So Special in Dayville Read online

  He gasps. Backing away hurriedly, he bumps into the shopping cart as the arm seems to float in the darkness in pursuit of him. He says nothing but retreats rapidly down the street, thinking he’s seen a ghost.

  ***

  Crystal meets Ajeno at the door of their apartment. “You’ve been gone forever!” Wrapping her arms around his right arm, she hugs the appendage. “You know how sometimes you look at something you’ve seen a thousand times, and suddenly it looks weird, like you’ve never seen it before?”

  After Ajeno frowns in contemplation, he gives a quick, definitive head-shake. “Did you grade Timmy’s test?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, graded his and all the others. They practically graded themselves.” The girl tugs impatiently on his arm. “But that’s not the best part!”

  “No?”

  “No,” she’s now pumping his arm in excitement, “cause tonight with your cookies, it was like . . . like outta this world! I mean, the flour looked like snow. And when the light caught the sugar, they looked like crushed diamonds. Then, as the cookies were baking, they popped up just like delicious, greasy toadstools!”

  “They . . . uh,” Ajeno looks doubtful, “aren’t, are they? Cause I don’t like veggies in my cookies. I mean, you know that, right?”

  “Oh, babe! Now you’re just being silly.” She gives him a playful slap on the arm before going into the bathroom to pee. “All that coffee’s just going straight through me!”

  “They aren’t, are they?” Ajeno calls after her. “Crystal, I can’t eat no toad cookies.”

  ***

  Returning to the tampon factory, an exasperated Ruiz lingers longer than usual on the upper roof. He knows the fat man has to be silenced. Fast.

  The Guerrera Cartel is as ruthless as it is elite. Teethed in the drug trade, the cartel now focuses on information. Paid by brokers, they organize global shipments of data too sensitive to ship on the Net—hidden military maneuvers; blueprints of parliamentary buildings; GPS tracking info on politicians, terrorists, and everyday civilians; banking ciphers; marketable identities; recipes for germ and chemical warfare; reactor overload sequences; seismic pressure points; warhead activation codes . . . etc. FRCs are just a small component of their operation.

  That afternoon, Ruiz had met his latest contact—a woman who cleans for a shirt factory when she’s not prostituting herself. Word on the street is she was a computer wiz demoted to janitorial for smoking crack on the job. But Ruiz is gambling that she can still hack the factory’s antiquated computer system for the FRC he needs.

  They met at her place just after she’d gotten off work. She turned the key in the front-door lock while looking Ruiz up and down. Apparently satisfied, she let him follow her inside after flicking on the light switch. The apartment was tiny, and Ruiz fought not to gag at its acetone stink of crank.

  Dropping her purse onto a stained sofa that was obviously used as a bed, she stretched, sticking her breasts out while arching the spine. “This job’s gonna kill me. I’m sore all over! My back, my knees . . . hell, even my hands ache. I feel like an old woman. Only thirty-two, and I feel like an old woman!”

  Ruiz eyed the woman’s sunken cheeks and her mummified skin. “It is unfathomable.”

  “Yeah, that’s right . . . unfathomable.” Grinning, she again looked him up and down, but this time hungrily, while again stretching her skeletal frame. “Do I look like an old woman?”

  Leaning now against the cold metal of the handrail, he sniffs, smelling her perfume, which still stains his flesh. She’d been a cheap lay, though, as she pointed out: “I won’t charge you for this roll, but next time, it’s gonna cost ya!” Still, it had felt good, just for a short time, to feel . . . something. Dwelling on their tussle on the stained sofa, he listens to the hard sound his guard shoes make as he goes down the steel steps into the factory. It’s an open staircase that descends to ever-darker levels of cold, immovable air. He takes this same route every night.

  Below, in the packaging area, he walks through a large room with concrete floors and scuffed white walls. There are long tables where big cartons of tampons are sorted into batches of six before being shrink-wrapped and stacked on pallets. The loaded pallets are then shrink-wrapped again with cellophane, the pallet rotating on a disk as the cellophane goes up and down its height like thread to a spool. Ruiz likes this area, packaging and shipping, with its whiffs of exhaust fumes, which appeal to him as a man.

