American Morons Page 8

  “What?” I said aloud, and slammed my palms against the pavement and scraped them badly. Do what? Pick up my friend’s body like a cigar store Indian, tie him to the top of the car, bring him to our house, which he’d never seen, and prop him on our little porch in our choice of vests? Maybe bring along a poodle-skirt woman so we could make set pieces?

  Staggering to my feet, I took a huge breath and let the ocean air cut my lungs. In my pocket, I realized, I’d crumpled the newspaper article, and I removed it now, opened it, ripped it to pieces, and set the pieces flying. Rebecca could never see that article, could never know what I was thinking. It was bad enough—it was flat, fucking murder—that we’d left Ash down here. I didn’t even want to imagine how she’d react when she realized what really might have happened to her father.

  How did it work, I wondered? Were Rooff’s ghosts, or machines, or whatever they were, selective about the company they brought him? Had they let us go, or had we refused? Had Ash known, before it was too late, that he had a choice? Had the rest of them—the roller-skate girl, the flag man, the kid, maybe even Rebecca’s father—chosen to stay, because it was bright and musical and happy in there, and smelled of the sea?

  It was almost light when I fumbled my car door open and collapsed back into the driver’s seat. I could be wrong, I thought. I could go home right now and find Rebecca with the kitchen phone dangling from her ear, smiling in the way she didn’t anymore as Ash told her where he’d vanished to this time and she spooned minced carrots to our child. But I didn’t think so.

  Not until I was off the freeways again, just pulling into our little driveway, did it occur to me to wonder where, exactly, Rooff’s last merry-go-round stopped. At the edge of the white curtain? Or the end of the pier? The ray could have been part of it, and the fishermen, and the beggars, too. Or maybe they’d just wanted to be.

  I stepped out of the car, felt the stagnant L.A. air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor’s windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street, wind chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and also almost sweet. Because I realized I might be underestimating the power of Rooff’s last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still—Rebecca, me, the whole crazy, homogenizing coast—bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone’s favorite people and places inevitably do. Until, finally, we are just our faces, smiles frozen bright as we can make them, hands stretching for our children because we can’t help but hope they’ll join us, hope they’ll understand before we did that there really may be no place else to go or at least forgive us for not finding it. Then they’ll smile back at us. Climb aboard. And ride.

  Safety Clowns

  As soon as I spotted the ad, I knew I’d found what I wanted.

  Like being the Good Guy? Like happy faces? Safe driver? Safety Clown needs you.

  One phone call and thirty seconds later, I had an interview appointment for 5:45 the following morning with Jaybo, dispatcher, founder, and managing owner of the Safety Clown Ice Cream Truck Company. “Bring your license,” Jaybo half-shouted at me, voice hoarse as a carnival barker’s, and hung up.

  Replacing the phone, I lifted the red dry-erase marker out of its clip on the message board and made a tentative check next to item #7 on my mom’s list: Find USEFUL summer employment. Help people. Have stories to tell. Make enough to concentrate on school in the fall. Then I sat down on the tiny lanai to watch the evening marine layer of fog roll in off the beach and fill the ravine between our condo complex and the horse racing track down the hill.

  My condo complex. I still couldn’t get used to it.

  My mother had scrawled her final message board list for me in the middle of the night, three hours before I drove her to the hospice to die. That had been a little over a month ago, orphaning me on the eve of my twentieth birthday. She’d left me our one-and-a-half bedroom condo, enough cash to finish my sophomore year at San Diego State without taking any new loans or other job beyond my work-study at the library, and her cactus garden. “No way even you can kill those,” she’d told me, touching her fingers one final time to the tiny prickles in each individual window box. It had taken me less than four weeks to prove her wrong.

  The morning of my interview, I set the alarm for 4:45 but woke a little after three, prickly and unable to sleep any more. After this, the only undone item on her list would be #1: Celebrate your birthday. And it was a little late for that. So. No more mom lists. Nothing left to do for anyone but me. Already, I was certain I’d sell this place, maybe before September. And I’d slowly lose the memory of air-conditioners hissing in all the condos jammed up against ours. I’d forget 4:15 a.m. garbage trucks and dogs snarling through screen doors at the hot-air balloons climbing with the light to lift rich people into the sunrise.

