Brief Encounters with the Enemy

VICTORY

The story began to change for me the summer I was working at the supermarket in Montour Heights — that enormous state-of-the-art supermarket that had been built to great acclaim, with its forty-eight aisles, its ice cream parlor, its travel agency.

It was summer, but it was starting to get unseasonably cool, strangely cool, sixty degrees, fifty degrees sometimes. The days were overcast and the nights were chilly and when I left home in the morning there’d be frost on the leaves. The public pools had shut down and the price of heating oil had gone up and families picnicked in their living rooms in front of the television. It wasn’t unusual to see people on the street dressed in corduroys and sweaters and sometimes gloves and hats. In the evening there’d be smoke coming out of the chimneys. No one cared about the weather, though, because everyone’s attention was on the war. We’d taken the bay, we’d secured the border, and we’d had almost no casualties. Within a week we’d made it within fifty miles of the capital, and a week later we had closed to twenty-five, and it was agreed upon by all the experts, patriots and naysayers alike, that the enemy no longer stood a chance and now was the time to begin discussing the terms of settlement.

At the supermarket, business was booming. The factories had opened back up along the river like old times, and people had come in from the outskirts to work, and people needed to eat. Before and after our shifts, we would crowd into the break room — the cashiers, the baggers, the stock clerks, the butchers, the bakers, the man who collected the shopping carts — and talk about what was happening and what was going to happen. Fifty of us standing shoulder to shoulder in that windowless room, laughing and joking and breathing a sigh of relief because now that the end was near, it was evident there wouldn’t be a draft. Some of the guys said they were thinking about enlisting anyway, before it was too late, so they could have an adventure. I said I was thinking about enlisting too, which made everyone laugh, because of course I would never be eligible. That summer everyone was happy and everyone was carefree. But then toward the middle of August, things started to bog down due to terrain and logistics, and for a while we advanced no more than a quarter of a mile a day, sometimes not even that, sometimes we lost ground, little by little we lost ground, until before long we were once again fifty miles from the capital. So after that we talked about other things.

In September Ziggy caught a girl shoplifting. I saw her first when I was coming through the produce aisle with my broom. Her back was to me, and she had long wavy hair that was the color of chocolate, and she had a nice ass, and she was eating strawberries straight out of the bin as if she owned the place. No regard. It was about four o’clock and I was late on my tasks because I’m overworked, but I lingered, hoping I might have an opportunity to chat her up, which is what I imagine whenever I see a pretty girl — imagine but never undertake. I wasted some time sweeping up the stray lettuce leaves, even the ones that had been ground into the floor, which I generally leave for the guy on night turn. My good side was facing her way, so that if she happened to turn around, I would be at my most handsome and appealing, and I would say something in the nature of “What’s your name?” and she would blush and tell me and we would go from there. When she did turn around, however, I saw that her face was covered with acne, like sunburn, painful no doubt, red and splotchy and concentrated around her forehead and cheeks but also her chin and nose. She was staring at me as if about to ask a question, one side of her mouth puffing out like a chipmunk’s because of the strawberry in her mouth. I wanted to look away out of respect. I could detect that underneath the acne she was a very pretty woman, with brown eyes and high cheekbones and puffy lips that were noticeably without blemish. She was wearing a fur coat with an American-flag pin on the collar, and below the pin were her breasts. I knelt down to gather up the pile of lettuce leaves and when I stood up, she was gone.

That could have been the end if I hadn’t run into her again, not over twenty minutes later, as I was wheeling my trash bin past the row of hot soups. This time she was putting a plastic spoonful of clam chowder into her mouth, tasting it slowly and making a big show of considering its merits before moving on to the next selection. She was trying to appear as if she were having a small sample of each before deciding which one to purchase, but it was clear that she was one of those people who intended to eat an entire meal within the confines of the supermarket. I didn’t appreciate this, because I’m a company man at heart, but she was a poor girl — I could tell that now — and since I have my own struggles, I felt some affinity for her. She was doing her best to conceal the reality of her condition, but I’ve learned well that the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the supermarket eventually reveal all, and seeing her poised above the steaming pots of soup, I noticed that her long chocolate hair was unwashed and unkempt, and her fuzzy coat had tufts missing from the collar and wrists.

Coming down the aisle was Ziggy, pushing his shopping cart filled with two weeks’ worth of groceries. He wasn’t a customer. He was an undercover, and today he was dressed like a soldier in camouflage and combat boots. Yesterday he’d been a construction worker wearing a hard hat and tool belt. Tomorrow he might come dressed as a baseball player or whatever other profession struck his fancy. Halloween was two months away, but for him every day was Halloween. “Why don’t you come one day dressed as an undercover?” I joked with him once.

“Because I’d give myself away,” he had responded solemnly. He was slow like that sometimes.

He winked at me as we passed each other. He knew what the girl was up to, and he knew that I knew. He loved this. He lived for this. I’d known him since middle school, where he had developed a passion for tattling. He once tattled on a girl for copying off his math test, even though it was no skin off his back. Her parents had to be brought in for a conference. Things like that can mar you for life. Now he earned twice as much as I did, and he didn’t do anything but spend his day strolling up and down the forty-eight aisles, gazing at the assortment of products, studying, pondering, selecting, then handing me his shopping cart at the end of his shift so I could return every single item to the shelves. Most days he was just an endless shopper full of suspicion of other shoppers, hoping for his intuition to be proved right to affirm him and release him from his tyranny of wandering. His original dream was to be a cop, but like a lot of people’s dreams, this one was dashed, mainly because he failed the written exam three times. “They’re all idiots anyway,” he told anyone who would listen, near tears, inverting the judgment. He was thinking about joining the army now. Once the war ended, of course. Or the marines. He was chubby and easily winded, but I supposed he had a shot. “Keep striving for your goal,” I encouraged him. It was what my father always said when he found himself at a loss for what to tell me next.

