The Impossible Fortress(7)
We DON’T SELL COMICS so please STOP ASKING!!!
Sal Zelinsky stood behind the checkout counter, fifty years old with ruddy skin and the high-and-tight crew cut of a U.S. marine. He wore a shirt and tie under a filthy ink-smeared apron. He was skewering a long screwdriver through the back of an IBM Selectric; scattered all around him were greasy knobs and levers and keys. It looked like he’d slaughtered the typewriter and ripped out its guts.
At the sound of our arrival, Zelinsky adjusted his bifocals with blackened fingertips, studied our faces, and frowned. There was a swollen artery on his forehead, zigzagging from his hairline to his right eyebrow, throbbing like he’d just finished an arm-wrestling contest. He couldn’t have looked more pissed off.
“Help you?” he asked.
“We just need a few things,” I said, then forced myself to spit out the rest, because Clark insisted these words were crucial: “. . . for our office.”
“Your office.” Zelinsky said it the way another person might say “Your pirate ship” or “Your space shuttle.” Just over his shoulder, behind the cash register, I saw Vanna White on a rack of magazines labeled ADULTS ONLY, and sure enough, her butt was on the cover. My heart did a little flip.
“Just some odds and ends,” I said, but the words came out all mumbled.
Zelinsky turned the Selectric facedown and speared a second screwdriver into its bottom. “This isn’t a toy store,” he said. “You get what you need and you leave.”
“Right,” I said.
“No problem,” Clark said.
“Understood,” Alf said.
We were barely through the front door and already I wanted to turn back. But Alf and Clark were grabbing wire baskets and moving ahead with the plan. I grabbed a basket of my own and followed them.
I’d shopped at Zelinsky’s dozens of times but never ventured past the magazine rack. Behind the checkout counter, the store divided into three long aisles filled with office supplies: calendars and stationery, staples and staple removers, markers and mailers, and a million other doodads. We spread out and went to work.
Clark’s plan was to fill our baskets with many large but inexpensive items. I grabbed a three-ring binder, a pack of A13 batteries, and a massive tub of Elmer’s Glue. If it cost less than a buck or two, I put it in the basket. There were no other customers. The store was silent except for the radio; Phil Collins was repeating the fade-out chorus of “Invisible Touch.” But as soon as the song ended, it inexplicably started from the beginning all over again.
At the back of the store was a large showroom designed to look like a working office, complete with desks and swivel chairs, typewriters and wall clocks and file cabinets. Everything had a price tag; the whole showroom was available for purchase.
A fat girl sat at one of the desks, typing on a Commodore 64 computer.
The monitor was full of code and I was too far away to read it, but I could hear the results streaming from the speakers: a tinny, synthesized version of “Invisible Touch,” the same song playing on the radio. The melody wasn’t quite right—there were a few wrong notes—but as a copy, it was pretty damn close.
The girl looked up. “Can I help you?”
I grabbed the closest item on a shelf—it looked like a white paper hockey puck—and dropped it in my basket.
“No, thanks.”
I turned down the next aisle but felt her eyes tailing me; none of the shelves were taller than my shoulders, and her desk in the showroom allowed her to observe the entire store. I grabbed some #2 pencils and then topped off my basket with old, bulky typewriter ribbons that were marked down to fifty cents apiece. Alf was in the next aisle over, scooping Styrofoam peanuts into a plastic bag. Clark walked past him with a dozen mailers wedged beneath his arms. They’d already gathered more stuff than we could carry.
I knelt down to grab a handful of erasers, and suddenly the fat girl was right beside me, straightening a display of Post-it Notes. She spoke in a low whisper: “My dad will call the cops.”
“What?”
“He has zero tolerance for shoplifting.”
She pointed to a sign on the wall:
We have ZERO TOLERANCE for SHOPLIFTING!
We WILL call the COPS!
“Thieves will not enter the kingdom of God.” —First Corinthians, 6:9,10
“I’m not stealing anything,” I said, but I started blushing anyway, because we were clearly guilty of something.
She reached into my basket for the batteries. “These are for hearing aids. And this”—she grabbed the paper hockey puck—“this is receipt tape for an adding machine. Nothing you’re buying goes together.”
She was leaning over to whisper, and I could smell her perfume, fresh and clean, like soap in the shower. Long black hair fell past her shoulders. She wore an oversize Genesis concert T-shirt, and her wrists were covered with purple jelly bracelets. A small gold cross hung from the chain around her neck.
“Is that your 64?” I asked.
“It’s the store’s. Technically it’s for sale, but my dad lets me use it.”
“I’ve got one at home.”
She seemed skeptical. “Disk drive or tape storage?”
“Disk,” I said, allowing a touch of superiority to creep into my voice. Programmers on a budget could store their data on cassette tapes, but the process was slow and unreliable. I gestured to the stereo speakers in the ceiling—She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah—and asked, “Was this song playing on your computer?”