  But I probably wouldn’t forget the summer afternoons playing skateboard tag with the thousand other kid residents in the alleys of our sprawling nowhere of town-home blocks, stealing each other’s wish-pennies out of the fountain by the guard shack, and waiting for 3:30, when the ice cream trucks descended en masse and we engulfed them. Hours after the trucks left, the buzzing tinkle of their music stayed trapped in our ears, like the bubble of pool water you can’t quite shake out.

  Getting this job would be my farewell, not just fulfillment of my mother’s wishes but tribute to her. To my father, too, although what I mostly remembered about him was the smell of the strawberry air-freshener he insisted my mother spray all around to hide his sick smell, even though it didn’t, and the way he’d died, holding his wife’s and his seven-year-old son’s hands in his surprisingly strong ones, croaking, “God. Damn. I can feel myself going down.”

  At breakfast, alone in my condo, I watched the marine layer through the open lanai door, hearing horses nickering as stable-hands led them to the beach. Right on time, I left, pointing my mother’s battered blue Geo down the empty I-5 freeway. I kept the window down, and the fog buffeted my face as though I were piloting a speedboat. Jaybo’s directions pointed me above 10th Street into a motionless neighborhood of empty lots and warehouses. At that hour, even, uphill and inland, mist streamed from the lampposts and chain-link fences. Reaching C Street, I slowed, turned, and began creeping east, looking for a street number or sign. What I saw, mostly, were human-shaped humps curled under newspapers or garbage bags along the fencing. I was about to turn around when I spotted the hand-lettered poster board lashed by its corners to a post at the end of an otherwise deserted block:

  SAFETY CLOWN.

  Next to the letters, someone had drawn a primitive yellow sun, with pathetic first-grade rays pointing in too many directions, so that it looked more like a beetle. I parked, walked along the fence until I located an opening, and stepped through it.

  I got maybe five steps into the lot before I stopped. Strands of fog brushed against my face and hands like a spider web I’d walked through. My shoulders crept up, my hands curled in my pockets, and I stood rooted, listening. Peering to my left, I confronted the dead headlights of five hulking white vans. I looked right and found five more vans facing me in a perfect line. No movement, no lights, no people anywhere.

  I was in a parking lot, after all. Discovering actual vehicles parked there rated fairly low on the discomforting revelations scale. Except for what was sprouting from them.

  Clinging to them?

  I took a step back, realized that put me closer to the vans behind me, and checked them, too. Sure enough, giant cockroach-shaped shadows clung vertically to each sliding passenger door from top to bottom, spindle-legs folded underneath and laced through the handles, tiny heads jutting from between knobby, jointed shoulders. It was the fog—only the fog—that made them twitch, as though preparing to lift into the air like locusts.

  “Hey Jaybo,” a voice called,
surprisingly close behind me, and I turned again. From somewhere among the left-hand vans, a man had emerged. He had red hair, dark coveralls, a grease rag sliding around and between his fingers like a snake he was cradling.

  The barker’s voice I’d heard on the phone yesterday answered him. “Yep?”

  “Think our lucky newbie’s here.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  The guy in the coveralls flipped his grease rag onto his shoulder and stared me up and down. “Kind of short. Too thin, like maybe he needs some ice cream. Good bones. I like him.”

  A door clicked open toward the back of the lot, and another face peered out. This one was narrow, with bulbous green eyes and a mouth that hung a little open even at rest, like an eel’s. “Come on in,” Jaybo said, and retreated into the lighted space.

  Why did I have to be here this early, anyway?

  The manager’s office proved to be a silver Airstream trailer lodged against the wall of a warehouse. Making my way there, I sensed shapes drifting behind windshields, cockroach shadows shivering as the vans rocked and the fog swept over them, and with a flash of disappointment I realized that these had to be the ice cream trucks. I’d been hoping for the milkman-style vehicles that used to service us, with their bright blue stickers of Popsicle Rockets and Igloo Pies pasted unevenly all over the sides like Garbage Pail Kid stickers on a lunchbox. I wondered if these vans even played music.

