Читать книгу In the Course of Human Events - Mike Harvkey - Страница 12

From Liberty Ridge, Clyde headed to Walmart to give Esther the rest of what he owed her. He walked all the checkouts before someone told him that Esther had been moved to Pets.

Clyde smelled the Pets Department before he saw it, all mossy water and dead fish. The floor where Esther was working was cluttered with aquarium parts, bags of fish food, crates of baby turtles, and loads of junk. Esther was tapping the glass of an aquarium and whispering to a fish when Clyde saw her. “Good thing I’m not with those animal rights people,” he said.

Esther flapped her arms at her sides. “Clyde!” she whined. “Mrs. Asbury had a stupid stroke so they stuck me in this shithole.” She cast an eye upward. “Sorry, hun, but it is, and not even one of your miracles would change that.” She whispered to Clyde, “This is the worst department in the whole store. Everybody knows it.”

“Well,” Clyde said. “At least you got the fish to keep you company.”

“Poor fishies,” Esther said. “I was just telling this one that it’s gonna be okay on the other side. His water’s filled with poop and half his friends are dead and rotting.” She leaned toward the glass again and sang, “But everything gonna be all right . . . ”

Clyde pushed a box out of the way to reach her. He took out his wallet.

“Hey!” she said. “You found it. I knew you would.”

“Yeah.” Clyde held out a twenty. “This cover it?”

“Oh my gosh, Clyde, really?”

He shrugged.

“At this point that twenty-dollar bill will cause more trouble than it’s worth. Seriously. You think Walmart needs your money?”

“No,” he said.

“Then put that away ’fore somebody gets the wrong idea.” Esther fluttered her white eyelashes and twisted sideways with a hand on her chest. “I am not that kind of girl, Clyde Twitty. Shame on you,” she said with a lot of breath, batting a hand in his direction. “Shame on you, naughty boy. I have half a mind to turn you over my knee.” She straightened up and then stared into a tank. Clyde slipped the bill back into his pocket. She’s right. Walmart’s doing just fine without my money.

Esther flinched like she’d been slapped, grabbing Clyde’s arm and making him jump. “Mrs. Asbury!” She bounced up and down. “There’s an opening now. You could work here! You’re always worrying yourself half to death over the groceries, pinching pennies and, no offense, Clyde, but there is not a single nother man who comes in here with coupons. You must be pretty sure of what you got ’twix your legs to lay a stack of coupons on my belt.”

Clyde’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. Esther was right, of course, about all of it. He didn’t know she’d been paying such close attention.

She shouted, “Work here! Work here!” twirling on one foot. “Every paycheck you’ll wanna cry or kill yourself, but the job’s easy, we get a thirty percent discount at the Starbucks and a fifteen-minute smoke break every two hours. But best of all, of course, you’d get to work with moi, Esther Hines.”

It was hard to argue. She walked him right then to the office in back and knocked at the open door. Behind a plain desk sat a man with thin, tan arms poking out of a short-sleeve button-down. A Walmart tie choked him around the neck, that or high blood pressure making his face look boiled. “Esther,” he said.

She dragged Clyde in by the elbow. “Mr. Wilson, meet Clyde Twitty, totally the guy you should hire to replace poor Mrs. Asbury.” Esther gave Mr. Wilson an exaggerated sad frown and extended the arm she was holding so that there was nothing Clyde could do but open his hand above Mr. Wilson’s desk. A fake wood plaque said Jerry Wilson, Manager.

“Mr. Wilson,” Clyde said.

The manager stood up, revealing a comically distended belly, a complete surprise given the bony arms. Clyde half expected to hear one of his shirt buttons zing into a corner. Wilson shook Clyde’s hand. “It’s only part time,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Clyde said. “I got other work too.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Such as?”

“I drive cars to auction.”

“See?” Esther said. “He’s reliable, he’s nice, he also takes care of his uncle, who’s a paraplegic. He didn’t say that ’cause he’s all modest. It don’t get any better than Clyde. He won’t let you down, Mr. Wilson.”

“Thank you, Esther.”

“He used to make extension rods,” Esther said. “Before the economy tanked and the place went kaput.” She really had been paying attention. She took a small ceramic pig from Wilson’s desk and held it a couple inches from her right eye; her left scrunched shut. “Ask him what he got paid.”

“Esther,” Mr. Wilson said.

She put the pig back on Wilson’s desk and said, “Eighteen bucks an hour!”

Wilson’s eyes flared, but narrowed quickly. “Well, this position starts at significantly less than that,” he said. “Try seven seventy-five.”

