Firing offence

SIX

Lee returned to the store somewhere around five and parked her books beneath the counter. When she had straightened up, she waved to me briefly and smiled, then turned her head away in mock embarrassment. Her hair was uncombed, and I imagined it matted and spread out upon a pillow. My blood pressure jumped a bit, and I kept my stare on her until she felt it enough to look once more in my direction.

When the transfer truck pulled around back, the sales crew typically scattered. McGinnes bolted for the back room, and Lloyd gathered up his things and left for the evening.

As I went to the back door, I noticed Malone and a younger guy talking in the Sound Explosion. The man was wearing a velvet maroon jogging suit and a thick, braided gold chain around his neck. They shook hands for an artificially long time, then Malone buried his fist and its contents into his pocket.

I unloaded the truck with the help of a driver I recognized from the warehouse, a wiry, hard-looking young man who wore his Nathan’s cap backwards and had a cigarette lodged above his ear. We worked without speaking until he departed with a tough nod.

I managed the merchandise onto the conveyer belt, which ran parallel to the stairs leading down to the stockroom. I walked alongside the crated goods until they hit a flat, rollered surface at the foot of the stairs, then pulled the power lever back from d Excenuforward” to the “off” position.

I heard the crush of an empty can and looked up to see McGinnes stepping out of the shadows of the stockroom’s far corner. A fresh malt liquor filled one hand, his brass pipe the other. He handed me the can while he filled the pipe.

I drank deeply from the can. He lit the pipe thoroughly and then we traded. The pot was smooth passing my throat but singed my lungs. I made it through half an exhale before coughing out the rest and reaching back for the malt liquor. McGinnes pulled another can out from the inside of his sportjacket, popped the tab, and tapped my can with his. We tipped our heads back and drank.

We stood in a fairly thick blanket of smoke. McGinnes knocked the ash from the pipe onto his palm and filled another bowl. He lit it evenly with a circular motion of the disposable lighter flame he held above it. We smoked that while downing our Colts. I thought of how good a cigarette would taste, then thought of something else. I looked at McGinnes’ face and laughed. He thought that was funny, and both of us laughed.

“Evan Walters’ bucket came in,” I said. “You want it?”

“Yeah,” he said, and a wedge of black hair fell across his forehead. “Give it to me.”

I found it on the conveyer belt, a green cylinder wrapped in plastic and secured with a twist tie. I took a four-point stance, centered the bucket to myself, stepped back, and passed it to him with a surprising spiral. He caught and ran with it halfway across the stockroom, where he stopped and did some weird end-zone strut.

Walking back my way, he let out a short, mean burst of laughter. His jaws were tight and his eyes looked directionless, and I realized, in a sudden rush of alcohol and marijuana, that the way I felt just then was the way he felt all the time.

“Evan Walters,” he said, “deserves a little extra something for all the trouble he’s been through.” Mimicking Walters, he lowered his voice to an effete growl, and said, “I’ve been calling you for months, Mr. McGinnes, and frankly I don’t appreciate…”

He continued the speech as he unraveled the plastic, removed the top, lowered the bucket beneath his crotch, and unzipped his fly. He looked at me glumly, shut his eyes, found his pecker, and let fly a hard piss-stream into the mouth of the bucket.

“Come on, man… ”

“I’m a lawyer,” he whined, “and I want my ice bucket!” McGinnes washed the urine around with a circular motion, then flung it out and across the room where it crackled as some of it hit a hot, naked bulb. He reaffixed the plastic and secured it onto the bucket using the tie.

McGinnes handed me a mint, popped one in his own mouth, and raced up the stairs. I followed him up and out into the showroom. He seemed to be skipping down the aisle, swinging the bucket at his side as if it were a picnic basket. At the front counter he handed the bucket to Lee, who gave us both a disapproving look.

“Give this to a Mr. Walters when he comes in tonight,” he deadpanned, then walked away. ight="0eeight="0em"›

I had accumulated some dirt on my sleeves while unloading the transfer truck. Lee knocked it off, then brushed a hand across my chest to finish the job. I noticed that brown speck again in her eye.

“What have you boys been up to?” she asked, her smile twisting to one side.

“Science experiment in the basement.”

“Who’s closing tonight?”

“You, me, and Johnny.” She laughed, rather evilly I thought, and walked back behind the counter.

Malone stopped to tuck a silk scarf into his jacket before leaving. He patted his breast pocket, felt the deck of Newports, and showed a look of relief.

