“The Supr Savr’s kind of a weird place for a job interview, don’t you think? Especially when it’s been closed since eight o’clock.”
“That’s what makes it good, Dink. Privacy in a public place. I’ll 223
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park right by the Kart Korral. You’ll know the car—it’s a big gray Mercedes.”
“I’ll know it because it’ll be the only one there,” I said, but he was already gone.
I hung up and put the money in my pocket, almost without realizing I was doing it. I was sweating lightly all over my body. The voice on the phone wanted to meet me by the Kart Korral, where Skipper had so often teased me. Where he had once mashed my fingers between a couple of shopping carts, laughing when I screamed. That hurts the worst, getting your fingers mashed. Two of the nails had turned black and fallen off. That was when I’d made up my mind to try the letter. And the results had been unbelievable. Still, if Skipper Brannigan had a ghost, the Kart Korral was likely where it would hang out, looking for fresh victims to torture. The voice on the phone couldn’t have picked that place by accident. I tried to tell myself that was bullshit, that coincidences happened all the time, but I just didn’t believe it. Mr. Sharpton knew about Skipper. Somehow he knew.
I was afraid to meet him, but I didn’t see what choice I had. If nothing else, I ought to find out how much he knew. And who he might tell.
I got up, put on my coat (it was early spring then, and cold at night—it seems to me that it’s always cold at night in western Penn-sylvania), started out the door, then went back and left a note for Ma.
“Went out to see a couple of guys,” I wrote. “Will be back by midnight.” I intended to be back well before midnight, but that note seemed like a good idea. I wouldn’t let myself think too closely about why it seemed like a good idea, not then, but I can own up to it now: if something happened to me, something bad, I wanted to make sure Ma would call the police.
VIII
There are two kinds of scared—at least that’s my theory. There’s TV-scared, and there’s real-scared. I think we go through most of our lives only getting TV-scared. Like when we’re waiting for our blood-tests 224
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to come back from the doctor or when we’re walking home from the library in the dark and thinking about bad guys in the bushes. We don’t get real-scared about shit like that, because we know in our heart of hearts that the blood-tests will come back clean and there won’t be any bad guys in the bushes. Why? Because stuff like that only happens to the people on TV.
When I saw that big gray Mercedes, the only car in about an acre of empty parking lot, I got real-scared for the first time since the thing in the box-room with Skipper Brannigan. That time was the closest we ever came to really getting into it.
Mr. Sharpton’s ride was sitting under the light of the lot’s yellow mercury-vapor lamps, a big old Krautmobile, at least a 450 and probably a 500, the kind of car that costs a hundred and twenty grand these days. Sitting there next to the Kart Korral (now almost empty for the night, all the carts except for one poor old three-wheeled crip-ple safely locked up inside) with its parking lights on and white exhaust drifting up into the air. Engine rumbling like a sleepy cat.
I drove toward it, my heart pumping slow but hard and a taste like pennies in my throat. I wanted to just mat the accelerator of my Ford (which in those days always smelled like a pepperoni pizza) and get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t get rid of the idea that the guy knew about Skipper. I could tell myself there was nothing to know, that Charles “Skipper” Brannigan had either had an accident or committed suicide, the cops weren’t sure which (they couldn’t have known him very well; if they had, they would have thrown the idea of suicide right out the window—guys like Skipper don’t off themselves, not at the age of twenty-three they don’t), but that didn’t stop the voice from yammering away that I was in trouble, someone had figured it out, someone had gotten hold of the letter and figured it out.
That voice didn’t have logic on its side, but it didn’t need to. It had good lungs and just outscreamed logic. I parked beside the idling Mercedes and rolled my window down. At the same time, the driver’s-side window of the Mercedes rolled down. We looked at each other, me and Mr. Sharpton, like a couple of old friends meeting at the Hi-Hat Drive-In.
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I don’t remember much about him now. That’s weird, considering all the time I’ve spent thinking about him since, but it’s the truth.
Only that he was thin, and that he was wearing a suit. A good one, I think, although judging stuff like that’s not my strong point. Still, the suit eased me a little. I guess that, unconsciously, I had this idea that a suit means business, and jeans and a tee-shirt means fuckery.
“Hello, Dink,” he says. “I’m Mr. Sharpton. Come on in here and sit down.”
“Why don’t we just stay the way we are?” I asked. “We can talk to each other through these windows. People do it all the time.”
He only looked at me and said nothing. After a few seconds of that, I turned off the Ford and got out. I don’t know exactly why, but I did. I was more scared than ever, I can tell you that. Real-scared.
Real as real as real. Maybe that was why he could get me to do what he wanted.
I stood between Mr. Sharpton’s car and mine for a minute, looking at the Kart Korral and thinking about Skipper. He was tall, with this wavy blond hair he combed straight back from his forehead. He had pimples, and these red lips, like a girl wearing lipstick. “Hey Dinky, let’s see your dinky,” he’d say. Or “Hey Dinky, you want to suck my dinky?” You know, witty shit like that. Sometimes, when we were rounding up the carts, he’d chase me with one, nipping at my heels with it and going “Rmmmm! Rmmmmm! Rmmmmm!” like a fucking race-car. A couple of times he knocked me over. At dinner-break, if I had my food on my lap, he’d bump into me good and hard, see if he could knock something onto the floor. You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about, I’m sure. It was like he’d never gotten over those ideas of what’s funny to bored kids sitting in the back row of study hall.
I had a ponytail at work, you had to wear your hair in a ponytail if you had it long, supermarket rules, and sometimes Skipper would come up behind me, grab the rubber band I used, and yank it out.
Sometimes it would snarl in my hair and pull it. Sometimes it would break and snap against my neck. It got so I’d stick two or three extra rubber bands in my pants pocket before I left for work. I’d try not to 226
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think about why I was doing it, what I was putting up with. If I did, I’d probably start hating myself.
Once I turned around on my heels when he did that, and he must have seen something on my face, because his teasing smile went away and another one came up where it had been. The teasing smile didn’t show his teeth, but the new one did. Out in the box-room, this was, where the north wall is always cold because it backs up against the meat-locker. He raised his hands and made them into fists. The other guys sat around with their lunches, looking at us, and I knew none of them would help. Not even Pug, who stands about five-feet-four anyway and weighs about a hundred and ten pounds. Skipper would have eaten him like candy, and Pug knew it.
“Come on, assface,” Skipper said, smiling that smile. The broken rubber band he’d stripped out of my hair was dangling between two of his knuckles, hanging down like a little red lizard’s tongue. “Come on, you want to fight me? Come on, sure. I’ll fight you.”
What I wanted was to ask why it had to be me he settled on, why it was me who somehow rubbed his fur wrong, why it had to be any guy. But he wouldn’t have had an answer. Guys like Skipper never do.
They just want to knock your teeth out. So instead, I just sat back down and picked up my sandwich again. If I tried to fight Skipper, he’d likely put me in the hospital. I started to eat, although I wasn’t hungry anymore. He looked at me a second or two longer, and I thought he might go after me, anyway, but then he unrolled his fists.