PAID TO TRESPASS, part two
That wasn’t my only summer job. I also helped old man Cooley put away bales of hay in his barn loft. This was on the weekends for a couple weeks during the summer. It seemed like the haybales never stopped falling from the elevator on those Saturday afternoons. Cooley was down on the wagon throwing them on the elevator as fast as he could. I think he was doing it to be sadistic to us boys. It was me and Dom and Jason. We made $20 a piece for an afternoon. We immediately spent the money on beer and cigarettes. We were too young to buy beer but it was a snap getting Jason’s older brother Dwight to by twelve-packs of Rolling Rock for us.
We used to build bonfires out in the woods behind Jason’s house and have parties starting just before twilight.
“Where’s Colleen?” Dom asked me on that particular weekend after I’d done the meter reading. He was double-fisting bottles of Rolling Rock.
“Working.” I was prodding at the fire with a long stick, trying to get some logs to collapse closer to the flames to catch.
“How long has she been at the video store?” Jason asked me. “ I wouldn’t mind that job.”
“A year or so.”
“She gets free rentals, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Her boss wants her to watch the new releases so she can recommend them to customers.”
“So you get to watch the good stuff.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s crap.”
“Crap still gets recommended though,” Dom said. “Crap makes money, you know that.”
“True. Hey Dom, let me ask you a question.” I gestured for Jason to pass me another bottle of beer.
“Shit, shoot.”
“Your sister, Cherie. Where does she live?”
“Up on Jordan Hill Road.”
“She seeing anybody?”
“Oooh, looking to shack up with an older woman,” Dom said. “I’ll be sure to tell Colleen, she wouldn’t be too happy.”
“I wouldn’t fuck Cherie with Jason’s dick. I’m just curious.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Dom shook his head. “You’re fucked up. She’s not your type, she likes older guys, older than her even.”
“Yeah,” I said. After a few seconds, I added, “I wonder if I could ever get into that zone.”
“Colleen not doing it for you?” Jason asked.
“She’s going off to college next year and I’m history, I just know it.”
“Ask her to marry you,” Dom said. “You’re the marrying type, all the girls say that to me.”
I perked up at the thought that girls were talking about me like that, but I had to roundly reject this concept to my friends. “Shit, fuck that. That’s gay. If you’re the marrying type at 18, something’s wrong with you.”
“My dad did it,” Jason said.
“That was olden times,” Dom put in. He was agreeing with me.
We sat and watched the fire for a minute or two. It had been a long day. The sun was just going down behind the trees and it would be getting chillier soon.
“Ever been with an experienced woman?” I asked the gathered dudes.
“You really are after Cherie,” Dom said.
“No way. I just wonder if it’s true what they say.”
“What do they say?”
“You know.”
“Why don’t you find out? But you gotta know that be talking bout it so much, you’re incriminating yourself because we’re gonna tell Colleen.”
Before the sun went completely down, I said I had something to do and left the bonfire. The guys were disappointed but they knew not to make me feel like shit about it. I got in my car and went to the videostore next to the Big M. It closed at 9 p.m. on a Saturday and it was around 8:45.
When I went in I saw that Colleen was talking to a customer at the checkout desk and I waved to her. I got a little nod from her, barely a ripple of attention taken away from the customer. I went looking through the shelves. Colleen and I had seen everything good so it was like picking over a turkey three days after Thanksgiving. On the new release shelves were Dumb & Dumber, Clear and Present Danger, Interview With The Vampire, Pulp Fiction. The last movie was completely out and Colleen had messed up and not been at work at the right time to be able to get it before it got snapped up by all the customers. We’d have to see it when a copy got returned to the store.
I came back down around the maze-like shelves to glimpse Colleen at the checkout desk talking to Belinda Berenson. I ducked out of sight and carefully looked around the corner to watch them. Belinda was wearing a leather jacket with fringe off her cuffs and acid-washed jeans and red leather cowboy boots. Her hair was done up like she had a date. With Harry? Colleen was cheerfully talking with her, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Colleen laughed loudly at something Belinda said, tossing her head back. It was something on the naughty side, I could tell from the two ladies’ body language in the aftermath of the comment. Were they talking about me?
Colleen wouldn’t be laughing if Belinda told her we’d had a flirty drink together in her house a few days ago. Belinda said a bubbly goodbye and left with two videotapes in their milky plastic cases with the yellow printed receipt hanging out of one of the cases like a tag. Colleen always did it that way.
