What Is All This? (20 page)

Suddenly, one of the front windows broke and a fire started at number-three cash register and I knew right away what had happened. Someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the window. Because just before the smell of fire and smoke had covered over every single smell in the store, there was this smell of kerosene that had flashed in and out of my nose.

“Hey, I'm burning, I'm burning up,” Nelson Forman said, first very surprised to see his clothes on fire, then running from his post at number three with flames coming out of his back.

“Get a blanket,” a woman customer said. And when I yelled “Where in hell am I going to get a blanket in a supermarket?,” she said “Get a coat, then, something to wrap around him, at least.”

But this was a hot, sticky August day and not a person in the store had even a jacket on, not even the register clerks, though it was compulsory for them. Nelson ran up aisle A, flames still coming out of his back. Everyone, including a dozen or so customers and the delivery boys and all the clerks, except the two who were using the store's only working fire extinguisher to put out the small blaze at number three, just sort of looked dumbfounded and helpless at Nelson running up and around and down the aisles, wailing his head off, till I tackled him from in front, a perfect tackle right below the knees, so his whole body would buckle and fall backward and lose an extra yard and maybe even loosen the ball from his hands, and rolled him on the floor on his back till most of the fire was out. Then I flipped open five quart bottles of cranberry juice, the nearest liquid I could reach, and poured them over him till the fire was doused, and rested from the ordeal, with my breath coming on hard, while all three delivery boys uncapped quart and half-quart bottles of tomato and pineapple and apricot-orange juice and spilled the contents over Nelson, even after his clothes had stopped smoking.

“Anyone call the police for an ambulance?” I said to the manager, and he repeated the question to the customers and staff surrounding Nelson and me, and they just looked at one another, some shaking their heads.

One man, speaking for his wife and him, said “We didn't; nobody said to.”

“Well, someone call the police for an ambulance,” the manager said.

“Want me to do it, boss?” Richard, a food bagger, said.

“Dial 9-1-1, Richie.”

“Nine-eleven, right, that new police emergency number, right away. Which phone should I use—the one in the office or the pay one in back?”

The office, and quick, now, Nelson's hurt.”

“What I do, what I do for this?” Nelson said, his eyelids and nostrils fluttering, and just my trying to blow away the ashes on his chest that were the remains of his short-sleeved white shirt caused him great pain. He seemed to be going crazy and his hair smelled singed like burned chicken feathers and we were both getting more soaked by the second from being in this large puddle of juice. Nobody seemed to want to get near us or even get their shoes wet.

“How do I keep him from going into shock?” I asked the manager.

“Put his legs up on that olive-oil can there and keep his head straight down.”

“No,” a woman said, “you put his head up on something soft and his legs down.”

“Which do I do?” I asked the manager.

“Let's keep him flat, then. The police will be here in a sec.”

A combination of different sirens was heard in a few minutes and then police came and firemen with picks and fire extinguishers and what looked like gas masks and then ambulance people from the local city hospital. Nelson was given oxygen and put on an IV and treated briefly for his burns and was being wheeled out of the market on a gurney when he threw off his oxygen cup and yelled “Boom, damn bomb went boom. And I saw the man who threw it, saw the bum who went boom.”

“Hold him there for a moment,” a police officer said to the bearers, but the doctor said he'd have to insist that Nelson not be detained.

“Just one quick question, please.” And to Nelson: “Who'd you see throw the bomb, son? I'm saying,” when Nelson looked at him blankly, “the person who threw it, I mean. You know him? Could you give me a description of him?

The person was a man,” Nelson said. Threw it right through it, right at me, right through the window at the Heinz beans I was ringing up. Went boom. That man went boom. And the boom went off like a bomb and burned my back, the bum, my back.”

“Is that what happened. Don't worry, you'll be fine and dandy in a few days, son, and take care.”

“Good luck to you, Nelly,” one of the register clerks yelled out.

“Safe recovery.”

“Now, what happened?” the police officer said to me. “And please say it nice and straight and slow. Shorthand's not my profession.”

 

My wife asked if anything had happened at work that day, as she asked almost every night when I first got home and immediately went to the bathroom to wash my face and hands and sometimes take a shower, and I said “No, nothing much.”

She said “Oh. It's because this time you look more tired than usual, so I thought something might be wrong. Like a beer?”

“Yeah, a beer—no, an ale. I'm dying for one ice-cold.”

“You bring home any from work?”

“No, I didn't even bring home a beer. I didn't even bring any groceries. There was a fire at work, that's why.”

“A fire? So, now what are we going to do for supper? I was counting on a chicken from you, Kev. Why didn't you stop at another market? Or, better yet, phoned me so I could shop somewhere near here. I would've, even though we don't get the discount like at your C & L.”

“Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the store window and Nelson Forman nearly got burned to death.” She asked who Nelson was and when I told her, she said “Was he seriously hurt?”

“I said he was nearly burned to death. That means nearly being burned to death. The hospital I called said he has second-and third-degree burns on about fifty percent of his body and that he's still critical and probably lucky to be alive.”

“Which is worse, second or third?”

“I don't know. I don't even know if first is worse or better than second. All I know is that fifty percent body burns is very bad, very critical.”

“You should've phoned me, Kev. You phoned the hospital; I admit that's more important, but you should've also phoned me. Now we have nothing for supper but eggs, unless you want to go and walk the ten stupid blocks to the market.”

“Is that the closest?”

“And the only one. It's almost seven and that's it in about a square mile around here that stays open. I think they're worried about robberies and such. An enterprising chain should open a store nearer the project, stick an armed guard in it and stay open till nine or ten at night and make a fortune. You ought to suggest it to C & L.”

