Authors: Christopher Hebert
He started off in the other direction. Around the bend he came upon a wooden desk and chair. And there was a side table supporting a primitive cash register. Beside it, a tiny flower-patterned teacup in a matching saucer let off a steadily climbing twist of steam. He thought of the blonde and the girl with anime eyes, and he wondered which of them the cup belonged to. The china was delicate, like the blonde. But there was no trace of her dark lipstick on the rim.
The desk was cluttered with books and paper, a stack of blotchy flyers dangling over one edge:
Bricoleur @ The Woodshed. No cover. All ages. Video premiere. Music + Revolution
. And the same odd line drawing of a stapler that he’d seen on the van’s bumper sticker, no less obscure here.
Dobbs folded a copy of the flyer into his pocket. Then he turned to go. But that was the moment the two men appeared in front of him, each carrying an armful of books. They were both middle-aged. The black man wore some sort of uniform: dark blue pants and a matching shirt. The photo badge clipped to his pocket said his name was Darius. The Hispanic man was stocky, with long hair pulled back into a ponytail. His clothes were spotted with paint and stain, and his dry, coarse hands were nicked and scraped.
“You surprised me,” Dobbs said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
The Hispanic man looked around. “Do you work here?”
Dobbs lowered himself into the chair behind the desk. “Find everything you were looking for?”
The two men set their books down on top of the posters. As if he’d been doing it all his life, Dobbs folded back the covers. The prices were penciled in the top corner of the first page, as always. The two men watched in silence as he tried to add up the numbers.
Wiring. Farming. Home electronics. “You must be pretty handy,” Dobbs said.
Darius had a look on his face like he’d been caught with a stack of porn.
“How much?” the Hispanic guy said.
At the bottom of the pile, unrelated to any of the rest, was a guidebook to Mexico, ten years out of date. “Beautiful country,” Dobbs said.
The Hispanic man’s face grew taut.
“For you two,” Dobbs said, “an even twenty.”
Each man fished ten bucks from his pocket.
The Hispanic guy picked up the books and turned away in silence, taking a step in the direction of what Dobbs hoped was the exit. The black man started to do the same, but at the last moment he paused, catching a glimpse of something over his shoulder. “Do you play?”
Following Darius’s finger, Dobbs saw an old Fender propped up on a chair, its red finish crosshatched with scratches.
“I’m learning.”
“I played once,” the black man said. “I was pretty good.”
“Darius!” the other yelled.
Darius might have gone on, but he saw his partner’s jaw rocking in its socket. “I’ll see you,” he said.
Dobbs gave a broken wave. “Come again.”
As soon as they were out of sight, Dobbs put one of the tens on top of the register. The other, his commission, he put in his pocket.
In his dream that morning, the two men from the bookstore came to him dressed as generals, donning pointed hats and sabers. Even without a weapon of his own, Dobbs knocked them off their horses, before single-handedly taking on their armies. But then why, when he woke up in the middle of the afternoon, did he feel so afraid?
Everything on the monitors was gray: the blacks were a dark charcoal gray; the whites were like newspaper pages. The walls of bookcases appeared as undifferentiated smudges of darkness. Because of its size, the china cup was only a blur against the dark desktop, but Myles knew it was there. He’d dropped the tea bag in just moments before the meeting started, and then he’d forgotten it. All the way up the stairs and across the store—there was no way for him to get it now. And anyway the tea would be too bitter. He liked two minutes of steeping, no more, no less, with water just shy of boiling.
“Myles,” McGee said. “Is there anything you want to add?”
Myles turned his head at the sound of her voice, finding himself once again in the world of color. Everyone at the table was staring at him, McGee straddling her ladder-backed school chair. To see her there, surrounded by pads of yellow paper and three eager friends, made Myles happy and hopeful. They’d been meeting almost every
night this week to go over plans for the demonstration. Finally they were down to the last details.
“It all sounds great,” he said.
McGee frowned. “I said I’m worried no one’s going to show up. Again.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Myles said.