Ziggy passed me as I passed her. She had moved on to sampling the broccoli soup. I wanted to hang around long enough to see the exciting moment of revelation when the soldier takes his true form and removes his store ID, but the loudspeaker clicked on just above my head, and Mr. Moskowitz, as if he were a fire captain ordering his men into the burning building, screamed with great urgency, “There’s a cleanup in aisle thirty-nine!” So I had to wheel my trash bin around and return the way I had come, through the maze of aisles, past the cheese court and the chocolate confectioner and the ice cream parlor, to the back room, where I retrieved my mop and bucket from the mop and bucket closet, then hurried all the way to aisle thirty-nine, where someone, through negligence or spite, had knocked over a display of molasses. A half-dozen bottles lay smashed in the middle of the floor, and from them oozed a great puddle that was widening slowly, almost imperceptibly, oozing across the aisle as if it were a lake at the beginning of time that, if left long enough, would engulf the entire supermarket.

No, I don’t have a problem cleaning: I hold the mop in my good hand and the crook of my bad arm, and I swing it like a normal person, and when I need to rinse it out, I dip it in the bucket, keeping it tight against my chest as if I’m dancing close, and I wring it out with my good hand, and that could also be just like a normal person.

Midway through my endeavor, three cashiers walked by on their way to the break room. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, Max,” they said. Sabrina and Jessica and Melanie. They wore fake nails. They wore eye shadow. They chewed gum.

“Hiya,” I said, and I paused to watch them sashay their way down the aisle.

After that, Pink from coffee came past, high on pot and wired on caffeine, wearing his giant watch that glinted in the fluorescent light. I was waiting for him to get fired so I could take his job. How hard is it, really, to pour a cup of coffee?

He said rapid-fire, “Working hard or hardly working?” Which is what he says almost every time.

“Workingly hard,” I responded.

He never stopped thinking this was hilarious, and he laughed in slow motion, bending in two and propelling himself forward as if ascending a mountain.

And then Howie from deli came past. I could smell him before I saw him. He reeked of salami and cologne, the latter of which he used in an attempt to camouflage the former. He wasn’t much older than me, but he acted like an elderly man, joyless and embittered, whose best days were behind him, which they probably were. He slouched noticeably to his right, almost like a hunchback, because he spent eight hours a day slicing four-pound blocks of meats and cheeses. I’d switch jobs with him any day too. He didn’t look up when he walked by. He said without any trace of humor, “What’d you do, Max, huh, take a shit on the floor?”

When the customers came by, they were all smiles, real sweet smiles, real sympathetic smiles, and they stepped lightly and took an extra-wide berth to show their consideration and compassion.

“You’re an inspiration, Max,” they’d say, addressing me by way of my name tag.

At one point, a husband and wife arrived with two shopping carts and five children, three of whom wanted to play in the puddle of molasses. The other two stared at me while they aimlessly waved small American flags that were being sold at the front of the store for ninety-nine cents. While the wife was trying to corral the younger ones, the husband took the time to tell me that I was living proof that if people really wanted a job, they could have one.

“There’s good and bad in all people,” he said.

“You got that right,” I said.

“That’s why we’re in this mess today,” he said, meaning the war and meaning society. He was getting worked up and wanted to keep talking about the guys he knew who were over there fighting, and the guys he knew who were over here doing nothing. I would have let him keep talking, but his wife said they should go so I could get back to work.

Before she left, she leaned in close, discreetly, and said as if telling me a secret, “You’re one of God’s angels, Max.”

When I got back to the back room, justice was running its course. The girl with the acne was sitting on top of a giant cardboard box filled with containers of laundry detergent. One of her wrists was handcuffed to the steam pipe that ran two hundred feet to the ceiling, and she was rocking back and forth, explaining how it was a big misunderstanding. They all said it was a big misunderstanding after they’d been caught. I once watched a man try to claim he had no idea there were eight packs of cigarettes down his pants.

“You don’t understand!” the girl gasped.

The day’s delivery hadn’t come in yet, and the back room was empty, like a stadium before a game. In the vacant space, the girl’s cries were amplified and her size diminished. Ziggy was unmoved. He was all business, oblivious to her beseeching. He was in the process of pulling things out of her fur coat like a magician: cookies and lipstick, chips and cheese, it was endless. He didn’t care about the strawberries or soup in her stomach. They were the least of it. When he was satisfied that he had bested her sleight of hand with his own sleight of hand, he snapped open his briefcase with authority, showing how wrong the police force had been for passing him over three times.

On the wall behind the girl’s head was an array of photographs, almost like a memorial, of the people who had been apprehended over the years, with name and age, staring out at the camera with their bounty held in front of them, their shame lasting into eternity. Once caught, they could never return to the supermarket, but I had become so familiar with their faces that it was as if they shopped there every day. Children with candy, moms with milk, men with meat. To this collection of hundreds of unhappy faces, sullen, grim, imploring, occasionally smirking faces, would soon be added the girl’s face. As I put away the mop and bucket, her voice echoed behind me.

