The Espressicle

By Thomas Dietzel



“I guess this is where I say I bet you’re wondering why it is I asked you to meet me here,” Angela said.

Here was a crappy dive bar about half a mile outside of the Rose City called The Bar at the End of Time. Whoever had named it hadn’t followed through with the conceit – far from invoking apocalyptic glee, the décor was a gloomy mishmash of fading classic rock posters and strange paper mache African masks. The layout was bizarre - although there was a largish space in the center of the bar with a pool table and a stage, much of the place consisted of isolate rooms separated from one another by wire mesh or screened partitions. These were connected to the central space and to each other by random clusters of stairs and narrow hallways. The overall effect was not unlike one of those antiquated carnival rides involving rickety trains careening claustrophobically past cages full of assorted lurching robotic vampires and ghouls. It was a good place to go if you didn’t want to be spotted. The balkanized rooms and an atmosphere of congenital obscurity saw to that.

Jack shrugged. He was mildly curious, of course, as to why the beautiful Angela had requested his presence here at the Bar at the End of Time, but mostly he’d come because of the promise of free drinks, which Angela had dutifully provided. Half a pitcher of something called Hot Woog Ale remained on the table between them; their glasses were still mostly full. “If we finish this can we try one of the other ones?” Jack asked. He was interested in the Humblebee Porter and was slightly resentful that she’d ordered before he’d arrived.

“Sure, sure,” said Angela brightly. “We can get one now if you want.”

“That’s okay,” Jack said. “I can wait.” He took a generous swig of Hot Woog Ale and waited. It tasted faintly of chocolate and honey.

“Okay!” said Angela. Somewhere in the bar the jukebox flared to life and started blasting out a rock song. For a minute Jack didn’t recognize it but then the riffs swam into focus – it was that Led Zeppelin song that sounds like reggae, the only reggae song they have.

“Hey,” Jack said. “What’s the name of this song?” Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, sang Robert Plant.

“D’yer Mak’r,” said Angela. She was smiling at him in a manner that was – what? Creepy? No, no…well, maybe a little.

“What?” Jack said. “What’s that mean?”

“It’s from a joke, an English joke.” Angela said. She wrinkled her forehead dramatically, trying to dredge something up from her memory bog. “It’s like – let me see if I can remember it. There’re two guys talking, right? And one of ‘em’s like, ‘Oh no, my wife left me,’ and the other one goes, ‘Jamaica?’ Like – ‘did she go to Jamaica?’ And the first guy is like, ‘No, no, she went by herself.’”

Jack just looked at her blankly.

She continued her exposition. “He thought the guy said, ‘Did you make her?’ Like – like they sound the same – Jamaica, did you make her – D’yer Mak’r!” she finished triumphantly, and leaned back in her chair. “It’s a joke.”

Jack shrugged again and emptied his glass. “Well, it’s not very funny,” he said.

“Hey!” Angela said. “I didn’t write it! You asked.”

Jamaica? What a stupid joke. He sighed and poured himself another glass of Hot Woog Ale. Not to be outdone, she drained her own glass, and then let him fill it for her.

Jack and Angela knew each other from Jack’s work, which was an AllNite convenience store up on 82nd Avenue. 82nd Avenue was a true shithole lined with Chinese restaurants, used car lots, and lingerie modeling shops. He worked the graveyard shift, which was 10 pm to about 6:30 am the following morning. The graveyard shift at the AllNite was a real tour of duty. He might as well have been stationed in Kabul. In the last month they’d been stuck up twice and firebombed once. The firebombing was interesting – someone had come in and sprayed lighter fluid all over the paper products and ignited it. The poor bastard who was working, Sammy, had the misfortune of having been working during the two stick-ups as well. After the firebombing, the franchisee owner, an Armenian named Ezan Bagdasarian, had promptly had Sammy transferred to the suburbs. Apparently being on the receiving end of three violent crimes in as many weeks was the equivalent of a Purple Heart as far as the AllNite Corporation was concerned and qualified you for a change of scenery.

And Angela? He’d met Angela at work. About twenty-two, twenty-three, maybe older. A peer. She was always coming in and asking for stuff, for cups of water, for a cigarette, to use the phone, to hang out in the beer cooler because it was too hot outside, to look at the classifieds. Sometimes she even bought something. Mostly, though, she hung around, insinuating herself into the reality fabric of working the graveyard shift at the 82nd Avenue AllNite. At first he’d resented Angela’s demands and constant presence but soon he realized she knew everyone in the neighborhood and had the potential to be a valuable ally. Plus she dressed in jeans and tight black T-shirts with the names of rock bands he’d never heard of hooked over her triangular breasts. She was easy on the eyes, that was for sure. She had luscious red hair that ran halfway to her ass and cheekbones like the hull of a pirate ship. She was something, all right…

The manager was something else. Ezan was a cantankerous hairy wart of a man who spent most of his time in the back office arguing with distributors or else yelling at unknown persons in what Jack assumed was Armenian. He seldom addressed Jack directly, preferring instead to use his son Raffi as mediator. Raffi was a bored-looking teenager who delivered his father’s wisdom in nasal monotones. You need to sweep more. You didn’t sign the bottle return sheets. You forgot to clock out yesterday. It was better than dealing with the old man, anyway. He was irascible. On one occasion he had refused to come in to cover for Jack after Jack had sprained his ankle in a pair of new Rockports. Later he’d found out his boss had been at a golf tournament. Asshole.

“So I have this friend,” Angela was saying, and Jack’s ears rose a little. “He’s very interested in your AllNite Store.”

“Interested?” Jack said. “For a job?” They were always hiring. There was massive turnover in Kabul. What kind of friend are we talking here, he wondered.

If one can smirk without guile, Angela did so at this point. “That’s – that’s very funny,” she said. “Yes, it’s a job, all right. See – he’s an artist, right?”

“Like a painter?” Jack said. The paper mache masks loomed on either side of them from the dinge, striped in fearsome colors like ghostly battle flags.

“No,” Angela said. “More like a writer. A novelist.”

“Mmmmm,” Jack said. He wasn’t bored yet but he almost was. This conversation had nothing to do with sleeping with Angela or anyone else, not so far. His neck itched.

“See, and what he wants to know is,” Angela said, “what he wants to know is if – well hypothetically, right, someone wanted to jack the store – I mean, sorry, rob the store, Jack, ha ha ha!” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Well – I know this sounds very suspicious and all but – well, see, if someone wanted to, um, get not just the money in the register, but the money in the safe, well, what exactly would be the best way to go about doing it?” She leaned forward and looked at Jack with something like great expectations.

“What?” Jack said. “Are you nuts? He’s an artist? Why don’t you just tell me he’s the president of the company, of the entire AllNite corporation, who wants to know how to get in the safe?” The grammar in this last sentence wasn’t quite right, but his mind flew on. “I could lose my job.” His precious job.

Angela pressed on. “But you know, right? You do know.”

Jack couldn’t deny it. His eyes thinned out and he looked at her.

“Do you like your boss?” Angela said.

Jack thought of Ezan scrunched in his back office like a canker, thought of the golf tournament. “Not particularly,” he said. “That’s not the point.”

The server, a blonde waif of a woman, materialized out of the haunted house and gathered the empty pitcher in her arms like it was an infant. “Another one, guys?” she said. Her voice was surprisingly deep.

“How about the Bumblebee – I mean, the Humblebee Porter?” Jack said. Might as well.

The woman nodded and disappeared.

Angela was still smiling at him. She didn’t look like a criminal. She looked like a red-haired Virgin Mary. She was beautiful. Jack wondered why he had never noticed how – how precisely beautiful she really was, like a dime balancing on the edge of an open clam shell. “And?” she was saying.

Jack couldn’t help smiling back at her. “Angela, what are you up to?”

“What?” she said, a little sketch of innocence. Somehow how even if she were deceiving him about the artist thing she was still entirely without guile.

“Your friend, the artist?” Jack said. “What’s his angle?” He liked this angle part – it sounded very scrupulous, like something a private investigator or a mobster might say. Damn, that Hot Woog Ale was strong! Chocolate and honey and something else…licorice?

“Well…,” she said. “He’s kind of a – a performance artist, right? Like – he does things – he stages them – and then he writes about it, right?”

“Stages them?” They were getting somewhere, though. “Like – stages a robbery, for instance?”

“Something like that,” Angela said. “He’s very talented. Except he’s never, um, staged a robbery before and he needs your help. I mean, we both do. He and me.”

“So,” said Jack, scrupulously, “will the safe be removed during the performance?” He and I, he thought.

Angela looked at him for a minute but her smile never wavered. “Yes,” she said. “Or maybe we can just open it, right? We don’t actually need the safe.”

