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Shovel 3 | Jul 17 2002

My grandfather didn’t want me to see the papers. He said, “I don’t think you’re old enough.”

He worked the front register; I dusted. I would remove all the items in a particular section and place them in the aisle in the same configuration as on the shelf. Then I’d dust everything, the items and shelves both, and put everything back the same way. It was awful.

My grandfather said, “If you see them, you’re going to have nightmares.”

I didn’t understand it at the time, but my grandfather must have been doing badly to have to work on Sundays in his son-in-law’s pharmacy.

“But I already have nightmares,” I said.

Actually, no, I didn’t say that; I whined.

My grandfather had taken the papers off the shelf and hid them somewhere. I knew this because of the empty spaces.

He said, “Michael, I want you to trust me.”

A sudden memory. The security system. At night a razor-thin beam of light shone across the store at a height of several feet. You couldn’t see it, but it was there. The light was aimed at a piece of reflective material which my father had placed inside some kind of male support product. A tiny rectangular hole had been cut in the front of the package so that it looked liked the man in the photo was wearing a metallic bathing suit.

Finally my grandfather relented, recognizing, as I imagine it, that he couldn’t protect me from anything, as much as he wanted.

It was a tabloid—the National Star or National Enquirer. A cover story about a dog eating a baby’s arm. An enormous photo of a baby and its mostly-eaten arm.

I’ve forgotten the rest: what we said, what I thought about it.

The whole thing just ends with the arm.