Devils in Exile

Ricky

Maven cracked open his second rockstar energy drink at the 3 a.m. mark, drinking half of it before setting down the tall can behind the lottery machine. He had already restocked magazines and candy, cleaned and refilled the coffee and Slush dispensers. Soon the news carriers would arrive in their open-doored trucks, dumping off bundles of newspapers. Skimming the Herald and the Globe would take him through to the first-shifters stopping in for Merits and City Oasis java. At some point he would sell his first scratch ticket of the day, and then dawn wouldn’t be far behind.

The City Oasis was a four-pump gas station and convenience store on Hancock Street in downtown Quincy. The owner’s name over the door was Iranian, which was ironic, or Iraq-ic, as Ricky once said, Maven now employed by a Middle Eastern man selling gasoline to Americans. But the guy was totally hands-off, letting Maven and Ricky eat their fill of corn chips and Yodels so long as the store was kept clean and secure.

The buzzer went off, Ricky checking the pump cameras, a white F-250 awaiting a fill-up on pump two. Overnight drive-aways were a problem in the down economy.

Ricky switched on the pump after the debit card was approved, saying, “We should put a sign up out there, apologizing.”

“For?” said Maven.

“The fifty-dollar fill-up. I feel like we went out and liberated Iraq, and somehow the cost of a barrel of light sweet crude doubled. Somebody fucked up somewhere. Must have been us, right?”

“Yeah. Me and you.” Maven tapped the $3.99 GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS yellow-ribbon magnets for sale on the counter. “What happens when the price of gas goes higher than the price of a ribbon?”

Ricky reached for the bathroom key and pulled a copy of Hot Rod off the magazine rack and headed to the john in back. “Then we cross out the word troops and write in cars instead.”

Maven guzzled more caffeine, looking out at the lit island of gasoline pumps. A white Mazda pulled into the handicapped space, three kids walking to the door, the chime sounding as they filed inside. Not much younger than Maven, but looking like kids to him, decked out club-casual for a night of let’s-get-lucky, which, evidently, they had not. Maven could smell the failed evening on them, the booze, the endgame before last call, the flop sweat. He could hear it in their husky voices. Half-in-the-bag and light-in-the-pocket, yet happy. Upbeat. Too wound up to do the sensible thing and call it a night already.

One pulled a quart bottle of chocolate milk from the wall cooler and uncapped it and started chugging. Another snagged a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a bottle of phosphorescent green AMP. The third wax-bagged two stale Boston cream donuts from the pastry cabinet and a flavored Diet Pepsi. They reconvened at the front counter and pooled their bar-dampened dollars, one of them plucking a Maxim from the display underneath the mints. He flipped through it with a practiced hand, pointing out the good parts to the others, one laughing, the other sighing, the magazine holder sticking his nose into the fold and inhaling deep.

In a moment of woozy solidarity with the working stiff behind the counter, the kid with the magazine turned it around toward Maven. It was an actress peeling the back of a white lace thong off her ass crack, lips pursed. “You see this, dude?” the kid said with a grin.

Maven looked. “That’s not a dude.”

The other two chuckled at their horndog buddy, who pushed the wrinkled magazine to the counter, adding it to their tally. “My goal in life, man? Seriously? Two chicks at once.”

Maven said, “My advice would be, start with one.”

The other two hooted, grabbing their bellies to keep from choking, while the third guy grinned good-naturedly, proud to have discovered a clerk with character.

Then the laughter died away and their smiles flattened. Ricky had returned from the back of the store, standing to the side. Maven wondered what exactly about Ricky spooked them. The dent in his head? His left arm, the way it hung stiff and crooked at his side? Or the fact that Ricky was their age, his eyes looking out at them from a place they had never been.

All three, Maven figured, watching them collect their purchases and change and pushing back through the chiming door to the Mazda.

Ricky, if he was even aware of his effect on them, said nothing, coming around to return the bathroom key and finding his patrol cap where he had left it, the one he always wore, popping it back onto his head. “Lightbulb out over dairy.”

“Magnificent,” said Maven, finishing his soda. “This oughta chew up a good ten minutes.”

The top of the step ladder afforded Maven a God’s-eye view of the store and its overbright, machine-cooled aisles of candy-colored packaging. Ricky once said that others could keep their clouds of dead relatives playing harps; his idea of heaven was an immaculate convenience store.

“You know what we need?” said Ricky, sipping a blue raspberry Slush Puppie below.

“College educations?” said Maven.

“Our own lightbulb joke. Example. How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know because you weren’t there, man.”

“Okay,” said Maven. “That’s actually pretty good.”

“Now we have ourselves a project, see?” Ricky nodded excitedly, sipping more blue. “Now the rest of the night’s gonna fly.”

People assumed that Ricky Blye had gotten his screws knocked loose in the war, but Maven suspected he had always been a little off. Skinny, gawky, not so smart, and not so good at sports either. One day the D student at Gridley High School walked into a recruiting office in Brockton, Massachusetts. One year later, he was driving a diesel supply truck across the Fertile Crescent between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, known in ancient times as Mesopotamia, the reputed site of the Garden of Eden.

