Going Native by Stephen Wright Page A

(biggest inventory, lowest prices in greater Windy City area), an ugly cinder-block bunker he shared with Software Plus, manager Herb Blair or Nair or Nerd, good guy he succeeded in avoiding but for accidental encounters here at the Dumpster, where on this particular afternoon he was seated on a plump garbage bag in his usual dollar daddy uniform of pink polo shirt, gray pants, and gold-plated aviator frames, refreshing himself with the tonic fumes from his glass pipe, when a distinctly nonconsumer-type woman in a bowling shirt and ripped jeans rounded the corner and caught him in the act. He tried to palm the evidence, but fearing she had seen him anyway, he got mad, he came at her with a board in his fist.
    "Chill out, buddy." She reached into her pocket and showed him her pipe. She had been casing the store for a possible burglary attempt and was as surprised as he was by this crossing.
    His eyes kept going up and down her body. He invited her to join him behind the Dumpster, and without even bothering to exchange names, they settled into the serious business of racking up a few pipes, riding out on private currents, staring wordlessly on this involved backdrop of crumbling brick and cracked asphalt, the solitude deepening like the sky at dusk, and as beautiful, this silent sharing of isolates. In a profane world the passing of the pipe was a sacramental act.
    When he felt like speaking again, Mister CD said, "They found a body back here couple years ago. Back here with the trash. Some woman. All cut up. Face and hands burned almost all away."
    "Yeah?"
    "Just dumped here sometime during the night. Never did identify her, far as I know. Never found out who did it, either."
    "Bad." She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, checking for the umpteenth time this past minute her teeth, which felt, oddly enough, like gums.
    "Right here. Right where we're sitting."
    "Maybe you should put up a plaque."
    He looked at the insolence in her face, he looked at the nipples outlined on her shirt. "I like you," he said.
    So she met him for "lunch" back of the garbage the following day and the day after that and then a week and a half ago he moved her into his "bachelor pad." They were going on a mission together.
    Now she was holding in her hand an empty CD box, gazing into the cover (a leather-gloved fist brandishing a boy's dream of compressed firepower, the cannon-sized barrel a sleek chrome sculpture of naked cartoon womanhood) as if it were a pocket mirror. She opened the box and read the liner notes. She read the liner notes. She read the liner notes.
    He said something. He said something else. "Hey," he called, "I'm talking to you."
    She showed him the cover, 9mm Love by Burning Sore. "Did you know Axl Rose plays tambourine on this cut of 'Blood Depot'?"
    "Fucking Axl Rose. Forty-six with a bullet the first week and how many copies I order?"
    "I don't know."
    "I don't either."
    She weighed the little box in her hand. "Sure would like to hear it."
    "I'm working on it, okay? Tomorrow." He glanced around at the wadded sheets, feeling under his legs. "Okay, so where's the damn stem?"
    She was having thoughts and her thoughts were having thoughts, a regular birthing frenzy in the old cranium tonight, strangled cries and organic mess and a horde of deformed infants crawling like advancing troops over the rocks and nails and broken glass in her head, and suddenly she couldn't seem to determine with any certainty which was more pressingly real, these bloodied babies hunting for a way out, or the besieged voice most anxious to preserve its status as the imperial "I" that was looking for a way in -- a dilemma admitting neither easy response nor the measured pace of judicial deliberation, since the moment the question was posed she was engulfed by a wave of pure panic, as if nerves were being raked with a steel comb; she experienced a sense of being peeled away, ushered toward a revelation she wasn't capable of bearing, as when one