Never Never Land I: Twenty Minutes
In an effort to, as my wife says, write because it's my passion and not because I have to, I decided to post a little something. This is the beginning of, well, I don't know what. A collection of stories, maybe. Or a novel. Don't know, yet. Don't care, either. I'm not going to go back and change anything. I'm just going to forge ahead and keep working. This way, I get some feedback (maybe) and Harwell has a better way to procrastinate. So here it is - Never Never Land I: Twenty Minutes
It’s January 4 and that means the holidays are over and the holiday staff is gone. The seasonals get dropped on the second and by the tent, a day before Cooper turns 25, it’s back to regular crews: 2 in the AM, 2 in the PM, 3 for the overlap but only on busy days, which is fine since the crowds are already dropping off. Even the returns-exchanges have slacked off, a bit early this year, but what can you have returned when your sales sucked? And now the final Saturday night of the busy season is almost over. 9:10pm, Cooper notes, glancing down at his Darth Vader watch, mentally reminding himself that no normal twenty-five year old would be wearing a Darth helmet on his wrist. Only another twenty minutes, he thinks. He can do this. He can make it.
He slips his cutter through the cardboard and packing tape of yet another box, another box from another load from their first restocking shipment of the new year, only a week and a half after they really needed it, but try telling Home Office that. L&C clings to their shipment schedule – planned by men and women in ties and skirts who wouldn’t know a Pokemon from a poke in the eye – with the fervent devotion Cooper’s mother reserved for the fourth of her twelve steps. And so, last week, when they could have used the merchandise for day after returns and exchanges (such as they were), the shelves were as bare as pole dancer’s ass, but from now till November, Cooper and company will be filling one item holes with six or seven or eighteen too many and pricing load after superfluous load.
Welcome to the wonderful world of retail. Check your intelligence and life goals at the door.
He steals another glance at Darth, then flips the black helmet shut. Nineteen minutes, thirty seconds. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven… nothing to it. Just keep sliding boxes on the shelves. Mindless busy work. Open. Price. Put away. Five more boxes. Four. Three. Nineteen minutes.
He can hear Dave in the next aisle over and Jared up front. He should be starting to clean up the store front, getting ready for close, but Cooper knows he’s not. Jared’s probably talking to a girl, probably a blonde, tits bigger than her hair, but just barely, looking eighteen or nineteen, save for the Hello, Kitty purse, but even that doesn’t warn you anymore, doesn’t scream I’m Twelve! Thirteen! Fourteen next week!
And Jared’s the kind that wouldn’t even think of it, would never even cross his mind to ask. A sweet guy, really, smart as a whip at his job (#1 Video Game Salesman in Northeast Region Seven three years running) but he’s lucky that he’s got looks, lucky that his smile makes you think of a young pre-couch-assaulting Tom Cruise, all glossy white teeth and sharp enough to put out an eye cheekbones. The young ones want to date him, to parade him out in front of their friends. The older ones want to take him and teach him the finer points of a long, slow fuck. The younger ones probably wouldn’t mind that, either. Jared could get laid more than Cooper and Dave combined. Except…
He can never close the deal. Oh, he gets the digits and the dirty notes dropped off at the counter by giggling girls for their giggling friends and he takes them to The Pub for a drink or two, but then they hit the parking lot and see his little ride, the bright blue Neon with the Jesus fish on the back end and the Elmo keychain dangling from the rear-view and the sex appeal just slips away and Jared goes home alone, again, but never seems to mind.
Cooper finishes box number three and stares down at the last two. Seventeen minutes and it’s on to board games – bored games – Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, and Monopoly. And Monopoly. NFL Monopoly, NASCAR Monopoly, Pokemon Monopoly, Yankees and Mets Monopoly, Star-fucking-Wars Monopoly. And how much for the Death Star with two hotels, again? He just shakes his head and tries to get into the rhythm. Pull it from the box. Slap a price sticker on (upper right corner, batter sticker below). On the shelf.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Tom Cruise,” Jared says, from up behind the counter, where he’s “sweeping”, the broom doing little but pushing air.
“Cruise?” Dave asks from his aisle, the scorn in his voice strong enough to scour the flaky beige paint from the shelves. There’s no one in the store. They can talk without having to raise their voices. “You can’t pick Cruise.”
