7
He shoots the old lady and nothing happens.
He aims the gun at her mouth and pulls the trigger, and the words fall out of the world. Her hands cover her face as if to hold her skull in place. He aims at her chest and fires again, and she crumples to the linoleum, twitching. He listens for the slow groan underneath her robe and fires another slug into her back. Then waits.
Eventually, like always, she rises, her back arched like a puppet on strings. She crawls on all fours and lifts her wincing face toward his raised .32, then begs him to spare her family, her mother with gold hair who’s still back there, through the rapeseed meadow, in the cellar of the hideaway house, crouched behind human-sized jars of pickled radishes and beets. He bites his lip and shoots her in the forehead. She jolts before doubling over.
He shoots her in the kitchen, in her bedroom, then the foyer. He puts his sights on her hunched back and fires as she sweeps the hallway. All over the house she lies, clutching her side, her blue robe billowing through the rooms as she dies. It’s like he’s aiming at pieces of the sky except he always ends up hitting a grandmother.
Because they’re at war and it doesn’t make sense. They are playing at real life but it’s so much like hell it feels fake. She is his landlady. Sort of. She is Grazina Vitkus, and as the bullet hits her, she cries out, stumbles on the landing. But this time she reaches into the pocket of her nightgown, takes out her own pistol (a Walther P38), cocks it once, settles the nozzle where the boy’s heart is, and pulls. He’s hit in the chest during the commercial break of Dancing with the Stars and immediately winces before grabbing the nearby bag of unopened pretzels and hurling it at her. His head jerks back as he collapses on the musty carpet, writhing wildly, making blood-clotted groans while she laughs and blows smoke from her raised crooked finger like a James Bond villain.
Once he was assassinated from behind while eating breakfast. Her mouth fired a bang and the boy’s face fell with a plop into the bowl, lukewarm, brain-colored oatmeal oozing from his temples. Because the Red Guard’s coming and Stalin is killing thousands by the week. But the gulags won’t have them, they’ve decided. Not if God and Mother Mary can help it. This is as real as it gets. This is East Gladness, Germany. This is November, and heat from their wounds comes out as steam between their fingers. This is nowhere in the middle of their lives, yet closer to death than they’ve ever been.
It is simply the way here, in this house beside a river marked only by what it makes disappear. He is Sergeant Pepper, Second Division, US Infantry. He aims for the mouth because it’s the deepest wound he’s ever seen. No matter how many years the body wrecks itself on the shore of living, the mouth stays mostly the same, faithful through its empty, eternal void. Some call this hunger. Others call it loss. He knows it only as the law. Whole nations have burned from this little oval ringed with teeth. Were we even human until God opened us here, His fingers singeing a place in the lower face so we can say, eyes narrowed at the embered new world, “The fuck?”
He aims for the mouth because it opens the way time opens—whatever goes through never returns the same. Like a word. Like a you. Like I said, this is war.
After the night he pretended to be an army officer named after a local pizza shop to fight a war he knew nothing about, they began, at Grazina’s request, to conduct shooting drills via mock gunfights. Whenever she slipped into one of her episodes, her eyes clouded with that faraway look, Hai would deepen his voice and bring out the sergeant. “I have no problem shooting Reds and Krauts. Just show me how,” she said, hands on her hips, her nightgown blotched with Salisbury steak gravy.
These gunfights, a dream inside a dream inside an illusion, occurred around three times a week, where they’d fire at each other throughout the house, their finger-pistols locked and loaded as they crouched among the floral furniture. They were on an old dairy farm pasture, he’d tell her, or stopped over on the side of the road by a shelled village, a grove of pines, gunmetal light splintering through the eaves.
In this theater they made of her memories, the war was drawing to a close. If the Soviets had taken Vilnius, Grazina informed him, it meant the Germans were losing the Eastern Front, and it was only a matter of time before the Allies closed in from France. He nodded as if this was obvious to him. He was about to suggest they get back on the jeep when she stopped, looked around the room as if someone had just called her name, then walked into the kitchen, where she set out cups for tea as though none of this happened.
And like that it was over.