“Well, that might be the easiest way,” Jack said. He was feeling a little whoop whoop from the Hot Woog Ale and wanted to milk this moment, this talking to this beautiful Irish (if she was Irish – she looked Irish) holy virgin gangster a little bit longer. He felt daring. Maybe she wanted him to feel daring and garrulous but Jack didn’t care. “See, some of the safes – some of them are bolted down, but ours isn’t. This one is kind of new – we just got it a few months ago, and I guess they’re gonna give us a different one next year, so Ezan – he’s my boss, Ezan – Ezan didn’t bother having ‘em bolted down since they’re just gonna get moved anyway next year when we get the new one.” Jack felt snug and deliciously evil. The waif darted into their little chamber to deposit another pitcher of beer and just as rapidly vanished. “So you could wheel in a handcart and just walk out with it.”

“And later?” Angela said. She looked very interested, not just in what he was saying, but in him, personally, like he was a celebrity known only to her.

Coitus? he thought to himself, but he poured them both more beer and said: “Well, there’s a hole in the bottom. You should be able to go in with a tire iron and pop the door off. And if that doesn’t work, you can take the hinges off.”

“Uh-huh,” Angela said.

“But if I really wanted to hit the store, to jack it,” Jack said, “you know what I’d do?”

“No,” Angela said, her breasts heaving slightly.

“I’d come in the first Monday of the month, right? The safe would be full of all the receipts, all the money orders from the weekend and all that shit, people paying their rent and bills plus buying regular crap with their monthly disability money or whatever, so by Monday there’s a ton of cash.”

Angela’s eyes looked like virginal moons. They were very big. He was locked in on them with his own as he spoke.

“So every Monday Ezan comes in and takes everything in the office and counts it up and cashes it out and he’s back there for about an hour and then he goes to the bank. So you – I mean, your artist friend, could hit him anytime in there, in the office, or in his car, or on his way to the car, or whatever.” Jack felt very pleased with himself. He took a great swallow of Humblebee Porter and regarded her as a teacher regards a pupil. He wondered what her relationship was, exactly, to her friend, the performance artist/ novelist, and what her situation was, exactly. She wasn’t a street person, not quite, more like – well, a beautiful poor girl from the neighborhood, from the Avenue of Roses, a little down on her luck, sure, but a spunky nut to boot, and a fine cookie at that as well how swelly well…Jack’s thought process was a little impaired, like an outboard motor stuck in a mudbank, but his heart was soaring. Hell, maybe he’s rob the store with them. That would be a kick! It would be worth getting caught just to see the look on old Bagdasarian’s face! Ha! Ha! Ha!

“So that’s it?” Angela said. “That’s great!”

“Yeah?” Jack said. “Do you think he’ll like it?” The Virgin Mary was giving him a very sultry look.

“Oh, I do,” said Angela. “I like it, too. It’s very good. So when is that, exactly?”

“What?” Jack said. She was so beautiful it was hard to concentrate. He was giving her all his attention but inebriation was working against him like the tide against a swimmer. He had to struggle to keep his eyes synched in with hers.

“The first Monday of the month?””

“Well – ” Jack looked at his cellphone – “next week. Six days from now.” How convenient.

“That’s great,” Angela said, utterly innocent, and took his hand off his glass and held it in her own. “That’s really soon.” She leaned closer to him.

And at that most superb of moments, with the two of them swimming in ethanol, their foreheads almost touching, deep in the thick of scheming like Bonnie and Clyde, he remembered something else entirely: the Espressicle.

The Espressicle was the get-rich-quick scheme of the century. It was the last and best in a long line of Jack’s unrealized inventions that had included the electric saline wash goggles for allergy sufferers, alcoholic gum, the collapsible/ reusable doggy bag, and the river bicycle. The Espressicle was far simpler than any of these and had the potential to be far more lucrative. It was just frozen espresso (mixed with generous dollops of cream and sugar) on a stick. It would be perfect for the hot, the tired, and the ecologically conscious. The slogan of the Espressicle company would be “Look, Ma! No Hands!” Jack figured that after he had perfected the recipe he could start by selling them out of the back of an ice cooler mounted to his bicycle. He envisioned himself tooling through the crowds at the Rose Parade or the Brew Fest or any number of neighborhood street fairs or block parties, ringing a silver bell to announce his presence. The summery customers, overheated and understimulated, would flock to his little mobile shop, eager to drop a dollar or two on an Espressicle sealed in cellophane, or an Espressicle Lite, with soy milk instead of cream and Splenda instead of sugar. He figured that on the weekends he could easily gross hundreds of dollars. Of course, the recipe and the name would be securely copyrighted and patented and protected by then and it would only be a matter of time before he was approached by Barstuck’s or Coffee King or any one of a horde of other big time coffee corporations eager to pay him a quarter mil for the rights – he could probably haggle a half mil out of them, he figured, by the time they shook on it. Then it would be no more AllNite, hell, maybe no more Rose City – he could go live on the beach in Morocco smoking kif with mysterious raven-eyed women...the Espressicle! Graduate school and service jobs be damned! The invisible hand meting out financial justice! All he needed was a little startup money, a little investment capital, a little taste of that twenty or twenty-five grand that he was positive the safe held on an average first Monday-after-the-first-weekend-of-the-month.

So at this point, with the two of them sitting there in the Bar at the End of Time, the future saga of the Espressicle seemed more tangible than ever. Angela was enlisting his help in this scheme, was she not, this scheme which was rapidly condensing into an actuality from the steam of suggestion? Would not his assistance entitle him to some portion of the loot, the booty, the fruits of their wicked deeds? His brain felt like it was floating in a cool bath of Hot Woog Ale and Humblebee Porter. She was still holding his hand and giving him that beatific smile. She didn’t seem creepy anymore, that was for sure.

“So,” he said, pulling himself together, “what’s it going to be then?”

“Excuse me?” she said. She let go of his hand and filled both their glasses again even though they were only half empty.

“You going to take the safe or hit up Ezan?” I asked.

She took a long pull at the Humblebee Porter and regarded him, deliberating. “How does the manager open the safe?” she asked. “Not with a tire iron, I think.”

“There’s a code,” Jack said. “You just punch it in and it opens. I don’t know what it is.”

“Mmmmm,” said Angela. “Ezan knows, huh? Who else?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. He changes it all the time. Raffi might know. They change the code all the time. I know that Raffi knew it at one point because I saw him open the safe once – he was helping Ezan with something.”

“Raffi?” said Angela. “Who’s that?”

“That’s his kid – his son. He’s sixteen or seventeen or something like that. Dumb prick. He’s got nice rims, though.”

“Uh-huh,” Angela said. “I’ve seen him around there.” She was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then she said, “It’s probably easiest just to hit him there in the office. Are you working that day, the first Monday of next month?”

“Not the day shift,” Jack said. “A woman named Wendy Barnes works the day shift.”

Angela looked at him carefully. “Well – can you switch with her?”

Here it comes, thought Jack. “Why?” he said. “You want me to get in on this?”

She smiled at him again. “You already are,” she said. “It’s a question of how in on it you want to get, I guess.”

Look Ma! No hands! “Well,” he said, “if I do help you, if I can switch shifts and make sure this whole thing goes down smooth and all, what’s in it for me?” Money and sexual favors would be nice, he almost said, but checked himself in spite of the cool bath in which his brain was sloshing around.

Angela’s smile never changed but her eyes gave something away he couldn’t quite place – was it fear? It wasn’t deceit. She didn’t have it in her.

“I’m sure we could work something out,” she said. “Like a cut of the money in the safe?”

“Yeah,” he said. Don’t get greedy, he told himself. “Couple of grand is all.”

“Oh, yeah?” Angela said.

He suddenly felt very businesslike. “Look,” he said. “There’ll probably be between twenty and twenty-five grand in that safe.” She was as beautiful as ever but he was doing his best to focus on the idea of the Espressicle. Business before pleasure. Work before leisure. “Give me ten percent. You’ll barely miss it.”

“Ten percent,” she said.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Up to thirty grand, ten percent of that. After that you keep it all. Just give me a tenth of the first thirty grand and I’ll do whatever you want. But you have to keep me informed about everything. Make it foolproof. There’s no way I want to go to jail.” He wondered why he didn’t feel more scared than he did, even with all the alcohol percolating through his blood. This was serious shit.

“Okay,” said Angela. “Let me talk to my associate –”

“You mean the performance artist?” Jack cut in. Was there any truth to that part of it at all? “What’s his name?”

She blinked at him. “Does it matter?” she said. “If you don’t know his name you can’t tell the cops anything. I’m just saying,” she added quickly, as Jack’s nostrils flared with repressed terror.

The cops!

“Well, I have to call him something,” Jack said. “Not during the – the, uh, robbery, but, you know, when I’m talking to you, or whatever.”

“You can call him the Wasp,” Angela said without a trace of irony.

The…Wasp? Jack pictured a tall white man with a cleft chin and patrician nose, wearing French cuffs. “Okay,” he said. “Do I meet him beforehand or just meet him when he comes in and sticks a .38 in my face on the way to the country club?”

Angela laughed a tinkling little laugh that reminded him of the silver bell with which he would arm the Esprescycle, which was his name for the bike that would deliver the Espressicles. “Yeah, you’ll meet him,” she said. “I guess it better be soon if we only have six days, huh?” She was very calm. She acted like they were discussing a day trip to the beach instead committing an egregious felony. “Why don’t we meet here the day after tomorrow? Thursday night? At seven?”