“And why not?” Jared asks, though Cooper suspects he already knows. Cruise is a December choice, maybe November, a pick for playing with the seasonals, with their tween-age part-time minds that can’t comprehend pre-1995 cinema. Cruise is the traditional lead off pick of the filmically challenged, the old standby, the fruitcake in the yearly roll call of Next Big Things. The Lohans, the Duffs, the Biels. Cruise is not a January choice. Not in a world of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.
“Too easy,” says Dave, striding in his silly-power-walk style out of Three – the Male Action Aisle – a small pile of ripped open action figure packages in his hands. Old school G.I. Joe figs. Somebody got the good shit. “Gotta be some challenge there, man” he says, slapping the packages down on the counter. “Gots to be some challenge.” He tugs at his belt buckle, the silver plate with his initials on it, and his pants shift a bit, giving him a little more wiggle room in front, though, if you listened to him, he’d mention the fifteen pounds he’d lost since December 1, along with the twenty he lost at Thanksgiving and the thirteen he lost back around Labor Day.
“You’re stalling,” Jared says, wagging a stern fingered broom handle at him, looking for all the world like the teacher Cooper’s supposed to be at his second job, Graduate Assisting at the local college. “You’ve got nothing.”
Cooper shakes his head and turns back to his last box. Fifteen minutes now and he’s onto Uno and Uno Stacko and Uno Attack and Uno, Dos, Tres, let’s get the fuck out of this place!
“Hey… back off there, bitch,” Dave says, reaching one Chunky Soup arm across the counter to slap away the broom handle. “I’ve got an answer.” He glances around, making like he’s checking for someone listening in. “Top Gun.” He grins and gives Jared a double thumbs up and does a little victory dance that jiggles his wiggle room toward his hips and he has to pause to straighten it out. “That’s right, babee! Just call me Maverick!”
“Ooooh… Top Gun.” Jared scoops the torn G.I. Joe packages off the counter and dumps them in the trash. “Really had to work hard for that one, didn’t ya, you… you… you Tubby Bitch, you?”
Cooper bites back a chuckle, waiting for Dave’s retort, but then he hears them, hears them even before he can see them, pulling a Radar O’ Riley – Attention All Personnel, Incoming Assholes – hears their voices echoing down the mall hallway, all the way down into Aisle Four. He drops his last box and heads to the front of the store, past the bickering Dave and Jared, looking out into the hall to check them out.
It sounded in the Aisle like a troop of them and one look confirms it. A gang. Each one trying to look or act or sound worse than the last, but Cooper’s not buying. He’s looking for the quiet one, the one that’ll slip in while you’re distracted by his buddies Sound and Fury and rob you blind. And Cooper finds him right off, near the middle of the line, blending in with the others in their oh-so-cool matching bad-ass-black. He’s got a Metallica T-shirt on, Ride the Lightening logo screen printed on it, looks older than the guy wearing it and Cooper tries not to think of the fact that he’s old enough to remember when Ride came out and this little shit probably wasn’t even born yet.
He flips open Darth’s head and checks the time. Fourteen minutes. Of course they have to come in now. He stands in front of the store, arms folded across his chest, flexed as tight as he can make them, Darth-covered wrist tucked away under the other arm, fingers slipped under the fronts of his sleeves so the fabric will bulge more. He tries to will them to go on by. Turn around. Leave. Go to the food court or the movie theater or parking lot. He hopes they’ll see him there and just pass on by, yeah, that’s the ticket, he thinks, see me and be scared off. Because everybody knows a polo shirt and a fucking “Hi! My name’s Cooper! Ask Me How to Get FREE Batteries!” name tag is the intimidating outfit of the season.
Dave’s behind him, straightening the impulse counter. “So, come on Jar, you picked Cruise. You got anything better than T.G.?”
“Hell yeah, I got one,” Jared says, moving out from behind the registers, broom back in his hand. “Risky Business. T.C. and Rebecca DeHorney.” He smirks at Dave. “Who’s your daddy?”