I came out from hiding and went up to the desk and Colleen’s expression clouded over as fast as it had when the storm came on at the Berenson’s pool.
“I can’t go out with you tonight,” she said. “I’m supposed to have a talk with my dad.”
Her father was a former cop who had been let go from the force for anger management issues. I’d had a few awkward dinners with her family. I wonder if he knew then that Colleen and I screwed in the backseat of his Jeep Cherokee behind the gravel pile every few days that summer. He didn’t like me but it was nothing specific, I think he just didn’t like Colleen’s boyfriends in general. Like a lot of eighteen-year-old kids getting steady sex I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong or that the universe or other people could touch me.
“Talk with you dad about what?”
“College.”
“At night?”
“He said he wanted to see me after work.”
I nodded to the exit. “That lady you were talking to, you know her?”
“Belinda!” Colleen cried. “She’s a riot.”
“What movies was she renting?”
Colleen paused, did something with her hands on her side of the counter I couldn’t see. She used to give me the scoop about what people were renting from the video store. Our high school principal would rent salacious things like 9 ½ Weeks and Porky’s. Tough guys from our school that were known homophobes who beat up weaker, effeminate kids would rent feel good movies like Steel Magnolias and Beaches. It was like they all trusted Colleen with their awful secrets, or didn’t even think about it enough to be discreet. Colleen could look up everybody’s account and it was all there, revealed like their underwear under X-Ray Specs.
“I’m not supposed to tell you anymore,” she said to me. “I decided.”
“Who will find out?”
“Chuck might.” Chuck Anderson was the proprietor and he didn’t especially like me, either. He kept trying to set Colleen up with his nephew who was into hockey and what was becoming known as nu-metal.
“There’s no record of you looking,” I said. “You’re just doing your job. You’re looking up overdue fines, tell him.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“That Belinda lady, Dom’s older sister babysits for her and said she’s kind of strange.”
“I didn’t know she had kids.”
“Maybe she has more secrets than you thought.”
Colleen made a taut, confused face.
“I’ll buy you a pizza tomorrow night at Louie’s,” I said, with a tantalizing lilt to my voice.
“Ok, as long as it has pineapple and ham on it.”
“I’m not going to eat that. We’ll go halves. But I’ll pay for it all.”
Colleen tapped a few keys on the computer. “Let’s see. She just rented Disclosure and… Pulp Fiction.”
“She’s getting it before us?” I was pissed.
“Luck of the draw. It looks like her favorite movies, wow, are Blood Simple and Blue Velvet. She’s rented each one, like, twenty times in the past six months.”
“Really.”
“Drugstore Cowboy and After Dark, My Sweet are also repeat viewings.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Cult classics,” Colleen said.
“Let’s watch them some night,” I said. “I want to know what she’s up to.”
“That’s weird, Okie. You’ve spent too much time walking around people’s yards. You’re like a peeping tom.”
“You have to admit you’re just as nosy as me, you love knowing people’s private viewing habits.”
Colleen made a face like I’d caught her being bad and she didn’t like it, but it was a face for show.
The next day Jason and Regent and I were pouring sidewalks on Chapman Road which led out of Pottbridge north to Jordan Hill Road and on to Trout Kills which was the town that had combined with Pottbridge to make our school district. All the poor kids lived in Trout Kills.
Regent was screaming at us to rake the cement coming down the tube from the cement truck faster and to make sure to her it all the way to the metal forms he’d set in place with metal stakes.
“I don’t want to be fixing these sidewalks in a year because they weren’t put in strong because of you,” Regent yelled over the noisy cement truck.
It was hot, just like every workday that summer. Jason and I had our shirts off and were glistening with sweat. I had to wipe the sweat out of my eyes every two minutes.
We were screeding off the surface of the cement pour so it was creamy and smooth. Then we used special trowels, edgers, to put in the grooves along the forms and the seam across the sidewalk every few feet (I used to know the exact measurement). We did that so that, in winter, if ice got in there and expanded, if the sidewalk broke it would only do so in uniform sections that didn’t make it look like unprofessional shit.
Jason was taking his turn with the edger when I looked up to see a black convertible parked down the street with a woman behind the wheel. She was in sunglasses I recognized and her hair was blown out from driving around town fast. I waved, with a lack of enthusiasm, at Belinda as she sat there in the car, to let her know I saw. She lifted a disposable camera from the passenger side seat and took a picture of me, then laughed. She held the camera up like “How did this get in my hand,” stuck out her tongue at me, tossed the camera aside, twiddled her fingers at me, and drove off.