“You’re trying to get yourself hurt. And you’re about to succeed.”
He held out a hand, and I put the Solarid in it. If I dropped the camera—if it slipped out of my sweaty, shaking hand—I believe he would’ve killed me. Put his hand on my throat and squeezed. I believed that then, and I believe it now. His gray eyes regarded me with a cold, curdled fury, and his pocked face was as inexpressive as a rubber mask.
He tugged the camera away from me, and the moment passed. He swung his gaze to the young man and elderly woman behind the counter.
“The picture. Give me the picture,” he said.
Mat still seemed dazed from the camera’s flash. He looked at me. He looked at his mother. He seemed to have lost the thread of the entire conversation.
The Phoenician ignored him and focused his attention upon Mrs. Matsuzaka. He held out a hand. “That’s my photo, and I want it. My camera, my film, my photo.”
Her gaze swept the floor around her, and then she looked up and shrugged again.
“It popped out and fell on your side of the counter,” the Phoenician said, speaking loudly and slowly, the way people do when they’re hideously angry with a foreigner. As if translation were aided by volume. “We all saw it. Look for it. Look around your feet.”
Mat rubbed the balls of his palms into his eyes, dropped them, and yawned. “What’s up?” As if he had just shoved back the sheets and walked out of his bedroom into the middle of an argument.
His mother said something to him in Japanese, her voice rapid and distressed. He stared at her in a kind of foggy daze, then lifted his chin and looked at the Phoenician.
“What’s the problem, brah?”
“The picture. The photograph the fat kid took of you. I want it.”
“What’s the big deal? If I find it, you want me to autograph it for you?”
The Phoenician was done talking. He stalked around to the waist-high door that would let him in behind the counter and the cash register. Mat’s mom had returned to scanning the floor in a forlorn sort of way, but now her head twitched up, and she put her hand on the inside of the swinging door before he could come through. Her expression became severely disapproving.
“No! Customer stay other side! No, no!”
“I want that fucking photograph,” the Phoenician said.
“Yo, brah!” If Mat had been in a daze, he shook it off then. He stepped between his mother and the Phoenician, and suddenly Mat seemed very large. “You heard her. Back off. Company policy, no one on this side of the counter who don’t work here. You don’t like it? Buy a postcard and send your complaint to Mobil. They’re dying to hear from you.”
“Can we move this along? I have a baby in the car,” said the woman who was standing behind me with an armful of cat-food cans.
What? Did you think it was just the four of us in the Mobil Mart all this time? While I threw my Arctic Blu special at the Phoenician and he cursed and sulked and threatened, people were coming in, grabbing drinks and chips and plastic-wrapped hoagies and forming into a line behind me. By now the queue stretched halfway to the back of the store.
Mat moved behind the register. “Next customer.”
The mom with the armful of cans stepped carefully around that sci-fi-colored puddle of vividly glittering blue, and Mat began to ring up her purchases.
The Phoenician stared in disbelief. Mat’s curt dismissal was an outrage on a par with my flinging frosty Blu down his pants.
“You know what? Fuck this. Fuck this store and fuck this fat waste and fuck you, slant. I got enough gas to get out of this shithole, and that’s more than enough. I wouldn’t want to blow one penny more than absolutely necessary in this toilet.”
“That’s one eighty-nine,” Mat said to the woman with the cat food. “No extra charge for the afternoon’s entertainment.”
The Phoenician reached the door but paused, half in, half out, to glare back at me. “I won’t forget you, kid. Look both ways before you cross the street, know what I mean?”
I was too choked up with fright to squeak any kind of reply. He banged out the door. A moment later his Caddy blasted away from the pumps and onto the two-lane highway with a shrill whine of tires.
I used the rest of the paper towels to mop the slush off the floor. It was a relief to get down on my knees, below eye level, where I could have a semiprivate cry. I was thirteen, man. Customers stepped around me, paid for things, and left, considerately pretending they couldn’t hear my sniffling and choked gasps.
When I had the mess swabbed up (the floor was tacky but dry), I carried a great mass of sopping paper rags over to the counter. Mrs. Matsuzaka stood to one side of her son, her eyes far away and her mouth crimped in a frown—but when she saw me with my load of wet towels, she came out of her thoughts and reached for the big industrial wastebasket behind the counter. She wheeled it over toward me, and that’s when I saw it: The snapshot was face-down on the floor, in the corner, had slid under the bin and out of sight.
Mrs. Matsuzaka saw it, too, and went back for it, while I dumped my soggy paper towels into the trash can. She stared down at the photo with incomprehension. She looked over at me—then held it out so I could have a look.
It should’ve been a close-up of Mat. The lens had been right in his face.
Instead it was a photograph of me.
Only it wasn’t a shot of me from a few minutes ago. It was from a few weeks earlier. In the picture I sat in a molded plastic chair by the soda machine, reading Popular Mechanics and sipping on a giant plastic cup full of soda. In the Polaroid (Solarid?) I was wearing a white Huey Lewis T-shirt and a pair of knee-length denim shorts. Today I had on khakis and a Hawaiian shirt with pockets. The photographer had to have been standing behind the counter.
It didn’t make any sense, and I stared at it in complete bafflement, trying to figure out where it had come from. It couldn’t be the picture I’d just accidentally shot, but I also didn’t see how it could be a snap from a few weeks back. I had no memory of Mat or his mom taking my picture while I read one of Mat’s magazines. I couldn’t imagine why they’d want to do such a thing, and I had never seen either one of them with a Polaroid camera.
I swallowed and said, “Can I have that?”
Mrs. Matsuzaka took one last bewildered look at the photograph, then pursed her lips and put it on the counter. She slid it across to me, and when she took her hand back, she rubbed the tips of her fingers together, as if it had left a disagreeable coating on her skin.