Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (5 page)

Jenny walked over to the fire hydrant and ran her finger over the top of it, I guess to see if it was covered with ice or something.

“Careful,” I said. “You know what dogs do to those things!”

With one foot, she stepped up onto the top of the hydrant and stood on it, lifting her other foot into the air and howling at the moon. Trying to set the night on fire, I suppose. I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody having such a good time just standing around outside a coffee shop, but in a way, I knew where she was coming from. There was a certain thrill just to being out on the streets, after dark, without any parents—mine or anyone else’s—around. I was getting kind of used to it, but my parents weren’t overprotective in the slightest compared to Jenny’s.

A minute later the cab pulled up. It didn’t look like a cab to me. I always pictured the yellow things with the black and white checks on the side, but this just looked like a little maroon sedan that said “Bonaventure Taxi Service” in white letters on the door. It looked sort of dingy. But it had the light-up thing on top like cabs always have on TV, which was good enough for me.

I opened the back door, and Jenny climbed in, and I got in after her.

“Where to?” said the guy driving the cab.

“Uh, 7942 August Avenue, please,” I said.

“And from there to Oak Meadow Mills,” said Jenny.

“Sure,” said the guy.

And he took off.

The driver had sort of a shag mullet and a mustache, as though he had found a look he liked in 1978 and had just stuck with it ever since. He had clearly been blond at one point, though his hair was mostly gray now. His fingers drummed on the dashboard, keeping the rhythm to a classic rock song on the radio.

“Any objection to Led Zeppelin?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said.

“Good.” He turned the stereo up a bit and drummed harder. I got the idea that this was how he’d spent every night of the last few decades—driving around, drumming along to classic rock. Not a bad life, really.

I took a quick whiff of the air. I’d always heard that taxi drivers were known for not bathing, but this one smelled like a mixture of cigarettes and air freshener, which, together, smelled like a forest full of old people—nothing
too
offensive.

We got about a block before Jenny looked over at me, smiling so wide I could only assume that she’d be sore in the morning. “This was a great idea, Leon. Thanks.”

“Hey, thanks for the fare,” I said.

“You know,” she said, suddenly smiling a bit less, “I’m not really sure I understand what’s going on with you and Anna.”

She had taken off her hat and was kind of playing with her hair.

“Well,” I said, “it’s complicated, I guess. One of those things.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Like sometimes I think you’re a couple, and sometimes I think you’re just friends.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s somewhere in between, I guess.”

“Okay,” she said.

And she turned to look out of her window, still playing with her hair, wrapping it around her finger, then unwinding it and starting over.

I looked up at the cabdriver, eager to change the subject. “Have you been driving a cab long?” I asked. I always saw guys in movies asking that.

“Oh, hell yeah,” he said. “Nineteen years now. Hey, you guys mind if I smoke a bit?”

“Go ahead!” said Jenny. He opened up the glove compartment and pulled out a pack of smokes and a lighter.

“Have you been driving in Cornersville all that time?” I asked.

“Hell no!” he said. “Nineteen years ago there wouldn’t have been nobody to drive in Cornersville. I still don’t come out here much, on account of the cops out here are insane, but it’s easier work than in the city, and some nights I just wanna rock, ya know?”

“Hell yeah,” said Jenny.

“Until a few years ago you never got nobody out here. It was just a little, you know.” And he made a weird noise like a duck having sex, which I guess meant that until a few years ago, the town was just a little place where ducks got it on.

“The town’s gotten a lot bigger, hasn’t it?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “that’s what happens when you build a town near a city, man. I remember when I first started all this, people thought that Shaker Heights was just a little crap town out in the middle of nowhere.”

Shaker Heights was the next town between Cornersville and the city. The two towns were creeping closer and closer together; I figured that in a few years, there’d be no space between them, just a big field of subdivisions connecting the borders like stitches.

“And Preston will be next,” Jenny said. Preston was a small town, quite a bit smaller than Cornersville, about five miles north, past a long stretch of farmland.

“Oh, just watch,” said the guy. “In ten years there won’t be any space left between Cornersville and Preston. Some developer’s gonna buy up those farms, and that whole area’s gonna explode like shit. Just watch.”

I kind of got a kick out of the fact that the driver was cursing and smoking in front of us. Most adults seem to be under the impression that people my age don’t know what all the cusswords are. Still, I wasn’t sure I liked the image of anything exploding like shit. Ew.