“Okay,” Jack said, and drained his glass. She took his hand again and for a minute he almost forgot about the Espressicle, but then it popped back into his consciousness like a cork at sea. When she squeezed his hand he squeezed it back but his entrepreneurial vision never left his mind from then on, not even for a second, not until the robbery.

He didn’t have to work that night but Wednesday he did. He stopped in early that Wednesday morning to talk to Wendy Barnes about switching shifts with him. She was posed behind the counter like a sentinel, ready for trouble or good fortune. Ezan and Raffi were in the back office, apparently – he could hear them jousting in muted Armenian through the closed door.“Hey, Wendy,” he said buoyantly. “How are you?” He gave her a big old Team AllNite grin but she just stared at him. He was never completely sure that she remembered he worked there.

“May I help you?” she said. Wendy Barnes was in her mid-fifties with a white head of hair that lurched this way and that like a drunken Yeti. She had severe brown eyes that looked even more severe behind her ancient bifocals. Although she had worked there for a little over a year in this time she had betrayed not a microdatum about her personal life. This made her hard to charm.

“How’s life, Wendy?” Jack asked. There was a loud assorted bang from the office like someone had knocked over a tool box. She didn’t flinch.

“Fine, fine,” she said, and shut her mouth again. She was looking right at him but she seemed to be looking through him at the beer cooler.

“Okay!” he plowed on. “So….I was wondering if maybe, um, you could switch with me this Monday? I mean Sunday, really – I’d like you to work the graveyard shift and I’ll work your day shift?” This last sentence wasn’t really a question but he let it stand.

“No,” she said quietly.

Wha? “What?” he said. “Definitely no?” She wasn’t looking him in the eyes, was what it was. She seemed to be trying to burn a hole in his sternum with her bifocals. He realized then that she never looked him in the eye when they spoke. Maybe it was easier to not trade shifts with people that way. “Wendy…”

“No,” she said again, in exactly the same way.

Why? “Wendy is it – is there something I can do to make this work? I mean, are you going to miss your favorite show or something?” Somehow he managed to utter this last sentence without it sounding patronizing. “I could tape it. I can put it on a DVD if you want.” He wondered if Wendy Barnes knew how to operate a DVD player. He kind of doubted it.

“No,” she said. And that was it. She was going to keep saying it no matter what bribes or threats he made. Well, fuck. He saw his Espressicles melting into little sad puddles before her broiling obstinacy. He started to say something else and then gave up and left to the accompaniment of Armenian voices rising in pitch and volume. Maybe Angela and the Wasp (that name!) would still want to rob the place even if he wasn’t there. He wondered if they’d still be good for the ten percent. Ten percent not to tell the police what he knew, maybe. But that was blackmail. Plus he was involved now – who told Angela the safe wasn’t bolted down? Who told her about the first Monday after the first weekend of the month? He sighed to himself, barely seeing the hideous used car lots behind wrought iron fences and the vinyl banners flip-flap-flapping in the breeze. It was getting more complicated now…Wendy! He could ask Ezan to work something out but there was no guarantee that he would get to work the day shift that morning instead of just getting off the Sunday graveyard shift. Crap. He wanted to be in on this so much, wanted to be a part of this Bonnie and Clyde and Clyde scheme they were developing, wanted ten percent of twenty or twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars…and the Espressicle! His baby…strangled in the cradle by the stubborn small-mindedness of Wendy Barnes, a nobody! What the fuck did she have to do Sunday night anyway? Not once did it occur to him that a slight, shy woman in her fifties might not thrill to the notion of spending the night in a retail store that had been held up twice and firebombed once in the last four weeks and whose nocturnal clientele consisted primarily of tweakers trying to steal lottery tickets, prostitutes and strippers haggling over cigarettes, and drunks refusing to accept that alcohol sales had stopped at two AM and there was nothing anyone could do to circumvent this no matter how much swearing or spitting or bearing of teeth was on display.

So Wendy Barnes wanted to work her shift in Kabul next Monday morning. Fine, let her. Let her be working when the Wasp showed up to kick in the office door and give old Ezan a heart attack. Let her. She’d probably get redeployed to fucking Beaverton with Sammy. She could swap war stories with him and then ride the bus for an hour and a half just to get home. Screw her.

When he got to the Bar at the End of Time the following night, Angela and a tall, Latino-looking man with short dark hair were waiting for him in one of the little wiry encasements. He and Angela were sitting on the same side of the table, on a bench, and he slid into place opposite them. The man was gazing intently at one of the nearby masks and continued to do so but Angela smiled her Virgin Mary smile and shook his hand for a moment longer than necessary, temporarily shifting the Espressicle to deep background and bringing erotic fantasies of a two-backed beast named Jackangela to the fore. After they unclasped hands Jack regarded his competition. If there was a romantic liason between Angela and this fellow it was not obvious. Angela poured Jack a glass of something called Whole Mary Ellen Porter and said, “Jack, this is the Wasp.”

The Wasp broke eye contact long enough with the African mask on the wall to exchange a limp handshake with Jack and give him a glance that made it obvious he didn’t think very much of his new partner in crime. He could have been shy, but Jack kind of doubted it. He wasn’t too shy to want to rob the AllNite, performance artist or no. His nose was flat and spread out like it had been broken once or twice. Instead of a cleft chin he had a nasty little scar that ran from his lower lip diagonally to his jawline. No French cuffs. “Hey, Wasp,” Jack said, leaving out the definite article at the last moment. It didn’t seem to fit. “How’s it going?”

The Wasp had no input to offer concerning his personal well-being other than a barely visible shrug that made it clear that further inquiries along these lines were not welcome.

“So,” said Angela, coming to the rescue. “How are we doing?”

She wanted to talk about the plan. “Well,” Jack said, “I can’t switch shifts with that Wendy Barnes bitch. I asked her. She’d not doing it. So she’ll be working that Monday morning when you-” – here Jack gave the Wasp an inclusive nod – “-show up to meet with my boss.”

“No, she won’t,” the Wasp said. It was the first thing he’d said since Jack had shown up and he looked at him with surprise.

“How’s that?” Jack said. Were they going to kill her? This was getting interesting.

Angela cut in. “Jack, the Wasp is very committed to carrying this performance piece out successfully. He’s willing to do almost anything to see it through. So if we need her not to work that shift and have you work it instead – well, we’ll just have to find a way, won’t we?”

Okay! The performance artist didn’t look very committed or uncommitted or anything. Mostly he looked terminally bored. He managed to take his gaze off the African mask he had been staring down and instead fixed it at the bottom of the pitcher of Whole Mary Ellen Porter that confronted them. The fate of Wendy Barnes remained a mystery.

“Now then,” Angela said. It occurred to Jack that Angela spoke pretty well for someone who spent most of her time hanging out on 82nd Avenue. She sounded like the chairperson of the PTA or something. “What do we have? Do we have a plan?”

“Are we assuming I’m going to be working?” Jack asked.

Angela glanced at the Wasp but he didn’t look up. The Wasp was wearing a Britney Spears T-shirt, Jack noticed. A young jailbaiting Britney peeked out at Jack from between the Wasp’s nipples. “Of course,” Angela said. “So – what time does your boss show up on Mondays?”

Jack wrinkled his nose and downed a bolus of the Whole Mary Ellen Porter. Not bad. He wondered again if they had ever screwed, these two. He couldn’t picture it. “He comes in around eight or nine,” he said. “Every weekday. I used to work that shift, the day shift. He’s real regular, real routine, that guy.” He realized he was slipping into gangster patois again – real regular, real routine, that guy – but he let himself slide. You couldn’t be responsible for everything you said, could you?

“Okay,” said Angela. “So he comes in at eight or nine and opens the safe and takes the money in the back, right?”

“Yeah,” said Jack. “Sometimes –”

“The cameras,” The Wasp said. He’d now uttered a total of five words. He obviously was developing acute logorrhea. Jack was going to say something smart but then the Espressicle tapped him on the shoulder of his mind, as it were, and he shut himself up.

“Right,” said Angela. “How many cameras are there?”

“Two,” Jack said. “One’s over the office door hidden behind a 7-Up sign – it’s pointed at the counter, at the register. The other one is above the stacks of Gatorade in the far left corner and it’s pointed at the beer cooler.” He was proud of himself for being able to share this with them. He didn’t mention that he was an expert at slouching down and dozing, when necessary, by the cigarette cabinet - the one spot that was completely out of the camera’s domain. You had to know what the cameras were looking at if you planned on sleeping. Ezan probably spent his free time watching the tapes for someone filching beef jerky or something, the shithead. “So they feed into a pair of VCRs in the back, in the office.”

“Okay,” said Angela. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to be loitering around the store outside at around eight in the morning. Nothing weird about that, right?” She smiled at Jack and the Wasp in turn. The Wasp looked like he was about to fall asleep. Maybe it was the porter. “So Ezan comes in – that’s his name, right? – Ezan comes in and takes the money in the back. When he does that, when he actually takes the money out of the safe and goes in back, you come outside, just for a second, and then go back in.”

