ACHIEVEMENT
by Joseph Woodard
She was heavy. Heavy's in, you know. Big is beautiful. She had the kind of pretty face that fat women have. She found a boyfriend. He liked her. After they'd been a number for more than a year, he told her he hadn't always worked gas stations busting his fingernails every day on socket wrenches and hose clamps. He told her about his dream, a kind of wish that he'd nursed for ages. He bought two tickets and flew her a thousand miles to a little town he escaped years ago just so he could buy her a negligee and introduce her to the manager of a drug store.
He had worked there at the kind of everything-you-might-need on the spur of the moment outlet, including things for ears, nose, and throat. He stocked shelves and trudged fifty minutes back to a motel room at night, saving his money for a ride West.
Every night he walked by a ladies shop named Clothes 'n' Things. In the corner of the window display near the entrance, a paper screen partially hid a female mannequin with a long black wig. It wore a red lace camisole. It was positioned as if it was stepping behind the screen but looking back at the viewer. Its generic expression was somewhere between beatific and motherly. A sign lying on the white paper covered floor said, "We have everything. You could, too."
He never wasted his pay on anything more than staying alive. He heated food from cans on a hot plate in the motel room. The drugstore owner liked him. No one else worked twelve hours on a sandwich and two cokes without complaining. Five dollars an hour times twelve, every day in cash. Sixty a day minus thirty a day for the motel minus five for cans of corn and hash left twenty-five a day. The motel supplied a little soap and complimentary toothpaste along with a small black and white TV. He rinsed out clothes in the bathtub and hung them to dry, rotating three changes of clothes under his one jacket and a pair of tennis shoes. In a month of twenty-four workdays he'd accumulate six hundred dollars. He had the bus ticket to anywhere in his pocket, purchased a month in advance for sixty bucks. If he was careful not to splurge at stops, he could make it to the end of the route with nearly all of his six hundred. He fingered the growing lump in his wallet when he dressed in the morning.
Every night on the way home he paused outside the clothing shop. The doors were locked, lights off. Few people passed. He whispered to the manikin as if it could hear through the plate glass, only twenty more days to go, only fifteen more days, only ten, and so on.
When it came time, he thanked the drug store manager and said he wouldn't be coming to work anymore. He explained himself and thanked the man again. He had to be going. Pausing one last time by the dress shop he noticed dust that greyed the manikin's shoulders. He wondered why he hadn't noticed before.
In the morning he sat on the hard wooden bench at the bus stop until the Americruiser roared in. After the air brakes released and the door swung open he hopped on. He hefted his backpack into the overhead rack by a seat near the front where he could watch the road coming.
The engine gunned. The road out of town was the one he walked every morning and night. The bus rolled past the clothing shop so fast he hardly caught sight of his manikin. He resisted talking to himself. He passed his fingers over the wallet in his coat pocket and tried to think about California.
The drug store manager pretended as if he remembered and the negligee disintegrated immediately. That was the best part. The motel room had never seemed so comfortable, even though she complained about lumps in the mattress and food stains on the wall. In the morning they drove the rental car all the way back to little airport without talking. "Of all the wild hairs," she murmured as she struggled up the three step ladder through the door and squeezed into the puddlejumper's seat. "I always dreamed about going to Reno."
"Whatever you like," he smiled, helping her. "Everyone has a dream."
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