The Dave Store Massacre

By Ron Ebest

The Dave Store is quite possibly the greatest retail
enterprise in American history. Selling everything from lawn
mowers to Pop Tarts to wine-cask-sized jars of dill pickles,
the Dave Store doesn't just dominate the retail market, it is
the retail market.

That is, until an employee at an outlet in
small-town Jackson, Missouri launches a wildcat strike. Then
company owner Dave Blandine, a retail legend known for
merciless cost-cutting and a glass eye the size of a doorknob,
decides to take a stand against organized labor.

He sends his half-witted son and heir, along with the
megalomaniacal head of a security company and nine heavilyarmed
agents to quell the unrest. They are met by Jackson's
sharp-as-a-blade lady mayor, and its laconic, marijuana-smoking
police chief who is famous for his two-gunned marksmanship.

Standing between these antagonists is the Dave Store's
local manager, a sycophantic nebbish with a penchant for
Byronic poetry, and his wife, a 15-year-old girl in a 25-year-old
woman's body.

As the strike deteriorates, both sides reach
for their guns. And the town moves inexorably toward mass
murder.

But cheer up. It's a comedy.
Loosely based on the story of the Matewan massacre--
the 1920 shoot-out between striking coal miners and armed
strike-breakers in small-town West Virginia--The Dave Store
Massacre is a satire in an American tradition that extends from
Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker to Christopher Buckley and
Paul Mooney.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9780897336345

Book preview

MQQRE

CHAPTER ONE

THE WILDCAT STRIKE THAT LED to the massacre started two months to the day after the little town of Jackson, Missouri, suffered a murder-suicide. The murder was the first in the town’s 138-year history.

CE Lively, the city attorney, got the news of the strike first. The telephone in Lively’s office began to ring at the same moment that the cell phone in his vest pocket did. Both calls were from the same person: Lucas McCain Cantor, the manager of The Dave Store. All over the quarter-million-square-foot store, sales associates, mostly women, were throwing their green smocks on the floor and walking out. Some of them were singing. For Lucas McCain Cantor, the sight of such mass disobedience, such disloyalty, not just to Cantor himself, to the store itself, but to Dave himself, was utterly fantastic. He bawled into the phone as though he were watching the approach of a Communist land army. He had simultaneously called the city attorney’s office and cell, the better to ensure that he’d find him. Had Cantor owned a third cellphone, he’d have called Lively’s home, too.

In his office, CE Lively listened to the sequence of sobs, chirps, and snorts that constituted Lucas McCain Cantor’s story. When the call was over, CE Lively turned off the little green-shaded lamp on his desk and sat back in morning sunlight. His windows were open, and he could hear the sounds of the little town starting its day: Cars on the square. Fits and starts of music. Voices wafting upward three stories from the sidewalk below. A whistle announcing the approach of a train into the Amtrak station in the next block. The whistle comforted him. The sound was like a tintype in the bottom of a shoe box. A cozy artifact from an earlier, untroubled century.

The shotgun blasts that killed the manager of the CushionAire factory and put the blood and brains of the killer, a laid-off employee, all over the ceiling of his car two months earlier, had echoed their warning across the county. It was time, the blasts announced, to be done with locomotives and family farms and deer rifles and other childish things. Time to grow up and face facts. To face the future.

It seemed to CE Lively that the folks in Jackson had fought the future just as doggedly as their ancestors had fought the same future under the Confederate battle flag that hung over his desk. Video footage from the CushionAire factory, broadcast that day all over the state, had made it clear that this war had gone no better than the earlier one. When the factory owner’s body was put on an airplane for Dallas, and the employee’s ashes had been scattered over his parents’ graves, people in the town grew watchful and still. When they passed each other in doorways. Exchanged greetings in the grandstands around the high school baseball diamond. Ran into each other in the aisles of The Dave Store. Their every conversation, every laugh, every remark, seemed a deliberate effort to avoid one question. Are we the same? Are we still who we used to be?

But then one morning, CE Lively found that there were voices beneath his window, and music, and trains stopping at the Amtrak station. It was Spring. The days were growing warmer. At night the air was dusted with fireflies. Folks on porches could listen to the clank of baseballs on aluminum bats as far from the high school as the town limits. CE Lively took his scarlet suspenders from the bottom of his wardrobe and starting wearing them again. It seemed to him that Jackson, a town that couldn’t secede from the union, might well have seceded from the future after all.

