Goodwill
by Tom Noyes
Teaching a summer course meant two thousand dollars, enough to squeak me through to fall if I played it right. There weren’t enough first year composition classes to go around, though, so a lottery was set up. At the end of spring semester, all of us grad students gathered in the fourth floor seminar room to write our names on scraps of paper and drop them in Dr. Verner’s bike helmet.
Ten names were drawn in rapid succession. Mine wasn’t one of them.
In the hallway afterwards, those who’d landed teaching slots tried to convince the rest of us that we were the lucky ones.
“So much for summer break,” Dennis said to me. “So much for finishing that crown of sonnets I’ve been wrestling with. So much for pulling my thesis together. Instead it’ll be another couple months of reading plagiarized argument papers.”
I liked Dennis’s poems because they were funny, but I don’t think he thought they were funny. Or maybe he knew they were funny, intended them to be funny, and he just didn’t want to let on. Maybe he thought that was how poets needed to operate.
“So much for paying rent,” I said. “So much for eating.”
“Just sell one of your stories,” Dennis said. “Send one to The New Yorker. You fiction writers have it made. Always just a few steps away from the big time. Agent, two book deal, book club selection, film option. What do you need to teach a summer class for? Don’t be greedy.”
“Rich’s stuff isn’t New Yorker material, Dennis.” Dr. Verner had already reclipped his clip-on sunglasses and redonned his bike helmet, and his ugly tie was swung around so it hung down his back like a skinny cape. He paused next to us as he wrestled his briefcase into his backpack.
“There’s a difference, a crucial one, between self-consciousness and self-awareness. Unfortunately, Rich hasn’t figured that out yet,” Verner said. He was addressing Dennis like I wasn’t there. “What’s more, Rich isn’t writing standalone stories so much as first chapters of novels even though he probably doesn’t know that either. Not to mention his sentences don’t have anything going on. No shape. No energy. No torque or verve. They just lie there on the page like broken equipment. Bland translations of themselves.”
Verner shrugged on his now bulging backpack and tightened the shoulder straps. He looked ready to jump out of an airplane.
“You know, though, come to think of it, recalling the last few stories I read in the New Yorker, maybe I’m wrong,” Verner continued. “Maybe Rich’s stuff is perfect for them after all.” He smiled then and, still without looking at me, clapped my back. “I’ll see you guys in the fall. I hope you have a productive summer.”
Without answering him, Dennis and I watched Verner disappear down the hall, past the elevator and into the stairwell.
“That was special,” I said. “Am I bleeding?”
“He’s messing with you,” Dennis said. “Kind of half a compliment if you think about it. If your stuff was actually terrible, like terrible beyond help, he wouldn’t have taken you down like that. He never would’ve said anything like that to Missy or Kelvin.”
“So you think my stuff is less terrible than theirs?” I said.
“That’s a sad and boring question,” Dennis said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Just for the record, I think you’re a bad writer.”
Dennis nodded. “Coleridge says ‘best words in the best order.’ I’ve got neither.”
“Would you rather be good or New Yorker good?” I said. “The New Yorker publishes poems, too, you know.”
“I’d rather be Coleridge good,” Dennis said.
As we waited for the elevator, he took his wallet out of his back pocket. It was connected to the belt loop of his Wranglers by a chain. “How many bean burritos can I get at Taco Tico for three dollars?” he said.
“Somebody wants your wallet bad enough, they’ll just steal your pants,” I said. “That’s what I’d do. Beat you unconscious, take your pants, and wear them the next day as I spent your three dollars. Your chain wouldn’t stop me.”
“I need my chain,” Dennis said, pressing the already illuminated elevator button with the side of his fist. “It connects me.”
It wasn’t just the money I’d be missing that summer. I’d discovered that I liked teaching. Among most of my peers this wasn’t cool to admit—you were supposed to complain about the borderline illiterate students, the drudgery of grading, and the early morning sections we grad students inevitably got stuck with—but I couldn’t help myself. I knew that in most contexts I usually didn’t make much of a first impression. Didn’t look like anything. Didn’t possess much initial charisma or charm. I knew that what Verner said my sentences lacked, I lacked, too. Teaching, though, put me at the front and center of a room for fifteen weeks. Gave me a chance to play the long game with a captive audience. I thought I’d figured out that teaching was about winning over my students, and I thought I was getting good at it. Some of my course evaluations seemed to confirm this.
