I went to the cabin after I jacked in the maintenance man job. I went there and worked steadily with one foot in the refurbishing of the cabin by day, and the other in painting the stones by night. The drywall and plaster went as I expected. The stones went great guns—they were really telling a story. My first night up there I worked until 3AM. I made a pot of coffee while my stone dried. I sat back down and admired it without touching it. It was Jason in an incubator, just days after he was born. He hadn’t been feeding properly and he had actually lost a couple of ounces. The doctor said his temperature was a notch below where it should have been, so they put him in a plastic box and he had tubes running into him. That was scary as hell. I still can’t think about it too much, even now that he’s dead. Back then when he was tiny and frail I was so damn worried that he would die. I went outside for a smoke and I hoped the air would clear my head. And then I thought about what a dimwit I was because fresh air clears the cobwebs from too much booze, or a lungful of paint thinner, but it doesn’t do much for the memory of a dead son. I cried for him. I cried for the time that had been stolen from him, and because I felt like a moron, so tense and a belly full of nerves back then when he was a baby and in that stupid incubator. And yet when he was a young man I took for granted that he would arrive home safely each day, no matter what.
As the week wore on I started doing guitars on the stones. I practiced by sketching the guitars on my pad in pencil first. I would stare at the sketch and then at the new pot lights in the ceiling and shut my eyes tight. The image of that guitar seemed etched in my mind. The best of the bunch is one of Jason with a guitar on his lap. He’s playing, strumming away, and you can’t see his face because of his hair hanging down and obscuring it. That’s how I remember him when he played at home. Once he’d let that hair of his grow out it hung like a curtain and blocked him out when he played. All you got was the top of his head and the guitar, and a load of music. The kid could play.
I remember he came home one evening from jamming with his friends. He would have been about fifteen at the time. He was all pumped up. His band had gotten a gig at a coffee shop. He came tearing in the door and yelled to Donna that they would be paid and they hadn’t gotten it through connections or friends—they’d gotten it by walking into the place and playing for the owner.
So that Friday we drove him to The Java Room and grabbed a table while Jason and his band set up. There were only twelve tables in the whole place, but they all filled up. The stage was pretty much a large carpeted plywood box and Jason and his band mates stood on it like they were on a packed subway train. The drummer was a tall lanky kid named Jerry who wasn’t all that keen on soap or shampoo. He looked frustrated as he squeezed his drum kit onto the tiny stage. I stood to help him but they all waved me off. It wouldn’t have been cool for a burly guy pushing fifty to act as roadie. Donna was concerned about the stage.
“He could topple off.”
“He’s sitting on a chair while he plays,” I said.
“But still, he could fall.”
“He’s sitting, not dancing. Just enjoy the show.”
“But if something happens he could ruin his career before it even gets started—before it’s had the chance to take flight.”
That was the first I had heard of a career. It bothered me, especially when I saw how serious Donna was taking things.
“He’s a boy playing in a local coffee shop, not Lightfoot at Massey Hall,” I said.
Donna shrugged her shoulders. The coffee shop manager took the microphone and blew into it before introducing the band.
Jason played well that night. He sang in a whispering voice and the band was right in time with him. He looked like quite the folk singer up there, doing some Dylan and Guthrie songs, and a couple of original tunes he and the band had written together. Those two original songs sort of meandered like lost dogs, but for the most part they pulled it off. I was damn proud of him.
On the way home, we got the band’s viewpoint. They had all crammed into the car and sat with their shoulders pulled up to their ears talking about a girl that kept smiling at Doug the bass player. But they were tight, they kept saying. They played tight. After we’d dropped off the other two band members, Donna started what would become a habit, sending the wrong message as far as I was concerned. She was planning for things that were a longshot.
“So, Jay, did the manager actually say to come back next Friday?”
“Yeah, he dug us. He said Fridays every week for this month, and maybe some Wednesdays too. He said he would get some posters made up. His sister is solid with desktop stuff and she can do some up this weekend. That’s why we gave him the picture of us.”
“Did you make sure he had your names right?”
“Yeah, mum.”
“What about the band’s name?”
“It’s only three letters, mum. You know what the band’s called right, dad?”
“Yeah I know what you’re called.”
“ AIM. It sounds so short and mysterious,” said Donna.
“You know what it stands for right, dad?”
“Yeah, I know what it stands for. It’s Ants In the Muck, isn’t it?”
Jason sighed and laughed. “No, it’s Acoustic In the Man.”
