The BOYS
Episode FORTY-ONE
"So
he's, like, this sponge?” queried
Walt over the kitchen table of the trailer on the morning after the night
before, "the kind guys like me take into the shower and, you know, use 'em?"
"Well,
not that kind," said Fran, "or... I mean, that kind which is when
it's alive, before it's taken out of the ocean and used, dead... I
think..."
"I'd
hope," Walt agreed, pointing.
"Guy like that, I wouldn't want against my skin."
"He
lives in a pineapple under the sea. I
read somewhere, I think, that there are religious fundamentalists think he
promotes the gay agenda but, also, that nine hundred seventy million, I
think... or, maybe, it was seven hundred ninety million dollars worth of Spongebob merchandise was sold over the past year. Former President Bush – the younger one, he’s
a big fan…"
Walter Fales pondered this.
"Hmmm... do you remember if it was just this year, to date, or a
whole year, on the clock... September to September,
October to October, however they figured it out..."
Fran blinked. She was holding one of those long, women's
cigarettes between the index and middle finger of her right hand, a joint of
lousy weed between the index and triple-bound ring finger reposed in her left. Over breakfast this morning, while Elle was
gathering books for her junior college Western History and Survey of English
Literature classes... they were up to the foppy romantics
of the 16th century; Dryden and Milton, and Andrew Marvell, those people...
Fran had explained that, as each wedlock rusted, she'd
move the token from the left hand to right.
"All but Toby... gave me a poptop from a
beer can. But that was in Nevada, and I
was drunk. You'd think I'd have made a
mistake like that when I was this stupid kid, but no..." and she took a
quick hit off the joint, a longer draught of the 120, "...it only took a
few weeks to go south, literally. Toby
had all these warrants out on him and was going to Mexico, he said. He robbed gas stations. Probably dead now, knifed in some alley
behind a Pemex... him and his brothers…"
"Or
else lyin' on some beach next to this guy I used to
know..." Walt suggested, thinking, for a moment, about Bill Braxton.
"Maybe..."
Fran pondered, "like who were those Donald Duck
guys, the Beagle Brothers on Disney?"
She nodded, "... if he finally pulled off that big score he was
always talkin' about.
All of 'em had big ideas, all four and a bunch of others..." and
she elbowed Walt in the ribs, "so what about you, big boy? What's your
secret plan for bustin' out of the life, moving up to
the big house in the hills with the three car garage..."
"I
have a house in the hills,"
Walter reminded her, "but it's only a two car garage, and one of the
stalls is filled with crap, Scottie has to park on the street."
"Was
meaning to ask you 'bout him," Fran thrust her hips round, squirming for a
more comfortable position on the couch, which sported a blue corduroy slipcover
and spectral vestiges of dog... more than a year gone, Walt figured by the
smell, but less than three. "Your
boy... from what Mishy told me about him it would've
fallen apart sooner or later, but... would he have been good for her?"
He'd
bummed a cigarette off her; it was smoldering in a glass ashtray with the name
of a bar on it, resting on a pressboard coffee table with three legs and a
cinderblock. The cigarette was a good
friend, Fran was a good friend too... maybe… she deserved something nearer the
truth than not. "He's got a good
head on his shoulders, when he takes the time to use it," Walt cautiously
said. Last night, or early in the
morning, maybe, slackened by a couple of cans of Rainier Ale that Elle had
given him money for (he'd gone into the same fuckin'
police-state Gas n' Go he'd had that throwdown with
the cleft-palate clerk in on fuckin' nine-oh-eight)
he'd told her and Fran most of the story, including the wide shot that Scottie
had taken at him.
"He
wasn't trying to kill you," Elle had opined, stealing a hit off another of
those coffin nails that her mother had put down. "Scottie's kinda boring, but he's
focused. He wanted to do you," and
she'd pointed the 120 at his chin, like a box-cutter, "you would be
dead."
And
now, added to the rest of the tarnish on his good name, she'd turned him into a
criminal... technically speaking... one of those dirty old men who buy alcohol
for young people for a quarter, or a hit of the sauce. The gashmouth was
gone; there was an indeterminately aged adult foreigner at the register... hard
to tell Muslims from the Hindus without their headgear... who'd given Walt the
fisheye, suspiciously looking from him to a bunch of kids boarding at the
darkened corner where the curb between the Gas n' Go and a used tire place,
shut for the night, provided an impromptu obstacle course. Walt gathered his change, refused the poker-faced
invitation to buy stamps or lottery tickets and, with the sixpack
under his arm, hurried off, head down, withering under the silent rebuke
directed at Elle in the passenger seat of the Town Car. Well, fuck 'em, he'd decided after the first
Green Death, if they didn't like the way Americans lived, they could go back to
their own desert. After the second, what
Scottie had almost done to him seemed almost
funny – now, in a Wily Coyote, cartoony way...