“You, you, you, don’t, don’t, don’t, understand …”

And then Ziggy responded with his own plaintive call for help: “My forms!”

His face was red and anguished, embarrassed and humiliated, as if he had been the one caught cheating on the spelling test. He held up his empty briefcase, showing how right the police were for passing him over. “Goddammit, Ziggy!” he scolded himself in the third person, and he kicked his way through the swinging doors with his combat boots, Lieutenant Ziggy en route to procure the necessary paperwork. The doors banged back and forth six times before coming to rest.

Soon the day’s delivery would arrive, three hundred pallets of groceries — double the amount since the factories reopened — to be unloaded from the eighteen-wheeler by the night turn manager, Tom or Tim, depending. Among my many tasks, it was my responsibility to make sure the loading dock was clear and accessible, so that nothing would be in Tim or Tom’s way when he got to work, so that nothing would slow him down, since the drivers made forty dollars an hour — and I made eight — and the manager had to get them back on the road as soon as possible. Every once in a while I would ask Tom or Tim if he might consider putting in a good word for me with Mr. Moskowitz about the possibility of becoming a stock clerk. How hard is it, really, to put cans on a shelf? But they’d hem and haw and make up some excuse about how the time wasn’t right, Max, about how they’d see about it later, sometime later, about how I should remind them about it later. I’d heard it all before. In the meantime, they’d say, “Time is money, Max. Let’s keep the loading dock clear.”

I pushed the green button and the gate churned upward, letting daylight into the back room and the smell of the factory smoke coming from along the river. It smelled like melting plastic. There was also a breeze, coming unimpeded through the parking lot, reminding everyone that winter was going to be early this year, that winter was going to be bad. Sitting on the dock were some saggy bags of garbage, filled and leaking, alongside a cart piled with cans and bottles, dropped off by concerned customers, and which needed to be sorted and recycled. I placed the bags of garbage in the cart and wheeled it inside, and then I threw everything down the garbage chute, every single can and bottle and bag of trash, because I have too much to do and I don’t have time to sort and recycle.

When I turned around, I saw that the girl was staring at me. She was quiet and had stopped rocking back and forth. She seemed resigned to her fate. Her hand, held aloft on the steam pipe by the handcuff, made her appear to be in the process of trying to hail a taxi. I tried not to look at her because it’s embarrassing to be free when someone else is captive, but in the dim daylight of the back room, her face was very pretty, her acne less acute, and her chocolate hair had regained its luster. I moved awkwardly, self-consciously, trying to keep my good side facing her way, although it was most likely too late for that. She had discovered what everyone eventually discovers, that my left arm is considerably smaller than my right, about half the length. I make sure to always wear a three-quarter sleeve to save everyone the predicament of having to see my arm twisted like a corkscrew and topped by a withered and nearly useless hand, three fingers only, no thumb, more fish fin than human limb, and which I can use to do things like unscrew the cap on a bottle, but that’s about it. “We all have our burdens to bear,” my minister had told me years ago when I was about twelve years old, taking me aside one Sunday after service and quoting at length some scripture that he said applied directly to my situation, and which I felt emboldened by at the time but can no longer recall.

Looking out at me from the great tableau of faces on the wall above the girl’s head was one in particular, that of a young boy, redheaded and freckled. In the photograph, he is holding a bag of pretzels in front of his chest as if it’s a prize he’s won, and he is smiling at the camera because he isn’t quite sure what’s happening and because he was taught to smile whenever he has his picture taken. He was apprehended years ago and would be a man by now, maybe older than I am, but he has been preserved forever in that photograph at age ten. No matter what he goes on to accomplish in his life, he will never outlive this crime.

I happen to know that hidden behind the photograph is a spare key, and it was that key I used to unlock the girl’s wrist from the steam pipe. She yielded with a whimper. Her wrist was pliant and thin. I led her to the loading dock and I clicked the red button so that the gate began to churn down. Then I let her go, releasing her the way trainers release birds back into the wild. She ducked beneath the closing gate without hesitation and without thanks. The last things I saw were her feet.

I spent the rest of my shift avoiding Ziggy. It wasn’t that hard. I’d catch sight of him in the aisles and head the other way. It slowed me down but I got most of my work done. I finally ran into him in the break room, where he was eating a bag of chips like a pig, leaving crumbs all over the floor — perhaps as an act of revenge. He looked at me glumly, sitting there in his fatigues, but all he said was “It’s snowing.”

It had never snowed in September. It hardly ever snowed in October. When I exited the supermarket, the flakes were fluttering in the parking lot lights as if suspended on invisible wires. It was nine o’clock at night, but customers were still coming. They pushed past me as if they were trying to get into a rock concert with shopping carts. Two hours later they’d be pushing their carts the other way, filled with five hundred dollars’ worth of groceries. Next week they’d do it again. My main concern was that they would be tracking snow across my floor.

A couple of the stock clerks were getting off at the same time and they stopped to watch the flakes with me. So did the guy who scoops ice cream in the ice cream parlor. So did the travel agent. So did some of the cashiers. Night turn was just coming in and they stood along with everyone else. It was like we were watching fireworks in July.

Howie from deli stopped too. He smelled like bologna and deodorant. “If it’s snowing in September,” he said, “what’s it going to be like in January?” He ruined the moment. We all got in our cars and drove home.

