The BOYS

Episode NINETEEN

When lunch rush was over, Monday, Barry found Walt rotating salad stock in the DP's cooler... which was not such a bad job; it was hot for October, sullen and humid, the sort of weather that either presaged storms or fire. He grasped Walter's shirt and Walt slapped him away like some species of undesired insect as they went back to the counter.

"Muriel is going to be leaving us at the end of the week," the day manager said, referring to one of the temps who worked eleven to two, between classes at North County Community. "Her grades were going down... parents stepping in, same old same old," Barry scoffed. "Maybe if she spent less time before the tube, or hanging out at the mall, she'd be able to handle work and an education, but the decision's made, deed done, and I need another hand at the register."

"That's a... you know," Walt spun a finger, trying to come up with a term that wouldn't offend Eunice, who'd been helpful, " a ladies' job."

"Sexual harassment and discrimination have no place at Zweiss Interplanetary," Barry stated, sternly and righteously. "We must all be able to pitch in, regardless of gender... I am not saying that it would be my preference, but if Tex or Ed were to leave us, I am confident Eunice could step up and... well, not man, but, you know... or if you got some other job, like you keep acting the way you think you might, and Achmed left, and the new kid didn't work out, Eunice could stack deliveries. You're a strong girl, right?" he asked her.

"Strong enough to bust you open," the head cashier reminded him, then crooked a finger at Walt, pointing down towards a register which, he'd already noticed and wondered at... but only a little. It was what might be called a smart register - there weren't any numbers on the buttons, just little icons. Some were recognizable - there was a bucket, and a basic hotdog, of course, two sizes of drinks, a few leaves that presumably represented salads. Others were alien, so he pointed, too, and asked: "What's that?"

"I guess they figure that the new hires coming in these days can't read, as well as not being able to do simple mathematics like we were taught back in the day, you know? Addition... subtraction, percentages to pay tax to the Governator? That's a chili dog - you see a picture of a fire and it's hot, you get it? Only it's just orange hot... the jalapeño's red, red-hot. Pizza's a pizza dog, of course, and that green sort of smear, that's guacamole."

She ran through the rest of the icons, and Walt tried to memorize them as best he could. At a few minutes after three... dead center of the deadest hour of the dayshift... a lady came in for either a late lunch or early supper; she was wearing expensive shades and a clingy tank top, worth a second look, definitely...

"Take her, horndog," Eunice snapped, under her breath. "I don't mean literally, take her order..."

"Uhh..." Walter stammered, "...can I help you."

"Let me see... what's a Good Dog, it's... like..."

"Plain," Walter nodded. "You can help yourself to fixings at the Condiment Bar."

"Okay, one of those, small fries and a small Coke." Walter flexed an index finger, punched the plain dog icon, the small fry button and the small Coke button. Then, he pushed "ENTER" and there was a whirring sound, a number came up, a bell rang and the cashdrawer opened, bruising his hip.

"Three dollars, forty four cents," he said, looking to Eunice for reassurance.

"You got it!" she replied, then gave the woman in shades a pitying shrug as she extended a limp Jackson. "New on the job. He's special..."

She took back her change as though it was contaminated and drummed her fingers on the DP countertop until Tex and Davy, respectively, passed over dog and fries. Walter added a small plastic cup and pointed... unnecessarily at the soda machines. She was out the door in the time that it took the toddler in one of the booths by the window to toss his little bowl of salad to the floor.

"It was for your own good," Eunice commiserated, "you're a married man. And don't go thinking that finishing one order makes you the Prince of Wales. In the first place, Barry'll be all over your ass if, when somebody orders small fries, small drinks, small anything... and it doesn't matter what they look like... you're supposed to at least try selling them on a larger order. He'll be watching you on his little television, back in the office, unless he's busy pounding his meat to Miss Britney. And, in the second place, you hold all twenty dollar bills up to the light and be sure that they're not fake, and if it's not busy, the tenners, too. You would not believe some of the crap that comes in from Mexico, and if you take a bad bill, it comes out of your check, just like if the register's short at the end of every two hours."

"What if the register's over?" Walt asked.

"You wish!" Eunice snorted.

The dinner rush, that day, was distinctive only in that one of the night shift temps... this weasel of a kid, Walt never learned his name or never remembered... waited until Barry was gone, then slithered in and told Louie he was quitting, proudly declaring that he'd gotten a six buck an hour job with one of the pizza places a couple of miles south, off the Interstate. "You wanna quit, quit!" Louie told him, "I let you work the grill, be out front where the chicks could admire your sorry ass. Six bucks ain't the end of the world... so remember, loser, you ain't comin' back here at sixty cents...

"I mean, Mister Z. tolerates Barry because he kisses ass," Louie told Walt and this nutcase Crake, "but my recommendations still count for something."

