Since the Layoffs (6 page)

But I have to proceed carefully because I don’t want to get Tommy in trouble. So, to his revelation that he wants a urine sample, I stifle the urge to ask him if he’d like it right now, in his face, and I nod peacefully.

“We’re drug testing all our employees,” he explains.

I nod.

“I’ll give you a chit, and you have to go by the clinic later today and give them a sample. The chit has the directions on it.”

I nod again.

“And I’ll be around for the next few days,” he tells me. “Just to make sure things run right.”

I nod. “Excellent.”

My appointment at the clinic is at two in the afternoon, which, as I work nights, is like scheduling someone for an appointment at two in the morning. I have to be at work at seven, because, with this corporate fuckstick around, we can’t let Jughead work at night due to the minor laws. The result is that I’m not getting any sleep for nearly forty-eight hours.

I show up to see what is probably the busiest workplace in this town. Secretaries, receptionists, women in white smocks, all running around with clipboards and vials of pee. It’s good to know someone is making money around here. The girl behind the desk takes my chit and tells me to have a seat. I have barely sat down when another woman comes up. The place seems to be staffed entirely by females, making it the prime pick-up location in town, now that most of the bars have gone.

“Mr. Skowran?” she says, her voice hard and official.

“Yes?”

“Do you have your chit?”

I hand her the paper and she hands me a plastic vial. “Fill this up to the line. Use Bathroom One.”

She walks off, a bundle of efficiency. I go into the bathroom with a big “One” on the door, quickly fill the vial, screw that cap on, wipe my piss off the outside, then notice that washing my hands is impossible because the water has been shut off. I assume this is so we can’t add water to our urine to make our drug use less detectable. I go outside, holding a clear vial of my urine, wondering who to hand it to. The woman who gave me the vial is gone, and everyone else looks busy. A woman walks by with a clipboard and I ask her who gets the sample, and she says, “Heather” and keeps walking. I stand there for a few minutes more, holding my piss in my hand. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours and I’m being drug tested for a six-fifty-an-hour job which leaves me too broke to buy drugs. What if I was using drugs? Would a horrific drug-addled mistake by a convenience store clerk really endanger society, if I put an extra bag of coffee in the coffee machine, or misplaced the beef jerky display? Heaven forbid I should forget to wear my smock. I put the full vial of urine down on the receptionist’s desk and say, “Here you go. Bye.”

She backs away from the urine vial as if it were a live snake and starts calling after me, but I’m already out the door. A furious woman in a white smock comes out into the parking lot. “You can’t just do that,” she tells me. “You have to wait for—”

“Fuck you.”

I’m in my car and gone, and as I’m pulling out of the parking lot I see this woman copying my license plate. Is she going to call the cops? Am I to be charged with leaving piss unattended? Something fundamental about my tolerance for bullshit, and my ability to relate to others, has changed since I blew Corinne Gardocki’s brains out. The rules by which I have lived my entire life, rules of conduct, are disintegrating before my eyes. I see them for what they are, a carefully designed system to keep me in line, to keep me from asking for more, like Oliver Twist. Now that I have stepped out of line in the worst way, there’s really no reason to stay in line in all the smaller ways. If that woman makes any trouble for me, I’ll blow her fucking brains all over the street. Drug test this, you bitch. I’m going home to get some sleep. Go ahead, call the store, tell that corporate guy on me. I don’t much care for that guy. He’ll be dead in two days anyway.

Just as I am pulling the sheets up over my head, there is a knock on the door.

Oh, Christ, who could that be? Has Financially Consolidated Finances, or whatever the hell they’re called, finally started making house calls? Have the cops tracked me down for the piss incident? I get out of bed, grumbling furiously, and open the door to see the pockmarked face of the guy who gave me the gun in the convenience store, still wearing the Packers jacket. Ken Gardocki’s henchman.

“Ken wants to talk to you,” he says.

“When?”

“How’s now?”

“I haven’t slept in days.”

“He’s got money for you.”

“Let’s go.”

He comes inside and watches me closely as I pull on my jacket. Is he checking me for a wire?

