The Project Team Will Now Introduce Themselves
By Bryn Dodson
The project manager starts to say it looks like everyone is on and the meeting can begin.
A beep interrupts.
This is Brad, says Brad.
Oh, hi, Brad, says the project manager, great timing, we were just about to do introductions.
A dog barks. A child whines. On a separate call a husband speaks in his bland phone voice. The project manager mutes her mic, holds back a breath that threatens to escape as static. She unmutes, laughs, and says, I guess I’ll start!
Hi, I’m Maria, and I’ll be managing this project, which in practice means I’ll be in a state of low-grade enmity with everyone here. From my perspective, the project will consist in being crushed between the walls of a very large and very slow-moving vise, in which I will stand shouting at people to push in one direction or the other before the walls close. To the project team, all of you on the client side will remain a distant obstruction wrecking their beautifully laid plans, and to you I’ll be the prophet of doom, the bearer of dreadful news about budgets and deadlines, and believe me, if I could shove all these people out of the way and do the work myself, if I could sit down after everyone else has gone home and just do the fucking work, that is what I would do for you, my client. And honestly I would very much like that, no longer having a dozen little egos to stroke and a clutch of spreadsheets to maintain, whose main function is to hide the fact that I’m as helpless as a baby bird in a nest, waiting for scraps of work to be shoved in my mouth.
The other day I was taking a shower, and somehow a drop of water got onto the other side of the glass and was trickling down. I went to wipe it away and I couldn’t, obviously, but I tried again, and then a third time, and I burst into tears. Now I’d say I cry at or about work semi-regularly, so this was not totally a new place for me, but this time I wasn’t reacting to being yelled at, I’d just seen something that captured my predicament so perfectly that I was overwhelmed by it. It’s dangerous to feel sorry for yourself, and I was shocked to find that some part of me held so much self-pity despite my wishes.
But other than hectoring people into doing their jobs, I am also tasked with building relationships with all of you, work which I am actually quite good at and which mostly consists of feeling two incompatible sets of feelings simultaneously. I will tell the project team over and over, you have to do the work but they have to live with the work, so listen to their feedback no matter how misguided or ridiculous you might find it. But I also feel the pain, on behalf of my own team, of watching clients mess things up, watching them parade around utterly deranged suggestions and treat them as brilliant because they happened to think of them—it’s an obscene spectacle, like seeing a pug wrapped in a Communion dress and paraded around to be adored, a crazy lie in plain sight.
But possibly the worst part of my job is absorbing both perspectives, project team and client, so completely that in the course of two separate conversations I feel totally simpatico first with the project team, then with the client, only to discover I’ve disappointed everyone and I still feel exactly what each side is feeling, to the point that I’m not sure what I feel anymore, except that I feel deeply, devoutly worthless—but there’s no time for that because the emails don’t stop coming, do they? Which is to say, I’m excited to get started on this project and really looking forward to working with y’all!
The project manager finishes. It is unclear who will introduce themselves next. The quiet stretches out.
The project manager is waiting, breathing quickly, for Diana to speak.
Finally she says curtly: All right, Brad, why don’t you go next, since you were last on.
Brad turns on his camera. He sits in a constricting-looking gaming chair in racing colors. Headphones tamp down his hair, which is unbrushed, and deep shadows form around his deep-set eyes. Small fluorescent suns bloom on his cheeks.
Hi all, Brad. Data guy.
Brad blinks off screen, muting himself. Polite laughter from the client team. He reappears, letting himself show a touch of amusement.
Nice background, Brad, says one of the client team by way of encouragement.
Brad’s background is the command deck of the Enterprise being rocked by torpedo fire, redshirts being tossed across the vaulting space as crew members plunge into cover, enemy spaceships swarming and beyond a careless arrangement of nebulae and stars.
Heh, yeah, I’m not a big Trekkie but I think it captures life at the moment pretty nicely, everyone being thrown around like that.
Well, look it’s great to meet you all, it’s nice that people want to hear from me. My last job, I was Data Guy to everyone. I used to work with this woman who heard someone call me Brad at drinks, and she leaned close to me and said, Now I know your name I’m going to drink until I forget it. Can’t humanize you too much. She clearly knew my name because she always messaging me when she needed something, but she always treated me just like that.
Sometimes being Data Guy is kind of like being a big guy, a heavyset guy. You know how some chill big guys are trouble magnets? People wanna know, can I take the big guy, and sometimes it’s the man with the MBA who wants to know. So he’ll say there’s an error here or I think the data says X when you’re saying it says Y. And sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s not—nobody’s perfect—but you can tell how much it means to him, to get one over the Data Guy.
The closer you get to numbers, the more people’s ideas about you become one with the numbers. I’m a big Ultimate Frisbee guy, and every so often someone asks me about my weekend, and I might be telling him about a play from the game, and they just cut me off. They just don’t want to change the way they think about you—that’s what it is. So when people take an interest, I worry I’ve misread the situation and I’m just crapping on—excuse me—like now.
Anyway, because my last job was like that, the little things mean a lot, like people wanting to hear from you. And it’s good to meet you, and I’m pleased to see you have your own Data Guy, although he’s probably going to be difficult, Data Guys are territorial by nature, they need their own space to roam about in, and he’s probably terrified of getting fired and he’ll most likely compensate for it by attacking everything I do. Looking forward to it.
One member of the client team has put on her camera and is peering into the lens. Her tortoiseshell glasses have elaborate horned endpieces and she is so poorly lit her age is indeterminate. After minutes of squinting into this aperture she forgets it is there, turning up and to the left, the camera angled onto a mole on her neck. Behind her is an almost-impressionist painting of a sailboat, but in the dimness of her room the boat appears to be sailing in the dark.
Danika? says the project manager.
Hi! I’m Danika, says Danika, slightly breathless, I’ll be responsible for Tactical Strategy, and I just quickly want to say it’s wonderful to meet you all and talk about one moment in my day that’s become very special to me, which is the moment, fifteen minutes before the end of one meeting and the beginning of the next, where everyone’s calendars start chiming at once. My calendar starts chiming and that’s a delicious moment for me, because I know I’m about to hear everyone else’s calendars going crazy through their speakers—warning! warning! a meeting, oh god, a meeting!!—everyone’s calendars flaring up at once. I love the fact that it happens in unison but I get a special warning the half-second before, and I love, love love the way everyone’s calendars try so hard to keep us organized and end up creating this little slice of chaos instead, and that is the time of day I feel most alive.
As Danika finishes a voice is audible. It does not sound like anyone on the call. This voice appears to be a man’s. His tone suggests he is shouting, although he seems some distance from the microphone.
