The BOYS

Episode Thirteen

Fortunately, the cramps didn't start until lunch hour's rush was mostly over... around ten minutes past two. They were bad, though – starting in hot, red little coils that simmered in his bowels, thrusting the occasional shaft backwards so that, by the first time Walt had to make a dash for the gents, his kidneys and liver ached as though they'd been ripped out, pounded by mallets and run through a grinder for sausage meat, then poured back into his body. He sat on the throne... someone, Barry, probably, had thought to duplicate the placard that reminded employees to wash their hands that hung over and to the right of the sink with another, miniature version on the door. Must cheer up the customers, he thought, as a long, thin brown snake glided out, then a farrago of little jagged chunks, finally, a wet fanfare, an explosion of mostly water, and just a little blood. It had him gripping the sides of the bowl, sweating like a beer-drunk in Vegas.

Walter had accustomed himself to leisurely bowel movements, accompanied by a smoke and something light from the newspaper, sports or comics. But, when he looked upwards, the video monitor was staring down at him, positioned... he began to think... at some insane angle that afforded views of both sink and stall. Oughta be a law, he decided, but, since there was not, he wiped himself, flushed and, once he'd pulled up his pants, carefully wiped the worst of the brown stuff off the bowl, flushed again and washed his hands, thoroughly and conspicuously. A holdover from the plague.

He almost knocked Mister C over on the way out. Barry looked at his watch... "what the hell were you doin' in there, Fales, you one of those jackoffs? I get kids like that, part time, too fuckin' stupid, even, to look up at the camera... they don't last. You, on the other hand, get paid good money to work, not just sit around..."

Walt held up his hands. "I was washin' my hands, you do want us cleanin’ up after we pleasure ourselves, don't you?"

The manager shook his head. "Mr. Z gets what he pays for. Just get back to work and, if it's slow, go stand by that table of the Civil War actors from Freedomland, move things around, make noise and impress them with your body odor or else they'll sit in my window all afternoon, scaring the customers and, maybe, inspiring someone to file a civil rights lawsuit. I've got to go to my meetings..."

And the manager passed into the kitchen, tossing off unpleasantries to all within range on his course past the grill, through the counter door and out... a curse, a slur, an exhortation to keep busy. The front door of the DP was pressurized, it wasn't supposed to slam, but Barry managed to slam it, pushing past a fat guy off a pickup truck whose indignation was momentary, like a man who'd suffered a severe brain injury... he proceeded to the counter, ordering three chili dogs, rings and a Giant Slushie.

"Motherfucker!" Davy said at the fry pit, as soon as the boss was out the door.

Eunice gave a snort of grandmotherly contempt, passing the fat man's ticket over to Ed, who, working the grill, just spat on the gasworks beneath, a momentary sizzle of resentment, soon evaporated. She handed the guy his change, looked over her shoulder at Walt, taking in the greenish tinge around his eyes.

"Barry offered you a Salty, and you ate it," she commiserated, and Walter nodded, sheepishly.

Until that moment, he'd suspected the free sausage, but had, also, considered Missy's mangled chops and casseroles of the past week. But his wife burned stuff, she didn't poison him.

"He's got a reason, such as it is, he tells me things. That Salty was kept under a lamp two, three days, soon as he knew that a new boy was coming in... it's his funny little way of reminding the newcomers that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

"I guess he's right," Walter gulped.

"Drink some soda water. That imitation 7-up stuff... nobody else buys it. Tastes awful, but it'll flush your system out, you'll live. Don't forget to mark it up in the employee book," she reminded him, lifting an eyebrow upwards, "big brother's watching."

It helped, though only a little. They were well into the hottest, laziest hour of the shift. Fermeley was doing her nails at the window, Tex and Ed poked at dogs on the griddle, pushing them to one side so that they wouldn't burn. "Smoke 'em if you got 'em," Tex said, and yawned. "Time to go back into the cooler and replenish the salad bar..."

Walt glanced. There was nothing wrong with the salad bar... plenty of lettuce (not the diseased king) and sliced cucumbers, croutons (they looked sort of like stale chips off surplus buns) and mushy canned tomatoes from Mexico or wherever that most places had been using since the hurricanes over the summer had destroyed almost everything coming from Florida.