The house reappeared from behind their hallucinations, drab and musty as ever. It was like coming down from a high. Over cups of Earl Grey—which he found unbearable, like drinking hot perfume—she told him about her life, how much of it true there was no telling. She went on about her family in Lithuania. How her father was a baker famous in the region, his raspberry strudel unrivaled, capable of bribing the Nazis to spare his pastry shop when they rolled into Rokiškis in ’39. “The Krauts smashed every window on the road. When my father saw them coming up the street, he ran to the back and dumped the chocolate rugelach—my favorite—into a sink of dirty water, covered them with baking pans. Then he came out with rye loaves big as babies and tossed them into the officers’ arms. I was only twelve when I stood staring out the window as they marched by us—their arms full of bread after taking our country, their eyes watching me from under their helmets, this girl among prune cakes and cookies—and spared my father’s windows.” She spoke with a mix of pride and sunken rage. “Of course, we didn’t know what they were actually capable of. What was happening in the ghettos. If we knew, we would have left like the others, the smart ones. You see, the Germans, they saw us as just Slavs, slaves, and wanted us gone, sooner or later.”
“And what happened after that?”
“My mother was so scared, she became a Catholic. And then bombs. And more bombs. Boom, boom, boom,” she slapped the table.
“And your father, what did he believe in?”
“No Catholicism, no Judaism for him. But he did convert to Alcoholism.” She bit her lip and shrugged.
Her father, she explained, foolishly believed bread would spare his family forever. The Red Army, after pushing back the Nazis, invaded Lithuania in June of ’44, just five years after the Nazis marched past the bakery. Two weeks before Vilnius was occupied, her father took her and her brother onto a train heading west into Germany, where they would hopefully sneak into occupied France, then perhaps London. Though the Germans might have had plans to exterminate them eventually, the Communists posed a more immediate threat, seizing private property and splitting entire families, deporting them into Stalin’s working camps in the nether realms of the Soviet Union, many of whom would never return. “Like I said, there was more than one devil those days. You understand?”
He nodded, his tea cold. “A rock and a hard place.”
“More like being crushed by two ballsacks filled with demon blood. You ever been crushed by a ballsack?”
“Not really.”
“Stalin was worse for us only because he lasted longer. Ever heard of the pogroms? I regret nothing, Labas.” She pushed up her glasses with her middle finger. When she saw him smile at it, she said, “My husband used to hate that, said it was just my excuse to flick him off. He wasn’t wrong.” She laughed and the glasses slid back down her nose.
He wanted to know more, at the very least to build out Sergeant Pepper’s world, keep him believable and true when he needed him most. The longer Pepper existed, Hai realized, the easier it was to manage Grazina’s episodes. It meant having a portal into which he could usher her when the present burned away, like the fog burning up now over the river as the first sunrays splintered over the mountains.
“You know what?” She held up a finger, as if testing the wind. “I do regret one thing. I never got to go to a Gene Pitney concert.”
“A who concert?”
“It doesn’t matter. He was born in Hartford, then became real big. When he finally came to town I had to do a fundraiser for the VFW. Thought I would have another chance, but that’s how things go. You see people get big, then before you know it, they’re washed away and it’s all Duran Duran or whatever. I’m tired, Labas. Did I sleep last night?”
“I dunno. Did you?”
“I don’t remember,” she shrugged.
“I hate to tell you this, but Bugs Bunny is definitely sucking a dick,” Maureen said, her lips pursed over Russia’s tattoo as she studied it. It was a sketch of Bugs Bunny drawn down the side of Russia’s upper arm, supposedly biting into a carrot. Wayne was the first to point it out. When Russia, withering, turned to Hai and asked if he also saw a dick, Hai tried to be diplomatic. “Honestly? It could go either way,” he said. “I mean, with his cheeks bulging and all, I see what Wayne is saying. But I wouldn’t, like, think of it…immediately, you know?”
“But you’ll think of it sooner or later,” Maureen laughed with her hand over her mouth. “Your Bunny’s giving head. And you know? I think it’s pretty cool.”
“No, it’s not, dude.” Russia yanked his shirt over the tattoo, rubbing it like a burn.
“Why do you even have that thing anyway?” said Wayne, wiping down his butcher block.
“It was my nickname back in high school.”
“Blow job?” Hai tried to suppress his laugh.
