The BOYS
Episode Fourteen
It didn't take a rocket scientist to
guess the chakra of Walter's discomfiture, and maybe Eunice had taken pity on
him... maybe she was only looking out for herself, figuring a mop-jockey with diarrhea
was still better than no mop-jockey at all. The third time
that stricken look crossed his face, she said "grab a mop and
bucket out of the Chemical Closet, put a sign up for the ladies' room and do
your business there. And do the floor after you
crawl into the stall, that's part of your job anyway and what's Mister
C-everything through his little peepholes going to do about that? He
gave you that Salty deliberately, to teach you a lesson, you know..."
"I've learned my lesson," he
said, weakly, looking over his shoulder, through a greenish haze, towards the
Chemical Closet with longing and gratitude.
"We have to look out for one
another here, don't we?" she ventured. "Ed?"
The old man had returned from his
mission stonefaced, and kept pushing sausages around
the periphery of the grill. "So long as people don't get ideas that
they're any better than they are," he snapped, a freezing glare roaming
from Walt and Eunice to Davy.
"He wants to start a
union," she nodded at the fryboy.
"Why not? Forget about any increase in the minimum
wage," Davy launched into a spiel that raked Walter's innards like
fingernails on a blackboard, "...the Republicans are all going to be
elected again and it'll probably go the other way, you know? Feds cut down all
the state minimums to some fuckin' training wage, six
bucks an hour, five... maybe only for part-timers and kids, so Mr. Z and Barry
cut hours, maybe kick us out and bring in more temps, work 'em till their
probationary status expires, then toss 'em, like expired hotdogs..."
"Barry won't toss expired meat
until it's green, or with that gray, slimy stuff growing out around the
edges," Fermeley said from the window. "And
if you were really afraid of Republicans, why did you go around saying people
ought to vote for that hooker lawyer last November and the greenie person in
2020?"
Davy looked up from his province of
hissing, crackling fries, fingering the Avenetti
button on his collar. "Because the system's
corrupt... both parties are, they pander to the rich and the stupid Americans
who think they'll win the lottery, some day, and benefit from war and the tax
cuts. Avenetti’s crooked, too, but at least the
Republicans haven't a chance in California, even with the sound asleep sheep
who'll vote for whoever screams loudest about gays and terror and Mexicans and
appointing judges that will terminate a woman's right to choose and make things
harder for you people..."
"What you mean, you people?"
Fermeley objected. "Women?
Afro-'mericans? Mr. Z... I
mean he's crazy with that Mars and all, but he is a black man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps so as to
make America great again..."
"He's a token. The system lets a
few Zweiss Interplanetary enterprises exist, along
with the basketball players and rappers, people put up with crap from him that
they'd never take from a white boss..."
"Goes back to the question why
you'd want to waste your vote on Avenetti..."
"If I wore a button for some
Democrat, Mister Crappery would make me take it off,
or probably sanction me, five bucks, maybe ten... it's technically illegal to
wear Trump buttons, too, but he gives out these Back the Blue and Support the
Boys flag buttons that mean the same thing. I think he gets to keep those
fines, part of 'em, but the point is that Barry has probably warned him about
you, but since a vote for Avenetti is a vote for
Trump, you have all the freedom of speech you can handle..."
"Yeah," Walter spat,
starting not to care if he did shit all over this place and everybody in it,
"if you feel safer with war cowards and deserters running the country, why
not just vote for a Democrat?"
"Because the Democrats aren't any
better," Davy repeated, as if he were speaking to children, or dogs.
"There'd be a few differences... you'd have Hollywood actors pulling the
strings instead of oil men, maybe a little more tolerance for dissenting
opinions[ the real issue, though, is that it doesn't matter. Our vote doesn't
matter... Trump is going to lose in California no matter what our Nazi
ex-Governor says or does, so it's OK to cast a protest vote. In
New York, Texas, in the South...
"So what you are saying,"
Walter deduced, "is that it's safe to vote for Avenetti
here, but not in... say... Ohio or Florida?"
"Well... it'd be something to
think about. And if he gets the
Libertarian nomination and runs on a fusion ticket, he might just steal Vermont
and, maybe, Oregon or Hawaii and then it would go into the House of
Representatives where everybody could see and smell the corruption…"
"Typical liberal manipulations and
evasion," Walter snorted, "do this unless, do that... everything is
shades of gray, no values, nothing worth fighting for. Some of us, thank God,
still believe in black and white."
Fermeley
turned towards him again, as if to make some point, but the emergency door
slammed and Tex strutted in, happy from his nicotine fix. Walt cramped up
again; his feet fairly moonwalked the length of the
grill and he yanked the mop, broom and yellow 'CLOSED for CLEANING' sign out of
the Chemical Closet, entered the Ladies brandishing his tools for the benefit
of the silent, blinking videocamera, locked himself
into the single stall and blew out more of his insides until there was nothing
more than sputtering and dripping. He flushed, dipped the mop in the bucket of
chemicals, swabbed, flushed again and stumbled out towards the sink, pants
still bunched around his ankles... mopping and sighing, catching glimpses of a wildman in the mirror that bore no earthly relation to any
Walt Fales he’d ever been, with his suit and his job,
and his eight hundred thousand in BCM Preferred. A spectre...
like a police lineup photo of Nick Nolte or James Brown (or Missy in the
morning)... disheveled and stubbled; a stubblebum with a mop...
The wildman
in the mirror winked.
Walter Fales
swabbed on.