“Groovy, man,” I said.
“Just think, Jason, if things go well you could save up the money and record something,” said Donna. “The artists that make a little tape and send it around to producers have the best chance, you know.”
I wanted to make sure she wasn’t getting his hopes up. I wanted to put a little realism in the man. I told them not to get carried away. I told them that for every person that makes it in music there are a couple hundred thousand that don’t.
“I’ll have to move to the city when I get older. They have a scene there. There’s no real scene here,” said Jason.
I dropped by Jason’s room later that night. He was sitting with his guitar and his stereo was on so that he could strum along to the music. I turned it down and he stopped playing and shook the hair out of his eyes. I told him I was glad he had a passion for something—a hobby he really liked. I told him how there were days when I couldn’t wait to wash up after work and bust out of that garage. I couldn’t wait to get home and down to my work bench, or set up my canvas and line up my paints. It felt good to have something to come home to.
“Hey, dad, I hear you, but this isn’t a hobby for me. It’s my life.”
That worried me. It worried the shit out of me. I knew I should have just left, maybe told him something a typical parent might say, like: Don’t stay up too late. But my instincts told me different.
“Well, it is a hobby. You’re barely sixteen and you have school and a decent part-time job to think about. So don’t get too attached to the idea of being the next Johnny Cash.”
I was scum for that. It changed things between Jason and me. He didn’t talk about his music around me anymore. I can remember coming upstairs with a couple of knives I had sharpened for Donna one time. Jason and Donna were in the kitchen and I could hear him talking about a struggling musician, some guy who’d visited his music class at school. Jason said he’d been impressed with the guy. Jason liked that the guy was poor, but driven, and wasn’t a slave to some corporation, toiling away for a paycheck. He told his mother that money wasn’t important. I heard her agree. They both went tight-lipped when I walked into the room.
“Here they are. Watch it, they’re sharp. I could shave with those suckers,” I said.
“Thank you, Raymond.”
“Do you want them in the knife block or the drawer?”
“In the knife block, please, near the top.”
“So what are you guys talking about? Is this a big meeting?”
Neither one answered. Donna smiled and Jason got up to grab a guitar pick.
I got the new floors down in the cabin and I damn near broke my back tearing the old bathtub out of the place. The thing had become part of the floor and I took half a day just re-patching and tiling after I got the new spa tub in. I don’t really go for spa bath tubs with jets and built-in headrests, but Donna likes them. I’d watched her take her pen and circle fancy bathtubs in magazines and flyers over the years, but we’d never gotten around to buying one. I enjoyed the work. I didn’t even call to see if Steve was around, to see if he wanted to wander up and lend a hand. I needed to get out more, talk to people and just be around some regular routines and activity. I vowed that when I finished the bathroom I would get back into the swing of things.
Once I had the tub fastened in place and the floor pretty much done to within inches of the tub base, I turned on the faucet. I waited like an idiot, just in case it took more than ten seconds for the water to start flowing, but it didn’t. I grabbed a beer and my trusty bar of biodegradable soap, and I went and washed up in the lake. The cabin was in worse shape than I had thought.
I got a job at Pat’s Superstore at the very north end of town, out near the highway and the new subdivisions. Pat’s was a gourmet grocery and household centre. It was really just a warehouse all done up with polished floors, bright colours and aisle upon aisle of products—twenty types of hot sauce and sixteen kinds of mustard. They even sold small appliances and pots and pans, and books too. They had a whole mini book and music store right in the top left corner of the place.
The guy that hired me was Hiram. He wasn’t a day over twenty-five. He was well-groomed and smelled like he’d been stealing a few sprays of his mother’s perfume. He had business cards:
HIRAM W. SOUTHAM, B.COMM
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS
After he gave me his card I was tempted to tell him to take it easy, it was just an overgrown grocery store, but he was a nice enough kid. When I first walked in and filled out the application, he’d been behind the customer service counter searching for something. He waited until I had finished writing. He introduced himself and invited me up to the office. We sat and drank coffee from Kenya while he read the application.
“So, do you have any retail experience?”
I told him I had none, unless you counted pumping gas each summer back when I was a boy. I was looking for something else to do. Retirement just wasn’t for me, I explained. Hiram appreciated my honesty. The store needed some maturity and it was part of his “operational plan” to “populate” the floor with “mature associates.”
“You want to give us old fellas a shot,” I said.
