Strange Weather Read online

  The only thing I could think to do was abase myself, as quickly and fully as possible. I was ready to cry, and the Phoenician hadn’t even screamed at me yet. I reeled into the front of the store, hip-checking a wire shelf of potato chips. Bags of Lays scattered everywhere. I clawed the twenty out of my shirt pocket.

  “Oh man oh man I’m sorry oh man. Oh, I screwed that up. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even look at the money when I threw it on the counter, mister, and I must’ve put down my ten instead of your twenty. I swear, I swear, I didn’t—”

  “When I said you could keep the change to buy yourself some weight-loss pills, I didn’t mean you could fuck me out of a sawbuck.” He lifted one hand as if he had a mind to catch me upside the head.

  He’d come in with his camera—it was clutched in his other hand—and even as rattled as I was, I thought it was odd he wouldn’t have just left it in the car.

  “No, really, I’d never, I swear to God—” I was babbling, my eyes tingling dangerously, threatening to spill tears. In my haste I set my enormous thirty-two-ounce Blu slurry on the edge of the counter, and the moment I let go of it, a bad situation turned so, so much worse. The cup toppled and dropped, hit the floor, and exploded in a vibrant gout of blue ice. Glowing blue chips sprayed the Phoenician’s perfectly pressed black pants, splashed his crotch, and threw sapphire droplets on his camera.

  “The fuck!” he screamed, dancing back on the toes of his cowboy boots. “Are you fucking retarded, you enormous pile of turd?”

  “ ’Ey!” shouted Mat’s mom, pointing at the Phoenician. “ ’Ey, ’ey, ’ey, no fight in store, I call cop!”

  The Phoenician looked down at his Blu-spattered clothes and back up at me. His face darkened. He put the Polaroid-that-wasn’t on the counter and took a step toward me. I don’t know what he meant to do, but he was shaken up, and his left foot skidded in the spreading pile of Arctic Blu–Coke slush. Those boots had high Cuban heels, and they looked good but must’ve been as tricky as walking around in six-inch stilettos. He came very close to slamming down on one knee.

  “I’ll clean it up!” I cried out. “Oh, man, I’m so sorry, I’ll clean it all up, and, oh, Jesus, believe me, I’ve never tried to cheat anyone out of anything, I’m really honest, if I fart, I always cop right to it, even when I’m on the school bus, swear to God, swear—”

  “Yeah, brah, chill,” Mat said, rising from his stool. He was sinewy and tall, and with his dark eyes and shaved head he didn’t need to make a threat to look like one. “Take it easy. Fags is okay. I guarantee he wasn’t trying to screw you.”

  “And you can stay the fuck out of it,” the Phoenician said to him. “Or try paying attention before you choose sides. Kid rips me for ten bucks, throws his drink on me, and then I just about break my ass in this puddle of shit—”

  “Don’t put the boots on if you can’t walk in ’em, pard,” Mat said, without looking at him. “You might get hurt one of these days.”

  Mat handed a big roll of paper towels across the counter, and as I took them, he gave me a wink so quick, so subtle, I almost missed it. I felt almost shaky with gratitude, that was how relieved I was to have Mat on my side.

  I tore off a fistful of paper towels and immediately dropped to my knees in the slush to begin swiping at the Phoenician’s trousers. You could be forgiven if you thought I was getting ready to give him a blow job by way of apology.

  “Aw, man, I’ve always been clumsy, always, I can’t even roller-skate—”

  He danced away (almost slipping again), then leaned in and snatched the clod of sodden paper towels away from me. “Hey! Hey, no touch! You get down there on your knees like someone who’s had way too much practice. Keep your hands off my dick, thank you. I got it.”

  He gave me a look that said I had crossed the line from someone who needed an ass-stomping to someone he didn’t want anywhere near him. He swiped at his pants and shirt, whispering bitterly to himself.

  I still had the paper-towel roll, though, and I splashed through slush and grabbed his camera to clean it off.

  By then I was so nervous and wretched I was moving in spastic bursts, and when I picked up the camera, my hand pressed the big red button to take a shot. The lens was pointing across the counter, into Mat’s face, when the Polaroid went off with a snap of white light and a high-pitched mechanical whine.

