.”
I held the screw up to my eye. The screw she handed me had been cross-threaded, a wreck. It looked like 1.5 mm, Phillips. “You’re looking for one item?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve just cost us about three hours of painstaking labor to re-sort all the screws you’ve just dropped in the bins. We don’t need your three cents worth of business, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Pardon it? Sure, I’ll pardon,” she said. She smiled at me. She strolled down the aisle and I started sorting. Four hours later, after I found that someone must have gone through every bin and mixed everything, Ross tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey,” I said.
“What’re you doing over here?”
“The screws are screwed,” I said.
“So I’ve been told,” he said. “You ever see this?” He handed me the trashed Phillips-head screw the woman had been looking for.
“No,” I said. “Looks like some kid has been playing construction man.” Ross could say nothing to that.
I pressed my fingers into the dusty red cinders of the old track while I stretched. Pansy Runner ran past me while I rolled my neck in circles. His butt jiggled under his nylon shorts and his shoulders rotated with his hips. I went through my routine twice before Betsy pulled up in her Honda. As I heard her car door slam, I started running around the track. “Hey, Betsy,” I said. Nothing. Nylon Butt waved and she said something to him. I heard him chuckling ahead of me, a sound like Dillon would make after a joke that he only understood on account of his going to college.
I passed Betsy again. Nothing. My toes tingled and the instep of my foot began to grow hot and blister under my tight shoelaces. I began to gain on Nylon Dick. I watched the triangle of his foot pull back. The roll of his calf jiggled up and then fell as his foot planted down. The foot flew back and then, as it started to plant, I kicked the heel in a straight point, the way I used to kick soccer balls. He fell. He rolled into the old football field where he lay still. I kept running. When I came back around to where he had fallen, Betsy was helping him to his feet and holding him up. She glanced up at me. I nodded. She didn’t do anything but look into Nylon Dick’s face. He drew his lips into a flat smile and they walked over to the parking lot together.
I kept running. On each pass I would stare at myself in the wall of windows and raise my eyebrows. Who knew he would fall? The pansy.
After work, Dillon called. “Hey, I’m coming over,” he said.
“What for?” I asked. I was doing my dishes. I had to run to the store to get a new vacuum cleaner belt because I had worn it out and had used the extra. “I’ve got plans,” I told Dillon. He sounded like he was on a pay phone. I could hear the sound of a motor running. Car doors slammed. People murmured things just beyond the mouthpiece.
“I’m already on my way over,” he said.
I started looking for things Dillon might see when he came over. I decided to stand at the door. He didn’t have to come in. The futon with the red comforter needed to be refolded across the back. The pressboard bookcases needed dusting. The carpet needed to be vacuumed.
When Dillon knocked, I stood in front of the door. “I have to come in,” he said as he pressed the door into my chest. “I’ve got to go,” he said.
“No,” I said. “The place is a sty.” I held the dust rag in my hand. I hadn’t finished.
“I’ll close my eyes,” Dillon said. “I’m your brother; you’ve got to let me in.”
“Close your eyes,” I said. I waited for him outside the bathroom, casually dusting the door’s molding. When Dillon saw me standing in the hallway with the rag, he said, “It’s okay. You’ve still got some toilet paper in there.” I shoved the rag into the coat closet and when I turned around I caught Dillon spiraling through my apartment. He fell across the futon, knocking the folded red comforter on the floor. I sat down on my sofa. “What’s going on?” I said.
“Work,” Dillon said, “work all day.”
He looked at me. I looked at him. “Let’s get some beer,” Dillon said.
We drove around after we picked up some chilled beer. We stopped just as it started to turn dark at a lake way out beyond Seattle, out toward the mountains, along miles and miles of tree-lined roads. At the park, we sat on the cold grass. The sky turned dark. Then Dillon said, “Let’s go out to the raft.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s go.” We lay out in the raft, beyond my job, beyond his work, sauced, looking together at the trees around us and then the faint stars that appeared in the sky above us. Around us the sharp shapes of the trees hanging over the lake looked like a couple of gates guarding us. I remembered, lying with my back pressed to the warm wood, a time when Dad had taken Dillon and me way up into the mountains to swim at a lake. I had just learned to swim the winter before at the YMCA. The lake filled up the entire floor of a valley. Old rotting logs choked up the side of the lake. Dad told me to help him push one of these logs out into the middle of the lake with him. “Like a raft,” he said.
“It will be in the middle of the lake,” I said. We were paddling beside this log. A few bushes grew along the exposed side of the log and it bobbed in the water beside us.
“Look,” Dad said. “If we get tired on the way, we can just rest on the log.” We paddled and pushed the log to the middle of the lake and it sank. I don’t know, on recalling it, how it could have floated at all.
As the log slowly vanished into the bluish depths below us, I asked, “What do we do now?”
“Swim to shore.”
“Which way?” I asked, because we were in the middle of this lake. But Dad was already swimming back toward Dillon. Dillon stood on the shore waving his arms. My arms started to ache on the way back and my head dipped underwater.
On the raft, by the beach, I reminded Dillon about the log that sank and how Dad had left me in the middle of the lake.