Hiram laughed. “Yes, Raymond, we do. We will target younger people who want to build a career with us, but we need to include wisdom and maturity in our plan. It has to have balance.”
“Well, I’m happy to give it a go,” I said.
Hiram gently took out a blue file folder, labeled it, and slid my application in there.
“Are you available to work some evenings and weekends?”
“I can do that.”
“I think I’ll start you as a general associate. That could entail helping the crew in the back-of-house area with receiving and stock set-up, or it could entail actual re-stocking. It all depends on where the manager on duty needs you. You would also provide price checks and aisle clean-up when and where necessary.”
“No problem.”
“Did you have any questions before I send you over to see Kayla? She’s our HR associate.”
“I won’t have to work the cash, will I?”
“No, our check-out stations would be too cramped for you. I see you doing some heavy lifting here and there and becoming an integral part of our stock and inventory team.”
“Great.”
“Well, Kayla will arrange for your orientation and she’ll introduce you to Fred. Fred’s a FOMY, which is our nickname for Front Operations Manager. We have FOMYs and BOTs—Back Operations Team. And of course we’ve got MAPS—Marketing And Promotions Specialists. We like to have fun around here. But the FOMYs are our front line, our customer-centric leaders.”
I shook Hiram’s soft little hand and he smiled and welcomed me to Pat’s Superstore. The more he talked, the more I figured he was wacko, but he’d just given me a job and I was happy about that.
Fred, the manager, was an all-pro, hall of fame moron. Top five biggest dimwits I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was twenty-two, fresh out of community college. He was a kiss-ass and good buddies with Hiram’s brother, who worked in the meat department. The meat department guys all wore patches, like cops, on the shoulders of their coats. The patches said things like Organic Beef Certified or Free Range Expert. I was trying to change my ways and become more social, but it wasn’t long before the very sight of those stupid patches made me want to punch someone. Pat’s Superstore quickly got on my nerves and I began to understand why Donna preferred to shop at Rat’s Ass Grocer just around the corner. And Fred was the icing on the cake. He was skinny and had a thin head, shaped like the top end of a pear, and yet he wore his hair thick and puffy and combed forward. He looked like an exotic breed of dog. And the hair never moved, not in the wind or when he’d bend down. It just never shifted. Fred was also nervous and moved like a wild turkey, like someone had shoved a hot stick up his ass. He had no ability to plan or think ahead. He just reacted to everything, and while his body quivered and moved like it he was convulsing, his speech was slow and deliberate. He had nicknames for every employee in the store and you had to guess why he’d given you yours. Mine was Big Cat. I never bothered to ask why. And worst of all, he had a favourite word that he used in pretty much every sentence he spoke.
“Big Cat, I want you to move all those soup and pasta boxes to that loading door, and then you should break them down for recycling, naturally.” Or, “Hey Big Cat, could you please go on a buggy retrieval? And clean any flyers or waste paper out of them, naturally.”
I witnessed him say this to a customer: “Thank you for choosing Pat’s Superstore, ma’am. I will arrange for Ray, one of our associates, to give you a carry-out, naturally.”
She was a well-groomed, sharp-eyed woman. I watched her flinch, and I could see it in her face: Why did you just say ‘naturally?’
I restocked shelves and chased down items most of the time. Working in the aisles wasn’t as bad as I figured it would be. I put the inventory on the shelves and displays and rotated it, and recorded it all in a portable computer which someone upstairs downloaded into the main system. The work itself wasn’t anything to write home about, but I kind of liked being around the customers. I would shoot the breeze with them and point out the family box of cereal on sale, or the eight-pack of yogurt. They would ask me questions and I could use the portable to tell them things, like how much longer an item would be on sale. I could hit a button and take the portable out of the inventory screen and into a product description screen. The kids liked that. I would let little kids push buttons to make the pictures of their teddy bear cookies or chewy rolls bigger or smaller. The kids were all crazy for these strange fruit rolls that looked like a small roll of toilet paper made of flattened jam or jelly. They could actually unroll the stuff and tear it off in pieces. I started carrying some in my pockets and I would give a pouch of it to kids perched in the buggy seat. That got warm smiles from some of the mums. There were some nice looking women that went through the store. Some of them could have been models.
This one lady used to come in twice a week. Her little daughter was three and looked like a chubby, shrunken version of her mother, a redhead with bright green eyes. I used to let the daughter push the delete button on the portable and it would beep. She got a thrill out of that, and she would kick her little legs as the beeps sounded. One day she shut the thing off. I don’t know how she did it, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to start again.