“All right, darling,” he said to Lee by way of goodnight, then turned to me. “All right, Country.”

“What about tonight, Andre? You meet us down at the Corps?”

He shook his head and pursed his lips in an exaggerated manner. “Uh-uh. I got that redbone freak, uh, young lady, coming over to my joint tonight for dinner, some cognac, you know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.”

McGinnes yelled from across the floor, “You gonna get your face wet tonight, Jim?”

Malone said, “I don’t eat nuthin’ you can’t buy at Safeway.” He looked at Lee and said, “Pardon me, darling.” Then he turned and left the store.

The evening progressed with McGinnes and me hammering malt liquors one for one in the back room at an alarming rate. I was through smoking pot for the night, though the damage had been done during our earlier basement sessions. I lost count of our alcohol consumption, but I remember McGinnes racing next door to Mr. Liquor (in my opinion, the classic name for a spirit shoppe) and coming back with a tall brown bag in his arms, his eyebrows wiggling excitedly like the kid with the fake ID returning to the party.

Lee was reading a textbook up front and pretending to ignore us, though I caught her looking up often. By seven she had cracked a Colt and had begun nursing it in the back.

We had some traffic that night and initially handled it well. The early customers seemed oblivious to the fact that I was on a tear. I went through a good bit of eyewash and quite a few breathmints.

McGinnes, as was his fashion, became more aggressive and quicker with customers as his sobriety deteriorated, though this did not affect his closing rate. If anything, the alcohol made his rebuttals more certain, less open for debate.

I luckily hit upon several open, friendly customers who were intelligent enough to have an idea of what they wanted when they came through the door and not afraid to spend some money on it if it was offered at a fair price. Consequently, the pressure to perform impossible switches in front of McGinnes was taken off me. The confidence gai Conf was oned after my first sale of the evening spilled over into my rap with subsequent customers, and I was suddenly on a roll.

McGinnes became troubled by my momentum. At one point, when I moved to take an up, he stepped in front of me and threw an elbow into my stomach, keeping a wide smile plastered on his face as he greeted the customers. They turned out to be bait-snatchers who demanded to be sold the plunder, which only served to shake him further.

After he had written them up, he signaled me to the back. I followed him into the radio room, where he cracked two Colts. He handed me one and we both had long pulls.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said defensively, and reached into his pocket. He unraveled his fist to reveal two orange hexagonal pills, then jabbed that hand in my direction. “Eat one of these.”

“What is it?”

“Like a ’lude, only not as heavy.” He became impatient. “It’s just a painkiller.”

“Huh?”

“Eat it, you pussy.”

I took the pill and washed it down with a healthy dose of malt liquor. He popped his dry with the flat of his palm.

“So,” I said, wiping something wet off my chin, “what else did you bring me back here for?”

He finished another swallow. “I just wanted to tell you that you looked good out there tonight. You haven’t lost it, man, you belong on a sales floor. That guy in the red jacket, I saw you step him into that Mitsubishi, that was clean.”

“He stepped himself.”

“That’s the point. You saw where he was going, you kept your mouth shut and let him roll right into it.” He paused. “Most of the good ones are dead or selling mattresses, Nick. There aren’t many left like you or me.” He winked and tapped my can with his.

“Is this ‘ The Closing of the Sales Frontier’ speech?” I asked.

“I’m just telling you that you need to be back on the floor.”

“I don’t think that’s what I need.”

“You’ll be back,” he said smugly. I could only hope that for once the silly bastard would be wrong.

Our small evening rush came and went without major incident. We did walk most of our customers, however, as our pitches and counter-objections increasingly consisted of alcohol logic.

At one point McGinnes nudged me and walked up to the backs of a man and, judging from her magnificent, showcase ass, his extremely attractive companion.

“Fuck your wife for you today, sir?” McGinnes asked cheerfully, running the words tog Cthe="0em"›ether rapidly as if they were one.

“No thanks,” the man said, turning and smiling. “We’re just looking around.”

I had hoped that McGinnes would someday be caught in the act of this, his oldest and stupidest trick. It was his contention that people never listened to the salesman’s opening line, so anything could be said, so long as it had the proper speed and inflection. Often he’d pinch the cheek of a toddler and say to his proud parents, “Cute little cocksucker!” or wipe his brow on a summer day and to sympathetic customers tiredly proclaim, “Sure is cock today.” And always get away with it.

