Please Don't Go (3 page)

“
I’m commmminnnnnnnng,” Zephyr called over the tops of the aisles, hoping that his projected words would reach the customer service desk buried in the sphincter of the market, behind the magazine racks and to the left of the unkempt bathrooms. Though there was not a third role call for him, he could hear the public address kick into its distinctive hearty dying buzz once again, delivering a second snooty sigh. Karen’s misery was perpetual.

Zephyr galloped down the aisle, hung a right at the battery display (two for one special on C and D size batteries), skipping past checkout with not a single nod or smile to the middle-aged spinsters who manned the registers (all of whom admired his dashing vibrant youth from afar, without exception), and slid into position at the customer service desk with a forced smile upon his face. “Yes, ladies?” he asked of Karen and her devilish counterpart, Trudy Franklin, as they gossiped in low whispers in front of the cigarette display (buy four packs of menthol El Dorado’s and receive a free grill lighter). “You rang?” he queried the women, who looked over to him for a moment with their best excuse-me-we’re-talking eyeballs, fierce in their evisceration of his character, though he was comfortable with how little it mattered to him, and how much it truly affected the collective egos of Shithead One and Shithead Two. Though Trudy was a less significant shithead to the workings of Richter’s, she was still a raving shithead, all the same.

“
One second,
Little Z
. Women are conversing, if you hadn’t noticed,” Karen replied, chewing and snapping her gum, tossing her frizzy red hair aside on her shoulder, looking back to Trudy and realizing that their conversation was complete, but that they should not give Zephyr the pleasure of dictating their social limits. Trudy shrugged her shoulders. Karen turned and sauntered towards the front counter, plodding her elbows next to the beckoning roll of half-priced out-of-season scratch tickets, their title: “Christmas Cash Cow.” “Yes?” she asked, resting her drab bored face on the palms of her hands, sighing one more time for good measure.

Zephyr hung his head, smirking in disgust, biting back his evident disdain for his co-worker. He looked back up and said, “
You
called me, Karen. You called me on the overhead no less than ten seconds ago. Are you serious?”

She popped her gum, casting her burning eyes across at him with a secretive disgust that he was but a twenty year old boy who would never dare touch her decaying body with a ten foot pole, and that she had become nothing but a thirty-something year old woman with a growing collection of house cats and an increasingly worrisome smoker’s cough. How she longed to be in his shoes once again, but would never admit so in open public air, amongst her lifetime brood of grocery store Oprah-watching cowgirls. “That’s right, I
did
call you. And you snap right to action, don’t you.... little doggy gets right along, huh?” she stated with a sway to her overgrown skull. Trudy giggled from behind her, shifting to hide behind the spinning carousel of dipping tobacco that almost reached the drop-ceiling. “I’ve got a special job for you, called down to me by Mr. Richter himself,” she whispered, leaning in close to Zephyr’s face, obviously wanting to kiss him on the lips and stab his cheek with a ballpoint pen in the same loving, yet violent, motion. She spoke of the great and mighty Richter as though he was the Distinguished Gentleman Senator from the state of Maine, as if he were waiting in the back room for his royal servants to come polish his golden throne and return his scepter to its security-monitored crystal case. “So you better not fuck it up, jack-off.”
Or I’ll tear your nuts off
, she seemed to say without a single word.

“
No need to worry, sweetie,” Zephyr replied. “Just spit it out.” He admired himself, at times, for being so straightforward with his very temporary co-workers. It only stemmed from the fact that he had just one more year of such treatment, and then he would be free of their petty, uncalled-for wrath. She snorted in revolt, looking into his dark brown eyes with a hidden lust that Zephyr could detect all too well. Karen had buried a secret longing for his dirty blonde hair and lanky arms since the day he had taken the job. She dreamed of him at night in her frigid cat-fur-coated bed, wishing she could burrow her face in his sweaty (and maybe even hairy) chest, to embellish her greatest desires at the hand of a ravishing young lad, one without bad breath or wrinkles, at that. Though he was not a handsome Greek statue, in the classical sense, he was a far superior catch than most women could find in the backwoods void of Maine. Though she claimed to despise him, he knew it to be a poorly executed facade. “What’s the job?” he asked, breaking Karen from her drooling lust-slash-hatred.

