Brief Encounters with the Enemy

ASSOCIATES

It was about a month after the war began that I took two boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, considering I’m the assistant manager, but I was in love with a girl who might or might not have been in love with me. Either way, this was the necessary course of action.

When the truck pulled up to the loading dock, I opened it myself and walked around being a pest with my clipboard, punctilious and official, examining things, checking things off my list. The driver kept sighing and coughing and making all manner of frustrated sounds. “It takes as long as it takes,” I said. Finally he went to piss, and while he was away, I grabbed the boxes and fled to the mop closet. I took a big box of toilet paper, sixty-two count, and I took a big box of something else that I didn’t bother to look at. I just grabbed it. Cookies or cupcakes, I think it was. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Mr. Bildman didn’t care either. He took whatever you brought him. He took motor oil. He took nail polish remover. He took apples and oranges.

About an hour later, I tracked down Joey Joey in the break room, talking to three cashiers. He had his feet up on the chair like he owned the place, like an asshole. When he saw me, he stood up and saluted. The girls laughed. Jenna and Haley and Lisa Marie. He was putting on a show for them.

“I’m going to need your help with something,” I said.

“You got it, cap’n!” he said.

He calls me “cap’n” all the time and I’m not sure what he intends by it other than to irritate or possibly humiliate me. When he isn’t calling me “cap’n,” he’s calling me “sarge” or “colonel.” It might have been tolerable if there’d been some trace of irony in his voice. We’re friends, after all, we grew up together, we played Little League together, we graduated from high school together. But I’ve been promoted three times and he’s remained an associate. “You know why, right?” he said once. “It’s because you’re good-looking.” No, it’s because I’m more diligent than he, more industrious, and somewhat more intelligent. It’s also because while I was working my way up at Walmart — beginning with cleaning the bathrooms — he was selling prescription drugs, dressing as if every night was prom night, carrying a roll of money the size of a baseball, and driving around the city in an SUV with ROAD TO THE RICHES hand-lettered on the side. He was sure that this was it, that he had found his calling and the good times would never end. But the good times ended when he got arrested and the fear of God was put in him. I went to visit him twice at the county jail with Chip, who also went all the way back to Little League. A window with fingerprints separated us and we had to talk over a telephone, Chip and I taking turns. There was a disconcerting hitch in the mechanism so that Joey Joey’s lips moved before I heard the words in the receiver. It was like I was watching a movie that had been dubbed in English. He was wearing a baggy green shirt and an ID bracelet, and if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought he was a patient in a hospital, which I guess in some ways he was. He had a small bruise on the side of his head, and when I asked him how he had come by it, he told me he’d dropped a dumbbell lifting weights. It was a story I found hard to believe, since he’d never worked out in his life. He spoke at length about his innocence, about how it was all a misunderstanding. He was facing six to eight years, but he managed to affect an assertive, nonchalant voice, highly enunciated designed to persuade the authorities who were presumed to be listening in on the conversation (which may have accounted for the delay on the telephone). But his eyes were the opposite of confident; they were wide, white, and tense. The next time Chip and I went to visit, the warden had locked down the jail and visiting hours were suspended. We left Joey Joey twenty dollars on his account, along with a porno magazine. Not long after, he went to court with a decent lawyer and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. He ended up serving eight months. Ever since then he’s had some catching up to do.

At six o’clock I left the store with my spreadsheets and a cup of coffee. “See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough,” the cashiers called out sycophantically.

A long line of customers was filing in with their shopping carts and their babies and I had to jostle my way to get through. It was chilly outside but getting warmer day by day. It had been a rough winter and now we were hoping for a nice spring. The clocks had just been set ahead and the sunshine was pleasant but disconcerting. It made me feel like the last ten hours spent indoors had been doubly squandered. I drove my car around to the back where the garbage dumpsters stood in a row. No one was around. No one had any business being around. I turned on the radio and drank my coffee and listened to some news about baseball and about the war. I shut it off. Sitting in the silent cocoon of the car, with the sun beginning to go down, familiar fatigue came over me, originating in the soles of my feet and emanating upward until I felt soft and heavy. Even the coffee couldn’t offset the effects. It was warm in the car and I turned on the AC and it blew in my face. I took out my BlackBerry and checked my email. I have a tendency to check my email compulsively, especially when I’m idle. There were four new emails, all from work, all forwarded by people who had cc’d fifty people. It was what you did when you were trying to get out of responsibility, when you wanted to pass the buck to the next guy — you cc’d everyone. “Accounts Payable Protocol” was the subject line of one. I didn’t bother to read any of them.

In my lap lay my spreadsheets, rows and columns of blocks, some of those blocks filled, some of them empty; by tomorrow morning they’d all be filled in by me. They looked like a road map of sorts, my spreadsheets, an aerial view of the city, little block by little block, and I considered the drive I was about to make to Winchester Parks and whether I should take the expressway or the bridge. I thought about Mr. Bildman, and I thought about Mr. Bildman’s daughter, Zlottie. She liked me, but I wasn’t sure if she liked me as more than just a friend. A slight tremble of anxiety passed through me, briefly counterbalancing the fatigue. It had been a while since I’d had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, mainly because I was shy, but also because I worked all the time and I couldn’t find any girls I liked. But Zlottie was smart, she was also sophisticated, and she had the darkest eyes. She had the darkest hair too. In short, she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met.

The last time I’d seen her was right before Christmas. I’d gone to the shop with Chip. Chip had the connection and I had the car. He’d brought with him sixteen boxes of underpants that he’d taken off the truck at Kmart. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. He’d been at Kmart seven years and was about to deploy and had nothing left to lose. He’d lost it all already when he blew out his knee senior year and his basketball scholarship was revoked. He’d shown me the letter the college sent him upon hearing the news, a giant coat of arms telling him they’d be happy to still have him if he could come up with twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He was six-foot-six but walked with a slouch, all shoulders, no neck, as if trying to get back to normal height so he could forget the whole thing. Instead of going to college, he’d signed up for the reserves. When he’d gotten called up, I’d told him, “You’ll be back before you know it.” I’d been one of those fools who thought there wasn’t even going to be a war. Now that’s exactly where he was.

