“Marty,” Ben called, but Marty kept holding the button, staring straight into the machine through glassy eyes. “Dude!” Ben shouted as he put his hand on the mass of cardboard, grabbing his friend by the shoulder and pushing him backward. The machine disengaged and the massive block of cardboard rested awkwardly on its corner.
“Jesus,” Ben said.
Marty looked down at the pallet he was standing on and laughed with what seemed like mild wonder. As he stepped off the wooden slab, Ben held the cardboard back with both hands and moved to the side. He let go as he stepped off the wooden slab, and a thousand pounds of bundled boxes teetered and fell, slamming onto the pallet.
14
“Let’s get this over with,” Ben muttered as he yanked on the metal latch to the freezer. The first three attempts felt like trying to pull a car sideways by its door handle. Finally, it opened and a cloud of frigid air rolled out of it. Ben stepped back instinctively, like a child dodging a crashing wave on the shore. He looked for the wooden wedge to prop the door open, until he decided that he’d looked long enough. He wanted to move this miserable process right along. Reaching into the freezer, Ben hooked his fingers into the taut plastic that enveloped six half-gallons of ice cream and dropped it in front of the door.
Ben stepped inside and the cold hit his bones immediately. Iced wind surged audibly out of a grate in the ceiling that was thankfully nested near the far wall. Pockets of frost hung in the corners like glass spiderwebs.
It looked like Marty had sorted the room with a snowplow, and Ben treated it with the same gentle touch, heaving the arctic boxes clear of the threshold before they could sting his hands too much. Usually there was someone there to catch the stock, but not tonight. No one else was scheduled, and Palmer wouldn’t believe that Ben hadn’t seen the note.
His leg ached, but as long as Ben made a point to stay in motion, it was unlikely that it would seize up entirely. So that’s what he did. Even when he paused to consult the inventory listings on the back of the note, his legs kept moving in a kind of pathetic cancan.
Ben wiped his running nose with the bare skin of his forearm and shot another box into the warmth. The freestanding aluminum racks clanged as Ben rooted through them. Mercifully, most of the items were at a manageable height, but as the list shrank so did Ben’s luck. A geyser of steam sighed from Ben’s mouth as he looked at a box that was nestled so high it might actually be touching the frostbitten ceiling.
The thin metal rails of the rack burned against Ben’s palms as he hoisted himself onto the first shelf. There was a slight tremor in the frame, but it seemed to steady as Ben spread his feet apart. Tall, but not tall enough, Ben stretched his arm upward, grasped at the box, and then settled for the shelf below it. As he pulled himself up and stepped on the second shelf, the whole rack suddenly twisted and threatened to topple. There was a fluttering in Ben’s stomach as he reeled backward. Quickly, he heaved his great weight forward, slamming the whole shelving unit against the wall. With a snarl on his face, he clawed and struck at the box. Fucking frozen peas, Ben thought as he hooked his fingers into the box’s seam. Gotta get these stocked up ASAP or else no one will ever really notice or give a shit.
Packages surrounding the box he needed crashed to the ground. Ben cussed under his breath and realized that he was mad not only at both Palmer and the cold of the freezer, but also at peas and people who liked to eat peas. With one last pull, the keystone finally began to shift, but as it moved, so did something in Ben’s peripheral.
The door was closing.
Silently, the massive slab glided on its bearings like a pivoting wall. Ben scrambled. The whole rack twisted at the center and buckled. Ben reeled for balance as boxes and bags collapsed on and around him.
His foot clipped the edge of a package, and Ben’s good knee smacked against the cold concrete. Still the door swung in its lazy and carefree arc. But here’s the stupidest thing about this piece of shit. The floor was cold against Ben’s palms as he tried and failed to regain his footing, slipping once, twice. Ben hurled a frozen box at the door, but it was too light. The door kept moving, pushing the box back toward Ben indifferently. You just give it a little love…
Ben planted his left foot on the ground and yowled at the pain of burdening his weaker leg with the entirety of his weight. The box scratched against the filthy floor as the door pushed it, but it looked like that sound might not last much longer. Ben lurched forward, uncertain whether his bad leg would be good enough, but certain that no one would ever hear him over that fucking air conditioner. The latch clicked against the lock plate.
