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July 27, 2005
Translocator
Okay so the first thing that I was going to write for this got about two paragraphs long when my brain hit a speed bump at about 50 mph. So now I'm swapping out parts and have done my typical thing, which is where I step back and think long and hard about it to be sure I get it right. Real long. So here's something else in the meantime.
Four months in a new town in the mid west and Dwade still didn't know anybody he wasn't paid to be around. With all the deft cunning and enthusiasm of a sedated bull moose, he maneuvered his old clunker into a parking lot somewhere out on the horizon directly opposite Wal-Mart. The long walk past legions of tightly packed vehicles went by in a haze. He was elsewhere, thinking of better things.
This wasn't just Wal-Mart. This was The Other Wal-Mart. The one he hadn't been to yet. Dwade hated going to the first one. This one was just as bad. It didn't matter, they're all the same. And every time he walked through those all-the-same doors and faced the anonymous thief-pouncer who pretended to be there to greet him, he heard the pleas of the world's poor. People working without sleep in over-heated, cramped sweatshops for pennies a day so that overfed Americans can have cheap crap. Farmers whose families had provided food from the land for generations, left helpless as the world economy tells them what they do isn't good enough. The death of the mom and pop store. Mom and pop wear blue vests and forced smiles now. They stand behind cash registers and don't say much; just enough to find out of your card is credit or debit.
The handlebar of a shopping carriage hit the palms of his hand. He was then in the vegetable isle. It matched his state of mind.
The layout of the place was oddly familiar. Dwade had a theory that there are a limited number of configurations for a place like this. Each department is a block, each with its own size and shape, sort of like a jigsaw puzzle for idiots. There's only a few ways that these blocks can fit together into the sort of giant architectural monstrosity that makes the Lords of Wal-Mart smolder with demonic glee. But dammit, there were the green bell peppers, and Dwade needed some of those.
The shopping cart took on cargo: vegetables from space and meat grown in vats for all Dwade knew. There was a tall stack of gigantic frozen salmon flanks. The world is facing a salmon shortage, he thought, so where the hell did all of that come from, anyway?
Nearby at a stack of pork, Dwade recalled reading the story about how pigs-for-food were being genetically engineered with a snippet of human DNA to make them grow and mature faster. Half man, half pig.. and 100% delicious.
There, for an instant, he considered converting to Judaism. He decided against it, of course, judging that a genuine religious objection to consuming a swine-human hybrid probably wasn't worth the required surgery. Most of them spent their time in politics instead of the slaughterhouse anyway.
At the rear of the grocery block, another familiar turn brought him around to face towards the front of the store, looking straight down a corridor walled with plastic food holding devices and hundreds of variations om a theme spun sugar.
Dizziness set through him like water through a sieve, flowing upwards into the sky and then rained back down with the consistency of tar. Disorientation. He checked his pulse. It was normal. It was like the mass-produced, soulless architecture itself had reached out to bash and squeeze on his brain like one of those stress relief toys you see in the impulse-buy racks at the front.
A Cuban family bustled by, their carriage piled high with goods; two small children bantering back and forth with their parents about who knows what in a language Dwade couldn't speak, but was probably Spanish. He had been used to that back home. They were half of Wal-Mart's customers in Florida, but not in the mid west. He didn't think too hard about it.
Forty-five minutes later, after a near-miss with an expensive purchase in the electronics section, he was first in line at the checkout. And there he was startled, shaken to his very core! For he beheld a BEAST! A horrid thing! His testicles leapt up into his abdomen for safety and one day his unborn children would have nightmares remembering this moment!