Then the quality of the voice changes—now it sounds plaintive, almost whining. The voice seems to draw closer to the mic and for the first time words and phrases are audible. The voice is saying are you kidding me? are you kidding me? seriously? repeated with the same upward, nasal intonation. Then the voice explodes into everyone’s ears, Motherfucking bitch! motherfucking bitch! motherfucking bitch! motherfuuuuckiiiiing biiiii as the sound slows to a half its normal speed, before sliding into a scream that shades into a rumbling noise before snapping into silence as the microphone is muted.
Everyone sits on mute behind their names.
Diana, finally, takes her turn to speak.
Well, that was a strange interlude, but here we are! Sorry everyone, I couldn’t figure out how to get off mute. I’m Diana, and I’m your point of escalation for this project, which is to say that if something goes wrong—when something goes wrong—you’ll be demanding to speak to me, and I’ll be trying to reassure you at the same time as I’m reassuring half a dozen other clients whose projects are in a similarly parlous state. And the strange thing is, you actually will be reassured, for reasons that I have never yet been able to grasp. As someone that people regularly complain to, it seems to me that everyone who complains is, in their own way, afraid of having broken the banks of the ordinary course of things, afraid that something has flooded and is now out of their control. When I see videos of people freaking out at customer service—and I go out of my way to watch these videos, sometimes the second I get off a difficult client call—I don’t see rage so much as total, encompassing terror. The terror of being less than. The terror of not being treated like a human, but above all the terror of no longer being yourself, as your frustration has flooded into something new and frightening.
Watching these videos you’d think I would sympathize with the person on the receiving end, but I don’t, not at all—there’s an emptiness to all their gestures and reassurances, their sirs and ma’ams, the way they empty themselves to absorb the rage. And while I’ve often had to do that myself, when I watch others do it I can’t empathize. What I get out of that type of video is a cold type of comedy and a secret desire to defect, to join the side of the ragers. But what the ragers seem to want more than anything is for the person receiving the complaint to show them that things can go back to normal—so much so that I’ve resolved more than a few client issues without promising to lift a finger, simply because my demeanor promises a return to normality when they’re finished raging.
So providing a figure who sits in a chair marked Reassuring Person, and having that figure say Yes, yes, these are all valid points, is exactly, inexplicably enough reassurance for everyone except, of course, me. Because the struggle of my career is that I was not considered the kind of figure who might appropriately occupy a chair marked Reassuring Person, lacking the gravitas or, I suppose, the penis. There were many of those days of one against all—days in enemy territory, surrounded by men’s stares, men’s patronizing words, men’s spitting little attacks and propositions that are really attacks. But time does its work, those reassuring penises end up in places they really ought not be, certain frauds are unmasked, and one day the way is suddenly clear and the office door is alluringly open. And then when you walk in and close that door, you find the chair that was never meant for you has absorbed you, that despite the striving and ingenuity it took to bring you here, the chair requires only your voice and your buttocks. This is something that usually goes unremarked, the way the world as you climb higher has a way of requiring less and less of you, whittling away the capacities that vaulted you into your privileged position in the first place. In my experience one has to carry on a daily fight against that, to resist one’s own figureheading, to coin a phrase.
And I resist that ferociously, I promise you! I’ve started endless initiatives to put out the fires before they spread, to stop so many miseries and grievances from making it to my throne. I’ve built so many defenses in an attempt to protect myself, and you. In the process I’ve watched many of my ideas die. In daily life we’re surrounded by ideas with incredible tenacity, most things that reach us have been through some spinmeister or some viral wringer, and it inures us to how fragile ideas really are. Ideas depart quietly and leave nothing when they go. I’ve seen ideas die in the aftermath of bursts of enthusiasm that leave nothing left over. I’ve seen them die the way a smile dies when it’s outworn its use, a lean smile on the face of a flatterer who tells me how hard they tried, but this new way of doing things just won’t stick…
So this has gotten to be a long introduction [laughs] but it is a roundabout way of saying that much as I put my heart into this, the only place where I have the capability to match my self-belief is in this chair, and more and more lately I feel I am the chair and the chair is me, and it is in the chair that I have resigned myself to speaking with you soon, especially as your budget is modest and your requirements are, frankly, outrageous. Great to meet you all.
Maria, do we have anyone else left to introduce?
Silence. The project manager says, I guess I’ll turn it over to your team, Jeni.
Anna cuts in in a small voice, Actually, I haven’t introduced myself, Maria.
Tiredly the project manager says, Oh, Anna. Go ahead.
Okay! Hi everyone—I’m Anna—and to be completely honest with you I don’t know if it’s totally worth me introducing myself because I’m like ninety percent sure I’m about to be fired [laughs]. No one’s said anything—no five o’clock meetings with HR on the calendar—but I can tell from the way everyone talks about my work. There’s always someone being assigned to ‘work with me’ or ‘punch it up’ or ‘get it to a good place’. I’ve made so many ‘strong starts’ that if I make another strong fucking start I swear I am going to vomit on my keyboard. What I desperately wish I could do is ask my manager, straight up, Do you even like me, but I know the answer is no and she won’t be able to hide it, and she’ll stare at me like a trapped animal, and there’ll be nothing left to do except stare at a floor that has so far refused to swallow me up.
They’re putting me on fewer and fewer projects now. But the less I have to do, the more anxious I get about the jobs I do have. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like time is squeezing me tighter and tighter. The two hours before my fifteen-minute check-in is a python crushing my chest. And then I get so anxious I don’t even know how I’m going to do my check-in, and some part of myself that just—cannot—take—any—fucking—more—of—this says maybe you would feel better if you blew it off. And then for fourteen minutes of this fifteen-minute meeting I’m not attending, I’m just sitting in my chair hyperventilating, and when they message me to ask where the hell I was all I can say is I lost track of time.
I think about being fired all the time, and this may sound insane but when I really need to calm down, I think through all the steps that will be involved in me being fired. I think about the talk with HR and the forms I’ll sign and the updates I’ll make to my LinkedIn and even the kind of bag or box I’ll take back to the office to clean out my desk when no one is around. Other days I scroll Twitter and that’s always a mistake. The articles make me so angry I can’t even think. I’m reading about obstetric fistulas, where girls in poor countries give birth and become incontinent from the damage that’s done to them because they’re literally children themselves, and they go through this terrible experience just to be shunned by the communities that gave them away as brides in the first place. And I’m reading this while I’m in a meeting listening to some old white man drone on about nothing, sitting on mute just paralyzed with the psychopathic wrongness of our fucked-up world. And that is kind of unconducive to taking clear notes.
As a kid, did you ever have the fantasy where time freezes and you’re the only one unstuck, and you can just go around staring in people’s faces, kicking their shins, pulling down their pants, whatever you want? When my internet craps out on a call I get that feeling. Everyone’s glitchy little face freezes and I’m the only one moving, and I feel all-powerful. Then everyone starts moving again and I have to start trying to take notes. Danika made me think of that, when she talked about the notifications.