Cooper watches as the crew moves in, barely even breaking stride as they filter through the store-front, fanning out into flanking and rear guards, like some sort of slacker SWAT team. He wonders, briefly, if they’re that well armed, hopes not, they haven’t had a gun in the store in at least a month. Most of them hang around the front, playing with the demos, the Bumble Ball in particular, picking shit up and putting it back any old place, generally just acting like kids. The quiet one is still quiet, but he’s not slinking off into an aisle, he’s standing tall and proud, front and center, in his T-shirt, black jeans with holes in both knees, red and black flannel tied around his waist, sleeves dangling down to the top of his combat boots with their laces undone and half the left toe ripped off.
How very grunge, Cooper thinks. How very 1995.
“Hey, Coop?” Jared calls out, as he moves further up front, waving the broom over the floor, simply moving the dust from one side of the store to the other and back again. “Cruise to you, man. Show Tubby how it’s done.”
At least a couple of them are drunk, Cooper thinks, his eyes never leaving Grunge and his crew. They’re staggering a bit. Slurring just a little as they talk smack back and forth, but still, they’re keeping it down, behaving almost civilly, certainly no worse than most of the ten to twelve set, better than most of the parents. He checks his watch again, careful to shield Darth’s head from prying eyes. Eleven minutes. Maybe, he thinks, they’ll just get bored and leave.
“Coop?”
“Days of Thunder,” Cooper says, diverting his eyes from Grunge and company for just a moment. “All you, Dave.”
Dave leans back against a bulk stack display of EZ-Bake Ovens and tugs at is belt buckle again. It doesn’t move and Cooper wonders if Dave realizes they all know his pants aren’t really that loose. “Easy,” Dave says. “Jerry Maguire.” The thumbs come out and up again. “Show me the money!”
Cooper’s eyes slide back to the boys in black and he sees that they’ve found the sporting goods in Aisle Five. Bats, balls, and Frisbees, oh my. Grunge picks up a Nerf football and starts chucking it back and forth with a couple of his boys, the girls in the gang standing off to one side. Heavy Metal Cheerleaders.
Watch check. Nine minutes.
“Cruise to you, Jared,” Dave says, the tone of his voice making it quite clear that he’s relishing any difficulty Jared might be having.
And one of the girls breaks formation. Slips away from the rest.
“I’m thinking, Tubby, I’m thinking.”
It’s her hair that catches Cooper’s eye, even as he starts to look at his watch again. Red, brown, and orange all at once, curling flames and sparks licking their way down her back, nearly down to her ass. She seems jittery, nervous, too caffeinated to be drunk, just shaky enough to be strung out, moving – hopping more than walking – toward the grid of sale priced Barbie in the store-front. Cooper pulls his eyes from her long enough to see that Jared and Dave have noticed her too.
Darth’s alarm beeps. Seven minutes to close. Time to round ‘em up.
Cooper turns his attention back to Five where Grunge and his sidekicks are still playing catch. He starts toward the aisle, but Grunge has already sent one of his boys deep, gotta test the arm, you know? But Grunge’s boy doesn’t see the bulk of clearance merch right in his path, runs himself a nice little post pattern, but Grunge thought he was going to button hook and now his boy’s gotta dive for the badly overthrown ball. And a cardboard display of Buster Bubbles – The Biggest Bubbles Blowing Baby! – pays the price.
Five minutes.
Dave’s already jiggling his way toward Five and Jared’s jumped back over the short counter by Register One – a move Dave and Cooper are both too round to manage – and now his hand is poised over the speed dial button for security. Which leaves Buster Bubble Boy for Cooper.
He extends a hand, helping Bubbles pull himself up out of the mess and tries to ignore the puddles of soapy water already pooling under the drunken fool’s ass. “Think it’s time to go, boys,” aiming for strong and stern and landing somewhere near his father’s ‘do your homework’ voice.
Bubbles, clearly brighter than Cooper had given him credit for, sensing trouble, tries to make amends. “Hey, sorry ‘bout that, man. Didn’t even see that shit, man.” He takes a look back at where he landed, sees the puddle on the floor. “DUDE! Bubbles!”
The look on Cooper’s face shuts him up. Grunge – clearly dumber or drunker than Cooper originally thought – is slower on the uptake.
“Hey, fuck that. You kicking us out for that? That ain’t shit, man Kicking us out for fucking bubbles.” He gets right up in Cooper’s face. “Where’s your Christmas spirit, man?”
