Authors: G.M. Ford
The one holding the outside door shot him the finger on his way out. Brittany slipped into her jacket and zipped it to the throat.
“You okay, honey?” the waitress wanted to know.
Brittany assured her she was all right. Her shaking hands told another story, but nobody wanted to prolong the incident by asking twice. By the time the guy with the bat returned, a couple of the kitchen crew were swabbing the floor and resetting the table. The conversational level of the place was beginning to return to normal.
“Sorry,” bat said. “Those guys are a bunch of drunken idiots. Sorry you had to—” He stopped talking and pointed to the floor.
“Over there,” he said to the guy with the mop, pointing out the jagged remains of a tooth hiding under the nearest stool. The guy picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of his apron. The same hushed scrutiny that had ushered them in now ushered them out. Outside, the temperature had risen five degrees or so in the past half hour. Once they’d descended the three steps to ground level, Brittany thrust her arm through his. They ambled arm in arm toward the car. “Thanks,” she said briefly, leaning the side of her face against his arm. “I appreciate what you did in there.”
He shrugged. “What else was I going to do?”
She laughed. “And while I’m at it . . . I want to thank you for being a gentleman last night.” He frowned and opened his mouth. She took him by the elbow and pulled him along. “. . . not that I’m God’s gift to men or anything . . .” she continued, “but half the guys on the planet would have tried to jump my bones soon as we took off our clothes in the room last night. The other half would have waited till morning. Thanks for being nice about it.” She shook her head and made a disgusted face. “It’s a hell of a world when the only guy you know who isn’t weird doesn’t know who he is or where he came from.” She sighed as they walked along. “Probably shouldn’t surprise me,” she said. “These days nobody wants to fuck anymore anyway. Everybody wants to hang you upside down and paddle your ass or something weird like that.” She slashed the air with her free hand. “Everybody’s so jaded.”
He felt blood rising in his body again. He looked straight ahead and nodded.
They were at the car now. She opened his door. His eyes followed her around the car, watching intently as she slipped the key into the lock and pulled open the driver’s door. She looked up and captured his gaze over the top of the car. She’d gotten over her rant and was smiling now. “I’m against violence, you know.” He waited for the lecture. “I’m always telling people violence doesn’t solve anything,” she continued. Her eyes twinkled in the slanted light. “But it sure as hell solved that little problem, now, didn’t it?”
They shared a hearty laugh as they got back into the car and drove the fifty yards to the Texaco station next door. “I’ll get the gas,” he said. He handed her a twenty-dollar bill and stepped out onto the asphalt; he twisted off the gas cap and pulled the nozzle free of the pump. He waited. Finally, twenty bucks and Brittany convinced the attendant to turn on the pump.
Brittany returned and began running a dripping squeegee back and forth across the windshield, pausing here and there to use a little extra elbow grease on particularly stubborn bug carcasses. He watched as she leaned against the glass, smiling to himself and settling against the side of the car. The morning sun warmed his face as he waited for the pop of the handle to signal full. What his ears caught instead was the pop of gravel under a tire. He turned toward the sound.
A Dodge pickup truck jerked to a halt just outside the pump area. Great splashes of yellow mud nearly obscured the coppercolored paint. He heard the rasp of the emergency brake and watched as the front doors swung open together, bouncing on the hinges as the two flannel mounds stepped out onto the tarmac, one carrying a heavy open-end wrench, the other hefting a three-foot length of tow chain with a big brass lock decorating the end. They hadn’t come to chat. They moved at him together, raising their respective weapons as they closed the distance between themselves and their imagined antagonist. The brass lock made a whirring sound as the guy twirled it around his head. Above the low shuffling of their boots, he heard Brittany drop the squeegee, heard the fear in her voice, and she ran his way, chanting, “Come on. Come on,” and hurrying along the side of the car. Instead of retreating to the car, however, Randy walked the other way, moving directly at his attackers as if determined to hasten his own demise.
For her part, Brittany was sufficiently transfixed by the bonecrunching potential of the chain to fail to notice the hose and nozzle trailing from her companion’s hand. Wasn’t until the hose ran out and the safety cable began to hiss from of the gas pump that she slid to a stop and closed her mouth. Might have been better for the guy with the chain if he’d done the same thing. Instead, he opened his mouth to sneer just as Randy sent a high-powered river of gasoline directly at his face.