Clyde grimaced. At the rate he was going, he’d be paying the IRS every month for the rest of his life. “How’s anybody supposed to pay the mortgage with seven seventy-five an hour?”

That pushed Mr. Wilson back in his chair. “You own a house?”

Clyde lied. “I do. Bought at the top of the market, too.”

Mr. Wilson’s eyes narrowed. Clyde could hear him breathing through his nose. “Well, I’m sorry, but Walmart’s not responsible for poor timing.”

Clyde knew he needed a job. Now more than ever, with this goddamn out-of-the-blue IRS bullshit. But letting one of the world’s most profitable companies pay him minimum wage seemed like a particularly hard kick in the balls. I’ve had enough kicks in the balls to last a lifetime. Clyde shrugged. “I mean, I guess I’ll take it.”

Mr. Wilson laughed. “Will you, now?”

“Yes sir. Just until something better comes along.”

“Well well.” Mr. Wilson shook his head, making notes and chuckling like Clyde had just made his day. “Don’t do us any favors, uh . . . ”

“Clyde,” Esther said.

“Clyde,” Mr. Wilson said, looking closely at his writing. “It’s very nice of you to put yourself out for us, Clyde, it really is. I’m sure Sam Walton will appreciate it.”

Clyde had known this guy two minutes and he already had him figured out: prick.

Mr. Wilson nodded at Esther. “Help him fill out an application.”

At home, Clyde told his mom that she wasn’t the only one who’d been offered a job. He wasn’t sure that he’d get it now, but for her sake he made it seem certain.

“Boy,” she said, “Walmart. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“Pays less than half what I used to make. Richest company in the world too.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but with the head you got on your shoulders, Clyde, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to find you running the place in five or ten years. I think what we’re seeing here is proof of the economic recovery. At last!”

Clyde nodded but he wanted to spit. Even with Walmart and driving and what his mom made setting hair, they’d still be struggling. Here he was, about to start a new job, and he felt like he’d just lost one.

After supper he went around stapling Pretty Lady fliers on the telephone poles between Pleasant Hill and Grain Valley. He heard the Plymouth Fury before he saw it and looked around for a place to hide. The ditch was too wet. The car rolled by and the same group shouted, “You did! You did tee a putty tat!”

“Hey, fuck you!” Clyde yelled, jumping into the road behind them and walking down the asphalt with both middle fingers raised. This had been happening for ten years. Literally.

Clyde pounded one of the roadside Pretty Lady signs he’d made last week into the mud. The four or five vehicles that would pass by—the Plymouth Fury dicks included—ought to appreciate that. It was pathetic, he knew, but what was the alternative? Give up? Then what? He was standing on the side of 58, still pissed about those townies, when his phone buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number and thought it might be Walmart. “Hello?”

“Clyde?” a woman said.

“Yes.”

“It’s Tina,” she said. “Smalls. From earlier.”

“Oh,” Clyde said, immediately thinking about the ten-dollar bottle of shampoo. What a scam. “How you doing?”

“Good,” she said. “Here, my dad wants to talk to you.” She smothered the phone.

Jay came on. “Clyde-san?”

“Yeah, hey, Mr. Smalls.”

“Special class tomorrow, Clyde. Be a real good introduction for you. Nothing too clazy. Just some basics. Running, stretching, kihon, kata, light kumite, no big deal. You gonna love it. Eight o’clock. Can you make it?”

“Um,” Clyde said, looking out at the endless stretch of road, not a car in sight past his own truck in the grass. “Sorry, can you hang on a second, Mr. Smalls?”

“Call me Jay,” Jay said, and Clyde lowered the phone. With no voice in his ear there was nothing to hear but wind and a lawn mower so distant it was probably coming from Grain Valley. Clyde wanted to train, but there was no way he could afford to, especially without knowing whether or not he’d got the Walmart job. “Mr. Smalls?” he said.

“Jay. Or sensei.”

“Well, I’d really like to make it but . . . I just can’t,” Clyde said.

“You can’t,” Jay said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Um,” Clyde said. “Well. I haven’t worked much in the last couple years.”

“I don’t teach to make money, Clyde. This ain’t one of these ‘you give me five hundred dollars and I give you a black belt’ deals, and believe you me, them deals exist. Half the black belts walkin ’round out there’s garbage.”

Clyde laughed. He said, “Okay. I, uh, I just can’t really afford, uh, anything right now. Especially since I got this letter from the IRS.”

“What they want?”

“They say they made a mistake three years ago and now I owe them more money than I got in the bank.”

