Donut Days (10 page)

“He made Anita’s job at Happy’s quite challenging,” Bear explained, looking down at the top of Anita’s head.

“Challenging how?” I asked.

“I’d send an order back to the kitchen and he wouldn’t cook it,” Anita said. “I’d have tables that waited over an hour just for omelets and toast. Wasn’t nothing I could do about it when they thought it was my fault. I’d try explaining, but what could I say? They wound up not tipping me and my paychecks got a lot thinner. I told the manager about it, but you know what his response was?”

I swallowed. “What?”

“Said I should just sleep with Gus, get it over with, and then get back to my job.”

Bear smiled sadly, in a way that puffed out his stubbly cheeks.

“Jeez, Anita,” I started. It was all I could think of to say.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” she said, her pencil-thin lips pale. “I was just telling you so you knew why we didn’t go to any sit-down restaurants on our ride.”

Bear gave Anita’s shoulder a pat and looked at me. “Meet back here at eleven-thirty?” he asked, changing the subject.

I nodded. “Sure thing. Eleven-thirty.”

“See you then,” said Anita in her gravelly voice, and crushed the end of her cigarette into the grass with the heel of her black leather boot.

Poor Anita,
I thought as I picked my way through camp toward the GaSmart. As bad as things were at Living Word Redeemer, thank God I wasn’t being asked to
sleep
with someone just to make the issues go away. Was this common among waitresses? I wondered. And, if so, did the fact that I had no clue about it mean that I was completely sheltered, or simply that I didn’t know very many waitresses?

I tried to keep my thoughts focused on Anita as I made my way through the camp, yet, as much as I tried not to, I also thought about Jake as I walked. Suddenly hot Jake. Son of the man who was trying to ruin my parents’ lives Jake.

Logically, I knew I shouldn’t feel anything except contempt for an O’Connor, since they say the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to trust Jake. He seemed like a very atypical O’Connor anyway, like he’d fallen very, very far from whatever tree that family grew from. I imagined an O’Connor family tree and pictured the twisted, bloody tree in the Johnny Depp
Sleepy Hollow
movie—the one with all the severed heads in it.

As I approached the GaSmart, I saw there was a line for the women’s bathroom. Of course. There were even more people at the camp this morning, and the GaSmart was one of the only decent places to pee. There were Porta Potties along the perimeter of the donut camp, but they didn’t have running water and, well, they were Porta Potties.

The line stretched out the front door and snaked along the side of the building. If I was going to have to wait this long, I figured I could at least use the time to do some more interviews. It couldn’t hurt, after all. I stepped in line behind two college-age girls who were sharing iPod headphones. They looked like they were in the middle of making a playlist. I dug out my notebook and pen and took a deep breath. “Excuse me,” I said, tapping one of them, a blond with black-rimmed glasses, on the shoulder. She looked up from the iPod and took the earpiece out of her ear.

“Yeah?”

“Um, excuse me, I was wondering if I could ask you two some questions. For a story I’m doing? It’s on the campout.”

The other girl, who had brown hair and was wearing a T-shirt showing two unicorns humping, nodded. “Okay. Sure.”

“Can I get your names, please?”

“I’m Jana,” said the blond. “This is Heidi.”

“Are you guys from around here?”

“We go to Carleton College,” Heidi said. “It’s about, what, an hour south?”

Jana nodded. “We’re sophomores.”

“Can you tell me a little bit about why you’re here today?”

“It was our R.A.’s idea,” Heidi said. “He thought it would help us bond. The school year just started and he was trying to get everyone on our floor to gel, and he was like, ‘Let’s go eat some donuts.’” She spoke so quickly, I had to concentrate on the movement of her lips to make sure I was getting all of what she was saying.

“Yeah,” interjected Jana. “You don’t need much more incentive than that for college kids. Free food rocks!”

They laughed and I scribbled furiously. Then I looked up. “Sorry, this might be a dumb question, but—your R.A. is a guy?”

Jana nodded. “Chris Thompson. He’s here too, somewhere. I think he’s from Edina or something.”