I thought at first Rich sucked but he’s actually kind of funny in a weird way. I don’t know if I write better now but I don’t hate it as much as I did in high school and the class wasn’t too hard but it wasn’t too easy either. In conclusion, the university should hire Rich to be a real professor because he’s actually already better than most of the older teachers who should’ve straight up retired forever ago.
Mike, the kid I suspected had written this, had earned a ‘C’ in my class. He might’ve pulled a ‘B’ or even a ‘B+’ had he shown up more and handed in his reading journal, but he told me a ‘C’ was all he needed. When we met for his mandatory one-on-one conference during finals week, he said, “I’m aeronautics engineering, so, you know, I won’t be writing for my job. They farm out that shit.”
He zipped his bookbag and pulled it onto his lap. He sat in the orange plastic chair I’d pulled up beside my desk for the string of students I’d see that day. Across the office I shared with three other grad students, Dennis was conferencing, too. A female student in another orange chair balancing a baby on her knee. “Not mine, my sister’s,” I’d heard her say to Dennis when she sat down. “I been stuck with him all last night and this morning, so I don’t have my thesis statement.”
“If you write better, Mike, you think better,” I said. “They don’t farm out thinking in aeronautic engineering, right?” I felt like I was getting at something true. Saying something a real professor would say.
Mike leaned forward and put his fist over his mouth. “I’ll tell you why I’m not thinking good at the moment,” he said. “That girl over there with the other teacher? If she didn’t have a kid, I’d wait for her in the hallway and make friends.”
“Not hers,” I said quietly, and then I caught myself. “You want to make friends, you should go make friends with a tutor in the writing center.”
Mike smirked and on his way out knocked his knuckles lightly on my desk. “My man,” he said.
After the summer teaching lottery, I walked with Dennis to Taco Tico, but I didn’t eat. I figured training myself to skip meals would be a good strategy for the summer. Getting in the habit of taking walks on hot, humid afternoons might be a good move, too. I wouldn’t want to eat.
“The Hunger Artist,” Dennis said. “That’s you.”
I knew it was Kafka, but I hadn’t read it. There was so much I hadn’t read. I was just beginning to understand how much. No wonder my stories sucked. The twenty-first century was five years away, and I’d set the year two thousand as a goal. I’d be thirty, ready to do serious work. In the meantime, I was playing catch-up. Laying the groundwork. Churning out my juvenilia. Figuring out how to convince myself of my own stories so I could get other people to believe them.
Dennis said he had four beers in his refrigerator that he’d be willing to split with me, but I turned him down, told him I’d sworn off day drinking with poets, and caught a bus across town to the plasma bank.
On that first visit I was happy to learn they offered a twenty-five dollar bonus for initial donations. Otherwise, they paid based on your weight. There was a scale at the counter. They told me to take off my shoes. I was worth forty bucks. The downside was you were only allowed to donate twice a week. I was disappointed to hear this.
Financial considerations aside, I liked the experience. I found the dull hum of the machine relaxing, and the icy tingle that ran from my wrist to my bicep when my blood was returned to me every couple minutes was a pleasant surprise every time. There was a whiff of comradery in the room, too. Even the roughest looking characters had an affirming nod for one another, and everyone seemed OK with the fact that all the ceiling-mounted TV’s were showing the same Magnum P.I. rerun. I’d never liked the show—the Hawaiian setting seemed gimmicky, and Tom Selleck was too Hollywood handsome to be a Detroit Tigers fan, and the macho sportscar-driving private eye premise was already tired—but there in my vinyl recliner, as I grew more lightheaded with each milliliter donated, the show pulled together for me. Magnum and Rick and T.C. and even Higgins were a kind of family.
When the orderly told me I was done, removed the needle and tubing from my arm, applied a Band-Aid, and helped me out of the chair, I felt dizzy and asked if there were cookies. “Or pretzels or apples. Any sustenance at all,” I heard myself say. I sounded like I was in an underwater cave.