Cooper stands his ground, despite the currents of cheap beer rolling off of Grunge’s breath. “Christmas was last week,” he says. Three minutes. “And I’m kicking you out, man, because we’re closing. And because you and Jerry Rice over here just ruined-” he takes a quick look down. “About a hundred bucks worth of bubbles.”
“Fuck that noise,” Grunge snorts. “Bubbles ain’t worth fucking shit.”
Technically, he’s right. Cooper knows a hundred bucks is probably four times the actual damage based on what was broken and what was left in the display to begin with. But, he thinks, that’s hardly the point.
“Watch the language, Sparky,” Dave says, sidling up next to Grunge. He draws himself up to his full height and sucks in the gut a bit and he’s almost intimidating. “Now why don’t you and your little buddies just move on, all right? Before my buddy back there dials up security and you get to spend the rest of your Saturday night talking to them.”
And then, right on cure, security shows up and that’ll be it for the Grunge gang’s night at the mall. No shirts, no shoes, no service for you assholes. They leave, swearing at Cooper, Dave, and anybody within range. And then, there she is again, bringing up the rear, walking – shivering, shaking, shuffling? – slower than the rest. Almost drifting. And just before they reach the hall, she slips off, melting into a group of moms and daughters, scouring the store-front dump bins for that just marked down bargain. Cooper watches her the whole way.
No one else sees. No one else cares.
One minute.
Dave starts pulling in the dump bins and sale signs from the store-front, politely suggesting to the moms and daughters that it’s closing time. They flash him a dirty look or two, but move on anyway.
Jared cleans the counter and leans back, reaching for the button to lower the gate. “You know,” he says, “that one guy, the one that dropped the pass, he wasn’t too bright. Reminded me of Dustin Hoffman, you know, in that movie… what was that movie?” He rubs his chin, thoughtfully, for a moment before breaking into that make-the-girlies-weak grin. “Oh yeah… Rain Man.” He high-fives himself and lets loose a ‘Boo-Yah’. “Cruise to you, Coop.”
Cooper leans back against the lowered gate and surveys the slowly spreading Buster Bubble flood. One minute over. And not over yet. “Mission Impossible,” he mutters, heading for the backroom, the cash counting, the book balancing, and the end of his night.
It’s January 4 and that means the holidays are over and the holiday staff is gone. The seasonals get dropped on the second and by the tent, a day before Cooper turns 25, it’s back to regular crews: 2 in the AM, 2 in the PM, 3 for the overlap but only on busy days, which is fine since the crowds are already dropping off. Even the returns-exchanges have slacked off, a bit early this year, but what can you have returned when your sales sucked? And now the final Saturday night of the busy season is almost over. 9:10pm, Cooper notes, glancing down at his Darth Vader watch, mentally reminding himself that no normal twenty-five year old would be wearing a Darth helmet on his wrist. Only another twenty minutes, he thinks. He can do this. He can make it.
He slips his cutter through the cardboard and packing tape of yet another box, another box from another load from their first restocking shipment of the new year, only a week and a half after they really needed it, but try telling Home Office that. L&C clings to their shipment schedule – planned by men and women in ties and skirts who wouldn’t know a Pokemon from a poke in the eye – with the fervent devotion Cooper’s mother reserved for the fourth of her twelve steps. And so, last week, when they could have used the merchandise for day after returns and exchanges (such as they were), the shelves were as bare as pole dancer’s ass, but from now till November, Cooper and company will be filling one item holes with six or seven or eighteen too many and pricing load after superfluous load.
Welcome to the wonderful world of retail. Check your intelligence and life goals at the door.
He steals another glance at Darth, then flips the black helmet shut. Nineteen minutes, thirty seconds. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven… nothing to it. Just keep sliding boxes on the shelves. Mindless busy work. Open. Price. Put away. Five more boxes. Four. Three. Nineteen minutes.
He can hear Dave in the next aisle over and Jared up front. He should be starting to clean up the store front, getting ready for close, but Cooper knows he’s not. Jared’s probably talking to a girl, probably a blonde, tits bigger than her hair, but just barely, looking eighteen or nineteen, save for the Hello, Kitty purse, but even that doesn’t warn you anymore, doesn’t scream I’m Twelve! Thirteen! Fourteen next week!