“Nah, man. B-Rab.” Russia turned to Maureen as if she’d confirm this. “You know, Eminem’s name in 8 Mile? I used to memorize all his lyrics off the dome. I was a legend back in high school. The quarterback, Jimmy Nikels, when we made it to the state semifinals junior year, even asked me to hype up the team in the locker room before the game with ‘Lose Yourself.’ ” Russia scratched his nose and looked at them sheepishly. “We got blown out but it was still dope as fuck.”
“It’s alright, man,” Hai offered. “Your tats can mean B-Rab and be a sex-positive message. A double meaning. Most people have tats that are a bunch of stupid shapes or barbed wire or Chinese words they can’t pronounce. But yours is sick.”
“Who’s sick?” BJ walked out from the back, her hands dusted with corn bread mix.
“Russia’s dick,” Maureen said. “I mean, his tattoo of a rabbit giving head.”
“The fuck? Let me see?” BJ tried to lift his sleeve but Russia pulled away.
“Fuck out of here. I’m not a museum.” Russia let out a sigh and turned back to the drive-thru window, where a customer was pulling up.
“Okay, since we’re sharing, I got something even better,” BJ said.
Hai stopped stirring the creamed spinach.
“Let me guess,” Maureen said, smirking as she crossed her arms, “you got a Prince Albert.”
“How the hell am I supposed to get that, Maur? No, man. Do I look like a penis ring person to you?”
“I thought a Prince Albert was a type of tattoo!”
A woman, in earshot from the dining room, stopped unwrapping her meat loaf and paused in her seat, her entire body listening. BJ loosened her belt, untucked her white manager’s shirt, and unbuttoned it all the way to the top before turning to reveal her fleshy bare shoulder. At the center of the right shoulder blade was a dusky blotch the size of one of their chicken drumsticks, resembling a bad chemical burn.
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” said Maureen.
“Don’t you see it? It’s a fucking music note. As a birthmark. You know what that means? It means God marked me and I’m carrying out his work. And you know wrestling is ninety percent music, right?” She was nearly bent over, the birthmark shining with sweat under the halogens.
Maureen turned to Wayne. “Looks like Mexico to me. Don’t it look like Mexico?”
Sony came over and peered over Maureen’s shoulder. “It’s more like Florida,” he said in a rare divergence from his commander, “the third state to secede from the Union,” and shook his head with disappointment.
BJ popped up and flung her shirt back on. “Okay, everybody get back to work! We’re not paying you to have opinions.” She buttoned up her shirt and fixed her name tag. “And don’t forget it’s Peace Treaty Day. And I want you and you,” she pointed at Hai and Maureen, “to do the exchanges.”
“What? Didn’t I do it in the spring?” Maureen frowned. “I recall bringing back tulips with the cargo.”
“That was two years ago. Sony did it last spring and fucked it all up.” BJ was already walking away.
“Fuck me. Alright, come on, kid,” Maureen said as she hobbled toward the back. “I gotta ice my knees before we hit the road.”
The Peace Treaty, Maureen told Hai as they sat on milk crates in the freezer, a slab of frozen mac and cheese balanced across her knees, was a food exchange between HomeMarket and the employees at their arch rival, the Panetta down the road in Millsap. It was the only other fast-casual in a twenty-mile radius and had a notoriously snooty vibe. “They think they’re better than us cause they have fucking salads. You kidding me? Who wants to eat leaves at a fast-food joint?” Maureen shifted the mac and cheese slab to one knee and grimaced. Back in high school, Panetta was the place where rich girls from “the Heights,” wearing a uniform of Abercrombie sweatpants tucked into Ugg boots and puffer vests, would sit in a booth, look at you while sipping cantaloupe ice tea, then whisper to each other before erupting with toothy laughter.
Peace Treaty Day also gave each group of employees a chance to eat something other than what they served every day. “But the thing is,” Maureen said, leaning forward, “their food is shit. Fealthy is what I call it. Fake healthy. They cut up two stalks of romaine, toss it into a bowl of mayo covered in bacon bits, and call it ‘conscious crisps.’ Don’t that make you wanna punch a toddler?”
Hai thought about it and nodded.
“Just wait till you see ’em, stuck-up in their nutmeg aprons and T-shirts like it’s a farmers market and not a franchise next to a Walmart.”
