Since the Layoffs (4 page)

“The reason I’m calling, Mr. Skowran, is that we have an outstanding debt to resolve,” she says, only she’s making it sound sexy. Resolve my debt, baby, oh yeah. “If you don’t take care of this, you could have some difficulty down the road.”

“Like what?” I ask sleepily.

“Well, it could be difficult for you to buy a house.”

“Buy a house?”

“Yes,” she continues. “It would be difficult to have a mortgage application accepted with this on your credit record ….”

And I’m off.

“Lady, I make SIX FIFTY A FUCKING HOUR IN A GODDAMNED CONVENIENCE STORE!!! DO YOU THINK I GO HOUSE SHOPPING ON MY DAYS OFF? DO YOU HONESTLY THINK THAT PEOPLE MAKING SIX FIFTY AN HOUR—” I hear a dial tone. These people called me and aggravated me on a FUCKING SUNDAY MORNING! Don’t they ever rest? Is nothing sacred?

No, it isn’t. Not around here. No church for me. I remember the week the news of the layoffs hit, they had a minister come and tell us that if anyone wanted to talk, he’d be there for them. A bunch of guys went down to talk to him, and they came back and told the same story. The reverend apparently had his own agenda. He was a minister hired by the company, sent in from New York. They flew in a minister to make sure nobody was going to show up the next day with an M-16 and start mowing down people in Personnel, which had happened when they closed a plant in Kansas. As for providing actual comfort, he couldn’t have cared less. He was mostly interested in our gun collections.

Now, when the people around here go to church, they do so with the sense that they have pissed God off, and are trying to make things right again. They don’t go out of gratitude for their blessings, but out of a fear that things will get even worse if they don’t start groveling to a higher power in a hurry. Nobody wants lightning bolts or floods slamming into them as they shuffle back from the unemployment office.

Tonight is my second and final day of training with Jughead. After this, I’ll be left on my own. Because it is Sunday night, Jughead explains in his mumbling dialect, tomorrow morning will be much busier than last night, so I have more setting up to do. People will be coming in early to buy cigarettes, get coffee and gas, maybe microwave a sticky bun on their way to jobs they still have. We’re close to a highway. Truckers passing through often stop by, and the coffee machines have to be filled and ready to go. Even though it is illegal, Jughead has worked a few overnight shifts and he shows me some tricks and shortcuts.

“Allscontdadror early,” he tells me. Always count my drawer early, so I don’t have to do it when people start showing up at around six a.m. The drawer I count at five will be the one Tommy uses on the day shift. He shows me how to get the backup filters of ground coffee ready, so starting new coffee to brew is a two-second affair rather than a minute and a half. After he has shown me this and a number of other little tricks for staying ahead of the game, he hangs around, skittish.

“Everything all right?” I ask.

“Mmmmph,” he nods. He is looking around nervously, making me feel like a girl he wants to ask to the prom. I go about my business, expecting him to leave at any second, but he doesn’t. I’m organizing the candy racks and he stands and watches me.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“You friend a Tommy, right?”

“Yeah, I’m a friend of Tommy’s.”

“I need a favor.” Apparently needing a favor necessitates that he speak clearly, because suddenly he can.

“What?”

“Tommy would get mad,” he says, and stares at his shoes.

“How mad would Tommy get?”

“Labor cost. He’s always talking about labor cost.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“He hired you as an assistant manager, right?”

“Right.”

Jughead nods wisely. “That means you get salary. You don’t get overtime. He can work you ninety hours a week, and you get an average of whatever he promised you as an hourly wage. But I’m a minor. He’s got to pay me overtime.”

Well, I’ll be damned. Tommy fucked me. I guess he had to. This is his job, and the corporate suits give him a bonus for no overtime. What am I going to do? Quit? Maybe I will after I’ve killed Corinne Gardocki. And perhaps a few others. “What’s the favor, kiddo?”