It has started to snow again. I go downstairs and hop in Ken Gardocki’s SUV, which has the heat on full blast and a Kenny G CD blaring from the flawless speakers. It is like being in another world, enclosed, safe, a wall against the elements provided by money. I want this, the SUV, the speakers, the contoured bucket seats, even the damned Kenny G CD. This was what I had before the closings, what I had earned. Nothing against my 21-year-old Honda Civic, but the windows don’t roll up and the radio doesn’t work and I realize, as I relax in the bucket seat and we pull out onto the main road, that it’s hard to go backwards. Once you’ve had something, you always believe you deserve it.

“Is this a Cherokee?” I ask the pockmarked guy.

“
Grand
Cherokee.” He stares out the window blankly, concentrating on driving in the worsening weather. Who is this fellow? I’ve never seen him around town. If he’s such a right-hand man to Gardocki, why doesn’t
he
kill people for him?

“What’s your name?” I ask.

He continues driving. He is looking for a road sign. He doesn’t know the area that well, not being from around here.

“Is this Exit 31?” he asks. About three seconds ago we passed a huge highway sign saying “Exit 31.” No-name Pockmarked Guy isn’t the swiftest caribou in the herd. I don’t feel like dealing with any more of his silent routine, so I decide to badger him until he starts talking.

“Yes, it is,” I tell him as he wrenches the wheel, taking us over two lanes, barely making the exit without hitting a concrete barrier. “I asked you what your name was.”

“What’s it to you?”

“All right then. Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

There’s something about this guy I don’t get. It’s like he’s playing the part of Ken Gardocki’s henchman, based on years of TV watching. He learned how a henchman should act by watching
The Rockford Files.
Why doesn’t he just talk to me?

I start noticing we are going down roads increasingly more remote, getting out into the country. Trees have replaced buildings. This would be an excellent place to dump a body, say, the body of someone who has just committed a murder for you and you want to shut them up for good. I wonder if there is a freshly dug grave around here, waiting for me. But then, if this idiot was going to kill me, why didn’t he just kill Corinne Gardocki and he and Ken could have left me out of it? I watch Pockmark carefully, wondering if he has a gun. If he does, I’ll be ready. I’ll wrestle it from him and put a few rounds in his ugly dumbass skull before he has a chance to ….

“This is it,” he says, as he pulls into the gravel parking lot of a small bar, hard to notice even from the road, covered on all sides by thick, snow-covered trees. There are a few pickup trucks in the parking lot, getting dusted by the snow. The bar has neon beer signs out front, but apparently no name.

He parks, shuts the car off and gets out wordlessly. He starts walking toward the bar, then realizes I am still in the car. “You coming?” He walks inside.

What’s wrong with this asshole? Aren’t henchmen supposed to have manners, to get the door for me? I get out of the car and trot over to the entrance just as he slams the bar door in my face.

Inside, the bar is better lit and more lively than I imagined. Ken Gardocki is shooting pool with some older guys I remember from the factory, and they nod to me as I walk up to the table.

“Jake!” Ken smiles and shakes my hand with a warmth and exuberance I hadn’t expected. “Good to see you.” He starts leading me over to a booth, and Pockmark looks like he is coming with us. Gardocki turns to Pockmark. “Hey Karl, why don’t you shoot in my place while I chat with my friend Jake here.” Karl. So that’s his name. He looks disappointed about not joining us, but he goes over to the pool table and grabs a cue, eyeing us as we sit down.

“Fuck’s the matter with that guy?” I ask.

“Who, Karl?” Gardocki laughs. “He’s all right. Not too smart. I have him run errands for me, but nothing too serious.”

“Where did you meet him? I haven’t seen him around before.”

Gardocki doesn’t want to talk about Karl. He takes a pay packet out of his shirt pocket and gives it to me. “You did good,” he says.

“Thanks.” For the first time in months, my work has been appreciated. Gardocki is looking at me with the intense gaze I remember from our first meeting. “Are you interested in more?”

“More what?” It takes me a second. “More work? Of this nature?”

Gardocki says nothing.

“Yeah, I guess so.” I think about it for a second. So there is work to be found in this town after all. I am being offered more work, how cool is that? “Same pay?”

“We’ll see if we can’t get you a raise. This one might involve some travel.”

“Travel?”

“Ever been to New York City?”

Wow. This is too good to be true. A free vacation. I could sure use one. “I’ve never been there.”