But now this.

He’d have to take the news to his wife, he thought. And to Sid Hatfield. He knew where they’d be. They met every morning in a little café on the square. He opened a desk drawer and took out of it a bottle of whisky and a glass. This, he thought, was a day that was going to require some fortification.

With the glass in his hand, he stood and walked to one of the windows. His office occupied a corner of the building. From one side he could look down into the square. From this side he could see, over the roof of a boarded-up office building, the train station in the next block. His view was partly obscured, but he could see the station roof, and the train, silver and ratty-looking, and people milling around on the platform. A young woman took a child by the hand and led him the length of the platform. Squeals of welcome from two other young women drifted over the roofs. The alcohol made him nostalgic. He wondered how long before the ugliness at the CushionAire factory, and now at The Dave Store, would deface this place as well. He knew that drink was making him maudlin, but the feeling was no less real for that. How sad it was, he thought, that someday this must pass away.

CHAPTER TWO

ON THE DAY OF THE STRIKE, Sid Hatfield and Mary Lively met, as they did three mornings a week, at a corner table in the Hob-Nob Café.

The Hob-Nob was the last surviving coffee shop on the town square. Its windows offered a vista of the Municipal Building. The Municipal Building’s huge green lawn was adorned with a flagpole (whose flag still flew at half-mast in mourning for the CushionAire shootings) and a piece of 19th-century field artillery. This cannon had been christened Big Mo by the locals. They pointed to the fierce scarring on its barrel as proof of its significance to the Civil War battle of Wilson’s Creek. Actually the weapon had lost a wheel on the long trek toward the battle, and never made it farther south than its current resting place. The scars on the barrel had been delivered by a first lieutenant of Sterling Price’s retreating army. Meeting the broken axel with an explosion of rage and tears, he shouted at the cannon: "I’ve had all I’m a-goin take from you! Y’all hear me?" Then he unholstered his service revolver and emptied it at the cannon’s mouth. Much of his command took to their heels under a hail of shrieking ricochets.

From her chair Mary Lively could see the barrel of Big Mo pointing directly at her. Big Mo fascinated her. In the scars on its barrel she imagined she could read the history of the town of Jackson itself. The gulf between the artifact and its myth seemed to her to be a perfect metaphor for the gulf between the Jackson of popular imagination and the actual town that she governed. Jackson, the locals liked to say, was a little town in the heart of a big country. And when they said heart they spoke of emotion as well as of geography. Inside the locals’ heads, Jackson was a place where kids in rough plaid shirts raised and groomed the horses they rode. Where people spooned on a twilit bank of the Missouri River. Where fireworks at the Fourth of July picnic annually threatened the Jackson Park Gazebo. Where the high school’s marching band played John Phillip Souza songs. Where neighbors knew each other well, intimately, walked in and out of each other’s unlocked doors at all hours and kept vigils for one another, prayed for one another, married one another, lived and died together, and were buried in rows in the shade of the Resurrection Cemetery’s many oaks and pines.

The town Mary Lively governed, on the other hand, was dying. The square was like a shipwreck: Boarded windows. Chipped paint. Dusty Open! signs that for months or years now had served as mere ironic commentary. Jobs were ghosts. The only manufacturing in the county to survive the 90s, the CushionAire factory, had finally outsourced itself to dust. And now its front windows were shot out and boarded up. The retail jobs had been consumed by The Dave Store. Indeed, Mary Lively thought, you could trace the moment when Jackson ceased its long slow decline and began its headlong collapse. It began on the day, five years earlier, that The Dave Store opened its new Supercenter just inside the city limits.

But on this morning, as they sat together over coffee, Sid and Mary’s talk wasn’t about the town’s economics.

They had decided to meet regularly in the café on the day after Mary Lively was sworn in as the town’s first woman mayor. Sid had shaken her hand for the first time the day before, at the inaugural reception. He was dressed in black but for an old St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. He wore two pistols in his gunbelt, both revolvers. But for the cap, he looked like a character from Gunsmoke. At first she regarded him as a figure of fun. But his eyes went through her like thin air and she automatically closed the open shirt button at her throat. Her own reaction infuriated her. He saw this, and she saw that he saw it. He grinned. Now she was really furious.