The next morning the sun was out but there were eight inches on the ground. School was canceled and children from the neighborhood had assembled in the street to have a snowball fight. I sat in my kitchen and watched them play: they were fearless and they were ruthless, and they hit each other in the face. Half were the Americans and half were the enemy. “Kill, kill, kill,” they screamed. The snow made everything in the neighborhood look white and clean and newly restored, like in the photographs from fifty years ago when times were good. Before I got in the shower, I opened the window and gathered snow off the windowsill and made a snowball about the size of a cantaloupe. It took me a little longer than the average person, but I got it done. “Here comes the atom bomb,” I yelled, and the boys and girls looked up at me with terror and delight as I hurled it down on their heads.

They said, “Do it again, Max! Do it again!”

“But you’re all dead,” I said.

“Do it again!”

I had to get to work.

Since we were an important city, a vital city, the mayor had sent trucks round-the-clock to clear the roads, and I had no trouble making it to the supermarket on time. Nearly everybody else was late. There were five cashiers when there should have been nine, and there were three baggers, and there was no one in dairy, and the flag displays were all empty. The managers ran back and forth like fools, trying to figure out what to do next.

In the locker room, Pink from coffee was slowly changing into his uniform. It was nine o’clock and he was already high. How he’d made it to work on time, I had no idea.

“Check out my watch,” he said. He displayed his wrist. He always had a new watch, always larger the last one. This one had a gold face with diamonds around the edge. You could tell the time from a block away.

“That sure is a nice fake watch,” I said.

“I can get you one,” he said. He looked at me significantly.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t need to tell time.”

He thought this was funny. He laughed hard but with no sound. Two late baggers sauntered in as if they were on their way to a day at the beach, and I wanted to tell them that I’d take their job any day. How hard is it, really, to place objects into a bag?

When I took off my shirt, everyone looked away.

“Check out my watch,” Pink said to the baggers.

Mr. Moskowitz had the door to his office wide open, and as I was coming out of the locker room, he called out to me like a general ordering his soldier to the front line. “Max!” he said. He sounded angry, he sounded exhausted. Everything that came out of his mouth sounded angry or exhausted. The day he hired me, he sighed, leaned far back in his swivel chair like he was about to fall asleep, and said, “I guess I’ll take a chance on you.” I wanted to tell him, “Don’t do me any favors, pal.” I wanted to tell him that I knew he was getting a tax break for hiring me. Instead I said, “Thank you, sir. You won’t be sorry, sir.” Because the truth was, I needed all the favors I could get. “You don’t need to call me sir,” he said.

This morning he was halfway through a Hostess cupcake, presumably his breakfast. His belly was pressed against the desk, which was littered with spreadsheets of facts and figures — the lifeblood of the supermarket. He worked six to six, he worked six days a week, he’d been here twenty years. He’d be here another twenty years, then he’d retire and move to the suburbs. On the wall behind him was his framed diploma from college, and next to it was a recruiting poster that showed a group of smiling models dressed like stock clerks and cashiers, standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, above a caption that read, WE OFFER FREE DENTAL EXAMS.

He was staring at me hard from behind his desk. Angry and exhausted. Suspicious too. Also disappointed. He didn’t take his eyes off me. His stare chilled me. I understood suddenly why I was being summoned. Namely the girl from the day before. Ziggy had ratted me out after all — just like the poor little girl with the math test. What could I say? I had breached the company’s trust, maybe even committed a felony. And here I was, a company man at heart. It was too late to make amends now. The supermarket had taken a chance on me and I had repaid it with dishonesty. “If you give one hundred percent,” my schoolteachers had told me years ago, “you get one hundred percent right back.” It was a phrase I had heard often, and it returned to me with the full force of its haunting implication: you get what you deserve.

“You wanted something, Mr. M.?” I said. I tried my best for playful informality.

He was having none of it. “I was about to page you,” he said. He leaned away from his desk as if about to stand. Instead he sat deeper. He was perspiring in his wash-and-wear suit despite the weather. The exchange was not going to take long. He’d have me packed and ready to go by the time he finished eating his cupcake. I once watched him tell a cashier of fifteen years, “You must gather your things, leave, and never come back.” That had been that.

His gaze bore into me.

“The faggots from the city blocked my car in,” he said. “Do me a favor.”

No, I don’t have a problem shoveling. I hold the shovel in my good hand and the crook of my bad arm. Ten minutes in, I hadn’t been able to make much progress. The car looked like it had been wrapped in marshmallow, but the snow was packed hard like concrete. I chipped away at it, making small piles. Then I moved the small piles into big piles. Chink, chink, chink, went my shovel. The air was cold but clear, and every so often I would catch a faint whiff of the smoke coming off the factories. It smelled like bug spray. After ten minutes, I broke through to Mr. Moskowitz’s back bumper, where there was a red-white-and-blue bumper sticker that said HOLD STEADY.

The man who collected the shopping carts rolled by with a train of fifteen. “That’s not in your job description,” he said. He was a union man from way back.

“It’s in my job description now,” I said.

He rolled on.

Cars were beginning to fill up the parking lot, a long line of cars coming to load up with boxes and bottles, cans and bags, coming to eat and digest and excrete. Over by the loading dock, I could see a woman waving to me. I’m always happy to help customers load their groceries, and I’m also always happy to accept a gratuity, even though supermarket policy prohibits accepting gratuities. And when they see my arm, they are inclined to be extra generous. Toward the far end of the parking lot I walked, with my shovel resting on my shoulder like a miner, and as I got closer I saw that this particular woman didn’t have a shopping cart, in fact, didn’t have any groceries. What she had was long brown hair, and a coat with fur missing from the collar, and a face that was covered with acne.