The information was having a hard time penetrating my thick skull. “But how can
he
be your R.A.?”

“Oh,” said Heidi like she suddenly understood. “The dorms at Carleton are coed. The rooms are same-sex, but the floors and dorms are most definitely coed.”

“Yeah,” said Jana. “And lots of the bathrooms are coed too. Most definitely.” They exchanged glances and smiled again.

Were coed dorms and bathrooms one of the things my dad was worried about when it came to my college education? Did he want to ship me off to a Christian college because he was worried I’d turn into a heathen at a place like Carleton?

“Do you guys like it there?” I asked.

“It’s awesome,” said Jana. “Everyone is seriously cool. In the winter you can take trays from the cafeteria and use them to go sledding. And anybody can have a show on KRLX. That’s the college radio station.”

“We have a show called Pahoehoe Lava,” said Heidi.

“Come again?”

“Pahoehoe Lava. We’re geology majors.”

I guess I didn’t need to ask them how old they thought the earth was.

“I’m sorry,” said a woman ahead of us, whose butt was as wide as a GaSmart aisle. “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. My daughter was a geology major too. She went to Saint Olaf, though, and it’s been a few years now since she graduated.”

“That’s the college right across the river from us,” explained Heidi.

“Can I get your name?” I interjected.

“Connie Belford. I live in Orono.”

“Can you tell me why you’re at the Crispy Dream camp?”

Connie smiled. Her face was pudgy and dimpled. “If we make it to the opening, we break the record. It’s thirteen days now. We’ve checked in with a donager every single day we’ve been here and they’ve got us down for all our time. On opening, we’ll have been here
fourteen days
.”

Connie was one of the people trying to break the record! Sweet.

“Fourteen days?” asked Heidi.

“Some Crispy Dreams give out big prizes if you break the camping record,” I said.

Connie nodded. “This year, they say they’re going to give the winner an RV. Right now it’s between my husband, Martin, and me, and two brothers from Brainerd. Most of the donagers agree that we were at the camp an hour before the Brainerd brothers and so we should win, but those brothers have been inviting all the donagers to their camp and giving them free beer and chips. So I guess you never know.”

“What’s a donager?” asked Jana, momentarily removing her glasses so she could polish the lenses.

Connie scanned the horizon for a second, then pointed to her right. “You see that guy over there? The one wearing the white shirt and white pants?”

Jana put her glasses back on her face and squinted. “Yeah.”

“That’s a donager. Stands for ‘donut manager.’ They’re the ones Crispy Dream puts out here to give out free donuts and prizes. They ’re the ones that’ll give away the RV tomorrow. Either to me and Martin or those Brainerd brothers. We’ll see.”

“I saw the donagers and their stand when I first got here,” I said. “Was it there thirteen days ago when you and your husband showed up?”

“Oh, heavens no,” said Connie. “The stand was put up just a couple days ago. In our case, you have to register with Crispy Dream corporate if you think you’re going to try and break the record. Then, you’re supposed to call an 800 number to tell them when you arrived at the camp. According to the rules, they’re supposed to send out a donager to confirm your arrival, then send one out at least once a day to make sure you haven’t abandoned your camp.

“We called the minute we showed up, and no one else was here. But when the donager finally got here, the Brainerd brothers had pulled in too. They were an hour behind us, but now it looks like they might take the prize from us.”

“Even though they didn’t call like you did?” Jana asked. “How is that fair?”

“Is it because the donagers can be bought?” I asked. “I mean, do you think that they could really give that RV to those brothers just because they like them more?”

Connie’s pudgy face seemed to sag a little. “I don’t like to think that’s the case. I want to believe they’ll do the right thing, but you never know, do you?”

“Yeah,” said Heidi, twirling the iPod cord around her finger. “Like this one time, my boyfriend and I went into this boutique pet store? And my boyfriend—he’s older and lives in Minneapolis—he totally picked out this dog and put a deposit down on it. It was so cute, it was called a Yorkie-poo—and when we came back an hour later with our car all loaded up from the Pet Supply Mart, the dog was totally gone.”

