Passenger by Ronald Malfi Page B

remember all the horrible fucking things in your life that made you a people-eating psycho.”
    “Jesus, Clarence…”
    “Well,” he says, burning through a red light, “it don’t matter now.  You can be whoever you want now.  You gets to start over.  You lucky.”
    “I don’t feel lucky.”
    “Sure,” says Clarence.  “See, I had some opportunities to make something of myself.  You know what I’m sayin’?  Maybe I’d have a better job now.  Maybe I wouldn’t have to move junk from one part of the city to the other.  But now that’s what I do.  But, see, you get to do it all over, start fresh.  Man, that’s something!”  He laughs.  “Hey,” he says, “you think I can forget all my shit, too?  How’d you do it, do you think?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Seriously,” Clarence says, “you think you’re really a governmental spy?”
    “Sure,” I say, watching the row homes shuttle past the window, “why not?”
    “Then we best be careful.  You dig?  Keep a lookout.”
    “A lookout for what?”
    “For the peoples who might be out there looking to kill you, dog.”
    We spend the afternoon loading junk from different porches into the bed of Clarence’s pickup.  The porches are all residential and they are scattered throughout the city.  Often, there are people outside while we load the truck, and they offer us some coffee and, once, a plastic bag of potatoes.  They all seem to know Clarence.  Clarence works hard, whistling while he loads the truck, and we are both sweating and sore by the time we arrive at the Charles Street Salvation Depot and Auction Center.  It is an eclectic little shop with headless mannequins dressed in sequined harem garb and an old-fashioned bicycle with an oversized front tire in the front window.  Clarence winks and pulls the pickup down a brick alley that runs alongside the shop.  Someone has sprayed the phrasenigel sweeny lives along the brick in bright orange letters.  The pickup truck bucks and sputters and dies.  We climb out and begin the arduous task of relocating the junk from the bed of the truck into the store.
    Inside, the place is like a schizophrenic’s nightmare—a narrow corridor cluttered with relics of times forgotten, with papier-mâché parrots lazily twirling by lengths of catgut tacked to the ceiling tiles, with ceramic cats placed strategically about the floor like landmines, their eye sockets aglitter with emerald jewels.  Crossing through the corridor, I pass into the store itself, and I am immediately overcome by the mustiness of the place.  I get the feeling I’m breathing in the dust from an Egyptian tomb.  An enormous rainbow-colored parachute covers the ceiling, bowing slightly at its center.  Bric-a-brac gnomes patrol various shelves.  The hide of an alligator or crocodile—I cannot tell which—is splayed and pinned to one wall, directly below the mounted head of a rabbit with antlers.  A desk crowded with papers, books, a skateboard, a gold-leaf lamp in the shape of a nude woman, and a coonskin cap is shoved against one wall.  Behind it stirs a parchment-faced man in his seventies with great tufts of white hair sprouting like kudzu over his ears and large, roaming blue eyes.  A pair of suspenders is draped over his shoulders, but they hang loose, flapping against his ample belly and not affixed to his pants.  Much like everything else in the place, those suspenders serve no purpose.  Clarence sets down a bookcase he has carried from the bed of the pickup truck and introduces the proprietor to me as Wiley Jum.
    “Jum,” says Clarence, “this here’s Moe. Short for Mozart.”
    “H’do,” Wiley Jum growls, bobbing his head like a marionette.
    “Moe here, he’s a governmental spy, Jum. Had his mind wiped clean after his las’ mission and now he’s workin’ for me.”
    “Hmmm,” says Wiley Jum.
    “How ’bout that, Jum?  Got me a governmental spy on the payroll.”
    “Hmmm.”
    As we continue