“Sustenance? You’re getting cash money, youngblood,” the orderly said as he cupped my elbow. “This ain’t the Red Cross. This ain’t trick or treat. Get out there in the world and do for yourself.”
I walked to the grocery store a couple blocks away where Dennis had told me Billy the Kid was born. There was no historical marker, so I wasn’t wholly convinced, but whenever I was in this part of the city, I remembered the claim and tried to decide if I believed it or not.
I bought two ripe bananas, which I had to rip off a larger bunch, which earned me an eyeroll from the produce clerk. The guy was my age, another youngblood, stocking summer squash in an apron and keeping an eye out for bad banana etiquette. Outside, I peeled and ate quickly on the hot sidewalk and saw that across the street at Goodwill, according to the sign on the door, help was wanted.
When I entered, the place was empty, but after waiting a while, a petite woman wearing round, candy apple red glasses emerged from the back. She had short, shiny hair and a single curl in the shape of an upside down question mark dangling down her forehead. As she approached, the door behind me opened, and a thick-necked guy wearing hiking boots entered the store. The boots’ long, red laces dragged on the floor. Both the man and woman wore nametags. Everett and Candace. I thought Everett looked a little like one of the guys from Public Enemy. Ice Cube. I didn’t want to think this, but I did.
“You’re late,” Candace said. She tilted her chin up in saying this, as if to arc her words over my head and land them on Everett.
“I’m not late.” Everett was smiling but didn’t sound like he was smiling. “You just want me to be late.”
Candace shook her head and turned to me. “Can I help you, sir?”
“I saw the Help Wanted sign,” I said.
“Don’t do it!” Everett’s voice boomed as he made his way to the back of the store. “Save yourself!”
“You can ignore him, please,” Candace said. She circled behind the counter, reached under the register, and pulled out a manila folder. “You have experience?”
“Doing what exactly?” I said.
“Getting somewhere on time. Working when you’re scheduled. Not calling off for nonsense.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Lookit,” she said. “Straight up. Are you a drinker or user?” She glanced at the Band-Aid in the crook of my arm.
“Neither of those,” I said.
“You boys with Everett?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“The clown. He sometimes tries to get his clown friends to apply so they can clown around together and get paid for it, but I can’t have that. Here at Goodwill we have a one clown limit.”
“I don’t know him,” I said. “Everett and I aren’t boys.”
“Everett and you aren’t boys, huh?” She smiled. “No. I don’t suppose. OK. Take this paperwork with you. If you come back tomorrow morning at 9:00, not 9:15, and the paperwork is filled out, not half-filled out, you can start then.”
I nodded, took the folder, and stuck out my hand. “Thank you, Candace. My name is Rich.”
She shook my hand. She had rings on every finger, thumb included, and her long nails were the same shade of red as her glasses. “OK, Rich,” she said. “Where you from, Rich? What’s that accent you’re working with?”
“Delaware,” I said.
“Delaware? What are you doing in Wichita, Rich? You lost?”
“Right,” I said. “Where am I again?”
“You’re at the Goodwill, Rich,” Candace said. “Lucky you.” She smiled and held up a finger. “You know what you didn’t ask, Rich? You didn’t ask how much you’re going to be paid. You interested in that information? Minimum wage is only $2.65, you know.”
“You pay minimum?” I said.
“I don’t pay anything, Rich,” she said. “Goodwill Industries International, Inc., though, pays $4.50 to start. Plus you get a half off employee discount on purchases.”
“Good enough,” I said.
“That good enough, Rich?” She sang it as much as said it. “OK, Rich. Good enough at the Goodwill. We’ll see.”
I was fifteen minutes early the next morning, waiting at the door when Candace pulled into the parking lot.
“One for one, Rich,” she said, nudging past me with her keys.
Candace led me to the counter, where she leafed through my paperwork. For references I’d listed Dennis and another grad student, Lindsay, who was a few years older than us, married to a barber, and on the serious side. I’d warned both Dennis and Lindsay that if they got a call about me from Goodwill, it was legit. For both of them, under “Occupation,” I’d written “College Instructor.” I didn’t think people in the real world knew what M.F.A. Graduate Teaching Associates were. Dennis suggested I list one of the real faculty as a reference, maybe Verner. If he was trying to make a joke, it wasn’t funny, and if he was being serious, it might’ve been the dumbest idea I’d ever heard.