“I want you to punch me out about a half hour after I’ve left.” His face is guilt-ridden and red, and he stares at his shoes with shame as he relates this. “Tony, the guy who got shot, used to do it for me. We’d help each other out. But I gotta be somewhere on Sunday nights. That’ll give me two hours of overtime, which is the minimum I need every two weeks to pay my dad a hundred dollars a week.”

This poor kid. Where do they come from, people like this? A guy who is so ashamed to ask for a tiny break, who doesn’t even expect it. He goes to high school full time, works a full-time job, and still doesn’t feel he deserves a little extra so he can pay his dad rent money. “How about three hours overtime. Think that’ll help?”

Jughead smiles, something I didn’t believe possible. He turns to go.

“There’s something you can do for me, though,” I tell him as he is gathering his books from behind the counter. He studies sometimes when it is slow.

“Wozzat?” We’re back to Jughead-ese now I’m asking the favor.

“Next Saturday night. I’ve got some shit I have to do. It’ll take about four hours, but Tommy’s got me scheduled. I need you to come in from about ten until two in the morning. Don’t touch the timecards, I’ll just give you cash. Fifty bucks for four hours.”

Jughead thinks. He’s sharp enough not to ask questions. He probably figures I’m running off to fuck someone’s wife, rather than kill her, an impression I’m going to foster by putting on cologne for my Saturday night shift. “Fifty bucks?”

“Fifty big ones. Four easy hours.”

“Deal.”

“Deal.” We nod at each other. He is gone.

The shift goes smoothly, but I notice something. Almost every customer fucks up the store somehow. Some put their nasty hands on my freshly Windexed glass doors, some pick up things, examine the price, then put them back in a different spot. Almost all of them track dirt around on my mopped floor. I don’t even want to talk about the ones who ask for the key to the restroom.

This, I realize, is something that I have missed about working. I actually have something to care about. I was good at managing the loading dock, I checked invoices thoroughly, made sure every truck going out had the correct items on it. In twelve years on the dock, I got maybe half a dozen complaints from the receiving warehouses, and a few of those I think somebody miscounted on the other end. If something went missing in the warehouse, I’d spend hours trying to locate it. If guys working the forklifts misplaced things, I’d make sure they knew about it when it was discovered. And here, things are no different. I want things in my workplace to be right.

Working for the man has nothing to do with it. If the head of the Gas’n’Go empire called tomorrow and told me I was getting laid off again, the quality of my work wouldn’t suffer. I wouldn’t stop cleaning and start stealing, like they think I would, which is why, if layoffs are ever necessary, you never find out until the last second. They consider every worker ant among them a potential felon, dying to get his hands on their stuff. But me and the guys I worked with weren’t there for them, or even for our paychecks. We were there for ourselves, for the knowledge that we could work as a team and get things accomplished. And that was the worst part of getting laid off, the sudden realization that the team was a mirage, conjured up by management to get more work out of us for less pay. The things we accomplished meant nothing to anyone but us.

A guy comes in and looks at a candy bar. He spends three minutes looking at it, then throws it—throws it, not places it—back with the wrong candy bars. Then he comes to the counter.

“Hey man, you got any beef jerky?”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” He is a skinny, shifty-looking guy, not young enough to be a kid but hardly a man. His thin face and the worn tattoos on his bony arms make me imagine he has a girlfriend who he beats. “’Cause I want to buy some.”

“Are you sure?”

He stares at me.

“Are you sure,” I continue, “that you don’t want to just look at it and then throw it somewhere it doesn’t belong?”

“Hey man, fuck you,” he says, but is quick enough to back away toward the door as he says this. He sees me coming out from behind the counter and grabs a rack of sunglasses and pushes them toward me, scattering sunglasses all over the floor. He is gone before the last pair has come to a standstill.

I look up to see Jeff Zorda coming into the store, as I am down on my hands and knees gathering the sunglasses.

