Before You Go (2 page)

Jude turned his back to the tower and walked toward the boardwalk like everybody else in sight—it was either that or step into traffic—then turned right to wind his way to operation headquarters where he’d been told to check in. The building wasn’t much, a trailer on steroids obscured by a scraggle of bushes, tucked behind the men’s bathroom. Jude noted that it offered showers and lockers, definitely useful if he ever wanted to run to work some morning.

He hesitated in the open doorway, looking in at a thin, middle-aged man dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark tie seated behind a gray metal desk. The man, obviously a boss-type individual, had sinewy arms covered in thick curly hair, like some kind of tree-climbing forest creature. His jaw muscles worked on a stick of gum. A nameplate on the desk read
KEATING
. No dummy, Jude took that for the guy’s name. Keating spoke into his phone in fits and spurts, listening impatiently before barking out directives such as, for example, “We’ve got to get those freezers fixed, or we’ll have fifteen goddamned hundred pounds of melted chopped beef on our hands!” If he noticed Jude’s presence, Keating didn’t bother to glance up. Even after snapping shut the phone, Keating continued to ignore Jude, concentrating instead on working his gum while tapping a pencil against the side of his head.

Tap, tap, tap. Anybody home?

Jude recognized Keating’s performance for what it was, a random, unnecessary, and totally unimpressive display of power. So Jude said, “Yeah, hi, excuse me, I was—”

Keating raised a hand for silence. “Grab some bench, son. The car’ll be back in a few minutes. Where you going?”

“Going?” Jude asked. “I just got here.”

Keating raised his chin to give Jude a long look. The career food-service manager was lean and square-jawed, a wiry man, a runner no doubt, and he chomped on gum as if it had hurt his feelings. One of those marathoner guys Jude saw everywhere filling the roadways in his neighborhood, galloping down the street as if they were chasing immortality. His own father was one of them.

“This your first day?” Keating asked.

“Yeah,
yes
,” Jude said, pulling some rumpled papers from his back pocket. “They told me to—”

“And you are?…”

That stumped Jude for a second. He wavered, befuddled. Jude’s mind didn’t at first recognize it as a question, so he stood like a lowland gorilla, waiting for Keating to finish the sentence, tell Jude what he was, exactly, before finally answering, “Fox, Jude Fox.”

“You sure about that, son? You need more time to think about it?” Keating cracked. He reached for Jude’s papers as if they’d been soaked in poison. Unsmiling, he poured coffee down his throat and unsmiled some more.

Things were going just swell.

Jude shifted on his feet, glancing around at the grim, cluttered office. It truly was nothing more than a transformed trailer. Jude hated this whole scene already with a passion he usually reserved for chemistry teachers, party clowns, and the Grammys. Worst of all, Jude was pretty sure he wasn’t getting paid yet. So all this pleasant chitchat came absolutely free.

Keating’s phone chimed the opening riff to some Billy Joel tune—“We Didn’t Start the Fire”—and the man paused before answering. He jerked a thumb, gesturing outside. “Like I said. Find some pine, sit on it, and we’ll get to you.” Keating didn’t need to call Jude a dumb-ass; it was implicit.

Jude took a couple of steps back, more than happy to get away from the runty marathoner and his Napoleon complex. Outside, there wasn’t a chair in sight; confused, Jude looked back at Keating.

“Around the corner,” Keating said. Then he grumbled into the phone, “It’s a parade of lost lambs around here, yeah, yeah,”—he laughed like a toothy hyena at some joke—“everybody’s looking for new talent. Right now all’s I got is a couple of guys with that deer in the headlights look. I’ll send you what I got.”

TWO

There was another kid waiting on the far end of the bench. He was fattish, and splotches of sweat already darkened his orange T-shirt. The boy sat with his shoulders against the trailer office, arms folded across his chest, legs stretched out, ankles crossed, wearing red sneakers with bright green laces. His expression said that he wasn’t thrilled to be here and didn’t care who knew it.

“Hey,” Jude said almost inaudibly.

The boy stirred, uncrossed his ankles. “Sucks, doesn’t it?” he grumbled. “Sitting here, hot as hell.”

Jude squinted at the climbing sun. He shrugged. “I hear when it rains, they tell you not to come in to work. We only make money when the weather’s good.”

“Got that right,” the boy said. He reached out a hand. “My name is Roberto and I’m a workaholic.”