And Jared’s the kind that wouldn’t even think of it, would never even cross his mind to ask. A sweet guy, really, smart as a whip at his job (#1 Video Game Salesman in Northeast Region Seven three years running) but he’s lucky that he’s got looks, lucky that his smile makes you think of a young pre-couch-assaulting Tom Cruise, all glossy white teeth and sharp enough to put out an eye cheekbones. The young ones want to date him, to parade him out in front of their friends. The older ones want to take him and teach him the finer points of a long, slow fuck. The younger ones probably wouldn’t mind that, either. Jared could get laid more than Cooper and Dave combined. Except…
He can never close the deal. Oh, he gets the digits and the dirty notes dropped off at the counter by giggling girls for their giggling friends and he takes them to The Pub for a drink or two, but then they hit the parking lot and see his little ride, the bright blue Neon with the Jesus fish on the back end and the Elmo keychain dangling from the rear-view and the sex appeal just slips away and Jared goes home alone, again, but never seems to mind.
Cooper finishes box number three and stares down at the last two. Seventeen minutes and it’s on to board games – bored games – Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, and Monopoly. And Monopoly. NFL Monopoly, NASCAR Monopoly, Pokemon Monopoly, Yankees and Mets Monopoly, Star-fucking-Wars Monopoly. And how much for the Death Star with two hotels, again? He just shakes his head and tries to get into the rhythm. Pull it from the box. Slap a price sticker on (upper right corner, batter sticker below). On the shelf.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
“Tom Cruise,” Jared says, from up behind the counter, where he’s “sweeping”, the broom doing little but pushing air.
“Cruise?” Dave asks from his aisle, the scorn in his voice strong enough to scour the flaky beige paint from the shelves. There’s no one in the store. They can talk without having to raise their voices. “You can’t pick Cruise.”
“And why not?” Jared asks, though Cooper suspects he already knows. Cruise is a December choice, maybe November, a pick for playing with the seasonals, with their tween-age part-time minds that can’t comprehend pre-1995 cinema. Cruise is the traditional lead off pick of the filmically challenged, the old standby, the fruitcake in the yearly roll call of Next Big Things. The Lohans, the Duffs, the Biels. Cruise is not a January choice. Not in a world of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.
“Too easy,” says Dave, striding in his silly-power-walk style out of Three – the Male Action Aisle – a small pile of ripped open action figure packages in his hands. Old school G.I. Joe figs. Somebody got the good shit. “Gotta be some challenge there, man” he says, slapping the packages down on the counter. “Gots to be some challenge.” He tugs at his belt buckle, the silver plate with his initials on it, and his pants shift a bit, giving him a little more wiggle room in front, though, if you listened to him, he’d mention the fifteen pounds he’d lost since December 1, along with the twenty he lost at Thanksgiving and the thirteen he lost back around Labor Day.
“You’re stalling,” Jared says, wagging a stern fingered broom handle at him, looking for all the world like the teacher Cooper’s supposed to be at his second job, Graduate Assisting at the local college. “You’ve got nothing.”
Cooper shakes his head and turns back to his last box. Fifteen minutes now and he’s onto Uno and Uno Stacko and Uno Attack and Uno, Dos, Tres, let’s get the fuck out of this place!
“Hey… back off there, bitch,” Dave says, reaching one Chunky Soup arm across the counter to slap away the broom handle. “I’ve got an answer.” He glances around, making like he’s checking for someone listening in. “Top Gun.” He grins and gives Jared a double thumbs up and does a little victory dance that jiggles his wiggle room toward his hips and he has to pause to straighten it out. “That’s right, babee! Just call me Maverick!”
“Ooooh… Top Gun.” Jared scoops the torn G.I. Joe packages off the counter and dumps them in the trash. “Really had to work hard for that one, didn’t ya, you… you… you Tubby Bitch, you?”
Cooper bites back a chuckle, waiting for Dave’s retort, but then he hears them, hears them even before he can see them, pulling a Radar O’ Riley – Attention All Personnel, Incoming Assholes – hears their voices echoing down the mall hallway, all the way down into Aisle Four. He drops his last box and heads to the front of the store, past the bickering Dave and Jared, looking out into the hall to check them out.