“Go outside and do what?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know,” Angela said. “Pick up a cigarette butt or something. Just go outside,”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Gotcha.” Had she done this before? The Wasp didn’t seem too engaged. Maybe she was running the whole show. He wanted to ask the Wasp if he was really an artist but he didn’t.

“So you give me the signal, I take off and get the Wasp, and about fifteen minutes later he comes in.”

“Ski mask,” the Wasp said.

“Right,” Angela said. “He’ll be wearing a ski mask and he’ll have a gun.”

“Oh yeah?” said Jack, as nonchalantly as he could manage. “Loaded?”

“Well,” said Angela brightly, “that’s up to the Wasp, really. I mean, that’s not my department.”

“Loaded,” said the Wasp. A real chatty Cathy, this guy was turning out to be.

“Is it worth it?” Jack asked. “I mean, don’t the cops – I mean, isn’t it worse to be busted robbing a place with a loaded gun?” He’d seen Raising Arizona.

And then the Wasp did something very unexpected. His lips parted and his cheeks rose and he gave Jack a smile with a mouthful of gold teeth and – laughed! He sounded like a jolly bear in a children’s movie. And Angela started laughing too, giggling, really. Were they laughing at or with him? Or both? “Naw,” the Wasp said finally. “It’s way worse when the po-po show up and you ain’t got shit.” He seemed to think this was very, very clever. He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. He gave Jack a look of kindness and pity like Jack was a mentally challenged puppy or something.

“Well, just don’t shoot me,” Jack said. This generated gales of laughter from his co-conspirators. Jack forced himself to chuckle a little bit to show he was game, just one of the gang. He raised his hands in the air and waggled his fingers beseechingly. “Don’t shoot me,” he said. “I’m just the cashier.”

“Now then,” Angela said, bringing the PTA to order, “all you need to do, Jack, is cooperate with whatever the Wasp says. Just pretend it’s a real robbery. Which it is.” She let Jack consider this little koan for a moment and then she went on. “Act like you don’t know the score. He might have to tie you up or something. Then he’s going to – what?” She looked at the Wasp expectantly.

“Kick in the office door, get the tapes, get the money, and blow,” the Wasp said. “Under two minutes.”

“Then what?” said Jack. He wondered again what was going to happen to Wendy Barnes. “You just go catch a bus or something?” He was trying to revive the comic banter they had enjoyed so much mere moments ago but they didn’t catch on. This time the Wasp looked at Jack like he was a supreme dolt.

“I got an escape route,” he said. “Got it covered.”

Something else was gnawing at Jack. It had teeth with little percentiles tattooed on them. “And the um – the money?”

They both looked at him blankly and then Angela said, “Oh, right – your ten percent, right? For being a good actor and a good informant, right?”

The Wasp looked at Angela and then and Jack and started to say something but didn’t. Had she just kicked him under the table? “I mean,” Jack stammered, “I have big plans for that money. If you’re going to shut me out I need to know right now.”

“Big plan?” the Wasp said. He looked intrigued, of all things. “What sort of plan?”

So Jack, against his better judgment, told them about the Espressicle.

On Sunday night Jack showed up for work around nine pm, as usual. As far as he knew, Wendy Barnes would be arriving at six the following morning to take over for the day shift. The guy he was relieving was an obese chain smoker named Gary. Gary always had to be somewhere after work but he was notoriously bad at cashing out his till. When your shift ended you were supposed to take your drawer in the back and make sure it came out even. Why this shit hadn’t been computerized long ago was a mystery to Jack. Thank God the cameras hadn’t gone digital yet. The owners of the AllNite Corporation were fucking Luddites. After a few minutes of number-crunching Gary would start swearing to himself and banging the table in the office with frustration. He took twice as long as anyone else to finish his drawer and tonight was no exception. After about forty minutes he emerged from the rear, looking haggard. He was huffing and puffing like a hippo with COPD. “Goddamn it,” he said to Jack and to no one in particular. “I’m off by fucking twenty bucks again. Can you believe this shit?”

Jack made it clear that he could not believe it.

When a fretful Gary finally waddled away toward the bus stop, Jack tumbled into the fast-moving river of evening commerce at the AllNite. Beer, beer, lottery tickets, cigarettes, more beer, a can of Pasta-O’s!, more beer, more cigarettes, some light pornography, and more beer, and on and on and on. He was amazed he wasn’t more anxious about what was going to go down in about twelve hours or so. Time usually chugged right along at the AllNite until two or so anyway, when the beer sales stopped. It was a routine night at the AllNite. Until –

At about one in the morning a diminutive pale man that Jack had never seen before appeared and wordlessly marched over to aisle five (paper towels, toilet paper, assorted implements of hygiene and personal care). Jack was ringing up a chubby woman with a tongue that seemed too big for her mouth when he heard a sound like a campfire and saw the pale man dashing for the door. Then he smelled the smoke. Not again!

“Hey!” Jack yelled. “What the fuck?” The chubby woman shrieked as he ran out from behind the counter and toward aisle five. The whole left side of the aisle was engulfed in flames. Whoever it was had just firebombed the store. Again. Was it the same person? He had no idea. He heard the doorbell chime as the chubby woman fled. The empty bottle of lighter fluid lay on the floor. The guy had emptied the whole thing onto the shelves and torched it. Thick, bluish smoke was forming a baneful cloud overhead. The only other person in the store was a acne-covered wraith of a teenager who stood gaping at the conflagration.

“Get out!” Jack yelled. “Get the fuck out!” The two of them ran toward the front of the store again. One of the garish tubes of fluorescent light overhead burst with a sound like someone chucking a fastball through a window and tiny shards of glass floated down from the ceiling. The teenager got outside first and stopped abruptly, causing Jack to run into him and nearly knock him to the pavement.

“W’t’fuck?” the teenager yelled, and then Jack realized he wasn’t yelling at him but at the sheer craziness of what had just happened. Jack fumbled for his cell. First he called 911, and ordered up a firetruck to be dispatched at once and then he called Ezan. The teenager watched all this with shock and awe.

“Yello?” someone said on the phone. It didn’t sound like Ezan.

“Raffi?” Jack said. “Raffi, is your dad there?”

There was a pause. “He sleep now,” Raffi said. “What is up?”

Jack told him what was up.

“Mmmmmm,” Raffi said. “Very bad, eh?”

“It’s not very good,” Jack agreed. His head spun. How this affected the robbery or Wendy Barnes or anything else he couldn’t begin to fathom.

“I be right there,” Raffi said. “Wait for me. Don’t let anyone in the store. Ten minute. I call fire departments.”

“Okay,” said Jack, and hung up. He’d already called them but whatever, the more the merrier. At least Raffi was coming. He wasn’t sure if he could stand the sight of the old man tooling about in his bathrobe and muttering to himself. He wondered if it was usual in Armenia (was that even a country?) for multiple fire departments to show up for this kind of thing.

He and the teenager stood on the pavement outside the store and peered inside through the enormous thick windows that filled the whole storefront. Both of them had their hands cupped around their eyes like they were naval officers straining to spot dirty Japs or Ruskies from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Aisle 5 was in a state of advanced devastation. The fire had already spread the whole length of one side of Aisle 5 and was busily fording its way to the opposite bank. Legions of AllNite brand paper products lay smoldering on the shelves or on the floor, sending wispy whorls of black smoke heavenward like so many hecatombs.

About three minutes had passed since Jack had spoken to Raffi but already he could hear the keening of fire trucks in the distance. The sound grew louder and louder until it became a painful physical presence, like someone was hammering a pair of pinking shears through their eardrums, and the trees and wrought iron gates of 82nd Avenue blinked and flashed with red and blue lights. Then the two trucks rolled into the parking lot like huge wheeled tanks, and just as Jack was sure he was looking forward to a lifetime of tinnitus, the sound of the sirens abruptly subsided and there was only the noise of the engines and the excited shouts of black clad men and women leaping out of and off of the crimson beasts. “Whoa,” said the teenager, impressed.

At this moment Raffi pulled into the lot in his blue Toyota Camry station wagon. Nice rims, though. There were big stickers on both the front and rear bumpers that said Remember 1915! in fierce red letters against a white background, although the lettering on the one on the front bumper was backwards so that it could be read correctly in the rearview mirror of whatever car was in front of it. For the nth time Jack wondered why he was supposed to remember 1915 and then Raffi got out of the car and looked at the store sadly. The firemen, some of whom were women, were now mucking about with huge spools of hose. Raffi approached one of them and had a rapid conversation about something. The other firepeople were dragging the snouts of the hoses through the glass doors as black clouds of smoke billowed out into the parking lot. Raffi and the fireman with whom he had been talking walked around the side of the building and a second later all the fluorescent lights in the store went out and there was only the eerie glow of Aisle 5, which seemed to be settling into some kind of pyrotechnic equilibrium. They had shut off the power. Then the two of them reappeared and split up, the fireman walking back toward his truck and Raffi toward Jack and the teenager, who looked like he was having a grand old time. There was a burst of shouting and the hoses sprang to life. Inside the store water was soaring and splashing everywhere as the firepeople struggled to aim the hoses at Aisle 5. From where they stood on the pavement the place looked like some kind of hellish waterpark.

