Rocky, a Recruit

June 2020 | Realistic Fiction | 2500 words

Four months after the paint dried on the exterior walls of Rocky’s brand new restaurant, the rioters marked it up in gruesome red spray paint. The vandals blocked out and added letters to the sign, disfiguring the quaint “Fargo Eatery” into the morbid “Fargone State.”

Rocky faced away from it. He stood on the curb while morning passersby toured the damage of the previous night from the safety of the empty roads, kicking half-empty water bottles out of their way. A young woman, holding her puppy high above the shards of glass littering the pavement, gawked at the graffiti behind Rocky. He tried to flag down her attention with a coupon card and a saturated grin, forgetting that his mouth was hidden behind a mask.

“Beautiful day,” he offered. As she continued to stare at the wall behind him, Rocky added, “Don’t mind us. Just working here.”

Behind him, Jenny plunged a sponge mop into a recycled ice cream pail. She rubbed on the letter n for the sixth time that morning. Her head sank below her shoulders. Her eyes rolled back. She stopped and exhaled, louder than she already had been, finally getting Rocky’s attention.

“I haven’t started open duties,” she said.

Rocky took a deep breath. There had been time for her to start her open duties before he asked her to clean the graffiti off the wall for him, but he left that issue undiscussed. He scrutinized her progress on the wall, which, if anything, had started stripping away the white letters of his sign, rather than the red letters of the rebellion. He forced a cheerful, “Go on ahead,” and took the mop from her.

As she flew inside, Rocky caught sight of a group of young men in black t-shirts, wearing bandanas over their mouths to protect themselves from the virus. He pretended not to see them, but his spine instantly stiffened. He lowered the mop discreetly and picked at the bun in his hair—in his rush this morning, he had tied it too neatly. Sensing the young men approaching, he kicked the ice cream pail over, releasing the flood of soapy water into the gutter, and strode inside his air conditioned restaurant. Maybe it was better to leave the message up for now.

When he had cycled into town that morning, he had seen that other stores were not only graffitied but kicked in—and perhaps looted—during the latest riot. The members of the rebellion were getting bolder and bolder, marking and dismantling establishments that they deemed threats to their movement. Rocky was sure someone would come through with bolt cutters and steal his bike if he put it on the rack outside, so he stowed it in the back of the store, with the janitorial supplies. Until today, he had stayed unwavering in the face of the danger, sure that he and the Fargo Eatery would be safe as long as they mirrored the culture of the kids who were fighting for their rights. When he saw the spray paint on the wall, he nearly lost his cool. He thought he had made it clear he was on their side.

“Jenny, can you come here for me?” he called from the kitchen. When she didn’t come out right away, he had to come to her spot at the smoothie bar. As Jenny counted the money, Rocky asked, “What’s the protest about? I mean what is it really about?”

Jenny took her time formulating a response. “Sort of like class issues. Black Lives Matter, yeah, but class issues too I think? Abolish the police.” She cleared her throat and carefully added, “. . . And workers’ rights, workers’ wages . . . stuff like that.”

“I’m not asking for any reason.” Rocky leaned against the counter. Then: “I was just thinking about joining it.”

Jenny tried to lock the money drawer with the wrong key. “Oh?” She blinked at the lock. “It’s more like a war now.”

Rocky shrugged. “I stand with them. We’re a progressive establishment. We take pride in black lives.”

After two months back in the restaurant with Jenny, he still hadn’t figured out how to read her masked face. Right now, her eyes alone revealed nothing except, perhaps, a slight nervousness around him. But she had always been shy around her manager. As she moved to take the stools down from the counter, she asked, “Have you donated to the movement?”

Rocky sniffed. “Maybe we should. I was thinking, more so, I’d talk to the governor, you know. Make good use of my privilege for some meaningful, peaceful police reform.”

“Police abolition,” she corrected.

Rocky looked out the windows of his restaurant. Not a single one had been broken. He knew he had to count himself lucky for that. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

That day, the number of customers he served was among the lowest since the pandemic restrictions were lifted. Having nothing to keep him adequately busy, he found himself in and out of the front door, letting his anxiety steer him repeatedly toward the red, dripping warning on his wall.

