Shoplifting Will Set You Free

Fiction by Alberto Vourvoulias

“Open up, handsome. Let’s see what you’ve got inside.”

Mrs. Flores is locking up tonight. Her husband’s in back, closing out the registers and counting the cash. We queue by the front door.

Chucho holds his army surplus jacket wide. “If you’re going to act like a police state, you’ve got to pay more than minimum wage.”

Mrs. Flores’ fleshy hands palpate Chucho’s waist with conviction. “Touch me any lower, lady, and you’ll have to marry me.”

Titters from the line.

“Get out of here, lover boy,” Mrs. Flores says, then dismisses us with a wave.

“Except you.” She points at me. “You come.”

The office is air-conditioned to arctic blast, for which I’m grateful. The lingerie wound and knotted around my body is warmer than expected. I’m beginning to sweat.

Old Man Flores sits behind a big metal desk. He sports a Machete mustache and a Buddha belly, a clash of civilizations in one body. Two battered chairs face the desk on the other side. Mrs. Flores motions and I sit.

“My wife tells me you’re a good worker,” he says. I smile at Mrs. Flores, who smiles back — sweet, sweet — two packets of Splenda.

“She tells me you quit school to take care of your grandmother.”

I nod.

“She had Alzheimer's.”

Another nod.

“My wife says your grandmother would steal things from stores without remembering what she’d done. You’d return them and apologize.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Your grandmother died recently.”

“Three months and seven days ago.”

“You are a good person,” he says. “A moral person. You know right from wrong.” He shows his teeth when he speaks. “Not everyone is,” he adds. “Listen, keep this to yourself, but someone is stealing from us. We believe it’s an employee.”

I look down at the mold-colored carpet. Beads of moisture run down my back. The air conditioner fan kicks in and out with a clack, promising breeze, changing its mind.

“Who?”

“We suspect Chucho, but don’t have proof yet. We gave him a job out of kindness after he was let out of the bin. His parents are good people, but there is something wrong with that boy, something deeply off. ”

I notice a dappling on the rug — grey on grey — a pattern, a stain?

“Have you seen anything suspicious? Anything at all?” He exchanges a glance with his wife. “If you help us, we’re thinking of making you Assistant Manager. It means more money, more responsibility.”

Chucho’s car is on the far side of the mall lot, behind the supermarket and the foreclosed Cheesecake Factory. It’s parked under a faltering street light that hisses, strobes and whines. The other cars have given the diseased lamp a wide berth.

Chucho has reclined the driver’s seat all the way flat. He lies with his head in the shadows. The back seat is littered with clothes and assorted items lifted from stores, things with price tags but no value, things that were born junk.

I open the driver’s side door. Chucho keeps his eyes shut. He’s listening to a song stitched almost entirely out of feedback and electronic distortion. It sounds like a machine talking to another machine, or a chorus of rusted doors, opening and closing in unison.

I climb in on top of him. I press hard against his long muscular body. I kiss his closed eyes and lips. “They offered me a promotion to rat you out.”

Chucho reaches under my shirt to undo the wrapped clothing next to my skin. He unwinds and dumps the stolen articles in back. His hands return to my nipples, but his head is still inside the sound.

“Do you hear it?” Chucho asks.

This song has a backstory. The sound engineer walked out during the recording. He would not even sit and listen. This was not music — the way Mozart is music, the way Ravi Shankar and Ja Rule are music. He refused to be implicated.

My grandmother knew melodies by heart. “A girlfriend gave me the record and a forward boy taught me to dance slow,” she’d say. But song, friend, and boy floated in a nameless, faceless haze — cut loose from ties of affection and chains of possession. “Who the hell are you?” She demanded every morning for years. “Stop stealing my stuff, bitch,” she’d yell whenever I retrieved items from her handbag.

“Do you hear it?” Chucho repeats.

Words are music we don’t dance to. Noises are words we cannot understand. The singing of the bulb above our heads, the tremor of light beating down on the roof of the car, like a broken piece of sky that cries and cries, like a dry rain, it floods the sea of parking lots that surround us, the shuttered, darkened malls, and highways that rush to empty nowhere. Yes, I hear it.

Alberto Vourvoulias was born in Mexico and grew up in Guatemala during a time when that country was torn by civil war and drug violence. His parents brought him to the United States when he was 16 years old. He’s worked as a journalist in both Spanish and English-language media, including Time Magazine and El Diario. He’s taught in the Master's Program in Bilingual Journalism at CUNY in New York. He’s also taught courses in politics at Yale University and in the New Jersey prison system.