“Two for two, Rich,” Candace said, setting the paperwork down on the counter. “You trying for employee of the month already? For real, though, we don’t have that anymore.”
The Goodwill wasn’t bad. The air conditioner was new, and there was variety to the work that helped the clock move. You ran the register, took donations at the back door when the bell rang, and stocked and rotated and straightened shelves and racks. Mostly clothes, but there were some housewares and small electronics. Some toys and sporting goods. Irons, toasters, typewriters. Table games, fishing rods, tennis rackets. You also supervised the fitting rooms and kept an eye out for shoplifters.
Those first few weeks, Everett kept calling me his trainee to get a rise out of Candace. “Me and Rich are going to hit the training hard today, Miss Boss,” he’d say. “You hear me, Candace? Rich is coming along, but he’s not there yet.”
Candace would answer him indirectly by addressing me. “Whatever the clown tells you, Rich,” she’d say, “do the opposite.”
Everett told me the Goodwill was only his day job. At night, especially weekends, he was a dancer. “Bachelorette parties and shit,” he said. “A lot of them hire me as a joke. They make like it’s a joke. Like, ‘Look, us females can be naughty, too!’ But once I start laying it down, the way some of them eyeball me is no joke. Some of them is hungry. You know what I’m saying?”
We were on lunch, sitting in a thin ribbon of shade behind the store. Candace would’ve rather we staggered our breaks, but Everett told her he needed to stay in my ear at all times if the training was going to take.
“No kidding,” I said. “A stripper?”
Neither of us had anything to eat that day. Now that I had the Goodwill money, I didn’t need to skip meals anymore, but I found myself doing it quite a bit anyway. It’s like I’d forget to eat.
Everett sipped a two liter of 7-Up between drags on his cigarette. “Just down to my drawers,” he said. “Most of them don’t want anything more than that. They don’t want to admit they do, anyway. Dirty but not too dirty.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. He was good looking enough, I guess. He wasn’t tall, but he had a clean fade, muscular arms and shoulders, and thick thighs. He had a bit of a paunch, too, though, and a patch of acne scars on his neck. I couldn’t tell exactly how old he was, but if I had to guess I would’ve said mid-thirties. Maybe he used to be a stripper. I would’ve believed used to.
“I know what you’re thinking, Rich,” Everett said. He smirked and stubbed out his cigarette on the side of the building. “I’m no model, but I can move. It’s the attitude. When I show up they know right away I’m what they want because I know I’m what they want.”
“Who’s ‘they?’” I said. “Who are these women?”
“All sorts, Rich. Moms, career ladies, college girls. They’re all yours, though.”
“How’s that?” I said.
“All white,” he said. He drained the last of the 7-Up and loudly crinkled the green plastic. “Maybe I’ve even danced for someone you know, Rich. Your moms or your sister. Maybe your girl.”
“No,” I said. “No girl. No sister. And my mom’s back in Delaware. She’s pretty loyal to East Coast strippers.”
“Oh, OK, Rich.” Everett laughed and leaned forward to spit. “I said dancer, though. You keep saying stripper.”
“No offense,” I said.
“Not about that,” Everett said. “Just seems a wannabe writer would listen more attentive. More precise. More articulate.” He annunciated “articulate” like he was teaching me the word. “Seems a wannabe writer would want to know the truth.”
“I do,” I said.
“And I just gave it to you,” Everett said. “This training we’re doing, Rich, this is about more than the Goodwill. We’re going deep. Life lessons.”
“That’s what I need,” I said.
Everett nodded without smiling. “I got you, Rich,” he said. “We’ll be figuring it all out.”
A station wagon pulled up, and an old woman got out. She wore bedroom slippers and a long, heavy sweater even though it was over ninety and the air was thick and sticky. When she circled around the car and popped her tailgate, I saw the boxes, at least a dozen, overflowing with paperbacks and LP’s.
“You gentlemen work here?” she said. “I got donations.”
