THE PHONE WAS ringing, and Doug wondered who the hell was calling at ten to eight in the morning. The debt collectors had to wait until eight. It was a state law. Doug didn’t know state capitals and hadn’t read a book since high school, but he knew about regulations for debt collectors, and about pharmaceuticals, and he could answer any trivia question about rock bands from the eighties. Things that mattered.
If it was after eight, he would have let it ring, but he figured this might actually be important. Maybe the nursing home calling about his grandmother. He got out of bed, grumbling, tripping over a box of recycling Mitch had left outside his room. It was Doug’s week to take out the trash. OK, Mitch, I get the fucking point. Now there were plastic soda bottles and empty milk cartons all over the floor.
“Yuh,” he mumbled grumpily into the phone.
“Good morning. Did I wake you up?” He recognized Linda’s voice; she sounded upbeat and alert. Was she serious? How many people who worked in restaurants would be awake at this hour?
“Yuh,” he said.
“I’m sorry. You want me to let you go back to bed?”
“No,” he muttered and flopped onto the couch, curling up in a fetal position. “It’s OK. I’m up now. Wassup?”
“Are you working today?”
“Not till four.”
“I want to take you shopping.”
Doug let this sink in for a moment. He had never really been “shopping.” Occasionally he went to the mall when he had specific things he wanted to buy, but it was a chore, like laundry or brushing your teeth. It wasn’t an activity one looked forward to. “OK,” he said.
“Really?”
Apparently, Linda had expected an argument. Hell, it was something to do. And since he had hung out with her in her kitchen, he had realized that Linda was a lot cooler than Kevin made her out to be. He certainly didn’t want to get involved in their marital difficulties, but he figured he could be friends with both of them. Plus she got high, which was a big surprise to Doug, as she had never joined them in their basement smoke sessions. “Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
“I dunno. I thought guys hated shopping.”
Doug shrugged, aware that the gesture wasn’t visible over the phone. “I don’t really even know what you mean by shopping. But I’ll try it.”
Linda laughed. “You don’t know what I mean by shopping? We’re going to buy you some clothes.”
“I have clothes.”
Linda laughed again. “What time do you want me to pick you up?”
“How about one… thirty,” he added quickly, to give himself another half hour of sleep.
“I have to pick Ellie up from school at two. How about eleven?”
“Eleven?” Shit, that was like the middle of the night.
Linda heard the dismay in his voice. “OK, eleven thirty.” “Awright.” Linda sounded cheerful and it occurred to Doug how different that was. He spent too much of his time around cheerless people: Mitch, Kevin, the cooks at the restaurant. There was a definite need for some kind of cheer in his life, even if it involved getting up before noon.
Unable to go back to sleep, Doug grabbed a cigarette and sat on the back porch and wondered what to do with his life. The Navaho believed that your life calling just came to you. He had seen that on the Discovery Channel. Why wouldn’t his calling come to him? It sure wasn’t cooking at a corporate restaurant. He had been there four years now and his wage had only gone up two dollars and at least three other guys had been promoted to kitchen manager without a thought even being given to him. “You’re our best grill man,” his boss always told him. “We can’t afford to lose you.” He could work every station on the line blindfolded, could do all the food ordering when the kitchen managers were on vacation, but the management would fight him if he ever asked for a quarter more an hour. Doug was convinced they would move him up if he cut his hair, but that wasn’t going to happen.
The truth was, he didn’t care that much, because he knew that the restaurant wasn’t his calling. It was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on. It was around him; it was near; it was getting closer. He could feel a personal epiphany about to burst through, if he could only get some kind of a sign. The Navaho got their signs when they were thirteen. He was twenty-six. He should have had two already. Where the hell was it?
A traffic helicopter flew low overhead, its rotor beating like a bass drum, breaking the quiet of the morning. Maybe that was it. Maybe he should be… a chopper pilot. That would be cool. Wearing one of those helmets and talking into those mikes that extended out in front of your mouth, flying hot traffic reporter chicks around. Or maybe he’d be a personal chopper pilot for some billionaire and fly him down to the Bahamas a few times a year and stay in a hotel. Or maybe he could get a job with the Coast Guard, rescuing people who had taken their yachts out in bad weather. No, not the Coast Guard. They were always busting pot smugglers. And they drug tested. But still, being a chopper pilot was definitely something to think about.