The effect was staggering. The power of the stream pushed the gas down his throat. He first bellowed and then whinnied through his nose like a horse, before tossing his breakfast onto the ground. The puddle of puke failed to break his fall. He collapsed and began to roll around in his own discharge, retching and choking and hacking, writhing in agony. The other one took just a second too long to process the information. When he looked up, the whole world was the pressurized stream of gasoline flying toward his face, sending a wave of brown liquid over and around his head, filling his eyes and mouth, soaking his clothes, sending him reeling, separating him from the wrench as he brought his hands to his face.
He fell to his knees, threw his face into his cupped hands, and howled. The third guy poked his head around the side of the cab. He was still holding Morris’s head in his lap. Looked like he was deciding what to do next. Whatever it was apparently didn’t include getting out of the truck.
Randy turned on his heel, replaced the hose and nozzle. He dusted his hands and walked along the driver’s side of the car. “Get in,” he told her over the car.
She stood there with her mouth open. Looking back and forth between Randy and his attackers. “Get in,” he said again. He didn’t have to tell her a third time. The attendant appeared in the doorway carrying a fire extinguisher. Randy started the car.
“Keep the change,” she shouted out the window. The guy smiled and gave the okay sign.
Randy popped the clutch and floored the accelerator. They went roaring onto the highway in a dusty whooosh.
The VW’s front tires bounced off the curb. She blinked herself back into the moment and looked around. Dumbfounded, she pulled up the emergency brake and shut off the car.
“What day is this?” she asked.
“Wednesday, I think,” Randy said.
“What in hell has happened here?” She checked her watch. “Ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning and the place looks like Ground Zero.”
Randy suddenly recalled an old science-fiction movie. One of those scenes right after the aliens have killed just about everybody in town except the handsome young football star and his cheerleader girlfriend. He could see their faces and hear the eerie organ music, but try as he might, neither the title nor the circumstances under which he had seen the film would come readily to mind. When the movie ended, so did his recollection, as if the memory was a solitary image floating in a sea of ebony ink.
He blinked and looked around again. Reese’s Hardware, for rent. Dixie Diner, for lease. South County Auto Parts, NAPA, available. Pack and Pay, make offer. New Price. It went on and on. The onceprosperous main street of this backwater town had been reduced to a quarter-mile stretch of empty storefronts, both sides of the street, desperate, dusty, and decaying right before your eyes. At the southern extremity, an American flag flapped in the front of an ancient Texaco sign. Directly in front of the VW, a red-and-white circle of neon glowed: open. Hadley’s Sweet Shop. That was it. Everything else was closed up tight.
Brittany stepped out into the street. She bumped the door closed with her hip and then turned herself in a long slow circle. By the time she took it all in, Randy stood across the car from her, stretching his arms toward the sky and groaning.
“Damn,” she said. “When I left . . . this here was the big time, the bright lights.”
“We in Airhart?” Randy asked.
“This here’s Thurston.” She pointed in the direction of the gas station. “Airhart’s five miles that way. Nothing there except another gas station and Millie’s Market.” She made eye contact. “Millie’s doubles as the post office.” She pointed to a red brick building on the other side of the street. Randy nodded his understanding. The sign had long ago been removed, but the outline of the cursive script remained etched on the bricks. trailways, it read.
“Everything’s gone,” she said.
“Wal-Mart.” A deep, booming voice pulled their attention back toward the sweetshop. An elderly black man in a starched white apron leaned against the doorway with a broom in his hand. “Come in here about seven years ago. Took ’em about a year and a half to run everybody off. Ain’t no competing wid them for price, and as bad as things around here is, they’s no blaming people for buying on the cheap neither. Y’all get behind in your payments, you start living offa inventory, and next thing you know you got no inventory.”
“You’re still here,” she said.
He smiled. “I own the building,” he said. “Ain’t gotta make nothing but the utilities and the taxes.” He narrowed his eyes. “You one of the Harris girls, ain’t ya?”
She smiled. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I am.”
“Alma, right?”
