About his own family, where they were from, he knew a little more; when his grandparents or his aunts and uncles got together on the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving it was pretty much all they talked about. All conversations tended toward simple genealogy and geography: who was related to whom, who lived where now, where they’d lived in the first place. There was a numbing comfort to it. These conversations, endlessly repeatable at any family gathering, were a zero-stakes game. Is Pete still in Tama? No, he got a job over in Marshalltown working in sales for Lennox. Is that the air-conditioning people? Well, Pete says “climate control.” Oh, “climate control,” is that it? Sure, sure.
Tracing of movements was the whole of the process. If the recruiter from Caterpillar collared Mike at the job fair and offered to double his salary inside of two years, then that was how Mike and his family ended up in Peoria: but simple movement atop a shared, internalized map was still the heart of the action, the desired point of engagement. Bill’s up in Storm Lake now. Did he sell the Urbandale place? The place off Seventy-second? No, that was a rental. Oh, is that right? Yes, the Handsakers owned it, they rented it out for years until their youngest got back from Coe. You mean Davy? Well, but he goes by Dave now. From Davy to Dave to Dave’s parents to their folks you could get a fair bit of talking done, but the trail went cold at about that point. Jeremy’s mom’s grandparents were Russian somehow, one of those places that wasn’t really Russia any more. His great-grandfather on his dad’s side had come from Germany. But it went no further than that. The tracking of local movements was sufficient work until it came time to part ways, and they’d pick up where they left off at Labor Day, or Christmas.
By the time he was fourteen, Jeremy could locate magnetic north from practically any place in Story County, even in the total absence of known landmarks. Knowing where you were: this seemed like a big part of the point of living in Nevada, possibly of being alive at all. In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.
*
Video Hut opened at ten in the morning, which was ridiculous. Anybody returning tapes before mid-afternoon just used the slot in the door, and hardly anybody ever came in to rent before noon at the earliest. Still, there’d be one person sitting behind the counter just in case, waiting for the store’s day to actually begin. Sometimes hours would pass.
There was a television mounted above the racks in one corner of the store. During shop hours it showed movies continuously. By policy, these had to be movies with a PG rating or lower. Picking out the movie and starting it up was one of the duties listed on the A.M. OPEN sheet, a six-point list printed on neon-green paper and affixed to the counter by the register with clear tape whose corners had frayed and blackened over the years:
1. lights front and back
2. power up register
3. count cash on hand in strongbox, record in notebook and move to register
4. file slot returns, return cases to displays
5. pick tape (PG or lower) for in-store, start up computer
6. check database for tapes overdue 3+ plus days and make phone calls
The list was there to make the opening routine look like work, though in practice it took Jeremy about five minutes altogether. He went to the computer before even turning on the lights; it was a Gateway 2000. Gateway’d still been a more or less local company when the computer was new; it creaked through its start-up routine for a full five minutes now. By the time it was ready to use, Jeremy’d gone through everything else on the list except the overdues. He wasn’t going to call anybody about overdues before noon, anyway.
Underneath the counter there were six or seven tapes that got played in rotation—this was the “pick tape” step, almost entirely mechanical. The Muppet Movie, Bugsy Malone, A League of Their Own, Star Wars: most people working the opening shift just grabbed one without looking. There were a couple of newer ones that got traded in and out from month to month. Jeremy usually went for these, keeping the sound muted until customers started showing up.
He had Reindeer Games in his hand when he got to the store, so he put it on with the sound down and paid it no mind, letting it run while he leafed through a summer courses catalog from DMACC. Joan from Mary Greeley stopped in to trade out a couple of exercise tapes for new ones; the hospital got these tapes for free, which was fine, since nobody else rented them. Joan used them for classes on the convalescent ward. She came up to the counter and nodded over her shoulder toward the screen overhead: the picture went black and white for a second as Jeremy looked up, then stabilized.
“Not expecting a lot of customers today?” she said. Charlize Theron was in a swimming pool untying her bikini.
“What? Oh. Sorry, sorry,” said Jeremy, reaching for the remote.
Joan laughed. “No, it’s fine.” He stopped the tape just as things were starting to get explicit. “Sorry, I watched this last night, I don’t know what I was thinking.”