Ray’s Fine Foods

Damion rarely had time for grocery shopping. He’d schedule time to go, but usually, on those nights, he’d have an install that would take longer than expected: a crawlspace with a possum in it, a tap that wasn’t installed properly, a squirrel nest inside the cable box, too many roaches. Hurried and hungry grocery shopping after late-night installs had added a few inches to his waistline since he started working at the cable company. On a few occasions, he tried stopping in the little convenience store, Ray’s Fine Foods, in the neighborhood where he worked. Damion found that the place carried anything but fine foods. There were bruised bananas, old dusty beer stored in balmy soda fridges, and pickled eggs that glistened vibrant red inside the jar on the counter. On top of that, the Icee machine at Ray’s never worked. But Damion would still stop in when he worked on the west side of the small South Carolina town of Allendale. He’d always say hello to Ray, and Ray would always ask him if he’d installed cable in every house in town yet. The answer was always no.

Tonight it was eight-thirty, and Damion was still crawling around underneath Miss Anderson’s trailer, his last customer of the day. She’d shouted down through the flimsy floor that a tornado warning had been issued. Damion couldn’t remember which was worse, a warning or a watch. It didn’t really matter. If a tornado arrived, he was in the safest place he could be for now: not inside of the trailer, technically.

As he worked, the rain began to pummel the trailer’s aluminum siding. Damion could see a puddle of dirty water beginning to form along the edge of the crawlspace. A rat emerged from underneath an old mattress and ran toward him. Damion threw his screwdriver at it. He missed the rat and his screwdriver landed behind an old broken cooler. The rat ran toward the edge of the crawlspace, wiggled under the jagged metal skirting, and took its chance with the storm.

Damion reached behind the dingy yellow Styrofoam cooler to recover his tool. He snapped his hand back when he felt a sting.

“Shit!” Damion squeezed the back of his hand and sucked air through his clenched teeth. He’d cut the back of his hand on rusted mattress springs.

“Hey, cable man! You alright down there,” Miss Anderson shouted through her thinly carpeted floor.

“All good down here.”

“Storm’s looking bad.”

“I’m finishing up now,” said Damion.

“What?” said Miss Anderson.

“I’m almost done,” shouted Damion.

Damion could hear the floor creaking above him as Miss Anderson walked toward what looked like the kitchen with all of its leaky PVC pipes jutting down into the ground like stalactites in a cavern. He rolled over onto his back and lay there in the dark and airless crawl space holding his wound. He could feel the wind billowing through the shoddy metal that surrounded the crawlspace. He could hear the thunder clapping and the rain clanging against Miss Anderson’s humble home. He thought about the name of the trailer park, Queen’s Trailer Park, and thought about what Miss Anderson had told him.

“Pizza Hut won’t even deliver here,” she’d said. “After the fifth shooting at Queen’s, they won’t even put in an order from here. We can’t even go pick it up. Not that I even have a car to get there with.” Miss Anderson had leaned in closer than Damion was comfortable with. “Watch yourself out here, young man.”

Down in the crawlspace, Damion could hear his stomach gurgling and thought about his wasted Saturday evening. He could have gone to the grocery store and gotten something for dinner, but here he was, with no food at home in his mother’s tiny apartment and no food in his belly, horizontal in the dirt, chasing away vermin, and nursing a wound in the middle of a tornado. Or was it just a storm? He didn’t really know.

He wondered if tonight would be a night that he would, yet again, have to stop at Ray’s Fine Foods. It was closer than the big box grocery store on the other side of town, and the enormous, brightly lit grocery store would probably be out of all the staples because that’s what people did here when there was a tornado anything, warning or watch. People bought up all the water, bread, and eggs when they saw the first snowflake hit the ground in the winter. He’d seen it before. It didn’t snow much in Allendale, but when it did, people lost their minds. By now, he knew he’d not be visiting the giant grocery store with its bare shelves and endless rows of glaring lights.