Maureen shoved the mac and cheese to the floor, where it thumped like a dead body, and got up. “Let’s go. Can you drive?”
Hai shook his head. “I failed my test four times.”
“Jesus Christ.” She gave him a once-over.
He braced himself for the expected comment about Asians and driving.
“You’ll get it next time. Five’s a lucky number after all.” She walked out the freezer, adding over her shoulder, “I divorced my husband after five years.”
Ten minutes later he was riding shotgun in the van, a black 2002 Dodge Caravan Passenger with HomeMarket emblazoned red on both sides. Sony and the dishwasher girl had already loaded the back with aluminum trays full of every menu item except pot pies, which they had run out of the day before.
Soon they were chugging through the back roads, taking the scenic route to stretch the drive. “The longer we ride, the longer I get to sit. Here, take this.” She shoved an opened metal flask in front of him. It reeked of gin and something else. “Go ahead if you want. Three sips of this and my knees feel thirty-five again.”
“No thanks. I’m allergic.”
“To alcohol? That’s a new one.” She glanced at him with one eye. “Now, that a real situation or some gluten-free hipster thing?”
She took a swig, stuck her tongue out, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. They were silent for a while. Just the car puttering through stretches of rye and cattail marshes, past tracts of slate-like fields cleared for power lines, the mist burning steadily as the sun skimmed the knolls edging the valley. Then Maureen said, “I’m gonna tell you something that you might not be ready for.”
He looked to see if she was joking, but her eyes were steady and red at the edges.
“You’re green and you need to know some things, okay? All this knowledge is no good sticking on a creaky-kneed old lady. I might not look like it but I’m a philosopher, you know.”
“What’s a philosopher supposed to look like? Also, you’re not an old lady.”
“Oh, fuck off. This isn’t a date, for God’s sakes. You don’t gotta butter me up, kid.” She made a turn, then tapped the windshield with a nubby finger. “You know, if we keep on driving, like, past Millsap, past the Panetta, Hartford, then into New York State, Pittsburgh, all the way out west, and then beyond that, and if this van could swim and went out even further.” She made her hand into a ship and sailed it toward his face. “Right out there, deep out in the ocean, you know what would happen?”
“We’d drown?”
“Guess again. With more imagination.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re one of those?” Hai leaned away and looked at her. “Like we’re really gonna fall off the flat earth?”
“You kidding me? That’s amateur stuff, friend. The earth isn’t flat and it never was.” She made her hand into a sphere. “It’s hollow. And the entrance is in Antarctica. So if we keep going, we’ll hit the big ice block down south. All roads lead to Antarctica. Literally and figuratively.”
Hai thought about it, his head hurting. “I could use a coffee.”
“Listen, before you go on and judge…” She gave him the one-eyed stare again, then went on talking about how the earth was inside some giant display case. “Like those model towns you see in museums? You know the ones. Except it’s us, you and me, right now, riding in this shitty van to a shitty Panetta. Everything’s a model. A simulation. The white coats have always known it too. They have formulas, algebra that can explain it now.”
“I don’t get it,” Hai said. “What about that picture of the earth from space and all that? Neil Armstrong and Bud Lightyear and all them?”
“Buzz Aldrin!” she laughed. “Man, I forgot you’re just a child.” There was no free-floating globe, Maureen explained, because the earth was controlled by reptilians living underground, whose tunnels can be accessed only through a secret entrance on an ancient ice sheet on the “forbidden continent,” and all the politicians—including every American president since Kennedy—have privately visited Antarctica to make deals with these lizards. For some reason, Hai hadn’t pinned Maureen for a tinfoil hat. “What, you think they just all love icebergs? Even the goddamn Pope? Give me a break. They’re checking out the entrance, maybe even going down there, snooping around. Why you think there’s no country in Antarctica? Think about it now. Really think about it.” She swallowed as they stopped at a crosswalk. An old woman with a headscarf was struggling against the wind, a tiny smudge of a dog in her arms. When they passed, she turned up her face and stared blankly at them with black eyes.