Fred sat in the prep room hunched over the portable with screwdriver in hand and his knee bouncing up and down like a piston.
“This could be serious, Big Cat. Naturally, I want to get it back online, but it might have to go upstairs to Rudy. He won’t be happy.”
“Okay,” I said.
Fred took the back off the unit and yanked out the battery.
“I did that already,” I said.
Fred counted under his breath, “One stream boat, two steam boat . . .”
He snapped the battery back in and then gasped like he’d just spilled coffee all over himself. “Oh my God this will have to go to Rudy. Maybe you should take it to him and explain what happened.”
Rudy was located in a small office right at the back of the second floor. There were no windows and the place was filled with computers and keyboards. Rudy was a dimwit. He had black hair with a light streak in it, and well-kept facial hair. He usually wore a pair of striped dress pants and a shirt with high collar and weird metal buttons. He rode a big-assed motorcycle and wore a studded leather coat that went down past his knees. A lot of the younger crew found him intimidating. I thought he looked like a civil war general that’d stepped out of a fucking time machine and gone straight to a hairdresser instead of a barber.
His office door was open and he was sitting with his back to me, reading some sort of code on a long sheet of paper, like a scroll. I said excuse me, and then hello, and he finally swiveled his chair around slowly. He didn’t answer. He just looked at me like I was spider or roach that had crawled into his space. I offered him the portable and told him what had happened. He took it and dropped the sheet of paper to the ground. He started pushing buttons.
“A kid was playing with it?”
“Yeah, I let the little ones see the thing when they’re shopping with mum.”
“Do you know how much these things cost?”
“No sir, I don’t.”
“Well, the whole family would have to shop here a lot to pay for one of these.”
“Well, then I guess I should find another way to amuse the toddlers.”
He handed back the portable. “Tell Fred to send me up a requisition on it.”
“Okay.”
“And, yeah, find another way to get that MILF.”
I didn’t know what he meant. I had worked at the garage with some younger guys, but they knew the boundaries with me. I’d heard a lot of their horseshit sayings, but I hadn’t heard that one before.
“That what?”
Rudy had swiveled his chair around and his back was facing me again. “If you have your eye on some MILF, find another way to get with her,” he said.
Later in the shift I asked Fred to translate what Rudy had said. Fred went wide-eyed and called Chris over from dairy. “Did you hear what Rudy said to Ray?”
Fred retold my story and Chris laughed. “He is totally off the hook.”
“He is that,” said Fred.
I went and checked the expiry dates on the eggs and sour cream. And I thought about Rudy and his attitude, and what he was suggesting. I was just being nice to the customers, especially the ladies. I didn’t like him much, so I waited outside near his motorcycle when my shift ended. I read the newspaper and I watched some mums loading groceries and children into cars. A lot of the kids were fussy and emotional. They’d had enough of shopping for the day, I guess. I remembered that Jason was a good boy when his mother took him to the store. I felt my face burn as I remembered them coming home and Jason helping us with the grocery bags. He used to storm around the house all pumped-up about the maple syrup his mother had bought, or the little sugarcoated donuts. I was about to start the car and leave when Rudy finally strutted into the parking lot. I got out and went over to his bike to meet him. He was surprised to see me. He looked at me with a bit of disgust but nodded hello anyway. I put my hand on the seat of his bike.
“What’s going on, dude?” he asked.
“Here’s what’s going on, asshole. If you ever talk to me like that again I’ll cave your fucking face in. You’ll be eating apple sauce through a tube for a month. Do you understand?”
He was scared. I could see it in his eyes, but he fancied himself too cool to back down.
“And you have what authority, exactly?”
I stepped closer to him and he leaned back, placed his fingers on the handlebars of his bike.
“Do you want to do this right now?”
I grabbed a handful of his shiny coat and he pulled back again, let go of the handlebars and nearly fell over.
“Dude, you need to chill. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
The next day Fred was waiting, loitering around my locker. He looked like he was spring-loaded. I had taken some time that morning to think about what I had done to Rudy, and I didn’t feel good about it. The guy probably had a sleepless night because or me. But he was still wrong for saying what he’d said. Fred’s voice was shaky when he talked to me.
“Good morning, Ray. I guess you know we need to talk, naturally,” he said.
He smiled and kept his distance.
“Are you going to fire me?”