Maybe tonight, as he grabbed whatever expired soup can he could find at Ray’s, he’d strike up a longer conversation with Ray. Was Ray really the man’s name? Damion had never asked. Ray and Damion could talk about other things besides the broken Icee machine and bruised bananas. Damion imagined that Ray might also need to eat dinner at some point that evening, and that the solid brick building could be a good place to wait out the storm. Ray seemed like a guy that’d be into pasta. Maybe Ray liked white sauce, probably not red sauce, that seemed too plain, too easy. Damion imagined that Ray could be a complex individual even though his store was not all that fussy.

Perhaps he had a dining room in the back of his store, where he ate every night. The store was open until midnight. Ray had to eat at some point. Damion could join him this evening, sliced-up hand, middle of a bad storm, and everything. The two would sit in the back dining room. Maybe they could share a six pack of the only beer in the store, Schlitz. Or they could share a bottle of cheap red wine and have two chili dogs from Ray’s Broil-O-Dog machine.

Ray would tell Damion that he’d settled down in the back room during many storms. It was safe, secure. Damion could tell Ray why Pizza Hut doesn’t deliver to Queen’s Trailer Park. He’d learn that Ray was Hungarian and that his name was actually Gabor. They were both the first generation in their families to be born in the US. Damion could talk about his mom, and her love affair with QVC. How she never left the house, and how she was terrified of crowded spaces. He’d tell Gabor how his mother had moved from the UK to the US for a man. He’d tell Gabor how his father then left his mother as soon as he found out she was pregnant with Damion. He’d tell Gabor about how his mom went from being called a chavette in England to being called white trash here. His mom had told him when he was in middle school that they’d still upgraded, even though his dad wasn’t around, no matter what people said. Damion would ask Gabor about his own dad. He’d ask Gabor about his pasta preferences, and Gabor would say he hated pasta. He’d say he had it too much as a kid. It was all his dad knew how to make, but all he’d ever had was pasta with red sauce.

“Next week, I’ll bring dinner then!” Damion would assert, thinking he would make this a weekly event. But there’d be no storm the following week and maybe Gabor wouldn’t want company.

Gabor and Damion would laugh at the notion of planning such an event like this again during the next week. They both were busy, overworked, exhausted, and strapped for cash. They both thought that their lives would be grander by now, that they would be working less hours and have deeper pockets. Gabor would say that he thought he would’ve sold the store by now and he’d be enjoying his retirement, but property values in the neighborhood had been stagnant since he took out a loan and bought the place. A chicken plant had bought land just outside the neighborhood. Made the whole damn place smell like death. Nobody wanted to live next to that stench. Damion would say that after three years he thought he would have at least moved out of his mother’s house and gotten a promotion to cable auditor. The auditors didn’t have to crawl around in dank and dark places during tornado watches, or warnings, or any weather for that matter. They had offices. And they got paid more than installers when they went out in the field. Damion would tell Gabor that he knew he should be getting paid more, but he’d tell Gabor what his mom had said, that he should be glad to have income at all.

Gabor would reach out and grab at the empty space between them, make a fist and shake it up and down. Gabor would firmly tell him, “That’s bullshit,” that he should take life and make it what he wants. Damion would see that Gabor wanted Damion to do better than he had, but Damion would look around and think to himself that Gabor had done quite alright for himself.

Damion and Gabor would laugh so hard that their purple, wine-stained teeth would glisten under the store lights, just as the power would go out. Gabor would wobble up from his chair and declare that he had a backup. He’d stumble around in the dark until his fingers found his battery-powered camping light. “Fine lighting for fine foods,” he’d say, and then sit back down. Damion’s pale and freckled cheeks would glow a splotchy red, partially from the wine and partially from the warm camping light.

After dinner they’d open the back door to watch the storm rage on as flashes of lightning illuminated the trees and their faces. The awning above the back door would keep them dry, but they’d still be able to smell the aluminum-scented rain. Gabor would pull out a pack of Newport cigarettes. He’d offer one to Damion, who doesn’t smoke, but Damion would take one anyway. In high school, he’d gotten pretty good at taking a drag and releasing the smoke so that it looked like he’d inhaled. His grandmother back in England had died of lung cancer before he’d ever met her, and his mother was adamant about Damion not smoking. The kids at school didn’t make fun of him as much if they thought he really smoked. Damion had managed to play both sides of that social puzzle, and he was proud of his cancer-free smoking technique.

