Since the Layoffs Read online

  “You also have to make sure no one finds you on the way home. Don’t smoke outside my house and leave cigarette butts around. They can do things now with DNA, all that shit. Don’t leave boot prints in my house, either. Wrap rags around your feet so they can’t get a clear boot print, especially if it’s snowing.”

  The waitress comes up and brings our food, and Gardocki changes the subject so deftly it leaves me worried. He’s too good at deception, and I’m in a life-or-death pact with him. “And Favre, I’m not sure how much longer he’s going to last. The Packers now aren’t the same Packers we saw in the Super Bowl two years in a row.” He says this in the same voice he has just used talking about the murder of his wife. The waitress tells us to enjoy our meal and walks off, and Gardocki continues, without missing a beat, “I’ve got your gambling stuff worked out, too.”

  “How do you mean?” I stare at my steaming bowl of baked ziti, fork ready.

  “I’m leaving a line blank on my betting sheets. You’re going to place a fifty-eight hundred dollar bet on the Jets-Bills game this Sunday. Whoever wins, I’ll just fill that in as your bet. Minus the vig, I’ll owe you exactly five grand. That’s how you explain coming into the money to everyone you know.”

  I nod.

  “Do you have any problems with this?”

  “I understand everything. I’ll do a good job.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Problems? You mean moral problems?”

  “Yeah.” Gardocki is waiting to tear into his food, but is staring at me patiently.

  “Yes.”

  Gardocki nods. “Good,” he says. “Good answer. If you’d said no, I’d know you were lying. Do you think these problems are going to stop you from doing a good job?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll talk about the deeper issues later. For now, just kill my wife and we’ll all be happier.”

  We begin to eat.

  I have lied to Ken Gardocki. I don’t have any moral problems.

  I was aware the question was loaded when he asked, that he was looking for a specific answer. I knew he knew me well enough to suspect I would be morally torn, and I wanted to appear predictable to him, safe. I didn’t want Gardocki’s big fear to be that I will suddenly find Jesus when I am standing in the kitchen, pointing the gun at his wife’s head. I have a feeling I’m going to do a much better job than he thinks. I might discover hidden talents.

  The fact is, my morality is all but gone. My own life was taken from me by a twist of fate, an economic whim, a stroke of a pen in some office in New York City. My town is destroyed, my girlfriend is gone, my friends and I are constantly broke. Somebody killed me and my town, and I’m sure they’re not tossing and turning about it. Why should I tear my hair out over Corinne Gardocki?

  Killing other people, now the idea has been broached, doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Corinne Gardocki. I’ve never met the woman. What little I know about her comes from barroom rumors. About five years ago, I placed a bet with Gardocki in a bar, and afterwards got to drinking with some of his older acquaintances. They were all guys from the factory, metal workers who were just a few months from retirement, and the conversation this night turned to Gardocki’s new wife, Corinne. She was a stripper at a so-called gentleman’s club up Highway 40, and Gardocki had laid eyes on her one night and determined that she would be his next wife, replacing the one who had passed away from cancer some six years before. Gardocki had been infatuated, had bought her all kinds of presents and visited her constantly. After the stripper’s don’t-appear-too-eager mandatory nine-week waiting period, she became his wife.

  The conversation at the bar that night had been mostly derisive of the new Gardocki marriage. Most of the metalworkers were laughing about it, making jokes about her fucking ole Ken to death and then keeping his plush new house, the product of twenty years of factory work and twenty years of bookmaking. Most of these older guys said they didn’t trust her. They talked about how sweet Ken’s first wife had been and how reptilian this one was in comparison. At the time, I figured it was just jealousy. Now, having entered into a contract to kill her only five years later, evidently these older guys had seen something that Gardocki had missed.