When we’d walked into Mr. Bildman’s shop that final day, Zlottie had been right in the front, standing on a ladder stacking boxes of crackers. On the shelf behind her was one of those Jewish candelabras with half the candles lit. The shop glowed in a soft light, making Zlottie look dramatic on the ladder, like an angel descending. She was wearing the same thing she always wore: a long black skirt that dropped all the way down to her shoes like a curtain on a stage and which hid the good parts from view. Even so, I could make out the curve of her ass. While Chip was in the back sorting out the details with Mr. Bildman, I broke the news that I wouldn’t be coming back. It was Chip’s thing, after all, and I was only the driver, and he was going off to war — and I wasn’t really a thief.

“That’s that,” I said. I tried to sound detached.

“Okay,” she said.

She didn’t seem to be affected by it that much. Apparently I was the only one with feelings. It was dark enough in the store that Zlottie, in her dark outfit, was almost beginning to disappear before my eyes. Then she caught me by surprise by saying, “Well, I’m just glad it’s not you shipping out, Nick.” Her voice sounded poignant in a time of war.

Since then I’d masturbated every day, sometimes twice a day, thinking about her working in that dusty shop, with that long black hair and that long black skirt, me entering with a box of whatnot, and the candles lit romantically.

From around the corner of the loading dock, Joey Joey appeared, pushing a big green dumpster that said WALMART on the side. He looked lethargic. His blue shirt was half untucked and there was sweat under the armpits. His pale face and round head added to the quality of lethargy.

“Oooooh,” he said as I rolled down the window. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Nick.” The teenage humor from earlier was gone. Outside the walls of Walmart, he was all sniffles and submission. That’s what jail had done to him. Eight years in the penitentiary would have turned him into a rabid, raging fiend, but eight months in county jail had sapped his spirit. I felt a pang of remorse for having recruited him in a crime that was for my benefit only. “I’ll make this worth your while,” I said.

I got out of the car, and together we pulled my big box of toilet paper and my other big box out of the dumpster. There was slime on the boxes, grease or something, but they were no worse for the wear. Mr. Bildman would take them.

I chose wrong and took the expressway. It was bumper-to-bumper. Joey Joey passed the time by flipping back and forth through my spreadsheets. I checked my email. It was getting dark out, and my BlackBerry glowed with emails of cc’s. Every few seconds we’d crawl a foot and then stop. All the cars had flags on them, or red-white-and-blue bumper stickers, or some indication that we were in the midst. Occasionally someone would yell out a car window. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” they’d yell, or “Joey JoEYYYYYYYYY!” because we’d lived in this city all our lives and we knew everyone.

“I could do this,” Joey Joey said, meaning my spreadsheets, meaning my job.

“Why don’t you, then?” I said.

He guffawed. Then he got quiet while he pondered. “Twenty,” he said, “thirty-three, one-oh-seven.” He pointed with schoolboy pride at the little empty city blocks on the spreadsheet.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “What about the weekend?”

He pondered again. He tallied on his fingers. “Twenty-nine,” he announced, “thirty-four, two-eleven.”

He was right, he probably could do my job. But he wouldn’t. He’d just talk about doing it. He didn’t have that thing anymore, whatever that thing was that got you ahead in life. He’d fallen hard and couldn’t get back up. Maybe he’d never really had that thing. Maybe he was the kind of person who was better at taking orders than giving them. “That boy moves like a coon,” my father once said. He was a boorish man, my father, unschooled and unskilled, pretty much like the rest of the people in my neighborhood. I’m the one who ended up accomplishing something, making something of myself, and now I had to live with everyone thinking that they could do my job, that what I’ve earned is because of some secret to which they don’t have access: ill-gotten gains. The real secret is I worked sixty hours last week, not including the work I took home. The week before I worked seventy. I get full benefits and three weeks’ vacation, but I’ve done the math, and when it’s all added up, my salary isn’t much above minimum wage. About the only thing that separates me from the associates is that I wear a white shirt instead of a blue one. Often I’ll fantasize about when times were simple and I carried a box cutter and waited around for someone to tell me what to do. Other times I fantasize about moving up to upper management, which is at least ten years away if things go right. In ten years I’ll be thirty-six. I’ll have a potbelly and I’ll be bald. I’ll look like the district manager who drives a yellow Mercedes with a license plate that says WLMRT-1. He says to me, “I was just like you once, Nick.” He wants to keep me motivated.

I got off at Exit 12 and circled back down and took the bridge. I was speeding, I didn’t care, I was trying to make up for lost time. When I took the turn, Joey Joey had to put his hands on the dashboard. Down below, the river had a nice tint in the evening light, and on both sides of the river were the factories pumping out smoke for the war effort. Twenty-four hours a day, they pumped out smoke.

“I should get a job down there,” Joey Joey said, tapping the window. He sounded wistful.

“You’d be back in a week,” I said, “begging to be an associate again.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. He was looking at the river. He was talking more to himself than me. “Might go ahead and join up,” he said. “Might just do that.”

I’d heard it before. He’d talked about it during the peace and during the buildup. He’d talked about it when the shooting first started. He’d be talking about it when everyone came home. He’d probably be talking about it during the next war. He didn’t have that thing.

“Join up,” he continued, “head over there, see Chip, have an adventure. Blow some people up.” He snickered. “Get in shape.” He pinched his muffin top by way of example. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said.