Notifications stress me out. Shocking, right? [laughs] The little red ‘1’ in a circle looking like a lizard eye. I can feel the person sending the message staring at me like the Eye of Sauron, I’ve fucked up again and they can see everything. I refresh messages constantly but I don’t dare open them, so I’m constantly missing information I needed and actually had. And when the notifications really pile up I feel this high of despair—this feeling like, this is finally it, and I get this shot of adrenaline and this sense of relief, you know, that it’s finally all over, but it never lasts and I go back to panicking.
But the weird thing is. At night, after a couple glasses of wine, sometimes I sit in the dark and I log back in to see my notifications. I’m on my bed with my wine, the curtains are closed, the laptop is the only thing that’s lit in the apartment, it’s all dark. And I just watch. I watch people in other time zones doing their work, messaging each other, getting responses. I like finding people whose jobs sound similar to mine and watching the way they work, and saying to myself, I see you. And from that vantage point it just seems so peaceful. Everything goes round and round. Everything gets done. When I’m a little tipsy it truly feels like what we do is beautiful, and I wish I could put a heart next to every message. And if I can get access to a document or a brainstorm and sit in it anonymously, watching people collaborate—I kid you not when I say for me that is better than sex.
And you can guess what my therapist said—try to imagine your own work unfolding like that. But just thinking about my work sets my pulse racing, as the notifications come in and drown me. No, I think for me work will always be like that, the terror up close and the intense peace of seeing it all happen from far away. I think if I had a dream job, it would be to just watch everyone work, and every so often send them messages of encouragement, to let them know they were all seen and loved, by someone who had no other job but to wish them well. But I don’t think anyone would pay me to do that. Anyways, I’m really excited to be here and get going with this project, for as long as they keep me around…!
The sky is gray. Rain spatters down on the East Coast. Scraps of yellow leaves on the trees. The streets are empty, the windows dark, emptied or closed in on themselves. Everyone settles and sinks in their chairs, blended so gradually into the early dark that no bedrooms or offices or kitchens have been lit.
Brad, in Arizona, sits in the sun. Light coats the tiles concealed by the starship Enterprise, and behind him a greyhound sleeps on the couch, paws over its eyes. Brad takes a drink from a steel water bottle beside his desk.
On the lone client camera everything grows more distinct except the sailboat, its edges blurred with glowing brushstrokes as sky and sea merge and the boat now seems to float in the darkness of space.
The Wiggle Room
By William J. Cobb
According to his father, the neighbors who lived in the house behind them were conservative Christian weirdos. “Stay clear of those two,” he said. “Give them a foot in the door and they’ll have you down on your knees, praying for salvation. Or nail you to a cross somewhere because you don’t.”
The neighbors were brother and sister. The brother a vet back from Afghanistan, missing a leg. He didn’t talk to people.
The woman walked over to their house and knocked on the door. The boy answered. She smiled at him and asked if he knew much about God? He was eating peanut butter crackers and shook his head. He didn’t want to open his mouth to talk and show her all the mashed-up crackers and peanut butter. “Well don’t you think it’s about time you found out? Jesus loves you, you know.” She had a nice face and was exactly the same height as he, so they looked directly into each other’s eyes.
Her forehead and cheek were unlined and seemed to glow with a waxy sheen. She had fine pale hair at her temple and scalp line as if they wanted to grow onto her face and cover it, like the Wolf Lady he had seen on the internet. Like her face was an open field in a forest of pale wispy hair. Her eyes a curious color, a dark blue tinged almost violet. She was maybe a little younger than his mother but she dressed in old-timey clothes. She wore a sun bonnet on her head, with white lacy straps tied neatly at her chin. Other faint wisps of her sandy hair curled out beneath her bonnet, at her neck, and the bonnet, which was a pale blue like baby boy clothes, ruffled in the wind. They lived near the shore and it was always windy. The boy guessed she wore the bonnet to keep her hair from being tangled.
“Who’s at the door?” shouted his father. He was upstairs, in his dark room, developing pictures. “Tell them we don’t want any.”
The woman heard that, and did not waiver. “Take this,” she whispered, handing him a pamphlet titled The Watchtower. “Read it, okay?”
He finished chewing and swallowed, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get right on it.”
She frowned, just a little. Turned her head. “Was that a joke?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m serious.” He held up the pamphlet. “Got nothing else to do.”
She kept staring at him. Looked behind him, over his shoulder, into his house.
“Who is it?” shouted his mother. She was in the living room, watching TV and working on her laptop like always.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just the lady who lives behind us.”
“Oh, okay,” she called out. “What does she want? Does she need something?”
The woman kept standing there, staring at him with a Mona Lisa smile on her face. “Lady,” she said, squinted her eyes. “Is that what I am?”
He didn’t know what to say. She didn’t seem to be a weirdo at all. “I don’t know,” he called out to his mother. Speaking to her in a softer voice he said, “What should I tell her? She wants to know what you want.”
The woman made a face like that was a trick question, one which she didn’t know how to answer. She held one finger to her plump lips and tapped, three times. “I want,” she said, pausing, “you to read that pamphlet. Then we will talk about it.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.”
She nodded and started to leave—took a step backward, still looking into his eyes—then stopped and stuck out her hand. “I’m Genevieve,” she said.
Before he could take her hand she wiped it on her skirt and apologized, told him, “I’m sorry. It’s this heat I guess. My hands get so wet.”
He shook her warm and damp hand and laughed. “Pleased to meet you, Genevieve. I’m . . . .” And for a second he forgot his name. She let go of him and put both hands in the air as if she were trying to catch something, ducking and miming like she was playing baseball, in the outfield trying to catch a pop fly, until he finally remembered, “. . . Patrick.” And then her hands grabbed the air, and she closed her fist on the sound of his name, and put one hand into the pocket of her long dress. “Next time, then,” she said.
She made a little curtsey, turned, and walked down the gray concrete flagstone path to the white sidewalk, turned sharply, and headed down the street. She’d have to walk around the whole block to get back to her house from that direction. He started to call out, tell her she could cut through his yard. He held his tongue. It didn’t seem right, yelling at her like that, on the street and everything.
“Is that woman still here?” called out his mother.
“She’s gone,” he said. But he watched her walk to the intersection of Ibis Street, passing through the palm tree shadows, the brown palm fronds swaying and crackling in the wind above her. A pair of teenage girls, wearing flip flops and swimsuits and floppy T-shirts, passed her at the corner. When she couldn’t see them, they turned and made faces, giggling. One of them held up her phone and took a picture of the woman walking away.
He wished he had done that.