  Maybe none of it is true. Maybe Corinne Gardocki spends her days volunteering at the homeless shelter and the affair with the airline pilot is a product of Gardocki’s aging paranoia. Maybe the “airline pilot” is her brother. The fact is, it doesn’t matter much to me. She is going to die because I have been laid off from a profitable factory in the middle of my career. She is going to die because my girlfriend left me because I can’t deal with life in the unemployment line. Corinne Gardocki is a dead woman because some Wall Street whiz kid decided our factory could turn a higher profit if it was situated in Mexico. Catch you later, Corinne. Any moral problems? Not really.

  * * *

  I go down and see Tommy at the convenience store, and he has great news for me.

  “Jake, one of my counter kids got shot last night,” he tells me. “We’ve got a job opening here.”

  Yesterday, this would have been great news. Yesterday, I would have started crying with gratitude that Tommy had offered me, had reserved for me, the $5.75 an hour position as a convenience store clerk. Today, I don’t know what to say, because I have ninety-seven dollars in my pocket and I had gone down there to have Tommy steal me cigs so he would think I was still broke. I couldn’t let anybody know I had money until after the supposed bet went down, when there would be a legitimate explanation. So my plan had been to continue my usual broke behavior for the rest of the week. Now this creates a problem. If I say I’ll take the job, and Tommy needs me Saturday night, how do I kill Corinne Gardocki if I have to work at a convenience store?

  Tommy mistakes my silence for glee-related shock, and he tells me the story of the shooting. Apparently, the cops came last night to haul off one of Tommy’s two employees, who was trafficking marijuana and cocaine out of the store. He had been squealed on by some kid who had been busted with an eighth, and when the cops came for him he grabbed a gun the store stashed under the counter and ran off through the parking lot. One of the cops saw him with the gun and winged him. If my cable wasn’t cut off I might have seen this on the news, if the newspeople even bothered reporting stuff like this any more.

  “That’s great, Tommy,” I say, my voice lacking the required enthusiasm. I have eight hundred dollars coming to me, I don’t need to be wearing an apron and making coffee for truck drivers and forking over cigs to housewives for three fifty a pack. But Tommy looks delighted for me. So I’ve gone from having nothing to do all day to having to juggle my schedule. “When do you want me to start?”

  “Today would be great. Come back at five. I can probably squeeze you in as an assistant manager. That’s six fifty an hour.”

  “Great, thanks, man. I appreciate it.” I know that the kid who got shot, the drug dealer, was the one who worked the overnight shift. So Tommy’s probably going to expect me to work overnight Saturday, and I have to make up an excuse to get Saturday off. But what excuse can I use? Tommy knows I’m broke and have nothing to do, ever. I couldn’t afford a date even if I had one, and Tommy knows all the girls I know, so even if I said I was going out with one he’d mention it to her if he saw her. Now this is getting complicated.

  I need someone to vouch for me as being busy Saturday so I can request it off. The obvious choice is Ken Gardocki, but he’s going to be out of town. Besides, it’s best if I use Gardocki’s name as little as possible in the next few weeks, and limit my contact with him. Even if Gardocki provides me with an alibi, that’ll look worse than no alibi at all because the alibi could obviously be traced back to Gardocki. All this is going through my mind as I stare, with an expression of forced joy, at Tommy.

  It dawns on me for the first time that being a contract killer is more than just pulling a trigger.

  “Hey, man, can I borrow a pack of smokes until my first paycheck?” br />
  Tommy nods and grins. He gets them for me. Then he slaps me on the shoulder. “You and me, man. Workin’ together again.”

  I get home just as the phone is ringing, and as my mind is buzzing with thoughts of my new career, I answer it without first checking the caller ID. It is a debt collector, one of many I have been avoiding lately.

  “Mr. Jake Skowran?” I realize immediately I have made a mistake.

  “Yes, this is me.” I make another one. When in debt, never admit to being yourself on the phone.

  “This is Mike Murty from Consolidated Finances.” His voice is cold and humorless. I hate that, the rudeness with which they begin. I swear, if there was a single one of these guys who didn’t forgo the formalities, who chatted with me for a bit, asked me how my day was going, I’d almost be tempted to care that I owed their company a lot of money. “You have a $3,189.66 outstanding balance on your Visa account, and we haven’t had a payment from you for four months. What are you going to do about that?”