She cast a quick look over at Randy. “Yes, sir.”
“One that run off and left ol’ Danny Leery at the altar.”
The smile disappeared. “Yes, sir. I’m the one.”
“He’s right up on the hill,” the old man said.
“Excuse me?”
“State consolidated all its offices a while back. Put ’em all up in the ol’ high school building. Danny works up there. Does the DMV and issues permits, lookin’ out for the county records, you know that kinda stuff. You want anything official done in this part of the county, you got to see ol’ Danny.” He beckoned them forward.
“Come on in,” he said. “Got just about anything you could ask for. Got me an espresso machine. Got wi-fi. I’m diversified is what I am. Gotta be flexible when things get bad,” he said as he turned and disappeared into the store.
“Alma?” Randy mouthed.
Brittany took a deep breath. “Brittany is . . . you know sorta like my city name. I mean . . . think about it, can you see anybody back where we just came from being named Alma?” She shook her head in frustration.
“Who am I to talk?” Randy asked.
“No kidding,” she said, rummaging around behind the driver’s seat until she came out with a silver laptop. “Might as well check my e-mail,” she said with a shrug.
He followed her inside, where it was cool and dark. Hadley’s was an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor, all stripes and squares and shiny stools. The kind of place modern designers were always trying to recreate but never quite managed to capture. Alma ordered a double espresso, Randy a chocolate milk shake. As the old man shuffled back around the other side of the counter and Alma logged onto the Web, Randy excused himself and walked toward the restrooms. Actually it was a restroom, one of the unisex variety.
On his way back to the table, Randy hooked a leg over a stool.
“How long you been doing this for?” he asked the old man. The old man poured chocolate milk into a stainless-steel cup.
“Me personally?”
“Unless there’s some other kind of ‘me.’ ” The old man smiled. “Fifty-seven years.”
“Long time to do anything.”
He dropped three scoops of chocolate ice cream into the cup with the chocolate milk.
“Used to be a lot more fun,” he said. “Used to be a little movie theater right down the street there. Every kid for miles around’d come in for the Saturday matinee.”
He slipped the cup into the milk-shake machine and pushed the button. He walked over next to Randy. In the harsh overhead lights, the old man’s skin was nearly as gray as his hair. “Soon as the picture was over, they’d all run over here.” He waved an expansive arm. “I’d have ’em all over the sidewalk out there.”
He flicked his bloodshot eyes in Alma’s direction. “She back to stay?” he asked.
“I don’t think she knows,” Randy said.
He looked Randy up and down, “You and her . . .” he started.
“Just traveling together.”
He lowered his voice and leaned in close. “I’m askin’ ’cause, you know . . . Danny . . .” He looked up at Randy. “. . . you know, the one she left . . .”
“I know the story.”
His eyes took on a conspiratorial cast. “You was to ask me, I’d hafta say he was still carryin’ it for that girl.”
“After all these years?”
“Some things don’t change.” The old guy put the period on the sentence with a nod of his head and then turned to the espresso machine.
Randy levered himself back onto both feet and rejoined Alma at the table. She was intent on the screen, pecking away at the keyboard.
“So . . .” he said, “who’s looking for you?”
She shook her head sadly. “Not a soul,” she said. “I’ve been gone three days and nobody’s even noticed. It’s like I was never there at all.” She stopped typing and looked at Randy. “See, that’s why I wanted to leave. The city’s so impersonal. You’re gone three days and it’s over. Somebody else slides right into your place and nobody knows . . . hell, nobody so much as cares you’re gone.”
His failure to respond pulled her eyes from the keyboard. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
He shrugged and looked out the window.
“You’re gonna find what you’re looking for. I know you are.”
“Been a long time.”
“You’re going to find it.” She reached over the table and put her hand on his.
The tension was relieved by the arrival of their order. Randy handed the old guy a twenty while Alma typed with one hand and sipped coffee with the other. Randy found the milk shake too thick to drink and began spooning it contentedly into his mouth. The old man returned with the change. “Everything all right?” he asked. They told him it was. Several minutes passed before she looked up from the keyboard. “There’s a whole lotta Wesley Allen Howards,” she said. “All over the country. Seems like it was a pretty popular name for guys your age.”