“Hey, Jake,” Jeff laughs. “Tommy got you working here?” He points at the door. “What was up with that asshole?”

“He has no manners,” I said. “I’m learning that most people don’t.”

Jeff steps over me on his way to the beer cooler. “You trying to teach him manners?”

“The lesson didn’t go well.”

Jeff shrugs, and plops a six-pack of imported beer on the counter. Imported. Things must be going well. Since the layoffs, Jeff has made do by involving himself in a number of scams, usually selling things over the Internet that he didn’t have. He’d take the orders, cash the checks, then disappear. He was using the computers of people he knew were on vacation, or worse, in nursing homes. He’d scan the obituaries for the recently deceased, then do all kinds of things in their names.

“What line of work you in these days, Jeff?” I ring up the sale as he takes out his wallet.

“Need cable TV? I can hook you up. For you, half-price. Twenty-five dollars.”

“I don’t even have a TV anymore.”

“I’ll get you one of those, too.”

“I’m all right. I’m getting used to reading.”

Jeff looks at me, shakes his head. I’m a lost cause to him. He backs away from the counter in mock fear. “Don’t teach me manners,” he says, and laughs at his own wit. He leaves his palm print on the newly cleaned door on his way out.

A half hour later, the phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sending a guy in. With the gun. He’ll be wearing a Packers jacket.” Click and dial tone. About thirty seconds later, a guy wearing a Packers jacket comes in, doesn’t look at me, heads straight to the beer cooler and gets a six-pack of imported. Imported. Everyone is doing well in this town but me. He strides to the counter, and pulls out his wallet. He is fortyish, with blond hair and a pockmarked face, his eyes blank and staring straight down as he hands me a twenty. I give him change, and he leaves without a word. And without giving me a gun.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the guy. The Packers are popular around here. Then I see Ken Gardocki’s SUV go driving slowly by, then take off along the boulevard. Then I remember Gas’n’Go’s Fort Knox-like security system—God forbid someone should make off with a Tootsie roll—and I realize that the only place the cameras can’t see is in the back corner, by the beer cooler. This guy was smart. I go back to the beer cooler and there is an object by the Budweiser, wrapped in an oily rag.

I crouch down on the floor and unwrap it. It is a shiny black pistol. I sit on the floor and stare at it for a while. I like the way that was done. That was teamwork.

The door opens and I stand up quickly to see my new customer, let him know there is someone in the store. It’s the skinny beef jerky guy from earlier, only this time he’s got two big friends. Really big. They are fat bastards, both over six foot five, and both look as dumb as rocks. He must have high-tailed back to the trailer park to find two morons he thought would intimidate me.

He strides toward me, the two dumbasses lumbering behind him. “Hey dipshit,” he hisses, his voice full of hate. “You got any beef jerky?”

I stand up, the pistol held loosely in my hand where he can see it but the security cameras can’t. I’d love to point it between his eyes, but that would ruin the teamwork. Keep away from the security cameras.

“No, but I’ve got a really nice pistol.”

One of the dumbasses touches the skinny guy’s shoulder.

“Man, he’s got a gun,” the dumbass says.

I look at the big guy. “Get the fuck outta here.”

I turn back to the beer, as if I’m doing some kind of inventory. They leave quietly.

When I get home, I lay the gun out on the coffee table and stare at it with fascination. At this point, I should be thinking, this is a gun, a real gun I’m going to use to kill somebody, and the fact that I have it in my apartment means there’s no turning back. I’m not thinking that at all. I’m thinking about playing Cowboys and Indians when I was a kid.

That was the last time I held a gun, even a fake one. I’ve never had much use for guns. The only function a gun has is to kill people, and as I’ve never needed to do that before, I’ve had little experience. I can’t recall ever shooting one as an adult, or even wanting to. I never had a desire to kill. I had a desire once to be a husband and a father and a breadwinner, not a killer. Oh well. In the immortal words of REO Speedwagon, ya gotta roll with the changes.