At the top of the hill I made a left into Winchester Parks and then a right. It was called Winchester Parks but there wasn’t anything green about it anymore. It’d been an Italian neighborhood, it’d been a Jewish neighborhood, now it was up for grabs. Way down at the end of the street, I could see the long row of stores, with Bildman’s shop in the middle. It had a red neon sign that was lit up: BILDMANS SH P. On one side of the shop was a pizza place and on the other was a Chinese store that sold remedies. I slowed down because I was suddenly nervous about seeing Zlottie, suddenly unprepared, suddenly didn’t know what I was doing or why exactly I’d come. “I thought you said you weren’t coming anymore,” she’d say. She’d be confused. I’d be embarrassed.

At the stop sign, I took a long time. Out in front of Mr. Bildman’s shop were boxes filled with little American flags being sold for ninety-nine cents each. The pizza place had a sign saying that if you were a soldier, you could get a slice for half price. “I should tell them I’m a marine,” Joey Joey said.

I pulled over and checked my face in the rearview mirror. I checked my teeth and I checked my email. I leaned over and popped the glove compartment and took out a tin of Altoids. There were five tins of Altoids in the glove compartment. I’d bought them at Walmart. Almost everything I owned I’d bought at Walmart: toothpaste, socks, you name it. Walmart helped keep me alive and I helped keep them in business. I put three Altoids in my mouth.

“Can I have one?” Joey Joey said.

I gave him a whole tin. “Wait here,” I said.

The door jingled when I entered the shop. I was anticipating seeing Zlottie on the ladder, the way she had appeared in my late-night and early-morning fantasies. Instead, I saw her father. He was standing behind the counter with a handful of slips of green paper. His black hat was on the counter and his head was bald. He was wearing his black wash-and-wear suit that he wore every day. His enormous white beard seemed to have grown more enormous since the last time I’d seen him, more cloud than beard. It looked untrimmed and unwashed. The shop looked unwashed. It was small and cramped, about the size of the customer bathroom at Walmart, and it was loaded floor to ceiling with anything you might ever need in life. I’d once seen a boy come in and ask for a can of sardines and a pack of baseball cards, and Mr. Bildman had them bagged and ready to go in under a minute.

At some point we’d swallow this shop whole. I’d be the district manager by then and this would be my district. That would be an example of irony.

Mr. Bildman looked up from his green slips. He didn’t seem particularly happy to see me. I stood in the center of the store holding my boxes of merchandise like one of those trainers who showcases a dog at the tournament. I hoped he liked my boxes.

“Put them in the back,” he said.

I wanted to ask him where his daughter was, because if his daughter wasn’t there, I wasn’t interested. But I went dutifully to the back room. There was a gunmetal desk standing like an island amid towers of more odds and ends. I set the boxes on the desk and sat down in the swivel chair and waited. I was prepared for something to fall on my head. I checked my BlackBerry. Now and then I would hear the door jangle and I would listen for Zlottie’s voice but it was always a customer. Every customer wanted some kind of break. “I’ll pay you the rest next week,” they all said.

I started to wonder if Zlottie had taken off, moved or something, gone to Israel. She’d talked about Israel the way old people I knew talked about Ireland. She’d also talked about going back to school. We’d had heartfelt discussions while I was waiting around for Chip to get his money. She would stand on the opposite side of the counter with the cash register, but it felt close, like the counter was a part of us and we were pressing our bodies against it as we stood staring at each other. She was the only person who ever asked me what my plans were for the future, and I’d tell her about becoming a district manager. “Wow,” she’d say, “that’s exciting, Nick.” It sounded like she was sincere, but who knows. I always made a point of encouraging her to get her degree, because I wanted her to see that I was one of those kind of people who could be optimistic and helpful. Now I regretted it. I should have encouraged her to remain in the shop forever.

Mr. Bildman came into the back office. He didn’t look at the boxes I’d brought, he just said, “I’ll give you sixty for everything.”

It was a generous figure, far more than I’d thought it would be. It made me wonder if Chip had been duplicitous when he’d hand me fifteen bucks on the way home and tell me it was half.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

He had it right there in his pocket. He handed it to me. He wanted me out of the shop as fast as possible, as if he knew what I’d really come for. He was one of those fathers who didn’t want anyone to lay a finger on his daughter. I stood up and he sat down.

“Tell Zlottie I said hi,” I said.

He snapped his head sharply. “What?”

I repeated myself. He nodded. He wasn’t going to tell her a thing.

But as I came out of the back office, there she was, just like that, like a vision, standing on the top rung of the ladder stacking cans of soup. Here was my fantasy come alive. She was wearing the same black skirt with the same black shoes, and her hair was as black as I remembered. She must have thought I was her father, because she said something like “I’m almost done,” and then she accidentally dropped a can of soup. It banged and rolled. I bent down to retrieve it, and when I looked up, she was staring at me with surprise. I could feel my face burn red, and the heat from my face traveled straight down my body.

“What are you doing here, Nick?” she said. She laughed, as if my appearance was comical. This wasn’t what I had fantasized. I stood there staring at her. She hovered above me in the air, five rungs high on the ladder, the shelves of merchandise floating behind her head.

“I missed you, Zlottie,” I said. I wanted it to come out breezy, but it sounded earnest and maybe a little pathetic.

I handed her the can of soup. She reached for it and her skirt rode up an inch past her ankle.

“I missed you too,” she said, but she grinned so broadly that I couldn’t tell whether she was teasing or not.

And then the door tinkled, and I heard someone saying, “Nick, hey. Hey, Nick. About how much longer you think you’re going to be here?” Joey Joey stood in the doorway with a slice of pizza.

“You know why you don’t get ahead?” I said to him. “It’s because you don’t know how to follow orders.”

“Awwwwww,” Zlottie said. “That’s not nice.” But before I could explain to her what kind of person Joey Joey was, and what kind of person I was, and how he never listened, and how I was a hard worker, something like six customers came charging through the front door and our moment was lost forever. She didn’t even say goodbye.