After that he watched her all the time. The woman in the house behind his house. The only thing that separated their yards was a weedy, sand-filled alley, where at night hunchback raccoons ransacked trash cans. It always smelled like garbage and dead things. Plus the salt spray that coated everything. Otherwise what separated their yards was just two stretches of gray chain link fence.
His father told him that the brother was an angry guy back from serving in the Marines. His leg had been blown off and now he wore a prosthetic. “But if he walks by, whatever you do, don’t stare at it. That’s rude.”
The neighbors’ yard was a lush green square of St. Augustine grass, with four palm trees, one in each corner. A flagpole in the center, atop which flew a large Confederate flag. The woman mowed the grass every week, usually on Fridays or Saturday afternoons. The boy watched her from a tree house in his backyard, a plywood platform hidden up in the live oak branches. His mother said he should be careful up there. He could break his neck. His father thought it was good for him, would get him in touch with nature and shit. He helped the boy saw some two-by-four scraps and then hammer them into the oak trunk for a ladder, up to a vee-shaped spread of branches, onto which they nailed a sheet of weathered gray plywood they kept in the garage to cover the windows if a hurricane might hit. The boy took to spending his afternoons up in the tree house. He told his parents he was reading and doing homework. He was in ninth grade and making good grades, but he didn’t have a close friend. If she came into the yard he spied on her.
She had a precise way of mowing the grass. Push the loud mower down the length of the yard in the center, turn left and go to the back corner, turn left and go back to their patio area, turn left and back to the place where she started. With each time the mowed area became wider and the dark green grass area in the center became smaller and smaller until he imagined he was in the center of the square, and she mowed the last spot, chopping him up into little pieces. Then he would wriggle on the ground, all the little pieces of him moving at once, chopped up and squirming and giddy.
He mowed grass, too, for money. Several neighbors paid him and he was saving up for a PlayStation video game console. The weed-eater was the worst part. It made a high-pitched buzzing sound. The sun was hot and it was always humid. He took off his shirt to mow some yards but then the mosquitoes in the high grass bit him like crazy.
From the treehouse, he could see the windows on the backside of their house—their backside faced his backside. The house was nothing special: a two-story box with sage-colored aluminum siding, a small concrete patio behind the downstairs sliding-glass doors. Five windows upstairs, which he guessed to be (left to right): bedroom, bathroom, hallway, bathroom, bedroom. The three center windows were small squares. The outside windows, right and left, were larger rectangles. Late at night he snuck out to the treehouse and sat there watching. The right-hand window filled with golden light. A lamp on a nightstand. Gauzy curtains over the window. The figure of the woman, standing behind the curtains. Through binoculars, he saw her, standing there in her nightdress. Looking in his direction. He wondered if she could see the glint of reflection from the security light onto the binocular lenses. He wondered if she could see him when he stood up, coated by moonlight there in the tangled oak branches.
Wearing a long white nightgown with ruffles at her throat. Her dark brown hair was long and flowed down each side of her body as if her head were a stone in the center of a milk chocolate river. He took a picture with his iPhone but all you could see was a fuzzy glow of their security light and a vague square shape of house—with, on the right, one golden window—like a licked butterscotch throat lozenge.
The brother drove a red pickup truck and was the only one who seemed to leave the house. He left in the afternoon and came home in the night, late. Sometimes the boy could hear him yelling at the woman and telling her things, how she needed to clean up all this crap, how they couldn’t live like this anymore. Once he came out on the patio with an armful of stuffed animals. The boy watched through his binoculars. The brother moved pretty well for having a fake leg.
There must have been a dozen stuffed animals: Through the binoculars he spied a penguin, a fox, and a bear in a canoe. “This is for your own good,” he shouted at the sliding glass door. Behind the glass, the dim figure of the woman, standing there, her hands holding her head, her mouth telling him to stop. Her brother opened a barbecue grill and placed the stuffed animals inside, then squirted lighter fluid on them and tossed a match.
They burst into flames. The boy wanted to rush out there and knock them off the grill, but he didn’t. “It’s time for you to move on,” shouted the brother. A skinny man with a pegleg and a big adam’s apple. He wore crocs and cargo shorts. “Enough already,” he said as he opened the sliding glass door. “What’s done is done.”
The week after her brother burned her stuffed animals, an ambulance came to their house early one evening. The sky was a violet color and the Confederate flag in their backyard popped in the wind, its grommets pinged against the metal flagpole. The boy could hear the crackle of the EMTs radio but not what they said. The flashing lights pulsed against the palm tree fronds like an outdoor disco. His father peeked out the back windows and said, “Uh oh. Trouble in paradise.” His mother said she hoped it wasn’t anything serious.
Another week went by. The brother’s truck never left the driveway. On Saturday the woman mowed the backyard up in one strip toward his yard, where he sat cross-legged watching her from the treehouse, turned left, and when she came to the corner of the chain link fence, in the shadow of the corner palm tree, she tripped. The boy saw her fall to the ground. The lawnmower engine stopped. She just lay there in the dark green grass, half in the shadow of the palm fronds. At first the boy expected her to get up and brush herself off. She didn’t.
He climbed down from the treehouse and went out the chain link fence, lifting up the latch and swinging out the gate, with its gray metal Irish Setter figures on top of the gate frame. He walked up and spoke to her through the fence, her lying on the ground like that. “Are you okay?”
“Shhh,” she said. “There’s a snake.”
Between her and the palm tree trunk lay the dark olive shape of a huge snake. The boy guessed it to be a python because they were all in the news now, how the swamps and marshes were full of them, how they grew big enough to swallow a child. This one was like a black and dark green log that stretched from the palm tree to the chain link fence and slowly squirmed away.
“Can you get up?”
“I don’t want to scare it,” she said.
“I’ll be right back.” The boy ran to his father’s garage and found the garden hoe, ran back to her and passed through her fence, slowed down when he got close. “I’ll kill it,” he said, holding the hoe in both hands and raising it high. “I got a hoe.”
She sat up and straightened her bonnet, which had twisted around. Her eyebrows crinkled. “You will not.”
“Those things can bite.”
She smiled, squinting up at him in the sunlight, a halo around his head. “So can you. Should I hit you with a hoe?”
“I’m a person. Not a snake.”
“We’re all god’s creatures.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm. “It’s too hot out here,” she added. “For me and Mr. Snake.”
He stood there, awkwardly, hoe in the air. He wore gray sweatpant shorts and a T-shirt that read You May Not Rest Now, There Are Monsters Nearby. “Why’d you fall?” he asked.
“I got all twisted up.” She rubbed her ankle and said she was afraid it would be swollen.
He asked where her brother was and she just looked at him. After a minute she said, “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
She kept rubbing her ankle, and started to hum a faint, sweet tune. “Gone?” she asked. “Gone to Dallas. The big D.”
