Read Online In Mike We Trust by P. E. Ryan - Free Book Online

actually doing what he regularly fantasized about made him feel more isolatedand hopelessly virginal than ever. People dropped dead every day, didn’t they? Heart attacks, brain aneurysms, car crashes. What were the chances that he might die a virgin? Underneath CALL ME and the phone number, he’d written in pencil I WISH , and then hurriedly scrubbed all of it away.
    He had nothing to compare his job at Peterson’s to, since he’d never worked before, but it was hard to imagine more demeaning employment. Mr. Peterson, who’d been nursing a cold since the day he was born and yet still managed to talk through his nose, treated Garth like an idiot. He wouldn’t even use his first name, would call him only “Rudd,” stretching the one syllable out so that it might have emanated from a squeezed lamb.
    â€œRhhuudd, more bags on register two, pronto.”
    â€œRhhuudd, mop up that per fume spill on aisle seven.”
    â€œRhhuudd, there’s a situation in the popcorn machine.”
    The “popcorn machine” was nothing more than a wheeled, plastic case with a heat lamp inside: a holder for the massive bags of stale, prepopped popcorn the store ordered in bulk. A “situation” usually meant a mouse.
    Peterssuuun, Garth dreamed of saying one day, there’s a pound of dandruff on your shoulders and you smell like blue cheese and lighter fluid.
    The old man had to be close to seventy. Mr. Peterson’s dad had opened the store when he’d been a teenager and then left it to him when he died. The store was the only place Mr. Peterson, like Garth, had ever worked. He was skinny and slope-shouldered, wore black-framed glasses repaired (probably years ago) with a safety pin at one of the temples, and suffered back pain that prevented him from standing completely upright. He moved about the store like a worn-out prison guard, jangling his giant key ring and eyeballing each and every one of his employees with equal mistrust.
    That Tuesday, as soon as he saw Garth come in, he called from across the stationery aisle, “Rhhuudd, trash pocket.”
    Kill me, Garth thought. “I just did it two weeks ago.”
    â€œAnd if you do a decent job this time, it might not need it two weeks from now,” the old man muttered.
    I’d rather die a virgin than wade into that hellhole today, he thought. But he knew he had no choice—not if he wanted to keep his job.
    The “trash pocket” was a sealed-off corner of the stockroom accessible by a regular door on the insideand a metal garage door on the outside. The garage door opened onto an alley where, in theory, and on some unspecified biweekly schedule that Garth could never keep track of, a garbage truck would appear, unlock and roll up the door, and empty the dozen or so trash cans into its bowels. The problem was that Mr. Peterson’s employees—underpaid and overworked—didn’t care about actually getting the trash into the trash cans; they simply opened the inner door and let the bags fly, including trash bags from the cafeteria that contained half-eaten food, spoiled food, rotten food. Add to that a few random holes punched into the walls over the years and a spigot near the floor in one corner that constantly dripped over a drain long-ago clogged, and you had a rodent’s paradise. The bags were tossed from the doorway, missed their mark, burst open. The garbagemen refused to take the trash away unless someone gathered it into the cans. That someone, armed with a shovel and yet another pair of rubber gloves, was Garth.
    As with the hedges on his chore list, he performed all of his other duties and saved the trash pocket for last. There was always the faint hope that some emergency might come up that would prevent him from getting to the pocket before his shift was over (say, a fire that would burn the store to the ground).Unfortunately, that day, as slowly as he allowed himself to move