Raffi shook his head. “No good,” he said. “No good. You go home.” He looked at Jack meaningfully. Then he jerked his head at the teenager. “You too.” He scratched the side of his nose and spat on the ground. “Maybe police want to talk to you,” he said to Jack. “I call you if they want.” The teenager shrugged and skulked away. Raffi shrugged too and spread his arms wide, palms open. “No good,” he said again.

“No good,” Jack agreed. He needed to talk to Angela. Again he wondered about Wendy Barnes and if they had her tied up in an attic somewhere. He had no way to get a hold of her. So much for the robbery, he thought, as he climbed onto his piece of shit bicycle and started rattling home, the trees winking in the trucks’ lights like Halloween pumpkins. He could see the Espressicle growing more distant by the second, like a jet plane bound for Armenia.

He crawled into bed at two and was awakened about four hours later by his cell phone ringing rudely at him from the bedside table. Groggily he sent his hand after it and after several seconds of groping and grasping like a drunken crab his hand found the phone and delivered it to Jack’s ear. It was someone calling from the AllNite.

“Mmmmm,” he said. He had been dreaming of sultry firewomen disrobing before flaming cedar edifices.

“Jack,” said Raffi. “Jack, I need you come to work.”

“What?” said Jack. He sat straight up in bed and the firewomen disappeared. “The store’s open?” Did the police want to talk to him?

“Is okay,” Raffi said. “Open for business. We close the aisle 5.”

“Where’s Wendy?” said Jack.

“She not come in,” Raffi said. “Her cat missing.”

What? “Her cat?” He didn’t know she had a cat.

“That what she say,” Raffi said. “Someone steal cat. So you can come in and work, yes? I need to go sleep. You come work until two. We pay you for graveyard hours, too. Is okay. You can come in, yes? I talk to Ezan. Is okay.”

What the fuck had they done to her cat? “Someone stole her cat?”

He thought he could hear Raffi shrugging into the phone. “That what she say. She very upset. Call police.”

Police. “Do the police want to talk to me?” Jack said.

Pause. “About what?” Raffi asked.

“About the firebomber. The aisle 5,” Jack said.

Raffi laughed. “No, we got it on tape. We got VHS film!”

The cameras. “Do they know who he was?” Jack asked.

More laughter. “They find him, Jackie.” Jack cringed. He hated being called Jackie but Raffi seemed to think it was a term of endearment. “He on tape!”

“Okay,” Jack said. “I be there soon.”

“Hurry up,” Raffi said. “I need my beauty sleep. I’m feeling very ugly right now.”

“Right,” said Jack, and hung up. Thirty minutes later he was rolling back into the parking lot of the AllNite on his fixie, just as the dawn was shooting laser beams of crimson and gold through the trees of 82nd Avenue. Raffi was waiting for him outside, smoking a cigarette. The front doors were propped open with a pair of cinder blocks.

“I already start drawer for you,” he said to him as he dismounted. “You all set.” He gestured grandly at the store behind him. Jack could see that the lights were all on again except for the fluorescent bulb that had exploded over Aisle 5. He locked his bike to the little rack next to the phone booth outside and peered around. There was no sign of Angela or anyone else. In an hour and half or so Ezan would be here to open the safe. He wondered if and when the Wasp was going to turn up. He had a sickening pinched feeling in his stomach from lack of sleep. Where was Wendy Barnes’ cat? “Okay!” said Raffi. “You on! Good luck! Watch out for firebombers, yes?” He winked at Jack and climbed into his (Remember 1919!) blue Toyota Camry.

Jack gave him the thumbs up sign and went into the store. It looked okay. Raffi must have spent the whole night cleaning up the mess. The ceiling over Aisle 5 was the color of a cancerous lung and there was yellow police tape blocking off access to the aisle at either end. Aisle 5’s shelves were empty except for a few pairs of gardening gloves that lay overlooked on a wire hook near the far end cap. The acrid scent of smoke hung limply in the air. Somehow they’d managed to dry the floors, too, which was a minor miracle. All in all, it wasn’t too bad. Jack poured himself a cup of Doubleplus Good Coffee and leaned on the counter, regarding the store with the air of a seasoned warrior. He had survived a firebombing, and soon, with any luck, he’d be surviving a robbery, too. He’d probably get transferred to Beaverton. He hoped not. If this was Kabul, Beaverton was fucking Siberia.

It was now 6:37 AM. He glanced at the safe and for a moment he was going to get down on the floor and check to see if the old bastard had bolted it to the floor anyhow but then he remembered the cameras and didn’t. And Jack learned something about himself, or thought he did, which was that he was very good at going about business as usual, even as terrifying and criminal developments loomed on time’s horizon, like distant enemy armadas curled into the soft curve where the ocean meets the sky. He swept the parking lot and made coffee and broke down some cardboard boxes that Raffi hadn’t gotten to and then the customers came swarming in like a red tide. The customers on the day shift, he remembered, had different plans than the customers who rolled in during graveyard. They wanted endless cups of coffee and flavored mochas that came out of square black boxes with silver nozzles, and Red Bulls and Juice Magnets, and energy bars made of mysterious granola/tofu alloys and little laminated strips of fruit that looked like translucent refrigerator magnets, and they wanted tuna or chicken salad sandwiches on pale crumbly white bread sealed in cellophane vacuum chambers, and desiccated apples and oranges that looked like they had been abandoned in government food warehouses. These latter items, the sandwiches and pathetic pieces of fruit, depressed Jack immensely when he thought of the same customers eating them for lunch during their sad thirty minutes of respite at their crappy day jobs. Today he was too distracted to be concerned with their nutritive or vocational plights and took care to remind himself that he, the convenient store worker, fighting in the front lines of the free market for the sake of consumers’ ease and access, was even worse off than the day laboring wage earners he serviced.

So he was sort of ambling in his mind in this nervous but excited fashion like a father in the maternity ward when he looked up at the next customer and saw Angela’s Virgin Mary face hanging there, beatific and pendulous against the garish backdrop of cardboard cutouts of NASCAR drivers hawking carbonated juiceless juice drinks and displays of flavored popcorn, pre-popped and packaged in hyperreal primary colors. He nearly wet himself.

Angela put a Snickers bar on the counter and said, “Change of plans, my friend, change of plans.” She smiled at him like they were talking about the weather or something funny the president had said. “Too much uncertainty in the equation for Operation Ezan now.” Too much uncertainty in the equation? It occurred to Jack that he knew nothing about Angela’s background at all. Street people didn’t talk like that, did they? She looked hot, though.

He took the candy bar and scanned it across the transparent wafer of glass embedded in the counter that magically read bar codes and the register beeped and read .99. He figured he had about thirty, maybe sixty seconds of talking, assuming no other customers showed up, without appearing suspicious if the cops connected Angela to the robbery and decided to watch some store movies. But wait…the Wasp was going to take the tapes anyway. They could get a piece of paper and draw a map of the robbery right there on the counter if they felt like it. But was she calling it off? “So now what?” he said, matching her amiable grin tooth for tooth.

“That crazy firebombing is liable to fuck shit up. There’s no guarantee your boss is going to show up and empty the safe like he usually does, right? He could be talking to police, talking to insurance people. For hours. He might not even get to that safe until later today or tomorrow.” She seemed pretty sure of herself. “That money is already spoken for. People are waiting on it.”

“What?” Jack said. “What people?”

“You know,” she said. “Business people. So we have to do this thing – we just can’t do it like we discussed earlier.” She shrugged nearly imperceptibly to indicate the insanity of continuing to carry out such a plan under current battlefield conditions. She was the Virgin Mary at War. She was Joan of Arc. “In about fifteen minutes,” Angela said, “The Wasp is going to execute Plan B, which means he’s going to come in here, pretend to strongarm you, get the tapes, and handtruck the safe out the fucking door.” Jack wondered vaguely what strongarming meant but she was on a roll. “You might have to help him. Just remember to make it look like you’re doing it ‘cause you’re afraid of getting shot and not just for the sake of your Expressicles.” She dropped a dollar bill on the counter.

“Espressicles,” Jack said. He was aware of the terrible omnivident eye of the camera lens recording every thing like it was Hal in that Stanley Kubrick LSD movie. He kept on smiling. He felt like one of the Beach Boys – not Brian Wilson, one of the simpletons. His mind was spinning out of control, a centrifuge too heavy for its pinion. He picked up the dollar bill. It was too large between his fingers, like a flag. He punched a button on the register and mechanically traded the bill for a penny. It looked so shiny and perfect, the penny did. He was aware his thought process was impeded by fear but so what? There was nothing he could do about it. The money was already spoken for. The Espressicle’s existence had become an inevitability, an operative rule of the universe no more subject to the whims of capricious humans than was the second law of thermodynamics.

