Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (3 page)

then it’s better to put your head in the oven

just like Sylvia Plath, who never

did a sit-up to my knowledge,

than to dry up like the last few drops

of aforementioned blood,

sitting in your wheelchair,

trying with the little strength remaining

to sputter “Drop and give me twenty”

to the nursing home attendant.

Drop. Sputter.

Drop. Sputter.

Drop and give me.

Sputter.

Twenty.

Thank you.”

There was a smattering of applause, and Dustin jumped off the stage and came back to the table.

“One of your better efforts,” said Anna. Beatnik poetry suited Dustin pretty well.

“Thanks,” said Dustin. “Think it’ll convince Coach Hunter to kill himself?”

“I doubt it,” said Brian. “I’m not really sure he can read anything other than football playbooks.”

“That’s a good point,” said James. “Maybe we should write up a depressing playbook or something.”

I tried to imagine a playbook that said something like “27 pass the ball to 12. 12 start running, and just keep running and running, because everything is pointless anyway.”

We sat there and drank our coffee. I kept my coat on so Anna couldn’t see what a good job she’d done giving me the hickey—I was afraid that would just make her want to give me another one on the other side of my neck. Still, her foot was brushing against mine, and I was pretty sure she was doing it on purpose.

Meanwhile, Brian and Edie were up to their usual routine of making Bambi eyes at each other, and Edie occasionally sucked on Brian’s fingers like they were pacifiers or something. It was disgusting, but it kept her from talking, which could occasionally be a blessing.

Finally, Brian withdrew his hand from Edie’s mouth to look at his watch. “It’s probably about halftime,” he said. “You guys want to head out of here?”

“What for?” Anna asked.

“I feel like getting a burger,” he said. “A cheap one.”

“We’ll probably have to go up to Cedar Avenue to get a cheap one,” I said. “It’s quite a walk.”

“It’s only a couple blocks farther than the high school.”

Edie made a nasty face. We all generally preferred Sip and the places that were left in the triangle to the retail wasteland on Cedar Avenue, but Edie hated even to set foot on that street.

“Do we have to?” she asked.

“You won’t die,” said Anna. “It’s not like you’ll disintegrate the minute you step into a Burger Box parking lot.”

“I might,” she insisted.

“You won’t,” said Anna. “The government stopped setting booby traps to catch communists in fast-food parking lots when the Berlin Wall fell.”

“C’mon,” said Brian. “Pretty please?”

Brian was a cool guy. Clearly, any man who is into both mechanical things and fire is destined to do great things in life. But if there’s anything more disturbing than seeing your dad with a Mohawk, it’s seeing a pyro saying “pretty please.”

Edie rolled her eyes and said “Whatever,” and we dropped our money off on the table. James and Dustin stayed behind; Dustin was busy scribbling another poem on a napkin, and James was busily looking over his shoulder.

We headed out into the cold and started walking back north, toward the high school. The wind had picked up a bit since we’d been in the coffee shop, and now it felt like an arctic wasteland outside. I felt like we were trekking through the frozen wilderness toward Shangri-la or something, except that the destination was not a tropical paradise—it was probably going to be a gas station that sold cheap frozen burgers.

Brian and Edie clung to each other really tightly, kissing frequently, and for a moment I worried that their lips might stick together, the way your tongue can stick to metal when it’s really cold out. But they seemed to be able to separate pretty well.

Anna, meanwhile, had her arm wrapped around mine, and I couldn’t be sure whether it was a display of affection or just an attempt to stay warm, but I decided to consider it the former.

Cedar Avenue was a few blocks past the high school. When I was a little kid, it was a mostly empty road that you took to get to the mall or the interstate, but over the last few years, it was as though someone had planted strip mall seeds around it, and practically overnight, it had turned into the new downtown. Even the stores inside the old mall were starting to close down.

