American Morons Read online

  He came back fast, whistling, and hoisted the top five boxes off his stack.

  “Randy, what is that?”

  “What?” he said.

  “On the side of the van.”

  “He’s…a friend. Load up, and I’ll show you.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, we arranged ice cream cases in the freezer bins that lined the inside walls of the back of the van. Around us, meanwhile, activity increased throughout the lot as more doors slid open and more ice cream disappeared into bins. Randy worked quickly. When we’d finished, he banged the bin lids shut and hopped out fast and started around front.

  “Close that door, will you?” he called over his shoulder.

  If there’d been a way up front from where I was, I’d have used the inside handle. But the back of the van had been sealed off, probably to help maintain coolness, and so I had no choice but to hop down and face the bug thing.

  Up close, it looked wooden. The fog had left a wet residue on its slats, and I could see splotches of colored paint all up and down them. I remembered my mom taking me to the natural history museum in Balboa Park once to see newborn moths dangling from their burst cocoons, wings drying.

  Randy stuck his head out the passenger window. “Hurry up. Don’t let the heat in.”

  With a grunt I didn’t realize was coming, I reached into the nest of slats, grasped the metal handle at their center, and yanked. The door leapt onto its runners and closed with a click.

  “Okay. Back up,” Randy said. “Farther.”

  I could see him at the wheel, hand poised over the control panel. “Say hello,” he said, and pulled down hard.

  For a second, the bug thing quivered on the pegs holding it to the van. Then it unfolded. First a leg, human-shaped, popped free of the nest and dropped earthward as though feeling for the ground. As soon as that one was fully extended, another fell. The legs had purple striping, as did the arms, which clicked open, pointing sideways. Finally, the head sprang up, tiny black eyes staring at me above a deflated balloon nose, wide red happy mouth.

  Thinking that was it, I peeled myself off the neighboring van where I’d been watching. Then the whole clown pivoted on its pegs and swung perpendicular to Randy’s door. Its puffy marshmallow of a right hand pointed its little red STOP sign right at my heart.

  I stepped around it to the passenger-side window. “That’s for cars, right? So kids can cross the street?”

  Randy nodded.

  I grinned. “It’d work on me.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Jaybo made those?”

  Randy shook his head. “Loubob.” When he saw my expression, he cocked his head in surprise. “You know Loubob?”

  Memory poured through me, of my father with his determined, trembling hands on the steering wheel as he drove us to Loubobland the night before Halloween, two months before he died. The last time I’d been in a car with him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been there. The muffler men.”

  “The muffler men,” said Randy, and nodded. “Hop up.”

  I did, remembering that long, silent drive east into the farmlands of Fallbrook, the sun pumping redness over the horizon as it sank behind us. I couldn’t recall a single thing my father and I had said to each other. But I could still see Loubob’s junkyard. He’d been a carnival skywheel technician, the story went, then a funhouse specialist, then a circus-truck mechanic before retiring to sell off a career’s worth of accumulated spare parts and create annual Halloween displays out of rusted mufflers and scrap metal and hand-built motors. His muffler men wrapped themselves around eucalyptus tree trunks as though trying to shinny up them, shambled from behind junk piles like prowling silver skeletons, dangled from overhead branches to bump shoulders with shrieking guests. My father had loved it.

  When I’d buckled myself in, Randy released the lever on the control panel, and the Safety Clown clattered back into place against the side of the van. Randy blasted the horn. An answering blast followed almost immediately from deep in the lot. Over the next sixty seconds or so, blasts erupted from all the vehicles around us. But no one honked more than once, and when I’d come back to myself enough to glance at Randy, I found him counting silently.

  Eight. Nine.

  Before the tenth horn blast had died to echo, he punched the gear shift into drive and moved us out of the lot. My eyes flicked to the side mirror, where I saw the clown shuddering as the wind rushed over it, and beyond that, the rest of the vans falling into line in rhythmic succession.

  “You always leave all together?”

  Randy shrugged. “Tradition. Team-building, you know?”