And pres—
The moving wall stopped and Ben cried out as its heft and momentum traveled squarely into his index finger. He gritted his teeth and rammed the thick door with his shoulder. It flew open and thudded loudly against the wall, and Ben found himself hoping that it hurt.
Ignoring the pain in his knee, Ben kicked the ice cream, which was sitting just outside the arc of the slowly returning door. The bundle hardly moved, skidding abrasively in the quiet back room, then stopping dead. Ben stood there for a moment blowing hot air into his hands and trying to think. Where had he put the package? Closer to the middle of the door? Maybe the edge? Ben grabbed the ice cream and rocketed it back into the freezer, ignoring the obvious sound of tumbling inventory beyond the fog.
Near as Ben could figure, the door had started moving and the ice cream had slowly spun out of its path. That was what had happened. But as he watched the door creep home, he didn’t feel like that was the answer. His mind squirmed as if it could overcome the rising thought, but the fact was it wasn’t a thought. It was something that Ben had come to laugh about in the privacy of his own heart: that silly feeling from the first night—a feeling that he thought he had outrun.
The latch clicked as the door stopped. The air conditioner roared to life. Right on cue.
Ben blew heat into his cupped hands as he kicked the Receiving door open. It yelped at the top of its arc and then swung angrily back toward Ben. He kicked it again, ignoring the cries from both of his legs, and moved quickly away from the back room.
As he stood at the urinal in the bathroom, Ben ran his eyes over the graffitied tile and placed his hand against his back pocket to feel the hard sleeve of Eric’s photograph, a motion that seemed to have gone from habit to tic over the past few weeks.
Since the first night he’d brought the photo, he’d come to think that it was reassurance that he belonged in the store just as much as anybody. More than anybody, in fact. But the ache in his good knee and the lingering chill in his blood seemed to contradict that so strongly that as Ben left the bathroom, he did so with the timidity of a scolded child.
There was no yelling waiting for him, of course. Nothing but the toneless melodies and industrial rumblings that were saved for those who walked the aisles when no one else did. A sound track of isolation that amounted to nothing at all for those who heard it often enough. And for just a second, nothing was all there was. But as the bathroom door whined home, something else joined the chorus.
TAP, TAP, TAP.
Ben’s body jerked; he tried to smile his nerves away. He moved to check his watch and tried—
TAP, TAP, TAP.
He moved cautiously toward the front of the store.
TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP.
It could be a customer. It wasn’t unusual for a person to try to walk into the store after it had closed. But those pleas always came in the form of knocking knuckles or smacking palms. These taps were unique to those who knew which sounds traveled through the store and which ones didn’t. This was metal on glass.
TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP.
Ben felt for the key to the front door in his pocket. Reflections of displays and registers swirled on the glass doors, making the bright store appear to extend beyond its borders and into the blackness of the world
outside. But there was something wrong with the symmetry. A hazy and black shape. A figure. As Ben came into full view of the locked entrance, he could see that the apparition looked a lot like Marty.
Ben sighed as he fished the key from his pocket. The doors screeched apart.
“Jesus, dude. You scared the crap outta me.” Ben mustered a smile, but it was unreturned. Smoke crawled and twisted up Marty’s arm like powder vines. A cigarette burned between his fingers. Seven more lay at his feet, charred and used up. Ben stepped outside.