The road was lined with giant signs that shed light all over the place, making the snow on the ground glow red, blue, and yellow. The giant blue Mega Mart sign at the end of the street stared down as if it were surveying the whole scene; if it had eyes, it could probably even see the skeletons of the stores on Venture Street that had closed down after the Mega Mart opened. If the noise from the traffic died down, I’ll bet you could hear that sign laughing.

Good ol’ Comrade Edie made no bones about the fact that she thought the whole street was disgusting.

“Being on this street,” she said, “is like being in a commercial for something I don’t want.”

“Yeah,” said Brian, “but where else are you going to go for a cheap burger at this time of night?”

“C’mon,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the Quickway lets communists in. Their sign is red.” Don’t ask me why, but communists tend to be attracted to things that are red. If anyone makes a public television nature documentary about suburban commies, they’ll have to mention that.

Inside the Quickway, Brian immediately headed for the slushee machine and started to pour himself an enormous one.

“Jesus, Brian,” said Edie. “How big a slushee do you need?”

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked. “It only costs a dime to upgrade to the ‘holy crap’ size. You can’t pass that up.”

“Sure you can,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Brian, “but I wouldn’t want it on my conscience.”

He took his slushee, which was roughly the size of a barrel, to the cooler, where there were a bunch of plastic-wrapped one-dollar sandwiches and a little microwave for heating them up. I picked out a turkey sandwich on honey wheat bread with caramelized onions, Anna got a BLT, and Brian and Edie both got cheeseburgers—Edie may not have wanted to be there, but I guess commies have to eat, too.

“All they have are cheeseburgers,” she whined. “Why can’t they have any without the damn cheese?” She took the burger out of the plastic wrap and took out the slice of American cheese, putting it in her pocket before she put the burger in the microwave.

As Brian and Edie took their stuff out to the parking lot to eat, Anna and I took turns with the microwave.

“Edie’s sort of a whiner, isn’t she?” I asked.

“I guess so,” said Anna. “But my dad hates this street, too. He says it makes the town look like the airport.”

“I think so, too,” I said, though I’d never really stopped to think about it. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of copycat, but Anna and her dad were pretty good at convincing me of pretty much anything. If anyone else, like, say, my parents, had told me I should build up to drinking my coffee black, I would have thought they were insane.

We joined Brian and Edie in the parking lot and stood around eating our food, watching the cars drive in and out. My sandwich wasn’t half bad; turkey, honey wheat, and caramelized onions had sounded suspiciously fancy for a gas-station sandwich, and I questioned how they could use safe ingredients, keep them fresh, and still be able to sell the thing for a buck, but it tasted all right, and it didn’t glow in the dark or anything, as far as I could tell. The sky was dark, but there were so many lights going that I probably couldn’t have told if the thing was glowing. Maybe that’s the idea behind having gas stations well lit.

The night air was thick with the smell of French fries and dirty snow. Near the door, somebody had written the word “SHIT” on one of the bricks with Wite-Out, presumably protesting something or other.

After a few minutes, we started heading back in the general direction of the high school, since we’d have to get back in enough time to warm back up. If my dad picked me up and I looked like I’d been out in the cold all night, I’d be in big trouble.

Once we got past the Burger Box, on Seventy-first and Venture, the green sign for Wackfords Coffee came into view, and Brian called out “Wackfords!” and socked me in the arm. I would have been pissed off if I weren’t well familiar with the rules of the Wackfords game—when you see a Wackfords, you shout “Wackfords!” and whack the person next to you in the arm. You can really get hurt playing it in the city, where there’s one on every corner.

We were about the last town in the state to get a Wackfords, and Edie, naturally, was pissed that they had come to town at all. The only person I knew who’d actually been inside was Dustin, who’d gone there once to try to arrange a poetry reading and had been told that they never did things like that. They tried to act like a cool coffee shop, like Sip, but for all I could tell, they were really just another fast-food joint. They made the employees wear uniforms and everything.

Edie stood in front of the Wackfords sign when we got closer to it. It looked like she was having a staring contest with it. The green light covered her entire body and made her look sort of like an alien in a bad sci-fi movie from the 1950s.

