Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (13 page)

“Hey, it's our anniversary, we can do what we want, right?”

“What about bugs?” Evie looked at the grass around them. “Could be something lurking there.”

“You always find excuses, you take the fun out of it, really you do, Evie. Why not try to be spontaneous like we were the first few years. Remember when we did it in the library stacks? Now that was dangerous.”

“We were younger then, and dumber.”

“We were healthy, we were in love.” He paused and reached for her hand. “And, damn it, we're still healthy, and I, for one, am still in love.”

“Remember when we did it in that boat? That was crazy.” She smiled wistfully, as if all that were irretrievably lost.

“Come on. I'll put my jacket down. No bugs, you'll see. I will personally destroy any bug that even considers approaching your beautiful body. Come on.”

A woodchuck stood up on its hind legs and looked at them.

“And what about that?” Evie pointed to the creature only a
few yards away. “Are we to corrupt that young woodchuck? It's probably only four months old, and you want to take the responsibility of performing a live sex show before an infant woodchuck. Really, Wayne, I thought you had better values than that.”

She was funny, but Wayne was also getting annoyed. It was such a good idea, so harmless and well meant and, in her playful way, she was making sure it would not occur. So much for the anniversary.

“Let's just walk, okay?” Evie said, trying to make peace.

And they continued on their way along the path. The young woodchuck didn't duck for cover until they were four or five paces away from him.

Some storm clouds were moving in from the west, but they wouldn't be overhead for another hour. Two elderly women hikers were now behind them some distance down the path.

“See,” Evie said, “We would have been caught in the act, definitely.” She was right, but this didn't make Wayne feel one bit better.

“So?”

Evie didn't answer. Wayne was hurt. He looked down at the boaters and envied them. It was strange, not knowing them, imagining their lives. Maybe they were all married to axe-murderers and prostitutes. He cocked his arm and threw a stone as far as he could and moments later it made a small splash just at the edge of the water.

“Your mother called this morning to congratulate us. I forgot to tell you. When you were at the store. She says your father's not well, he's very depressed.”

Wayne knew her ploy, to change the subject once and for all.
He played along, there was nothing else to do, either that or let an argument develop, and he was determined to keep the day free of any unpleasantness.

“He should have never retired, that's what it is,” he said.

“You work forty-five years for the same company and get sick a month after you retire. It doesn't seem fair.”

“Right.”

Evie was sorry for bringing up the subject. Wayne worried about his father all the time now, though he seldom spoke to her about it. One reference a day was all he shared, but she knew.

“Let's head back, what do you say?”

They passed the two lady hikers on the path, and all four nodded politely without speaking.

“Very military,” Wayne whispered to Evie, and she laughed in agreement. “Nazi Special Forces, Alpine Division.”

“Oh stop it, now, you're being bad.”

When they reached the car Evie sensed that Wayne was barely holding back tears. It had been a hard year for him—his sister's divorce, his father's illness, and she had been remote from him at times.

He opened the door for her and bowed, waving his hand grandly. “My princess,” he said. She got in and leaned over to his side to unlock his door for him.

“That was a lovely walk,” she said. “We'll have to come here more often. I bet it's lovely around dusk.”

“Too dangerous,” he said, “what with the Nazis and rodents and bugs. It's a miracle we're alive.”

T
he new manager was an impish twenty-three year old named Arthur Tomten. His first day on the job he wore a button on his lapel which said
Wanna see my chainsaw?
and a tiny silver axe dangled from his left ear. He had five employees working for him, all older than himself, and all of whom had been working at the store for at least six months. It was only natural that they would initially resent his having been chosen from “outside” for the newly vacated position of manager. Still, there was not a great deal at stake since none of them were making much, if anything, above minimum wage, and the manager of the store only made a token amount more, and had to shoulder far more responsibility.

The five workers—Dave, Chris, Leslie, Don, and Richard—were eager to see what kind of boss Arthur Tomten would turn out to be. And Arthur himself was so young he too was eager to find out what kind of boss he would be. The second day on the job he lost the keys to the store—thanks to the hole in the pocket of his one decent pair of trousers, and the owner of the store was furious at him and demanded that all the locks on the store be changed immediately—at Arthur's personal expense, over $100 as it turned out. Arthur was humiliated and felt the instant loss of
respect of his workers. It was not an auspicious beginning. The owner's name was Earl Smith. He had owned a shopping mall previously. He had nearly lost everything, but had recouped by investing in the newest hot trend, video rentals. He knew and cared nothing about movies, but was out to prove he was no fool. He bought any movie in sight, generally following the principal that the public wants garbage, more and more garbage, sex and violence and work-out videos, Rocky Fucks the Poor and Feels Good About It. So far it seemed to be working. But he had no humor, this owner. And when he visited the store on one of his surprise raids and found the employees loitering in the backroom joking with one another, he issued rigid orders, new rules, strict guidelines of behavior. Arthur would turn pink during these dressings-down, his frail pride withered, his anger well-corked. He felt like a bad child in military school, and he wondered what kind of a man he must be to tolerate such humiliation from a man he would never in a million years respect. Earl Smith embodied everything he detested in the older generations.

“Yes, Mr. Smith,” he would reply, “I will see to it that all employees are kept busy every minute they are on payroll. You have my word there will be no more nonsense.”

Smith would glare at the diminutive manager of his store. He would stare specifically at Arthur's button of the day and his violent earring.

“What the hell is that?” he'd asked, “You're a manager now, Tomten. You're representing my interests to the public.” He couldn't bring himself to even mention the earring it infuriated him so. “Act like a man, can't you? I entrusted you with this responsibility
and I expect you to make me proud of that trust I put in you. Do you get my message?” Now it was Smith who was red, and Arthur swallowed deeply to suppress the horrible laugh that was welling up in his bosom.