About this time he pulled up to my house, rolled down the window a crack, and blew some smoke out into the air.

“I’ll get all the fare when we get to my place,” said Jenny.

“This where you get off, then?” the cabbie asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I looked over at Jenny. “And thank you, too!”

Jenny smiled. I smiled back, and was just about to climb out, but I was totally unprepared for what happened next: she leaned in closer and kissed me. Not quite on the lips or anything, it was on that little corner between the mouth and the cheek, like maybe she’d been going for one or the other but ended up in between.

“Good night,” she said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Good night.”

I practically jumped out of the car and shut the door, then ran around the front of it and into my driveway.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said to the cabdriver.

“Rock on, my good man,” he said.

“Rock on,” I said, making the devil sign with my hand.

She kissed me. Jenny.

And there was a fifty-fifty chance she had intended to kiss me on the lips.

I stood there in the driveway sort of blindsided for a second as the cab pulled away, drove up August Avenue, and turned onto Eighty-second Street.

Okay, I thought. So she kissed me. It’s probably just a part of her whole “living on the edge” thing. Maybe she read that Jim Morrison kissed people all the time just as a way of saying good-bye. That was probably it. It had to be.

But then I remembered her asking what my deal with Anna was. But I hadn’t told her it was nothing, or anything like that. I’d said we were sort of in between. Surely she hadn’t seen that as a license to start going after me herself, right?

I sort of stood there in the cold for a second, letting the snow hit my face, while I tried to shake the feeling that I’d just cheated on Anna. Jenny had kissed me, not the other way around, and anyway, Anna and I weren’t really an official couple or anything. No rule said no one else could kiss me.

For the first time that night, I really felt cold.

I only had time to think about this for a second or so, though, before I heard my mother shouting at me.

“Leon!” she shouted. “Get in here this instant!”

I turned around and headed up to the front door, where she was standing, still wearing her Wanda gear.

“What the heck is going on here? Was that a police car?”

I laughed. “No. Jenny and I called a cab.”

“A
cab
?” she asked, as though I’d said it was a carriage made of a pumpkin or something equally unlikely. “Leon, you know you’re supposed to call us for a ride!”

“Aha!” I said. “The rule is that I’m supposed to call for a ride. There’s no rule about
who
I have to call.”

My dad showed up behind her, still wearing his Lester hat. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Your son,” said my mother, “just came home from the café in a taxicab.”

“No kidding?” asked my dad. “What did that cost you?”

“Not much,” I said, not wanting to say that I’d let someone else pay.

“Well, that was an okay idea,” said my dad. “But it would have been cheaper just to call us.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I was going to. But Jenny was going to be stuck walking clear back to Oak Meadow Mills, and it’s freezing outside, so I offered to split a cab with her.”

“Well, that was nice of you, I guess,” he said.

“Yeah, it was just a favor for a friend, that’s all,” I said. “I would have done it for any of my friends.” It wasn’t like I had ridden with Jenny because I had a thing for her or anything. I was telling myself as much as I was telling them.

“Well,” said my mother, “I think that’s all beside the point. You know that when we say you’re to call for a ride, we mean to call us, not a cab. We would have given Jenny a ride home.”

“It might have been implied,” I said, “but it was never explicit.”

“Have you been reading legal thrillers or something?” asked my mother. “Because lawyer-speak isn’t going to get you out of trouble.”

“Oh, Judith, there’s no harm done,” said my father. “He beat the system. Good for him!”

I wasn’t too surprised that my dad thought this was clever; he was a lot more lenient on matters like this than my mother. But I’d never heard him say it was good to beat the system. Maybe that hair dye he’d used on the Mohawk had seeped into his brain.

“Well,” said my mother again, “in the future, let it be known that you’re to call
us,
not a taxi, a bus, a hansom cab, a volunteer service for drunks, a stolen Soviet tank, or Air Force One. And even if you just get a ride home from Anna’s dad or something, call and let us know.”

“Deal,” I said.

My mother nodded and I headed up to my room, forgetting all about my parents and thinking about Jenny again. I couldn’t think of any way I’d led her on, but I still felt guilty. But I reminded myself that it wasn’t really that big of a deal or anything. She was just trying, in her way, to live on the edge a bit, like Jim Morrison. Kissing me was her way of pushing the bounds of reality.

Then again, it did seem like I spent every gifted-pool meeting with her butt on one of my arms. Maybe it wasn’t an accident.