“You suck!” she screamed at the sign. Anna and I couldn’t help laughing at her.

“Yeah, man!” said Brian.

“It’s not even a coffee shop,” said Edie. “It’s just an office!”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “An office!”

Edie pulled the slice of American cheese out of her pocket, tore it in half, and threw one of the halves directly at the sign. It hit it square on the “R,” stuck there for a second, then fell to the ground.

Suddenly, a head poked out from the door. It was a young, curly-headed guy in a Wackfords apron.

“Aw, be nice,” he said. He shut the door and disappeared back into the store just as Edie was throwing the other half of her cheese at him. It fell well short of the door, and I was glad she hadn’t hit him. I doubted you could actually be arrested for assault with half a slice of American cheese, but it’s best not to take your chances with things like that. Especially in towns where cops are expected to be busy chasing gangbangers but don’t really have much to do.

We stood there in the parking lot for a minute, surrounded by signs that towered over us like giants. A few of the gas-station logos were reflected in Anna’s glasses. I thought that maybe, someday in the future, another, newer downtown would pop up a mile or two north, and all these places would be empty shells of stores just like the ones that were starting to fill up Venture Street and the mall. All the signs would be like gravestones. I’d go up there with a can of spray paint and write “Here lies” above the names of the stores, if I was still in town, which I prayed I wouldn’t be.

That night, after I got home, I stood at my window, looking at all of the different-colored lights in the sky. I could see a bunch of rooftops from the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood a couple of blocks past mine, and, back behind those, quite a few of the lights from the signs on Cedar Avenue. Red from the Quickway. Yellow from the Burger Box. I couldn’t see any of the blue Mega Mart sign, except for maybe a bit of a hazy blue glow, but right between two rooftops a few blocks back, through some bare branches of the January trees, I could see just a little bit of the green from the Wackfords sign. I’d never noticed it before. It hadn’t been there very long, after all.

Before I finally went to bed, I stared at that little green light for a long, long time.

On Saturday morning, I noticed a new bit of Magnetic Poetry on the fridge:

Darling son

light of your years

please glow from our wisdom

and keep certain parts

behind closed pants

until you grow into marriage.

I wished I had Dustin Eddlebeck’s skill at writing poetry to put up a response. I was pretty sure I could write a better poem than that, but Magnetic Poetry has certain limitations. If they made tiles saying “go to hell, geezers,” my mother would not have allowed them on the fridge in the first place.

That evening, I got a call from Dustin.

“Can you be at Sip at about seven?” he asked. “Anna’s called a summit meeting.”

“She did?” I asked. “Why didn’t she tell me herself?”

“Summit meeting, man. It’s protocol.”

Summit meetings, when the gifted pool got together to plot some form of strategy, were rare—we’d only had one of them before, about a month after
La Dolce Pubert
was finished, when we’d plotted ways to make sure every kid in school could see it. The protocol for summit meetings was that Anna would be notified first (unless it was her idea, which it had been both times now); then she’d call Brian, whose last name was after hers in alphabetical order. He’d call Marcus Clinch, and Marcus would call James Cole, and James would call Dustin Eddlebeck, who would then call me. My job would be to call Jenny Kurosawa, whose name came after “Harris” on the list.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

As usual, Jenny’s parents gave me a regular interrogation as to why I wanted to talk to their daughter—if it wasn’t school related, they probably would have hung up on me. I was sure she’d never told them about my getting suspended over a movie for which she herself had helped with the music. If she had, they probably would have blocked my number. I had to make up stories about algebra questions for a good five minutes, but that was easy enough—I didn’t have to be much of an actor to convince people that I didn’t understand polynomials. Finally, they let her on the phone.

“Hi, Leon!” she said, sounding awfully excited just to get a phone call.

“Summit meeting,” I said. “Tonight at seven o’clock, Sip Coffee in the triangle.”