George Crake was maybe a decade younger than Walt - he looked a decade older. The tracks on both arms under his DP whites could've served as one of those connect-the-dot features in the Sunday funnies, but he was clean; Fermeley said he'd been clean since his last prison jaunt four years ago. Of course, enough methamphetamine probably remained in his system to do for four more decades... but Mr. Z. had taken a chance on him and, though Barry refused to have him on his crew, he'd found a sort of home on the night shift, poking and prodding and worrying the various grilling dogs, to the point where, if you watched him at a distance, you'd think he was doing something.

Having given up drugs, Crake had fallen back on the comforts of conspiracy theory... at first, just a by-product of the crystal. Crake's job was to roll the hotdogs across the grill so that the whole surface came off cooked more or less equally, Walt had to admit that he did his job, and it was harder than it looked. The few times Walt'd tried working grill, some of the dogs would come off burned on one side, nearly raw on the other, and his attempts to lay blame off on the company hadn't worked all that well either. "What the hell's in these things?" Fales had asked, once Barry was gone and Louie back in the office, presumably with better stuff to do than spy on the monitors...

He'd asked Tex... Musgrove went home at six... but Davy had jumped in with a recitation of the ingredients that might or might not have been true. "Salivary glands, cow snouts, poultry that's too foul to get ground up for McNuggets, lungs, cornmeal. Rectums..."

"Cow rectums?" Walt had recoiled. "Where do you pick up this stuff?"

"Haven't you old guys ever heard of the Internet?" Davy answered, choosing to assume that Walt was challenging his information, as opposed to asking where the dogs came from. "Cow rectums, pig rectums... it's all the same after it goes through the process in St. Louis or wherever they ship the boxes from..."

Crake raised his spatula like a flyswatter and then lowered it as a customer stepped up to Eunice at the register - cellphone in one hand, squalling infant in the other. He was short and dirty, and an unruly shock of graying hair dangled from his hairnet like the cowlick on that kid from the old cartoons, Alfalfa... an Alfalfa gone to methamphetamine hell. "Don't forget all those Canadian cattle that they had to slaughter because feeding them brains from other cattle gave them that disease..."

"Naw," Walt said, already disgusted. "They burned those mad cows, I saw it on TV..."

"Poun' Dog, fries, grape Slushie," the woman at the counter brayed.

"Yeah, but what about their brains. Did you see their brains being burned? I swear... a lot of the rest of the world has it in for us Americans," Crake raised the spatula, again, "and those politicians, they don't give a damn!"

So, when Walt finished his shift and drove up the hill to Alta Mesa after hearing all that he needed, and more, about brains... squirrel brains were a favourite of Crake, just ahead of Roswell, and the Priory of Sion, too... it was to the discovery that Federal agents had finally arrived and rampaged through his house, smashing shit, tossing things around, taking all of his tax papers for the past four years, his passport and checkbook, and Scottie's computer. So much for his emergency plans to sell stuff on E-bay! Missy hadn't been able to call, of course, because the work number that Walt had given her was bogus... as soon as they were gone, she'd found a bottle of cooking sherry and was, mostly, incoherent. Scottie had watched it all go down with his usual teenage sullenness, then gone out with his latest girlfriend so Walt, essentially, had come home to an empty house. Some jackboot had trampled the only remaining picture of his parents when they were young, there was crumbled glass all over the carpet and some genius had even ripped all of the books off the bookshelves... perhaps because he'd seen one-too-many spy movies and thought there was a safe behind Missy's rows of romance novels, Readers' Digest condensed classics and Walt's numbered collection of motivational videocassettes.

These he'd grown too depressed to play, so it wasn't as if it were a total loss.

He opened the refrigerator door, but it was warm inside... he took out a can of one of the generic colas they'd been buying, anyway, popped the tab and sat, alone, at the head of his dining room table, which had been pushed off to the side. "I think they broke the refrigerator," Missy had said in one of her few, lucid moments, "...they were banging and shaking it all over, and it started sounding funny, and then it quit."

She tottered back into John's old bedroom...

Walt drummed his fingers on the table. "This ends tomorrow," he promised himself. "They're treating us like dopers, I hate dopers. No more running, no more hiding," he said, dialing the number Curry and Melk had given him. "This... ends..."

At least it was a toll-free number, a direct line into an office, connected to a machine at the SEC, in Los Angeles, probably, maybe Sacramento. "This is Senior Agent John Wexford Curry," said the voice, which gave Walt pause, and probably saved him from saying something stupid. Wexfords of this world weren't to be trifled with. "I'm not in my office, at present, but if you leave your name and number..." and so on and so forth.

"Walt Fales here. This ends..." he said, "...now. Terrorizing my family the way you've done is low, it's un-American and I'm not going to take it any more. If you want something from me, say it, or put me in handcuffs, but leave my family out of it." He hung up.

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