“The dinosaurs, they never died off, you get me? They evolved, just like us. Except they got a few million years’ head start on us. Now they’re intelligent lizards feeding off our negative energy,” Maureen went on. “They’ve forced our world leaders to work for them, trapping humanity in endless cycles of war and death machines. Some of our leaders are even lizards in disguise. I mean, how else do you explain Dick Cheney? Now they can’t wipe us out because they need us here to keep giving off bad vibrations. They feed on our suffering, ya know? We’re nothing but a crop to them. They let us live our little troubled lives, let the sunlight and the rain make us grow…then, once in a while, they mow us down to keep their numbers up.” She went on and on like this. Hai started drifting off, staring at the abandoned cars along the shanty lots, some so flat and rusted they looked like fallen trees. She turned to him, her eyebrows arched, and it took him a moment to realize she had just asked him a question he didn’t hear.
“Yeah,” he said without a clue.
“You really think so?” She slit her eyes at him and bit her lip.
“Most of the time. Yeah.”
“Right.” She nodded. “You’re not as dull as you look, you know.”
He had never heard of a lizard conspiracy before, but in a van cramped with trays of food, the overpowering smells of their twenty-one menu items mixing together, the world outside blurring by like a washing machine, amorphous and out of reach in its ruined stretches, it was hard not to believe her. It even made sense, in a way. Wasn’t that how taxes worked? Aren’t we alive just so they can skim our earnings off the top for as long as we live? But what would it matter if they were ruled by immortal dinosaurs hiding underground? He was not at war with them; he was only alive inside pieces of mistakes that gravity had collected into a life raft called the present. He was in a catering van, heading downriver, toward whatever iceberg lay ahead.
“It’s a lot to take in at once, I know. But I’ll break it down for you slowly. Through time.” She reached over and patted his knee with a gentleness he didn’t expect. That’s when he saw the watch on her wrist. A Star Wars design with powder-blue bands, it had Han Solo on its face surrounded by tiny Chewbacca heads to mark the time.
“How does Star Wars fit in with hollow earth?” Hai nodded at the watch. Maureen stared ahead, keeping quiet. He looked out the window. They were passing a junkyard filled with car carcasses on both sides. The leaves had already fallen onto the shells of old sedans, some dating back to the sixties. The grass, high as the door handles, was still blue-green and weeks away from the moldy greys of winter. A yellowing fern had spent the summer prying through a crack in the floorboard of a taxicab and now swayed in the driver’s seat like a person napping at the wheel.
“It was my son’s. He was obsessed. We both were.” She let herself chuckle. “The big man upstairs took him home in ’99. Leukemia. Bad blood, they said. Funny thing is his deadbeat father always said that too. That my boy had bad blood. But he was talking about me. That he had my temper in him, which was true. Then my baby went ahead and really did have bad blood. What a joke.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say stupid shit like that.” Then in a mocking, Valley girl tone, she added, “ ‘Oh, Maureen. I’m so sorry for your loss. Here’s a Jell-O mold for your loss. Oh, Maureen, it must be so hard to lose your only child. We’re so sorry.’ Everybody’s so sorry about what they don’t know shit about.”
Through the corner of his eye, he saw her shake her head, saying softly, “You’ll learn not to get too worked up about me. My situation might be jacked up but I’m God-fearing and I respect people if they come at me straight.” Her son loved Han Solo, she explained, and she bought the watch for him for his tenth birthday, over a decade ago. It didn’t even work anymore. “He said Han Solo looked like a better version of his dad. I didn’t want to believe it, but he was right. We used to—” She coughed into her arm, took out the flask, and was about to open it, then paused and put it back in her jacket. “We used to watch Empire Strikes Back together over and over. He said it was the best one.”
“He’s not wrong,” Hai said.
“His name was Paul. Such a boring name, you’d think he’d get a long, boring life.”
Maureen was still paying off Paul’s medical bills. She had a town house off King and Main but heated only the kitchen to cut costs, where she slept on the floor in a sleeping bag.
They turned back on Route 4, and the gas stations and fast-food joints on the strip sparkled from a break in the clouds. Behind the strip, like a cardboard backdrop in a film set, was the Bowen power plant, its two water towers looming over the skyline. Beside the plant, in a grove of pines, was an unfinished SAM site built during the Cold War. In high school, kids would go there to make out, throw parties, do lines of coke off the old steel pipes while punk bands played in the concrete chambers with generators stolen from shop class. All this passed through his mind like projections from a slide.
After a while Hai said, real quiet, “Can I ask you something?”