“In my opinion, the IRS is a rogue agency. I don’t recognize their power. Personally I ain’t paid them a penny in years.”

Clyde had never heard such a thing. “You haven’t?”

“Do me a favor, Clyde, and bring the letter when you come over tomorrow.”

Clyde wanted to, but he didn’t want to be anyone’s charity case.

Jay said, “Clyde?”

“None of your students pay?”

“Don’t you worry about my other students, Clyde. Every case is unique unto itself.”

“You sure, sir?”

“I’m sure, Clyde, I am a hundred percent sure. Question is, are you sure? You’ve plumb run out of excuses.”

Clyde grinned. Jay could already read him better than some people Clyde called friends. What the hell? he thought. If he didn’t like it, he could always quit. “Okay,” he said.

“Hot damn! What I like to hear. See you Sunday morning. Be on time, that’s all I ask.” Then Jay said, “Osu,” which sounded like “oh” followed by a long hiss. Clyde didn’t know what it meant but Jay hung up before he had time to say anything.

Getting back in his truck, Clyde wondered how Jay had got his cell phone number.

At eight the next morning, breath visible on the air, Clyde stood in the cold grass in his bare feet, shivering. The belt Jay had tied around his waist was the same color as his gi but dirty and limp. Jay grunted some Japanese stuff before Clyde, the only student there. “Let’s start with a little run,” Jay said, jogging into the street on bare feet. “Five miles.” Clyde nearly stopped right then and there; he hadn’t run five miles since junior high. The macadam was hard and cold. Less than a mile in, Clyde stumbled to the edge of a pit and threw up, vomit the color of tea dappling the water below. He hadn’t eaten any breakfast and had drunk only half his bottle of rocket fuel on the drive over. Puking, he was sure, would excuse him from training. “If you’re gonna puke, puke hard,” Jay said.

When Clyde finished he said, “Sorry.”

“No ‘sorry’ in training. No shame in upchucking. The body gets rid of what it don’t want. The more you train, the better it gets at doing it.”

Clyde wondered when Jay would say, “Well, you done good. That’s enough for today.” Jay executed a series of techniques. Clyde had never seen anybody with so much raw power and it gave him a chill. “Four laps left,” Jay said. “Then we train. Don’t worry about puking. Don’t worry about what happens later. Worry about entering the mai.” He didn’t elaborate on that, pulling Clyde by his gi back into the street. By the time they were in the yard again the sun was up and the balls of Clyde’s feet, what Jay called his chusuku, were bloody, the bones of his heels bruised. The left side of Clyde’s chest ached. When he headed for the house, Jay said, “Get back in line, Clyde-san. We ain’t done, we’s just getting started.”

“I was just gonna see what time it was.” Clyde hadn’t forgotten that he had to drive his mom to the Omega today.

“When we train, we leave everything else at the door of the dojo. And dojo don’t mean a little room with mats an’ shit, some cross-eyed Jap pouring tea. Wherever we choose to train becomes our dojo. Right now, it’s this patch of grass. We decide to do some kihon in a McDonald’s lobby, that lobby’s our dojo.”

“Osu,” Clyde said, already understanding that much. He also understood that he probably wouldn’t make it home in time to drive his mom to her first day of work. He understood that, without a fight, he wasn’t going anywhere until Jay said class was over, and no part of him wanted to fight this man.

All morning they trained against the cold and Clyde pushed his mom from his mind. It felt good learning how to throw a punch, straight and fast and hard. At midday, Jay went into the house and came out with a big kick bag. He held it against his body and Clyde threw front-snap kicks, what Jay called chusuku mai geri, into the bag as Jay yelled, “Gotta move me, Clyde. Push me back!” Clyde never did move him, but after a hundred kicks, his toes were stubbed and swollen and he’d overextended both legs.

When Tina and Jan came out of the house and took to the front porch, watching, Clyde again wondered about the time. The sun was high. He thought that he might, if he left right now, still make it to Strasburg in time. Distracted by the women, Jay said, “All right, let’s take a break. Clyde-san, you bring that letter?”

“Osu,” Clyde said, getting it from his truck. He handed it to Jay and turned his phone on.

Jay stood in the yard, a cigarette in his mouth and the letter held up to his face. He made noises as he read. He laughed. When he finished he tucked it inside his gi.

“How’d he do?” Jan asked.

“I think we got us a damn warrior here,” Jay said, snickering, and Clyde couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Light lunch, Clyde. Banana. Some crackers. No more than one glass of water. Ten minutes, then we train till five. Dale’s on his way.” When his phone powered on, Clyde tried to read the time, but sweat ran into his eyes. The muscles that wrapped his ribs burned and his hands shook. It was one thirty. He’d missed five calls, all from his mom. Clyde stood with the phone in his hand, staring at Jay.