“You always say it’s going to be fine,” McGee said. “And then no one shows up.”
Across the table, Holmes and April watched the volleys in silence.
“It’ll be fine,” Myles said. “It’ll all work out.”
Myles could see by her expression that she wasn’t convinced, but when was she ever? She was too hard on herself. Lately she couldn’t see the good in anything they did. More than anything else, he wished he could show her.
He returned his gaze to the monitors, to his forgotten cup of tea. But something in that brief time had changed upstairs. Myles detected movement on one of the cameras. Two customers, men—one dark, the other a medium shade of gray—stood inside the doorway of the bookstore. The black man had pulled a book off the shelf and was leafing slowly through the pages. Arms folded across his chest, the other looked furtively up and down the aisle.
The cameras were a recent addition, installed with Holmes’s help. Now Myles could take part in meetings while also keeping an eye on the store. If customers needed him, he would know. And then, of course, there was security. Things being the way they were these days, you couldn’t be too careful.
The two men came in and out of view, the black man leading. The other man kept looking over his shoulder. He was stocky, with long dark hair tied into a ponytail.
What were they looking for?
Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Myles turned around, eyes reluctantly following his head. McGee was holding a piece of paper. She was waiting for him to take it.
“This is a draft of the press release,” she said.
Holmes grabbed a copy, barely glancing at it. “It’s just more of the same,” he said, letting the sheet float back down to the table.
“I think it’s good,” April said, eyes still gliding down the page.
“This environmental stuff,” Holmes said. “No one cares. The city’s such a fucking mess.”
“It’s not the same,” McGee said. “I’m trying to make it clear these are global issues that affect us locally—” All at once she stopped, her lips still parted.
Myles felt her gaze narrowing in on him.
“Seriously?” she said.
In the corner of his eye, Myles could see something happening on the monitors, but McGee continued to hold him there with her binocular stare. “What?” he said.
But she wasn’t looking at Myles. It was Fitch this time, slumped in the chair behind him, unshaven chin bobbing against his chest. Holmes and April had noticed, too, and they seemed to be waiting to see what McGee would do, what she’d say.
The only sound across the entire basement was something burbling in Fitch’s throat. In his sleep, his knee shot up, thumping into the table. One of McGee’s red markers rolled to the edge and onto the floor. It was that dull clatter of plastic on cement that finally caused Fitch’s eyes to pop open.
“What’s going on?” he said.
McGee’s nostrils flared, the way they always did when she was angry. “Why do you even bother?” she said. “What’s the point in showing up at all?”
Fitch yawned into his elbow.
“We were up late rehearsing,” Holmes said.
Fitch laid his head down on his arms. “There’s just something about people talking.”
“He always used to fall asleep in school,” April said.
McGee looked from one to the next. “Why are you defending him?”
“We’ve been talking about the same stuff for weeks,” Holmes said. “What are you afraid he missed?”
The stubble had been on Fitch’s face for three days. His clothes had been on him even longer. And yet somehow he looked the same as always, like one of those guys paid to glower in his underwear next to strips of scratch and sniff cologne. And April could have been the pouty, negligéed beauty draped over his neck. First cousins, and even perfect strangers couldn’t miss the family resemblance. Was there something in the country club water, Myles sometimes wondered, that bred people like these?
“Moving on,” McGee said, making no effort to hide her anger. “We need to get the banners finished. We’re running out of time.”
At the front of the store, where the two men had entered only a few minutes before, Myles now saw another guy, newspaper white, wearing a winter coat. All last week they’d gone without a single customer. Now they suddenly had three at once? As Myles debated whether to go upstairs, he watched the man in the winter coat move from monitor to monitor, coming closer with each step to the other two men.
Myles was hunched over the desk, squinting at the screen, when McGee called his name again.
“What?” he said quickly. “What?”
“I asked if you think those friends of yours are still coming.”
“What friends?” he said.
McGee gave him a pained smile. “You said you knew some people who’d help us out.”
“Yeah,” Myles said, already turning back toward the monitors. “Sure.”