“Well, Hiram doesn’t know about it yet. Rudy came to me with it. He’s pretty upset.”
“He has a right to be. But he was in the wrong as well.”
“I wasn’t there to hear the conversation, but Rudy has said he might call the police.”
I had been putting on my cloak, but I stopped and looked Fred in the eye.
“I don’t want any trouble,” said Fred.
“Fred, I’m not going to give you any trouble. But you listen to me: if Rudy wants to go to the cops I can’t stop him. I’ll go to the human rights commission or a justice of the peace, whoever the hell I have to chase down to file a complaint that the IT manager insinuated I was making advances on the customers. I don’t need to hear that horseshit from him.”
“I think this is about pride on both sides,” said Fred. “And I’ll ask you not to threaten anyone else. It’s unacceptable. And I will tell Rudy to watch what he says, or implies.”
Fred rushed away. He was always running from place to place. He moved like there was an air raid siren going off in his thin head all the time. He was right though. As much as it burned my ass to admit it, he was right. Pride and maybe a good dose of anger caused the whole thing in the parking lot. I could hear my wife telling my dead son how not to solve problems in life. I could hear her telling Jason about reasoning with people and about what she called righteous and unrighteous anger. I went to the washroom, shut myself in a stall and, for only the third time since my son’s funeral, shed a tear or two. I was ashamed of myself.
I would like to say that time marched on for me at Pat’s Superstore, and that I stayed on and did my job, and made some friends. But the place drove me nuts. It bothered me the way everyone used terms like “associate” instead of clerk or stocker. The kids on the cash or check-out desks were “purchase and package specialists.” The managers ran around the place like they were infantry, rushing to back up their platoon in a firefight. And the main concern wasn’t really the customer, it was the computer system and how important it was. If you worked on the system and had a job upstairs in the computer room, you were allowed to treat the people around you like garbage. Pat’s Superstore was the same as the huge TV and stereo place right across from it. Both were giant warehouses full of plastic—plastic products crammed onto plastic shelves, and plastic banners full of plastic promotions and jargon. They were both full of shit, and operated by computer geeks and staffed by incompetent assholes that knew all about processes and policies, but had no clue whatsoever when it came to actually servicing their customers. It wasn’t long before I dreaded walking into the place. My last day at Pat’s went something like this:
I rolled out of bed that morning to find that Donna had gone for the day. She had left some scrambled eggs and sausage under the heat lamp on the kitchen counter. Her dishes were washed and sitting on the draining tray beside the sink. There were two place-settings on the kitchen table, both with a glass of orange juice poured and sitting beside the knife and fork. I knew that one place was for me. I cleared the other one before I sat down. I looked at the eggs and realized I wasn’t hungry just then, so I took my coffee downstairs and got ready for work.
I filled the basin with hot water and opened up the drawer containing my shave kit. I reached in with one hand while I switched on the fan with the other. I pulled out the small leather bag and my hand touched something behind it. I pulled the drawer all the way open and found an old straight razor, tortoise-shelled with the blade filed right down so it would hardly slice through butter. I brought the razor to my nose. It smelled like metal and faint soap. It was Jason’s. He never used a straight razor when he actually started to shave. Donna got him an electric for Christmas when he turned sixteen. But when he was little he was fascinated by my straight razor, the way I had to run it up and down the strop and care for it. He loved to sit on his rocking chair in the bathroom doorway and watch me lather up shaving soap in a big enamel bowl that had belonged to my father. He liked the badger brush and would blow on the bristles and watch them sway.
I would hand him my bottle of aftershave and he would shake it and then twist off the cap and sniff it, claiming he had made it smell better by mixing it for me. Pretty soon he wanted lather on his face and was asking how long until he could shave too. So I got one of my older straights and I filed it down to nothing. Jason would stand on a stool beside me and copy every move I made. He liked the part where he tipped the aftershave in his palm, rubbed his hands together and slapped it on his face and neck. He really liked the old lime stuff I used to get back in the day. It was green and came in a tall plastic bottle and it stung like a bastard when you first splashed it on. Jason would sometimes get a handful of it and slap it on before I could shake the excess from his little hands. We used to have a secret saying. I would tell him, “Not too much, little man. You’ll smell like a whorehouse.”
He didn’t know what a whorehouse was at that age, and I realized after telling him that I should have kept my big mouth shut. He liked to say it. I guess he could see it in my eyes that it was a bad thing to say.