When Earl Smith left there was a collective sigh of relief and the workers went back to work pretty much as before. Their injokes were all that got them through the day. The work was, in fact, dreadfully boring. The customers were a peculiar lot of lonely, battered people. The garbage man from Belchertown who checked out “Seka's Fantasies” three times every week, the boat people with their obsession with Chuck Norris films, the college professors with their nervous fingering of risqué foreign imports. There weren't that many surprises or even pleasantries. Something about a VCR that says nowhere-to-go, no-one-to-speak-to, nothing-to-do, little-on-my-mind. And to stand behind a counter eight hours a day, five or six days a week, was a window on the world that needed constant cleaning.

Arthur's own obsession was with “splatter” films and biographies of serial killers. No one knew exactly why. He was sweet and polite and was refreshingly funny to his co-workers.

“That woman makes me want to throw up razor blades,” he would say after a particularly unsavory customer had left the store. He didn't talk much about himself, but it was known that he lived with a girl, Angie, and that they were both from Shamokin, Pennsylvania. He loved both Angie and Shamokin. Shamokin had at least three major distinctions to its credit. One: Walter Winchell had said that the women of Shamokin were among the most beautiful in the world. Two: Groucho Marx had
been given the key to Shamokin and had mentioned it on his TV program, “You Bet Your Life.” And three: the noggin. The “noggin in a jar” is how Arthur always referred to it. It seems that sometime near the end of the last century a severed head had been found in the town park. No one knew what to do with it. An ad was placed in the newspaper so that anyone wanting to claim the head would know where to go. Days passed and no one claimed it. A week passed. It was beginning to decay and smell, so the temporary holders of the head had the good sense to embalm it. It was placed in a large jar of formaldehyde and years passed, decades, nearly a century. Arthur, as a young child and even later as a teenager, loved to visit the “noggin,” as he had dubbed it. It sat on a shelf in the backroom of the town library. He took pride in his town for keeping it all these years. But then, one Christmas after Arthur had left home, the library burned to the ground and the noggin was no more. A sad loss.

As for the beautiful women of Shamokin, Arthur was particularly fond of recalling the lovely albino twins, Eunice and Eugenia Smitherman. They were considerably older, in fact, they were even older than Arthur's father, but thought of themselves as eternally sixteen. And, of course, they dressed as twins always, and would only consent to double-dates with brothers, which in the long run hurt their chances in a town as small as Shamokin. They, however, did not burn down and can still be seen occasionally in the malt shop or at their favorite dressmaker's.

Arthur's eyes actually twinkled when he told his tales of Shamokin. And Dave and Chris and the others laughed in appreciation
and egged him on with questions. Arthur, essentially a private man, even in his youth, gradually revealed more of himself through these stories. His father was a prison guard who raised pigeons. His mother worked in an old age home. Arthur's girlfriend had been his high school sweetheart. They had lived together for almost five years, which meant, in effect, that Arthur had never had any other girlfriend. Angie was something of a mystery to the employees of Advanced Video. All they knew about her was that she too loved “splatter” films and that she had total power over Arthur. She made him move into another room in their apartment. Then she'd let him move back a little later. She even dated other men occasionally, and Arthur would be depressed for days.

Earl Smith was making a killing in his new business. He opened three more outlets and bought thousands of films. He'd make trips to distant warehouses and come back with a truckload of random trash. Growth, growth, and more growth. He had been rich eight or nine times before, he had lost count, but he always knew the way back out of bankruptcy. He could find the pulse, was how he liked to put it. Of course, everybody was always stealing from him, he knew this, but he figured it took more time to watch over them every second than it was worth in the long run. About Arthur Tomten he had mixed thoughts. The little guy certainly knew something about films, and he wasn't sure if this was an asset or a bother. Arthur was always trying to advise him on what the store needed, what kinds of films, and this partly annoyed Earl, though it was just possible that he needed someone like that, some film nut.

He didn't even remember the names of the others, just the managers. He'd blame all failures on them, that's why they got paid more than the others, the little shits.

“I want to know which films are not being checked out. I want you to go through all the records and give me a complete list of all films that aren't moving. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Arthur replied, filled with dread, knowing that this meant working nights for the next two weeks, knowing too that Angie would be fed up with him, that she would have ample opportunities to step out on him with her new interest, the Ph.D. political scientist creep she met the week before last.

He, Arthur, could not imagine a future without Angie. There had always been Angie. He and Angie, Shamokin, the noggin, the Smitherman twins. The Torque-Master, as he liked to call the owner of Advanced Video, was putting an end to all that, completely oblivious to the gravity of his situation.

“Listen up, Tomten. I've given you a chance here. I've trusted you. I could have promoted one of the others, but I didn't. You get this store moving in a big way, and there's something in it for you. You let me down and there won't be a second chance. Understand? Two of the other stores are already doing greater volume. You're slipping. Now you run a tight ship here or else. Do you follow me?”

“I follow you. I'll have the list for you next week at the managers' meeting.”

“That's more like it,” Smith snarled. He was like some kind of despicable football coach, never satisfied, always insulting, with no notion of human dignity. And Arthur despised himself for not
telling him to his face. What kind of sniveling chattel was he becoming? In Shamokin he and Angie had always thought they didn't need anyone else, they had this unspoken contract with one another that nothing could tarnish their private world as long as they remained strong and true to one another. They knew when the world was false, they knew what it was they would do and what was beneath them. Now, he had to earn a living somehow, but the harder he worked, the closer he was to losing all that he was working for. Angie was changing. She was not amused by their old habits, watching horror films, listening to bizarre music, putting down most everyone around them. She wanted to go back to school and finish her degree. She even talked of moving to New York.