Pirates of the Retail Wasteland Read Online Free Page A

calls are a lot harder to trace than normal calls, but it was cold enough to freeze a guy’s nuts off, and I didn’t consider my nuts to be a reasonable sacrifice for a prank call.
    On the other end of Da Gama Park was the little triangle made up of Venture Street, Douglas Avenue, and Seventieth Street, which, when I was a kid, was the main downtown area. Now, though, we called it the old downtown. Most of the stores there were closed up; nobody really went there anymore, since all of the new strip malls had gone in on Cedar Avenue. It seemed like people hardly even went to the regular mall anymore.
    As we walked down Douglas, the diagonal street, we passed Cornersville Grocery, the little grocery store that no one had ever gone to. It had been the first business to close down, and had been sitting empty for years now. An oldtimey sign painted on the window said SINCE 1957, and under that some joker had scribbled in “until 2002” with a permanent marker. It might as well have been a gravestone for the old downtown—all around the triangle, and all down Venture Street, there were hollowed-out shells of stores that had closed and never reopened.
    But Sip, the coffee shop on Venture Street, was still in business, and had become our usual base of operations outside of the gifted-pool room and Fat Johnny’s. Friday nights were the open mike nights, and though there were usually only two or three people with anything to read or play, Dustin Eddlebeck, poet laureate of the middle school men’s room wall, was almost always one of them. We thought it was important that we be there to support him.
    Inside, Sip had the look of a basement that someone had started trying to turn into a rec room in about 1982 but never quite finished. Its walls were the same shade of green as my grandmother’s teakettle, there was artwork painted by customers on the walls, and most of the lighting came from the little stained-glass lamps that hung from the ceiling at odd angles. Some were low enough that you hit your head if you weren’t careful. A sign on the wall invited mean people to “piss off,” and now and then there would be a cat on one of the tables. I suppose you could say it was the last bohemian enclave in suburbia.
    Some kind of classical music with accordions was coming out of the speakers mounted on some bookshelves. I thought it sounded like a tango, which meant that Trinity, our favorite waitress, was probably working that night. She went to the high school, and dreamed of running away to become a ballroom dancer—she was into tango, in particular, because it was so sexy that the Pope once declared it a mortal sin.
    When things were slow around the shop, she was often seen tango dancing across the store with an invisible partner. Officially, though, she was a punk rocker. Her hair was dyed deep blue, and though she dressed in vintage ball gowns most nights, she had them covered in safety pins and punk rock buttons.
    Dustin and James were already there at one of the larger tables, and we sat down to join them.
    “Evening, escapees,” said Dustin. Neither he nor James bothered to show up at the basketball game ahead of time—if they’d said they wanted to go to a sporting event, their parents would have known right away that they were up to something.
    “
Bonsoir,
butt-sticks,” said James. If it wasn’t the French that qualified him as gifted, it was probably his genius at inventing his own slang terms. The guy was an artist.
    “What’s happening?” I asked.
    “We were just talking about my class project,” said James.
    “The one about Coach Hunter?” Anna asked. They both smiled.
    “That thing about getting him to kill himself over the course of the semester was a masterstroke, Leon,” said Dustin.
    “You guys
do
know I wasn’t serious, right?” I asked. “I was just messing around.”
    “Of course we do, ass monkey,” said James. “But we happen to think you were on to something. We probably can’t get