ä ä ä ä ä
So,
watching Spongebob frying and serving up Krabby Patties, Walt lifted his ladies' cigarette...
bankrupts can't be choosers, he was coming to terms with that... and said
"he'll probably turn out OK.
Doesn't have the vaguest idea about what he wants to be, to do..."
"Doobie, doobie do..." Fran
hummed, rotating her wrist to take a hit off the joint.
"...but
who can blame a kid, blame anyone! I
mean, the economy's so damn fast, and unpredictable, you could spend years
getting an education, go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, and then you
have a skill that someone invents a machine to replace, or they send over to
India to get done, and you're screwed.
And all of that retraining crap is just a scam... who's gonna go to
school for three years, on their own dime, to learn to do something that's
obsolete within eighteen months. Or the
government pays for it... yeah, they just put it on
plastic..."
"We
pay, one way or another..." Fran said, "we'll pay. The more
that government goes into debt, the more worthless the dollar becomes... you can
fool yourself if you don't travel, but the shit's floatin'
down, even if you do live in a pineapple under the sea. I go to the Safeway, understand?... they got
this olive oil there, cost two bucks a little bottle at the beginnin'
of summer. Olive oil is supposed to be
good for you, right? Italians don't get
heart attacks..."
"Nah,
they get chains wrapped around 'em and then tossed in the ocean, like on the
Sopranos..."
Fran
elbowed him again. "We don't get
that fancy cable... I'm tryin' to make a
point..."
"Okay! Okay!" he laughed, belly rolling above
the rim of the boxers he'd worn to bed, the one with medieval lords and ladies
posing, crowns and scepters... Missy had packed the one suitcase of his
"things" perversely... all his underwear with stupid cartoon pictures
on it, old shirts that didn't fit, single socks, gift ties...
"So
it used to be two bucks... it's the cheap stuff, ain't
Italian, ain't even Spanish. I think it comes from Turkey or Algeria, one
of those places, I could look, but it's three bucks
now. The dollar used to be worth more
than those new Euros, like they were worth ninety cents, and now, because of
the plague and those deficits, one Euro is a buck forty, American."
"At
least this place didn’t burn down last year and our money's still worth more
than Canadian," Walt rallied.
"Yeah, but for how long?"
ä ä ä ä ä
The
topic of money had also come up as the last can of ale was divided into three
grimy glasses that had once held jelly, perhaps, or something... Fran said he
could crash at Precious Joy as long as he needed to for seventy dollars a week
and Elle... bless her myopic little face... had come to his defense. "They pay barely minimum at the Dog
Pound, not some high-falootin' eight bucks an hour
and Walter's trying to get back on his feet... how 'bout fifty?" In the end, they'd settled for fifty, plus he
would chip in for groceries, once he got his check on Friday, and there would
be some side arrangement about the use of the Town Car to be determined later
(since Fran's fifteen year old Sentra showed signs of
developing serious transmission problems).
It
didn't help that Kenny had finked to Barry around his being late on Sunday and,
with visible relish, the day manager said, when he'd clocked in, Monday, at
3:56, "...you'll be docked half an hour for yesterday, and..."
"And?" Walt prompted when Mister C seemed to run
out of vitriol, Davy hadn't come in and probably wouldn't, and one of the temp
cashiers had quit. (She'd only worked
twelve hours a week, but it meant that the day manager would have to either
crawl to Mister Z for another hire, or try raiding the night shift... it didn't
help that, when Louie strolled in at about five past, Barry snapped:
"You're late!" "Don't get
ahead of yourself," Spicotti had yawned back,
"you don't have any authority over my timecard," and any possibility
the Lou-ster would do Barry any favors was
inextricably, inevitably gone!) Fermeley Haber had left early, almost as soon as Mister C.
was out the door, gathering her belongings from the employee shelf and spending
almost five minutes in deep conversation with Lula at the window and another
five alone, with Louie, in the office before approaching Walter and putting her
hand on his elbow.