  His least favorite area is scent and deodorant. There, in clean, carpeted areas with silk flowers, the employees work deep into the night observing focus groups. These volunteers are paid to hyperventilate, sniffing themselves silly over tester perfumes. Ruiz can’t imagine why scent is necessary. The stink of blood, he knows, swallows everything.

  The lab is on the second floor of the factory. A rat’s maze of hard fluorescent lighting and air stinking of disinfectants, it’s where they experiment on cotton wadding for its resistance to bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and viruses. The doors to this area are locked, but Ruiz can shine his flashlight inside the glass inserts of the doorframes, checking for movement or anything out of the ordinary.

  On wide shelving in the reception area are a series of jars such as those seen in medical museums, usually with something pickled and dead floating in formaldehyde. But these jars instead display tampons of various absorbencies. There are little girl tampons with the expansion diameter of a tootsie roll to ever-increasing sizes from regular, super absorbent, super plus absorbent to, finally, ultra absorbent, which expands to something slightly smaller than a bratwurst. After his first glance at the display when being hired two months before, Ruiz made it a point to never again let his gaze wander in its direction. There are some things about women that he prefers not to know.

  Now he glances around as his ears strain for those who might overhear. But he only senses concrete; a damp murkiness; and the sound, somewhere, of a machine running. The phone slips from his pocket as he stabs in a number memorized from the phone book. “Dawdleman!” His voice, rough with danger, holds undeniable authority. “It is I. We must talk—”

  “Oh, we must, must we?!” hoots Dawdleman. “What is it—did I win a free cruise or something? Or maybe you want me to change phone companies, is that it? Now I know times are tough and you’re just doing a job, same as me, pal. But harassing good, tax-paying folk is just wrong.” His tone turns dismissive before disconnecting the call. “And you should be ashamed of yourself!”

  ***

  The next morning, before leaving for work, Crystal wipes down the counters and runs the vacuum cleaner. It farts clouds of dust in her wake.

  Her mother always said how it was best to leave the house as tidy as you wanted it to be seen by the undertaker. “But,” asked Crystal as a child, “why, Momma?”

  “Cause you never know when your ticket’s to be called, your tax return’s to be audited, the notice comes calling you to jury duty, now do ya?”

  The girl finishes vacuuming. She’s wrapping up the electrical cord when she hears a thump against the party wall. Next door lives Beth Phillips, a manic rodent who is always darting here and there, muttering, “Gotta find my bits and pieces!”

  The old woman’s wrinkled cheeks will bulge from what she’s scavenged. Her favorite hunting grounds are junk shops and neighbors’ apartments when they’re so careless as to leave doors unlocked. Then, disappearing into her unit, next door to that of Crystal and Ajeno, she’ll make small scuffling sounds, sometimes banging, and having frequent arguments with herself: “Oh, that doesn’t go there. It won’t fit and doesn’t match.”

  A more strident tone invariably steadies the old woman’s voice. “Nonsense, of course it goes there. Hell, it was made to go there!”

  “I don’t know. It just seems . . . well, I have to wonder, don’t I?”

  “Wonder ’bout what?! I swear, don’t be a Timid Tessie.”

  “No call to be insulting.” The soft reply contains more than a hint of hurt. “And better
to be a Timid Tessie than a Lunatic Lucy, if you ask me.”

  “Well, who’s asking you? I swear I don’t know . . .”

  This warble of an old woman bitching to her selves is apt to go on for hours. More banging follows. Then sounds of furniture being dragged across mildewed carpeting.

  Crystal, next door, will sometime later cock her head, listening. Silence. Finally, silence.

  This signals her to turn the stovetop burner to low. Or squeeze the last of the washcloths free of Ajeno’s daily grime. Or, as she still has a few minutes more before needing to leave for work, to hurriedly wheel the vacuum cleaner into their only closet. It’s showtime!

  Two knocks on Crystal’s front door confirm this. A small, mischievous face twisted in wrinkles beams up at her as the young woman opens the door. “You want to see? It’s my best yet, I think.”

  A snort interrupts the beatific expression. “Think? You don’t have a brain in your head. What the hell are you thinking with?”

  “That’s really not fair,” complains the old woman. “And it’s,” sniffle, “mean.”