“Not too much, daddy. You’ll smell like a whorehouse.”
It would crack me up every time. It was wrong, but so damn funny coming out of the little guy’s mouth.
I eventually convinced him that secret code was cooler than saying the actual word. We agreed that smelling like a “W-H” was what we would say. We used to have fun on those Saturday and Sunday mornings. And he was a good kid. He never did tell his mother about our secret code. But he did caution me to take it easy with the aftershave, and not to smell like a W-H.
I took Jason’s razor and put it in my overnight bag for the cabin. I went upstairs and called Donna at the office. I was pretty sure she’d come across the razor and put it in my drawer. I was ready to blast her for doing it. I was all set to tell her to stay out of my fucking stuff, but I hung up after three rings. What had she done wrong? She had found something and thought it belonged to me. She put it back where she thought it fit.
My blood was boiling and I stood in the kitchen, my mind running through some other possibilities. I could take the coffee pot and smash it against the wall. I could take a kitchen chair to the backyard and bang it on the concrete step until the legs buckled. I could punch the wall in the basement. There were already six holes there anyway. I went to the living room and sat for a minute. The sadness was like physical pain. It embarrassed me even though there was nobody around to see it. I forced myself out of the chair and went downstairs once again to shower and shave. I did not look myself in the eye as I guided the razor across my beard. And I did not splash on aftershave either. I rinsed my scumbag face with cold water and went to work.
There was a promotion on that day. They had cleared the carpet cleaners and windshield washer fluid away from the checkout zone and set up a large shallow sandbox filled with white sand, and placed it against a painted background of a deep blue ocean. They had diamond-bright floodlights beaming down on the whole mess and it looked like shit, but people seemed interested and were all smiles and grins over it. That entire area of the store was crowded with cases of COOL BLAST, a blended fruit and tea drink. Fred was wearing a red and white Hawaiian shirt over top of his regular uniform. The sight of him made me want to shove him into the fake beach scene and knock over all the lights. The cashiers were all wearing various colourful beach clothes and towels hooked up like dresses. Fred was in a panic and kept talking about “optimal product placement.”
“Naturally, Big Cat, I would like your opinion.”
“It’s fine, Fred. The lights are a little bright though.”
He ran towards the office. “I was right, we need to dim the lights,” he was saying.
Gary, the assistant manager, was standing near the lottery kiosk yawning and rubbing his eyes.
“Hey Gary, dimwit forgot to tell me what I’m doing today.”
Gary smiled at me and took a bite out of a pastry, and then sipped his coffee. “Go and see Dwayne in the back. He’s running behind with some stuff.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I was tired, and the extra place setting and the old razor were still on my mind. While everyone else rushed around the store, I limped along that day. I couldn’t find an ounce of energy. A lady dropped a family-sized jar of mayonnaise on aisle 6 and the stuff shot everywhere in globs. It looked like Godzilla had just devoured a giant egg salad sandwich. I got a pile of fresh rags and the mop and bucket, filled it with hot soapy water and wheeled it to aisle 6. The lady hung around and kept apologizing and I kept telling her not to worry, I would clean it up. She took a rag and wrung it out.
“That’s okay, ma’am, please just carry on. They have some nice iced tea up at the front,” I told her.
“Oh, but look at the mess I’ve made. At least let me wipe these spots from the pickle jars,” she said.
A kid I called “It” went strutting by. It usually worked the deli counter. I heard It make a noise in its throat like it was surprised.
“You don’t have to do that,” It said to the lady.
“Oh I’m just pitching in,” she said.
“Mind your own business,” I said to It.
The kid gave me a dirty look and took off. It was rail thin and had a pretty face and a voice like a chimpanzee. It wore boy’s shoes and a boy’s wristwatch, six earrings in each ear, and something that resembled pale lipstick on its mouth. It had a tattoo of a spider on its forearm and walked like a girl but had no breasts to speak of. It’s eyes fluttered like a girl’s, but It chewed gum with its mouth open like a boy. And It carried a shoulder bag that I could never figure out: was it a purse or a gym bag? Was It a boy or a girl? I didn’t know and I’m pretty sure most of the customers that appeared to be in a trance while they ordered their 200 grams of maple glazed ham couldn’t figure it out either. Fred was on the scene of the mayo spill within a minute of It passing by.
“Hello, ma’am,” he said to the lady. “Please let the associate clean up. He’s happy to do it.”
“But I made such a mess.”