Gabor never showed any of his customers his tattoo (or told them his real name!) but it would seem fitting to do so after sharing an entire meal and a cigarette with Damion. Standing there, on the threshold, between the dim cinderblock building and the wide open, raging wildness of the storm, he’d roll up his T-shirt sleeve and point his bent nub of a finger at his arm. Damion would first notice Gabor’s lopped-off finger and how the end of it looked like the butt of a pink hotdog, like the lone remaining hotdog rotating on Gabor’s Broil-O-Dog machine in the back of the store. All that folded skin meeting in the middle, dimpling inward. Then he’d see Gabor’s tattoo, the screaming figure of Death on a horse. Atop Gabor’s olive-colored arm, Death peered its open-mouthed skull out from behind a torn and tattered hood. The rest of the flowing fabric rippled in the rider’s wake. Death held a sickle, and the horse’s hooves were in mid-gallop. Death appeared to be chasing after someone or something. Who or what, Damion could not be sure.

~

In the crawlspace, Damion heard a new rat squeak, taking cover from the rain. Or maybe it was the original rat returned, the storm too strong and the rat now willing to take its chance with Damion’s screwdriver. Damion remembered where he was and rolled over. He belly-crawled out, leaving his screwdriver somewhere in the dark decay of the crawlspace. He didn’t bother to tell Miss Anderson that he’d come back tomorrow and finish the job. He didn’t bother to tell her anything.

Earlier, when she had leaned in close to tell him about the Pizza Hut delivery rules, he’d smelled sour liquor on her breath and cigarette smoke wafting up from an ashtray inside. In a way, she reminded him of his grandmother. She was probably a very kind woman, just looking out for him. But he didn’t want to hole up in her smoke-filled trailer during this storm, and he didn’t want to have a conversation about it either. He just ran to his truck while the torrent of rain soaked through his clothes down to his skin.

As Damion drove, the last bit of daylight slipped through a few clouds above. No other cars were on the road. Damion’s old and brittle wipers were doing a terrible job of keeping his windshield dry. Ray’s Fine Foods was just down the road from Queen’s Trailer Park. As he neared Ray’s, he slowed down, pulled into the lot, and stopped under the gas pump awning. Damion picked up the pump, but the display remained blank. Ray peered out the window through the metal bars and slid his hand, with all his fingers intact, back and forth across his neck, cutthroat. Damion looked up at the awning and realized the lights weren’t on. The only illumination inside Ray’s Fine Foods was coming from a small battery-powered camping light resting on the counter by the register. Ray looked like he’d stepped right out of an old monster movie, illuminated from underneath his face. Damion threw up a hand and waved in return.

He hung up the nozzle and jogged through the rain to the front door of Ray’s. A small brass bell jingled as he yanked the door open. Ray looked up from his stool behind the counter. “Closed,” he said, “got no power.” Damion stood there dripping water onto the rubber mat at the front of the store. “You don’t have an umbrella,” asked Ray. Damion shook his head and more rainwater dribbled off his face. As Ray reached across the counter and tapped the stack of newspapers, his shirt sleeve lifted up, revealing the bottom of a tattoo. “Take today’s paper,” he said. “It’s better than nothing.”

“Thanks.” Damion grabbed one of the newspapers from the stack. “Is that Death?” He pointed to Ray’s shirt sleeve.

“This?” Ray lifted his sleeve and held his arm close to the camping light. A small nautical anchor was nestled between his bicep and shoulder. “Keeps me grounded,” said Ray.

Damion smiled and nodded his head. “Right.” Damion unfolded the newspaper and covered his head. “See you next time,” he said.

“See you,” said Ray.

Damion ran back to his truck. He looked back toward Ray’s Fine Foods and saw Ray locking the door from the inside. Damion spread the newspaper out onto his seat, climbed in, and closed the door. The rain walloped the awning above him. Damion wondered if he should’ve asked Ray if he could buy a can of old dusty soup, or, better yet, if Ray had eaten dinner yet. He glanced at the store window once more. The store was black as coal inside. Ray was gone. Damion started his truck and drove it back out into the storm, tattered windshield wipers squealing, cut hand oozing, empty stomach growling.