"Can I help you?" The guy had snuck up on me.
"How long has this place been open?"
"Don't know," he said. "I've been here two months. Are you looking for new drapes?"
"Has it been here longer than five years?"
"Still don't know," he said, checking up and down the aisle, if anyone else needed his services.
"I used to live here."'
"In Home Depot?"
"Home Depot was built on top of my house. I'm trying to find out when my house was knocked down"
I wondered if I was in the exact place where my bedroom used to be. The bikini girls. All the love I yanked from myself. Or maybe I stood where the bathroom used to be. The smell of hydrogen peroxide. Mom rubbing soaked socks or cotton balls or coffee filters on my shiners and singing one of her John Lennon songs in the softest voice in the universe.
"Has anything out of the ordinary happened here?" I said to the salesman.
He smirked, leaned in close to me, close enough that I knew he had barbecue sauce at lunch. "Got a lady's number last week. Took her to dinner." He flicked his eyebrows. "Then took her home."
"What about the floor?"
"Sir?"
"Has the floor ever moved? Stretched? Have the aisles ever gotten longer?"
My good hand got attacked from the inside, felt smothered in gunshots, like there was a tiny me and a tiny Letch walking through the desert, walking with our shotguns and aiming at the doves but missing, bullets imbedding into my hands.
"I'll be right back," the orange-vested salesman said, scurrying away.
I was all alone, the book of matches still in my pocket.
If they were here, hiding somewhere, maybe I should smoke them out. I mean, there I was surrounded by rolls and rolls of drapes and curtains, which was basically a huge cache of kindling, and I had a book of matches and I could feel the snake's venom bloating my veins, percolating, searing, ordering me to complete my mission, to find my mom and Letch and finish this.
I ducked behind one of the hanging curtains and sat on a stack of extra drapes, all rolled into thin tubes and covered in plastic casings to protect them. I struck a match. The first one lit the edges of four different curtains, and the second lit six, tried to stretch the next match to light eight and ended up burning my finger, a black smudge across my fingerprint.
It all started to take.
To smoke.
The burning plastic produced an awful smell, like singed hair, like old lady Rhonda's couch. I shimmied across the stacks of curtains, lighting the next group, and that was when the sand cracked the floor, pushing up through the concrete's slits. Sidewinders wiggling through the cracks, purring, purring.
And then I saw Letch. Sitting about twenty feet away from me. Sitting next to little-Rhonda, but he wasn't wearing his miner's helmet. Sitting on some rolled-up curtains.
Letch had antifreeze all over the front of his white shirt.
Me, Rhonda, watching them.
Suddenly they weren't sitting on the rolled-up curtains anymore. Suddenly they were sitting on the amnesty bench. Rickety wooden thing with a plastic red and yellow awning. Letch said, "You've got sixty seconds," and the kid said, "I think you're a bastard."
I ran over to them and tried to grab Letch, to scream at him, but they couldn't hear me, and he couldn't feel my hands on him.
He said to the kid, "Forty-five seconds."
He said, "You never were very good at this," laughing at the kid, laughing at me.
I leaned over so our faces were only inches from each other. I said, "Why won't you leave us alone?" but he still couldn't hear me. I shut my eyes. My good hand fingered the matches in my pocket. I could hear people in the store saying things: "Where's that smoke coming from?" and "I think something might be burning!"
Finally, Letch looked at me, not the kid, looked right in my eyes and said, "Nice arm," and he ran his fingers up my arm's bend, and I wanted to do something to stop him, but I have to tell you that I liked the way his fingers felt on me.
The fire alarm went off.
'Where is she?" I said.
"Your guess is as good as mine."
I peeked my head out into the aisle, noticed the customers stampeding toward the exits. The orange-vested drones, scattering in every direction, tried to locate the smoke's source.
I grabbed the kid's hand, helped him off the amnesty bench, told him, "You better get lost." He took off running toward an exit, looking over his shoulder at me, all confused, a look that seemed to ask if it might be better if he stayed around to help, but I had to do this on my own.
There were voices, working their way toward us, orange vested voices no doubt, beginning to pinpoint the epicenter of all that was going wrong.
I looked at Letch and said it one last time, "I think you're a bastard."
"You can do better than that by now. Put your balls into it."
He'd taught me how to put my balls into things, and there was one last sequence of events that needed them: like striking a match and holding it to the amnesty bench's plastic red and yellow awning until it started to drip down on him. I put my balls into realizing that the only thing I had to burn today was him. Letch's face contorted into anger and he said, "What are you doing?" and I said, "I can finally do it," and he said, "Do what?" but I didn't answer, letting the awning melt, turning to hot wax, torture raining down on Letch, dousing him in color. He yelled and bellowed and shook his head around, trying to keep the freefalling colors out of his mouth, but the wax got so hot that it boiled on his skin. Violent, hysterical bubbles. Letch screamed, tried to get off the bench, but the wax, like glue, had fastened him to it and he couldn't move. He flailed his arms. I could see less and less of Letch as the colors smeared all over him.
I said, "Of course you love your own son," and Letch said, "You're not my son," which was true, but it didn't matter anymore. It didn't matter whose son I really was, because family could mean so many different things. It could mean anything. Maybe my mom was my mom, but maybe old lady Rhonda was my mom, or maybe there were no moms and there were no dads and there were no children, only people. Maybe that's enough.
The burning wax slathered all over Letch's face, dissolving his lips and eyes and nose, melting them to nothing, coating him in a red and yellow mask. I said, "Tell me where she is," and I could hear him trying to say things, but they were only mumbles mashed into the mask. I looked at him one last time: a statue, frozen, castrated. He was fixed to the amnesty bench, and I wondered, did that mean he'd tell the truth forever?
The last thing I did was fuzz his head, which didn't have hair anymore, but felt smooth like a rubber ball, very hot, swirled in color.
I slipped out into the aisle, acted like a panicked customer, too, except I wasn't running away, wasn't fiending for an exit, I was running up and down different aisles, looking for her. If he was here, she was here. I tried to blend in with the mania, the roiling fear of everyone else. I saw their faces and made mine look petrified, slaloming down random aisles, camouflaging myself as another person trying to make it out alive.
I turned down another one. There were four displaykitchens set up. Sinks, countertops, cupboards. Refrigerators. Microwaves. Pots and pans hanging off racks. Expensive light fixtures dangling over the stoves.
I ran by the first three of them, jumping over huge cracks in the floor and massive piles of sand, sidewinders winding all around me, purring. And as I sprinted past the last kitchen, I saw my mom standing there, and she said, "Are you hungry?" reaching into the freezer, pulling out some taquitos. She smiled. "I can thaw these if you're hungry."