“Right,” Angela said. So he’ll have a handtruck and a white van with no plates. Maybe a driver. Just go along with it and meet me tomorrow night at the pub. At eight.” She smiled at him again. “So help him get it in the van. Look scared in case there are witnesses. And that’s it.” She reached over and picked the penny from his hand like a petal off a rose and dropped it in the little need-a-penny-give-a-penny jar on the counter next to the register. “Keep it,” she said. “Good luck.” Then she smiled even wider and went bouncing out of the store like a kangaroo. Of course she was happy – what did she have to worry about? Nothing. He was the one about to be strongarmed, whatever that was.

The next fifteen minutes were the longest minutes of Jack’s life except for the three minutes immediately following them. The feeling was similar to what he experienced on those occasions when the day shift person was late, or called and said they were going to be late, and every minute became a little cartoon glass jar of nitroglycerine impatience teetering on a shelf, during which time Jack would think come on come on come on come on, as though he was going to get up the very second he finished cashing out and get busy composing a national epic poem for the United States, in heroic couplets, instead of going home to loaf on the ugly upholstered chair in the living room in his apartment and watch court TV shows until he passed out from a surfeit of bong hits. But this time it wasn’t impatience that threatened his sanity but tremendous fear and terror and panic. Plan B? He had gone over the first plan, the one involving the Wasp jacking Ezan in the office, so many times in his mind that he felt as though he had watched it on HBO, the excellent plan, Operation Ezan, Plan A, which required him to do nothing other than stand around wringing his hands and playacting at being terrified. This new plan, which involved him helping the Wasp handtruck the fucking thing out of the store, probably with a gun sticking in his face, handtrucking it out into the parking lot, fully visible to anyone driving or walking down 82nd Avenue who might misunderstand the obviously coerced nature of his involvement and get the wrong idea and…do what? He couldn’t even begin to fathom the possibilities.

Jack was experiencing one of those moments in life unknown to the wise or scrupulous but far too familiar to rest of us, one of those moments in which the sentient being at the core of events asks themselves, in effect, how the fuck did I get myself into this? And Jack saw in his mind, he saw how it had happened – it was all because he had chosen to graduate from college with a fucking English degree – haw haw haw! – an English degree at a time when the economy was tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down a rabbit hole through ever more refined levels and layers of nihilism and worthlessness, pulling whole job sectors with it, especially, especially, anything concerned with the finer things in life like reading and writing and editing and the poetry of John Donne and the novels of Nathaniel West – oh God! - which of course meant that the only jobs for people like him, idealistic miscreants, were the same ones the service economy offered to anyone who could pull a lever or read two consecutive digits – and of course, having apprehended this, rather than plunging ahead immediately to graduate school and setting about building a nest in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land like a good zealot, he had elected to “take some time” and work at a low-wage service job, a job like…the AllNite! The AllNite! A little caloric and caffeinated trashy battery of overpriced convenience tucked into the armpit of the rose city like a goddamn mitochondrion…oh, but he was witness to the human comedy! Human tragedy, or farce, was more like it: day shift, graveyard shift, and the same neighborhood wretches, buying tiny packets of Advil instead of the cheaper store brand ibuprofen, buying crazy things, gardening gloves with suckers on them or astrological fortunes printed on lurid paper and spooled into tiny scrolls, malt liquor mixed with guanine and taurine, magazines with names like Open Plains and Titfucker, a whole Third World of wares dumped on those too weak or too lazy to go to the supermarket, customers marching in dragging filthy children by one snot-covered tiny hand, or humping in garbage bags of hundreds of fetid bottles and putrid cans to be recycled for money for meth to inspire them to look for more cans and bottles, all of them, all those who had been coming here before he worked here, and would still be coming here when he moved on to…what? Was he really any better than them? Graduate school seemed more remote than Easter Island, more elusive than dark matter, and less relevant than the editorials in Tajikistan, or Armenia, for that matter, which he still wasn’t sure was a country…

…and then again, as in another film, he saw himself...succumbing to the cries of this virgin succubus, this beatific night-witch, easily, willingly, like a chump, saw himself deluded, diluted with poisonous waters courtesy of his vision of the Espressicle, making himself prostrate at before Angela, and the Wasp, to earn their…approval… Jack wrung his teeth and gnashed his fingers, thinking these thoughts, thinking about the caricature of a reality that was his life, there in the dawny halflight as the big hand on the clock, the numbers on the digital displaying his cellphone, inched, millimetered their way fifteen minutes in time, and still no Wasp, and then the minutes advanced three more…

…and then the nameless fear, the King of Terror, leapt into his mind, which was jail, also called prison, the clink, the big house, the pen, the pokey, the slammer, and so on…any way you said it, it meant daily boredom, endless fear, and homosexual rape, among other things...what was the charge, exactly, for assisting in the robbery of 20 to 30 grand from a convenience store? Jack was a very uninformed perpetrator…wasn’t he, oh yes he was, oh yes…

The Wasp!

The Wasp was wearing his trademark Britney Spears T-shirt and a pair of black jeans with black boots but mostly he was wearing a red ski-mask that covered his whole head except for a thin and determined pair of lips and a couple of bored eyeballs that looked like they’d been through this a hundred times already. He strode – there was no other word for it – strode into the AllNite like he owned the place, owned the whole corporation. He held a enormous black gun in his right hand. Jack thought it was a .45 but he wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it was an evil-looking thing that made Jack almost forget this was a play. Just a little play. Acting. He held it before him at his waist, the barrel pointed right in front of him. It’s way worse when the po-po show up and you ain’t got shit.

The Wasp didn’t waste any time – he walked to the front of the counter and for a second Jack thought the thin and determined lips darted into a tiny smile and then the Wasp reached forward and grabbed him by his shirt collar and pulled him forward onto the counter, facedown. Jack threw his hands out to his sides and managed to yelp please don’t hurt me very convincingly and then his feet left the ground because the Wasp was pulling him up and over the counter with no more seeming effort than he might lift a bag of laundry. Jack fell to the floor in front of the counter, landing on his knees, hard, but the Wasp still had a hold of his shirtfront and was dragging him down Aisle 4, past tiny cartons of FooFoo Berry cereal and Toast-Pops. Jack thrashed with more fear than art and suddenly they were at the door to the office. For a second Jack noticed the filth and grime that had accumulated against the metal base of the doorframe and then there was the sound of cheap wood cracking as the Wasp kicked in the door to the office – unnecessary, since it wasn’t locked, but a nice thespian touch nonetheless. Then the Wasp pulled him to his feet and before he had a chance to catch his breath the Wasp was barking at him to get the tapes, get the tapes, and he was waving the gun in Jack’s face. Jack was shaking now as his sympathetic nervous system anted up and started dumping gallons of adrenaline into his bloodstream to prepare for the binary and irrelevant menu of fight or flight, neither of which applied at this juncture. Jack thought about how the core of acting was to act, to do, to make some moves, and at the same time he watched his shaking hands open the cabinet where the VCRs were and, fumbling, manage to EJECT both the tapes. He turned to look at the Wasp who now (there was no question about it) was smiling at him in a way that said hey! we’re in this together! isn’t it fun? and then he took the tapes and set them on the desk and leaned against the desk for a minute.

“Okay, blancito,” he said. They were back at the PTA meeting. “There’s a handtruck outside the store. Alli. You move the safe into the parking lot with it, okay?”

“Alone?” Jack said. He was terrified and definitely not acting at all now. His mouth was so dry he could barely speak, like his oral cavity had been baked in a kiln. He could hear his heart pounding in his breast like the drums in those possibly apocryphal movies in which the natives prepare to roast the great white hunter and his blonde tomato. “What are you going to do?” It came out Whachewgondoo? Drier than Antarctica.

Again the smile. “Customer service,” he said. “Van ahora. Here they come.” He grabbed Jack’s shirt again and spun him around just as the little bell rang that meant there was some wretch coming in for coffee or a little egg salad sandwich vacuum sealed in cellophane.

“Can’t you just wait here and let me take care of them?” Jack hissed, but the Wasp shoved him forward through the office door, back into the store proper.

“No time,” the Wasp said, not unkindly, and then Jack felt the barrel of that gun that might be a .45 at the nape of his neck.

The hapless customer who had just entered the store was a cute brunette with freckles, in her mid-twenties, maybe, wearing some kind of maroon warmup outfit. She was over by the coffee station and was turning around when Jack and the Wasp reemerged from the office. When she saw them she dropped the empty cup she had just picked up and turned absolutely white, like those fish that live in sunless caves in the bowels of the good earth. The Wasp grabbed Jack’s shirt collar again and in his peripheral vision he could see that the Wasp was pointing the gun directly at this woman. The cup rolled in a semi-circle and came to rest at the base of an altar of Up&At’Em energy drinks at the end of Aisle 2. Jack had never seen her before – she didn’t look like she lived in this neighborhood, that was for sure. She looked too healthy, too sane. Outside there was one of those new Volkswagen Bugs, a red one, with the engine running. Probably on her way to the gym or something. Tough luck. And then Jack heard the Wasp say, “Beer cooler.”