I started to get up, but Everett stopped me. “You’ll have to come back later,” he said to the woman as he lit another cigarette. “We’re on lunch just now.”
“I don’t see you eating,” she said, grabbing the first box. She carried it over and set it on the ground between us. “Come on now,” she said.
When Everett smiled, shook his head, and followed her back to her car, I followed him.
“You’re mean,” Everett told her, grabbing one of the boxes. “I bet you been mean a long time. A mean old woman wearing a mean old sweater.”
“Hush,” the woman said to Everett as he carried the box away.
When I reached into the car to grab another, the woman looked to me to continue the conversation. “You don’t know what mean is,” she said. “You got no idea.”
A month later Everett was gone from Goodwill. When I came in one Monday morning, Bella, the high school girl who worked Saturdays, told me that over the weekend a group of guys had stolen a bunch of clothes when Candace was on lunch, and when she got back she noticed right away and fired Everett on the spot.
“I didn’t know they were stealing,” Bella said. “When they first came in, the guys were saying stupid stuff to me, two Black guys and a third guy—I couldn’t tell what he was—and Everett told them to knock it off, what they were saying, which was whatever, but I didn’t see them take anything. I went to the other end of the store so they’d leave me alone. I mean, I know I look mature for my age, but still.”
Bella’s perfume had a lemony, chemically smell, like disinfectant or furniture polish. Whenever we shared space, I tried to breathe through my mouth. “Did it seem like Everett knew them?” I said.
Bella looked over my shoulder to make sure Candace was still behind the register. “He knew them. They were calling him ‘E.’ ‘E, introduce me to your work colleague,’ one of them said, and then they fell all over themselves laughing. Like calling me ‘work colleague’ was funny I guess? Anyways, Candace thinks Everett knew what they were doing. Like he was in on it and maybe told them when she’d be on lunch.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I don’t think she’s right, though,” Bella said. “Everett kept trying to get them to go outside with him to smoke. I told that to Candace, but she got all bitchy, told me she’d let me know when my input was required or whatever. So, whatever.” Bella lowered her already quiet voice. “Candace seems to be OK with you, but I don’t think she likes white girls.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “You don’t want to say that.”
“And then right after she’s rude to me, she asks if I can work today, even though I was really clear when I was hired that I wanted just weekends because I lifeguard at the Y during the week,” Bella said. “It’s like I’m too nice sometimes, you know? I need to learn to stick up for myself.”
A few minutes later, Candace called me up front. She asked me to grab the ladder and head outside to take down the Sidewalk Sale banner. I didn’t know if or when the sale had ever occurred, but the banner had been hanging over the door since I’d started working there.
“Take care with it so we can use it again next spring,” Candace said. When she said “we,” it sounded like she was assuming I’d still be around in seven or eight months, still working the Goodwill, and even though at that point in the summer none of my clothes fit me anymore, and I already weighed less than I had in high school, and my cheeks had hollowed in a way that I thought made me look a little handsome and a little sick, I suddenly felt heavy, like there was sand in my stomach.
I was walking the ladder from one end of the sign to the other when Candace came out to supervise. She folded her arms across her chest and watched me work in silence.
“Here,” she said when I climbed down. She took the banner from me, laid it flat on the ground, knelt over it, and began rolling it like a scroll. “I was going to have Everett do this over the weekend, but so much for that,” she said. “I’m sure Princess told you about your boy. Told you how unfair I was.”
“Bella just feels bad,” I said.
“She feels bad because I asked her to work some weekday shifts until we hire somebody new and because she thinks Everett’s innocent, but he’s not.”
“I don’t know, you know?” I said. “You think Everett would go to the trouble of masterminding a heist of the Goodwill?”
Candace stood, brushed off her slacks, and nudged the rolled up banner against the building with her foot. “Because we’re a shit store, and there’s nothing here worth anything.”
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
Candace shook her head. “You know what Everett told me, Rich? He told me he had you believing he was a stripper. For white women. You should’ve heard him. Making you out a fool. He also said he got you to buy him lunch at Julius’s because he was saving for his daughter’s birthday. Everett doesn’t have a daughter, Rich. He has as many daughters as you do.”