Jana looked at Heidi. “Really? You never told me Roy tried to adopt a dog.”

Heidi nodded. “He did. Just this summer. And the store owner—he just shrugged and said he couldn’t help it, another customer wanted the dog.”

“Did he give you your deposit back?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Heidi said, “but it wasn’t about that. It was about the dog. We found out later that Rayon Man was the one who took the dog.”

“Rayon Man? As in the former governor?” I asked. Rayon Man was, in real life, Robert McPatterson. In his late twenties he’d played the comic book character Rayon Man on a long-running TV show. In his late forties, he’d run for governor of Minnesota—and won. He’d served the state for one term, then left, though he still lived in Minneapolis.

The line inched forward and we finally entered the circulated-air environment of the GaSmart. “It was totally Rayon Man,” said Heidi, shuffling forward a little more, “and that’s my point. I think Rayon Man, because he was governor and a hotshot TV star, is probably just used to getting what he wants, you know? And I think there are a lot of people like that out there. People that just get what they want, all the time, and they don’t care what it costs
other
people. Rayon Man, those Brainerd guys—I’m just saying they might have a few things in common.”

Gary O’Connor fits on that list
, I thought, clutching my pen and writing so fast, my hand was threatening to cramp up. Maybe this was my
Press
story. Or part of it, anyway. How maybe everyone, in one way or another, knew someone like Gary O’Connor. Was he one of those Jungian A-things we learned about in psychology? What were they? Oh yeah:
Archetypes
. Like a witch, or a hero, or a mother—timeless forms that repeated in every culture, in every society, in every mind. Here we were, all of us standing around—Jana and Heidi, who thought lava was cool; Connie, who had camped out for thirteen days in hopes of winning an RV; and me, trying to take a break from Living Word Redeemer—we were all so different, but then again, it seemed like we had all had run-ins with a Gary O’Connor at one time or another.

I was so busy writing, I barely noticed when the GaSmart bathroom door opened and a tall redhead stepped out. I probably wouldn’t have given her a second look, except that she bumped into a display of Ricochet energy drinks and sent half of them tumbling onto the ground.

I glanced up and saw Natalie bent over, picking up cans and trying to shove them back onto the display. Women in line for the GaSmart ladies’ room looked at each other like,
Isn’t that too bad,
but nobody was helping Nat. She chased rolling cans with her head down, but her skin was scarlet with embarrassment.

Watching her, I felt like my intestines were migrating to one spot in my gut, which ached to see her in such a mortifying state. Part of me wanted to let her be embarrassed in front of everyone—it would serve her right, after all—but there was a bigger part of me that just couldn’t bear to let that happen.

“Excuse me,” I said to Jana and Heidi and Connie.

Stepping out of line, I walked over to the display and started picking up cans. Natalie glanced up at me and paused for a second, but then kept cleaning up. She didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say a word to her either, much as I wanted to.

It wasn’t long before we had almost all the cans back on the display case. I put the last Ricochet on the shelf slowly, afraid of what would happen when the task was done. I straightened and looked at her. Her mouth was open just a little and her skin was still pink from the fiasco.

“Thanks,” she said. She was cool when she said it. Not warm and friendly, but not an ice witch either.

“No problem,” I said, trying to be cool too.

There was an awkward moment of silence during which we both wiped the film from the dirty Ricochet cans on our jeans.

“I should probably go,” Natalie said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“You lost your place in line,” said Natalie. She was actually concerned about it, which was nice.

“It’s okay,” I said. “There are Porta Potties up at the camp.”

“Yeah,” she said, “and I bet there are some redneck truckers up at the camp too, but I wouldn’t want to go near them either.” She laughed at her own joke. I would have laughed too, except my heart felt like it was bursting through my rib cage and I thought it might come exploding out of my chest if I so much as giggled.

“Yeah,” I said instead.

“Okay then,” said Nat.

She turned to go and I felt sick, like all the things I wanted to say to her were in a queasy mass at the bottom of my gut. I puked up the only words I could think of: “You must be pretty happy.”