On the drive home, I gave Joey Joey fifteen dollars. He took some cash out of his pocket, which he still carried in a roll like the old days, and which looked to be about twenty-five dollars, and he carefully folded my fifteen dollars into it. I waited for him to say thank you.

After a while, he said, “You know that hair isn’t real.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“The Jewgirl,” he said, “she’s wearing a wig.”

We were coming over the bridge now, it was night and the river was illuminated by the factories. We’d gone fishing down in that river, this is years ago, me, Joey Joey, Chip. Before the factories opened back up, the river had fish. For five hours we fished, but we didn’t catch a thing. It wasn’t until there was about thirty minutes of daylight left that Chip’s line drew taut. “I got something!” he screamed. The line got so tight that we had to help him hang on. Fishermen came and gave us advice. “It’s going to be seaweed,” they guessed. “It’s going to be a tire.” No, it was a turtle hanging from the end of the line, spinning in the air like a top, waving its legs. Chip took it home and kept it as a pet, named it Zero and painted its shell purple. It lived six years, and when it died we went back down to the river to bury it, but by then the factories had opened and you couldn’t get within five hundred feet of the shore.

“I’m not thinking about any Jewgirl,” I said.

But it wasn’t a week later that I took three more boxes off the Walmart truck and hid them in the mop closet.

I found Joey Joey in the break room with his feet up.

“I’m going to need your help with something,” I said.

“You got it, sarge!”

At six o’clock, the cashiers called out on cue, “See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough.”

I walked through the oncoming surge of customers and straight into a group of college students who make it a point to come by every Friday evening to cause problems. They were walking around in a circle, twenty or so, looking sentimental and holding signs with a long list of goals for Walmart, which, if ever achieved, would cost me my job. I had to walk through them like a gauntlet. I didn’t appreciate that. One of the guys held out a flyer.

“If you want respect, give respect,” I said.

He must have misunderstood my allegiance, because he laughed. “You got that right, bro.”

“I ain’t your bro,” I said.

Now he was confused and conferred with the others. I passed through them.

“Overrated businessman,” one of the girls yelled after me, but the comment had not been uttered with consensus. I could hear them begin to argue.

“We’re all bros,” half of them said.

“No, we’re not,” the other half countered.

No, yes, no.

Back by the dumpsters, I sat in my car. I’d just worked eleven hours and the exhaustion came over me like a wave. Slowly I changed out of my white shirt and into a new blue one from a three-pack I’d bought that morning. I wanted Zlottie to see me in something other than a white shirt when I asked her out. Just like I wanted to see her in something other than a black skirt. Looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I was surprised to find a much younger version of myself looking back, a self from when I was an associate and wore a blue shirt almost the same color as the one I had on now. My younger version was good-looking and optimistic, and he walked briskly up and down the aisles looking for the assistant manager to tell him what it was he should do next.

“Mr. McDonough,” I addressed myself in the reflection of the rearview mirror, “what do you want me to do next?”

“This is what you do next, Nick,” myself answered, “you take these three boxes off the truck and then you hide them in the mop closet and then you go find Joey Joey …”

I woke to the sound of Joey Joey tapping on the window. His pale face was an inch from mine, separated only by the glass, like I was back visiting him in jail, except this time his mouth was wide with mirth. I rolled down the window.

“You were drooling, Nick,” he said. He let out a howl. Sure enough, there was a wet stain on my blue shirt.

“Open the dumpster, jackass,” I commanded. I was in no mood.

The boxes were large and hard to fit in the trunk. Since he’d blown my moment last time with Zlottie, I handed him five dollars and told him I’d see him tomorrow.

“I don’t mind coming,” he said. I left him standing there by the dumpster, his blue shirt half-untucked.

I drove fast and I took the bridge and I practiced what I would say. I would try to be casual, but also charming, and I would lean on the counter with my elbows as if it were no big deal to say, “I’ve got Tuesday off, Zlottie, and I was wondering …”

“I’ve got the Thursday after next off, Zlottie …”

“I’ve got a Sunday at the end of the month …”

In less than twenty minutes I was coming around the bend into Winchester Parks. This time I didn’t linger at the stop sign but drove straight to the front of the store and parked. Once there, I procrastinated badly. I checked my email twice. I checked my face and my blue shirt. I checked my teeth. From the glove compartment, I took out three Altoids, put them in my mouth, and chewed them like candy. I checked my email again. Something had arrived, but it was from an unfamiliar address with a distressing subject line that read, “Not dead yet,” and which I thought must be spam until I opened it and saw that it was a message from Chip.

“Dear Nick,” he wrote, “I finally got my personal pfc. military account set up. They sure do have every thing down here.…” He went on to list the Internet café where he was writing from at that very moment, some fast-food places, and some other necessary hometown conveniences including a shoeshine stand, even though he’d never used a shoeshine stand in his life. He said things weren’t so bad overall. It was boring mostly. More boring than he thought it would be. It was colder too. He was hoping for some new gloves to come through. And some boots, size fourteen. Other than that, everything was fine. He had no real complaints. It was like being in the Boy Scouts, he said. He was hoping to see a little action soon so he could kick some ass and break up the monotony, but he wasn’t counting on it. He told me not to believe what I was hearing on the news. He said everything was exaggerated. He said it was all about advertising. In closing, he wanted to know how I was.

There was a time difference of some twelve hours, whether forward or backward I couldn’t tell, but as far as I could see, he’d sent the message a few minutes earlier. Hoping that I might have a chance to catch him before he logged out, I quickly wrote,

Does your army base have a Kmart?

Your friend,

Nick

Before I could click send, however, I had a second thought that this might come across more mean-spirited than witty, so I backspaced over it.