“Normally I’d say no, but go ahead. Oh—that place over there has the best fried Oreos.” She pointed with her chin.
“Where do you think he is?”
“Where who is?”
“I mean with Antarctica and the lizards and all that. Where does somebody like Paul go when they’re done using his energy?”
“Ha! My baby’s with God.” She looked at him as though willing him to believe her, as though his believing would confirm its truth.
He turned his face toward the rusted power plant. “Right, that makes sense.”
They parked in the back of the Panetta, which, unlike HomeMarket, had a loading bay. Maureen took another swig from her flask. She wasn’t exactly drunk but looser and warmer now. “You ready to party?” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears.
“Your eye shadow’s running a bit,” Hai said. “If you care.”
“Oh, fuck’s sake.” She checked herself in the rearview and wiped her cheeks with her knuckles.
There were already two employees from Panetta waiting for them on the dock, a man and a woman who smiled too widely and in unison, like Wes Anderson characters. Hai trailed Maureen as she lumbered up the stairs. He noticed her red, swollen ankles, her heels sockless and scabbed with blisters. She headed inside and said to the workers, “It’s unlocked. Get in there and do what you gotta do. I need a muffin.”
The store was bustling with the early lunch crowd, most of them dressed either in full suits or business casual, office workers from the office park across the street that housed obscure insurance companies, tech services, or the occasional specialist in warts or Lyme disease. Everything in the place was neat and radiated politeness and order. The walls were lined with faux brick and decorated with high-definition stock photos of bread and vegetables. In the back row, where HomeMarket had chickens dripping with grease, there were wire hoppers filled to the brim with bountiful varieties of freshly baked bread, spotlit by studio lighting. As they approached the counter, a blond woman with a yoga-instructor ponytail wheeled a baking rack filled with square croissants, so fresh from the oven they crackled as they passed.
“Give me one of those hand pie things,” Maureen said, pointing to the croissants.
“Oh,” the woman quipped, “those aren’t ready yet.” Despite Maureen’s efforts, her eye shadow had smeared her other cheek, and she looked like she’d just been punched in the face.
“Would you just give it to us? We’re from HomeMarket. Peace Treaty Day and all that. They look ready to me.”
“I’m sorry, our pastries are baked hourly and come out very hot, and I simply can’t serve them until they’re ready. It’s a safety issue.” Then she added, more coldly, “Even if you’re not a customer.”
“Jesus Christ.” Maureen went on her tippy-toes, wobbling as she peered over the tea displays into the hoppers.
Hai asked the woman if they had anything else like the pastries on the rack.
“Oh, you mean our pain au chocolat? Well, it depends—”
“What a name for a baked good,” Maureen said. “You people are something else.”
“Flat white at the register!” another worker shouted, setting a drink on the counter.
“What the hell did you just call me?” Maureen said.
“HomeMarket!” said a high-pitched voice from behind them.
They turned to find a five-foot-nothing man with a Pringles mustache rubbing his hands together and grinning. “You guys made it.” He did a performative glance at his watch. “Only fifteen minutes late. But when in the service of peace, time, too, must wait. Am I right?”
“I want the chocolate pain,” Maureen said, unimpressed.
“Of course.” His name was Sam, and he was clearly the manager. “Shelly, please give our friends four,” he raised his fingers to Shelly but placed them so close to Hai’s face he could smell lavender hand sanitizer, “pain au chocolats, please.” He pronounced it in French, then turned to them, his grin struggling to show through his overgrown mustache. “They’re fresh baked, as always.”
Shelly handed Hai the bag of pastries and promptly looked past them, calling for the next customer. Just then a man walked up behind Maureen and tapped her shoulder. She whirled around. “Nacho!” she cried, and started tucking what seemed like invisible strands of hair behind her ear.
The man let out a big laugh and pulled Maureen into his arms. He wore a cowboy-style button-up ringed with sweat at the armpits, his skin the shade of good scotch. “How you been, Mama? You look like you’re thriving.”
Maureen giggled and brushed his cheek with the back of her hand. “Now I am. And look at you. Florida gave somebody a little makeover.”
Nacho smiled shyly and looked away. He was a big rig driver for Sysco, a distributor that provided restaurant supplies to a wide array of franchises, including both Panetta and HomeMarket. He was parked across the street to unload a sixteen-wheeler for a Subway inside the Walmart.
