Gandy likes to fret about the store being in trouble, but he hates when anyone else acknowledges it. I think about telling him that we haven’t had a customer all day and nothing I do in the store will help attract them, but I don’t want to lose my job. We need to be working hard to keep it afloat.” “The store’s not in good financial shape. “You’re not getting paid to watch movies,” he says. I don’t know if Gandy is his first name or his last name, but I’ve been working here too long now to ask. A Reverb Video nametag is pinned to the chest of his purple oxford, and GANDY is spelled out in big block letters. He’s a late-middle-aged guy with a thin moustache and not much hair. Gandy heaves a sigh that could reach from one end of the store to the other. I straightened all the boxes on the shelves and checked in the returns.” We have a small television and VCR set up in the store that constantly runs movies, and I’m planted in front of it in one of those old style director’s chairs, watching Raising Arizona for roughly the ten-thousandth time, so I don’t notice his approach from the back office until he’s standing over me, his pen tapping against a clipboard. The front wall of the store is made of glass and I watch as he starts his bike and speeds away toward the shimmering red horizon.

I bag up his tapes and he grunts his thanks on the way out the door. He exhales heavily and it sounds like the rattle of failing pistons. He’s s seven-foot shadow come to life, an abstract artist’s rendering of torn metal and melted rubber pooling along an endless broken highway. Dust rides the creases of his suit and he reeks of illegal petroleum. He looms there like Jason Voorhees, silent and unreadable. He might be smiling but I can’t see through the grill of his mask. “No, just a favor from one fan to another.” Just let me know what you think when you drop it off.” I sprint to the back of the store, pull the sun faded VHS box from the shelf, and add it to his pile. His neck makes a stretching, leathery sound as he shakes his head side to side. I can’t see his eyes through the scored surface of his goggles, but I can feel the edge in the way he’s staring at me. “Yeah, so?” His voice is a mechanical whine and the desert winds have rendered his gray body suit smooth and practically transparent. “You like this kind of stuff?” I ask when he hands the tapes to me for checkout. Friday the 13 th Part III and the original Halloween. He heads straight to the horror section, not bothering to remove his breathing apparatus, and pulls a couple of classics from the shelf.

The dust biker comes into the video store that afternoon looking for slasher flicks.

Ripit face mask