  “Hold on,” I say. “Let me get a cigarette.” I fumble around, find my lighter, light the cigarette, exhale, and sit down on the couch. Mike Murty waits patiently. “Now, what were you saying?”

  He repeats the same information in the same tone, and asks me the same question. What am I going to do about it? I don’t know. Get used to it eventually, I guess.

  “I’ve been out of work for nine months,” I tell him. “I got laid off. Everyone in my town got laid off.”

  There is a silence.

  “Mr. Skowran,” he says. “This debt isn’t going to go away. We need some kind of payment, something to show good faith. Then we can set you up with a payment plan.”

  “I’m on unemployment,” I tell him.

  “Unless you can give us something, we’re going to have to file a judgment against you. That’s going to effect your credit ….”

  He rambles on. I’m not listening. I lie down on the couch and look at the dust outline where my TV used to be. The entertainment center is empty, the stereo gone, too. I can see my breath frosting up into the cool air. The heat has been cut off. Some guy in an office hundreds of miles away writing bad things about me on a computer is the least of my problems.

  “I’d like a promise from you that we can expect at least one hundred dollars by the end of the month or we’re going to have to take action,” he says.

  Something comes over me. I am a contract killer now, I don’t have to take shit from anyone. I have a job, I’ll be coming into money soon. I’m not going to spend another day avoiding people because I owe them money. I owe them, they want to talk to me. This is a position of strength.

  “Do you remember elementary school?” I ask him.

  There is a pause, then he says, “Mr. Skowran? I asked about a payment.”

  “I asked you if you remembered elementary school.”

  “Mr. Skowran, I’d like to stay on the subject here. Are you or are you not going to be able—”

  “Because I wanted to know if this was it.”

  He is curious now. “If this was what?”

  “Is this what you dreamed of doing when you were in elementary school? Was this your little boy’s daydream? Did you stare out of the window of your first grade class and think, one day, one of these days, I’m going to call up people who have been laid off and pester the fuck out of them so they could give their unemployment checks to a giant corporation that charges TWENTY-SIX FUCKING PERCENT INTEREST PLUS LATE FEES ….”

  The phone is dead. Mike Murty doesn’t want to hear my irrational screaming. Mike Murty has other people to torment. Maybe there is an unwed mother somewhere in Tennessee he can convince to send him half her food stamps. But me, I feel good. For the first time in months, I feel powerful. All the fear and worry have turned into a hard core of hate, and it has a life of its own.

  Jake Skowran is back.

  TWO

  A sixteen-year-old kid named Jughead shows me around the Gas’n’Go and explains how to use the cash register while Tommy goes home for dinner. He doesn’t make eye contact with me once and he mumbles, but fortunately Tommy has provided me with a corporate pamphlet which outlines my responsibilities. I can’t understand anything Jughead says, but things are easy to figure out. The Gas’n’Go uses a scanner for everything, so I don’t have to know prices, and the register totals everything. My main job is to make sure people don’t shoplift or try to shoot me.

  Because of the events of last night, the gun which the store usually keeps behind the counter is in a police evidence room, so if anyone does try to shoot me, the plan, I gather, is for me to try to conceal my main arteries. I’m also supposed to be comforted by the fact that surveillance cameras, with which the Gas’n’Go is liberally sprinkled, will catch people in the act of shooting me. The fact that the surveillance tapes are in an unlocked room which anyone could get to by stepping over my body makes the whole forty thousand dollar system worthless, to my mind, but this is corporate security. This is them taking care of us.

  Before the factory closed, there wasn’t a single armed robbery in this town for as long as I can remember. Since the layoffs, the late-night convenience stores have become fortresses, the six-dollar-an-hour nightshift workers there the equivalent of combat veterans. Every one of them can tell a story of a gun battle. Jughead doesn’t seem the least bit fazed by hearing the police have just gunned down his co-worker. When I ask him about it, he shrugs and says, “Agasta mel.”