“Do you remember me?” she said as if our interaction had happened a year ago. She smiled. She was chewing gum and it had turned her lips a shade of purple.

I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “I don’t think so,” because under the circumstances I thought it in my best interest to feign ignorance. For all I knew, Mr. Moskowitz was about to come around the corner at any moment. Followed by Ziggy. Followed by the district manager who stops in once every six months.

She seemed surprised by my response. She had no response for my response. She stood on the opposite side of a foot-high railing where the jitney drivers have to wait, as if she feared that merely stepping onto supermarket property would be grounds for her arrest — which it might very well have been. I got the sense that she had rehearsed something to say but I had confounded her by veering from the script. Now she was onstage, at a loss for what to say or do next. In lieu of dialogue, she blew a purple bubble.

I tried to think of something to say myself, something that might be appropriate at a time like this, but the best I could conjure was “Do you need help with your groceries?” There were no groceries, of course.

She smiled at me, more of an embarrassed smile. Her teeth were very white and very straight; they stood in contrast to her imperfect face. I wondered if the cold air helped or hurt her skin. I wondered if she’d stolen the gum she was chewing.

Then she snickered to herself and announced, “See you around sometime, Max.” The sound of my name in her mouth was electric. She turned and walked through the parking lot entrance where the cars were entering; she walked quickly and disappeared around the corner.

The moment she was out of sight, I stepped over the railing and ran. I ran with my shovel. No, I don’t have a problem running.

It was underneath the neon sign that proclaimed NOW OPEN 24 HOURS! that I caught up to her. She whirled around. Her eyes were wide.

“What’s your name?” I said.

Her name was Amanda, and she was twenty-two years old, and she wasn’t a poor girl at all. She was a very rich girl. She lived in Amberson Valley, where I’d never been, because you have no business being in Amberson Valley unless you live there. Her house was set back from the road, at the end of a long driveway, and hidden behind some big trees with a hammock strung between them that was filled with snow.

“We’re not rich,” she said, “we’re comfortable.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” I said.

Her parents were both professionals doing something or other, investing and psychiatry I think it was, and her little brother was ten years old and already talking about college. They had paintings on the walls, they had a library, they had a skylight, and the first time she brought me home, she took me down to the basement to give me a tour of the wine cellar.

“This is from France,” she said. “This is from Spain. This is only for special occasions. This is for Christmas.” Then she stopped talking about wine and put her arms around my neck and pressed me up against the bottles. I was anxious, mainly about breaking something expensive but also about my bad arm. I hadn’t kissed anyone since eighth grade, when I’d danced with a girl in the school gym.

Before it could go any further, her little brother screamed down into the basement, wanting to know what we were doing, wanting to know if he could come down.

“Shut the fuck up!” Amanda screamed back.

Then her father screamed down into the basement, “Don’t use that language in my house!”

At dinner, we sat on opposite sides of the table, Amanda and I, our feet touching underneath. Before eating, we bowed our heads while her father said a prayer, a long meandering prayer about new friendship and good company.

“Amen,” we said.

Her mom said, “This wine is from Savoy, Max.”

We made small talk about the snow, about the war, about the wine, about whether or not there was going to be a draft.

“What does the future hold in store for you, Max?” her father asked me.

It was a legitimate question, but it put me on the spot. He put down his fork and waited. His wife waited too. They were going to wait as long as they needed. The table was silent. From the moment I entered the house, I’d been sure I was going to say or do the wrong thing. Or break something. Now, with all eyes on me, I had no idea what to answer about the general trajectory of my future. Meanwhile, Amanda was rubbing her foot up my leg.

“If I give one hundred percent,” I said, trying to affect some expertise, “I get one hundred percent back.”

Amanda’s father looked at me as if he’d never heard anything like that before. “I think there’s some real truth to that, Max.”

“I think so too,” Amanda’s mother said.

Amanda’s brother took it as an opening to list all of his activities. “I’m on the debate team. I’m on the tennis team. I’m on the Monopoly team.” He sounded like he was going to grow up to be a real asshole.

Midway through the meal, Amanda had to take her acne medicine. Everyone got quiet as she took out the bottles and shook the pills into her palm one by one, big colorful pills, pills for a horse. She swallowed them with a tall glass of water.

Her mother said, “I think I’m beginning to see a change, honey,” and her father said, “I think so too,” and her little brother said, “I’m not seeing any change.”

“Shut the fuck up, Oscar!” Amanda said.

She was a thief. That had already been established. The only surprise was that she admitted it so openly.

“I’m a kleptomaniac,” she told me. She wasn’t proud, but she wasn’t particularly ashamed. “It’s a phase.” She shrugged.

“How long does this phase last?” I asked.

She didn’t know.

She was a thief and she was about to finish college. “I want to help the world,” she said.

On our first real date, I took her ice-skating at the rink at the mall by the river. They’d decided to open the rink early this year. If it was so cold, you might as well make use of the cold.

COME IN FROM THE COLD, the sign read, which was a joke, because the rink was outdoors.

At the entrance, Amanda wanted to see if we could forgo the admission and get in for free by sneaking past the guard who was barely paying attention. “Please, please, please,” she said. “I want to, I want to, I want to.” The compulsion was laid bare. Her eyes were intense but also blank.

“Sneaking past a guard,” I said, “doesn’t count as kleptomania.” That seemed to put her at ease, and she let me pay the full price.

