Suicide's Girlfriend (10 page)

“Quik,” write Crocker's students. “Cheez.” “Cum.”

Ahmad and Pop. Initially, they entered Crocker's classes with bowed heads, wore wide-sleeved white shirts, stayed after unbidden to wipe the blackboards. Now they like tight denim and playing nasty tricks; they slyly deposit gobs of phlegm in the hair of studying classmates, knock over pails of cafeteria slops, put an occasional spin on the wheelchairs of handicapped kids.

Crocker carries two twin-packs of the coconut pastries to the counter. One each for the students, another for himself. And should neither boy want the fourth pastry, Crocker promises himself he will chuck the thing in a waste bin.

Behind the cash register, the face of the young clerk looks hot, like the faces of cafeteria workers, people bent over steam tables. “You don't ever want to get a job here,” she says when Crocker approaches the counter. “I thought I was hired, but now I have to take a polygraph test. They want to know if I've ever done drugs!” She frowns in the direction of a pair of disembodied hands busily filling the refrigerator cases from the storeroom side: sandwiches and microwave burgers and individual, huge pickles packaged in brine and plastic. “I can forget it,” she says.

Just to be friendly, Crocker says, “Maybe you don't have to take the test. Maybe it's not even legal.”

The clerk looks him in the eye. Crocker hands her the pastries. “Those are really bad for you,” the clerk says, before her particular circumstances once more shoot up before her like a torpedo from water, and she blurts, “They won't even let me wear jeans here! All I've got is jeans! No way am I going to last.”

Crocker finds the clerk pretty in her despair and baby-blue pants. In a spill of harmless attraction, he says, “I hear we're hiring at the high school these days.”

“Really?” The clerk straightens a frisky basket of matchbooks. Interestingly enough, her face becomes homely during its stab at mature consideration. “But look,” she says, sighing and resuming her cute and cranky youth, “you probably have to go to college to teach and all.”

Both of them turn in alarm as the back room's swinging doors pop, and out steps a young man, shrugging into an overcoat.

“I wish you wouldn't do that,” says the clerk. The young man—clearly the manager—laughs. “See you tomorrow,” he says.

Once the young man is gone, Crocker tells the clerk, “Actually, the jobs I was talking about at school . . . I meant jobs in the cafeteria.”

“You've got to be kidding! A food server?” The clerk snaps Crocker's change on the counter as if she prefers not to touch his fingers.

One hundred and fifty calories per pastry. Four grams of fat. Each gram of fat contains nine calories. The AMA and the surgeon general recommend lowering fat intake to twenty percent of daily calories. Thirty percent? Ten?

Both Ahmad and Pop now sit in the red convertible, watching their spicy breaths spout in the cold night air above their heads. Under the stall's fluorescent lights, their lips appear silvered, like blueberries. The silver on blueberries has its very own name. Go close enough to a subject and you will find—if its qualities receive sufficient handling—names.

Actually, Crocker
gave
these shivering boys the two sweaters he had received at Christmas. If either ever wore one, Crocker missed it. In their embrace of the hard sell, the boys prefer “muscle shirts,” sleeveless, form-fitting things they wear on even the coldest days, and which leave them looking like the goosefleshed kids who hook old guys in the city.

“To imagine a language means to imagine a way of life.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein
. So reads the line of type that Crocker has taped to the top of the rickety desk of his school office.

“No, thanks,” says Ahmad to Crocker's offer of coconut pastries. His eyes appear rheumy, as if he has been smoking dope, drinking. “No eat shit,” Ahmad says.

Crocker barely manages to rock back on his heels, laugh. “So,” he teases—playing the teacher/fool, a role he despises—“I suppose you boys finished your homework?”

Pop hoots with laughter. His eyes are eerie—a blue that appears milky against his dark skin. While Pop laughs, Ahmad looks away. He keeps his hands tucked hard in the pockets of his snaky jacket, as if this helps him to hold down his shivers.

“Come on next door,” says Crocker. “I'll buy you coffee. You boys look chilly.”

Pop looks to Ahmad. Who squints at a small tan car chugging out of the market lot and into the street. “Yes,” says Ahmad, “yes, okay,” and unfolds his handsome bones from behind the steering wheel, and opens the door.

Ahmad saunters. Ahmad hugs his elbows and doesn't talk. Ahmad's jaw stands out in a tight knob. While—in zigzags, smiling at the two of them, hooting—Pop runs backwards across the lot and toward the store.

Crocker thinks of himself young, running to outfox the cold. “See the full moon?” he calls ahead to Pop.

Gibbous. Very white. White rock. Matte as sponge when seen through a telescope. In Crocker's terrible dreams, the moon does not appear, Crocker is not a man at all. Crocker is an atom-size observer, set in place to receive cruel and unrelenting stimulation at the hands of the newly revealed universe. Where is the moon in Crocker's dreams? In his dreams, does he float, perhaps, beyond that side that we on earth never see?

(From the 1940s, an experiment: Subjects are asked to quickly identify a number of cards. One comes up marked with a number six
and a red spade. The subjects identify this as a six of spades, or, sometimes, as a six of hearts. Shown the card again, however, for a longer period of time, they hesitate in their identifications; certain subjects declare themselves no longer certain they actually
recall
the shape of a spade.)

In an attempt at jocularity, Crocker tells the boys, “We always see the same face, you know; always the same side,” and he pats his cheeks, and grins.

Obediently, the boys offer the moon a second, bored look; then they step through the convenience-market door.

“So.” The clerk frowns while Crocker counts out his change for the coffees. She points at the pastries he has laid on the counter. “So are those the ones you bought before, or different?”