  “Then shouldn’t I have met the rest of the team?”

  “They won’t be selling your ice cream.”

  We were headed, I realized, for the port, and for the first time, the absurd hour made a sort of sense. The workers down here had been on all night, probably shifting huge crates inside cargo containers that trapped heat like ovens.

  “So what are yours?” Randy said as we crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, angling between grunting eighteen-wheelers as we approached the docks. Between trucks and stacked crates and gantry cranes, I caught glimpses of big ships hulking in the fog, their steel siding so much more solid, somehow, than the glass-and-concrete structures perched on the land behind us.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you guessed we have different priorities. I’m not sure I liked that. I want to know what yours are.”

  Startled, I turned toward his enormous frame—a superfreighter to my weekend eight-footer—and decided on caution.

  “Just…spread a little happiness,” I said. “Get some myself. Make buttloads of money so I don’t have to eat Top Ramen and bologna at the end of next semester. Maybe get laid for the first time since high school.”

  “See?” He sounded almost defensive as he let the van glide to a stop in front of two forklifts and some more heavy machinery I had no name for. “Happiness and money. Don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I haven’t had my share of either, yet.”

  Reaching under his seat with both hands, he pulled up the first assault rifle I had ever sat beside. It was flat black and spindly except for the chamber, or whatever it was called, that ballooned off the back of the trigger area. The barrel pointed straight at me. Randy did something that made the whole thing click, swung the stock to his shoulder and sighted down into the dash, then returned the rifle to its hiding place.

  “Is that an Uzi?” I whispered.

  “Not a Corps man, huh, Big Screen?”

  “You were?”

  “Six severely fucked-up years. Wait here. I’ll introduce you properly from your own van tomorrow.”

  He opened his door and hopped down, assuming point position in the phalanx of van drivers that immediately formed around him. My eyes kept wandering from the phalanx to the shadows under Randy’s seat to the Safety Clown crouching in the corner of the side mirror, right above the Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear warning. My father’s ghost kept floating up in front of me, too, so it didn’t occur to me that we hadn’t reopened the back of the van or dug into any freezer bins until Randy returned, dropping a small, square cardboard box onto my lap.

  “Count those, okay?” This time, he didn’t even wait for his colleagues to reach their vehicles, and he didn’t wave as we u-turned and blew by them. Seconds later, we were speeding north on the freeway.

  I pried the duct tape off the top of the box. “Seemed like you trusted Jaybo,” I said.

  “These guys aren’t Jaybo.”

  The box lid fell open, and I lifted out the topmost plastic baggie, zipped tight, packed with white powder that shifted when I pressed like confectioner’s sugar. I knew what it was, though I’d never done any. Dazed, I started counting bags, got most of the way through, and looked up.

  “How many?” Randy said. I could feel his eyes on me in the mirror.

  Don’t react, I thought. Don’t react, don’t re
act, “This is fucking cocaine!”

  Randy grinned. “Appreciate the appraisal. But I need a count, there, Bubba.”

  My brain scrambled back to the pier. I’d barely paid attention. I didn’t even remember seeing anybody but Safety Clown drivers.

  “Thirty-seven,” I said dully.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Positive?”

  I nodded.

  “Guess you’re not going to find out what kind of rifle this is yet.” The note of open disappointment in his voice drew my gaze, and my gaze made him laugh. “Got ya.”

  The next three hours passed in a blur. The marine layer had burned away, leaving a bottomless blue emptiness overhead. We stopped at two law offices and one dental practice in Sorrento Valley. By the time we reached the dentist’s, I’d started getting nauseous and rolled my window down, which is how I got to hear the receptionist with the white, winking hair yell, “Hey, Doc. Here comes the cavalry” through the open office door.

  Our next stop was Ripped Racquet and Health Gym, where a pony-tailed Tai Chi instructor halted the class he was conducting on the circle of grass fronting the building to stop Randy. “Hey, guy, do the clown.”