He was going to look into it. And he was going to talk to the Mexican girl this week, and tell her he was going to chopper pilot school. He finished the cigarette and stubbed it into an ashtray, which was overflowing.
He could feel some weird psychic energy flowing up from somewhere, a rush of enthusiasm for a life he knew he should be having, and his brain began to whir, exploring his options. The restaurant had a program for employees who had been there over two years, in which they paid 50 percent of tuition. He could apply that to chopper pilot school. This was going to work out great. This was it. Things were about to change.
Chopper pilot. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
BOB SUTHERLAND WAS walking around the Accu-mart at midnight, checking the displays, adjusting the vacuum cleaners on the top shelf so they faced sideways, not straight out. People wanted to know what a vacuum cleaner’s silhouette looked like, not what it looked like when it was coming at you. They bought vacuum cleaners for their clean, sleek look, not because they vacuumed floors. Why couldn’t the housewares staff recognize that? Why did he always have to walk around at midnight and shift things so they looked more… buyable?
It exasperated Bob Sutherland that his staff always seemed to lack that sense of what made a customer want to buy. They would come in unshaven or with their hair everywhere and stand around talking in groups until they saw him coming, and then they’d scatter like mice, off to perform some menial task, which they would halt the minute he was out of sight. They liked to complain about their wages, he knew, because he could eavesdrop on them with the surveillance cameras. They didn’t know that some of the cameras had audio. Rather than try to get better wages by showing some enthusiasm, they’d sit around and bitch about their hernia operations or having to work two jobs and how tired they were all the time, and they’d just shelve the vacuum cleaners any which way. If it wasn’t for him always walking around, checking, adjusting, fixing, the whole place would just go to hell in a few hours.
Sighing heavily, he retired to his office and slumped in his Healthy-Back office chair, watching the laser printer quietly pump out the daily sales reports. He flipped back through his caller ID and noticed a call from Washington, D.C. His brow wrinkled. Who could that be? He picked up the receiver and checked his messages.
“Mr. Sutherland, this is Ken Spargenbergerluger, the Webmaster General, here in Washington, D.C. We just wanted to let you know that if you have any problems with your Web site, you should contact your own Web administrator, not us. Please tell that to your employees. OK, dork?”
Click.
Sutherland’s heart was pounding. Had a government official just called him a dork? His hand shaking, he hung up the phone. Then he picked it up again, then put it back down. He took a few deep breaths. Think, he told himself. This might not be as serious as it first seemed. He listened to the message again, and he noticed that the voice sounded distantly familiar. He couldn’t place it, but he had the distinct feeling that perhaps, just maybe, one of his typical miserable employees might have had something to do with this.
He took the employee phone list out of the drawer and studied it. When he got to the bottom of this, he told himself, there was going to be hell to pay.
CHAPTER 3
VERY CAREFULLY, KEVIN filled the eyedropper with bleach and slipped it into his right front pocket so that the nozzle pointed out through a tiny hole he had cut. Now, with a little bit of pressure applied on his thigh, he could spray bleach out with his urine stream, right into the cup he was expected to piss into. A few drops of bleach would ruin any chance of a positive result on the drug test, but you had to be careful not to spray in too much or the urine would reek of bleach. To insure against that, he had eaten asparagus for the last two days, so the urine would definitely have some kind of weird odor, and the addition of bleach would just make the smell even odder. The more factors you could throw in, the better. Hopefully, the lab people wouldn’t know what to make of it. There goes Kevin, the guy with the weirdest smelling piss you ever encountered. Does he smoke pot? Hard to say.
For the first six months after he had been released from jail, Kevin had actually been pot-free, but then resentment rather than craving had taken over. Who were these people to tell him what he could and couldn’t do when he was alone and off of work? They had taken nearly all his money and locked him up for the whole summer, for indoor gardening. Why wasn’t that enough? Five grand for the lawyer, $2,500 for fines, $600 for court counseling. He’d even had to pay administrative fees for getting released from prison. The discharge paperwork had cost him $120, which must have meant it was either typed up by someone with a doctorate in office work, or it had been printed with solid-gold toner. But who would say no to that expense if it was all that stood between you and freedom? While paying his debt to society, he had managed to accumulate a significant debt to his credit card company.