After that day, Rocky didn’t take his normal route home. His wife agreed to keep the security cameras on all the time. And he began hiding his Mustang in the garage. He doubted any of the protestors lived in his neighborhood, but if they ever came near his lawn, spying his driveway from beyond the sprinklers, he knew it would be all over for his car.

There was something about wealth that the rioters had grown increasingly bold about demonizing. In one week, he watched as the rebellion destroyed stores, hotels, and other local businesses. Rocky didn’t consider himself a wealthy man by any regard, but it was too late to take chances. The Mustang had been a gift from Sean Hoggarth, his friend, mentor, and regular patron at the Fargo Eatery. The sickening feeling he got when he first saw “Fargone State” on his wall was nothing compared to the thought of finding his gift defaced, of having to speak to Sean about it, of confronting the truth that even his personal life could be infiltrated by a movement that apparently couldn’t distinguish one’s politics from one’s personal livelihood.

Rocky thought about Sean again when he rode into town with his brown hair freely floating behind his shoulders, pondering how he was going to respond to not one but two text messages from his cooks telling him they were quitting. “If this is about COVID, you can take time off,” he told them. “I can’t get you pandemic pay, but you can take all the time you need.” The cooks said they were going to travel across the Midwest to protest. Protest . . . it had started to sound like an affront. It was mutiny, and he needed advice on how to stop it before his restaurant sunk. Sean would know what to say to his crew members at a time like this.

Rocky passed Sean’s bar and squeezed the brakes. He heard a pop as the air in his front tire yielded to a crumpled tear gas canister. He was surprised it wasn’t the glass that had popped the tire—shards of it had been blown out of the windows of Sean’s bar, and now lay strewn in front of the dismantled neon sign. The bar was completely ravished.

Once back in his office, Rocky punched a number into the landline. After two dial tones, Sean answered his phone.

“Have you talked to the police?” asked Rocky.

He could imagine what Sean’s face looked like simply by hearing the “tch” at the other end of the line. “Of course I didn’t call the police, Rocky. What are you thinking?”

Rocky couldn’t wrap his head around his incredulity. Sean wasn’t black. He should have no problem getting justice served.

“You know, you had a really good idea,” said Sean. “I wasn’t so sure about it, but now I really understand where you’re coming from.”

“What idea?”

“Joining the protestors. That gal at the smoothie bar mentioned something when I was there last week. It stuck with me for a while. Now, here we are.”

The fan in Rocky’s office blew over his face and dried his eyes as he spaced out, sucking on Sean’s words. Here we are.

“I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved if you hadn’t made the first move,” said Sean. “But this protest is really heating up—I should’ve seen it sooner. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of a brick when all this comes to a point.”

Rocky stood up and clutched a rope of his hair and paced.

“Karen and I will be at the protest early tomorrow,” said Sean. “She’s going to pack a cooler. We’ll make sure to find you. Bring Rachelle, won’t you?”

He remembered a time when Sean had said he would be all-in with him, no matter what, as long as Rocky returned the favor. What had his reasoning been? Always remember that we’re people first, and businessmen second, he said. When the lights go out in our stores for the last time, we need living souls to lean on.

By the time Rocky hung up, it was 8:39. The lights were still off in the restaurant. Not even Jenny had clocked in yet. She never would.

Rocky was no stranger to his own reflection, but the next morning, he found himself staring at it longer than usual. He knew how to put up his hair to look younger and more lax, but how did one put up their hair for a riot? He spent so much time looking in the mirror that he forgot to tell Rachelle what to expect. He watched her take the key ring from the hook, nonchalant and dressed in pink, as though she was going to pick up neighborhood kids from swimming lessons. He wondered if there was a way he could object to taking the Mustang.

As they drove to Island Park, protestors shuffled around their car. Rocky tensed in the passenger seat and lifted the top of his mask until it almost covered his eyes. Several young black women, seeing him stare at them, raised their fists. He mirrored their salute, smiling, forgetting that his smile wasn’t visible.