About twenty minutes later, I got an e-mail from Jenny. The subject line read “Plutonian Night.”

Leon,

Wasn’t that cabdriver awesome? On the way to my place he was singing along to the radio really loud, and he said the f-word twice. Hope I didn’t freak you out tonight at the end of the cab ride. I couldn’t help myself. I know you and Anna are sort of going out and all, but if that ever changes, I imagine you can guess that I’m interested. Ever since I started reading biographies of Jim Morrison I’ve wanted to live more on the edge, cause some more trouble, and, you know, actually live a bit instead of just doing homework all the time. And the only person I know who is actually doing that sort of thing is you. And I’m not going to go trying to split you and Anna up or anything, but I just thought you should know that I think you’re awesome. I hope this doesn’t weird you out or anything, and that thing scan still be the same between us as they’ve always been if you aren’t interested.

Sincerely,
Jenny

Whoa.

Well, that threw a bit of a wrench in my gears. No one had ever written me a letter telling me how great I was.

I took a deep breath and thought about things. Sometimes I felt like Anna and I were sort of stuck in neutral or something like that, and I always felt like maybe I couldn’t keep up with her. I mean, she was about ten times smarter than I was, and despite the whole suspension thing, I didn’t think of myself as particularly rebellious. I mean, even Anna wasn’t all that rebellious—she was just better at living on her own terms than the rest of us. I imagine she probably would have been able to talk her way out of suspension if her movie had been the one Mrs. Smollet had a problem with. Anna and her parents were the kind of people I only hoped I could eventually be.

Maybe that was the way Jenny thought of me.

And I couldn’t help being flattered.

I quickly wrote her a reply.

Jenny,

Yeah, that cabdriver was all right. I’ve always heard that cabdrivers don’t speak English and don’t bathe. I’m not sure this guy bathed, exactly, but he certainly spoke English! Thanks again for the cab fare and the nice letter; I don’t really think I’m as rebellious as all that, but I’m flattered that you think I am. Don’t worry about things between us being weird—I’m sure they’ll be the way they’ve always been. Not weird at all.

See ya,
Leon

I only wished I believed it.

With the exception of the time I spent staring out the window at the green light of the Wackfords sign, there wasn’t a second on Saturday night or Sunday morning that I wasn’t thinking about Anna or Jenny. Anna, mostly. When my thoughts turned to Jenny, I’d try to steer them over toward Anna. But I couldn’t stop the things Jenny had written from running through my head. I thought—hell, I
knew
—that I should just call Anna and say, “Hey, what’s the deal with us, anyway?” but when it comes to things like that, I’m a total chicken.

On Sunday afternoon, my dad offered to take me thrift-store shopping, and I readily agreed. I was not one to pass up a chance to hit the thrift stores, even with a guy with a Mohawk. And anything that would take my mind off of Jenny and Anna for a while was especially welcome.

When my parents went to the thrift stores together, it was usually on a cookbook hunt, but when my dad went alone, he was usually shopping for scientific gear—or, failing that, junk he could get away with calling scientific gear. Anything made out of glass was pretty much fair game; it didn’t bother him in the slightest that real chemists probably don’t keep their chemicals in bear-shaped honey containers or jars shaped like Santa Claus.

“I’m gonna need all the bowls I can get for this project,” he said as we got into the car. “It’d be easier just to use the nonstick ones from the kitchen, but, well, you know.” He snorted a bit. One of his least-favorite household rules was that he was not to use any of the kitchenware as lab equipment—he had to buy his own stuff for that. He tended to grumble about it, but it was one rule for which I thanked God daily.

“Hey,” I said, “maybe you’ll find something with Teflon at the thrift store.”

“Ha!” He snorted again, and I wondered if maybe having the Mohawk was making him snottier. “Forget that. You never find anything that nice in the thrift-store cookware. It’s mostly old, worn-out stuff. That’s why I go through it so quickly out in the garage.”

Well, that and the fact that he used them to mix hazardous chemicals that ate right through them. I thought this, but didn’t say it.

“I’m out for records,” I said.

“Naturally.”

My old project had been buying large speakers, which come remarkably cheap at thrift stores and flea markets. I’d originally planned to buy enough to cover a whole wall in my room, but I’d stopped after I got about halfway, since the noise half a wall of sound made was already enough to break circuits, start fires, and generally cause trouble around the house. Once I’d declared that project kaput, I moved into buying actual records. I didn’t own a record player or anything, but I needed something to decorate my other bedroom walls, the ones that weren’t covered in speakers, and thrift-store records were way cheaper than actual posters.