“I try to lay off the workahol myself,” Jude said. “That stuff’ll mess with your mind.”

Roberto laughed. “Workahol, that’s funny.”

Jude smiled, asked, “This your first day?”

“First day, second year,” Roberto answered. “I reenlisted. I still can’t believe I took this job again—even my grandmother laughs at me. You know what that feels like? When even your mawmaw thinks you’re a joke? Damn. Everybody knows I hate the beach. The sun, the crowds, the seagulls. Sand everywhere. You never get it out of your hair,
ever.
Growing up, it was the last place I wanted to be. Now I work here. God’s big joke and I’m the punchline.”

Jude gestured to the trailer. “I guess you know Mr. Sunshine.”

“Keating?” Roberto said. “Don’t worry, you won’t see much of him. Did he tell you what field you’re working?”

“No,” Jude said. “He told me to sit on the bench.”

Roberto explained that there were different concession buildings up and down the beach: Field Six, Central Mall, the Bathhouse, Field Two, Zack’s Bay, a few others. He quickly ran through the pros and cons of each one. “Field Six is dead, so that can be good
and
bad. You don’t have to work hard, but it’s boring as hell. Mostly moms with dark tans, fake boobs, and little kids. Plus, some old people who never bother to walk down to the water. They set up folding chairs right on the edge of the parking lot and bake in the sun like raisins. They never eat anything, just wander in looking for napkins and free ice,” he said. “Central Mall, right here, is a mob scene, busy all the time, and it’s right next to headquarters, so the white shirts like Keating are in and out all day for surprise inspections.”

“‘Surprise inspections,’ what’s that?”

“It’s when the big shots show up unannounced. They love to strut around like peacocks, you know, feathers in their butts, point out ridiculous crap nobody cares about, ketchup containers almost empty, the heat’s too high on the grill, too many boxes lying around, what the F ever—it’s their big chance to boss around a bunch of teenagers, basically. Chat up some of the pretty girls.”

Jude nodded. He enjoyed listening to Roberto almost as much as Roberto liked talking.

“And just pray you don’t get stuck at Zack’s Bay,” Roberto said emphatically. “That place is like another planet, believe me.”

“So where
do
I want to work?” Jude asked.

Roberto held up crossed fingers. “West End Two,” he said. “It’s way out there, almost at Long Beach, not far from where they shot the tollbooth scene in
The Godfather.
Remember that, when Sonny got shot, like, fifteen million times?”

Jude remembered. You spend any time on Long Island, somebody’s bound to point out those tollbooths where Sonny got shot.

Roberto continued, “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from here, so if one of the bosses decides to pull a surprise inspection, we’ll get a call from our spies before he’s even in the car. But the best thing about West End Two? I hear that Kenny ‘Half-Baked’ Mays is back as closing manager—working for that guy’s a trip and a half.”

A few minutes later, they were on their way. A different supervisor had picked them up—Jude guessed it was his job to taxi around different workers to the far-flung concession stands. This guy was thick and fiftyish. He wore tinted, wire-rimmed glasses, a ten-gallon hat, and told the boys he was new to the area, originally from Houston, Texas. He had that avuncular Southern thing going full blast, so he blabbed the whole ride over. “Call me Ed,” he instructed the boys, “Big Ed, Eddie, I don’t give a rat’s patootie.” He looked into the rearview mirror at Jude. “You met Mr. Keating this morning, huh?”

Jude nodded cautiously.

“So what’d you think?” Big Ed inquired.

Jude knew a trap when he fell into one. “We didn’t really get a chance to, um—”

Big Ed laughed, a hearty whoop. “You know what we say about guys like him back where I’m from? He’s all hat and no cattle.”

Roberto laughed out loud, smiling and bobbing his head at Jude. “I like that, Big Ed. All hat and no cattle.”

“Texas is a great place for expressions, lots of colorful people back there,” Big Ed mused.

“So how’d you end up here?” Jude asked.

“That’s the $64,000 question, ain’t it?” Big Ed replied. He looked out the driver’s side window, clicked his wedding ring on the steering wheel, and his wondering eyes scanned the dunes and the ocean beyond it, as if looking for something that wasn’t there. “I guess it was time to go, simple as that. Besides, I’m near retirement. Time for a new beginning.”

