In Mike We Trust (6 page)

“No, he wasn't!” Garth said. “He didn't mean it that way.”

“‘People from the South are a particular breed'? ‘Mayor of Freakville'?”

“He was just trying to be funny. Listen—” He closed the folder and searched his brain for something that would make her like his uncle. “I
told
him. About me. Today. And he was fine with it. I mean, he was
totally
fine with it. So he's open-minded, I know.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad he doesn't have any problem with it. But I stick by what I said before. There's something a little too slick about him. Be careful.”

“Be
careful
?” What did she think, that his uncle was going to knife them in their sleep? That he was going to rob them of house and home? (Not that there was much to rob.) Lisa, he decided, only had a sliver of the picture.

P
eterson's Department Store (“Fine Products and Good Eatin' Since 1947!”) sat on Broad Street and was probably half the size of a football field, but it felt a mile wide when Garth worked it. During any given four-hour shift, he had to sweep every aisle with a rickety push broom, mop the old terrazzo floor, and vacuum the rectangle of carpet that demarcated the women's clothing section. He had to restock the shelves, keep the stockroom organized, scrub down the men's and ladies' rooms—often while trying not to gag. Worst of all, he had to occasionally clean out what Mr. Peterson called the “trash pocket.”

There were always surprises. The plethora of rats and mice that lived in the stockroom (when he'd walked through the double doors his first day on the job, he'd heard a scurrying beside him and had turned around in time to see a long, pink tail as thick as a finger curling out of sight behind a box). The pair of panties he'd found on the floor of the kitchen supply aisle (not a brand of panties the store carried). The graffiti in the bathrooms
(more prominent in the ladies' room than in the men's, though less dirty). And the bizarre and truly disgusting list of items he'd had to dig out of the toilets by means of a coat hanger and rubber gloves: a plastic breath mint box, a set of keys, a Slinky (!), and, once, a cell phone that had startled the hell out of him by ringing as soon as he had it in his gloved hand (he hadn't answered it).

The graffiti in the men's room was, for the most part, stupid and occasionally insulting (as was Mr. Peterson's blanket order to “scrub those faggot words off the wall”).
HERE I SIT ON THE POOPER, GIVING BIRTH TO A STATE TROOPER
was one of the more recent additions, along with
G.A.Y
. =
GOT AIDS YET
? One long paragraph was written in tiny letters and described very specifically what the “author” wanted to do with another guy, and then named in graphic detail what he'd already done with guys in various public restrooms around town.
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
,
CALL ME
, the paragraph concluded, followed by a phone number. Garth assumed that the person who could write such a thing would be gross, maybe even dangerous. He couldn't imagine having sex with a total stranger and certainly not in a restroom, but the thought that there were guys out there actually doing what he regularly fantasized about made him feel more isolated
and hopelessly virginal than ever. People dropped dead every day, didn't they? Heart attacks, brain aneurysms, car crashes. What were the chances that he might die a virgin? Underneath
CALL ME
and the phone number, he'd written in pencil
I WISH
, and then hurriedly scrubbed all of it away.

He had nothing to compare his job at Peterson's to, since he'd never worked before, but it was hard to imagine more demeaning employment. Mr. Peterson, who'd been nursing a cold since the day he was born and yet still managed to talk through his nose, treated Garth like an idiot. He wouldn't even use his first name, would call him only “Rudd,” stretching the one syllable out so that it might have emanated from a squeezed lamb.

“Rhhuudd, more bags on register two, pronto.”

“Rhhuudd, mop up that
per
fume spill on aisle seven.”

“Rhhuudd, there's a situation in the popcorn machine.”

The “popcorn machine” was nothing more than a wheeled, plastic case with a heat lamp inside: a holder for the massive bags of stale, prepopped popcorn the store ordered in bulk. A “situation” usually meant a mouse.

Peterssuuun,
Garth dreamed of saying one day,
there's a pound of dandruff on your shoulders and you smell like blue cheese and lighter fluid.