  Hand extended, I stepped into the trailer. “Good morning, Mr. Jaybo, I’m Max Wa—”

  “Just Jaybo. You’re not that short.”

  Instead of accepting my offered shake, he waved one arm in the air between us. The arm had no hand on the end, or at least no fingers, ending in a bulging ball of red skin. I dropped my own hand awkwardly to my side.

  “Thin, though.” He cocked his head. Up close, his eyes were almost yellow behind his filthy round glasses. Stubby silver hair studded his skull like pins in a cushion. “Think you’re going to love all kinds of things about this job.”

  Except for a small stack of ledger paper and a pen cup full of cheap, chewed-on Bics, Jaybo’s desk had nothing on it. On the wall behind him, he’d tacked a massive map of San Diego County, with snaky pink and blue lines crisscrossing it like veins. Other than the map and a green, steel file cabinet, the trailer’s only adornment was an Al Italia calendar, two years out of date, opened to April and featuring a photograph of a woman with astonishingly long, silky brunette hair and a smooth-fitting stewardess uniform, smiling sweetly. The caption read, Roma? Perfect.

  “You’re Italian?” I asked as Jaybo settled behind the desk and dropped both his hand and his stump across it. There was nowhere for me to sit.

  “If she is,” he said, smiled with his mouth still dangling open, and wiggled the fingers he had at me. “License.”

  I gave mine to him. He noted the details on his ledger. Remembering this was an interview—the whole morning had felt more like sleepwalking—I straightened, smoothing my checked shirt where it disappeared into the waist of my khakis.

  “Like kids, Maxwell?”

  “Always. Last summer I—”

  “Like making people’s days better? Giving them something to look forward to?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re hired. You’ll train today with Randy. Randy!”

  I shuffled in place. “That’s it?”

  Jaybo turned slightly in his chair and winked, either at me or his Al Italia woman. “I know trustworthy people when I meet them. And anyway.” He grinned, thumping his stump on the desktop. “You’re going to love this job.”

  The door of the Airstream burst open, and I turned to find the entry completely blotted out, as though some massive, magic beanstalk had sprouted there in the three minutes I’d been inside. The beanstalk bent forward, and an ordinary head popped under the top of the doorframe.

  “Randy,” said Jaybo. “This is Max. Make him one of us.”

  Randy had neatly cropped brown hair with a few shoots of gray along the temples, slitty brown eyes, and a jaw so long I half-expected him to whinny. Inviting me out by inclining his head, Randy withdrew, revealing the foggy world once more as he stood to his full height.

  He wasn’t that big, out in the air. My head nearly reached his shoulders, which looked square and hard under a tight green camouflage T. So maybe 6’5”? 6’7”? If he stood with his legs together, I thought I could probably get my arms around his calves. Maybe even his knees.

  Wordlessly, he led me around back of the trailer toward the long cement warehouse that formed the property’s northernmost boundary. He whistled quietly but expertly as he did so, with little trills and grace notes. After a few seconds, the tune registered, and I started laughing.

  Randy swung that epic jaw toward me. “Join in. I know you know it.” His voice had an odd, strangled quality, as if his throat were too narrow for the rest of him, like the barrel of a bassoon.

  I did as he’d directed. “She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes.” Maybe the vans played music after all.

  The warehouse door was metal and ribbed and freshly painted white. Still whistling, Randy beat on it with the heel of one huge hand, and it shuddered like a gong.

  “C’mon, Monkey, open up, we got joy to spread.” The jaw swung my way again like the boom of a sailboat. “Randy, by the way.”

  “I’m Max.”

  “IMAX. Big Screen.”

  I had no idea whether that was a non sequitur or a nickname, but it made me laugh again. Randy pummeled the door some more, and it jerked and lifted off the ground on its chain. Freezing air spilled over our feet.

  “Freezer,” I announced, instantly felt stupid, and so employed Mom’s Law of Idiotic Comments: go one stupider. “For the ice cream.”

  “Big Screen,” Randy said, and thumped me on the shoulder.