It sounded in the Aisle like a troop of them and one look confirms it. A gang. Each one trying to look or act or sound worse than the last, but Cooper’s not buying. He’s looking for the quiet one, the one that’ll slip in while you’re distracted by his buddies Sound and Fury and rob you blind. And Cooper finds him right off, near the middle of the line, blending in with the others in their oh-so-cool matching bad-ass-black. He’s got a Metallica T-shirt on, Ride the Lightening logo screen printed on it, looks older than the guy wearing it and Cooper tries not to think of the fact that he’s old enough to remember when Ride came out and this little shit probably wasn’t even born yet.
He flips open Darth’s head and checks the time. Fourteen minutes. Of course they have to come in now. He stands in front of the store, arms folded across his chest, flexed as tight as he can make them, Darth-covered wrist tucked away under the other arm, fingers slipped under the fronts of his sleeves so the fabric will bulge more. He tries to will them to go on by. Turn around. Leave. Go to the food court or the movie theater or parking lot. He hopes they’ll see him there and just pass on by, yeah, that’s the ticket, he thinks, see me and be scared off. Because everybody knows a polo shirt and a fucking “Hi! My name’s Cooper! Ask Me How to Get FREE Batteries!” name tag is the intimidating outfit of the season.
Dave’s behind him, straightening the impulse counter. “So, come on Jar, you picked Cruise. You got anything better than T.G.?”
“Hell yeah, I got one,” Jared says, moving out from behind the registers, broom back in his hand. “Risky Business. T.C. and Rebecca DeHorney.” He smirks at Dave. “Who’s your daddy?”
Cooper watches as the crew moves in, barely even breaking stride as they filter through the store-front, fanning out into flanking and rear guards, like some sort of slacker SWAT team. He wonders, briefly, if they’re that well armed, hopes not, they haven’t had a gun in the store in at least a month. Most of them hang around the front, playing with the demos, the Bumble Ball in particular, picking shit up and putting it back any old place, generally just acting like kids. The quiet one is still quiet, but he’s not slinking off into an aisle, he’s standing tall and proud, front and center, in his T-shirt, black jeans with holes in both knees, red and black flannel tied around his waist, sleeves dangling down to the top of his combat boots with their laces undone and half the left toe ripped off.
How very grunge, Cooper thinks. How very 1995.
“Hey, Coop?” Jared calls out, as he moves further up front, waving the broom over the floor, simply moving the dust from one side of the store to the other and back again. “Cruise to you, man. Show Tubby how it’s done.”
At least a couple of them are drunk, Cooper thinks, his eyes never leaving Grunge and his crew. They’re staggering a bit. Slurring just a little as they talk smack back and forth, but still, they’re keeping it down, behaving almost civilly, certainly no worse than most of the ten to twelve set, better than most of the parents. He checks his watch again, careful to shield Darth’s head from prying eyes. Eleven minutes. Maybe, he thinks, they’ll just get bored and leave.
“Coop?”
“Days of Thunder,” Cooper says, diverting his eyes from Grunge and company for just a moment. “All you, Dave.”
Dave leans back against a bulk stack display of EZ-Bake Ovens and tugs at is belt buckle again. It doesn’t move and Cooper wonders if Dave realizes they all know his pants aren’t really that loose. “Easy,” Dave says. “Jerry Maguire.” The thumbs come out and up again. “Show me the money!”
Cooper’s eyes slide back to the boys in black and he sees that they’ve found the sporting goods in Aisle Five. Bats, balls, and Frisbees, oh my. Grunge picks up a Nerf football and starts chucking it back and forth with a couple of his boys, the girls in the gang standing off to one side. Heavy Metal Cheerleaders.
Watch check. Nine minutes.
“Cruise to you, Jared,” Dave says, the tone of his voice making it quite clear that he’s relishing any difficulty Jared might be having.
And one of the girls breaks formation. Slips away from the rest.
“I’m thinking, Tubby, I’m thinking.”