I’d gotten the idea from Anna’s parents’ house. The walls in one of their hallways were lined with a bunch of framed jazz albums, which looked really cool and kind of elegant, in a way. It made me want to buy up old jazz albums and other artsy things like that to decorate my room, and that was my original plan, but I soon found that cool jazz records are a pretty rare find at thrift stores—they have records galore, but mostly Christmas albums,
Jane Fonda’s Workout Record,
copies of that one album by Boston, and religious stuff. The closest thing you normally ever see to jazz is
Whipped Cream & Other Delights
by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which I’m not sure really counts as jazz.

So, since the supply was much greater, I’d gotten into collecting albums with really stupid covers—which was not quite the same as cooking bad food on purpose, since I didn’t actually listen to the albums. They just functioned as conversation pieces in the room, and anyway, I got a kick out of knowing that I was the only head banger in town with an album on his wall called
Satan Is Real,
the cover of which featured a couple of preachers standing in front of what appeared to be a large cardboard devil that wasn’t likely to convince anyone that Satan was, in fact, real. Also, I didn’t really know all that much about jazz. Anyone who saw a bunch of jazz albums on the wall and questioned me about them would have realized I was a faker really fast.

An hour later, we were back in the car, heading home. Dad had found a whole bunch of bowls, a few wooden spoons, and, to his great delight, an old chemistry set.

“Look at this thing!” he said, practically bursting. “It’s just like the ones I had when I was a kid…and most of the chemicals are still there!”

“Is it safe for them to sell it like that?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said, smiling even wider. “Not in the slightest. The instructions are missing, and if you mix some of these together the wrong way, you could end up with stuff that would eat right through your skin, or cause something to blow up.”

My stomach turned a little bit. This was the kind of speech that gave me nightmares. Every time I heard a loud noise in the garage—which was not uncommon—I’d worry that it might be “the big one.” Even our cat acted like a shell-shocked veteran of World War I.

“Anyway,” he said, “they’re sure lucky I bought it, instead of some undesirable sort who’s up to no good.”

“Look at yourself, Dad,” I said. “The lady at the counter probably thought
you
were an undesirable sort.”

“Oh yeah.” He chuckled. “I forgot that people tend to get scared of people with Mohawks. Well, let them think so. They have nothing to worry about. What did you get, anyway?”

“It was slim pickings today,” I said. “Just this.”

I held up a worn copy of something from the 1970s called
The Wildewood Singers Sing the Beatles
. It showed a bunch of middle-aged people standing in front of a tree, all of them looking as though they’d just robbed a hair-spray store and wanted to use up the evidence before the cops arrived. Dad made a nasty face at it.

“Leon,” he said, “this thing looks awful. If you want to hear the Beatles, I have every one of their albums.” For my dad, this was exhibiting pretty good taste. I’d always imagined he preferred bland choral versions of the Beatles’ songs to the originals.

“You do?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Have you ever actually heard them before?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Just checking,” he said. “Lots of kids nowadays are surprised to hear that Paul McCartney had a band before Wings.”

“Give me a break,” I said. “That might have been funny in the seventies, but if there’s a kid alive today who’s never heard of the Beatles, there’s no way that kid has heard of Wings.”

“Fair enough,” Dad nodded. “But seriously, throw that thing out the window. It looks like a travesty.”

“Hey,” I said. “I just got it for the cover; it’s not like I’m going to listen to it. That would be like buying a book of nasty-looking recipes and then actually cooking them.”

He paused. “Point taken,” he said. I was a bit surprised by this; normally that’s the kind of mouthing off that would get me in trouble. I guess having an armload of chemicals just put him in too good a mood.

We drove right past the Wackfords, but I refrained from whacking Dad in the arm. Cedar Avenue looked a lot different by day, when the signs weren’t glowing.

“What do you think of all these new places?” I asked.

“Well,” he said slowly, “the newspapers keep calling it the revival of Cornersville, like we were just a little dump before all the minimalls moved in. And I guess it’s good for the economy. It creates a lot of jobs, having all these places.”

“Not very good ones,” I said. “They’re mostly just nametag jobs. I heard a guy last night saying that retail was sort of the modern equivalent of going to work in the mines.”

He nodded. “That’s probably about right. Most of the people who actually make any money off these places’ being here live miles away in some fancy mansion, I suppose.”