As for there being no turning back, there never was. I’m a man of my word. I said I’d do it and I will.

THREE

T
ommy is working my ass off, and by Saturday I’m actually tired. Tired from work. What a beautiful, forgotten feeling that is. People who are having their asses worked off at their jobs don’t appreciate what a gift that is, to feel that sense of satisfaction, the beauty of their exhaustion, which they can wear like a medal. It gives you energy, that exhaustion, knowing that you’ve contributed, made a difference. I made a difference by filling coffee pots and mopping floors and ringing up bags of potato chips and beer. I’m a worker again.

Tommy has me scheduled for every night this week and every night next week, all twelve-hour shifts. Even though I don’t get overtime, I do get a management bonus for working over fifty hours a week, so he’s trying to help me get back on my feet. I’m back on ’em, all right. My feet are starting to hurt. By the time Saturday afternoon rolls around, I’m washing my face in my ice-cold bathroom and I see my eyes in the mirror, surrounded by dark circles of exhaustion. That was the look I used to get at the factory before the spring started. Most businesses have their busy season just before Christmas. For us, it was when the winter ended, when farming got under way. We made machine-tooled parts for farm tractors, and sometimes in February and March we would work seventy and eighty hours a week. Those were the days of fat paychecks. When spring began, the men would all take their girlfriends and wives down to the car dealerships or furniture stores and trade in last year’s model, or finally get that flat screen TV or sofa they had been talking about all winter. Now the car dealerships have moved, the furniture stores are boarded up, and I’m washing my exhausted face in cold water and toweling off before it turns to ice so I can get my ass to the convenience store and kill someone’s adulterous stripper wife.

Saturday nights, I have learned, are never busy until the bars close. Then people come in and beg me to sell them beer after 2 a.m., which I have to be very firm about. The security cameras have timers on them, and if they film a beer transaction after two, it’s big trouble for everybody. The local law enforcement agencies also send in underage kids and agents trying to buy beer illegally, so I have to card everyone and never sell the late beer, or I lose my job and Tommy does, too. Myself, I don’t really give a fuck if they wanna get buzzed, but I don’t want to cost Tommy his job, so I try to stick to the rules.

It strikes me as odd that these rules are being enforced now more than ever, even though the town has largely turned to trash. You’d think that things like this wouldn’t matter so much, that we should all be left to fall apart in peace. But no. Rules are rules.

I bathe myself in cologne, remembering that Jughead expects me to be off committing adultery somewhere. I smell good. I grab my pistol, shove it down the back of my pants under my jacket, and I’m off for my shift at the Gas’n’Go.

* * *

The evening is uneventful, and at ten o’clock sharp, Jughead comes in to relieve me for four hours. I’m to be back at 2 a.m. I need to be back then, because that’s the time the alcohol law enforcement folks might stop by and try to buy illegal beer, and they might notice an underage worker behind the counter.

Before I go, I adjust the time on the surveillance system to read last night. Now, the tapes will show FRI on them instead of SAT. Then I’ll do the same thing for every night this week. If I ever become a suspect, the police will have to look back through six nights of surveillance tapes to prove I wasn’t in the store when Corinne Gardocki got shot, and I’ll just claim the surveillance system is a piece of shit that can’t keep time. I can’t see why I’d ever be a suspect, but you can’t be too careful.

When Jughead comes in, I’ve already stuffed my pockets with rags from the cleaning closet I can use to wrap around my boots so I don’t leave bootprints in the snow. I think that’s all the preparation I’ll need. At 10:01, I wave goodbye to Jughead, who is opening his schoolbooks and starting to study at the counter, and I’m on my way to make Corinne Gardocki dead.

I’m walking the whole way. It’s a little over five miles out to the Gardocki place, and the average person walks three miles an hour, so I should have about a half hour to get the job done before I have to turn and walk back. I’ve decided my car is too much of a risk. What if I have a fender bender on the ice pulling out of the Gardocki driveway? What if I break down half a mile from the murder scene? How do I explain my presence there? Besides, I’ve driven to work tonight, and made sure my car is parked in front of the outdoor security camera.