“Ought oh,” Jan said.

“Think you just broke him, Dad,” Tina said, giggling.

“Nah, Clyde’s tougher than that.”

Clyde crossed the distance in the yard so that only Jay would hear what he had to say. “I’m really sorry, sir.”

“Sensei. And say ‘osu’ when you want to talk to me.”

“Osu. Sensei,” Clyde said. “My mom needs me to drive her to work.”

“Do she?”

“Yes sir. Osu.”

“Sunday class don’t end till five though.”

“Yeah, I didn’t know that. Osu.”

“When we train, we leave everything at the door, Clyde. That’s all I ask.”

“Osu. I’m sorry.”

“You were doing so well too.”

“I guess, sir, Sensei, if I’d known this was all day . . . I woulda had to . . . skip it.”

“What’s the problem?” Jan asked Jay from the steps.

“Turns out,” Jay said, loud enough for everyone to hear him, “Clyde-san’s got other obligations.”

“Oh, man.” Tina fixed her mouth in a grimace. “You screwed up, buddy.”

“I’m sorry,” Clyde mumbled to Jay. He hit the button on the side of his phone. 1:43 now.

Jay snickered and slapped Clyde’s shoulder. “I’m just playing with you, Clyde. Go on, git. Your mommy needs you, don’t let us keep you.” Jay said all that grinning but he still looked mad, Clyde thought, still looked disappointed. Clyde bowed the way he’d bowed at the beginning and limped to his truck just as Jimmy-Don pulled up in front hollering about the FBI. Dale slammed his door and ran off down the street on bare feet in a filthy gi.

“What’s happening?” Jay said, hurrying across the yard. Clyde wiped his eyes and saw a brown sedan parked near the entrance of the Ridge, a K-car or some other shitty make and model. When Dale got close, the engine started and the car lurched from the curb. Dale yelled after it and snatched up rocks to throw. They peppered the trunk. The car jerked into second, getting a scratch, and raced away.

“You’re shitting me,” Jay said to Jimmy-Don. He spat, looking worried. His lips crimped into a tight line.

Jimmy-Don had his huge pistol in his hand. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Uncle Jay, is it me or is the FBI getting positively brazen in its surveillance of us?” He waved the Magnum.

Jay and J.D. stood watching Dale walk back to the house. “Get the plates?” Jay said.

Dale shook his head.

“Same fuckers as last time, you think?”

Dale said he thought so, yeah.

At the moment Clyde was more worried about his mom than about a car the Smalls thought was FBI. He didn’t feel like he could leave before somebody said something, so he stood in the open door of his truck, watching Dale, J.D., and Jay talk in a circle. When Jay noticed Clyde standing there waiting, he said, “Oh, Clyde-san. Monday through Thursday class at six in the basement. It’s only two hours. Two-hour class for mama’s boys who got other obligations. Hope to see you.”

“Osu.” Clyde got quickly up into the truck, feeling pain in his fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, ribs, stomach, ass, legs, feet, and toes. He cranked the engine and shifted into drive when he heard his name, or a version of it.

“Clydus Twittus.” Jimmy-Don lumbered into the street, put a paw on Clyde’s open window, and handed Clyde a book. The Turner Diaries was the title. “Ever read this?” he said.

“Huh uh,” Clyde said. The paperback was tattered, worn, much used. Its spine broken, the book fell open to a page with several passages underlined and handwritten notes choking the margins. The cover was familiar. He might have seen it at a gun show.

“I hope you don’t mind, Clyde. Twitty. The book is used. I did not purchase this book new. I did not participate in our national pastime, I did not, I confess, stimulate the economy, and for that I will undoubtedly hang. From the neck. Until dead. Or maybe just sleepy.” Jimmy-Don tapped the cover. “Read it, Clyde Twitty, read it and weep, my tweety-bird friend. Do you tweet? Have I seen you on Twitter? Can I give you a titty twister?”

Clyde grinned. “It’s like a . . . novel?”

Jimmy-Don nodded and wagged his head at the same time. “I dare say you might find some of my notes insightful. Profound even.”

“Thanks,” Clyde said. He resisted the urge to check the time again.

Jay stepped to the curb and called out. “Think of that book as part of your training, Clyde-san. Read it.”

“There will be a quiz later,” Jimmy-Don said, slapping Clyde’s hood so hard Clyde jumped.