“So you don’t like it?”

He shrugged one of his shoulders. “I like having some of the stores here, but on the whole, it’s just making the town look more like every other town, and it makes the traffic a hell of a lot worse. So no, I guess I don’t like it very much.” He chuckled for a second. “Or maybe having a Mohawk just makes you automatically bored with the suburbs. Did they have any albums by the Sex Pistols back at the thrift store?”

“Hell no,” I said.

“Rats,” he said. “Ever since I got my new hairstyle, I’ve really felt like lashing out at society.” He laughed again. I thoght maybe I should have Edie over—they could throw cheese at signs together.

“Warren doesn’t like it much, either,” I said. Warren was Anna’s father.

“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose he would. How are you and Anna getting along?”

“Fine,” I said, looking out the window. There were certain things I simply refused to discuss with my dad, but I knew he was ready to push the issue. I went for evasive action. “Speaking of the gifted pool,” I said, which we only sort of had been, “did I tell you about the new project we’re doing?”

“Max Streich told me about it,” he said. “Building monuments?”

“Yeah.”

One of the main benefits of being in the gifted pool was that when my parents wanted to talk about school, I could just talk about whatever project we were working on for that until they were satisfied, and hence, I’d never have to bring up math, science, or any of the other subjects in which I could pretty confidently expect a C-plus, tops.

“What kind of monument are you thinking of making?” Dad asked.

“I’ll probably make a film tribute to something,” I said. I didn’t want to let on that the idea included possibly taking over the Wackfords.

“Been a while since your last movie,” he said.

“Don’t remind me.”

James had written up a script for another film, called
J’ai un Loulou Grand Comme le Montana Collé à Mes Fesses,
which translates to “I Have a Booger the Size of Montana Stuck to My Buttocks.” The whole thing was going to be in French, which would have instantly made it all kinds of artsy, but it never really got off the ground. I figured that when the time came to make another film, it would have to be something other than avant-garde—we’d already been there and done that, and there was no sense repeating ourselves. Still, it was hard to come up with a way to do something less weird than an avant-garde sex-ed movie without looking like we were going mainstream. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that something that criticized the new downtown might be just the thing we needed. It might be more watchable than something avant-garde, but it could also be controversial. And it might just help Sip stay in business.

When we got home, I stuck
The Wildewood Singers Sing the Beatles
on the wall next to
Saved
by the Voices of Carbondale, which featured even more middle-aged people wearing tacky matching suits and a whole lot of hair spray. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I really don’t know what the hell people were thinking in the 1970s. I mean, people in the fifties had a pretty good excuse for any bad album covers they made—they were all living under the notion that they were going to be blown up at any moment, a feeling to which I was no stranger myself. And in the sixties they were reacting to war and other forms of turbulence. But there’s just no excuse for the kind of crap they were putting on album covers in the 1970s. Maybe after the Beatles broke up, people found themselves leaderless and adrift.

I spent the rest of the night thinking about Anna and Jenny and all that business. I tried to get my head back into the new movie, or even Sip, but it just didn’t work.

Monday morning came around, and I got to school early so I could see Anna before she went inside. I waited by the flagpole until I saw her coming. It’s always weird when you finally see someone in the flesh after thinking about practically nothing but that person for a while.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. “You do realize it’s colder than penguin shit out here, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just thought I’d wait for you.”

She smiled. And I know this is the kind of thing that makes me seem like I deserve a good punch in the face, but when she smiled, it was like it wasn’t cold anymore. All the doubts I’d had, all the thoughts that I might be better off with Jenny, just vanished.

“How was the city?” I asked.

“It was okay,” she said. “I had to spend most of the day bumming around the university library while Dad worked. But after that we went and ate at this joint that had live jazz and really good espresso.”

“Did you drink it straight?”

“Three shots.”

Espresso is sort of an extra-extra-strong form of coffee. It’s like concentrating an entire mug of coffee into a little plastic cup from a preschool girl’s tea set, and it tastes remarkably bitter. It’s not for amateurs. I could only take it if it was mixed into an insane amount of milk, and Anna was drinking it straight. I felt like a total wimp.

Not to mention that a day with
my
dad would have involved bumming around the thrift store while he looked for new ways to blow up the garage, then eating grilled rabbit while he pretended to be a hillbilly, not studying history and listening to jazz. The closest thing to there being any espresso present would be if he and my mother decided to drink shots of ketchup.