She looked at Jack and then at the Wasp. Her eyes were enormous and her mouth seemed very small. The Wasp was pointing with the gun at the little door at the corner of the store through which the employees could go in to restock the shelves with cans and cases of beer from the inside, which the customers accessed through wide glass doors arrayed along the back of the store that opened to the shelves. It wasn’t locked but the door made a beeping sound when it opened so the employees could hear if a customer went in there. Then her very small mouth opened but nothing came out.

“Get in that beer cooler now or I blow your head off. Now, bitch,” the Wasp shouted – no, commanded – and the woman put her hands over her head like she was trapped in a hailstorm, and rushed toward the transparent door to the beer cooler making horrible whimpering sounds. Jack felt sorry for her. Christ, if anyone got hurt…he wasn’t cut out for this. Then he remembered he could get hurt, too, in a million different ways, and he didn’t feel quite as sorry for her anymore. Better her than me, he thought.

The door to the beer cooler beeped and she went inside and then it was just the two of them again, but in full thespian mode, of course. You could see everything that went on in the store from the beer cooler. Together Jack and the Wasp marched to the door, gun to nape, and then the Wasp gave him a little push outside. There on the pavement, where just a few hours ago he had held parliament with Raffi after the firebombing of Aisle 5, was an orange U-Haul hand truck, obviously stolen. The road was filling up with traffic now and Jack wondered how many of the drivers could see the ski-masked Britney Spears fan inside the store with his (probably) loaded gun pointed at Jack through the thick glass. Jack wheeled the handtruck inside and like a possessive lover the Wasp stuck the barrel back on Jack’s neck, hard, almost hitting him with it, really.

“Careful with that thing!” Jack hissed under his breath.

“Sorry,” the Wasp said, but he was already pushing Jack around to the back of the counter, not over it this time, but around the side, until the two of them and the handcart were all together in front of the safe.

The safe was a black cube with some blinking lights along the top and a numerical keypad on one side. There were little holes that delivered rolls of quarters or dimes (via numerical request on the keypad) at the bottom and a slot on the top of the safe through which you could shove thin stacks of bills or checks and money orders. In the past it had always seemed like a benevolent electronic monolith, guarding cash and delivering coins, but now it was an enemy robot, an obstacle. It was tucked under the counter but the portion of the counter directly over it was on a little hinge and could swing upwards. Jack looked at the Wasp, who had removed his gun from Jack’s neck. Instead he used it to gesture dramatically at the safe. “Go on,” he said, and whacked the underside of the counter over the safe with it so that it came loose. He grabbed it with his free hand and lifted it so that it swung up and to the right, sending little astrology scrolls and copies of Busted! magazine flying everywhere. Jack turned the handtruck so that the plate on the bottom was even with the safe and slid it underneath it. He pulled back on the handtruck but the safe didn’t move. There was nothing obstructing it – it was just massive.

“It’s heavy,” Jack said and the Wasp frowned. Jack wondered if the woman in the beer cooler could figure out that they were colluders.

“Try again,” the Wasp said. He reached over and unplugged the safe from the little power strip that had been hidden under the counter.

Jack pulled on the handtruck, out and down, until he was practically hanging off of it. The safe remained stubbornly immobile. It was like they were trying to steal a glacier.

“What the fuck,” the Wasp said. He didn’t look so much like Mr. Cool anymore – there was sweat on the thin determined lips and a strange look in his eyes. He lay the gun on the counter and shoved Jack aside and grabbed hold of the handle of the handtruck himself and pulled down on it hard, trying to lift the safe. This time the safe moved an inch or so off the floor but then came crashing down. Enormous moons of sweat were appearing on either side of Britney’s head. “Que merde,” the Wasp said. “You too – we do it together.” He moved over slightly and made room for Jack. Together they yanked and pulled and cajoled the handtruck until they were able to get the safe balanced in the handtruck on its corner, like it was a diamond. It might have well as been the Kaaba, it was so fucking heavy.

“Okay,” the Wasp said. There was a slick layer of sweat where the ski-mask ceased and the T-shirt began. Somehow he managed to reach over and get the gun without letting the safe come crashing down on the floor and stick it in his pants. Then the two of them pushed it forward with supreme awkwardness. Jack wondered why they hadn’t just come at it from the floor. Was pushing better than pulling? Was that why? They squeezed themselves through the gap that existed in the counter now that the Wasp had raised the hinged part of it and managed to push the safe forward about three feet when they heard the bell again.

This time it was a customer that Jack knew intimately well. He looked like a tall angry dwarf. He had red hair and a long red beard and had a stern look in his blue eyes like he was a woodsman or something. Every morning he came in and bought two 24 oz cans of Budweiser and never said anything besides a quiet thank you but Jack always suspected his stout frame to be packed tightly with the potential for tremendous violence. If the Wasp noticed this he didn’t change his approach any. He released the handle of the handtruck, letting the safe crash to the floor again in spite of Jack’s efforts to hold it up. He waved the gun at the tall dwarf, who Jack had named Red, although he had never called him that.

“Beer cooler,” the Wasp said.

Red looked at the Wasp with something like great curiosity. His beard twitched and Jack realized he had never seen the woodsman’s mouth underneath all that keratin. He said nothing.

“You need to get in the fucking beer cooler right now, fucker. Last chance. In a second I smoke your ass,” the Wasp said.

Red kept staring at the Wasp. Then he looked at Jack. “Guess I came at a bad time,” he said, and walked slowly toward the beer cooler in the corner.

“Arriba, asshole. Move.”

Red didn’t say anything and the beer cooler alarm went off and he went inside. At least there was a cute girl in there for him to talk to.

“Okay,” the Wasp said, looking toward the parking lot. “In about a minute a white van is going to pull into this lot and you and me are going to put this safe in it. Got it? If the police show up you run. Esta bien?”

“Si,” said Jack. He felt like he would never be able to sleep again, never. Everything seemed to be happening too slowly, like the universe was filled with a viscous gel. He wondered who was driving the white van. Business people. The money already spoken for.

They started humping the safe toward the front door again. The parking lot was empty except for the brunette’s car, which was still churning merrily away in park as though the world were a wonderful commercial. Somehow they managed to get the safe out the front door and then let it fall to the pavement with the base of the orange handtruck still underneath it. A Buick pulled into the parking lot and immediately pulled out back into traffic, nearly hitting a motorcyclist. The driver had seen something. The Wasp glanced after the Buick and Jack wondered if he was considering going after him but then a dirty white van rolled into the parking lot. It had tinted windows. It sat there for a second and Jack had the irrational sensation it was going to explode like a grenade.

“The tapes!” the Wasp said. And then they left the safe there on the pavement and ran, gun to nape, Jackfirst, back into the store, into the office. The Wasp grabbed the tapes and jerked Jack around and shoved him forward again. “Almost done, shithead,” he said. Acting. They were halfway to the front door when the beer cooler blew up.

Or rather, there was the sound of an explosion, like a firecracker, and simultaneously one of the glass doors that you had to open to pull beer off the shelf burst outwards in a colossal fit of fragments and shards, and the Wasp made a sound like uhuhuhuhuhuhhhh and fell, spinning on one leg, so that when he hit the ground he was facing the beer cooler. A woman screaming – the brunette. It was impossible to see her or Red in the beer cooler from out here – all you could see were rows and rows of cases and bottles and cans, all behind frosted glass, except for the door they had blown out. Immediately Jack knew what had happened. Red must have been carrying a-

Before he had time to finish the thought the Wasp was spraying bullets at the beer cooler: BLAM BLAM BLAM. Glass shattered and shattered and shattered. He was laying supine, raised slightly on his elbows, and his lips were twisted in an expression of tremendous pain. There was a pool of blood swelling beneath him but Jack couldn’t see the wound. Jack covered his hands with his ears and threw himself to the ground, rolling past the police tape into Aisle 5, where the smell of burnt paper was still palpable. He peeked out around the endcap at the Wasp. He was still grimacing and shooting indiscrimately at the beer cooler. Every shot now was like the sound of the sky cracking in half. BLAM BLAM BLAM. In between BLAMS Jack could hear scurrying and yelling in the beer cooler and then the Wasp stopped firing and there was the other explosion again from the beer cooler, the firecracker one, louder now that there was no glass between the shooters. This time the Wasp screamed and fell flat on his back. He had been hit again, in the shoulder this time, the shoulder that bore the arm that bore the hand that bore the gun.

For no good reason, Jack found himself rooting for Red.

The Wasp stuck his gun in his pants – was he out of bullets? He started dragging himself backwards toward the front door, leaving a trail of blood slicking across the floor. Britney’s face was turning a deep, awful crimson from the blood seeping out of his shoulder and saturating the T-shirt. He tried to wipe his hands on his pants again. He was still going uhuhuhuhuhuhhh.