The rink was crowded with people, half of whom I knew. “Maaaaaaaaaax,” they called out when they saw me. Amanda and I went around in a circle, her hand in my good hand, taking our time. “You’re so sweet, Max,” she said, and she put her head on my shoulder. I could smell her shampoo and I could smell the factories burning.

It turned out she was a good skater, but I was better. I would have been a hockey player if the story had been different for me. I would have been a lot of things.

Around and around we skated, without variation, like a merry-go-round. It was trancelike. “Look at the time, Max,” Amanda said, and we saw that it was late, that it was night, that it was past dinnertime.

So we went to Burger King, where I knew the guy who worked the register, a guy named Mordecai from high school. He’d been at Burger King six years and had a brother in the military. When he handed me my order, there were extra fries on the tray. He winked.

“Tell your brother I said hi?” I said.

“My brother?” he said. His eyes dropped. “He’s dead, Max. You didn’t hear?”

I said, “I sure am sorry to hear that, Mordecai.”

“Come on, man.” He laughed. “My brother just got promoted to lieutenant!”

As we sat at the table, stuffing our faces, Amanda said, “Do eating these extra fries count as shoplifting?” She had a point.

I didn’t live that far away from Burger King, so I brought her over to my apartment. “Just to stop by for a second.” I wanted it to seem casual, like an afterthought. Meanwhile, I was wondering if I could get her undressed.

I gave her a grand tour of the apartment. “This here is from Walmart,” I said, “this here is from Kmart.”

There was fake wood paneling and green carpeting and the smell of cigarette smoke from the neighbor below. The green carpeting was in every room, including the bathroom.

“I’m planning to put down new carpeting,” I said.

“Your house has charm,” she said. She thought everything had charm. She thought Burger King had charm. She thought the supermarket had charm. She thought I had charm.

We made out on the couch. The couch that I’d gotten from Walmart. I put my good hand straight up her sweater and she didn’t resist. Her stomach was smooth. Her bra was smooth. Her breasts were smooth. I thought about doing things with her, things I’d seen in videos, a number of which were hidden under the very couch we were sitting on. She must have been thinking things too, because she tried to pull my shirt straight over my head in one motion. That put an end to the proceedings. I pulled away and tucked my shirt back in. “I have to work in the morning” was what I said.

I drove her back home over the bridge. We had a good view of the factories all lit up.

“I should get a job down there,” I said.

“Like doing what?” she said.

“Like stoking the furnaces,” I said. What did I care? I pictured myself wearing overalls and a hard hat.

“You think you can stoke furnaces, Max?” she said.

“I can do whatever I set my mind to,” I said.

She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “You’d be back at the supermarket in a week, begging to mop floors again.”

She was probably right.

She clicked open the visor and examined her face in the mirror. She took out a tube of lotion and put some on, rubbing it in small deliberate circles, clockwise and then counterclockwise. It smelled like lavender. I wondered if she’d stolen it. She used all sorts of lotions and potions, each one the one that was going to be the miracle cure.

“I think I’m beginning to see a change,” she said.

“I think so too,” I said.

“Really?” she said.

But I wasn’t so sure.

When I got to her house, she kissed me hard on the mouth. Then she reached in her pocket and handed me ten packets of ketchup that she’d taken from Burger King.

I said, “You know those are free, right?”

She got out of the car and her brother came out on the porch. He was holding a snowboard. “I’m on the snowboarding team,” he said.

When I got back home, I checked to see if she’d stolen anything. I checked everywhere, kitchen, bathroom, dresser drawers. I couldn’t find anything missing.

Halloween was coming. The days passed. The temperature rose. The snow melted and turned to slush. Everyone who had complained about the snow now complained about the slush. When the slush finally disappeared down the sewers, everyone complained about the cold. It was only October and it was going to be a winter full of complaint.

The war continued to hold steady, and we continued to lose ten to fifteen men a day, which wasn’t that many, all things considered. The experts said you had a better chance of dying in a swimming pool than dying in a war. The bodies came home in coffins draped with flags, as we held steady. Driving home at night, I’d pass the Halloween displays in front of the stores and homes. They were exceptionally imaginative and gruesome this year — bodies impaled, bodies decapitated, bodies on fire, along with the conventional artifacts of unease: pitchforks and black cats and spiderwebs. By late October, we were losing twenty-five men a day, which still wasn’t that many.

At the supermarket, business continued to boom. The deliveries increased to three a week and then four. In the afternoon, there’d be a line of eighteen-wheelers pulled up to the loading dock like cattle at the trough. Mr. Moskowitz ordered the guys on night turn to come in two hours earlier, but even that wasn’t good enough, even with Tom and Tim shouting like drill sergeants. In the morning, the back room would be filled with pallets of every kind of food imaginable, stacked floor to ceiling, so that I had to push my mop and bucket through narrow paths as if I were a mouse in a maze of cardboard skyscrapers. Everyone was trying to cut corners, trying to do things faster, including the stock clerks, who got into the habit of pulling their boxes out from the bottommost pallet and undermining the foundation, so that one afternoon, about thirty minutes before I was supposed to punch out, an entire skyscraper of produce collapsed. It sounded like an explosion when it fell. Two hundred pumpkins lay crushed on the floor like bodies in a disaster. I was the one who had to clean them up. I had to use two mops and a shovel. This time when Pink from coffee came past, he didn’t bother to make his usual joke about hardly working. His big fake watch told him he had five minutes left for his break. “Hardly hard?” I called after him. He didn’t think it was funny. Howie from deli walked by, reeking of aftershave and cheese and saying somberly, “I wish that was my head on the floor.” The cashiers passed, not saying hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, because they were working double shifts, and so were the butchers, and the bakers, and the baggers, and so was the man who collected the shopping carts in the parking lot whose hands were red from the cold. “That’s a safety violation” was what he said when he saw the mess. The only person who wasn’t having a problem with the workload was Ziggy, who was catching an average of three shoplifters a day and having the time of his life posting new photographs on the wall in the back room.