“He told me my mom, my sister, and my girlfriend would all enjoy his act,” I said.
“You just smile at him when he said that to you, Rich?”
“I was trying to figure out whether I believed him,” I said. “He got me I guess. What, when someone tells me they have a kid I should demand proof? Anyways, he’s good. He was telling me her favorite TV shows, her favorite subjects in school. He should be an actor.”
Candace clicked her tongue. “Takes one to know one, right, Rich?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’re doing this, Rich? OK,” Candace said. “You’re a graduate student at the university studying creative writing? If that’s even a real thing you can major in? But then you’re also teaching writing at the university? If you’re still learning it, how can you be teaching it, Rich? And you left the East Coast where they have plenty of colleges and publishers and magazines and what-not to come out here to Kansas to be a writer? That’s backwards, Rich. And in the summer you sell your plasma and work at the Goodwill?” She smiled. “You know, like writers do.”
“I applied to a few other programs, but this is where I got funding,” I said.
“If you were a writer, wouldn’t you be spending your days writing?” she said. “If you were a teacher, wouldn’t you be teaching? The university has summer classes.”
“There was a lottery,” I said. “I didn’t get a slot.”
“A teaching lottery?” Candace raised her thin eyebrows. “That’s how the university chooses their professors?”
When I didn’t answer, Candace realized I was telling the truth. It happened suddenly. She felt one way about me, and then, in the next moment, she felt another way.
Writers tell each other that “suddenly” isn’t artful. “Suddenly” is lazy. “Suddenly” detaches a story from the world rather than grounding it in the world. The truth is, though, that “suddenly” happens all the time in real life. “Suddenly” is never not happening.
“Anyways, Rich,” Candace said, “what matters to me is you do a good job here. You’re reliable. I appreciate you. I’m not out to give you a hard time.”
“All right,” I said. I closed the ladder and swung it onto my hip. “I’ll put this away and then come back and grab the sign.”
“You need help?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I got it.”
“You and me good, Rich? I want us to be good,” she said. “All’s good at the Goodwill, right?”
“No worries,” I said.
Later that day, a leather satchel came into the store as a donation. The guy who dropped it off used it to carry in a mess of other items, most of which we threw out. A pile of mismatched Tupperware, an Etch-A-Sketch with a missing dial, and the ‘P’ and ‘Q-R’ editions from a set of 1978 World Book Encyclopedias. The bag smelled old, like an attic, like hot dust, but I liked the scuffed, worn out look of it. It reminded me of a saddle.
Instead of putting it with the other donations for processing, I rested the satchel on top of some clean boxes in the Dumpster behind the store. With my employee discount I could’ve bought it for five bucks, but I didn’t want to buy it. Instead, after we closed at the end of the day, when Candace’s car was out of sight, I circled back, fished it out, and took it home.
I didn’t show up for work the next day. I never worked at the Goodwill again. I didn’t tell Candace I quit. I just never went back.
In the years since, I’ve left other jobs I needed. Like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it gets. I once walked away from a safe factory mid-shift. The factory wasn’t safe. They made safes. I took a pair of work gloves with me when I left and used them for a few years as oven mitts.
Another time I was working in a mall parking lot in one of those film development kiosks. This was back when cameras and phones were different things. One evening there was a mom at the window who wanted to complain about her last order. I asked her to hang on for a second—I don’t know if she even heard me over her squad of rowdy kids—and as she waited, I ducked out the back and escaped into the crowded rows of cars.
Then there was the time I abandoned a classroom of students in South Korea. I was teaching English as a second language, reviewing prepositions with a bunch of business majors on the outskirts of Seoul. “Aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid.” I faked a coughing fit and ducked into the hallway. Then, suddenly, I was on a plane.
Writers tell each other not to create characters who don’t change. Static characters who just keep being who they are don’t take a story anywhere, but this kind of person is everywhere. To tell good stories, you’re supposed to mirror the world, nod to it, frame it for your reader so they can see it clearly, but on the other hand, you’re somehow supposed to decry the world. Expose it. Undo it. Revise it. I never got the hang of this. How to do these two things at once. Or, if it’s a decision to be made, if you’re supposed to choose which kind of writer to be, I was never able to wrap my mind around that, either. Is it that stories should correct what the real world gets wrong? Or should they tell lies that are somehow better than the real world’s truths? Necessary lies. Lies to get you by.