  The photo didn’t just pop out. The camera launched it from the slot, firing the square of plastic across the counter and over the far side. Mat snapped his head back, blinking rapidly, blinded by the flash perhaps.

  I was a little blind myself. Weird, coppery glowworms crawled before my eyes. I shook my head, stared stupidly down at the camera in my right hand. The brand was “Solarid,” a company I’d never heard of and as far as I know never existed, not in this country or any other.

  “Put that down,” the Phoenician said, in a new tone of voice.

  I thought I’d heard him at his scariest when he was yelling at me, but this was different and much worse. This was the sound of the cylinder turning in a revolver, the click of the hammer cocking back.

  “I was just trying to—” I began, my tongue thick in my mouth.

  “You’re trying to get yourself hurt. And you’re about to succeed.”

  He held out a hand, and I put the Solarid in it. If I dropped the camera—if it slipped out of my sweaty, shaking hand—I believe he would’ve killed me. Put his hand on my throat and squeezed. I believed that then, and I believe it now. His gray eyes regarded me with a cold, curdled fury, and his pocked face was as inexpressive as a rubber mask.

  He tugged the camera away from me, and the moment passed. He swung his gaze to the young man and elderly woman behind the counter.

  “The picture. Give me the picture,” he said.

  Mat still seemed dazed from the camera’s flash. He looked at me. He looked at his mother. He seemed to have lost the thread of the entire conversation.

  The Phoenician ignored him and focused his attention upon Mrs. Matsuzaka. He held out a hand. “That’s my photo, and I want it. My camera, my film, my photo.”

  Her gaze swept the floor around her, and then she looked up and shrugged again.

  “It popped out and fell on your side of the counter,” the Phoenician said, speaking loudly and slowly, the way people do when they’re hideously angry with a foreigner. As if translation were aided by volume. “We all saw it. Look for it. Look around your feet.”

  Mat rubbed the balls of his palms into his eyes, dropped them, and yawned. “What’s up?” As if he had just shoved back the sheets and walked out of his bedroom into the middle of an argument.

  His mother said something to him in Japanese, her voice rapid and distressed. He stared at her in a kind of foggy daze, then lifted his chin and looked at the Phoenician.

  “What’s the problem, brah?”

  “The picture. The photograph the fat kid took of you. I want it.”

  “What’s the big deal? If I find it, you want me to autograph it for you?”

  The Phoenician was done talking. He stalked around to the waist-high door that would let him in behind the counter and the cash register. Mat’s mom had returned to scanning the floor in a forlorn sort of way, but now her head twitched up, and she put her hand on the inside of the swinging door before he could come through. Her expression became severely disapproving.

  “No! Customer stay other side! No, no!”

  “I want that fucking photograph,” the Phoenician said.

  “Yo, brah!” If Mat had been in a daze, he shook it off then. He stepped between his mother and the Phoenician, and suddenly Mat seemed very large. “You heard her. Back off. Company policy, no one on this side of the counter who don’t work here. You don’t like it? Buy a postcard and send your complaint to Mobil. They’re dying to hear from you.”

  “Can we move this along? I have a baby in the car,” said the woman who was standing behind me with an armful of cat-food cans.

  What? Did y
ou think it was just the four of us in the Mobil Mart all this time? While I threw my Arctic Blu special at the Phoenician and he cursed and sulked and threatened, people were coming in, grabbing drinks and chips and plastic-wrapped hoagies and forming into a line behind me. By now the queue stretched halfway to the back of the store.

  Mat moved behind the register. “Next customer.”

  The mom with the armful of cans stepped carefully around that sci-fi-colored puddle of vividly glittering blue, and Mat began to ring up her purchases.

  The Phoenician stared in disbelief. Mat’s curt dismissal was an outrage on a par with my flinging frosty Blu down his pants.

  “You know what? Fuck this. Fuck this store and fuck this fat waste and fuck you, slant. I got enough gas to get out of this shithole, and that’s more than enough. I wouldn’t want to blow one penny more than absolutely necessary in this toilet.”

  “That’s one eighty-nine,” Mat said to the woman with the cat food. “No extra charge for the afternoon’s entertainment.”