But on Halloween things changed for the better: we were on the move again, making progress toward the capital. That day, every thirty minutes, Mr. Moskowitz would click on the loudspeaker and announce, “Forty miles to go!” He’d shout like he was calling bingo. “Thirty-nine miles to go!” A great and spontaneous cry would rise up across the forty-eight aisles, people shouting and screaming, customers and employees alike. Everyone was happy and everyone was excited and everyone was breathing a sigh of relief. Thirty minutes later, the loudspeaker would click again. By the time I punched out, we had closed to within twenty-five miles.

Amanda’s parents were off at a fund-raiser or something, so it was up to us to accompany Oscar trick-or-treating. He was dressed up like a soldier in camouflage, a flak jacket, a plastic helmet, and a plastic bazooka. Since it was cold, he had to wear a coat and hat and scarf, so the only thing that made him look like a soldier was the bazooka. He didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t such a bad kid.

It was such a long walk between each big house that it took a while for us to get from one destination to the next. In the dark, you could hear people calling “trick or treat,” but you couldn’t see them, you could only see glowing pumpkins. Oscar held Amanda’s hand, and Amanda held my hand, and I imagined that this was what it might be like for me, twenty years in the future, walking with Amanda through some rich neighborhood on Halloween with our son or daughter. She probably wouldn’t marry me, though. She’d marry one of those successful guys with a college degree and a normal body. That was most likely what the future held in store for me, I thought.

“Bang bang!” Oscar said when the doors opened. In reply, the homeowners gave him generous handfuls of candy, which he didn’t mind sharing with Amanda and me.

At one point along the way, we stopped in the road to say hi to some of his little buddies from school. They stared at my empty sleeve and said, “What happened to your arm, mister?”

“It’s congenital,” I said.

“What’s that mean, mister?”

“It means it got shot off in the war.”

They liked this.

By the end of the night, we had ten pounds of candy.

“Can I stay up?” Oscar said when we got home. He wanted to count everything. He had chocolate all over his mouth.

“No,” Amanda told him. Then they screamed at each other. Then he went to bed. Then it was just the two of us.

It was quiet except for the ticking of the grandfather clock coming from somewhere deep within the house. We sat on the couch together. My good arm around her shoulder, her leg pressing against my leg.

I said, “This is what it could be like for us.”

“What could be like for us?” she said.

“You and me in this house.”

“We are in this house,” she said. She didn’t get it.

“You don’t get it,” I said.

She unwrapped one of her brother’s lollipops and stuck it in her mouth. She watched me watch her. She leaned over and put her lips close to my ear. I could smell the strawberry. “Come on,” she whispered, “let’s go upstairs.” Her breath made my toes curl. “I have to work in the morning” was all I could think to say. It was true. But I followed her up the big staircase anyway, tiptoeing past Oscar’s room, and then across the landing, and then up another staircase that led to her bedroom.

It was small and cozy, with slanted ceilings, and it was decorated with the pinks and purples of her childhood. She had fluffy pillows all over the bed. She had posters of kitty cats on the wall. Sitting on her dresser were a hundred tiny bottles and jars. On cue, she opened a tube and squeezed a small amount of cream on her finger. She rubbed it into her cheeks and forehead.

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to wake up in the morning and be cured.”

“If you believe it,” I said, “it will happen.” I was quoting.

She looked in the mirror at me. “Is that so?”

“Good things happen to good people,” I said.

She snickered. “Who told you that?”

I couldn’t remember.

Abruptly, she asked, “Do you think I’m pretty, Max?”

“I sure do,” I said. Because I did. And to show my sincerity, my romantic interest, I put my good arm around her waist and kissed the back of her neck. But she’d had enough with kissing. She whirled around and stuck her finger in my belt loop and pulled me against her. She was surprisingly strong and her breasts were pressed against my chest. She tugged at my shirt. I twisted awkwardly but she wouldn’t let go.

“Can’t we at least,” I said, “turn off the light?”

“No,” she said. “Please,” I pleaded.

Back and forth we went like this, me wiggling and squirming, she pulling and tugging, me the object of desire, she the kleptomaniac, until finally, too exhausted and embarrassed to go on, I succumbed.

“Okay, okay,” I said.

She relaxed her hold on me at once. It felt like a snake uncoiling. Then she reclined with a sigh onto her purple bed, her back propped up by a dozen pillows, her hands behind her head in a posture of luxuriousness.

I stood there in the middle of her bedroom, the lights blazing away, as bright as those fluorescent lights in the supermarket, and I did what she wanted: I undressed. The shoes first, of course, then the socks, and after that I took off my belt because I was stalling for time, and then I unzipped my jeans and stepped out of them, and after that I dropped my boxers, since I’d rather be naked from the waist down than from the waist up. But soon there was nothing left except my shirt, which I unbuttoned as slowly as I could, until my chest was exposed with one sleeve hanging full and one sleeve hanging empty. Then I took it all the way off.