Rocky and Rachelle parked and locked their car outside a Mexican restaurant, then carried their poster boards past hundreds of people of all different ages. Rarely did they pass someone who didn’t protect their face with a mask. So many eyes drifted toward and away from Rocky, so many uncocked eyebrows—bland, expressionless faces that harbored untold thoughts and feelings. Rocky nodded to many of them, expecting that they might recognize him and be put off if he didn’t acknowledge them. Of course, no one said anything.

They began marching before they even knew where they were going. Rocky had never experienced traveling between the old, repurposed, gentrified buildings without the partition of a vehicle’s windows to separate him from the town he served. He felt at once exposed and cradled by the flow of the demonstrators. While he had always thought of the movement as destructive, he had never considered that it might be this large. For some reason, those two characteristics never joined in his mind as he pictured the group of people who threatened his restaurant. Everyone in Fargo was here today.

In the middle of a chant, as he passed the Fargo Eatery, he stopped, temporarily disrupting the flow of many of the people around him. An idea hit him. He pulled down his mask. “Rachelle, take a picture of me,” he said. “From over there.” He motioned to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Rocky lifted his sign up to his heart—it was a simple recreation of a wage protest sign he had seen online. He smiled. His whitened teeth shone for the world to see.

“Hey,” said a young man. “Stop that.”

A woman joined him. “This isn’t Coachella.”

Several others stopped to stare.

“It’s okay,” said Rocky. “This is my restaurant.”

Now others took out their phones to record. A crowd like a blood clot clung to the front of the Fargo Eatery while the rest of the protest pulsed on.

“Do you really believe that? ‘Every age, raise the wage?’”

Rocky couldn’t tell where the voices were coming from anymore. There were too many masked faces bearing down on him. He averted his eyes, pulled his mask back over his mouth, and looked down at his sign. It hadn’t taken him long to make it. All he did was copy the picture he had seen online, stroke for stroke, with a red poster marker. It was mimicry. It hadn’t even felt like he was writing words, much less words of his own.

He looked up. He could hear Rachelle’s voice, but couldn’t find her behind the sea of camera lenses.

Then, in the span of a sharp inhale, a white man with goggles around his neck flung himself out of the crowd, brandishing a skateboard like a maul. Two more men came after him. Rocky flinched, but the rioters didn’t attack him. They took their fury out on the windows of the Fargo Eatery.

Rocky once again felt himself lose his cool as he saw the sun’s reflection bend and warble in the glass, under the repeated strain of the skateboard. The window didn’t break, but it would at any moment.

Rachelle’s voice pealed above the uproar. She had almost reached the front of the circle that surrounded the impromptu stage.

Rocky finally raised his voice. “Hey!”

It had no effect. Even when other voices in the crowd called out for the men to stop, they persisted. Onlookers twitched, half in motion, ready to intervene. Rocky turned to the crowd and held out his arm—wait. He sprung forward, yanked the skateboard from the leader of the trio, and dropped it like a hot brownie pan. All three men stopped then, ready to fight. Rocky knew he had only a split second of their attention. Using the time he had, he picked up a loose chunk of concrete off the ground and threw it directly at the window.

The glass shattered victoriously. Rocky felt heat hit his ears. He let himself imagine the heat was from a fiery explosion within the building, and not his own disbelief at the images he watched blossom in front of him—the concrete cartwheeling off his fanned fingers; the shiny, dark surface of the glass turning pale as a network of cracks erupted on the surface; the pale sheets of glass falling down like curtains and sagging on the sidewalk; and the reflection of his own face, looking so alien among a backdrop of rebels, instantly transforming into the exposed dark heart of his four-month-old restaurant.

He gawked at his work while the trio brushed the remaining shards of glass out of the window frame and started breaking the others. One of the men placed a towel over the window’s ledge and leapt into the building. His silhouette tore stools down from the smoothie bar. Everyone outside just watched, holding up their phones. No one called the police.

Rocky turned around and took a sweeping look at the diverse crowd beholding the scene. He made eye contact with every camera lens. With his mouth obscured by the mask, only those closest to him could tell that he was laughing.