“The same. I thought my friends would like them—”

When Crocker turns to smile at the brothers, he finds Ahmad, lips drawn back like those on an angry dog. Ahmad is gesturing to Fop with some urgency, one hand holding the younger boy by the back of the neck.

“Look,” says the clerk. She leans forward rakishly, one elbow on the counter. Crocker hopes the boys do not try to flirt with her. The boys seem to have acquired their sense of courtship from X-rated cable TV and clumsy work with dictionaries. “Beautiful girl,” Crocker once heard Ahmad cry in the hallway, “come close to let me see the pudendum.”

“What's the trouble?” says the clerk.

“I'm paying,” says Crocker. “No trouble.”

Ahmad nods. He picks up two of the steaming cups, takes a sip from one, and smiles at Crocker over the cup rim. “Hot,” Ahmad says. He holds out the second cup to Crocker, and so it is that Crocker is extending his hand for the cup as the boy's elbows swing back—

Crocker cries out in pain and surprise as the coffee splashes his face—

“On legs!” yells Pop.

“On
knees!
” Ahmad says, an angry correction, and, with a swift
crack from the almost comically dangerous-looking gun he whips from his jacket, he proceeds to create shattered lightning and rolls of thunder across the back of Crocker's skull.

A glowing moment.

Pink. Gold. Mentholated.

Crocker subtracts himself from it long enough to bid good-bye to his wife and son.

But finds himself alive. Still alive
now
. And alive
now
, too. Down on the floor. Everything above him is sun—terrible—and he blinks and considers his dear life, and how, maybe, maybe, they'll shoot the clerk first; and maybe that moment of concentrated attention might allow Crocker a scramble toward the banged-up metal doors leading to the storeroom—

“Tell girl, Crocker!” So shouts one of the robbers. Robbers, gunmen, assailants; personality vanquished in the battle with function. “Give key! We shoot!”

“Here!” the clerk sobs. “Here! Here!”

One boy presses a foot on Crocker's neck. Melting snow drips from a shoe onto Crocker's face, his hair.

If you had told Crocker, once upon a time, that he would someday be a customer in a convenience store during its robbery, he would have said, “I'm not surprised.”

He is surprised.

When the robbers go—with a miraculous swish of doors, roar of car, ripped gravel—Crocker stays on his knees. He considers the melted snow—now warm on his skin—and his remarkable breath, the charming coils of his guts, the delivery of messages of injury that travel from his banged-up skull and coffee-scalded face to his brain, so nicely protected by a basically intact skull, which, like every other part of his body, presses against its delicate husk in grateful articulation.

A purple gum ball beneath the candy display beside Crocker's head. Grape. Next to the gum ball: a bit of fuzz. On the racks, Jolly Rancher candies flavored with cinnamon. Slo-Poke suckers. An open
box of lucky rabbit's foot key chains. So people still buy lucky rabbit's feet. Crocker extends a finger to one of the feet, finds the tiny claws hidden in its fur.

Lucky.

“I can't believe this!” The clerk comes out from behind the counter to nudge Crocker with her foot. Rather hard. Actually, some might describe her movement as a kick. “Were you in on this?” she demands.

Crocker steadies himself with a hand on the counter, and gets slowly to his feet. “Was I in on it?” He smiles at the clerk, and gingerly touches the aching knob on the back of his head. “I guess I taught them how to use the imperative,” he says.

Asks the clerk, “Is that the kind of gun they had?” From beneath the counter she brings out a box of pink tissues and hands it to Crocker. “If you weren't in on it, why did they come in with you?”

Crocker dabs at his wet collar and neck. Coffee, dirt, not blood. The wound to his head cannot be much, though the pain bellows impressively, on and off, like a foghorn or a smoke detector, some warning device designed to come in pulses so that the ear might not adjust, tune out the sound.

“They're my students,” he says. “I don't know what they were thinking of.”

The clerk shakes her head. She dials 911. She places her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone and whispers, “Look.” With a pointy elbow, she indicates a station wagon, now lumbering across the uneven parking lot. “Look, you'll have to help that customer while I'm talking to the cops.”

Crocker nods. On the counter, steaming, the third—and last—cup of coffee still sits. Carefully, he takes it up in his hands. The Styrofoam is warm; the coffee, hot. It seems to him an elixir, more sacred than any communion wine drunk in his youth. A prophecy has been fulfilled, Crocker thinks, some sort of prophecy, and he takes a drink from the magic cup, and helps a hefty woman in house slippers to locate a bottle of maraschino cherries.

The police: one a woman, one a man wearing makeup apparently meant to give him a fierce, foreign air—sooty brows and lashes, a sticky orangish complexion. Just come from an underground operation, perhaps? A costume ball? Crocker smiles at both and does not mention the crack to his skull; nor does the clerk, who, in attending to her own pain, perhaps missed the blow entirely. “Really,” says Crocker, “I have to be going. My wife and son.” The officers smile. They drink coffee, and, with a tidy hand cupped under the chin to catch crumbs, eat the coconut pastries for which Crocker no longer has an appetite.

Crocker's step, crossing the parking lot, is springy; he does not mind if anyone smirks. A sweet, musty smell of hay fills his car: last summer's hay, hauled for mulch, now stirred up by the vacuum. And in his hair, beneath his fingers—now sensitive as a safecracker's—he finds grit. Grit from the melted snow that dripped from the boy's shoe, grit from this four-billion-some-year-old earth, or perhaps something older, something fallen out of the sky, cosmic dust picked up in our journey around the sun.