In its place, I composed something delicate and thoughtful, how at the very moment I was sitting in Winchester Parks with three boxes of Walmart merchandise in my trunk about to ask Mr. Bildman’s daughter out on a date, he, Chip, was sitting in an Internet café on the other side of the world. “By the way,” I asked, “were you being up-front on how much Mr. Bildman was paying you for the boxes?”

Then I had the thought that this question was too trivial, given what he was going through, even if he wasn’t going through much, so I backspaced over that, too. Then I backspaced over everything because he might not want to hear me crooning about Mr. Bildman’s daughter and philosophizing about the speed of the Internet, while I sat in the comfort of my car and he waited for some new boots that fit his feet.

After that, I sat there staring at my blank BlackBerry not knowing what to write to him, wishing quite frankly that he’d never sent me anything at all, wishing that I could ignore the email altogether. Now I was the one stuck having to picture things that were unpleasant about my friend, like him sitting in the Internet café, his enormous frame slouching in the chair, typing away to his mom, to his girlfriend, to me, probably saying pretty much the same thing to each of us, hoping that someone would write back before his fifteen minutes of allotted time expired.

So I wrote,

Kick some ass!

Your friend,

Nick

I clicked send fast and got out of my car. I opened my trunk and the butterflies returned. The boxes were big and unwieldy, bottles of laundry detergent and the like, and I regretted not having brought Joey Joey along to help. I teetered under their weight. I hoped Zlottie would not notice me teetering.

But when I got to the front door, I saw that the lights were off and there was a sign taped to the window. CLOSED FOR SHABBOS.

So I had to wait. I had to wait four days until my day off. On my days off, I usually sleep till noon, but I was awake at seven, thinking about what to wear. I ended up putting on a suit and tie. Dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. I thought it’d be good for her to see me in professional attire. “You look like a senator, Nick,” she’d say. I took the tie off — business casual. “Oh, this is just what I wear when I’m not working,” I’d say. Then I took everything off and masturbated.

When I got to the store, I had to get the big boxes out of the trunk again. All the pushing and pulling wrinkled my clothes and pissed me off. The door jingled like a sleigh bell when I entered, but Zlottie didn’t hear me because three Chinese women were crowding the counter, screaming about some apples and oranges. They were sitting on top of the counter, the apples and oranges, and the Chinese women kept picking them up and putting them down as if this would prove their point. I couldn’t see Zlottie, but I could hear her voice. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying over and over. In the face of the customers’ displeasure, she was as polite as ever, her voice as sweet as ever. “You, you, you,” the women said, unswayed. They were short and round, and they wore polka-dot outfits that could have been pajamas. They crowded her like bullies. Somebody was trying to rip somebody off, and it wasn’t clear whom. I could imagine Zlottie’s father sitting at his gunmetal desk in the back room, oblivious to his daughter’s dilemma.

The women must have thought I was an official in my suit, a detective maybe, because they got quiet and made way for me. “What seems to be the problem here?” I said. I set my boxes down on the counter, amid their apples and oranges, and I smiled at Zlottie, who, even in her distress, looked beautiful. Strands of black hair dangled in front of one eye.

“You, you, you,” they said to Zlottie, but in my presence the fight had gone out of them. They paid the ticket price and gathered their fruit and left. The door jingled three times.

In their wake, it was silent. In the silence, Zlottie blurted, “You, you, you,” with breathy exaggeration, and she pulled the corners of her eyes so that they slanted. Her imitation was surprisingly good. I laughed. Then I took the high ground: “There’s good and bad in all races,” I said.

She thought about it. “That’s true,” she said.

It was something my father had told me in his better moments. “There’s good and bad in all races, Nick.” He had an obsession with good and bad, the latter of which generally included, among others, Jewish people. When I was about six years old, he had observed me peeling a banana without first washing it. “What’s wrong with YOU?” he had shouted as if I were about to insert a burning torch into my mouth. He got off the couch and pounded his hands on his legs. His face was contorted with terror and fear, and this made me cry. “You see them in the supermarket putting their hands over everything!” Then calmly, patiently, lovingly, he said, “Go wash that banana in the sink, Nicholas.”

“You look like a salesman, Nick,” Zlottie said. I couldn’t tell if this was a compliment.

“Thank you,” I said.

“A door-to-door salesman,” she continued. “What did you bring”—she patted my boxes—“encyclopedias?” She laughed. “Girl Scout cookies?”

“Zlottie,” I said, leaning toward her and pressing hard against the counter and speaking too loudly. “I happen to have a Sunday off at the end of the month—”

But before I could finish she’d already said yes.

I’d been wrong about Joey Joey: maybe he did have that thing. Because when he came in to work the next day, he informed me that he had joined the army.

“Effective immediately, brigadier general!” he said. He saluted and clicked his heels.

Apparently he’d gone down to the Career Center, taken a physical, signed some papers, and now he was officially a soldier.

“I’ve got twenty-eight percent body fat,” he said. “That’s not too bad.”

I told him I was proud of him and gave him the rest of the day off. In turn, he invited me over to his mom’s house that weekend for a going-away party. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the store shaking hands with the guys and getting kissed by the girls. By the time he was done, he looked like his face had been painted with a Magic Marker.

It was eight P.M. when I left the store with my spreadsheets.

“See you tomorrow, Mr. McDonough!”

Out in the parking lot, the air was finally getting nice and warm and I took a deep breath. When I exhaled, I heard someone calling “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” It was Pink calling. Pink from the neighborhood, from high school, Pink who’d worked one year at Walmart before coming in stoned and getting fired and losing all his benefits. He still shopped there, no hard feelings. He was wearing an enormous gold watch and pushing a stroller with a sleeping baby that had jelly on its face.

“Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” he yelled. “Nick!”

He shook my hand hard, with deep feeling, like we were long-lost friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. I’d seen him two weeks ago.