  Inside, I found myself facing a desk made from a slab of wood and twenty or so stacked milk crates. This desk was as empty as Jaybo’s except for a sleek black ThinkPad folded open. Behind the desk on a swivel chair sat the grease-rag guy who’d greeted me, wearing gloves now. Beyond him, ceiling-high stacks of cardboard boxes with clear stretch-plastic tops fell away in rows to the back of the warehouse and out to both side walls.

  “How many, Randy-man?” said the guy at the desk. His rag lolled from the pocket of his work-shirt like a friendly, panting tongue.

  “Feeling good today, Monkey. Thinking Big Screen here’s going to bring me luck. Let’s go twenty and twenty.”

  Monkey shook his head and tapped the tab key on his keyboard. “Going to put us all to shame. You’re learning from the best, kid. All-time champ.”

  Resuming his whistling, Randy marched past the desk, tousling Monkey’s hair. At the first stack, Randy hunched, got his arms around the bottom box, and held there like a weightlifter preparing for a clean-and-jerk. Then he just stood up, no effort at all, and the boxes came off the ground and towered in his arms.

  “Goddamn, Randy,” said a new voice from the entry, and I turned to find three new people lined up by Monkey’s desk. The speaker had to be over seventy, long and thinner than I was in his gray denim jacket and red Urban Outfitters cap. Next to him stood a Chinese kid about my age, and behind them a yellow-haired forty-something woman in sneakers and a sundress.

  “Morning, slow pokes,” Randy said, pointing toward another stack with his foot. “Big Screen, grab me another five, would you, and bring them out front?”

  “Must eat half of it himself,” the old guy muttered.

  “He doesn’t touch ice cream and you know it,” said the woman in the sundress, and Randy nudged her affectionately with his elbow as he strode past.

  Under cover of the patter, I approached the nearest stack of boxes, slid my arms around the top five, and gasped. They were freezing. As soon as I lifted them, the crooks of my elbows began to ache, and my fingers cramped. But at least they were lighter than I was expecting. I gazed through the clear plastic of the topmost box. There
they were, in their garish orange and Kool Aid-red wrappers. We’ll be bringing Popsicle Rockets when we come….

  “Hey, Randy,” Monkey called as the big man reached the door. When Randy turned, Monkey tossed him a long white envelope, overstuffed and rubber-banded twice around. Without any sort of hitch or arm adjustment, Randy stretched out his fingers and snatched the envelope out of the air, pressing it against his tower of boxes. “Might want to count that.”

  The sound Randy made came as close to pshaw as anything I’ve heard an actual human attempt. He strode into the fog, and I hurried after him.

  “See, Big Screen,” he said without turning around, “we’re all independent contractors. Great system. You pay for your product up front, in full, so the trick is buying only what you’re going to sell. Jaybo gets thirty percent, Monkey gets five for keeping your van running smooth, and that’s it. Rest is yours, in cash, free and clear.”

  Even after he mentioned the vans, I somehow forgot about the cockroach things until we were halfway to the front of the lot. The cold and the weight from the boxes seemed to have latched onto my ribs like pincers. When I remembered and looked up, the figures were where I’d left them, just hanging against the van doors the way spiders do when you stare at them.

  Randy went right on talking. “But see, the best thing about Sunshine Safety Clown, Jaybo’s got the routes laid out for you. Long a route as you want, street by street, stop by stop. These are guaranteed sales, man. Guaranteed. You saw Jaybo’s map?”

  “And his girl,” I murmured, boxes starting to slip, eyes still flitting between vans.

  “What girl?” Randy lowered into a squat and settled his boxes on the asphalt next to the front-most right-hand van.

  “Guess we have different priorities.” I lowered my own boxes a little too fast. The bottom one thumped.

  “Careful, Big Screen. You bought those, you know. Alright, I’ll open her up and let’s feed her.”

  Did I imagine him pausing for just a moment as he approached the van’s side? His fingers drummed the thighs of his jeans, and his whistling ceased. Then he jammed his hand between those giant, spindly legs, twisted sideways as though tearing out a heart, and ripped open the van door.