CHAPTER 11
Liz had been dancing for a full three or four minutes with her eyes closed. She did that every once in a while, taking special notice of smells, breezes, and if she turned off her earphones, ambient sounds. It helped her appreciate whatever she might see when she opened them. Wisps of clouds, all sorts of birds. She couldn’t tell one bird from another though, except for gulls when they strayed this far off the beach. Some of the stores along the street had flowers planted out front, but she didn’t know one flower from another either. She was shockingly deficient in so many areas, but many of her weaknesses, she told herself, were correctable.
Opening her eyes, she took a good long look at the imperial, possibly life-shortening overhead transmission lines that led straight out of a gas-burning power plant on the water a couple of miles away. The imposing cables stood tall over a middle-aged white man emptying trash into the bins alongside the Laundromat next door. He was pulling junk from two shopping carts. It was remodeling detritus—broken bits of drywall, boards with nails in them, paint cans. And he was dumping it all into the wrong places, most of it going into the blue bin designated for bottles and paper. When that was full he dumped the rest into the green organic refuse bin. He probably had some kind of vendetta against recycling rules, part of a changing world he couldn’t bear—hybrid vehicles, men marrying men, coons in the White House. Liz imagined this angry white man’s home with an angry white man’s wife and 2.3 angry white man’s kids. Probably none of them in their whole lives would ever read a book, see a foreign film, or attend a lecture. Jesus, you’re a bigoted jerk, she told herself and smiled behind the mask of her chicken costume. She considered approaching the man to correct his trash disposal methods, but the fowl suit rendered all her opinions useless. That was something she didn’t want to think about, how a grievous socioeconomic station could devalue everything about you, turning even incontestable statements of fact into useless blather. At least little kids thought her suit was terrific, although older ones knew it represented something not altogether amusing. On her last break she’d posed with a toddler at the counter while his mom in high heels, polka-dot slacks, and earrings the size of thermos bottles snapped photos with her smartphone. Liz never spoke when she was in costume and Buddy had asked her never to take a kid on her lap. Apparently the insurance company didn’t want to take the one-in-five-million chance the child would slide to the floor and crack his skull open. “They hate to be sued,” Buddy explained. Buddy rolled his eyes to express his own opinion. He often strived to let people know he wasn’t as dumb as the company and assumed his superiors would never hear of these infractions. Liz had been tempted to warn him against this behavior but was conscious of her lowly status even among other employees of their fast-food purgatory. Buddy was married with three kids and always behaved properly with her, wouldn’t even countenance swear words. Another employee told her he’d had gang tattoos removed from his neck.
In the windowless restroom Liz quickly removed the chicken head and wiped the sweat from her face and hair with paper towels, then checked her cell for messages that never came. The restroom, as usual, would fail any fair-minded inspection, but the chicken person did get certain perks, and one of them was not having to take a turn cleaning it. Before putting it back on, she contemplated the yin and yang elements of the chicken head resting on the toilet paper roll: smothering her as it concealed her shame. You’re going to look back at this and laugh, she told herself.
BACK AT her sidewalk station, Liz switched on an old Miami Sound Machine samba and danced softly in place. The routine was starting to feel too familiar. Every day out here widened the inescapable hole in her résumé and took her even farther from her destination. And it was difficult to relax at night hunkered down in the clamor of Value Motel, a way station for castaways sliding toward homelessness. Couples yelled, threw things, and batted each other around while the kids out on the asphalt gave birth to rap sheets. It wasn’t the kind of home her parents had envisioned for their yet-to-be-born Elizabeta when they crossed la frontera.
Sometimes Liz wondered whether anyone profited from the bad breaks that assailed her and her family. Perhaps the owner of the maquiladora where her exiled mom and dad performed mind-numbing tasks for a dismal wage. She’d looked it up on the Internet, and the company was a subsidiary of a much bigger corporation headquartered in Bermuda. How do you assign responsibility when everything is tangled in credit default swaps and exchange-traded securities? It must be that way for a reason. But it made no sense for the world to train her to safeguard books, documents, and other vessels of art and knowledge and then deprive her of the chance to do it.