But the next morning he had appeared at her office door. I think we should start meeting some mornings, he said. Maybe over coffee at the café.

What? Why?

You’re the mayor. I’m the police chief. My office is probably your biggest responsibility. I have five officers, you know. Six, if you include Hilde Laughton.

Hilde Laughton is a moron.

He’s cunning, though.

And deaf.

Just in the one ear. Oh, all right, five then. And don’t forget the secretary. When she said nothing, he went on: You seem to think I’m doing this for my own amusement. You seem to think I would enjoy sharing coffee with you three days a week. The truth is, I find the idea appalling. Well, disgusting. More disgusting than appalling. But I’m willing to do it because I’m a professional.

His bright insincerity made her laugh out loud. Now he reminded her of Bill Murray. So she said: I suppose if you will shame me into it, okay.

Mary told herself that this was a question of good governance. The mayor should stay in touch with her most important employee. But it was also matter of politics. Mary Lively’s opposition before the election, and her chief critics since, had been older conservatives. Mostly men. These same conservatives had seen Sid Hatfield’s remarkable displays of marksmanship—he could shoot a Coke bottle off a rail fence at a distance of thirty paces with either his left or his right hand. Largely because of this skill, they liked him and trusted him. For her own part, Mary Lively could see no practical value in being able to blow away Coke bottles with either hand. To her it was the same sort of thing as the annual Graduate Gridiron Game, a fundraiser for Jackson High School. Aging jocks drenching themselves with Ben-Gay and then pulling muscles and tearing ligaments for sixty minutes on the Harry S. Truman football field. In other words, proof that you could not simultaneously be male and fully adult. But she was far too smart to every actually say this to anybody. And she was certainly far too smart not to understand what having Sid Hatfield’s trust meant for her reputation.

So they met for forty minutes three mornings a week for about a year. During the Cushionaire crisis, they spent almost 40 hours straight together, putting out this fire and that. Afterward their conversations were more familiar. Watching them together at their regular table, laughing, Mary occasionally resting her fingers on the back of Sid’s hand, anyone might have said that they were intimates. One morning Mary caught herself modeling clothes in her bedroom mirror an hour before she was to meet him. It occurred to her that she would never take this trouble for her husband. Furthermore, the fabric of her blouse was sheer. She caught her own reflected eyes and flushed to her hairline. So she took off the blouse and put on a button-down shirt as alluring as a burlap bag. Seeing her dowdy reflection, she felt a sense of relief: as though she had come to her senses before it was too late. But on the way out the door, she was taken by a perverse impulse. So she tied a red kerchief around her throat.

Sid’s eyes did not leave her throat during the whole meeting. His attention gave her a kind of uncomfortable thrill. As though she were wearing fetish gear. Afterward, on the sidewalk, when she told him goodbye, he answered: Annie Oakley, you are the prettiest girl in the county.

As he walked away, he paused and turned around. Then he walked backward to the end of the block. He tipped his cap and then vanished around the corner.

That night she sat in the glare of the television set and relived the moment. She laughed out loud, and then looked at her husband. CE Lively sprawled on the couch. She looked at his hair and clothes, unkempt as though he fallen from a great height. At his blank and dull eyes. His slack mouth. His face red across the cheeks and very dark under the eyes. A tumbler of vodka over ice rested within reach of his left hand. He hadn’t noticed her laugh. She imagined Sid Hatfield could have fired both pistols at the television set, and her husband wouldn’t have noticed that, either.

It had been on the tip of her tongue to share the story of Sid’s performance. But now she thought better of it. It seemed like something Sid had meant for her only. As though she ought to ask his permission before sharing it. The thought occurred to her that she was now forging an intimacy that excluded her husband. The thought disturbed her. It seemed to her as though she should feel guilt, perhaps even shed tears. All she really felt was a kind of pleasure.

I think I’m going to leave him.

Mary was talking about CE. She discussed her husband with no one but Sid. Since the Cushionaire crisis had thrown them together, she talked to Sid about little else. She added: Just for a while. Just to get a little space until I can decide what to do.