He took her hand, which was warm and damp, and she pulled on him as she got onto her knees, then stood up, rising up to his height, like she was being inflated. “Thank you,” she said. “For not killing Mr. Snake.” He turned to look and it was in the other neighbor’s yard now, their problem.
“Did he get a new job?” asked the boy.
“Who? Donald?” She brushed herself off and started to limp away. “No. He doesn’t work. He’s injured. Or disabled, I guess you say.”
“Oh. Okay. Well what does he do?”
“Do? Mainly he just drinks.”
He let it go.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you something.”
He followed her as she limped toward her house. “You want me to finish mowing?” he asked.
“No. Oh, well. I guess.”
“I don’t mind.”
She stopped and stood there. “You could?”
“I don’t mind,” he repeated.
“I’ll pay you.”
“That’s okay. We’re neighbors, right?”
She nodded. “I’ll pay you anyway.”
“I won’t let you.”
She turned her head to one side. “Stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“Principled.”
“Come in when you’re done. I’ll make us something to eat.”
The boy got her mower going and followed her shrinking-grid pattern with geometric precision. Before he finished it began to rain. The woman came out on the concrete patio and stood under the awning, waving at him. He waved back. He wouldn’t stop until he was done. The last square of grass had the flagpole in the center and he was soaked with cool rain when he stood beneath it, wind blowing the flag sideways, a spray of droplets speckling his face as it popped off the fabric with its blue X against the red background, his hair plastered to his head. He felt a tug on his shirt and turned around to find the woman, now wet and bedraggled, pulling on his T-shirt and telling him to get inside.
In the kitchen, she said, “Look how wet you are. Here.” She handed him a towel. “You look like a wet rat.”
The boy wiped his face and laughed. “Thanks. Call me The Rat.”
The woman untied her bonnet and set it on the table. “I’m wet too. Let’s be rats together.”
Dripping all over the kitchen floor, he toweled his hair and looked around the room. A wall calendar with an illustration of Jesus with a woman prostrate before him, as if kissing his feet. An old green table in the center, with a bowl of apples and bananas in the center. She left and came back with a pair of bluejeans and a western shirt with pearl snap buttons.
“Take off your things and put those on,” said the woman. “We’re wet and making a mess of everything, aren’t we?”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy.
“It’s not your fault. Go on now.” She made a shooing motion with her hands and smiled her little Mona Lisa. “I won’t bite.”
The boy stood there, holding the jeans and shirt. “You mean here?”
“Here. Where else would you go?” She reached out, took both of his shoulders in her hands, then turned his body. “You face that way. No looking.”
He heard some clothes ruffling and feet shuffling. “Go on now. I want to put these in the dryer.”
He took off his shirt and hesitated, and before he could stop himself, glanced behind him. The woman had pulled her dress down and was facing away from him, standing barefoot in her white brassiere and her bottom in white underpants, kicking the dress to the side and stepping out.
He unzipped his pants slowly and as quietly as he could and pulled them down. They were soaked and heavy. He stumbled, standing there, trying to get his feet out of the cuffs. As soon as he could he pulled the blue jeans on, put his arms through the shirt sleeves. When he turned around the woman was watching him.
“Isn’t that better?” she asked. Her dark hair was long and wavy and he tried not to stare at her. She was like a different person.
“Warmer,” he said.
“Warmer is good?”
He nodded, staring at the graceful lines of her collarbones, like wings.
She reached a hand out to him. “Come here. I want to show you something.”
He took her hand and she led him through the formal living room, with a striped hard-looking sofa and no TV set, to the garage. A floor of cool gray concrete, the smell of wood shavings. The garage door pulled shut. An amber Yield sign nailed to one wall. In the corner was a low white freezer with a black cord plugged into a socket on the wall behind it. Above it, an illuminated bar sign with the legend The Wiggle Room in loopy lime-green cursive neon script at top, and below the title, silhouette images of a blue martini glass and a red go-go dancer.
Genevieve saw the boy staring at it. “Isn’t that a hoot?” she asked. “Donald put it up there just to irritate me. Now I kind of like it.”
The boy asked where he got the thing. She said it was from a bar he used to visit. “He bought it for two hundred dollars when it closed down. But if I asked him for that much he’d yell at me. How money doesn’t grow on trees.”
Otherwise the garage was mostly empty. Cardboard boxes in the corner, a stack of Watchtower pamphlets on top. A cricket hopping across the floor. A weight-lifting set in the center, with a wide black bench in front of it. No car. She led him to a rough wooden table upon which were dolls arranged around a small wooden farm set. “What do you think?” she asked. “Do you recognize it?”
A house and barn made of Popsicle sticks. A tiny corral in which stood four plastic horses. Behind the farm scene was a good-sized cotton-candy-looking dark cloud shape with a wide top that narrowed to a small funnel at bottom, suspended by wires.
“Watch,” said the woman. She flicked a switch on the table and a buzzing noise commenced from the cloud: It began to twirl and spin around, slowly at first, then gaining speed. The narrow bottom of the cloud wobbled and skittered across the table, and almost knocked over the Popsicle stick house. “Oops,” she said, and flicked the switch. It slowly quit turning and the buzzing sound diminished. “Donald made it for me.”
The boy looked at her. “It’s a tornado, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Bingo. But what tornado?”
She took his hand again. Hers was wet and warm but he didn’t pull away as she made him get closer and lean down on the table. He had to hold the blue jeans waist to keep them from falling off. “Look.” She pointed to the small doll of a girl in pigtails, wearing a blue and white dress, holding a little dog. The dolls were about eight inches tall, about the size of Barbies, and rough-hewn. The girl stood next to a mean-looking woman in a man’s hat, standing astride a bicycle with a basket in front, pointing at her. The woman said they were corn-husk dolls, made from corn husks.
“The Wizard of Oz?” he guessed.
“Oh, you’re a sharp one, aren’t you, Patrick?” said the woman, not letting go of him but putting her other hand on her heart and fluttering her eyes.
“Looks pretty obvious to me,” he said, not knowing if he should pull his hand away or not. She was squeezing him and pulling him closer. “That’s Elvira Gulch, isn’t it?”
The woman laughed. “It is indeed.” She let go of his hand and touched his cheek. “No one has ever recognized it before.”
“Way cool,” he said. “Kind of weird, too.”
She made a funny face, scrunching up her eyebrows. “Donald said it was a stupid waste of time.”
“Who’s Donald?”
“My brother.”
“Oh, right. Well. Brothers are like that, aren’t they? Always giving you a hard time.”
She picked up the Dorothy doll and held it in front of his face, ventriloquizing, “Did you ever read what I gave you?”
“What?” he asked, laughing.
“The Watchtower,” insisted corn-husk Dorothy.
“A little,” he said.
“What’d you think?”
He shrugged. “I’ve heard of Jesus before.”
“But not that much?”
