Time to Go (12 page)

“Do something, I'm about to fall,” and one of them says “Fall?

From where you are? You'll be hurt. Look, you've fewer feet to climb up than down, so I'd advise, and I think I can say this for everyone here—yes, they're all saying I can—that you just come on a coming, because there's nothing else we can do for you now.”

“You can quickly pull the ladder up,” and one of them says “Okay, good idea, that's what we'll do, that's really thinking, sorry we didn't come up with the idea ourselves,” when the crosspieces I'm holding split in two and I fall to the ground, my feet breaking every crosspiece along the way.

“Hey down there, how do you feel?”

I'm lying on the ground, hurting all over, and for all I know I was out for a few seconds or even minutes.

“Hey, hello down there, I said how do you feel? Any broken bones? You alive? Answer us. Anything we can do?”

“I think I definitely broke a foot this time and I think also my arm which I landed on. Yeah, it's limp, won't move. What kind of ladder did you give me?”

“The best kind,” and I say “If it was the best it would've had secure crosspieces or rungs or whatever you call those damn bars.”

“Both will do. In fact, all three are good. And they were secure till you started going through them. How much you say you weigh? Less than two hundred? Don't try to fool us. Anyway, you can't do anything. Okay, you followed our directions and got yourself out here, but what have you done since? You can't scale a wall on your own. You don't know how to use a rope. We give you a perfectly good rope ladder a child could climb, a person twice or even three times your age could climb—”

“Nobody could be three times my age. And anyone twice my age who could climb it would have to be in extraordinary shape and have a ladder whose bars are strong. But the bars on my ladder were weak, once I got up around twenty-five feet—”

“Twenty at the most. Don't exaggerate.”

“Twenty then. But after I got up that high, all the bars were either very loose or splitting the second I stepped on them, and I didn't step on them hard, nor pull on them hard either. That ladder was defective.”

“If it wasn't, it certainly is now. Look, I'm sorry, we like you and you're a nice guy and all that—sincere too, which I think is what we said in our invite to you. And you come with good recommendations, though maybe in the future we'll have to check everyone's recommendations a little deeper, seeing what yours came to. But it just doesn't seem you really want to be in here.”

“What are you talking about—I do.”

“You still do?” and I say “Sure, why not? I heard great things about the place, and it'd be a terrific achievement for me and I think a big improvement over what I have now. So yes, I absolutely still do.”

“Okay, then you're in. We only wanted to see how much you'd take before you quit. But it doesn't seem anything's going to break you, which is just the kind of material we want and need, so come on in. Door into here might look like part of the wall from where you are. But if you look close about ten feet to your left, you'll see it and a latch to pull, which will let you in easier than any other way. Congratulations.”

“You mean it?” and one of them says “Mean every word we just said,” and I say “Why thanks,” I get up, fall, my right foot is useless for the time being, and I say “You sure you have someone to fix a broken, or if that seems like an exaggeration, then a badly sprained foot and arm?” and someone says “Everything, just like we said. We have every kind of doctor and profession and healing art and all the other disciplines and arts and whatever you want and the very very best. But show us again how much you want to come in, by not having us come out to get you, though if you're really that hurt, we will.”

“I'll show you, don't you worry,” and I crawl to the place they said the door was, but don't see any outline of one or a latch. “Say, you said ten or so feet to my left, correct? So I'm here, looking at nine and eleven feet to my left also, and I don't see any kind of anything that looks like a door or a latch, handle, lever, button or whatever it might be to open it.”

Nobody answers. I can't see anyone on top, maybe because I'm so close to the wall, and I say “Any of you still up there?” Nobody answers. I crawl around, cover every inch of the wall I can see from one to twenty feet to the left and right from where I fell, but always crawling because of my broken foot, and I'm sure it's broken. Crawling's made even more difficult because of what I'm also sure is a broken arm, but there's no latch, door seam, nothing but a wall.

“Say, I don't see anything resembling what you said would be here, so give me some more instructions how to get in, though don't forget to take into consideration my bad foot and arm.”

I yell and look for another half-hour. By this time it's dark. I wouldn't try to make it to the road to get the bus back the way I am, so I just sit against the wall, roll down the sleeves of my sweater and shirt, and to help keep out the cold, roll my socks up far as they'll go and button the top shirt button and buttons of my shirt cuffs. In the morning I should probably be rested and strong enough to not only yell to those people inside what I think of them, but to limp or just crawl to the bus stop.

Larry said “Rose, listen, I've decided, something very important—we have to get out of the store. We can't take it anymore. For once we have to do something like this for ourselves.”

Rose said “Go back to sleep. It's too early. It's still dark. The birds aren't even chirping. I'm not kidding, Larry. I'm too tired to talk.”

“Okay, but tomorrow we'll have to talk about it. Today—later this morning I mean. We have to get out of that store. Sell it for what we can get. Hopefully we can sell it for something high. The price. I'm also confused now because I'm sleepy, but you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. But you can't be sleepier than I. You woke me up. Worse, you're keeping me up. Sell it for high, sell it for low—right now I don't care but I'm sure tomorrow I will. But that's it for now—no poking me awake again—all right?”

“For now, maybe, but not later today. I've been lying here thinking about it for hours.”

“I'm sleeping, Larry. I'm fast asleep, or would be.”

Later that morning when they were dressing, Larry said “Remember what I spoke to you about the store and our lives earlier before?”

“No, reacquaint me.”

“You'd have to remember, but I said I wanted us to sell the store and I don't know what we'd do next, but that we definitely have to start looking out for ourselves.”

“Now I remember. Yes, I heard you. I thought you forgot that nonsense by the time you woke up. Hurry up dressing or you won't have time for breakfast.”