I stood there naked and silent, waiting for her to issue her verdict about my deformity, which presently she did: “What’s the big fucking deal, Max?”

Then she turned off the lights and pulled me onto her bed, where she spent the next few hours teaching me how to do all those things I’d only ever watched in the videos.

In the morning I woke late. I was late for work. I didn’t care. I lay there without moving, next to Amanda in her fluffy bed. Then very quietly I got up and got dressed and sneaked downstairs past her parents’ bedroom, where I could hear a white noise machine whirring, and out the back door.

In the daylight, the Halloween displays had lost their power to frighten; they were flat and wilted and wet. During the night the ghosts and goblins had fallen or been torn down, and now the roads were covered with pillowcases and cardboard, pounded into the ground by a succession of cars, mine included. The American flags were flying, though, they were flapping in the wind, and when I came over the river, the factories were going strong.

Everyone said that it was only a matter of time until we took the capital, maybe a matter of hours. But every time the loudspeaker clicked on that day, it was just Mr. Moskowitz letting me know that there was a cleanup in such-and-such aisle, and I would wheel my mop and bucket the other way.

For two days people walked around holding their breath, looking expectantly at one another. For two days everyone waited to hear what would happen next.

And on the third day the draft began.

Pink from coffee was called right away. So was Howie from deli. So were three baggers and someone from fish and someone from bakery. Ziggy was called. He’d gotten his wish after all.

You could tell who was going by the way he walked, slowly, deliberately, as if groping his way through a rainy night. If I happened to make eye contact with one of them, they would look startled. I tried to avoid them when I could. Within a week they had gotten their papers, and they had gotten their physicals, and the day before they were to depart, we had a surprise going-away party for them. Everyone gathered in the back room, including some customers who’d been shopping in the supermarket for years and knew everyone by name. When the recruits arrived, they pushed their way through the swinging doors, and we shouted, “SURPRISE!” But the surprise was on us, because they’d gotten their heads shaved and they looked strange, like newborns. I couldn’t even recognize them. The baggers looked like they’d give anything to go back to bagging.

“You boys look so handsome,” one of the cashiers said. The men tried to smile, but they knew the truth. They stood with their arms folded meekly in front of their chests.

Mr. Moskowitz said, “Eat up, everyone!” And we ate our free doughnuts and drank our free sodas that Mr. Moskowitz had gotten the district manager to donate. No one really knew what to say. We tried to mill around, but it was difficult because the back room was cramped with the day’s delivery, the pallets stacked one on top of another, ten high, towering over our heads. It was a reminder that all of these boxes would soon be opened and unpacked, so as to make room for the next day’s delivery — life goes on.

Eventually Mr. Moskowitz said he wanted to make a speech. Everyone got quiet and he stood on a box and started by saying how he was proud of each of the guys, even though they didn’t have any choice in the matter.

“What you’re doing,” he intoned, “what you’re about to do …”

Ziggy and Howie stared straight ahead — they already had the stare of soldiers. Pink had his eyes closed because he was high. The baggers stared at their feet.

“I know it’s going to turn out all right for you,” Mr. Moskowitz said, “because you’re good people.”

The room said yes to that.

“You’re going to be back soon,” he said.

The room said yes to that too.

“It’s not easy,” Mr. Moskowitz said, “but it’s important.” His voice was rising, and his face was getting red, and some of the cashiers were wiping their eyes, and the mood was becoming even more doleful and downcast, and the back room was hot, unbearably hot, and I had the feeling that we were at a funeral, not a going-away party, that this was it for Ziggy and Pink and the baggers. They wouldn’t be coming back. Their faces told the story.

So I shouted, “Shoot some motherfuckers for me, fellas!” And that broke the tension. The back room erupted, everyone applauded, including Pink and Ziggy and the guy who collected shopping carts in the parking lot. After that, we ate and drank our fill and talked about other things until Mr. Moskowitz said it was time for us to get back to work.

Later that day, as I was coming out of the locker room, Mr. Moskowitz called me into his office. “Max,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “Come in, Max, and shut the door.” The knot in his tie was loose because it was the end of the day, it was casual time. He put his hands on his spreadsheets and looked at me from across the desk, a paternal, patient look. A look of forbearance.

What wrong thing, I wondered, had I done now.

“If you give one hundred percent, Max,” he said, “you get one hundred percent right back.”

And the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, I changed into my new uniform and took my place behind the coffee bar. I had been right, it’s not hard to pour a cup of coffee, especially when you have a five-dollar raise to go along with it.

That winter I learned fast and I learned well, and the customers would come walking up to the counter, tracking slush across the floor, which was no longer my problem, and I’d make their mochas and their cappuccinos and their lattes with a smile and a flourish. Sometimes Amanda would stop in unannounced, sometimes with her parents — who were proud of me — and little Oscar, who had started teaching me how to snowboard, which I had a surprising proclivity for. I’d turn around and they’d be standing there waiting for me to notice them. Amanda would be wearing that old fur coat with the American-flag pin.

“May I help you?” I’d ask, as if they were customers whom I’d never seen before. It was a game we played, and it never failed to get a laugh. Then I’d make their drinks how I knew they liked them — hot chocolate for Oscar.

When they were done drinking and chatting, Mom and Dad would say that they should let me get back to work. They’d wave goodbye. “So long! So long!” Amanda would stay a few moments longer, leaning across the counter to kiss me on the lips, and with that expert sleight of hand she had mastered somewhere long ago, she would slip a single packet of sugar into her coat pocket.