But McGee had another question for him, and another, and then another, and he wanted to tell her what was happening upstairs with the three suspicious guys, but the way she was looking at him made it impossible for him to tell her to wait a second, just one second, just
long enough for him to get another look. Her eyes wouldn’t let him go. Five minutes passed, then ten. He waited for the bell at the cash register to ring for his assistance, but the ring never came.
And then the meeting was over, but by then it was too late.
As McGee straightened her papers and markers, Myles glanced from one monitor to the next. The men upstairs had vanished without him having any idea why they’d come. And now the meeting had ended, and he had no idea what had been decided.
The walk home began in silence, except for the scraping of McGee’s boot heels on the cement.
“It went well,” Myles said. “Didn’t it?”
McGee didn’t speak or slow down or turn her head.
“It’s going to be great,” Myles said. “People are going to be excited.”
“Please stop talking,” she said. “It was better before, when you weren’t paying attention.”
She was surprisingly fast for someone with such short legs.
When they reached the building, she waited for him to open the door, the one bit of chivalry he was allowed. The overhead door was heavy, but she was like an ant, a thousand times stronger than anyone would think. Sometimes he wondered if she stepped aside out of pity, just to make him feel useful.
The building had once been a factory of some kind. Ball bearings, according to one story, but it was hard to imagine something so small leaving such a mess. The lower half of the building was still full of metal drums spray-painted with skulls and crossbones. Myles had pointed them out to McGee on the day she’d brought him here for the first time, eager to show the place off.
“Well, they’re sealed, aren’t they?” she’d said.
Even though this was exactly the sort of stuff she was constantly getting agitated about. Brownfields and poisoned groundwater and
toxic sludge. But for some reason she found it more compelling when these things happened to people other than them.
He and McGee were the only ones living in the building. The rest of the second floor had been converted to artists’ studios. Maybe the light blasting through all those vast, uninsulated windows was flattering to canvases. On sunny days, Myles found the dirty glass had a way of making his life feel sepia-toned.
Before the sun went down, though, the artists fled. Myles didn’t know where they went, but he liked to imagine little cottages in the suburbs with herb gardens and roaring fireplaces. He almost never talked to his neighbors. One was a mailman, or maybe he worked at the DMV. Something awful. His paintings were dark and blobby, like album covers for heavy metal tribute bands. And there was the middle-aged woman who rolled clay into thin gray turds that she assembled into something she called jewelry boxes but in fact looked like colanders made of Lincoln Logs. The third was a batty old hippie who taught art at the community college. Myles had never seen her stuff. She was always finding reasons for shutting her door whenever he came near.
McGee didn’t mind the exposed ceilings or the wall of windows looking out over an old railway bed. Or the floorboards slathered in gray industrial paint. She didn’t notice that their futon, lying in the corner beneath a mound of blankets, looked like a jumble of newspapers swirled together in a dirty alley. She didn’t care that the bathroom had been an afterthought. There hadn’t been one at all when McGee found the place. But there were some things, thank God, even she was unwilling to live without.
McGee had put Holmes in charge of building the bathroom. But Holmes didn’t know anything more about plumbing than the rest of them. His main qualification was that he owned tools and had at least a vague idea what to do with them. Holmes had stuck the bathroom where he could, in the middle of the sidewall, where it was easy to access the pipes crisscrossing nakedly overhead. A shower stall and
toilet, side by side. Around them Holmes built a Sheetrock cubicle with a curtain for a door.
On the other side of the bathroom was the kitchen. A single sheet of drywall was all that separated the toilet from the two-burner stove. The plastic, paint-splattered utility sink was the only fixture the place had come with.
The day she’d given him that first tour, Myles had willed a convincing grin, saying, “It’s perfect.” And she’d taken him by the arm then, smiling her pixie smile, making his lie worthwhile.
But that had been more than five years ago. Tonight, as soon as they came inside, McGee began to pace, walking back and forth in front of the windows. She didn’t take off her jacket, didn’t even turn on the lights.