The music seeped through the closing doors, growing quieter with every lost inch of open air until it couldn’t be heard at all, the vibrations too faint to compete against the double-paned glass. The light in the awning above them flickered softly. It would need a new bulb soon; whether it would get one was another question entirely. A wrapper crinkled as Ben removed a candy bar from his pocket. He took a bite. Smoke whipped gently around Marty’s face in the still air while mosquitoes and gnats began to swarm around Ben’s neck and head. Their wings squealed in his ears like a balloon slowly running out of breath.
Marty had made no reply. Ben studied him in the fickle light. A faint bruise colored the corner of his eye. “You alright?”
“Huh? Oh.” Marty touched the edge of his socket with his thumb.
“You come to lend a hand?” Ben joked. “You just missed me almost getting locked in the freezer.”
Marty was scratching his arm next to the inside bend of his elbow. A dark red streak was forming in the wake of his nails. He turned his head toward Ben, who was blinking in hard squints to reroute the sweat that had begun trickling down his brow.
“I been thinking about this since your first night, man,” Marty said. “Jesus, I been running it around in my head again and again, and I still don’t know what to say or how to say it exactly. Less than that, I don’t know what you’ll say…or what you’ll do, even.”
And that was enough. Somehow, Ben felt he knew what Marty was about to say, and he found himself wishing that he were anywhere else at that moment, that he were about to listen to someone say something that didn’t matter, something that was so trivial he could ignore it and the conversation wouldn’t miss a beat. But Ben wasn’t anywhere else right then. Ben was there with Marty and Marty’s words.
Sound leaked through trembling lips and echoed like cannon fire in Ben’s ears.
“I seen your brother.”
15
For a second or two Ben felt dizzy, like his brain was on fire and it was rolling to extinguish itself. No emotions had come yet. They were lurching and colliding with one another like a slow black avalanche. But his eyes still watered, and the hairs on his neck still stood erect, as if Marty’s words were some germ his immune system was trying to shut out. Ben looked at Marty stupidly for a long time.
“Say somethin!” Marty’s voice shook Ben into comprehension.
“You saw him?” Ben’s fists were balled tightly. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, you saw him? When?”
“ ’Bout six months ago.”
“Six months?” Ben’s heart was pounding. He squeezed his skull between his hands.
“I wanted to say somethin sooner.” Marty fumbled with his lighter. “But…”
“But what?” Ben’s words were weaker than he’d intended.
Marty stared at the cement. He took another step backward and bumped against the propane cage.
“No,” Ben said. “You…You’re telling me…” Ben fumbled at his back pocket. He put Eric’s photograph so close to Marty’s face that it would have been impossible to actually see it. Marty flinched. “You’re telling me that you saw this kid. That you seen him before I ever started workin here? That you seen him six months ago and you never said nothin to nobody? No—”
“I did,” Marty cut in, “I said somethin. I called.”
“No.” Ben was inches from Marty’s face. “The fuck you did.”
Marty pressed his back harder against the metal cage, as if he could be absorbed by it, disappear into it. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that. I ain’t lying to you, Ben. Why would I?”
“Why would they? I talked to the police. I called ’em. I was at the station two weeks ago, and they didn’t say nothin about anyone calling—not in the last six months. Not any goddamn time. This ain’t somethin you want to mess with me about, so you quit it.”
“I ain’t lyin to you, Ben,” Marty said flatly.
“Yeah you are!” Ben screamed violently. He shoved against Marty’s chest hard enough that his body ricocheted off the cage. When Marty said nothing, Ben pounded his fist on the metal next to Marty’s head once, then again, then again and again, until his hand went numb and the rattling of the frame was louder than the screams in his own mind. Marty had shrunk into himself more with each strike. The rims of his eyes were lined with water, but he said nothing. For a while neither of them did.
“This whole time,” Ben muttered. “This whole time I been walking around like…like some kind of idiot.”
A pain swept into Ben’s jaw as he clenched his teeth. He looked at the bulletin board, at his brother’s flyer. One face among a dozen, shining out to him like a beacon that only he could see. Ben felt a wave of heat move through his body.