“Let’s go over to the customer service centre and I’ll give you some coupons. We want you to remember your experience with us as a positive one, naturally.”
He ushered her off and shot me the stink eye as he left the aisle.
It was a busy morning. Any customer spending over $30 received a three-pack of COOL BLAST. Girls wearing bathing suits were swaggering through the aisles with trays of little plastic sample cups. Some of them were beautiful. There was one in particular who was tall and slim. She had long legs and she walked with her shoulders pulled back; she had a thin waist and her butt was firm and I stood and watched her wiggle it past the rows of cereal I was re-stocking. She reminded me of Donna and I thought of calling her. I hadn’t called her for a long time. I had no idea what I would say and so I continued arranging the shelves, making them “customer-centric” as Fred the dimwit liked to say. They called me over the PA system to assist a customer in Sight and Sound where they sold CDs, DVDs and cameras. When I got there a guy in his mid-forties walked over. He was one of these guys that wears a sport coat and dress shoes with his jeans.
“I wonder if you could help us out. I want to buy my boy this CD, but there’s no price. There are six of them, but none have stickers,” said the guy. He held up the CD. His son was a clean-cut kid, maybe thirteen years old.
He smiled and sort of stayed in the background while his old man sorted things out. I double-checked and none of the CDs were priced.
“I’m sorry about this, sir,” I said.
“No worries, I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t fifty bucks or something,” he said.
His son chuckled and said, “They’re never fifty bucks, dad.”
“Follow me, gentlemen,” I said.
I put my hand out for the CD as we walked over to the customer service desk. I handed the CD to Anna and asked her to scan it. “Mark it as complimentary, please.”
Anna looked confused. I took a Thanks for Choosing Pat’s sticker and stuck it on the CD.
“Does Fred know?” she asked.
“I’ll look after Fred.”
The father and son left the store happy. They both thanked me a couple of times. I stood near the shopping buggies and watched them walk across the parking lot together. I could see they were in step with each other. They knew each other, and had an understanding. The boy was yapping away to his old man as they got into the car. The father was grinning as if his boy’s voice was music to his ears. The sight of it stabbed me right in the gut. My throat went hot and my lower back and legs were like jelly for a second. I leaned against the railing of the buggy corral and pulled myself together. It and a kid named Sal were on the approach with a forty-foot buggy train. The two of them struggled to push the squeaking train without stopping to straighten the whole mess. Sal waved to someone inside the store and took off. He charged by me like he was Fred Jr.
“Could you help me with these?” asked It.
I didn’t answer. I was looking over the parking lot. There was a family loading up their car. The mother was laughing about something and the father closed the trunk lid for her. Two blond daughters hopped up and down, giggling. Maybe they were all going for an ice cream or something. They were a happy looking group and as I watched them I couldn’t imagine a harsh word ever exchanged between them.
“Can you help me or not?”
I turned my attention to It, but I didn’t answer right away. I always figured that when you worked a retail job it was the customers that drive you nuts, but at Pat’s Superstore most of the idiots worked right alongside you.
“Do it yourself you little asshole. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
I was cleaning out the yogurt fridge when Fred went bombing by with sweat on his brow.
“Hey Big Cat, what are you doing? “
“Pink yogurt spilled in here. Looks like a lid popped off or something.”
“We want the fridges clean, naturally, but we need to get this promotion really happening. I put a shirt back near your locker. It’s an XL. I’ll see you up front.”
I watched just over Fred’s shoulder. There was a husband and wife shopping together. They were middle-aged. She wore a nice dress, a loose colourful thing. She was a cute, kind of button-faced woman. He wore pleated trousers and a golf shirt. I got the impression they were going to something after they’d picked up what they needed. Their buggy had bags of chips, peanuts and a case of tonic water in it. I figured they were on their way to a barbecue, or lunch on a friend’s patio. He looked very content.
“Ray, are you listening to me?” said Fred.
“Not really.”
“I need you to put on the shirt and cover off the front. Be alert for carry-outs and ensure the girls have enough COOL BLAST.”
“Okay then.”
“After your shift we need to chat. We need to talk about getting you in the first module of the training program. They’re holding it downtown at the Hyatt this month. They have an excellent team-building—”
“I stock shelves and mop floors. I’m not going to any training program.”
We were interrupted by the PA: “Manager on duty to cash five, please. Could the M-O-D please come to number five?”
“That’s me,” whispered Fred. He took off like he’d just been called to assist in emergency surgery.
