True Story

I watch her pocket two Snickers bars while I’m ringing up the guy who always buys a can of Skoal and a tallboy.

His name is Billy. Nice guy, friendly. Works at the tire factory or the auto shop, I can’t remember which.

He’s watching the girl, too, as she heads to the front doors, the afternoon sun glaring on the cases of water bottles and the rack of sunglasses.

Billy says to the girl, “Hey, I saw what you did. Put them back.”

I wave Billy off and give her a look like I’m sorry we interrupted her day.

“It’s okay. Go,” I tell her.

Billy shoots me a look like, What the hell? I thought you were one of the good guys.

“She looks hungry,” I offer in the way of explanation.

“But stealing’s not right,” Billy says. “You should call the cops.”

By now, the girl has slipped through the doors, and we watch her walking along the grassy median that separates the highway. Semis and $80,000 Dodge Rams whiz by, spraying her with water that hasn’t drained off from last night’s storms.

I can feel Billy watching me watch her. “I’ve seen her before. Nothing good’s coming from the way she’s living,” he says.

“And we’re doing any better?” I say, somewhere between dead serious and a joke.

Billy shrugs, slaps a twenty down, tells me to keep the change. Tells me work’s been picking up lately, that it’s a good time in his life and he’s not messing it up again.

In this version, Billy shows up with some girl tagging after him.

Her hair and clothes are damp, like they’d been parked down by the river and out of nowhere she decided to jump in for a quick swim. Maybe they just met and she was trying to impress him. Maybe she slipped on a rock. Probably Billy told her, “Do this and I’ll love you forever.” Billy seems like that kind of guy.

Or maybe she’s his wife. She looks a lot younger than Billy, but what do I know? People can surprise you. They surprise me all the time. Like that woman who comes in wearing a business suit and heels, hair in one of those fancy chignons, and buys one pack of Swisher Sweets Minis, grape flavor, that she tucks into the bottom of her purse. You’d never guess it looking at her, fancy corporate woman like that, smoking cheap cigarillos on the sly.

Billy sees me looking at the girl’s wet hair and clothes. You’d think he’d offer up some kind of explanation, but he just tells her to go grab them a couple of candy bars, whatever looks good, while he points at the Skoal cans behind me.

He asks me if I’ve heard about the couple going around robbing convenience stores—In broad daylight. Can you believe the balls?—and I tell him the liquor store a few blocks over got hit last night.

“No shit?” Billy says. “Changing up their MO. That’s smart.”

The girl shows back up and puts two Snickers bars down on the counter.

Billy pulls a twenty out of his shirt pocket. “Yep. Keep them guessing. That’s real smart.”            He asks the girl, “Hey, don’t you think that’s smart?”

“I guess,” she says, not taking her eyes off the Snickers bars.

“You guess?” Billy looks at me like he can’t believe he’s having this conversation. “You guess? Smart and sly’s where it’s at. How many times I gotta go over this with you?”

This is the version I tell the cops:

He pulled a gun on me, not the other way around. I lunged over the counter when I saw that gun pointed in my face, grabbed his arm and we wrestled over it, because I wasn’t about to die making $12 an hour where people are always shoplifting shit anyway, and besides, who am I to know what someone’s going through, why they feel the need to steal candy bars or tallboys, maybe they’re hungry, or maybe they had a bad day at their own shitty job.

What? Yeah, I’ve seen him in here before, he comes in a lot, maybe he’s been casing the place; sometimes he comes in with a girl who always looks like she just rushed out of the shower, sometimes not, guy’s always friendly.

Yeah, could be. Now that I think about it, maybe too friendly. And she never talks, but today she kept yelling Don’t you hurt him! and I’m thinking what a weird thing to say, he pulled a gun on me. And then I notice they both have the exact same hazel eyes, and it hits me, who the hell brings their kid along to a robbery, and then I feel this pain shoot up my arm, all the way to the shoulder, and I see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear him, and then my ears pop and I hear screaming, and he’s looking down at the floor, up at me, down at the floor, up at me, then he’s running out the doors, then you guys show up and all I can do is point toward the highway, and I can’t remember the girl running after him, you’d think he wouldn’t leave her behind, right? His own daughter?

No, sir, never have. Nothing good comes from having one around. Only one time I’ve ever held a gun. Thrust in my hand by my dad, uncle, one of Dad’s friends? I can’t remember anymore. Only thing I remember is how cold and heavy it was, how it wasn’t at all like I’d expected, how surprised I was. It felt just like that.