It was a nice ride. Big Ed was a good guy, laid-back and quick to laugh. He talked to Jude and Roberto as if they were equals. Big Ed was a boss and they knew it; he didn’t need to club ’em over their heads with it. Best of all, Big Ed dropped them off at West End Two. “Work hard, boys,” he called after them in a Texas lilt, “from can till can’t. You ever need a lift, give Big Ed a shout.”

THREE

Roberto led the way through the back door, which opened from the parking lot into a gray room about the size of a train car, cluttered with shelves, metal tables, and boxed goods of every size. No one seemed to be around.

Acting as tour guide, Roberto pointed to various doors and explained that they opened to closet-size storage rooms, a large walk-in refrigerator (with kegs of beer), a freezer, and the manager’s office. Though the door was partially open, Roberto knocked on it and waited.

The manager’s name was Denzel Jessup—no lie. He recognized Roberto from the previous summer, when Roberto spent a week filling in over at Field Six. Jessup had the look of a thoroughbred: tall, taut, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned. As manager, he earned the right to wear a white button-down shirt and a cheap black tie. Somehow on Jessup it looked almost sharp. He stood tall, acting neither friendly nor unfriendly; kept it neutral, all business. It took Jessup about a minute and a half to casually let drop that he was an upperclassman at an Ivy League school, that he was too smart for this shit, and that if everybody did their jobs, it would all go fine and he wouldn’t have to crawl into anybody’s ass.

Jude would spend the rest of the summer trying to purge that disgusting image from his mind.

Jessup grabbed a clipboard and filled out time cards for the new employees. He exhaled heavily, obviously bored, and intoned, “I’ll say this once, so listen up. This is your time card. It’s how you get paid. Unless you are doing this job for free out of your deep love for fast food, mouse crap, and cooking grease, you will need to keep track of your hours.” He put a hand on a clunky, square clock mounted to the wall. “This is the time clock. Are you following me so far?”

“Time card, mouse crap. Got it,” Jude said.

Jessup titled his head to look at Jude, as if he wasn’t sure he liked what he heard. His eyes flickered with cool assessment. “Do not check in before your assigned starting time,” Jessup continued. “Not if you arrive five minutes early, not if you arrive two minutes early. If your shift starts at ten, that’s when you punch in. Got it?”

Jude nodded. It wasn’t hard to get.

The building itself was basically a large square box, divided by a long, chest-high counter that ran across its length. On the far side of the counter, there was an open area for the public to mill around, search through squat freezer cases for ice cream, line up for hot food. There were also a few wire display containers with bags of chips, Doritos, Cracker Jacks, that kind of stuff. Beyond that there was a row of five cashier booths, where customers paid good money for bad food.

The walls at the front of the high-roofed building were made completely of glass, offering an open view of the big sky, the beach, and the Atlantic at least two hundred yards beyond. West End was a huge beach; it was a long, hot trek to the water. A few people sat at round, yellow picnic tables, shaded by green umbrellas. Mostly indolent girls in bikinis, sipping on straws, watching their napkins blow away in the breeze.

Things were slow, Jessup explained, since it was only a little after ten o’clock, but it would pick up soon. A skeleton crew of six worked on the business side of the counter. During peak hours, as many as twelve orange-shirted laborers crammed behind it. There was a long grill for burgers and hot dogs, a pizza oven, one of those glass warming boxes for soft pretzels, a couple of deep fryers for popcorn chicken, French fries, and onion rings. There was a place to serve soda and beer. Jessup paused there. “In New York State, you must be twenty-one to serve alcohol. You must be twenty-one to drink it.” He looked directly at Jude. “If I catch you stealing so much as a sip of beer while I’m on duty, you’re gone. I will fire your ass, and I will not blink twice. Got it?”

“Yep.” Jude nodded. But even so, it was pretty cool to have cold beer right there, free-flowing from those silver taps. Jude liked beer, more or less, but didn’t love it, though it wasn’t something he admitted out loud. Jude guessed a lot of guys felt the same way—all standing around, phony as Monopoly money, taking their first sips of beer, faking it. And though he’d been around it enough, Jude usually passed on the opportunity to get plastered and throw up on himself. He figured it might be in his blood, that one day he’d get all slurry and puke-faced, but he wasn’t in a hurry to get there. Jude didn’t like the idea of losing control, bumping into things, falling down face-first. He thought of his mother. She hadn’t taken a drink in six years. But he still remembered when she did. Mom and her cocktails. She didn’t drink for fun back then—it wasn’t about good times for dear old Mom—and it never ended pretty.