By eight o’clock the down had kicked in and brought to the forefront all the alcohol that had preceded it. McGinnes, who had begun bumping into displays and cackling at me from across the showroom, had fallen off what was for him a very wide ledge. It was plain now that both of us were on a violently twisted binge.

When it became obvious that a Japanese-American woman who had wandered in was not going to buy, McGinnes began substituting the r’ s in his words with l’ s, and the outraged woman, who probably had more class in her pinky finger than he had in his entirely moronic body, walked out in disbelief. We’d get a letter on that one in the office, and she’d get an apology, most likely from Louie.

A little later, an elderly woman came in and asked for McGinnes. I broke away from Lee up front and found him in the basement. He was walking down a row of stock, jamming his forefinger through the cardboard cartons with a scream, before stepping up to the next box and repeating the act. There was blood on the tip of his finger.

I left him in the basement and returned to the floor to help the woman. The false confidence gained from eyedrops and mints had equalized me, and I was doing quite well with her, explaining the features and benefits of a blender as if they were earth-shattering.

I was doing well, until I looked over her shoulder. Sporting an utterly absurd smile, McGinnes stood casually behind her, one arm leaning on the display rack, one foot crossed over the other like some cologne cowboy against a split-rail fence. His freckled dick drooped lazily out of his unzipped fly.

In the course of a few seconds, as she turned around to see what I was smirking at, the zipped-up McGinnes stepped forward to greet her. She walked out ten minutes later, receipt and blender in hand.

McGinnes followed me to the Sound Explosion and tried to slap me five. I pulled my hand away.

“There’s no way I’m going back on that floor with you tonight.”

“Easy, Jim,” he said and pointed to the front door. A skinny man in an L.L. Bean costume and his very plain, pregnant wife entered the store and approached the counter. He said something to Lee, she handed him the ice bucket, he nodded curtly, and he and his wife exited the store.

Evan Walters ran across Connecticut Avenue to beat the onrushing traffic and left his pregnant wife stranded on the median strip. From the east side of the street he impatiently waved her across.

“Piss-bucket,” McGinnes mumbled.

In the last hour of work few customers came in. Those who did left quickly, undoubtedly recognizing the smell of marijuana that McGinnes was now smoking openly on the sales floor. More letters, apologies, denials.

Just before closing time, McGinnes, who had been ranting about management for the last fifteen minutes (“Fuck Brandon… Fuck him!”), emerged from the back room with a Crossman pellet gun that would have exactly replicated a Magnum if not for the CO 2 thumbscrew beneath the grip.

“This is for you, Nutty,” he yelled, and began firing into the cardboard caricature of Nathan Plavin that hung suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the store. McGinnes, who had spent a few troublesome years in the army but had escaped combat duty, was a fair shot, and the pellets tore right through Plavin’s ample middle and below to his vitals.

Lee immediately shut down the showroom lights and locked the front door. I took the gun away from McGinnes and instructed him to wait for me up front. Lee walked by with the paperwork, said she’d be a minute, and disappeared into the back room. I followed her back.

She was finishing her Colt and stashing it in a plastic trashbag filled with empties when I walked in. I stood and watched her file the papers. She looked at me and at the gun, which I held at my side.

“What are you going to do with that?” she asked. “BB me to death?”

“Thought I might bring home a bag of sparrows. For my cat.”

“Sounds yummy. But why don’t you put that thing away. He keeps it in the radio room, where he keeps his beer.”

I entered the small room, had trouble finding the light switch, and groped along the wall for the spot of boxes where he usually stashed his paraphernalia. I looked to my left and saw that Lee was behind me, silhouetted against the low-wattage bulb of the office. I clumsily stashed the gun behind the nearest box.

“Where are we going?” she asked. She was near me, and her hand touched mine.

“The Corps,” I said.

“I like that place.”

“Good.” I moved closer and felt her warm breath near my face. “Thanks for helping tonight. Things got a little out of hand towards the end.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.

I cupped the back of her head and kissed her. Her tongue slid over my teeth and along the roof of my mouth. She pulled her mouth away and arched her back. I moved my hand inside the top of her shirt, reached into her loose bra, and lightly skimmed her swollen nipple. She kissed me harder this time and made a guttural sound. I reached down with my right hand and tugged on the back of her upper thigh below her but tocks, pulling her lower body up as she ground it into mine. We broke apart, and she pushed some hair away from her face.

“Well, then,” she said, and exhaled. “Let’s get going.”