That so? Sid said. I’m not sure you want to do anything crazy, do you?

"Crazy, what crazy? You left your wife."

I’m not mayor.

She put her chin on the palm of her left hand. With her right hand, she picked up a teaspoon. Sid watched her idly stir the dregs of the coffee in her cup. He took advantage of her distraction to study her closely. Her hair was as black as his; in every other respect she was a dead ringer for Kate Hepburn in early middle age.

It’s every night, she said, her voice flat, nasal, and quavery. He’s always drunk and he always falls asleep on the couch. In the morning I find him sitting there, his head back, his mouth huge and open. Television on. The snoring is like roadwork. And, you know, it’s not just that, it’s all the other. The jealousy, the paranoia. He thinks I’m cheating on him with just about everybody in town. You should hear some of the accusations. The clever detective work. Always putting two and two together and getting five.

That’s the drink.

As though that makes it better. Two days ago I told him I was going into the office to get caught up. But on the way in I got a call from Larry Wilcox. The usual: the property tax rate on the Mobile Home Village is too high. So I tell him I’ll meet him here. Right here. So I’m standing outside, right out there on the sidewalk, and along comes CE. He asks me what I’m doing here, and when I tell him, he says he thought I was going into the office. As though he’s caught me lying to him. As though I’m sleeping with Larry Wilcox behind his back. With Larry Wilcox! All three hundred pounds of him.

Have you talked to CE about this?

He’s always too drunk to talk to. And he’s always right anyway, no matter what. There’s never any point in arguing with someone who’s always right and more than willing to tell you why.

You ever consider what it would be like to be single in this town?

You’re single.

I’m not single.

When was the last time you saw your wife?

Ten years this Fourth of July. But I’m not single.

How do you know she’s not dead?

No such rumor has reached me.

Would you believe it if it did reach you?

It would depend.

Yes? Depend on what?

Inga Cantor in short-shorts, and an apron with the words Hob Nob Café worked into the fabric, paused at Sid’s elbow. She was just younger than thirty. She was fashionably emaciated, and her eyes were over-made, like the eyes of one of The Dave Store’s mannequins. Her frizzy blond hair was parted in the middle and brushed like wings directly out from the sides. Her head looked as flat as a tabletop. Her husband, Lucas McCain Cantor, had bought her a pair of new breasts in St. Louis; these sat hugely on her stick-frame. Her head, Mary Lively thought, was as empty as a hayloft in May. But that didn’t stop Sid from following her with his appraising eyes as she walked across the café.

You lovebirds ready for some pie?

Just the check, Sid said to her.

God, I hate that woman, Mary Lively said a moment later.

That so? She seems harmless to me.

The sound of her laugh makes me question my reason. And that godawful frizzy hair in everything. There was hair on my cruller. Makes me ill.

Yet you managed to eat it.

Mary Lively snorted and slapped Sid on the wrist. She let her hand stayed there. She could not herself said why. But there she was, smiling and holding Sid’s hand, when CE Lively came into the café with news that The Dave Store was on strike.

CE Lively stopped in the doorway. He watched them for several moments before they became aware of him. He looked at his wife, and then at Sid, and then back at his wife again. Then Mary Lively noticed him. She snatched back her hand, her face scarlet with guilt. Sid waved and called: CE! Over here.

CE Lively kissed his wife on the cheek and shook Sid’s hand. He was suddenly very cheerful. He said: You won’t believe this. I just got off the phone with Lucas Cantor. The Dave is on strike.

Immediately Inga was at his elbow. Strike, you say? Her painted eyes gleamed with cruel humor. Lucas called you?

I think you should have a look, Sid, don’t you?

They’re not breaking the law, CE. Are they?

Not yet. These things can turn ugly.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to just go see, would it? Mary Lively asked.

Can I come? demanded Inga Cantor.

Sid rose and put a bill and the check into Inga Cantor’s hand. Not with me, he said. A moment later he was out the door. With a kind of thrill in her voice, Inga said: Maybe there’ll be some shooting. Do you think there will be some shooting? Have you ever seen Sid Hatfield shoot a pistol?

Mary Lively said: I should go out there, too.

Should you? CE Lively’s face was bland as a lunar surface, but his eyes shone like mirrors.

You okay, CE? Inga Cantor