  A bored teenage girl’s voice slips between the wrinkled lips. “Can I go watch TV?”

  Anger replaces boredom. “Why are you always watching television? I swear, Lizzie, it’s like it’s glued to your face.”

  “Leave the child alone, why don’t you? You’re always picking on us. Pick, pick, pick!” Frail arms arc upward so a hand can rub the old woman’s forehead. “I just don’t know how much more of this that I can stand!”

  A bottomless sigh cuts the pathos. “So I can watch TV now?”

  “Oh,” Crystal tries appeasing all three, “you’re all so creative, aren’t you? Artists never agree. It’s because you each have the courage of your convictions!” She lightly grasps the old woman’s arms in an affectionate embrace. “Intuitive ecstasies of the soul!”

  “That’s right,” choruses the old woman. She darts out a boney hand to pull Crystal down the hallway. “We call this . . .” A gentle push sends the young woman flying into Beth’s living room. “Home for the Holidays!”

  “But,” exclaims the girl, “it’s barely October.”

  The old woman looks slightly confused. “Is it? Oh my, I thought it was a lot later than that!”

  Eliza spits. (It must be Eliza, thinks Crystal. Beth would never actually spit, leaving a gob of saliva dripping down her doorframe.) “Ah, hell, what’s a few months? Close your eyes for a second and POOF—it’s Christmas!”

  “Yes, I guess that’s true.” Her eyes growing larger and larger, Crystal stares at the tree. She’s tempted to cry. Because here, on an October morning, in a grimy Dayville apartment, the decorations—cheap colored balls, clumps of artificial icicles, and blinking lights—are wrapping her in a tinseled fantasy. She feels the blows against her own flesh—of hope (whack) . . . of Santa (whack) Claus . . . and of a cozy family home (whack, whack, WHACK!). With difficulty, she breathes into the pain. “Eliza, it’s absolutely beautiful!”

  A sweet voice answers, “It’s me, dear, Beth.”

  Crystal is still thinking of Beth’s Christmas tree that afternoon, when walking home from the bus stop. She passes a homeless man sitting in a cardboard box. He’s busy typing on a computer keyboard, its unplugged cord dangling over the tatters of his jeans. But there, just a few feet from him, is a cart of garbage through which to rummage.

  Crystal holds her breath. There are three dirty diapers and a rotten head of lettuce, but she’s got the tingle. The buzz, the shiver, the quiver that promises her that in this fetid, rotting, disgusting goop is . . . GOLD! A hard edge meets her touch. Feels like wood. She tugs, careful not to dump coffee grounds on her best dollar-store tennis shoes.

  The young woman likes turning trash into collectibles that she tries selling at Dayville’s huge flea market. Last month, it had been little dolls she’d made from discarded toilet paper rolls. Markers, glue, and small pieces of fabric transformed the half-crushed cardboard tubes into whimsical figures such as cowboys, sheriffs, and Las Vegas cabaret dancers.

  Crystal has a whole line of crafts made from such disused bathroom items. She’s especially hopeful this month. Their apartment’s bulging with three cartons filled with brand-spanking-new flyswatters made of old toilet-bowl brushes adorned with glitter. She’ll get Beth to help haul the cartons to the gumbo flats, where the market’s held in dry weather.

  Her own ambivalence about the flea market, a secret pain confessed to very few people, is never forgotten. A shipwreck, the buried trauma lies submerged so deep in the undertow that she’s barely conscious of it. Instead, Crystal revels freely in happier memories.

  A smile will touch her lips, as there on the gumbo flats, she inhales deeply. There . . . there she smells her late mother’s Chanel perfume and her late father’s cigarettes. Her pain was, after all, never caused by the market itself, but rather by its location, and then only because it rained.

  Naturally, when rain is forecasted, the market’s immediately canceled. Worst-case scenario is when it rains unexpectedly, as it had that fateful June day when her parents were working Crystal’s stall. Rain makes the gumbo flats immediately unstable. And that day, the people had panicked. Screams erupting, they’d turned on one another, savagely clawing one another for sturdier ground. Stalls, merchandise, babies, and the aged were abandoned as the strong flailed against the sucking earth to free themselves.