  The Phoenician reached the door but paused, half in, half out, to glare back at me. “I won’t forget you, kid. Look both ways before you cross the street, know what I mean?”

  I was too choked up with fright to squeak any kind of reply. He banged out the door. A moment later his Caddy blasted away from the pumps and onto the two-lane highway with a shrill whine of tires.

  I used the rest of the paper towels to mop the slush off the floor. It was a relief to get down on my knees, below eye level, where I could have a semiprivate cry. I was thirteen, man. Customers stepped around me, paid for things, and left, considerately pretending they couldn’t hear my sniffling and choked gasps.

  When I had the mess swabbed up (the floor was tacky but dry), I carried a great mass of sopping paper rags over to the counter. Mrs. Matsuzaka stood to one side of her son, her eyes far away and her mouth crimped in a frown—but when she saw me with my load of wet towels, she came out of her thoughts and reached for the big industrial wastebasket behind the counter. She wheeled it over toward me, and that’s when I saw it: The snapshot was face-down on the floor, in the corner, had slid under the bin and out of sight.

  Mrs. Matsuzaka saw it, too, and went back for it, while I dumped my soggy paper towels into the trash can. She stared down at the photo with incomprehension. She looked over at me—then held it out so I could have a look.

  It should’ve been a close-up of Mat. The lens had been right in his face.

  Instead it was a photograph of me.

  Only it wasn’t a shot of me from a few minutes ago. It was from a few weeks earlier. In the picture I sat in a molded plastic chair by the soda machine, reading Popular Mechanics and sipping on a giant plastic cup full of soda. In the Polaroid (Solarid?) I was wearing a white Huey Lewis T-shirt and a pair of knee-length denim shorts. Today I had on khakis and a Hawaiian shirt with pockets. The photographer had to have been standing behind the counter.

  It didn’t make any sense, and I stared at it in complete bafflement, trying to figure out where it had come from. It couldn’t be the picture I’d just accidentally shot, but I also didn’t see how it could be a snap from a few weeks back. I had no memory of Mat or his mom taking my picture while I read one of Mat’s magazines. I couldn’t imagine why they’d want to do such a thing, and I had never seen either one of them with a Polaroid camera.

  I swallowed and said, “Can I have that?”

  Mrs. Matsuzaka took one last bewildered look at the photograph, then pursed her lips and put it on the counter. She slid it across to me, and when she took her hand back, she rubbed the tips of her fingers together, as if it had left a disagreeable coating on her skin.

  I studied it for a moment longer, with a clenched, ill feeling behind my breastbone, a cramped sensation of anxiety that wasn’t entirely a product of the Phoenician’s rage and threats. I tucked the picture into my shirt pocket and eased over to the cash register. I put the twenty on the counter, thinking, with a shudder, That’s his money, and what’s he going to do when he realizes you never gave it back? Better look both ways when you cross the street. Better look both fucking ways, Fags. See, I even insulted myself.

  “Sorry about the mess,” I said. “That’s for the thirty-two-ounce soda.”

  “Whatever, brah. I ain’t gonna charge you for that. Just a little spilled sugar water.” Mat pushed my money back toward me.

  “Okay. Well. I owe you one for not letting him kick my ass. You saved my life there, Mat. Sincerely.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said, although he had narrowed his eyes and was giving me a puzzled smile, as if he weren’t quite sure what I was talking about. He considered me for a moment longer, then gave his head a little shake. “Hey, ask you something?”

  “Sure, what, Mat?”

  “You talk like we know each other. Have we met before?”

  4

  I WALKED OUT OF THERE with my nerves jangling and a sick buzz in my head. By the time I left, I was reasonably certain that Mat didn’t have any goddamn clue who I was, and had no memory of ever seeing me before, never mind that I walked into that Mobil every day and had been reading his used copies of Popular Mechanics for more than a year. He simply didn’t know me anymore—an idea that rattled me badly.

  I told myself I didn’t understand, that it was crazy, that it didn’t make sense, but this wasn’t entirely the truth. I already had a notion about Mat’s sudden forgetfulness nibbling at the edge of my consciousness. I was aware of it in the way you might be aware of a rat scuttling inside the walls. You can hear the furtive scrabble of its claws, the thump of its torso against the drywall. You know it’s there, you just haven’t set your eyes on it. My notion about Mat and the Solarid was so horror-movie terrible—so Steven Spielberg impossible—that I couldn’t bear to consider it straight on. Not yet.