The old man had to be close to seventy. Mr. Peterson's dad had opened the store when he'd been a teenager and then left it to him when he died. The store was the only place Mr. Peterson, like Garth, had ever worked. He was skinny and slope-shouldered, wore black-framed glasses repaired (probably years ago) with a safety pin at one of the temples, and suffered back pain that prevented him from standing completely upright. He moved about the store like a worn-out prison guard, jangling his giant key ring and eyeballing each and every one of his employees with equal mistrust.

That Tuesday, as soon as he saw Garth come in, he called from across the stationery aisle, “Rhhuudd, trash pocket.”

Kill me,
Garth thought. “I just did it two weeks ago.”

“And if you do a decent job this time, it might not need it two weeks from now,” the old man muttered.

I'd rather die a virgin than wade into that hellhole today,
he thought. But he knew he had no choice—not if he wanted to keep his job.

The “trash pocket” was a sealed-off corner of the stockroom accessible by a regular door on the inside
and a metal garage door on the outside. The garage door opened onto an alley where, in theory, and on some unspecified biweekly schedule that Garth could never keep track of, a garbage truck would appear, unlock and roll up the door, and empty the dozen or so trash cans into its bowels. The problem was that Mr. Peterson's employees—underpaid and overworked—didn't care about actually getting the trash
into
the trash cans; they simply opened the inner door and let the bags fly, including trash bags from the cafeteria that contained half-eaten food, spoiled food, rotten food. Add to that a few random holes punched into the walls over the years and a spigot near the floor in one corner that constantly dripped over a drain long-ago clogged, and you had a rodent's paradise. The bags were tossed from the doorway, missed their mark, burst open. The garbagemen refused to take the trash away unless someone gathered it into the cans. That someone, armed with a shovel and yet another pair of rubber gloves, was Garth.

As with the hedges on his chore list, he performed all of his other duties and saved the trash pocket for last. There was always the faint hope that some emergency might come up that would prevent him from getting to the pocket before his shift was over (say, a fire that would burn the store to the ground).
Unfortunately, that day, as slowly as he allowed himself to move without being obvious about it, he was still left with an hour on the clock; the old man made sure of it by telling him the bathrooms didn't require cleaning, and the vast floor needed to be swept but not mopped.

Groaning, Garth stormed into the back of the store, heard the regular chorus of scurrying claws (the creatures in the stockroom had long since stopped bothering him—at least they were on their way to somewhere else when he passed, which was more than could be said for the tenants of the pocket)—and gathered up the shovel and gloves. Having learned from experience, he tucked his T-shirt into his jeans and tucked the cuffs of his jeans into his socks. Then he opened the inner door.

The smell was horrific. And the little room, no more than five feet by seven feet, was alive: shifting, gnawing, and scraping with life—the pulse of ravenous diners. He reached a hand inside, felt along the wall, and switched on the single, bare lightbulb fixed to the ceiling. The only part of the floor not covered with trash was the corner where the spigot dripped. A pink-eyed, white-furred rat the size of an eight-week-old puppy crouched over the puddle, paused to sniff the air, then resumed drinking. In a nearby, torn-open
bag of sour hamburger buns, a colony of gray mice climbed over one another, into and out of the tunnels they'd made. Something hidden under the refuse near the garage door bit or scratched something else; the something else squealed in anger—or pain.

Garth took a deep breath and set to work.

The task took nearly all of his remaining hour. The garbage was wet and the shredded plastic bags made the shoveling difficult. More difficult still were his efforts not to kill any of the mice or rats. (As much as they disgusted him, he didn't relish the idea of accidentally chopping one in half with the shovel blade.) The smaller ones crawled up his socks and latched onto his jeans until he swatted them away. The larger ones did their best to ignore him. Eventually, they all got the message, and those that weren't happily scooped into the trash cans with the rotting food moseyed back to the various holes in the walls and disappeared.

He had just finished scrubbing his hands in the stockroom's utility sink when he heard a scream from somewhere in the store. This was followed shortly by “Rhhuudd, aisle ten!”

He untucked his jeans from his socks and pushed through the double, swinging doors. An elderly woman was standing in aisle ten, her feet close together and her purse clutched under one arm. She was staring
down, and when Garth rounded the corner, he saw Mr. Peterson crouching over the floor in front of her with a paper bag in one hand, a whisk broom in the other. “I don't know how this happened,” he was saying. “It's the first one I've ever seen in this store, and I've worked here since I was a boy. It must have come in from outside.”