“Not really. Not much. I mean, my parents? They think it’s kind of kooky.”
“It is not. It’s the light,” she said, letting go of him and lifting her hands and the corn-husk Dorothy up to the heavens—in this case the exposed two-by-four rafters of the unfinished garage.
“Okay. Well. To them it’s kind of kooky, so I don’t want to get in trouble.”
She smiled. “You’re kidding, right? Your parents wouldn’t get mad at you for finding Jesus, would they?”
He grinned. “Maybe.”
“Well, I never,” she said.
He laughed.
“Why are you laughing?”
“People don’t say that anymore.”
She smiled her little smile and lifted her chin. “I do.”
“It’s old-timey. I mean, I like it. In an old-timey way.”
On a shelf above the workbench was a stack of dark blue books. She took one down and opened it up to show a page of large coins, set into slots in the book. She told him Donald was a coin collector or numismatist. “Here,” she said, working out two bright coins and holding them out to him. “Take these silver dollars. They’re rare. Worth a lot more than a dollar.”
The boy said he couldn’t do that. He was glad to mow the grass for her and wouldn’t take any money, silver dollar or paper money. “It’s just a favor,” he said. “Neighbors do each other favors.”
Before he could stop her she reached out and stuffed one of the coins into his jeans pocket. “It’s yours now,” she whispered. “You can’t give it back.” She stared at him and looked odd, in the dim garage light. Her lips were slightly ajar and her eyes seemed to be looking into him, expecting something. The violet color faintly visible in the dim blue light. Outside the sound of rain gushing out the gutters and splattering on the driveway.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” She smiled and turned her head. “How can you not know if you’re hungry or not?” She let go of him and pushed his chest. “You either are, or you aren’t.”
“I better go I guess. My p’s, you know, they’ll be wondering where I am.”
“Your p’s?”
“Parents.”
“Oh.” She reached out and took his hand again. “But you’re next door, at your neighbor’s?”
He raised one eyebrow. “But they don’t know that, do they?”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” she whispered, looking away from him, squeezing his hand. “I have Eskimo Pies,” she added.
“You mean the ice cream sandwiches?”
She nodded. “Ice cream bars,” she corrected. “I love them.”
“Well, yeah. I could go for that.”
She smiled and walked over to the freezer. He followed her but a few feet away she paused and stopped him, putting a warm hand on his chest. “You wait here.” When she opened the freezer he couldn’t see inside, and she kept her body in the center of it, blocking the view. “Just one second,” she said. “They’re in here somewhere. I don’t want you to see. It’s such a mess.” She barely lifted the freezer lid, and rummaged around inside, feeling with her hand.
“You want me to help?”
“No. I’m good,” she said. A moment later she turned around and held two Eskimo Pies to her chest. “The best part of the pie is the wrapper.” She opened one and peeled back the foil wrapper, making sure not to tear the illustration of the Eskimo in his fur suit and rainbow on the cover. “He’s such a happy little Eskimo. Here,” she said. “Open your mouth.”
He hesitated but saw that she was serious. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Come on.” She came close to him and stood at his same height, with the black chocolate-covered ice cream sandwich in front of his mouth. Close enough to smell the tang of her body, her wet hair. “Bite.”
She eased it into his open mouth and let him take a little bite, then pulled it away. “That’s enough,” she said, and laughed.
His phone started to vibrate. It was his Mom texting him, asking Where in the world are you? He showed the woman, who squinted at it, then told him to shoo. “Next time,” she said.
He finished the Eskimo Pie before he walked in the backdoor of his house, and hid the stick. In his room he locked the door and took the silver dollar out of his pocket and rubbed it between his fingers. He liked the warm feel of it. It was dated 1925, the head of a woman with spiky hair on one side, an eagle on the other. He slept with it beneath his pillow.
The next day the boy rode his bike past Genevieve’s house and wondered if she was home. Her brother’s red pickup truck, parked in their driveway, close to the street, now had a red-and-white For Sale sign taped to the windshield. “$7K OBO. 512 729-2355.” Why would the woman’s brother sell his truck if he just moved to Dallas? The boy was almost old enough to drive. Next year he would be. He wondered if he could buy it. Maybe his parents would help him. Maybe he could mow her grass for a few years.
Days later, when his parents were at work, he watched her yard from the treehouse. With his binoculars he looked at all the windows and the patio. Through the sliding glass doors he could see into the living room: Two bare white feet and bare legs prone on the tan carpeting of the floor. That’s all he could see from his angle. It appeared to be a body lying lifeless on the floor.
He climbed down from the tree house, passed through both gates, and walked up to the back of the woman’s house, watching the sliding glass doors. When he got close the sun came out from behind clouds and the reflection of the light on the glass doors blinded him from seeing inside. He cupped his hands against the glass to make a shadow to see through the reflection.
The woman was lying face down, on top of a sleeping bag, her head on a small pillow. She wore only a nightgown that was hiked up to her hips. Her skin so white it seemed to glow, her dark hair tangled and curling off the pillow, and her legs open to show her darkness below. He stood for a second, staring, his shadow crossing over her white skin. He wondered if she was sick or dead or if he should go for help. She looked like the victim of a sacrifice or an attack.
She stirred, squirming and wrapping her legs around the sleeping bag, burrowing into the pillow. He heard a sound and glanced behind him, but it was just the flag, luffing in the wind. When he looked inside again the woman was staring up at him. He stepped back, hurrying sideways, out of view of the sliding glass doors. His heart pounding, he walked quickly through her side yard, past her driveway with the red pickup truck parked in it, out to the street, then the long way around on Ibis Street back to his house. His mother pulled into their driveway just as he was walking up to the door. She rolled down the car window and asked, “So where have you been?”
“Nowhere.”
She made a face. “What are you up to, Pat? Nowhere is no place to go.”
“I just went for a walk.”
“Right,” she said. “You never go for walks.”
“Okay, if you really want to know,” he added. “I got a moon pie from 7-Eleven.”
“I told you not to eat that crap.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”
She got out of the car and asked if he would carry in the groceries for her. “And no more sweet things,” she added. “Sugar is poison.”
When he got off the bus the next day and walked past her house, the woman opened the door and waved at him. He waved back but put his head down, kept walking. “Patrick,” she called out. “Come here a second. I want to ask you something.”
She wore one of her long dresses and no sun bonnet, a gold crucifix at her throat. When he got to the door she wasn’t smiling and asked if he could come in for a second. He said that he probably shouldn’t. He needed to do some homework.
“Please?” she asked.
“I guess so.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d appreciate it,” holding the door open. He stepped inside and she told him, “Follow me.”
She led him to the garage.
“Does your mother know what you’re doing?”
He realized she was angry. “What do you mean? Doing what?”
“Spying on me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I saw you yesterday when I woke up. You were looking at me.”
