By Trevor Keaton Pogue
Spring 2012 Kaplan Award Winner
It’s a Tuesday on a dusk in Seattle’s University District, and The Dollar Tree is filled with about twenty customers. Behind the farthest front counter, at check stand three, there is a young black girl in a faded black Dollar Tree polo shirt and a thin silver necklace. Her face looks like graph paper, every movement is repeatable and rigid. Because here, at The Dollar Tree, we are all, that is, every single worker and customer alike, the same person with the same forty items in the same restricting plastic hand basket. We are the bargain shoppers.
I walk through the aisles looking for nothing. I come to the frozen food. Rows of salted meat and potato and wheat products are all I see. It seems as if The Dollar Tree, in a fit of saving incentive, has somehow found themselves a way to turn the potato into a side dish for nearly every meal, and the pig into its continual companion. French fries sit next to microwavable hamburgers. Hash browns next to maple sausage and waffles. Every potato cut comes in a plastic bag. There is no choice here. All the vegetables come from the same supplier: T.J. Farms. On the front of the package, there are pictures of farmlands and big red barns full of John Deere tractors. Over and over again the illusion of an American farm industry is force fed to us.
To my left, there is a man buying shampoo and crackers. The cashier who’s assisting him, that’s Bolt. Bolt is a white guy with a face full of excitement. He looks like a kid who either has plans to work his way through dentistry school or is currently doing so. The man with the shampoo, I don’t get his name. But he’s the silent type, dressed in all black, and possibly at one time in his life may have worked on a chain gang next to a man named Sue. I do not like this man.
My next stop is the balloon aisle. The amazing thing at The Dollar Tree is they seem to have nearly everything your conventional store like Rite Aid or Walgreens would have, it’s just all of it seems to have been laying around in the back of a discarded semi for a year or so’s time. The packages are dusty and the bottles all have a less-than-fresh snap to them.
I round the corner of the candy aisle, making my way to the stationery section when I see him. Down there on the floor below me, there is a man in a dark grey windbreaker and blue jeans. His hands are outstretched. His face lies in the metal pillow of the shelf tile. There are two piles of blood. Maybe pile isn’t the right word, perhaps they were more like smears. The first is next to his right hand and the other beside his mid section. Because I am not wearing my glasses and my vision is equal to that of a starless tree, it doesn’t immediately register. I stand there, looking at him for awhile. After thirty seconds and the back and forth decidings of-
Should I poke him? Should I try to help him?
“…Key to register three!” The loudspeaker says.
I walk slowly over to the back counter. Bolt’s still there. Still sharing small talking with the man in black. I wait for a pause to interject.
“Excuse me,” I say, “but are you aware that there’s a man passed out in your stationery aisle?”
Bolt’s eyes become the face of a clock.
“Yeah I saw that,” the man in black says.
“Hold on just one second,” Bolt says to the man.
I follow Bolt.
“Next to the bathrooms,” I say.
The bleeding man is still there.
Bolt rushes away to the front of the store. A few seconds later, a middle-aged black woman, who I can only assume is The Dollar Tree’s manager on-duty, thus making her Bolt’s manager, arrives.
“Grab those wetfloor signs,” she tells Bolt.
It’s then I walk around to the opposite end of the aisle and round the corner.
Separated by bubble wrap and a thin layer of wall, I listen.
Aisle 9, my current isle, is the fake flower and coloring book section.
“Call 911!” I hear someone say.
Soon after, my aisle fills. A group of teen girls have arrived. Their voices are like that of a cat in heat. Seems a birthday is in the works and one of their best friends is in need of some candles, candies, and cards. They’ve come to the right place.
The Dollar Tree might as well have been built for cheap knick-knacks. In every corner, stuffed away, there is little something, something that you would never buy if you were any place else or with any amount of non-bargain high-deliberation given, but for some reason, for one dollar, it doesn’t seem like such a bad investment.
When the firemen arrive the store is swinging. It’s not the possible dead man in the party supply aisle that has them energized though; it’s the deals. From the adjacent aisle, I hear no fewer than four people try to walk past the bleeding man before Bolt’s manager notifies them-
“I can’t have you come down this aisle right now,” she tells a man with a picket sign the size of a small billboard.
Again, I apologize, but because of my eyes, I can’t make out the cause posted to his sign, I’m pretty sure it was more important than a man’s life though.
“What’s your name, sir?” The fireman asks the bleeding man.
The man says something about fucks and no’s.
“What’s you name, Sir?” The fireman asks again.
“Randall,” the man says.
His voice is a fan blade. It cuts through the hum of silence while remaining unnoticed by the clientele. It’s as if everyone here has become systematically unaffected by anything besides the sounds of commerce. Staring at the Dora The Explorer coloring book, I feel alien.
“Can you stand up, Randall?” The fireman asks.
“Probably not,” Randall says.
Eventually, Randall gets to his feet. He exits quickly. Not far behind him five firemen trail. The last man is carrying a yellow tackle box. His arms are heavily tattooed in reds and blues. His blue coveralls don’t fit him like they do with the other men of his company. The fabric is baggy around his thin waist. His walk is muddy.
I walk back to the aisle where it all began to see if there is anything I missed or am missing. Bolt and his manager are staring at the blood. I hide by the bubble wrap again. This time, I look at the candles.
Bolt has been designated Hazmat lieutenant. With a pair of in-store yellow rubber gloves and a bottle of bleach, he cleans the bloodstains from the tile.
“Look at how the bleach turns the blood a different color,” his manager says.
“Yep. Yep. Bleach just kills that shit,” Bolt says.
They laugh about this. She then dials who I believe to be her manager and walks off towards the hand soap section.
Content to call it quits, I make my way back out to main street. Just before I step through the door and into the approaching dusk though, a man with bandaged hands walks past me.
Sure enough, it’s Randall, bloody hand all ragged up, and twisting eyes mad within his gasoline sockets. He’s quick on his feet. so I turn on my heels and follow him cautiously. In a straight line, he goes through the front door, past the frozen meats and potatoes, and out the back and into the alley.
Not far behind him, the oldest of the five fireman follows. This one walks with a limp. Every few steps or so, brushing his hair from his forehead, I notice a look of resignation in his eyes. Later, when I ask him about this, he tells me he’s sees men like Randall over and over again day in and day out. They’re all over in the University District. Always the same story too, minus or plus as few particulars: Someone, usually drunk or high, passes out in a public enough place. Someone else notices them and figures they should call 911. The firefighter and his men arrive and try to help that person. They get met with insults.
“When that happens,” he tells me, “there’s really nothing we can do to help them.”