It’s her hair that catches Cooper’s eye, even as he starts to look at his watch again. Red, brown, and orange all at once, curling flames and sparks licking their way down her back, nearly down to her ass. She seems jittery, nervous, too caffeinated to be drunk, just shaky enough to be strung out, moving – hopping more than walking – toward the grid of sale priced Barbie in the store-front. Cooper pulls his eyes from her long enough to see that Jared and Dave have noticed her too.
Darth’s alarm beeps. Seven minutes to close. Time to round ‘em up.
Cooper turns his attention back to Five where Grunge and his sidekicks are still playing catch. He starts toward the aisle, but Grunge has already sent one of his boys deep, gotta test the arm, you know? But Grunge’s boy doesn’t see the bulk of clearance merch right in his path, runs himself a nice little post pattern, but Grunge thought he was going to button hook and now his boy’s gotta dive for the badly overthrown ball. And a cardboard display of Buster Bubbles – The Biggest Bubbles Blowing Baby! – pays the price.
Five minutes.
Dave’s already jiggling his way toward Five and Jared’s jumped back over the short counter by Register One – a move Dave and Cooper are both too round to manage – and now his hand is poised over the speed dial button for security. Which leaves Buster Bubble Boy for Cooper.
He extends a hand, helping Bubbles pull himself up out of the mess and tries to ignore the puddles of soapy water already pooling under the drunken fool’s ass. “Think it’s time to go, boys,” aiming for strong and stern and landing somewhere near his father’s ‘do your homework’ voice.
Bubbles, clearly brighter than Cooper had given him credit for, sensing trouble, tries to make amends. “Hey, sorry ‘bout that, man. Didn’t even see that shit, man.” He takes a look back at where he landed, sees the puddle on the floor. “DUDE! Bubbles!”
The look on Cooper’s face shuts him up. Grunge – clearly dumber or drunker than Cooper originally thought – is slower on the uptake.
“Hey, fuck that. You kicking us out for that? That ain’t shit, man Kicking us out for fucking bubbles.” He gets right up in Cooper’s face. “Where’s your Christmas spirit, man?”
Cooper stands his ground, despite the currents of cheap beer rolling off of Grunge’s breath. “Christmas was last week,” he says. Three minutes. “And I’m kicking you out, man, because we’re closing. And because you and Jerry Rice over here just ruined-” he takes a quick look down. “About a hundred bucks worth of bubbles.”
“Fuck that noise,” Grunge snorts. “Bubbles ain’t worth fucking shit.”
Technically, he’s right. Cooper knows a hundred bucks is probably four times the actual damage based on what was broken and what was left in the display to begin with. But, he thinks, that’s hardly the point.
“Watch the language, Sparky,” Dave says, sidling up next to Grunge. He draws himself up to his full height and sucks in the gut a bit and he’s almost intimidating. “Now why don’t you and your little buddies just move on, all right? Before my buddy back there dials up security and you get to spend the rest of your Saturday night talking to them.”
And then, right on cure, security shows up and that’ll be it for the Grunge gang’s night at the mall. No shirts, no shoes, no service for you assholes. They leave, swearing at Cooper, Dave, and anybody within range. And then, there she is again, bringing up the rear, walking – shivering, shaking, shuffling? – slower than the rest. Almost drifting. And just before they reach the hall, she slips off, melting into a group of moms and daughters, scouring the store-front dump bins for that just marked down bargain. Cooper watches her the whole way.
No one else sees. No one else cares.
One minute.
Dave starts pulling in the dump bins and sale signs from the store-front, politely suggesting to the moms and daughters that it’s closing time. They flash him a dirty look or two, but move on anyway.
Jared cleans the counter and leans back, reaching for the button to lower the gate. “You know,” he says, “that one guy, the one that dropped the pass, he wasn’t too bright. Reminded me of Dustin Hoffman, you know, in that movie… what was that movie?” He rubs his chin, thoughtfully, for a moment before breaking into that make-the-girlies-weak grin. “Oh yeah… Rain Man.” He high-fives himself and lets loose a ‘Boo-Yah’. “Cruise to you, Coop.”
Cooper leans back against the lowered gate and surveys the slowly spreading Buster Bubble flood. One minute over. And not over yet. “Mission Impossible,” he mutters, heading for the backroom, the cash counting, the book balancing, and the end of his night.
posted by Christian at 8:39 PM
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