He had been driving down a trash-strewn road outside Al Gharraf when his front left tire rolled over a discarded U.S. army humrat — the humanitarian rations distributed to civilians, distinguishable from military meals-ready-to-eat by its bright yellow packaging — rigged as an improvised explosive device. The blast drove Ricky’s head into the ceiling of the cab with such force that it pushed the dent in his helmet down into his skull, the truck flipping onto its side, leaking fuel. While Ricky lay unconscious in the burning cab, another soldier from his convoy braved the heat to haul him out, just before the truck fireballed. That soldier smothered the flames on Ricky’s arm and waited with him until medics arrived.

No, that hero soldier’s name was not Neal David Maven. Maven’s role in Ricky’s military career was a little different. After basic training at Fort Campbell, the army sends its newly minted soldiers back home to spread the word about how fantastic and rewarding military life can be. Maven walked the length of the Westgate Mall wearing his Class A uniform, looking sharp, a clipboard under his arm. His quota was five phone numbers a day.

He vaguely recognized the small-headed kid sucking on an Orange Julius. Three years behind him in high school, they had shared one mixed-grade study hall. A kid in a RUSH T-shirt, copying out the lyrics to “Red Barchetta” on the back of his paper-bag-covered textbook.

Ricky reminded him of this when he caught up with Maven again, two months ago, at Maven’s sister’s funeral. His half sister, three years his senior, Alexis Maven, dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-nine. She and Maven had never been anything other than sworn enemies, but in the absence of his AWOL mother, Maven had been forced to return, ever so briefly, to his hometown, to go through the motions of a graveside observance.

Ricky had seen the notice in the Patriot Ledger. He showed up in a short-sleeved shirt and tie, his left arm hairless and mottled, creased along the underside and withered looking, thinner than his right. He wore his old patrol cap — flat-topped, digital camouflage, his last name on the back — cocked at an angle to hide the bare patch over his left ear where hair no longer grew.

Ricky had gotten him the City Oasis job. Occasionally the headaches were bad enough to keep Ricky away from the store, dropping out of sight for a day or two, but otherwise he lived for their shifts together, for the camaraderie he had been denied when his tour was cut short. One minute he was living in the Green Zone with his asshole buddies, bitching about sandstorms, crap food, the heat; the next he was waking up in a hospital in Germany, looking at his bandaged arm, wondering What the fuck? Mobility restrictions in his left hand, wrist, and elbow earned him a disability retirement he didn’t want, and a one-way ticket home. Ricky appealed, requesting a desk job, anything that would get him back in uniform and back in Iraq. But the medical board denied him, and now he found himself, at twenty-five, a disabled American veteran.

The new bulb came on bright, like a hot idea. Maven climbed down and collapsed the ladder. He felt the emptiness of the store and must have had a funny look on his face because Ricky said, “You still thinking about going back?”

Maven had made the mistake of allowing as much a few weeks earlier. “Not really.”

Ricky trailed him back to the front counter. “Sick part is, you can earn more killin’ and chillin’ over there than you can here. I wouldn’t blame you. I’d go back if I could.”

“I know you would.” Maven poured himself a blue one from the Slush machine and turned to drink with Ricky.

Ricky said, “Here’s to the best job I ever hand. Second best, after this one.”

They tapped puppy-labeled paper cups, and Maven drank until he got that forehead pain. He was thinking about Danielle Vetti, about the card she had given him, nestled in his wallet like a lottery ticket. Wondering about that job.

The door chimed again, and a blue uniform entered. A Quincy cop, a regular, standing in the doorway a moment, sizing up the place. “How ya doin’ tonight?” he barked, and strode off down the center aisle.

Maven and Ricky looked at each other, then Maven went up to take the counter.

The cop came back with a Muscle Milk and one of those meal bars that taste like Sheetrock. “Quiet one, huh?”

“Average,” said Maven. “You?”

“Not bad, not bad.”

The cop was in his early thirties, decent build, cocksure eyes. He had a swagger, even when standing still. Here in Quincy, with a silver shield pin and a fifteen-load nine-millimeter snapped to his belt, this guy was the shit. In Eden, he’d be just another walking pouch of entrails.

“And whyn’t you gimme a Cheri, there,” he said, peeling a few more bills off his roll.

Maven reached into the magazine rack, between Barely Legal and Celebrity Skin, and slid the publication into a flat brown paper bag, sending him on his way.

Ricky came up opening a pack of Sour Patch Kids. “Dickhead brings home sixty K a year, plus details at forty bucks an hour. One-tenth our training. Wonder how he’d stand up if any real shit ever came his way.”

The cop had never got to Maven before, but Ricky was right: how had they come to be stuck here selling candy and cigarettes?

He turned to Ricky. “You ever hear of Danielle Vetti?”

“Vetti?” said Ricky. “Sounds familiar. Gridley High?”

“Before your time. A senior when I was a freshman.”

“That puts me in middle school. Why?”

“Thought I saw her somewhere.”

“Yeah? She used to be something?”

“Still is,” said Maven, staring out the window in the direction the cop cruiser went. “Still is.”

He felt something then, something he hadn’t felt in a long time. Hope, it turned out, was a very real thing for a convenience-store clerk at three in the morning — as potent an impulse as hunger, or lust.

He was going to call this guy in the morning. As soon as he got off work, first thing.

Ricky broke into his reverie. “I got it. Check this out. How many Iraq War veterans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

Maven said, “I give up.”

“Only just one.”

Maven looked at him, shrugged.

Ricky continued, “But, hey, we got over one hundred thousand applications, we’ll give you a call.”