“You put the toy in the box.” He rolled his head back toward Marty. “I asked you about it, and you said you never seen it.”
“I didn’t ever see it, Ben! And you didn’t ask me nothin. You got in my face and screamed at me about it. You put your fuckin hands on me and scared the shit outta me. I didn’t have any goddamn idea what you were talking about until later.”
“Fuck you!” Ben shrieked, turning away from Marty. Ben clutched the sides of his head with his fists, then clacked one near his right temple until his knuckles stung and he didn’t feel like screaming anymore. Ben could feel something caustic swelling in his chest as his anger ebbed: an unclean mixture of despair and something poisonous that sat in Ben’s heart like oily water. “Where? Tell me where you saw him.”
“Up the street a little ways. Maybe half a mile or so.”
Ben turned his head toward the dark and empty parking lot. “Show me,” he said.
“What?”
“Take me to where you saw my brother.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t care,” Ben snapped, sliding his aching and bruising hands from his head. “You wasted enough time already.”
It wasn’t a long walk, but it was a dark one. There were no streetlights to guide their path, and the moonless sky loomed indifferently above. Small creatures rustled and cried in the blackness, invisible to all but one another. Although Marty knew the location, he walked a pace or two behind Ben, whose feet trampled the tall grass with long, uneven strides. Ben could barely hear Marty’s gentle movements over his own. Every dozen or so steps he’d turn to make sure he was still there, and Marty would look up, wide eyes shining out in the smothering darkness, as if something were about to happen. While they walked, Marty played with his lighter. Slink. Clink. Slink. Clink.
Ben’s gaze crept crablike to his left. It must have occurred to Ben when he and Marty first set out where their path would lead. He must have known what lay on that black horizon, and of course he did know. But it wasn’t until his neighborhood crept out of the darkness that his stomach began to knot. Irresistibly, his thoughts turned to Deidra, alone in the house, a festering hermit who would hate her stepson even more now. Ben winced and tried to bury the thought, but the ground wasn’t deep enough for that. Ben had already buried too much.
The asphalt horizon shimmered with a sliver of light that exploded as a car’s headlights crested the hill. Ben squinted into them until he was forced to look away. Power lines that hung over the street like loose stitching were wrestled briefly from the dark sky. The air grew quiet as the engine
churned down the road, and the darkness returned, more consuming than before—a punishment for looking at the light.
“Here,” Marty said. Ben stopped and turned toward Marty, who was gesturing toward the woods to their right. “It was right around here.”
“Here or right around here?”
“Here,” Marty said forcefully.
The trees that made up the forest blurred together into a dense visual singularity. Ben could see nothing in the dark contours of the impenetrable wall before him. But it felt familiar, like he’d seen it before, though not with his eyes. This black woodland void.
“Tell me what happened.” Ben’s voice quivered. “Don’t leave nothin out.”
Marty held Ben’s stare for a moment. There was a kind of faint pain on Marty’s face. He breathed out heavily through his nose.
“I was…” He cleared his throat and then put fire to another cigarette. “It was like eight in the morning, and I had stayed late to pick up my check. Something was busted, the printer or the computer or something.” Marty waved his hands in front of him like he was fanning away the unimportant detail. “Whatever it was, it was taking forever.
“I get my check, and I start walking home. It was sunny as hell, and I had this splittin headache from this bad tooth I got. All the birds were chirping and making it worse, but then all at once they all piped down. I could hear this crunching in the leaves, so I turned and looked.” Marty swallowed hard. “And I see this kid. Real young. Dirty and whatnot. And he’s just staring at me from behind this bush, standing still as a statue; he’s just looking at me.”
“How did he look?” Ben interjected. “Did he look alright?”
“Yeah, man. I guess. Yeah, he looked alright.”
“Tell me what he looked like. Was he scared?”
“No. No, it didn’t seem like he was scared. That was the weird thing,” Marty said nervously. “His face was…was like a painting or something. It was just all froze up.”