"I mean, if you go to the cooler, there ain't any damn cameras between there and the emergency door, we can slip out for a quick cig, coupla minutes, then come back with a box of something and move vegetables around, go back into the cooler and finish."

"Go ahead," Eunice encouraged them. "Barry goes off to his so-called meetings almost every day and he won't be back for an hour, at least. If he wasn't eating in that office all of the time, I'd say he goes out somewhere decent for a meal, but that couldn't be the case..."

"Probably goes to the retro video store with the porno machines in back, the gentlemen's porno," Davy suggested with Bolshevik disgust. "Or he's got something on the side, evicting widows and orphans, perhaps..."

He broke off a frozen iceberg of fries, tossed them into the pit and they spattered grease and noise enough to make two of the bedraggled men in a group of four at a window-booth look up. All were bearded and dusty, three of them in gray uniforms, one decked out in Union blue. A Confederate officer... sword scabbard hanging low, as if off the belt of a rapper's baggy trousers... approached for a half-priced Slushie refill.

"How are things hangin', Gen'ral Jackson?" Eunice said, taking his empty cup.

"Root beer," the re-enactor ordered. "Lousy. It's the economy, and nobody's going to drive halfway out into the desert to see the Battle of Antietam with sagebrush and scorpions. A stupid idea... lucky if we make it to Christmas. I had security, workin' as a turtle for Disney til’ we got laid off in the plague..."

"So why didn’t you go back?" Eunice pressed the root beer lever of the Slushie station, and cold, fizzy sugar and water and whatever the stuff was that gave it more constitution than ordinary soft drinks... corn syrup, Davy would tell Walter later, perhaps correctly, perhaps not.

"Fuckin' shell weighed forty pounds. Hot as Hades, inside, I was getting all of these boils on my back and neck... the little kind you can't reach around to pop. Freedomland offered independent contractor sub-minimum - eight twenty an hour, part medical after a year... I guess they must've known that the park wouldn't last a year, nothing out of their pockets."

"Who are the owners?" Eunice passed the Slushie over the counter.

"Damned if I know. Foreigners, I think, the French or Koreans. Freedomland's not the sort of mistake an American would make."

The General ambled back to his booth, back still bent over as if still bent under forty pounds of papiér maché, wires and green paint. Bearded heads lowered... disputed, conferred, consensed and, then, he finally looked up, triumphant. "Danish!"

"Comin' out for a smoke?" Tex invited.

Another spasm, a chilly one, this time, rumbled deep within Walter's gut and shook his whole body like a kitten in a pit bull's jaws."

"I... I don't think so. Got somewhere else to go"

After Walt hurried to the Gents, he'd unloaded, wiped and, while washing up at the sink, glanced out the tiny prisonlike aperture that served for a window. It was maybe a foot square... just barely enough to allow one shaft of light into the DP, but not so large as to allow the desperate to crawl up on the sink, squeeze through, and escape. It was also high enough that most persons would've had to stand to see outside, but Walt was six five, so he'd been able to observe Ed Musgrove emerge from the emergency door, glance hastily around and cross the parking lot to this old beater in front of the bankrupt nail salon next to the bankrupt aquarium. There were a couple of guys leaning on the car, somebody else inside... Walt couldn't hear them talking at this distance, but they looked like Mexicans, the two outside, visible guys wearing t-shirts, jeans and scuffed cowboy boots. They said something to Ed, and he said something back... extending a closed first which one of the car loungers took, money, probably. The shadow in the car handed something through the other Mexican, it was a small, white paper bag which Ed balled in his fist, nodded, and walked away with towards his own vehicle - a decently maintained, if not restored, late '70s Dodge sedan. The Mexicans drove off, Musgrove looked left, then right, then manually unlocked the door to the passenger's compartment, stuffed the paper bag under the seat, shut the door and lit up, so anybody passing, by now, would assume he was just taking a smoke break, enjoying a lungful of the tobacco that was still, if precariously, legal in California.

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