“That must have sucked,” Dillon said.
“Don’t you remember that?”
“You made it to shore.”
“Barely,” I said. We made the mistake of getting dry, lying out there; when we stood up to go back to where our clothes lay on the beach, we just looked at the rolling silver waves with the white specks of insects skittering over the surface.
“How are we going to get back?” I asked.
“What am I supposed to do,” Dillon said, “swim?”
We dared each other, and then he pushed me, and I pulled him, and we fell backward into the lake. My skin hit the cold surface and then I was under it into the warm body of water. I surfaced out of the greenish depths, and I swam with Dillon beside me toward our clothes.
I woke with my face in the carpet. The strands that pressed into my face tasted like a toothbrush someone had been cleaning their shoes with, plastic and dirty. Dillon sat on the edge of my futon. “Hey,” he said, “wake up, don’t you work today?” He was dressed in his work clothes.
I jumped into the shower, shaving with one hand while lathering my hair with the other hand. “See ya,” Dillon said. When I finally looked at the clock I was well past the point of making it to work on time. I called in sick to cover my ass.
I went to the track, thinking about Betsy. When I finally got there, I waited. I sat in the car all morning, watching Nylon Butt run around the track, and then the old couple being dragged around by their dog. Finally, hours after she should have shown up, hours after I should have been at work, she did show up. Her Honda parked and then she walked around the track alone. She waved her arms back and forth as she walked, the black line of her Walkman cord flipping up and down.
I jumped out of the Chevy and slipped around the track. “Hey, Betsy,” I said, even though she wore headphones. She didn’t say anything. She pretended I didn’t exist. It was like I wasn’t even there. And then the next lap around I waved with a soft, limp flap of my hand and I was around the track again. On the next loop, I tackled her. I brought my chest up into her torso, and then lowered her. As I closed into her I could smell the floral shampoo smell of her hair unfurling around my head and I heard the tinny racket of her headphones. She didn’t scream like I had expected her to. Then I had my fingers in her mouth, and I felt her cold damp tongue between my index and middle fingers.
Finally I had her around the back, and I tossed her into her Honda. I slammed the door shut and asked her for her keys.
She sat next to me just breathing. The windows started to fog almost at once. We sat in the parking lot. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but the traffic drove past the school and no one did anything. “Do you know who I am?” I yelled at her as she suddenly started to scramble for the door. I hit her on the head until she sat still in her seat. She did not answer me.
When she looked at me then, her eyes were like two brown, flat M&M’s. “Rapist,” she said. As I raised my hand to hit her, I thought, I should just bang the bitch and get on with it. But I couldn’t. I had an erection but it just made me feel sick. So I let her be in her foggy little shelled-out Honda Civic. I hopped into my Chevy Malibu. I peeled out, burning rubber for as long as the car would stay on it, and then I was out into traffic.
I slept. When the clock radio began, it was in the middle of a song, four three two one, someone sang. Earth below us floating weightless. I remembered the video; guitars sound as sections of a rocket fall back toward the earth. I pulled the plug on my clock, set to go off early enough to get me to the track before work. Finally, when I felt like it, I headed into work.
When I pulled into the office, the cashiers, who usually didn’t arrive until an hour after I had started, were already standing in their row. Some of them smiled at me. “Ross is looking for you.”
“Haven’t been feeling well,” I said.
“He misses you, sweetheart,” the cashier said.
“Hey, Milton man,” Ross said, sweeping down one of the aisles. “Good to see you. Glad you decided to drop in today. You can drop in next week to pick up your check. Why don’t you go on back home.”
“For what?”
“You’re fired.”
I didn’t know what to do. I left, thinking that if I went home and let Ross cool off, I could get my position back. On the way home, as I began to realize that wasn’t the case, I brought three twenty-eight-ounce spray bottles of Windex from the Food Merchant. I don’t know why I bought the Windex. But it made me feel a little better.
Dillon sat outside my apartment door reading one of his books. He wore a brand-new green sweatshirt and black jeans. He had on new shoes. “Hey,” he said. He started going through my grocery bag. “What’s this Windex for?”
“To clean windows,” I told him.
“Your windows are clean,” he said.
We sat at my table. I didn’t ask him how or why he was in my apartment. “I wanted to clean these windows at the high school,” I said. “Four hundred unbroken panes,” I said.
“Four hundred unbroken panes?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s break them,” he said.
When he said that, I thought of the absence of those windows, and how it would be to run around the track and expect to look up and see myself running and running and not see anything. How would I know I was doing it?
Dillon and I cruised around looking for rocks. Finally we found a place on the Cedar River, just up from Renton Stadium. We tossed handfuls of rocks into my laundry hamper and then hauled it back to my Chevy. Six trips and the back of my car practically sanded off on my tires.
As it began to get dark the sunlight shined in an angle across the field, turning everything orange. Dillon and I rolled out onto the track and I backed the car up. “Just throw a rock,” I yelled. “You can’t miss.” I could see myself in the wall of windows that reflected Dillon and me. As I drew my arm back, my mirror double drew its arm back. In an instant it would shatter. I almost yanked my shoulder out of its socket as I let the stone fly.
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This is part nine of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.