  “You’re doing him just fine,” Randy answered, then gave the instructor what looked like a brotherly chuck on the shoulder of his robe as he breezed past. He was inside almost half an hour, and when he returned, he waved at me to pass him the cardboard box from the floor. He fished out three more baggies, tucking them carefully into the waistband of his jeans. “Walk-up biz,” he said happily, and trotted back indoors.

  From there, we cut over to the 101 and up the coast, stopping at Del Mar Plaza and the Quesadilla Shack five minutes from my condo door, where I laid myself flat on the front seat and told Randy I was known in this place. The real reason for my hiding had more to do with the number of dinners I’d eaten with my mom on the red picnic tables in the sand outside the Shack, versus the purpose of my current visit.

  Randy gave me a long look, and the fear I should have been feeling all along finally prickled down my scalp. But all he did was pat my head. “You should eat, Big Screen. I get so caught up doing this, I forget half the time. Doesn’t mean you should. Want a carne asada?”

  Just the thought made me gag. He came back ten minutes later with a Coke for me and nothing at all for himself.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ready for the good stuff?”

  I leaned my head against the window and kept my eyes closed, and we drove a long time. When I finally opened my eyes again, we were juddering over a dirt road just a bit narrower than the van, crushing birds-of-paradise stalks on either side as we rumbled forward. Still nauseous, increasingly nervous, I scanned the fields and saw red and orange and blue flowers nodding like peasants at a passing lord, but no buildings anywhere. I thought of the poppy fields of Oz, the witch’s voice and her green hand caressing her crystal ball. Randy downshifted, and I sat up straight as the van coasted to a stop.

  No one on this planet knew where I’d gone today. Certainly, no one other than the Safety Clown people had seen me arrive downtown. Training, Jaybo had called it. What if it was more of a test? And I had not accompanied Randy on a single sale.

  “Get out,” he said quietly, and popped the locks on both our doors.

  I did, considering bolting straight into the flowers. But I had little chance of outdistancing my companion. I watched him remove his not-Uzi from under his seat and step down and swing his door shut.

  “Listen,” I said. He was already halfway around the front of the van, using his gun machete-style to chop flowers out of his path. I’d meant to start pleading, but wound up standing still instead, gobbling up each tick of insect wing, every whisper of wind in the petals. I swear I could hear the sunlight falling.

  Arriving beside me, Randy stared into the distance, dangling the rifle by the trigger-guard. For a few seconds, we stood. Above us, the blue yawned wider.

  “So what do you think, Big Screen?” he said. “Just you and me?” In one motion, he swept the rifle butt to his shoulder and fired five quick bursts into the sky, which swallowed them. Then he grinned. “Better get that door open.”

  Before I’d even unlocked my knees and gulped new air into my lungs, people sprang from the flowers like rousted pheasants in a whirl of dark skin and tattered straw hats and threadbare work shirts open to the waist. Several of them chirped enthusiastic greetings at Randy in Spanish as I stumbled back against the van. He chirped right back.

  “Hurry up, Big Screen,” he barked, and I reached a trembling hand between clown slats and grabbed the handle and twisted. I was grateful I hadn’t drunk any of the Coke from the Quesadilla Shack. If I’d had any liquid in me, I would just have pissed it all over my legs.

  As soon as the door was open, Randy jumped in and threw back the nearest freezer lid. The field hands nuzzled closer to us like pups vying for suckling spots, though they avoided so much as nudging me. One, a boy of maybe twelve, met my eyes for a moment and murmured, “Buenos dias.” Several others nodded as they edged past. I climbed up next to Randy.

  “De nada, Hector,” he was saying, handing a chocolate nut Drumstick to the nearest worker, whose spiky streak of dirt-gray goatee looked embedded in his skin like a vein of ore in rock. Hector handed Randy a dime and retreated to the back of the group, peeling eagerly at the paper wrapping.