"It's
not your fault," she said, and stepped back, a quizzical tension drawing
the muscles of his face upward, so that his mouth formed a tiny, almost
feminine O, as he looked towards the closed door
of the office for help.
"She's
leaving us, hopefully only awhile," Louie said,
when Walt brought up the matter. "Fuckin' county took her kids away... they've had
investigators investigatin' for months, even coming
round here, undercover. Said they'd
subpoena our surveillance footage - there must be hundreds of hours of it, so
Barry signed a statement that she brought her kids in here while she was
working... I guess we're considered a sort of hostile environment, you
know. And that crap with the taser... man, society sucks, you know? She says they cut back on the Head Start, so
what else can she do with the kids... actually, she'll be makin'
more on welfare than if she tried to line up private daycare. I'll sort of miss her running commentaries on
The Apprentice," the night manager reflected, "and she did score a lot
of donations for Project Moonglow or whatever it was,
guess I should get over my fear, buy one of those videorecorders
and learn to program it."
"They
got lots of them, cheap now," Walter suggested, owing to the fact that Fermeley had been alright by him, too, even with... well,
that difference decent people didn't talk about. "Thing is, now that everyone's buyin' DVDs, it'll be impossible to get repairs, or even
tapes, and once that happens, they'll come up with something to replace the
DVDs, too."
"Can't
win," Louie sulked.
"Can't win."
There
was the usual spurt of commerce in the hour before Monday Night Football,
then... at around seven... the still of the grave descended over 271st NW and Gerson as if though the agency of the great Vampire Mickey
Mouse balloon (of course not-so-great, to Walt, next to the mammoth MP blimp...
which, the media reported, was somewhere over New Mexico... but, still, a
colossus of fear and confusion to most children under seven). A chthonic hush... a
silence of the lambs. (And of the pigs and roadkill, their lips
and their lungs and their salivary glands. A blister on one of the sausages on the grill
swelled and popped, a wheezing sound escaping from the charred dog.)
The
Chargers had taken a sixteen-fourteen lead over Arizona in the third quarter on
the Ukrainian kicker’s fifty-three yard field goal when four of the tidiest
young people Walt had seen out of uniform entered... three male, one female...
and, in tortured, but earnest English, heavily accented, barraged Crake and the
two temps working registers with questions: were pecans in the pecan pie
careful sifted to extrude walnuts, peanuts and other contaminants lethal to
nut-sensitive consumers? Were the coffee
coffeebeans imported from certified cruelty-free and
child-labor-free nations.
"You saying we're poisonin' yer nuts?" Crake shot back, menacingly, and the
two girls... their first language wasn't English, either, but lacked the
guttural imperatives of these visitors from the far North... appealed to Walt.
"Help
you people?"
"Can
you guarantee, sir," a young Thor with blond tresses curling down over his
backpack addressed the former Triple Ace Achiever of BCM, "that the... the
components of..." and he snapped his fingers, repeating, twice, a foreign
word...
"The
household animal which is duly prepared..." said the female, whose long,
blonde hair framed an eccentric, oval face that reminded Walt of a fish...
"The
hot dogs?" he guessed...
"Ga!"
said Thor, "that they are not of the radioactive or alter the genetic
substantial over the meat..."
"You askin' if I jerk off over the
Good Dogs?" Crake's eyes narrowed, suspiciously... “like we was Domino’s or something…”
"Nah,"
Walt stepped in before he added something that could get him arrested, maybe
even extradited by some United Nations Commission and put on trial in Der Haag. "You
want me to tell you whether these dogs been irradiated, or come from one of
those places where they mix cows with sheep, pigs with celery and chickens with
chimpanzee DNA, somethin' like that?"
"Ga! Ga!" the quartet gabbled... Thor and Fish-face, the fat one with the red face who looked like
he'd been drinking beer since about noon, and a quiet-looking one, echoing the
others.
"You
look like a bunch of students," Walt surmised, "...any of you
familiar with Mister Nietzsche, the philosopher, Freddie Nietzsche?"
"Ga!"
declaimed Thor. "Der Superman, the being and nothingless..."
and Fish-face rattled off something in her native tongue that was distinctly
and unmistakably corrective, at best, corrosive, at worst...
"People,"
Walt held up his hands in his best imitation of a Geneva diplomat. "What I am trying to convey to you is
the fact that all of the Dog Pound's sausage constituents are, like the
Almighty, something unknowable. They are
wholly beyond good and evil..."
“And
nutrition,” smirked Crake.