Liz turned to see a man who looked like . . . yes, like Bogart. What a curious dream, she thought. But wasn’t she awake? He was speaking to her, but she couldn’t hear over her earphones and traffic noise. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, so he raised his volume to a half shout. His name was Philyaw, she thought he said. Curious name. And he began telling her about his business. She couldn’t catch all of it, but it made no difference. He’d seen her in costume so he was dead to her.
An eighteen-wheeler stopped very close to them at the edge of the sidewalk, its big diesel belching and harrumphing, waiting for the light to change up ahead. When it moved on, Liz heard the man say, “You’d be on the phone a lot.” He handed her a card. Western Credit Associates. Could be anything. She handed it back.
“Chickens, we don’t have pockets,” she shouted over the noise.
He said something else she couldn’t make out.
“Is this about a job?”
Now he shouted. “Sure! What’d you think?”
“I don’t need no stinking job. I’m already a crucial cog in our dynamic new service economy.”
The man looked at her curiously. He probably didn’t get the reference to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It seemed particularly apt, given his Bogart appearance. Oh well.
“This job you’re talking about, it’s not an internship, is it?” She’d once run a law library for a group of attorneys, working for nothing until they couldn’t string her along anymore and had to go out and find a fresh sucker.
Bogart shrugged his shoulders, indicating he hadn’t heard her. Speaking louder, she added, “More important, how come you want a chicken? Chickens aren’t particularly qualified. We can’t even fly.”
“We’re a collection agency,” he said, as though that explained it.
“Look, I’ve got to turn the music back on.”
He pointed to the restaurant. Was he going to wait for her? Christ, he started heading over there. “Wait,” she yelled out, catching up to him. “Give me back the card, okay?” She pulled down a zipper. “I’ve got pockets underneath.”
“Call any time, today even,” he said. “You don’t have to be coy, okay?”
When she got back to the motel she tore the card in half and threw it in her waste can. It wasn’t just that he knew of her hidden chicken identity. He wanted her to help him collect debts from people who were maybe even worse off than she was. After she watched bunny-ears TV for a while she fished the two pieces out of the waste can and stuck them in the Bible drawer. Who knew what tomorrow would bring? But Bogey’s proposal was just another stairway to the wrong place. She already had a crappy job, and this one offered anonymity and left her mind free.
Two days later she was taking her trash to the motel dumpster when her cell phone rang. All around her kids were yelling, radios blaring, big rigs rolling along a freeway overpass. A dog was even barking. Lately her whole life seemed spent around sounds she didn’t particularly want to hear. Liz couldn’t recognize the caller’s number and knew she should let it go to message mode, but curiosity got the best of her. “Hello,” she said.
“Ms. . . . Huizar?” Pronounced haltingly and Anglo-Saxonly as Hwizz-air, not Weez-ahr. A female voice.
“Yes?” Liz thought she heard the word “library” in the torrent of words that spilled out. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s noisy here. May I call you back in five minutes?” She raced up the steps to her room.
The woman, a Mrs. Rasmussen, was calling for a Mr. Upchurch at a private library in Monterey. Liz dimly recalled sending a résumé there weeks earlier. “Mr. Upchurch would like to see you. Can you come up Thursday?”
“Thursday, I’m not sure, but—”
“Mr. Upchurch needs to wind this up quickly, and he has a very full schedule.”
“It’s about my résumé?”
“Yes, of course.”
Liz was supposed to do her chicken dance Thursday. It was way too early in the relationship to ask for a day off. Maybe she could just tell the truth to Buddy and plead for mercy. Passing up the chance at a real job so she could dance on the sidewalk was crazy, but a Monterey round-trip would drink more than two tanks of gas, and the woman didn’t say anything about expenses. “I’ll try to rearrange my schedule. Is it okay if I call you back in the morning?” Mrs. Rasmussen was displeased but finally agreed as long as Liz called by ten. Despite these troublesome aspects she decided it was safe to view this as a positive development. Funny how things always came at you in bunches. First the chicken restaurant, then the collection agency, and now maybe even a real job. “Fucken A!” she shouted in her little room.