Maureen offered him a croissant, but he refused, saying he just had Chinese. “I’ll meet you at the van when they’re done,” she said to Hai, then snuggled into Nacho’s arms as they walked out, giddy with each other.
When Hai returned to the van the Panetta crew was already finished. The back was loaded with cardboard crates full of earth-colored biodegradable boxes tied with yellow ribbons. There was a piece of paper taped to one of the crates that had Be Your Best Self Sharpied in handwriting that can only be described as soccer mom Comic Sans. Maureen was right. These people were obnoxious. He looked around but she was nowhere in sight, so he climbed into the passenger and waited. After nearly a half hour, a white Sysco truck pulled into the lot. Nacho got out and helped Maureen down the passenger side, all gentleman-like. They hugged and air-kissed, and she hurried toward the van, grinning at the ground, suddenly lithe on her feet.
“That was quick,” she said, breathing heavily as she closed the door. “They usually take forever loading their dumb salads. You wait long?”
“Not at all. Who’s the guy?”
She waved at Nacho, who stopped on the truck ladder and waved back.
“Oh, Nacho? An old friend. Well, I’ll just say it.” She removed her cap and fixed her hair. “A friend with benefits. He’s not bad-looking, right? A gas station ten with a good heart. What, you don’t think I’m out of commission for a little joy yet, do you? His name’s short for Ignacio. He said that nachos—you know, the ones you eat—were invented by some guy named Ignacio.” She stared dreamily at Nacho’s truck. “But he’s so full of shit he probably pulled it out of his ass just to get in my panties.”
“Guess it worked.”
“Fuck you. We got everything?” She turned back and grabbed one of the boxes, squinting at the labeled sticker. “Oh, great, shit take mushroom salad? That’s a hard pass for me. I take plenty of shits without them, thank you.” She chucked it in the crate and fired up the van.
“At least we got these.” Hai shook the bag of croissants, smiling.
It was almost three by the time they returned to East Gladness. Everyone helped unload the boxes, which, to no one’s surprise, were full of salads. There were four tiny muffins shoved in the corner of a box of dressing packets. “I knew it!” Wayne said. “Every damn time. It’s a scam, man. I don’t know why we even do this shit anymore.” And he proceeded to carve up a meat loaf for everyone while Russia started making his corn bread and chicken skin sandwiches.
Sony picked up a sickly green slice of something between two fingers, reading the label. “What’s a hare-loom tomato?”
BJ peered over his shoulder. “It’s when rich people think fucked-up-looking things are more special than normal stuff.”
But the crew picked through the spread while tending to the sporadic stream of customers anyway. After cleaning the van of dressing that had spilled on the way back, Hai and Maureen sat on milk crates out back.
“Want me to get you a mac and cheese ice pack?”
“Nah, cum lubes up my joints. And Nacho had plenty.” Maureen winked.
“You fucked in that truck?”
“It’s got a bed, believe it or not. Oh, and he gave me some Purple Haze too.” She nodded to a neatly rolled joint tucked in her apron pocket. A car pulled into the drive-thru. Russia’s voice, cut with static, asked how the people inside were doing, and they answered with what they wanted to eat.
The sun had finally come out, cold and weak but making pretty shadows inside the hollowed rooms of the apartments across the lot.
“I just thought it would mean something,” said Maureen, letting out a long sigh.
“What are you talking about?” Hai asked, not wanting to look at her.
“That it has meaning when somebody dies. That it leads to something. But it doesn’t.” Her voice sounded buried. “The only thing that’s different is that I can’t stand flowers now. All that color just pisses me off. Sometimes flowers just make you wanna quit, you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
She pouted her lips and drooped her shoulders. “Here.” She nudged the paper bag of pastries with her foot. “Dig in. Good thing you didn’t tell the others we had these.”
Hai took a chocolate croissant, the size of his face, from the bag and pulled it apart, the gooey filling reflecting in the fading sun, and handed her half. “Have some chocolate pain,” he said. “You earned it.”
She laughed and bit into it, the flakes flecked across her lips. “Those fucking lizards,” she said, staring at the bit of sweetness in her hand. “They don’t know shit about this.”