She paused. “I’m not sure I can get there,” she said. “They’ll never let me out for that.”

“Well, make it if you can,” I said. She said she’d try.

I ran downstairs and asked my dad if I could get a ride to the coffee shop at seven.

“Well,” he said, “we were going to be eating around that time, Leon.”

“What are we having?”

“I don’t know. Probably something from the grilling book.”

This, of course, called for fast strategy.

“Would it be all right if I just ate at Sip? They have pretty good sandwiches there, and I have to meet some people to work on a project.”

“Well, as long as it’s for school,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

I was the first to arrive at Sip; Dad took me a bit early so he and my mother could have whatever hideous crap they were planning to eat before all their TV shows came on. Jenny walked in a minute after me, wearing one of her Doors shirts over what looked like about three layers of sweaters, and decked out in gloves, a hat, a scarf, and earmuffs—the whole winter set.

“You made it!” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, taking off her gloves and putting her “Jim Morrison’s Soul” bottle on the table. “If my parents ever ask, I’m running sprints to try out for track.”

“In the middle of January?”

She smiled. “According to the latest studies,” she said, suddenly speaking like the narrator of a PBS documentary about athletes, “wintry nights provide the ideal atmosphere for physical conditioning.”

“Nice.”

“Anyway, do you know what the meeting is about?”

“No clue,” I said. “I know it was Anna’s idea, but I didn’t call to ask. There’s protocol to follow.”

I don’t know why we were so formal about summit meetings. It was probably just more fun that way.

Having set all her stuff down, Jenny climbed up and stood on top of the table.

“All hail the American night!” she shouted at the ceiling. I assumed this was something Jim Morrison used to say. Apparently, part of being an obsessed Doors fan is trying to live on the edge, and to her, standing on a table was really pushing some limits. Had there been anyone in the café besides us and Trinity, I’m sure they would have stared.

“Hey!” shouted Trinity. “Get down!”

Jenny just looked over at her with a face like she was on a roller coaster. I’d never seen her so excited.

“I made the blue cars go away!” she shouted down at Trinity.

“Yeah,” said Trinity. “But there’s a ceiling fan right by you. Get down before it takes your head off.”

“Oh,” said Jenny, a bit sheepishly. She jumped down and took a seat.

“Living on the edge these days, huh?” I asked.

She smiled. “Just being out at night like this…it’s like I’m busting out of jail, you know? I mean, my parents might disown me for this! It’s so exciting!”

One by one, most of the rest of the group started to file in. Dustin and Brian came in at pretty much the same time, and Edie showed up a minute later. Most of the rest of the people weren’t as likely to show. Everyone in the pool could be counted on to do something that would raise eyebrows for our projects, and we could all be trusted to raise a little hell in the classrooms from time to time. But some of the other kids just didn’t get out of the house much, or were always busy with real extracurricular junk. Those of us who came to things like summit meetings were the ones who wouldn’t be caught dead joining the Spanish club—or, in Jenny’s case, would join but were always on the lookout for an excuse to miss the meetings.

Anna was the last to arrive, and she sat down in the seat I’d quietly saved for her by piling my coat and bag on the chair next to me.

“Good evening,” she said, sounding very formal. “Welcome to the summit meeting.”

Before we could get started, Trinity walked, or rather, danced her way over to the table.

“Wow, the gang’s all here,” she said. “What are you guys? Like, the Cornersville weirdo club or something?”

“Gifted pool,” said Dustin, chuckling. “Same thing.”

“Oh,” said Trinity, as though we suddenly made a lot more sense to her. “I was in the gifted pool in middle school. It was the weirdo club then, too!”

“Cheers, comrade,” said Edie, raising an empty coffee mug that had been sitting on the table.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Trinity. “You guys want coffee or what?”

We all ordered cups. Jenny ordered a cup with two shots of espresso in it, which to her was probably the equivalent of ordering speed. Trinity brought them out a minute later on a tray. “I must be insane,” she said. “Bringing caffeine to a bunch of eighth graders.”