  Distribution to the whole group took less than five minutes, but Randy lingered another twenty, dangling his legs out the cabin door, talking only occasionally, smiling a lot. The workers clumped in groups of two or three, leaning on hoes and wolfing down Igloo Pies while gazing over the fields. Their dwellings, I realized, might well be hidden out here somewhere, along with any other family members who’d somehow made it this far and managed to find them. None of them spoke to me again, but every single one tipped his sombrero to Randy before melting away into the fields they tended. They left neither trash nor trace.

  “This stuff sold for a dollar when I was ten,” I said. “And that was ten years ago.” My voice sounded strained, shaky. Randy’s rifle lay seemingly forgotten between freezer bins in the van behind us. I almost made a lunge for it. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure what I’d do afterward.

  “Cost me a buck-twenty per,” Randy said. “But see, I figure I can afford it. Starting tomorrow, you can make your own decisions. Beauty of being a Safety Clown, dude. Ain’t no one going to know or care but you.”

  Clambering inside, he collected his rifle, hunched to avoid banging his head, and began swatting freezer lids shut. He didn’t seem thoughtful enough to be deciding whether to mow me down.

  “Why not just give it to them?” I asked. “The ice cream, I mean.”

  Randy cocked his head. The gun remained tucked under one arm against his chest. “You like insulting people, Big Screen?”

  I gaped at him.

  “Didn’t think so. Remember, they don’t know what it costs me.” He left me to slide the door shut again, and we rumbled out of the fields and returned to the coast.

  Another two hours passed. We stopped at an antique shop and some accounting firms, a bowling alley and a retirement home. At the latter, I finally emerged from the van. Partially, I did so because I thought I’d better. Partially, I wanted to get away from the Freon I’d been breathing virtually nonstop for the past eight hours, and which by now had given me a sledgehammer headache. But also, I’d gotten curious. The experience in the flower fields had shaken something loose in me, and I could feel it rattling around as I stepped into the midday heat.

  Randy had already been inside fifteen minutes. I wondered if he’d received the same joyful, personal greeting there that he had everywhere else we’d gone. Edging forward, I reached the sidewalk fronting the main entrance, where my progress was blocked by a bald, pink-skinned marvel of a man whose curvature of the spine kept his head roughly level with my navel. jabbing the legs of his metal walker into the ground like climbing pit
ons, the man dragged himself toward the brightly lettered sign at the edge of the parking lot that read BEACH ACCESS. Below the words on the sign was the silhouette of a long-haired bathing beauty laid out flat with her breasts poking straight up in the air. The man didn’t acknowledge me as he inched past, but he did remove the cherry lollipop from his mouth, and left it hovering in front of his lips like the dot at the bottom of a kicked-over question mark. I thought about lifting him, ferrying him gently to the sand.

  Only then did it occur to me that the man might well have hauled himself out here for Randy. Help people, my mother had commanded, since the day I first started working. But help them what? Which jobs, exactly, qualified, and who got to say?

  By the time Randy returned, I’d stumbled back to my seat, more confused than scared for the moment, and the question-mark man was well on his way to the bathing beauties.

  “Two-thirty yet?” Randy asked, though he was the one with the watch. He checked it. “Right on.”

  Leaving the coast, he drove us across the freeway, over El Camino Real and into the maze of white and salmon-pink condo communities and housing developments that had all but enclosed the eastern rim of North and San Diego Counties during the course of my lifetime. Any one of them could have been mine. Blood beat against my temples and massed behind my forehead. I closed my eyes, caught an imaginary glimpse of my mother bent over her potted plants at the nursery where she’d worked, better paid and sunscreened than the workers in the flower fields but nearly as invisible, and opened my eyes again to find Randy’s hand hurtling toward my chest.

  I twisted aside, but he didn’t seem to notice, just grabbed the knob on the dash that I’d assumed was a glove box handle. Now I realized there was no glove box. Randy twisted the knob to the right.

  At first, nothing happened. Then the air shattered into winking, tinkling shards of sound. My hands rose uselessly to my ears, then dropped again. The van slowed, stopped on the curve of a cul-de-sac, and Randy shouldered his door open, nearly banging his head on the ceiling as he jumped out and rubbed his hands together.