The Grinding (14 page)

Chapter 18

My work. Big Shot Chicken.

Yes, after six years, I still worked at the
chicken place.

I pulled around back into my regular spot next to
the dumpster. Garbage lay strewn over the lot, and under normal circumstances,
I’d be pretty pissed. Jeremy and Nan closed last night, but closers on a
Saturday worked till 1 A.M. and by then, the power and phones would’ve been out
for hours.

I’d first gotten hired at Big Shot when I was 17
years old. It seemed like a lifetime ago. I was a different person, that
17-year-old walking into the front door to fill out an application. It was the
day after Samantha had dumped me. I’d planned on working there through the end
of high school, and maybe through the summer before college. It’s funny, how plans
slip through your fingers. You can’t point at one thing and say,
this is what happened
,
this is why things didn’t turn out
.

It’s never that simple.

I don’t want you to think I’m ashamed of working
fast food. I’m not. I’ll never be ashamed of it. It was a real, legitimate job,
and I was good at it. You’re supposed to hate jobs like this, but I didn’t. I
liked working here. No, it didn’t pay all that great, but I was assistant
manager, and I made more money than many people thought. Plus, I had health
benefits, and I didn’t stay up at night stressed out over reports and
presentations like some of my cubicle-chained friends.

Still, I avoided telling people my occupation
unless they asked. They were ashamed for me, and they were embarrassed that I
wasn’t embarrassed. To them, working here while everyone else my age was
becoming engineers and lawyers and moving to different cities to get their own
offices meant I had failed somewhere along the way. They were embarrassed and
ashamed and better than me. I’d get that look, especially from the assholes I
went to high school with. The look that said,
I thought you were a geek. I thought you went to college.

What did you
do to ruin your life
?

That seemed to be a common theme. Everyone around
me kept thinking, hinting, and flat-out saying I was squandering away my life.
With Nif. With my job.

But I was happy. What was wrong with that? Why
couldn’t that be enough?

I didn’t have my keys to the restaurant, but I had
a set hidden inside a fake rock by the back entrance. I picked them up, and I
jammed them in the door only to find it was already unlocked, which didn’t
surprise me. Jeremy often forgot to lock this door on the best of nights.

Not for the first time, I thought about all that
had happened in this place. The place where Nif and I first had sex. Where we’d
fallen in love. I knew every square inch of this building, and I could run the
entire restaurant by myself if I had to. (And I did have to from time to time.
That was the price of having teenagers as employees.) This was the only job I’d
ever had.

Like I said, it had been six years, full-time for
almost five. Though I’ve never sat down and done the math, I’m pretty sure I
spent more time in this restaurant than in any other building in my life,
including any homes I’d had. In many ways, this stupid place was more my home
than anywhere else in the world.

The kitchen was trashed, and the freezer hung
open, revealing people had actually stolen 250 pounds of raw chicken. Pieces of
one of my Rubik’s Cubes lay scattered across the floor. The manager’s office
door had been kicked off its hinges, and I fought the temptation to check if
the safe was broken open, too. The floor was covered in oil and flour, and the
place stunk like rotting buttermilk, grease, and mayonnaise.

To my relief, what I came for still remained in
the kitchen, hanging with the other utensils over the sink. I grabbed the cheap
flashlight. It was for checking the grease trap at closing time, though it rarely
got done. I switched it on—dim, but it worked. I tossed it in the bag and
turned to leave.

Four people blocked the exit.

I recognized all four of them. They were skinhead
punks, roller derby regulars, guys I had seen more than once at parties, though
none of them I would consider friends. In any group of people, there were
sub-cliques and inner circles. The Tucson punk scene was no different. Even
within the skinheads, there were several distinct groups. Most were cool guys
who weren’t the mouth-frothing, neo-Nazi racists people made them out to be. In
fact, most of the skinheads I knew hated the racist connotations associated
with the skin subculture.

These four, however, all belonged to the
mouth-frothing contingent, which was why I didn’t know them that well. They
made me nervous during the best of times. These guys were the type who hung out
in the backyard at parties, drinking beer, picking fights, smoking weed, and
talking about how they’d one day take over the world when they barely knew how to
take care of themselves.