He told her he wasn’t spying on her. He just saw her lying on the ground and thought she was sick or something. When she asked how he could see her from all the way across the yard, he told her he was bird watching with binoculars.
“So you were spying on me, then, weren’t you?” She stepped close to him. “You’ve been looking at me at night, haven’t you?”
He didn’t know what to say. She was breathing hard through her mouth. “Kneel on this bench. Hands and knees. Here.” She pointed to the weight-lifting bench. “On your hands, and on your knees.”
“Listen, I-”
“Do you want me to call your mother? Tell your parents what you’ve been doing?”
He was breathing hard now. “No.”
“Do it.”
He got on his hands and knees. It was so quiet he could hear a cricket chirping. He was wearing khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. They dangled awkwardly as he leaned over, and he felt her knock them off his feet, the slap sound of them falling to the concrete floor.
“Look at the wall,” she told him. “Beg forgiveness.”
He stared at The Wiggle Room sign bright with its loopy lime script. “Please don’t tell my parents,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything.”
He felt as she reached around his waist and unbuttoned his pants, yanked them down. She tugged his white underpants down to his knees. “There. How do you like that?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“I’m going to teach you a lesson,” she said. “You don’t want me to call your mother and father, do you?”
“No.”
“So you’re not going to tell them anything, are you?”
“No.”
He heard her moving around the room. She took a leather weight-lifter’s belt from off the rack of free weights. Then she was behind him. The basement air was cool and he had goosebumps on his skin, tingling.
“This is what Donald used to do to me when I was bad.”
He felt a sharp slap against his bare behind. She spanked him three more times with the belt. He could hear her breathing and yelping, just a little, with each swing. “How do you like that?”
He didn’t know what to say. It stung.
“Were you looking at me, asleep on the floor?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Good,” she said. “At least you’re telling the truth.” She spanked him again. “Are you going to do it again?”
He promised he wouldn’t. He heard faint sounds, her voice choked with emotion. “What if I want you to?”
He didn’t know what to say. He waited for more and then felt fingertips on his skin, lightly touching him. She said she hoped she didn’t hurt him. “You have red marks,” she added.
He told her he was okay. Could he get dressed now?
“I’m not a good person,” she said, starting to cry. “I’m a horrible person and I want you to know that. To know how horrible I am.” She put her cheek against his back, then kissed it, and told him to get up, helping him pull up his pants and touching his bare skin as she pulled them up. Then she got him to his feet and took his hand, led him to the freezer. “Open it.”
A gush of white mist escaped the freezer when he lifted the lid. Outside rain began to fall and spatter on the metal roof of the garage, gutter down the driveway. When the mist lifted it revealed a bulky bundle wrapped in a checkered quilt filling up the freezer, with boxes of Eskimo pies and frozen peas and hashbrown potatoes jumbled on top. She told him it was Donald. He died after he came home from the hospital and she didn’t have money for the funeral and she needed his disability checks so she was going to keep him there. “Here in the Wiggle Room,” she said. “It’s better this way, you see?”
The boy said he wouldn’t tell anyone.
Donald complained of aches and pains all the time. “It was for his own good,” she added, reaching into the freezer and giving the body wrapped in quilt a tender pat. “He was in misery, you see? Out of which he’s now put. I was arranging his pillows and he just stopped breathing.”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy.
“He didn’t like anything. He thought women were evil because he never had a girlfriend. I told him how can women be evil if God created them? And he said yeah but he just pulled out a rib, and it was a bad one. They’re a trap, he said. But I’m a woman, I told him. Don’t go bragging about it, he said. You’re my sister, but give you half a chance? You’d be like the others too.”
The boy said it was wrong for a man to say a thing like that.
She handed him the belt. “Here. You take this.”
The boy told her he should leave now.
The woman made a small motion with her head, turning it to one side, as if trying to hear him better. “Will you help me be a good person?”
He told her he really had to go now, that his parents would be worried. They’d be calling any minute. But she didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him as she crossed the room and got into position on the bench. On her hands and knees. Then she asked him to come over and bring the belt. Told him she was bad and she deserved it.
He said he had to go home now.
“You don’t want me to tell your parents about you watching me, do you? You know what they do to peeping toms?”
“No.”
She said they would castrate him. That it’s a law. “You have to do this,” she told him. “You have to save me. It’s the only way.”
He stood there with the belt in his hands, the sound of hard rain rattling on the metal roof.
On Interstate 75 Sits a Diner
By Benn Jeffries
The booths are red vinyl with a faint dusting of glitter. It is summer and exposed thighs stick to the seats. Leaving customers are announced by the sound of sweaty skin peeling away from vinyl. The spilt ketchup and breakfast syrup wipes away cleanly though, and the regulars here know not to wear short shorts. A juke box sits in the corner of the diner, but the Elvis album that is playing comes from a phone behind the long bar. Bottles of syrup and cordial are lined up beside a milkshake machine and a soft drinks dispenser. A customer with a wiry mustache and a belly that stretches his wife-beater asks for more coffee. Angel gives him a practiced smile and tops up his cup.
”You new here?” the man asks.
”I been here ‘bout a month and a half,” Angel replies.
”Yeah, it been ‘bout that long since I last drove through here.”
Angel walks off between the booths, she can feel the man’s eyes on her ass as she tops up the coffee cups of the other customers. She stops by a woman with a white curly perm that makes her look like a poodle.
”Oh thank you, sweetie,” the woman says as Angel pours the steaming black brew.
”No problem. I love your hair,” Angel lies.
A bell sounds from the back and she leaves the poodle woman and pushes through the double doors to the white and silver kitchen. The chefs are speaking Spanish to each other. Sometimes it sounds to Angel like they are fighting, but they are really just excited about something. Jose taught Angel how to say you’re the best, in Spanish so when he makes her an extra pancake on a morning shift she can thank him with the phrase. Sometimes his family comes into the diner and Angel slips his kids a slice of cheesecake to share from the cabinet. They always seem to have room for cake.
”That creep hit on you?” asks Emily, the waitress who showed Angel the ropes when she started. Emily smokes a lot and looks about sixty but could be forty, no one really knows. She gets away with doing very little because she knows everything there is to know about the diner and when anybody has a question, they ask her.
”Which one?”
”The weirdo with the seedy mustache. He used to be a regular when Blondie worked here but stopped showing up as much after she moved. I reckon he was in love with her. Got a thing for little girls probably. Fucking sicko.”
Angel balances a stack of pancakes on her forearm and a breakfast quesadilla in her hand. “This whole highway moves sickos,” she says and backs out through the double doors with the plates.
”And so I said ‘fuck him, if he ain’t gonna step up then he ain’t getting none—’”
The two women stop their conversation as Angel places their plates down before them. Outside, through the large windows, Angel sees summer rain clouds gathering. The air is thick.