Karen shook her head from side to side, breaking Zephyr’s invisible spell, embarrassed of what he did to her. “Oh. If you can find it in your
busy schedule
,” she shot back at him, “Maybe you can deliver everything on this list to Mr. Rattup on Holyoke Road.” She leaned over the counter, placing a torn white slip of paper in front of Zephyr. Glancing with brevity at the shopping list, he noted the usual suspects of items: toilet paper, Irish Spring soap, two heads of lettuce, half a dozen tomatoes, eight cans of minestrone soup, two loaves of oat nut bread, a bag of salted peanuts, two gallons of bottled water, sugar (the raw brown kind), coffee, green tea, and more. She pointed to a scribbled mailing address beneath the inventory of requested goods. “And here’s where the dinosaur lives. Don’t talk to him too long or he’ll give you rabies. Heard he’s a real numb-nuts,” she added, Zephyr taking careful note of her blossoming maturity.

She placed a second torn shred of paper on top of the grocery list, dictating rudimentary driving directions to Mr. Rattup’s home. Upon observing Karen’s maddened scribbles, he took a second look at the name, realizing that she had not said “Rat Trap,” but rather “Rattup.” The words had been spoken with such vitriol that he found difficulty conjuring them without the dripping venom that hung from every one of Karen’s snobbish syllables.

He backed away from Karen’s garlic breath and piss-poor attitude. “Rattup,” he said to himself, recounting the name over and over, positive that such a unique name had passed through his mental kingdom once before. He could not pinpoint the exact moment or instance that he had heard the name, but it resonated with an unending nag as he plodded through the aisles of Richter’s, stockpiling a cart with the necessary items for his voyage. He also questioned why this man needed a delivery rather than a traditional pickup of his groceries. Elderly? Or handicapped? Or maybe just a good old fashioned shut-in. “Rattup,” he stated once more as he loaded the piece of metal and rubber that once resembled his automobile. He slammed the trunk shut after securing the bags, whispering once again, “Rattup,” trying to overcome his earlier preconception of the words “Rat Trap”.

2.

“
Hey,” he said into his warbling cell phone, cradled against his neck in a discomforting position, glad that he had managed to pay his monthly bill and was able to at long last communicate with friends and loved ones. It was one of the undocumented joys of college living, in lifting seat cushions to dig for spare change so that you can make a simple phone call.

“
I was wondering if you’d get a break today,” Jackie replied, her bubbling voice easing Zephyr’s otherwise shitty day just enough to stabilize his tectonic nerves. He pondered how one woman could hold such vitriolic rage, as Karen did, and another could convert the world to butter with her calm and loving banter, all the while not breaking a sweat. They were two diametric extremes of a human spectrum, and Zephyr found himself glad that he spent a majority of his free time on the warmer end of it.

Zephyr smiled, moving the phone to his opposite shoulder to avoid the developing crink in his exhausted neck. “Not really on break, but I get to take off after this delivery. I guess.” Karen had never stated aloud that his day ended after bringing Rattup his weeks’ worth of sustenance, but his six hour shift was close enough to its end that there was little debate on the matter. Although, he backtracked, calling in and having Karen punch him out when he was through would be a laborious task in and of itself, certain to be rife with teasing and hatred.

“
Delivery? So you’re the delivery boy now? Funny how that works, given you have the biggest hunk of junk in the entire parking lot,” she said, and Zephyr could hear her smiling at the irony of it all. She teased his car as a matter of principle, and on a regular basis. She had a decent vehicle, bequeathed upon her by a very well-off set of parents. It was a 2007 sedan, which was nothing fancy by any means, but parked next to his 1991 rust-bucket Chevy Malibu, it looked like a futuristic space vessel.