  “What?”

  “I gotta stock milk. Washaresta.”

  “Watch the register?”

  “Yeah.” He is gone.

  I sit by the register and read my pamphlet, a nineteen-page tiny-print roman à clef describing the exciting and rewarding career on which I have just been launched. The cover shows a stunning blonde wearing a Gas’n’Go uniform smiling broadly as she hands change to a well-dressed, beaming customer. Inside, I learn it is only a matter of time before I move up the Gas’n’Go food chain to become regional director of all the Gas’n’Gos in the Midwest.

  A car pulls up, an old orange BMW covered with rust spots. I eagerly await my first customer, but before I can pleasantly welcome him to Gas’n’Go, Jughead comes out from the back and says, “Reddonplay.”

  “What?”

  “You gotta write down the plate.”

  “What plate?”

  Jughead is clearly irritated with me. He pushes past me and pulls out from under the counter a small keyboard. He looks at a tiny color video monitor and types in the car’s license plate number, then puts the keyboard back. “All old cars,” he tells me. “Anything suspicious.”

  “You think he’s suspicious?”

  “It’s an old car.”

  “But he’s already on the monitor. If he does anything the cops’ll get him.”

  Jughead reaches down and shows me the keyboard, which is hooked into the wall with a thick black cord. “Gusta cops,” he says. It goes to the cops.

  Miraculous. Modern technology at its best. When I type in a plate number, the plate is run through a police computer. If it’s a stolen car, or a car registered to someone with an outstanding bench warrant, a police car is immediately and automatically dispatched to the Gas’n’Go. Jughead stares fondly at the keyboard. He finds this technology intriguing, and it gives him a sense of comfort. For my part, all I see is the increased likelihood of a shoot-out right in the store. I make a mental note never to use this feature.

  The customer, a middle-aged, potbellied, unshaven man with grease on his hands, comes in and hands Jughead a five dollar bill for $2.97 in gas. He doesn’t look at either of us. Jughead doesn’t look at him as he hands him $2.03. No words are exchanged as the man leaves, pushing the glass door open with his blackened hands, smudging the glass.

  “Yagattaclindor,” Jughead says, as he goes back to stocking the milk. I gotta clean the door. “Agasta mel.”

  Jughead goes home at seven because there’s a state law prohibiting minors from working at nig
ht. The only other employee on Tommy’s roster was shot last night. So tonight, that leaves me here until seven in the morning, a fourteen-hour shift for someone who doesn’t have any idea how anything in the store works.

  I wonder if the Gas’n’Go CEOs are aware that things like this occur, their hundred thousand dollar business left in the hands of the likes of Jughead and myself. Judging by their pamphlet, I’d guess not. I think they honestly believe that we smile a lot and wear pressed uniforms and our customers are full of delight. I’m wearing torn three-year-old jeans and I’m happy if the people I hand change to don’t have guns. I wonder how this division began, the line between the pamphlet and reality. Did the suits who wrote this never visit one of their stores? Perhaps it’s just this store, in this wrecked town, which is an embarrassment to the Gas’n’Go empire. I suspect not. I suspect all of America is slowly sinking into moral and financial decay while the pamphlet-writers sit in their offices with a view of rivers or valleys and make a sport of pretending not to notice. What difference does it make to them, unless there is actually a revolution? This pamphlet was written to pacify stockholders. I tear it into small pieces in front of a surveillance camera, and as the hours pass, I tear the pieces smaller still, until, by three in the morning, I have confetti, and by sunrise, dust.

  Throughout the night I get customers and I learn things. An overweight woman in her fifties with unwashed, stringy black hair comes in at two in the morning and buys three gallons of whole milk. She hands me what looks like a credit card, but instead of a bank logo, this is plain white and has a faded government seal on it. I look at her suspiciously.

  “Run it,” she says.

  I shrug and swipe it through the credit card machine. Nothing happens. She looks at me, I look at her.