  Dayville officials like to justify the use of these flats on the basis of low municipal costs since the gumbo is self-maintaining. “Hell,” spat the mayor during a press conference after that particular day of tragedy, “it’s the perfect venue; any fool can see that! Flat as a pancake and no trash to pick up since it’ll all sink with the next rain. I tell you, we could use twice that amount of gumbo!”

  Dayville’s top politico is a good-looking man—chiseled features, eyes of piercing blue, and teeth so white as to blind a bat. His overweening ambition for higher political offices should’ve been easily satisfied. He’s just never been able to see how his used-car-salesman’s soul turns people off. Instead, he blames unsubstantiated rumors of his ill health being circulated. That, he always tells himself while sucking breath mints, is what holds him back!

  “Fact is,” he’d lowered his voice that day as if confiding a secret to the roomful of reporters, “I’m working a deal, right now, as we speak, for the state to lease a good portion of our gumbo for prison executions.” Grinning, he looked around at those attending the press conference for approval. “Just think of it—no drugs, no electricity, and no namby-pamby firing-squad members to hafta provide mental-health benefits for! I tell you, it’s the perfect method of prisoner extermination!”

  In the garbage cart, Crystal now finds a rubber doll whose eyes bulge out when the body’s squeezed. She laughs, tickled by delight. Tucked in the pocket of her sweater, she all but skips home, confident that Ajeno will find the doll just as amusing when he gets home from work.

  Chapter Four

  That night, a family of tourists sits at a table by Mom’s Diner’s only window. With two parents of indeterminate gender and two children of indeterminate sex, the foursome sticks out like the proverbial thumb amid a dolorous crowd. The adults are ill at ease and yet talkative, their voices carrying over the heads of silent workers.

  Ajeno, bussing nearby tables with a plastic tub for dirty dishes, stops to watch them, fascination on his face, as if they’re images on a television screen.

  “I told ’im,” drawls the biggest tourist, “that if he’s still there when we get back home, I’ll knock him into next week!”

  “Oh, honey,” says the smaller adult, “you know he’s half a bubble off plumb. And he is my brother and all, so maybe we should just be more charitable.”

  “Charitable—hell, he’s worth less than spit, and I’ll tell ’im so!”

  “Whatever you say, dear.” The small adult, turning to the child playing with something on its plate, scolds with a hint of surprise, “Lord
y, now didn’t I tell you to leave that outside? Fine restaurants like this ain’t no place for dead things.”

  A hangdog expression seizes the child. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then go on,” admonishes the adult, “get outside with that and leave it there!”

  Meanwhile, from behind the cash register, Ruiz watches Ajeno lumber about the room, clattering dishware. The Mexican’s eyes narrow, keeping his target in sight. Tonight, he thinks to himself, the fat man will not escape. It’s all very good for the cook to pretend not to know what Ruiz did in the alley the night before, but the tall man is not fooled. Knowledge is power, but it is also a dangerous bomb to hold.

  Finally, as early evening wanes and customers dwindle, Jones takes over the cash register. “Better take out the trash,” he tells Ruiz, to which the other nods.

  Perfect! The Mexican angles himself near Ajeno in the grill area. He acts casual when bending over to grope from a shelf under the cooker. But then the knife he has hidden there falls to the sticky floor. He hurriedly picks it up, but not before Ajeno’s sausage fingers also close over its steel.

  “I can help,” says Ajeno playfully. “This is the kitchen, and I’m the cook.”

  Ruiz snatches back the knife. “I belong here more than you, pinche cabron!”

  “You do?” Astonishment marks the fat man’s expression.

  “It is time for your break,” Ruiz spits into the other’s face. Threateningly, he presses the knife’s tip against the fat man’s chest. He searches vainly in the other’s expression for terror, pleading, or even condemnation. His voice goes ice cold. “Outside, in the alley, the air is fresh. It might clear your head. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Biting his lower lip in thought, the big man nods, his eyes fixed innocently on those of Ruiz. “Sure, why not?” He clumps out the back door, but not before grabbing, from an open jar, handfuls of pickles to stuff in his pockets.

  Ruiz glances to the front of the diner. At the register, Jones is flirting with a cheap-looking blond woman. She makes Ruiz shudder. Not even a faint blush warms the pallid skin of that face.