“Did you hear what happened to Chip?” he said, holding on to my hand and looking at me with half-sad, half-sober eyes.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

But I suddenly knew what had happened to him. I could hear my voice crack as I spoke—“What happened, Pink?”—and I felt queasy, wobbly, happy to be grasping Pink’s soft hand as I saw my friend Chip lying six feet six facedown in a ditch somewhere on the other side of the world. And here he had just emailed me, saying it was boring and there was nothing to worry about, and I’d believed him. I’d said there wasn’t going to be a war, and he’d believed me. And now Joey Joey was on his way there, to that same war, all smiles and lipstick and papers signed.

“He got called up for the army,” Pink said. “You didn’t hear?”

I withdrew my hand. “That’s old news, Pink,” I said. Pink always had old news.

“I need a job, Nick,” he said amiably, pushing the stroller into the store.

“That’s old news too,” I said.

That weekend I went to the going-away party that Joey Joey’s mom was throwing. The grill was on when I got there and so was the music. There were nieces and nephews crawling around in the backyard, and his mom had strung red-white-and-blue streamers all through the house and tree.

“Well, look who’s here,” his mom said. She was fatter than last time, and she was wearing a T-shirt that said, HOLD STEADY. She hugged me hard. Her arms went around my neck. She was doughy and it felt good. “Get yourself a plate, Nicky,” she said. “Get yourself a beer.”

Joey Joey was on the deck with everyone I hadn’t seen in a long time. Everyone had put on weight. The flag was out and it was waving in the breeze. The breeze felt nice. It was going to be a nice spring.

“If more people made an effort to keep the flag out,” someone said, “we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.” Everyone agreed.

“You look good, Nick,” someone said. I had come from work in my white shirt and was overdressed for the occasion.

“Nick’s a businessman now,” Joey Joey said. He winked.

“Can you get me a job down there, Nick?”

“What about me, Nick?”

“Sure,” I said to everyone. “Come down and fill out an application.” I’d hire them. They’d work three months maybe. They’d work a year. I’d fire them.

I ate a hot dog and I drank a beer. The beer made me tired. So did the sunshine.

“You look tired, Nicky,” Joey Joey’s mom said. I felt like sitting down but there was nowhere to sit except the ground.

“Nick’s always tired,” Joey Joey announced. He was reclining luxuriously in a blue chaise longue with the back put down to the last notch. He’d bought it at Walmart. Everything in the backyard he’d bought at Walmart, including the grill and including the flag. The rest he’d bought when he sold drugs.

“Nick runs the store,” Joey Joey continued. The way he was lying in the chaise, the center of attention, all comfort and ease, with one arm behind his head and his shoes off, speaking about me but not to me, made it seem like he was big man around town again.

I ate another hot dog.

“You got ketchup on your shirt, mister,” one of the little cousins said. In the middle of my white shirt, right near my heart, was a red stain about the size of a thumbprint. “You look like you got shot, mister,” she said.

Everyone thought this was funny.

“Bang bang!” she said. “Bang bang!” The words were infectious, and all the little cousins and nieces and nephews, everyone under the age of ten, ran around the yard, screaming, “Bang bang! Bang bang!”

I was ready to leave. I waited fifteen more minutes and then I kissed Joey Joey’s mom goodbye. “It was good seeing you, Nicky,” she said. “Don’t be a stranger.” Then confidentially, she said, “Thank you for everything you’ve done for Joey Joey.”

“Aw,” I said, “I haven’t done anything much for him.” Which was kind of true.

Joey Joey said he’d walk me out. We passed through the kitchen, where his sister was making a bowl of pasta salad. “Are you leaving already?” she said. She was five years older, her hair had highlights, and her nails were so long she had to grip the serving spoon with her palm. She’d visited Joey Joey every day when he was in jail.

“Nick’s a businessman,” Joey Joey said again. “He’s got spreadsheets to work on.” He thought this was funny.

But out on the porch he got quiet, he got melancholy. We stood around with our hands in our pockets, looking at the traffic go by.

I said, “You’re about to go on an adventure,” and I slapped him on the back.

“Sure am,” he said, but he didn’t seem too excited. He was staring at the traffic.

“When you see Chip,” I offered, “tell him I said hi.”

“Sure will,” he said.

His demeanor made me earnest. “When you get back, your job’ll be here for you.” It was company policy, but it sounded like I was doing him a favor.

“I do appreciate that, Nick,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

Then he turned and I saw those eyes again, wide, white, tense. I could have been staring at him through a jailhouse window.

“I don’t want to die, Nick,” he said.

The sentiment caught me off guard. “You’re not going to die.” I was oddly offended.

“I don’t want to die,” he said, as if he hadn’t already said it.

“You’re not going to die,” I said, louder now, like I demanded it. I was angry and also embarrassed. “You have a greater chance of dying in a plane crash,” I said, because that was what the statistics had shown.

He was nodding and taking deep breaths as if he was trying to catch up to the absurdity of his panic. He smiled a brave smile. Then he hugged me unexpectedly, putting his arms around my neck and pulling me close. He was doughy like his mom, but he was stronger than I expected, and I felt at his mercy. He held me long enough for it to begin to feel awkward. When he released me, we stood staring at each other.

Then, to lighten the mood, I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Kick some ass, Private!”

On Sunday, when I pulled up in front of the shop, Zlottie didn’t look as if she thought she was going on a date. She was dressed in that same black blouse with that same black skirt and those same black shoes. She looked like a witch. Or a mortician. It was going to be seventy degrees and sunny, the first day that year we were going to hit seventy degrees, and I couldn’t imagine she’d be able to stand the heat for long, especially considering we were spending the day at the amusement park. “I’ve never been to the amusement park,” she’d told me, clapping her hands in delight. I couldn’t believe it — twenty-six years old and never been to the amusement park.

Still, she had dressed like this.

I got out of the car and opened the door for her like a gentleman. Her father was nowhere to be seen, so I thought I’d start the day off right by giving her a kiss on the cheek, but she giggled and moved past me and sat down and slammed the door closed herself.