“It's disgusting,” the woman said.

“You're absolutely right. And I apologize.”

He closed up the bag as she walked away. When he saw Garth, he frowned, handed him the bag, and said, “Take that into the stockroom and step on it, then throw it in the trash.” Jangling his key ring, he started off after the woman hollering something about extra coupons.

Garth unrolled the top of the bag and looked into it. A small, gray mouse stared back up at him, its front feet testing the paper walls for traction and finding none.

He closed up the bag and carried it into the stockroom. When the swinging doors closed behind him, he squatted down, opened the bag, and poured the mouse out onto the cement floor. It stared at him for a moment without moving.

“Go make friends,” he said, and watched it scurry away.

 

He came home that night to the smell of fresh paint. Mike had covered up the water stain on the living room ceiling with a coat of dull primer, which would be covered with ceiling paint once it was dry. He'd also repaired the screen door, replacing the screen and properly anchoring it into its track with rubber tubing. Both jobs were somewhat slapdash (the new screen had a slight sag in it, and Garth noticed a couple of paint drops on the living room carpet), but why hadn't it occurred to
him
to just do that?

Over dinner, his mom asked him how work had been.

“It was fine,” he said. “Same old, same old.”

“What do you do at this store?” Mike asked, turning his fork through his spaghetti.

“A little bit of everything. Cleaning, stocking, whatever needs done.”

“But you like your boss,” his mom said. “Mr. Peterson. You said he's nice to you.”

“Yeah. He's great. A real joker, that guy.” Garth forced a smile onto his face, and stuffed his mouth full of pasta.

“I have to say, I never had a boss I liked,” Mike told them. “Not even the nice ones. It was just the idea of having somebody lord over me, telling me what to do,
that didn't sit right with me.”

“That's what most people call ‘work,'” Garth's mom said.

“Mmmm.” Mike sounded as if he were half humming, half growling. “You're channeling my brother, I think.”

“It's true,” she said. “Even bosses have bosses.”

“Jerry didn't have a boss. He owned his own hardware store.”

“Well, he had investors…” She trailed off. Garth wasn't sure if Mike knew the whole story. Not even Garth or his mom had known the truth until after his dad had died: the business had been struggling for some time and things had been much worse than his dad had ever let on. There was a bank loan his mom had no knowledge of. Personal loans from other businessmen. Of course, it had never entered his dad's mind that something might happen to him. The fallout of all that shaped their daily lives now nearly as much as their grief and healing—if, indeed, there was any healing going on. Sometimes Garth wondered.

“I guess there's always someone to answer to,” Mike mused. He folded a piece of bread and dipped it into the sauce on his plate. When he was done chewing, he said, “So, not to change the subject, but Garth told me about his, uh, orientation.”

Not to change the subject?
It was all Garth could do to keep the pasta he was trying to swallow from funneling into his lungs as he saw his mom's eyes cut over to him. “Mike's family. You said it was all right to tell family,” he explained.

There was a long pause while she thought about this. He knew she'd been put on the spot. Thankfully, she rose to the occasion. “You're right, I did say that. And Mike
is
family. I'm sure he understands how…delicate…this topic is.”

“Oh, yeah, I totally get it,” Mike said, nodding. “I was telling Garth how I've had gay friends before, and how they struggled with being in the closet and with coming out.”

“We're not thinking about it in terms of his being ‘in the closet.'”

True enough,
Garth thought. In the very few words they'd exchanged on the subject, they'd never once used the word
closet.

“Well, I'm just saying I've known people who've stifled who they were because they were afraid, and all of them, hands down, look back and wish they hadn't.”

Who could argue with that? Garth felt his embarrassment at Mike's having blurted out the subject slipping away. Instead, he was beginning to feel grateful.

But his mom said, “Garth is only fifteen; he's not
necessarily ready to…defend himself…against people who might have certain prejudices, and we've agreed that waiting to explore this impulse is for the best.”

“Impulse?” Garth said.

“Orientation.”

“I really don't mean to stick my nose in where it's not welcome,” Mike said, raising an open palm. “It's just that, you know, he's my nephew.”