“How’s next week? Can you get off at the convenience store?”

“Sure.” I’m getting used to his habit of casually letting me know he is aware of every detail of my life.

“This one might be tricky,” he tells me.

“I love a challenge.”

Gardocki grins. “Take off from work Thursday and Friday. I’ll take care of all the arrangements. I’ll get $2,500 to you as a startup fee, probably give you another five Gs after the fact. This isn’t for me,” he adds. “It’s for a friend, in New York. We switch off doing favors for each other.”

“Cool.”

“So I can count on you?”

“Absolutely.”

We shake hands. “I’ll have Karl drive you home.”

Gardocki goes back over to the pool table and talks to Karl. Karl looks over at me, then walks out to the car. I’m supposed to follow. The door slams in my face again as we go outside.

I get to sleep for an hour before being back at the convenience store to relieve Jughead at seven. Jughead is wearing a brown Gas’n’Go smock, which means our corporate friend must still be around. Jughead is not doing his homework at the counter, as usual, but is staring straight ahead like a Buckingham Palace guard.

I go up to the counter, and I see a corporate ID card near the register. James Brecht. He’s never bothered to introduce himself.

Jughead doesn’t acknowledge me when I walk in, which means Brecht must have talked to him about excessive speech, or some such thing. Perhaps talking to other employees is discouraged in the manual. But the manual got pulverized. No matter, Brecht greets me with another one as I walk back into the surveillance room/office to hang up my coat. And put on the smock which is in his other hand.

“Hi, Jim,” he says as he walks past me with a clipboard and motions for me to follow him. He taps his watch and shows it to me. Seven-oh-six. “Let’s try to get here on time, okay? We’ve got a lot to do tonight.” He walks me up to the rack of potato chips and dip, one of our big sellers. “All Wenke products have to be on the top shelf, okay? I need you to go through the whole store and get Wenke products on the top shelves. Vienna sausages, potato chips, whatever. We’ve got to get them into view.” He looks briefly irritated, then adds, “We’ve been sending Tommy memos about this for weeks, but nothing got done.”

“Wenke on top shelf,” I say, pulling on the smock. “Check.”

“I’m going to be the day manager here for a while,” he says.

“What’s happened to Tommy?”

“He’ll be joining you behind the counter until he’s proved he can handle the pressure of running this store.” Brecht doesn’t want to part with any more details, and starts reciting more things to do with stock.

“You demoted Tommy? To clerk?”

Brecht doesn’t want to talk about this. “We came to an understanding,” he says, showing me both palms, the gesture of friendliness and peace which is supposed to mollify the angry. I’m not angry, I’m just curious and concerned for Tommy, and the gesture annoys me. I pretend to listen to him as he walks around and describes things to do, and I wonder when he will go home.

“Kenneth?” Brecht calls over to Jughead, who is still staring straight ahead.

“Yes?” Jughead screams.

“Jim’s here, you can clock out now.”

“It’s Jake.”

He looks at me for a moment, as if absorbing this information into the deepest recesses of his brain. His eyes assure me he will never make that mistake again. He never will. “Jake,” he says.

Jughead walks out wordlessly, and Brecht says, in a low, conversational voice, “Did you ever notice that kid is hard to understand?”

I shake my head.

Brecht shrugs and continues walking me down the aisles. “Oh,” he says off-handedly as he moves a bag of Wenke chips from foot level to the top. “Was there a problem at the drug-testing center?”

“No, no problem. There was a long wait. I needed to—”

“I’m going to need that clean drug test.”

“You’re going to get it.”

Two and half hours later, Brecht is still here. He is back in the office. I have already done most of the things I was expected to do tonight and would be smoking out front, if there was no chance he would catch me and give me a five-minute patronizing lecture about it, when he calls me into the back room. It is dark in there, but for a small black and white TV he has brought in. He has been watching videos from the surveillance cameras from the past week, like a football coach going over game tape. I expect he has drawn up a chalkboard somewhere with x’s and o’s, game plans for how we can better serve the customer.

“Jake, we’ve got a problem,” he tells me.

Oh, Christ. He’s noticed I’ve played with the camera dates. He knows I’ve had Jughead work for me late-night. He knows, he knows, he knows. He knows everything.