A light snow is falling and the cars drive by me as I make my way along the darkened streets, their tires hissing on the pavement. It is a busy Saturday night on the roads, but not as busy as it used to be. The town has depopulated a good bit since the layoffs, and a lot of people just stay home nowadays and stare at the walls, which is all they can afford to do. Until I got my convenience store job, that was what I did. Stare at the walls and try to go to sleep early. I pass a small corner bar, and through the faded yellow window I see two old men inside, pissing away their social security or veteran’s benefits for a chance to die somewhere other than their one-bedroom apartments. The snow turns to a hard drizzle, and I start thinking about getting out of this town. What’s Florida like this time of year?

I turn off the road and cross a field, walk through the empty lots of an old industrial park, cross disused train tracks. I go through broken fences and across an unused access road, everything a reminder of a civilization that used to be and is no more. Gutted, the whole town. Empty buildings, rusted vehicles, broken and disused equipment lying everywhere. This town reminds me of old photos I saw in school of World War II battlefields, with blown-apart tanks and overturned jeeps lying all around, the only difference being that the dead bodies which lay everywhere in the pictures are the still-living zombies populating the town.

Why don’t I leave? Why don’t I just take my next paycheck and hop a train to Florida and be done with it? Because I was born here. I wanted to live here my whole life. Like most of the people here, I was happy with the place, liked surviving the winters, loved the first coming of spring. I wanted to take my kids down to Lake Michigan in the summertime. I wanted Ernie Enright, the best, most honest mechanic I’ve ever known, to fix my car. I imagined growing old, and still being able to drive to the Packers games from my home near the lake, which I had bought with savings and investments and my 401k which had taken me a lifetime to accumulate. I lived within ten miles of where I was born, within ten miles of where Kelly was born, and I liked it that way.

I pass the factory. It is surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence, topped with razor wire. Someone is worried that people will steal tractor-building equipment and start making tractors in their basements. A huge sign above the entrance announces that the land is for lease. I hear Ken Gardocki’s words: The factory days here are over. I look at the lease sign and realize how right he is. Who the hell would lease this place? Is a competing tractor-parts firm going to snap at the opportunity to reopen the gates of a rusted factory which other executives already decided, for whatever reason, wasn’t profitable enough? Our stock was going up when they closed the plant, just not fast enough. It could be improved upon. So improve it they did.

A mile farther on, I come to the bridge over Kruc Creek, where I’m supposed to throw the gun on my way back, after the job is done. I look down into the water, which is a real torrent tonight, what with all the rain and sleet. Good plan. The gun will get washed into the mud and buried forever. I walk quickly across the bridge. I’m getting soaked through, but I don’t really mind that much. The cold feels good. I’ll have some coffee when I get back to the store. Corinne Gardocki, who is alive now, will be dead then, when I have my next cup of coffee. She’s probably getting fucked by an airline pilot right now, with no idea how close death is.

About a half-mile from the bridge, I cut back through some trees, the final leg of my journey. The shortcut will bring me around the back of the Gardocki place. So as not to leave boot prints, I wrap the towels tightly around my feet. I take out the gun, check it, take off the safety. I pull my hood up and walk up to the edge of the treeline facing the Gardocki’s back yard. There is a light on in the kitchen and through the kitchen door I can see Corinne puttering around in lingerie.

I can feel my heart pounding as I drop into a crouch and dart quickly up against the side of the house, the snow making an awful crunching noise with every step. I can’t believe everyone in town can’t hear this, because it’s so goddamned quiet except for my heart pounding and my feet making shotgun-blast steps in the snow, and except for the low growls coming out of the huge kennel which, until now, I haven’t even noticed is sitting at the end of the driveway.