The phone rang just around the time we normally sit down to eat. “Who is it?” I said, angry, as if everyone in this time zone should know that most families have supper at this hour, and a man said “Wimer, Kevin Wimer, you're in charge of the C & L produce section at Bainbridge, correct?”

“Sort of assistant in charge. Finerman's head.”

“Finerman, that's right. There was a fire in your store today, caused by a particular labor-trouble reason I'll disclose this very minute, if you're not in a rush. There's a movement going on for better wages and working conditions by the ras-, black-and loganberry pickers of this country. And your food chain has continued to sell these products, even though we've expressly requested it to boycott all the big growers of them till they've fallen in line with the few smaller growers who've raised pickers' wages to the national minimum and improved the pickers' living and working conditions while they're on the job. Were you aware your store was firebombed today?”

“Sure. One of the clerks got fifty percent of his body burned, both second and third degree.”

“I heard. And it's terrible. But if it's only five percent second and forty-five percent third, it wouldn't be that bad, am I right?”

“You are if second is worse than third, but it could be fatal the other way around.”

“I'm very sorry for this clerk. But if I related to you some of the living and working conditions these pickers have to endure, you'd see they're almost better off dead than alive.”

The pickers can always get other jobs, can't they? I mean, there's no Government law saying they can't.”

“Are you a union man, Mr. Wimer—I mean a good one? Then you, of course, know you can't be fired from your present position without an exceptionally good cause, correct? And if you've any complaints that can't be settled by you directly with management, then the union settles them for you, correct? The pickers formed a union, but the major growers won't recognize it, so no complaints are settled in any way except the way the growers want, and that's always to the extreme disadvantage of the pickers. These pickers are relatively uneducated but very honest people, usually from a foreign-speaking minority, good family men, they know how to pick fruit, like the outdoors and accept gladly their means of livelihood. And now all they want is for their legitimately formed union to be recognized and honored by the growers, so the union can bargain directly and fairly for better wages, decent wages, the most minimum of national-minimum-wage-act wages, and for the most commonly accepted working and living conditions, which means a portable privy near their work area and dormitories that weren't built ages ago for pigs. Now, is that asking for too much?”

“No.”

Then support us by joining the boycott movement against the illegal growers. We're asking you—and, incidentally, this is in full accordance and sympathy from your own union organizer, Mr. Felk, at Local 79—to refuse to sell ras-, black-and loganberries in your store. And, in fact, tomorrow, in the street outside your supermarket, to publicly dump and destroy the berries you already have while TV news cameras of two local stations here take pictures of you doing it, all of which we'll be instrumental in setting up.”

I made a few whews and good Gods into the phone and asked the man to repeat what he'd just asked me to do, which he was doing when Jennie walked over with a blackboard that listed the ingredients that were going into her “New Superspecial Famous Northern California Egg Dish tonight, which includes sweet cream, Swiss and parmesan cheese, scallions, peppers, pimientos and fresh chopped oregano and parsley,” and said “Who's on the phone?”

I said “Union business.” And to the man: “What's your name, if I might ask?”

“I'll give my organizing name, which is Blackspot. Now, what do you say?”

I said why not ask the head of produce, and he said Finerman was too old, besides being in complete agreement with the berry growers and management against the pickers. “Do what I ask, Kevin, and it might be the spark to make our Eastern boycott successful. We don't want any more firebombing. Innocent people get hurt and it looks bad for us, besides. Just dump the berries at ten a.m. tomorrow, which the stations say is the latest they can cover the story, because of previous camera commitments. We swear we'll use every pressure we have to keep you on at the store, if they decide to fire you, and if that's impossible, then your union has promised to place you at even a higher wage at a pro-picker store. You'll also be stamping your own special mark for the same things your union fought for and won only twenty years ago. Now, what do you say?”

I said I'll think it over, but he said I had no time. I said why didn't he get a produce head of one of the giant, more influential markets to do it and he said because my store was in the news now and to gain back respect for the movement, that firebombing had to be whitewashed from the public's mind. “What you'd do would mean that even though one of your favorite colleagues was severely burned, his fellow employees still thought so much of the movement that they forgave the firebombing and were, in fact, placing direct blame on the market owners for selling those berries.”

I said oh, what the hell, I'd do it, and he said I'd see him in front of the store at ten, then. “You'll recognize me as an ordinary pedestrian with the most unordinary happy grin an ordinary pedestrian ever had. Pickers around the nation will never forget you for this. You're a credit to your profession and local.”

I didn't care about being a credit to my profession. I never had any illusions my job was difficult, or needed many physical or mental skills, though I did have to use some better judgment and really strain a muscle or two when I worked for a small market five years ago and had to get up before the pigeons do to select and buy the store's produce line right off the trucks. Now I open crates that are delivered twice a week to the market, make sure the fruits and vegetables look appetizing and salable to the customers, which mostly means using the right fluorescent lights and straightening out the food and spraying it every other hour to give it that just-picked or rained-on look and odor, put up the price signs that management directs us to from its offices in another city and occasionally use my own mind by writing and installing cute and clever sayings on the more perishable items, such as “Act like this fruit is your mother-in-law: Please do not squeeze.” But I agreed with just about everything Blackspot said about improving the lot of the pickers, was bored with C & L after three years and didn't mind losing my job, with two weeks' severance pay, if I could get another one. And it'd be a kick seeing myself on television, having my wife, friends and relatives all seeing me, which'd be the most exciting thing to happen to me since my plane came back with me and my National Guard unit in it from an overseas emergency Middle East crisis several years ago and my crying wife and family nearly suffocated me at the airport gate.

“How'd you like to see me on television tomorrow night?” I said to Jennie when she set that superspecial northern-California egg dish in front of me, and she said “And how'd you like to see me in a brand-new Valentine gown?”