And that, after he’d talked with Durius, had been enough for Rydell.
The Lucky Dragon had been starting to get old for Rydell. He hadn’t ever gotten along with Mr. Park too well, and when he’d take his break, out back, after the curb check every morning, he’d started to feel really down. The patch of ground the Lucky Dragon had been set down on was sort of scooped out of the foot of the hillside there, and at some point the exposed, nearly vertical cut had been quake-proofed with some kind of weird, gray, rubbery polymer, a perpetual semi-liquid that knit the soil behind it together and trapped whatever was thrown or pressed against it in a grip like summer tar. The polymer was studded with hubcaps, because the place had been a car lot once. Hubcaps and bottles and more nameless junk. In the funk that had started to come over him, out back there on his breaks, he’d collect a handful of rocks and stand there, throwing them, as hard as he could, into the polymer. They didn’t make much of a noise when they hit, and in fact they vanished entirely. Just ripped straight into it and then it sealed over behind them, like nothing had happened. And Rydell had started to see that as emblematic of broader things, how he was like those rocks, in his passage through the world, and how the polymer was like life, sealing over behind him, never leaving any trace at all that he’d been there.
And when Durius would come back to take his own break and tell Rydell it was time to get back out front, sometimes he’d find Rydell that way, throwing those rocks.
“Hit you a hubcap, man,” Durius would advise, “break you a bottle.”
But Rydell hadn’t wanted to.
And when Rydel! had told Durius about Yamazaki and Laney and some money, maybe, to be made up in San Francisco, Durius had listened carefully, asking a few questions, then advised Rydell to go for it. 22 “What about job security?” Rydell had asked. “Job security? Doing this shit? Are you crazy?” “Benefits,” Rydell countered.
“You tried to actually use the medical coverage they give you here?
Gotta go to Tiajuana to get it.” “\Vell,” Rydell had said, “I don’t like to just quit.”
“That’s ’cause you got fired from every last job you ever had,” Durius had explained. “I seen your rйsumй.”
So Rydell had given Mr. Park written notice, and Mr. Park had promptly fired him, citing numerous violations of Lucky Dragon policy on Rydell’s part, up to and including offering medical aid to the victim of a one-car collision on Sunset, an act which Mr. Park insisted could have involved Lucky Dragon’s parent corporation in costly insurance litigation.
“But she walked in here under her own power,” Rydell had protested. “All I did was offer her a bottle of iced tea and call the traffic cops.”
“Smart lawyer claim ice tea put her in systemic shock.”
“Shock my butt.”
But Mr. Park had known that if he fired Rydell, the last. paycheck would be smaller than if Rydell quit.
Praisegod, who could get all emotional if someone was leaving, had cried and given him a big hug, and then, as he’d left the store, she’d slipped him a pair of Brazilian GPS sunglasses, with inbuilt phone and AM-FM radio, about the most expensive item Lucky Dragon carried. Rydell hadn’t wanted to take them, because he knew they’d turn up missing on the next inventory.
“Fuck the inventory,” Praisegod had said.
Back in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz’s garage, six blocks away and just below Sunset, Rydell had stretched out on his narrow bed and tried to get the radio in the glasses to work. All he’d been able to get, though, was static, faintly inflected with what might have been mariachi music.
He’d done a little better with the GPS, which had a rocker keypad built into the right temple. The fifteen-channel receiver seemed to have really good lock-on, but the tutorial seemed to have been translated 23 badly, and all Rydell could do was zoom in and out of what he quickly realized was a street map of Rio, not LA. Still, he’d thought, taking the glasses off, he’d get the hang of it. Then the phone in the left temple had beeped, so he’d put the glasses back on.