“You’re a little tool,” I said, but he was well on his way to deal with the end of the world on cash number five.
The fake beach used some pretty big floodlights. They had moved a big-assed cooler up front and plugged it all into one power bar near the very last checkout desk. I smelled burning insulation as soon as I got up there.
“I think something is burning,” said one of the cashiers.
I checked the power bar and saw that it was defective, and had no reset button. The AC receptacle was warm but seemed okay.
“Who set this up? “ I asked.
“Fred and one of the guys from the back,” said the cashier.
I pushed on one of the plugs in the power bar and little wisps of smoke appeared.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“I’ll have to unplug this,” I said.
I yanked everything out of the bar and the music stopped and the floodlights went off, leaving the beach in darkness. One of the cashiers called for Fred over the PA. I went to try and find an extension cord so I could hook the lights and cooler into another receptacle down by the washrooms. I would also need some heavy duct-tape to keep the cord on the ground and avoid a tripping hazard for the customers. I was in the storage room just down from the washrooms when the lights went off. I heard some loud voices and laughter over near the check-out area. When I got out there some of the lights had come back on, but a few of the cashiers were complaining that their terminals were down. I watched one lady shake her head and leave her buggy full of groceries and walk out. I also watched various lights go on and off and I could just about picture Fred standing like a child in the electrical room flipping every switch he could find.
“People are complaining,” said one of the cashiers.
“I’m out of here. I so hate this place,” said another.
I didn’t know what Fred had done, but we had rows of ceiling lights off and half of the registers down. I went over to the fake beach and said, “Okay girls, raise your hand if your terminal is working.”
The girls at cash 1 through 6 all waved.
I went to the customer service desk and took the mike for the PA. “Hello folks, if I could have everyone move up to cashiers one through six until we get power back. Cashiers on six through twelve please help the girls on one through six with bagging and so on. And also, free ice teas for everyone while supplies last.”
It showed up and took out a cell phone. It stood with the cell at arm’s length and it took me a moment to figure out that It was taking photographs of the confusion.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Hiram’s going to want to know what happened here. Fred said he’s really worried.”
“Where’s Fred?”
“In the utility room. He hit a button and it won’t pop back out.”
As It answered my question, It aimed the cell phone at me and said, “Smile.”
The flash went off and bugged the shit out of my eyes. I took a bottle of window cleaner from under cash number 7 and adjusted the nozzle to the stream setting. I then pumped the trigger and soaked It’s shirt.
“Hey, stop that.”
I did stop. I put the bottle back and said, “You’d better go and wash that off. It might irritate your skin.”
“I’m filing a complaint,” It said.
“Go for it you little asshole.”
And then It marched away. I sat in one of the fold-out beach chairs and watched It trudge past the cooler, around the stereo system, past the supply room and thrust its scrawny arm against the Men’s Room door. It disappeared inside.
Mystery solved, I surveyed the log jam of customers and their long faces from where I sat. I got out of the chair and the lights in aisle nine went off and never came back on.
“He’s back there switching lights when we’re in deep shit up here,” whispered one of the cashiers as she bagged some packages of pasta noodles.
“Will we get something, a discount for our time and trouble?” asked a lady lined up at cash 3.
I went back to the customer service desk, grabbed the mike and cranked up the volume. “Fred, please report to the front of the fucking store! M-O-D to the front of the fucking store!” I said.
I heard some laughter, men mostly. I saw a lady staring at me open-mouthed. There was a little girl of about four hopping up and down and grinning like she was waiting for more. Kids love bad words.
Customers parted as Fred approached the customer service desk. Wheels squeaked as they moved their loaded buggies to make way. Fred looked like he’d been dragged through the bush by his ankles.
“You just used profanity on the PA system,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“That’s not acceptable. That’s very serious.”
“You know, Fred, you were back there fucking around with the lights when people need your genius up here. I wanted to get you here as quickly as possible, naturally.”
The two closest cashiers began to giggle. Fred adjusted his shirt. “You have read the employee handbook, the back section?”
I picked up the mike again.
“Big Cat, please don’t,” he said.
I put the mike back down, took off my apron and dropped it in a garbage bin.
“That’s company property, that doesn’t belong to you,” he said.
“Everything in here is company property, Fred. Nothing belongs to us, including our fucking brains—that’s the whole problem,” I said.
I never went back to Pat’s Superstore. Not even to pick up milk or a loaf of bread.