The alarm on the beer cooler door went off and Red walked back into the store. In one hand was a snub-nose revolver. In the other hand were two cans of Budweiser. He reached up and knocked some shards of glass out of his beard with the barrel of his gun. “Fuckin’ beaners,” he said to no one in particular. “Dirty fucking greasers.” He was peering at something outside and didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the Wasp writhing on the floor. Jack pulled himself to a sitting position where he could see the parking lot. Another man, someone in a white ski mask, who was taller and wider than the Wasp, was struggling to push the safe up a steel ramp into the back of the white van, which had its doors open. Red walked past the Wasp and went outside. Jack could hear the woman crying in the beer cooler. Was she hurt? The man on the ramp saw Red come outside and let go of the handtruck and jumped off the ramp as the handtruck and the safe came tumbling back down off the ramp to the pavement in a great cacophonous symphony. The safe had landed on its side but looked as impenetrable as ever, like you could drop it out of a plane without even marring its excellent black finish. On the floor nearby the Wasp was hyperventilating, like a dog panting. He didn’t look so good.

Jack got on his knees now in Aisle 5 and craned his neck to see more of what was going on outside. Red was walking toward the rear of the van holding the .38 in front of him like a crucifix. Jack couldn’t see the van driver now. He had disappeared under or behind the van. It didn’t look like Red could see him either because even from where Jack was he could see his stern blue eyes flashing this way and that, searching. “Jackkkkkk,” said the Wasp. “Jack, help me.” He turned his head around so that he could meet Jack’s eyes. “Por favor,” he said. “He shoot me twice.” There was so much blood everywhere. It was like he had an open spigot in his shoulder. The first shot Red had fired had hit him in the leg – Jack could see it now. The back of the Wasp’s knee was all mangled and little yellow chunks of cartilage and bone were sticking out, visible even through the torrent of sanguineous fluid running out onto the floor. Jesus, Jack thought. The Wasp collapsed on his back and lay there, gasping for air like a goldfish on the family rug. It was horrible. There was so much blood, gallons of it, it looked like.

This line of thought was cut short by a burst of noise from outside – a series of explosions this time, like someone had strung a ton of firecrackers together so they would go off consecutively, like dominoes. He dropped prone to the floor. The pool of blood was still expanding and was now only a few feet from where Jack lay. There was a shout from outside and then Jack couldn’t stand it anymore. He got on his knees again and looked out there. He could see Red lying on his back on the pavement but his upper torso and most of his head weren’t there anymore. They had been blasted all over the pavement and across several panes of glass to the right side of the front door. Organic matter slid down the glass outside like snot dripping down a mirror. The storefront glass was cracked and spiderwebbed but not broken. The big man in the white ski mask was coming around the back of the van toward his victim, holding what Jack immediately recognized as an AK-47. This guy, whoever he was, had just used it to turn Red into dog food. The two cans of Budweiser were rolling across the parking lot, spraying beer into the air like little lawn sprinklers. Jack leaned forward and vomited; the emesis was orange and yellow and when the pool of blood reached it a moment later it flowed into and around it like an amoeba engulfing its prey.

The man with the AK-47 came into the store and laid it on the counter. He was wearing a black muscle shirt and cutoff black jeans with white sneakers. He looked at Jack and said something in Spanish that Jack didn’t understand. Then he shrugged and walked over to the Wasp, who was now making digusting gurgling sounds in his throat. Was he dying? Did this newcomer know Jack was in on this nightmare? The man bent over and picked up the VHS tapes from the floor where they had fallen. Jack stood up and looked at the tableau of the AllNite: the yellow police tape in Aisle 5; the broken glass on the floor; the pools of blood and vomit mingling with the little astrology scrolls and issues of Busted!; the Wasp laying on the filthy linoleum, his eyes closed, gurgling, still clutching his presumably now empty gun; the coffee cup that the brunette had dropped; the cracked office door, the AK-47 on the counter. And in the parking lot, the white van with its ramp and open rear doors, and the handtruck and safe lying there on their sides, and what used to be Red sprawled on the pavement and sprayed across the front of the AllNite. For what? For Angela? For the Espressicle? He didn’t know anymore. Whatever it was for, it wasn’t worth it. In the distance were the inevitable sirens.

The man was bent over the Wasp, peering in his eyes intently. He reached down and grabbed a bloody wrist and held it, feeling. The Wasp tried to say something but the man shushed him. He looked at the Wasp like the Wasp was the Savior, putting humanity’s karmic debt on his cosmic credit card, instead of being of a two-bit gangbanger. A performance artist. What a crock of shit. When Ezan walked into the store the man barely noticed the door beeping at them.

The boss was – in!

“What is this?” Ezan said. He didn’t look scared at all. He looked annoyed.

The man lunged for the rifle on the counter but he was too slow. He and Ezan got to it at the same time and they both grappled with it for a moment but Ezan managed to yank the barrel down so it pointed at the man’s groin and then the gun went off. The man shrieked and leapt backwards, clutching his pants, and then he fell on his ass. Ezan inspected the gun closely for a minute and then let loose with a BUHBUHBUHBUH burst of fire and blew his head and his white ski mask all over the magazine rack, al over the buxom babes of Titfucker and Open Plains. He stood there casting severe glances around the store. Jack had his hands up. For some reason he thought Ezan was going to shoot him too but he didn’t. Instead he put the gun on the counter and leaned there. He looked very tired.

“Maybe you like to work in suburbs?” he said to Jack. Whether this was a joke or empathy or an insinuation Jack had no idea but it made him burst into tears, great blubbery tears that streamed down his face to the accompaniment of deep guttural sobs and he shook and shook. He didn’t know why he was crying – he was somehow scared and relieved and traumatized and so horribly sad all at once and Ezan came over and put his arm around him.

“Is okay,” he said. “Worser things happen. This is nothing.”

And Jack sobbed in his boss’ bosom like the prodigal son.

Of course, by the time the cops got there, the Wasp was dead. Bled to death. The Wasp, Red, and the van driver, all gone. The brunette in the cooler was unhurt but she was hysterical and had been taken to Providence General for examination and probably sedation. Some curious details emerged in the aftermath of the attempted robbery. The Wasp and his van driver turned out to be brothers: Rujillo and Guillermo Gomez, respectively. Both had long sheets and had been in and out of prison for most of their lives. Rujillo, the Wasp, was wanted for holding up a liquor store in Gresham two months previously. Red turned out to be one Darryl Eisenhoffer. He was in his fifties and had done two tours of Vietnam. He was subsequently much praised in the neighborhood for his heroism and martyrdom.

One of the things that the cops wanted to know how much was in the safe that the Gomez brothers had tried to steal. When they got it inside and plugged it in and opened it was completely empty except for a single money order a customer had bought from Jack that morning. Suspicion immediately fell on Raffi since no one else knew the codes to get into the safe but under subsequent questioning he denied everything sullenly and neither his father nor the AllNite corporation decided to press charges against him. Ezan was not a suspect – his alibis were perfect. He had been home all weekend with his wife and her brother and they were able to separately corroborate his account of the last couple days. There had been no opportunity for him to get in the safe. Raffi was relieved from future duties at the AllNite and remained under a cloud of suspicion in spite of not exhibiting any signs of having come into a sudden windfall – he drove the same shitty car, wore the same shitty clothes, ate the same shitty food. If he somehow had taken the money from the safe, he didn’t seem to have it now. He let the cops search his room, his car. Of course, (the detectives argued), of course the firebombing the night before the robbery seemed like the perfect cover for Raffi to have gotten into the safe, and this was much remarked upon by all parties concerned, but nothing could be proven. His interception of Jack’s phone call to Ezan was also mentioned but led nowhere – Ezan really had been asleep and it wasn’t unusual for Raffi to answer his Ezan’s phone if his father was sleeping. True, Raffi and the firepersons had cut the electricity before they went in that night. There would have been ample opportunity for Raffi to unplug the video recorders, turn on the electricity, empty the safe, and start the recorders again. But again, nothing could be proven. There was no money ever found. The firebomber was never caught or identified. Wendy Barnes’ cat was returned to her as mysteriously as it had disappeared but after the robbery and the murders she refused to come back and was not heard from again. As far as Jack knew, she never mentioned to anyone that he had approached her about switching shifts.

No suspicion alighted on Jack. They had the tapes, but on the tapes all that was visible was the Wasp dragging Jack over the counter to the office. The brunette in the cooler had been too panicked to induce any previous relationship between him and the Wasp. According to the register, there should have been over $27,000 in the safe. Jack didn’t show up for his appointment with Angela at the pub the night after the robbery and he never saw her again. About six months later, long after he had quit working at the AllNite and was interning at the Rose City Weekly, a local arts and entertainment rag, he came across a story on the Internet about a woman in San Diego who had successfully launched a new product: frozen espresso and cream on a stick, perfect for hot and tired ecologically-minded Southern Californians. She called them Espressicles. It was going gangbusters down there: she’d started it with 20 grand in seed money and it looking like a number of major coffee corporations were getting ready to engage in a bidding war to buy her out, though she hadn’t okayed anything yet. She was a tremendous inspiration to young female entrepreneurs everywhere. She had a different name – Zoe Weiss – but there was a photograph in the online article. Jack didn’t bother to look at it. He knew who it was.



August 2009