A dog. Christ. Ken Gardocki has a dog. And it’s big and it’s coming right at me, fast. It is a blur of anger and growls and fur, flying across the twenty yards that separate us, too intent on the idea of tearing my throat out to emit any sound but a furious growl as it closes the distance in what must be a half second, which is just one microsecond more than I need to level the gun right at its head and squeeze the trigger.

BANG.

The gun kicks. The noise is godawful. My ears are ringing. The dog slides to a stop at the bottom of the steps leading up to the kitchen and lies there, upside down. He twitches once and is still. I lean back against the side of the house, and I hear myself softly repeating “shit shit shit” over and over, like a mantra. Then the door opens.

Corinne Gardocki sticks her head out and I shoot her.

BANG.

She pitches forward and falls down the steps onto her dog, her head sliding under the dog’s belly. In her negligee, the scene looks bizarre, her head buried in the dog’s genitalia.

The echo of the gunshot dies and it is completely quiet. The snow is falling on both bodies, and I sit and stare at them for a full minute, lit up by the slim light from the kitchen, letting the ringing in my ears subside. Far off I can hear a car driving by, driven by someone who has no idea what has transpired here at the Gardocki household, unaware that less than half a mile from him or her, two beings, alive two minutes ago, are now dead in a pile.

The shots must have been audible for ten miles, I imagine. I think of Jughead, back at the convenience store, looking up from his books, wondering what those gunshots were. Then I realize that if a neighbor heard them, he would probably be dialing an emergency number right now. I push myself away from the wall of the house, take a last look at the scene, and dash off through the snow, through the trees, back onto the roadway. I tuck the gun back into my jeans, and take the two rags off my feet and throw them over the bridge into Kruc Creek.

The gun I keep. I can’t bear the thought of tossing it. The gun and I are connected now. I’ll take my chances.

My ears are still ringing. One thing I’ve learned … I need a silencer. That loud banging noise every time I pull the trigger just won’t do.

I get back to the store with fifteen minutes to spare, soaking and frozen through. Jughead looks up when I come in.

“Wanneystay tutoo?” Do I want him to stay until two?

“Nah, thanks. I appreciate it.” I take two twenties and a ten out of my pocket, where they have soaked through, and I hand him the dripping money.

He nods wordlessly, grabs his books and is gone. He couldn’t care less where I have been. He could never be a witness against me anyway. He’d give a court stenographer fits. “Where was Mr. Skowran the night of the killing?” “Hebelyt he fawar reeg.”

I sit down and make a cup of coffee, and stare into space. By the time Tommy comes in, at seven in the morning, my hair has dried, my jacket is merely damp, and I’m ready to go home to a satisfying sleep.

The killing was so easy, so fast, that I can’t believe I’m getting my gambling debt wiped out and eight hundred dollars just for that. It was nothing. I shot the dog out of instinct, and Corinne too. The situation just developed, and I reacted with an efficiency I had forgotten existed in myself. When you’re out of work, it becomes difficult to evaluate yourself because you’re never in stressful situations. Well, that was stressful, and I did good.

Why would someone who heard a gunshot in her backyard come outside on a snowy, dark night wearing nothing but a negligee? What were her final thoughts? I wonder this as I watch my breath evaporate in the frigid air of my apartment. She didn’t even know I was hiding against the house, the first inkling she had was the bullet entering her head. I did everything wrong, yet everything turned out right.

I know what to do now. Nothing. All the things I’ve heard about murderers, that they love to sign their work with some kind of personal touch, that they compulsively return to the scene of the crime, that they brag about their killings to friends, cut out newspaper articles about their crime and save them all over their apartments, I won’t do any of that. I won’t call Ken Gardocki, either. I’ll let him contact me.

I hide the gun in my closet. This might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, keeping the gun. It is the only thing that connects me to the murder, and the minute it is gone, I’m safe. But I want it. I consider it an instrument of work, and work is a thing of honor. That’s something that the people who closed the factory never understood.