”Y’all got hot sauce?” asks the woman who ordered the quesadilla. She is a large woman with fingernails as long as her fingers. Angel digs into the pocket of her apron and produces a bottle of tabasco.
”Thank you, sweetie,” the woman says and turns back to her friend. “Anyway, you know for sure that motherfucker ain’t doing half those things he said he was gonna do. When was the last…”
Angel goes back into the kitchen and the double doors silence the two women.
”Angel, what do you think, huh?” asks Jake, the dishwasher. He is only fifteen but wears tight black t-shirts to show off his arms and thinks of nothing but girls.
”What do I think about what, Jake?” She is too old for him but she gets a kick out of flirting and watching his boyish excitement overflow.
”You think I should give that girl my number?”
”Which one? Table four?”
Everyone in the kitchen turns to look at table four through the two porthole windows in the double doors. At table four the poodle-looking woman is lapping up her coffee.
”Hell no. You see table nine? That fine looking Russian.”
They all looked through the windows to table nine. A straight-haired woman in her late twenties with fake lips.
”How the hell do you know she’s Russian?” asks Sam, a lanky boy who wears black nail polish and a staff shirt that shows his pasty white belly button.
”Oh she’s Russian alright. Rushing for my dick.”
The chefs both snort and say something in Spanish. Jose brandishes a spatula at Jake. Angel and Emily laugh and shake their heads.
”Honey, you got no chance,” says Sam.
David, the front of house, comes through the double doors and slumps into a metal chair. “I’m never drinking again. I swear it,” he says. “Angel you can have half my tips if you take on bathroom duty today. I swear to god I’ll vomit if I have to clean another shit off the floor.”
The sound of the Interstate reaches their ears and they all look through the portholes again to see a cowboy-looking fella walk into the diner.
”Oh shit,” says David and hurries out to greet the new customer.
”Don’t take his money Angel,” says Emily in her harsh smoker’s voice. “He’s hungover every goddamn day. He needs to learn his lesson.”
”Well, I’m not his momma. I’m taking his damn money. He can learn his lesson some other time.”
”Yes! That’s my bitch,” says Sam and high-fives Angel.
”Angel’s a hustler,” pipes in Jose. “She only speaks money.”
They all laugh and Angel rolls her eyes. “Yeah well, I’m gonna go do this thing called work y’all never seem to have heard of.” With that, she pushes through the double doors and disappears amongst the booths.
”She saves all her money too, I never seen her spend a dime,” says Jake to whoever is listening.
”She wants to go to college. That’s why,” says Emily.
”College,” echoes Sam. “Huh.”
The cowboy-looking man takes a seat across from the mustached creep. Angel stands before them both and asks the newcomer if he wants to order anything. Even sitting, the cowboy is almost eye level with Angel.
”No, just coffee will be fine,” the man says as he removes a hat stained with sweat and dirt. “What’s your name honey? I thought you ladies were meant to wear name tags.”
”It’s Angel.”
”Angel,” the man echoes and nods to himself. He mulls the name over, tasting it on his lips. Angel looks down and sees his enormous hands spread flat on the table. They are rough and his fingers are squared at the ends like metal tools. She moves her eyes across the table and sees that the man with the mustache is sweating. A dark V has formed around the collar of his singlet. He seems to have shrunken before the Cowboy.
”Angel you got fresh coffee? I only want it if it’s hot and fresh.”
”We got fresh coffee alright,” she says and walks away to fetch a pot from the back.
The doors swing closed behind her and Emily eyes Angel with her arms folded across her chest. Her jaw is moving rhythmically, the faint sound of gum between teeth just audible.
”Who’s the cowboy?” Emily asks.
”Don’t know, don’t care.”
”Kinda handsome don’t you think?”
Angel looks out through the porthole. The Cowboy is old enough to be her father, but there is something pleasant about his worn features and sense of calm. A cool confidence you only get from being used to winning something. Whatever it was he did, you knew he was good at it.
”You got no shot,” says Jake from his sink full of bubbles.
”You speak to your mother with that trap?” barks Emily.
Angel laughs at them both, then looks back out the porthole again at the two men. The Cowboy is talking, his lips moving in a slow way that matches his drawl. His beady, black eyes watch the mustached man with something like loathing.
”We got fresh coffee?” Angel asks, looking away from the window.
“Be done in a second,” Emily says, gesturing to the machine. She pulls a cigarette from her apron pocket and walks to the fire door that opens out into the lot. She props it open with an extinguisher and lights her cigarette, blowing the smoke outside. Angel slides up next to her and offers her lips. Emily gives her a drag.
It has started to rain outside. The daily summer storm. That smell of warm soil turning damp rises from the earth. The coffee machine clicks to announce it has finished its task. Angel picks up the jug and pushes through the double doors. Sam is over at table five collecting dirty plates. A receipt and cash tip now sit on the table where the poodle-looking woman had sat. Three dollars. Cheap bitch, Angel thinks and drops it into her apron pocket.
”Why don’t you put your hands like this, John,” the Cowboy is saying just as Angel arrives at their booth. She fills up the Cowboy’s cup with the steaming hot liquid and the mustached man spreads his hands on the table like the Cowboy’s.
”Good, now keep them just like that John. That’s a good man.” Then Cowboy takes his cup of coffee and pours the boiling liquid over John’s hands. Angel takes a step back and bumps into the booth behind her. John winces from the pain but he keeps his hands glued to the table. His jaw locks and sweat covers his forehead.
”Angel would you be a doll and get us some napkins,” the Cowboy says calmly. “I spilt a bit of my coffee.”
For a moment, Angel is frozen and then her mind comes back to her and she moves between the booths and pushes her way through the double doors. Emily is sucking the last drag from her cigarette. She looks over at Angel and sees her face has gone pale.
”Call the police,” Angel says as she gathers a handful of napkins. Emily nods and pulls her phone from her pocket. The chefs follow Angel to the double doors but they stop before passing through them. Angel carries on, moving through the booths towards the two men. The Cowboy has stood up from his seat. He has his hands on either side of his waist, his enormous thumbs tucked into his belt. John is shaking, whimpering.
”Please,” he stutters.
Angel stops still in the aisle, the pile of napkins in her hand. Elvis sings a slow song, a song a band might play at the end of the night for a room full of lovers. The Cowboy looks over at Angel and smiles a handsome smile. Then he reaches down to retrieve his hat from the table and places it on his head, adjusting it so it sits just right.
”It’s raining outside, John, think about that for a second.”
The Cowboy draws a gun from the back of his belt. No one screams or moves. All the customers are frozen. Angel feels her breath catch in her throat. The cowboy puts the gun to John’s head and shoots him. John is still. The ceiling fans whirl.