“And eighth grade ne’er-do-wells, at that,” I reminded her.

“All right,” said Anna as Trinity danced her way back to the counter. “I hereby call this summit meeting to order.”

“Great,” said Brian. “What’s it all about?”

“I have an idea for the next movie project,” she said. I leaned in closer. We all knew that if the next movie didn’t make a really big splash, no one would watch anything else we did.
The Rooster in the Skating Rink
had been our sophomore slump, and now we needed a real homer.

“Something else avant-garde?” asked Jenny.

“Not exactly,” Anna said. “I was thinking of a sort of documentary.”

“About what?” I asked.

“The old downtown and Cedar Avenue.”

“What about them?” Edie asked. “About how all those capitalist pigs exploit their workers?”

“Something like that,” said Anna. “I was mostly thinking about how you said Wackfords was more of an office than a coffee shop last night.”

“Yeah?” Edie asked.

“I was thinking we could do a short documentary contrasting the style and substance of the old downtown versus the faceless corporate garbage of the new strip malls.”

“Or better yet,” said Edie slowly, as though she was choosing her words carefully for once, “we could take over the Mega Mart.”

Nobody seemed to take this seriously. What were we going to do—charge in and take the place over at gunpoint, then steal ourselves a couple of cheap shirts?

But Anna nodded, considering the suggestion from the floor. “That’s an interesting concept,” she said. “Go on.”

“We’ll take it over like pirates,” said Edie, grinning.

“Avast!” shouted Brian, in his best pirate accent. The rest of us joined in with a chorus of “arrrr’s.”

“I don’t know,” said Anna, even though she was smiling. “That sounds just slightly illegal. It’s not worth going to jail over.”

“Jail?” asked Jenny. She had been leaning in close, but now she pulled away a bit. If being in a café under legal pretenses was risky to her, I could only imagine how far out of her league it was to even joke about something that could lead to jail time.

“Then we’ll do it at Wackfords,” said Edie. “They’re way smaller, so they’d be easy to take over. Then we’ll turn it into an accounting office or something and see if anyone even notices!”

“Maybe,” said Anna, laughing, “we can find a way to set up an office in the Wackfords without actually doing anything illegal.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If we showed up with a watercooler and some ferns and set them up in the middle of the store and started handing out paperwork or something, nobody would even notice the difference. We could probably film a pretty good scene. And the most they could do is ask us to move.”

“I could see that working out,” said Anna.

“Well,” said Edie, “I suppose that might work. It would be better if we could tell customers they didn’t sell coffee anymore, though, because it’s just an office now.”

“Anyway,” said Anna, “the point of the movie will be to make a monument to the old downtown, so we can use it as our pool project, and point out that Cedar Avenue sucks, however we go about it. And maybe we can have a scene showing a full accounting office being set up in Wackfords and not having anyone even notice. Everybody in?”

“You know I am,” I said. “We could maybe even prove an actual point with this one.”

“I’m in,” said Edie. “So’s Brian.”

Right about then, we heard Trinity squeal, and she ran to the front door, where a curly-headed guy had just walked in the door.

“Troy!” she shouted. She jumped over the counter and leapt up at him. For a second I thought she was going to knock him down, but he caught her and held her up by the butt while she wrapped her arms and legs around him. I hoped, for his sake, that all the safety pins on her dress were securely fastened. The guy—what I could see of him through Trinity—looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

She jumped down after a second, then said, “Troy, come here, you have to meet these kids.” She grabbed his hand and practically dragged him over to our table. “Check it out,” she said, pointing at us. “These are the kids who are in the gifted pool this year.” She turned to us. “Troy was in it the same time I was.”

“I know you,” said Troy, grinning at Edie.

“You do?” asked Edie, looking confused.

“Yeah,” said Troy. “You threw a piece of cheese at me last night.”

That was why he looked familiar.

He worked at Wackfords.