“
Funny, aren’t you? Always attacking my car. They’re gonna bury me in this beast, sweets. Kiki is still my second favorite lover, so keep that in mind,” he said, tapping on the steering wheel with his hand. That was how
she
liked to be petted. He had, in a moment of random absurdity, named his car Kiki, but it had never stuck, try as he might. Jackie considered men who named their cars after females to be the second lowest rung of human thought, right above professional wrestlers.

“
I can’t even...” she trailed off, her calling card when something was far too absurd for words.
I can’t even... deal with this.
It was her way of saying that Zephyr was a ridiculous specimen, that he was more than a young bright-eyed lady could bear.

Chuckling beneath his breath, Zephyr changed the subject to more serious matters, “So are we still on for tonight?”

“
Movie at the Railway Theatre, then mexican at Nacho Mama. Which one were we seeing again? I keep forgetting,” she noted, and Zephyr could picture her furrowing her lush brown eyebrows in deep thought. She didn’t keep a mental track on movies the way that he did, often even forgetting altogether what films they had already rented from the video store. She had come home (while flying solo—a bad idea) no less than five times with the same movie, having disregarded her previous consumption of it.
The Haunting,
it had been
.
Not the original, but the clumsy remake. Now, whenever she went to the video store by her lonesome, Zephyr would remind her that they had already seen
The Haunting
. “Was it another one of those silly Charlie Kaufman movies?”

He paused, thinking to himself for a moment, then answered, “the documentary. The one about the World Trade Organization. Can’t remember the name of it.”

“
Right. Right. Sounds good. And early to bed?”

“
Early to rise,” he replied.

“
Get back to delivering your pizzas,” she stated, ruffling his feathers one last time, all in good humor, and closing out their conversation for good. She was the sole dictator of that duty, since Zephyr was too passive to ever insist that the flow of topic had come to a halt.

“
Stop it. If I delivered pizzas, you and I would be living in the lap of luxury off that fat tip money. I’d kill to be a pizza guy at this point. And is it just me, or has this conversation run its course?” he darted back.

“
Indeed!” she blurted, hanging up the phone without another word, most likely in hysterics at her blatant disregard for phone manners at the opposite end of town. He pictured her giggling on their couch; her legs crossed Indian-style, incense burning in the background. She was reading a magazine or a book, chewing on black mission figs for a snack. Such behaviors had become common place since she had quit smoking. Healthy, and moving in the right direction. He had caught the whiff of cigarettes on her a couple of times, in a sneaking moment of guilt, but he had never said anything about it, because she was trying her best.

He turned off his phone, dropping it on to the passenger seat.

He sighed.

Jackie,
he thought.

There was nothing left to do but marry her.

3.

The rocky unpaved road that spilled into the bowels of Holyoke Road was one challenge, but the street’s drifting spaghetti layout presented a second tournament of
Hope My Tires Don’t Pop
for Zephyr’s decrepit vehicle. By the time he rolled into Rattup’s gravel driveway, Zephyr had already calculated a rough estimate of damage that could have occurred to the underbelly of his floundering Kiki. He sighed, knowing that her days of road ragin’ glory were numbered.

Mr. Rattup’s home was a traditional farmhouse. Shutters painted jet black, but not presuming of anything more than modest simplicity. A trellis ran along the left side of his home, reaching up from root to sky in a beautiful amalgam of painted wood and the outdoors, intertwined between the natural world and industry. It seemed as though the trellis were emerging from a grave like a hand did at the end of a horror movie, grasping at the house for an anchor that it may use to emerge from the packed dirt. The cobbled path leading up to Rattup’s home was adorned with smooth gray stones, beckoning a visitor to hop between each iteration, like a giant would with islands upon an archipelago. The grass was unkempt- not mowed in several years, Zephyr presumed. The natural state of the seasons took its toll upon the landscape—winter killed it all and spring brought it back to life like Lazarus. The in-between was nothing more than a waiting period for one of the two extremes to grab hold and dictate its dominance. The old man’s lack of action gave respect to the seasons for their true identities, not offering any kind of interference to the will of Mother Nature. More likely, though, Zephyr was reading into the man’s absent home landscaping further than was necessary. It was possible that he was just a lazy man. Or just too elderly to bother.