I didn’t write anything that summer that I worked at the Goodwill. Not a word. I’m still surprised by this because I felt the whole time like I was just about to start something good. The thinner I got, the more strongly I felt this. The emptier I got. The less of me there was.
The morning following my last day at Goodwill, I grabbed my new old satchel and carried it, empty, to the university library. There I found a Kafka collection that included “A Hunger Artist.” I could’ve checked out the book, but I didn’t want to check it out. Instead, I dumped it in my bag, nodded to the hungover student worker at the circulation desk, and didn’t break stride until I hit the bus stop.
I read the story on my ride to the plasma bank. I was disappointed. I found the most satisfying part to be the ending when Kafka gets rid of the whiny title character, vaguely and quietly kills him off in the straw, and then replaces him with the hungry, pacing panther. I wished the story would’ve started with the panther, and I wondered what Verner would’ve made of this analysis.
“You know why I don’t like people who read on the bus?” The woman looking at me from across the aisle was doubled up like her stomach hurt.
“You don’t like people who read on the bus?” I said.
“That’s what I just said,” the woman said, grimacing. “Makes me feel stupid is why. Same goes for people listening to headphones. Like me just riding the bus isn’t enough because I’m only doing the one thing.”
“You’re just getting from Point A to Point B,” I said. “I get it.”
The woman sat up and pointed out the window as the bus slowed and I rose from my seat. “Billy the Kid was born right goddam there,” she said. “I didn’t get that out of a book, either. That’s just something I know.”
When I weighed in at the plasma bank, I was told the visit would be worth only thirty dollars.
“You’re on a downward trend,” the receptionist said, studying her clipboard. “What’s your secret? My problem’s genetics. All I have to do is look at food. Plus, I really like chips, and my husband keeps buying chips.”
Instead of Magnum, all the TV’s that morning were tuned in to the O.J. trial. This was during an uneventful stretch of the case. Judge Ito and Kato Kaelin had already had their turns in the spotlight, and the prosecution’s stunt of having Simpson try on the glove had backfired weeks before. Now Clark, Darden, and the rest of the team were in damage control mode, putting off the inevitable, reluctant to rest their case because they knew they were screwed.
“Did you ever see The Juice play?” Along with a thick accent, the man in the recliner next to me had a short salt and pepper goatee and a shaved head. The top few buttons of his tropical print shirt were open. Orange and red parrots perched in green and yellow palm trees. Magnum would’ve loved it, and it wouldn’t have lasted long in the racks at the Goodwill.
“Maybe when I was a kid,” I said. “He was mostly before my time.”
“I bet he would’ve been a hell of a rugby player,” the man said, studying O.J.’s handsome poker face on the screen. “That was my game back in Barbados.” He looked at me. “You’re a bit on the skinny side for rugby.”
I heard the knocking of my machine and felt my arm buzz as my chilled blood found its way back to me.
“Soccer and football combined, right?” I said.
“Not really, no. But sure. As a way for an American to understand, OK,” he said.
“The ball is like a football, right?” I said.
“Think of a breadfruit instead.”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“I have a question for you,” the Barbadian said as an orderly approached us. “I have a question for you about The Juice.”
“You’re done, honey,” the orderly said to the man, stepping between us. She pushed a button, deftly unhooked him from the machine, and slapped his knee. Her thick braids were gathered back in a loose knot, and she wore a man’s watch pushed all the way up over her elbow. “See you next week,” she said as she pressed a Band-Aid onto the man’s arm.
“One moment,” the man said. “I need to ask my skinny friend here a question first.”
“Your friend doesn’t know, honey,” she told the man without looking at me. She took his elbow and helped him to his feet. “Your skinny friend? What does your skinny friend know?
Tom Noyes has published a novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For, and three story collections, including Come by Here: A Novella and Stories, which won Autumn House Press’s Fiction Prize. His stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Story, and many other journals. He directs the B.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, where he also serves as Consulting Editor for the literary journal Lake Effect.