One was enormously fat, and he wore a white T-shirt
with red suspenders. People called him Hippo. I didn’t know the other guys’
names. Each carried a baseball bat, like they thought they were those assholes
in
A Clockwork Orange
.

All four of them advanced on me. I took a step
back. My foot splashed in the oil. I regretted not taking Clementine up on her
offer of a shotgun.

“I knew you’d be here,” Hippo said. “Everyone else
is staking out your house or Peach’s place, but I said to my colleagues here,
isn’t he that Jew faggot who works at the
chicken place
? Nobody’ll think to look there. He’s probably there now
guarding the safe because he’s a cock-gobbling kike.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not
Jewish, you racist cunt. I’m half Filipino.”

“You know, I never liked you,” Hippo continued.
“There’s always been something
off
about you. Your wife, she’s hot as fuck for a half spic, but you…you always act
like you’re better than us, you conceited piece of shit, holding your nose up
in the air like a fucking faggot.”

If you’ve never been hit in the head with a
baseball bat, I recommend that you call in sick the day it’s supposed to
happen. This was the second time in my life I’d been smashed in the temple with
a bat (the first being an accident in the first grade that had bought me a
night in the hospital and a mess of stitches.) Neither event was pleasant, this
one more notable in terms of extreme, excruciating, I’m-going-to-die pain. In
the instant it took to register that the guy next to Hippo was playing piñata
with my head, and the actual moment the bat crashed into my skull, I hoped that
I would either:
A)
Die, or
B)
Get instantly knocked out.

Unfortunately for me it was
C)
falling-to-the-ground, wondering-if-my-skull-had-been-fractured-while-I-puked-my-guts-out.

My memory of the moment immediately after is a bit
fuzzy, but I think I said something like, “Gah, what the fuck, man? Gah.” I sat
up, my dry suit covered in cooking oil, flour, and puke. I had to blink several
times to see straight. It didn’t seem like any bone was broken, but the side of
my head felt like it would pop from the pressure, like a car had parked right
on top of it. I put my hand at the wound, jerking it away in pain. Again, I
felt sick to my stomach.

“Don’t fucking move,” Hippo said. “He only hit you
with half force. Next time he’ll crack you open like a Jewish watermelon.”

At first I had thought they were doing this
because they were a new kind of drone, but I was beginning to have my doubts.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I don’t have a
problem with you guys.”

“He’s on his way,” one of the guys said, putting a
device in his pocket. Couldn’t have been a cell phone. It had to be a sort of
walkie-talkie.

“You fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of
us,” Hippo said.

I realized, then, what these assholes were on
about.

“This is about Scooter?” I said. “Are you kidding
me?”

“The government has collapsed,” Hippo said. “Our
time has come. Scooter told us how you jumped him and stole his truck. The new
world order requires us to take care of our own, to set examples of those who
don’t follow the rules.
Our
rules. And
rule number one is: Don’t fuck with our friends.”

I shook my head. “The government hasn’t collapsed,
you moron. If you had half a brain, you’d take your fat ass as far from this
place as possible. This entire city is toast, along with everybody inside.”

The one who had hit me jabbed the bat in my
direction. “Oh, yeah, smartass? Then why are you still here?”

My head throbbed. I feared if I tried to stand, I
wouldn’t be able to.

“Did Scooter tell you why I took his truck? My
wife was one of the ones taken at the bout. He offered to help me, and then he
pussed out. I had to take it.”

“That’s not what he says,” Hippo said. “He’s
nearby. He’ll be here soon.”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit,” I said. The
closest edge of the Grinder was a mere two miles away. Past the pain in my
stomach and head, I could sense the pull in my chest again. The fourth guy in the
group continually looked over his shoulder, toward the outside. I eyed him
closely.
Yes.
I could see it in him.

He felt it, too.