It wasn't its ugliness that absolutely scared the hell out of him, though it was certainly ugly enough to do the job. The scary part was, he knew this beast. He had faced it many times before, and apparently some dastardly fiend had set about cloning it for the ill intentions of the sinister Lords of Wal-Mart. Uneven teeth the color of a week's worth of unflushed urine were arranged helter-skelter in the dark purple blotchiness of its lower gums. They rose up into view from behind a dry cracked lower lip that hung open like either it had forgotten to shut itself or that its owner just didn't care. The upper lip curled up in a perpetual sneer. Its skin was thick shoe leather stained from centuries worth of tobacco abuse and then sealed in with a heavy lacquer finish. It wore oversize sunglasses that were fashionable only in the minds of the infirmed. Its hair looked like it had been glued-on and badly bleached after being harvested from the tail of a mad cow that had wallowed, berserk, in an oil spill and then explosively shat itself. It smacked interminably at the same wad of gum it always had. Its name was Mary. Named for the Holy Mother. And a sort of resigned hatred burned behind its dead eyes.
Some time after his heart resumed beating, Dwade heard the beast groan.
"Credit or debit?"
He kept his head low as he hurried out of the building, reflecting a forced smile back at a different thief-pouncer on his way out. And outside, the sky was the sort of magnificent orange, the kind that makes you forget there were other colors. The sort of magnificent sunset orange that doesn't happen in the mid-west, but in Florida. The kind of magnificent orange that flies high behind the line of palm trees he was now gawking at. To the side there was a repainted school bus, letting out two dozen Hispanics in grungy work clothes, fresh from the orange groves, making lewd jokes to each other in Spanish. Small, ridiculous looking cars painted psychiatrist-office-beige with little flashing yellow lights affixed to the top of them patrolled the parking lot. His car was definitely not there. The parking lot he'd left it in contained no foliage, and ended at the edge of a local highway. This one ended at a row of, yes, those were in fact palm trees.
Had he imagined it? Which 'it' would he have imagined?
After the sun set, the milk had gone sour, and the giant Florida mosquitoes had come to feast on him, he pulled out his cellphone. He laughed a little, remembering how important it was to him that he got a plan that had local coverage in his Floridian hometown, twelve-hundred miles away from where he now lived and worked. The phone popped open and, not even wanting to look at the buttons, he quietly asked it dial for him. It obeyed.
"Hello?"
"Hey dad."
There was a pause. "Hey! How are you?"
"Uh, well, I'm okay. Umm.."
"Yeah? What's wrong?" Scenarios had already begun to develop in Dad's head, and if it took ten thousand dollars bail money to get him out of a French-Canadian prison for homicide, after using lethal force to defend himself from an enraged Russian mafioso in an unfortunate collision of illicit arms deals and mistaken identity, well, lets just say that Dad is ready to come to the rescue. Dad's been waiting for this moment all his life.
"I.. I think I need a ride?" Dwade hadn't intended for that to sound like a question.
Dad quickly ran numbers in his head. Quebec from southwestern Florida. He could make the drive in 18 hours, he decided. "Oh... kay... what's wrong? Where are you?"
"Wal-Mart. You know.. up.. uh.. by where I went to college."
"Are you okay? Have you done drugs?" Dwade had never done drugs in his life, but Dad had secretly been ready and waiting for that event too. He'd swoop down from the clouds and rescue him like an after-school special savior, solving Dwade's problems instantly and showing him the errors of his ways. Dad wondered, briefly, if wearing a cape during the rescue would be too much.
"No. No I just went shopping. At Wal-Mart." Dwade had found that the softer you speak, the easier it is to conceal a tremble in one's voice.
"Oh.. uh. I didn't know you were coming to visit! What happened to your car?"
"It's in the parking lot. But not this one. Look, can you just come get me?"
(© Eric Chapman 2005 all rights reserved.)
Posted by Eric Chapman at July 27, 2005 02:04 AM
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Comments
So, trying again -
I would really like to see you turn this story fragment into a complete thing. Really, really, really.
Considering that this is a fragment, rough spots are to be expected. The first part is rather rambling and needs a bit tightening up. The paragraph describing the 'beast' is too long - it would be most effective if the description was briefer and read quicker. However -
"Its name was Mary. Named for the Holy Mother. And a sort of resigned hatred burned behind its dead eyes."
Keep that! It's priceless!
Posted by: Renatus ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.ericchapman.net/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 11, 2005 12:37 PM
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