I took the bridge. I drove slowly. I wasn’t in a hurry. I’d been up early again, trying on different outfits: dressy, sporty, casual. In the end, I decided on jeans and a tank top. I wanted her to see my arms and shoulders, just like I wanted to see her legs and ass.

“Down there,” I said, indicating the river, “is where I used to go fishing.” I’d only gone fishing once, the time we caught Zero the turtle.

“Fishing!” Zlottie said. “I’ve never been fishing.”

It sounded like an invitation for an invitation. “I’ll take you sometime,” I said. I glanced at her to see if the promise of a future engagement had made an impact. She was staring down at the river. “I’ve never been fishing,” she repeated. “I’ve never been to the amusement park. I’ve never been to a ball game.”

All her life in this city and she’d never been anywhere except BILDMAN’S SH P.

The entrance to Adventure Playland was clogged with strollers and soldiers. The park had become all the rage again because they’d built a new roller coaster called Kingdom Coming and everyone wanted to see if it lived up to the hype. Up and down in sixty seconds, the commercial said. The commercial ran every fifteen minutes. It had been ten years since I’d been on a roller coaster, any roller coaster, and I couldn’t wait.

At the ticket booth, I bought two all-you-can-ride passes for thirty dollars.

“All you can ride?” Zlottie said with apprehension.

I bought a hot dog for myself but nothing for her because: “I can’t eat anything here, Nick, you know that.”

“Aren’t you going to be hungry?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to be hot?”

“No.”

The line to Kingdom Coming was long and it wrapped around the fence twice. You could hear the coaster before you saw it, a big whoosh of air, and then a few moments later a long train of red cars coming past the fence in a blur, one hundred miles per hour, jammed with people screaming their heads off.

“Wow!” I turned to her in excitement.

“I’m not going!” Zlottie said. Her face was filled with terror.

I took her hand in a comforting fashion. She let me hold it for a moment and then she took it away. “We’ll come back a little later,” I said.

At the far end of the park was a minor wooden roller coaster from the old days; it had a couple of hills and a few turns and there wasn’t much to it. It was the first roller coaster I’d ever gone on, but I’d outgrown it and moved on to bigger and better thrills. Apparently everyone else had outgrown it as well, because no one was in line.

“I’m scared,” Zlottie said.

We took our seat in the car. The car was wooden, and it looked like it couldn’t go faster than a bumper car. “Don’t be scared,” I whispered, and I imagined putting my arm around her shoulder and holding her close. Onto my palm I briefly mapped the course that the ride would take. “See?” This seemed to settle her, but as soon as the attendant came by to push the rubber restraining bar in front of our waist, Zlottie repeated, “I’m scared!”

It was too late now, the train was starting up, clanking and groaning as it climbed that first little hill. “See?” I kept saying. “See?”

We crested tranquilly, and for a moment I could see the whole wide city. Over there was Winchester Parks, and in the other direction was where I lived, and in the middle was Walmart with its big blue roof, where I’d be back tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. And then we dropped.

I hadn’t remembered the drop to be so sharp. It seemed as if the wheels had lifted from the tracks and we were pointing straight down, hurtling toward the ground below. The momentum pulled me from my seat and I was sure I was about to be thrown from the car. I grasped the restraining bar. “Hold on, Zlottie!” I screamed in anguish. The car hit the bottom of the hill headfirst, a jarring landing that snapped me back into my seat and banged me against the wooden backrest, giving me only a second to catch my bearings before we went tearing around the bend. Now it felt as if I would be hurled out sideways against the railing that was inches from my face. “Whatever you do,” I screamed, “hold on!” Around another bend we went, nearly perpendicular to the ground, with the terrible roar of the wind in my ears, the terrible screeching of the fragile dilapidated fifty-year-old wheels on the track. And just beneath the roaring and the screeching, just beneath the screaming and the pleading, I was surprised to hear the familiar sound of Zlottie’s laughter. It was long and loud and without pause. Up the hills and down the hills she laughed, wheeeeeeeeee, through the tunnel and around the curve, and when we pulled into the finish line and the restraining bar released us mercifully into the world, she said, “Let’s do it again!”

Her face was flushed and healthy. Her black hair was blown across her forehead and mouth. If her hair was fake, it didn’t act fake.

I stumbled from the car. I wobbled. I belched. I was reminded of the hot dog I’d eaten.

No, I could not do it again.

“Come on,” she said, “Kingdom Coming!”

“Let’s sit on the bench for a minute,” I implored.

We sat in the shade and I leaned forward on my elbows, fearing I might puke.

“I thought you liked roller coasters,” she said.

After a while I felt her hand rest on my bare shoulder. It was a very light touch, almost incidental, but it had a reviving quality. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll come back later.”

We meandered through the park as I tried to gather my bearings. The park was getting crowded. Every once in a while, I would hear someone calling “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” And I wondered what they thought of me walking around with a Jewish girl.

“You know everyone,” Zlottie said.

I knew everyone and she knew no one. All her life in this city and no one called her name.

As we passed by the arcade, an old guy in the booth said, “Why don’t you try to win something for your girlfriend?”

I appreciated the word “girlfriend,” so I gave him five dollars for three chances to make one basket. I missed all three because the ball was rubbery and the basket was steel. I gave him five more dollars, and this time I won a small stuffed purple bird with plastic eyes.

I gave it to Zlottie.

“That’s ugly,” she said.

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“Give it to a little girl,” Zlottie told the guy in the booth.

He took it from her. “She’s a tough lady to please,” he said.

I walked on, disheartened. When we turned the corner, there was Kingdom Coming again, looming above us with its six loops and its mile-long course.

“Are you ready, Nick?” she said. “All you can ride!”