“What’s the combination to the safe?” Hippo
demanded.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. None of this was
funny, but I laughed all the same. All of their talk about changing the world,
all the plans they’d been making for years—and the first thing they clamored
for in their supposed anarchist new world order was the single biggest symbol
of the government they reviled: the almighty dollar.

“There’s probably a hundred bucks in there,” I
said. “If you’re lucky.” If Jeremy and Nan had closed the store properly after
all the shit started, there’d actually be five or six grand, maybe more. But I
doubted any of it was left, not after the chaos from earlier in the evening.
Three shift managers along with the store manager and district manager all knew
the combination. I wouldn’t be surprised if any one of them had come back here
and raided the safe before skipping town.

“I didn’t ask you how much is in there. I asked
you to tell me the combination, faggot.”

I sighed. I told him.

“Dale, go open the safe.”

One of the guys—Dale—nodded and went
into the office. He came out a minute later, saying I gave them the wrong
numbers. I swore at him, called him an idiot, and he went back to try again and
got it open.

“It’s empty,” Dale said.

“I guess you’ll have to start your new world order
without being financed by corporate chicken,” I said.

“Shut your Jew mouth,” Hippo said.

I touched my head again.
Ouch.
Still tender. In a couple hours—if I lived that long—the
side of my head would be swollen like a water balloon.

Dale said, “Where’s Gobo?”

I looked up and saw the four were now three. The
missing skinhead was the one who seemed affected by the Grinder. No way he
would come back. Outside, the fog was as thick as ever, but dawn had embraced
the world, and everything glowed orange. The Grinder was still about two miles
away, moving parallel with our position. I no longer heard airplanes overhead,
which I took as an ominous sign.

“The fuck? Gobo! Gobo!” Hippo said, looking
around. “Go find him,” he said to Dale, who went outside.

“You know,” I said, “the first thing I did when I
got in here was check the safe. I’m really surprised you let Dale go in there
alone.”

“What’re you talking about, fag boy?” Hippo asked.

“I was lying when I said there was only a hundred
bucks in there. There had to be at least ten grand. Saturday night is our
busiest time, especially with a football game. Think about it. It’s all in a
blue bag, small enough to stuff down your pants.”

Hippo and bat boy looked at one another.

“And now that your friend is outside in the fog,”
I continued, “he’s got all sorts of opportunities to hide that money. Or maybe
he won’t come back at all. Or maybe he and Gobo are in this together.”

“We’re not retards,” Hippo said. “Your Jew mind
tricks won’t work on us.”

“Maybe…maybe I’ll go out and look for them,” bat
boy said.

“No,” Hippo said. “You stay with me.”

I shook my head. “Ten thousand dollars. You know,
if it was
my
plan, I’d probably have
it all worked out. I bet Dale comes back, saying he couldn’t find Gobo. But
what he really did was pass the bag off to him, you know, to make it look less
suspicious.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Hippo said, raising the
bat above his head. He paused as two people walked into the restaurant.

Dale and Scooter.

“Gobo is gone,” Dale said. “He’s disappeared. But
look who I did find.”

Scooter walked right up to me, pushing past the
other two, his shoulders square, trying to look big. He got real close in my
face. His nose was swollen, and he had the beginnings of dual black eyes.
Geez. Had I hit him that hard
?

“You look like you got the tar beaten out of you,”
I said.

“Where’s my truck?”

“I tried to fuck your mom with it, but I couldn’t
get enough traction,” I said. “Still, I’m pretty sure she liked it.”

I don’t know what had gotten into me. I think I
was in so much pain, and I was so scared and tired and frustrated that I just
didn’t give a shit anymore. Earlier, I had been so fearful of being cowardly,
of running when others needed me. That was gone. Even Scooter looked taken
aback. His surprised look evolved into a mask of unadulterated rage, and he
slapped me hard across the face. His hand smashed right below where I’d been
hit with the bat, and little bright lights of pain exploded in my vision.

He pulled a pistol out of his waistband and stuck
it against my head. The cold metal of the barrel stung where it pressed against
the massive bruise at my temple. I remembered what the twins said about the
Glock they had sold him. It contained a clip filled with blanks, but there
might be one bullet in the chamber.