Alf tugged on my arm. “Let’s go,” he whispered. “We got what we came for.”
“Seriously,” Clark said. His good hand was wrapped in the bottom of his T-shirt, but this hadn’t stopped the bleeding. Tiny red dots were spotting the floor around his sneakers. “I’m pretty messed up. I need a bandage or something. You do, too, Billy. Your forehead’s all bloody.”
I gave two of the magazines to Alf. “You can go if you want. But I’m staying. If anything happens, it’s going to be our fault.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Alf said.
Rene swung his crowbar at the case of antique lighters. The glass door splintered but didn’t break. It took three more whacks before it shattered. Then Rene set down the crowbar and began plucking lighters out of the case, transferring them one by one to the empty duffel bag. At last I understood why he’d come: the lighters were easy to carry, easy to unload at pawn shops or flea markets, and worth a combined $7,500 or more.
“Stop,” I told him. “You can’t take those.”
Rene ignored me. I was just a gnat in his ear. I turned to Tyler. He picked up the crowbar and was feeling its heft. It was maybe twenty-four or thirty inches long, the sort of wrecking bar used by EMTs to pry the doors off a smashed vehicle. I stepped in front of Tyler and said, “I didn’t come here to steal.”
“Me neither,” Tyler said.
He finished the last of the Snickers and dropped the wrapper. I knelt down to pick it up. Zelinsky was always on me and Mary to keep the showroom neat, to pick up our garbage and recycle our soda cans and get rid of our scrap paper. Tyler watched me reach for the wrapper and grinned. “Don’t bother.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not finished.”
He hooked the crowbar on the candy rack, tipping it forward and spilling all the shelves—an avalanche of gums and mints and chocolate falling over my sneakers. Alf and Clark backed away, but Rene didn’t even flinch. He kept plucking lighters from the case like he was picking apples.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Let’s go.”
But Tyler was just getting warmed up. He twirled the crowbar like a baton and walked toward the aisle with all of the typewriters.
“Six months I worked here,” he said. “I swept the floors. I stocked the shelves. I fixed the whole goddamn inventory. That room on the second floor? It was a mess when I got here. I designed that room. I built those shelves.”
With the curved end of the crowbar, he hooked the mouth of a Brother portable typewriter and yanked it off the shelf. It landed with a crash and Tyler stepped over it, moving onto the next machine, an old-fashioned black Olivetti. “I showed up on time, I did my work, and the asshole fired me anyway.”
“You stole from him,” I said.
“Bullshit,” Tyler said. “I never stole a thing from this place. But I’ll tell you what happened, if you really want to know.”
The Olivetti hit the floor and split open like a melon, cracking down the middle and revealing its oily black innards. Tyler looked crazed, and I wondered if he was high on drugs, because what he said next was ridiculous: “First of all, Mary Zelinsky is the horniest bitch I’ve ever met. From the day I started working here, she couldn’t keep her hands off me. Every time Daddy turned his back, she’d start rubbing up against me. Pushing her tits in my face. I’d leave the store and she’d come racing after me on Market Street, hanging on my elbow like I was her boyfriend.”
He toppled three more typewriters, knocking them to the floor, then turned to a shelf of Elmer’s Glue—twelve white bottles with orange tips, arranged in rows like toy soldiers. With one swing of the crowbar they went scattering across the store. And through it all Tyler kept talking: “For weeks, I put up with her crap. I figure she’ll get over it, she’ll lose interest. But she doesn’t lose interest, she just gets worse! She’s sending me letters and song lyrics. So one day I lay it out for her: I say, ‘Sorry, but you are never going to be my girlfriend. It’s not happening, ever.’ And that’s when she runs to Daddy. Tells him I tried to steal a lighter. And the asshole fires me on the spot.”
By this point Tyler had stopped smashing stuff. He was concentrating on telling his story, holding my eye contact to make sure I was paying attention. I nodded in all the right places but I knew it was bullshit, just like his stories about Se?ora Fernandez and banging girls on the roof of the train station.
“Now, if that’s not bad enough,” Tyler continued, “Zelinsky spreads the word in town so no one will hire me. And pretty soon I can’t pay the insurance on my bike. And the day after it lapses, I swear to God, Tack pulls me over and there goes my license. Now I’ve got no job and no way to get around. All because of Mary and her dad. So this is my little way of saying thanks, understand?”
Maybe if I’d answered “Yes,” the night would have ended right there. We would have taken the magazines and the lighters to the roof; we would have crossed the bridge and gone home.
Instead I said, “You’re full of shit.”
Tyler stared back at me, astonished. But I couldn’t help myself. Someone had to say it: he was full of shit. He knew it, I knew it, anyone who knew Mary knew it.
“Me? I’m full of shit?”
“Mary would never go for you,” I said. “She’s too good for you.”
Tyler snorted. “You don’t know that girl at all.”
“I know who I believe,” I said.