“Sure,” I said, “I’m ready,” but I wasn’t ready. “How about we go in here first?” And I pulled her into the entrance of one of those old-time rowboat rides that goes down a dark tunnel populated by plastic gnomes who gaze out at you from nooks and crannies. It had scared me as a boy, then it had bored me, and now it revealed itself to be what it was intended for: a place of romantic possibility.

This was the destination everything had been leading toward. This was the place and the moment.

“It looks dumb,” Zlottie said.

“It’s not dumb,” I said, “it’s sexy.”

Zlottie got in and grabbed the oars, but they were nailed to the sides. “I can’t paddle?” she said.

“That’s not the point,” I said.

Through the tunnel we floated. It wasn’t very dark, and it smelled like mildew and urine. The gnomes looked at me in their overalls and cowboy hats.

“I feel so sexy,” Zlottie said sarcastically. She laughed. In the tunnel, it sounded like fifteen Zlotties laughing.

I sighed. I brooded. I said finally, “I’d like to be more than just friends, Zlottie.”

“More than just friends?” She repeated. She peered at me curiously in the dim light.

“Can we be more than just friends?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, “I have lots of people who are more than just friends.” She started naming names, a long list of names, men and women, all Jewish-sounding. I got the sense that she didn’t understand what I meant by the word “friend.” She probably didn’t understand what I meant by the word “more.” Or “just” or “want.”

“Do you know what I mean?” I interrupted. “Do you know what I’m asking you?”

She squinted her black eyes at me.

It was so daunting. Everything was daunting, everything was a task. Even defining the word “friend” was a task. Even that took effort. Never mind a kiss. Never mind the first time I tried to put my hand up her long black blanket of a skirt. It was exhausting to think about. It made me want to fall asleep in the rowboat. In ten years, I’d lost my zest for roller coasters. In ten more years, who knew what other changes I’d undergo, what other passions I’d lose. I’d be thirty-six years old, still trying to fit into jeans and tank tops. But I’d be the district manager.

We floated on. The gnomes grinned at me. If the paddles had worked, I would have used them to smash the gnomes one by one. I shifted in my seat with aggravation, and as I did, the rowboat rocked hard, side to side, as if it might upend and toss me into the putrid water. I put my hand out to steady myself, but instead I accidentally caught Zlottie’s wrist, and suddenly I was pulling her close to me, not thinking just doing, putting my naked arms around her shoulders, and kissing her on her lips. And damn if she didn’t respond by putting her tongue right in my mouth as if she’d been waiting all along to do just that. She put her tongue in my mouth and one hand on my leg, so high up my leg that if she went one more inch higher, it wouldn’t be my leg anymore. She might never have been outside Bildman’s shop, but she knew what to do.

We held each other close, body against body, no counter-top between us, and I ran my fingers through her hair. It was fake hair all right, no doubt about it, stiff and synthetic in my fingers like the bristles of a brush, and it smelled faintly chemical.

“I’ve always loved your hair,” I whispered. And we floated in our little rowboat out into the sunshine.

The line to Kingdom Coming wrapped three times around the fence. We held hands and stood close and waited. Every ten minutes we’d hear the sound of the wheels rumbling, and then the train would come flying past our faces like it was shooting up to the moon. Each time Zlottie would gasp with glee and I would tremble with horror.

We moved a few steps. We waited. We held hands. We moved a few more steps.

Eventually she had to pee, though she hadn’t drunk a thing. I watched her ass swish away in that black skirt.

The second she was out of sight, I heard someone calling my name. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!”

Who could it be but Pink again, pushing that same stroller with that same baby, still sound asleep and its face smeared with jelly. He was wearing another enormous watch, this one with diamonds, and he shook my hand hard, with deep feeling, as if he hadn’t just seen me. He looked at me with half-sad, half-high eyes. “Did you hear what happened to Joey Joey?” he said.

“That’s old news, Pink,” I said.

“He’s dead,” he said. “He got killed.”

He said something else I think, a couple other things, but I couldn’t hear too well because the roller coaster was coming over my head with everyone screaming, and it drowned out the sound. All I could make out were Pink’s lips moving inside his face, thin lips and bad teeth, jelly in the corners of his mouth. When the roller coaster was past us, he held out his hand again and we shook. He did all the shaking.

“See you around sometime, Nick,” he said, and he wheeled his little baby away.

I stood there for a while. Not thinking anything, just standing there. And then I took out my BlackBerry and I checked my email. I don’t like checking my email on my day off. My inbox was empty anyway.

“The line moved up, mister,” someone said behind me, and I saw that the line had moved up.

I turned off my BlackBerry and put it in my pocket, but once it was in my pocket, I took it right back out and turned it on and started typing. “I regret to inform,” I wrote in the subject line.

I wrote about how I had just received the tragic news that Joey Joey had been killed in the line of duty. I wrote in business-speak because that’s the way you have to do this when you’re an assistant manager. I wrote some nice things about Joey Joey, about how he was a good worker, about how he was going to be missed. I ended it by saying, “Condolences to all the associates.”

When I was done, I didn’t read it over, I just sent it out. I sent it to every one of my contacts. Five hundred people I sent it to, including the district manager. Sure enough, half a minute later it came right back to me. “Fwd: I regret to inform.”

“It’s our turn, Nick!” Zlottie was saying. She was standing next to me, looping her arm through my arm, and guiding me up the stairs to where Kingdom Coming sat waiting.

We took our seat in a shiny new soft black car. All the kids were chattering in anticipation, and all the grown-ups were chattering too. An attendant came by to secure us with the thickest restraining bar I’d ever seen and which clicked into place with a mechanical precision.

“Are you ready, Nick?” Zlottie said.

“Sure am,” I said, and a few seconds later I could feel the contraption engage and the vibrations begin, and then the entire train, with all fifty-some people aboard, slowly started to crawl up that very first slope, as if we were merely setting off on a placid and uneventful journey.