“I didn't forget it. And this is way more important than breakfast. I meant it and I mean it now. We have to sell out. We already had too many robberies. The security guards we get are only good against petty thieves with their clubs but can do nothing against guns. We can't take any more of this at our age. Everyone who comes in but a few college kids and their professors look like robbers to us and I bet half of them are. I get sick of it every day till closing and half the nights I can't sleep. I'm sick of it for you and just as sick of it for me. I'd kill myself if someone shot you. But that's what could happen. One day someone will come in with a gun and that time we won't be so lucky. He won't just say ‘Stick ‘em up, shut your mouths, give me all your money.' He'll say nothing but bam—bam with his gun and take our money and leave us and the guard dead on the floor.”

“So you're that worried?” Rose said.

“I'm that worried, for you and me and all the innocent bystanders.”

“What about if we also got an attack dog?”

“They'd kill the dog just as fast and probably first.”

“Then all right, we'll go ahead like your brother once suggested and get that glass partition separating us from the customers—why not?”

“I don't want any partition. I don't want to be separated. I don't like having to use a guard either, but that I had to accept. What I want is a store where I can talk to my customers more. Where I'm a lighthearted person, not someone afraid. I want a happy store like it used to be. Where the customers come in and talk to us awhile if they have time, and then ask for what they want or just take it out of the cooler or off the shelves, and where I gladly ring up whatever it is and they give me money or even a check like we used to accept when people didn't cheat us on them every day. And where they'd say goodbye and we'd say goodbye and if their packages are too heavy, I gladly run to the door to hold it open for them till they get outside, though without my looking right and left on the sidewalk to see which thief's going to come in next.”

“That kind of business you won't find anymore in this city and maybe not even in the state. Maybe only in a little village in Spain you'll find it, or one in Japan, or in all of Japan for all I know, but too many people just don't behave that kind of way in stores anymore. Besides, we have it pretty good. Even behind bulletproof glass, God help us from what it'll cost us, we'll have a good business. You can still smile behind glass, can't you? And maybe even smile more so now because you'll feel safe behind there and because our insurance rates for the store and our lives will go down once we put in that glass.”

“And then go right up again,” Larry said, “because the thieves will manage to steal from us behind that glass too. Who do you think we're dealing with, unsophisticated amateurs? They'll inject gas or some inflammable stuff through the exchange hole in the glass and then threaten to throw a lit match in after the gas if we don't throw all our money out. I've heard how it's done. I've read it to you from the papers myself, and not just to package stores. Groceries. Butcher shops. Cleaning stores.”

“Cleaning stores can't have that glass. Not for the big dry-cleaned clothes.”

“They. do. One up on Greenmount. A special turnaround glass carousel or whatever you want to call it that turns the cleaned clothes around on their hangers to the customer once the customer's paid the bill. Look, we just can't manage it anymore. Partitions, guard dogs or not, if we don't get shot at in this store inside of a year the way things are going in this city and have already happened to us, we should consider ourselves fortunate.”

“Tell me more over breakfast. It's not that I'm not concerned. But I'm hungry, you have to be too, and if we fritter away one more minute in here, we'll be opening the store late.”

“I don't want to open at all.”

“Don't talk silly.” She raised her finger to him. “And I'm telling you this in all seriousness. Talking about it and maybe making a compromise on it is one thing, but not coming to the store and leaving me there alone because you suddenly don't want to go in, is another. You want to do that? Because I'm driving to the store in half an hour whether you go with me or not.”

“I'll go with you, what do you think? But later we have to talk about it some more.”

They read the newspaper while they had breakfast, then in the car going to the store he said “Okay, we had our little rest period, so now we have to decide what we're going to do.”

“If you're referring to the store again, you know where I stand.”

“No, no glass partitions. It's either we sell the store or nothing.”

“Then nothing.”

“No, no nothing—we sell the store.”

“Oh,” Rose said, “first you give me a choice, then you take it away? That the way you operate? No. Glass partitions or if you want, an armed security guard, but that's as far as I'll go, and not both. Maybe in five years, when we've put away a lot more savings and you still want to with the same idea, we'll think about selling it. So is it a deal? The partitions?”

“No.”

“You care that little about my life? What I'm saying is if what you say's true about what we should expect, you want to see me in there alone get shot or both of us get shot if we don't put the partitions in?”

“What about the gasoline they could squirt in to blow us up?”

“That's a rarity. I don't think it happened in this city for a total of more than once or twice in all kinds of banks and stores.”

“I also heard they have some sort of dynamite arrangement where they stick it half in half out of the hole and threaten the store owner with to blow up.” “They got that dynamite in the hole, how they think we'll get the money through to them?”

“They take it out. They give you a few seconds. They maybe even light it right there on a long fuse and hold it up so we can see and maybe even set it against the partition when the fuse gets down and leave the store and blow us up. Those partitions say bulletproof but they don't say bombproof. We'd die like soldiers killed with hand grenades dropped into their tanks.”

“It'd never happen. I believe people can be that cruel, but not that clever. Besides, the glass partitions will work. Once more, though you don't have to answer me now if you don't want, do we do nothing about the store or do we make inquiries about getting the protection of that glass?”

“I don't know.”

“Say yes so we can settle it.”

“Okay,” he said.

They got several estimates for the partition that week and the next week had them installed.

About a year later Rose nudged Larry in bed and said “Larry, Larry, I want you to get up and awake enough to talk with me about something. I think we have to get that glass in the store removed.”

“What glass?”

“The partitions. Those cell bars. That see-through wall we've created between our customers and ourselves.”