  I returned home in a state of persistent, low-grade panic. It took me ten minutes to cross the distance between the Mobil and my house on Plum Street. In my mind I died seven times on the way.

  Twice I heard the Phoenician’s tires squealing on the blacktop and turned to see the shiny chrome grille in the half second before the Caddy slammed into me.

  Once the Phoenician slid to a stop behind me, got out with a tire iron, chased me into the woods, and beat me to death in the brush.

  He ran me down as I tried to scamper across the Thatcher family’s front yard, and he drowned me in their purple inflatable wading pool. The last thing I saw was a headless G.I. Joe sunk to the bottom.

  The Phoenician drove past nice and slow and hung his left arm out the window with a gun in it, put two bullets in me, one in my neck, one in my cheek.

  He drove past nice and slow and lopped my head off with a rusty machete. WHACK.

  He drove past nice and slow and said, Hey, kid, how’s it going? and my weak heart stopped in my fat chest and I fell dead of a massive cardiac arrest at age thirteen, so young, so full of promise.

  The snapshot was in my shirt pocket. I felt it there as if it were a square of warm, radioactive material, something that could give me cancer. It could not have made me more uneasy if it were kiddie porn. Possessing it felt criminal. It felt like evidence . . . although of what crime, I could not have told you.

  I cut across the grass and let myself into the house. I heard a mechanical whirring and followed the sound into the kitchen. My father was out of bed and using the electric beater on a bowl of orange-tinted whipped cream. Something was baking in the oven, and the air was redolent of the warm scent of gravy, an odor quite like a freshly opened can of Alpo.

  “I smell dinner. What’s in the oven?”

  “Battle of Stalingrad,” he said.

  “What’s the orange stuff you’re whipping up?”

  “Topping for the Panama Thrill.”

  I opened the fridge looking for Kool-Aid and found the Panama Thrill, a mountainous sculpture of Jell-O, cherries suspended within its quaking mass. My father only knew how to make a few things: Jell-O, pasta dis
hes with ground beef in them, chicken topped with sauces made out of Campbell’s canned soups. His real gift in the kitchen was for naming the meals. It was Battle of Stalingrad one night, Chainsaw Massacre the next (that was a weird mess of white beans and meat in a bloody red sauce), Fidel’s Cigar for lunch (a brown tortilla stuffed with shredded pork and pieces of pineapple), and Farmer Pizza for breakfast (an open-faced omelet piled with cheese and random chopped leftovers). He wasn’t a fatso like me, but thanks to our diet he wasn’t anyone’s idea of trim. If we passed each other in the hall, we both had to turn sideways.

  I poured the Kool-Aid, drank off the entire glass in four swallows. Not good enough. I poured another.

  “It’s almost ready,” he said.

  I made a humming sound of acceptance. Battle of Stalingrad was mashed potatoes topped with shaved steak and a bottled gravy-and-mushroom sauce. Eating it was roughly like consuming a bucket of liquid cement. I felt boiled after my hike to the Mobil and back, and the dog-food smell of dinner was making me ill.

  “You’re not enthusiastic?” he asked.

  “No. I’m eager.”

  “Sorry it’s not Mom’s apple pie. But I got to tell you, even if she was here, I don’t think she makes pie.”

  “Do I look like a kid who needs pie?”

  He glanced at me sidelong and said, “You look like a kid who maybe needs a shot of Pepto-Bismol. You okay?”

  “I’m just going to sit in the dark and cool off,” I said. “I haven’t been this hot since I was fighting off the Cong outside Khe Sanh.”

  “Let’s not talk about that. If I start thinking about the boys we left behind, I’ll begin crying in the whipped cream.”

  I went out whistling “Goodnight Saigon.” My dad and I had an ongoing riff about the time we’d spent fighting the North Vietnamese together, the arms we’d run to the Contras, the helicopter crash we’d barely survived on a mission to save the hostages in Iran. The truth was, neither of us had ever been out of California, except for one trip to Hawaii, when we were still a family in the traditional sense. My mother was the one who had adventures in faraway places.